I wrote to Marisa just now:
Dentro del autobus, hay Ingleses delante de mi y Alemanes atrás! Ha. locos!
But they are not the strangers. I am. Jayson once told me, and actually told everyone around us, aligned with us, groovin’ with us and otherwise accompanying us on the dotted life trek through the universe:
You’re lost and you like it.
They are not the strangers. I am. They giggle like misfits, but laughter among the superficially inane is glue. Camaraderie is a disease that ultimately benefits all with its contagion. Kavus Torabi sings in my ears:
So I’ll drown myself in wine with the only living friends that I can find. If they leave me all adrift on foreign shores, would it be so wrong of me to crash at yours?
Ha. I haven’t actually perused the lyrics of this obra closely, but I enjoy what he is getting at in that, shall we say, chorus.
But still, they are not the strangers. I crash at foreign shores frequently. Or, at least, I used to. I’d say that Michal’s apartment in Praha is one of those shores I have crashed at once upon many times. What’s the irking word in Spanish? He naufragado a menudo en las playas de mis amigos. And why not, really?
I am the stranger.
I’m not claiming that the purpose of friends are to line the shores on which I may crash, but it is certainly convenient when they do so. I’m a fleshy shore-liner, as well, I must admit. Or, at least at times. It is important to remember that we are ALL shore-liners and to certainly visit those who line available shores. They are more than proxies. They are companions that captain encapsulated journeys. Bubbles love to intersect and partially merge. Seemingly, they always separate later. When they DO merge into a larger sphere, they tend to burst before those smaller and less hybridised.
Now I wonder whether breaking open my lager will alert my travelling companions to my intentions of becoming slightly intoxicated en route to Bilbao. I shall find out very soon, and then write about it! Glory be! Fuck um.
Though the beer overflowed onto my fingers and not my keyboard, no-one turned their apparent visual attention on me, though surely the scent of hops radiated out to at minimum one meter. The English bloke in front of me, who I overheard telling an anecdote about a pub (in Logrono?), surely caught it. I recognise a potentially drunken Englishman from a considerable distance. He is not a stranger, but in a strange land, perhaps. I say perhaps, since he may come to La Rioja in his spare time now and again to suck down red wine and fuck goats. It’s a well known English vacation plan.
It occurs to me that my bladder may explode before I reach Bilbao. Regardless, I shall continue sipping my 40 (Loyal would refer to it as that) throughout the journey.
Kavus sings:
Your congregation will die alone. Your congregation will die alone. We’ll build our empire out of their bones. We’ll build our empire out of their bones.
Jayson, the fuckup that told me once You are lost, and you like it, and I discussed how relationships are like books in a personal library. When you spend time with a friend, in depth, you once again open that tome, take out the bookmark, and read. There are paragraphs your go over again and again bearing concentration, and others you simply skim. When beers are drunk, shots shot, cigs littered like a trail of bageta-crumbs, you place the book back on your shelf, bookmark in place, to be resumed at a later date. Or perhaps not. Jayson was fond of this idea. It doesn’t really take into account minglings with groups, though. Cross-referencing encyclopedia after encyclopedia could be exhausting, not to mention the weight to heft all of them in a backpack already splitting at its seams. Christián might suggest to create an app, perhaps with voice analysis, that categorises each human (tome / novel) throughout a night of social density and later allows you to review the myriad cross-references. Jayson would probably be fond of that idea, as well. However, he’s dead. Fuck um.
The bus has paused at an anonymous town full of humans discarding their camaraderie for a time to share the surely pervasive smell of LAGER permeating the autobus. By the time we reach Bilbao, each will crave drink. They’ll flock to watering holes, begin sucking down vodka martinis, sidras, txakolis, snifters of cognac and distilled juices from their own tear ducts. Drying out is not an option, because it means facing the reality of lost camaraderie.
All this being said, it’ll be nice to decapitate Christián and leave his fetid body floating in the fountain in front of the Deutche Oper. Finally, out of fate and familiarity, the flowing water will clog, the fen will become a bog, and his flesh will ferment the liquid into a nectar imbibed by all.
Pestilence.
