The Calcutta was very packed even for a Friday [7th October 2006]

The Calcutta was very packed even for a Friday. I had 3½ pints before going to the Wigmore. To be honest, Frittoli was more voluptuous than I was expecting, in a three-layered black dress covered with silver diamante patterns, and I had to revise my plan to leave at the interval. She was gorgeous and fantastic. A special honour to see her and yet in my mind I conflated her and -- together so it felt I was looking and worshipping both of them at the same time, while I muttered away still talking to --. I was reminded very much of the Prokina night when she turned and looked at me at the end. "I still love him". I had a Becks in the bar downstairs, much-changed!, while reading about Pete and Kate. I will perhaps go to Sunset tonight after the Bell, if the Bell is no good. If I leave the Bell quickly I won't really be spending anything extra...? I have got my £69 gas bill and my £136 TV licence renewal bill in! Forget Berlin in the New Year. Though I think a lot about Alla. I have to keep drinking and living madly like last night. Then I can potter around town with a silly drunken smile on my face muttering to --. Better than staying in doors brooding and crying and feeling suicidal. I wish to destroy myself with drink. I plan to drink myself to death. 

I never even noticed, last night was Egon Schiele night. Things always start to become more erotic from this point on. Today is the first anniversary of being in Frankfurt and getting train to Nuremberg for the great Saturday night at Caribic and that girl in the Pils having  her stockings mauled by that man. It is the third anniversary of going with Maria in the Brussels windows before going to Munich and meeting Susi the next night. 

As I was leaving the flat last night, the little blonde Polish bob had just come in & was checking her postbox. She did not turn around but I said hello anyway and she turned around with such a big lovely smile & said hello back & she looked so gorgeous & I was glad I did something friendly. I was rewarded by meeting English teacher and Greek girl on the bus & having a good night in general. The more you give out the more you get back. It is difficult when you are in the depths and coils of a depression, but I hope to meet my Rilkean turning point, and bounce back. Given her flowers, Frittoli bowed low & all the rainwater from the flowers spilled onto the stage. Everyone laughed & she pretended to shower the front row with it. When she came out for her encore she very exaggeratedly stepped round the water & pretended to slip over.  A true star, reminding me of Jochen Kowalski catching the bouquet with one hand at the Komische Oper. 

As I entered the hall the ticket girl smiled at me "we are sold out so no one can cheat" and we grinned at each other. You will not get out of your depression by being moody and cold, you will only do it by being warm and friendly, and trying to smile and be nice to people, and then get warmth back. November 18th looms hugely on my horizon. In the meantime if I do not see her at the Bell I know I can always go back and have a good night at the Sunset. 

Thunder at 6am. Now torrential rain [30th Sept 2006]

Thunder at 6am. Now torrential rain. Winter is finally coming. I am autistic. I am Stephane in Un Coeur en Hiver. I am Will Penny. I am the Consul. I am Noodles. It was so good watching that Stephen Fry programme about depression. Even though he had just been to a party and was laughing and joking and was the life of the party, when he got home he cried his eyes out and thought of ways to kill  himself. Richard Dreyfus has only coped by being on medication for the last 30 years. Many people find it hard to cope with their minds.

*************

I am so ridiculously nervous about meeting -- again tonight. Most people have got lots of different kinds of relationships, as Sarah would say. I do not. I have only my longing for -- and nothing else. -- is everything. I just know how I will feel when I wake up Sunday morning with a hangover, depressed, so so empty, feeling so worthless and pointless because I am alone and without her. I dread it--yet what is the alternative? If I stay in and do not go, I will feel just as empty. At least for a couple of hours I will have the intensity of losing myself in the depravity, of diving deeper into darkness. Into the Libertines, Hogarthian, Crane Wine Menagerie world. What I did was perverse with --. I eventually got over the black psychological meltdown with Black Bob, I eventually got over the black psychological meltdown with Pooky, I eventually got over the black psychological meltdown with Susi and Irina. I suppose I will eventually get over the black psychological meltdown with --, but it is hard when temptation is always there, when she is so close. I am so unhappy, because I am alone, because I did not take a chance with --. Falling in love is awful. I have been bombed to ruins again. What is there for me to look forward to? Just writing with cold blue hands in cold stoveless rooms high in the icy mountains. Complete emptiness and hollowness. 

I was always the one who wanted to stay in the corner and not get involved. Fine.

Perhaps I will abandon the January visit to Berlin as well, and instead aim myself at April for Katarina Dalayman's Salome.

I got to the Calcutta at 4 Wednesday and I knew it was ominous when I felt how easy the beer was going down [28th Sept 2006]

I got to the Calcutta at 4 Wednesday and I knew it was ominous when I felt how easy the beer was going down. It was one of those rare special days when the beer goes down so easy. Up to the Scotsman after two pints. Didn't take me long to realise -- was not there as I did not hear her laughter. A new barmaid! Very sexy brunette. A good line up, Lucky, Vicky, Amanda, Helena, Tequila, Nicky, Crystal and Aussie Victoria. -- gave me a nice welcome back, where you been? Where you been I said. In italy? That was fucking July! Where have you been going she said. My mum's house. She was pulling shocked faces. My mind is boggling! After she danced she came & stood in the dark centre corner with me talking. She has got a private party tonight, Tilly's. Next time I will ask her to put me on the list. I got there about ten to six I think, and -- finished at 7. The last two times she collected she leaned right against me till I put the money in. After she left a little brunette girl came in, and mentioned she was a better dancer than them and had better tits. I pulled her back and stopped her from leaving. And after that she was with me for 30? 40? mins. Me with my hand on her tits and she with her hand down my pants around the base of my cock. Francesca, she is in love with Jazmine. We made a deal, she will help me with -- and I will help her with Jazmine. Helena was grinning at me as she collected. Because of all this, I completely lost count of my number of pints, but it was a lot. And this was even before I started watching the Levski v Chelsea game on tv! I think I left before half time, and fell asleep on the 87 home and had to get one back. 

Straight away I am reminded how attractive this world is, and how much I love it. 

I always have to have this twisted painful sado-masochistic relationship with women [27th Sept 2006]

I always have to have this twisted, painful, sado-masochistic relationship with women--like --, Melani.  Where initial fondness and attraction turns to anger and bitterness and incomprehension. Like Stephane with Emmanuelle Beart in Un Coeur en Hiver. Like Will Penny. How close I came to Lotta's fitta, to Covadonga's, to --'s. To get so close to those lovely soft nubile women's bodies, to be so close to being let in, and then to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I was absolutely like Stephane with Emmanuelle Beart with --. Let her know I like her, make her want me, and then just coldly stand there and let her go. 

Yes I miss those nights at Atlantic City and Sexyland and Golden Gate & Mon Cheri & Monte Carlo & Ciro & Pour Platin and Empire and the Bell and Sunset Strip & Sunset Cinema but you cannot keep doing it all the time [25th Sept 2006]

Yes I miss those nights at Atlantic City and Sexyland and Golden Gate & Mon Cheri & Monte Carlo & Ciro & Pour Platin and Empire and the Bell and Sunset Strip & Sunset Cinema, but you cannot keep doing it all the time. You cannot do it every week, 52 weeks a year. Yes I am missing out on all those experiences and all those heady nights and all those new people like Janet or Martini that might be arriving--but it is great to have some months when you do nothing, and then have some months when you go back to it. You have to deny yourself some things for a while, in order to enjoy them again. The longer I leave it the more I will appreciate it when I go back to my Pope life, my Francis Bacon life, my George Grosz life. The Broken World. The Shining Road. Once again I pore over the weather forecasts. For signs, auguries, of when the right time will be to resume my former sinful profligate life. I divine things from the weather. My sexuality is linked to the weather as much as it is linked to finance and to justice and to cathedrals. I will indulge my sexuality when the weather indicators are right, and the financial indicators are right, and the scales of justice feel right, and when in the cathedral it feels right. 

I love the wicked women. I have met some women I could trust in that broken world, Lela, for example, Ana Maria, Pamela. Diana in Berlin or Riccarda. Probably not Iga, as much as I love her! You can genuinely touch someone in that world and be touched by them, I think. I always go into that world looking for love, as I think they are the only women I could ever love. The clink of gold in the glass. The Tallulahs are probably no more cynical than the Esmeraldas. They are only nice to you as long as you are filling their glass with gold. Still, I think you can meet some exceptions, when something genuine passes between you, with Susi, with Janet, with --. And if I am wrong, then it does not matter. Fleetingly, it felt nice to real there was something real between us, if only in the blink of an eye. It is those moments that you keep go out looking for. That is what you keep gambling for, throwing so much money down on the roulette table for the very occasional moment when you get back more than you put in. That is what you keep trawling the broken world for, those fleeting moments when eye meets eye and some spark of electricity passes between you, and that current brings you back to life, for a couple of hours, or for one night, at least. That is what the poems of Hart Crane speak to me of: "The flesh assaults outright for bolts that linger". How you put on your beer goggles, so everything looks magical, everyone looks beautiful and desirable, and everyone seems to find you beautiful and desirable in return. If it is all commerce, simply, then no matter. There are just those brief moments when it seems so real, comes so close to being real, that it is as good as real. 

In every city there is Helen of Troy locked up somewhere in a room. She lives on like Orlando, like Emilia Makropolus. You go out every night searching for her, as David Tennant's Casanova always searches for Laura Fraser. "The sight of a whore is profoundly thrilling to a man". As a scopophiliac, sight is everything to me, and I lose myself in that world. For two months I have had to abstain completely and withdraw from it, only so that I might return refreshed and enjoy it anew. "There is only one woman in the world for me, you know that". "Who is she? Tell me!""No. She is cruel to me." "Maybe you were cruel to her." "Ah, that's what a bleeding heart does to a man. It drips and leaks into his soul, and before long floods his soul, and saturates him, and all his thoughts and all his words and all his deeds become bloody." "What could a woman do to help such a man?" "Well, if you would just give me your hand for a moment..." "No! You're an animal!" "If you would just step into this dark corner with me for a moment..." "No! Never again! No more dark corners with you!"

How I walked away from Irina without seizing my moment. How I walked away from -- without seizing my moment. How I walked away from Susi without seizing my moment. Maybe Riccarda, too. Pamela?

I live in the Ernest Dowson world. Don’t stick your head above the parapet unless you want to get shot at. When I hear Maneater I want to see -- dancing to it. I am obsessed with her.

"As Nietzsche put it, while recovering from his intoxication with Wagner: 'What can be done well today, what can be masterly, is only what is small.'"

What a merry chase I lead people! [23rd Sept 2006]

What a merry chase I lead people! I exult in it now. How I torment them and torture them with what I get away with and STILL get away with. I used to feel chased and hunted and hounded. Now I delight in leading them on a chase after me. See if you can keep up!

Everybody was waiting for me when I first went to Europe. They already knew me and they already knew I was on my way, and they already knew the date and time of my arrival. I feel like Bourne. They know who I am and I don't. What was it I did? Who was I? Why was everyone trying to kill me? When I went to the top of the St Marks Belltower in Venice, the American kids knew me. 

Like you can tell the age of a tree by counting its rings, I can measure my life out in the number of Salomes I have seen at the opera. Just listening to songs on Berlin Energy reminds me of being in Berlin. I only asked -- and Pamela to come home with me because since then all I have done is get drunk and spend all my time in the Bell and Sunset Strip then go home and pass out.

Yes I am amused to feel like Bourne. But I also feel like Joe Orton--still getting away with it! Like Frank Wedekind, flaunting it in their faces! Pour épater le bourgeoisie. To do whatever it is I shouldn't do. I LIVE FOR THE WILD NIETZSCHEAN DIONYSIAN PLEASURE. I LIVE FOR STIRRING PEOPLE UP. I LIVE FOR DOING THINGS I SHOULDN'T. I LIVE FOR DOING DANGEROUS THINGS WHICH WILL PUT ME ON THE VERGE OF SELF-DESTRUCTION. I LIVE FOR THE SLEAZY THRILL.

Royksopp What Else Is There? Yes I owe a massive £6000. Yes my monthly interest is a massive £80. But think of those nights in Munich Atlantic City watching Susi, Irina, Patricia, Bella Rosa, Viktoriya, or in Femina with Emily. Going to Nuremberg and meeting Martina in the Pils Bar. Those nights in Berlin with Yulia, Riccarda, Iga, Diana or Arrica. Would I take any of it back? No!

I AM DEBAUCHED. Debauchery is the road to Taoist contentment. The pleasures are great. The rewards are great. 

The rewards for that £6,000 have been great.

Oh God I love to get drunk and lose it! And I always will. Whether in London or Berlin or Munich or Vienna or Brussels. I will always want to get drunk and lose it. That is the point of life. Live for the moment. Live every moment like its the last.

Why do I keep going back to the same places? For me, it is an attempt at time travel. I am trying to go back to the past & this time put right what I did wrong. I have left so much blood on the tracks, and I want to put it all right this time, with Susi, with Irina, with Viktoriya, and do the right thing  this time. Please let me have that chance. So of course all my visits become increasingly forlorn.

What a lovely 30? 45? minutes I had with Harrietta in Angelique in Vienna.

I am quietly obsessed with recording my own life.

Für Elise is nostalgia for all the beautiful Esmeraldas you have fallen in love with & who you have had to leave behind.

What the hell happened to Pink? What a loss. What a brief golden age. How can I not love all the Tallulahs and Esmeraldas I have met? What magical, never to be forgotten high, special moments they have given me.

Oh what a return it will be when it happens. October? November? How wonderful that memory is of seeing Michela dancing to Global DJs is, even though at the time it seemed so failed a visit. What happy memories those strip clubs around Europe (Munich) have given me. That is why I cannot regret the £6,000.

It's possible I could go to Berlin for one night only to see Dalayman in Salome isn’t it? Suddenly a visit to Munich (or Vienna) in December becomes possible. But I said Munich never again after January!??? It is all just memories now. That incredible Jay Z Threat night. Will life ever get any higher than that?

If I have learnt one thing in life it is that you have to take your chances--Susie, --, Irina, all of them. Clarissa. Martina. 

When you hear Afghan Whigs See About Me, how can you not want to go back to the strip clubs? Yes, but it is about going back when they are at their best---in winter, and on Saturdays, and in Berlin or Munich. The Whigs seem to exist in that same drunken world as the Libertines, and Faith Healers, and me.

There is nothing better than travelling around Europe to see my favourite opera singers [19th Sept 2006]

There is nothing better than travelling around Europe to see my favourite opera singers. While there enjoying the brothels and strip clubs and pubs as well. Travel seems the only point to life. To travel is to be held in suspension. As soon as you come to rest, everything stops and falls. You are just left waiting until you can travel again.  Between travels I will just drink and drink to make the time go faster.

I will go home today so I can get drunk while listening to music. That is all I do every day on my days off, get drunk. Just waiting for the time I can travel again. Thursday should be thundery, and Friday showers. The paper says we are heading for a period of high winds, torrential rain and abnormally high temperatures! Phnom Penh weather. It remains to be seen whether I can resist the lure of the illicit thrill during these atmospheric conditions. I do not want to go back to the Bell and Sunset Strip and Sunset Cinema and Demi and Pamela until I am also ready to travel. Even when I get September out of the way, there is still all of October, all of November, and all of December to get through! Can I really resist travelling in December? Maybe I will just pop to Brussels?  

I live for gambling, I live for saving my money in periods of abstinence just so I can blow it again on wicked women in London and Brussels and Vienna and Munich and Berlin. This boom and bust is what I live for. "What Rodin depicted in the Burghers was the birth of a specifically modern form of despair: an acceptance that there is no external source of redemption and the knowledge that one's life might not be capable of generating its own capacity for redemption. What solace is available in the face of this dilemma? One possibility is work, the unswerving devotion to a craft that so impressed Rilke. The other is the sexual promise offered by women. In his later years Rodin achieved a blissful combination of these possibilities, devoting hours and hours to making thousands of drawings of naked women, often in states of sexual rapture. 'People say I think too much about women,' he explained. 'Yet after all, what is there more important to think about?' In Milton--as in the Bible--the Fall comes after Adam has tasted Eve in all her tainted sensuality. This inverts the reality of the situation: that the lure of sex is one of the things that makes the fallen state not simply bearable but desirable. Wittingly or not, Milton provides a glimpse of a paradise that is endlessly regainable: 'Carnal desire inflaming, he on Eve/Began to cast lascivious eyes, she him/As wantonly repaid...' Rodin trained himself to draw without taking his eyes off the women who were happy to surrender themselves to him as he abandoned himself to his gaze, (William Rothenstein, to whom Rodin made the remark about the importance of women, recalls him 'caressing his models with his eyes, and sometimes too with his hands'.)" 

I abandon myself to my gaze. I have a deep attachment to Brussels, Munich, Vienna and Berlin. I used to spend all my spare money in the Bell and Sunset Strip and Soho. Now I save it all for travelling in December and January. I can moan about all the money I have wasted on sex and strippers over the past few years, but isn't that the point of life?!!!! There is nothing I would rather do with my money. I just need to control it in London so I can also enjoy the womanly delights of Berlin and Brussels and Vienna and Munich. 

"We drank hard and talked about what Debord, who drank persistently and prodigiously, had written about alcohol"

"We drank hard and talked about what Debord, who drank persistently and prodigiously, had written about alcohol. 'I admire Debord as a perfect and dedicated drinker.' We talked about how, in the early years of his career as a drinker, Debord was always in pursuit of or just arriving at a perfect point of intoxication which, unlike paid labour or any other servile activity, would reveal 'the true taste of the passage of time'. Drinking was a beautiful poetic game, with its rules and protocols. Debord devoted pages to describing this notion."

Irina suddenly leaned over to me and said to me "I'm sorry, you're a nice guy, but you drink too much" before giving me the ultimate private dance. I said to Viktoriya "You don’t like me, do you", and she exploded back with real hatred "Yes. Because you're always drunk". *****************I insist on the primacy of my own experience. My own vision. I can only be alone. I can only be in cold icy mountains. ******************Don't be unhappy, be happy! Think what immense power you have got! You have made the great separation & now live for pure Priapism. You have got money. Winter is coming. I can go to the Bell, the Sunset Strip, Sunset Cinema, Demi and Pamela. In January I can go to Berlin. This is going to  be a season of the flesh. I have got a nice little job I enjoy. I have got money coming in. I have got my own little nest. I have got a week off in December and another week off in January to go to Berlin, for La Traviata and Carmina Burana.

"Where do you live actually?" said Pamela to me. The discipline of saving money is actually a really exciting one. It has made the Bell more exciting for me. It will no doubt make Sunset Strip more exciting for me eventually. I love the things I have got away with in the past, the things I get away with now, the things I will get away with in the future. 

I have got my book-lined London home, filled with ferns, and classical music. I live like a church mouse in a little hotel earning the money to write my books, while enjoying the girls taking their knickers off to loud music, and travelling a couple of times a year to Berlin. I am still sad about --. Do what you want with your genitals, otherwise you will regret it when you're dead.

I feel an almost physical revulsion at the thought of going back to Sunset and Demi and Pamela [13th Sept 2006]

I feel an almost physical revulsion at the thought of going back to Sunset and Demi and Pamela. But what else is there, so I will eventually. When I know the pleasures I have felt in those places felt so intense. I feel a physical revulsion for going back to those nighttime Vienna places and the nighttime Berlin places. I feel a physical revulsion for spending any money when I am in this saving mode. That is good. I have become allergic to spending money when before I seemed addicted to it. I feel an almost physical revulsion for women. I am a strange man. How can -- or anyone have a relationship with a strange man like me. I am like Ralph Fiennes Spider. I only learnt how to be alone when I was a baby, and I always will be. I love places where I can be alone surrounded by loud pounding music and naked girls, that is why I love the dream world of the Scotsman and Sunset Strip so much. It is the ultimate detachment. The ultimate transcendency. The ultimate lens. The ultimate gateway to the state of bliss that is the Kingdom of Death. Ultimate nothingness. --'s finger to the lips in a hushing gesture seems a very big moment. That nervousness so intense I cannot breathe as the train nears Nuremberg & as I got off and walk along the corridor to the entrance hall, and the nervousness I felt so intense I could not breathe as i went down the steps at the Astral, I now feel when I walk to the Scotsman from the north from the 91 stop. I feel it too when I enter Sunset Cinema, hoping to find a woman being monickered, and also when I go up the models' steps. That is the high. That is the drug.

"Berlioz's unstinting lionisation of Beethoven in the pages of La Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris" [12th Sept 2006]

"Berlioz's unstinting lionisation of Beethoven in the pages of La Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris,the most important and influential music journal in 19th-century France, also played a major role in establishing him at the centre of the repertory for the concert hall." In my journal, what would I write about, who would I lionise. I would lionise the Midnight Bell, perhaps, and its dancers, extolling the virtues of Sylvia and -- and Janet above all others. Extolling them in messianic, apocalyptic, grandiose, diva-esque terms, like they are Sarah Bernhardts. Invoking Hungarian history. Giving reviews of their performances just the way one would with reviews of violinists or pianists. They are all on a stage, why not? Instead of one paragraph reviews of Anita Berber's Bethanien or Marlene Dietrich's grave, extend them into full page articles, enabling me to digress into talking about the Blue Angel, Lola, etc. Berber at the Romanisches Cafe, Tucholsky. It would be a journal devoted to the strip clubs of London, the pubs, to Berlin, and Vienna, and Brussels, and Munich. Talk about them the way you would about great opera singers of the 1880s, from the stage side box. Write a magazine where on one page there is a review of Barbara Fritoli at the Wigmore Hall on Wednesday night, and on the facing page, a review of the Flying Scotsman on Thursday night, each with equal analysis. My reviews are scurrilous and scandalous, like James Ellroy, Charles Bukowski. Winter is coming. Remember those cold icy days when I first moved in here? Remember the excitement of those Astral  nights? Miising in Action Painter film? The unable to breathe shaking with excitement as I headed down the steps not knowing what I was about to see? Remember that unbelievably huge breaasted beautiful Czech girl at the Boulevard? It is almost like a dream. I cannot believe I witnessed something so spectacularly sexy as her and made so little of it. If only I knew where she was now. 

I would like to write my own magazine like the Fackel, full of my hard-hitting sometimes scurrilous articles and reviews of London life. Write about Barbara Frittoli and the tyranny of not being able to write about the singer's beauty, and sexual allure, as if this must not be mentioned, like some guilty secret. Write about La Traviata at the ENO, a weepy opera about "some consumptive whore, when in real life whores are treated like the lowest of the low, yet here she is celebrated as something glorious". 

The fact that I have paid £600 off my Barclaycard in the space of a month shows what is possible [11th Sept 2006]

The fact that I have paid £600 off my Barclaycard in the space of a month shows what is possible. I don’t think I am going to go to Vienna in December. I think I would rather keep waiting and keep saving. So when I do travel I will have a real war chest to travel with. I was thinking in the Calcutta on Thursday that there is nothing worth spending money on except sex. If it is a choice between seeing Volver or A Scanner Darkly, or going to see a girl take her knickers off to music, then there can only be one winner. You see people who go on beach holidays, or Amalfi, and I think how bored I would be. The only holiday that means anything is in red light districts. To meet new strippers and new Esmeraldas. What is wrong with running a high debt? We will see how high my Virgin interest is when that hits in October. 

In McDonald’s most beautiful gorgeous voluptuous brunette girl, maybe 18 or 19, skin tight black top over rolls of fat and big fat huge tits, thick yellow snakeskin belt, blue jeans over fat arse, pretty pretty face, little snub nose. I could not take my eyes off her & she knew it as she finally shot me a glance as I stepped forward to order. 

Nothing in the city matters except sex, the buying and selling of it, young women stripping for you, young women lying back on the bed and opening their legs for you, men all with their cocks out in a dark porn cinema. This is the reality of my life. Vienna is still a mystery to me. With three consecutive visits to Brussels, then three to Munich, then three to Berlin, I felt I cracked the nut of all those places. I still have not achieved that with Vienna. Viennese Eroticism is very important to me. Primitive London. I am very intellectual yet I live very primitively, my animal instincts always winning out over my cerebral ones. So much drink has sozzled my brain that I doubt I have any cerebral instincts left at all. What an animal I was with Anya at the stag party; how impressed Sylvia seemed to be & so much more warm and friendly to me than she had ever been before. When people write about my life 50 years from now, they will have to write about the Calcutta, the Flying Scotsman, Sunset Strip and Carnival. About Astral, Soho Cinema, and Sunset Cinema. About Atlantic City. About Stutti Frutti, Mon Cheri, Golden Gate, Monte Carlo and Ciro.

If I do not travel to Vienna and Berlin in December and the New Year I will have no chance to meet a new Irina or Susi, Patricia or Viktoriya. Things happen when you travel. In Brussels I met Clarisse. In Frankfurt Katerina. In Berlin Erica. It is important to keep exploring. I live in a kind of Francis Bacon London. I live in the gutter like him. My writing is visceral and from the guts, full of pinks and reds and purples, like his paintings. I too am fascinated by a Pope. I am visceral and fascinated and turned on by my naked self like Egon Schiele. Do not apologise for this. Exult in it. I am priapic and I will just do it more than ever. I am saving money by not doing it so much just so I can do it more. I am going to Vienna at Christmas to fuck a couple of Viennese whores. In strip clubs every night is like Sylvester's Eve; or Walpurgisnacht. The more bawdy and raucous the better; that is why I like the Bell on Saturday nights. In London all the strip pubs are packed with men; again I ask the question, where do all the men go in Berlin? In Vienna? In Brussels?

I love the scientific analysis of my life [10th September 2006]

I love the scientific analysis of my life, like Nietzsche. In Nietzschean numbered paragraphs. Like the Rhine Zeitung newspaper articles of Karl Marx. Like the Die Fackel magazine articles of Karl Kraus. Apocalyptic, messianic, satirical. This is not possible when I have drink in my head all the time. It is also true, that some of the high moments of my life have come in the Astral Cinema and the Boulevard Cinema and the Sunset Cinema. Remember that big mullet haired guy who pulled his shorts down all the way to his ankles & sat there with a tube of soap or vaseline, regularly applying it to his cock in the Astral. Remember Red Riding Hood night when I sat for six hours in the front row of Soho Cinema till I was raw & practically passing out from the smoky, fuggy, sticky, lubricious atmosphere and when I finally left I crossed deserted Leicester Square in the lashing rain. Remember black dress Kay in the front row of Sunset sitting completely naked as black man put his huge dick in her mouth, businessman with trousers round ankles put condom on & fucked her, before "monicering" her over her tits, all the time while she stroked my cock with her hand. Remember red bra girl in the Sunset. Not to mention the highs I have reached in Berlin Erotic Centre, or Sarah Young, or Atlantic City or Sexyland kabins, or ML Revue cabins, or the Brussels Gare du Nord cabins. 

On the train into London last night in the pitch dark, I felt so much like I was on that train to Nuremberg. It crept and creaked along & I felt with every minute that passes I am getting nearer to Nuremberg and I remembered that absolutely mindblowing nervousness I used to feel on those three visits. By the time I got off & was walking along the station corridor from the platform I could hardly breathe. I was gasping and hyperventilating and shaking, knowing I would soon be in the Pils Bar and the Caribic. Also I felt like I was on the train into Vienna. 

I am a great believer that you carry the weather with you [9th September 2006]

I am a great believer that you carry the weather with you. If you travel with a spark, a dancing flame inside you, you will have a great time. If you travel unhappy, and in a black place, weighed down by worries and debts, you will have a sad time. I cannot say the well in Munich has run dry; probably it is my well that has run dry. When my well fills up again, by making myself happier, ridding myself of obsessions, financial worries, anxieties, paranoid depressions, I will find Munich’s well is full to overbrimming again, stars filling the throat to the crop, as it was absolutely full to overbrimming when I met Susi, Irina on the night of Turkey v England, Patricia, Emily on the Night of the Snow, Viktoriya in those four magical life-changing visits in the space of six months. 

I love loud pounding music. Muse Starlight. Even in the Scotsman standing looking up at the screen I loved hearing the loud pounding music from behind me, Pink Who Knew. Miami Vice suddenly starts with loud pounding music in a club & a girl poledancing.*********I think after all it might be possible to achieve a balanced lifestyle for myself. Paying my rent, and allowing myself one night out a week, so I can still get to wallow in the Libertinesesque/Hogarthian/Rabelaisian/Rake’s Progress life, and still seriously paying off my cards so I can get to Berlin or Vienna a couple of times a year.

It is always hard to drink, go to cinema, then start drinking again. I was tired & run down yesterday & still quite enjoyed Zoe and Jane and Leah, how much better if I am sober and excited? The Francis Bacon Gilded Gutter Lily/Ernest Dowson/Frank Wedekind/Oscar Wilde Feasting With Panthers/Vincent Van Gogh Hour of the Flesh life. Kanye West Number One. Kelis Bossy. Junior Senior Get to Know you better. On my last few trips I have been hoping to get lucky and have a great time on just a very small budget with just a very small outlay & that is why I got so little back. You have to speculate to accumulate. I had so little starting capital to gamble with so I was only ever going to get little back. You have to gamble big if you are going to gamble at all. I should have gone with Alla & Olga and to hell with it. I should have gone with Clarisse & to hell with it. What memories that would have been! Justin Sexyback. Sugababes Red Dress. After all, the great thing about the Bell is that it can cost as little as £5. One pint and two girls and then push off. Sunset Strip is a minimum £19 to start off with. How I always remember Munich girl dancing to Global DJs. That is why I travel. I will go back to Vienna, I will go back to Munich. I will owe £6000 or £7000. So what? For those memories. Habit encrusts itself to us, like barnacles. Every few years one finally makes the effort to scrape all the barnacles off, and uncover the shiny ship’s hulll underneath, as if new. Such I have just done.

Yes I question if I want to go to Vienna wasting all that money after working so hard to save it [1st September 2006]

Yes I question if I want to go to Vienna wasting all that money after working so hard to save it, but that is to forget the excitement, the nervousness so intense I cannot breathe as my train pulls into Vienna.

I wake up midnight with an iron hard erection [30th August 2006]

I wake up midnight, with an iron hard erection. An incredible serendipity. I want European porn again. The Munich Intercity films, the Munich Atlantic City and Sexyland kabins. The Vienna Dorint films. I was dreaming of Kerry Marie a lot. I got the 12:10 bus to Calcutta after a lovely hamburger & fries, without any sleep. Sexy redhead at back in brown jacket & black glasses. Getting on at next stop beautiful black haired Greek looking girl, eyes met, little smile as she squeezed into corner. Pale blue jeans over meaty thighs & bum, pale blue coat, pale blue bandanna headband. White T-shirt. So pretty, got off Vauxhall. Coming into Calcutta just before I left, absolutely mindblowing thick light brown brunette, like Raquel Welch huge hair, red v-neck sweater over massive massive heavy breasts, grey skirt tight over her voluptuous hips & thighs, very self confident ordering her large white wine, sitting at round table behind me. What a sex bomb. I want Sunset again. Black dress Kay. All the money I have spent on strippers and drink this year, and such a small amount on porn cinema & whores. All these Bad Timing and Night Porter pictures form a triumphal way leading to the Ishtar Gate perhaps, of Maria's c*nt. It became clear to me after 1 pint how drink suddenly makes me want to throw my money away. It is such a disinhibitor.****“The paradigm of the romantic bohemian” sitting at the table in the Café am Zoo reading about The Libertines and Pete Doherty in the Observer newspaper, “the outsider painter who pursued his own vision amid a swirl of drugs, alcohol and dissolution”. Oh I cannot wait to get back to Berlin again! If I can achieve this saving, it will be like shaking hands with myself. Sylvia still shines on my horizon higher and brighter and bigger than any other woman. She is a Charlotte Rampling of a woman. In Berlin alone there has been Iga, Diana, Riccarda, Yulia.  “We learnt what our national Church was…a visible testimony of the collective experience of mystery, enshrined by generations in stone and glass. Imagine how we should feel if all the cathedrals were museums. What would be missing? Betjeman gives some hint of what the mysterious something was. It was a something in which, for all his doubts, he most passionately and sincerely believed”. The Arrest of Oscar Wilde in the Cadogan Hotel. “I think I’m excited by extremity. I don’t think of myself as sleazy—I like to think of myself as intrepid. Whether sex, food or going on holiday, whenever I’m confronted by a decision I always do the thing that’ll be the best anecdote.’ Pushing boundaries almost to the point of transgression is his stock in trade, and sex a major topic. ‘I’m just trying to bludgeon ennui,’ he says, ‘trying not to be bored'”. Wouldn’t it be great to always behave myself in London and save it all for Berlin, Vienna, Brussels? Every £50 I spend in London is 74 euros I could use to buy a night in a European hotel. But I have such great memories in London. Cotton and Demi and Pamela. “The smoky Tanz bars of Berlin, where the German public tried to put aside growing concerns about world politics and lose themselves in a seething pit of immorality, decadence and extravagance”.

How lovely it was lying on the floor of my flat when I got home [28th August 2006]

How lovely it was lying on the floor of my flat when I got home, just doing my newspapers, and I put the anglepoise lamp on for the first time in months. My little nest looked so lovely, with all those books starting to pile up against the wall. I slept on the floor again! I think I actually prefer it on the floor, I seem to sleep a lot longer, and have so many vivid dreams. I did not get up till 645pm again. Before sleeping I was listening to that tape & it was full of the Vienna 2002 songs! Avril Lavigne Complicated, Los Asejere The Tomato Song, Puddle of Mudd, No Doubt Underneath it All. It was amazing to hear them again. At the same time I have been thinking a lot about those great films, the German tramp in the forest with the girl in the fur coat, and at first he exposes himself, then she just touches him a bit, before they are full on fucking in the middle of the forest path where anyone can see them. And the Last Bus to Boobsville. And the women's hen night party. Incredible memories. This is why I travel. Watching it on your computer is not the same. It needs oxygen to become combustible and erotic and catch into flames. But do I really have to wait so long till December!? 

It will be great to finally get back to ML Revue again. How excited I will be that night, leaving the hotel, and riding the tram up the Gurtel till I get there!!! How excited I will be on the train to Vienna and arriving at Westbahnhof, and crossing the road to the Dorint!!!! At Christmas time!!! Progress is slow, it will be such a long time till I get there. All of September, all of October, all of November---is it possible? I will have to go back to Sunset in the meantime, and Demi and Pamela. No, you must wait for Vienna, because I really want to have some spending money when I get there, for the dancing, and the kabins, and the whores. 

I woke up briefly at 5, just as it started to thunder! Then lash with rain. That was lovely. If only I did not also have to come to work. Just one more night to get through! I want to see Volver, Snakes on a Plane, Scanner Darkly, the Sir John Soanes Museum. Plenty. It can wait a week or two. I have just realised tonight is the Third Anniversary of Powercut Night, T--- If Loving You is Wrong I don't want to be Right, when the Flying Scotsman really started for me. It is also the second anniversary of Animal Trainer 14 and my second time with Lydia. I have found a new place to go in Brussels, the incredible bar of the Hotel Metropol by Brouckere, and a new place in Vienna, the Liechtenstein Palace.

I wake up alone and how do I feel about that? Fine [26th August 2006]

I wake up alone and how do I feel about that? Fine. There is no one I want to be with. I am so happy to be alone and free. I feel pain gripping my chest, though. I feel stressed because I have got to go back to the flat early in order to force myself to get to the Rebels & Martyrs at the National Gallery, and I have become so used to not going out, not doing anything. I have retreated so deep into my own little world, almost a hibernation, and liking it. Those drunken addictive years to strippers & whores seem so far away. It is so nice to be curled up small & protected. But always I fear everything being torn down, invaded, ripped away from me. As always I expect the great flood any moment & having to gather all my things together on a raft and starting all over again.

For all that talk of big breasts I never really made the most of my opportunities [25th August 2006]

For all that talk of big breasts I never really made the most of my opportunities: Clarisse I never even had a 5 euro dance in my seat & refused to talk to her, Martina, I went with Diana instead, Andrea I just had the £20 option instead of half an hour. I can worry about the sadness and despair of my last trips to Berlin, Munich, Brussels, but I always feel this sadness and despair so it is normal & I should enjoy it! There is a kernel inside my brain that only wants to be stimulated by pornographic films and prostitutes, and will never be able to feel anything in real relationships, so I should just understand that and enjoy it. Isn't it great that I now feel so happy in myself and so self-confident, I am writing, I have my own place, I am enjoying the porn films and the prostitutes the same as ever, and no one can touch me. How beaten down I used to be. Not anymore. I am taunting them with what I enjoy that they cannot. I am flaunting it in their angry faces, more and more. I am provoking them more and more. I am Beethoven. I am genius. Alcazar Crying at the Discotheque. My God I cannot wait to get back to Vienna again! Back to the Ring! I cannot wait to see Jolanda again. And Melani. Then on to Demi or Pamela. Oh travel is so much the greatest thing. I try so hard to recreate the sensations I feel when I am on holiday. That feeling drinking beer from my minbar in my Munich hotel room before going to Atlantic City. Or drinking in my Vienna hotel room before going to ML Revue. Or in Berlin before going to BEC and Stuttgarter Platz.**********I lead a strange existence. I read and write for a couple of hours, then sleep for a couple of hours. Listen to some classical music for an hour, then read & write some more, then sleep some more. ********What a great life this is. Sleep for a few hours, get up to read and write for a few hours, listen to classical music for a while, sleep some more, for three or four days a week. Even my bad trips still produced interesting experiences. I need complete isolation. Complete peace. Complete solitude. I can only exist in solipsism, and its military wing, Priapism. I enjoyed living in the broken world of strippers and whores. But I fell in love with one of the strippers and started embarrassing myself. I want to write a magazine like Simplicissimus and Die Fackel. Or make my satiric interventions on, for example, BITE, or Openlegs4u. I would restart The Serpents Egg either on wildeboy.com or Yahoo360 but I would have to reveal too much about myself. My life revolves around strippers and whores and yet I cannot talk about that. 95% of my life would have to remain hidden under the surface leaving only the tip of the iceberg which is not worth talking about. 

Why do I say I love travelling when the trips are filled with such sadness and despair? [24th August 2006]

Why do I say I love travelling when the trips are filled with such sadness and despair? Because in the sadness and despair I still find jewels, and have incredible experiences, like Clarisse, Martina, Erica, etc, etc. And after all the sadness and despair is no different from what I feel at home. That is just who I am. I take it everywhere with me. Europe offers greater sensual pleasures that is all. The greatest moments have always involved the porn cinema or videokabins. It is almost a year ago I first met black dress Kay, what a sexy moment that was, as she stroked my cock with her hand, as the black guy put his huge cock in her mouth and other guy put condom on & fucked her before coming over her breasts!

At Christmas I really can treat myself to a couple of days in Brussels first [20th August 2006]

At Christmas, I really can treat myself to a couple of days in Brussels first. The longer I can resist travelling for, the more money I will have to spend when I get there, and so the happier I will feel. Especially if I know I can come back to London and pay it off quickly with my new continence. Going to Vienna in December will give me the chance to see the After Schiele exhibition at the Atelier Augarten.

Oh God I am so excited about going to Vienna in December! And I am so excited about all the weeks before then, just twelve, when I can not go out, and save money frenziedly. These will be rich weeks, rich in writing and classical music, and ferns. This week I want to go to the Rebels & Martyrs exhibition, and The Third Man at the NFT. Maybe even Miami Vice. "Boundless aestheticism and ambivalent premonitions of an imminent and inevitable decline brought about a unique atmosphere in turn-of-the-century imperial Vienna, and led to Early Austrian Expressionism." I am aware of the decline and decadence, the sensual decadence, the diving deeper into darkness, the romantic nihilism in myself, so that is why I am attracted to Vienna around 1900, to Weimar Berlin. If I am to dive deeper into darkness, then let me do it when it is dark, in December! I think a new mature phase of my life is about to begin, it is struggling through its metamorphosis and is just about to emerge from its chrysalis! A new mature diving deeper into darkness! A new mature sensual decadence!

****If I can achieve this it will be like shaking hands with myself. A dip in the grotesque. “Violetta, the courtesan. Always free and libertine, always playful, venerated and admired everywhere she goes. But slowly and imperceptibly, consumption spreads through her body. When she meets Alfredo, she finally discovers true love and denounces her dissolute life. Alfredo’s father begs her to leave his son to save their family’s honour. And so the Traviata, this depraved woman, sacrifices herself for the sake of love and breaks with Alfredo without telling him why. Passionate outbursts abound, and the border between love and hate proves slight – until the truth comes out and love triumphs. But happiness doesn’t last, as death will not be deferred. In spite of its scandalous premiere, La Traviata has easily won a place of honour in the hearts of music-lovers. ” How this reminds me of Riccarda. Lydia, too, a bit. How I saw Lela deteriorate, and Ana Maria, too. What pleasure I feel at night, just going to the Calcutta for a night cap. It will be great to see Vienna in The Third Man on a big screen again. Oh what a long way off December is! I must be able to enjoy Demi and Pamela before then. There is nothing specially to go for in December so I can go at any time, let’s say arriving Wed 6th Dec in Vienna for four nights, that would be £58 a night and £230 in total. That is hot deal no change. Not bad. I just feel relief and release. Storms, floods and record tides on way. “Storms and floods are forecast in the coming weeks as the hot summer comes to an end. Experts said last night that heavy rainfall was expected to affect many central and eastern regions during the next two days as areas of low pressure sweep in from the Atlantic. Further torrential downpours are forecast for Thursday and Friday.” How to enjoy this? Sitting by my open window in my flat, in the lamplight with the black skies thundering outside, spray splashing into my room, as I write on my laptop, and listen to Viennese music on my tape machine. This is always the greatest pleasure. The simple pleasures are the only realities. It is much more pleasurable to be sitting alone in my flat with the rain pouring down outside, drowning out the music from the tape player inside, than it is to be out with people around me. It is so pleasurable in fact. To think I can just run next door to get a hamburger & fries. I might actually stay in my flat all week this week. 

Yes it is true I am travelling to Vienna for sex and I have always travelled for sex but by chance along the way I have also discovered so many things that I would not have discovered otherwise [19th August 2006]

Yes, it is true I am travelling to Vienna for sex, and I have always travelled for sex, but by chance along the way I have also discovered so many things that I would not have discovered otherwise--the Libertines, Elena Prokina, Heidi Klum on the billboard. You always find things while looking for something else. While looking for Susi I met Patricia & Bella Rosa. While looking for Patricia I met Emily. While looking for Viktoriya I met Martina. While looking for Riccarda I met Diana. The Libertines and Elena Prokina were complete chance discoveries that I would not have made if I had not been in Berlin and Brussels respectively, and they are now two of the most important things in my life. I am going to Vienna to see the Maria Callas exhibition but no doubt I will find something else instead. I always find something different to what it was I thought I was looking for. But if I had not set out looking for that thing, I would not have found the other thing. This is becoming the law of my life. I suppose if I go now expecting to meet some other thing I will find nothing but the original thing. Life is a see-saw. As soon as you think you have worked out its hidden laws and mechanisms, they swing back the other way and become the opposite. It is more than anything travelling, though, that keeps them swinging & keeps giving you glimpses into their internal workings, like looking inside a watch. As Kenneth Williams wrote, none of his trips to Tangier were ever what he could call truly successful, but they were important in that they kept the pendulum swinging. Ernest Shackleton kept going back South, even though none of his expeditions ever had any clear aim. It was enough to be heading South again. There is something in my soul that means it is enough to be just heading South again, and South in my case meaning my four Stations of the Cross, my four Cities in the Autumn Stars, Brussels, Munich, Vienna and Berlin, with occasional forays as far as Venice or Budapest or Oslo. I have almost forgotten what it is like to sleep at night. I just lie there and stare at the ceiling and have to give up. I love to be awake all night reading or writing while the world is quiet. Days are noisy and full of people, so it is a pleasure to sleep through them. It is cheaper that way, too. This "loan"  I have taken out of £6,000 is vital to pay for my travels which gives me my vital observations which go to form my books. You have to speculate to accumulate. To dare is to do.

I have got £13,500 credit and I owe £5,900. With this Vienna holiday that will increase temporarily but so what? [18th August 2006]

I have got £13,500 credit and I owe £5,900. With this Vienna holiday that will increase temporarily, but so what? It is just like taking out a loan. I have taken out a £5,900 loan which I will pay back when I come back from Vienna. And with this loan I am doing amazing, extraordinary things. Burning bright like a firefly. You have to push yourself to the edge. It is only there that you can observe things & record your observations. I am excited about going to work from now, because my journey to Vienna has already started. Remember how I always used to enjoy going to work because it was just getting me through the two or three weeks till I could get back to Munich again, or get back to Berlin again, or get back to Vienna again? Am I really spending hundreds of pounds going all the way to Vienna just to have sex? The sex with the Vienna and Berlin whores is more expensive but it is better. They will do anything. Remember how Yulia, Riccarda, Maria, Diana, did absolutely everything? You do not get that in Soho. Once you have paid your 100 euros you do get an absolutely mindblowing experience. Now watching the Alizee J'en ai Marre video I know why I travel. If I had never travelled I would never have seen that video. If I had not gone to Berlin and bought the Observer that Sunday in the Café am Zoo I would never have discovered the Libertines. If I had not gone back to Brussels I would never have discovered Elena Prokina. Travel enriches you so much. Just as the flat costs me a lot of money but it would be a false economy to give it up, so travelling costs me a lot of money but it too would be a false economy to give it up. That night coming away from Katarina & her Wild Stallions with such a huge erection in my trousers it still had not gone down by the time I crossed the leaf-carpeted Ku'damm. Meeting Clarisse in Brussels. On a wild goose chase to Nuremberg to look for Viktoriya I met the incredible Martina with the most enormous breasts I have ever seen in my life.

The pleasure of travelling around Europe by train is so great even if I'm lonely because when I am lonely I write the most [17th August 2006]

The pleasure of travelling around Europe by train is so great, even if I'm lonely, because when I am lonely I write the most. It is Nietzsche in cold stoveless rooms writing with blue hands, while weeping, writing in blood. That is what I like best. So what I owe £6,000. You cannot take it with you. I might as well live intensely for the next few years while the rausch is on me. I am inclined to go to Berlin in January for La Traviata and Carmina Burana. That will mean I should go to Munich and Vienna at the end of October, to pull into Munich Hauptbahnhof in the dark at 7 o'clock at night and walk into the Intercity, for a couple of beers from the minibar, shower, couple of beers down in the bar, before rounding the corner into Atlantic City. The next day I can enjoy the gorgeous Lamm's and that night maybe go to Nuremberg coming back for 6:30 breakfast. So Thursday get Eurostar to Brussels Radisson SAS, few drinks in bar, up to Empire and Gare du Nord. Next lunchtime to Munich. Saturday night in Nuremberg and Sunday lazing in Munich? or train to Vienna? Monday night arrive in Vienna for some drinks from minibar then Dorint bar, then Seilerstatte. Next night Pour Platin and ML Revue. Yes, Munich and Vienna in end of October, save Berlin for January. That will give me all of November and December, another 8 weeks, to save for Berlin. Munich more than anywhere is really the City in the Autumn Stars. It even has a Rosenstraße!!!! Maybe I could buy some new boots. I am really going to enjoy myself this autumn in Munich and Vienna. Still, before I go, I would like to return at least once to Sunset Cinema and then to see Demi and Pamela. This time I will take some pictures in Munich at night. I am going to really absorb myself in Munich and draw out of it as much as I can this time.

Why do I wake up at 2AM feeling so unhappy? [16th August 2006]

Why do I wake up at 2AM feeling so unhappy? I feel like I want to cry. I had such an unhappy dream. I was trapped on a long distance train going across Europe and I knew no longer wanted to be on it, but I was trapped. I had no choice. In reflection in the window I saw an old man with black holes where eyes should be. It is almost a premonition of myself in 20 or 30 years time. I felt like I was trapped on this train, and trapped in this travelling, without aim and without enjoyment. Maybe it is just the after effects of the drink. Drink causes depression and low moods. Such a reversal of how I felt on the train home last night. Instead of having my epiphany in the Calcutta, I had it on the train home. As the train neared home in the darkness from station to station closer to ——-, I imagined I was on my train in Europe, getting nearer and nearer to pulling in at my final destination of Munich, or Vienna, or Berlin, and I felt again that intense excitement of about to arrive. How exciting it is to arrive at a place by train, not by plane. It made me really want to be on that train to Munich, or Vienna, or Berlin. The great thing about arriving by train is I know my hotel is right next to the station in Munich, and in Vienna, and very close even in Berlin, and in Brussels. To arrive in Munich at night is so exciting, when everywhere is so dark, and all lit up, and the night is about to begin. Very soon I can be heading over the road to Atlantic City and the night can really begin. Now, however, this morning I feel like I do not want to travel to those places and do those tawdry things again. I am sick of those places, and throwing all my money away. As always in the mornings I am most conservative and frightened, and at night I am most wild and hedonistic.

Oh God how could I ever have considered giving up my lovely little flat? (13th August 2006)

Oh God how could I ever have considered giving up my lovely little flat? It is so lovely to come back to at night. All afternoon, and tonight, travelling to Charing Cross I felt so nervous. It was good, it felt exciting, like being in Vienna or Berlin or Brussels at night. Everything was pitch back, windy and rainy and storm-tossed. It felt like winter. It felt like how nervous I felt going out in Vienna at night to look for the peep show place, or how nervous I felt going to look for Stuttgarter Platz in Berlin the first time, or going into Atlantic City every time. I love that nervousness! That excitement! Sitting with my first pint in the Calcutta I still felt it. I felt I was sitting in the Brussels Pullman bar prior to heading up to Empire and Gare du Nord. Or sitting in the Dorint preparing to go out to Pour Platin or Manhattan. It was so exciting. By the second pint the excitement had been replaced by deadness, and I could not recapture the nervousness. By the third pint it had started to turn to the nihilism which can be as exciting as the nervousness but I did not push it to a fourth pint. I think three will be my rule for these Calcutta nightcaps. Oh God I cannot wait to get back to Vienna and the Dorint, and I cannot wait to get back to Munich and Atlantic City. But first I think must come Berlin for Violeta Urmana and the Mort de Cleopatra. That would be special. Any money I save let me use it on Alla & Olga and Erica first. On the 87 bus home someone started playing the Hot Club de France at full blast! It was fantastic. Riding along listening to Stephane Grapelli and Django Reinhardt. Every bus should sound like this at 11 o'clock at night.

******Low rumble of thunder. To think I was thinking I could sit out on my balcony once summer comes, and now it is black & rainy & I am turning my heating back on, and it is only 13th August! John Dilys Cooper "turns everything into an epiphany". I had an epiphany last night. Getting the bus to Charing Cross feeling so nervous, and arriving there in the pitch black, and it was so windy & stormy, and I sat in the Calcutta with my first pint feeling so strongly what it would be like at this same 930PM at night to be sitting in the bar of the Brussels Radisson SAS, or the Ibis Cafe Belge, or the Dorint Wien, or the Berlin Plaza, nervously drinking enough so I was ready to go out looking for Tallulah or Esmeralda. Tingle-Tangle. That feeling in the knot of your stomach. Those butterflies. That excitement, that nervousness. On the bus, around Parliament Square, I was thinking this was how nervous I felt when I went to get that tram in Wien, or how nervous I feel when I leave the Intercity at night to cross Bayerstraße & round corner of Schiller, my heart suddenly starts beating so fast, my breathing comes so quick, my blood pumps around me so quick, as I am sure everybody knows what I am up to, but they cannot stop me, and I am going to do it anyway. A real epiphany last night, and again on Wednesday, when everything reminded me of Wien Westbhanhof. We grow beautiful out of our longing. The greatest highs of my life have been those midnight trams in Vienna around the Gurtel to get to ML Revue, or those walks from the Intercity to Atlantic City, or those walks from the Berlin Plaza to the Berlin Erotic Centre or Sarah Young, or that midnight tram from the Gare du Midi up to the Gare du Nord and trying again to find the right exit. Lust suddenly suffuses my whole body. I become so nervous and so excited. In Europe you have dirty experiences. The ONLY time I get close to that in London is when I go to Sunset Cinema, and some man comes in with a girl, and that is so exciting, and then when I am ready, I leave there with my swollen cock rolling in my trousers from side to side like a ship in a storm, just around the corner to Demi or to Pamela. That always feels so dirty. Once September comes I will allow myself this again. As the nights get dark so early. Save my money for October, once the clocks go back! That is why I call November 1st Volcanic Night! I do not think I find Simon Boccanegra interesting enough as an opera to go all the way to Hamburg to see Prokina in it. I'd rather spend all that money the train would cost on sex in Berlin. I would like to see Urmana in the Mort de Cleopatra though. What to do, Munich & Vienna first, or Brussels & Berlin? NOTHING THAT HAPPENS AT WORK CAN POSSIBLY AFFECT ME. I LIVE FOR WRITING AND FOR TRAVELLING. I AM LIKE A GHOST AT WORK. THUNDER! A dirty, black, thundery, raining evening.

Go into Brussels like pulling into a great palmhouse (11th August 2006)

Go into Brussels like pulling into a great palmhouse, gigantic tropical ferns and trees and butterflies all around me. A steaming primordial paradise. With soot on the leaves. Let it become an overheated, closed, hothouse. Go into Munich the same way. Go into Vienna the same way. The more poor I became the more I travelled miserably, to Empire, Atlantic City, Pour Platin, Golden Gate. When you are happy people are attracted to you like to a magnet & you have great times. As I get poorer, I become more miserable & only have bad times. How happy I will feel when I reduce my Barclaycard to zero!!!! The long project starts here.

OK so it has taken 8 months for me to get my position this bad. It follows it will take another 8 months to get it back even to where it was before, owing £3,900. How fantastic to see that Paul Delvaux Pygmalion picture again! De Chirico’s Melancholy of the Beautiful Day! Now let me spend all these long hours in my flat, my little nest, my eagle’s eyrie, going through all my old notebooks, manuscripts, book margins, typing up everything from my previous holidays that can be of use in my journals. Finally going through all those newspapers. Oh what joy this next few days off is going to be! I will live on cokes & hamburgers from McDonald’s next door. At night I will treat myself to a couple of pints in the Calcutta. Maybe once a week treat myself to Dionysus and the Sunset Cinema and Demi or Pamela. I must get to the Rebels & Martyrs exhibition next week. Of course I cannot give up my nest. What a crying tragedy that will be. That is the best thing in my life. That is the nuclear option. If I spent £800 on beer & strippers in the last two months I should therefore be able to pay off £800 on my Barclaycard over the next two months? This is where I turn my life around, and the fightback starts. I ache to see that Paul Delvaux picture for real in the Brussels Museum of Modern Art! How I ache to see Dali’s The Temptation of St Anthony in the flesh again! 

“Today, visitors to the Wiertz Museum enter into a highly preserved atmosphere from a revolutionary era favourable for contemplation, inner reflection or daydreams… ” How fantastic to see La Belle Rosine again! Le Tresors de Satan! La Figure Tombale! How much I want to get back to Brussels! I will have to go on a pilgrimage to Felicien Rops in Namur, I think. The train to Berlin is 7½ hours and costs 236 euros!!! About £180? Wouldn’t it be better to get an Interrail pass for £380 so I can go from Brussels to Nuremberg instead for one night stay, on to Munich for two nights stay, on to Vienna for two nights, before the long journey up to Berlin for my last four nights? For sure, that is £1,200 gone just on train & hotels!!! Add on another £100 a day for expenses, that is £1,200, making a total trip of £2,400. Almost impossible to be less than that. A 12-day trip has to come to at least that. I think I am going to have to accept that I will be flying from Heathrow to each of my destinations for four-day holidays at a time. Maybe with a two month gap between each holiday? I could maybe combine Brussels & Berlin on the first trip at Halloween, £60 Eurostar plus £180 Berlin train, comes to £240, not to bad for say an 8 day trip, and then in the New Year combine Brussels with Munich & Vienna, if my savings have continued! How I ache to see the huge Fountain of Inspiration in Brussels again, and the Mars & Venus on the opposite wall. So full of personal meaning, more than ever now. Getting back to Brussels will be such a symbol of my rebirth. It will be very emotional, before then pushing on to my reunion with Berlin Plaza and Berlin Zoo. Brussels can never be enough on its own. Brussels is always the stopping off point, the starting point, the staging post. I could even go to Berlin for a one night stand in January to see La Traviata?

I am on such an exciting new project now (10th August 2006)

I am on such an exciting new project now. I am as thrilled by the prospect of tightening my belt, and living like a monk, and saving money now, as I used to be by living wildly and spraying my money around and living hedonistically. It will be such a slow process before I notice any difference though. Like a supertanker, your personal finances are very slow to turn around. Your Love Is Like Poison, the song that -- put on & I felt it was aimed at me. Yes my love is like poison and my love of strippers had become like poison. Like alcohol poisoning your blood by too much drink, I had stripper poisoned by blood. My love was like poison to --, to Jolanda and to Melani. All of them started off liking me then wanted to avoid me. Finally now I have the chance to remove the poison from the blood and be clean again. Confessions of an English Opium Eater I carried around with me Friday, and really strippers has been my opium over the years, ever since I first fell into it on that dark, stormy September afternoon on the shining road of Dean Street 14 years ago. I have been in its thrall ever since. And yes in the early days it provided me with magical moments, supremely high moments, but increasingly over the years those high moments became fewer and further between as my addiction worsened, and became nothing but habit, with no joy or excitement left in it. 

Those red wig days, Czech Boulevard girl days, gold dress days, Carnival days, are very far in my past now. Now there are only the desperate depraved addicts memories of my appalling behaviour. How thrilled I will be now by watching my Woolwich building society account filling up and rising from minus to plus, from plus 100 to 200 to 300. That will be my high now. That will be my addiction now—hoarding money. I will get as much thrill from hoarding money as I used to from spending it. Oh if only I could have had this revelation earlier, if only I could have had this road to Damascus conversion sooner! But it has to come when the moment is right. I had to wait until I suddenly became physically revolted. I had to wait till the poison became so bad that it reached the tipping point and where it suddenly physically made me sick.

It was only when I got the —— job that I had the money to start travelling and travelling led to so many amazing breakthrough moments in my life and caused so many explosions in my mind and opened up so many new rooms in my mind that I never knew existed. I went through so many Ishtar Gates and crossed so many Rubicons, really starting from that first trip to Brussels on the hotel money where I saw Alizee’s J’en ai marre & nothing has ever been the same again. So of course I must save my money and hoard it so fiercely and protect every penny I earn so lovingly, to enable me to keep travelling. I have stopped going through Ishtar Gates and so have fallen stagnant and become a fever infested swamp of lethargy and stripper addiction which brought no real joy or happiness.

The richer you are the more you can gamble,and the more you gamble the more you are going to enjoy spectacular wins. If you are poor you can only gamble very rarely and very small sums and so even if you do sometimes win it is only for very small rewards. How can I say Munich is boring? How can I say Vienna is boring? You carry the weather with you. If I travelled with £2,000 in my pocket I would have the time of my life there. If I went in with a million pounds I could fuck the Irina lookalike, fuck Maria, fuck Angelique, and have the time of my life. Even in Munich I could go from club to club having a drink with every girl I liked until I found the one with looser morals who would let me come on her breasts at least. But as it is now I cannot afford to look in so many clubs, I cannot afford to buy so many girls a drink in order to find the one I want, and I come away feeling frustrated & that Munich is over, when really it is only that I do not have the starting collateral to enable me to gamble freely. You have to speculate to accumulate. At the moment I cannot speculate. To do is to dare. At the moment, I can no longer dare. This is a very important thing I have realised. Munich can come back to life for me ! Brussels can come back to life for me! Vienna can come back to life for me! All these places can bloom and blossom and shoot up above me letting me shelter under their glorious smutty fronds—if I repair my finances and hoard my gold coins in London so I can gamble wildly and speculate crazily and dare everything when I go back. In Feb and March I spent £617 on strippers and £547 on drink, another £1,164 in Feb and March alone. So together Feb March April May June July I could have had an extra £2,700 in my Woolwich account, or £1,100 in my Woolwich account and my Barclaycard at zero! Then for sure Munich would be full of life for me and bloom and blossom. Then for sure Vienna would be full of life for me, and bloom and blossom. You should only go into those Munich clubs, Vienna clubs, Berlin bars, if you have a lot of cash to spend; there is absolutely no point if you are on a tight budget. Then no wonder you come home feeling frustrated and dispirited. My holidays have got increasingly worse as my debt has increased. Let me go back to those years of repression 1996 1997 1998 when I could only yearn for those occasional visits to the pornographic cinema and a whore. That repression was so sexy, I was like a tautly strung hair trigger, it was delicious. Since then, in contrast, I have been like a gambling addict, Merson or Rooney, going deeper and deeper into debt. That is over now. The girls always say in those places I look miserable. If I went in rich I would be happy & fuck them all.

I think Brussels was so exciting because I knew it was just the first leg of my European tour (7th August 2006)

I think Brussels was so exciting because I knew it was just the first leg of my European tour, and after sampling the delights of the Museum of Modern Art, Wiertz, Pullman bar, and Gare du Nord, I could head off later in the week on the long train journey to Koln and Munich, and that night be heading over Bayerstraße to the White Coffin, on Saturday getting the train to Nuremberg for the Pils Bar and the Caribic, before then heading off again to Vienna, knowing that Manhattan and ML Revue and Pour Platin were waiting for me, before heading off a few days later for Berlin, knowing that Stuttgarter Platz was waiting for me and the Berlin Erotic Centre. Maybe this time I can finish up in Copenhagen for the The Makropulos Case? I want that Interrail pass again! £380 for the train pass, then maybe cheap Radisson hotels in Brussels, Vienna and Berlin? Ah but it is spending money that is the thing. Now that I have given up Sunset Strip and King's Cross, perhaps my finances will improve a bit? JUST IN JUNE AND JULY ALONE I HAVE SPENT £424 ON STRIPPERS ALONE!!!! What did Pete say? I need to see how it is destroying me. Get this: Since the New Year I HAVE SPENT £1,778 ON STRIPPERS ALONE!!! What hideous wastefulness on something that I was increasingly starting to despise. If I could have that £1,778 back now, it would pay for the Interrail pass, and every hotel for two weeks, and give me all the whoring money I could ever need. Since moving into the flat on November 17th I have spent more than £2,000 on strippers alone. And it is worse than that, because the vast majority of my drinks bill in that time---£515 in June and July alone! £1,867 since December 10th! has been consumed in the strip clubs. Without the Bell and Sunset Strip I reckon I would now be owing just £2,400 on my credit cards instead of £5,900. These are sobering figures. For sure I could go on that long train journey to Europe in December if not for that. PLEASE GIVE UP THE STRIPPERS!!!! Just concentrate on the Calcutta, Sunset Cinema, and Demi and Pamela from now on. By the end of August and September that should save me £900 alone. DO IT. Do it, so I can see Brussels again, I can see Gare du Nord again, I can go to the White Coffin again, I can go to the Pils Bar and Caribic again, I can go to Pour Platin and Manhattan again, I can go to Berlin Ciro again.

When the Esmeraldas and Tallulahs I have met in my life have been so extraordinary and stimulating and life enhancing, how can I give them up? (6th August 2006)

When the Esmeraldas and Tallulahs I have met in my life have been so extraordinary and stimulating and life enhancing, how can I give them up? The closest I have come to a real relationship has been with the Esmeraldas I have met in Moloch, namely Lela from Romania, Ana Maria from Spain, Lydia from Russia, and latterly Pamela from Sweden. 

I can only fall in love with Esmeraldas. I do not think I am capable of loving a normal girl, a respectable girl. There is so much of me that I have to hide from them, so much of the double life that I must keep secret from them, which is never necessary with Esmeraldas, because we know everything about each other from the beginning. What a relief to be able to talk so openly and honestly with an Esmeralda, when by necessity only one word out of every hundred I would like to say to a normal girl can be said out loud. Ninety-nine per cent of what is the most essential me must remain concealed from a normal girl, like a portrait in my attic, whereas with Esmeraldas I can be 100% open. That is why I love Esmeraldas so much. As much as for the sex, it is to just be able to be myself and speak freely. I have felt closer to true friendship with Esmeraldas than I ever have with a normal girl. 

In Munich, because of its strict conservatism, there basically are no Esmeraldas as such, except for very huge sums of money. The roles of Esmeralda and Tallulah have become merged, and the dancers will do a lot more than just dance, and the whores will stop short of going all the way, which is both more exciting and yet ultimately frustrating. The single greatest liberating moment of my life I regard as the time I took Patricia into one of the White Coffin séparées in Munich. At that moment a Rubicon was crossed, and I have never looked back. Two weeks later, on The Night of the Snow, I took the Romanian Emily into one of the Three Cats séparées and enjoyed the greatest sexual experience of my life, again without any actual sex taking place.

I want to write books the like of which have never been seen before (5th August 2006)

I want to write books the like of which have never been seen before. Journals of a man subsumed in a life of emptiness and nothingness, but who revels in and gorges himself on this emptiness and nothingness, like a mother eating her own placenta. Journals about the visceral pleasure in detachment of an autistic person. About transcendency, about finding lenses that enable one to focus all the rays of this emptiness and nothingness like a magnifying glass used to focus the rays of the sun to start a fire, like the mirror that Orphée steps through to enter the Underworld, and then the transcendency flares into life like a white phosphorescent explosion, and one orgies in the transcendency, in the sublime orgasmic detachment from everything and everyone around you, in the supreme quality of emptiness and nothingness stretched to the nth degree like a taut violin string that is at any moment about to break but never quite does; what exquisite pleasure is then to be found. If Guy Debord's view of life was to seek the perfect point of inebriation, mine is to locate the perfect point of transcendental orgasmic detachment. The nights I would go to the Coliseum and have to creep in the darkness to the gentleman's toilets and furiously masturbate so aroused was I. The nights at the opera in Berlin, when I had to leave at the interval in search of Kant and cunt, so highly-strung and aroused had I become.  It is possible to take an aesthetic appreciation in fine pornography, fine aids to arousal and ejaculation; indeed it is impossible not to. The night in Munich I had to leave Strauss's Arabella in desperate race back to Schiller and Goethe. It was Karl Kraus who said a woman can sometimes be an acceptable substitute for masturbation, but that it requires an awful lot of imagination. When I think of all the brief connections I have made this year with women, -----, Melani, Amanda, Pamela, Lydia, I can say that not one of them gave me an iota of the pleasure that I felt when the woman in the cinema let the men crowd around her with their cocks out, and let me wrap her hair around my cock to masturbate with in the dark. Transgression is not only possible, but beautiful. I would go further. Transgression is not only beautiful, it is essential. The double life is absolutely essential in order to save one's life.

Oh I cannot wait to get back to Nuremberg again! To go back to the Pils Bar to look for Martina! To go back to the Caribic on a Saturday night! My trips always used to be a three-way battle between Love, Art and Eros, this in the days when I was tormented by my desires and my repression, and the more I repressed my desires the more they overwhelmed me. Truly the only way to avoid temptation is to give into it. Only by indulging your tormenting desire does that desire go away and leave you free to go on with more constructive things, like writing about it. In the last two or three years, however, I have achieved a unity of the three. Love, art and Eros have been forged together so everything I do is motivated and fuelled by the combination of the three. I go to the Wiertz Museum during the day, and walk around that extraordinary single big room—alone, always alone—and already achieve a fine erection. My cock strains hugely in my trousers and rolls from side to side like a ship in a storm as I walk slowly around the room. By the time I penetrate into the three smaller rooms at the end of the corridor, it is all I can do not to remove my swollen member from its captivity and frig myself maniacally there & then on the spot. How Wiertz’s Napoleon arouses me, his Satan. Because I remember every time I have been here before, it was a precursor to the exquisite coils of desire I would envelop myself in later that night, so the Wiertz Museum serves as the appetiser, the foreplay, the anteroom on the first floor, as it were, to the brothel on the second.

Similarly, I go to the Museum of Modern Art in order to arouse myself by looking again at the deliciously dirty Paul Delvaux pictures, the Profond des Plaisirs, Salvador Dali’s Temptation of St Anthony, Tresors de Satan, and Alfred Steven’s Salome, knowing what it will lead to later. How can I not walk around art galleries with an erection! Especially if there is some sexy woman walking around the galleries just ahead of you, so you sometimes pass her and she sometimes passes you, in an erotic dance, a waltz, where you both know less than half your mind is on the pictures, and your eyes are surreptitiously looking at each other much more than at the paintings on the wall! Oh art galleries are the most erotic places on Earth! Classical music concerts, too. I have never met so many single women as I did when I used to go to concerts every week. The red scallop neck top girl who followed me back into the auditorium at the Barbican after the interval, and who as I looked up from my notebook, I made suddenly electric eye contact with. For the entire second half of the concert, as she sat two rows in front of me, her chest rose and fell like she had been running, so excited and aroused had she become about what might happen between us afterwards. Of course, nothing did. I sidled miserably home on my own, hating myself more with every step I took, but still—the mutual arousal and anticipation had been thrilling. So many times I have had encounters like this at classical music concerts. The Irish-looking lush in front of me in the Wigmore Hall ticket queue, who kept looking back at me, and then for no discernible reason bent right over, so I could see up her skirt. Women can be quite primitive in their seduction techniques sometimes. And people say to me “How boring! Art galleries! Classical music concerts!” They have no idea. The highly developed dirty mind, the truly smutty intellect, can find sex in a pot plant. And don’t get me started on tropical palmhouses and butterfly houses! Steamy indeed! Steamy in every sense of the word! I want to write smutty monographs of no more than 45 or 50 pages each, to document how deliciously dirty the world is. For the true connoisseurs of smut.

The sexiest encounters of my life were with girls at classical music concerts (4th August 2006)

The sexiest encounters of my life were with girls at classical music concerts, while I was sitting in the back row---the red scallop neck girl at the Barbican, little brown bob who sat opposite me in the Barbican lobby, black fur coat at the Wigmore, the grey skirt lush in the Wigmore lobby. The erections I have got in art galleries! Especially the Brussels Museum of Modern Art and the Wiertz Museum---I have got to go back to Brussels this autumn! To the Modern Art [gone, waiting for it to be put back in place], the Wiertz, the Cathedral, the Gare du Midi Pullman bar [gone], it is such a morbidly erotic place, even before I get up to Empire and the Gare du Nord. I got great erections in Antwerp, too. And Munich Neue Pinakothek. Oh how erotic it is to be there during the day, going to the New Pin and Lamm's [gone], knowing it is just preparation for what I am going to do later---cross Bayerstraße and round the corner of Schillerstraße and disappear into the White Coffin [Atlantic City]. My heroes are Walter Benjamin, Karl Kraus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx. I live every day of my life now as if I am on holiday, just drinking and eating and w-----g. The gorgeous beer in the Calcutta, the gorgeous fish & chips in Dionysus [gone], the gorgeous KFC in Leicester Square. The gorgeous tuna & mayo rolls in Charing Cross Station. When in Berlin I live for the knesepfannes [gone] in my hotel bar and the ham & eggs rolls in Thobens at Berlin Zoo station. In Vienna it is the alt wiener rostbratens in my hotel bar; I no longer go to Wegenstein's after the staff attacked me. I went back once but it is always so empty there, in contrast to the warmth & conviviality of Lamm's in Munich. I think I almost go to Munich solely so I can eat in Lamm's & have a glass of their ice cold Augustiner beer. I go to Berlin solely so I can eat the knesepfannes in my hotel & the Zoo Thobens rolls. Oh I so much want to go back to Munich! But where to stay---the Regent which I love for its bar, or the Intercity for its ease? I go to Vienna solely for the cold Zipfers served by the white shirted girls in the Dorint bar before I commence my afternoon of sightseeing, which usually means St Stephen's Cathedral, the Pummerin bell made out of Turkish cannons left behind after the Siege of Vienna, the Butterfly House, the KHM, the Belvedere and the Leopold. Always the same places. Sometimes I will mix in a few Third Man sites, like the Am Hof, and the steps where Harry Lime stood when the cat gave him away and we see him for the first time. I will not go into the sewers again. 

After Lamm’s [gone] what else is there to do for me in Munich, apart from struggling to the New Pin & trying to make it back to the Intercity before I explode? Nothing. Really. Lamm’s is the be all and end all of my every day in Munich. At nights, the White Coffin [Atlantic City] becomes the be all and end all but I think even that has finished for me now, as it has become just full of memories which the here and now increasingly struggles to live up to. The more fantastic memories you have built up in a place, or exquisitely painful ones, the more blood you have left on the tracks, the harder it is to get the same thrill out of the place & the more disappointing it becomes. It becomes a law of diminishing returns. There is a rising arc of your first few visits when it gets better & better, then you reach the zenith, then level off, then the arc inexorably descends, and every trip becomes increasingly distressingly flat and uneventful. The whores get more flat-chested and unattractive every time you go. In Berlin, Yulia, Riccarda, Iga, Diana, gone forever. Maybe they were always poor but the excitement of going somewhere new made them seem more sexy and alluring than they really were. The more you return the more you tend to see the same women in the cold light of day, as it were, and you realise they weren’t all they were cracked up to be.