07.28.06

In the morning I had to get to the train station by 8 AM. Groggy and unshaven I get there only to find out that the lady who sold me my ticket the previous evening mistakenly booked me for the wrong day. I was desperate to get out of Paris, I don't really know why, I just wasn't in the mood for that bustling city energy after cooling down in Arles. So I paid a surcharge to get placed in first class going from Paris to Amsterdam via Brussels.

It's a morbid thought but you know, if this train was to jump the rails the people in first class would be just as dead as the people in second.

Stewing lots of ideas around in my brain for this story, about WIllard. I'm realizing too that I'm drawing a lot of my ideas from my experiences working with TIm at Google. I kind of feel guilty, appropriating his life for myself, because the character is largely becoming him. But oh well..I guess that's what you do with art, you take the reality you're given and you make it what you want.

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In Arnhem now after an afternoon of walking around with all the weight bearing down on me in the summer heat. Had time to kill before catching a train from Amsterdam to Arnhem so I took a good long walk which ended up with me getting lost as I always do when there's canals involved. ANy city with multiple bodies of water cutting through it, I get lost. But I made it back to the Central Station okay albeit a bit dehydrated, and made it to the Stayokay hostel in Arnhem.

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Dutch breakfast. Skip over the yogurt in favor of breads and cheeses and muesli. It's funny watching how the kids here go crazy over bread. They literally squeal with delight when their mom comes back with fresh bread. They're all so wholesome, so cute, so dutch. Arnhem is a lovely town. I feel like no matter how many times I tried to write that sentence it came out trite as hell, and that's the thing, Arnhem is a bit of a postcard town, life there is strange and slow.

I took a bus to a nearby national park called De Hoge Veluwe. It was one of the greatest afternoons of my life. When you enter the park you go to a collection of racks with white bicycles and pick one out for yourself and ride it all over the park. It's mainly flat ground but there are hills here and there and long rides through expansive wide open meadows. Sometimes I would park my bike in the middle of a trail through a desert-like meadow, without a human soul around me as far as my eyes could see and not a cloud in the sky to beat out the sun. Crazy moments of raw solitude.

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I woke up early, ate a lean breakfast and made it to the Centraal Station with 5 minutes to catch the next train to Rotterdam. My body aches from backpacks and busrides but this part of the travelling is great. I wake up, eat breakfast and go to the train station and just pick one out eenie meenie miney mo. In a country as small as Amsterdam there are trains every hour between the major cities. I think for a few days I'll spend a night and an afternoon in a few different cities. TOnight Rotterdam, tomorrow Groningen, the next day Utrecht.

It's nice, this little life the Dutch have carved out for themselves in Arnhem. It's so different from New York. The pace is unbelievably slow. It's as if the common undercurrent to thought here is, "Just slow down now and we'll get this alllll sorted out." I'm definitely feeling like an aberration in a smaller town like this. The combination of my hair and my major metropolitan marathon pace make me stick out like a thumb tht's been trampled on by a football team with cleats.

The intersections, for such a small town, look entirely too complicated, evoking memories in my mind of photograph's on Lucy's wall of Japanese sidewalks. Well, not that complicated - on the Dutch scale we have to shrink that sown a good bit. THough we'd have to enlarge thepeople because the Japanese are tiny and the Dutch are Europe's tallest people - didn't know that, did you, hm? Aa New Yorker I'd join a crowd of Dutch people waiting at a crosswalk staring out over a field of criss-crosses of black and white and tram track, toeing the blacktop like a Formula One racer revving engine. Look left, look right, and for miles there's not a car or tram or bike in sight.

Yet the DUtch stand entirely still, looking quite serious as they await the great god traffic light's signaol that Yea, verily, the green man hath turned green. Naturally, this drives me mad. I just can't understand why you'd stand around waiting for some unseen system to tell you when you can go instead of just taking matters into your own hands. I'm not gonna be one of these, these, these slaves! I told myself. I'm crossing!

Of course, I forgot about the biks path as I did. I stepped out onto the pavement and I was inbetween a rock and a hard place immediately. It's amazing how bikes here can zip up out f nowhere whereas the cars all go entirely too slow. I danced around like John Wayne was shooting at my feet and finally made it past the biker lane and wound up at an island in the middle of the square where I nearly licked the side of a bus which whizzed by me. Cue tram, jump left, finally ended up stranded on aother island as a mi of cars buses trucks and bikes suddenly wove back and forth around me like some well-orchestrated DIsney color cartoon. As soon as it all came, it passed, and I was stood there slackjawed while the mostly elderly Dutch behind me snickered and glared disapprovingly.

Dumb American kid.

07.27.06

In Rodin's garden underneath a canopy of leaves from trees I once more cannot name, one of the sculptures has been removed from its perch, presumably to be touched up, polished, refreshed and renewed. It's my first full morning in Paris after a late night arrival and a good few crepes, and I hop up on the perch, a rectangular stone slab, and assume a pose. Nothing gaudy or flashy, just placing my arms slightly akimbo and leaning my head a bit. I look at the other statues and wonder what it feels liek for them, to stand where they do through rain and sleet and hail and thunder and war. I wonder how they - collections of vibrating molecules jus like you and I - perceive the flow of time. I try it out for a few minutes, this statue thing, and now one person that walks by gives me the look I'm waiting for.

I get one of two looks - the look that says I'm crazy or the look that says I'm defiling some sacred stone. No one looks at me knowingly, with a wink that says Yes! Precisely! We're all of us works of art, admission price bedamned. Good show, old chap! Its funny how we always want pictures of ourselves with pieces of art, but first ensure no one else will be in the picture. For a moment, it was ours! All ours! Look! There we are with it! We create our own little version of the world at large for ourselves.

I always say I couldn't get along with 99 percent of people. I can deal with them, sure, but we wouldn't get along. I think that's how it is for most people, anyway. I call it the bell curve of perception. YOu stand at the peak of said curve and you see the world the way you see it. Stretching out on either side, theworld falls away, slowly at first and then further and further down down down and away it goes. You find kinship with those closest to you upon the hill, but only really understand the world in your own particular manner and only forge the strongest connections with a scant few.

But 99 percent of people. It ocurs to me that that leaves one percent of the human population. 65000000 people. PEssimistically I could say that I must be overestimating how many I could get along with. But optimistically I could say that the world is rife with the possibilities of meaningful connection, and that the odds are good that magical things could happen any moment. THis trip I'm on has me leaning towards the optimistic side of things.

Electrons detach from their nuclei and float into unchartered orbits. Gravity and momentum pull them this way and that as they look for home and along the way they find others of their ilk, stray lightning bolts in the endless meadows of the world, and clash together for moments to explore one another. THey crack the sky open and meet at the samepoint on the surface of the earth, exchanging ideas and breathing air together, experiencing silence together. Eventually they go their separate ways, each headed slowly home having grown older. 6 and a half million people travelling alone and looking for their own private version of the same thing, themselves.

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French waiters are funny. They're either young and energetic - tip-hunters - or else they're old and just as crusty as their clientele. When I say young and old I don't necessrily mean ge as a number either, with some of them it's just a mindset. THe old ones crack me up. They're fierce - to them no issue is more serious than the art of food service - not nuclear war, the AIDS epidemic, or fresh bombings in the Middle East couldn't elicit a slightly arched eyebrow from them so much as a soiled salad fork could.

One of my favorite Parisian pastimes is to make eye contact with a waiter serving the outdoor section of a cafe and to smile quite exaggeratedly at him as I walk by. The look of alarm that crosses their faces is priceless. I like especially to do this to the waiters at Le Select and the Dome, places so stale they make moldy bread look like vine-ripe tomatoes. At La Cupole, on the other hand, I leave the waitrs be. The air of pretention there is still fresh enough that the waiters don't look so much like misplaced penguins. Even the rainbow faced old ladies that sit inside the air conditioned salle seem a thousand years younger than the Methuselah mamas at Le Select.

Tonight I'm at Les philosophes and Ive eaten my best meal in recent months. Pate de fois gras, cuisse de canard, a half a carafe of red wine, and a coffee. As I write this a fly falls on to my table and writhes around. Upon further inspection, it only has one wing. I don't want to watch it writher, so I euthanize it. So strange, life. SOme choices are so easy to make and some tear at your heart like vultures pecking liver and all are parts of the same chain. No, not a chain. Like TOm RObbins says, "Life is more a meadow than a highway."

paris

This feels good. Motion. Music. Snaking towards avignon on a bus and picturing the route to be shaped like a question mark. Definitely feel like Paris is calling my name; ot necessarily museums or any sort of famous spot so much as just the streets and neighborhoods.

I met a man on my way to the bus today who I recognized from the hostel. His name was Bernd. I think he was in his late thirties or early forties, with a receding hairline of grey and a very angular structure to his skull. It was a trip looking at his face, because it was so expressive, especially his eyes, which had this intense searching quality in them. They reminded me of the eyes of young smart dogs whose eyes are constantly sucking up every visual cue of information they can find. His hobby, he said, was photography. Putting them eyes to use.

It was funny - he teaches French, yet it seemed that we were both at the same speaking level. We eventually conversed in English but at first we were each holding our own in French. He said that when you're teaching a language you only really use the basics on a regular basis and so no matter how often he comes to France he has to relearn the language. We sat in the shade and talked for a long while. This was far from his first time in Arles and I really understood what he saw to love about it, especially as a photographer. Every time that you turn a corner down a new street in Arles, you're struck by how picturesque the arrangement of everything is.

I wonder where wild horses sleep. I mean, I know there aren't even many wild horses these days but do those that remain have preferred sleeping spots that they repeatedly return to? Or do they run around all day and just stop wherever and stand and sleep? I wonder what they'd think about stables. Sitting in a stable all day. Munch munch chew. Wag tail. Look left, look right. Munch munch chew. Horrified, I bet! WHat do stabled horses think about behind those eerie black eyes, those looking glasses through to the twilight zone, those oil slicks of madness?

I bought this journal expecting it to - well, without any expectations really. But here I am with only 13 pages left after ten days. I am churning myself out and it feels damn good.

That last entry was skimpy and a half.

Arles was chicken soup for the weary traveler's soul. The night that I got there I sat down to the crappiest croque monseiur this side of the Rhone (which ran right through Arles) while mosquitos amassed atop my feet sucking gleefully at my veins. I didn't care. A nice quiet boulevard and a beautiful sunset. I found out that the reason Cezanne and Van Gogh and other painters liked to come to the south of France to paint was because the quality of the light and the colors it produces are so rich. The sunsets were long and drawn-out and it never got completely black before ten o'clock.

The dorms were closed from 10 AM until 5 PM and so that forced you out onto the street. The curfew was midnight, which normally would have sucked but you don't come to Arles for the nightlife. It was an ungodly sort of hot while I was there and so after a day of walking around stone streets and rarely encountering air conditioning you were too tired to do too much anyhow.

It was cool to see the country version of France, since all I really knew of it before was the city side. The people here have different chins than the city-folk. There are two prominent types of French chin I've noticed. The first is the chin held high as if some invisible butler was walking alongside the chinbearer at all times holding it aloft. The second is the pillow chin. THis is the chin that seems to grow out of the front of the neck and that is used as a pillow for the head to rest upon, smooshing the skin of the jowls and cheecks into a multi-layered array of pouchy flesh. No matter which chin a particular Frenchman or woman has, I always get the feeling they're looking down their nose.

The hostel in Arles was good for meeting people from other places. The first night I sat for a long time talking with Dmitri, a photographer from Belgium, and Nadia, a student from Germany. It was good to have some real conversation, and especially to talk about differences in American and European life. I know I want to write about America, but I really needed to uproot myself and get some outside perspective on the place, something to compare it to.

We talked about travelling alone and how it allows you to lose yourself. You could be anyone you wanted to be and no one would be there to recognize you or know the true you. But you don't really want to be anyone but yourself and in a way you become yourself in a way you can't fully be at home among friends and family where there are certain constant rhythms and with them expectation. Plus, you're on foreign soil, and it's like what I said in an earlier post about the self being a self-defense measure. You're alone and young on foreign soil, and faced by a world of difference you get to know yourself better.

I keep thinking about one line from the movie Cube:

"It's a headless blunder, operating under the illusion of a master plan."

There was nothing to do but walk around all day in Arles.

I saw all the different parts of the city and took a nap by the curve of the Rhone river near some extremely old buildings. Went to some museums and wrote down all that jazz in the park afterwards. Yadda yadda yadda. I stuck around Arles for about 3 nights because I was so in love with the town. It was such an out-of-the-way crossroads. I interacted with more interesting people in my time there than at any other hostel I've been at.

Now let us travel back and time to the land of Mr. Portable and Jacques the sweet old man. Not so sweet, as it turns out. Before I skipped ahead and died in Picasso's arms and then found myself reborn in a garden of sculpturely delights, I had just finished Tropic of Cancer and was headed back to the hostel in Avignon..

From my journal:

Something had to go wrong eventually. What do they call that again, Murphy's Law? If it can go wrong, it will. Ha.

My reservation at the dorm was only for 2 nights and so this morning I signed on for a third, all in love with the festival and what not. They moved me to room 25 on the second floor. I dropped off my big bag on my bunk and headed out into to eat and blog and watch and read and write. Once again before I knew it it was the middle of the afternoon and the dorms would be closed until 5. Helped myself to a chevre chaud salad avec noix and had a half hour chat all in French with an older couple from Bayonne (France, not New Jersey!) I say I hate the French but like New York or anywhere else I guess you find good people whose masks of pretention and whatever else melt away in the face of conversation. We talked about France, and about America. They were under the impression that the South was full of alcoholic Bush-lovers. I didn't do much to dissuade them of that notion.

I really enjoy speaking French, so I was glad they didnt know a lick of English.

By the time I paid the check the suyn was overhead and I was quite literally dripping with sweat. I headed back to the dorms and went to my room to check on my things. My bag still there and intact I proceeded to unpack it in order to swap out Henry Miller for a new book - I settled for Tom Robbins' Skinny Legs and All, deciding it was high time I complete his library.

Just as I start repacking my bag one of my new roommates walk in, it's Jacques, the cross-eyed sweet old man....fresh from the pool...and holding my missing towel, that unmistakable red striped cloth that's been sitting in the closet at home since before I can even remember.

All in french now, I exclaim, That's my towel!

He turns to me looking insulted and suddenly that sweet old man face of his, cross-eyes and all, takes on an entirely different tone. Suddenly he looks positively deanged, and he huffs and puffs about how it's HIS towel, his ribs rising and falling underneath that emaciated layer of tightly wound skin he's got. After all, he says, I just came back from the pool, with this towel, so it's my towel!

At first I suspected foul play but it soon became clear to me that he didnt even remember yesterday, much less the fact that we shared a room yesterday. That senile bastard. So he's talking on and on all of asudden about Paris and the pool and travelling and I'm just staring at the towel out of the corner of my eye as he's folding it. I pack up my bag, positively fuming, and wondering what to do. There's no convincing him it's mine.

He tells me he's not a thief, that in fact someone stole all of HIS clothes...shows me his empty backpack. But when I think about it he's been wearing the same thing every single day...he probably didnt even bring any other clothes. I feared for my own clothes, leaving them in my bag in the room while I went out at night, since he just saw me repack my entire bag. So, I took all of my worldly possessions with me to the front desk where I was informed that no other beds were available and that I couldn't get a refund if I cancelled.

I went over to the phone and called home for some opinions. The whole time, Jacques is sitting in his usual cigarette smoking spot, watching me. He knows I want the towel back. Something is twisted in his brain, like his eyes. This isn't just paranoia on my part, either. I test it by walking from one place to the other, and his eyes follow me. I decided I was done with this town and with this crazy fucker, I was headed to Arles. I called ahead to the dorm there and had them hold a bed for me, and Jacques watched me as I walked out of the grounds...

But the saga was not complete!

I re-enetered the hostel grounds via a side door in the cafeteria and saw that Jacques had wondered over away from the dorms a bit...It took me no longer than 30 seconds to be in and out and en route to the train station, towel in bag in backpack. Victory!

The adrenaline rush wore off quickly though when I remembered how god awful sweaty and grimy and hot I was, not having showered since the night before. I ended up having to trek on foot all the way to the train station under a 101-degree sun, like a Jew in the goddamn desert, heavy pack on my back and heavy backpack in my hands. I can't even convey how long the walk was, nor can I convey the glorious feeling that rose up in me when the train station rose up in the distance like an oasis. I hopped on a fortuitously late train to Marseilles and was in Arles within 20 minutes.

Trekked to the dorms - this place is a palace compared to the fleabag I was staying in at Avignon.

un apres-midi sans raison

Dans le jardin..

feel funny, head swimming in this heat. Sweat beading out of every pore in my body.

Everything seems so rigid right now. Perhaps that's just reality failing to live up to my expectations. I don't know. Weird mood. I sit simply listen to the incessant ticking of my watch and feel my lungs expanding and shrinking once more.

In New York the parks are carved a long the gridlines, they are simply allotments of real estate. Here, they rest more like organs in the city skeleton all kidney lung and bladder shaped. Pigeons peck at crumbs a vagrant tosses on the head of Van Gogh and chase the falling remnants of their squabbling down into a field of flowers, red and pink and purple and white and yellow ones that reach above the rest like privileged mirrors of the sun.

I feel my inadequacies as a writer most profoundly when I cannot name the flowers and trees in my field of vision. I am a city boy. It seems to me the great authors always write of spruce and elm and juniper, of lilacs and periwinkles, of thrushes and sparrows and mockingbirds. I know the names but I wouldn't know a one of those if they came up to me and bit me in the ass. I know the tree with leaves like spades that make it seem to float. I know the tree with needles that stretch in the light and collapse in the shade. I know the redwood, I know the sequoia, from the parks. The unmistakeble leaf of the cannabis plant that adorns all the walls of the world's college dormitories and that grew beneath my balcony in Barcelona. For birds I know the pigeon - everyone does. I know the cardinal and the blue jay and the oriole, not because I have seen them dancing tree to tree but because I've seen them playing baseball.

How can a man who worships Whitman not know what a spruce tree looks like? It just doesn't seem right to me. I know more of bugs and rodents than I do of forest flora and fauna. Ah well, let's not mourn it or weep because of it, it is what it is and it is what I know.

Gah.

I make myself more than a tiny bit ill. All that time spent in my apartment like a hermit content with the wonders of his cave. At least a hermit could probably make fire out of sticks while I simply sit and worship my magic box of crystals and wire and metal and lights, jacked into some fac-simile of the world.

All things at once, apart and together, sun and sky and trees and dirt and gravel autos water backpack tourists language color sculpture person and person and city and earth. I think this is the hard truth of the world, that all things are facets, expressions, permutations of an infinite oneness; that all things no matter how fractured are inextricably intertwined and dependent upon one another for their individual existence. It's been colored by some as a rosy daydream - we are the world style bullshit that you'll never get anyone to eat anymore. (These love-everyone people are fascists, I tell you - you can't tell people to love everyone much less everything. That's a pipe dream.)

This is about moderation. This is about balance. This is about compromise.

This is about the impossible and if we don't strive for the impossible then we're doomed to failure. Individuals and society alike. If you want to live you have to march towards the impossible, or at least whatever it is YOU perceive the impossible to be.

Wind blows by and berries tumble down all around me. So it goes, the good old man said.

Smile, you're on god's candid camera.

Hm, I said "individuals and society alike" earlier. Hold a moment. Society? When did I stop hating that word? Ah yes, I didn't. Consider it a moment of weakness, when I stretched too far in a fit of overblown grandiosity.

Society - c'est part de la probleme. Society, bah! We're so convinced we can organize ourselves on a mass scale, so fixated on order and regimentation. It is sheer madness. Consciousness and the individual just will never allow it on a full human scale. It's up to the individual and not some blowhard idea of society. Individuals and compromise and cooperation on a daily personal level. Not collectivism, not even "unity." Just respect. I mean, jesus christ people. Just coping wth one another, space and set and setting.

Hey, a boy can dream!
And he does!
And he will continue to, goddamnit!

And what do I think is impossible, what am I going to have to march towards? Nothing more than this, the translation of all these thoughts and idea(l)s into art for human consumption. I think communication of the deepest things we feel is impossible is art is what I'm gunning for.

All that unproductive hermitude; the goddamned regret.

I realize most people probably have neither the patience nor even the desire to hear any of this. Tell someone you're going to Europe and they will tell you to do two things: get fucked up and get fucked.

Lives dominated by this overwhelming presence known as "society," dominated by ideas of moralness, legality and illegality, by laws and governments and the control complex. There's not even any TIME to think about all this because They Own Us.

And here in this garden on vacation I'm aware and I acknowledge that money is making this moment possible for me. What to make of that? I don't know. I only know that if providence has made it possible for me to dream of art and make it real and perhaps affect just ONE person the waz that Robbins Hemingway Byrne Yorke Faulkner Grey Tolkien Lewis Dick Asimov Blake Williams Ginsberg Foucault Burroughs Orwell Irving Miller have affected me, I will be content as much as any human being can hope to be (which I fear is not very - contentment is not equated with comfortability, some forget...)

Birds are singing beautiful songs.

If I can be just one drop in a sea of names in someone else's mind who strives for the impossible I'll feel I've done something worth doing, and I'll likely never even know if that's so and so all I have to go on is faith.

This moment is but a blip on my existential radar. When I awake from this dream, or when I fall back asleep from this waking, there will be a whole other reality to face. Lust and libido; money and survival; wants and needs.

But no matter - these are the moments that make life worth living. One must wade through the shit to get to the water.

In the end there's just me here, my arms and legs all tangled up as I position myself over this book, and while I am here and now and All the pigeons in the tree above me are lined up preening pecking playing mating games and neither know nor give a shit about the pale monkeyboy with the curly hair who keeps his water wrapped in plastic. And the bugs continue sucking my blood. And the air flows in and out like rivers. And a hunger groans in my stomach reminding me that no, this isn't all a dream. My pulse beats like a steady drum. My mind, is nothing but a pool of chemicals conducting electricity. Thought-machine. Lifebot. ALIVE.

YOU ARE ALIVE!

Im in the Van Gogh Foundation and there is no Van Gogh to be seen other than the postcards in the giftshop. There's an exhibit here all about bullfighting with works by Picasso and Goya and I'm about to lose it. Walked in feeling lonely as hell and all I see are bulls getting rammed through with spears. Something inside me feels terrible, it must be the heat.

Damn. So much violence in all of us. With art you can at least focus it in a much better healthier manner...just live it vicariously, or pull a Picasso:

He has this room here with eleven drawings of a bull. He builds it up and then tears it down. It starts as just as this charcoal congregation of brushstrokes and then he adds more flare and gives it vigor and this robustness like UMPH. The third sketch in the series has muscles that seem to ripple before zour eyes. Then starting in the fourth sketch he begins to make the bull more abstract, giving it sectors and divisions and distorting it completelz over the course of five sketches. Finally in the 9th it's all lines but the balls, the balls of the bull are the onlz thing with substance to them and in the tenth too but all the other lines have grown thinner and it's all lost its glorz and finally #11, the final insult, when its just an empty shape, and the balls are empty, and the penis a speck and there you have it: without a knife or a cape or a spear Picasso becomes a toreador and he kills a fucking bull. And that's art at its greatest, putting you through the paces and it's all just lines and shapes but you FEEL something and it's saying something and I just want to fall on the corpse of a great big bull and beat my fists against it and scream all the way to America....and right outside the foundation is an arena where they fought bulls and now down the road there's a McDonald's and doesn't that just sum it all up? That[s what we have today instead of bullfights and that's what the artist has to draw upon as his material. Fucking McDonald's!

I ride that bad trip out into the streets but can't make it further than the steps that lead up to the Arena, just wanna hide from everything and everyone. If you want to enter the deathbowl and see the ground where the blood was spilt that will be Six Euros Please.

About 20 more images added to the link from below..

a straight line exists between me and The Good Thing

That night I had a sandwich - chevre, tomatoes and olives - and spent far too much time uploading pictures on to the internet. It was a moment of weakness, when I forgot that this loneliness of mine had been quite good to me, quite pleasantly productive. It probably had something to do with calling Lucy, that real and familiar voice sounding impossibly close through telephone wires, that made me hunger for familiar contact. At a rate of 3 euros per hour I pissed away twenty minutes staring at my g-mail screen waiting for one of the grey dots to turn green. Finally I got so absolutely sick with myself that I just whipped out my camcorder and marched back out to join the throng of festival-goers.

I've been putting so much focus and energy into my writing that I found it difficult to get excited at first about filming, and I would record only little snippets - seven seconds here, fifteen seconds there. Soon enough I found joy again in framing reality and moving that frame at my will to encompass what I wished. It all came much easier when I thought about Larry and how absolutely thrilled and enthusiastic he'd be about this opportunity to film such colorful, brilliant life and capture it in permanence.

I was looking for the perfect thing to film and found it in a trio of charismatic french men, all in their forties I'd say, singing silly French songs. They were dressed like sailors in black and white striped shirts with red handkerchiefs strung around their necks. One of them played a small drumset strapped to his chest, the second a lively accordion, and the third a bass made out of nothing more than a string fastened to a mop - he was the frontman of the outfit. I was too wrapped up in capturing their antics and facial expressions to pay close attention to the song they were singing, but I'm pretty sure it was about a fish vendor and judging by the grinning crowd's reactions, it was hilarious.

Further down the Place d'Horloge there was a pair of street performers that would stand stock-still until someone gave them money. This is usual fare all around the world but this particular pair sent peals of laughter through the crowd. One was a man dressed as a devil complete with a pitchfork, and the other a woman dressed as a winged angel. Each had a tin of money in front of them and depending on who received money, the other would sport a look of incredulity while the one who got the coins would celebrate. The angel's disappointment act was so hilarious and the devil's celebrations so over-the-top that the crowd much preferred to fill the tin of evil than the tin of God.

Sending a great opportunty I walked up to the devil with my camcorder trained on him and tossed a 20-centime piece into his tin. He cheered and did a little dance and both he and the angel put on a show just for my camera. I got a great close-up of the angel's sad, shocked face. Now that I think about it I should have walked right back up and thrown another coin into the angel's tin. Perhaps tonight.

It was late now, and feeling a bit more satisfied with myself I headed back to the hostel and didn't dare read Henry Miller because I was far too sad about the prospect of finishing it.

---

i have found the line and its direction is known to me

Sometime in the middle of the night I awoke when something fell on to my bed, tumbling down from the upper bunk. I was half-asleep, delirious, and after jabbing at it with my fingers and seeing it light up I realized it was a cellular phone. I put it on the floor beside my bed without thinking and fell back asleep immediately.

I awoke this morning when my bunkmate climbed down from his bed and I lay there yawning, thinking what a strange dream I had about a cell phone. I was convinced I'd dreamt it, especially since there was nothing on the floor near my bed. Just as I'm thinking this the french kid whose phone it was leans down to me and says, "'Ey, tu as vu mon portable?" I respond with "Mais, j'ai pensé que c'est un reve." But I thought it was a dream.

Rubbing my eyes I sat up and explained how it had fallen on me and I'd put it on the floor, still mostly asleep. All of this in French, and all the while Mr. Portable as we'll call him is giving me a very suspicious eye. To appease him I proceed to empty my bags as proof that I don't have it. This satisfies him but he's still rife with anger at the situation. Just then old man Jacques walks in from taking a shower and Mr. Portable spins around towards him and says, in French, "So! You stole my phone?" Jacques looks confused as hell in that cross-eyed manner of his and I jump to his defense out of a sense of pity. "He didn't steal it!" I say and Mr. Portable looks at me and says, "You, then?!" I deny stealing it and stand to stretch my legs.

That's when I look out on the balcony we share with two other rooms and realize my towel's been stolen from where it was hanging out to dry. Seeing me gt angry at this fresh turn of events is enough to finally convince Mr. Portable that I'm not the thief. Figuring there was nothing I could do, I packed my stuff up and headed to the cafeteria for breakfast.

I join the line and pick up a bottle of water and a chocolate croissant, taking a seat a couple of chairs down from an old man doing crossword puzzles at a picnic table. Just after that a young french man sits down opposite me to have a cup of coffee and a cigarette and asks me for the time. I tell him and he asks me if I'm English.

So far only a couple of people have guessed that I'm American. The previous night I struck up a conversation about the festival with the proprietor of this web cafe and deep into it he asked me if I was from Spain. Spain! When I told him I was American he was quite surprised and said my accent sounded like that of a native European.

So here I am at the cafeteria and this kid, whose name I never got to know but who I'll call Henry, thinks I'm English and is surprised to hear I'm from New York. He speaks okay English but I insist we speak as much as possible in French. We end up talking up a storm, a fierce storm, all about travel and literature and writing. This is by far the longest and most interesting conversation that I've had with another human being since parting from GIacomo. It felt great.

Henri asked me what I studied in school and he too studied literature. He asked me which French authors I like - Voltaire, Moliere, Sartre, Camus - and I asked him which American writers he liked. He responded by asking me if I knew - who else? - Henry Miller. I literally threw my hands up in the air in joy, ripped open my backpack and slapped Tropic of Cancer down on the table.

"Ah, you've almost finished it!"
"Oui, je suis triste." Yes, I'm sad.

Finally, someone to discuss this masterpiece with! We weaved in and out of French and English then, talking about Miller's observations of America and Paris and Henry told me that the Paris Miller wrote about simply does not exist anymore - the war destroyed it. Everything, everywhere, is so much cleaner now than it once was. Things were once raw.

We talked about life. We talked about writing.

Why are you travelling? he asked me.

"Je veux devenir un écrivan." I want to become a writer.
"Mais, tu es un écrivan, ou tu n'es pas un écrivan. Alors, écris-tu? Es-tu un écrivan?" But, you are a writer or you aren't a writer. Do you write? Are you a writer?

Yes, I told him. You're right, and I do, and I am.

"Bon," he replied, and then went off to find his girlfriend, both of us saying we hoped to meet each other again and how pleasant it was to meet each other at all.

Then I went into town, sat at a café, and read the final chapter of Tropic of Cancer, and when I finally shut the book, I let out a most pleasurable sigh and couldn't look at anything but the sky for a long, long time.

Here's a link to a slideshow of twenty or so pictures out of the 400 I've taken.

"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.

---

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.

---

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...

---

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.

I get to Avignon and the atmosphere is one of a carnival. Before I can join in on the festivities though I ride the bus loop twice before finally getting off at the right stop (Barthelasse) and manage to grab a bed at the Foyer Bagatelle, a youth hostel bustling with activity on the island near the city center. I can't even begin to describe the sheer joy I felt as hot water poured over my body in the cramped shower.

To get to the city center I had to walk the length of a bridge stretched out over a river that was catching the last rays of the day's sun. To the west where the sky was darkest the landscape was lit up by a gigantic ferris wheel that is calling my name. Oh yes, I WILL ride it. Once ont he shore of the city center a smile was permanently glued to my face. I don't know what it was but something inthe circuslike atmosphere just grabbed a hold of me. Bonjour, monsieur! Bon soir, madame! like some actor in a Fellini carnival scene hopping down cobblestoned streets. A french girl caught my eye just as a banana wheel popped out of my crepe when I bit it, splattering rather unceremoniously on the floor of the main drag. i felt the usual rigid New York glare melt away and my face took on the stretchy attributes of a mime, shrugging at her with a lopsided grin like some street performer who lost his invisible dog and we both laughed.

Here even spectators are a part of the show; that's the nature of the party. It is the Avignon OFF festival and the lines between public and private and pedestrian and performer are blurred. Yards from where a japanese woman is posing as the statue of Pericles a pair of french teens dressed in rags are playing violin duets while a third plucks at a mandolin. Further down the plaza tecno beats are blaring as some gymnasts put on a modern dance show. The thin streets are packed shoulder to shoulder and the smell in the air is a perfumed mixture of tobacco, liquor, crepes, hashish, sweat, and coffee. I love this place!

Though I'm getting used to the whole alone thing I wish Larry was here with me. If there was one person who would fit perfectly into this particular scene and city it would be him. Every time I turn a corner and witness some new theatrical debacle I wonder what it is he would say, and more than that, what he would do. I think, in becoming more circuslike myself, I'm channeling the Merry Prankster in Larry.

...

Sometimes if I watch human beings long enough and unfocus my eyes a bit and try to forget all I know I see my species in a strange light.

Walking brainpods.
Gently gliding temples of the mind.
Floating fortresses of thought.

I begin to see through the eyes of other animals and our bodies seem so strange. This only lasts until I'm realizing it's happening and then I'm me again and I see legs and arms and all the usual anatomy.


Well, thank goodness I finally realized I could change the keyboard configuration to English. That was driving me crazy. Off to do...whatever.

permutations

All of this, this human world we build, no matter where you go, it's all just variatoins on a set of common themes. The numbers and the letters on the big board flip, you know the last one is the track the train will pull into, you board the train, and you watdch the city shrink away. Climb above the subterranea and out into the countryside and pretty houses give way to industry just like this was anytown, U.S.A. I readjust my headphones and take a good long look at the ends of the cityscape, soaking int he difference. Can't smell the air from in here, or hear the Spanish sounds, so I grab on to visual cues and clues; colors and shapes have their own flavor here. THe architecture seems so...celebratory.

Note to self: learn how to play that Sudoku game with the numbers.

The train pulls on through Barcelona suburbs as I listen to the mix that Lucy made me, matchbox cars pulling in and out of driveways, all of it chopped away when a pair of walls rise up around us draped in spraypaint. People will express themselves anywhere they can. "If you build it, they will come."

I'm sitting facing backwards on the train and whenever that happens it's so easy to see how Michel Gondry got the ideas for his Star Guitar video.

We surf the dry countryside, past towns-in-progress. It becomes clear to me how vital these rails are and suddenly I feel privileged to be riding them, like i've caught a ride on a blood cell of some great lumbering beast.

Jesus, there are mullets-a-PLENTY in Spain. Fall asleep and wake up with no idea if I'm still in Catalunya or if we've crossed the French border already.

portbeau-cerbere

Downtime before I catch my connecting train to Avignon. A nice little station and I keep making eye contact with a couple of djembe-equipped hippies that seem lke scruffy european versions of zippoz.

One thing about Europe, when you buy food at places that you'd expect shit eats from in America, it's usually good. Like sandwiches in train stations. Avec jambon et fromage.

French came flooding back to me the moment I got off the train but that was still a moment too late. One stop before Cerbere a group of silver-haired beach bums boarded the train at Portbou. One of them sat across from me and pointed to a newspaper someone had left on the seat beside me and said, "C'est prix?" THis is price? is what I thought he was saying. I was very confused. Not until he gave up trying to ask and his friend sat elsewhere did I finally think as far as the passé composé: C'est pris? THis is taken? Oh well.

Got to the cafe where a couple of Swedes and Brits fumbled through ordering sandwiches and then I walked up feeling like hot shit as I rattled off "Bonjour! Un sandwich avec jambon et fromage, s'il vous plait. Non, c'est pour ici, merci. Et un coca." Simple stuff but it felt good when it came out effortlessly.

It's a funny thing, this backpackers-at-the-train-station dynamic. We all eye one another, sizing each other up and trying to figure out who's from where and who's up to what. I see a guy wearing a Yankees visor and though he looks like some dumb fratboy I try out another Go Yankees anyway. He looks at me and says "Yeah...right." I guess the logo's not just a fashion statement in Europe alone...

Sixty minutes to kill and I consider venturing into town but the midday sun is killer and convinces me to keep my sweet spot right beside the fan inside the station restaurant. The hippies go around asking folks for change but just nod to me. I guess with my frazzled hair (god I look forward to a real, warm shower) and bulging backpack I strike them as one of their own.

...

The seats on the next train from Cerbere to Avignon are cloth, there's no A/C on the train, and I feel disgusting. Havent really had a good full on soaped up shower sicne I arrived, always hopping up and down like a lunatic in the bArcelona flat screaming through sharp intakes of breath as I blsated the grimy sweat from my body with that frigid water. The worst part of that whole experience was that the water got colder the longer you kept it running, there was no getting used to it.

When I take a moment to stop squirming in disgust at my own skin I look out the window and the southern French countryside is GORGEOUS. Like a fresco, done in reds and whites and lush vegetative greens. Cornfields here somehow manage to be less monotonous than your average Kansas fare.

I wake up thinking I've just been dreaming about youth and idealism then realize I'm just listening to Wilco and soaking in the lyrics..."What wouldwe be without wishful thinking?" We're pulling out of the station at Narbonne and finally we hit the famed sunflower fields of Provence. Two thirds of the way through Tropic of Cancer, and I'm sad to see it nearing the end. But the closer I get, the more I devour the pages.

Monopoly houses with candy coated windows.

No matter how many people get on the train, it's always an old lady that sits next to me.


Somewhere between Montpellier and Avignon it came back, the old fear. Fear in knowledge, knowledge of the only thing a man can be certain of in life - that's he's going to die. I was watching flowers ou the window when I thought about the simple fact I'm going to die eventually and terror gripped me. I dug my fingers into the seats beneath me and tried to slow my breathing. Like it always does (and like I someday will) it passed.

I remember the first time that fear ever hit me. It was in bed one night when I was young, while the rest of my family was still awake in the living room. We had just watched a film, starring Matthew Broderick I think, abou experiments performed onchimps by the Air Force. there were all these terrifying scenes of monkeys in flight simulators, or at least, they were terrifying to me. I remember lying in bed that nightand trying to comprehend a state of non-being and crying at the impossibilty of it all. I may be older now but the feeling remains pretty much the same.

final day in barcelona.

Stopped at the cafe near home and read Miller over a couple of cafe con leches. Strong coffee here. Caffeine is a psychoactive stimulant, everpresent in our daily lives. THe bulk of the population is high all the time. "But it's just coffee!" Caffeine and nicotine, our legal drugs. Hum.

Had the shakes by the time I asked for la cuenta, laughing out loud at a chapter all about Van Norden. Miller completely owns me, I'm his literary slave. Packed upw hen I got home to the flat. It was a good way to spend all my caffeinated energy. Now I'm ready to leave in the morning. Waking up in 7 hous to board an 11:21 train to Avignon, no reservations, excited. Not even as excited to be there as I am to be going there and getting there. Motion.

07.20.06

A wasted day today but I don´t mind. Went over a bit of a precipice last night and woke up after too little sleep and too little water with a hefty hangover. I walked the sizzling streets for a couple of hours in search of my usual internet cafe, the location of which I could not remember for the life of me. Finally found it right down the block from my favorite doner kebab place. Mmm. Doner Kebab. My new favoritest thing EVAR.

Felt recharged for a bit but somehow ended up back at the flat where I sank into a four hour nap. Gotta love siesta.

When I woke up again it was six thirty and the museo di Futbol Club Barcelona was closed. Disappointing, especially since during the World Cup I fell in love with soccer stadiums. Beautiful structures they are, they take my breath away, a lot like baseball diamonds. For an extra 3 euro you can walk the field, too. I might set back my plan of training it to Avignon tomorrow just so I can visit the stadium, Camp Neu.

All this falafel and doner kebab is making me gassy as all hell.

Sitting at the docks as I write this, listening to The Arcade Fire. Music I´ve long taken for granted is taking on new life and meaning here, probably because it´s the closest thing to home that I brought with me. And I haven´t even delved into my Talking Heads library yet.

It´s a fun game to play, not allowing myself the comfort zone created by my headphones until I just can´t take it anymore. And then it feels so good. I definitely feel finished with Spain and ready for France.

I just blogged all the entries leading up to and including this one at the only internet cafe I could find open past 10 P.M. It´s called easyInternet and it´s tailor made for Americans. All the Z-100 hits of the mid to late 90´s are playing. Janet Jackson, Alanis Morrisette, Spin Doctors. It´s kind of hilarious. There´s a Subway Sandwiches built into the back too, and the entire place reeks overwhelmingly of that unique Subway smell. I think they may bottle and package that smells and just pump it into the ventilation systems at their stores. I really wouldn´t be surprised.

Not sure about tomorrow. Maybe Avignon. Maybe futbol and the Park Guell.

Picasso, et al.

The first thing I see when I walk in is a faceless, featureless Christ on the cross. Raised Jewish, it took some time to appreciate the powerful symbol that is christ on the cross. It´s become one of my favorites. I love new interpretations of that image.

Strange, this museum dynamic. `I have been here, and I´ve got the brochures to prove it!´ They, ha, we, move amongst these deified images searching for ones that are familiar to us so we can say Aha! That one! take a picture and move on. Then you get home and you can say, you know THAT one? I saw it! I did!

The fallacy in touring the museums of the world, going to each perhaps just once, is that most people are fitting it into a schedule. They don´t have to time to soak in everything. Fuck, even if they did I don´t know that they would have the desire to. Tourism is masturbation on an international scale.

Overheard: `Is Picasso the one that went crazy?´ hahahahahahaha!!!!!

Picasso is a dirty man. Some of these sketches are downright filthy.

But boy, he gets around, as far as trying everything once. Reminds me of what Hemingway and Faulkner talked about in their Nobel speeches, about going further with your art and pushing yourself to go to new places. Picasso is a case study in artistic development.

I love how he doesn´t commit himself to symmetry when painting humans forms, how he glorifies our quirks and celebrates the strangeness of our forms.

Basilica di Barcelona

Tourism turns everything into a business.

At the ticket window a group of obnoxious brits create a stir because they have nothing with which to cover their shoulders. I watch, appalled, as they look at the church employees and scream, ´That´s stupid! Stupid! Your church needs money and it´s not getting ours! Stupid! Bye bye! bye bye!´

I can understand amused disappointment perhaps, but red hot anger like this...jesus. I mean, it´s an issue of respect, no matter how much I think it´s silly that God doesn´t want to see female shoulders. Female shoulders can be quite beautiful, I think he´d be proud. Though, those brits had skin like Kentucky corn huskers that spent days getting sprayed by DDT in cropdusters.

Sitting in this pew I must say, they´re missing out.

I may not be a fan of the religions that spawned churches such as these but the structures themselves inspire both awe and respect in me. Somewhere far beneath the dogma and the closed-mindedness of it all, this was all born out of sheer amazement and delight in the strange mysteries of life. They named it God, that´s fine. All things end up with names. The mistake is when they began to decide that their way of knowing God was the right away. Jews, Muslims, Christians. All idiots in their own ways.

Still, these Cathedrals and all their symbols are undeniably beautiful to me. My friends and family are (and raised me to be) disilliusioned with and disinterested in faith, religion and spirituality. Here and now though, I am quite certain I have faith. I just choose not to delve into what my faith is about. It´s enough for me knowing that I have it. It isn´t in anything, it´s in everything. There is meaning wherever you choose to find it, and it is what you make of it.

Sagrada Familia

My second church of the day is Gaudi´s La Sagrada Familia. Amazing. A church for all human kind. I feel like I´ve travelled through time and philosophy and evlution from a bastion of antiquated Christian thought to a church for a future we´re still giving birth to. It is a church of shape and color, of curves. A cavern of light. A hall where right angels are eschewed in favor of organic melting walls. I love that it´s incomplete, still under construction. If I designed a church, it would be ever-changing and never meet a moment of completion.


Nighttime now. Once more I prowl Las Ramblas in search of eye contact. No idea how to make friends. I approach a man wearing a pinstriped Yankee Jersey and smile big and say Go Yankees! He looks at me like I´m fucking insane.

Later on I walk down a side street filled with Hip-Hop shops. Guess what the Hip Hop shops sell? More NY Yankees memorabilia than the NY Yankee store on fifth avenue. I realize my Johnny Damon shirt means something completely different in Barcelona and start laughing aloud on the street.

To the waterfront, and I buy an Estrella Damm, the only beer anyone seems to drink in this city. I love you can drink out in the open here. Beer on the waterfront.

There are tiny fish like little white maggots fluttering about near where the pier becomes the water, giving the illusion that it´s raining all around us, ripples exploding with their tiny movements. Peering closer there are darker, bigger bodies skimming the surface of the water, playing like they´re shadows of pedestrians walking the planks above. They suddenly dart towards the congregated aquamaggots, swallowing some and scattering the rest.

I sit here and then I walk the pier, all the while clutching this book like it´s all I have. Kind of refreshing. It´s been a while since words and paper felt this important.


Thought: The Sense of Self is an instinctual self-defense mechanism. Humans have developed such complex social habits and layers of consciousness that we develop our Selves as a preservation against simply going insane in the presence of It All. We are at an important juncture. Society is making it more and more possible to become who you want to be rather than fitting some sort of pre-conceived social mold. Yay Democracy. America. Fuck yeah.

So our brains have become sponges for information. We swallow everything we´re given, but I wonder how many of us really look at all that info with a critical eye. We´re losing our control over selves, losing it to advertising. This seems like old hat, rehashed lyrics lifted out of Chuck Palahniuk but it´s true. WHat´s sad is that we have a choice in all of it but our spongy brains, they just love shiny things, and TV and billboards fit that so perfectly, don´t they? A bunch of grown up baby clamoring for shiny things, that´s all we are.

Miller said AMerica would drag everyone down with her, I don´t know if I can make such a proclamation yet but we are surely on our way to being a failed experiment.

What to do, alone? Keep drinking. This shit will be illegibile soon.

Two whores come and share the bench with me. Out of the corner of my eye I see them trying to grab my attention, rubbing oils on their arms and smoking hash, blowing the smoke against the wind and towards me. Fuck if this city isn´t just filled to the brim with whores.

Sometimes it´s just right to be sad.

I come to the cafe at the Plaza Sant Antoni, around the corner from my flat, the buzz from the Estrella Damms wearing off. I sit and drink outside, and decide I´ll do so until they shut down for the night.

A lot happening in the brain, how will I ever be able to communicate all this?

Sometimes everything swells up with a song and energy just flushes all throughout me like a chakra overload and I look to the skies expecting the whole thing to just explode. I´m on my knees in my mind, speaking in tongues and crying out to gods both new and old and undiscovered, ready to go on. And of course it all just passes away into something else. One more song is one more breath is one more moment coming to an unbearably beautiful crescendo. Forever and forever, amen.

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.

07.18.06

Last night, I definitely had a dream about Peter Sarsgaard, the actor from Boys Don´t Cry and Shattered Glass and what not. He wasn´t very nice. I was in love with his girlfriend and the three of us along with another friend of thers went to a place called Nell Park, which felt like the onramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. They made a monkey out of me and left me in tattered clothes lost in a foreign land. I woke up with their laughter ringing in my head.

Slept more than 12 hrs. Hope to get on track today.

To do:
sagrada familia
futbol barca museum
picasso museum
waterfront, monument 2 colon
park guell
aquarium
el raval
las ramblast

The pigeons here look just like NYC pigeons but react differently to human beings. You can get much closer to them than any NYC pigeon would ever allow, which in a way is an example of the difference in crowd movements here. So many sweaty bodies, and the stench of sweat does hang heavy down every street in BArcelona, sometimes it is overwhelming.

Giacomo and I spent most of the day walking around. That´s my favorite way to see a city. Tourist sites have their attraction but if you want to put your finger to a metropolitan pulse you have to beat your feet. We finished the day with some paella and Giacomo went home and was going to head back to Madrid and then the Canary Islands the next day. I´ll miss his companionship, I am alone now.

At the foot of Las Ramblas, at the base of the monument di Colon, I photograph a trio of English homosexuals. Las Ramblas oozes with sex. Perhaps Miller is sinking too deeply into my brain but is it just me or is sex on parade here? I guess that´s Europe. THis rotunda reminds me of one in D.C. where I sat with Miriam, a place where gays came and played mating games with nothing more than eye contact, picking each other up for quick easy lays. I suddenly realize I´m sitting here all curly-haired and kicking my feet in the middle of a gay sex pavillion. To my right a thirty-some-odd woman takes a seat, close enough to make it clear that she is trying to get my attention. I glance briefly, her makeup tells the story of a prostitute. The sun goes down and the city drips with sex.

Other than the arabs walking around peddling warm beer I seem to be the only man alone. At least, I think to myself, loneliness leads to this. Words words words.

I can´t even recall half the thoughts I had as I travelled the length of that amorous avenue, Las Ramblas. Fiction, come to me. Be my lady.

Four Catalan girls, fifteen or sixteen maybe, sit down giggling on the tiled floor a ways away from me - I´m seated in the major plaza at the city center. They take furtive glances around and light up a couple of hash joints. Across the park a mohawk baby dances in his underwear. To my right four Germans put down their cervezas and begin to cartwheel. I´m a writer in a circus.

Everywhere, everyone, all the same, all of the time, languages I can´t understand, both home and here.

Home now.

I sat writing in the Place de Catalunya then tried to board the metro. It was closed; forgot about that, this isn´t New York. Momentary freakout of large proportions. Started walking as an instant defense mechanism, deciding to find my way in transit. A quick consultation of my map showed me an easy route home. People still hanging about. The deeper I walk into la ciutat vella the thicker the layer of whores grows. These arent like the stray backalley prostitutes you usually imagine either. They seem trendier than they do dirty. Most of them are very young, some even beautiful. Their hair is dyed a uniform shade of red that seems designed to magnetize the eyes. I just let my headphones carry me home and avert my eyes.

Barcelona, 5 P.M.

Day 1 is apparently at its end. This is just one out of 31 days. I need rest. I have not slept in approximately 26 hours - that, my friends, is fucked up. Henry Miller will lull me to sleep with sweeping discussions of hairy grasping cunts.

Giacomo a.k.a. Deepman a.k.a. Colonel Kurtz, PhD. met me at the airport and we caught a bus to the city center where we met up with his father, who brought us to a renovated apt. that belongs to Giacomo´s brother. No hot water, and no bedframe for the mattress to sit on, but shit, I´m not complaining. Beggers can´t be choosers and having my own flat for a few days in a very cool part of town is nothing to complain about at all! Not that this town is cool, temperature wise.

The more I think about it the more I think this trip will lead me back to Paris. All this writing, all this reading Henry Miller, it seems like the place I should end up at. Yes, I long to get drunk at La Cupole, to drink coffee on the sidewalk. I´ll go to the city of light and stare it in the face. I will be a literary cliche, unashamed.

3:00 A.M.

I awake to the sound of Catalan screams and silverware slapping against dishes. Either a meal to wash down late-night drinks or some day laborers preparing for an early shift. Part of me wants to get up and go, to walk the mid-night streets of Barcelona under the moon, but I know that might not be so safe. I´ve been sleeping since 5 P.M. My only real option is to sleep more but I don´t know how much of a possibility that really is at the moment.

god, I am so conscious of myself-as-photograph or myself-as-movie-clip, I wish I smoked cigarettes so I could stand here at the balcony nursing one in the strange light of early morning. THat seems fitting.

As much as I am striving to be here and now I really can´t help but wonder what on earth will become of me along the way, down the line. Barcelona is beautiful, but I long to hit the road.

Day one, airport.

Good omen, the Yankees swept the ChiSox right out of town. God help me without baseball.

Taking off now and this journal is the only friend I have here with me. I take an oath to write here every day, I´ll try my best not to overthink or judge, just let loose and let flow.

In the air now. My wrist gets far too tired far too quickly, too spoiled by keyboard ease. I need to fight that and work my writing muscles back up to par, get this arm here back into shape. Funny, looking at words, how I take them for granted, how we all do, swimming in a sea of language all around us on signs and buildings. These markings are the legacy of an ancient ritual, creating meaning for the human realm where there was none before. Mm, airline dinner time. Beef and mashed potatoes. Not bad.

I remember a time when crossing an ocean via aeroplane immediately knocked the price of alcohol down to $0. No more. I guess in an international economy faced with consistently increasing fuel prices, the airlines have to make every extra bit of cash that they can. But O, how glorious it was to be sixteen, floating high above international waters and well beyond the grasp of U.S. drinking laws, sauced and soothed en route to Europa.

I´d kill for a drink right now. A gin and tonic would sit perfectly in my not-so-nervous-anymore tum. On this trip I´ll explore my relationship with alcohol, I´m sure. I can only imagine that while drunkedness may ease the flow of the creative juices, it will only massacre this chicken scratch that calls itself writing. I am an impatient thinker. It is high time that I succumb to the unavoidable truth that things only come from other things, that creation was only a truly spontaneous act once - In the Beginning.

Since then, it´s been placed in the hands of me and mine and you and yours. Some of us will choose to do something, others will be passive players in the grand game of life. There are choices laid out at my feet and nothing is going to happen for me unless I make those choices - even the wrong ones. Just like Grady Tripp, I have ceased making choices; and while the idea of some continous flow may be romantically attractive, it is certainly not productive. At least, not the way that I need to be productive if I am to truly be happy. Each choice unfolds into a million other fractalized possibilities and on and on forever and ever, amen. One can´t just close their eyes and watch the visuals forever.

And while everything, including all these choices, and the choices they birth in turn, exist within my mind folded over and over within one another ad infinitum, they must be unlocked, and the key has been, is, and always will be experience. I must read words so that I may filter them and the ideas they communicate through my own worldview, further developing that worldview...then they will be ready to be prismatically refracted back onto empty pages like these to be passed onto other confused souls like myself. Note to self: anyone who tells themselves they understand this whole human drama is a self-deceptive fool.

I look out the window, it makes me laugh, the fucking obvious truth that all things are one and connected, that all acts are circular and intertwining and that karma is not simply a belief or a notion but the way things are. And yet, that at the same time, any human attempt to make sense of and/or quantify and judge karma is absolutely futile.

I look up at the inflight movie and see mermaids smelling feet.

Tropic of Cancer, Pg. 6: Indigo sky, swept clean of fleecy clouds, gaunt trees infinitely extended, their black boughs gesticulating like a sleepwalker.

Well holy shit, Henry Miller, I´m pretty sure you just blew my mind.

...

pulling towards Spain now

the sun is unbelievably bright, over to the east. I´ve been so tempted to look at it that I´ve hurt my eyes and given myself a slight headache.

Good morning, Europe.

From above, the Spanish countryside looks like someone spilled a gigantic Irish carbomb on top of a color-by-numbers puzzle, everything shaded somewhere between black and tan.