According to a dedicated reader who will remain nameless, morale around the Onward and Upward readership camp is at an all-time low due to a lack of posts. That WILL CHANGE once I get settled in London, and it’s going to kick you in the ass and you’re going to have to like it.

I took a train yesterday to Amsterdam. It took 6.5 hours. It was nice and I LIKED it. But before that, I had to give Berlin a proper send off by engaging in a nefarious activity of some sort. I decided to check Teufelsberg off the list—an abandoned US listening tower in West Berlin that is completely dilapidated and old and completely fucking great. The word Teufelsberg means “Devil’s Mountain,” which could very well be a Nic Cage film. The station itself is on top of an old Nazi training camp built by Albert Speer. It was literally TOO sturdy, so they just buried the thing and built those towers to collect intelligence during the Cold War right on top of it.

It is surrounded by Grunewald forest, which is pretty nice in and of itself, so I was delightfully relaxed when I got lost 5 minutes in. I thought I had a pretty concrete idea of how to get there, then I realized when I hit this little junction that I truly had no idea where I was.

I figured it would behoove me to just climb upwards. I thought I was reaching the summit where the towers would be, but turns out, I was really far from it. In fact, I was where I took that first picture, and that is zoomed in. I would last a matter of minutes as a Boy Scout.

I reached the top of the first hill, and that was nice and everything, but after months of no REAL exercise, it felt like my lungs were bleeding.

After realizing that my sense of distance is on par with that of a blind person, I made my way BACK down the hill before having to hike back up to the one that I actually wanted to visit. Now, I knew it was illegal to be in there, and I had heard there were weird homeless dudes living on the grounds who take pictures of you in they catch you and call the police, which sounded pretty unlikely, but enough to make me a bit trepidatious anyway. Naturally, the fence was lined with barbed wire, which bummed me out. I walked around a few times, searching for an easier way, and after finding a small hole, decided that it was not worth it. Wasted time. This was going to be the photo for the Lifetime Of Failures Blog, a new venture from the writer of Onward And Upward.

I told some older folks looking to break in about the smaller hole I had seen, and was ready to head back, before I saw some girls walk through a huge opening 10 feet from where I started. They waved, and went on their merry way. The degree to which they made me feel like an asshole was astounding. Those poor old people crawling through a hole. Oh well. It’s a tough world out there.

Eureka. I have found it.

David Lynch was in talks to buy the grounds to open up a Transcendental Meditation University. Cool, I thought. But turns out, his German partner in this project at a talk announcing the plans decided to talk about how they wanted to make Germany “invincible.” What they didn’t say was that they wanted to achieve this by way of TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION. Turns out, if you’re talking about boosting Germany up into mega Mario mode with the fireballs and everything, you’re going to remind some people of some guy with a shitty mustache who kind of fucked everything up for…the world.

Apparently David Lynch, who speaks no German, just stood there while people screamed things at them about the last time someone wanted Germany to be invincible. I think the plans have been shelved.

Apparently you can climb up into the dome area, but I figured, with me being by myself and all, probably not a good idea in the event of a board snapping and my leg breaking. I’ve seen it happen to too many friends of mine.

I’m going up next time. That is, unless it has been raised and there are a bunch of meditating people just sitting around contemplating perfect harmony with the universe. I’m getting a headstart in the next photograph, which is what I’m using as my Christmas card. 

Amsterdam Preview: One of their famous coffee houses. Stay tuned for the full update tomorrow.