Berlin Nights

So B. in MA sends me mail that I need to meet A, a Desi gay otter technologist who lives in NYC when he comes to Berlin. We hang together for two of his trips: same gay sex clubs, dinners, other clubs, and then on a next trip says, we are having dinner with my friend M and her friends, and I am like, how come you have more friends here than I do?
But we end up at dinner by M with C as well and then we dress up in semi-fetish sexy clothing go out to the KitKat club and have shenanigans with standing in line and being rejected and going to another club and then trying again and having one of the co-owners now supervise entry allow M & C in as a couple and then next look at A and I with a look of why aren't you already in there? and waving us through in disgust for being so late. We dance in between the half-naked very mixed mostly-straight crowd and I now have a new set of anecdotes--and M at the end of the night says, we need more of this.

So A is back in NYC, and C, a software engineer in his late twenties who already has had one big exit and lives in Berlin in a fab remodeled apartment, is on a five-week trip, but M invites me for further dinner parties. We all sit in her kitchen in a flat of a nineteenth-century apartment building, made of brick and stone, and 2.5m tall ceilings and weird corners. She invites her friends, who she has met through residencies at programming retreats in Brooklyn that sound like a cult, friends of friends, that kind of thing. All ex-pats, mostly American, we speak English. She servers vegetarian food, I always bring meatballs for the meat-eaters, and chocolate mousse I kept screwing up until the third time that it was perfect but she had invited 16 people so we all just got a few spoonfuls of heaven--God it was good.

We hang around the table, they drink all kinds of wine, and I am always the oldest. They all work in blockchain and universal basic income societies and big data security and things like that. We talk about capitalism playing itself by letting Brexit happen, and what a good hook-up is like, and witnessing Charlottesville and getting residency permits.

I soak it in. Around midnight we break up, and we all go home or to clubs or a bar around the corner here in Kreuzberg where one of us saw live music being set up. It's the kind of night you move to Berlin for.