Šibenik

Triumphant approach after accidental highway through the hinterlands. Behold the quiet town, shimmering mirrored in the harbor.

Should we have come at daybreak? No: Šibenik’s stone streets are mute orange magic by lamplight.

Doors stand wide open. Ventilation trumps lock and key in the tiny town. Childishly tempted, we “break in” to an apartment building.

Plants in odd architectural corners of the stairwell. Our feet and mouths try to whisper. We reach an apex beyond which there are only locked storage spaces. Disappointed by the lack of roof access, our investigation yields no light bulbs, no reason to pick locks. The nudged rat poison lingers on his fingers as he touches my hair. He apologizes but I’m unconcerned.

We climb over fence and crumbled wall to make shadow puppets in a wrecked fortress. He’d like to steal the flag, but it is padlocked to the pole. Red lights blink in a triangular cemetery below. We contemplate death dates on temporary tombstones bearing the same surname.

Shall we? We nod to each other, sleepy, but a pontoon juts into the harbor: an invitation. I disrobe first, rapidly. The girls follow, orbs of pale flesh softly orange before slipping into the glittering black.

Adriatic silk on nymphean skin. We shout and laugh, calling into the dark. We hush, silent to meet the exigent still of perfectly doubled boats on water. We splash and swim and finally shiver, waiting selfishly for towels.

On losing things

I am shedding objects. Moving in, moving out, alone, with friends, with family. Everywhere things get left behind.  My passport in Madrid, sunglasses on the cruise, shorts, earrings, and flip flops in Ibiza, makeup in Brussels. Several lighters, a pack of cigarettes in Barcelona, a pipe, nice marijuana, some hash, a nail clipper. Many pairs of underwear stolen from off my bed in Amsterdam, along with my primary bag of toiletries. Two leather purses, an expensive digital camera, a notebook with a week’s worth of drunken and drug-addled notes regarding the meaning of life written in Brussels and Amsterdam. Late for my train to London and in a sleep-deprived fog I left a bag behind.

I am saddest now about the notes. The camera is insured, I only lost a day’s worth of pictures, money comes and goes like the tide.

This is a moment to reflect, to get my shit together and see more thoroughly: through my pen, rather than so obsessively through the lens. I will remain open to magic and adventure and I will write more dedicatedly, I will strive with more passion to sort out my dream and make it real. I will get more of it up, out, and on the net in case another notebook or this laptop are lost next.

I don’t need these objects, I don’t need these records any more than I need any thing. All I need is experience and language. To sharpen my pen, to forge forth with more gusto, to be stronger.

I will enjoy being lighter, being less fixated upon holding on. I will get square with the stream of the universe, with the fact that all fades and eventually no one will know I was ever here. Images are not superior to reality, they only offer us the illusion of immortality by preserving precisely the moments that slip past us in real time. We cling to photographs to fill our flawed memories, to give us narrative jumping off points when the mind fails.

We are in those images, our vision and our presence. It is not unreasonable to mourn the loss of that evidence.

Still, reality trumps its lens-snatched facsimile. I am getting closer to that in prose, close as can be; I am shuffling up to it, snuggling my skin against it like an antsy, coiling cat.

I must keep looking as if I have the camera; perhaps I’ll buy a new one when I head east. I musn’t be afraid of losing cameras over and over again because it’s just money, just hassle. Hassle moves and motivates like any part of the journey, I can’t be afraid or impatient with it. This is the worst that can happen, remember? I know my silly self.

“Ridiculous absentminded girl, how can she do this again? How does she exist this silly way?” I ask from the outside, feeling my purse like a phantom limb. But I know, I do know my silly self, I expect nothing less at this point. In spite of my disappointment, silver linings sink in like the gray relief of Dutch sky after so much scorching Spain. Luckily luckily I did not lose my passport again, luckily luckily I still have my ticket to London. I will get there, things are not so bad, nothing will stop my forward momentum.

Last week in Amsterdam, a mushroom trip dissolved into panic at the end of the night. The pleasant thing about drugs is that generally if you take too much, you wake up in the morning and everything is right with the world again. This is different; the consequences here are real. Canceled credit cards, lost equipment, another bump up in my mother’s anxiety. I wish I could turn it all back. I wish I was less like me and a bit more like someone else, someone responsible, someone fastidious and vigilant.

The roller coaster will take me up again, I’m sure. For now I dial these numbers again, where lost objects are meant to be found. I hope that someone kind will read my notebook, find my address, and drop it in the mail.

I find a nail clipper on the bench, waiting outside the station. I have no money and no heart, but a friend is on the way to rescue me. The sneaky universe has not forsaken me yet.

More on Barcelona

I arrive here by magic. Barcelona: the name jangles heavy in my throat, laden with expectation.

Awash in the sensual possibility of Gaudi, I scribble: don’t take convention for an answer. Write stories like Gaudi and poems like Gaga; disrupt and redefine and have boundless confidence. Hang chain from the ceiling to locate architectural stress points: stop hammering away at physics formulas.

Why shouldn’t every door handle be crafted lovingly for the human hand? Why shouldn’t every courtyard creep to the roof in a mosaic of undulating underwater blues? Seats contoured to the spine, rooms with adjustable folding partitions and stained glass different from every angle, windows of different sizes and orientations to best distribute the light of day: the Gaudi houses are truly made for human beings. They appeal to our senses, to our bodies and imaginations. They note our caprices and oblige them, rather than demanding that we sink subhuman to adjust to a shapeless, characterless box of concrete.

Why is this such a unique idea? Most people live and work in buildings. People, then, should be our primary concern when constructing buildings, no? All we do is slap up more concrete boxes, to minimize materials and maximize building profits. Why have we forgotten the wisdom in the hanok, the wigwam, the Spanish courtyard? There are too many of us, and comfort is expensive. Better a concrete box than a cardboard one, right?

It takes thought to design, effort to produce, and conscientious concern to maintain comfort. I understand that Gaudi’s details are expensive, but I don’t grasp why we all go so quietly along with the idea that everyday dignity and humanity are only promised to the wealthy.

Average people should be comfortable and happy in the spaces where they work and live. Artistic detail thrills us, color delights us, design inspires us. This is not frivolity chipping away at the bottom line: this is the difference between living like chattel and living like people.

The only limitations that exist are the ones we recognize. We are lulled into mediocrity by the conventions and habits we submit to. We can do better than concrete boxes - there must be an efficient way to deliver Gaudi-style concern for the physical and spiritual needs of humans outside the circumstance of extreme personal wealth.

And even if it isn’t efficient, we should do it!

(The pipe dreams of fruitcake.)

In which I visit the Dalí Theatre-Museum in 25 episodes as recorded chronologically in my notebook, titled with (mostly) Dalinean explanations

Sensory joy overload in the Plaça de Gala i Salvador Dalí. Approaching the building alone is a thrill. The day is beyond beautiful. I lose track of the ruminations that pursued me here and plunge.

____________________________________________________________________________

1 

“In which I enter the courtyard and use the restroom before entering the museum properly.”

Accordion sweep and burst of pubescent cynicism from wooden stupefaction toga bust and crumble television. Native philosopher, borrowed hat. Welcome!

Empty your bowels! You wont need them! This is the realization of surrealism!

2

“In which the geodesic atrium is even more beautiful from the inside than it was from without, and I am shocked by the number of Russians on tours milling past each other like rival ant colonies.”

Fantastic orb, dismantling gyrations. Cube head and wringing: Gala, Gala, Gala. Overwhelmed. Deliberate disorientation. A fight.

3

“In which I peruse the fishmonger's room, deeply impressed by Dalí’s mastery of craft at such a young age as well as the museum’s style of displaying work from all periods of his life at once rather than in any order; also in which I feel desperate to produce more, to be as prolific and consistent in my imagery and style, to create a true body of fully realized work.”

The melancholy of youthful effort. A painting on both sides, I lens-spy glass delight. Ceaseless production. Texture, medium, constant inspiration. Utter absence of inhibition. His sister, his model always in those years.

Ocell putrefacto: rotting bird. Rot and rot and fade into sky. Rearrange your body. Deface your printed signature and tumble the horizon vertical.

Be afraid of nothing. Make no sense. Prop with cane and melt clock open wide (open eyes, open mouth.) Mercury and Argos in ‘81: no chronology. Storm of rot. Recline.

Woman animal symbol, one old, one new. Satirical composition and enigma in landscape. Portrait. Cigarette. Work in gold!

4

“In which I stand before Dalí’s tomb in the crypt below the museum and realize that for a year we were both alive at the same time; I consider how unbelievably dynamic the world was during the 85 years he was alive and am jealous.”

Salvador Dalí i Domenech, Marques de Dalí de Pubol. 1904. 1989. (We were on the earth at the same time!!!!!!!!) Pile of rocks. Golden peacock lingering.

5

“In which I start to feel a mystical fatedness to my fixation with the birds in Gerona and now Figueres; the mysterious enigma of the cloud of black birds swooping and darting with electron probability before a bell tower is not one that only compels me, but also compelled this famous native son.”

Nails like black birds! My birds! Sky and sky and scale. Metaphor of material? Mysterious transfiguration and label-lessness. Tie a red string to God, heaven, karma; to nothing. An airplane unravelling its veins.

Nails are birds and likewise. Be liberated.

6

“Untitled” or “This is precisely what you should teach your children.”

Meteor and tear me open! Wet car cobweb and pick the boy up, hold him to the broken glass. Impress him strange with genius snail and mannequin decay, perpetual rain in a taxi cab.

7

“In which I stalk the halls, laughing alone.”

DELIGHT. Curtain and brocade. Sing it, alligator, illuminate windmill diagram and filth. Acupuncture cock and balls and ass march roll. See and see and see. Fill holes.

8

“In which I realize that we are all living components of Dalí’s work, our spectatorship folded in as the most important layer of his planned absurdity.”

How preposterous we all are! Gilded premonitions in the window.

[I am having a religious experience: the trembling, the lightheadedness. Chaos in me.]

Lick! Maze and Roil! Why not a mechanical crucifixion, why not a joke?

9

“Untitled,” or “Everything in the universe conspires for you,” or “In which I feel myself as the reincarnation of Gala and/or madly desirous for a Gala of my own.”

Gala’s crazy eyebrows are why I should work here - exactly like mine when I over tweeze! The tiny horsemen, the many lovely multitudes for her, for her, for her.

Where is her work, though?

And why shouldn’t I do whatever I want? Weirdo! Take it all! Yes! I never want to leave this velvet womb. I will be reborn in Dalism, in absurdity and surreal possibility.

Lounge chair bucket medusa. Reproduction. Tie me to the ceiling, too.

11

“Untitled.”

What is the date? This is the best day of my lie. I want to weep.

12

“Mae West cum apartment cum I am an asshole too cum this is exactly what he wanted” or “In which I grow tired of waiting to look through the lens at the top of the steps and some of the magic seems lost.”

Peek inside, vegetation. Be selfish, couch lips. Hair Curtain. What’s inside a face but a jungle?

Spacial interpretation of Mae West cum apartment through the eye of a camel with real hair and rhinestones. A fireplace in each nostril.

Have patience on the queue (imagine his delight with our obedience.) Bathtub ceiling.

13

“Untitled.”

Do you ever get sick of being absurd?

Ant and bread and chocolate pleasant. Gold cast of an asshole, again I am the only one laughing.

14

“In which I feel I cannot stand the stink of undeoderized Russians any longer, but then I do with much amusement.”

You cannot be alone here or anywhere, you must be irritated by idiots until you realize you are also a fucking idiot.

Glitter and splack and hologram never forgetting pencil, technique. Control. Mirror and bang.

Context! In Situ! Nothing is accidental. Nothing has meaning. Perfectly crisp nonsense.

15

“In which I become completely preoccupied with my camera for too many minutes after accidentally pushing some button that ruined whatever setting was working so well before that,” or “In which I fail completely to appreciate the irony of my frustration in failing to capture the ineffability of a moment in pixels.”

Fuck a motherfucking camera goddamn it.

16

“Untitled.”

Fishbone parquet duomo disappointment. Don Quixote, paint her hair gray in stereoscopy!

17

“In which I connect this visit to every trip I’ve ever had, be it a physical journey or a trip on hallucinogenics: I follow the same narrative arcs from unbridled positivity, to some negative sticking point that I fixate upon until complete despair, to coming out of negativity just as the drugs start to wear off/ the journey approaches its end, to a peaceful recognition of retracing my steps back to the start even as I mourn the fleeting nature of my euphoria; it is like trying to look at two mirrors that face each other, or giving up on the time machine.”

I’m getting sad, this is exactly like both acid and travel. All adventures require mishaps. I’m taking myself out, is the magic lost? Did I buoy the stakes too high? Roll over the rubics cube and weep for grammar, for sentences.

So much to learn! Don’t go, don’t go! But the lessons are the same everywhere, absurdity is not contained within this place. The come down, the stickiness. The rapture mitigated by irritation, by lack of affection for fellow men (though I do want people in my pictures, to record spectacular reaction.)

There are so many ways to feel (so few?) So many things to obsess over (indulge in.)

Cuant Cau Cau - “When It Falls Down, It Falls Down.” [So nervous! So excited!] Cynical and innocent; playful and deadly paradox.

To look through the window is an unending prism of possibility. Black birds overhead! Sinks around the rim.

18

“In which I realize I’ve been here for five hours and really need to eat something.”

Everything in everything. The pathos of this visit. Add hunger! Oh? A body?! I have one! It has needs so base by now. Every day a wind-up toy, winding down.

19

“In which I linger, afraid to go, to let go of this thing, when I realize there are a few more rooms I haven’t seen.”

Knights and piles of shit; loud, hip Americans. Nothing disgusts me but other people. Sailor hat, long nails, stench. Gifts. Prints.

Esophagus recognition, unwind it backwards now. Trace it back.

Oh! Octopus shoulder and Piranesi prints in the impossible stairwells of a madhouse. Copied from a Rubens, copied from a Leonardo.

20

“In which I recognize more than ever the power in names.”

Preliminary study of Gala for the painting “One hundred virtual virgins reflected by as yet unspecified number of real mirrors by cybernetics (etant donnes)."

LHOOQ under the defaced postcard of Mona Lisa.

Dalí seen from the back painting Gala from the back eternalized by six virtual corneas provisionally reflected by six real mirrors.

A Dalinean Michaelangelo Slave.

21

“In which a room is filled with pro-Israel art I did not know existed.”

Barbed wire. A black curtain to keep out the light. Ink dance and adept. “Eliahu Golomb” (?) Aliyah 1968. I had no idea.

22

“In which I hear someone say, “I had no idea he was into rocks and things,” but mishear it as “I still have no idea what it means,” and interject with an unnecessary treatise on surrealism.”

Rock bodies. We are so terrifically ancient and textured, conglomerated. How can that baby suckle at a stone teat?

“So into rocks”: foot-in-mouth time. (What journey is without one?)

The dream of a rock in lichen. Breast and ass and howl of agony in stone.

23

“In which, working my way out, I notice a plethora of details I missed on the way in.”

Jade armor in motherboard and Georgia O’Keeffe bull skull.

The painting I had such a hard time capturing is called “The Poetry of America.” I laugh, relieved. It’s all a part of the trip. Eye of the peacock.

Comfort again in the airy atrium. You’ve never seen it all, death mask and the pope.

24

“In which it takes money to make money.”

None of these things are cheap to make (and then the jewels!) The perpetual motion machine that is success.

25

“In which I read about the museum on the way back to Barcelona and I ponder the degree to which I’ve already internalized Dalí’s maxims without even realizing it it.”

 “Start building a house from the roof. Create by addition, not selection.”

The Black Bird Enigma

Before I left for Gerona, my shoes were of primary concern. Which to pack, which to leave behind in Barcelona? What would be safe, what would be comfortable? I regretted what I’d chosen upon arrival. (Such a silly fixation; ultimately I was better off sweating in boots on those cobblestones than I would have been rolling my ankle in flip flops.)

I went up to the roof of the hostel and forgot my feet. Immediately I sat and started to write. I cannot get enough of Mediterranean balconies and terraces, nor gothic bell towers dominating charming plaster horizons.

This time, the tower was accompanied by a cloud of black birds. I became fixated on them, their swooping and darting, their seeming disappearance before re-apparition in a burst of feather and screech.

For a week I’d been noticing an inordinate number of bird silhouette tattoos on Barcelona’s women; immediately I felt these birds overhead to be the inspiration. I am making this bond up. Who knows what each bird meant to each woman? But in my mind we were all linked, me and bird tattoo ladies, in this recognition of this enigma overhead.

What were they, swallows? I have no idea; I so lack the vocabulary to describe nature. I loved their punctuation of the burning blue slate sky, their sudden elusiveness when I tried to capture them with my camera. They forced me to be in the moment because there was no way to satisfyingly record them. The more I thought about them, the more I stared and tried to take pictures and wished for a clear metaphor or symbolic understanding of why I was drawn to them, the more mysterious they seemed. Why were there so many? What were they doing, circling and hovering like that?

More and more I noticed them, like clouds of electrons or harbingers of... what? There was nothing to say about them, nothing but this buoying joy I started to feel every time I saw them. My black birds, my enigma.

They are patternlessness with shifting form and shape, like a jazz improvisation. They are dance, grace, kinetic ebb and flow. They mean nothing, they are the great turning wheel of the natural world set whirling in miniature through the sky. They are primal, simple, functional beyond my understanding; beyond deliberation, they are thoughtless instinct manifested in multitudes.

Paradoxically they’ve acquired symbolism for me now, for their very lack of symbolic clarity. They are my personal reminders that life makes no sense; means nothing, says nothing until one stares and speaks or writes to lend it meaning. There is nothing to figure out, nothing to unlock; the locks are in our minds and all we have to do is free ourselves from the expectation that we have more control and understanding than we do.

Çok fazla!

Korean edition in the middle! 

On the road to Ephesus I let Amanda play photographer and focused on chatting with our cab driver using my ten new Turkish vocabulary words along with his five English ones. The first words in a new language are so delicious, like popping one tasty truffle into my mouth after another, unsure of what’s inside but delighted all the same.

I was a bit bummed about the futility of recording everything. Sometimes a photo or a note jotted down in my notebook is enough, but “enough” for what? To remember? To capture? To share?

Maybe it’s just to entertain myself, to become more amusing as an old lady, with a slideshow to accompany my stories.

Sometimes it feels aggressive or possessive, like theft. Like conquest.


I write everything down because I want my ideas and thoughts to be more explicit, to thicken in layers of meaning and metaphor. I love and enjoy visual art of all stripes, but my mind tends to move best in language.

Language is insufficient, too, though. At least my skill with it is: I try and try to get at the lushness of the vegetation in Laos, or the light that moves across the rooftops in Barcelona, but my pictures have me beat before I even open my notebook. These images are mute. They evoke whatever they do without words, without need of words. Images are so elegant and efficient in that sense.

When I feel like I’m overdoing it on the recording and analysis, I make deliberate efforts to put my pen and camera away and just look, just smile and talk and try to let go into observation and experience alone. But I hate for things to end, I hate to ever forget anything, lose anything, throw anything away -- in part because it feels like that’s all I do sometimes. Lose things. Break, stain, ruin things. Leave them behind, have them stolen, mail them somewhere to where I’m not.

Its tremendously comforting to get ideas out on paper or in pixels, to know that they’re in my pocket or humming in the internet, and I don’t have to trust this silly brain to keep from forgetting it all.

Anyway, Ephesus.

We first visited some ruins believed to be the last place where the Virgin Mary lived before her death. It was bizarre to think of her as a real person, someone living in a house as an old woman with caretakers and apostles by her side. I felt nothing but a bit of awe at the age of the building; a man next to me from the Philippines wept as he prayed.

There were prayers written on scraps of fabric tied to this wall outside, a huge knotted mass of them. I wrote similar prayers on wooden plaques at shrines in Kyoto and left paper flakes of gold on Buddha’s knees in Bangkok, but this time I took a pass.

It was partially to keep from holding our little group back, but it was also because Christianity has no novelty. I never believed that my plaques or gold flakes would get me anywhere but it was fun to bow and circle, to join with people of unfamiliar practices and try it, try everything.

I half wish I had tied a prayer to the wall now, too. Occasionally I treat Christianity like an ex, or like a friend who wronged me somehow whom I no longer speak to. That simply isn’t the case; Christianity didn’t wrong me, it just wasn’t right. It’s better when I treat it as neutral, as one amongst many religions I don’t believe in, though I happen to know a bit more about it than the others. The art is better when I think this way, the ruins are more awe-inspiring. Just another current in the stream of history: as an observer and contemplator of life, I can get close to it without expectation or intimacy.

The library of Celsus was awesome. Once it had space for 12,000 scrolls! Celsus was buried inside! I want to be entombed in a library! Wickedness all around.

I was also thrilled by the last standing column of the temple of Artemis... and by my camera’s incredible lens and its ability to capture the nest on top.

a bond so instantaneous

Billy Jonas has a song called "The Bus” (lyrics) (listen) in which he shares a few anecdotes of fellow passengers he met while riding the bus across America. A father goes to bail his young daughter out of trouble, a young man heads off to boot camp to avoid gang violence, and a Native American woman teaches Billy how to kill rabbits with a stick (before cooking them with instant onion soup mix.)

The point of the song is the bond, the trust that arises amongst travelers in a single vessel, the breakdown of suspicion in favor of camaraderie and straight-up love. It’s a subversion of our natural fear of strangers, and an assurance that it isn’t so odd to let your guard down, to get close and be vulnerable because we’re all in this thing together

I wept over this in the sun on a beautiful day at sea, so happy to be on the boat with strangers, getting to know them, hoarding the small intimacies they shared with me.

We have so much to learn from each other. Each of our lives represents a perfect example of what it means to be a human being. I can only live from this one seat, from these feet and this brain and this set of predetermined and acquired circumstances. Whenever I talk to someone new, it feels like a bonus round of life, a tiny taste of what it’s like to be that person, to think their way and experience what they have. It gives me the most expansive thrill, that spontaneous moment of closeness when we break through our conceptualizations of each other as “other” or “foreign” and find common ground.

Of course this is Marina, too. Her words shake in me everyday. I reread and think about her and it feels something like studying scripture; enigmatic enough for multiple layers of analysis but prescriptive and instructive. Important. It feels good, painful like a workout or an overzealous massage, but good.

Good today at least. Mourning can be like the weather, capricious and unpredictable.

The Vatican

We got to the Vatican and back by an easy train ride from the port of Civitavecchia. It was good to trust each other and our instincts, the inherent logic of a system meant to move people around. Every time we saved ourselves a few hundred euro by not booking cruise-organized excursions I felt smug and snobby, too proud of our willingness to do things the quote-unquote real way.

hell yes I took that in manual! I am totally getting the hang of my camera!

In the Vatican itself, gilt glitter like religious shock and awe. How much wealth could one group of families possibly acquire? Enough to fund all this, at least. Apparently the Vatican is still one of the richest countries in the world. I don’t know if that’s per capita or what, but I believe it on sight alone.

In the Sistine Chapel I put one hand on my mother’s shoulder and one on my sister’s back and shuffled through like that, saying nothing, looking only up. On a gentle current of human bodies I was carried past a legend I had studied but never quite connected to; it’s hard to feel anything personal about a work so heavily reproduced and pop-ified. (Who could imagine they have a personal relationship with the Mona Lisa?)

I wanted to linger, but our excellent tour guide prodded us out after what only felt like a minute or two. When there are so many masterpieces about, there are compromises that have to be made.

On the street were several Roma beggars. For many Roma this is a lifestyle, not a temporary state of hardship. Amanda and I sort of pat each other on the back and shook our heads in fine Puritan fashion, emphatically claiming, “No! Neither of us would ever live this way! Whatever it takes, you’d never find us on the street like this!”

Is there a natural conscience that supersedes cultural and traditional strictures? Education is one way to develop a mind beyond culturally imposed boundaries, but only if society lets you and culture teaches you that education can be used to create such a personal perspective and set of values.

Or is there something innate in us that tells us how to live, and culture simply lets us make excuses? Lets us form habits that become exceptions to the unyielding internal compass indicating true north no matter what language spoken or religion practiced?

We ate pasta to the tune of a violinist ambling slowly up the alley. “Oh, how very Italian!” we thought, eagerly taking out our video cameras to capture the magical Mediterranean moment.

Our waitress warned us the violinist was a pickpocket, known for lifting tips off patio tables before the waitresses returned, and we should watch our bags when he waltzed by again.

put it in your pocket and take it with you

FLORENCE

Overwhelming beauty in Florence. Every facet, every gilded rafter and crumbling cobblestone speaks. All they say, though, is, “eat something. Drink something. Look at this, look at that. Life goes on, and in what fine style.”

Richness and movement in stone. Intensity and passion held static but forcing the eye to movement. Emotional investment in the content is palpable. The Duomo! How much detail in color, in texture, in composition can you pack into and onto the exterior of one structure? Every other square made me reevaluate my answer.

Man do I love me some pointy pines. (I now can identify these as cypresses. They are THE tree of the Mediterranean countryside.)

How can people live in such a beautiful place?! How does anything ever get done? I would just walk and stare and eat and stare and smile, never writing, never asking for anything more than what I had.

We had. The most. Incredible. Gelato. Ever. Rich, light, smooth, with one delightfully crunchy bite of coffee bean.

I was bored of shopping until I touched the buttery leather we had talked so much about. My mother wanted a jacket, a jacket, a jacket from Florence, so we were on a mission.

Apparently there’s a 10,000 euro fine for buying fake designer purses off the street. It sounds crazy to fine the customers rather than just the sellers but after spending a little time in this leather market I’m pretty in favor of the fine.

The Italian government is serious about protecting their artisans and their manufacturers. They know they have a treasure, and they’re not down to let Chinese bootleggers destroy that market. Even though the fine is mostly about protecting the big brands like Prada and Gucci, small manufacturers benefit too because if you can’t get a fake Gucci you’re totally happy with a real leather no-name bag or wallet or coat from one of them.

My bag just broke and I started using the one I bought in Florence yesterday. Wow. It’s awesome and so beautiful. Thank you, Italian government, for protecting the leather industry!

There wasn’t much time, but there was no way I was going to miss Santa Croce. I stood before the tombs of Galileo and Leonardo DaVinci and Dante. I wish there had been more time. Contemplation of greatness can’t be done in a 20 minute dash.

There are many holes in the wall serving decadent-looking sandwiches and little glasses of wine. Two patrons can stand at the counter at once; we breezed pass many pairs like this, always in the shade.

We had no time to eat ourselves, or even to pause for a picture. How opposite we were than the diners, deciding spontaneously to feast on the street because there was nothing else they needed to do. Their only aim was enjoy each other and some food and wine for a moment before ambling on in their beautiful, beautiful city.

PISA

The leaning tower is a fabulous stage prop.

We had pizza in Pisa and life was absolutely grand. It was good to relax, to sit back after a full day of running around to enjoy some deliciousness that could really make us feel like we had arrived.

The best of everything

Europe loves Speedos so much

It’s important to be able to embrace and enjoy even very corny things.

What’s “the best?” Of course it exists, and it’s pleasant to stumble upon, but I’m not going to spend my life looking only for the best of things at the expense on missing out on other really wonderful or silly things that make me happy. I don’t want to have tastes too refined for joyful foolishness.

I say this because of the cruise. I was concerned, very concerned that it would be an irritating waste of my time to spend two weeks on a boat full of fat Americans, stuffing my face with mass-produced buffet spaghetti instead of sampling local cuisine and traveling the way I like to.

Instead it was the most fun ever. Much more diverse than I ever expected. So much to do! Silly poolside activities and samba lessons, scavenger hunts, karaoke, bingo, a club every night. And each day at port was a little mini-exercise in the kind of travel I like, pushing my mom and sister to do the public transportation thing instead of relying on ship-arranged transport or private taxis. It was good for us to make decisions together about what we wanted to do, and to have the time restraints imposed by the call for all-aboard to keep us from overdoing it.

The cruise was a perfect place to work on Marina’s opposite of loneliness. For two weeks a bunch of strangers actually were all in literally the same boat, living and eating and playing side by side.

The thing I enjoyed the most about the cruise overall was bonding with fellow passengers. There was a couple from Mississippi that loved to dance, maybe in their late 50s or early 60s. Whenever there was music, I joined them on the dance floor to huge smiles, hugs, and high fives. Another couple composed of a big bellied woman and her husband like a dressed asparagus made us one rug-cutting fivesome.

There were families we spent days with, saving lounge chairs by the pool for each other and reserving full booths for bingo. There was an old Spanish man who had been married for 67 years, and in 67 years he could never get his wife to dance. He was shuffling and shaking his booty at every event by himself. By himself until I joined him, at least.

I thought a lot about myself. In conflicts with my sister I was told that it’s always “the Jessica Show” and that that can be a lot to deal with. Irritating. Too much to handle sometimes. She’s right, it is the Jessica Show. I am a lot.

I’ve decided it’s mostly good and not something I want to change. It brings people together, it makes people laugh and loosens them up. I have nothing to lose, I have no shame and little pride. It’s easy for me to say sorry and accept apologies. It’s easy for me to sidestep awkward and ignore sarcasm. I met someone like me, someone older who has been running his own Show for a lot longer than I have. We found common ground and I’m not turning back from his assurances that this way is a good way, a loving way and not a selfish, attention seeking way at its core. It’s a way of being that means well. I hope other people will understand.

Anyway. Here are the few notes I had from Cannes:

The yachts in port were huge, enormous, ridiculous. How much boat can a private citizen use at once?

Every building looked to me like an ancient, crumbling cake. Pastel plaster fading into the sea, indifferent to our shopping and searching for croissants.

They called it a playground for the rich and beautiful, but we are all so much more the same than we are different. We play the same ways, just on different scales.

Saying “Bonjour!” over and over made us feel like we were in the intro sequence from “Beauty and the Beast.”

Cannes was basically a wash. We have Fifth Avenue in New York; the facade of a Dior store doesn’t exactly thrill me. The best part of the day was getting a bunch of t-shirts on sale for 3 euro each. I promptly ruined one of them by banging into a holy oil-coated candelabra in a church in Athens.

on Barcelona, the first time

first meal was paella! nom nom nom

A little twist in biases of Spanish as a blue collar language. To hear white people speaking snobby Spanish made Amanda and I raise our eyebrows at each other and say, “Ahhh, but of course.” And they were speaking it right to us, without fail, because we could easily be one of them.

The crowded bus was full of smiling, quiet people. They were mostly beautiful, even those with paunchy faces sloping to pop in exaggerated chins and noses. 

A pale, skinny girl in a dirty white dress was hanging off her father like swinging from a lamppost in the rain. Her dark and taciturn companion didn’t touch her own father at all.

The old women don’t look innocent here. They look like repositories of wisdom and scandal, beyond the possibility of shock or surprise. 

The “x” in Catalan is a lock to which I desperately want to key. 

Everything is lovely, lovely lovely lovely in every direction. Thrillingly gorgeous buildings with old plaster facades and curling wrought-iron balconies, the fantastic architectural genius of Gaudi, the way light moves across the rooftops.

I want to do more than take a picture, I want more than beauty. How can I crawl inside of this, this feeling of peace and chill and joy and vibrating excitement at once, to be alive? To see these things? To be with my beloved family at the same time?

Why are there no scrambled eggs here? All we wanted were egg sandwiches!

Why does it take a half hour of charades and pictionary to STILL only end up with four well-done sunnyside up eggs and some bread soaked in vinegar and salad dressing? 

To hit the ground running...

As usual, everything starts with worry and concern. Too much stuff, don’t like my blog, conflicted about how much to focus on photography, not sure what I’m doing out here. Writer’s block outside my notebook. I have to shed it, this icky sensation that I’m somehow getting it all wrong.

It doesn't LOOK like that much stuff.... the only thing missing is my camera bag and my other shoes. Whatever, soon the useless shit will become clear and I'll mail a box home. 

I’m never going to be anything but myself. I may never be a real writer, but I have to write. From now on, I’m going to try to throw something up here every day or every other day. It’s going to be meandering, unstructured, and exactly like my brain. I can’t pressure myself to craft perfect pieces, and quite frankly the sun is shining and I want to get my ass out there in the adventure.

So here’s to new habits and hitting the ground running.

But what is the ground made of? Where am I running to? What do all these cords connect to and why do I feel like the anxious shepherd of a flock of very poorly behaved digital sheep?

To catch us up:

I was on a cruise around the Mediterranean with Mom and Amanda for the first two weeks of this adventure. It was outrageous, amazing, wonderful. Exhausting. Invigorating, hilarious. Mostly wholesome (but for the Bingo storage room rendezvous...)

Everywhere we went (France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey) I could have passed for a native. This is a shift in what it’s meant to be a foreigner to me in the past - no visual marker of difference means people are more open to talk (at least until they realize we have to switch to English and/ or charades.)

I want to learn every language. I ended up with Korean because that was the first place I went and had an experience like this, but the impulse doesn’t change. I always want to get at locals, to try to communicate even when the only shared denominator is a body with arms and legs. I spent last night with some Barcelona boys who spoke almost NO English and somehow with my totally limited Spanish we got by in hysterical laughter and acrobatics.

I know I’m drunk when I’m talk to myself out loud in the bathroom. I took a picture to commemorate during my bathroom break from the charade-a-thon that was last night.

Yep, that’s my face reflected upside down in the toilet paper holder. “Bitch I’m in Barcelona! Bartheloooonnnaaa Barcelona! Si si si, yo hablo espanol, si si siiii en Barceloooona.” Over and over.

Anyway, back to the point:

Now I’m back in Barcelona by myself for a few days. I sort of have to figure out what I’m doing next, but mostly not. Mostly I’m just so grateful to be alive and excited about my adventures that I don’t even care what I see or what happens.

A lot of this is coming out of losing Marina. Marina Keegan passed away in a one car accident a few days after her graduation from Yale. She was probably the most talented writer I’ve ever known personally, my little WORD dongsaeng all set to be the shiningest of shining literary stars.

I don’t want to say that I’m devastated; I’m running around. I’m smiling and laughing, I’m writing again. But I am devastated, I think of her and I cry at least a little bit everyday, not only for her and her family but for the rest of us, for literature and the course of America and the world for not having her with us anymore to inspire and delight and provoke us. Her death has changed me, or reminded me of something I’ve always known but haven’t actively engaged with consistancy. I can’t let this go without being affected, she was too important. Too good. Too brilliant.

The last thing she wrote was about the opposite of loneliness, about the shared sensation that we’re all in “this” together. I want to live that way, making it clear to everyone I meet that I’m in this thing with them and that we can count on each other, we can love on each other and be vulnerable and laugh too loudly because I’m not going to judge, I’m not going to knock anyone down or be too cool for school. 

I’m pushing deeper and I’m not letting go. I’m going to do it with love and trust and honesty, and whatever it is - it is. I’m going to write about it, too, even if the writing isn’t very good, because we can’t get anywhere without sharing and communicating with each other.

first two video attempts