Sitting in the passenger seat of my father’s car, I remembered to ask about a stranger. It was a brief ride, and for the five minute distance between the train station and the parking lot he and I shot the breeze with enough script-dialogue pretension to sound like some kind of a dress rehearsal. The last time I had asked him about his work, he mentioned that this stranger — somewhat less a stranger to him, as his co-worker — was about to get fired by the pencil pushers with the fancier pencils.

I asked if she had been “put on ice” yet, seeing as dad was taking a quick respite from the office for the purposes of this modest drive, and he remarked that, well, it seemed as if she had been “saved by the bell.”¹ The lady who had been lined up to take her job after the pink slip offed her was herself in risk of being offed by a pink slip from some higher office: fresh complications from her recent brush with cancer surged through her with a vengeance, and word was that it would take her at least a year to recover – if she recovers at all. It’s a peculiar world, I guessed: one woman’s malignant tumor is another woman’s paycheck. I spoke this thought aloud, and the Camera of Life made a hard cut from one scene to the next:

A few weeks later, I’m in a warmer nation with a radiant laptop cradled comfortably in my lap, hoping I don’t become someone else’s paycheck. It’s probable that I might get a tan here, in this Nation of the Suns, which like just about everything else is a carcinogen, nowadays. But shall my skin bronze, I will not loathe it — it would be my first tan in a couple-or-few years, pretty much ever since I had to set down my oars for the last time. A healthy, shaded pallor wouldn’t be a thing to rue, no, not at all.

I might as well just come out and say it: I’m pretty deep in the Spain right now, folks, and that’s no lie. If you also find yourself in the Spain sometime in, say, the next week, contact me immediately and we’ll break it down and build it back up again. You can get in touch with me this way or that, it matters not.

It wasn’t easy, to get this deep into the Spain this fast. Most of the transition was spent on some vehemently shitty little plane, where I was confronted by a rotating cast of breathing horrors and weirdmen. The most prominent weirdman was a graying old boy whose hairline was also being hit by the recession, as I discerned when he woke me up to ask me a very important question that went like:

“I’ve been told that the seat you’re sitting in has an armrest that doesn’t go up. Is this accurate?”

After I spent a moment grappling with this daft douche’s apparent social disability and pungent stench of argyle, I verified with him this information, watched in unmasked wonder as he returned to his seat in coach (not first class or even the relatively poor man’s business class, as his Entitled Asshole routine had suggested), and considered briefly the impact of this grand recession on the loins of humanity. It’s hard for me to tell, shielded semi-college boy that I am, but all indications lead me to believe it’s been one powerful sack whack to remember.

These thoughts were interrupted by visions of a stewardess who had the facial geometry of a transvestite. Her face (and the voice that came from it) suggested the otherworldliness of a former man, though most of her other features appeared distinctly womanesque. She told people to put their seatbelts on with curt authority, offered me a choice between plastic pasta and microwave roadkill with curt authority, and complained to a nearby co-worker when the alarm of the plane’s cabin service failed to shut the fuck up after some twenty-odd minutes of uninterrupted beeping.

Which has become something of a theme in my life in these past 24 hours: uninterrupted beeping. Before those long hours inside that rambling airplane, there was the alarm in my house, which would not stop screaming while I packed clothes and books to feed the Spain all day long. Later, on that same verbose plane, some sleeping body’s forgotten cellphone alarm chimed with the subtle menace of Chinese water torture. It was a gentle, nearly silent drone, but its automated persistence made for a slow and maddening attrition. The damn thing nourished my insomnia and kept me conscious, all across the night and sea.

One way or another, the ringing hasn’t stopped. Is it a sign? It’s sure as hell annoying, now that it’s a telephone in my Madrid hotel digs’ bathroom, shouting when it wants to (often) and stopping when it doesn’t (less so). It’s hot as a bitch in here, so I keep the door to the balcony open at all times, and across the way there’s a family doing the same thing, a family that includes a child who screams and cries with the rhythm and clarity of a bell. Speaking of cancer, this kid bawls and weeps the way an adult would only if something truly disastrous, truly terrible like cancer were to happen. Though knowing it’s a kid, he’s probably just pissed that the TV channels here suck, or something. I wouldn’t know: I don’t know Spanish, and I don’t know television.

I’m not letting it bother me, though — not even when his endless tirades are punctured like clockwork every 15 minutes by the feedback of some phantom guitar.² I’ve been drowning it down with some chilled-out Miles Davis and some laid-back Nas, along with the inner monologue that plays out in my head concurrently with the way my fingers play it out on this laptop keyboard. It works well enough, when I’m in this hotel.

When I’m not, I’m drinking cups of chocolate in cafe basements, eating miniature meals in restaurant lobbies, and admiring pretty performers performing pretty things in the street.³ This is what the Spain is, at least as far as Day One is concerned. Day One is one of Nine. I’m not really sure where the rest of those days will take me. Definitely this Madrid business I’ve gotten myself into, for a bit longer, but maybe some Barcelona as well — if the train passes and logistics can be worked out easily enough. You can have some say in this too, if you’re in the Spain and ready/willing to hear the real music. But we’ve been over this before.

Right now I’m back in bed, tired as fuck and eating sugared teeth. They aren’t very good — but I come to you with a purpose. I’ve been up to a few things, Belgium, and I think they’re going to please you. If you would only just listen!

• 1) I found out today, as a pleasant surprise, that the piece I was writing just before I left became published as the cover story of the paper I most frequently write for. Check it out, read it online, scope the pictures I took (the first published photos I’ve ever taken), and Philly people: this shit is available, tangible printed matter-like, for the next week in the vicinity. Consult your local street corner’s orange box to find a copy. It’ll be residing there, broadcasting my name to the sidewalk in all its sans-serif glory, until Thursday the 26th of March in this fine year of Our Lord, 2009.
• 2) A friend of mine and I blog musically, now — I’ve mentioned him here before, actually. This new blogthing is really good and well done and you can even hire us to DJ for you, if that’s something you require. It’s called Revenant, for it is the unseen hand that guides you on to better things.⁴
• 3) Dancefloor, you know. There’s the .com, there’s some little snippets of photos. Maybe some actual audio-visual, sooner or later.
• 4) My good friend and attorney at law came down to visit me for what will heretofore be known as Fedor Week. Photographs exist.

I’ve been up to more than that, Belgium, but this weary mind of mine can hardly recall. I need a shower; I need some sleep. I’m about to get both. I’m not even sure what I’m going to do with this thing I just wrote, seeing how I’m on a laptop with zero internet and, as it seems, zero imminent ability to attach itself to the internet machine. By the time this makes it to the forefront of the Revolution, I won’t even know what day it might be, by then. I haven’t a clue.

1. ”Too cliche,” says the director’s note in the margin, mentioning an inadvertent association with Screech for the Gen X demographic. “Needs revision.” [↩]
2. The sound is also, alternatively and very possibly, the whine of a bus braking upon a bus stop. That would be less interesting, though. [↩]
3. Most notably a young girl who was very good at flamenco and artful gyrating. [↩]
4. We’re both on vacation so it’s gone without an update for a little bit. This will change in a matter of days. [↩]

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