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Politics

Mossy Brackets: A guide to stalking

Inspired by our surveillance-centric September issue (on newsstands now!), Mossy gives you her best tips and tricks for stalking - sorry, "Love Investigation" - in Berlin.

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“Collins St., 5pm” by John Brack

No doubt, Schätzchen, along your Berlin escapades you’ve encountered someone who’s managed to wrangle free of your clammy, desperate clutches, leaving you forlorn and being peeled off some unfortunately sticky floors in Friedrichshain. While Berlin is big enough for you to find someone new, it’s also small enough to track down the one that got away when you’re totally fucked and can’t get over them. Such situations call for some good old-fashioned stalking or, as I like to call it, Love Investigating.

Despite daily advances in social techonology, your real-life practical Love Investigating options can be rather limited when it comes to actually physically colliding with your sweetie-to-be. Until these geo-locating hook-up apps can perfectly co-ordinate bumping into your baby as you saunter out of the hairdresser on Älte Schönhauser flanked by intimidatingly attractive friends, we’re going to have to fall back on more laborious, less sophisticated modes of Love Investigating. And we’re talking literally ‘bumping’ into them, like in Hugh Grant movies with plenty of accidental torso/breast impact. Please, thank-you.

First off: you need to locate your Love Investigating Target within a certain scene. Shouldn’t be too hard. Everyone in Berlin is part of (or trying to get into) some kind of scene: the literati, start-up scene, music scene, theatre scene, lefty scene, foodie scene, gallery scene – find that out. Mossy’s first order. Then subscribe to the mailing lists of all relevant venues/institutions.

To state the obvs: now is the time you thank Gaia for social media. Besides eliciting narcissistic dispositions, cultivating insecurities and wasting your fucking life, Facebook is the fait accompli of stalking. You can always just friend them, but if you want my opinion, that’s just not classy. Especially if you’ve already started to act creepy, which I know you have. Instead note their Facebook ‘Likes’ – in particular their preferences in terms of bands and cultural venues. Sure, bars and cafés may help you localise your Love Investigating Target, but you can’t very well sit in the only cool café in Moabit every day of your life hoping to spot your one and only. Turning up at the gig as their favourite musical act inevitably tours through Berlin is a much safer bet, as is looking shit hot at a culturally relevant launch/opening/symposium. And for Gaia’s sake kids, plan your outfits.

If you’ve been here for long enough, you’ve realised that Germans are pretty keen on privacy. From Facebook aliases to taking on Google Streetview, surveillance is something that is pretty unappreciated since the Stasi overdid it a tad. So keep that in mind if you’re drawing up a file on a Deutsche, because that shit makes them kinda cray cray. 

When all means and forms of contact have been exhausted, you always have the last-resort bridge of communication: STDs. This is where, behind the veil of being a sexually-responsible adult, you contact your Love Investigating Target to inform them that you think you may have something (N.B: going high-end i.e. HIV with your STD scare is not recommended, think more along the lines of the Ich Mach’s Direkt billboard face with his sweet-puppy eyes). Plus all the cool kids have chlamydia these days. Trust me 😉

When I was younger I had a secret affair with a guy who was very much in a relationship and had a very-girlfriend girlfriend. And by a very-girlfriend girlfriend, I mean a lovely, devoted mentally-stable muffin-baker who looked like Sarah Michelle Gellar whose competition I could seemingly only match by behaving like a deranged, wanton slut. Anyway, during one of our coveted trysts he caught me perusing his girlfriend’s Twitter account, and it did not seem very cute of me. The exposing browser just lingered there for three or four epic seconds before my heart finally resumed beating, I closed the offending browser and poured myself a litre of Chardonnay. He didn’t say a thing, but it was never the same again, either. Take heed from Mossy that stalking does not float everybody’s boat, especially not German Boot. But if your Love Investigating is still mitigated by morality, dignity and the law, it can be some sweet, 75-percent-harmless fun.

XOX Mossy Brackets XOX

REMEMBER: a bizzare-yet-posh-looking cat, a bottle of whiskey and a vibrator are all you need.