Closing my Berlin chapter has become the recurring topic of the last few posts on this blog. It takes up most of the time I have left to make a living and live in paradise, which isn't much.
I'm terrible at inventing excuses for not publishing here. Don't hold it against me.
Today's closure was fiscal. The Finanzamt — Germany's evil cousin of the tax office — sent me demands and things like that, the sort of letters you open with the same enthusiasm as a bank letter. So I sat down with a tax adviser and we started doing the numbers.
The conclusion was not very poetic: my expense management had been a pile of invoices with no order or common sense. Service bills, subscriptions, servers, work tools. Everything was there, more or less like socks in a drawer: technically present, organised by no known authority.
Then Asere showed up and put them one underneath the other to fill the missing section of the report. One invoice, one date, one description, the amount, the VAT, and a link. At some point it started to look like accounting instead of a folder called “things I'll sort out later”.
Careful: these are official documents. I love Asere and I trust it, but I checked what it gave me. If I go to prison, Asere becomes 404 and nobody answers here.
The other part of the closure was writing a letter, in Goethe's language, to tell the same institution that we were shutting down transmissions until further notice. Asere researched the procedure, I gave it some context, and it left me with a PDF ready to sign.
Now I only have to send it, keep dealing with the remaining tax loose ends, and convince my Berlin past to stop sending me letters from Germany.
One step closer to getting properly settled in this country. And one step closer to publishing about something that isn't a closure.