Happy new year! Writing this from Berlin. This city is weird. It feels almost inhuman, the architecture not built for people but for some alien megalithic creatures, the people all cloudy and misterious.

Even the normal apartments feel devoid of personality. All the lights are off, there's nobody in the windows or balconies, even when theres a light on, its a single overhead light and theres no art on the walls, no shelves full of stuff, nothing. It all feels like a facade for the visitors and the citizens recede underground where they actually live in bunkers and feed off nutrients from decomposing creatures in the earth.

We went to berghain, got rejected of course. Just seeing that place and the people in queue, the bouncers, gave me this sense of some big secret going on.
Every person in Berlin is in on it and they have a specific look and head nod to acknowledge the secret with other secret-holders. And if you're not part of the secret-holding club, you are inferior to them. You are trash and you do not belong and you never will.

And i'm not talking about berghain or the club door policies, I understand why they reject people and i'm fine with that. If I had a club i'd reject people left and right all the time. No, im talking about the general vibe of Berliners. There's a fog around people's faces here, an impenetrable blurrines which forms during the face-fog ceremony where the elders tell tou the secret and brand you a secret holder.

It's not to say the people are awful and hostile, they're okay. Perfectly normal. But once you leave their field of vision, they go back to being grotesque bunker people with fog heads. They know you're not a secret holder and that you never will be.

There's also an overwhelming sense of guilt among the citizens. The secret is so awful, so depraved and disgusting that the human part in them feels remorse for ever knowing the secret. And that's why they don't share it with outsiders. They don't want you to become one of them, a bunker dwelling gargoyle dragging lead chains sprouting from its spine.

The strange thing is - i don't dislike this city or its secretive bunker people. They're like Vonnegut's Trafalmadorians - odd, gross, incomprehensible, but fascinating and philosophical. There's no possible way for Billy Pilgrim to grasp the way they see time like an unmoving, definite, touchable thing and there's no way for me to comprehend the Berliner's secret.