Sent in Haste

My friend Christoph—known online as Jeriko, a Berlin photographer with a pathological relationship with his iPhone—had been assembling a small print project called Ausdruck, collecting blog texts and putting them into physical form. He asked me to send him my favorite piece from this journal. I sent him something at random, stressed and hungry, and immediately forgot about it because there was a cheeseburger involved and somewhere else to be.

What I hadn’t considered was that Christoph would turn this into a live reading. So on a Wednesday night in December 2009 I found myself at the Yuma-Bar in Neukölln—a little drunk, standing in front of people—reading aloud a piece I’d written in July called Here’s To The Crazy Ones, a text that had felt perfectly reasonable to produce at 2am alone but carried a different charge when delivered to a room full of people who could see your face while you did it. I may also have read a few pages from Stadthunger. Memory gets fuzzy past a certain point in the evening.

The others there—Markus, Max, Christoph, Sara—seemed more composed about the whole thing than I was. The crowd was generous. There was enough beer that embarrassment didn’t have much of a half-life, mine included.

The specific experience of reading your own writing out loud is that you hear every sentence you’d change now. Every clause that drags, every transition that creaks under the weight of what it’s trying to carry. But there’s also something clarifying in it—hearing the actual rhythm of what you wrote, whether it breathes or just sits there. Some of it breathed. Some of it sat. I bought another round and decided not to inventory which was which.