bloomheller22

..... what did I do last night?

I'm sitting at the kitchen table with my host mom Luisa and we're watching television, some show that mixes the subject matter of E! with the deathly seriousness of a Dr. Phil episode about date rape or anorexia or something. This all took place in Spanish, of course.

L:  Can you believe that?
B:  What?
L:  She´s fifty-two years old and dating a guy your age.  26!
B:  Yeah, she looks old.
L:  Old?  She looks like plastic!  She's got fake tits and her face is all shiny from the surgeries.
B:  Is that guy some sort of fashion model?
L:  Him?  No!  He's this male stripper that she met in a club one day and they started dating.
B:  And who is she?  An actress?
L:  This woman, she was on a television show a few years ago where she played this mom with a lot of kids.  That's how she got famous, nothing else.  No movies.
B:  And now the guy is famous?
L:  Oh, he's very famous now, of course.  Everyone knows him.
B:  Good work if you can find it.
L:  I guess.  But now he's cheated on her, because she got him a job as a model and in movies and whatever, and he doesn´t need her anymore.
B:  Shit.
L:  What?
B:  That's a tough break.
L:  She's an old whore.

.... but I feel hung over today.  Probably the one-two-three combination of working out and then drinking three huge bottles of cider last night, combined with, uhm, other recreational activities.  So, to go out tonight or not.... shit.  Maybe if it stops raining, since last night I lost my damn umbrella while sitting somewhere drunkenly.  Dudo que yo tenga ganas, pero... no hay mucho mas tiempo.

I bought my plane ticket home today for the 25th of May, a Sunday.  I think I'm getting back to NYC in the afternoon sometime, and then I'll have to take the Chinatown down to Philly.  I think A_S is picking me up from the airport and then driving me home.  So, if anyone is interested in hanging out, I'll be in the area for about a week, starting then.  I'll be down in S. Philly though hopefully by that following weekend.  We'll see how it goes.

Oh, and I've started buying a whole new British-made wardrobe over here, since Primark  is about as cheap as Target but much more posh.  Anyways... hasta luego.

So, last night we bought a bottle of Jose C. and some Mexican beers, nachos and salsa and had an American fiesta near the university, which drew in some of our European friends who wondered by, thus making it an international celebration.  The weather here is perfect, clear, sunny, about 78 degrees.  Unfortunately I have three hours of classes that begin in fifty minutes.  Ah well.  Anyways, at least its nice out... wait, why am I in the computer lab?

Well, not entirely.  I'm coming back to the States around abouts May 25th or 26th.  My program ends on the 23rd, and it may seem strange that I'd leave so soon, since Europe is going so well.  However, I've got to have some money saved up so I can move down to Philly as soon as I get back.  I figure with a grand or two I'll have no problem getting into a place.  In fact, I know that's the case, so I'm not particuarly worried.  Rent in Philly is really, really cheap considering that you're living in a major city.   What I am worried about is the shock to my system when I start working my first normal job in about two years.   Christ, it seems strange to say that.  And it feels pretty good too, for the record.  Anyways, I was working the whole time, either writing or painting toy soldiers for commission.  Jesus, I sound like a nerd there.  Well, it did pay pretty well, better than minimum wage (almost twice, in fact) and it beat anything else I would have done.  At least I didn´t have to leave my house.  Anyways...

Yeah, so I'm trying to put out positive vibes about going back to Philadelphia.  This´ll be the first time in about five years that I'll be in a place that I might be living in for sometime, so I'm going to try to actually construct a decent life there.  I'm excited at the idea of actually exploring the city, meeting people, doing things.  Having a local girlfriend.  Last fall I was pretty much a recluse.  This time, more action.  Of course I'll be poor the whole time, but then, life is more fun if you're poor, I've found.  Especially if you don't care, which I don´t.  Not about money. 

Also, I now have an actual book that is really going well for once.  It's incredible how much bad writing you have to do before you can do any good.  Like, three years of it.  But then again, I'm not complaining. 

Well, I'm going to get going, because there´s a girl here I'm trying to avoid.  A long story.  It's four in the afternoon and I have yet to begin drinking... a situation that will not endure for long!

Here things are good.  I can't believe I'm taking a break from the weather right now to post here.  The weather is perfect, sunny, a clear sky, seventy-five.  I have a three hour break in my classes.  Will I drink sangria or will I drink Ponche Caballero (my favorate liquour, from Andalucia)?  Should I drink alone or with a friend?  Decisions decisions.

Other decision:  should I skip out on America and stay here, leaving behind all debts public and private, etc, etc?  Probably not.  I should though.  I would stay all summer if I could afford it.  Alas, I'm coming back two days after my program ends, so I can quickly get a room down in Philly, and quickly afterwards a job.  I can't deal with Boyertown anymore, so I have to get to the city, even if it is an ugly and dangerous one.  Also, I'll have to work like a dog all summer to pay my bills until I get my first GI Bill payment in September.  Maybe I'll score a managerial job, since I have military experience and all.  Then again, that chapter of my life has never earned me more than a poverty level supplement to my sub-poverty wages, so why expect anything this time around?  Pero, bueno...

I have a conversation partner here that I met at some mixer function the university runs.  I meet with her every few days to talk.  Her life is a living hell:  all work and study, no sleep.  She's 23, quite pretty, and she's almost a total void.  Favorate book?  Doesn´t read.  Favorate movie?  The Notebook.  Favorate music?  Some europop trash.  Of course I continue to meet with her because she's attractive.  Anyways.  Last night she recieved a phone call towards the end of our hour together.  I followed most of it in Spanish, and then she filled in some details.

Apparently she's friends with this 40-something married couple from Catalonia who've been having problems.  They were thinking about divorce, and then last night the guy came home and found that the wife had taken the kids and some of their things.  So, terribly distraught his first thought was to call my attractive, twenty-three year old conversation partner Belen, who is, she told me, very good friends with both of the people involved.  She had lots of good advice, like calling a lawyer, etc, etc. 

So, my thought is that the problem between the couple was none other than Belen herself, or she was one of several problems, which is probably more likely the case.  Of course I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm not.  This is the second time in a month that I've seen instances of twenty-something girls hooking up with forty-plus year-old men.  ¡Qué extraño!  Anyways, I'm still going to meet with her because she's attractive, even though her life makes me depressed.  In fact she wanted to meet tonight.  Anyways, these are my preoccupations right now.  Life ain't so bad...... as long as I'm not in the US. 

And Obama chose the wrong word when he said bitter.  He should have said either deluded, foolish, ignorant, poorly educated, slow, idiotic, stubborn, hillbilly-ish, pig-headed, shit-brained or something else.  And those are my people, so I can talk.

You're next to a beautiful girl in a computer lab at your college and you'd give an arm and a leg to say something to her, but you can't come up with a single danm thing in English, let alone another language????
   Danm!

I just realized today that I have to buy new clothing here.  Every time I go to Europe it happens- I lose a ton of weight.  This time I've been gaining weight, actually, because of lifting weights, but I've lost two inches off my waist.  So nothing fits me now.  In American I'd be happy ,but in Europe it's going to be a bitch.  Clothing here costs an arm and a leg.  Also, something about the detergent here eats holes in my socks.  It's like my house mom washes them in battery acid or something.  Anyways, these are my problems:  pants and socks. 

Oh, and I've been reading Duras.  Everyone should read Duras, possibly the most womanly of writers.  She really turns me on actually.  Anyways, I've been thinking that there are female works of literature and male works, and the difference depends on how the writers treat silences, and the presence or absence of negative spaces.  If you'll follow me, we have to press ourselves into the warm mystery of feminine prose in order to get anything out of it.  Whereas with masculine prose it acts as a positive phallic force to put ideas in us.  So feminine prose needs to be pursued and second-guessed in order to get anything out of it, whereas any old barbarian can be led along by a masucline work, riding, literally, on a wave of phallic words.  A romance novel, in my reading, is esentially a phallic work, and men can write feminine works, though not as well as women, I'm sure.  And then you have some hermaphroditic works, like The Savage Detectives, or Gravity's Rainbow, or possibly, I've been thinking, anything post-modern.  I've been trying to sex every work of literature I've ever read recently as a sort of pass time.  So generally things are good, and it's very nice and spring-ish here, when it's not pouring down rain. 

I'm sure that given the predilictions and interests of more than half the people on my friends list, I'm probably not mentioing anything new with this article. ANyways, this guy named Zoltan who lives with his parents built a robot girlfriend.  It first made me laugh, then made me sad, then made me depressed and then pitched me into nihilism.  Although the memory-clearing feature is one I wish real women had.....

Best lines??


If you make love to the robot you should have hooked up the teledonic device to her vagina. After you are finished take the plug out of her right away. Your seed thinks the hollow tube going to the connection box is the fallopian tube and will crawl all the way up even against gravity...The vagina can be cleaned with regular soap and water. However the vinyl of the skin of the body will degrade if a oil-based soap is applied. So Instead use sex toy cleanser that can be bought at a sex shop.

You can go to this website, which I google searched for, and talk to the chatbot he bases his girlfriendbot off of. 

I'm reading Swann's Way right now, and I want to say that I might actually prefer it to Ulysses. The reason for this is that Proust is a celebration of life, and the cerebral qualities of Joyce are too cold. I mean, we can force Joyce to have feeling if we want, and there is feeling in Joyce, but not like Proust. I mean, I've never read a book so living and filled with love for love and life. And I rarely talk/type this way about anything. Everyone should read it! Of course, the first two hundred or so pages are basically plotless (not to sound like a philistine), but there is something profoundly peaceful in the first section, also sad. However, once the second part begins, Swann in Love, it takes off like Spring. Actually it's a perfect book for Spring time, even though here in Oviedo it rains all the time and Spring will probably be about the same as winter. I'm actually going to go back to it right now, so... hasta luego.

Is that proper French?  I dont know.  Anyaways; pardon my spelling and gramar. Im using an Arabic language keyboard here in Essaura, a little sea side artist town.  The trip has been educational, for many reasons, some more scandalous than others.  Could I live here some day for a few monhs?  Yes.  For years?  Probably not.  I will post in full detail about my trip later on.  And get ready for some old school white western male pomp in the imperial tradition.  Alhough Ill give my current city this at least; the natives here know how to comport themselves around a western woman.  In Fez and Marrakesh if I let go of my girlfriends hand for a minute she had men hissing at her like snakes.  Even given that, Ill admit that if one ever waned to dissolve onesself,  or had a pain too great o bear and which needed to be run away from, it could be done here better han any oher place in the world. f

Yep.  Vacation time.  I'll try to take some good pictures of Morocco while there and will post them upon my return.  We're going to visit this ex-pat artist community in some sea side village where apparently one can live like a human for very little money.  I'm very interested in checking this location out.  We'll see how it goes.
I'd post more, and maybe later I will, but unfortunately I have a bunch of homework to finish here quickly before I leave, since I'm taking three days extra off for my trips. 

Soldier bear.

I'm serious, after the book is done this will probably become a movie...

I went to the movies last night to see This is England. Apparently Franco demanded that all movies in Spani be dubbed into Castillian, and to this day it's rare that you see a sub-titled movie. Tradition, I suppose. Anyways, this is what I've been told. I was able to understand all of it ,which is a shame, because it's a pretty depressing flick. I guess I was expecting Train Spotting II, and I got Kids. Except with early 80s English skinheads. I guess I learned that skin heads in England were, if anything, more pathetic than skinheads in America. And also sort of wishy-washy and without any guns.
A girl in my classes here from Temple almost got raped or mugged the other day. She was walking home drunk at 5 in the morning from a club and turned into the long hallway that leads to the stairs to her apartment. When she got towards the end of the hallway she heard someone running up behind her, and turning around saw a guy almost on top of her. So she screamed a few times and threatened to hit him with her purse and he turned and ran away...

Yesterday my platonic lady friend and I walked from our city to a mountain top that overlooks it, on which perches like an eagle a statue fo Jesus. It was quite a walk, and the closer we got to Jesus the more often he became hidden behind ridges and trees. What struck me as interesting is that almost all the trees were very young. There's an old story here that a squirrel used to be able to go from Seville to Salamanca without touching the ground. Now there are hardly any trees. Is this from ship building? That's what I was told, but it seems a bit of a stretch. That's a lot of ships...

Anyways, at the top of the mountain we took a break at the feet of the statue. It's one of those deals where Jesus is spreading his arms out to all the world below. There is also a huge replica of some Reconquista cross on his pedestal, covered with banged-metal jewels so that it reflects the sunlight. It almost seems that Elvis made the call on that one. So while we were sitting there a family came up and the kid, a boy of maybe 3, stood on the platform to get his picture taken, and spread out his arms like Jesus. This really freaked me out. And then he posed for another one in another location, also mimmicking Jesus. It was very lurid.
After that and a walk back down to the bars on the way it was time for a cerveza. of course it took an hour for the waiter to bring us out beers, but it hit the spot after our pilgrimage.
Anything else? No. But today I craved sushi, something I really have never been into, and something that is impossible to get here in Oviedo. I'll have to get into some of it when I return to Madrid..

Not much new here so far. 
Spain has been treating me fairly well.  I haven´t made any new bartender friends, but then I haven´t been spending as much time in bars as I have in the past.  In fact my host-mom made fun of how little I´ve been going out recently.  My roommate Clara, a strapping Irish lass, goes out every night until six in the morning or so, a real party girl.

Spaniards eat a lot of pig.  Have I mentioned this before?  They eat a shit load of it.  I´ve never seen one animal so dominate a national menu.  Of course, the pig here is quite good, so I´m not complaining, only noting this in awe.  

I need to post more but I´ve been lazy.  For this I apologize.  I should get a camera so I can post some pictures of the city, and the statues they have up, like the Woody Allen statue, and the comely naked woman throwing her baby in the air.  A very arty city.  

Well, times almost up at cafe.  Gotta run.  Paz

I got to Madrid a week ago and haven´t posted much as I had to pay for the internet in Madrid.  Now I´m in Oviedo at a library and have all the time in the world.  Or at least until siesta.  
So what have I been doing?  Well like Satan I've been going back and forth upon the world, specifically Spain.  I´ve been to three cathedrals, two castles, uncountable cafes and restaraunts, and have eaten about ten pounds of ham.  The pig is the chicken of Spain, as it were.  You can´t avoid pork here, it´s in everything and is everywhere.  Apparently Queen Isabel started eating pork to prove how non-Jewish she was, and the entire pork-culture of Spain was a result of this, like a culinary inquisition.  Oddly enough, I found out that she was, like a lot of Spanish nobility at the time, part Jewish herself, and thus the need to demonstrate.
It feels so damn good to be back in Europe it taxes words to describe it.  Here in Oviedo it´s about 50 or 60 degrees during the afternoon and everything is green, thanks to the English climate the mountains to our south provide.  The city is small-ish, a little clean and modern for my taste (I prefer the Mann-ian decay of Southern Italy).  However, it´s not Philadelphia, and that´s all that really matters.
The highlight of the trip thus far was our tour of The Valley of the Fallen.  That´s the basilica that Franco built to honor dead fascists.  If you ever get the chance to go, I highly reccomend it.  No where else will you get to feel such a muscular, pulsating evil as there.  A cross a hundred and fifty meters high tops the mountain it´s built inside of.  Two huge, bronze angles, blue-green with patina and holding two handed swords guard the entrance way.  It's metal as fuck.  Areas of the interior are bare, showing the rock of the mountain, for all those perverse fascist reasons of the soil and the universe being one, which connects Franco to the Spanish earth, sort of like how Hitler wanted his tomb open to the elements so it would represent him being one with the Universe.  The entire complex is what Europe would look like if the Nazis had won the war, which means it resembles something designed by a 14 year old Dungeon Master who grew up Catholic.  Franco´s tomb is in the middle, and nearby that of the father of Spanish facism.  Both have flowers laid upon them and above them rears a wooden statue of Jesus Christo hanging beaten and bloody from the ole rugged cross.  Huge, gaunt copper statues of the archangles surround them.  All of it is very perverted.  And then I found out that the basilica is actually an active Catholic entity, with priests who actually live and work inside of it!  I wonder if the Pope know´s about this?  Oh, I think he does.  The over all effect of robed men and the lighting recall something from Star Wars, or maybe The Lord of the Rings. 
So all in all it was very tasteless and creepy and puerile, as we all know fascists are.  I highly reccomend that you go if you come to Spain.  America, in stopping those people (generally, not in Spain) did at least one inarguable good in the world, and the Valley of the Fallen makes this quite visceral.  
Alright.  What else?  Well, as me and some other Americans returned to our hotel three transvestites and their demi-midget pimp accosted us, and one tried to grab my penis, though since I had my hand in my pocket at the time was foiled in the attempt.  And another one kicked my buddy in the leg.  That was in Madrid.  Oviedo is a bit more laid back.  And speaking of which, I´m going off to explore a bit.  

Hey, so, I´m here in Madrid and things are going well.  I´d say super good.  In fact I´ve already made one Spanish friend:  the hotel bar tender who gives me free refills of my drinks.  
This is just a quick email, becaue I´m about to head out and drink some wine, or, maybe, some beer.  Madrid is nice but lacks the delapidated charm I like in Europe.  I´ll only be here for a few more days though, then we´re heading up to the foggy mountain town where the bulk of the semester will be spent.  Still, I respect a place where the wine is cheaper than espresso, and the national passtime is slowly getting more and more drunk as the day progresses.  So yes, Spain is a pretty decent place.
Of particular interest to someone:  Jamon of amny types is everywhere here.  There´s a really popular local hangout near my hotel called Museum of Ham, in English.  I went to another, smaller ham place last night and tried out a few small pieces of Jamon Bellota, which is the sort of ham fed acorns.  Bellota, for the record, means acorn in Spanish.  It´s also known as black ham, as it is aged for a really long time.  Anyways, I tried two cuts (like any pig there are several dozens cuts of the stuff).  Lomo, that is, the pork loin, tasted like I was eating champaigne.  I´m not even kdding- it sizzles the tip of the tounge as though carbonated, though it doesn´t actually taste much like acorns.  It is however deleriously tasty.  Then I had some leg of jamon bellota, and that was acorny- it was like eating a concentrated acorn.  Very tasty, and left a long aftertaste.  It was 90 Euros a kilo for the latter, somewhere less for the former.
Anyways, not mch else going on.  My classmates are the ususal collection of Ugly American college kids.  Well, whatcha going to do?  Except avoid them.  And on that note I´m going to go wonder around the city and drink and people watch.
Also, I just finished Lolita, and I went to the Prado today.  More on that later, probably.

From Spain!!!!!
I just got here after a rather gruelling 18 hour trip.  The cross Atlantic wasn´t bad, but the five hour layover in Germany was a bit drawn out.  Didn´t probably help that I couldn´t resist a good 7am beer.  I ended up meeting a girl from Washington in the subway who was on her way to a hostel, so I followed here through one of the nicest subway systems I´ve seen to some area in the middle of Madrid.  The subway here must have been between two and three hundred feet underground.  There were six escalators leading out of the metro.  Anyways, so the hostel is satisfyingly dingy, but with many amenities for only 18 euro a night.  I´m rooming with two Argentinians.  Tomorrow my program begins and I can check into the hotel I´ll be living in for the next week, which is, nicely, incuded in the cost of the program.  I´d type more in here, but really not too much has happened yet.  I´ll try to post reguarly about my adventures.

And not Tom Wolfe, the late sixties New Journalism hack.  The real Thomas Wolfe, that is, the one Faulkner called the 2d greatest American Modernist, after himself.  A great writer of ideas, if nothing else.  The reason I ask is that I just noticed (I'm trashed, gone, it's 3am, I admit it) that in Cat's Cradle there is a definate granite angel motif.  I think that it's highly improbable that Vonnegut wrote this without Look Homeward Angel in the back of his mind.  Today I was thinking about how the angle motif applies to my own life, and how Thomas Wolfe is one of the great tragic figures in American literature of the 20th century:  too manic to be coherent, too racist to be palatable today.
Has anyone read Wolfe and Vonnegut??
Emma_Bovary?????

I'm not really surprised that the Japanese numbers are so even between yes and no.  The fourteen percent "No apology necessary" is livening up my day, however....