☆ STARSAILOR ☆

I am in Madrid. Yesterday I took a three-hour flight from Berlin and now here I am dead center in massive Spain. I had never been here before, so I figured I ought to see what it’s all about. I’m staying with my good friend Tombo and his girlfriend Claire in their cute little apartment near the city center . . . and so far we have walked many miles around the city drinking coffee and eating tapas and visiting basement arcades with machines that are free-to-play after you buy a single beer. Later, at four in the morning on the walk home, Tombo and I even witnessed a car plow into a motorcyclist. Meanwhile, a waning gibbous hovered over us in the night sky . . .

And today, a sunny and breezy day, we walked to the Museo Nacional del Prado not far from here. I saw Goya and Bosch and a whole bunch of paintings of royalty and Jesus Christ, and on and on. We couldn’t take any pictures, which is just as well because it would have made the visit miserable as hell wading through a thousand other people who had the same idea. I had to cough up €15 for the entry fee on account of the guy in the ticket box not buying the fake teacher credentials Tombo had whipped up in Photoshop before we left the house:

I mean . . . bless him, at least he tried! Though you know what: I don’t mind being a patron of the arts. What the hell else am I going to do with my life? Sit around and get old??

Back in Tombo’s fortified compound, in his high tower, the three of us ordered ramen and watched Ozu’s GOOD MORNING, which was so good I want to scream until I die:

I have brought along my Sony FX30 because I have decided I’m an Artist now. I’m just going to shoot a bunch of B-roll to use in a Thing I’m making. They say it will be 76°F (24.5°C) tomorrow, which sounds terrible, and there will no doubt be a UV index over 7 or 8, as there was today. If I have any chance of getting out of the city alive, I am going to have to dip my entire body in SPF 50 zinc oxide and cower in the shade like fuckin Count Dracula. See: I am used to the gentleness of Berlin! Beautiful though it is here, I wouldn’t last a month. In fact, the reason I came here now is because Tombo warned me I had only a few weeks left until the whole country becomes surface-of-the-sun hot. Even the Spaniards hate it!

On Sunday, which will be even hotter, I’m flying to London to see Kate and Bex and Nicole. I have never been there either and I’m not sure why. I reckon I just never made my way over. And at the end of the week I’m taking a four-and-a-half-hour train up to Edinburgh to stay with Cara Ellison. I was actually there only a few weeks ago before I flew to Dublin. But this time I have a childish task to fulfill, which is that Friday morning early I’m taking ScotRail an hour south of Edinburgh to the Aero Leather factory so they can measure me. My beloved denim jacket . . .

. . . is nearly a decade old, for god’s sake, and I am terrified it’s going to eventually turn into a shredded rag I drape upon my shattered body. I sometimes have nightmares that my jacket is torn asunder or else bursts into flames. And so saying, I have no choice but to protect it from the cruel world and future-proof myself by having a leather Type III trucker jacket made. Behold:

They let you customize anything . . . I’m going to swap out the lining for black or blood red, and add inside pockets, and get rid of the red tag, and so on. Every time I have emailed them, they’re so nice. I mean, they’re Scottish. They said, “We would love to have you here in our factory.” After they measure me and write down all the Stuff I want done to it, they make a custom jacket that takes about 12 weeks from start to finish. Listen: I can wait.

And then I’ll fly back to God’s green Berlin and live a life of peace and harmony from atop my high tower in Schöneberg. And from there I will get stoned and work on my novel, and get stoned and watch movies with Elina The Estonian Girl, and get stoned and walk around all the many parks there while cherubs circle overhead with little harps. Hey, it’s OK with me. . . .

It is four in the morning here in THE CAPITAL CITY OF SPAIN, WHICH IS CALLED MADRID. Surrounding me in every direction are 3.3 million people, most of them asleep. Lord help me, I will join them now. Tombo asked me this morning if I dream. I told him I dream every single night, for good or ill. Recently I have been dreaming about my friends, whom I miss. It is a little sadness to me to wake up to in the morning and realize they are not there . . . but then, having no alternative, I perform the ancient ritual of telling the person who was in my dream that they were in my dream, and then we get to have a conversation about it. Whenever I show up in other people’s dreams, they tell me too. That’s the rule, don’t you know.

I wonder who I will dream about tonight? My crush [redacted]?? I reckon there’s only one way to f*ckin find out. . . .

FORGIVE MY SENTIMENTALITY