Fuck the Crisis

Fuck The Crisis

Day two Zubirit to Pamplona-745 kilometers to go to Santiago

We got off to a kind of late start today, eating eggs and onions and baguette and hitting the trail at ten o'clock. We walked through more of the fall color changes in the Basque country today, streams, five hundred year old stone bridges, and got to Pamplona by about two thirty. We walked maybe seventeen miles. Walking across the Puente de Magdalena and through the Portal Frances into old Pamplona was an amazing experience-a castle wall perhaps sixty or seventy feet tall towered over us as we entered. We found a public wi-fi zone and found a pensione for $45.00 Euros near the old section and headed out for something to eat. What we found was really something extraordinary in every regard.

Now keep in mind that Spain is in the middle of a severe economic crisis, what the locals refer to simply as, well, 'the crisis.' their economy has tanked hard. They also refer to it as a 'popping of the bubble' of over valuation, similar to the U.S. housing collapse. While wandering Madrid, Teo and I spotted a hand written sign in a shop window stating three simple words with a very large meaning behind them. It said, ' Fuck the crisis.'

As we went deeper into the old section to explore and to find some bars to get cañas and pinchos, (aqui no hay tapas, hay pinchos!) we found the same, classically European mis-en-scene of sodium phosphorous street lights beaming their yellow, soft, under water light onto the cobblestone and wrought iron playground, people meandering or standing in front of establishments in the ten to fourteen foot spaces between the buildings that constitute roadways here, partaking in precisely that which we were about to receive.

We passed a street vendor with the Beatles 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds' playing, but with Spanish lyrics pasted over the top. This set a bit of a surreal stage for things to come. We then saw a small street, more of a lane, if you will, stretching off to our right and, spotting the people gathered at the small, rounded stand up tables, maybe two for each, outside of the drinking establishments that we were interested in, decided it was right for us.

Our first stop was Basseri, a tiny bar maybe ten feet from side to side and twenty five feet deep, and sauntered in to order two pinchos and a couple of cañas. We brought them outside in order to people watch and, okay, honestly, so I could smoke. The pinchos were outrageously gourmet. One was two items on a stark, white plate-browned, grilled cheese akin to Camembert, on top of a slice of tomato, on top of a slice of grilled eggplant, drizzled with olive oil and honey.. The other a small bowl of traditional Basque potatoes in an oily, flavorful sauce with pieces of fish. We talked, laughed, watched others passing or standing for maybe thirty minutes before heading for bar number two, San Nikolas Cocina Vascsa(Basque).

Here I let Teo go in and choose and order two pinchos and two more cañas. And what delights he indeed brought out. Two deep fried balls about the size of tennis ball filled with eggplant, a Brie like cheese, and pancetta, and two small bowls of morcillo topped with a fried egg, along with a small basket of four to five pieces of baguette. We dined most gleefully on these culinary marvels, the taste of which I can only tell you rate mucho mas more than what I could attempt to explain. With some odd centuries of history, all I can tell you is that they have refined these dishes to the apex of fine dining.  

We told stories, talked family business, rebelled in our good fortune, and all in all had a really great experience. When we had finished these Teo ordered mother round of cañas and an incredible pincho that had shredded eel on top of grilled mushroom, topped with crispy pancetta pieces all piled onto a slice of grilled baguette.

While we were doing this I kept jotting down notes for writing this after we got home. Hilariously enough, my ipad's auto-correct continued to produce faux pas. Examples include 'lo Scientology' for 'lo siento' (it just tried the very same substitution as I write this!), and 'nos vamps' for 'nos vamos'!

We paid about $30.00 Euros for the beers and the amazing, indescribable food and I bought two bocadillos, sandwiches in the Spanish parlance, filled with egg and chorizo, different from the Mexican variety, closer perhaps to what we think of as pepperoni, for our lunch tomorrow for $3.60 more Euros, and then we took a walk around the old quarter and then on to the Pensione Leyre where we are spending tonight. As we wandered we saw a street label, painted on ceramic tile, mounted on the walls of the buildings at street corners in lieu of street signs, that stated, 'Antigua Rua de Los Torredondas,' to which I stuck a, 'huh?' Teo caught the etymological lineage and guessed, rightfully so I figure, that it meant the road where the bulls go. Pamplona is famous, of course, for the running of the bulls, and this calle must be one of those used each July.

Pamplona derived its name from the Roman general, Pompey, who took the city, formerly called Iruña, or 'the city,' by the Vascones, from their leader, Sartorius in the winter of 75-74 AD. The original name given the town by the Romans was actually Pompaelo. At the time of the Muslim invasion in 711, the Visigoth king, Roderic, was fighting the Basques, who still fight for their sovereignty today, but needed to turn his attention to the new invaders from the south (presumably the pinchos and cañas scene didn't hold as much allure then as today!). By 714-716 the Moors had engulfed the city, incorporating it into their Iberian empire. By 755, however, the last wadi (king) of Al-Andulus, Yusef-al-Fihri, detoured an Arab army near Pamplona, resulting in a defeat at the hands of the Basques.

The city changed hands between the Muslims and Basques, a history marked with the name of Charlemagne, Charles 'the hammer' Martel, and many others, and was not much more than fortified position near the entry to the defensive  line of the Pyranese. The two Battles of Roncesvalles, the starting point for our walk, served as major milestones in the quashing of the Moorish drive north into European lands. In 924 the Muslim authorities described the city and it's inhabitants, the Basques, as being, 'incomprehensible,' and the resistance continued into 1083' by which point the Muslim armies had destroyed the town and pulled down it's churches. The eventual overthrowing of the Moors in Pamplona can be thus attributed to the influx of Christians due to the Way of St. James, or, as we call it most idiomatic ally, the Camino de Santiago.

As I write this I am squatting on a bench outside of our pensione, on a busy street in downtown Pamplona, Teo asleep upstairs, which given that it is half past midnight, is more than reasonable, while I sit outside so that I can smoke and sip from a small bottle of brandy and do what I enjoy, playing with words. It's a blessing that my children, at their ages, do not see any advantage in squirreling themselves over to the Nth end of the bell curve where I seem, best I can tell, to dwell. There exists tonight an Ellensburg type of wind, blowing a steady fifteen, gusting to more than twenty, making lighting a cigarette a task in itself. The temperature is grand, perhaps sixty four or more, seventy five plus during the day, and I inhabit this wooden bench here, making it my office for the time being. A lovely device, the Power monkey Extreme, a solar powered battery storage device, recharging my iPad, down to 4%, and thus allowing my continued communication with you all.

Tomorrow we will find a post office, already located on a map not but a kilometer away, and mail home those items that we feel are available for release, this saving some odd pounds from the thirty plus pound packs that we will carry each day for the next thirty, to the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula. Weight in our packs, at this point, is a really big deal; an in depth examination of need vs want strips a combined seven pounds from our backs. Extra t-shirt for going out? Nice pants? The deflated soccer ball and small hand pump that T has been carrying and that we have twice pumped up and kicked around? The solar powered rechargeable battery pack for our electronics? And more-gone bye bye.

As I rest here on this bench in this foreign town, at 12:55 am local time, I am awash in the historical significance of this place, the meaning of its many castles and defenses, and the understanding that my son and I are modern witnesses to more than a millennium of struggle, a struggle which the Basque continue to this day. Businesses, street signs, highway signs, town names, are all in both Spanish and Basque, a language that, in the characters of the Roman alphabet, look largely like computer code, gibberish. Too many xs and ks.

Looking around it is difficult to see that youth unemployment in this country is fifty percent and that an exodus is occurring that will have a lasting effect on the economic future of this country. Combiined with the cuts in educational spending, the unemployment numbers and the exodus makes the Spaniards fear for their future.

As for us here in their beautiful land, we are simply happy to be able to take this time to walk and visit and to meet generous and friendly people and to able to partake, if only for a small time, of their historical and glorious culture.

Camino Day One

                     Worrying is praying for what you don't want. (pilgrim book)

Camino Day 1 - Roncesvalles to Zubirit

Got about 23 kilometers of walking done today. That's the good news. Got about 767 to go, not really bad news, but tell that I the four one inch screws and the plate in my left ankle! Only carrying about 25-30 pounds in the pack, but at times, of course, it feels like more.

The Camino de Santiago, or The Way of St. James, is a Catholic pilgrimage route that dates from the year 814. There are, in point of fact, quite a few Caminos. We are walking the Camino Frances, the same one represented in the film The Way, and it crosses Northern Spain from the Spanish-French border in the Pyranees to 30 miles shy of the Atlantic Ocean at Santiago de Compostela, made famous recently by the awful bullet train crash that left over seventy persons dead some months back. Some of the other Caminos include the Camino Plata, coming North from Granada, the Camino Norte, which follows the Bay of Biscay through Asturias, and another who's name escapes me that comes down from Belgium and through France. Thy all end at Santiago de Compostela, the supposed burial place of St. James the Apostle.

The timing of the announcement by the Catholic Church during the time of the most Northern advancement of the Moorish control of Spain, suggests that perhaps the desire to flood the remaining strip of Christian Spain with Christians had more to do with politics than with religion.

But back to my tired feet...we took a bus from Madrid to Pamplona for about 36.00 Euros each, then caught a bus for $6.00 Euros more to Roncesvalles, the starting point for the Camino Frances that lies within Spain. St. Jean Pie-du-Port, or St Jean at the foot of the mountain, is the rstarting point lying about twenty klicks further Nopeople.grb, but to which one needs to spend $107.00 Euros to reach by cab during the non-tourist months. And one needs to hump up and over a three thousand foot climb to pass between the tiny towns. Roncesvalles (Ron-they-VAY-as in the Spanish tongue), for instance has a population of thirty eight people.

Upon reaching our destination, we disembarked, sat off to the side looking at the ancient buildings, some dating to the sixteenth century, and then walked into the Albergue Municipal to pay 2.00 Euros for our Credencials the 'passport that marks you as a perigrino, a pilgrim, and which you have stamped at each place you stay in order to demonstrate your completion of the route in order to receive your certificate of completion, known as the Compostela. We paid $10.00 Euros apiece to pay for our bed, a bunk bed actually, in the dorm upstairs. The dorm was nice, clean, the entire inside remarkably modernized and very tastefully made over.

We ate our first Pilgrim's meal in one of the two bar/restaurants nearby. Seated with a fifty five year old Irishman named Garrod, on his first walk (doing, in fact, only one week's worth of walking, and an older Spanish native of Mallorca named Juan, on his fifth full Camino, we ate our way through a delicate and flavorful potato creamed soup, fried trout with pomme frittes (calling them French Fries, especially this close toFrance, seems somehow a bit too pedestrian), and a yogurt for dessert. The meal cost 9.00 Euros apiece and also came witha bottle of tinto, local red wine. The conversation was pleasant, although Juan's inability to speak any English and Garrod's to speak any Spanish left Teo and I in the role of interpreter. And since Juan talked very fast, it also meant that much of the conversation was left, in essence, unsaid.

We made the ten o'clock curfew by an hour and got into bed. Unfortunately, before we fell asleep one of the gentleman in our two bunk bed cubicle (the room is like the sleeping car of a train in that the cubes are adjacent with the entry facing an outer hallway that loops the outside edges of the floor) began snoring, a sound not unlike a gas powered chainsaw.

Because there was wifi in the dorms, I got a Face Time call from Karen after lights out and went down to a sitting room in the also clean, aesthetically charming basement and video talked with her twice during my insomniac time there. It was great to chat as she prepares for a crazy work adventure in Abu Dhabi in the next couple of weeks. Talking and viewing your dearest while sitting in the stone surrounds of a many hundred year old building is of itself a peculiar and surreal experience. I fell asleep around one. Lights come on and Hospiteleros, retired men who speak at least English, Spanish, and French, come to wake us at six am and we're out and walking an hour and a half before the sun breaks the horizon.

The first third of the Camino Frances is through the forested foothills of the magnificent Pyranees Mountains, green, often tree covered woodland trails much like portions of Northern Washington State's section of the Pacific Crest Trail. As I've become older I find that the downhill portions are more difficult than the uphill ones in that my ankles doth protest too much. Ibuprofen and the occasional rest allows it to be a doable walk.

We stopped for an hour in Biskarette, a small, tidy village looking somewhat Swiss Chalet style, with sixteenth and seventeenth century homes lining the narrow road that passes directly through the center of town. Teo's guidebook stated that the local Tiendika was reputed to be 'surprisingly' well stocked and appropriately priced. Indeed it was, both counts. I bought a six pack of eight ounce Heinekens for $2.00 Euros, a small miracle after having dropped $12.00 Euros for two twenty ounce Heinekens in the bar last night. We ate part of the sandwich we each had made from supplies purchased in Pozuelo de Alarcon, the ritzy suburb of Madrid where we Couchsurfed for three nights, as we sat outside the store, swarmed by teeny, feral cats and drank some beer before heading back down the trail.

We got to where we now reside at two o'clock this afternoon, crossing the Puente de la Rabia (it was said that any rabid animal that crossed the central pillar of the bridge three times would be cured of its disease) and promptly sat down by the bank of the small river so that I could re-up my Ibuprofen and chill down my not so trusty lower joints. We moved onto a private albergue not much later, paying $32.00 Euros for a really top notch double room next to a bathtub (yeah for the hot soak) containing bathroom. Free laundry facilities, free wifi, a talkative and warm owner who showed us around the place, and remarkably enough, no other persons staying in the place has made this place a keeper as far as we are concerned.

In lieu of the Pilgrim's Meal, which is offered at the cheaper rate, like the albergues, so long as one has a Credencial, we chose to go to an Alimientos store, a small grocery type store, to spend $11.00 Euros to buy baguettes, cheese, and two types of local cured pork to make sandwiches for tonight's dinner and tomorrow's lunch, thus putting our total costs for the day at $46.00 Euros for the both of us, covering our meals until tomorrow evening as well. The room cost us each $6.00 Euros more than we could have gotten had we chosen the dorm style Albergue, but given the three free nights spent Couchsurfing in Madrid and the two more that I have arranged starting tomorrow night in Pamplona, really means that our average over seven days will be about $4.00 Euros, or about $5.20 American dollars apiece.

We've got our start. One leg down, thirty two to go!  Can't hardly express, as the father of this twenty year old man who accompanies me, can't certainly adequately translate from my heart and head to yours, dear reader, what a forthright, stalwart, intrepid and sure young man he is. Whereas I fall down, get back up, falter in my emotional self, allow it to disrupt my physical world, he is more the example of not all who wander are lost. I, I hate to say, am much more the type who wanders often precisely because I am lost. He's got the better of the two guidebooks, he walks in the lead, his Spanish is probably better all in all than mine, he's less easily distracted than I, yet allows my side shows and cigarette breaks to occur with no complaint.

And The Children Shall Lead

I'm leaking a greasy, panicky sweat. Just arrived, by the hairs on our chinny chin chins, at the estación de autobuses in downtown Madrid. Woke up an hour late after the third night in a row of staying up far too late. Caught a cab instead of public transportation in order to arrive here in time for the 10:30 bus to Pamplona. Whew!

Crusty. More or less exhausted. Unsettlingly uncertain, second guessing myself, my entire world, this trip, my sense even of who I am. All the big ones. Where am I going, what the fuck am I doing? So thankful that Teo(despite his forgetting to turn on the alarm on his phone!) is accompanying me on this journey. I've got a horrible case of cold feet. I flip flop from feeling outstandingly certain that this trip, this pilgrimage-the Camino-is the most bestest and smartest choice I've made in a long, long while, to a stomach dropping, run down the middle of the street shrieking, large ass mistake. It's one or the other that I feel, and the change in my perspective on this topic is blindingly quick. From the one to the other and back again like hot flashes during menopause. No time is spent in the middle, between these two extremes. WHAM! WHAM! Like the sudden drop of a hammer. WHAM!

Had a hard to describe night. "It's okay of we have a barbeque tonight?" Gonzalo, our host, asks us. "Of course." We're thinking hamburgers, you know, hot dogs, maybe some chicken. Nope. The 'barbeque' turned out to be an outrageous assortment of meats, beef, pork, steak, sausages, cured meats, eggplants, potatoes, sauces, wine. Morcillo, a blackish cured meat shaped like salami, made from blood, copies, and rice. A beautiful piece of dark cured steak served sliced thin on a plate with olive oil over top and bread as one appetizer.

Gonzalo invited a good friend, Ignacio ( pronounced 'Ignathio' in Continental Spanish) to join our 'barbeque.' Like Gonzalo, he also rocks the house! Our host's generosity blew me away. His skills in preparing our meal no less so.

Having gone to an out of this world eating out experience with my uncle just the night before, Teo and I both agreed that the meal prepared by Gonzalo easily surpassed the former. We grazed our way through the food that he kept cooking and bringing from the grill, situated next to us on his wonderfully lit patio. The conversation and the energy between us was as spectacular as the food.

The two of them related a particularly hilarious story about being stopped by the Mexican military police whilst driving a rented Jeep with three other friends in Acapulco some five years back. It was a drug searching stop, complete with asshole soldiers and a drug dog. The soldiers were certain that these twenty something turistas were in possession of illegal drugs and spent two hours hassling them and trying to find the drugs. At one point the dog, sniffing away through the rented vehicle, found and ate a muffin-after this point in the story we all began to refer to the dog as 'the muffin dog.' Later a soldier, with what appeared to be an early model walked talkie, explains to them that it is a machine capable of electronically sniffing for drugs and walks around the Jeep with it. Gonzalo explains, no more able to keep a straight face then the rest of is, that the soldier would obviously rotate his wrist, thus spinning the antenna towards the car, at various times to indicate that the 'machine' had indeed busted them and that they might as well give it up.

And so it went, with Ignacio leaving a bit past two. We remaining three, already soggy from a few nights of three and five in the morning, readied immediately for bed. I decided to shove down one more cigarette on the patio and try to FaceTime Karen back in Ellensburg. After seeing no email or attempts on her part to contact me, feeling a growing anxiety, unable to connect on FaceTime, my anxiety, my feelings of loneliness and distance, even at that point from my own true self, I felt myself begin to crack. I finished the smoke, took a totally unnecessary swig of brandy, and made one last stab at Face Time. Very aware that when I awoke I would be catching a bus for the beginning of the trail, and that my options for accessing wifi (pronounced 'wee-fee' here!) we're going to be diminishing, the cold tentacles of self doubt and of pure fear started crawling worm like up the back of my neck.

I made another stab at it and got through!  saw her smiling face looking back at me. Heard her voice. Saw and talked also with JV and Chica, two dear friends with whom K was visiting at the time. Reaching through the pipeline of cyberspace I saw, as if I were looking into a magic mirror, a palintir, their front yard, the tall conifers in their front yard. With a pronounced mixture of anxiety and hope I spoke with my wife. What was at first cheery, positive, a palliative for what ails me, soon turned sour, a bowl of milk too long in the sun.

My childish glee at reconnecting, my desire, perhaps my need, for a brief reunion, a dose of water for my parched heart, smashed like ineffective waves against the stone breakwater of her anger. I had expected perhaps a bit of distance, although I longed for something else, but anger I did not see coming. It caused a turmoil in my breast that spilled as salt water from my eyes, my body seizing as this last desperate casting through the air to secure some succor from the only entity capable of granting it failed. The black winged things beating their leathery wings inside the cage of my breast rose and fell as I heard her tell me that it would be best for me not to contact her, that when or if she wanted it, she would let me know. At that collection of syllables, like rocks falling through a glass ceiling, the flocks of fluttering things flew up and out of me, carrying with them the remaining vestiges of hope, of the pride that I have held onto for almost a decade about that which we two had built with one another, a kingdom, a marvelous, shining city up on a sunlit hill.

Thankfully I have a guardian angel accompanying me on this journey. His name is Teo Fiann, he is my eldest son. At twenty a man perhaps more mature than I. His stalwart ability to stride forward, undaunted, seemingly not afraid, his coming to Europe three weeks before me and making it seem easy. Whereas I bring my fears, my worst moments, my shame and my anger. It is his tall and strong shoulders that I now ride until I am able to walk this path by the power of my own will, my own feet, my own joy at discovering the wonders around me, at discovering my own power and my own peace.

As I sit on this bus writing this now, traveling out of Pamplona and on to the starting point of our pilgrimage, Roncesvalles, my mind, roiling and turning inside, returns to words of my Uncle Jose, some scant forty hours ago, telling me that he felt me to be very anxious as a person, that it was obvious that I spent to much energy worrying about what others thought of me. He told my son and I about his understanding of God. What you feel, he said, that is God. It is, in the end, that simple. If you feel good, he said, that is God. If you feel bad, that too is God. Here as we creep upwards into the Pyranees, Los Pereneas in the local tongue, I clutch too tightly at the marks upon my breast, at the water that pools in the corners of my eyes. Through this parting of myself with the she that has been my all for a decade, with perhaps myself as well, I focus on those words of mi Tio, the freaking out, the sense of grief and loss,of losing my best friend and such a huge part of who I have thought myself to be, that perhaps he is correct, that perhaps this set of emotions cascading over and through each other, clawing and scratching for dominance, that this is God.

On this bus full of peregrinos winding up the verdant, wooded sloping hills of the mountains perched at the far Northern end of the Spanish frontier I merge and fall away again and again with myself, with these concepts of loss and of personal transformation, with the kaleidoscopic images of the beaming face, the glinting, emerald eyes of she whom the angels named Karen Heather, spinning in and out of focus in my mind's eye, I coax and lead my heart and my mind, trying to convince them with the rational parts of my brain to embrace this change, this absolute and total fear, this need for growth, this intense and imminent coming into the place of God.

Dinner With My Uncle Jose

Wowee! Another late night in España! Met up with my uncleJose who lives her for the last two decades. Holy cow! Told Teo that we would probably go to inner and then be home in time to get a good, our first her, night sleep. Not!

We met at a bar called Cervezeria Alemana at 9:30, at Plaza Santa Ana, a place that my uncle knew well, having moved here as a twenty something year old many moons ago, living in a hostel-y-night/brothel-by-day cheap place to stay circa 1973, as a young man looking for a new way to be. At a table in the Plaza we had a caña, a small glass of beer, maybe five ounces, served in all bars in Madrid, before moving across the Plaza for a meal.

The establishment that he took us to was a 'bull fighters' place, a spot where the matadors come when they are In town. We had Rape de Toro ( Ox tail) and a perfect, very rare filet mignon, with three appetizers (croquettes, fried eggplant, and very thinly sliced pieces of cured, smoked jamon ( ham) ), washed down beautifully with two bottles of Rioja tinto, red wine from La Rioja, Spain's most famous wine region (where, incidentally, Teo and I shall be walking through in about one week). The meal was a culinary masterpiece, the company equally brilliant. It was really grounding to reconnect with Tio Jose, my mother's youngest brother.

After the meal we three walked a block or two to a local jazz bar to hear live music, and to put away a couple more cañas. On to one more place for another round. It was about midnight at this point and, I was figuring, about the end of the night as well. Wrong. Jose called his good friend of thirty years, Jose Luis, who we then met up with at small bar around the corner. With Jose Luis was his girl, Rocio,  a Flamencan dancer by trade. Jose Luis and my uncle met while both lived and worked in Boston in the eighties. He is a rather diminutive man, but only, I assure you, in stature-not even a little bit diminutive in personality or panache.

We five sauntered to the apartment of Jose Luis, not far away, through the narrow, streets lined with wrought iron balconies and window grates, the yellow light of the street lamps reflecting softly off of the worn cobblestone underfoot. His place is small but, like the man himself, intricate, artistic, aesthetically sound. We had drinks, danced a bit, laughed a lot until three.

Jose caught a cab home. So did we.

The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead

Roiling emotions. Snatches of cramped sleep. Today is travel day and, yeah, here I am, traveling. Sitting between red fleece sweater doing plead sheet ll flight guy n super quiet, super skinny, spacy looking Chinese girl. Thinking to myself, "what the fuck am I doing?" cramped in this middle seat built comfortably for a twelve year old girl, hurtling across the globe in order to do what precisely? Yeah, sure. To walk the Camino. To get away. To make the cmyriad, largely untraceable noises and electronic tuggings at my sleeve. Is it somewhat lie schizophrenia? The sounds? I've seen it written that schizophrenia, in perhaps it's less pronounced varieties, is a reasonable response to modern living. The zombie apocalypse may indeed be upon us.

It's somewhat funny. My current Netflix series is The Walking Dead. A program whose premise is that a disease has turned most humans into flesh eating zombies, also called, in the show, walkers or geeks. A group of non-infested people attempting to find a safe place to be is the story we follow. As I sit here, outside New York's JFK airport in the midst of my four hour layover, eating my Cornerstone Pie pulled pork grinder, I see that I too am in that very same predicament. I too am seeking safe passage through and away from the zombie hordes and towards some sunlit meadow where I can lay my head down in peace.

A night in Seattle with Karen was what I was doing some short hours go. A night spent mainly at The Five Point, a true Seattle joint, having dinner and drinks. A mostly fun time out, sprinkled with deep sadness, with elation, with communion with new friends and even a bit of near violence. The latter being an interaction I had with a homeless gent who wouldn't take 'not tonight, friend,' for an answer. Got in my face until his baseball cap was touching my forehead, pushed him slowly away, only to get his drunken ass more agitated. He spit at me, getting damn close to hitting me, I flicked my cigarette hard as I could at his face, missing, unfortunately, by an inch or two. Too cognizant of being right in front of the bar we were attempting to enter and that when I put the wretch on his ass that the SPD would prolly be involved. Not needing any of that I escorted my girl in and, turning around, informed the fella hat if he was still outside and wanting some when I finished my beers that I'd happily whip his ass. Called him a 'Bitch!' walked in as one of the employees rushed out with concerns. Fucking walkers trying to spoil my last supper.

Met some fun Canadians, did some shooters, Jagerbombs to be exact, and drank Boneyard pints. Had a fairly shitty meal. Got to the cellphone waiting parking lot by Seatac at around 1:30. Slept in the bus, got up at 4:30 freaked out, desperately sad. My girl and I are in a bad way. The love is there but there are serious issues that don't allow for the  necessary trust to build and so we now try to make it work despite all that and it pretty much does, but the cap has bern placed on the highest place we'll reach together and for most looks that lack of any higher ground to reach is a death sentence. So we cling and cry and make brave smiles for one another as we work towards some other space in which we may be able to keep trying to make it work. Funny enough, the lime of the night was our smoking a cigarette with a tall fellow named Mike, in town for some medical conference or other, who asks us if we two know each other, meaning K and I, and I say, "Well we're still legally married!" As he's cracking up hard, I say,'That's the line of the night!.' To which he exclaims, "That's the line of the YEAR!!"

Yet here I sit on a bench, in the afternoon sun, moving away from the things that I know and, at the risk of sounding corny, towards the unknown. My son awaits me at the tail end of my next flight, the one to Madrid. He, as a twenty year old now, is, perhaps more than he ever has been, somewhat unknown to me as well. What's the adage, 'To discover new lands one must lose sight of shore for a long time.' 

I have great hope in my ability to get to these new lands, and I believe I'm on the correct path. But it feels often like a big, empty sack of air. Inside me. Lie I constantly deflate, hissing down, eroding, only to find new energies, new ideas about how to move forward. Much of the germination of these seeds occur while in communion with the love of my life, and therein, dear reader, lies one of the great crossroads that I have brought myself to. My pilgrimage, my walk, the Camino, is the perfect opportunity, I'm hoping, through which I hope to find some resolution, to find some peace.

Mere Anarchy

Slouching Toward Iberia

I find myself pulling up all sorts of lines from literature, from culture at large, I suppose, that pertain to the life place I am in. Hemmingway, Marvell, today it's Yeats. The Second Coming. A brilliant piece. A poem about apocalyptic times, end times. As poems speak often on many levels, this one speaks to internal turmoil and tumult. The end of days, as it were, inside.

Don't know how old W. B. pulled it off. Can't imagine where it came from. The poem, that is. Like Einstein reaching into the ether and coming back with e = mc(2). Perfect. What did Michaelangelo say, the angel was already there inside the marble; he simply chiseled it free. Thusly so with this work.

       THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;

    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know

    That twenty centuries of stony sleep

    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Mere anarchy is is loosed. The center can not hold. I get that. Don't you? Things spinning about Wizard of Oz like. Tumbling and turning, in a widening gyre, up, up, and away. Who doesn't wish for a big, red button that could be pushed in times of complete chaos and imminent catastrophe? My how the poet captured the internal anarchy and gyre. Today is Thursday. I get on that plane at 7:00 Tuesday morning.

And how does one properly slog forward into the maelstrom of details and of financial obligation and comstant over stimulation and requirements for attention. How much caffeine is there? How much can one cram into one's system before it shuts you down? Or how does one escape? And can one do so in a fashion that is not self destructive?

First One's Free, Kid

The first one's free, kid

"A once fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess." Anon.

Eight days to go. Feel weird. Hard to explain, really. Knowing that I'm this close to stepping off into the void. Tumbling over that edge, falling, dreamlike, in slow motion. Knowing mostly one thing-that I need to end what I am currently doing and transition forward into some other, different thing. The opportunity to walk the Camino is perhaps that thing. It is undeniably a different thing.

The above epithet is purported to be inscribed on the tombstone of legendary martial artist Bruce Lee. It has always captured my interest. The phrase resonates, I imagine, with most humans over the age of forty. Persons old enough, anyway, to have endured, or at least witnessed at close hand, the wearing away of hopes and dreams and the subsequent acceptance of the lot given. People that have come to understand viscerally the sour bile of regret and self-loathing that comes with the meeting of the irresistible force and the unmoveable object--the clash of personal desire for self-actualization and the monolithic, jack booted institution that is modern culture, the 'classical mess,' if you will.

On an important level I feel certain that my choice to focus on the Camino as some sort of a cure all for what ails me is an overly simplistic one. Admittedly. Maybe more symbol than actual. Or maybe it's just a momentum shifter, like a bracingly cold bucket of water to pour over my head in a more or less desperate urge to end the, oh, let's call it a hangover. A hangover caused by the over imbibing of the strong intoxicant that is current consumerist society.

The concoction is one ass kickingly potent brew. The shiny objects that we can't say 'no' to. The cars that we now converse with. The brand name shoes and hundred and eighty dollar sneakers marketed to twelve and fourteen year olds. The video game as electronic crack. Like rats choosing the endorphin rush lever over the food pellet lever. The smart phones that have somehow, in the span of a few short years, have become incomprehensibly indispensable.  

That part is the hook, the draw. The first one's free, kid. And before you know it the little buggers are scrambling like bugs on a sheet of hot metal, hurtling themselves into cyberspace, lemmings pouring over the cliff. The trick, as they grow into fine, upstanding participants in the ponzi scheme that is the capitalist economy, is to find the currency that allows the growing addiction to continue. Ah, and here's the rub. All one needs to do to stay plugged in, to get that next new rush, to join the ranks of the worker drones in their semi-mindless acceptance of their role as econo-slaves helping the globalists in building their pyramids-you know the one of which I speak, it's on our currency.

I gotta tell you, dear reader, swimming against this current of cultural normality, against the party line (and don't think that there is separation on this issue between donkeys and elephants) that spouts adages all day long about productivity, Protestant work ethics, doing your part, being a good citizen--I just can't do it anymore, or at least I need a good break. The Camino is that break.

There are no pretense in me that speaks to this time on the Iberian Peninsula as a fix all that will terminate my own intrinsic anxieties, fears, hang ups.  No, it's more that I have run plum out of tactics for staying afloat in the increasingly toxified pool that our culture is becoming. Can't tread water in an ocean of mercury. Can't keep putting one foot in front of the other when the path beneath your feet is made of decomposing diapers, electronic waste, automotive oil. Can't keep smiling into the faces of the materially addicted zombies around me, pretending that our house is not on fire, that no emergency exists.

Studies consistently draw startling, positive corollaries between high stress and poor health. The lack of control in one's life leads directly to suppressed immune systems and illness. The swimming upstream but always being swept downstream despite it phenomenon of always falling slightly further behind financially each month causes a distress that consumes our well being like cancer. The link between stress and cancer, by the way, is being established.

So, yeah, why I have this urge, like a bird knows it's time to fly south each year, and I've gotta go. Don't truly know why. But the desire to end the incessant, unceasing buzz and jingle of email alerts, texts, calls; the expectation that I'll respond to your message instantly--I want it to stop in the same way that Tom Hanks needed his toothache to stop in the film Castaway. Like his character, I too, at this point, would smash the sharp end of an ice skate into my gums with a cocoanut if I deemed it the only way in which I could make it all stop.

Today I'd like to end my verbal vomitus with Randall Jarrel's well known work 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.' The feel of the piece, it's emotional tone, the seemingly immutable meat grinder that is the nation state, that is the weight of convention and expectation--it resonates greatly with my emotional perspective at this time. 

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Think of my Camino trip as a parachute.

Whad'd President Bush tell the American public after we commenced our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did he tell them to contact their congressmen? No. Did he tell the to sign up to serve in the armed forces? Nope. Did he tell them to buckle down, tighten their belts and get ready for deprivations that would aid our cause? No he did not. He told them that extremists could not disrupt our way of life. He told them, and I quote, 'Take your family to Disneyland.'