Hedonic Reconstruction

Berlin is just one giant rehab clinic, she says, as I slurp smoke flavoured scotch from a tumbler, while the Big Bopper is lonely as hell sitting alone at a small, round table cut off from a forty years younger crowd of non-native English writing SubStackers who now self-edit their words with the brush of ChatGpt. I went through twenty eight days of withdrawal from cocaine twenty three years ago but in a sense she is right– all us damned foreigners who strove to find substances, under the strict eyes of ultra funded police, illegal and tucked away into the corners of our repressed hometowns, come here and are suddenly confronted with drugs and sex in the open, are pushed to sink or swim, to look at the demons in our very own eyes and face them, talk to them, pet them, accept we were running away, that we will be running until we learn to look in the mirror without judgement, without guilt, while mourning youth, childhood, the true idiots we once were so afraid of becoming out of fear of not being cool or out of the need to flee oppressive structures within which we once grew. Some of us don’t make it out alive. Some of us leave and come back, repeating rehab again and again. Some of us, like the Big Bopper, are seventy years old and still wrestling with karma, with angels, with tortured spirits, with ghosts of a once walled, divided city. Over here in the East, comforting blindness from the world through the bonds of camaraderie, through the seduction of communism. Over here in the West, American “liberators” carrying echoes of their former self, their long time colonising country still burning people in Vietnam and then preaching about freedom. No matter how anarchic or anti-fascist one chooses to paint their self, it is impossible to sever ties to the accent of imperialism.