Days 30,31

In Prague my pace of writing has sharply improved. I believe this is because I am sharing living space with not one, but two other writers, and I feel compelled to outproduce them. It is hard to understate how petty and competitive writers are, especially young ones. However, my pace of drinking has also greatly increased, because that's all that anybody does here, and because the friend I am visiting, Ben Zuerlein (a fellow graduate of the Boston University program), is the Lance Armstrong of drinking (in his words), and I can't help but try to keep up with him.

Prague is very beautiful, although it also feels like the sort of place where a person might spiral into horrible despair. All everybody does is drink (I can not overstate this) and there is a kind of cheery nihilism that goes through the culture, to the point that it even infects their civic institutions. But if one is not cheery, it can quickly become maddening. For example, the tallest building in Prague, the television tower, has giant sculptures of babies crawling up and down it, and from a distance they look "like ants crawling up and down a penis", according to the artist responsible for them. It is important always to keep in mind that this is the home of Franz Kafka. Prague clearly shaped him -- or perhaps he shaped Prague. In any case, so far I have been cheery.

One of Ben's roommates is a Bulgarian girl named Tanya. She has an extremely deep voice, cold blue eyes, and she chain-smokes repentantly. She plays at being constantly bored with whatever is going on around her, but it is only an affectation, if not something like a comic routine. She is a writer too, and between her, myself, and Ben, we have a very nice dynamic, in which Ben and I babble nonsense and she breaks in occasionally to inform us that we are babbling nonsense. I think I will have a very good time here.

Days 28,29

The previous two days were my last in Spain, possibly for the rest of my life, and I unfortunately spent them in alternating states of melancholy and horrible indigestion. The first ailment lingered from the leaving of Kelsey. The second was from eating an entire pizza by myself, which I'd drenched beforehand with pepper-infused olive oil. As far as my actions and their consequences go, I regret nothing. In any case, in these last two days I wrote less than two thousand words. My pace has totally been wrecked, and I can only hope that fleeing Spain will correct it. It's still quite certain that I will reach 30,000 words before I leave, but that is not enough. I hope to get to 40,000, even though 50,000 was the original aspiration.

For my last day here I ate the aforementioned pizza and went to the Sagrada Familia again. This was the third time that I'd been there, and I can say without shame that it is my favorite marvel that I have seen in all of Spain.

One of my very favorite parts about it is watching people try to photograph it, typically with themselves standing in front of it, which inevitably turns out to be a comically useless endeavor. The Sagrada Familia is perhaps the most unphotographable structure ever built by human beings. This is partly because it's so stupidly large that it can't possibly fit within the length and width of a camera's lens. But it's also because of a different kind of bigness, or muchness, which comes from the sheer quantity of intricate detail that is general all over the building, as well as the multitudes of dominating fixtures (the crucified Christ, the scene with the Wise Men, those eight terrifying towers, etc. even the damn crane that hangs over it, reminding you, in case you can't believe it, that the church isn't even finished yet), none of which act as a singular focal point of the work, which is why I think it's so damn alarming to come across it no matter how many times a person sees it. There is the sense that it was intended for eyes of greater vision than the eyes of human beings, and of their cameras too, of course.

What a mighty trick to play, to build a tourist trap that's impossible to photograph! I still don't see God when I look at the thing. I don't think anyone does, really. I think all that people see, and this includes myself, too, is a quantity of space that they desperately desire to squeeze into one small, manageable, frame.

Because of the aforementioned melancholy, indigestion, etc. I find myself leaving Spain on something of a sour note. But I think I will look back on this period as one of the most important of my life. I doubt that I have come anywhere close to conveying that sense, that muchness of experience, within this blog. But how could I ever?

I go to Prague next.

Days 22-27

For the last five or so days I discontinued the blog and took a break from writing, save for one late-night incident in which I wrote around two thousand words. This was because an old friend of mine, Kelsey, came to visit me in Barcelona during this period.

Kelsey's appearance meant that for the first time in three weeks I was not alone in a foreign country. Naturally I have had interactions, nights out, acquaintanceships, etc. with countless people over the course of that time, but in all of those cases there was an overriding sense of novelty and also of transience, and as a result any social bond I'd created over those three weeks was not enough to cut to the fundamental root of the aloneness that I'd been cultivating. Of course Kelsey cut right through the root.

When a person is alone in an unfamiliar place, it is an adventure. But when a person is with familiar company, it becomes a vacation. Everything becomes easier. With just one other familiar person it's possible to create a shared cultural bubble, a zone of safety, that I think has the effect of impeding or at least dulling the intensity of one's experience. And as a result there is little to note of these last five days. For the most part I brought Kelsey to places that I had already seen. We also went to a bar that looked a lot like the Rainforest Cafe. I was incredibly glad to have her here with me, but it was also of the utmost importance to my time abroad that at some point she be gone, which now she is.

The force of being together in this foreign place may have had one significant effect on us (i.e. myself and Kelsey), which was that there was a sudden clarification of the relationship between myself and this girl I'd known for the last seven or so years, for better or for worse, and as a result I will probably never see or speak to her again, although it is not possible for me to go any further on that subject. All I have written in this post has been hideously abstract. In truth, I can not go to the heart of what has transpired in these last few days, and so I can only write these limp little platitudes.

On the last night Kelsey was here I took her to the Plaza de Espanya, where we found that the road had been closed off and that there was a massive number of people waiting in front of the palace and fountain. We went and waited with them, although we had absolutely no idea what was happening, and we wound up waiting there for over an hour and a half, not knowing what was to come and having no ability to find out, in a really truly hilarious Waiting for Godot type situation. It turned out we were at some kind of Catalonian national rally. A massive projector played a film that we couldn't understand a word of, there was a massive fireworks display, and everybody in the crowd lit sparklers and held them in the air. And then there were two people in the middle of it all, two stupid Americans, who did nothing but turn to look at each other and laugh.

 

Day Twenty-One

Today I wrote about one thousand words. Moving along, but could be moving faster.

Pamplona is a dreary place. In a way it feels as if I'm not away from home anymore. There is an unshakable sense of ordinariness here, and it is not to my liking. This hostel reinforces it, with its teeming body of middle-aged people. Apparently it is a popular pit stop for people walking El Camino de Santiago, a long route through the north of Spain that has been in use by pilgrims for centuries. Naturally these walkers are not pilgrims. They are dorky British tourists.

For about ten minutes I did talk to one girl from Latvia who was absolutely delightful. I told her that I was a writer, and that I studied fiction writing in school for four years, and she burst out laughing. She said, "For four years! I could teach you in ten minutes! First you sit down. Then, uh, you write. Lesson over!" 

She asked me what my book was about, and I told her, and she said, "You should make it more science fiction. Why don't you have them go to Mars, or have one of them be an alien? How about: guy goes to Mars and writes love letters to girl from Mars to Earth. Then the girl flies to Mars. Her spaceship crashes, though, and she dies, and then he kills himself. Oh, you say you are not writing science fiction?"

"I could write a book," she concluded. "I think writing a book wouldn't be very hard. You just make things up. For example, today I made a paper boat and sailed it on a pond. But the boat crashed into rocks. So now what I do is I pretend the boat was real. I say, I was on a boat. In Spain! But a great wind came, and I was wrecked on a shore, and then ... I have to work it out from there, but you see? Easy." I agreed with her on all her points.

Days 19,20

For Day Nineteen I did not write a blog post out of shame, as fiction-wise I wrote nothing either. It was also a very uneventful day in general. I rode the train to Pamplona, got totally lost in Pamplona, and then once I found the hostel I went to sleep. On the train I sat next to the worst-smelling man in the world.

However, on Day Twenty I wrote 2000 words, which almost makes up for my prior productive failures. I consider it an important comeback. As I expected, it is easy to write in Pamplona, because there is nothing to do here. It is the most boring city I have ever been in, other than Utica, and at least in Utica there are crimes happening. Also, all the other residents at the hostel are fifty years of age and older, and I've found that talking to old people is not something I'm interested in, for better or for worse. So for the next three days or so I will be bored, and hopefully I will write a great deal.

To manufacture some excitement,  I walked out of the hostel into the city with no map and no directions, took off down a random street, and looked out for something interesting.. I wound up discovering a very long trail that took me through some of rural areas of Pamplona. I saw a ranch filled with miniature horses, and I smelled more than shit than I've smelled in a long time. It was very nice, and I felt as though I were authentically in Spain for the first time. Then, coming back, I got so lost that I thought I would never be found. But I am getting used to being lost. At this point I almost prefer it to knowing where I'm going. And it also seems that, as if by some mastery of fate, I always find my way.

There is more to say, but right now I wish to write.

Day Eighteen

Today I wrote about four sentences. I am desperately hoping that leaving Madrid will improve my writing habits. If it doesn't, then I might be screwed, or if anything I will have to start holing myself up in a dark, sad room until words start coming out. I am a firm believer in negative self-conditioning. In any case, I am still on track to write 20,000 words before the halfway point of my trip. That is my current (modest) quota.

I went out for lunch with the Brazilian psychiatrist girl. I still don't know if she and the other Brazilian are seeing each other, but in any case I think she has a crush on me, to no significance, of course, since as I write this I am on my way out of Madrid and out of her life forever. But it was a pleasure talking to her. She and her friend both have a remarkable knowledge of the American arts. She has seen all of the good movies that I've seen; she listens to all the music that I listen to, and more beyond that. I told her that she is a better American than most Americans are. I can't remember her name. I never had a chance to say good-bye to her. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

In the evening I went back to El Parque de el Retiro, as it is my favorite place i have seen in Madrid. On a Sunday evening the place becomes like a circus. Street performers and pickpockets come out in droves. I saw an old man in a velvet wizard costume blowing an orange whistle. He was inexplicable. Again I went very deep into the park, but then darkness began to fall, and I didn't know how to get out from where I came in, and I quickly got lost and utterly panicked. Bats flew in and out of the trees. At one point I think I began to run. I felt as though I was in great danger, although there were still many people and families in the park with me. It was an odd sensation.

Before this panic happened, I walked behind a little boy and an older man, the boy's grandfather, presumably, as they kicked a soccer ball back and forth to each other. The little boy was chattering away, but the old man didn't say anything. Instead he concentrated on the ball. Sometimes the little boy would put too much juice behind his kick, and the ball would go flying toward one of the other walkers, a man pushing a baby carriage, say, who would stop whatever he was doing and gently kick it back to the boy. I stayed behind them for a very long time

Day Seventeen

Today, again, I wrote only five hundred words. I am choosing to blame this drop of productivity on my living in Madrid, where I have been tempted, time and time again, toward bad habits, particularly getting drunk with anybody who asks me to get drunk with them. Tomorrow I go to Pamplona, and there for five days I will try to live the life of a grandmother, more or less.

But today I went to the Museum of Reina Sofia. It was a stupidly massive place, and it wore me out almost instantly, but if anything I managed to see Picasso's Guernica, which I practically walked into without realizing and which stopped me dead in my tracks. I have much to say about that painting, but here it is bound to come out sounding idiotic. I will try something brief. My greatest fascination with it is the joining of the Modernist aesthetic with political activism, the only such masterpiece of this kind, as the main line of Modernists desired to abandon such "trivial" concerns, and in doing so, I think, damaged the capacity of art to matter (whatever that means), but Picasso, in Guernica, was able to bear the exhausting complexity of modernity while keeping a clear enough focus to, in a word, say something. So that was nice.

At night I went out with two Brazilian psychiatrists, a man and a woman who may or may not be seeing each other, who are here for some psychiatry conference. I wanted to try to seduce the girl, but I was afraid of what would happen if I attempted to do so, so in the end we all remained friends, the three of us. The male psychiatrist is scheduled to give a speech at the conference, and he must give it in English, but his English is very poor, to put it mildly, and so he is very nervous. I helped him pronounce some of the tougher words. Apparently the one that gives him the most trouble is "failure." He says it so poorly that it makes me laugh every time. I'm sure his speech will go fine.

Neither of them spoke much English, and I speak no Portuguese, and so our conversations were, by necessity, somewhat elemental, although we attempted a very long banter about modern trends in psychiatry, and on Sigmund Freud's addiction to cocaine. But in any case, I have come to like such limitations. They create a certain intensity in one's speech, as one tries to say the closest to the essence of what one thinks or feels without allowing misunderstanding to creep in. For example, there is an absolutely beautiful Turkish girl at the hostel who I have spoken to a number of times. Her English is virtually non-existent, so the main thrust of our communication has been to smile at each other and laugh at our mutual incomprehension. And what more could anybody want?

Day Sixteen

Today I only wrote 500 words. Could I be slipping? It is possible. But hopefully today I will recover, and then some. The only reason I am here is to write this book. If I fail to write this book, then these two months will have been a failure. This is what I must remind myself.

I woke up hung over today, and so mostly laid around through the afternoon. The most substantial thing I did was buy a plane ticket to London, to see the girl who told me it would be impossible to see me. But then there are very few things that are impossible.

In the evening I went out with the girl who I'd met yesterday, the one from LA who travels on her parents' money. I found that I enjoyed her company very much, and I am glad for it. There are few better uses of one time than to weaken one's prejudices. On the other hand, she said the main reason she enjoys traveling is because she can very easily have sex with random men, so I won't go so far as to say that I admire her character.

Later I met another American who is traveling for three weeks. He is from Florida and works for Lockheed Martin. I believe he is the most American American to have ever Americaned. He fist pumped and hollered and flirted with women who wanted nothing to do with him. One of my hostelmates, a Frenchman, said that this American is what Europeans imagine all Americans are like, more or less. I thought about it, and decided that he wasn't very far off.

It has occurred to me that I am a very surprising species to people who have a certain conception of what Americans are like, and that perhaps I am  not doing a bad job of representing my country, or at least this is how I delude myself.

Day Fifteen

Today I wrote about one thousand words. This is the pace that I have settled into, for better or for worse.

I went to the cathedral in Madrid today. I went inside of it. It was the first time I'd been in a church since I was nine years old. At one point I tripped over a pew. I sat in the cathedral for a while and tried to think about what it means to believe in God, but I didn't get very far. I remembered a time back when I was in sixth grade. A girl from my neighborhood who I barely knew called my house and invited me to Vacation Bible School. For some reason I had a desire to go, but my parents said I couldn't, and in the end I didn't protest very much. The girl and her family must have believed I was going to hell.

I went out to the bars with some people from the hostel. There were two Irishmen who tortuously explained why Guinness is only good in Ireland. They also aggressively asserted Irishmen can drink more than anybody else on Earth. Yet they were very intelligent and engaging when not talking about drinking, a subject which dropped their IQs by about thirty-five points.

 There was also a girl from Los Angeles, twenty-two years old I think, who said she has been to Europe "like seven times". She travels the world mainly to go to clubs and to shop. Naturally I despised her, but then I attempted to check my resentment, because if my parents had a huge pile of filthy Los Angeles money and let me do whatever I wanted with it, would I do anything different, really? This line of thought wasn't helpful. I still do not like her.

Day Fourteen

Today I wrote around one thousand words. I would have written more, but I made myself sick from eating pizza, and as it happens I cannot write while sick from eating pizza. In any case, I am nearing 15,000 words, and should have 20,000 finished within a week.

The pizza that made me sick was the high point of the day, for better or for worse. It cost five euros and was covered, from head to foot, in lamb. I ate the entire thing on my own without shame. The place I ordered it from was a total hole in the wall, but they made wonderful pizza. The best thing about Spain, it seems, is that it is impossible not to find good food.

But little else happened today. I walked a great deal around the city, enough to become quite nicely exhausted. Perhaps the most compelling revelation of the day happened not in Spain, but over the Internet. I will not be seeing the girl from the UK, Claire, again, as it turns out she has a boyfriend, a very interesting (although rather common) twist. And so I said good-bye to her, more or less. I feel as though I am always saying good-bye.

Day Thirteen

Today I wrote about one thousand words, around 950, to be exact, which is not enough, but at least means I am not obligated toward self-flagellation. But I must write more.

I went to El Parque de Retiro in the afternoon, which was one of the most beautiful parks that I ever been in, an absolutely sprawling place, big enough that there are long stretches in which there are no humans to be found, and so it is possible for one to be alone there. There is also a feral cat colony there, although feral is perhaps too strong a word. They are a bunch of very clumsy and skittish park cats. There is also a small colony of peacocks, and an abundance of crows, or at least I think they are crows. Whatever they are, I became enamored with them in a way that is impossible to feel about the crows in the US, which are pretty much universally viewed as awful pests. I think the reason is because these Spanish crows are solitary animals, whereas the crows in New York travel in murders. This reflects a very common observation, I think, which is that there is something noble about the solitary individual, and something nasty about crowds.

I made the horrible mistake of going out to a pub crawl with the hostel-mates. Sadly, I do not think I like the people I share my living space with. I discovered that the hapless New Zealander, the big NBA lover whose passport was stolen, is for some reason hated by everybody at the hostel, and that they mock him cruelly whenever he is not around. But why? There is something about him that makes him easy to hate, although I cannot identify what that quality is. In any case, I feel as though I am back in freshman year of college, with the cliques and the bullies and all, and it is not a good feeling. There is nothing I despise more than bullies. But then I do not like the big New Zealander very much either.

I ended up walking back early from the pub crawl by myself, and on my way I was approached by one of the whores on La Calle de Mordena, and I spoke to her briefly. There is an abundance of whores in Madrid, and a few of them are actually beautiful, although this whore was not beautiful. I told her I could not accept her services, and when she asked why I told her it was because I was poor. I said it with a smile, and she told me that I was crazy, that it was crazy to smile about being poor, and I told her that she was mistaken, and then I told her good night.

What in the world am I doing talking to whores? My mind has been poisoned by too many Dostoeyevsky novels. It's an incredible wonder that I haven't been robbed.

Day Twelve

Today I wrote around one thousand words, 1100 to be exact. The project is giving me trouble, admittedly, and it is at a crucial stretch. The story has gone somewhat adrift. But I find that if one is lost, sometimes it's best simply to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, despite what they may say otherwise.

Today was an uneventful day. I have taken to going to Starbucks in the afternoons, which as I understand it is a kind of mortal sin when one is abroad, but truthfully there is no escaping the Americanization of a city like Madrid, and so I consider it better simply to embrace it. In keeping with this idea, last night I went to an Irish pub and watched American football for three hours. They sold Guinness for about seven American dollars per pint, but there were free potato chips. I can not bear to be away from football.

W.G Sebald writes of ordering french fries at a McDonald's in Belgium and "feeling like a criminal wanted worldwide." I do not feel this way, although perhaps I should, or will.

In my room there is a giant New Zealander who has worn the same Tim Duncan jersey for the last three days. Apparently his passport was stolen from his hostel locker (!), and so he will be trapped in Madrid for a total of three weeks. He has been here for ten days now. He has come to despise this city. He sleeps in until three in the afternoon and goes to bed around midnight. He drifts aimlessly, as though in Purgatory. He is someone I can easily mock -- you are in Madrid, you whiny lout, enjoy yourself! But in a small way I feel the same as him.

Hopefully today I will do something very "authentically" Spanish.

Days 10,11

Over the past two days I wrote nothing. This means that if I write nothing today after finishing this post, I will have to commit honorable suicide.

On day ten I planned to rest before heading to Madrid, but instead I went out with a Russian girl named Lilya and a Turkish girl named Basak. The two of them had become friends at the hostel, but their temperaments were so shockingly different that they argued with each other the entire time I was out with them, which was uncomfortable at first, but eventually became rather amusing. Basak is a skateboarder and architecture student who told me she never slept, and so far as I could tell all Lilya wanted to do was sleep, which eventually she did, and then I was left alone with Basak, with whom I got along with very well, and who gave me an impromptu architecture lesson through the streets of Barcelona. We went to see a very striking building that is lighted blue and red at night and looks like a two-hundred foot tall penis, or cucumber, depending on who you ask.

On day eleven I rode the bus to Madrid. Buses in Spain are the same as buses in the United States, except that there was a TV screen hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the aisle that every single passenger slammed their head into, except, miraculously, for me, and so for me it was an extremely funny thing. I sat next to a Mexican named Diego who smelled incredibly bad but who was very friendly, and who told me much about his life. Apparently he had not had a job for the last two years, but kept finding girlfriends who were willing to finance him completely. He said to me, "I used to do crazy stuff for girls, but now I've got it figured out. I find girls who will do crazy stuff for me." The last girlfriend he lived with he did not have a sexual relationship with. Her entire family had died in a car accident, and so she'd wanted Diego to remain as a kind of brother to her, and she supported him like a loving and dutiful sister. Why did he tell me these things? Who knows? The TV screen that everybody hit their heads on played Looney Tunes episodes for about nine hours.

I planned to go to sleep as soon as arriving in Madrid, but instead I went out with some Argentineans who were much too cool for me, and we went to a tapas bar where I ate too much and made myself sick.

Today I must write.

Day Nine

Today I wrote about a thousand words. In my first ten days here, all told, I will have written a bit over 10,000 words total, which will put me on pace, of course, for 30,000 by the end of the month, which would be enough to complete the first draft of the project. For the following day I plan to write nothing and to mostly stay in the hostel. I must rest before heading to Madrid.

I went out for the night with a girl named Claire, who is from the UK. She is looking for jobs in Barcelona as an English teacher. She is also an aspiring novelist, although I get the sense that she has not developed the appropriate discipline to complete her project, which she says she has been working on for the last three years. But then it is impossible to know.

In any case, we got along very well, and her company may well have broken the anhedonia that I have been feeling the last few days. I have found that it can be excruciating to be by oneself in a place like this. I arrived here, in part, with the goal of learning how to be alone, to be exalted by solitude. But that has not happened. Instead it seems I am learning the opposite.

Claire's flight back home was the following morning, but there is a small chance that I will see her again before I leave Spain. I think I have an affinity for the British.

I also went to the Parc Guell, which is a truly gorgeous tourist trap.

Day Eight

Today I wrote around 1500 words, which brings me back to pace, more or less, although I worry if I have confined myself to a quota rather than letting the words flow freely, or however one wants to describe that mumbo jumbo, but in any case I am moving again at the proper speed, which is all that matters.

The melancholy that I'd noted over the previous two days reached its apex today. I had a very strange and unsettling experience around dinnertime, in which my will weakened to the point of paralysis, and I was overcome with a sensation very close to Sartre's nausea, although perhaps lacking the philosophical effects. In my mind it is a long roiling drama, but for the blog I will just say that I was incapable of doing so much as sitting down at a restaurant. I wandered the streets of Barcelona, gnawed by hunger (I had eaten nothing that day), tortured by my own self. It is pertinent to note that the only thing that anybody does in this city is eat at restaurants. To be unable to sit down at a restaurant in Barcelona is to be the gravest sort of invalid. But I could not do it, even as I had fifty euros to spend in my pocket, and as my only concern in the entire world at that moment was to have something to eat. 

The whores in this city come out early, at around five o clock, well before the sun goes down. They attract your attention by blowing kisses at you. They can blow the loudest kisses I have ever heard. The sound echoes off the buildings.

I think I grow tired of this place. I leave for Madrid in two days.

Days 6,7

Over the course of these two days I wrote around 2500 words, slightly under the pace I had originally set, but certainly better than the days immediately before. In any case, I am on pace to have written 10,000 words in my first ten days here, and if I continue in this manner, the first draft of the novel will be done before I leave Spain, with time to spare to begin rewriting.

I went to see el Parc de Labyrint on Day Six, which is a beautiful, somewhat bizarre and sprawling garden that features an enormous hedge maze, an enclosure for ducks, statues of Greek gods, rock waterfalls, and man-made ponds. It lies very close to the rural hills, which I could view well from the park, and I had the incredible urge to climb them. I constantly have the desire to stand on top of things. I think this is because I am a Capricorn.

On Day Seven I saw the Sagrada Familia, which is certainly the most incredible thing I have seen so far in this place. It is supposed to be a church, but it appears to be a monument to the rise of man as God over himself. It is a beautiful nightmare, almost something out of science fiction, and I plan to go and see it again. It is not yet complete, and so massive cranes tower over it. I would like to imagine what it would be like to be one of the construction workers on the Sagrada Familia. They are acting as the tools of an artist. What a thing to be!

For the past three days or so I have been suffering depressive episodes, particularly at night before bed. In a way it is shameful to even mention this, given how enviable my current circumstances are, but it seems that my brain does not care whether I am in a basement in Allston on the beaches of Spain. They say that happiness is a state of mind, but I can say with certainty that happiness is a fortunate mixture of chemicals. Aristotle wrote that a melancholic temperament is a precursor to genius, and I hope this is true, because otherwise melancholy is the most useless thing in the world.  

Days 4,5

Over the course of two days I wrote very little, in part because I am at a difficult stretch in the project, the turning point of the novel, as it were, and also because I was distracted by the temptations of Barcelona. Specifically I drank too much on Day 4 and so was too hung over to write on Day 5.

I am struggling with time on this trip. If I stay in and write, then I am denying myself the experience of life in Barcelona. But if I go out, then I am wasting this essential period of time that I will freely be able to write. I presented this dilemma to one of the hostelmates and he answered, "You Only Live Once." But I already knew that..

I befriended a Chilean graphic artist whose name I cannot remember. He was about ten years older than me and he was gay, which wound up being problematic. But he was travelling all through Europe and also, he told me, trying to make into reality his dream of immigrating from Chile to Spain. I went out drinking with him and an older man he'd met on Grinder (who took to calling me Peter Parker, which I chose to take as a compliment), and it was all enjoyable enough, but over the course of the night the Chilean developed the desire to sleep with me, and the next day he was very overt, even aggressive about it, presumably with genuine hopes of persuading me in his favor. Surely I would have slept with him (if only out of politeness) if not for the fact that I'm uninterested in men, which was mutually understood from the beginning. In truth, his advances made me angry, because they had the obvious effect of poisoning our comraderie, brief though it was, and in the end I could hardly wait for him to leave the hostel for good. I can't remember his name, and honestly I'm glad that I can't.

The ambulance sirens in Barcelona sound very different from in America. To my ears they sound almost beautiful. It sounds as if they are repeating some foreign three-syllable phrase. It might be that the only thing I remember from Spain is the sound of the ambulances.