Ehm, garcon! s'il vous plait!

The only questions really worth asking are definitive ones.  Yes.  No.  Simple and impossible to misconstrue.  They put the wind in your sails off into that beating blood-red sun setting so close on the horizon.  Off into the wild unknown in a beat-up two door Explorer.  The passenger seat's broken.  It always flies forward so as if to offer someone a seat in the back.  The problem's that it never flies back, which really isn't a problem so much as an inconvenience for those precious soldiers sitting in it.  And of course, for those sitting behind, because the seat just rocks back and forth when it's occupied, depending on how hard you lean back.  It always give someone a jolt the first time they're encountered with it, a hodge-podge of emotions; confusion, embitterment, pessimism.  I think it gives my car some character.  Fix it? Why would I pay money for someone to take that away? That jolt. Oh that surprised tingle, oh that half-held-back gruff of a laugh.  It lightens the day, it does, starting each new car venture with some sass.  And maybe that's something I need right now, so I think I'll keep it just the way it is.  Definitively.  With clear conscious.

Sara didn't seem to mind.  "Ey-ee like your car," she said.
"Really?"
She paused for a moment, considering it seriously for half a second.  A short poised and concerted "Oui, j'aime!" and then she's all glowing giggles, full-smiled laughter that I can see in her eyes.  They brim with joy and yearning and pent-up passion, so when I look over at her while we're stopped at the corner of Post and Stockholm waiting to turn, I see her French heart restless and stabbed through at my departure.  It's a beautiful sight.  Since we're still not moving (it's Union Square on a Saturday), she sighs heavy and says she can get out here.
"Are you sure?  We're just about there..."
"Ah oui, c'est bien"
And she grabs my knee and squeezes hard while she leans in.  She looks sad and her lips quivering, so after a quick glance forward at the traffic that still wasn't moving, I kissed her soft, then hard, and her hand moves up from my knee, grabbing my shirt and pulling me close over the center console.  My pointer finger follows her jawline up just behind her ear and the rest of my fingers lock in her hair.  She kisses me conservatively, tight-mouthed, like a girl not getting her way, so my thumb pulls her chin down and I breath in deep until she shudders and pulls away, eyes still closed, still smiling.  When she looks up again, she's the same as before except more so, catching her breath.  And she kisses me again quickly, holding my lips for a moment with hers before she opens the door to leave.
"Au revoir!"
"A bientot!"
She smiles somberly, and it almost feels like my fault.  Almost.  I'm lost again, at the drop of a question.  But at least now I know for sure.

She said "no" and I can't stop thinking about her.  I'll see her back in Santa Cruz.

Barcelona: Central Station

So it's to be that our time in Barcelona ends as it had started.  Two long trains between San Cugat and Barcelona Sants.  Only now it's mid-day and not night, and we've had a lovely last little breakfast with Mama Pla and Irene.  Chocolate chip cookie cereal, toast, Granini guava juice, the works.  The farewells are fond and drawn out.  We love our little family in San Cugat, and they love us, and they don't want us to leave.  A part of me doesn't want to go either.  Because after this, it will have been over a month and a half.  And that return flight that seemed so impossibly far on the ferry over to the Holland, is now looming dastardly on the horizon.  That part of me doesn't want the dream to end.  It wants to roam the pridelands of Europe, live in this city and that.  Meet people.  Live as they do, with them, through them.  See what they see, look hard, and wonder what they're thinking.  The sensation's intoxicating, to be immersed in a different mindset, a different way of living and a different way of looking at it.  A feeling that only blossoms more with unbridled joy at a new day's passing in each city we come upon.  Barcelona is in full bloom.

And even though we're sad that we have to leave, and that it's all soon coming to an end, we're brimming with as much giddy excitement, as one could anyways lugging traveling bags around Barcelona Central Terminal. The air outside is a muggy Mediterranean sauna.  And that tinge of salty sea on it doesn't cut sharp and brisk like it did in Santa Cruz off the Pacific.  No, the Med's warmer and saltier, and so the smell marinates in the hot sun like a single note owed to a New York fish market in a summer stanza. It glazes over and sticks to your skin.  So we get ice cream cones from McDonald's of course, and we sit down inside the terminal, with our bags at our feet.  We wait.  We can't catch a train east for another two hours.  Side by side, in a row of seats that face another row of seats not ten feet away, we breath relief and lick and lap and suck down McDonald's vanilla cones that each cost a euro.  We talk bof Barcelona, and then of Paris and the train.  There's some confusion as to what city in southern France we should catch a sleeper train from, and alas, we're all high and silently still reveling at the ten grams of marijuana that Irene's brother had sold us for fifty euro.  It's sitting deep inside one of our bags, I can't remember whose, wrapped in tinfoil and towels and dirty clothes.

In four seats across the way, there sits four old Spanish men, side by side.  They're all in short sleeve button-downs tucked meaningfully into their respective khakis, rocking that classic old-timer look with rubber-soled Dock Martins, canes, and clean beige woven hats.  Two of them are speaking to each other in Spanish, their emotions all the more animated by the deep lines in their faces and the slowness of their motions.  They aren't agreeing.  And the other two are just kind of sitting there, facing us, but not looking at us.  Or who knows, maybe they are looking us.  One of them's just sort of mumbling to himself, looking bitter, judging, vigilantly senile.  He's leaning back in his seat with his chin down, almost resting on his breastplate.  His beady little eyes slowly focus on the couple walking by, the family on vacation, and every so often, the four ice cream licking, silly-faced goons with American accents sitting across from him and his friends.  I smile at him, but he doesn't smile back.  Maybe he didn't see.  The other old-timer's just sitting there, tired, not really looking at anything as if he had taken a step back to re-live the wild adventure that was his live.  He seems satisfied, and when I look over at Mike, happily zoned out in ice cream land, and Max and Grant discussing the route options, the end of my lips can't help but furl.  I close my eyes at the notion and laugh with a quick tut.  And I smile again, to myself this time.

On the Road

It’s the time of night that most nights, you don’t remember.  The ones worth remembering anyways, those are always the nights peppered with blank spots.  Lapses in time where things happen without conscious documentation or recollection, they are proximate to those hours of the late, late night and early morning.  It’s that time that I have always loved driving most.  Cruise control.  A highway lit up before you like some midnight rollercoaster into the wilderness.  To the City up the 1, or all the way down the 101 through to LA; each bend and twist like a wrinkle or scar on the back of my hand,  familiar to a comfortable approach.  Caressing jawline turns with weathered routine, slipping out and back into autopilot just long enough to bring the speedometer down to 55.  Around sharp side-mountain cliffs, up and down mountain passes.  Engaged.  And the mind is allowed to wander.  Allowed to belt passion and pour with music played much too loud – in response to the whipping wind rasp produced by broken sunroof and back side-window.  The kind of back side-window that pops out and locks like a little fish gill.  Except now it didn't pop and lock; it just flailed helplessly right behind my head, like an untethered sail.  The thing screamed like a banshee.  And it was an awful-on-the-ear, pulsating thump of air that only got louder as you went faster.  So you’re cruising at 65 or 75 or whatever you feel to be a rightful speed for so dark and forgotten in the evening, and the music just barely mutes it at half-volume.

Definitely not a quiet tune, that car.  A bold character.  It lives loud, and rough in suspension, and broken with its sunroof and side-window and duct-taped mirror.  But that wild bull owns it, dusty grit-crusted white shell, sand-soaked interior and all.  He owns the road, every turn, every speed trap to a tee, and in it I feel no fear.  My eyes and hands follow the ever-farther luminescing line of yellow and white reflectors, with that instinctual bee-to-pollen feeling giggling in the background as the rest of my thoughts alight with hypothetical suppositions, and dreams and always wanderings.  They dive deep into songs, breath held, hoping to find that clam with a tiny, perfect pearl of truth in it.  Not every song has it’s pearl to be found, but maybe just some sense, some meaning , made-up even; a statement of definitive mind and point.  You need to know the words, and when your only music selection is on CD, the words come to memory soon enough, especially for the good songs, you know, the ones that don’t get old. 

And then when you get there, you’re never late, and always just on time, presently.  You arrive when you arrive.  It’s just before tomorrow’s dawn.  

Shit Storms

Really? Shit storms?  The music's just barely muffling the undulating pulse of raindrops outside, and Peter Bjorn and John don't exactly wail on the guitars.  Why is it this loud?  It sounds like the window's open.  It's not, but there's still that incessant torrent of noise coming from it; watering falling heavy onto wood, onto metal, into pools of its depressing self.  Fuck!

I'm wearing sweatpants and my shins are cold because the ankles don't cinch off.  That's because they're warm-ups.  Ughh.  What happened to spring.  The window next to my desk has the shutters drawn; it's not much of a view anyway.  But through the patio doors across the room the wind's whipping the ferns and bushes and the trees and tree leaves around in an awful fury.  It's the kind of storm that would put the fear of the gods into the ancient Greeks; almighty and omnipotent.  I remember reading a few months back about scientist predicting a super-storm coming this year.  A once in a century storm, of biblical magnitude.  The last one reported saw rain for forty days.  Rain water ran like rivers through the streets of Central Valley towns.  It's throwing itself at the windows in sheets now.  This is miserable.

[time for wii]

Quote of the Day: Fairy Tails Don't Exist

"Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it'll be told for a thousand years.

But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.

That's why people invent fights. That's why we're drawn to sports. That's why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal.

We're trying to make our life into a fairy tale."

- Kurt Vonnegut

Copenhagen: Christiana

It's another bright and sunny day in Denmark.  Marie's promised to take us to this neighborhood in closer on the Amager Island side of the city that sold marijuana and hash out in the street.  Christiania had been a barracks and defensive rampart during the Danish wars with Sweden in the 17th century.  The post saw active military duty through World War II, including but not limited to serving as the site of execution for 29 Naxi collaboration criminals before the barracks began to empty in 1967.

Now it can be described under most guises as a large commune.  It's "hippy population" - as it would be identified in the States - occupies the former military barracks, adorned with murals and big, glaring NO PHOTOGRAPHY warnings at the top street-side corner of each building.  They peddle pot by the ounce and hash by the brick at meager shaded tables that dot either side of the unpaved main thoroughfare; Pusher Street. Not much in the entire neighborhood is paved, and if it is, it's cobble-stone and it hasn't been retouched since the military left. The vendors operating the quaint little drug stands up and down Pusher Street are all shifty looking individuals, never smiling, strictly business.  Old Turkish men sit at high round bar tables in high chairs skirting the street to the purpose of avoiding the dust being kicked up by the steady stream of foot-traffic just after noon on a Nordic summer Saturday.  They glare at us under their light woven-brimmed hats and thick, furrowed brows, pipe in hand, slowly working away at their perspective hash bricks.  The whole atmosphere is that of a dark and sinister farmer's market, and it flows into an open, dirt courtyard fringed by a stage and a handful of bars.  Some dreary, Danish four piece alt-rock band is droning away on the stage, and we sit for a spell and a couple of beers, Carlsbergs of course.  We're still feeling the spliff we'd had with breakfast, and no one's really too swooned at the idea of relinquishing any more Krooners than we absolutely have to.  Besides, we've still got a good amount of superb gange from our Amsterdam escapades, and the Danish Krooner is a whore, quite an expensive one at that.

Still high, and beginning to buzz from the beer and the heat, the stage music turns to soundtrack as my mind tries to half-grasp at the entirety of the environment around us.  The suspicious anxiety, the wonderland beauty; the stray dogs weaving fast through the dense crowd with artful poise and dutiful purpose, small and ragged, mouths open and tongues flopping.  We never go more than a couple seconds without seeing one.  Every sort of person has found their way through the green garnished gateway of the courtyard.  The old Turks stand together in groups with their matching short-sleeved, loose white button-downs, and their grave whispers and their thick, manicured mustaches.  The hippy love-children that founded this place are sprinkled about, along with their kin, skipping down the pathways and swaying to the music, dreadlocks swinging in time.   There are young ruffian types and crazy-eyed basers like so many fish in a pond.   Every now and then, a confused looking, touristy character stumbles by in middle-class vacation attire, map in hand, guidebook at the ready.  Hopefully, we donn't stick out so sorely.  After all, we have Marie to guide us, to talk for us, and to tell us what not to do.  And we already dress more or less like well-intentioned, eccentric vagabonds anyways.  Tinted glass hide the gaping awe in our eyes, so to those around us, hopefully, we look like we belong in Christiania, perhaps holed up in one of those boxy glass houses tucked away in the high reeds and greenery by the water.  What a place to be living, what a life so dangerously free that would be.