Red Bull and Radio Silence

Murphy’s Law ran a particularly thorough audit on me that week. A lamp fell on my head. A stove burner left a mark on my arm. A toilet roll holder nearly took me out—which is the kind of death that would have required a very diplomatic obituary. Final Destination logic: the universe circling back to collect what it missed the first time.

The Hurricane Festival fell through. And then my ISP, 1&1, managed to outdo all of it. I’d moved, needed DSL connected, called their service hotline, handed over thirty euros for the privilege of speaking to a human, and after a technician visit that fixed nothing, they started sending me appointment updates. Via email. To the account with no internet. The joke writes itself and they still didn’t seem to get it.

So the blog went dark for a few days, which I hated more than the physical damage. There’s a particular anxiety in having something to say and no way to say it—a pressure that doesn’t exist until the outlet is removed. I hadn’t realized how much of my daily rhythm was organized around this thing until it wasn’t there.

What I had instead: Red Bull, which I’d somehow turned back into an addiction, the morning can having become as non-negotiable as a toothbrush. An IKEA run with Basti, which is its own kind of spiritual experience—that particular state of calm exhaustion that sets in somewhere between the kitchen section and the self-checkout. And then an afternoon with Gülcan around Hermannplatz, in the stretch of Neukölln that still smells like cardamom and frying meat even in the rain, where I found a new shisha and a bag of apple tobacco and ate enough baklava to call it lunch.

I came home, set up the shisha, and blew apple smoke at the ceiling while the router blinked uselessly at me from across the room. There are worse ways to wait.