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.

Villaviciosa > Bodenaya 84 kilometers

Hola buenas, I haven’t written, I didn’t need to write. I’ve been happy, I work all day and I’m one with my work, I walk and I talk. Only when I notice how happy I am does it recede slightly, like a humming appliance you notice only when it’s switched off.

My needs are changing, I’m in flux. I’m reluctant even to pinpoint the changes in opinions, like that will stop me changing. Like a pinned butterfly.

It’s not un camino de rosas, I meet drunks and beggars. The drunks are mean. I learn you can be in relationship, or you can be right. I fall behind the group and a sheepdog bites my heels.

Except sometimes, it really is the path of roses, everybody talks of revolution like it’s a personal milestone, the revolution of the circular economy and the compost toilet: I’m in flux, maybe it is. I learn folk songs about the Goddess to bring home.

I don’t know how to tell you about this Camino. A vein in the udder of a Heifer cow: as I watch it pulses, huge, once. My open palm pressed against a wet fig leaf. Red poppies hiding under the new green wheat, secret and yours like catching someone’s smile in a crowded room. That’s all there is. Buenas noches.

La Vega > Villaviciosa 30 km

Today was feasts, our best weapon against violent heat. We ate everywhere. We ate avocados on the ground in a park outside the supermarket. We ate chocolate sitting on the highway. We ate on the terrace of a roadside bar, which is where I learned you can order tomatoes as a meal, tomato y aceite, and it comes salted, with raw cebolla, and it slaps.

We argued politics, and behind us the sea was thinking too, whitecaps whipped from blue cream. I bought a pair of crocs from an ice cream shop that also sold fishing bait- you know beach towns- and my quality of life has greatly improved.

Tomorrow, the route splits in two. There’s the Primitivo, which cuts inland southward to Santiago, or pilgrims can continue along the Northern Route, hugging the coast of the Cantabrian sea. The Primitivo is harder, prettier, and slower.

All three of my companions are taking the hard route. I need rest before I go hard. According to my own, somewhat approximate calculations, I’ve walked 271 kilometers in the past 12 days, 168 miles, just to clear my head. It’s weird how content I’ve been on the Camino. But I hurt, people. Maybe these crocs of mine take me to a bus stop. Buenas noches.

Cuerres > Vega 17 km

Today delivered the friendship rendezvous. Before we were three, now we are four. This makes me happy, as a square is more stable than a triangle.

Feeling overconfident in our network, we went to the beach. Somebody cut open a grapefruit with their credit card. We shared, then got ready to swim.

All was going well. We all went out together, we became floating heads to each other, with limp hair. I floated on my back, then flipped over and realized I could see something shiny on the bottom. On a hot day, I felt strong, pleased with stabilizing kick of my legs, treading water near the others. All was going well, until the strongest swimmer among us said, careful, don’t go out any further. The current gets really strong.

Immediately after that comment, terror set in. People tried to swim back to shore just to see how it was and found they couldn’t make it any closer. If anything, we were getting swept further out. I realized belatedly I had already been exhausted when we waded into the ocean.

It would be really embarrassing if I’d drowned within sight of the beach.

(Spoiler) We all made it. But it was a struggle. The kind of wild, serious thrashing that makes you think- sharks?

But after seeing my people try and shout something, swallow salt water, go under, and then you try and swim closer to them, and you go under too- after all that- I can’t help but trust these people more, better. Even though I never would have gone that far out into the ocean alone. None of us would have, alone.

I was so exhausted afterward that I had a pleasant sober hallucination while looking down on the village. The red roofs grew and shrank with my breathing. Even now in bed I’ve got that feeling that something inside me is still rocking, swimming. Goodnight.

Llanes > Cuerres 20 km

I’m staying in an anti-phone eco-lodge, so sadly don’t have much time to write tonight. I don’t want to paint it in a bad light though, if I couldn’t stay here, I would have had to sleep in an abandoned church. Instead, I’m happy, warm, in good company.

But, they are very worried about bedbugs here, so they gave everyone fresh clean clothes to wear. On the bright side, it’s been ten days since I slept in anything besides my jeans.

Unquera > Llanes 29 km

Today was mashed bananas and pineapple juiceboxes. On Wednesday night I have an ironclad rendevous with friends, which relaxes me.

Today was easier than yesterday, after I popped a blister on each heel. I was sucking on a piña zuma, a pineapple juicebox, and admiring a well-collared terrier, when I ran across a correo that was open. Finally, it’s Monday! Seeing there was no queue, I dashed inside without finishing my juice.

Sidebar: it took me way too long to connect correo electrónico, email, with correo, old-fashioned post office. Finally, I could mail my deadweight computer to myself in Santiago.

While I was filling out the forms, a long queue formed, and I became nervous. Then, the post office worker and I reached a great accord, and completed the task of answering some basic questions about my intentions with this package, where I wanted to pick it up, and so on, and I in great excitement, picked up my backpack by the straps without putting it on, and grabbed the juice without thinking, which sprayed pineapple juice all over the floor.

But optimism is mandatory. That mf computer was 3 kilograms.

Tomorrow is my tenth day on the camino. After a few days in the mountain pueblos, even Llanes feels big. There’s more than one pub here. It felt like every time I really dug into a conversation tonight, some kind of noise machine rolled through the city, like there’s some kind of cap on silence.

Tonight I sleep in a two hundred year old albuergue/mansion, built in the indiano style, aka it was built by a Spanish man who went to South America to make a fortune, succeeded, and returned, so it has both colonial porches, and Art Deco arches. The home is built to impress. Arquitectura que ida y vuelta.

The walls of the communal bedroom are green, and under the bare bulb they look like uncooked zuccini. Sometimes writing late at night, the room is filled with snores, and I feel like I’m writing to an aching god.