"I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences." - henry miller

I left the web cafe and made my way back to the Place d'Horloge, the center of the town and the festivities. Ordered myself a continental breakfast and practically spat my orange juice when I realized that, amidst all this good food, I picked the one spot in Avignon that was serving Minute Maid. Shrugged it off and cracked open Miller once more.

Sometimes you open a book just to pass the time with words and you don't realize your life is about to change, that you're about to travel the length and width of the cosmos and penetrate to other dimensions unforeseen. In this chapter I was reading Miller is lying in bed thinking and he delivers what would seem to be his great treatise. It was like I had penetrated to the heart of the book.

It's a grand exclamation is what it is, of art and artists, of the necessity for passion in life, and the vital nature of the search for anything meaningful be it just one amazing page mired in a book of mediocrity. It's been years since my eyes welled up from reading. I had to look away a few times and look back just to reaffirm that what I was reading was actually there and not just some fleeting hallucination, some epiphanic moment doomed to slip away with my next breath.

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God, the French are pretentious. When you cross a town border in America the sign will read "The nicest town in the world!" or "A place where freedom lives!" or perhaps even "Home of the world's largest apple pie!" Avignon? Its welcome sign proclaims itself to be, "The European City of Culture." I guess there's no arguing it.

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It's hot as hell, gets hottest here around 4-ish and it's 4:35 now. The dorms are closed for cleaning between 2 and 5, I had forgotten about that, so I couldn't even get my dirty clothes in order to do some laundry. I sat instead drinking water and listing to Talking Heads, making a best-of mix for my friend Kiel while finishing up the New Yorker I brought with me. Reading the New Yorker always makes me feel like I'm teetering on the brink of the apocalypse.

I toe a fine line between "the-less-I-know-about-world-politics-the-better" and "I-better-read-up-so-I'm-prepared-when-the-whole-shithouse-goes-down-in-flames." When some convoluted ideological straw finally breaks the camel's back and the missiles go flying in every which direction it'll be like September 11th; you wake up and there's a hole in the building out-side your window and no real pomp and circumstance leading up to it all. Somedays you're the fly, and others you're the windscreen, but when it all implodes around us we'll all be one humongous burning lump and won't that just be such fun? Mmm. One o'clock say a prayer; two o'clock join hands and dance on the grass and break all the windows in site; two forty-five unlock all the cages in the pet shops and set the dogs to howling; three-fifteen consume every chemical you never wanted in your body before four o'clock count the parachuted deathballs sinking and see if you can make out the flags painted on them and know just who it is that's killing you and by the time that they hit around, oh, say four-thirteen hopefully be inside your lover so you die feeling like you're connected to something and someone that means something anything just a physical sensation to end it all and then obliteration.

There'll be fingers on either side pointed in the opposite direction playing blame games up until the very end when the falling dots are getting bigger closer truer and then we'll finally experience the one collective communal moment of humanity I've been waiting for as everyone can't help but admit that this is pretty fucking stupid but I'll be so sickened I won't want to be a part of it and I'll let them all cry to themselves while I just kiss you dreaming of a baby that we never had the chance to have and teling you I love you I love you I love you forgetting how I used to think that words weren't enough and how right there and then they're all we have and in the movies it's a great white flash and we're all dead in a cinch but it will be so much more than that like burning at a subatomic level and feeling every tiny bit of yourself explode into a thousand pieces and then those pieces will burst into smaller pieces and it'll all still be you and pain pain pain...

A sunny saturday in Avignon and this is all that I can think about until it's five and I can just let myself get hypnotized by laundry spinning round and round and round...

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One of my dormmates is an old withered cross-eyed French man from Paris vacationing in Provence and I think he said his name is Jacques but I'm not sure. He talks all the time, to anyone who's around, whether they're listening or not. When he speaks to me he mixes English and French and I understand each just as poorly as the other. He's sweet though, and even though I explained I knew how to get to the showers he kept giving me directions. He loves talking about Zidane. Zidane this, Zidane that.

So I go to the showers and step into one of the stalls and lock the door behind me, setting out my toiletries and what not and hanging the clothes I'm going to change into when all of a sudden someone starts banging on the door. A pair of voices starts echoing in the hallway. "Monsieur! Monsieuuuuuuuuuuuur!" High-pitched young french voices, two young boys, who I quickly in my mind named Les Tetes-de-Merde...shit-heads, for those of you who don't read French. These kids seemed to have decided that I was their little playtoy and started not only banging on the door and yelling at me in French and singing French songs I couldnt understand but one of them also went into the nextdoor stall and started stamping his foot in the little space between them, wiggling his toes at me and slamming his body full-force against the wall separating us. I didn't say a goddamn word, I just soaped myself up, washed off, washed my hair, and all the while it was like a monkey madhouse.

Finally an adult voice came along and yelled at the boys...I heard one of them leave with (presumably) the father and the other actually got into the stall next to me and began showering, though he did continue to knock on the wall and yell at me in French. When he heard me turn off the shower his excitement was raging and he was putting on quite a stomping splashing show...I remained quiet and went to the sinks to brush my teeth and went back to my room to throw on my shorts. But oh, revenge was certainly on my mind.

I stepped back out into the corridor and made sure no one was around because hell, this could look bad, and I tiptoed, every so softly, back to the shower room. The kid was in there still, washing off, and humming to himself and I crept up slowly to the stall where he was. I banged on the stall next to his and the humming stopped...I didnt move, didn't make a sound, and he was inquiring in French and I didnt understand. I let him get comfortable again and, ignoring the fact that I felt petty and had no idea why I was doing this proceed to slam my fist against the door to his stall.

Which he had forgotten to lock. And which flew open, and there I am looking at this naked seven-or-so-year-old French boy and I scream shit! and give him a dirty look and run back to my room thinking first that I should have remembered to say merde and not shit, and then dreaming up scenarios where I'm arrested in southern france on charges of pedophilia and I don't know whether to laugh or check out and go catch a train to some other city. Fifteen minutes later I'mon the communal balcony when the kid comes back from the shower and we give each other a knowing look - we're even.