2007

26th November 2007

How icy cold your bottom was Friday night, my love. ["You have no idea how freezing -- was" you told me, although I was born there, my love, exactly 38 years and 1 day before,so I can imagine] Yet by time I got in bed beside you how red hot your bottom was! It is little moments like this that I want to live with you for. For the loveliness of that day in the Tiergarten. My life hangs in the balance between ruin and success. Between moving in and getting engaged with you, or splitting up with you. The closer you get to everything you ever wanted the more fragile everything becomes. The royal road, the Via Imperii, becomes a perilous tightrope. This is our test of faith. Now you are the one who is confused. The Gothic Justice Palace has turned into a Gothic Horror. It nearly and perhaps still will cost me my relationship with you. "I'll be honest with you, I am TOTALLY in love with you" you told me, confused and bewildered by my coldness, calling me on your bus home from the Black Pig. I could feel your pain and hurt but was powerless to say the loving words that would make things better. I was too frozen, shrivelled up, by the horror of my predicament, the Gothic Horror of my Justice Palace Hell. Almost to yourself, "You are so strange". Then, decisively, not wanting to waste your love on someone not worth it again, you withdrew from me. If I could pin you down to make a date with you, you did not keep it. When I did track you down and confront you with your no longer loving me, you were unnaturally happy, laughing hysterically at everything I said, evading every question I put to you, giving me nothing, keeping me at arms length till you could get away. Till at last you turned up, when I least expected it, with your icy bottom. Instead of leaving you at 330AM as I should have done to return to Hell, I stayed, waiting sleeplessly for you to wake at 7, when we at last had two hours when we could talk. It remains to  be seen whether it salvaged anything, but I could not help noticing that you took your dirty knickers with you this time, instead of washing them and leaving them in my bathroom for next time, as if you did not think there will be a next time. 

Start a new book, just called 'ADELAIDE'? How I spoiled things with my coldness and strangeness, but I was just under so much pressure. I shrivelled up and became nasty to everyone.

1st November 2007

I've got to hang onto Adelaide, she is the best thing in my life. Despair of the Justice Palace or anywhere will be so much more bearable if I have her to come home to every night. 

Be happy, and CUNNING. You are doing something FANTASTIC with your writing. Schubert's Winterreise was on when I got in, followed by Sibelius Tapiola. Very appropriate. No, trust your faith, You were RIGHT to leave GBM, and you were right to go to the Justice Palace, and you will be right to make the next move as well. Everything you do is a brilliant move. Your judgement is impeccable, always. Though it sometimes takes time to become apparent! I am the MASTER of going my own way without compromise. “He was the philosopher of going your own way without any compromise.,” Gerling says. “Every day, he did what he thought he should do. He never listened to public opinion. If he lost, he lost on his own terms. You can never fail if you go your own way.” (If I had turned down the Justice Palace opportunity I would have regretted it always. It was something I had to try and get out of the way).She cuddled me so much sitting on the bench, and made me promise we would go back in summer. I want to tell my mother about her, end these stupid secrets. My life was always so painful before, like an open wound, so any probing was agonising. But the two people I love most in my life, the two special people of my life, who have taken me in and accepted me despite the way I am, I would love them to meet. I am English. I am intelligent. Why is it so hard to get a job???! I always thought it would be so hard living with Adelaide, I would not be able to bear it, but after today I saw it is something I would love. Her love is so constant and tender and makes me feel so good. In this cold, hard, hostile world, unforgiving of my silence and misanthropy, Adelaide’s constant love is something that makes life worth living. “Bacon had seen how the Surrealists equated the desire to express something new with the need to shock, and it was to form the core of his own artistic belief. When the ‘wild boy from Ireland’ returned to London towards the end of 1928, he was set on a course that would not only scandalise conventional sexual and social morality. He had something far more subversive to do: to disrupt all notions of what art was and what it could express. Beneath the carefully calculated frivolity and the unresolved pain of a rejected son lay the iron determination of a man readying himself to throw a bomb and be held responsible for it.”

“Total abandonment to instinct, above all sexual instinct, was an ideal which Bacon maintained with astonishing vigour to the end of his days. If he had a sustaining belief, it was in the supremacy of instinct as the only guiding principle in life—a philosophy expounded at length by the Marquis de Sade."

20th October 2007

When will I learn: if I am to write my Die Fackels, they can only be about autism, anomie, misanthropy, solipsism, transcendency. Not about politics, London or Vienna. My milieu is my interior autistic world. A world of ruin, of night, of sadness. I cannot be cut off from Adelaide. But I must keep some independence. Those long train journeys across Europe. i want to shut myself away like a monk. i'm going to the Justice Palace to write my Die Fackel about autism and solipsism, and how I DON’T get on with anybody around me. Be the grumpy curmudgeon. As Antarctica's ice melts it causes more problems. The ice was deadly but the melting will be worse. Enjoy my curmudgeonous. I can only live in ice and high mountains. A job often sounds good as an idea but then the reality of actually getting on with my colleagues always overwhelms me with horror and social inadequacy. Sometimes i am overwhelmed by horror and revulsion of my fellow man and crippled by feelings of wanting to escape from my affair. I've always been the odd one out. I've always been hard to get on with. I've always craved everybody just leaving me alone. There was one person I don’t want to leave me alone. Now I wonder even if I want her to leave me alone. That would be a kind of death. How good it felt to come home to find her hairdryer still on my window sill and note on pillow. To find she had left her hair conditioner in the bathroom as well as her spare knickers. To find her glitter on my bathroom floor. To find she had cleaned my kitchen and bathroom sinks. But I need aloneness. I need to disappoint people and sink inside myself in melancholy and despair. 

Autismus is nothing but the first issue of Die Fackel, just 45-50pages red cover magazine. Lotta & Sophia will  be the second issue,50-60 pages, The Cold Icy Air of the Mountains will  be issue no.3, Casanova will be No.4. I will write the 50 page red cover magazines very quickly--quick now I am at the Justice Palace and in great pain. Pure autism. Pure solipsism. Pure horror and revulsion of all companionship, even at the thought of the woman I love most in all the world. Tell her honestly: sometimes I have fears that I cannot go through with this affair. All those times I sat looking at Poison is a Gift or the Karl Kraus book, thinking what can I write about--I have told myself so many times before but keep forgetting: autism, solipsism. Horror and revulsion of all companionship. I love her more than she loves me. If anything my Fackel must have the silhouette not of the Criminal Courts bu Berlin Zoo. I must travel again and do naughty things. But I can't lose Adelaide's love and closeness. Start to write my Fackels fast--but not about the Justice Palace, but about my same old subject. Austism, solipsism, horror and revulsion of all companionship. The battle to love or be loved. My contract with Adelaide must insist on freedom. I feel like a caged tiger now. I must be allowed out of my cage sometimes to roam free in the wild: to Brussels, Munich, Vienna. My books will be like Fackels, like the Berlin diaries of 1920-1945.

I need a "lost weekend". When I had that freedom I cried for the emptiness of my sordid nights in Europe and craved something real; now I have that something real, I crave the sordid nights but without losing that something real to come back to. I want to have my cake and eat it. Everything about Vienna, Brussels, Berlin, Munich. Antarctica. Gambling. Opium. My desperate need for a job that will enable me to pay my rent, support Adelaide AND travel. I feel like I don’t do anything I enjoy anymore. I have one night of pleasure then six of pain. Previously my life was just my pleasure. 

I feel tamed, captured, like Jokanaan gleefully caged by Salome. More Samson and Delilah. Is she making me strong or weak?

If my writing is going well, flowing, then i feel happy, then feel happy about my affair as well. A bad day today--gripped by doubt about my job, my affair and my writing. Nothing left. She is giving me so much love. I have problems with that. I have emotional problems. 

15th October 2007

"But we knew nothing of the cravings that we felt so strongly, nothing of why we should want a girl, nothing of what could and should be done with her. The one thing some of us knew, perhaps, indeed, most of us, at that uncertain age, was admirably expressed by Disraeli in his role as novelist and by Leigh Hunt and Shelley as autobiographers writing of their schoolboy affections: 'No bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy...so crushing,' said the first; 'The most spiritual of the affections...a disembodied transport,' said the second. Blunt Byron, however, put the less romantic side of such affections far more honestly: 'In law an infant, and in years a boy, In mind a slave to every vicious joy...'"--We should face the facts of life about pornography Brian Sewell Evening Standard 15th October 2002 

14th October 2007

I don’t think there are any websites that provide me with what I want to read, so I will have to write my own. Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, Marlene Dumas, Francis Bacon, Webern, Berg, Schoenberg. “The universe was never quite the same after 1905. Our understanding of space, time, matter and energy was transformed by a 26-year-old civil servant working a 48-hour week at a Swiss patent office. A ‘respectable Federal ink pisser’ was how Albert Einstein described himself. He didn't even have a PhD. But the man who had failed to find an academic job had a secret drawer - it was, he told his friends, the department of theoretical physics. And in 1905, after six months of intensive thought, five scientific papers emerged from this drawer that would revolutionise the laws of physics.”

13th October 2007

Feel this horrible flatness, deadness, emptiness again,blankness, nothingness. Ennui overwhelming swamped my final couple of hours with Adelaide. She said “you are happy, I know you are, I can see it, I can see it in your eyes.” This was earlier. I didn’t feel happy. I felt overwhelming depression about the job I hate. I said “I feel happy about you, but sad about my job.” I question again the path of my life, shouldn't I stay alone, alone, alone, pure, solitary, silent? Long train journeys across Europe. Lying next to you in bed at night though, you are so hot. Like lying next to someone on fire. We bought Chinese came back, she started to undress me in the doorway. We made love; afterwards, she climbed from bed saying "you’re BEEAUUUUUTIFUL. I am in PARADISE!" Still I feel this horrible sadness sadness sadness. But at same time knowing how lucky I am. What a special thing I have got in my life in you. Now horrible ennui and depression. Adelaide said about me working nights again, i said we will be living together so I can come home to see you and you can cook me breakfast. “English breakfast?” “Yes.” More than ever I crave aloneness. 

9th October 2007

“Both the Cantos and Kraus’s writings seek to conjoin extreme ‘locality’, temporal detail and even private reference with grand horizons of history. They aim at a palimpsest of allusion and citation, incorporating in their stylistic and polemical texture documents both literary and political. The pulse is one of anger and exhortation.” I can only be alone so how can this work. Don’t talk about Vienna and Turkey straightforwardly, use it only as METAPHOR. The Turkish cannon bell in the top of St Stephens can be a great metaphor for something or other! Every time i see her is like when Bogarde looks up from behind his hotel desk and sees Charlotte Rampling walking through the revolving doors in her white mink coat, their eyes meet and they recognise each other, and for a moment both their hearts stop beating. I am head over heels in love with her, yet our relationship has always seemed so painful. My romantic excitement about the Justice Palace can give me the hysteric fever to work really hard and really long. A kind of rausch intoxication.

“Kraus's initial targets lay in the sphere most familiar to him--the journalistic cliques which dominated cultural life. But the field of his critical crusade rapidly widened. After the sensational success of his first numbers, he found himself being equipped with inside information about corrupt practices in almost every sector of Austrian public life. And Die Fackel became a forum for the expression of the accumulated dissatisfaction of informants previously denied the possibility of ventilating their grievances. It also attracted contributions from men distinguished in various fields of public life. The German socialist leader Wilhelm Liebknecht and the veteran political crusader Joseph Schoffel were among early contributors. Others equally distinguished, such as the jurist Heinrich Lammasch and the Serbian political leader Milovan Milovanic, sent in contributions to be published anonymously. And Kraus found himself in the position of champion of public morality, exposing corruption, inefficiency and petty tyranny in every field. The bureaucracy, the Church, the judiciary, the stock exchange, the banks, the political parties, the universities, the Ministry of Education, the army, the police, the Foreign Office, the railway companies, the theatres, and above all the press--all were revealed to the scandalised gaze of Kraus's readers as venal and incompetent. The healthy circulation of DIe Fackel made him independent of the influence of advertisers, which stifled criticisms elsewhere. Die Fackel was indeed outselling some of the leading daily newspapers. No wonder it found so many imitators--one of whom even tried to pirate Kraus's original cover design.

For upwards of five years Kraus waged a running battle against corruption in public life. The 150 numbers of Die Fackel issued during this period constituted an exemplary achievement in the field of social-critical journalism. Kraus's intention is at this stage strictly reformist.”

24th September 2007

I work up with cold feet, literally, and it reminded me of the cold feet I always felt in bed in  Brussels Ibis and Vienna Dorint, and I started to miss those journeys, Koln Presse girll, that Europe-wide search for big breasts.

But Adelaide, Adelaide, is my girl!!!!!!!!!!!!

I miss my cold lonely life, all those long train journeys across Europe. Maybe I could still do them sometimes. That is something she has to allow me from time to time. I will give her money every week, and we I hope live together, but I must be allowed to travel sometimes.

Lying together just before we left she said "do you really want to live with me? do you really want to live with me?" She told D-- about me, that she made love with me, that she wants to have a relationship with me. She is now at last talking about us living together. 

What a hold I have over people, because of the sinful pleasurable things I have done. What power that gives me over them. And now I am with the sexiest stripper in Berlin, Adelaide of the Black Pig, that tasty little English Lolita. 

22nd September 2007

I just stepped out of the shower at 930am when door buzzer rang and it was Adelaide, in tight white dress with nothing underneath. Be Reasonable DEMAND the impossible. She was starting at the Black Pig 6pm. After making love, the first thing she said as we lay cuddling in bed is "we don’t want Phoebe yet do we?" Because some girl was eating food at work the other day and Adelaide felt so sick. Maybe she just has a bad stomach, a germ. She says she just forgot to take her pill the first day she saw me after she came back from holiday in England, as she hadn’t had sex for a month. Again she said that. The more she says it the less i believe it. My suspicious mind thinks she had sex with someone else while in England, knows she is pregnant so as soon as she came back had sex with me so she can then pretend the baby is mine.

Am I horrible to be so suspicious? We slept a little bit together, then lay cuddling, with her smiling, eyes closed, as I kissed and licked her face. 

While getting ready she was talking a lot and I just laying listening, sad I had to go to work, but so happy to just be listening to her talking. She said last week at the Pig she asked D-- about that boy in the corner. “He was STRANGE” said D--, and Adelaide wanted her to talk more. D-- said she talked to me once, “and he was strange, but all right, why?” “I like him,” Adelaide said. “Tell me more,” said D--. “I made love with him,” said Adelaide. “What?????!!! Wait I’m collecting then cut my song then I am coming back!” When she finished dancing she came back and was asking Adelaide more, “what was it like, good bad big small, he didn’t try to kill you?” 

I told her I don’t want any baby ever. Does she? “It’s nice, to have a little one calling mummy mummy. Little Phoebe or Little Ernst. Ernst Junior.” 

A hard night at work first, complete identity failure, disintegration again, though at 3am I turned on my phone and found Adelaide had sent a message at 22:39 Lots of xxxxxxxx and that cheered me so much. I felt much better from then on, stronger, confident in my new job. I was listening to classical music all night, feeling like Nietzsche with cold hands. Writing is so important to me. That me alone with myself. But also that cuddling Adelaide, holding her so tight. 

18th September 2007

At last the cold icy air of the mountains. All those people who I feel dislike from and discomfort from, would Adelaide want to be with any of them? No. I have got the most special thing in the world. 

I must give her ALL my money. So she can stop stripping.

13th September 2007

Once again, I don’t know what this good behaviour is gaining me. How long till I feel my cock rolling around again? I so much want to be on that Eurostar to Brussels now, I will have a priapic bulge for the whole journey till I arrive at Midi and the Ibis. 

The viciousness that people suddenly unleashed on me was bizarre; I had never done anything to hurt anyone in my life. I had never said a bad word or done a bad thing to anyone, but then when their restraint finally broke, they all went into a frenzy of viciousness against me, like they were determined to break me down and make me kill myself! To me, they just made themselves look unbelievably stupid, and it was hard to stop laughing, the power I now realised I had over them! Obviously it is just jealousy. If society thinks anyone is having more dirty sexual pleasures than them and getting away with it, they will boil away with insane jealousy, and eventually their volcano erupts,and they humiliate themselves. Oscar Wilde went through this, Byron, Bill Clinton, Lorca. All the viciousness these people had to endure from others, for what?! Always it is just jealousy. Once you know it is just jealousy, then you know you can carry on doing what you are doing more than ever, flaunt yourself in their faces, provoke them more and more, play them like a piano, till they get madder and madder and madder, and they cannot stop THINKING about you, they become OBSESSED with you, it eats them away, while you are going on enjoying pleasure after pleasure after pleasure, going on GETTING AWAY WITH IT. 

3rd September 2007

I have decided to name my Diamond Skull Gordon, after my hero, the Prime Minister of the British Empire, Gordon Brown, or maybe after Flash Gordon (I still want to marry Dale Arden when I grow up, even though I suspect Ming probably fiddled with her, INTERFERED with her Mercilessly, until she begged him not to stop, during her all-too-frequent captivities by that particular gentleman, Emperor Ming, that is, not Campbell). Tonight I have to go home to my little nest, after 10 days cocooned in my mother’s house, eating too much, getting fat, and not washing or shaving enough. Reality returns Monday when I start my new job, with Rigby & Peller, fittting ladies for their bras. They asked if I had any experience and I said no, but I’d be prepared to start at the bottom and work my way up.

I think things perhaps, after all, are still all right with E.T. and I (R.B.). It was maybe just my usual Sunday-morning-after-the-Saturday-night-before thing. Drinking nowadays always means I wake up the next morning drowning in depression, paranoia, self-loathing and embarrassment, and I have quite often messed myself as well I expect. So now my spirits rebound again, and for a while I feel giggly, and excited, and happy, so in a few hours there will be a further adjustment when things will go back to their normal equilibrium—a kind of calm resigned pessimism, neither tortured nor ecstatic. These swings from pole to pole are very exhausting, and are why I really want to stop drinking now. Gordon is saying nothing, just eyes me, dourly. Willi, bless him, hops around my desk and nuzzles up against my face. I give him a little stroke. My study is dark, just my green ‘banker’s’ (I said Banker’s) lamp on the desk, breaking the Stygian gloom. Willi likes it like that. There is some classical music playing quietly from my old wireless, my french windows are open to the black, rain-spitting skies, and oh joy, approaching storm. Electricity is in the air, the giant tropical ferns are blowing and thrashing against the glass, the smells of the garden drift in to me; Elizabeth is still sending me love, I think, much may yet, even at the eleventh hour, be salvaged. Willi has just shat on my face but I do not let this dampen my peace or my calmness at all. Nothing can upset me tonight.

All this talk of Herod’s Anus, and the black void therein, reminds me of Salome, my favourite opera. I have seen it three times in Berlin now, Evelyn Herletzius at the Staatsoper, Sylvie Valayre at the Staatsoper, and Inga Johanssen at the Deutsche Oper. Berlin to my mind has the best opera in the world, all right I have not seen opera in every city in the world, but Berlin certainly knocks the socks off anything I have seen in London.

Brunette in deep v-neck blue swirling geometric top, and big big tits and beautiful cleavage, sat in corner next to me. Stirring.

31st August 2007

When I drink I feel strong, and powerful, and in control. I feel like a beautiful angel. An illusion of course, but a powerful and comforting one. It gives me the confidence that I so often lack. 99% of the greatest (most shameful? most thrilling!) experiences of my life have been under the influence of the demon drink, and would not have happened otherwise. It propels me into situations and leads me to pushing situations to their crisis points so at last something HAPPENS, things get RESOLVED one way or the other, at least there is MOVEMENT. Without the fire of drink in my blood, I am fatally indolent and indecisive, and would do nothing for being unable to decide what to do. FAKE FAKE FALSE FALSE FALSE!!! I cannot stand prevarication, and have been meaning to say so for some time. People who make sweeping generalisations are idiots. Big windows open to black afternoon skies, soon to rain, when I shall open the windows wider still, I ‘listen again’ to Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.

30th August 2007

Can you believe Adelaide is with you? It is the miracle of my life. I only want Poison to be intellectual stuff, pure clean intellectual stuff, cutting out the dirty mucky sex whore stuff. That belongs in my books only. I only want the highest things in Poison. My life is unfolding, thanks to Adelaide. I am opening up like a flower. I have purged myself of strip clubs, porn cinema, Esmeraldas, it has been 26 days now. 626AM Thinking about me?? Why is that? Hahaha. Thinking about all the voluptuous SEX I am having?! It is on your minds ALL THE TIME? 718AM going up this time!! I want to talk about addiction, gambling, credit card debts. But in my BOOKS. They are my Die Fackels, my Simplicissimus, my Nietzsche books. It needs to be caustic, satiric, but true. “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality.” But anger was also a stimulant. “It is odd, but agitation or contest of any kind gives a rebound to my spirits,” Byron once remarked. His fury and his grief at what he saw as the vindictive injustice of his banishment impelled him into a new phase of creative energy.” I still cannot believe that me and Adelaide will ever be together. I will be back in that corner at the Pig before long. “Lily really LOVVVES you!” L— delightedly told me. “She shows me your picture and says isn’t he lovely!” The first rule of writing is WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT! Forget all this crap about Gul, Turkey, Vienna, bell, diamond, etc.****You only write well when you are under pressure, that is why my best stuff was from July 1999, and then whenever I am travelling around Europe. “Both the Cantos and Kraus’s writings seek to conjoin extreme 'locality', temporal detail and even private reference with grand horizons of history. They aim at a palimpsest of allusion and citation, incorporating in their stylistic and polemical texture documents both literary and political. The pulse is one of anger and exhortation.” I can only be alone so how can this work? Don’t talk about Vienna and Turkey straightforwardly, use it only as METAPHOR. The Turkish cannon bell in the top of St Stephen’s can be a great metaphor for something or other! Every time I see her is like when Bogarde looks up from behind his hotel desk and sees Charlotte Rampling walking through the revolving doors in her white mink coat, their eyes meet and they recognise each other, and for a moment both their hearts stop beating. I am head over heels in love with her, yet our relationship has always seemed so painful. Klemperer – May 1942 “'I shall go on writing. That is my heroism. I will bear witness, precise witness!' In his writing, Klemperer placed expectations on himself as well, aspiring to 'become a writer of contemporary cultural history.' Commenting on that issue in the weekly Die Zeit newspaper, Volker Ulrich wrote: 'There’s no doubt: He became just that. The diaries covering 1933 to 1945 — which merge the most detailed observation skills, linguistic mastership, educational scepticism, and human grandeur — eclipse everything that has ever been written on the era of National Socialism.'" 

I am slipping further and further from real life. I am becoming a ghost. It is so long since I have seen my love, 26 days, and now a week since we last spoke on the phone. I have not been outside my mother’s house since I arrived Wednesday night. I am becoming a wraith. I do not shave, or wash (as much as I should). I smell almost poisonous. I will bath now, but I think it is too little too late—my body really needs to be BURNT. It cannot be cleansed! When I don’t see her for so long I almost lose my nerve and become so shy, our affair seems increasingly like a dream, harder and harder to believe that we have ever really been together.

29th August 2007

Write POISON IS A GIFT in such a way no one knows if I am telling the truth or not! With a light touch and a wicked glint in my eye, keep getting away with it. Smuggle terrible things into people’s homes without them knowing it. I retreat like a stag at bay to my citadel, and listen to Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces. Of course I close my red velvet curtains against the repulsive, vile afternoon s**shine, and turn the radio up LOUD. Feelings of vile inadequacy and depression tormenting me as I wake up at 2am in the morning. Worried I cannot start the new job on Monday, and about what I wrote to G– about the monkey with urinary and bowel problems.

The eroticism of those trips to Wien & Budapest, don’t I miss that?!!! Remember being in Wien that cool autumnal day wandering around not knowing where I really wanted to go, so cut up and inadequate about Lotta. Incredible erotic memories. Isn’t it better if Adelaide/Lily does leave me? With the new job I can pay my debts and GO TRAVELLING AGAIN.

How I do miss Vienna. My next trip anywhere will have be to there, I think. My lovely Dorint, Schoenberg Foundation, Belvedere. Race memories are very long. How vehemently Vienna leads the opposition to Turkey joining the EU. Wouldn’t it be nice to just come back from trips abroad to Wien, Budapest, Venice, to see Adelaide again on Saturday nights? No. I cannot be shut out from that girl again.

How sexy it was to be in Budapest! But how exposed I felt in daylight, and on a Sunday, yet how relaxed and excited I felt coming out in Frankfurt at night. I am a creature of the night, I need the night. How exciting being in Antwerp art museum knowing I had Brussels to look forward to getting back to, and the Gare du Nord girls, Clarisse, McDonald’s girl! Oh I can feel the cold icy air of the mountains now! Paloma dancing to Superman. HOW SAD AND EMPTY I WAS.

How I am going to miss the Pig on Saturday nights now winter is here. Those lonely fucking holidays, are you mad!? Yes but I wrote a lot, yes about loneliness and despair.*******Three of my favourites on the Proms tonight, Strauss Zarathustra, Sibelius Symphony No.2, and some Webern. The Proms are the only thing that makes summer bearable for a dark-loving mole-like creature of the night like me.

The stuff I write has got to be surreal, manic, satiric. I want my books to contain truths. The stuff I wrote in my notebooks going across Europe was truth. The stuff in Autismus part 2 is truth. The stuff in part 1 is trying to think of something to say, trying to sound clever, and cosmopolitan. All that Paris 1875, Italian Justice Ministry stuff. Only after July 1999 was I able to start writing truth—because of the attacks on me. I suddenly broke through to my voice, with the simultaneous discovery of my format, i.e. Nietzsche numbered paragraphs. At last my splintered fractured mind had a framework it could hang itself on.

Oh God HOW I would love to get to Atlantic City! I don’t even have a passport. Oh I miss my travels around Europe! But—have I ever had a better moment in my life than upstairs at Jim’s with Adelaide, and in the church graveyard that last night with Adelaide??! I should have had a great time with Susi and with Irina, it was goodish with Iga and Diana and Riccarda and Yulia. But nothing to compare with the real thing with Adelaide.

What I want to write about: opera singers being junkies, people saying great wonders are boring. Philosophy is about sex. Brussels. Erotic, Billy Boy condoms. Vienna being anti Turkey. The largest diamond in the world.

Autismus part 1 is written in a Wilhelminian style, whereas part 2 switches to Nietzsche.

28th August 2007

Suffuse myself with Karl Kraus, Georg Trakl, Egon Schiele, Nietzsche, so I am always writing like them, thinking like them, in that cold hard sharp way.

Be the change you want to see in the world. I am looking for another Lilith (openlegs4u). I am looking for another Head Status: Chopped Off, the greatest thing I have ever found on the web. I want to lead a DOUBLE LIFE with my alternative ego on my blog. I am looking for a really CRITICAL voice. “Kraus, before Orwell and even before H.L. Mencken, was the ancestor of many of our best sceptics, and almost all of our best bloggers. (The blogger technique of glossing some absurdity highlighted in a mainstream publication was what Kraus did in every issue of Die Fackel and even in his enormous play The Last Days of Mankind, which consisted almost entirely of citations from newspapers and periodicals.)” 

I cannot stand people who prevaricate, and I’ve been meaning to say so for some time. People who make sweeping generalisations are idiots. Philosophy so often seems to be about sex. Kantstraße in Berlin I always thought of as Kuntstraße as it was the road that led to the brothels of Stuttgarter Platz. I stayed several times in the Kunthotel, therefore, before their awful Jever beer and lack of a proper bar drove me away to the Berlin Plaza off of Ku’Damm. Voltaire is the name of the restaurant next door to the brothels Mon Cheri and Stutti Frutti and Chocolate in Stuttgarter Platz itself. When I think of Goethe I think of Goethestraße in Munich which has the Sexyland stripclub and next to it of course is Schillerstraße with the Atlantic City stripclub (far superior to Sexyland in my opinion) and its innumerable dolly bars. A Russian girl in Femina, I think, told me she hated Nietzsche because he hated women, before saying that I smiled with my mouth but not my eyes.

“Mann brothers, Hesse, Hoffmansthal, Tucholsky, Zweig, Roth and Döblin. With a precision barely conceivable for us today, authors like Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka and Victor Klemperer scoured linguistic usage for mistakes, inaccuracies and instances of clumsiness.” Like Kraus I have an antithetic nature. I have to have something to disagree with, a newspaper article, before I can think of anything to write. “Humour magazines became popular means of disseminating propaganda for both Leftists and Rightists after the German revolution of 1918. These magazines reflected ideological views about art and arguments which were carried out in print. Thus, was born the theory of Tendenzkunst, an art form that responds and intervenes in immediate political issues. Humour magazines were used for domestic and international propaganda in neutral countries and went through variations in content and style in relation to political events of the times. Photomontages and cartoons were popular mediums of expression.” Die Weltbuhne: “With its famed small, red booklet, it was the key forum of expression for leftist, socialist intellectuals during the Weimar Republic.”

27th August 2007

Only when we drink poison are we well —we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue, to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell, who cares? Through the unknown, we’ll find the new.

Pour us your poison to revive our soul! It cheers the burning quest that we pursue, Careless if Hell or Heaven be our goal, Beyond the known world to seek out the New!//Pour out your poison that it may refresh us! This fire burns our brains so fiercely, we wish to plunge To the abyss’ depths, Heaven or Hell, does it matter? To the depths of the Unknown to find something new!”//Pour us your poison wine that makes us feel like gods! Our brains are burning up! — there’s nothing left to do But plunge into the void! — hell? heaven? — what’s the odds? We’re bound for the Unknown, in search of something new! “The atmosphere of carefree pleasure over a chasm”. “Remember me, I’m the one who helped you baby”. Yes, I will always remember how she has helped me. I’m too sexy for my shirt Right Said Fred, remember the girl dancing to that at Sunset 1993-94? Same girl to Lion Sleeps Tonight.

Without going to strip clubs, it is actually very hard for me to spend money! The odd cinema visit aside, I have no expenses in life.

The jungle drums start again, at 2am in the morning. Louder even than last night. Pounding, insistent now.

I want to provoke myself into self-perpetuating realms of brilliance like Nietzsche, or Oscar Wilde.

This is an exciting new adventure I am starting, with ——.******Where are the writers like Karl Kraus today? I had hopes for Sidney Blumenthal, Maureen O’Dowd, or Peter Wilby but none of them really satisfy; I want that Viennese causticness. My interventions and apercus on LS were quite sharp “Xma is indeed a serious illness” and “I wondered what all those chalk marks were”, as were my —— night reports “I came down smelling like a Sofia chimney”. Clive James says ”Kraus was essentially a blogger before the fact: his basic technique was to write a couple of hundred words about something silly in the newspaper. He sometimes wrote at length, but his admirers preferred him to keep it short. The kind of thing they liked best from him might have been designed to pop up on a Blackberry today”. Maybe I should look on the blogs for my sustenance, but I have never found one. Maybe I should write my own, with my concerns and themes and interests, Vienna, Berlin, Freud, sex, the brothels of the Gurtel and strippers of Seilerstatte, the nighttime walk to Stutti, the kabins of the Berlin Erotic Centre. Perhaps interventions on other people’s blogs is the only route, apart from my books. THEY are my Die Fackels, my Nietzsche books, my Simpliccimus. But I need to talk about sex openly, and eroticism, its primacy in my life, how I was drunk on it for years. How can I write on LS and say how primally sexy Isadora at Sunset is, now I am with ——! 

“Outside the German-speaking lands, Kraus is now known mainly for having been the Viennese café pundit who brilliantly fulfilled a self-created role as the scourge of loose language. Serious readers, even if their serious reading does not often include him, know that Kraus, from before the turn of the twentieth century until a couple of years before the Anschluss in 1938, was the linguistic health inspector who searched through what was said for what was meant, and was particularly scathing about the jingoistic propaganda that helped drive a generation of young men irretrievably into the mincing machine of the Great War.” Vienna and Berlin are the centre of my intellectual world still, I must find bloggers from there, and intervene and contribute, or write one myself. But what to say? When I must censor so much? It has to be slightly surreal i.e. “Jungle drums at 335AM in the morning”. No good just copying other people’s articles as in the pointless waste of time my wordpress Serpent’s Egg was! Ironically the first page of my Casanova or Lost Wanderings book is just the way I want to write in my blog: “Vienna has the laziest whores in Christendom. How magical things seem in the past. Here I am sitting in the same seat in the Café Klimt where I was when Lotta suddenly appeared at my side three years ago. Three years ago! It was a few minutes before I saw the solitary butterfly—a black one, all on its own. Gradually, more and more slowly appeared, as if attracted out by our company (they are as reticent and hesitant as the Vienna whores, and as luridly coloured). There were not many other people there either, just me and a few other sensitive young men. The whores were sleepy and sluggish, and didn’t really want to move to get up to talk to me, preferred to stay sitting curled up with each other. They could not be bothered to uncurl themselves for me. Instead they just all watched me, curious, contemptuous, till I finished my drink and left. I have only seen one woman with red hair this time. The bar manager in my hotel. No Lotta. No Fr Wahl this time. My life seems inexorably set on a downward path of disappointment. Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe Olga has eclipsed everything, and made my old priapic way of life no pleasure to me anymore. Like an oyster without a pearl is Vienna, as like an oyster without a pearl was Munich. Maybe I am the oyster without the pearl. Sophie Dahl as a Medieval King will live with me for a long time. How much she reminded me of Lydia. The blesséd Lydia. The little shrine she has made, to Saint Lydia & the Virgin Mary in front of her picture, next to it the picture of her boyfriend.” Maybe I could write the same way about Adelaide and my life in Berlin now? ALL my books are what I want to write in my blog, especially the stuff written in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Brussels, the lists of pictures I have seen—but I don’t travel anymore! My locations in Brussels, Vienna, Berlin are still so important to me, the Hotel le Dome, the Metropole bar, the Bourse, the Cathedral, how can I think of it without seeing Rops’ Christ with women hanging off his swollen member? Something delightfully dark and perverse about Brussels and Belgium as a whole, and sometimes some things far from delightful. But! to write like I did on the first page of that Vienna book I have to have complete isolation, just me & my little notebook!!!! Intellectual purity, heights, coldness. Cold and hard.

26th August 2007

Still the jungle drums beat 554am in the morning.

I've got to make her feel its worth it, so shes happy to be with me, and give her life to me.

I NEED MORE MONEY NOW!

Thank God Adelaide has saved me from my days of being a slut and a lush. You can never go back. I am too in love.

Autismus looks at why I chose the path I did. The moment before I made the choice to become the monster I did. The moment Wilde resisted flight and chose arrest. The moment Nero decided to kill Britannicus & start the journey to becoming a despot. After all in 1997 & 1998 I plunged deeper into darkness than ever before, adding Tingle Tangle and Esmeraldas to what before had only ever been Sunset and Carnival. Then from 2003 I added Flying Scotsman, Brussels whores and kabins, Berlin whores and kabins, Vienna whores and kabins, Munich whores and kabins. Patricia, Bella Rosa, Emily in Munich, Yulia, Riccarda, Iga and Monte Carlo in Berlin. Maria in Vienna. Irina and Viktoriya, Diana and Martina in Nuremberg and Munich. In Brussels Maria, Natasha, Margareta. In Soho Lela, Ana Maria, Lydia, Pamela, Demi,. Savage lust. Savage beauty. 

What brings you to town? Pleasure. What else should bring one everywhere?

One comes up to town for amusing oneself.

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."

You would love Oscar Wilde. He was of course DIRTY. His statue (him lying in his coffin smoking, have you seen it my love?) lies facing Charing Cross Station. His dialogue is so dirty"I hang upon your lips". "To lose one parent is unfortunate, to lose both begins to look like carelessness."

To write prose like Oscar Wilde!

"For Baudelaire, each emotion, each change, comes with its reverse. All that is solid melts into air. At the same time the city fills with stuff; the mythic past is pushed aside, except it won't bug off so easily. There's a 'Danse Macabre' around every corner, 'flayed Specimens and Skeletons digging like labourers.' Meanwhile, the poet dreams of voyaging with his erotic double to some pure shore: three times, he says 'There, there's only order, beauty: abundant, calm, voluptuous.' Of course these virtues (and none was more important than the last: 'the Revolution was made by voluptuaries,' he wrote in an essay) can't be bought on the street corner." 

25th August 2007

How Sibelius excites me and reminds me of those lonely European journeys. Of course my books must be my secret life. My secret life used to be strippers and whores, now it will be my books. Sibelius Symphony No.6.

I can only be alone.

I want my books to be perfect pristine jewels. My memoirs, my diaries, my Die Fackels, my philosophy, my Nietzsche books.

My attacks, my arrows.

I cannot read the book I want to read so I must write it myself. About Europe, night trains across Europe, Sibelius, aloneness. Sinfulness, opulence, waste. Sluttishness, lushness. I dream of a paperback book with my name on it. I want to absorb NEWSPAPERS, I do not want to read books. It is time to write MY books. This is my Confessions of an English Opium Eater. I am obsessed with Keats, Byron, Shelley. Chatterton. Trakl.

“Die Fackel was Kraus’s vehicle for his crusade against hypocrisy, psychoanalysis, corruption of the Habsburg empire, nationalism of the pan-German movement, laissez-faire economic policies, and all kind of signs of times. Kraus himself summarized his themes as follows: ‘Sex and untruth, stupidity, abuses, cadences and clichés, printer’s ink, technology, death, war and society, usury, politics, the insolence of office… art and nature, love and dreams.'”

Night is my time. The night is my world. Lucubrations. Maybe that should be my title! Of Book No.5 at least. Book talking about different subjects this time, Detachment, Sex Dancers, Mata Hari, Anita Berber. Psychoanalysis, the Tutankhamun analogy. In fact the book can be all the old bits that got cut out of my first four books.

I want to go back to my flat now and work my way through all those videos, find all the treasures on them. At last now my nest can be what I always hoped it would be.

How did someone as special as you come into my life? 

"The sex industry may be a £30 billion a year business, but this demoralising dive shows how the chink of coins fuels the bottom of the barrel realities. As one girl writhes on the tiny, raised stage, the next turn is circulating with the collecting pint pot. It's simple. The more that goes in, the more that comes off - and the more gynaecological the presentation. And that's the routine all day long. The range of drinks? God knows, or cares. But clearly methods are in place to transfer substantial quantities of alcohol into the bloodstream of transfixed punters - be they nervy looking little clerks, local pimps or lost souls from Hades. If you're into watching someone's daughter, someone's sister bump and grind for handfuls of cash to feed either her child or her habit, then you must live with that. But be ashamed. Be very ashamed."

I still want to write The Willing Cheeks of Fu Manchu and The Jungle Drums of Fu Manchu. Jungle drums, like a madly racing heart, like my heart if i wake up after an unplanned afternoon nap, beating through the night. Of course there will be dancing girls, naturally there will be.

24th August 2007

Another black, still day, with a nice freshness. Real beautiful Fu Manchu weather. I know what I would have done with this weather in the old days. Now I feel excited to follow intellectual pursuits again. But being at home depresses me, and I do not wash and do not look at my writing, I just fall into a slough of nothingness. Eating drinking sleeping.

I want to make something of my life, something spectacular, but I don’t know how. I YEARN for soberness. Karl Marx intellectual rigour, Friedrich Nietszsche writing in cold stoveless rooms with blue hands.

There are only two important things to me in my life: Adelaide, and writing.

I must make myself a hero, and organise my life. Work all through the nights, sleep all through the days.

I want to be piling money up in my bank account, for Adelaide. But instead I am just sitting here, idle, stewing in my own juices. Wallowing in my debts. I do not want to lose her. That is all I know. I do not want to lose her. 

23rd August 2007

Drink induced anger last night I felt like I wanted to fight anyone who came near. Now 5am awake, cannot sleep. Depressed.

Gloom and despair about our relationship. She can never tell me enough that things are all right. She urged the telephone number on me, urged me to call her.

"There seems to have been so many ups and downs in our relationship over the past year and a half. It has been exhausting. I feel like there has been a storm in my head ever since the night I fell in love with you (or REALISED I had fallen in love with you). Only when I said I would buy the plane tickets for you did the storm at last go away, and I started to feel calm and ALMOST happy again. Saturday was horrible.

I don't want to split up with you again. I need you, to save my life. I have lived like a slut and a lush all my life. If you leave me, I will go back to being a slut and a lush again, and stay that way for the rest of my life. It is hideous the amount of money I have spent on drink & strippers over the last ten years or so. I would much rather give that money to you. It is amazing to think that you have been supporting yourself for so long."

I like my intellectual solitude too much, don't I? I like my little nest too much. With its ferns, dark winter nights outside, classical music, lamps on floor.

"The world of Casanova, peopled with Fellini's favoured cast of degenerates, freaks and idiot crowds is a stylised transposition of this decadent contemporary landscape. The blasé, nouveau riche European sensibility which Fellini exposed a decade or so earlier with La Dolce Vita (1960) is distilled once more in the morally void Casanova and the grotesquery of his artificial surroundings. Fellini's approach is to unravel the myth of the great libertine and rewrite him as not merely depraved - this much is known - but as a romantic failure and a bankrupt cultural icon."

Living like a slut and a lush in Brussels, Berlin, Munich, Vienna. If Adelaide leaves me now, I will go back to Brussels and fuck Clarisse, and go back to Nuremberg to fuck Martina, and go back to Stuttgarter Platz to fuck Olga & Alla & Nadia & Evalina, and go back to Vienna to fuck all of them. And I will go to the Black Pig every Saturday.

"Casanova is not only the story of a man, it is also about a whole era--an era of grand opulence and grand waste. Like in many of Fellini's other films, the protagonist of Casanova serves as a guide for us through a phantasmagoric carnival-like world. Casanova is depicted as a sexually-ravenous, and deeply cynical man. He is constantly searching for some kind of image of the perfect woman--an ideal which eventually leads to his own destruction.

Casanova is not a film for everyone--despite having the usual Fellinisque scenes of ribaldry, Casanova is for the most part slowly paced (it reminds me of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon). Ultimately, Casanova, like Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, is about the passing of a golden age into oblivion. One leaves Casanova feeling both depressed, and yet somehow hopeful. Why?

Perhaps because like all great artists, Fellini realises that in our darkest hours, we still can hold on to our memories of happier times."

21st August 2007

The Tragical Adventure…of Heinrich von Kleist

Wednesday 22 August 2007 21:15-22:00 (Radio 3)

Ivan Howlett explores the life and work of one of the most tortured but brilliant writers of the early 19th century, who died by his own hand in 1811 at the age of 34. Heinrich von Kleist produced a body of work that eventually earned him a place in German literature next to Goethe and Schiller and was a major influence on Nietzsche and Kafka. However, he received practically no recognition in his lifetime and even today is little known outside Germany.

17th August 2007

I am a slut and a lush and sometimes it feels good to go mad and indulge those lush tendencies again. It is boring being a good boy. Living like a monk in a monastery.

I want to study financial issues again, accountancy issues, as they are now more central than ever to my life. When I was living my life on strippers and whores I needed to spend a lot of money I didn’t have to sustain this bubble. Now I have replaced that sluttish and lush life with a real relationship, I find I am spending even more money that I do not have than I ever did before! Money, and liquidity, I now see is ever more central to the happiness of my life.

I can be something of a revolution in her life, and offer her a way out of the place she is trapped in. For sure, she is a revolution in my life, offering me a way out of the place I was trapped in as well.

10th August 2007

Depressed by the emptiness of these three days, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But thank God I am free of the Black Pig! I have saved some money. “Sooner or later we all succumb to our weaknesses, some drink, others smoke opium, others again act like brutes—some kind of folly comes over us all.”—Stefan Zweig.

I want to be with you forever, but all I can see is me back in that corner at the Black Pig looking for you, if/when you have shut me out again.

“Falling in love is glamorous hell” Carol Ann Duffy.

I feel vile and repulsive again. Emotions always make me feel like this. Feelings of worthlessness, and complete pointlessness. I must make myself a hero.

I won her love after a year of trying, then I lost it after just two months, then I won her love again. It is inevitable that I will lose it once more.

From Wednesday 18th April, not yet a month into our affair:

“Coming in to work in pleasant spring evening looking up at buildings & trees feeling I am Lord Byron looking at this sight, & feeling the power locked up in everything around me. I feel there is something locked up in me too, I am capable of something spectacular.”

9th August 2007

“For my own sake – because it feels like they have the power to cut off my head – I must become a hero, organise my life and obtain from it what they deny me. If I live, in order to continue to live with myself, I must have more talent than the most exquisite poet. These people can only put up with the tamed heroes – they don’t know about heroism.” [Pete Doherty]

She wants me to be her hero. She is waiting for me to show her I can be. Do something amazing.

“Going to Nuremberg tonight would be a crazy expense—but it is only through crazy expense that I usually break through to the other side, and really touch some sensational pleasure. “—Written on the train from Frankfurt to Nuremberg, but still so true. With whores or with real girlfriends, just the same.

8th August 2007

I want to write small little pocketbooks, small monographs, about what it is to be autistic, to be unable to be with someone, to always be alone.

I love my nest, and want to stay here a long time. I want to write a book about addiction, erotic obsession. All my adult life I have lived naughtily, dirtily, like a slut, like a lush, then I fell in love with you and those feelings didn’t go away, they just became all focused on you only. All that naughtiness, dirtiness, sluttishness, lushness, has become fixated on you. Only you can satisfy these feelings in me. I live like a slut, any hole will do, but when I fall in love, I become completely faithful.

I loved living decadently, naughtily, sleazily, I went to those decadent naughty sleazy places to avoid love and stay safe from it, but then I fell in love with someone in one of those decadent naughty sleazy places, and now I have to change my behaviour in a number of important ways.

Now you are the all consuming passion of my life. All my lushness, sluttishness, has lasered in on you. You are the great love of my life. You are the Grand Passion of my life. You are my Immortal Beloved.

Yes the Black Pig (especially Saturdays) was my drug, but then inside the Black Pig I found an even greater drug.

I have always run away from women, then when they go I run after them crying “Come back! I didn’t mean it! Come back!” I tried to avoid falling in love with you for so long.

31st July 2007

It is like I have been on a ship in a terrible storm for 18 months. ALSO in the grip of fever as well! At last the storm seems to be calming down. Hope I can get my head together while you are away. I am still in limbo about the — and therefore the new job. Hope by time you return something will be resolved one way or the other. Now you notice the rains have finally stopped & the sun has returned. I told you I affect the weather.

30th July 2007

To be with Adelaide is the great gift of my life. It is the great miracle of my life. After all the horrors, pain, sadness of my life, this is the greatest miracle. I have to give her everything. My life has been the biggest farce of all time. I have thrown away all my chances in life. I did not want to throw away this one.

29th July 2007

Now I feel quite calm and happy again. I am frightened of the storm, and the fever, and the drunken depressions. I don't want them to come back again. I just want both of us to be calm, and happy.

"People would often talk about him to me; they said he was unstable, moody, even neurotic; I liked being the only one who understood him." (Simone de Beauvour, talking about her friend Nelson Algren). I like the fact that you are the only one who understands me (DO you understand me? "I understand, I understand"). Algren wrote The Man With The Golden Arm. "The addict's addiction is a kind of revolt." I was addicted to drink & strippers & the addiction was never going to go away overnight, even though I had you to hold onto at nights. Slowly, though, I think the addictions are leaving me.

I have always IDOLISED sex dancers (so much better word than "strippers"). Like Mata Hari, the sex dancer during the first world war, who lured all the German and French and British officers to her flame and got them to tell her all their secrets, till the French shot her! Josephine Baker the black American girl who danced in 1920s Berlin wearing nothing but a girdle of bananas and drove all the men into a frenzy (they had probably never seen a black woman before, let alone a naked one, SEX-dancing!)! And my all time heroine, Anita Berber: "Berber consciously broke every social and theatrical convention of her time, and proclaimed some startling theory to justify her provocative outlaw behaviour. She haunted the Friedrichstadt quarter of Berlin, appearing in hotel lobbies, nightclubs, and casinos, radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap that shadowed her gaunt shoulders and a pair of patent-leather pumps. One year, Berber made her post-midnight entrances looking like a drugged-out Eve, clad only those heels, a frightened pet monkey hanging from her neck, and an heirloom silver brooch, packed with cocaine. On Berlin's cabaret stages, Anita Berber danced out bizarre erotic fantasias--scenic displays, fueled by noxious concoctions of ether-and-chloroform, cognac, morphine injections, and a chic, pan-sexual disposition. Satiated Berliners, after a few riotous seasons in the early Twenties, finally tired of Berber's libidinous antics. The high priestess of choreographic decadence died a pauper's death in 1928; the result, more or less, of a desperate attempt to quit cold turkey from her most beloved of addictions, cognac."

For me, when I used to come to see you on Saturday nights, I idolised you, the same way I idolised Mata Hari, Jospehine Baker, Anita Berber. Up there in the spotlight, you were my GODDESS.

25th July 2007

Adelaide rang me around 11pm on bus home from the Black Pig, "Oh! I thought you'd be BUSY!", just to say hello, and that I was BRAVE. She was drunk cos some guy was buying drinks for -- and her cos he wanted to fuck --, black girl with fat arse, but she feels sorry for him cos her husband is waiting outside for her! Adelaide did sound tipsy, I hate hearing her drunk when I am not. She said goodnight, and "I love you".

She said don't worry about the job, that doesn't matter.

She said before she thought I was weak, why am I strong now? "Cos you working so hard, and, you said you want to save money for our WEDDING." Yes I said, I get better job then i can give you more money. "NO I am not talking about that, I am talking about the WEDDING. You never talked like that before." 

24th July 2007

It is easy to think without drink and strippers I have no life, just work sleep work sleep, but my life is WRITING, classical music, ferns. Sleeping with Adelaide, working for Adelaide. Being with Adelaide. I have found something to live for.

23rd July 2007

I am starting to love my little nest again. Waking up this grey, dark, Monday afternoon, I put my floor lamp on to relieve the Stygian gloom, & my classical music, and it feels warm & cosy & beautiful. When disappointed, I draw myself in.

I am a gambler risking all on one throw of the dice, and if he loses, he doesn’t even care, cos he knows this was a gamble worth taking. Afterwards he can say at least I tried. I have always gambled a lot on you, from the "I understand" night onwards, money but more gambled on showing my emotions in front of everyone & risking humiliation, and I have always got a lot back! Most of the time I went home having lost, in suicidal shame and despair at what I had lost, at what it had cost me in money, and emotions, but when I won, the wins were SO big, that it made up for all the losses. Now the stakes are getting higher! I am gambling bigger than ever before! Laying down more money & risking more than ever before. But I am playing for something that is the only thing that makes life worth living. If I don’t gamble big, I will lose it. To do is to dare. To dare is to do. You have to speculate to accumulate. What am I going to say, count my money, and add it up, add up the chances, and say no, it is too much of a risk, I’ll just let Adelaide go!? I will always gamble everything on you, always risk everything on you, all my money, all my emotions. In front of everyone at the Black Pig I let my emotions show. At the Black Pig I am as naked as you are.

20th July 2007

Adelaide said she couldn’t understand why I had this tunnel vision, just sticking in a job that only pays £–, "What will you do when you are an old man, who will look after you?" I said all I cared about was paying my rent, and having enough money left over for drink, “and strippers” she said, completing the sentence for me.

18th July 2007

Our relationship is like Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter, where they are playing and laughing and chasing each other around their room, then she locks herself in the bathroom. He demands she opens the door IMMEDIATELY, but before she does she smashes one of her perfume bottles on the floor, so when he bursts through the door in bare feet he walks on the broken glass, and she just grins at him nervously, like a naughty girl.

We seem to like to do little things to hurt each other; or at least we just can’t seem to stop ourselves. It is becoming very sado-masochistic.

I live on scraps. I scavenge in the rooms, around the marble throne where the Kaiserin once sat.

15th July 2007

By the time I get up it is already 11:06! Cool! So soon I can be heading back to the Black Pig again! It does seem to have become the most important place in my life, and that is sad I suppose, but why not? You are the most important woman of my life, so that is the most important place.

9th July 2007

553PM It is thundering, rumbling, has been for an hour, and is just starting to rain now after all the thunder. As usual at this time of year it is Phnom Penh weather. June was the wettest June ever. July is carrying on. Soon August will be here, & we will be on the last lap to September! The cold icy air! Brussels! Vienna! Munich!

I do love my little nest, if I can just get my mind back.

I want to write like the first pages of Autismus again, but about Phoebe and Arthur this time, rather than Lulu and Jack.

2nd July 2007

I am STRANGE , ECCENTRIC and BIZARRE. I am rake, libertine, and scandal.

If it is going to end, then let us end it.

1st July 2007

I AM MAD. I AM CRAZY. I AM AN ALCOHOLIC. Shame overwhelms me.

OUR RELATIONSHIP IS FANTASTIC NOW. FIERY! VOLCANIC! BETTER THAN THAT FLAT CRYING CLAUSTROPHOBIA WALKING DOWN TO TO GET BREAD FOR HER THINKING HOW CAN I GET OUT OF THIS?

I WANT A FIERY RELATIONSHIP. IT IS LIKE RICHARD BURTON AND ELIZABETH TAYLOR EXCEPT HE USED TO BUY HER HUGE DIAMOND RINGS & NECKLACES AND I SOMETIMES BOUGHT YOU A LOAF OF BREAD FROM THE CORNER SHOP.

29th June 2007

Only if I stay away for a long time, can I ever be friendly with her again.

But you will die of acedia. Dryness. You have to push it to the end. You have to damn yourself completely now. I am Faust. I am already damned. There is no going back.

26th June 2007

No I am not stupid, but I am naughty, I am dirty, I am rebel. I am rake, libertine, scandal, wild card, untouchable one unpredictable one, I am Byron. I am the devil.

This is the addict’s revolt. I am The Man With The Golden Arm. I go back to the Black Pig because I have contempt for myself. If you don’t want me, then I am no good. I will destroy myself quite happily. Drinking is nice because for a while I feel powerful, and in control, and like a beautiful angel.

When you think me surrounded, I will disappear from you. When you have forgotten all about me, I will land in your midst, splashing you with my waves.

25th June 2007

Already I feel this madness to return to the Black Pig Wednesday! Oh the human spirit is a marvellous thing. Crushed, downtrodden, beaten down, then my spirit rebels, wild passion! I will do everything I refused myself! Beautiful angel! “There’s got to be more to life than chasing down every temporary high”–Stacie Orrico. I start to feel a dangerous power as I start to feel maybe she cannot hurt me anymore. A dangerous latency. Once I stop loving her so much, I will then feel so powerful around her.

I once fell in love with an opera singer, Elena Prokina. She reminded me of Lydia and I was never sure if I liked Lydia because she reminded me of Prokina or the other way around. Anyway, I saw her first in Brussels, and when she stepped on stage & opened her mouth to sing, she made the most beautiful sound I had ever heard in my life. A couple of years later I saw she was giving a personal recital of songs at the Wigmore Hall in London so I went & got a seat near the front (at the side) just six or eight feet away from her, and when she stepped on stage I realised she was also the most beautiful woman I had ever SEEN in my life. She sang in Russian and when she got to her final song, the final line of her last song in Russian was “I still…love…him”, and she sang those words “I still love him” she turned her head to the side of the hall and looked me directly in the eyes. And as the piano player accompanying her just played the last few notes, she held my gaze the whole time, only when the piano player finished & the audience applauded did she lower her eyes with a little smile. When she came back out for her two encores, I am sure her eyes flickered to the side to check if I was still there. I was so thrilled! This beautiful world famous opera singer looked ME directly in the eyes while singing “I still love him”. I walked out of the hall on a high, like I had just had an orgasm. Two years ago I went back to Berlin for ONE NIGHT ONLY, just to see her singing in an opera, it cost me more than £300 for the whole trip but it was worth it just to see her again. I would give anything for a woman on a stage. I don’t think I am CAPABLE of falling in love with a woman who was not on a stage. I told you my last broken heart was a 19 year old Spanish violinist from my German class.

18th June 2007

I AM BECOMING SCANDALOUS AGAIN! DOING WHAT I SHOULDN’T DO. FLAUNTING MYSELF IN PEOPLES’ FACES. SHOCKING THEM. DISAPPEARING FROM THEM, THEN DROPPING IN THE MIDDLE OF THEM WHEN THEY LEAST EXPECT IT AND SPLASHING THEM WITH MY WAVES.

I needed something to blow my life apart. I was so bored & frustrated in my job, but I am too lazy to change, it was SO easy. Yes, it is low paid, I will never be able to pay off my credit cards, I will never be able to travel, but it is easy, so stay where you are. But I needed a forest fire to wipe out the dead wood, so new green shoots could start to appear. This is Germany Year Zero. Adelaide came to blow my life apart. I AM SO BORED BY STRIPPERS NOW! ONLY ADELAIDE GIVES ME THAT ELECTRIC HIGH. I feel almost excited now. High. Elated. I am getting over her, and at same time feeling more cocky & relaxed with her, easier to love her, getting my mojo back. I AM BECOMING A DEVIL AGAIN!

Now let’s concentrate on those amazing, exquisite, Fabergé egg, exotic, tropical fern & classical music, jewels on the jungle path in the Night of the Iguana paperback books.

How beautiful quietly hissing with rain now, quiet sibilant steady relentless monsoon rain.

15th June 2007

“Works of art are indeed always products of having been in danger, of having gone to the very end in an experience, to where man can go no further.” 1:27AM Light hissing of rain falling. So I get up and open the big balcony windows as well & leave the curtains open. Beautiful. I wish this moment could last forever, just me, the Full Moon, the rain falling at night.

There is love there, but we cannot be together. I cannot be with anyone. What happened to me when I was a baby damaged me too much. It made me completely solipsistic. I could not shake off this appalling solipsism even when I was with the girl I loved more than anything in the world. Haha there must have been times when you wanted to scream at me. I wanted to scream at myself ALL the time. "Wake up! Snap out of it!" But I can’t. I cannot. My solipsism is all consuming. It is like a tapeworm that has spread around every vein in my body. Still I think we could live “semi-detached”. Close to each other, I give you all the money I can. I told you I don’t need to be with the person I love all day. I just want them to be there with me at nights & when I wake up in the mornings. Or even once a week, twice a week. That is the way I am. You are different, girls expect to be together ALL the time! For me, I just want to know that you are there for me to come home to, or I am there for you to come home to. I decided a long time ago, I realised, that I would always be alone. I can ONLY be alone. But, then in the words of the great James Morrison “you pulled me under, I had to give in”. I knew no good would come of it, but I just wanted you so much, I was like a moth to the flame. Maybe because I am scopophiliac, the vision of you was so beautiful & overwhelming, I was captivated by the vision. That was the flame luring me in to my destruction! I had no idea what to do with you if I got you, as you found out! “I am not ready for repentance, nor to match regrets, for the moth bends no more than the still imploring flame”. For the whole 12 months probably anyone else would have given up and admitted defeat; or would have been too humiliated by all their shameful making a fool of themselves! But for me you were “the still imploring flame”, and this moth could not stay away. You are STILL “the still imploring flame”. I STILL cannot stay away.

For what? Just to get burnt again? Whatever. As long as your flame still keeps imploring, I will keep on getting my wings burnt. A better poem perhaps!? “Beauty in trouble”.

    Beauty in trouble flees to the good angel, on whom she can rely

    To pay her cab fare, run a steaming bath, poultice...her bruised eye.

I am sweet, no really I am. And I have nice eyes. But I realised a long time ago that I am not capable of ever being with someone. I tried so hard with you, but I still couldn’t wake up, & come to life. Still I think we could have some kind of relationship together. Hot young English girl and cold, frozen Englishman. I was hooked on your beauty. I was captivated by your beauty. I just stare at you, stunned, shocked.

14th June 2007

Be MAD and WILD. FIGHT FOR HER*********Thank God I am out of that claustrophobic relationship. Thank God I can save some money now. BECOME SO COLD. TURN TO ICE. GO TO THE ICY MOUNTAINS TO WRITE WITH BLUE HANDS IN COLD STOVELESS ROOMS. “In the face of renewed fits of illness, in near isolation after a falling-out with his mother and sister regarding Salomé, and plagued by suicidal thoughts, Nietzsche fled to Rapallo, where he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in only ten days.” TURN TO ICE. BECOME SO COLD. GO EVERYWHERE TO SEE ADELAIDE DANCE. We parted so lovely at Dressler's. Hot kisses, hot touching, lovely grins. What will be left next time I see her? I AM AN OPIUM ADDICT. MY OPIUM IS WATCHING ADELAIDE DANCE. I AM NOT GOING TO STOP.

I BADLY NEED SOMETHING TO GO RIGHT FOR ME, JOBWISE. THAT EXTRA MONEY WOULD GIVE ME SO MUCH CONFIDENCE, WITH ADELAIDE, WITH EVERYTHING.

FACE IT! SHE WILL NEVER COME BACK TO YOU!!! YOU KNOW IT VERY WELL.

I am crying, disintegrating, burning up. This obsession with Adelaide is not going away. I can only be a drinker in a pub watching strippers. But I cannot watch anyone but Adelaide now. I can only go where Adelaide is. Good, I wanted to be ignored.

I WANT TO BECOME COLD, HARD, RUTHLESS, LET ADELAIDE HATE ME I DO NOT CARE I JUST HAVE TO SEE HER DANCE. SHE IS MY ADDICTION.

13th June 2007

DO SOMETHING! GET MOVING DON’T MOPE and DON’T DRINK! SLEEPING WHOLE DAYS IN HANGOVER! WRITE MY BOOKS GET THE PRINTER SORTED OUT. SEND AUTISMUS TO PUBLISHER. GET SOMETHING MOVING JUST ME & MY BOOKS, AND MY BEAUTIFUL MEMORIES OF ADELAIDE.

SHE WAS JUST BORED OF YOU IT WAS AS SIMPLE AS THAT!!!! THIS IS STILL A GAME! DON’T LOSE YOUR NERVE YET. THERE IS BUS STOP GIRL TO F–K. THAT VOLUPTUOUS BRAZILIAN. MAYBE I SHOULD GO TO CLASSICAL MUSIC CONCERTS JUST TO MEET GIRLS? ANYWAY SUMMER IS HERE NOW! TOO LATE!

10th June 2007

How fantastic to watch the Discopolis girl’s arse on the big screen in the bar. "I have never really chased a girl, kept trying, like I did with you. Normally I have got too much pride, or too shy, or just can’t be bothered to ever chase a girl. Honey I have no one else to give money to! Of course I am going to give it all to you. Anyway it was not about money in the end."

Boogie Pimps Somebody To Love on the TV again, teasing me with Munich. If Adelaide does blow me out once & for all, this week & next, then I can once & for all know that it is back to the travelling for me, cos she is over. My spirit is strong. It always bounces back. I know that. I mutate in strange & surprising ways. I bloom & blossom.

—, you know it’s over. No, you know it’s REALLY over this time.

It is nothing to do with the money. But I can be wild and bitter and masochistic with her now, a devil. Mr Hyde.

I NEED TO FEEL A DISGUST FOR ADELAIDE NOW, LIKE I DID THIS TIME LAST YEAR, I NEED TO BE HUMILIATINGLY BRUTALLY REJECTED BY HER SO I CAN FEEL A DISGUST FOR HER. SOON THE HOT STICKY JUNE WEATHER WILL BE HERE & I WILL WANT STUTTGARTER PLATZ AGAIN. SWOLLEN COCK PERMANENTLY THROBBING PLEASURABLY ROLLING IN MY TROUSERS. IT WAS SO MUCH FU MANCHU WEATHER LAST NIGHT ON WAY TO WORK. BLACK ABOUT TO RAIN STEAMING HOT. OH GOD PILLARS OF HERCULES, MICHAEL CAINE IN MALTA WEATHER!

3rd June 2007

BE DARK & BROODING, BYRONIC. PLAY ON MY MYTH & MY NOTORIETY.

2nd June 2007

I will write my revolutionary tracts about LONELINESS, NOTHINGNESS, SOLITUDE, ANOMIE, COLDNESS. My blood red Fackels. My Nietzchean books written in cold stoveless rooms.

The tragedy is I love Adelaide with all my heart, but I can only be alone. No one can bear living with someone like me. "You only saw me for the whole time you’ve known me at the Black Pig when I was on the way to transforming from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde, becoming an animal. I was always in some stage of that transformation to Mr Hyde style animal. For two months I have been trapped inside my Dr Jekyll repressed persona, apart from one brief moment when Mr Hyde broke out again at the salon last time."

31st May 2007

I CAN ONLY BE ALONE. DRINKING EVERY DAY ON MY DAYS OFF. GOING HOME ALONE, PASSING OUT ASLEEP, WAKING UP IN THE EARLY HOURS OF MORNING WITH SORE HEAD ALL ALONE, WITH NOTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO. IS THIS WHAT I DID NOT GIVE EVERYTHING WITH ADELAIDE FOR?

"I have always lived like an animal. Dr Jekyll by day writing in my room, quiet as a mouse, but at night I turn into Mr Hyde, a disgusting animal capable of the most appalling debauchery. And I was addicted to this transformation into Mr Hyde every night. And when I started with you, I didn’t know how to live without being Mr Hyde. Mr Hyde has been the real me for so long, I do not know who I am without him.

Maybe a drunk is all I can be. There is something very romantic about that, because all my greatest heroes were all drunks, & pissed their lives away while writing their great books, so I have always been attracted to that way of living."

Maybe it would be better if it was over. It was Lily on stage that I loved? Not Adelaide the real girl? Wouldn’t it be a relief if it was over? Just live in a state of nothingness & denial for the rest of my sorry life. Living in memories of Adelaide & Lily.

But after Lily/Adelaide all those prostitution places in Brussels & Vienna seem foul, and repulsive. After something so real & so good, how can I go back to the fake?

29th May 2007

It is so much like Spiderman 3. I did lose all my power once I started with Adelaide, & stopped living my scandalous life. All the time I was living scandalously I felt powerful. Completely free. I suddenly became powerless when I became domesticated. But I love her more than anything in the world, more than life. I would give her every drop of blood in my veins.

A PERIOD OF SILENCE FROM ME IS ESSENTIAL NOW. TO REGAIN MY MYSTERY, & MY POWER. OF COURSE I WILL RETURN TO THE STRIP CLUBS, NOT THE BLACK PIG, TO SEE ADELAIDE. I WILL BE SILENT & BROODING, MYSTERIOUS & POWERFUL. I AM WRITER. I AM KARL KRAUS. FRANZ WEDEKIND. NOT THIS CRYING ERNEST DOWSON CREATURE ANYMORE. I AM HENRY MILLER. I AM BYRON, SHELLEY, KEATS.

Let’s face it I gave nothing in the relationship, it wasn’t just the supporting you thing. I was passive like Stephane in Un Coeur en Hiver. Just let you go. How could I want you so much for 12 months, then when I get you give nothing? Love makes me go cold. Watching someone on a stage turns me on. Because I only watched my mother from a distance, I have always thought, I am a scopophiliac.

BE NAUGHTY. BE A DEVIL WITH ADELAIDE NOW. BE A RED REVOLUTIONARY, AN ANARCHIST SITUATIONIST REVOLUTIONARY. BUT AT THE SAME TIME GET A BETTER JOB, SO I CAN BUY HER BIG PRESENTS.

21st May 2007

YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN YOU ARE LUCKY! Lying in bed with Adelaide today as she talked to L—, I was watching her face in profile with her blonde hair long & suddenly realise she looked just like Lily on stage, & thought how amazing that we should end up together.

My identity has disintegrated tonight.

I am Keats, I am Byron, I am Shelley. This is all right. I am Ernest Dowson. I am Van Gogh. It is all right to be tormented & torn apart by jealousy.

It is definitely my WRITTEN WORDS that won me Adelaide. She says she has kept ALL my letters. And when I look in her diaries & notebooks, she has copied so many lines from my letters into her books “I want to see you. I want to live with you”. “You have turned my life upside down”. It is incredible. Although she must have liked me first, from the beginning, as I stood in that corner.

I cannot talk to anyone, my voice has disappeared inside my throat. I have swallowed an egg.

My books are so precious to me. Autismus, Lotta & Sophia, The Cold Icy Air of the Mountains and Casanova. They are my Fackels. They are my Nietzsche books written in cold stoveless rooms with blue icy hands.

I am rebel, revolutionary, & voluptuary. Except, I am not anymore, I am not a practicing one anyway. So I don’t know now what I am left with. The most beautiful, sexiest girl in the world as your girlfriend & partner, that’s what!

Where can I find the confidence I need with her? Only by making progress in my writing. But Autismus is already finished! Lotta & Sophia is already finished! I want to throw a stone in the pond. I want to write the book that will destroy the world.

26th April 2007

I AM A REBEL AND A REVOLUTIONARY. I AM OSCAR WILDE, FEASTING WITH PANTHERS. I DELIBERATELY LIVE WILDLY & SCANDALOUSLY (“YOU MADE ME FEEL LIKE THE ONE”). I AM ERNEST DOWSON. I AM RIMBAUD. I AM BAUDELAIRE. I AM VERLAINE. YOU ANTS CANNOT COME NEAR ME. I AM PETE DOHERTY IN THE BACK OF THE CAR, SINGING ALONG TO HIGH & DRY. “YOU WANT ME? COME FIND ME. MAKE UP YOUR MIND.” I INTEND TO DESTROY THE WORLD.

YOU MUST TEASE & TORMENT THEM WITH TRYING TO CLUTCH AT YOUR COATTAILS. WHEN ATTACKED THE WAY TO RESPOND IS TO BECOME MORE FLAMBOYANT, MORE PROVOCATIVE, MORE WILD.

24th April 2007

I want to be priapic again. I want to be like Dr Pozzi again. I want to be dirty & sordid again, in Soho cinemas, like a wild bestial animal, up the stairways in models’ rooms, in Berlin—with Evalina, Iga, Diana, Ciro Nadia. In Vienna Pour Platin & Manhattan. In Brussels Empire & Gare du Nord windows. In Munich Schillerstraße & Nuremberg Pils Bar & Caribic. For that I need MONEY. I need to be earning £25,000.

Last year I spent £2,567 on drink=£214 a month, and £2,365 on strippers=£197 a month. (£1,116 on whores). Drink & strip combined=£4,932 or £411 a month. But, the PLEASURE this brought me! I need more MONEY! Now is the time to push myself to get it, shake off this indolence under Adelaide's stimulating influence. I am a writer. I am a writer and I do what I want. Now Adelaide's sun is shining on me, I can bloom & blossom, and flourish.

I want to do something spectacular. I want to write a book like has never been written before. So when they read it, they burst into flames. I want to write a book that destroys the world. Be wild in my writings, like Henry Miller.

20th April 2007

Sunday night she said to me you are so sweet, you never once complained about the mess I live in.

I wake Thursday tortured & tormented & filled with self loathing & self disgust & inadequacy again. These feelings of worthlessness never go away. My identity feels like it is melting like ice. Before I used to be the cold, hard, monolithic Antarctica. Cold, frozen, but hard, solid, together, I could walk around on solid ground. Now the ice is all melting to slush & as I try to walk it is cracking & melting under my feet & I feel I am falling through slush into the frozen water. Ha! I am with most beautiful woman. I should be arrogant & cocky & full of power. I feel more useless than ever. There is always an egg in my mouth. I can never talk to people or look them in the eye, still. I want to have a drink. I want to get my haircut. Discover my Byronic power. Please! Before I lose her.

13th April 2007

I am Karl Kraus. I am Lord Byron. Learn to sit at a cafe or pub table, writing, with a coke. A place like Cafe Central or Griensteidl, or the Romanisches Cafe. In the evening meet Adelaide having WRITTEN something.

This lassitude that weighs me down when sober; after three beers I turn into an animal.

11th April 2007

Still the horrible destroying thought that it is all over. That it will all be over in the next minute. I cannot trust in love. Never believe in it. After the incredible support & love Adelaide gave me yesterday, here I am 18:44 eaten away, crying inside feeling it is over. I am loathsome & inadequate & vile. How quickly & completely my identity & my life is destroyed, Torture & torment. She has my life on a knife edge. I must learn a hardness.

5th April 2007

Adelaide says Phoebe will have to be born in England, as it is too confusing for her here. She says she missed me. She says on the day I get married I can drink as much as I want, but I must wait till then! She says you know where you are living now? I was confused, then she pointed at the centre of her chest. “I told you! Here! In my heart.” It was so lovely waking with Adelaide this Friday morning, & knowing for the first time neither of us had to rush up & go anywhere, we could lay there as long as we liked.
I was just about to text her last night to say I was coming to the salone, when she rang anyway, & said I could meet her 10 or 11 there. "Are you my boyfriend? Why no texts?" Later in bed I asked "what difference do texts make?" “Then I know you are thinking about me.” I told her I am always thinking about her, for a whole 8 years not a minute passed without me thinking about her, she grinned and leaned over and kissed & hugged me.

4th April 2007

We talked a lot from then on to about 3AM. About her free English TV channels (because the TV engineer fancied her), watching films on her computer, going to cinema EVERY week, Casino Royale, the cartoons she loves, Family Guy, little Stewie, I told her how I used to go to Scala King's Cross for old triple bills, she pulled away “not black and white?” yes “YEEEEEUUUUWWW!! HORRRRRIBLE!” she flung herself away from me & completely buried herself under the covers! That was so funny. She is so adorable she takes my breath away. She says she was talking to her friend in England about me, “Blueboy!” She sent my picture to her friend. But her friend is black & only likes blondes, so does Adelaide. "Why you with me then?" "I am going to dye it," she whispered. We left my house together at 8, she was going to Berlin Zoo with me to get bus to --. We stood downstairs like sardines with her holding & stroking my hand the whole time, then went upstairs to only two seats left in the back where she again kept her hand on my leg & stroked it. Little girl talking with her dad all the way in front of us then she nudged me grinning, “that could be Phoebe. Phoebe will talk with you like that when you take her to school!” "My daughter will be quiet!" “MY daughter will talk like that ” she said!

3rd April 2007

To my astonishment my doorbell buzzed at 930pm forcing me to dress & go down to let Adelaide in. She looked mind-blowing in tight pink sweater with nothing underneath of course, blue leather miniskirt over black thick tights, black jackboots. Kissing me passionately, gorgeously. Talking to — on the phone at the front door as she came in. She says —– was asking her "have you finished with that boy?" "No, he just doesn’t come to the Pig anymore." "Oh cos you told him not to?" "But no, I didn’t did I?" said Adelaide. She started to giggle, "—– talks so much shit in my ear, I cannot tell you all of it. She thinks she is an alcoholic because she woke up at 2am & drank two cans of beer. She would kill — if he went to the Black Pig. She wants to have a fifth lipo because she thinks she is fat, & gets so depressed working with 'models'." Adelaide says she never worries what the other girls look like, "because different men have got different tastes." I said "it is all right for you because you ARE more beautiful than the other girls" & she became so happy & jumped all over me kissing & biting me “Thank you thank you thank you! You were always my favourite!” —– kept ringing from on way to Blue Diamond because she couldn’t find it, & then when there because it was "all blacks" & they wanted sex. Then —– was on the phone for like 30 minutes when she was leaving the Black Pig, while Adelaide‘s left leg was draped sideways at right angle all the way across my chest. That was so lovely. We talked about USA, her friend in Boston. Babysitting. "What will you do when you stop dancing?" We became very sad & serious. "I don’t know. I am confused. I just want to be happy. What is good in your life?" "Just you," I said. I talked how selfishly I had lived my life up to then but now I wanted to live for someone else. "But do you want to change your life?" she said. "Yes," I said. "It has already changed a little bit," she said. "Yes! no haircut, no drinking, no pubic hair!"

28th March 2007

During Monday night in the dark Adelaide lay on top of me & growled “I am going to RAPE you”.*************”””I’m in love with you” Adelaide said to me again today. “I told L—- I’m in love with you”. “I prayed to God to send me someone nice, someone I could trust, someone I could love” “I’ve found you” I’m stupid. “You are not stupid. You are brave….Once every week you asked to see me. It is brave if there is something that you want, you fight for it. You are brave.” She gave me one of her little fluffy dogs to remind me of her when she is not there. She rang me before 8 from the Black Pig to say “I am missing you. I don’t know what is wrong with me, I want to see you every day. My head is burning. What have you done to me? I think you have done some magic on me. I keep looking into your corner thinking you are there. I couldn’t think before because I was running for the underground, and thought I was going to be late, then I was getting changed, then I had my first dance, and it was only then that I had time to think. You’ve done some magic on me.” It’s my germs. “No, it’s not your germs!” I’m in your blood. Can I see you tonight? “No, not tonight. If I see you tonight I will want to come home with you & I can’t tonight.” There was someone knocking at her dressing room door, interrupting her ,“Hi!”, talking in German, saying something about —-, & —- talked to her for a while before she came back to me. “Bye sweetie” She will text me later & I can meet her when she finishes at 7 tomorrow.
From the Black Pig she asked me “Are you watching the football? England are playing. If you watch it in a pub, don’t drink!”

27th March 2007

Now I feel so melancholy & sad, because Adelaide has left. At 615AM. I always hate it when she leaves. As she sat up on edge of bed putting her pink stockings on, I said “I love you” and she hesitated, then said something back in German, what was that? “I love you”. The previous night after —————–, she lay with her head on the pillow, staring at me accusingly, angrily, & said “I am in love with you” then when I asked her to repeat it turned her face away “No. Bastard!” then “How can I talk to you if you are drunk?” Later I asked her how long, and she said two weeks, since the letter. Especially the bit where I said she is in my blood. Having got dressed she stood in front of bathroom mirror looking at her cold sores & said “How could you kiss me?” so I kissed her again & we kissed more than we ever did last night. She wore blue skirt, little tiny lime green top, long blue coat, black jackboots. I hate it when she leaves. Every time she leaves I feel it is over. “If you do not stop drinking, you are going to lose me” she said to me quietly in the night. Talking about what music we liked, she said Bryan Adams is playing in May, you like? No. OK, then, maybe C-- would like to go with me? she says in a funny singsong mock hurt voice. Asking me again if I would like to go with her back to England in August, I said “yes of course, but, we might be enemies by then”. She just quietly kissed me on the cheek.********234pm & still no word from Adelaide. I feel like it is already all over with her. I said to her will you come back here again? When can I come? Tonight. It is it all right if I just come for a short time? Yes. I did just get a call from Clementina, & she left a one word message in Russian on my voicemail, which is probably a swear word. Feel it is already all over with Adelaide. I will not be going to England with her in August. Four months from now we will have no contact. I said I don’t go to strip clubs looking for a girlfriend, I go to avoid feeling anything for anyone, to just get drunk & lose myself in the music & the girls. “But that is not life.”

It was amazing that she actually stayed with me. It got late & for the umpteenth time I said “stay” and this time she said “Are you sure? Are you sure?” She then got up, got out her toothpaste & toothbrush & went to brush her teeth. She did not stop holding me, & kissing me all night. Kissing my mouth, my cheek, my hand, all night. I love her so much.

When I just went out at 5 for food, it was like a beautiful warm spring day. This was the first time I have been out since Adelaide stayed the night with me, & everything felt different about the world. I still feel so stupidly nervous, unsure of our relationship. Any moment it could end. I have no faith in relationships.

2050 Adelaide texts me: Hi baby England win 😀 I’ll go to sleep now, see u tomorrow!Dont forget DONT DRINKALCOOL xxX

26th March 2007

I only had two in the Alt Berlin yesterday before it closed at 7PM, but really wish I had got through the day without any. I have a real desire to not drink now & stay sober, for Adelaide. If I am loved by her I do not need to drink. I can write all day in my little nest as I always planned.*************Adelaide just called 12:45 & said she is still in bed. Can I join you? Yesss. At your place? Nooo. Your place. Later. She will leave 6 or 7. She has got my germs & wants me to take them back.

24th March 2007

Dora was actually so sexy at the Wild Horses Friday. Adelaide thinks she is an alcoholic but it looks more like drugs to me. I almost wouldn’t mind going to see her when Adelaide is not there, but of course will not…..! Those drugged out junkie girls are so sexy, because they let you do anything & they just lie there & take it & go with it, like Riccarda. Dora is like a Swedish? Riccarda. When you are in love you feel sexy & everyone around you looks much sexier. How strange to think how awful my life still was when Dora came round to collect at the Wild Horses Friday 530PM, and I still had not seen Adelaide since the previous Sunday, "How do you love me?" & our missed Hackescher Markt assignation. She was so funny saying she did not expect to see me there, as I had been so angry on the phone Wednesday. “Grrr! Grrr! Grrr!” In bed Friday night, she just smiled at me in the dark before she left and said “You have made my day”.
I started off with one in the Kilkenny as I thought football would be on. The grey blonde bob Polish girl was sitting at corner of bar talking to young Irish bloke & old Irish bloke (I think the new owners must be Irish) while other Pole served me & then sat near me in the corner cubbyhole. I sent Adelaide the text “———————— xxx” then left, & girl thanked me & said goodnight, which was nice. Very tense & nervous on bus back to Berlin Zoo. But felt so good walking in now that everyone must know I HAD slept with Adelaide at last. C-- was very cold, walked past me twice as I stood watching football, without acknowledging me.
Adelaide was biting my lip so much I am surprised it did not bleed. Adelaide said I can see her Monday night as she is not working that night.

12th March 2007

Got back to Margarita’s flat about 445AM, and we went to bed together, naked. She kept asking me if I wanted to f–k, as she did not want to sleep, but I didn’t. I just wanted to hold her. We lay so close, kissing & cuddling. Till eventually she went to sleep for about 90 minutes. Laying there with her back to me, her tousled curly blonde hair all I could see, I imagined it was Adelaide in bed beside me & that turned me on so much.
Margarita’s alarm woke her at 8 & we got up. She was so unbelievably lovable. She is like a 6 year old. So funny, so sweet, so childlike. She was meeting a Chinaman at 9 to buy her a leather jacket. She was not working Sunday, as she had some boyfriend problem. On her phone I was “Anglizahnin” so I changed it to —–. Christ it is her birthday as well on Wednesday. And mother’s day on Sunday!
Margerita turned onto her back for a while still asleep & I just lay watching her face & it was so beautiful. Her face is so young & childlike. Special moments.
We came out of Margerita’s flat into bright white light of Sunday morning Charlottenburg, & Chinaman was waiting outside, he quickly turned away when he saw me come out. It was weird walking back through deserted Berlin streets back to the Kurfürstendamm. Of course a bus was pulling up just as I got there!
I no longer felt the pain stopping me from breathing of Saturday morning. Sunday morning it had been replaced by just a sadness, and almost a not being so excited by Adelaide anymore. Feeling it was all over. There was no energy left in either of us now. But still memories of how sexy she had been at the —– poking through to make me think this was just a temporary ennui.

11th March 2007

The Black Pig was packed and then I saw Adelaide starting to collect, & her looking straight at back to me to try to catch my eye. When she finally squeezed through the crowd it was with a big smile, and she leaned close to let me kiss her. I gave her the necklace & said happy birthday. She said “Be careful! They are fighting!” I know. She then danced to Timberlake’s Don’t Give Away Your Love, with the line “And if I wrote you a love note, made you smile with every word I wrote”. Then when I was watching other girl, I saw Adelaide in black lace pushing her way through the crowd from my left! She came up to me & said “Thank you” and showed me the necklace, I kissed her & she went back again. You collecting? “No, I just came to say thank you”. Next time I couldn’t get into room, she just squeezed my bum, I put pound in & she gave me big sexy wink, then danced to Shaggy’s Angel again. Third time she just held pot down low & I dropped money in so she squeezed my ear. So busy whole time. 7 pints, double vodka, said goodnight, left after she danced. It was only 9PM? Got 10 back to Stuttgarter Platz to see Margarita. Lay with her naked, asked if I could come back at 4 she said yes.

10th March 2007

An unimaginably horrifying end to the night. I went to the lavatory & when I came back Adelaide & the three men had gone. I searched outside & inside but she had vanished into the night. She must have waited for my back to be turned. Horror on an unparalleled scale.

When she finished dancing she changed into her long blue coat & sat back down with them. I turned away, but she came up & put two empty Berliner Kindl bottles on the bar next to me & said “I’m waiting for you” so sexily. I felt high as a kite. So I went to the lavatory, took a long while squeezing one out, came back & she & them had vanished.

They must have gone to eat together. How horrifying.

The first time she danced in front of me, I looked deep into those eyes, those blue ringed eyes & it was like the first time on the bed, later I asked her how was her birthday, she said “Fine. All girls! I must be a lesbian!” Later I told her I wanted to see her on her birthday, she said “Why you didn’t ring or text me?” Next time I said why didn’t I ring or text you? She answered the question for me “Because you don’t have my number.” Yes. The last time she danced, about ten to 8, I said “I haven’t given you your present yet.” She said back, so sexily “There’s still time.” Then she changed into coat, sat with them, put bottles beside me, said sexily “I’m waiting for you”, I went to the lavatory, came back to find she had gone.

Horror beyond belief. I am on the edge of madness. Her hair was curly for a change. She danced close to me, let me hold her, suck her shoulder with a love bite.

The first thing she said to me actually was “How did you know I was here?” I know everything about you. “I know.”

9th March 2007

I LIKE losing it like Ernest Dowson. Some mad insane drunk poet. Pouring his heart out in early morning letters. Getting drunk, getting so close to the flame, burning his wings, getting so close to the girl of his dreams, then just when she is about to let him in, destroying it in a drunken fury, and throwing it all away again. I am Brahms.
Yes, I lost my cool, and lost my head. That is not a bad thing. We are just different. She stays cool all the time, doesn’t lose her head, doesn’t get overemotional. I do lose my head from time to time, I do get overemotional & self-destructive from time to time. That is not a bad thing. It is just different.
There is something glorious in this.
This drunken self-destructiveness.
“You laugh at nothing in the pouring rain, try to tell yourself you’re not insane”
Richard Gerstl laughing self portrait.
So it has to be easy does it, if it is not easy you give up on it?

7th March 2007

I am ECCENTRIC. I am CRAZIER THAN A COCONUT. I am RICHARD GERSTL, feverish in the Vienna fever town.

2nd March 2007

BE WILD. ANIMAL. CRAZY. I AM ERNEST DOWSON. I AM CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 
My specialness only lies in my writing. Make the most of your competitive advantages. Adelaide does with her beauty & sexiness. I should do with my strangeness & my writing.
Oh PLEASE still like me!!!!!! It will be such a shame if she’s shut the door on me again.
Write those books inside the blood red covers. Write my Fackels documenting my Vienna. My neuroses, my fevers in this fever town. I AM KARL KRAUS.
I should get Adelaide something for Tuesday; but I don’t know where I stand with her. If I knew she was working I could send her flowers.
Saturday night is a lunar eclipse, the moon will change colour between 1030pm and midnight. This seems like an omen of something terrible.
My life only has any valid meaning if I write the books.

1st March 2007

That world of strippers & whores is so seductive to a young man. How could any young man enter that world of scantily clad young women, how could any young man see Adelaide for example, and not become completely & immediately hooked? 

Sunday 19th February 2007

I love her. I have given up hoping that I am going to get over her now. I know I shall not.
I would like to ask her how long is she staying in Berlin?
“So I didn’t get to meet my future father-in-law then?” she came up to me & grinned. That night L— bit my bum & I bit hers; that night I stood in corner by gents just as L— was starting to collect in the dancing room & Adelaide called out to her “L—! No!” What was she telling L— NOT to do?
How impossibly small & tiny Adelaide looked when she came in, buried inside that big fur hood. On stage, she transforms into this beautiful, sexy, mind-blowing sex dancer.

Friday 17th February 2007

Letting Adelaide go was a kind of suicide—I knew it instinctively even as I was doing it—and I have been bleeding to death ever since. It has been a slow, horrible, death. I cannot act spontaneously, I need time to think; but, unfortunately, he who hesitates in love is lost.
********
I have to confront something horrible–that the relationship with Adelaide is well & truly over, forever. That is unendurable. That is too terrible to be faced & yet I have to face it every time I see her. So then let us be enemies now.
So be it. She will get crueller & crueller & I will bleed more & more. So be it. It will deteriorate like that. Symons said Dowson looked like “a demoralised Keats”. Demoralised. That is the perfect word for how I feel now. Totally & utterly fucking demoralised.
YES! THE ANSWER IS TO GET TURNED ON. TO GET REALLY FUCKING TURNED ON. THOSE LENKA PICTURES.
THE ONLY THING TO DO IS LOSE YOURSELF IN RIOTOUSLY SORDID SEX..
I’VE GOT TO START BEING NAUGHTY AGAIN; DIRTY AGAIN.
WHAT FREEDOM IN THAT. LAUGHING AS YOU DESTROY ALL THAT IS MOST HOLY.

Wednesday 15th February 2007

All my little memories of Adelaide are so overwhelming. At the salon, sitting next to her, I had my arm around her and I was holding her left breast in my hand, until she removed it back to her waist. Upstairs, sucking her nipples. Lying her on her stomach on the black bed, & biting her bum, & rubbing my bulge against it. Kissing her on the lips four or five times, stroking her hair back from her face & looking deep into her suddenly scared eyes, blue mascara’d. “You’re lovely” “So are you”. Her kissing me on the cheek, then wiping off the lipstick. That little out of the corner of her eyes dark look she gave me as we sat talking downstairs. When she came up behind me & hugged me just before I left.
At the Black Pig when I passed close to her on stage, & she grinned so much when she saw me coming, and patted me on back of head. When she grinned so much on December 30th seeing me for the first time in so long.
“Are you all right?” turning back to me, hand on my chest.
She has a loveliness overwhelming. She is outrageously the greatest stripper in Berlin, but so much more to me than that.

Tuesday 7th February 2007

I must lead the double life, like Jerzy Koscinski. Debauching myself in the strip clubs & brothels at night, yet writing pain filled philosophical books about Kaspar Hauser Syndrome and loneliness.

Monday 6th February 2007

Woman in yellow top over massive breasts in Alt Berlin. All I want to do is suck & fuck. I am a strange, recessive character. I am Ernest Dowson, and can only be alone. I really want to get some ferns. What is the plan? Four nights at work now, reading Karl Marx, Autismus; Friday afternoon Alt Berlin then to Unter den Linden for Marina Nadiradze concert, night bus home to mother’s. Saturday train to Alt Berlin, Black Pig. I always come out of strip pubs/clubs feeling so desperately unhappy & suicidal. I am in a desperate emotional state; but when haven’t I been? Shut everyone out at work, just get through it with head down.
Stand outside of it, and laugh at it from outside. Be completely objective about it. —– & —– are glaring at me, but I am already out of their reach, I am already fucking Pamela & Lana. Getting wanked in the cinema. They do not know I am already over her, and in a place they do not know about. I always have more places. “But despite his literary success, Crane was a profoundly tormented man. Poetry sustained him in a life that otherwise teetered on the brink of collapse. When he wasn’t writing, he spent much of his time engaged in fleeting homosexual encounters and alcohol binges. In 1932, three years after meeting Lorca, Crane committed suicide by leaping from a ship into the Caribbean”.
    THANK GOD I AM ON MY OWN!
    THANK GOD I AM ON MY OWN!
    THANK GOD I AM ON MY OWN!
    THANK GOD I AM ON MY OWN!

Sunday 5th February 2007

What she doesn’t understand is that: all I want to do is watch her, and lust after her. (I enjoy twisting on that exquisite pain. Torturing myself on the horns of my desire, but knowing it can never become real. I force myself to make this sacrifice like the monks in the Alps. Whatever you cannot have, teach yourself that you did not want it anyway). And I am going to do it ruthlessly now. I am a scopophiliac. I fall in love with a vision. I could not be with anyone. 

From now on I will take my pen to the pubs with me to write my Fackels there. When beaten, and rejected by all, attack! Provoke more! Go on the flamboyant offensive. I love this masochistic relationship I have now with Adelaide. Compartmentalise my mind so Adelaide is in a little locked red box of her own. 

I have been down so many times, and I have been through this so many times, I know my spirit will always bounce back. OK baby you run from me. Go ahead. I’ll be here until after you leave. Time is on my side. You think you have me cornered, but I have more places you don’t know about. Places in the mind that I can move to escape this pain you would kill me with. 

I really don’t LIKE female company. Apart from Adelaide, is there anyone I could bear to be sitting in this bar with now? No. I just like looking at them. When with them I have nothing to say to them. Believe in my spirit. Have faith in it. My Berlin Vienna Munich Brussels spirit. You have power, too. I don’t like to talk. I don’t like company. I just like to watch. 

The thought of going back to my empty flat now is horrifying; and yet already half thrilling; my warm, fern-filled, classical music playing flat, while I work on my Fackels. Everyone needs a female friend, to offer them love, & kisses, & their pussy. Without that, madness is always close. I am so sick & tired, and bored & disgusted with all women. M-- left me on my own. I travel all around the cold towns of Europe on my own. In London I drink in pubs on my own. It is nice to have an evening in in my flat. When was the last time that happened?******Damien Hirst was asked how he rated Lucian Freud against Bacon? "You look at Lucian Freud, and Lucian Freud's an infinitely better painter. But you can just see why he shits himself while Bacon's alive. Because he represents something just so fucking enormous that Lucian's incapable of. You mean that Freud's technically the better painter? I'm not saying that. But I am in a way. But it's a sigh of relief from Freud when the cunt dies. I mean, Lucian Freud, without Bacon, would be the best painter we've got. But he's not. He's shit next to Bacon. And Bacon can't paint, and Freud can. What's going on? So what makes Bacon the better artist? Because he'll go right out there on the edge of the cliff and he'll stand there and he'll put his arms in the air with his shirt off in India without his passport and go, 'Come and get me, you cunts!' D'you know what I mean? And no one can get him because of it. He doesn't falter. He doesn't fail. And it doesn't matter he's a homosexual. Everybody wants to do that, and can't. All everybody ever wants is somebody to represent that, that 'come-and-kill-me'." The thought of Adelaide is horrifying, and yet—already it is half-thrilling, half a relief, that I can keep my warm fern-filled, classical music playing, Fackel writing life to myself.

Saturday 4th February 2007

I am feeling a little bit desperate. On the edge of madness. Just trying to hold it all together. Drink, and the Black Pig, and Adelaide, are making the madness worse; so I should give up all three. But of course will keep on ploughing on with them to make everything worse.

I live in a transcendental world, and that bewilders & frustrates anyone who thought me sweet enough to try to get close to. I am completely unreachable. I live in exile. I fold my exile on my back.
BUT YOU SILLY FOOL, YOU DON'T WAN’T A RELATIONSHIP WITH —– —NOT REALLY. YOU CANNOT BE WITH ANYONE IN A RELATIONSHIP. YOU ONLY L IKE BEING ALONE. YOU ONLY WANT TO USE HER LIKE A WHORE, TASTE HER, THEN COME AWAY. I AM NOT EVEN CAPABLE OF SEX ANYMORE, IT HAS BECOME HOW IT WAS FOR OSCAR WILDE, LIKE “COLD MUTTON”.
I would love to see mother tonight, but cannot face the bleakness of that train journey home & that walk down that desolate suicidal station approach, and then having to do the same journey in reverse tomorrow before work.
THE SECRET LIES IN VIENNESE EROTICISM.
I WRITE ABOUT KASPAR HAUSER SYNDROME.
Why the hell shouldn’t the girls be cold to you? What warmth or friendliness have you ever shown them??? You got what you want. You want people to be cold to you & leave you alone. You want to be unknown & invisible in the corner. I have an erotic obsession with —–, but ——, immediately before that you had an erotic obsession with S—–. And before that you had the sad & tawdry addictive visits to Brussels, Frankfurt & Berlin. It is a RELIEF now our relationship turns to hatred. That I can deal with. Before that you had the erotic obsession with Olga. Before that Iga. Before that Viktoriya. Before that Susi & Irina. Before that Stephanie. Before that Lotta. Before that Covadonga. Before that Rachel, Pooky, Molly, Black Bob. You go from one sad erotic obsession to another. You always have done.
IT IS ABOUT GETTING DRUNK. IT IS ABOUT SEEKING THAT PERFECT POINT OF INEBRIATION. LIKE GUY DEBORD & ERNEST DOWSON I AM A DEDICATED DRINKER. I FIND JOY IN THAT INTOXICATION, & THEN COME HOME & WRITE MY BLOOD RED FACKELS. ABOUT THE TRANSCENDENTAL WORLD. Oh if only this pain was transcendable. Time for classical music concerts again, sitting there in the back row with tears rolling down my face.
I AM A REVOLUTIONARY, I AM KASPAR HAUSER. I AM ERNEST DOWSON.

Thursday 2nd February 2007

These are sad, painful days. A pointless night in Calcutta having two pints (served by Anna), before walking to the Melon Tree to use toilets & look at barmaids but there was no one worth seeing, so I came straight back to Calcutta for one more pointless pint. At least the pain does go away for as long as I am drinking. Had a McDonald’s then to bed. Wish I had just gone home & slept at mother’s yesterday.

Voluptuous blonde in group of girls in Calcutta yesterday, but otherwise a depressing shabby bunch of people, and me the most depressed & shabby of the lot.

Three years ago today I went to see Mihaela Ursuleasa [no longer with us] at the Wigmore & shook her hand afterwards. Two years ago today I arrived in Vienna at 23:30 and watched Mando Diao and Saybia on MTV before going out in the snow to explore Manhattan and Pour Platin. Oh if only I was free to travel & wander around Europe again; but the flat is too important to give up.

Wednesday 1st February 2007

Crane was a profoundly tormented man. Well, so am I. That is all right. It is OK to be profoundly tormented. “I am utterly disgraced I’m afraid”. I behave crazy.

Monday 22nd January 2007

I AM A REBEL AND A REVOLUTIONARY. I AM OSCAR WILDE, FEASTING WITH PANTHERS. I DELIBERATELY LIVE WILDLY & SCANDALOUSLY ("YOU MADE ME FEEL LIKE THE ONE"). I AM ERNEST DOWSON. I AM RIMBAUD. I AM BAUDELAIRE. I AM VERLAINE. YOU ANTS CANNOT COME NEAR ME. I AM PETE DOHERTY IN THE BACK OF THE CAR, SINGING ALONG TO HIGH & DRY. "YOU WANT ME? COME FIND ME. MAKE UP YOUR MIND." I INTEND TO DESTROY THE WORLD.

YOU MUST TEASE & TORMENT THEM WITH TRYING TO CLUTCH AT YOUR COATTAILS. WHEN ATTACKED THE WAY TO RESPOND IS TO BECOME MORE FLAMBOYANT, MORE PROVOCATIVE, MORE WILD.