do you remember seasons

 now that the weather is getting colder in berlin i am thinking about the things you do when it gets colder - i was excited that you would be able to ice skate again and then i remembered it feels like i was JUST ice skating because before lock down happened i was ice skating but it seems just like yesterday

the months are put together in a big wobble! without seasons. seasons are not dictating the year. the year is dictated by when are things normal again? when are things down again? 

it's a different restriction than by the weather. it is 12 degrees and i am sitting outside at a vietnamese restaurant eating lunch with a thick jacket and a hat. why did we ever sit inside when it was still possible to eat outside ? i wondered

it felt completely normal to sit outside. so things are normal. just different normal

but between cold, spring, summer, the fall pretty much doesnt let you not see that it's fall. orange brown leaves dark red trees, a fresh smell from rain, just uncomfortable rain and wind but also beautiful that now i can focus on a season. 

i eat tacos with friends on benches in front of a bar and i ask my friend, would we have sat inside or outside? probably inside between smokey faces and a shortage of air that was made more bearable by another drink and another one. 

i don't have fall clothes, i have warm clothes that i layer less thick so i can layer it up once the eerie cold comes through. i look at chestnuts remembering the chestnut figures i made with my mom. why do chestnuts look so delicious that you want to collect them? then they sit at home. i started collecting leaves to make a leave decor but then used the bag to collect dog poop of a dog i was watching. 

watching fall arrive i suddenly pay attention to song lyrics

and then i dont

i guess it all comes and then it goes 

one day i like a lot of emotional music sometimes i dont at all

now i eat outside sometimes i dont 

it's nice to just focus on that

many freckles around the mouth make a beard

my room is small so i go out a lot. in the mornings for a long walk, on bike rides, just walking with friends

the sun reaches mostly the lower side of my face because i like wearing caps
the freckles and tan create a dark circle around my mouth
i have a beard now a little bit
only i can see it
of course

sometimes i open my phone and watch a video my friend from far away sent, where he slides from a water creek to the next over a stone because this is where he lives

i live where people sit late in parks together and teens film each other doing piggy backs
i live where being outside is the way from one closed room to another closed room
being outside is walking from one destination to sit around in to the other destination to sit around in

today i walked at dawn and i turned around many times as there was a man walking behind me in the dark
i shivered and i slowed down because i was not sure if he could see my beard from walking so far away in the park

you will tell your kids about the bars you got black out drunk in with „family friends“

today it was warm then it started raining and i went for ice cream with J. I was waiting for ice cream when I noticed a mom explaining to her son that she really likes this one „kneipe“ (bar) where she always goes „with our friend Thomas“. The kid wasn’t quite listening while she tried to explain how important this place is for her and her friends. This kind of really got to me.

Here is this mother telling her son about what my life is about basically 100% - getting drunk with thomas at the kneipe. Her son doesn’t care, also her son is now her life 100%.

I’m currently on a sober journey that includes daily meditation and it is absurdly „matrix-i-am-16-and-whoa“-to me — to visit yourself for a couple of minutes a day, and dismantling thoughts and thought spirals and negative thoughts what they are - just thoughts and perception.

Just like the pandemic changed perception of the world, and me having a son tomorrow, which i wont, would change my perception again, in meditation you are sitting on a tiny bench in the back of your head just watching yourself and there is no other perception that is influenced by the outside.

It would drive me mad for years, but also make me feel very interested in the world and in memory and how emotions and memory are connected, to see a certain thing that would remind you of how you felt back then. And it would drive me mad because I would feel, how can I feel like this back then when I feel like this now? And if i didn’t like how i felt back then, I thought about maybe I will hate how I feel now later too.

I listened to an episode on „consciousness“ the other day of the podcast „philosophy bites“ which gave a short introduction to different concepts of consciousness, and the host said there is also philosophers who argue your consciousness changes every second. In 5 minutes you are not the same person as you were before and they do not believe in a core persona.

Well I do believe in that but I just wanted to put it out there. What am I getting at here. Before I started thinking about meditations I was really jogging from one andreya to another, and that was so fast like, „i am wearing only this pair of jeans andreya“ to „i wash my hair every second day andreya“ or „i am wearing make up every day andreya“ to „i don’t wear make up every day andreya“. it’s fucking absurd. life is fast what i wanna say if you become a mom or a pandemic is happening or something is really changing or nothing is changing at all it is so nice to know inside you can go on a little bench and chill. so i can only highly recommend. urgh

i got cheesecake ice cream

life is not like a movie especially on benches

I am in a park on a bench, actually I am on a bench next to a trash can at the park entrance near the street because it is a warm day in Berlin and all the good spots on the park are taken of course. I just put on sunglasses because I think that makes me look cooler than without.
If this was a movie or at least a series or a short story I would sit here and something would happen. So someone would come and talk to me, maybe I would find romance in these times of complete absence of intimacy, at least analog intimacy. Someone actually just sat down next to me, an old construction worker smoking a cigarette. Another old man in a salmon colored shirt is talking to him, apparently they know each other from just hanging out outside. The worker says he has a beautiful wife in Poland. I wanna be a beautiful wife from Poland to someone some day.




So nothing happens while I am sitting here and writing these words. I got a tofu magali sandwich and another guy got the same sandwich as me, which I didn’t know, so when I went to pick up mine we locked eyes and he said „It’s mine“. This is the most dating experience I had in this quarantine. This and also the father of a 8 year old kid in his 40s cleaning out the camper van outside of my practice room that got nervous when I asked where they are heading too, so he repeated it three times and I still had no idea what he was talking about. He later picked up a pen from the ground and brought it to me. Hey, update, actually a girl stopped and asked me for a lighter. I felt like asking „what are you doing?“. I have no lighter because I don’t smoke. This is also a big minus for romance and social activity I guess. „Hey do you have a water?“ is what I will ask people from now on.

Circling back to the guy at the sandwich shop. How much of a movie moment was this?? It should have been like this „It’s mine“. - „Oh hahaha“ - „I’m Albert“ -  „I’m NOONE BECAUSE IT NEVER GOES LIKE THIS“.
Let me think of a movie romance moment that happened in my life, actually there were some to be honest but they always happened in very EXTREME circumstances. So either it was on tour through Europe or in California or on a very intense party night. But the real movie moments are the ones in a coffee shop or the sandwich stand. I know these things don’t exist right now - social gatherings in coffee shops - but they also never existed before, these moments.

Quick stop to inform you the most crazy person of Berlin just sat down on the bench next to me. The ones that are talking to themselves and obviously also about you loudly. Actually he and me are not so different, I’m talking to myself on the laptop and he is talking to himself. But right now he said I am playing the piano, actually me using the laptop looks like playing a piano. Now he said he is always there for me.

Alright.

So yeah, I’m gonna hang out here on this bench a little longer and yes it’s not a movie but you honestly if I didn’t have this delusional optimism of seeing my life like stuff that I’ve seen in movies and books i probs would have doubted „becoming“ a musician but I actually never thought about it. It’s just what i do, so i’m gonna keep sitting on benches, here i want to remind myself quickly to insert the video of me sitting on a bench in new york, and see what happens.

ok see you soon xoxoxoxoxox

fuck i got coffee to go today

I got a coffee to go today !!!!!!!!
Let's breathe in these news and realize, it is completely emptied out of useful information. These kinds of stories are the ones i'd pitch to the magazines i interned at and got depressed because noone wanted to publish them (and then i became a musician where i hide tons of coffee-to-go-stories in songs)

Where should I start so first off I had to
- have cash on me (!!!!) took me a while to have that and lets all use contactless everywhere else
- go there and get a coffee

I got a decaf capuccino because I stopped drinking coffee a month ago, which is a sad day for everyone. It took me 15 yeas to find out I am actually, contrary to my own believe, not a suitable host for coffee in my stomach and it makes me more anxious, more jittery, less focused, more sweaty. Nonetheless I love it and I love what it meant - it meant a morning, new start, productivity blabla but also missing the subway and getting a coffee while waiting, having cash in a pocket to spend randomly in a public place, going into a cafe and judging it for being hipster or investing 1$ into nescafe.

My top ten coffee to go stories

- one time i spilled my fresh capuccino on the train and i posted about it on facebook and somenone commented "dont post about it on facebook but clean it up bro" fair enough
- at a bagel shop in london (an infamous bagel shop) we got coffee which was just put some nescafe with hot water
- ALL THE COFFEE SHOPS THAT SELL FOUR EURO COFFEE that tastes like ASS come one we've all been there yet we have all awlays returned and shamefully drank that overpriced piss drink
- i'm just gonna put costa coffee here because it is my favorite place in england next to all whetherspoons
- damnit whetherspoons coffee???? FREE REFILLS FOREVER?? whetherspoons, man made heaven on earth but also do not support weatherspoons CEOs because they are pro brexit. also i went to so many whetherspoons sometimes in weird areas people would drink and gamble there at 10am but its publicly accepted i guess .. also they never play music in whetherspoons
usually i went to whetherspoons on tour
one time i went after a date

So i imagined this blog spot to be a great piece about how i start with "i got to go coffee" but it's a big philosophical ramble about how reality as we know it totally changed and the little things like this transport us into an old life where we didnt appreciate freely taking the subway, going places, drinking coffee etc but i got bored of it really quick

But feel free to meditate on this thought and if you really like coffee esp coffee to go because

i paid 2,80 on decaf capuccino that i drank walking 50 meters away from the cafe and was done and threw the non-reusable cup (I AM SO. SO . SORRY) away

so pre corona life was all about drinking coffee being jittery sweating spending money
now corona life is researching the best decafs!!!! the show must go on.

receipts i keep like this one

One time on a bus I looked out into the desert and wanted to live in a house in the desert. It would be a single house, and the next house would be 20 kilometers away. In one of the rooms in the house, I would have 10 - 15 puppies, maybe because I bought them like this or maybe because I had a dog who got pregnant. I am on a bus in Nevada and I was texting on my phone. I had met this someone a few months earlier and we had „sex“. I am putting sex in inverted commas because usually this meant we would make out, get really wasted on mixed drinks and cheap beer and then late at night, around 4 or 5 in the morning, we would start to go down on each other, the mucus spilling left and right of each others genital parts because the tilted perception of drunkenness makes you fail to give good oral sex. That’s just how it is. The sex was similar, no-one ever orgasmed, but it is just this animalistic, abstract idea of having sex that was driving us. Having sex until my vagina was too dry for even more sex, so I would just say „ok that’s it“. But the sex itself would be very wild: One night we spent in Boston and we were falling off beds and into shelves. I think it wasn’t even for the reason that the sex was SO GREAT, but that we constantly had to find our balance again. I put this into my good memory folder, even though the day after I sat in a cafe and felt anxious and empty, but sometimes, when you sit in one place and a lot of people are living their very safe, normal and clocked through life next to you makes the moment into an come-to-life meditation. Where in meditation, you sit in the back of your head watching the stream of thoughts pass by, I was sitting hungover, emotion- and thoughtless in a cafe watching all of  the people’s thoughts pass me by, while I was being completely thoughtless. I thoughtlessly ate a bowl of soup and scribbled notes on a paper that I would lose or throw away, but the receipt of the cafe I will keep.

The memory of the empty house in Nevada filled with puppies also has some pink and orange walls somewhere. Do you wonder where I am? Nowhere really, as the stream of life goes diagonally and I only choose where I want to sit in now.

i am neither in New York or LA or in a car or in a venue or at an airport

Some people say, when the body needs a break, it will take a break.

People say, every 7 years the body goes through a change, regenerates.

This year I turned 28 nd i feel like instead of getting a cold, or a UTI or sth i just get body ache lol. this april i couldnt play guitar on a tour with an injured arm/hand who was stiff and hurting from overexhaustion.

one and a half week ago, in the space of what I've always felt the most strong, confident, comfortable, safe, undestructable i got hurt again

I know I'm okay because I breath, I can walk, I can talk, think, compose, blah but on a more PSYCHOLOGICAL note this weighed heavy on me,
so I fell backwards as I struggle with balance anyways and crashed right into the drums and when I tried to get up I saw charley and laura next to me saying "andreya it's ok to go off stage if it hurts"

reason behind it is also because this is what i never do -   for example at haldern pop festival i crashed my head into lauras guitar and broke down and listened to myself like if i felt sick or sth and decided to keep on going but when i went off stage i went to the car and was traumatized w a mild concussion in a shock and felt like i've abused myself.

so when that happened now iwas laughing and said honestly "i dont know if im ok because im on adrenaline" and whe n i got up i felt ok that was it and went to the back and there i was lying in pain with my hands buried in my face for the next 30 minutes, squeezing one or two tears out of anger (and worry) about myself.

So now im not in new york or not in LA and not travelling and not jumping from space to space talking about what I see and letting things happen to me , now i am just with me, hurting while moving, taking things SLOW

TAKING
THINGS
SLOW
!!!!

in the first couple of days it drove me insane like if anyone of you knows my room, its interior design is based on me not wanting to spend time in my room - its just simple and nothing cozy.

Yesterday, day 9 of me being injured, was the first time I felt like getting cozy and I took time to cook a meal and I did a face mask.

It's so funny to me as when I was away this year for 3 months or so and came back, the thing i wanted to do the least was to be in my room and in berlin. So i kept on travelling. every free days i had i thought about where else i could go. now it feels like my room and berlin is a partner that i had distanced myself from and kind of need to approach again and reconcile with.




Like wtf is going on this year honestly.

Two of the most positive experiences (next to my fav USA tour) were the writing retreats that laura and i did. the stay at the ranch was the most free creatively and inspired i had felt in a long long time, and when we were in italy, looking back it was surreal too

on the last day or so we just recorded bits and bits after another and laura went on the piano and the night before daniel johnston had died which had made me so unexplainably sad
and we played a song where i choked up in the first verse

a painter who was staying there as well, kathryn, and i layed each other the cards and one of thing in the reading said that i should stop being so passive about my life

which i was so confused by because i felt rather active but maybe its true not to throw myself into intense stimulative experiences so things can just happen to me and i actually dont have think about myself -- as my mom has analysed from my insta feed that i like to live "too much in the moment"
but maybe just think about what i actually wanna focus on instead of letting myself live in 1000 different places at ones.