In my mind it was pubbugs feasting on hot text.
The other night in Barcelona I was walking around the gothic quarter. I just got done eating some halal food from a place someone had recommended to me, and after miscommunicating to the staff that I wanted it for take out instead of dine in, I was forced to gobble my delicious little falafel in the street. No water either. I was so worried I may need some water that it occupied my mind a bit more than the food did. You know when you eat too fast and you get a hard lump of food stuck in your chest? That's what I was thinking about. After doing some visual meditations with Chris, I realized that it was perfectly possible for me to ignore my senses. I think our minds only have a set amount of space to store conscious perception, one that's shared between our 5 senses and our thoughts. If one is full enough in thought, the stream of information from your senses may get tossed aside for lack of room, even if it's a delicious steaming falafel in Spain.
Point is, I needed a drink once I was done. Walking around—lots of options, all equally unsettling. These were small, intimate spaces. Maybe 10-15 people max. Each was a different nest of sleeping monsters. Say or do one wrong thing, and I'm toast. The fact that I'm a foreigner makes things even harder.
After wandering for a bit, sizing up the threat each space posed, I saw one that I felt I could manage. I began to survey the location. Walk past slowly, act like I got somewhere to be, glance inside, take note of the hazard spots. Then I rounded the corner and waited a minute to keep things believable, and walked past again. This time, I started planning my route, and got a pretty good mental map of the space. Once I walked past the second time, I stopped. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and gathered myself.
Times like these, moments before something momentous is going to happen, with anticipation thick in the air, these are some of the most interesting times to observe human behavior. It gives you a better sense for what kind of person someone is. One time, before a half marathon, I was watching the people around me carefully. Some were visibly nervous, some were quiet and confident, I was somewhere in-between, mostly distracted by my watching. One guy, I will never forget. We were on the verge of a competition, a test of the human cardiovascular system. Your heart, muscles, and lungs need to operate in perfect coordination like a machine in order to perform. And yet, here this man was, alone to the side, smoking a cigarette.
It's go time, I dove in.
I walked up to what I thought was the door, but upon closer inspection I saw no handle so it must have been a window. Shit, time to divert. I dove left around the corner to where the door must be, but this side REALLY looked like a window, so I had to double back. Panicked and confused, I took a second look at the first spot, and it was indeed a door. Push door, not pull door, so there's no handle on the outside, dummy. I jumped inside and swam my way past people and tables. I mustn't touch, or it's all over. I practically fell into the nearest open barstool. Home base, we made it baby.
"¡CERVEZA POR FAVOR!"
Everybody knows that once you sit on a barstool and have a beer in your hands you're immune to any predators or monsters in the nearby area. We can breathe easy now. Warm light, some music, and an air of livelihood. There's some friends on my right chatting with the bartender in Spanish that sounds like a two-stroke engine, and some loud Brits on my left, enjoying their study abroad or vacation.
At this point things were pretty comfortable. This guy walked in and sat next to me, hugged the bartender, I guess they were friends. Pulp Fiction was playing on the TV and I thought that it fit the space well. I was only thinking about it because I went to a bar the other night in Kansas city with my cousins, and they were playing Attack on Titan on 6 different TV's surrounding the dance floor while Jay-Z was playing in the background. This situation was a lot easier to digest than the Mozart of aesthetic complexity in that Kansas City dive.
The scene playing was the iconic Uma-Thurman-with-a-10-inch-needle-sticking-out-of-her-chest scene. I mentioned to this guy next to me in broken Spanish that the scene supposedly happened in real life. I've been told by questionable sources that Tarantino got the idea for this scene from another movie called "American Boy, a profile of Steven Prince" which for many years was so difficult to get one's hands on that it was a mark of status to say you've seen it. The guy next to me responded in English, which is the typical reaction when I try to speak Spanish to people. He was a Che Guevara looking guy, with a beard and long hair and leather jacket. Turned out he's Italian and told me to call him Jack.
Jack had spent 6 months or so in Barcelona at the end of a motorcycle trip around Europe, and had come back for a few weeks to get his motorcycle back, which he had left at the end of his longer stay here. Funny enough, Jack had also spent 6 years in San Francisco and was really into the beat poets, go figure. We started talking all sorts of stuff about the Hippies, Haight-Ashbury, Kerouac. He told me:
"Those people were some fantastic fucking lunatics. I mean, people like Kerouac would go out all night then come home and blast some word vomit to the typewriter in a frenzy"
"God, its frustrating. I mean, where today can you find people like that? Am I just totally blind, or is there nobody around today with this kind of attitude?"
"I'm not sure."
"I was reading this blog by a guy called k-punk. He was saying that we've lost our ability to imagine better futures and create new aesthetics. He thinks this is why we rely so much on vintage aesthetics, the established winners, what's already proven."
"I know there's people out there who have the talent of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Thompson, but maybe it's an environmental problem. Maybe those ideas are there, but they're never nurtured, so they don't grow. I feel like this is what happened to the hippies, they had many ideas, but never did anything about them."
"So, maybe it's a matter of creating the right environment for people?"
"Maybe, but someone's gotta go through the effort of doing it."
Jack tells me
The Hippies had some great ideas,
But mostly
They were just ideas.
Later that night I walked back, crawled into my bunk, and gave the bedbugs a feast of hot blood.