Porto Sketches, vi.

a woman with an indistinguishable european accent wearing a black cape and zorro hat welcomed us in the ante room. babs and i chatted with some other spanish and english speaking tourists until cape and hat took us into the cellar. once inside, the white brick vaulted ceiling reflected the only bit of light coming from sparse electric bulbs, and the hundreds of oak barrels big and small and the wood brick/dirt floor absorbed all sound. we were struck at once with the gravity and tranquility of the scene. it was like your first cathedral, stepping in from the street and losing your voice. but instead of stained glass and towering ceiling, it was dark and dank and low, and smelled something like an ancient forest cabin. a mix of dirt and wood and old. the air was cool. we strolled slowly down a massive aisle flanked on both sides by thousands of liters of young and old port wine. there was no echo. whispers here and there stood out but most kept quiet and observant.

Porto Sketches, v.

as we scaled the sloping city up from the riverside we found shelter from the bright midday sun in the alleyways where old women sat in their doorways wearing aprons and sighing. one of them watched us as we came up and when we paused outside a door she spoke to us in strange words that we both nonetheless understood to mean "go ahead boys, they wont bite in there." inside we found the narrowest bar imaginable, where people had to stand up off their stool to let you pass behind them, either for porto's dirtiest toilet or to climb the little ladder at the back for the dining "room" mezzanine above the bar. everything was stone like the inside of a fireplace except the wooden bartop, along which sat one old man and several old women. the woman behind the counter came up and through the gaps in her teeth asked us what we'd have. i went for green wine while babs took a café com leite. then i watched her pour a shot of something strange and yellow into a glass for one of the matrons sitting beside us and i asked for one too. babak made 3. then we drank and tried to keep from twisting our faces at the toxic burn. i inhaled some of the fumes and felt the sacks in my lungs shrivel. it was excellent.

Porto Sketches, iv.

in the morning babs and i both woke while sun shot through the shutter cracks as beams along the walls and floors. early yet, 9:30 perhaps and tasos still asleep. on the street babak looked bad - weeping and gnashing of teeth. well not teeth but his eyes were not well. the solution tasos had provided was nasal spray. i feared the lad wouldnt be able to see, and though i stressed as his pale eyeballs and red sockets poured streams of liquid agony, he assured me it would all turn out.

Porto Sketches, iii.

then it was night and we were back in the berry liqueur flat and back at the sauce. then i got the call and my best london lad babak was in town. i sprang down to the street and walked, walking as i did all 5 days with legs flexed and foot muscles tense, grabbing at the stones beneath my shoes and propelling my body forward with determined purpose. every hill was a new joy as i shot through air like gravity was a toy. when i say this was a walker's city i bloody well mean it. so i get babs and take him to a bar for immediate post-flight relief. large, cheap, shitty portugese beer. perfect. then were back with the boys and girls and we hit a restaurant where we sat on the back patio and ate killer burgers. the best ive had outside the states. wine, meat, table, cigarettes and hash. hash is in porto like tobacco in spain. everywhere found and everywhere permitted (except inside restaurant dining rooms).

then we were in the center and tasos and his boys led us to a street, nay an aisle of bars.

Porto Sketches, ii.

in the morning i showered and realized tasos would sleep late again and took off on my own. more walking, but this time in busy center streets further in from the river - famous fin de siglo pedestrian boulevards with shops, covered markets and art nouveau cafes. i bought fruit from hawkers in an old station/market and pastries from old women in sidewalk booths. café after café as they were 50cents a pop. i couldn’t get enough. 8 zinc bar, small spoon, 1.5oz black espressos for 4 euros if you felt so inclined. i was like a provincial peasant in paris. but way more fun.

Porto Sketches, i.

i arrived at a bombsite.

i landed in first daylight, thursday morning. the metro is 8 years old, its amazing. grand futuristic cars gliding along silently, wide glass doors and clean, airy platforms and stations. wardens periodically checking to make sure you validated your pass, which you did not do, and telling you the fine you’ve incurred is a cool 95 euros. but they know you’re a young american idiot so they walk you off the train at your station and hold your hand at the validation kiosk, and say <be careful next time.>

Notes from the Underground...a glimpse

On the metro, midday. I was riding homeward. Not quite five minutes on I pulled myself from reflections on the place I'd been to the place I was. The car was full - it was lunch hour - of every sort of folk. Having left the barrio Salamanca there were townhouse ladies aplenty. Teenagers with notebooks and playing on their phones. And pink faced seniors saying things like "trousers" and "simply lovely".

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.