Ta logo!

Ya está.
Dos años increibles, que pasaron tán rapido que parecían un sueño.
Os agradezco un montón a toda la gente que he conocido: a la buena igual como a la mala: me habeís enseñado ver a la vida de otra forma, me habeís cambiado, y eso tocaba.

Gracias, y aunque os echaré montones de menos, sé que nos veremos pronto, y tendremos mucho que hablar. Fins aquest dia. Os quiero mucho.

Visca!

Roads

Or: Changes

Or: Why do people like me feel comfortable sharing their innermost thoughts with people like you?

I´ve always been amazed by the way things change. It´s nothing new, really; everything changes, always has and always will. We all know that.

Before, I used to think changes came in two shapes: the good shaped ones, and the bad. Sweet oranges can become bitter blues. What starts out as milk may curdle into cream, then yoghurt, then butter, then cheese, and then something only the French would eat.

Point is, I´ve realized now that all changes are shaped in one way. The good and bad and ugly, all at the same time. Orangy blues, cheesy milk, bittersweet and scrumptuously sour. A dog which bites you but then apologizes and becomes your best buddy. A French person who steals your bread but also takes away your pain.

Now, how many changes can a person undergo before they change for good? For better, for worse? And for who? And are the big changes really that huge, and are the small ones really that irrelevant? How many are irreversible, and how many only seem to be?

Am I leaving soon, or am I going back?

The answer, of course, lies in the wisdom of Nick Drake:

"You can take a road that takes you to the stars,
I can take a road that will see me through."

We often wonder which is the right road, and which is the wrong. I argue here that there is only one, big, connected road. One that will take you to the stars and see you through. How? Well, there are many stars. And they are always there, night and day. And they are everywhere. So, you can travel to the stars by going up, or down, left or right, hacia la montaña o hacia el mar, north, south, east and west, by going far, by staying where you are, by being and doing, by loving and hating, by choosing your friends and foes, with or without knowing, by being what you eat and drinking what you can handle, by thinking before speaking, or by speaking before thinking, by writing, by pondering words like "skulduggery" and "tomfoolery", by finding a reason to smile, or by being delighted when a reason finds you, by spraying ants and feeling bad about it, by dreaming about living your dreams, by asking for directions, by giving them, by digging for treasure, even when no "X" marks the spot, by doing the unexpected, or by expecting nothing, or too much, by sipping a beverage on the beach, by singing, dancing, shouting, by watching others watch football, by remembering a moment, by organizing your thoughts or by letting them run rampant in your head, by finding something to do, for an hour, a day, or a lifetime.

Maybe Nick Drake had been sipping on the forbidden tea, or puffing the crazy leaf, or maybe I have, but one thing is clear to me: a change is never just a bad one. All you have to do is take your road and it will see you through.

Orange

This morning I ate the last orange I´ve ever eaten. After swallowing the first juicy mouthful I looked at the rest of the orange and noticed numerous little white larvae with tiny red dots for eyes crawling around on it. My calculations show that I must've eaten about five of them.

A bad omen?

Tonight Holland is playing Argentina in the world cup. If they don´t show the sportmanship they lacked against Ivory Coast I am going to officially declare myself ashamed to be Dutch.

Tables

(for those who care)

Here is a story I wrote last week. It's about time. Writing it had a purely personal and therapeutic purpose, but I decided to share it anyway.

Every single sentence in this story is a fact.


The 7th of June

Yesterday was the 6 th of June. I started the day sitting in a car with people I had never met before, driving to a camping south of Barcelona. When we arrived, we ate in a restaurant. There were a lot of Dutch people there. I studied them one by one. It was good entertainment during our lunch.

Then we lay on the grass, in the shade. But the shade would slowly become sun, and when that happened a Hawaiian woman would come marching towards us from where the pool was and tell us to get back into the shade. We would then obey without question. After all, we wouldn't want to get sunburnt.

It was the 6th of June, and we were laying on the grass, surrounded by people I had never met before.

At times we ate more. There was fruit, fresh and colorful, laid out on tables. There were sandwiches, cookies, chocolate bars, and there were drinks. The drinks were in iceboxes next to the tables with food.

So we occasionally munched on something while we lay there. Sometimes we talked.
We talked about unimportant things. The Dutch had come out of the restaurant to watch us. They sat on cheap white plastic chairs drinking from big bottles of water. Occasionally they would speak a sentence or two. I was watching them, they were watching me. I whistled the Dutch national athem and they stared blankly at a palm tree.

"That was the song they sing before a football match," a big Dutch woman said to a big Dutch man in some swampy Dutch accent.

We watched 3 boys and a girl, wearing black clothes and and swimming caps, with painted-black faces and hands, doing jumps off of a trampoline next to the pool. They would run towards it, in a black flurry, jump, arch, and smoothly disappear into the water. Then they would get out with much difficulty, and soggily trot back to where they had started. Then they would do it again.
We watched people sitting, talking, eating, drinking and smoking. We watched some people kick a ball around. Once and again the Hawaiian woman would swoop by and rub our necks and arms with a protective lotion.

We did this, and not much more, for 7 hours.

Then we got up and went inside. We took off our clothes and put different ones on. I wore jeans, a pink wife-beater shirt, a jacket and sneakers. They were of vital importance for what we were going to do.

We went outside and strolled over to the pool. It was huge and filled with water, but not with people. All the people were next to it. Then, the three people who had been lying on the grass with me jumped into the pool. I hesitated for a split second. But then, I stepped onto the edge, swung my arms backwards and dove into the water.

Under water, I found my way to a small table.

It was strange, swimming there, wearing jeans, a wife-beater shirt, a jacket and sneakers.
I pulled myself upright and managed to land my feet on the table. I stretched out my legs and I swam to the surface. I caught my balance, the table wobbled a little underneath me. I fastened my feet under two rubber footholds. I looked around. The three people that had been lying on the grass before were now each on their own underwater table, fully dressed and dripping, standing still and looking around. The water was up to our ankles. Then we crouched. A loud hiss sounded and my table started moving downwards, towards the bottom of the pool. I breathed in quickly and closed my eyes as my chin hit the surface of the water. When I was fully immersed I heard three muffled clinks, each one just a second after the other. I stretched out as the table shot upwards to its original position. When it reached it, I just sort of stood there, my clothes dripping. We repeated this for half an hour.

Then we went home. It had been a strange day.


The 8th of June

Yesterday was the 7th of June. I spent the day standing in the sun, chewing gum. The people who had been on the grass and on the underwater tables with me the day before were facing me. They were chewing gum as well. The gum tasted horrible. Nevertheless, we ate about 40 pieces each.

When I came home there was light coming from my room, and the door was slightly ajar. When I opened it, with caution, I noticed there was a beautiful girl sitting on my bed, smiling. In front of her there were two tables laid out with the most delicious of mariscadas one can have the fortune to stumble upon. There was home-made cake for dessert. From it stuck two candles, one shaped like a "4", and the other like a "2". Fortunately not in that order. At least, not yet. There were strawberries and there was whipped cream. Yesterday was a strange day with an amazing ending. Thank you, sweetie.


The 8th of June (Part II)

Today was the 8 th of June. I ran 60 meters in 60 seconds. I impersonated an autumn leaf floating in a river while I ran. Once, I jumped and milled my arms around. I went home and bought a hamburger. I took a shower and put on my pajamas. I sat down and wrote.

The Smiling City

I have not forgotten you.

I am writing.

I need time.

Give me time.

I am well, how are you?

Elephants

Or:

The Complexity of Simple Things

Or:

Why Nothing Should Not Have To Make Sense To Anyone

Or:

Cheap Deodorant Factory

Or:


Why everything is right:

I sat on the beach last night, enjoying what was left of the sunset, which was quite a lot, waiting for some friends to turn up for a swimming pool date. I had arrived early, because I had forgotten just exactly how good I am at dodging traffic on a rickety bicycle at high speeds. (Really, apparently saying the words "Via Laietana" is enough to make Lance shreek like a wimp and bury himself deep in Sheryl's wealthy bosom. But not me. Nope. No, siree. I crash down that street like a guy who looks like he has a habit of crashing down streets like that really fast. Nor do I have Sheryl's wealthy bosom to bury myself in. Which is not a bad thing.)

So I was there, on that beach, facing the waves, which came crashing down like a guy on a bike on Via Laietana, and amidst these thunderous thumps of literary overachievement I sat thinking about how I was pretty sure the dorky figure walking past in front of me was going to get his feet wet at one point or another, and how the little sausage-like dog - dressed up in a bright pink doggy-sweater, playing with the coming and going of the tide - obviously had some freaked-out, chain-smoking, blubbery fat old lady with a make-up smudged face frantically uttering the Spanish equivalent of "Fluffy!?" between raspy, heavy, hyperventilated breaths and uncontrolled swallows of accumulated panic-saliva.

I looked around to see if I could find this lady so that I could signal the presence of her chirpy chorizo before things turned fatal, but all that caught my attention was the gloomy mist that hung heavily over Frank Gehry's glittering "Fish" and the beach boulevard, with its proud palms, a mist which, at that moment, felt like it could not have been anything other than evaporated sea salt, but probably was.


The waves go like this:

BOOM
...
...
...
...
... (about ten meters away)
...
...
BOOM
...
...
...
... (closer this time, but not too much)
...
...
BOOM (BOOM)
...
...
...
... (one on top of the other, overlapping water)
... (two meters away from my feet)
...
...
...
BOOM and: etc.
...
...
etc. again.


Why everything is wrong:

Just then, a phone buzzes stupidly, unaware that its existence is an anachronism of the moment. (BOOM ... ... ... bzzz bzzz ... ... ... BOOMzz bzzz.)

After fishing the lit-up device out of my pocket, I find that the time is ten minutes past the one agreed upon, and that I have a message, curtly assuring me my friends "are arriving".

In Spain, this means you can stay where you are for a good ten minutes more.

Just then, a wave crashes down a little bit too hard to the pink sausage's liking (BOOOM!) and it scurries off yelping towards the panic-stricken lady in the mists.

Just then, the dorky figure, who was trying so hard to avoid the water by swaying dangerously close to the changing waterline but never letting it catch up with him, and who, on a sidenote, was doing so pretty zestfully, which is of course exactly what made him such a dorky character in the first place, gets his shoe wet. His face shows that famously funny realization:

"Shit."
"Got my shoe wet, I think."
"Prob'ly soaked it, as a matter of fact."
"Let's have a look."
...
"Oh shit yeah, I soaked it."
"But why then, do my sock and foot feel dry?"
"Oh shit, wait."
"Oh no shit, wait. No."
"Oh no, oh no, oh no."


Why things should never be taken too seriously:

One of the greatest poets and artists and performer's of our time and dimension is, beyond any doubt:

Raffi.

One of Raffi's most profound poetic achievements is the following:

"Willoughby, walloughby, woo,
an elephant sat on you."

Looking past the childlike façade, these lines speak a terrific, horrible truth. There is no need for elephants to sit on anyone, but ever so often they do. Does this mean we should shy away from elephants, that we should run away from them and just not try?

Of course I am asking:

Should we give up before giving it our best? Should we give up if we think we have given it our best? Or if we think we can't give any more? When we think we have failed? Can one ever speak of failure if one can try again? Try harder? Try something else? Try someone else? Is not the only failure the one where we don't recognize the elephant sitting on us, the one where we don't realize it's just an elephant? And if it seems there are an awful lot of them, and if it seems that they're constantly sitting on you, isn't THAT when we should realize our relativity to everything, the fact that elephants don't exist if you won't let them, even if they do? Isn't THAT the point where we gain our perspectives and learn our lessons? Isn't THAT when we realize how many friends we have around?

Soon

I'm taking a deep breath and getting ready for something big. Exactly what that will be I don't know, but there's a lingering feeling I need to do something soon and things will indeed happen. It's impossible for things NOT to. As Beck said it so well: I'd better go it alone. Na na na na na na.