madrid- a prose primer

madrid contains, however unfortunately, madrileños
those who dwell and commute
those who leave their apartments early in the morning
with faces prepared
to hate, and to complain
everyone else is rude. i am the only civilized person in this town.

the best defense
is to plead ignorance
or blindness
Oops! I didn’t see you there!
Whoa, I didn’t realize I was taking up the entire breadth of the sidewalk!
Hey! I didn’t mean to strike you, but wildly gesticulating is the only manner to
express myself while I complain about my family! Seltzer water should get that
wine stain out!

madrid is a polite society, where every other word out of one’s mouth should be
Fuck, or Cunt,
or Shit.
the asshole, the penis, and catholicism are prime sources of curse words, and
should be respected for being veritable springs, or founts, of self-expression:
·the mother that gave birth to you!
·i shit in the milk!
·the host!
·it makes my cock sweat.
·mother of god!
·i shit on god!
·i shit on the whore!
·i shit on his fucking mother!

being polite is not saying Thank You more than once.
being polite is to wish a fond farewell to every person in the elevator, regardless of
whether or not you know them.
in a restaurant, it is polite for the wait staff to begin a conversation with “What do
you want?”
it is polite in the subway to let people exit the train before entering.
the elderly and adolescents generally
ignore this, and squeeze their way
on board to catch a seat.

violence is rare in the city, except in sleazy nightclubs. guns are rare, though
knives are plentiful. the death rate is low, though “crimes of passion” seem to be
commonplace.
people tend to drive like they walk- rarely in a straight line, and nearly always
talking, either on the phone or with a companion. red traffic lights are assumed to
be suggestions.

if you own a bike, then may god have mercy on your soul.
bike lanes are few
and far between,
usually occupied by people walking and talking
bikes on the street are considered a nuisance by drivers,
there is no general consensus
as to the proper way to navigate
the streets
those who own a bike because it is fashionable generally do not wear helmets,
and tend to weave through the most crowded sidewalks instead of zipping along
the street

the general populace of madrid
is very good at one thing:
complaining. every new law passed
generates a mountain of complaints.
six months after a law is passed, most forget
that it exists, including the police. complaining is usually not followed by action.
not even by the police.

the one true way to obtain a service
performed to your satisfaction
is to complain. a lot.
do you want internet in your home?
be prepared to
complain to the service provider. the installation will not be quick.
do you need to return a defective object to the store? you will have to complain for
an extended period.
if a complaint is taken over the phone, and they say they will
call you back with a response,
it is a lie.
you will have to call them back yourself.
multiple times.

waiting in line is a foreign concept.
in this context, “line” is an unknown element. the known element is “chaos”, or,
the i-was-here-first-rule. “wait” is also a subjective term.
attempts are made to control
the natural inclination towards “massing”,
but these attempts are ignored
-are you in line to buy some meat from the butcher?
well, you will most likely have to wait to be attended,
for the person behind you
has two or three
or four questions for the meatman,

english is rarely spoken here,
even rarer with fluidity, or clarity
if you do not speak spanish,
then please
don’t try to complain.
it will be quite useless.
the customer is not always right. the customer is a nuisance, and
is interrupting my conversation with a coworker.

welcome to the city.

irritation & the city

Today’s a day when the city seems populated by, for lack of a better word, fucking idiots. Okay, a better word would be aliens, weirdos, dumbasses..well, that’s about the same.. Most days it’s a game of pretending that nothing annoys you as much as it really does. Like you were told, just ignore it and it wil go away. Except when it doesn’t go away, except when it’s sitting next to you in the metro or a crowded bus. A high-pitched screech wailing into a phone- “Juan! Juan! Juan! Juan! Juan! Juan!” hoping that, by sheer decibel level, a lost connection will reestablish. A woman draped in a faux-fur coat, lazily kicking a newspaper insert across the sidewalk into the street, then into the gutter, a few meters from a waste bin. A sweaty clock-puncher unwinding in the metro with a portable game device, playing car race with all the droning sound effects of acceleration, slight deceleration, then re-acceleration, with all the subtlety of a mosquito in your ear. These are the new sounds of urban life.

Posted by Wordmobi

two-year campaign / is this shit really overwith??

So tired of the election.. stressed and anxious for it to be overwith.. I’m excited, but seriously, two frickin’ years is too damn long. I voted last week, absentee, and am content knowing that my state is an Obama state. My hopes are high, and all signs point to Yes for a win, but I won’t be sleeping tonight until I see the results, which in Spain won’t be coming in until around 3am. I’ve got a bottle of champagne in the fridge, waiting to be popped open in anticipation of the outcome. Still, I can’t be overly optimistic.. anything can happen, and everyone talks about the possibilities.. is the US ready for a black president? Are people saying one thing and voting the other way? Too many polls, too many podcasts, too much NPR in my ear and it’s driving me nuts. So I’m a masochist for all of this, but I’m excited.. really excited, for the first time in years and years. Plus, my boss has a bet with me, and if he loses, he owes me a hamburger.

getting in my belly

Saturday, 24 November, I celebrated Thanksgiving dinner with my expat friends. It was my seventh Thanksgiving dinner in Spain, my eighth or ninth away from my own family. My parents have been spending the past few Thanksgivings down in Florida, with my sister and her boyfriend.Alan and I brought some chipotle sweet potatoes to the dinner this year, along with some olives and wine. There was a 32-pound turkey for the +-20 people at the dinner, though only the breast was used. The usual suspects were around, as well, including mashed taters, stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, and a few pies (pumpkin included, of course).Maria’s mother sent some great holiday decorations, including napkins and an accordion turkey. We ate and ate and ate. The dinner began at 4 in the afternoon, and we finished eating around 7. After eating, we had to get up and walk, so we met at metro Alonso Martinez and walked to Colón, down Recoletos, then up to Gran Vía, to see the christmas lights, which, unfortunately, had not yet been lit (they were lit yesterday, Monday). So the group of us ended up going to a wonderfully named bar, Cock, for a drink and to escape the cold.

It’s chilly nowadays, the nights have been getting down to 0ºC, which is cold for Madrid. I’ve busted out my alpahaca winter hat, a gift from Peru, to keep my noggin and ears warm. And walking around on a full belly certainly alleviates the biting wind, as well. After leaving Cock, Alan was hungry again. I couldn’t even think about food the rest of the day, but we went to get him a döner kebap for his barriguita, and then to home to sprawl out on our ratty-ass sofa for the rest of the evening. Fall is slowing up and taking the long slow curve into winter. I want more turkey.

this is what we’re gonna do

 So my first blog was a purge, a semi-drunken rant fueled by listening to The Jack Kerouac Collection while writing late at night. I had to get it out of the way, had to spit out that cud I’d been chewing for ages. I used to write with much more frequency than I do nowadays, but that was in the 90′s. I’ve really let myself go, and hope to recoup that which I’ve been missing lo these many years. I’ll eventually figure out what I’m gonna do with this, and I’ve got some ideas as to what I want this to be- a diary, a sounding board, a complaints window, an easy-bake oven, a boot, a flagon of meade. I work at Walt Disney Records in Spain. It’s an easy job, I’m an assistant in the production department, but significant for me as it’s what got me my legal status here in Spain, and for that I’m quite grateful. I’m at the office as I write this, so there are times, especially in the afternoons after the DHL delivery truck comes to pick up our outgoing deliveries, where there are lulls in the job. I’m trying to fill it in productively, as I’m listening to my beloved NPR podcasts and flitting between having an afternoon coffee and archiving CDs. I must go brush my teeth now, as I’ve got coffee breath. Later on I’ll figure out how to outfit this blogspace.

this is what we’ve come to

But here we are, a new day, a new beginning, this is this. Hemingway, Kerouac, Joyce, Delaney, eggs and bacon, toast and coffee, fish and fishing rod. We all have beefs, even the vegetarians. Your brand new day is another’s life on mars. Rotate, spin, chuck and roast. Spit and kettle, spindle and thread. Needle on haystack, wire on soldering iron. Rake the leaves and repair the mower, throw your pies to the wind. Ya no puedo mas, tronco. Roma, Madrid, Praga, take your pick and stamp your passport as you fly through customs to catch the connecting flight that somehow is always twenty minutes away from you in the opposite terminal. Jump on the train, hop on the bus, leap over the metro turnstile because you gotta run, you gotta move, you gotta get to where you got the feeling. It’s October in the railroad earth, it’s a little alley in San Francisco…you feel the rush, you feel the urge to hop it, jump it, it’s like adrenalin, but you gotta realize it’s mixed with melancholy too. A sentimental glee, that eventually catches up to you, and lends you a certain sadness. Of what was, of what you wish would be again, of what you want to capture- that which never existed in your time. It’s the rush, the joy of that first fine rush of sun to peek into your face through the morning curtains that hits you like a great scoop of coffeejolt gladness, that you wish to grab onto for the first time, everytime. Is it all done? Has it all been experienced for you? Is nothing new, is nothing newly sacred and ripe to pluck from the cold mountain wind-tremblin tree? It was old Johnny-Jack that first woke you to the possibilities of that bohemian life, that bebopcharlieparker-hip-to-the-hep-to-the-wise-sage-ginsbergian life that you longed for, longed to reach for and touch or, if nothing else, brush up against in a desperate search for the re-innocencia of a life long gone, a life never to be repeated, a life that, if you really want to know about, you can only experience through the pages of old books, and relive through the mind of a novato, a newbie, a fresh tabularasa unformed glob, open to whateverwheneverwhoever and listen to the breeze that whispers that which is going on in this life, among this people, between your ears and before your eyes. Don’t sit and fret and smoke and puff and cough and pine over that which might have been, that which once possibly was, but possibly was in your mind, but then again possibly not in the reality of that past timeline. Remember all of this, this life, these times, your history, your past, this present, our future. We need not sit and contemplate and daydream about the better times that were, but instead look ahead to the times that lay before us. Better than before? Possibly, but what is certain is that we cannot sit in the past corner, duncecap on our head and mourning a fate that has not yet happened. Our life is informed by the past, before our time and in our time, not just what we experienced, but what we longed to experience, what we longed to be. In our twenties, we searched for the equivalent of that life on the road, those subterranean blues which somehow were much more romantic than the reality of those protagonists. That bluemountain dream which eluded everyone became a gray reality as we all reached thirty and beyond, an unavoidable mess of adulthood, where complications became part of everyday life, where Sun Ra becomes Philip Glass becomes Madonna, circa “Ray of Light”, from the simple primitive jazzy beats to a hard technothrob, from the simple cigarette-stub-in-the-mouth-finger-snap to the wiccan-whirling-dervish of that life which has spun out of control. Can you feel it? I’m feelin’ it. Feel it and grasp it and don’t let go, don’t forget that feeling, those feelings, none of them. Think of Dean Moriarty.