Day One

Today was not really a day, but more a nebulous mass of time spent at airports totaling close to twenty four hours.

Today I wrote about 2,500 words. I wrote them at the Toronto Airport, where there are public iPads everywhere, practically an iPad for every person, and the iPads tell you your flight information and let you surf the Internet and encourage you to buy liquor from the airport bars.

I spent about three hours writing. My quota initially was to spend four hours each day writing and to write at least two thousand words within those four hours, but now it seems possible that I am able to do more. But this might quickly change.

Canadians apologize for everything, even for things that aren't their fault. This is called politeness, but really it's anti-social behavior. A woman, a passenger on my flight to Toronto, apologized to me when I couldn't fit my suitcase in the overhead bin. Who are you? Did you design this plane? In any case, I forgave her.

On the flight to Barcelona I sat in first class due to Air Canada's gross mismanagement. I've never sat in first class before. I sat next to a woman named Tara, who is a cocktail waitress in Los Vegas. She is taking a weeklong tour of Europe by herself. Within the first hour of the flight our conversation became suddenly intimate. She told me that being a cocktail waitress drains her emotionally and that she has nothing to say to her co-workers. She has a degree in fine arts. She has an obsession with Ernest Hemingway, like many other people, and we were able to bond over this, as countless others probably have in the past. She told me that she is afraid that she will regret the way she has lived her life up to now. She says this to me in the middle of sky after knowing me for an hour and a half. This is what first class is like. Eventually I fell asleep on the plane, but the woman, Tara, did not, and I woke up four hours later to find her still awake and suddenly a stranger to me, as if we'd never spoken a word before, and so it seemed the time we spent in different states of consciousness had created a void between us.

We flew over the long, brown mountains of Spain, as Hemingway describes them in one of his most famous stories, but they were far less brown and less long than I had pictured them in my imagination, and I suppose I have him to blame for that.

Tomorrow I am meeting the woman from first class, Tara, at the Pablo Picasso museum, at three o clock. I was wrong about the so-called void, as I am about so many others things.

For the next ten days I sleep in the top bunk of a bunkbed.