Today was Frida’s last day. Just a month after we left for Berlin, the poor purring kitty turned out to have kidney failure. Corii stabilized her for a few months, but she took a turn for the worse a few days ago. Today a needle slipped into her veins, and she shivered with a final little sneeze, and she was gone.

I remember when we brought her home, she and her runtling sister Soomu, Frida was the wide-eyed brave one, coming out of the box to explore our apartment, while timid sister stayed behind. She was always the gentle one, purring even when she was nervous, licking an arm or a wrist, getting picked on by her mercurial sister. She ate like a racoon, using her white paws to pull a bit of kibble from her bowl, dipping it into her water bowl as though it needed washing. She developed a habit of jumping into the shower as soon as we were finished; it seemed just another quirk, but turns out probably to have been a symptom of progressive kidney failure.

Godspeed to whatever kittyplace you go, O fuzzy one.

On Saturday, the Love Parade. Half a million people or so in the Tiergarten, dancing to 39 heavily adverstising-laden floats circling the main boulevard and blasting various stripes of rave music. It was fun, not as annoying as it could have been, nor as entrancing as a small rave can be.

Aimee described it best: Like the energy of gay pride and Castro Halloween, but with neither the full flamboyance or freakiness of either. Which isn’t to say it was bad, just far straighter.

A few pics on my flicker account here:

Yesterday afternoon, a group of artists and writers rode up and down Prenzlauer Berg with boxes on their bikes, tossing unsolicited wrapped “newspapers” into doorways, American paperboy style. We met one of them, a woman who just graduated from LSE, but is living temporarily here, at a party on the Spree last night.

Inside the wrapper was an assortment of art, beautiful unique silk screens, memories and manifestos, none of it particularly connected but all of it thought- or emotion-provoking. One hundred copies only; if you weren’t lucky enough to an issue of Papergirl thrown at you, or have one unwrapped for you at a party later that day, odds are that you’ll never see one.

I want to subscribe, I told the writer. She laughed, and said I can’t. Just be at the right place at the right time for Papergirl #2.

Someone on Flickr has a picture of one of the “artgifts” in preparation.

Next in the list of red wine’s superpowers: it may help fight deafness. Free radicals are in part responsible for degeneration of the tiny hairs of the inner ear that are responsible for hearing. Wine’s antioxidants may help slow that process, some scientists think.

And because it’s the magic powers of antioxidants we’re talking about here, yerba mate may well have the same effect. I think it’s time for a gourdfull now, my ears are ringing.

It’s 4 am and the sky is lightening, a little too soon for my tastes. We’ve just come home from an evening with Kenji and Till in their Kreuzberg neighborhood. Wine at their apartment and then dinner at an Italian cafe, where near midnight a tranny magician wandered in, and spotting us alone in a corner, sat down next to us, gave Kenji a cigarette, and began pulling tricks from a zippered little bag: a coin trick,disappearing in her palm, a rope trick, a set of balls and cups. A piece of paper that levitated ever so slightly, while she groaned in simulated effort. It was hard for us too.

But she talked and smiled nonstop, and that was the magic that won us over completely. No strings attached. I could understand only the barest gist; the differences between Italy and Germany, and the similarities between Japan and Germany. She passed around pictures of she and her boyfriend, and we briefly debated afterwards: tranny or real woman? She had breasts, after all, and rich dyed reddish hair framing her fleshy face. But there was no real question.

Afterwards drinks at a bar where the floor was covered in sand, and even the negronis came with pineapple floating with the ice. Now the birds are singing confusedly, and we glare at them on our way home even though the clouds are slowly lightening in the sky. Give us time, O give us time.