Went like this:

Terror
Terror
Horrible Movie
Seat Companion with a Cock and a Ponytail (Said not a single word to him in 12 hours)
Terror
Sky Sluts screaming LENNY KRAVITZ at me.
Customs stooges screaming LENNY KRAVITZ at me.
And finally
BERLIN.

Manuel from SPLATTER PROMOTION shows up, Fozzy, stage dude extraordinaire, sneaks up behind me and we whisk it all into the city via bus with me idly wondering "has the swastika been totally discredited here as a result of that little Nazi pas de deux?"

But we haven't even played a show yet. Not even a SINGLE SHOW and here I am already on Planet Oxbow.

See it goes like this:
1) I ask for drugs
2) People send me drugs
3) I lose the label/listing for whatever the drugs were when they came from the pharmacy and end up with a fistful of mystery pills and
4) In a state of the union decision to clear the cabinets I start gobbling all of the mystery tablets with the unstated intention being to have them all consumed by end of tour. Or at least 10 o'clock tonight.

So when this fella comes up to me and says

"My name is Germ."

I'm not sure if it's him or the purples talking.

"Jeremy?" I say, mishearing the tallish, bald record producer.

"GERM. My intelligence is totally vertical and I'm telling you that the Egyptians stole everything from the ancient Sumerians who got it from off of THIS planet. We were created by an intelligence off of this planet."

Standing in the middle of a stadium show by Xavier Naidoo, a german pop sensation on par with an R. Kelly you might be wondering, much like I was, why the fuck I was here. Well some TV producer friends who are mulling over doing a package on TRACKS, a widely watched and appreciated TV show, have dragged us here.

"We're space viruses. And the ancient Sumerians were vectors."

We pause and watch the mediocre R&B; stylings of Naidoo, complete with a surprise interruption by RZA from the Wu Tang Clan (who I think is to hip hop what OXBOW is to, ah, well, serial sex abuse) and then pause in that moment when the sight of 50,000 Germans cheering and raising their fists, hands, and lighters to the Northern Light tinged Berlin-night sky just reminds of us of, uh, HAPPIER times in Germany. Times when a man could BE a man and chase the Jew of his choice through the cobbled streets!!! Those heady times.

We shudder and move on.

"So that's why I call myself Germ."

"What does your mother call you?"

"Jeremy Swain."

And so he is. African-American-German.

We end up at a bar called appropriately enough AMBULANCE and this is the last thing I remember until I show up at Manuel's apartment. Banging. Kicking in the door and cursing him for a key that doesn't work when at 7 in the morning I notice for the first time that the name plate on the apartment is different.

"They switched his apartment. What a dirty fucking Nazi trick."

Until I realize that maybe, just maybe it's not the apartment's that have been switched but that maybe just maybe I'm in the wrong side of the building.

Strangely enough the occupant of said apartment neither answered nor called the cops. Perhaps he believed I WAS the cops. Well in a country where summary arrests are probably routine no harm, no foul.

I make it to the other side of the building, to Manuel's apartment where of course I repeat the same performance as the goddamned key doesn't work or rather the pilled state I'm in won't allow the key TO work and so it is that I'm there in his kitchen at 7:35 eating what at first blush seems to be a chocolate bar but which I later find out is supposed to be dissolved in a gallon of warm water and is like the concentrate of all concentrates a la some Swiss Miss shit.

So just as my head hits a pillow Manuel the Intrepid is bird-dogging us into training it over to the rental place, while Fozzy serenades me with Neal Young tunes on the guitar. My total elapsed sleep time in the most recent 48-hour period: 24 minutes.

Beautiful.