Dispatch: Berlin

I left the house.

I love disappearing. As a kid I used to hide in the bathroom reading for hours. As an adult, I move my TV into my bedroom and close the door, or build a fort in my living room and bolt lock the front door. Sometimes I wanna turn my phone off but then I wanna play games…it’s a whole fuckin thing. When I went freelance in 2012 I made a habit of getting on a plane 12 hours after any load-out. But my last go-outside-at-the-same-time-every-day job ended in Jan 2020 and that was the last time I left country.

The last two years I haven’t even left the city— not for Coachella, weekends in Joshua Tree, anything. (I live alone, I don’t drive and could not find the will to care.) I just kinda shuffled around all over on the bus/trains and generally disappeared for a while trying to get my life together. Berlin is one of the only major cities in Germany I’ve never been to. (Tour routing can be weird!) So when a friend asked me to come hang out and dogsit for three weeks in Berlin, I thought about my closest cousin growing up who I had not seen in a decade while he lived there and I lived in 12-hour-flight-away Los Angeles. I thought about how long it’d been since I made a stupid face in the customs camera, did not declare something I should have, and cursed at a white person in the airport for being an idiot loudly under my breath.

I stopped in New York for fifty hours to hug 45% of the people I love and hadn’t seen in the two years since I been home—a sentence that still looks crazy to me as I type it. I walked through the Chinatown and SoHo buying weed, running into family members, and using google maps to find Wooster St—embarrassing. I surprised my nephews (who lost their shit) and their mom (my wife/sister/cousin/left tit). I watched basketball with their dad drinking the Modelo thats always waiting for me in the fridge when I fly in. Took them to school and got to kiss their faces in front of all their friends. I was starting to feel like myself before I popped a Xanax at EWR and saw myself off the continent.