in defense of a stagnant landscape

i was walking home from friedrichshain tonight, walking my bike with my laptop strapped onto the back of it, that same walk always, across warschauer bridge, past the east side gallery, the oberbaumbruecke, falckensteinstrasse, across deadly dark görlitzer park, up glogauerstrasse that over the canal turns into pannierstrasse, the 29 busstop... and i thought about the violent stasis that is berlin, how people age but still all dress like they're 22, the same paths and schedules, mysliewska at 7 a.m., a beer at bagdad at schlesisches tor, a schwarma on boxhagenerplatz, the shortcut from the pizza place through the playground to cuvrystrasse and the benches there where people take ice cream cones the minute a slip of sunshine comes through, the ebb and flow of a house party and the cracking speakers, the drugs, the haircuts.... it all stands still ---- yet at the very same time, along with this stagnant (if admittedly comfortable) social paralysis, comes a dramatic change in the physical shape of the city around us.

i think since the sky is the same color of grey every day we don't see the violence in the landscape.... for example one day i'll be walking my bike with my laptop strapped on the back, and i'll realize that by that crosswalk between warschauerstrasse and the oberbaumbrucke across from the (also stealthily new) universal records, a four story fucking toyota dealership will have sprouted from the earth. or i'll be walking my bike with my laptop strapped on the back over warschauer bridge, and a fucking stadium will have materialized. or a new overpass between the ubahn and the sbahn. one day i'll buy a beer with my guy at bagdad at 7am after they will have put up all the chairs around us at mysliewska and walk over to that abandoned lot by the river, festooned with grafitti and reeds, where we would dangle our legs over the side and write songs we would never put music to about blowing up universal records and brian jones turning over in his grave.... one morning we'll walk over there and for once the crack in the fence will be chained shut. one day i'll go for a schwarma at that place on boxhagenerplatz and i won't be able to walk out the door because it is clogged by a 10-person-thick gaggle of dreadlocked nineteen year old italians all wearing identical kaffiyeh scarves and bellowing.

or one day i'll be planning an event for an independent project i will have been working on at a historic squat-slash-punk/artist collective near the warschauer tracks, and won't be able to get in touch with the woman who provides the space because she'll be too busy with hearings as to whether or not industrialists will be allowed to purchase the space and make it into a mall.