Tag Archives: Wedding

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I’m Published Cunt

Look at my name in print like I’m an author and all.

Last year I emailed Lambda Literary about their Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, and got told yes, me, as a not-American can apply to do the Fiction Cohort with the, the, fucking the Zeyn Joukhadar. I sent in the first chapter of my novel We’ll Never Be Remembered full of sexy trans femme Muslimah migrant sisters doing sex work and hooning cars, and a few months later I got accepted.

And the Retreat, which was online cos thanks ongoing epidemic, was fucking awesome. Which I never blogged about cos I’m a lazy cunt and pushing two years of slowly getting better chronic fatigue / burnout / Long COVID / Epstein-Barr Virus / or as I like to call it, chronic ijdgaf syndrome. And then Lambda Literary said we are publishing an anthology, send your best shit. Which is still the first chapter of my novel. At 10 pages or under that is, and contextually standalone. Some of the other chapters I fucking love too but the sisters, who moved into my head and apartment a couple of years ago, who all said write the stories we tell you and we’ll take care of the rest, said listen cunt it’s gotta be chapter one.

And then I got a copy in the mail and there’s my name in print.

Heaps big love to Vasiliki Lazaridou (who’s currently shooting their film and hasn’t slept for I dunno how long) and Gala Moody who both read the first readable draft, all 150,000 words, and provided excellent, and I mean fucking excellent opinions, criticism, advice, support and all. And to Zeyn Joukhadar who is the living embodiment of meeting your heroes and it being amazing and excellent. And to Lambda Literary for reading my very very niche shit and going yeah this is what we want.

Obviously I want you to buy it. Not only for me, also for the 50-ish other new queer and trans writers, many of whom are QTBIPOC. Their shit is gold. Support your local independent bookshops too.

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Volkspark Rehburg Plötzensee

I planned to bike along Saatwinklerdamm like I used to do before cyclocross fun in Flughafen Wald. But, realistically, two days after getting booster vacced, 16km of riding and 2 hours of walking felt a little ambitious. So I biked 15 minutes to Plötzensee, walked the east side of that, through the park to Schwarzer Graben and along to the NFL field and Hall of Fame Wedding, back the way I came alongside the canal, back the other way again between the Kolonie Plötzensee, with its garden houses bigger than the places I grew up in on one side and the cemetary on the other, back along Schwarzer Graben and did some random loops of actual Volkspark Rehburg where I got myself lost / turned around and got to walk both of the “I really want to go that way,” paths, which was pretty clever of me, and got back to Uferhallen just as the sunset was lighting up the chimney. Blue sky and sun too, everyone standing around pointing their faces at it like they’d forgotten what it was.

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Volkspark Rehburg Winter

I used to blast through Volkspark Rehburg on my way to doing cyclocross in what I always called Flughafen Wald — which is actually Jungfernheide Forst, but people confuse that with Volkspark Jungfernheide on the south side of the canal, and there’s a lake called Flughafen See at the eastern end of the Forst, so … Flughafen Wald. There’s an enclosure for wild boars at the western end of Rehburg, before the track goes through the Kleingarten (quite a few of which are bigger than my apartment and sitting on land bigger than the whole building I live in). I didn’t see any there, but the bare trees and drizzle and dim light were enough to feel I was out in the countryside and not a 15 minute walk to Müllerstraße.

I’m staying in Wedding for a few days, at Dasniya’s studio in Uferhallen, where I lived with her for five years. It’s nice being back (except for the upstairs neighbour, which is a whole other convo about why older white cishet German women are so much work), and the closest thing I’ll have to a holiday this pandemic. I planned to bike to get vaccinated, but it’s been raining and it’s easier to wash shoes than hose down and re-lube a bike. Walking then, the one thing I can still do four months into some weird round of chronic fatigue symptoms, which could be anything from a fucked neck to depression to just needing a month of getting fucked.

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💉3️⃣🦠0️⃣

’Cos I’m not a selfish coward. ’Cos it is possible in this country, thanks to science and vaccine apartheid, to get vaccinated at all.

Heaps big thank you to everyone at Corona-Impfzentrum Flughafen Tegel who made the whole process of having some mRNA stuck in my deltoid for the third time simple and routine and slightly less bureaucratic than the previous times. And again, especially to all the Brown and Black staff, young and old, who are still stepping up to do this job and were cheerful and helpful all the way through — even when you were bored and tired in the grotty cold outside. I see you. I wish Berlin was you all the time.

I wish also I could get a no questions asked jab at my local supermarket, and get free take-home rapid tests, and that all the information was easy to find in multiple languages on a single, specific website, and the drug companies said fuck it to ‘intellectual property’ and ‘patents’ and to making almost 100 million each and every day off this pandemic — but we all saw how they did the same with HIV/AIDS meds for the last decades, which is part why we’re in this shit, and politics means no government is going to force them to say fuck it, and I wish we had much much much better government ’cos pigeons making random decisions would do a better job, and I wish vaccination was mandatory like for polio and all the other stuff, and I wish very hard all the cunts ‘protesting’ about their ‘loss of freedom’ would choke to death on each other’s flaccid white dicks, and I wish I remembered everything else I want to wish for, but I’m fucking sick and fucking tired and my sick and tired is fucking sick and fucking tired.

Swear to God if you’re someone I know and I find out you ‘chose’ to not get vaccinated when you could, I will knife you.

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German Whip: Oettinger Volkswagen Golf Mk4 GTI

Seen on Böttgerstraße up Gesundbrunnen Wedding way. Might be an R32, might be a 1.8T, might be a 2001. Definitely maximum Deutsch hoonage. It was dusk, so the flat light blue isn’t as improbably bright as it was when I stood on the cobbles and stopped cars to take the photo. White! White 5-spoke rims with just the right amount of tuck, and the whole Oettinger performance kit, misbahah hanging off the rearview mirror the finishing touch. Tight as fuck. The last of boxy small German hatchbacks before they went blobby. “See man driving a German Whip.”

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💉2️⃣🦠0️⃣

Heaps big thank you to everyone* at Corona-Impfzentrum Flughafen Tegel who made the whole process of having some mRNA stuck in my deltoid for the second time simple and fun. And again, especially to all the Brown and Black staff, young and old, who stepped up to do this job and were cheerful and helpful all the way through — even when you were bored and tired in the heat outside. I see you. I wish Berlin was you all the time.

Heaps big thank you again to Dasniya who messaged me mid–April and said, “Because reasons, I can have two people close to me vaccinated. Want some?” And like the druggie I am, I said “Duh! Yes!”

*unlike last time

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💉1️⃣🦠0️⃣

Heaps big thank you to everyone* at Corona-Impfzentrum Flughafen Tegel who made the whole process of having some mRNA stuck in my deltoid simple and kinda fun. Especially to all the Brown and Black staff, young and old, who stepped up to do this job and were cheerful and helpful all the way through — even when you were bored and tired outside. I see you.

Heaps big thank you also to Dasniya who messaged me mid–April and said, “Because reasons, I can have two people close to me vaccinated. Want some?” And like the druggie I am, I said “Duh! Yes!”

*Everyone except the gammon Alman who misgendered me twice, I called him out and he did it again. I was wearing a dress, I know exactly what you were doing. Swear to God bro, you will shit through haemorrhoids the rest of your life and your dick will shrivel when you try to beat off to my trans sisters.

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Saatwinkler Damm

Bike ride and walking through Volkspark Rehberge and along Saatwinkler Damm with Dasniya the day after equinox and first day of spring. This was where I used to bike when I lived up in Wedding, all the way to the lakes and through the forest around Flughafen Tegel. We saw a wild boar and biked through the parks and streets back to Uferhallen and the Panke Kanal.

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Ballhaus Ost

Dasniya had a residency at Ballhaus Ost the last couple of months, thanks to pandemic and pandemic arts funding. I got to see a private showing last weekend, with Tara (yup, Tara!) and Yui. Yeah I’m a long-time fan of her work and Glutamat confirms it.

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Flughafen Berlin-Tegel TXL: Jan 1st, 2014 Berlin to Bologna

My favourite orange hexagonal airport is closing this week, almost a decade after the original date, making way for the highly blah, much delayed, extremely suss new airport south of the old Flughafen Schönefeld which opened in the middle of a pandemic.

These are a few of my favourite flights into and from Flughafen Berlin-Tegel TXL. First flight was to Brussels for the Roméo Castellucci opera Parsifal, and this flight was to Bologna, four years later for the same. This was one of the first winters with not much snow. Four years previously Berlin had been under layers for weeks.

Remembering my favourite airport this week as it comes to a close.