Echo

lies.

i’ve got a whole deck of cards of them.

oh my god.

it’s like every day out here.

every day is a wtf day.

all the channels in this hotel are in german, though i found two hardcore porn channels, twice more than in holland. i just saw five girls sucking off one guy in a pool.

sometimes i get so mad at other women when they do things that make mockeries of themselves.

Julia says (2:11 PM):
i took a picture of my shadow in the gas chamber and it really freaks me out

AZ says (2:11 PM):
let me see

Julia says (2:11 PM):
i don’t have my card reader. but i’ll send it when i get back

Julia says (2:12 PM):
it really scares me

AZ says (2:13 PM):
fucking germans

Julia says (2:13 PM):
i still can’t understand the scale of what they did

Julia says (2:13 PM):
like…you see the pictures and you just can’t comprehend that human beings did that

AZ says (2:15 PM):
just picture that experience of getting on a train with thousands of others getting dumped at a camp that separated families then told you had to go take a shower and got gassed to death. and all the strong men had to dig out mass graves

Julia says (2:16 PM):
that’s the unbelievable thing. they built the gas chambers to look like showers, with prop shower heads and tile and everything. they went to lengths to make the people believe they were really taking showers. like they didn’t just dump people into these rooms the way they would nonchalantly take them out behind the bunker and shoot them in the back of the neck…they felt it was important to TRICK these people to the extent of putting in fake showerheads. i don’t GET it

Julia says (2:16 PM):
it’s so sick

Julia says (2:17 PM):
like what kind of fucking idea did someone manage to infect people with?

Julia says (2:17 PM):
was it just hitler was so evil? or did he just sell himself to some evil force and speak for it? and if so, is that evil force out there, just waiting for someone powerful enough to let it back into our world?

AZ says (2:19 PM):
it was a supernatural force that i think still resides on earth and he tried to enter the bush administration but was unsuccessful

Julia says (2:19 PM):
oh fuck

the window of my hotel faces the windows of the hotel across the street.

as i was hanging out the window watching the people on the street below, i looked up to see that directly across from me, a very obese naked woman was facing the window, changing.

i think it broke something in my head.

I feel like I’ve reached a place where I don’t understand anything anymore.

I went to the Dachau concentration camp. It’s the first camp the SS set up to house political prisoners, and even though they didn’t use their gas chamber for mass killing, they still treated people atrociously. We had a guide who was really detached and didn’t seem to care, so it was hard to process everything on a human level. It’s hard to understand how a person survives in that kind of devastatingly sadistic and depraved environment, and how it was that a world allows this kind of existence to happen.

When we first got there, the tour guide asked our group why we wanted to see the camp. No one was willing to answer. Finally, this woman who was part of a mother/daughter combo from Pennsylvania pointed to her daughter and said, “She wanted to see it.”

“Anyone else?” the guide asked. We all remained silent. “So you’re all here for the same reason?”
Yeah, I thought. Because of that girl.

I wonder why it’s so hard to admit you want to see the site of the most gruesome trainwreck in history. It’s just important for people to understand and remember.

Most of the buildings are torn down and some of the things have been replaced by replicas. They’ve taken away enough things so that this place is a memorial, a symbol that will allow survivors to remember and mourn, but not exact and authentic enough to retain the most threatening of its evil power.

The only thing that had really bad feelings was the gas chamber. It has no windows so when you walk in, you’re stuck with it, all the energy in the room.

Even the room where they piled the corpses. Empty. You couldn’t imagine what they were doing here if you didn’t see the photo on the wall.

I couldn’t understand. I saw the pictures. And they were unbelievable. But the way the only things that remain are these mostly empty buildings filled with sunlight…they buried a lot of it. I couldn’t feel the energies to understand what had happened, how it was that 43,000 people could have died in the place where I was wandering, living a daily existence worse than anything they had ever imagined hell to be like. It was weird to stand in a place of great suffering but still not know how it was this happened, how evil could have exerted its will in such a far-reaching way.

There’s something about this country that makes you feel like your mind is in a fog, like it clouds your memory.

The sadistic potential in man is not something to underestimate. Ever.

You have to be careful talking about these things in Germany. They are sensitive about it.

A couple of nights ago I was on the subway late at night in Berlin, and these punks were drunk off their asses and violent. This one guy with piercings and a mohawk kept stalking up and down the aisles, intermittently beating on this guy while this strung out looking girl with short, spiky hair kept screaming, “Nein! Nein!” and trying to grab him as he kept kicking the guy in the face. The guy being beat was bigger but he just sat there with his eyes downcast, body hunched and took it.

Another one of their friends, a bony guy in an army vest with a dirty blond goatee, was walking from one end of the car to the other, thrusting this big, white rat into the faces of girls to make them scream and cower. As he came down the aisle, he did it to the girls sitting next to me, and they screamed, huddling together. I kept calmly small-talking to the guy next to me and projected a feeling of being emotionally bored with the scene. He skipped over us and kept going. If he had messed with me, I was prepared mentally for a fight to the death. But for whatever reason, he didn’t see me. Not having full access to my emotions makes interpersonal relationships difficult sometimes, but every once in a while, it helps me be a pretty calm and aware projector in dangerous situations.

So then guy who had been beating the other guy got up and started pacing the car. He was looking for trouble. The drunk Nein girl was screaming at people to stop him. No one made eye contact. He kicks this piece of glass next to the door with a shutteringly realistic violence. An old woman in the back somewhere gasps. He starts screaming at everyone in German, then he kicked the glass again, shattering it. Everyone in that section jumped up and crowded towards the back of the car. In my my head, I directed all my energy into the knowledge that I knew nothing was going to happen. That this was just another cliched moment in a play.

When we got to the next stop, everyone jumped up and got out of the car. The police must have been notified of the trouble because they were in front of our exact car, waiting to get on.

I dropped it out of my mind, just thinking that if I still remembered it when I next blogged, I would mention it.

It wasn’t until later that night, walking home from dinner, that it dawned on me that what happened had been a scary situation.

Last night a surprise snowstorm descended upon Munich. From my window, I saw the giant flakes swirl, at times making me feeling like I was inside a magical snowglobe, at others, like I was watching schools of fish swim in one direction then the other, so alive, playfully chasing each other with the vivacity of children released on holiday.

I woke to find the rooftops blanketed by fine white powder…pristine.

I feel this is a good sign.