Decompression.

Spontaneous night drive, long hours in the dark talking deep and winding through San Francisco and up and east to party in a vineyard barn, full of mannequins and lights, mirrors and beautiful strangers in fur and feathers, spilled wine and cupcakes, dogs wandering through and picking at scraps, music and fire, paint and cold air, and then Santa Rosa at 5am, bleary eyed father and Karen with blankets, waking up late and lazy and walking through the brick buildings in Railroad Square with iced chai, tree-dappled sunlight and a screw lodged solidly in my tire, goop and gunk and air, father fixes and we’re off headed down through yellow hills that look soft to touch and into that panicky San Fran traffic, back into boots and fur, and expensive IPA and big search lights, snakes and dogs and babies with head phones, and a trio of dancing men in velvet and knickers and leggings, strutting and painting and dancing in bright lights, laughing at the silent disco, headphones on green or blue, and everyone convulsing, so silly in the silence but so earnest when you’re tuning in, lifting up, and then winding home down the 17, all darkness and empty belly and thinking about what it means to be home and what it means to have a suitcase in the back of your car.

California, I love you.

California, I love you, You are all green and brown and purple, dotted hillsides and trees feathered out like amazing plumage. Up in Humboldt, strangely friendly hippies come out of their houses and RVs with stocky babies, full of good tidings and dark warnings.

Mishka rubs her muzzle in the dark soil and bounds with incredible buoyancy over fallen branches. Later, she will curl up on a mossy stump, nestled between the redwoods, and take a nap, looking royal and exhausted. We will dig a fire pit and burn dry wood and pine cones, their sap sizzling as they glow black, red, white, and then dissipate into the crisp air.

We've brought too much food, not enough booze, and wonder if we should ration our beer or start drinking cinnamon whiskey at dusk. The sky goes cold and we hang a bright lantern, drinking around the fire, and in the damp morning we drink watery coffee and seek out little patches of sunlight to defrost in. I change my clothes on a sunny hill and marvel at the soft sun all across my bare shoulders.

After scrambling eggs on a wobbling single burner, we gather bread and water and blankets and go tromping down a trail marked with big arrows made of sticks on the forest floor. The ground is soft with layers of fallen leaves and crackling twigs. We weave between skinny saplings and dark madrones, climbing beneath fallen trunks, and above branches that grasp at our ankles.

Up on the hilltop we spread our blanket in a sunny clearing and sprawl and explore and snack. Mishka disappears into the rustling bushes and emerges grinning and dirty, her long tongue lolling. We paint each others' faces, laying on our backs with our eyes closed, soft strokes turning us vibrant blue purple, yellow and red, stark white, smooth brown.

The sun droops, shadows stretching long across the yellow-brown leaves, and we gather up and head back down the hill, scattered in clumps. When we arrive at our spot, aglow with late afternoon sunshine, the rickety log benches, the still fire pit, our green and blue tents side by side, the little table perched in the shade, if feels strangely familiar. We spread out, building a fire, reading, gathering bread and pesto, slicing tomatoes. We cook paninis in a cast iron fireplace press, and eat them in little shared pieces. They are sticky and melty, warm and crisp.

California, I love you, and the golden singing treetops high up and green, while down below we crouch low to the cold packed dirt, listening to the crackle and hiss of the fire. The pine cones hold on tight, and the ashes come floating down, elusive and white.

I love the cold apricot ale at dusk, and layers of smoke-smelling clothing, bundled in hats and thick socks. California, I love you, and the promise of spring and the promise of pasta. I love you and the painted faces of my friends, wavering behind a plume of smoke across the fire, and my lover, with his hands on my shoulders, and my dog, gnawing on pine cones and bringing us twisted sticks, triumphant.

To the future:

Do not forget the slick green leaves, wet under February rain. Do not forget spilled coffee.

We were once a planet of questions and sore backs—what are you now? Do you have a lottery? We have a lottery; orange tickets sold over dirty glass counters. We pay for the fantasies of what we could become.

We cut down trees and turn their wood into pulp and turn the pulp into paper, pressed into thick notebooks that we carry, and when it rains they go soft. I hope you have paper and trees. I hope you have yellow books.

I hope you eat curly pasta, that you paint your faces sometimes, and that sex is safe and legal and good. I hope you are not defined by the arbitrary conditions of your flesh, desire, and belief.

I was born in a long state full of trees and sea. I hope your oceans are full and blue. I hope your lungs are big and clean. I hope you have beautiful homes, to cry in, to eat in, to fill up with memories.

Do not forget the grass bursting through cracks in black asphalt. Do not forget the spicy smell of nasturtium flowers, do not forget the feel of old tennis shoes. Do not forget how good it is to hold hands.

I hope you are better than I am.

photo credit: artolog via photopin cc

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.

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.

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!