this time, hopefully
at the door of my apartment building. he was in the process of being told that i wasn't there when i appeared. and it was a moment of contradictions. sergio's voice saying no está and my body downstairs denying him, saying yes i am. and so he came up. and watched me cook boring pasta, eating it a thousand times over with his skulking eyes before i eventually let himhave some. and then he hung aruond more than long enough to make himself a nuissance. and he thought that repeating everything i said, changing first person pronouns for second person, and drawing it all out a little more, would be sexy. it wasn't. not even when the sentence was, i'm going to bed.
in a park, in madrid. i was climbing onto some sandstone plaza pillar thing. to sit and watch the sexy anarchists play their drums. when it fell three of the markers* fell off. the three markers are now floating more or less freely within the little glass world of my watch. every now and then, one gets jammed under one of the hands, and the whole thing stops. if it gets caught on the hour hand, not even the second hand can keep going. the mechanics of the watch dictate that no seconds will be spent in vain. if they're not contributing to hours, then they can't pass. it's sort of like the party building idea of politics. if you're not building the movement+ then you're wasting time. i wish the seconds would pass, maybe it would buy me a little bit of extra time to hide out in.
god i sound sappy today. but i feel sappy.
*they aren't numbers. just little rectanguar markers. they imply a sort of base intelligence. i don't need numbers to tell the time. i can figure it out from twelve evenly placed sticks. god, i could probably work it out from the stars if need be. this is, of course, one step down in the heirarchy of intelligence imbuing watch-faces from that with no markers at all. people with watches like that have overstepped the line. they are arrogant. they bought the watch so that when people ask them the time, they can display the watch, and challenge the other person to figure it out. they buy these watches because they are bad people.
+there is always only one.
last week and a half or so.
went to madrid, lots of people, everywhere, lots of americans, lots of spanish boys smoking weed, saw ange! discovered that i can lie, in spanish. because it's just a game, right, this whole spanish thing. i mean, the spaniards just speak it for fun, i'm sure. then came back to pamplona and was tired, then went to barcelona and saw a dj set by ollie teeba from the herbaliser. trashy. hip hop and breaks and old funk. v nice. then i came back to pamplona and am tired again. i could fold my head in half with my own two hands right now. ahhhrrggmm.
postscript. i just updated this post, because i had spelt two, to. oh dear.
for the first time in weeks, a morning cold enough to step out of my apartment neatly tucked inside a black hoodie. yessss.
last night, in the apartment of french girls, after eating crepes. i'm in the lounge room and hear an australian accent coming out of their tv. eventually, after a couple of minutes, i see the face. it's stan fucking grant. the fallen angel of australian journalism. working for whatever that cnn channel is that gets to some spanish tv sets. he was doing some general, unfocused report from china. about reform, repression, democracy, all those things that can let you say that you understand a country like china in ten minutes. he talked about how the government permits dissent when it suits their purpose, like the anti-japanese protests recently. but there is always a heavy police presence, ready to move protestors on when they've served their purpose. he spoke about their fear of the people, how dangerous they felt they were if they let them gather for too long. he talked about the pathetic over-abundance of police at a particular protest where police, get this, outnumbered protestors by what must have been a ratio of three to one. the only protest i have ever been to in australia where cops didn't outnumber protestors by a similar ratio, was the anti-war rally in the february before the iraq was invaded. and that was because they didn't have to. the organisers provided their own.
the other day i had to ring ing direct, because i had forgotten my user number for their account, and that account had most of my money. hence i was left with the tiniest amount in my accessible account, and figured i had better sort this thing out so as to transfer so money. to make the money real, to bring it into the light. so i call ing from a payphone, and they have me on hold for five minutes, which hurts more when you're paying by the second. eventually the woman answers and has to ask me a few questions. a little test. i breeze through the first few. mother's maiden name. easy. date of birth. too easy. then i start to stumble a little. things like, phone number. shit. address, email address. housemates, workplace, sleeping partner... what would they have been when i last spoke to ing. who did i construct myself as? i figured that i had painted myself as the newtown resident that i was for a while. by some miracle i guessed the right self, and even remembered the particulars of that self. i even remembered our phone number. the one nobody ever called. and i remembered walking into that house for the first time, to check it out, but knowing that i was going to say yes. it was raining and everything seemed so dark in there. and damp. when sam lived there. when he used to shudder down the stairs so quickly. then later on, the night he told brigid that he was going to join the army. he pulled her aside like he was going to tell her he was in love with her. and we just went, shit. the army? are you serious? what a shame that you'll have to move out. we could have had such great parties with all the army boys, before they got shipped off to the next war. wouldn't that have been fun.
so i passed the test. just. i didn't have to tell the woman about sam or the red telephone we had that matched our red kitchen roof. but she gave me my number nonetheless. she had no idea that i'm not that person. sucker.
the showdown; some time last year.
joel vs mrs liew
setting: joel and steph cooking eggplants in the kitchen, mrs liew anxious about her daughter and this boy, whom she had met for the first time on this particular night, buzzing around cooking in her kitchen. we slice the eggplants and get ready to put the under the grill.
mrs liew: you're not going to peel the eggplant?
joel [somewhat brashly]: no, why would we, who peels eggplant?
mrs liew: the chinese.
joel concedes defeat, knowing never to challenge again.
we were huddled in this strange little extra room. it grew out like a tumour, but inside was womb-like, the music duller and less intrusive. so we sat and drank gin and lemon-squash from oversized glasses at oversized prices and chatted in our mangled spanish, all three of us. she was sitting across from me at the table, and at one point during the night, dropped her head against the wall, her hair hanging like drying clothes, and shot me the most tragic look i've ever seen. her eyes as wet as a dog's. her smile red and half-meant. she might have just been tired, but i gave a split-second smile back that i hoped she read as meaning that i understood, that we were both there, bleeding from the inside...
one of the other girls came over and wrote something on a piece of paper for luis to decipher. you know what this means? she says with attitude. she has written something in a sort of flowery heiroglyphics. she explains that each character corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. it's spanish, just with it's own script. luis says, oh yeah, i think i've seen this. my girlfriend in peru sent me a letter written in this one time with all the letters explained. so what's it for, like, where does it come from? i ask. you know, like, raperos and stuff, in the streets, in peru.
i am totally suffering from a kind of michelle pfeiffer syndrome - i think i've mentioned this before - where i desperately want to be the cool teacher. now the kids in my class see right through this. i mean, god, the first week i had class with them, i didn't even know what reggaetón was. (it's a style of music, sort of latinoish hip-hopish stuff. messy. big in ecuador, and the kids fucking lap it up) and if i play music for them (officially so they can try and figure out the lyrics, unofficially because now they complain if i don't do it every week) they laugh hysterically every time the music starts. the first week it was manu chao, the next jamiroquai, but both times they laughed just as hard. i think they just find the idea that i listen to music hilarious. because they know i'm not cool. yesterday, at this picnic day thingy with the kids, one of my students asked me if my friend penny was my wife. that was when i knew the cool teacher dream was dead. my wife? for fuck's sake.
still, yesterday was really fun. i hung out with most of the younger kids (they either haven't figured out yet that i'm not cool, or they're taking pity on me). the find out the day was madeline, a ten year old girl from ecuador, who heard penny and i speaking english, and mimicked, in a light voice, penny's 'oh my god', and then said, ahhh, hablan inglés, que guay [they speak english, how cool]. she was one of those middle-aged ten year-olds, which is even more captivating in spanish. we sat around chatting about learning languages and how difficult it can be. especially english.
they asked us over and over again how to say 'do you want to go out with me?' then they asked how to say maricón, which is your general run of the mill homophobic slur. so i was like, nah, i'm not gonna teach you that one. they just wanted something to call the boys, something to laugh at them for, a secret insult with a meaning whispered amongst the girls. but they showed their innocence when they were like, ok, how do you say tonto, which is like silly or maybe stupid at its harshest end of meaning.
when she spoke it was with a delicacy that suggested that she understood the full potential of words. she understood it in all its gravity. she would look at me from the corner of her eyes, speaking rapidly, she swallowed every s, and breathed out the rest of the phrases. she spoke as if every work might provoke all the pain in the world, that this, using of words was tied up everywhere in history; that it was hitler's main weapon - this yelling, this fury, always came out in words. she knew that if she whispered to me, with that economic and - for me - indecipherable bolivian accent, maybe we could whisper our way out of it all, with nobody else hearing, and nobody else having to die.
alba
another skinny white boy
antipopper
asti
english lessons
hon
no se puede
somnambulist
today
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