7.19.06

My own worst enemy, I awake to sun and alarm at 9:00 and manage to sleep until 11:30, my half-conscious ass managing to put on ´Helpless´by Crosby Stills Nash and Young first. The day begins just like yesterday, hosing myself off like some madman in an asylum with the freezing cold water in the shower. Some screaming is involved, and sometimes I just burst out laughing as I stand there shivering and hosing my hair down.

Strange smells here. Dead pigeons, back-alley urine, day-old sweat dried and re-saturated again. Breasts hang out of clothes, sometimes quite literally - walking down a side street the width of your average fat American Giacomo and I passed a beauty on a bike with her nipples shown to the world. That kind of thing just never happens in America.

Funny, I credit Protestant tight-assedness for much of America´s prudish ways but this is a Catholic country and you´d think they´d be just as if not more uptight. Modesty does not live here.

Crowd movements are strange. This is an old city learning to be young again in a new age. Modern life squeezes like a pulse through its tiny streets and alleys, surging out into plazas and rondas like wine rushing through a bottle neck. In New York even the Elderly will sometimes play the game of jockeying for position on the sidewalk. Here, they grow old like the city, rigid, unflinching.

Now and then the heat rushes into me and I see nothing but white flashes, then I´m back again and drinking ice cold water like it was life itself.

America has a bad name here, and our tourists don´t do much to help that. Much like our foreign policy, American tourists act as if it is a right and not a privilege to experience new aspects of our physical reality, seeing and feeling new places. THey stick their noses, rather than peek with their eyes. TO them new places and cultures are not things in which to immerse oneself, rather it is liek they find themselves in an interactive city-zoo constructed solely for their amusement. It´s no wonder that, much like the word Fucking finds a comfortable marriage to the word Hippie, it links up just as serenly with the word Americans.

I get to church just on time to be kicked out; you see, apparently God takes siesta as well.