''You know I could never be alone"

Jesus it's dirty in here. Sorry I didn't respond to all of your comments in the last post. They were nice and made me happy.

But the crusty laundry is piling up in this place, I've got a sink full of dishes with the remnants of food on them that I don't even remember eating. There is a layer of grime and dust on the creative parts of my brain, I haven't mopped in months, and the sheets haven't been changed in god knows how long.

The thing is, the filthier this place gets, the harder it is to throw the moldy cheese away that's on my counter no matter how sick I realize that is. Unfortunately, I'm the type of person that unless I can organize the place down to color coding my spare buttons and find the time to iron my damn sheets, shit's just gonna get moldier.

But today it was as if someone had walked in and I felt ashamed of the unidentifiable smell exuding from the fingerprint-tainted refrigerator and I decided that if I at least throw out the stinky shit and DO SOMETHING, I will be a better person for it. So I'm here to prove to myself and maybe to other awesome people I won't mention because they know who they are that I am not a moldy cheese type of person.

I'm a storyteller, dammit.

And I'm intrigued by a damn meme. Because it allows me to tell you stories and show you how cool I am because of my taste in music is all at once. Either that or it will make you once and for all realize we really have nothing in common.

So it's 30 videos in 30 days, so help me fucking god.

Day 1: Your favorite song

Alright, so unfortunately I have a problem with this meme already. How can I possibly pick a favorite song? It's too much pressure. So I'm already changing the category - I'll pick a song that brings me back to a time when I was one of the most favorite versions of myself.

After days of wandering around Madrid in a state of awe, I met Fernando. Fernando had creamy 18 year old skin with dark sugary eyes, longish black hair and the teeth of a toothpaste model. He spoke with the perfect boarding school English of an Argentinean that had been born into just the right family. His charming, educated manner and his nuanced table etiquette contrasted with his wrinkled heavy metal t-shirts and his black and white Pakistani scarf, symbols of rebellion against his family that was pressuring him into an aristocratic life he was nowhere near ready for and that his favorite songs and books told him was the enemy.

He too was lost in this new place. We had both just landed on this strange continent without a friend or a plan, but Fernando had the language down with an accent that made me drooly and he carried a thousand US dollars in cash in his underwear and a knife to protect himself from the unexpectedly benign world of European youth hostels. I was as naive as he was, if not more, with my water droplets which I thought were going to make the Spanish drinking water potable (turns out it puts Phoenix tap water to shame). We clung to each other in our foreignness and naivety and maybe without being fully conscious of it, our refusal of a mold other people had made for us without our consultation. We both seemed acutely aware that this was temporary, that we would be forced to fit into some tight box soon, but now everyday represented a refusal to be anything but what we wanted to be that day.

We had nothing to do except catch trains to Toledo in search of old graveyards to creep around in or lay lazily in the sun on a rowboat in Retiro Park letting each other listen to our tape collections with our headphones. Fernando was way more into harsh metal shit and didn't know any of the blues or Dylan or Dead or indie stuff I liked, but we coincided that day in the park with this little Rolling Stone's number.

As much as I enjoyed Fernando's company during those couple of weeks, my head was full of all the people I wanted to meet, places I wanted to go, languages I wanted to master, books I wanted to devour, new music I wanted to hear and having anyone glued to my side the whole time would have been a burden. Besides, we already had conflicting ideas about how to travel. The money in his underwear had to last him six months and he had to be careful. He started his day with mate for breakfast and skipped meals. He followed me around while I ordered food and claimed he wasn't hungry. He was proving to himself and to his family that he could make it in the world without them and I respected that, but I had two freshly cashed student loan checks in American Express travelers checks and a study abroad program that included my room and board so this was spending money, baby and I wasn't wasting any time or thinking about tomorrow.

My 21st birthday rolled around and I had only one person to celebrate it with, and I wasn't having any of that frugal bullshit. I needed someone to not think about the future with me just for a day and I reeled him into my quest of finding a bottle of wine from the year I was born and ordering it no matter what the price. We walked for hours, soaked in the pouring rain, in and out of expensive looking restaurants and bodegas to see if they had anything from 1977 without any luck (or maybe with a lot of luck, Jesus, what was I thinking?).

We finally settled on a nice expensive but not outrageous wine, and I told him to order anything from the menu, it was my 21st birthday, dammit. He ordered a plate of octopus and I ordered the paella. We sat next to a window overlooking a side street off of Puerta del Sol and if I close my eyes right now I can be there in that moment and hear the sounds of the street down below, the noisy clinkering of glasses and silverware and the chatter of the Spanish lunchtime crowd and the suits and white tablecloths. I can hear the accordion player trying to lure the pesetas from the tourists seated under the beige umbrellas just under our window.

I know that moment by heart because I mapped it into my guts and brains and the thickest, most fibrous parts of my soul. I must have closed my eyes and feared that if I opened them it would all be a dream, that Fernando and Spain and the accordion player and the octopus and me, the me I had always wanted to be would all disappear. Actually, Fernando and the rest of it could have very well disappeared, but I wanted to open my eyes and still be the me I was right then. The one that was confident for the first time in my life and looking to nobody else as a reference for how to behave, for what kind of music to like, for what I wanted to look like, for what I should think. The one that was open to experiencing things for the sole purpose of someday making my own good stories that were more mine than any other belonging I could ever own, that I've unfortunately gotten shitty about sharing. The one that saw the world as a never-ending series of open doors with mostly good things beyond them. The one that didn't feel even remotely dampened by a future unknown, and that appreciated the fleeting effervescence of life in its most vivacious and ripe stage - the now. The one that felt the intense heated color of gratitude - a feeling I knew then, that I lost touch with for some time and that I have found once again today.

I had to take off for Seville and I made it known to Fernando that he wasn't welcome to tag along on my adventure, we were parting ways. He was a good sport about it and didn't take it personally and was ready to venture off somewhere else himself. We kissed in the rain and I was surprised at how his long face bounced off me with an indifference I had never experienced before, especially for someone that would have at another time turned me to butter with a glance. He said he was sad that if we ever saw each other again it wouldn't be like now. I smiled, because I didn't regret it at all. I would still be me.

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XOXO

I´m in love again.

With the internet, that is.

I used to have a school girl crush on this blogger, and now I think I´m full on in love once again. She pointed me towards a new obsession and now I want to be a photographer.

(Insert forehead scrunching)

I want to be a lot of things. Like a person that does more than stare out a window smoking cigarettes with my swivel ashtray in my free time (shut up, can we talk about it later? Moving was stressful).

Little by little I´m catching up with my many other crushes and long time loves. I´ve missed you a lot. I´ve thought about you daily.

Besides having a really cool window to stare out and a whole damn city needing to be spied on with binoculars and cigarettes that need to be smoked, the thing is, I read really boring-ass shit all day until my eyeballs feel like the Sahara desert. I have even developed a "benign growth of the conjunctiva" which means that I'm some sort of a vampire because it presumably comes from too much sunlight, although I know damn well comes from reading about electrostatic precipitators in eight hour stretches.

Fucking eye growths. What did I do to deserve this? My dad had one too and eventually he had to get it removed. If you guys knew how I felt about getting shots or even stepping foot in a hospital to visit someone, you might be able to deduce how I might feel about someone holding back my eyelids with clamps and poking at my eyeball with scalpels and shit.

Besides that, I´m supposed to be learning how to edit professionally (and I have a long damn way to go), since in one year´s time I have to take an exam in order to keep my position at work and apparently, oops, I need to learn French within that year too, because the goddamn exam is in French. Don´t ask me how an exam for an English proofreader in Spain can be in French cause I haven´t got the foggiest idea. But apparently I need to figure this shit out or my career is going to turn into trace gas and my income is going to become nanomaterial. (Did you just hear that? Did I just say career? It may be the first time in my life I´ve thought in those terms.) Does anyone know how the eff I´m supposed to learn French while living in Spain, with a full time job and blogs to read and neighbors that need to be spied on with vampire eyes that need to be dealt with?

So I´ve neglected you a lot. And I don´t read books anymore or newspapers and my brain is going to expire soon and start rotting if I don´t start inputting and outputting some goodness.

I´m making an effort. But I always thought you deserved more than my crossed out and haphazardly scribbled brain upchucks and so I stay silent for ages. Why do I want to dazzle you so? Maybe because I like you a whole lot. This rut, it's hard to get out of and the only way I can do it is by posting words I haven't previously massaged and french kissed and marinated in butter overnight (I said something along those lines when I started this blog, but this time it´s fer reals and I might even post a bullet point list next of shit in my closet, or shit that my neighbors are doing, even though you deserve much better).

So there.

Because it makes me happy to just talk to you.

Because

I.

Love.

You.

<3>

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Can I get you some more crock pot food?

I might be breaking some blogging commandment that states:

"Thou shalt not blog about blogging"

Or, at the very minimum I may rile up your pet Peeve, making him bark and chase his tail until he barfs up your missing shoelaces.

But I feel I must explain because when you have a friend that usually calls and then they just stop, well, you deserve the courtesy of them stumbling like an idiot through an awkward excuse as to why they haven't called. Actually, you deserve them to buy you like five rounds of beer, but anyway, we'll start with the clumsy excuses.

My problem has been that for weeks now thoughts have come into this very confined head-like crock pot sitting on my shoulders where they have simmered, marinated, and tenderized, and then finally dried up and turned into the beef jerky version of thoughts. But I waited and waited in hopes that they would turn into a lovely curry instead of the same ole run-of-the-mill dried-the-fuck-up-crock-pot-pot-roast.

Fucking crock pots. Everything tastes the same when cooked in a crock pot. And don't go telling me I need to add a can of cream of mushroom and everything will be okay. Please, that is some sick shit.

Rather than serving you the crock-pot version of my thoughts, and instead of reading which just reminded me that I had this unbearable urge to force feed someone a nasty pot roast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, well, I stayed away.

So what have I been doing?

I've been filling my free time with the opiate of lazy Internet play: planning trips to Sardinia I may never go on, searching for apartments I may never live in, looking up recipes for Lasagna I may never make, drooling over jobs I may never apply for, or PhD programs I'll never submit an application to, reading economic forecasts that may never materialize into reality.

I can fill my days and weeks with this Internet narcotic, a vacation of sorts from a mind that I can open up and pick words from like there's a god damned pot luck going on up there. And I spend my days in that drugged state because the words annoyingly string together in the same damn way and I'm just so bored of it all– telling the same story I keep hearing on repeat again and again inside me. And I'm just staring at this paper plate full of shitty crock pot casseroles and stabbing my plastic fork into something and watching it jiggle as a solidified blob of cream of mushroom and bump into the wiggly jello-inertial-mass dessert from hell and I'm thinking....Oh, fuck this shit, let's go to McDonald's.

These fantasy vacations into the online world of Your Potential fill my mind with purposefulness, and attempt to confirm in me that my life can be, must be, meaningful in some way. I remind myself, no, I beat myself over the head with the argument that I've traded something for experience; loved-ones for a life less ordinary, where I can hop on a flight to anywhere in Europe, maybe live in an apartment that looks onto a quaint Spanish plaza, dulling the dreaded realization that no matter what the fuck I fill my days with, Father's Days and birthdays and 4th of Julys are passing me by and I'm. Not. There.

This brainless virtual wandering allows me to not have to think, especially about my upcoming trip home with all of the familiar anxiety that it entails.

The visiting with loved ones is nearing, which must be good, right? because I miss them so. But as Noble Savage alluded to, the good can only be experienced as such because it is defined by what it is not -- the bad; 'visiting' as the inversion of 'missing', 'home' as opposed to 'distance', utterly incomprehensible as concepts now on their own without the stark awareness attached to them of what they are framed by -- what they are not.

I long for a time when I didn't have to juxtapose happiness with its opposite; when there was the hazy in between, when definitions could be somewhat fuzzy or at least I didn't always see the dialectic staring me in the face, where 'togetherness' didn't make me so in tune to its ultimate undercurrent and its ever-present antonym 'apart'. I miss the gray area of 'potential togetherness' – that my mom might call at anytime for a quick lunch on a weekday, or my cousin might call because he's in the neighborhood and lets go grab a coffee at the Lux on Central. It is not the pure form of togetherness that erases the sad separation anymore, it is only potential togetherness that can erase the awareness that togetherness is always always always the opposite of a life spent without each other. And it's this potential togetherness that I don't have anymore.

So you see, I stay away because I myself tire of this broken record I hear when I click clack cluck away at this keyboard; the repetitive, dulling, unoriginal sound of a heart sick with longing for, not a place, but a state of mind I had once upon a time that I'll never get back, no matter how often I visit. Surprisingly I am all the more heartsick as my holiday nears, as the summer heat beats down on me and I try to find shade in the sparse palm trees of this city which reminds me so much of 'home'. The awareness gets nearer and nearer with every unit increase on the centigrade scale that my body feels when I step outside, or as I fall asleep listening to the familiar sound of the air conditioner, with every day that passes bringing me closer to August and to my trip.

You guys used to be my virtual escape but now I know that some of you get me, and all of you have real pulses that still really beat when I close my laptop and your realness makes you become like the other friends and family that I just don't pick up the phone to call for some reason that I can only explain by stammering my way through something that always sounds the same. In your case though, I'm honest and don't say I've been busy.

Cause I haven't. At all.

So here I am, on a limb. Hoping you'll forgive that my fingers won't stay away from the same keys, forming the same words I have asked you to read too many times now. Hoping you'll forgive me for making crock pot food for the millionth time that you've come over for dinner.

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