Lying in Madrid

The city sings - sings me out of sleep. Sleeping on Cam's couch. Oh shit, forgot that, I did. Fact, I woke and asked the old question: where tf am I? But then I recalled and it was all good. Guten. Guten tag. Yes, today is good. Gorgeous + good. A new respiration, a new vitamin D injection, a new rendition. But it's a bit sad. Not substantially, but a bit. For la gente in the street haven't any idea. I can see in their faces as they pass the Italian café window. They don't know what they have, what lies prostrate in front of them. This - this GLORY. It's the newness. The newness in the mould of the normal. But ho + hark, children: it's Saturday, mid-April (Shit, already???) and we are alive and open gulleted to take take take it all down, in, swill, swig, swirl, twirl, loop de loop, DANCE!



....By the way, today's a day calls for a woman!

Never According to Plan

This is a winter of shit. Natives will use words like strange or weird. Liars. Caught up and so they believe themselves. But it's shit. Today is nice, but we wont let that stop us. Can't let the guard down against this crap. A wonderful time for a visit, you might say. My sister will agree.

Some memories you carry, some carry you

The past follows me, but completely of its own accord and in its own preferred method. Some of the best parts dwindle and darken in the distance, just as some of the worst prick like thorns still stuck in my side. Sometimes friends come angelic and return to me lost parcels of my accumulated lifewealth. Sometimes a song, scent, or sight brings back not without pain things I would loved to have held onto tighter. Amid the vast aggregation from a thus-far short trip, I can see myself a nucleus (ha!) pushed in directions by what which I have lived. Some bear down from above. But then as many and to be sure more lift up, way up, like waxen wings bearing a load heavy as love.

I got a new set of wings myself, just recently, and I'll let you, o Reader, imagine how high they take me.

My life, in an Eve

I walked home tonight. Clouds were out but the sky was dry, so I could see the beautiful moon. La luna. It's funny, we have all these different names, but the moon knows no language. It's just there, and to it, we are here. We may even be living on its moon. The same moon I was on in high school, looking up from a blanket in a field one night in spring. The same moon as in college, amid buildings and frigid winds, I avoided my homework and the authorities. The same moon I looked at 24 hours ago, out from under portici. In Bologna, the buildings go out over the sidewalks, covered by porticoes. The city is known for them. It bored itself into my heart forever because of, among a great deal more, them.

Football, or the Value of a Day

The font has shriveled to but a trickle. Words flow far less frequently, and with no clear stream of thought. Days go by without writing nor reading a single word save a sign or a signature.

These times of unproductivity/inactivity leave me vexed and feeling pitiful. And time seems to pass faster, creating the dual sensations of lengthy dry spells and loss of life moments. Youth receding in the wake. Reflecting upon this, I realize it started with the commencement of the holiday. Eagerness for end of work time and start of party time - time that on its own flies lightningfast, time that leaves no time for whatever else. Reflecting further, I recall this same feeling hit same time last annum. Connections and implications, indicating in my contemplations. Something about the value of the day...

This time round this all happens to coincide with the nasty feeling of discomfort. The novelty is beyond long gone, and restless unease produces a nasty flair to temper. Situations I continually come into leave me with feelings of spite and malicious intent. I have a few drinks and say I'm leaving this place.

A friend thinks that's not right. Says this seems to make a good fit for me, and I need to focus on that which doesn't drive me toward thoughts of departation. A story then, and a focus on the good things...

Sweet Snippits of Old and a Cup with a Spoon

The sun bore down on the sidewalks and streets with the white hot light that it burns in winter to fool the eye into believing it's warm while the wind numbs your ears and makes your nose run freely. It reflected off the tarmac and stone, both wet from the melting of the last night's snowfall. White shine and glare and cloud, blue and cold breeze, and city. I stood in the middle of it wondering how best to spend the idle time between classes, the middle of the city in the middle of the country in the middle of the day.

Weekend in the mountains...Asturias, Spain

Not sure when or why exactly, but over the course of the day I decided that the best way to ensure my preparedness for the following morning would be to sleep at the house of those who'd arranged the whole trip. A good enough presumption, except that it was Friday, and nothing really occludes the festivities. So I threw some clothes in a bag and had a few drinks. Time miraculously flew and I was just able to throw the last of my weekend accessories in before heading out to the center with some of the boys to celebrate the weekend. It was between 2 and 3am that I made it to Natalia's flat to yell her name from the street because my phone was dead. But I made it to her couch and considered my plan successful as I lay my head on the pillow to sleep.

Friday Madrid... Midnight Repast

When I walked in the door the men at the entrance to the dining room turned with prepared expressions that dissolved as they recognized my face. I stepped down from the entrance and they put their arms on my shoulders smiling and told me my friends were sitting in the back. Three tables had been put together--a decent banquet board for the small restaurant on Cava Alta which seems to remain invisible to all but a few discerning denizens--and two open bottles were just being set down among wide crystal bowls on slender stems.

FIESTA: Al Fin

WAKE UP. TOM WAKE UP. Erik shakes me out of REM and before the blood even begins to flow he's telling me we have to leave. His lips are blue. He's shaking. "I'm freezing, man. I can't stay here anymore." Without a word I rise and pack my things, feeling the cold myself now penetrate my jacket to the bone. We're luckier than we know to be dry, but it doesn't occur to us breathing fog on the riverbank at dawn in late September northern Spain.

FIESTA: Nightfall

I WOKE to the sound of shrieks. I opened my eyes abruptly and in the purple gold city lights I watched a young child and his father diverted by a bouncing rubber ball. Erik was still on the bench. He saw me as I tried to feign uninterrupted sleep and walked over to expose my charade. With the blanket now folded in the pack we made for the center again, to load up on small cups of hot black coffee before the scheduled rendezvous. We sat for a while in Café Ibiza neither of us saying very much, shedding the grog and quaffing our thrift with narrow slits of eyes watching grumbling old people watching boisterous young people watching televised football. I put the small spoon from Erik's saucer in my pocket and we paid and went out into the night.

FIESTA: Wine-induced Sensory Forfeiture Blues

Outside the cathedral, amid thousands of bodies moving in all directions or none at all, we found Paula and her two friends standing in the sun. Erik introduced and I passed the tinto. We stood for a while conversing in the usual chat and looking around at the people sea in which we were situated. A call was made and we began to move, heading toward a narrow outlet at the northwest corner of the plaza. The road had been neglected at points and it was clear along patched cobbles between pale stone buildings both vacant and occupied that the city had fallen to hard times before. This, however, was anything but. Music oscillated as we shuffled like a hundred penguins down the street past bars where light disappeared behind swaying walls of bodies holding clear plastic liter-sized cups.

FIESTA 3

According to our festival program, a large portion of the events were set to go down at the Ayuntamiento plaza. We walked eastward along the main thruway of the center, a narrow street paved with pale stone bricks that's walled in by archways and colonnades and is overshadowed by the outward jutting balconies of the old apartments above the street, enclosed with glass and painted wood here in the northern half of Spain. We passed the cathedral whose towers never stopped arresting me and then a cross street we'd walked down several times already in the dark, without ever seeing the vista it pointed to.

The brown and black mountains rising like waves in the impossible distance nearly drew us out of the town, like sirens calling to forget indulgence of the flesh and blood. Nearly.

FIESTA 2: Pre-storm Calm

OUTSIDE in the main plaza full of green trees, small soft grass lawns, and anchored in the center by one of Spain's ubiquitous horseman effigy-topped plinths surrounded by a gentle pool, the number of people had begun to rise. We headed to the western edge, where we came in much earlier in the morning, to check the opening time of the tourism office. Behind the bandshell where bundled bodies slept and were slowly waking in the morning light, the closed glass doors bore the hour 10:00 in small off-white stencil. So, down the stone ramp and back into the city to see what might have been missed in the dark.

FIESTA: Food, Wine, and Barbarism in Logroño, La Rioja

ONE

It was on the floor of a large salon in Tribunal when, amid small glasses of silver tequila and jovial summer accounts, I remembered that I had a few minutes to gather my things at the place I where was crashing in the quiet, musty barrio of Lista and walk to catch the coach set to pull out of Avenida de America at 01:00 with or without me sitting in the seat I'd paid for.

Dry Well No More

A week is through and the bounce is back.

No easy start to the first week of work in almost three months. As can be imagined, one slips with comfort and ease into a routine consisting of leisurely activity, contemplation, and reflection. Eating well and visiting every city, town, and country fitting the dual-pronged bill of accessibility and affordability does much to relieve the mind of the burdensom memory of work. Complete monopoly over intellectual property. And so the first few days of classes and their preparations went along like a rusted locomotive.

One from the Archives: Camino Journal (Day3)

LEARNING FROM THE MISTAKES OF OTHERS BEFORE ME.

Yesterday it rained. A lot. The storm came in so hard and fast toward the shore that the very sea itself vanished in the torrent. As we walked under the heavy skies toward the city streets from one of Donostia’s promontories, shrieks behind us and the flashes of people running past made us turn to watch the white wall of storm come hurling in from the sea to erase everything it passed.

Volver

THE SUN ALIGHTS on green leaves and grass across the street in front of the plaza set in and shaded where I sit in the back in a café that shall not be named. The morning is about to end and people outside are walking in every direction. But I have finally stopped moving.

48 hours ago roughly a bus carried me eastward across dry, thirsty plains of sun-baked earth and sparse pale green vegetation. Earlier that bright Saturday morning I had left Lisbon - that sunny city by the sea where red roofs collide

My Mother's Teashop

My Mother owns a teashop. She runs it with her smart and lovely English friend. It is perfectly situated in the only place outside of England appropriate for such a quaint little building, here in the wood and pasture town my father lovingly calls, The Shire. From their house I drive uphill by The Academy - the two-hundred-and-eight-year-old town high school that's made up of five or six free standing buildings arranged around a quad on the hilltop overlooking miles of forested rolling hills. The hills light on fire with the bright oranges yellows and reds of autumn every year.

The Return...

THERE AND BACK. The hero's journey. Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Jesus. So I gave it a shot. Set out with questions and realized pretty early on that the answers weren't out there waiting for me. Instead I found new questions and different answers than I was looking for. Walking across the land with a backpack and a staff gave me a new perspective to have a look through. Many people and many places. Most all of them beautiful. One thing I learned: You can't do it just once.

ID:4 and a bit of Orgullo

SATURDAY wake-up to the light taps of clanking in the kitchen, metal fork on thick glassware filled with something thick being mixed. That's fine cause it's about time to rise anyway. Walk through narrow sunfilled hall and enter la cocina to find Natalia facing away. Only one thing could be happening. It's the day of the last Aussie barbie, and Natalia's prepping her Blue Ribbon Guapamole.