Fragments of thought from the back of my notebook.

Today I handed in the last paper of the quarter!

Every quarter, while I fill the pages front to back with notes for class, I fill the pages back to front with lists and dreams and thoughts. Often, these things creep into my margins and fill up the pages that are supposed to be notes, too.

Anyway, here is a little collection of notebook fragments that I've pulled from the insanely disorganized doodles of this quarter:

 

I.

All I can remember is making lewd jokes in my sleep. Now, dreamless, I feel hollow and heavy. Interrupted at least once, often twice in a night, crawling awake into gray-blue to empty myself out. Distracted sleeping.

II,

Only 3 days ago I complained into these pages, uncomfortable in my own skin, feeling stranded in the sea of my mistakes. But today, despite an early morning headache, and toast burned beyond rescue, I feel alert and ready, full of creative energy and hopefulness. Impervious to inattention, content with my social shortcomings, full of forward momentum. I hope it lasts.

III.

I dreamed that someone put me in a play without telling me the lines. It was Shakespeare. I tried to make a joke, but the audience was stunned and horrified by my irreverence.

Later, in a cafeteria, some precocious girl kept saying, “You know?” And I didn’t know. She asked me to make eggs fifteen different ways.

IV.

Somehow, I returned to Spain to learn more Spanish, but everyone spoke to me in patient English. Everyone I knew was one unwieldy hour away. I wanted to see those smiling faces in Granada, so close but impossible.

Kim was in a messy room with grayish light, where a boy was sweating feverishly into his sheets. I could see his bare shoulders. Maybe the fever was love; she would not leave him.

V.

The seams in my body are aching. I woke up unhinged from time, all gray and bleary eyed. It’s my own fault for going to bed thirsty. What is the name of my ignoring divinity, white eyed with rage foam; where is my crystalline sense of interconnectivity and direction? I am susceptible to pt. 10 Times New Roman, I feel heavy with second hand almost grief and undone elastic, with the orange wind that rattles my slumberous senses. I am susceptible to unintentional eye contact; I am semi-perpetually slogging through the fog of my fade-away analysis.

VI.

There are golden leaves bursting up beneath my eyes, there is a ghost, feeling my body. There is a thirty percent chance of rain, one hundred percent change of my pants slipping down. In the creeping, hopeful heat of Tuesday morning, I am bursting with sadness for humanity, bursting with melancholy affection for all the tiny, glaring vulnerabilities. The tall boy by the door, standing so awkwardly in his big blue high tops; the lecturer’s self-conscious clichés; a red-head’s soft shoulders; the smell of cheap public bathroom soap on so many hands; a girl’s chunky leather shoes, peeking out of her wide jeans, her chubby face full of lisping urgency. My mind is so critical and loathsome, so full of sad love.

VII.

If Rosa Morales were teaching Me in her bleating accent, what would she say?

“It was a known fact that she was awkward, and often red. She burrowed in a smoky, striped jacket, and withdrew. She planned anti climactic social events and then dreaded them. She offered squirming hospitality, begrudging kindness. She lived according to inconsistent belief systems and jumbled dreaming. She lusted after more authentic poverty and groaned at her tedious transformation into a penniless poet. Who is certain of their greatness and does it make the heavy scales of success any lighter? she would wonder. She did not know what she wanted very often. She was self-centered and sighing. She worried she was not very smart, after all. She could the smell ink on her cluttered pages, and the sides of her hands.”

VIII.

You and me, in blue-black predawn, your hand squeezes my side just a tiny bit. You’re drifting off, holding on. We ate orange capsules of focus, and hummed, and hummed in place, sitting on that faded futon, hours jangling through our desperate nerves. I become weird and obsessive, you lost steam, we distracted and muttered, went off on tangents. You spent what felt like at least an hour trying to explain integrating or something called u and a bunch of garbage symbols, but I leaned against you a little bit, and felt your hair brush mine where our heads met, and none of the words you said made sense but I said, uh huh, and was content, pretending this was maybe the third time we hung out, and that all our tiny touching was flirtatious and thrilling. It was easy to pretend, because the wanting to touch you has never changed. 

Mirrorless.

Your hands, moving in circles, dissolve me into uncertain puddles. I am uncomfortable in this place; taut anxiety rolls up and breaks over me in frothy green waves. I want to sail across this sea, harness that abrasive gale, fill up big white sails, and go somewhere, instead of watching my nerves erode like chalky red cliffs.

I am a floating speck in this silent golden explosion, unknowable as some achingly far off rock, drifting in icy ambiguity. We are atomic anomalies, hoping to pour into each other, but territorial of our skin. You have never held me in your hands. I am less than sand, a thousand grains of indecision.

Only mirrorless can I sigh away my sins.

Secrets buried beneath sandy eyelids.

I remember soft light through a window—it looked like the purple-yellow of an insect’s wing. It was a mysterious, murky light. I remember soft feet, I remember hiding up high in a tree,  waking up feeling heavy with the dampness of not-quite-dawn and the gravity of some lost fragment of thought. Secrets, buried beneath sandy eyelids. Cold toes on the wooden ladder. A split second fear before flipping on the bathroom light switch, perhaps of seeing something unexpected in my own pale face, reflected in the oval bathroom mirror.

Continuously coping with return.

I think I have finally identified that gnawing anxiety between my ribs, the intermittent weight hanging over me as an existential dread resulting from the mismatches in my experiences, in the realities that I feel attached to or embedded in; an expanding sorrow as the past and my connections to it drift away, the sense of relationships dissolving into their geographic impossibilities.

A letter to Macy.

To Macy—

You were born during a strange and fleeting heat wave in October. The night before your birth, miles away, I dreamed of your mother, round and bursting with life. You were born after a tumultuous September, and we looked to you as a green promise, a warm wind of hopefulness and light.

You were born into a family that will love you not sweetly, but fiercely. In many ways, we are more like a clan, a tribe, than a family. We brandish our last name like a flag and we will hold you up and sing your praises. We are boisterous people, kind, intuitive people, deeply connected with the other world, with the family members who are no longer here, but who guided you into your mother's arms. They are all around us, and you will feel them- when you are afraid, when you need strength, when you feel alone.

If I could tell you anything, offer you some small piece of advice, it would be this: life is full of all the lessons you need. Be aware of what is being shown to you, listen, and hold your mistakes in your hands like precious stones before tossing them aside and moving on. They are your most valuable possessions, but they weigh you down if you dwell on them.

Your life is a unique experience and no matter how much a person knows, only you are the expert in your own existence. Be receptive to the knowledge of others, but know that you are free to adapt what you learn to your own idea of self, your own path. The singularity of your existence is amazing- you are unlike any creature to ever walk the Earth. Embrace this as an opportunity to be unapologetically and wholly yourself, whoever that becomes.

No matter what, you are loved.

—Tressa

Fragments of dreams and teeth.

You were standing beneath a lamp, bathed in yellow light, packing cold earth into a mason jar, someone told me in a dream.

In a tent, my head is swimming, and some big person is pushing his body onto me. I call him filthy. I call him terrible names and cry.

There's something in my mouth. I spit our four cracked teeth and realize the rest are almost all gone already. What remains are sharp shards, exposed nerves. I feel responsible, guilty, almost, as if I've allowed all this decay to form, and am only now waking up to my ruined mouth.

This why we should have an emergency kit; a dream.

It’s coming—the end of civilization. In slow motion we see ships dropping from the sky, big barges, cruise ships, aircraft carriers, dropping on far-off cities, huge bursts of orange coming closer and closer. This is why we should have an emergency kit. In order to escape, we must flee to the fringes of the continent, to the costal edges of human reign.

We are swimming in black water, amid big blocks of floating ice. Casey is lighting the way intermittently with a cell phone. There is movement beneath us. I hear my breathing; loud, raspy panting. We follow the shoreline, where in the flickering light I can see shadowy objects of worship—gaunt Jesus, strung up on the cross, tarnished virgin Marys, looking up into the nothingness, eyeless skulls from worshippers of Santa Muerte—they send shivers all through me. I feel Casey’s body next to mine and search it’s presence for some sense of comfort.

Later there is a big washed up ship tilted on it’s side and a beautiful woman living amongst still corpses with a man whose wealth now means nothing. They sleep behind a curtain. Later the water dries up, and we retrace our steps across the debris-strewn shores of a huge, curving bay.

photo credit: wakalani via photopin cc

This is a snapshot a wish I could have taken:

I.

Your brown shoulders arched above the valley of your smooth neck;  your skin is shimmering with tiny white hairs smoothed like far away wheat. Your chin is resting against my chest and my fingers are in your hair.

II.

Your hand resting against my thigh as we drive through the dark redwoods. My elbow leaned against the center console, and Mishka's face, soft with sleep, propped in the intersection of our arms.

Second First Impressions

Everything here is flat and wide and spread out. The buildings are squat, the streets are wide and black and busy, but there is a wonderful greenness all around. The air smells sweeter and feels cleaner. The napkins at restaurants are wider and more absorbent. There are toilet seat covers and paper in the bathrooms. The streets are devoid of paper scraps; fences and walls are not covered in signs announcing apartments for rent, services provided, and animals for sale. The sidewalks are wide. There are houses with green yards and two or three front steps and colorful doors. The sidewalks are smooth, monotone gray, easy on my shoes. The passersby are thick and heavy; I feel a natural inclination towards dislike when I hear them speak. Somehow my own language has become a stigma. The waitresses are nice, they smile all the time; they try to be helpful. The food is better but more expensive. I gawk at the prices on jelly jars and sigh at my grocery receipts. There are more trashcans. The dogs are all on leashes and there’s no shit on the sidewalks. There are no people lingering in open plazas, sitting in the shade. The youth is hidden away. At 2am, everyone goes home. We drive everywhere—our friends are spread apart, the restaurants and bars are spread apart. There is no late night bustle, no clumps of twenty-somethings drinking forties on steps or in front of bars. I haven’t seen the sunrise yet.

It’s sad how fast the magic fades, the magic of all these little things that once seemed so symbolic, so intangible and achy. I’m thinking about this as I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, so foggy and solemn, so big. I’m thinking about this as I lay in my big bed and feel very, very alone.  

"Home"

 

I’m back in California after what could very well have been the most wonderful year of my life. Wonderful, yes, insane, chaotic, full of lessons, full of scrapes and bruises, full of loss and gain in an endless surging flow, sorrowful at times, surreal, unbelievable, euphoric, terrifying, also. There is so much I haven’t had the time or the attention span or even the words to tell you about. And now I’m back “home,” toying with that word like a question in my mouth.

Northern California is a beautiful place—we are lucky to grow up here, basking in the mild sunshine and the fresh redwood and ocean air. When I returned I was struck by the expansive sky, spread out above the low building tops, by the wideness of the smooth, black streets, the sidewalks. Everything is low and flat and spread out, bordered by green. Everything is square and new. The graffiti is painted over in stern squares. That image has a lot to do with how I feel, with a certain specific blankness, a lack of stories. I feel my bursting, booming, blooming year fading inside of me, as if eroding upon exposure to this sweet foreign air. Was it all a dream?

There are things that feel right about being here, like seeing my lover’s blue eyes up close, like getting behind the wheel of my dusty, leaf-cluttered car, like my brother’s skinny ten-year-old arms wrapped around me. I feel like I can sigh into California’s temperate embrace and sleep off a year long accumulated hangover. But I also feel something missing—a big gaping half of my heart. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t been overcome with the urge to cry at strange moments, like at a stoplight, or while buying cider at the grocery store.

In Spain time moved differently. Every moment felt full of possibility. Life seemed like some wild undefined adventure, something to be molded and tossed around, something to plunge into with open eyes and an open heart. Every strange, surreal dream felt possible. Back “home,” all those elaborate unconventional dreams seem impractical. I am being re-acclimatized to something called stability. Routine. Planning. Where before growth seemed spontaneous and personal, now progress seems like something to be charted out on some kind of dull trajectory of compromise. This is called the future. Suddenly all your living is supposed to be stored up for later—right now you must work to build options.

There is a Californian girl inside of me, and she knows how to navigate this kind of lifestyle—she’s done it for many years. But there’s another person, maybe new and raw and uncertain and incomplete but thirsty for life and strangely strong and all of this change is pressing against her all over, crushing her. Even on a purely geographical level, my options are suddenly limited. I’m compressed into a cage of stale social roles and a lack of travel possibilities. I feel like I left a certain kind of hole when I left, and now I’m supposed to come back and fill it, but I’m not the same shape anymore. I’m trying to find a place where I have room to move on, but also to acknowledge that so many amazing things have transpired in the past year, and to find a way to examine how these things have affected the trajectory of my life and who I am as a person.

Blog #100: Cádiz, Coming Home, and Cat Sedatives

Guess what!

This is my 100th blog. 

I was going to try and do or write something awesome, but life is just too crazy for me to be that creative, however the month is slowly taking shape and making a tiny bit of sense. Chaotic, stressful, transitional sense, but still, something like certainty is slowly creeping into July.

For starters, Gypsy may actually be coming home with me after all. My cat-loving aunt got wind of my pickle and has offered to help out, so now I've re-commenced the kind of slow, confusing, electronic communications process of talking to animal shipping people and figuring out how it's going down. It's simultaneously a huge relief, because I'm so happy to be bringing him home, but also a huge stress, because the process is confusing and the people aren't extremely helpful, and because it's changed all my semi-formulated, half-assed plans for my last little stretch of time here. Which is coming to a close, very, very fast.

The new plan is something like this: stay in Granada, in my house with Gyps and Borja until the 12th, then bum a ride with Borja and friends to Cádiz, where he's from, meet his fambam, see some stuff, hit up a little festival for a couple days, probably be a beach bum for a little, then try and get a rideshare on the 20th or so back to Granada, be a homeless cat person at Mauna's house for my last few days, and then rideshare or bus (potentially sedating my cat and sneaking him onto said bus...) to Madrid to catch my 11am flight from Madrid back to home sweet San Francisco, where my lover will be waiting with burritos in hand. And from there it looks like we may be headed to the woods, potentially escaping my reverse culture shock and despair by camping with mom, Uly, Casey and hopefully Kelsey for a couple days. I agreed to this without thinking about what to do with Gypsy, but I also recently bought him a harness and leash, so maybe he'll be chillin. So far he doesn't seem to give a fuck, even though Borja and Guille won't stop making fun of him and warning me that I'm going to give him a complex.

Look how many fucks I give about my cat harness.

Guys, I'm gonna be home in 19 puny days. This is incomprehensibly awesome and terrible. I don't wanna go home, but I can't wait to go home. Shit is strange. I've skipped a ton, but that's all for now. I have to go buy cat sedatives.

Although I don't believe in God.

 

How can I be expected to properly express myself when my vocabulary is so small a thing and the world so large and full of nuanced experiences? Here always comes the start—the outpour that does not know if there is too much or too little, if we are too similar or all alike, if there is more or less to be done, if I am doing anything right or everything wrong. I am tired, tiresome, my skin feels heavy and old, despite my sometimes role as that sort of semi-wandering embodiment of innocence. God bless the drugs, and God bless your father growing marijuana in his vast French fields. God bless the white-eyed German boy walking down the highway in his underwear with his thumb out. What have we done? Picked up a bit of trash, at least. God bless that docile compliance to the flow of life that rises up with the first rays of sun when our jaws are still working and our pale shadows are still jumping all across the sand. The margin for error is as slippery a place as my heels are full of sea urchin spores, but there is something to be said for these transition spaces and the strange, wonderful people that inhabit them, thumbing through memories in their little wooden homes. Home is where your questions come unraveled. Home is where you test out your new skin and hope.

The American Work Ethic

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

            Everything.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

            Building yourself up is not something you do with money or unhappiness. I want to build a self out of beautiful words and unforeseeable experiences. Strange and strong—I want to be like no other person you’ve met before. I want to be my own reverberating echo, a process of something like “freedom” and “truthfulness” and not in the sense of any cheap verbal honesty, but in the sense of fully inhabiting my own chameleon skin. Admit that you are not a person, neither the person you dream of, the person you long to be, the person whose mouth you speak through, you are a process just like:

            everything else.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

It’s based on a Dream;

            the Dream is not beautiful—

if you have the power to exist within an indefinite space with malleable rules and new visual/sensory possibilities that are impossible to even remember in a cognitive/conscious way according to the terms of waking memory—shouldn’t your Dream be at least beautiful?

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

America is not ours.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

Happiness should not be a novelty.

Too soon June.

May was mayhemic. Yup, not a word, but we all saw that coming, no? Kim's visit was fucking epic, we ran around with couchsurfers, boogied it up at the Booga club, drank wine at the huerto and played with puppies, caught a ride with Alberto (on the back of his motorcyle!) to a crazy rave party in a magical pine forest where we become polar bear and kitty cat and danced our souls off, trekked to the Quilombo and got our mothafuggin Drum&Bass on, we had tasty tapas and long talks and all time flew by far too fast. She was my last solid excuse to not study, as finals are fast approaching (first on is the 14th, aghhhh) but then the feria had to come to town, and seeing as it's a cultural experience and whatnot, I had to go. And I had to rage my face off in the punky/hippy tent until like 7am.

Oh yeah, you think the fair is for riding rides and eating candy? Well, we did that, too, of course, but this is Spain, so everything comes with a side of loud music and alcoholism. Their fair includes discoteca tents, and that shit doesn't close down until 5 or 6 or so. Naturally, I set my bag down like a dumb ass and all my shit got stolen. Goodbye bag, wallet and money and credit card, keys, fourth or fifth stupid goddamn cell phone, cracked screen Frankenstein ass iPhone, house keys, favorite leopard leggins, red bandana, and sweatshirt! Spain is teaching me so many lessons about the non-importance of physical objects, eh? Shit could be much worse, don't y'all fret.

In other news, I've semi-certainly decided to try and find Gypsy a good home here in Spain because of all sorts of flight fuckery that is too tedious to get into. Basically they want to charge me 400+ euros to have him transported and he wouldn't get to travel with me so who knows what those frightening money hungry fucks will do with him for those grueling 16+ hours of travel? Much less trauma to hand him off to someone who is (almost) as capable as loving him as me. Bummer, but, that's how it goes. Anyway, I'm supposed to be studying right now, which is obviously why I am writing this long overdue post instead. Exams end July 4th ('merica, fuck yeah...) and then I will hopefully trot over to Germany and take a gander, maybe dip a toe in Denmark, who knows, planning is not really my strong point. I'm giving myself to destiny. Or whatever. But that's about it, folks. No flight home QUITE yet, still wanna make sure my kittles is taken care of before taking off, but I aim to be back in August.

You have no idea (unless you do) how fucking weird it is to watch this trip come to a close. So many mixed feelings. I'm super fucking jazzed to get back to my boy, my puppy, the fambam, the redwoods, the food. But it's also a little like being torn in half. So much love for the place I've created for myself here, it's definitely a home. But, gotta keep on flowing.

Azul

Este es mi primer intento de escribir algo creativo en Español; ironicamente, es dirigida a alguien que no habla Español... Espero que no sea completamente ininteligible.

 

¿Donde esta mi taza azul, mi pájaro azul, mi alma azul?

¿Donde están mis dedos, azules, en la blancura del invierno?

¿Donde están esos ojos fríos, tan azul como el mar tumultuoso y indeciso, los ojos que me miran directamente en el azul de mi alma incierta?

Dos meses largos y ardiendo, dos meses de naranja y rojo, dos meses oliendo de la acera caliente, de sudor y agua tibio, dos meses lánguidos y húmedos…

Y vuelvo a ti.

Y vuelvo a la verde tranquilidad de los árboles.

Y vuelvo a la frescura del aire pacifico, de las nubes San Franciscanos.

Y vuelvo al azul de tus ojos, al azul.

Stop the squirming.

 

Stop that squirming,

with your blackhole anxiety,

transition dreams and pockmarked skin,

there are certain people and then

there are others.

Displacement is not replacement,

personality is a fluctuating element, susceptible

to time and rejection.

Don’t forget to dig up love,

don’t forget that you can’t dance but you do,

don’t forget,

bald bird,

that you are just another indoor cat

before the open door.

Your secret hands are no secret,

self pity is no hot commodity and hot days

make you like this:

sticky, stuck, irritable.

And your lungs, too, may be cloudy

and thick,

but breathe through the gunk.

And your eyes may be cloudy

with distance,

but don’t blink the time away.

And your skin may be cloudy

and lonesome,

but it’s still translucent;

so the only choice is to be the muscles and the blood

the only choice is to be the bones and the sinew

the substance and the soul.

Another dream underwater.

 

I’ve signed off on rights to a mermaid adventure film, mother tells me, somehow certain that I am the mermaid. Later I will ask about the slippery tail and an art director looks at me with scorn. It’s about more than a mermaid. It’s a metaphor. Oh.

Still, strangely, all this time in water and tape has captured something secret, and on the flight home my silver suitcase is shuffled and scanned. For discrepancies.  I picture them with their fingers all over the watery footage. They must have found it, that dark thing, and scraped it with a scalpel from the sticky lace of my memory. All around it are hints that something is missing, and yet…what?

The escalator also goes down.

The escalator also goes down, mother sees this and we dash down pushing past sleek-haired women in blazers, past serious faces and rolling suitcases. Commotion.

Ladies and gentlemen. We are all floated out to sea, in the most brilliant piece of silver; luggage is scattered and rearranged. Beside us a group of Asian businessmen gather crates of soy sauce looking somehow simultaneously calm and peeved. On another floor, footsteps echo on slick floors and a huge man stuffed into a gray suit becomes enraged, stuffy and enraged. Where is why is, etc, these are the things that vex and bite at him, gray and bureaucratic, he strikes me, grabs my arm. I look at a big glowing clock and take note that at 5:03pm, I was struck. He snarls and denies it. Look. We are out to sea.

Kelsey wanders in, and he put his hands on her, his big mouth making ugly remarks. There is one other woman in the room. I look at the big glowing clock, making notes. His protests are like malevolent elephantine wails.

On the deck, or whatever, red and blue backpacks… We see them coming.

Kkkk. underwater oxygen sounds, kkkk.

Hold still

mermaid

what if

your cell phone goes off

underwater.

The breathless faces, all greenish blue, looking.

The voice comes through, narration overlapping the cloudy waves sounding crisp, clean and serious; And in the darkest waters, I climbed up, and squinted, eyes fogged up in murky waters, and I hurled those secrets into the green streak that could be a river channel. Later we will scrape the ocean floor with metallic contraptions, and pull the truth up to the light.

Headrush

 

You are an empty something (I am)

Maybe when I saw your face bleeding,

            across the room, blinking lights and my heart the same

I was seeing something ooze

from you soul (your right eye).

How can I ever judge you when my head swims with infidelity and vacillating disappointment?

What was that word you told me to remember,

other you,

some sort of crystal eyed favorite, a blessed child gone all crooked bent and stray

and still loved so wholesomely,

and how are we still sorting through and categorizing,

judgments falling jagged like bricks like

my stubborn spine like

red blood cells and all our breathy deficiencies.

Oh, sigh, trailer, take me home,

            whatever that means,

just to let me

sit

down

heavily, sighing, and rely all over you,

sloppy like the creature that nowadays seems like an embarrassing fairytale.

Choosing is always a difficult thing,

for a fickle, pale person, for an  undecided soul,

and yet when the choice is one of skin and sinew and soul,

and when the options are as vague and intangible,

abstract like gaseous memories of throbbing feet and swollen tongues

of pine trees looming like antiquated morals

of chattering teeth,

and yet…

Oh, eternal unformulated self

            what is this thing?

What are we to do, what have we done, where did we go?

Where do our unspoken words wander, and where are the words we’ve spoken

            into an earshattering racket,

fractured, bruised, do they ever find a home,

in the hollows of our unconscious?

And, and,

reverberating cries, hollow eyes,

these are all the things that make reality despicable and false,

there is nothing to believe,

anymore.

And all this is just a headrush and a cough,

and all this is just your body, a thing as disposable as redwhiteandblue

paper cups.

I am the most contained,

I am the most free,

I am your average contradiction, a pair of bruised legs and

a head full of Spanish heat and questions,

expectations and overseas airline confusion,

cat fur,

dirty nails,

dinner at 9 or 10,

unaddressed postcards, unaddressed problems,

flutters and shudders,

sweat.

One More Weekend

Mellow late night pancake dinner, the Alhambra a'glow perched up in front of Mauna's terrace, tank top weather, sweating and searching for Fall classes, living room full of bare feet, Borja and his Italiana in aprons, beer and nisperos, tart orange fruit with thin skin and glossy chestnut seeds, shade in the huerto, a dog named Pulga (Flea!), hacky sack wars, dashing around at dusk, rabbit squeal at dinner, poor thing half-limp, Gato as fat and sleepy-eyed as ever, hot sauce, salad, police and personal space, borrachera and malabares, Pedro Antonio, girls with bangs and cigarettes, los 15 gatxs, dance, dance, surrender to the ridiculous, shadowy faces, free beer, stumble home, five minute bench break (vagabunda!) morning resaca, transnational delirium with Kim (5 days now!), bunny sized heart attack, water-soaked terraza, march down Gran Vía, dogs and big happy posters of protest, dancing foot steps and shaved heads, hot cement, the 99%, education, health, the sun slips away to the sounds of crackling megaphone cries, back at Adri's the lights are red, the music loud, my eyes are heavy, Saturday sun as hot as Hell, four pm rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, litro for breakfast, sweating on the bus, Vico tells me he doesn't want to be American, listen to American music, quick sandwiches, Google maps, exploding beer, up the hill (sweat!), pine needles under my feet, roving in the dark, muddy legs and sleepy eyes, headless bird surprise...

Let the Mayhem Begin

Alright, it's been a while since I've sat down and written something about what exactly I've been doing these days. Here's what's been going on:

My house is still wonderful, and it's more of a BroMansion than ever, since yet another dude has taken to inhabiting our basement, but he's also a mega chiller; David's long-haired juggling friend, Guillermo. He's older and cleaner than everyone else. A while back Matteo found a kitten in a trashcan (and when I say kitten I mean eyes-still closed, so small I thought it was a hamster, kitten) and we all become a like four-headed cat mama and fed him with a little squirty thing like a billions times a day, UNTIL: one fateful day we took him to the Huerto de Carlos V, because no one was home to take care of him, and I ran into Alberto, a jolly dreaded festival friend we made at the Dragón, whose housemate really wanted a teensy kitten. So we handed him off right there and then. Thank god he didn't end up as the fifth animal in our furry family; it's already impossible to cook without eating hair in this house. We plan on visiting him someday soon, though.

What else? A few weeks ago one of the biggest music festivals in Spain, el Viña Rock, took place in Villarrobledo, about a four hour drive North of Granada. The actual festival was quite expensive, but since Spaniards are awesome, they tend to set up the "anti" festival, or in other words, a free electronic rave fest, right outside...why don't we do this, California? Anyway, Leon, Adam, Carlos, Jarir and I rented a car and headed over. It rained ALL weekend, but we had an amazing time.

Picture: rain, mud, my polar bear hat (muddy), face paint, bodybuzzing speakers, thunder, lightening, short-lived, weather-defying nudity, vodka, muddy boots, muddy tent, muddy car, cereal out of the box and rain-soggy bread, one precious avocado (no knife), beer, star stickers (a gift from a fairy with a glowing wand!), strange coincidences and shared acquaintances, the thizzle dance, goosebumps, shit-smeared Port-o-Potties and bared asses in the field of stubby bushes, huge tarps billowing over the sweaty gape-faced masses, that collective stomp with the drop, bonfires, lakes of mud, giant pupils under sweeping colored lights, three hour sleep sessions cramped up in the front seat of the car, losing my third phone, losing Adam (who we recovered, unlike the phone), and then Monday morning deliriously scrubbing the seats of the car, vacuuming up the ashes, the roaches, gathering soggy brown articles of clothing, eating oranges and melting into couches, into bed. Twelve hours of recovery sleep. And then, in Carlos' case, fever.

Since then I've been in quite a mellow mode (understandably, right?) Recently had some couch surfers by- German and Finnish- and took them tapa-ing, strolled around the Albaicín, showed them the Huerto where I stopped briefly and had my face painted and befriended a gorgeous Australian Shepard and a hairy-chested shirtless old English hippy man. I also now know how to say "laughing sausage" in Finnish.

This is the last month of class, and I've quite honestly been a horrible slacker. It's become quite clear that all  my scholarly motivation is based on an actual interest in learning, something that is not really an option in this University system. Anyway, the slacking is at least half due to the holidays and strikes that have knocked out probably like 50% of the classes I would have had these past months. (For example,  I'm not at school right now because of striking...) But classes end soon and then I have June to "study" and exams at the end of June, beginning of July.

In other news I'm shitting bricks of anticipation and glee because my babygirl Kimmykins is coming to see me in 9 short days! Balls Almighty, it's gonna be a frolic and a half! I don't really have plans for June or July, but I want to go somewhere at some point... I'm kind of just waiting for the adventures to manifest themselves- they always do! Vin has mentioned planning some sort of roadtrip, to Poland, for example, and I also really want to go to Germany (there's apparently an amazing festival near Hamburg in June!), and Ireland is also high on my list... This world is so big and beautiful, I just don't have time to tackle it all, but I suppose this is really only the beginning.

May is gorgeous and sunny and I love it. I've started doing yoga on the terrace, and reading on the terrace, and generally living on the terrace. Three hurrays for sunscreen!

California, I do miss you, despite all the shameless fun I've been having. I can't believe I'll be back "home" in three short month! I hope you guys are all prepared to burrito binge with me, to Boardwalk our faces off, to embark on facepainted frolics, get our fresh produce on at Twin Palms Ranch, spazz out at the dog beach with my flufferbutt and my tan man, get some three am nacho fries at Saturn, be critters in the Meekerite woods, and I guess take a peek at some American bars for the first time in my life (unless you count the Jury Room in Santa Cruz...I don't.) I also hope y'all don't expect me to come back fashionable and cultured-- quite the contrary; Granada has cultivated the wild child in me more than ever!

Anyway, I take my leave to try and get some useful things done right quick before heading to Mauna's for breakfast-for-dinner tonight, hitting up a screening of También la Lluvia at some bar and maybe checking out a concert/party at a nearby squat on Friday, and who the hell knows what else! ¡Hasta pronto, bitches!

Heave

jangle of anxiety

nameless knot, a’tangle

sudden thirst for the drastic

bared skin and ink, needles, hard rocks, pounding muscles, heaving flesh, yellow bruises, rushing wind, taut vocal chords strumming, hollow echoes, spraying dirt

and here within the dull bluish light

you drone—

foe, fiend, friend

the bland blabbing nonsense, lesbian

interpretations, you reduce inspiration to

some groveling textual paste

sludge to be sorted, reeking dead words

to stack

and separate

and sterilize;

outside the sunshine glimmers in absolute liquid intangibility

outside, beauty is a thing as varied and monstrous and fluctuating as

pungent and sweat-beaded

clawed up and stinging,

scuffed and scarred arching back,

as some pock-marked tooth-sweet neck

            raspberry red, hot with surging blood,

loud and discordant as

jagged breath through swollen, wet lips—

nothing is pure and simple

nothing is clean and true—

life is only worthwhile as some sticky

            half-guilty, heavy-lidded ecstasy

something to be eaten up and ravished

to throw yourself upon

with naked, shameful abandon

to grasp at with greedy fingernails

            hungry, groping limbs

shadows running slantwise all across the bared,  imperfect flesh

traversing goosebumps and pink scabs

            with trembling fingertips

nerves exposed like the dirty rafters in some split-open squat

wide open

and submerged in wet adrenaline

ferocious, determined chance

absolute surrender—

I hope to not live in the stillness of black and white lines and

immense, immaculate care

but to spend myself in some exhausted heave

to drop dead in a morbid tangle of sweet sickly memories

splayed out, vulnerable as birth

and all mixed up in the reverberating echoes

of a million ecstatic, frenzied souls

each intensely devoted to the vibration of their own shadowy selves

intensely devoted to the exploration of their inky abundance

            boundaries

and the limits of this strange, rippling sea

            of possibility and pleasure

            of dark and velvety aching

            of celestial, stinging uncertainty

Belgium

I haven’t slept; the bright sunlight feels like a heavy blanket against my chest. Along the freeway are big stretches of warped glass, or birds and fish on long cement walls, we drive across a bridge with sleek cables that stretch out like big wings, like sails. We pass clusters of trees that look strangely flat, trees full of nests. The black birds seem to leave ripples behind as they glide through the purpley skies. All around us is a bright rainbow of green; light spring green, deep damp green, green leaves aglow with sunlight. At a gas station we pick up festival-bound hitchhikers. They give us Swiss chocolate and a little weed. We sail through the border and say, oh. We stop and smoke a spliff in a little cluster of trees, and later wish each other happy lives and I doze off watching orange rooftops and clusters of cows pass by the window. It all looks so clean and wholesome. In Brugge we park and then follow the peaks of old medieval towers, the big ancient brick buildings, wandering around and snapping photos of the red doors, the green shutters, the geese and swans and ducks along the murky canals. We buy French fries and write Brugge a letter. We gawk at big chocolate Easter sculptures. We stop at an art gallery with slippery floors, We find a wall of beer. We find a huge red poodle sculpture; it looks diabolical. We stop for tea, and then back in the car we begin to drive whimsically, turning onto smaller roads and searching for some quiet place where we can park. A headache grows in my temple, and finally we find a little turn out in the countryside alongside a swampy field. We push down the back seats and lay down blankets and pillows, and smoke out the door as the sky turns dusty midnight purple. The sound of rain drops patters through my dreams.

When we wake up, outside the window is thick white-gray mist; skinny reeds bob through the milky morning. We hit the road. In Antwerpen we stop at a little café and have tea. A man comes in with a sweet lab dog, and she walks over and greets us quietly. We find a busy market where men are calling out the prices for their asparagus and selling olives from enormous silver bowls. The scent of feta cheese and oil lingers in the air. They sell salami and cheese, they sell dream catchers and posters, tulips and clothing. Vincent buys a little water pipe. We hit the road, and eventually recognize the warped glass along the highway. Back in Amsterdam, traffic is fussy—we wiggle our way into a little parking space and eat Chinese food before parting ways.

Amsterdam: Part Two

 

Each day is full of tasty, expensive food. We buy a fried maize pastry and a crispy pocket full of veggies at the Indonesian place beneath Vin’s apartment, where we later return for tempeh and vegetables with boiled eggs in spicy over a box of hot white rice. One lazy night we order pizzas and eat them with creamy garlic sauce. We stop at a Surinamese shop where Vin gets a sandwich and I buy a savory donut type thing. We eat them sitting beside a canal, watching the black ducks dive and resurface. Another evening Vin brings home tasty red curry with tofu and vegetables, and he takes me to an “American” bakery for red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and blueberry muffins. One morning he whips up what he calls a “poor Vietnamese meal,” with boiled eggs and rice and a tasty garlic sauce. We eat it with tangy kim chee. We have Malaysian tea in little metal mugs—it’s foamy and delicious, almost like Chai—and then eat fried rice heaped with chilli sauce.

We buy Asian pears and green apples to munch on with salt and chilli pepper. One night Vin invites a friend over and wraps up shrimp and tofu with noodles and zesty cilantro in translucent rice paper. We eat the summer rolls with a dark sweet and salty sauce and a little hot sauce, too. He takes me to get French fries with Amsterdam’s famous joppy sauce; a sweet, tangy, yellow sauce that reminds me of sweet mustard. On several occasions we stop into a shop for Turkish pizza—a thin pizza, with spinach and feta, in my case, wrapped up with lettuce and vegetables and condiments. It’s heavenly. We follow it with sticky baklava. Another night we buy packets of space cake from a coffeeshop and eat it covered in whipped cream. Once it kicks in, we munch on cold cream puffs and toffee walnut spiced cake. We drink cans of Heineken beer with a side of coke and chat with Vin’s friend Robin about childhood, drugs, moderation, parenting, the future, education systems. We talk about how we’d make new people, differently. It feels important.

On a particularly gray day we stroll to a flea market. It’s cold out and I look half-heartedly for a hat to buy, but nothing seems suitable. Instead I linger on ornate little tins, a beautiful tree tapestry, an adorable summer dress, knitted hand warmers… Across the street is a Hell’s Angels shop and a man and woman are filming it with a big camera on a tripod as a burly old man with long hair rides up. Vin says he’s a leader within the European Hell’s Angels, which in and of itself sounds contradictory and kind of hilarious to me.

I find Adam in the museum quarter, and we take him to New Times, and then visit the Anne Frank house, climbing up narrow stairs to peer at the mostly unfurnished rooms, the grainy portraits, the pages she’d written and corrected in her girlish hand. She’d pasted up photos and pages from magazines on the walls, collages to make the hideout more cheerful. I find her collages somehow haunting. I collage. Later we watch videos, Anne’s childhood friends with quaking German voices and loose skin and distant nightmarish memories. We see the bony bodies piled up. Outside, the moon is full and the black canals glimmer with orange and yellow lights. The windows in Amsterdam are always open. 

That night we stick little pieces of paper with tiny dancing bears on our tongues. The crooked room stretches out and in, shrinking on one side and sloping down the other. Adam paces, scribbling notes all across a to-do list. It’s all about perspective, he keeps saying. Maybe I’m just on drugs, he comments, but maybe in the morning I’ll wake up and be the next Kerouac. We watch polar bears running and sliding through the snow, shimmering white and majestic. We watch schools of fish flicker and dart through dark waters in big baffling choreographies. We laugh at each other’s gaping faces. As the sun rises, smoke gathers in a long beam of sunlight streaming through the window. It looks like a beautiful dragon against the blood red curtains. I peer out the windows and watch as the city shudders and stretches. The last prostitutes finally close their red curtains.

Amsterdam: Part One

Amsterdam is cold and sleepy—gray lays over it, thick like a comforter. The tall, old buildings curl in on each other, leaning close for warmth, folding into each other. Cyclists steam by like schools of metallic fish. In the huge parking lots they huddle together, slumberous silver and rusted turquoise or engine red, glossy black, chipped copper frames. Vin wraps himself up to his nose, saying his Asian blood is too hot for the damp cold that goes all through you. By the ferry, little ducks bob and peck in the damp green-gray water.

Sleepy Amsterdam is full of a million languages, and no one seems to really bother with Dutch. We spend the days strolling through the streets, along and over the glossy canals, crossing tram tracks and bike lanes haphazardly, ignoring the crosswalks with their beeping timer mechanisms. Amsterdam is adorable, quaint, reminiscent of the things that you think of in Portland, or maybe San Francisco. I linger outside the shop windows gawking at the novelty gifts, handmade soaps, woolen hats, quirky t-shirts, pastries, waffles, psychedelic truffles, marijuana lollypops, little glass bongs and grinders with the big triple x across the top. We find a shop entirely devoted to buttons; too cute for words.

At the market there are booths set up with little yellow wheels of cheese, with jars of pickles, with flat waffles and poffertjes—fat pancakes the size of silver dollars. We eat the poffertjes with butter and powdered sugar using little wooden forks as we meander through clothing booths full of colorful scarves and bizarre American flag leggings, Amsterdam caps with tassels and bright green Heineken sweatshirts. As the market begins to shut down, egrets appear and pick at the ice left behind by a seafood booth.

The coffeeshops are dimly lit and sweet-musty smelling, with little nugs labeled and displayed in their countertops, with laminated menus and pre-rolled joints stored in slim plastic tubes. In one shop, an electronic panel in the counter glows pleasantly, displaying the menu on one side, and as the shop keeper weighs and packages the weed in small plastic baggies, the other side displays the weight and price of each strain, tallying up a neat total. People sit at the tables in pairs, rolling spliffs and drinking tea. Vin and I frequent a shop called New Times, with a burnished purple counter and purple candles at each table. We smoke Vin’s long spliffs and sip on English tea, Earl Gray, Moroccan Mint or Rooibos. The third or fourth day we stop by, the man behind the counter hands back our money and bumps fists with Vin. One day, an older man behind the counter is weighing out clumps of hash. Vin asks what it is and the man tells him couscous, handing him a little clump with a friendly smile.

One evening we stop at a dark little smartshop full of glow in the dark posters and metal pipes. The man behind the counter has long hair and shows us a menu of truffles that are rated based on the intensity of the physical high, the energy, and the visuals that each type produces. We buy two little boxes of Cosmic Connection. Back at the house we open them up and contemplate the black clusters. They look like animal shit. We eat them with Nutella, cringing at the acrid after taste. Vin’s friend, a thin blond girl, stops by and sits on his Fatboy bean bag sipping a beer while we watch some show about some nut job living with lions. When she leaves I go to the bathroom and sit on Vin’s strangely high toilet seat; my legs dangle off. I realize my toes suddenly seem miles away and the rug is undulating softly. Back in his room, the deep red curtains are rippling, deep velvety burgundy, the golden shapes on them glowing faintly. We are feeling melty, listening to Gramatik with the TV on mute, watching shadows spill across the African plains in lazy half-fascination. Mostly, my mind fills up. I feel like I can see myself from a strange new angle. I look at my legs stretched out before me. I pull a blanket over my head and watch the white polka dots drift sleepily through the dark.

We are pond.

First, I became a crocodile, amber eyes and pale green flesh, I slithered through the hot, swampy water, my mouth gaping. All around me was the swish and flow of parting water, beneath me, sulfuric orange and emerald stones; my flesh became like these stones, these fiery, slick pebbles. We scooped them up in our white, puckered fingers and poured them all across our shoulders. They tumbled and slid, down, across our collar bones, across our breasts, down the slope of our backs. And as we laid in the steaming streams, they piled up on us, great mounds across our bellies, piling up on our knees, our shoulders. We slithered and rolled, beneath the water we could hear the stones of our flesh scrape against the stones of the pond. We could hear the pond breathing, it's slick fingers reaching out to us. And we were crocodiles; we scooped up the dark red earth, the black earth, and spread it across our cheekbones, in stripes, over the ridges of our noses, we pushed it down across our shin bones, dug our fingers in, deep, and we knew we could not leave. We were crocodiles; we crawled up against the muddy, grassy shores of the pond, and snapped up at the creatures that passed by.

Do you speak the language of the crocodiles?

They sat up on the grassy slope and watched us cautiously, we could not reach them, we crawled the muddy banks and looked up at them with our yellow crocodile eyes. But slowly, we could feel a change in our flesh that was made of stones, we felt ourselves pouring back through time, coming apart at our slippery seams and folding down into our most basic chemical forms. The pond held us, spoke to us in its gurgling voice, and we receded to the shore, writhing in the slick mud, in each others crocodile limbs, and we began the slow process of devolution. Above us the trees shivered and quaked, and we melted into ourselves, into the red and black mud, into the damp green moss, into the bright stones, the soft flow of water, we became pond. We slumped back against the clay and the stones and mud and our bodies receded deep down, into sludge, into the absolute beginning. We are pond. We became mixed up with each other, bodiless, just soft and warm and wet. We can never leave. We are pond.

Being Bullied

So, this blog is about something that actually happened to me a few months ago. It was a pretty intense experience, but also kind of weird and embarrassing and I put off writing about it for a while, and then when I did finally write about it, promptly forgot about it in the back of my notebook. Today, in my Children's Literature class, we discussed a book called Juul, about a boy who is bullied and ultimately mutilates his body piece by piece in a search for acceptance. It was one of the most intense things I've ever read, and it made me feel compelled to share this. I may no longer be a child, but this was definitely a unique experience for me, and I think there is something to be learned from it.

 

I was walking home with a feeling like iron in my bones; I don’t remember why. I came up the hill, heaved a deep breath, turned right into the twisting narrow streets where during the holidays we heard the incessant boom of dynamite, where a singed bath tub has been sitting for weeks, where once a group of kids burned a chair and left its stinking carcass in the street. I heard someone laugh, it was loud, childish. I turned down a street, there was a group of kids, teenaged girls and a chubby soft-faced boy; the boy was in the street, stepped backwards as I turned the corner and turned to make an ugly gaping face at me. He made a harsh braying sound, and I gave him a kind of skeptical half smile, the tense look that draws up my eyebrows, and kept walking. The boy stepped in front of me. I tried to edge around him, and the girls poured out all around me in this awkward surreal kind of stream. I was looking down at them, they were either young or small or both and were united in a strange unspoken agreement, an instantaneous decision, to be whimsically cruel. There was a flood of sounds, ugly irony, their faces contorted in blind hatred, they got close up to my face, just barely resisting touching my skin, they screamed in mirthful glee, pulled apart my body. An older girl with a Monroe piercing and dry skin stuck out a finger, jabbing at my piercing, ¿que es eso?, she demanded with her mouth loose and wagging. Un piercing, como tienes tú, I finally said, the words coming incredulously from my tense, guarded smile. I guess it broke the spell, I pushed my body forward, finally resigned to move past, to flail if I had to, and they pulled back from me in reluctant, stubborn little steps, crying, ¡un aplauso! and clapping and howling as I walked away.

As the clatter faded behind me, I walked home listening to my breath. My face sighed down, anxious smile erased, I bit my lip and marveled at the silenced that roared in my hollowed out body. I got home, climbed the stairs, sat on the edge of my bed, and cried resentfully, struggling against each silly tear.

It’s strange to spend your life in a self-aware position of cultural dominance, with that history of privilege, that shameful advantage of being a white, middle class American, to be aware of that horrible dark thing, historical cruelty and repression, with all it’s echoes and ghosts, and to live all your years with the knowledge that you will never experience this twisted thing that you are implicitly and helplessly destined to be a purveyor of cruelty. It’s strange to be taught that this feeling is something you have no right to experience, and then to turn a corner one vulnerable day and be confronted by exactly that.

It’s strange to find yourself in a place where nothing you do is the right thing—your words are deformed, uncertain creatures, violence will only turn around and eat you up, silence is weak and indefensible. So, I cried on my bed, and then tried to breathe and felt quiet and lonely and strange and bad, and counted my limbs and my unbroken skin, and breathed and sighed and went downstairs, and found a new way to walk home. And then I cried more and felt weak and helpless and lame, but at the same time, hesitantly satisfied, because I’d glimpsed the nauseous thing a white American never thinks they will touch, and maybe there’s something to be learned from it, maybe this little piece of trembling, blurry nightmare day will be useful to me in that endless process of becoming—becoming a whole person, a better person, a worthwhile person, a new, never stagnant person, a changing, continual self.


Comic relief:

(I would prefer to use the scene after this when the guys are telling their parents about the incident, but I couldn't find it.)