Guten Tag aus Deutschland!

I can't believe I'm in Germany. This is so surreal because my mindset is exploration mode, but I'm in another country. I'm usually only in other countries with my mom and my brother (ah Michael...it's already hard being so far away from him. It seems so wrong that I'm in the land of Mercedes and BMW's without him. But I've been taking pictures of cars for him, and promised him I would visit the BMW factory).

So for those who are catching up, this is how it started. I quit my job on Friday, Feb 29th. That night, I was supposed to meet up with Sareet and the gang for DJ Ass & Titties at a club in Silver Lake. I was tired from the emotional strain of leaving my job and having to say goodbye to a family I've watched grow for almost 5 years. Plus, I'd already had quite a bit of happy hour tequila with the coworkers, and then gone home and had a good, cathartic cry. So I clean up and head out and am already all the way to Hollywood when I realize, I don't want to spend all night at an 18 and older club in Silverlake, only having to drive all the way back at 2am. So I turn around. I'm halfway home when I decide I do need to do something to commemorate the day, because it's the first day of the rest of my life. I figure, I never go to that Venice area, so I headed over.

As I park my car, I see across the street that Circle Bar has a line of about 40 men with no women (they were letting the women go straight in). I thought it would be funny to get in line. So as I'm in line, I meet a short dude who seemed really threatened by me a la Mike from back in the day, and showing immense growth over the last 4 years, I didn't let him get in my head. I ended up talking to a couple of friendly Germans, and I asked them why they would wait an hour in a line to get into a bar that seemed to be all men. They said that this is where their hotel recommended. So I ended up waiting it out (I had nowhere else to be) because I really was curious if it was all dudes in there. I ended up talking to one of the guys in the bar and then driving him around LA showing him the sights at night while listening to my night mix on my iPod. He was a great guy. Had a lot of soul, had a lot of spirituality, and we were able to communicate on that level despite a language barrier. He said, you can do anything you want right now, be anywhere you want. You're completely free and you should take advantage of this. He was really excited for me. You should go to Germany next week, he said. Okay, I said.

The thing is, I've got ties to Germany and I never understood why. I've never told anyone this, but my earliest conscious memories of dreaming involved dreaming of a fantastical factory that created identical blond hair, blue-eyed men (I don't think it was an ego desire, because from childhood to now, I've always been drawn to dark-haired men and not aesthetically interested in blondes). But these dreams were recurring. Of course, when I got older, I realized why I should never, ever, ever tell anyone about these dreams. Once I learned about Nazism and their love of blond-haired, blue-eyed children, I found these childhood recurring dreams a little scary. I also loved photography from Germany, the landscapes and quaint villages, and was obsessed with WWII and what happened to the collective psychology of the German people. I took a German cinema class one summer at Berkeley, and learned the word, Heimat. There's no English translation for this word, but it means something akin to motherland, the place where you come from. I fell in love with this word.

Was I a German in a past life? I was regressed once and I saw I lived in a cobblestone village. My father was blacksmith but I was an intellectual/academic type, though I was disappointed with my work as I expressed myself conservatively and never wanted to differ from what was academically accepted. I died on that cobblestone street, I just got dizzy and blacked out and that was the end, but my last emotion was one of bitterness at my own weakness. I thought this all took place in Austria but when I prepared for this trip, I learned that Bavaria is smilar to areas in Austria. Perhaps some lingering, overwhelming guilt would explain why I so obsessively strive to do good and put the good of others before my own. The guilt of the German people post-WWII is something I really want to feel and understand here. Perhaps it's secretly because it is so close to my inexplicable guilt that I hope this trip will be cathartic.

I definitely feel good here so far. People here, like me, are polite and friendly.

I'll update as I go, internet access allowing.