Scooters in Berlin

Scooters are not legal in Germany yet but in select locations like here in Berlin you can try them out on private land.

This was my first ride and they are an immense pleasure to use once you get your feet positioned properly. I’m not sure yet what happens if you fall off one but I’m pretty sure it will be bad.

The law allowing these on the road has supposedly been signed but still has to work its way through some German institutions. What will happen when these are legal is obvious:

  • People will adopt them en masse because scooters are amazing.
  • Chaos will ensue everywhere because cities like Berlin have near zero infrastructure to facilitate these vehicles and are unable to adapt at the speed required.
  • There will be some accidents which will be blown up by the media.
  • A huge backlash will ensue as has already happened in many other places.
  • The German attitude towards risk and the ever-present machinations of the car lobby will get scooters banned.

I hope I’m proven wrong but it’s hard to see how it would go any other way.

Highlights for Street of Thieves

I choked and turned tail, fled once again, fled faced with myself; I left at a run; there are things that can’t be fixed. Actually, nothing can be fixed.
Men are dogs who rub against each other in solitude
Sometimes we sense the situation is escaping us, that things are getting out of hand; we become afraid and instead of calmly looking, trying to understand, we react like a dog caught in barbed wire, thrashing about madly until it slices open its throat.
All I want is to be free to travel, to earn money, to walk around quietly with my girlfriend, to fuck if I want to, to pray if I want to, to sin if I want to, and to read detective novels if I feel like it without anyone finding anything to object to aside from God Himself.
You say, oh, seventeen, that’s not so much, tell me about a thousand, two thousand, three thousand stiffs, but seventeen, seventeen isn’t anything extraordinary, and yet, and yet, it’s an enormous quantity of vanished life, dead meat, it’s cumbersome, in memory as well as in the cold-storage room, it’s seventeen faces and over a ton of flesh and bone, tens of thousands of hours of existence, billions of memories gone, hundreds of people touched by mourning, between Tangier and Mombasa.
and I said to myself that tourism was a curse, like gasoline, a trap, which brought false wealth, corruption and violence;
I have made use of the world. Life consumes everything—

Highlights for The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

But other foxes say that in that brief second the man realizes that physical life is a stupid and shameful mistake. And the first thing he tries to do is to thank the fox who has opened his eyes. And after that he corrects the error of his own existence.
But this boom doesn’t have much to do with the economy. It’s just that the money from all over Russia flows into Moscow and moistens life here a bit before it departs for off-shore hyperspace.
‘All those French parrots who invented discourse were high on amphetamines all the time. In the evening they take barbiturates to get to sleep, and they start off the morning with amphetamines so they can generate as much discourse as possible before they start taking barbiturates to get back to sleep again. That’s all there is to discourse. Didn’t you know that?’
The greatest of books have few readers, because reading them requires an effort. But it’s precisely that effort that gives rise to the aesthetic effect. Literary junk-food will never give you anything of the kind.
Until I learned from my own experience what love is, I thought of it as a specific kind of pleasure that tailless monkeys can derive from being together, in addition to sex.
Chekhov was right: a woman’s soul is essentially an empty vessel that is filled by the sorrows and joys of her beloved.
Two lonely hearts met among the pale blossoms of the Moscow spring. One told the other she was older than the city around, the other confessed that he had claws on his dick.
They always see me as their last chance. Grown men, and they don’t understand that they themselves are their last chance. But then, they aren’t even aware what kind of chance it is.