I have found my sense of direction intact. The same boys tag the train stations of Córdoba as Madrid as Toledo as Bilbao. Outside Madrid, nobody lives in the middle of Spain, it’s the most desolate region in all of Western Europe. War too recent, angle to the sun too acute. Nobody leaves the train. Are those olive trees? Are those? 

I’m tired, I’m proud of this exhaustion, why shouldn’t I be. It proves I will die of genetic exhaustion after hurtling myself a piddling distance through time, and a hundred years after my death, no one will ever know I existed. Which mountains are those? Suffering slight inconvenience on the principle of moneyed curiosity. I must see this country because I must see. It’s the least I can do, self-sophistication is a hell of a drug. It’s the most I can do, ever, for right now, myopic youth, learn to see with discernment. It’s so virtuous, has anybody been sainted for alertness? Discerning which is the correct receptacle in which to deposit today’s plastic waterbottle. Those sweet cows, I’ll go vegetarian for real this time, when I go home. Nodding to the homeless winos in the cellars of Toledo and then averting my eyes and blushing. Do I make the Spain better by being here? Why would I? Cross-language exchange and a successfully defended Mediterranean reputation for hospitality. Tourist dollars. The anarchist in me groans. 

Do I make it worse? Environmentally, yes. But I would be consumer no matter where I am. Guilty, guilt, a byproduct of futurism, and very stabilizing, that’s why they breed it, if guilt moved us like spite did, all the governments in the world be slaughtered, for making us sin on their behalf. But then what? O science, O fiction, you are so stingy with the utopias. O life with your petty, petty victories. 

If Spain didn’t exist, I would still see my own desire, a chained thing encircled by beaten-down grass. My duty to move the stake when I can. Stroke its chin. Starve it? I’m not capable of thinking of that. Yet. My pet desires!

But O I’m tired! The solar romance of Spain! Why do we get tired so easily, half a day, forty-five minutes of concentration in the shade? Futile, tragic, but what a relief, to briefly submerge. In puzzles, in worries. That’s your personal history: your bath of filthy hesitations. 

I missed the lilacs at home again, as I do every year. I will have to make do with lavender in my soap, as long as it smells purple. And I missed so many birthdays. Is there anything more tragic than a grandmother waiting for you to call? 

Why is it so much work to rest? I rest my case. I rest assured. A headache digging holes in my lobes, I hope it finds what it’s looking for. The rest of what it’s looking for. 

I’ll invent rest. I’ll go back through recent memories, see what story I can extract and put to bed. The incense burning in the blue tiled reception. The overhead of umbrellas

the handpainted flowers. The mosque-cathedral with the candy arches, Mezquita-Cathedral de Córdoba. Brown and white. I can’t see the forest for the delight of Suess pillars on a grid. 

Spin, parallel, spin, perpendicular, spin, spin, spin, arched tunnels of mathematical purity, vision therapy, the eye glides into gloworm REM behavior. 

The arquitecture of the body submits to sublimity, ascends. The ten-storey foghorn organ bellows disciplines. The most beautiful building I have ever been in. The most perfect place I have been, the Mezquita-Cathedral in Córdoba. 

The synagoge dressed all in white, Santa María Blanca. Ecstasy, on the creaky wooden floor, before El Greco’s thirteen apostles in an air-conditioned room. 

I’d like to write a book with a potrait of each character painted by El Greco. Not that I want to write a book about the thirteen apostles. I want to write a book and have El Greco paint the characters. 

The impossible always seems perverse. 

Now I want a sound barrier of trees between the farm and the highway. Perverse? Need to study conflict resolution for twenty years. Need to study land back. Deeper and deeper into the books. If you love somebody, ask them a question.

A budding interest in carpentry, peeling the bark of cedars with a spoon. I want to raise from the ground a compost toilet. I want to be old in my old place and to know everyone at my deathbed. I wanted a daughter yesterday. I want to work again. The Earth is strong in those who work it. So not me. 

Isn’t this why I came? To want to go back? Looking for the pleasure of anonymity, until it was no longer a novelty, wonder on, wander principle, is there anything less original. But I really did grovel and marvel at every bridge-by-Romans. Every ruins-by-Visigoths. 

I dreamed last night of a weeping orchestra, a chick flick, friends clutching hats, I can see their back teeth as they say, Please let me come back. Please let me stay. I will make happiness fall out of your ears. Hugs for thank-yous, I guess that’s all I really wanted.

Then the back of a taxi, in the leering square at nightfall, yellow light on the stones. Tattoos of bears on the chest, hairy and flattered to see you looking. They bat their claws, oh stop it you. Friends in unlikely places. 

Really, really unlikely, as in, guess what, tomorrow my best friend Sarah arrives in Bilbao. !!!!!!!! And we take on the fashionable cities together. Together is the cradle of comfort. Just in time, too. This season of solo backpacking is burning itself out. Yes it’s backpacking, even when I take trains. But soon, so soon, it ends. Bilbao in sight. 

Snail life, crawling across countryside, Backpack full of life, traveling, life, which is made up of lists, quantified by the severity of heat on the arms. Life in the present tense. List of images, fleeting, fleeing. What else do you want? On the knife’s edge of:

• contentment

• exhaustion

• need, which needs? Need Swiss army knife to replace current backpack kitchen. I carry:

• lemon juice

• garlic salt

• miniature vial of olive oil

I lunch in the park, lying down, facing up, leaves of green hair. Heat recorded only in the solicitous winks of cars passing. At rest but in motion. Where are these patterns coming from?

Birds identified:

• peacocks

• baby peacocks (look like ducklings)

• ducks which look suspiciously like mallards

• Small Tern

• everywhere, pigeons. Where are pigeons from?

• swallows

The swallows in the Real Alcazar, Seville. Hundreds strong. Vortex swirling around an empty courtyard. Tiles in the terrace of the baths. It hurts to be this happy. Disapproving tiles in the Room of the Ceiling of the Catholic Kings. Why does it hurt to be this happy? I am concerned for the health of the koi fish in the Garden of the Dancing Ladies. It turns out they are just karp fish and they are supposed to be that ugly. Vital in the garden of a fortress, a millenium’s peace, it hurts, you are close to a moment where it is good to die, it is not the peace that is worth dying for, it is you, you are the moment. Admiring the pale shade of a pomegranate tree. You admit that your nostalgia is not true, it’s a slogan to brighten your impotence, see:

• [N/A]
• A bruised slogan.

• how much money do you have to have to fortress a peace for a thousand years?
• How much bravery?
• Arrogance?

• [N/A]

I do not take what I can not carry, conversations, burdens, hardcover books. I strengthen by No and my No thanks. What else do I want?

• [N/A]

I spend most of my reading hours on trains. Authors are distorted windows. What is distorted? The train moves fast.

Now I’m in Córdoba, with the Synagogue and the Cathedral-Mosque. After so many days of Jesus Christ the ever-suffering, Jesus Christ the Tormented, Jesus Christ the Man in Agony, Jesus Christ, How could you see That Guy Suffer Any Longer Without Thinking, That’s Just How I Feel. It’s a relief to visit other places of worship. At the risk of getting dogmatic with the Catholicism.

I haven’t seen much of the city yet. I did see a weird amount of cats in the Jewish quarter. I started counting once I had seen reached seven cats. Finally I discover that neighborhood is a ‘cat sanctuary,’ which means all the cats I saw were either sickly or hooligans. Buenas noches.

Often we have to slog through some exposition in order to get to the juicy bits of the story that were promised in the title, what we thought was the case of the brutal, but perhaps solicited, four-day hangover, was actually, hold your breath, covid, yes, exhale, what I’m telling you is, I spent most of the past week quarantining in a hotel room in Lisbon. It was also during this phase that in life that I learned I cannot afford to order Uber Eats more than, like, once, ever.

I guess quarantining is a skill though, as my brother reminded me, the last time I was in quarantine, I was literally jumping out my window to go on runs, call it a nervous tic.

This time around was a nice time, I slept for an average of fifteen hours a day, I was able to conduct experiments regarding my body and microdoses of caffeine, also sugar, I moved on projects that impartial observers would have assumed were statues fixed in a state of becoming, half flower, half bud, it was calm. It is unlikely to be that calm ever again, I will change again before that happens, and it will be a different calm, and if I recognize the future when it comes to me, it will only be because of its faint resemblance to the past.

It wasn’t all nice, unfortunately I am being an optimist, for example I’m still fatigued, vulnerable to weird shit going down, here ends the exposition, let me tell you know about the shenanigans in Faro.

Faro is on the very southern tip of Portugal and it was where I went to chill when quarantine was quarant-end. For the first time in the history of the past five days it took me forever to fall asleep, sleep would be a strong word actually, I dozed and here entered two malicious movie directors, perhaps two sisters competing, who can quickest deliver me to hell, I was granted two of the most back-to-back vivid nightmares I’ve ever had.

One nightmare was the color yellow. It slowly swamped my point of view and I only saw yellow. I can’t really describe why it was horrifying, except that I knew 1) yellow is death, and 2) it was a sick mucus-yellow.

The second nightmare was about a nest of three mice. They were eating something, and no one has ever accused mice having good table manners. One of the three mice pushed its way on top of the other two, then lunged forward, which is when I realized this wasn’t a mouse, but a snake with mouse hair, it elongated its body with the same soulless mouse face on the front, like a medieval painting, and lunged at the camera [which is me]. Freeze frame, then I re-enter civilization and get on a long-distance bus with an unaffected attitude, just kidding, I was bugging and I have finally come to see the wisdom of neck pillows.

Ok, so now with that restful interlude, I arrive in Faro. It smells like algae and fried food, salt and sandalwood, the seabirds who live on the Roman walls are having a row with the seabirds who inside the Arabian archways, a fiddler crab waves to me on the way in.

At the hostel, I am sad to see there are a bunch of cops outside, but it is too hot to be acute about anything, shocked or curious. With understandable delay, and a few false starts, I am able to make my way upstairs to the bedroom. The room is empty except somebody is in the bathroom. A second later the big Hostel Boss comes up behind me and asks if I know who is in the bathroom. I do not.

Then the guy who was in the bathroom comes out. He was in the shower and goes and lies down on a bed. There’s nothing for it, I am compelled to talk to him, just as I am compelled to read, and breathe, call me a glutton for people and their words. I don’t suppose the police are looking for you, that’s my opener, Let the fun continue, he replies, this isn’t such a suspicious answer, a police visit could be fun if you are being ironic, maybe this has been going on all day, maybe he’s handy with the banter. I notice as he’s lying down he’s sweating all over his nice clean sheets.

Actually, by coincidence, he is the one the police are looking for, and I tipped him off to it, not that it did him any good, within five minutes they’re in our room and I’m on my way out, and he’s on his way to the slammer, many people know why but I am not one of those people.

With urgent need to leave the bad vibes, I go to see the bones of 1200 monks.

Why did they do this?

Extra metal, The Chapel of Bones was right next to a playground.

It makes you wonder, Did all twelve hundred monks die together, perhaps with the noble cause of donating their bodies and souls so that the church might forevermore charge tourists 2 euros each to go see their bones, what a racket, and therefore God could never accuse them of not being pragmatic and taking care of themselves, even in death, or did they die one by one and did that donation make it easier to die, with an open heart, like you’re going to the party? I don’t know much about bones, but these seem rather… harvested, it’s all skulls and long limbs bones, no fingers.

Finally, there is cause for celebration in the world, I got a haircut, which means my personal affronts on style are, cut back, thank God, I could hardly see for all that hair.

Now I’m back in Spain at last, in Seville, I hear it will get up to 50 degrees Celsius here in August, it is said that even the olive trees, which for 2,000 years have grown here, even the olive trees are dying.

I spent my time eavesdropping, eating paella and reading in the park. A nice park day. Adios, cinnamon toast.

I’ve just left Porto, which not the fountain of Port wine, a wine so fortified it makes your mouth shiver, and which is produced, for tax reasons, across the river and down the hill in Gaia. Unlike Porto, Gaia had the fortune of obscurity, and housed no Bishop, and no Bishop’s taxes. Porto does, however, shockingly, have a port-river, and is tamed with seven bridges, and at least one double-decker bridge, the lower deck you can jump from if you are exceptionally daring, and have several friends egging you on, possibly the same friends ragging on you for years, and some training in how to dive, how to slice, how to avoid cowardice, the belly flop, I wouldn’t believe it would be safe to jump from that height, to me any leap from something taller than a house is death, probably, but I saw some jazzed-up Portuguese kids do it, and who am I to tell them otherwise. The higher deck of the bridge was level with the touristy cable cars, the same ones that take skiiers up mountains, and looking down made me excited to be in a crowd, if people are so fun to watch from above, it’s fun too to be an agent in the crowd, the pleasure in watching people from a bridge is all passive, synthesis and pattern, whereas if you’re in the crowd, you have power, conflict and foes, allies, a goal to achieve with your power, as long as you accurately measure how little power you have, and which also depends on the moment, the crowd.

Green wine is not green, but some roses are red, if you’ll forgive the agonizing segue, I was extremely provident in which hostel I picked, and spent four nights making friends, and now they’re lost in time and space, never to be seen again like that, which is how traveling is, a flourish, a spin and a death, a bit of a relief.

I spent a lot of time exploring. Narrow, stone, streets and stairs. Tiles and scalloped terra cotta, red roofs. I stumbled into a mass and felt the pleasure of bowing my head. I don’t speak Portuguese, but it was a good sermon, I could tell by the spitting. Plus churches are cool, literally, the sun is not welcome inside.

There is some pleasure in submitting to a God. And pain, too, because it’s not a seamless submission, He’s not my God and I resist losing myself in Those depths, I think he’s got problems, for starters, the Christian god is the only God without a wife, and His image of the world is the root of evil, paranoia and power, the world is of peoples, it is not a vision of one, for one, I think people are inherently good and this God disagrees with me, I think cooperation is our only strength as a species, everyone knows we’re not as smart as we would like to be.

But then again, climate change, that’s the simple argument against my position, maybe it warrants a response, I didn’t mention the size of the cooperative social unit.

Porto is a maze, on purpose, one-ways, narrow and hidden squares and slick bulging cobbled sidewalks, I wasn’t on time anywhere once. A nicer way to say this is, Porto was designed with a purpose, and that purpose was to avoid being invaded. I got my first non-shitty tattoo. I don’t tell you what it is, but I tell you I wear my heart on my sleeve. 🙂

Now I’m sick as a dog. The rapid covid test came back negative, and PCR tests here in Lisbon are 100 Euros (!!!!!) I’ve either been hungover for four days, or I’m really, truly, unavoidably, have a cold. Also, I’m in Lisbon, but before I see it I visit a dreamier land. The wise body delivers an ultimatum of rest. Ciao.

Que tal, possibly human readers. I’m back in Santiago de Compostela, I arrived by the earliest bus from Finisterre. I’m here for all of eight afternoon hours, really just the the hottest part of the day, long enough to get sweaty but not long enough to justify paying an albuergue for a shower, soap not included. At dinnertime I’m on another bus heading approximately south and back to the coast to Porto, Portugal, where the wine is green, along with a Czech guy who impressed me with a pragmatical approach to book buying, you could say he made a living off it. The mutual interest in the having of books endeared him to me.

Quick anecdote on my knowledge of Czech:

We’re running low on books and hit the snooty bookstores here in S.C. You think finishing a book is a dopamine hit? Finishing a book and then immediately losing half a pound in your backpack is a strong incentive. (If in lack of friends or friendly backpacks, I can leave books on the front steps of secondhand stores and libraries.) On the Camino we always shared food and books and almost never shared clothing: each to his own smell.

And so on. But the Camino is over: just life is left. I spent the midmorning reading under the fruit tree, blessedly secured away from shouting children and/or young men composing songs about how hot it is, like we needed reminding. Honestly unsure what kind of fruit tree it was except that the fruit fell from the tree and hit my head and it was rotten, and I finished Zadie Smith’s NW, which was prosey, hence my mood, and so I had room for 1 (one) not-too-self-absorbed book.

But before I buy another book, I have to use my gift of unwarranted small talk, so I ask the man behind the counter if they have any books in English, Ok they have a small miscellaneous section, Ok do you have any books in Czech? But what I say is, Do you have books for Czech? He runs a bookstore, he’s an old guy but not above a bad joke, from a pocket he shows me his private chequebook. So I learn the word for Czech in Spanish is Checia not Czech.

I’m enjoying the life. Maybe the word is bemused: the life bemuses me. In Finisterre, last night, there was a big moon rising over the rocks and beamed half the beach searchlight-white, and the sand was sprinkled with the red lamps of the nighttime divers harvesting clams. And the daytime cats slept under cars, on cupolas, bannisters, any puddle of shadow.

Just yesterday I came back from the beach wreathed in flies and met some friends on accident, really, by amazing coincidence they were staying in the same building as I was, even though I hadn’t really made a plan to stay anywhere, I was just bouncing from bus to couch, and I’m remarkably open with the word friends. I had sand crusted in all my loose skin, but what can you do, sometimes you start day drinking and next thing you know, you’re at a fire on the beach where everyone is lighting their joint with a stick and the French guy with the tentacle beaded hat is really feeling his rendition of Carnival music. Then I’m drunk and decide it’s time to learn German, which I think was at least part a drunken reaction to being annoyed with a French guy and in part homage to my German friends.

At the best of times I’m relaxed in myself. It’s not so easy, about every fifteen minutes I’m arrested by a desire to get a bad tattoo, and my mind plays the game of plotting a labouriously long story for-writing-but-not-Yet! This for me is the longest game. But it is summer: and it often is the best of times.

I don’t really have any clever anthropological observations to make at this point on any subject besides myself, I’m moving too fast through space and time, I I can barely take notes and collect characters. On the Camino someone wise pointed out to me there’s a nuance between the need for male validation and having romantic feelings for a man and boy howdy, this is one previously unknown pocket of nuance it would behoove me to explore, but I don’t tell more yet. Have to stretch my gray matter and inform myself on this point.

I just wanted to write, it’s just fun. Murakami says the key to writing is to do it every day and to stop just at the point where it becomes fun, that way you want to do it again the next day. Right now I am inhabiting exactly the opposite approach, not writing every day and only stretching as much as it’s fun to do so, but then again, I’m on holiday and furthermore not on holiday forever. Aprovechar el tiempo.

Maybe I will learn something in Portugal, like Portuguese. Optimism is mandatory. Also, the new book I got is Jose Saramago’s The Stone Raft, which was a good choice as Saramago is Portuguese and also my favorite writer with regards to how he wields commas and finally I’ve wanted to read this book since it was quoted as an epigraph in A Small Revolution in Germany:

Good night, comrade. Pleasant dreams, prophet.

Almost dinnertime, the pideons remind me. I gotta split. Cheers.

What’s up blogosphere, I did it, I walked from Bilbao to Santiago de Compostela. Very epic moment.

I really would walk five hundred miles.

Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s some really valuable things I collected.

TL; DR now I continue on to Finisterre, aka The End of the World, From Back When Europeans Didn’t Know About North America.

Fin, End, Tierra, Earth. Cheers yall

Bodenaya > Campiello > Granadas de Salime = 71 km

I’m hiding under the awning of my albuergue as I write this, as it’s midafternoon thunderstorming again. To my left is a leafy bush that makes the dripping rain sounds, and to my right is an occupied spiderweb and somebody’s still-smelly laundry. Despite the rain, I can still hear spooky cow noises in the distance. (They really just bellow.) I’ve just eaten a donated avocado and I’m having a donated beer. Finally, after three up-and-up- and-down days, I’m tranquila.

I’ve got to collect the last three days into some kind of coherent narrative.

I’ll start by telling you about the Way. The Way has been rain, rain as I walk through oak and pine forests, on needle and moss, rain even when the sun is shining, and I find a black bubosa, slug, as thick as my arm, no shit.

And the Way has been mountains. Yesterday we slept in a mountain village and, upon waking, blundered through a fog flavored faintly of goat shit. The smell was more of a stimulant than coffee. I walked alone, after my friends took a look at my mood and fucked off, bless them.

I got above the fog layer, it looked like a white sea below me, and I looked at the mountains striped with farm-terraces and thought, they look like a giant who can really pull off a modern shirt.

Then later I ran across a band of Free-Range Horses who were guarding an Important Ruin. The Free Horses had long hair that fell in their eyes and they were skeptical of my business with the Ruin. My business was to devour oatmeal before it rained again. The Important Ruin was a pile of rocks, apparently and incredibly a former mountain hospital in the 13th century (!) But why in the mountain? … Too many pilgrims with bad knees?

So yesterday I was on the mountain and alone. I had chosen to go the more difficult / scenic way even though it was probably going to thunderstorm and I cower like a mouse when it’s lightninging. No one has ever accused me of having exceptional executive functioning before noon. I was daydreaming about The Trial, which I had just finished courtesy of F., when the first big drop landed deliciously right on the crown of my head where the hair parts. This is just like how Kafka said, I’m thinking. We only keep our loved ones around to protect us from the oppressive state: but without any loved ones around, I’m free to run from the state. The state in this case is compulsive alientation and obedience: here on the mountain, I’m so free… freer than I would have been if I had companions with me… I had already mentioned my fair-to-poor mood on this day.

The thought of Kafka on the mountain was very funny to me. Embrace the rain. Tranquila.

Five minutes later, it’s fucking beating on my head and the lightning is rolling in. I can’t think about anything but finding some shelter. I’m looking around for a Very Important Pile of Rocks. There’s nothing, not even a tree. I keep going.

Then, I won’t tell you how I felt, but probably probably no more than ten minutes later, a Jeep comes down the Camino, which is a surprise as the Way is mostly a single-file footpath of pebbles. I wave them down to ask where the next town is. It’s an hour. This is not good news. The two farmers inside offer a ride, and I accept, which is my first time really getting a chance to andar en dedo, hitchike.

Once I buckle in, the Farmer immediately breaks from the path and goes windshield-first down the mountain. At first I’m alarmed at the air we’re getting but lo que sea, whatever, trust in the life. I attempt to make some very bouncey small talk. They raise meat cows. No, they do not name their cows. To my horror, we’re in the car for more than a half hour together, because they’re doing me a really big favor by driving all the way to where the Camino intersects with the highway. Then I insult them both by attempting to pay for the ride.

I’m thinking Kafka was right: the proceedings gradually merge with the verdict. But the accusation of guilt is actually an affirmation of one’s importance handed down directly from a higher authority: the Law, or Chance, lo que sea. Guilt is how you temper your understanding of your interdepence with others, your dependence on your parents, lovers, neighbors, teachers, friends. But the accusation of guilt is actually a revelation: the higher authority and/or State needs you to justify its own existence. To free yourself from the State, you need to depend more on others, not less. This is the K., the protagonist’s, fatal flaw.

This is one reading, I’d like talk it over more as social theory, as I think I’m ignoring some important points about the main character’s personal behavior. I’m kind of just reading K. as a Postmodern Post-Nobody.

Sobre todo its been a mountain-nice adventure 😉 I put myself outside my comfort zone and maybe even learned something, but there are opportunity costs to such acquired wisdom, such as not being able to find The Trial very funny anymore, just true.