Skip to content


The city alive

Fountain in the heart of Madrid

A despatch from Madrid at 4:30 AM, when you can look at the city, it with half-lidded eyes and walking with us down Calle Gran Via.  The night is relentless here, pulsing with energy and bonhomie.

Recipe for Spanish Experience Cookie:

  • One part getting lost in the center of Old Madrid
  • One part getting lost in the Metro
  • 1/2 part visiting the Palace
  • 1/2 part walking
  • 1/4 part gumption

It is not long after I retreat from the City Alive until I return to the streets in search for a Coke and a snack.  The wan hotel guard shrugs when I ask if anything is open around.  He says, “Try down the street,” indicating the street in front of the hotel.

So I do, walking down the street alone, accompanied only by newly withdrawn euros burning a hole in my pocket.  The night presses on me as I walk down, towards nowhere because I know not where I am, but thataway.  I pass by a couple hidden in the shadows around a makeshift bench, slouching, eating something that looks like thin pizza.  After a few quiet blocks, I encounter a white island, lit windows indicating a 24 hour convenience store.

Drawn to it like a moth, I bang up against the glass doors that didn’t open.  Confused, I glance around inside the store and notice a security guard waving at me.  He is holding one hand up, in the universal gesture to *wait*.  He then points at the crowd inside the store.

After a few minutes, two people exit the store after the guard presses a key on a remote to open the doors and I was then able to enter.  This singularly odd experience left an impression on me and I wandered the tiny store aimelessly, feeling the one-minded Spaniards watching me; the security guard with his powerful remote, the crowd of aloof hipsters near the register waiting for something.

The crowd was not together, not a group, they were a loose collection of individuals, waiting, individually, with expectant eyes towards the back of the store–ahh, where they were heating up purchased pizzas, which were laying in tidy stacks in refrigerated shelves.  I thought to myself, “Perhaps I should check that out, pizza sounds good.”

I quickly decided against it after reading the various and disgusting toppings that these people thought were appropriate on pizza.  Note that I am a purist and anything other than cheese, herbs, and perhaps pepperoni gets voted off my pizza island.

After paying for my coke, waters, and potato chips (which took me 10 minutes to choose, as I had to study each bag and make sure I wasn’t buying bacon infused cheese chips) I tried to leave the store by walking up to the glass, forgetting that the security guard held the Power.  He then opened it for me and I was let out on the night.

On the way back to the hotel I passed by many discarded boxes of heated pizza from that convenience store, discarded in dark corners and on quiet benches, refugees from that endless bright place.

Posted in spain.


To the land of bears

I am twenty minutes away from the Barajas airport in Madrid, on an Iberia Airlines flight.  Fortunately I have an aisle seat.

The people on the plane are a nice potpourri of various travelers–next to me sits a couple from South Africa, in their 40s.  They carefully sit, carefully eat, and carefully watch the inflight movie; with their gray hair and gray stares.

The young blonde girl two rows down from us is playing with her hair, getting the front of it back into a pinned twist, just so.  She is noticeable mostly because she is blonde, young, and good looking.  The boy with her is a lesser douchebag (as opposed to major) with only a few douchebaggy qualities:  (1) a permanent half scowl, (2) half-turned hat, and (3) a perfectly put-together clothing ensemble, complete with faux street graffiti tee shirt.  He has his training wheels on, soon he will remove them and move on to overly tanned skin, bluetooth earpieces, and white shoes.

A certain numbness, a kind of disbelief pervades me.  Perhaps I’m a jaded traveler now but it doesn’t feel like a vacation yet.  But I can smell it, just like I can smell the perfume of the gorgeous Spanish women on the plane, scattered around like impossible flowers in a meadow.

Me and my mate exchange jokes to melt frozen time, watching it drip away minute by minute.

Smells on the plane always come in cycles.

  1. Stale baseline plane smell
  2. Whiff of airplane food that always smells the same
  3. Unknown bodily function smell (was that from the toilet?)
  4. Actual smell of airplane food from cart or from tray
  5. (Bonus) Smell of shit as someone changes their infant’s diapers right next to you, or behind you, with an apologetic air (too bad it doesn’t smell better).
  6. See #1

At this time, 15 minutes before the flight lands, I am smelling #3, UNKNOWN BODILY FUNCTION SMELL.  When I smell this, I dart my eyes quickly around, almost as if to catch someone squirming in their seat, post-fart, with a guilty expression on their face.  I don’t see anyone.

When we touch down in Madrid, eight hours later and still carrying recycled air and smells from Washington DC, we will all exhale, the plane, the passengers, exhale and open to tumble down the concourse and into the land of bears.

Posted in spain.


Eighteen

“You have a good soul,” I said to the fresh-faced eighteen year old who was showing off his high-school acquired sign language.  He was here, there, in both places at once, raising his hand in the school of life, asking, “What is love?”

Heisenberg-like, he was both near his friends and a besotted older man who simultaneously looked fit and old(er), a hanger-on that shuffled near him while retaining the imperturbable aloofness that only years gain you, and near us.

“My boy hates me,” he signs, spelling out an ancient love story writ between the flashes of Lady Gaga on the televisions and the condensation on our drink glasses.  ”He’s over at Cobalt, and I’m here.”  We all roll our eyes in shared disdain for the Boy, the Boy who is missing Everything and is Absent.

“You can find someone here,” my friend says, pointing to the many bodies in the bar, bodies that seemed to press upon us with their presence, in only the way that bodies press in gay bars, mostly just there but with a hint of directness and challenge.  Almost as if they say, “Here I am, and here you are, and are you going to do anything about it?”

“My boy hates me,” the eighteen year old repeats, while drinking the rest of the liquid in his cup and looking sideways.  ”Here is my best friend,” white arm encircling a black neck, both handsome and vibrating with youth. Lady Gaga’s cleavage mesmerizes me on ten screens as we awkwardly shuffle around to block the Older Man from being part of our Group.

“I don’t want him,” youth says, glancing at the old.  ”How do I get rid of him?”  Our suggestions, lame as they are, create shared camaraderie that is shattered as they bound off, sliding between bodies and people to their next lily-pad in the pond., where undoubtedly they will repeat their lives until they are too heavy and sink below the water, joining the rest of us solemn swimmers.

Posted in dc.


The face it leers at me

The face it leers at me — the face on the wall.  It is just a trick of the light, light reflected through bevelled glass on the front door, going through it in such a way to shape a weird twisting face.  A face that greets me during the night, when the front porch light is turned on.

Thankfully those nights are rare, the porch light being on, because…just because.  They just are.  Often I turn it off so I don’t see the face when I go to the bathroom (which is adjacent to the front door).

In bed,with the porch light on, just knowing it is there gives me a small chill.  That forever face with its V-shaped mouth and hard eyes written in 100-watt soft white light.  No stranger to night terrors I am, childhood full of frozen moments where time leaked away slowly, body stiff, knowing the very air pressed itself against you with baleful intent.

They are old friends of mine, the quivering shadow against the window, the invisible presence by the bed, moving will-o-wisps out of the corner of your eye, cold LED lights blinking like eyes, goosebumps appearing like magic, rushing across the body as if propelled by wind.

Later, as I got older, these old friends slowed down and lost their power, only to be supplanted by the very real fears of not making a living, losing people, and not ever finding ones way through the world.

It takes a leering face in the darkness of the night to resurrect and transport these old, old fears, here to stop and say hello, why yes, we are still around.  We just wanted to remind you of childhood and through that, remark on your adulthood, how the simple honesty of being afraid of the dark is sometimes the only sane thing to feel.

Posted in misc.


Carlsbad Caverns


I miss you, Carlsbad. I had the chance to plumb your depths only briefly, penetrating only as deep as you would let me.

Next time, I hope to have your knowing guidance as you take me on a tour of your nether regions.

Posted in Uncategorized.


Clean, smooth sheets

Your mind goes, “mmmmmmmm” when you slide between smooth clean sheets for the first time.

“mmmmmmmmm.”

The bed is freshly made, correctly, and thus: a fitted sheet followed by a sheet, concluded with the usual filler blanket and the heavy quilt on top.  The bed vibrated with mmmmm potential energy.  The kind of energy that you instantly know will lend itself to a good nights sleep.

Sandwiched by high thread count, I felt content.  My body filled the space between sheets with heat.  The warm beige sheets rest on me, under me, above me, equally smothering and freeing.  Frowningly, the quilt muscles its way into conscious thought, and I shift my weight to the left, to the right, testing the boundaries and establishing the perimeter; beyond which only lies the arctic, a wintry landscape of darkest night and cold limbs.

Lying still, to best occupy the island of warmth, my big toe rubs a staccato rhythm against the fabric, feeling each tiny groove in the cotton and marveling at how the whole thing hangs together, thousands and millions of threads, strings, atoms, particles, all in one place at the same time, for me, for the bed, for you.  And it still holds, and will tomorrow and the next day, until the dark comes and unravels it.

Posted in art.


A quiet laugh

Above me the lurid red glow of two EXIT signs make the room far more sinister than during the bright New Mexico day, when the sun shines through the windows and you can almost imagine children playing in these old, long empty dorms.  The shouts and laughter of children still echo in this empty space, unseen drafts the only remnants of their young energy.

I sleep in the living room, adjacent to the kitchen, in what must have been the dorm mothers’ (or fathers’) room, that unknown caretaker who watched over a long hallway of now-empty dorm rooms.  It is said that ghosts haunt this place, this palimpsest of three storied life, each floor holding young occupants of New Mexico School of the Deaf who are now most certainly well within their teens and twenties.

Even the wary security man who woke me up yesterday morning seemed to crouch somewhat inside himself, warding off the emptiness of the place with gruff candor as he let me know that maintenance would be working during the day.  He shuffled off, door closing behind him as the sunlight flashed and pulsed in the room.

The large LED scroll sign-cum-clock reads 12:13 AM as I write this, feeling chills course up my body as I imagine things going bump in the night, ghostly laughter (actually heard by Adam’s classmate Ashley), and the strange sense that this place has energy left over from its past life, energy that will be changed forever when the renovations begin in earnest.

My heart skips a beat when I think about getting up and looking behind me, around me, for any sign that this place is haunted, haunted like my grandfather occasionally haunts my family, signaling his presence with lights that snap on and off abruptly (I love and miss you, Grandfather).

I’m going now, going to the restroom and dive into bed—may Fortune favor me with a good night’s sleep and friendly spirits.

Posted in Uncategorized.


A hidden ruby

The empty BART station cupped us in its yellow embrace as we stood, waiting, for the next train.  It would not come for ten minutes, dooming us to glance, glance, glance at the digital sign that declared variously 1) no trains were headed to San Francisco, 2) escalators were offline, and 3) that the next train was 10, 39 minutes en route.

Glance.  Nine minutes.  Glance. Still nine minutes.  It was a moment where you recognized the act of waiting.  Then you thought back to all the moments where you waited.  Then you waited.  Eight minutes.  Then the train was suddenly there with a quiet roar.

We were headed into San Francisco for a party, a gathering, to a auto-da-fé of pizza, burning in a wood oven.  Happy birthdays were given, drinks were received, and conversation slathered like sauce on bread.  Red sauce on pasta, even.

The zeitgeist of the evening was Zeitgeist, where barely acceptable Damnation was shared and we waited for Godot (in the form of the Tamale Lady).  She did not show but it did not prevent us from waiting.

Afterwards, back on the BART, a ruby-faced Ruby hacker accosted us in a green cape with a butterfly on the lapel, with green eyes.  He signed to us, “Are you a group or are you just friends?”  Stumbling over his words, his sign language stuttered and started amid weirdly surreal smiles.  He came from every Dungeons and Dragons game ever known.  He wore himself like a cloak.

Once on the train again, the memory of Green Cloak fading, we spoke of stalkers and sign language.

Posted in beingacritic.


Run, Bobby, Run

I’ve started running again in the last few weeks, and I am amazed at two things. One: How fast your fitness level goes down after a few months of inactivity. Two: How one’s basic fitness level doesn’t go down after a few months of inactivity.

Posted in beingacritic.


A gentle breeze

The breeze pushed against the leaves, trees, blowing small eddies of leaping dirt across the path.  She walked on it, the path, the red path bordered by small red strips of wood.  Each step was a tired struggle as she pushed uphill.

Then she was over the top, and the vista of San Francisco and the bridge opened in front of her.  A sense of vertigo touched her briefly as the yawning expanse of the Bay area pressed on her.  The dizziness passed quickly, to be replaced by the familiar feeling of loss.

She continued down the path, which ended at a iron fence at the edge of the bluff.  Her dark clothes flapping around her, she rested two small hands on the warm metal of the fence.  She put her foot on the bottom railing.  Her right arm dangled at her side, now, and her brown hair shone in the orange sunlight.

Below her, the wind coaxed white foam out of the sea water, breaking, only to be pushed anew.

Posted in misc.