Notes From The Temple of Dominoes #38

"Where the pristine shore of great literature
meets the speeding oil tanker of real life!"

Tonight's episode:

"The flawed, promising first novel!

Read it before it becomes hip!"

97/12/11 Being a writer without a job means I get to procrastinate full-time now, as I've been doing for the last two months, waiting for my brain to return from whatever mush-state it's been in, waiting to rediscover how to form a sentence in conversation that doesn't mention food or sleep, waiting to become the handsome articulate god-awfully funny master typist I'd love all my friends to think I am. Since arriving in New York in October I've been killing time, visiting friends, watching movies, washing dishes and vacuously stamping out perverse arts and crafts for an obscure profit venture I'll explain later...I've been putting off writing about my recent five-week somersault through Europe - Paris, Barcelona, my sister's wedding in Germany - and now it's been seven weeks since I got back and I've spent that time wondering when my heap of delightful remembrances was gonna suddenly form into a tidy beginning, middle and end like a well-behaved travelogue. By now my fondness for the story has grown into an ugly paralysis that leaves me turning the puzzle over and around, searching for any place to start that would allow me to preserve some illusion that my transcendent vacation was worthy of a novelization or even the effort necessary to remember that it happened. By now I'm bored with the details, sick of the sound of my own voice and terrified of spending my adult years broke and unfulfilled, like God's sad little example to the world. Directionless, unemployed and rapidly running out of room on my credit cards. Nothing to do now, then, but tell the story.

SEPTEMBER

97/ 9/11 It's not real yet - suddenly nothing is. In a vivid dream I woke up on a plane flying to the other side of the world, much farther than anywhere I'd been before. I remembered giving all my stuff away, quitting my job, moving out of the city into the backpack waiting in the overhead compartment, flying into Paris and a life I had no desire to plan. It would be a vacation, an education, a massive change - I didn't want to know which. And now, after the blur of several weeks became a day-long hurricane that swept five years of living from my room in a few hours, I wonder if I've been kidnapped, if someone else has been making all my decisions and now leaves me alone to make sense of the fantastic consequences. Half my life I've been dreaming of this type of electrifying freedom and now, for what it's worth, I'm awake.

There's an old joke...an angst-tortured writer with no story to write prepares to throw himself off a bridge. His emotional state proves contagious to the passersby and one by one half a dozen others join him to contemplate their last moments on the bridge. Finally the group counts in unison to three and they all hurl themselves into the water...except for the writer, who remains on the bridge, suddenly invigorated with an exciting story to tell.

It's been weeks since I've really slept, awake for hours each morning before the alarm, lying in bed resenting my exhaustion, repeating lists to myself, things to do that never got done and don't matter now. I'd scheduled myself to go to work every day until the moment I left to catch the plane, which was less of a stupid mistake than an ambush of awkward circumstances, still culminating in a final week of breakneck preparation that would make for a hilarious essay if I could remember any of the details that screamed by like runaway train cars plunging over a cliff, but that's all lost now and it's just as well. Ben L. drove away at 2:30 in the morning with a carload of cassettes and guitars and stereo equipment - maybe it was still mine, maybe it wasn't - and Evan and I left the house for good a few minutes later, another load of books and junk remaining in the garage that Evan said he'd clean up in a few days. In the end, the purge was hurried and sloppy and incomplete, somewhere between a spiritual purification and a crash diet, but the change had been eerily sudden. It was easy to give things away. Some days distributing my belongings felt like handing out tablets of poison to trusted friends, knowing I could someday get them back if I really wanted them. With every possession I gave away, I lost a commitment, a promise, a restriction. I became a little less of what I was and a little more of what I might become. I became smaller, and the world became larger, and I became more a part of it.

Evan dropped me off at the airport at four in the morning and I finally had time to arrange my possessions to fit in the backpack, feeling that thin sickly version of wide awake that lets me stay up indefinitely as long as I'm doing something that doesn't involve abstract thinking. I must have boarded the plane at seven, but I'm not very clear on that part of it.

97/ 9/12 10:30 pm Lying on top of the covers in a small hotel room near Paris. I turned on the TV and found a bottomless well of probably-dopey French sitcoms to help me remember at every moment that I haven't just traveled to Sacramento for the weekend...I left SF at 7 am yesterday morning, arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport at 7 am Paris time, 15 hours later, which felt about right. Found my way to a train station and bought a ticket to Paris, except I didn't know if I was already in Paris, so I had no idea where to get off. Watched oddly familiar buildings pass by...from the train it looked like any other big city. So far visiting Paris is a lot like visiting downtown Oakland, except the money's different and everyone here speaks gibberish.

Saw a rental-car place near the Massy-something station and jumped off to look for a hostel. I found a sign for a hotel I hoped was cheap and two local folks provided very friendly useless directions. I deduced that a well-pronounced question in French will be met with a friendly mumbled answer in much faster French, and unfortunately I've developed the habit of listening to people blather on nonsensically and responding with "yes" and "thank you", politely nodding as if I had some idea what had been said, as if establishing friendly human contact was my true purpose in asking directions to the hotel where I might sleep for the first time in thirty hours. Next time I'll use a guidebook. Yet I feel no regrets.

Found the hotel at 10 am, got a room and slept six hours, showered and shaved, scattered and sorted my belongings on the hotel bed and walked out into the world. Bought a delicious piece of quiche from a very nice deli owner and developed a theory that everyone in the country is short-changing me. The movie theater was closed and nobody spoke English. I found a small shop and spent several days' worth of unfamiliar money on maps I would never use.

American money isn't worth anything here, which all by itself made me feel like I was being de-programmed from a cult - it's only paper - but traveling in a country where I don't speak the language means that everything around me becomes just what it is, without all those words to get in the way. And so I had traveled underwater, into a mute world, like Jacques Cousteau. I walked past big metal things and flat wood things and little green things growing through the ground by the blanketful. Those who were speaking made French nonsense sounds and I felt like I'd learned something very basic I'd never known before.

I'd been re-united with some wide-eyed view of the world long forgotten in me, and so, treading for the first time on European soil, my heart pounded with the premonition that I'd soon be discovered and deported by the authorities because I couldn't order a sandwich or know how much it cost without an illustrated chart. Maybe I've watched too many American crime shows. Or maybe I've just spent the last fifteen years trying too hard to blend in. And now I'm in Paris, illiterate, confused, alone, wearing a big hat and carrying everything I own. I'd never felt so nakedly American before.

So I'm trying to learn. Everything in my life has melted together into a solid pounding demand that this trip be my turning point, the moment I grow up and out of the Pinnochio-childhood I've been dragging behind me everywhere I've gone for the last thirty years. I left California because I was sick of being a writer with nothing to write about and a workaholic who hated his job and a romantic who spent all his time hoping. God knows what I'm actually hoping to find...

Sarah K. told me shortly before I left that it was finally time for me to become a father: "...your own father. Your own anchor." Somehow on this trip I would become a man, even returning to a different coast when I come back to America, moving directly to New York. Katherine called this my "hero's journey", my "transformation"...or part of it, the beginning of it. It's my transformation vacation.

For six weeks I've been living in a world scheduled to end yesterday, and so I've spent every spare moment shedding possessions and playing with friends and doing things I'd long put off and becoming convinced that community colleges should offer "Armageddon Therapy" classes, wherein anxious, frustrated citizens who enroll are informed that the world will be ending at the end of the semester and any possessions, meaningless worries or neurotic attachments not relinquished before that time would be counted against each student's final grade. Clever enrollees would soon realize that the grade itself would mean very little after the final destruction of planet Earth and the end of life as we know it, but ultimately, peer pressure would win out and each of the participants would surrender these meaningless burdens and learn the value of living in the moment, just in time for Summer vacation.

During those last few months I'd spent evenings singing with Laura, who invited along Katherine, who was beautiful and talented and intelligent and dating Andrew the Law Student. Katherine sung gracefully, spoke precisely - she'd soon be teaching college English - and she wore the determined look of a young woman becoming a woman...clothes chosen carefully, straight auburn hair folded into a spiral and gently pinned up. She admitted to her fears only with a disarming smile.

Katherine asked to spend time with me before I left and suddenly we were seeing each other a few times a week, lamenting the approaching event horizon and talking excitedly about anything - favorite movies, family Christmases - as if we'd fallen together into a slippery cave of discoveries, excitedly sharing the same confused religions. Soon I'd told her I'd had a premonition that within two years I'd ask her to marry me. She spent two hours talking me out of it.

The next day she left an inexplicable phone message. "I've decided you were more right...than I thought."

She was in between. An educated pagan who could not sleep outdoors. A confident feminist determined to live the life of a lady. A passionate artist struggling for security. I had no idea what I was leaving behind.

I knew while walking through the airport, past black men with rough and relaxed voices laughing in polished French, security guards who might have thought my "bonjour" was from a local, maybe - I knew that this was my new home. If only for the next few weeks. In my hotel room, I put on headphones, shut off the lights and leaned shirtless out the open window, watching the moon over the motionless suburban streets. The voice sped through announcements between songs and I listened to "Stand By Your Man", watching over the road and the dark rooftops, kneeling in the dark.

5:30 am Trying to bore myself to sleep so as to get my money's worth from the hotel room. Woke up at 3 am, when California was having dinner.

There's an ugly spin in my head...over and over I think about studying French, adding that depth to my life and character, making myself more a part of this place. And every time, I conclude that I'm thirty and my life's directions have been chosen. I can't pursue a new home, a new life, a new me - except to move on to the next stage of the life I've already been living. I've felt dead inside, already beyond the last offramp to head in a different direction. Somehow I've been cheating myself and now I can't undo the damage.

In a museum years ago I saw a picture of three blue children - their skin was dark brown but they were covered with blue paint. The people of their culture believed that the child must die for the adult to come into being. The blue child was the dead child, waiting to be reborn into a new life.

Yet in my own neighborhood I had seen the same thing: young people dressed all in black, some draped in black lace or wearing white makeup, looking very much like young, hip, chain-smoking corpses. This was the same ritual. Each was enacting a child's death, leaving a lifetime behind. And wondering if there would be an adulthood to greet them...on the other side. If the paint could ever be washed off.

I've never come so far in my life. And now that I'm here, I feel a hunger to keep going, across the continent to new cities, further and further into some populated wilderness I don't know. I'm on the path of the unfamiliar...newly arrived into someone else's life, a city already more beautiful and exciting than any I've ever seen before...yet I know I haven't yet left the world I came from, only a distance away. Only distance. And knowing that, looking out the window at the train tracks leading back to the airport, I want to leave everything behind, fly and drive and walk and cut myself loose from the familiar suburbs and mattresses and freeways and wake up in the next world. But that would mean traveling forever.

I think I can sleep now.

USEFUL FRENCH PHRASES:

Do you speak English?

Did you understand me? Do you speak English?

DOES ANYBODY HERE SPEAK ENGLISH?!?

Your boss shortchanged me.

Oh, Jesus. Is that what I said I wanted?

Can you take this back to the kitchen and cook it?

Can you please take a picture of my wife and me in front of the statue?

Can you teach me how to drive a stick?

Which way to the graveyard?

How old is this building?

In America, the authorities would shut you down for this.

Me? No, I'm...Canadian. That's it, I'm Canadian.

Please tell me the age of consent.

You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my entire life.

You and your six friends are the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my entire life.

It would really mean a lot to me if you would pretend to be my girlfriend.

This movie is much too long and slow.

PARIS

97/ 9/13 Finally in Paris, wearing walkman headphones on a fold-out bed in a stranger's apartment with slanted white ceilings, six stories over a narrow, neon-lit street. I suppose I expected this. Certainly more than I deserved it.

I began the day with my new exercise program, donning a 30-pound backpack and walking four miles in the wrong direction. Covered the same ground three times, past malls and factories, finally catching a bus to a strange train station, a train into the city. Found the river and walked toward the Louvre museum, stopping at Notre Dame Cathedral. A chubby man in a San Jose Sharks jacket lumbered past and I felt immediately like I'd been cheated out of some pure experience I'd crossed oceans and continents to have. I'd half-expected the city to provide local costumes for the more mundane visitors, so as to heighten the illusion that the world I'd left behind hadn't been shipped to Europe as I slept.

I stood in line under the Notre Dame bell towers that reached high above the surrounding blocks. Dropped my backpack at my feet and was suddenly gripped by the feeling that I was standing in an amusement park in the United States: from everywhere I heard the nasal, complaining guffaws of Americans and Germans and Japanese on expensive vacations. I congratulated myself for not being one of them, until I remembered I was, and soon gave up and took pictures. The women next to me had come from Seattle - Annie left her job and home in the United States several weeks before; she was thin with long, dry hair and she seemed wise and funny without bothering to display either deliberately. Lori was much younger, relaxed and casually friendly, recently out of college and visiting Annie before crossing Europe with a rail pass. The three of us climbed the stairs and I squeezed my pack through the narrow tower walkways, rushing through four rolls of film photographing Paris as if I was preparing a detailed report for my distant home world.

Annie vanished without my noticing and late that afternoon Lori and I were hiking past the Louvre, through the gardens, over bridges and past a menagerie of statues in the streets toward the Trocadero apartment where they'd been staying. Wine was very cheap and I felt all the privilege in the world pouring over me in some kind of karmic retribution for the life I'd lived between the years 1971 and 1994.

Annie's ex-girlfriend Dawn is an American writer living with her current girlfriend Linda in an aged, remodeled fifth-floor apartment on a Paris hill overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Dawn's agent maintains the apartment on the sixth floor, where her clients stay when touring through Paris. Stiff gold knobs mark the center of each of the large green double doors, and a small label by the knocker reads "Charlotte Sheedy" - "Ally Sheedy's mother," Lori pointed out.

We drank wine, ate bread and cheese as the room darkened. Annie appeared at the door and apologized for interrupting, saying she was discussing business deals with Dawn and Linda downstairs and asking if she could borrow our remaining bottle of wine. We said yes and she and the wine disappeared into the hall, Annie popping her head back in to add "Oh, Marty - there's a chance you can stay here tonight." Lori and I continued rambling to one another about traveling and her boyfriend in Seattle and our mysterious futures as the afternoon grew darker before Annie appeared at the door again some time later, scrambling imbalanced through the apartment and noting "Marty, you can probably stay here tonight" before rejoining her friends downstairs. Lori and I agreed to see a movie and were preparing to leave when Annie returned again, thanked us for the wine and said that she'd be staying downstairs and I was invited to sleep on the fold-out couch in the apartment if I wanted. Three literary lesbians getting plastered on the fifth floor means I get a cozy room all to myself on the sixth! Is this a great country ou quoi?

I spent my first day in Paris not believing I was here. Even the Eiffel Tower seemed fake; I had to remind myself "...that's not just an Eiffel Tower...that's the Eiffel Tower." I wondered where they'd hidden all the English-speaking people - obviously they were somewhere. The streets and buildings were beautiful but still Paris wasn't as convincing as I'd hoped. Until I saw the movie.

Seeing "Face Off" for the third time was nice; seeing it with French subtitles and an audience busy reading them and laughing a moment late at the transcribed jokes was a dearly welcome slap in the face. I'm in Paris!!! It was not an exotic museum, but a beautiful city where skateboarding boys and old fat French-speaking women live atop a mountainous pile of history, celebrating life in Paris only by continuing to live it. The whole world had spun underneath me and for the moment I knew I was in my new home, many thousands of miles from the places I'd grown up.

97/ 9/14 Woke up at 5 am under a sheet and a few towels in the fold-out bed in Annie's or Lori's or Dawn's or Charlotte's apartment. Wrote postcards and listened to French radio until Lori stirred in the next room. We ate bread and cheese for breakfast, said a friendly goodbye and I set off to find the catacombs, feeling like a backpacker in Disneyland, eager to discover what really lies in the tunnels.

A friendly nun finally directed me to a line of tourists after I'd carried my pack around the same ten-block circle several times looking for the entrance, and I followed my fellow pilgrims down hundreds of spiral stairs to a cave entrance deep underground. Thousands and thousands of centuries-old bones and skulls are stacked along the walls of a maze of caves over a kilometer long - the remains of relocated cemeteries, filling underground halls stretching out in all directions. It wasn't quite sad or profound; the corpses had mostly died of natural causes, leaving the dark labyrinth as a testament to nothing save the enormity of death - and therefore of life - itself. A motionless parade of former lives, all names and stories quietly lost into the noise of history.

I hiked through - doesn't take long to get the point - and escaped, ate lunch and called my parents to coordinate plans for meeting in Germany. Mom answered the phone angrily announcing "You owe us!" and suddenly I was back in California, back in the trap. My former housemates had assumed that the pile of stuff I'd left in the basement - journals, photographs, donations, trash - had been abandoned and they demanded that my aging parents haul it away. Mom and Dad were furious that I'd been so thoughtless, my former housemates were furious they'd been left with such a problem, and I was furious that people who were supposed to trust me had assumed that I'd behaved so irresponsibly. I'd made arrangements, dammit. I was on the vacation of a lifetime and suddenly I'd returned to my parent's house, wronged and wronging, still the same kid I'd been for far too long, dragged back into that tiny space by people who couldn't possibly have been further away. I walked a few blocks and sat on the curb by a busy street, my head full of angry noises and places I didn't want to visit ever again.

97/ 9/...15? I arrived late last night at the Hostel in the remote Cichy district after I figured out I wasn't going to fall in with a pack of hospitable runaway lesbian writers every night, and so I reserved a bed while a well-spoken young Slovenian man bitched about how he'd requested a room to himself if such were available and now several other brutes were invading his quarters. This morning I discovered the lockers in the basement and thus was set free to experience France without the weight of my wardrobe supplies crippling my hips and knees. By today it had already become painful to walk, some damage already done.

Saw another movie, walked and walked and walked trying to locate an internet cafe to continue intercontinental argument with everyone back home via e-mail, finally arriving in the Jewish district to get one of the glorious falafels that Lori demanded I try. She said to find the deli with the framed picture of Lenny Kravitz shaking hands with the owner of the store, then leave and order a falafel from the place next door, the name of which she couldn't remember. Confident that there are places in the world where they still address envelopes like that, I searched for Lenny Kravitz and eventually bought one of those tuna fish waffle-sandwiches from a corner stand.

Someone I passed on the street called out to me. "Nice hat!" American? A grimy, weathered middle-aged woman sat against a building. She said she was a dancer from New York with two kids...when she was young she performed and did very well, spent lots of money. "Saw three movies a day." She couldn't imagine this happening to her.

I gave her two francs. "What brought you to Paris?" I asked.

"God." She said she was pregnant and told me she loved my hat. I almost handed it to her, another shard of an old life left behind me...but I'd be going through Barcelona too. And it was my only hat.

One of the metro lines had broken down the evening before and I considered spending the night outside. Being homeless in Paris for a day or a week or longer is not impossibly far from reality - not my reality, anyway. But she was something different...her life was an otherworldly blend of triumph and disaster. She'd wrestled her ambitions, lived a dream life for a time and now she's drinking in the gutter in Paris, my worst nightmare, the spirit of showbiz spectacle yet to come. I gave her 20f and left. If she was making it all up, she deserved a reward for the fake accent.

I stumbled through the gay neighborhood and considered seeing a show at a drag club - I had to eat dinner someplace, after all - but rode the Metro to the Eiffel tower. Chatted with tourists underneath the great structure, rode the multiple elevators to the top and spent half an hour squeezing all five minutes' worth of excitement out of standing exhausted and alone in the icy crosswinds hundreds of feet over the streetlights of Paris. Things looked smaller and closer together. Maybe I learned something. Took the metro back to the hostel.

So far France is gorgeous and charming, very old and very beautiful and graceful and expensive and I can't figure out where the Parisians buy their groceries. I suppose there are huge ugly shopping malls full of Pak-N-Saves and Lucky's stores hidden underground somewhere so the locals can purchase the necessities of survival...for three days all I found were baguettes and Orangina and Coke and fruit and sometimes quiche, all of which were lovely but after a few days I began to feel anemic. I've been trying to avoid Pizza Hut (and every roof in Paris has a Pizza Hut under it) but I couldn't afford or pronounce anything from a regular restaurant's menu. The orange juice is either fresh squeezed (expensive) or canned (disgusting). Many restaurants in Europe don't offer drinking water that isn't carbonated and sometimes the soda is served warm. After despising Costco stores for years, I see them differently now...in a European store, I can't buy what I actually want. In Costco, I have to buy so much of what I want that I don't want it anymore. In so many ways, I am learning what it is to be American.

Eventually I discovered cheap Middle Eastern take-out places and these long crunchy sandwiches they press in a waffle grill at street stands. I'm surviving.

I could get used to living in Paris. They seem to take liberty seriously; nudity is no big deal. Everybody drinks good wine. The most popular form of transportation is jaywalking. The women are incredibly sexy. The buildings are beautiful...and each one is older than my home country.

97/ 9/ ?...16 Don't even know what day it is. Very little sleep last night...I came back to the Cichy hostel and entered my new room to find the Slovenian guy asleep in the single bed. He'd taken an extra pillow from one of the bunk beds and neatly spread his clothes over every flat surface. I quietly arranged my things and slipped into my bunk with the one remaining pillow. At two in the morning, a friendly surfer from Portland, Oregon stumbled in drunk, flipped the light on and found his pillow under the Slovenian guy's head. He jovially yanked it out (no pun intended), bid me goodnight and lumbered onto the top bunk. The Slovenian tossed and shuffled in bed, furious but mannered. I'd have expected him to stomp down to the front desk to demand another room, but he knew the hostel was almost full. The lights were out and all was calm for a moment, until the gent from Portland began to snore. Not ordinary snores...great hideous gurgling engine trouble plane crash snores, like Darth Vader drowning in a bathtub above me. The Slovenian tossed angrily, his one pillow squeezed over his ears, and I wondered what this moment could teach me about America's place in world culture. Was this the way all Americans were perceived? The nations of Europe and Asia had raced with one another for centuries to create a dignified and graceful modern society, until America entered at two in the morning to steal away the pillows and throttle all remaining human dreams with a noise so ugly and overpowering...that those innocents listening from below could only create a folklore of metaphors to describe the atrocity.

I noticed Diana at the hostel last night and met her at breakfast this morning, chatting about her home in Florida over our regulation continental breakfast of two hard French rolls, jam, cocoa and watery orange punch. We rode the train to the palace at Versailles together and I did my best to enjoy the massive sprawling estate without walking or spending money. The palace is impressive, the way mountains of burning money are impressive, but aside from the historical intrigue, it's all kinda one idea piled on top of itself over and over.

Split with Diana and took the Metro across town as the afternoon darkened. Ben L. had given me a few things to deliver to Eve, a French native and the only woman I'd ever really seen him fall in love with. Ben had planned to join her in Paris until she told him over the phone that she'd forgiven her ex-boyfriend and they'd resumed their old relationship. And now I was in France, returning a book Ben had borrowed and delivering some personal message I didn't know how to read, a half-holy emissary for my oldest friend, on the street in Paris, guessing at the right address.

A lady sweeping the lobby opened the front door and explained in broken English that Eve had moved away months before. She didn't know where. I thanked her, walked several crowded blocks back and rode the Metro again through the strange dark city, now filled with someone else's longing, someone else's loneliness.

97/ 9/17 Met Andrea on the Metro - adorable, exciting 22-year-old language teacher from Costa Rica, speaks Spanish and perfect English with no accent. We chatted past three metro stations and I mentioned my regret that I'd not made this trip ten years ago. She asked why. "You'll get more out of it now," she pointed out. "You know what you want." What I wanted, of course, was her, suddenly...I asked for her address, no doubt with some vague intention of wooing her through the mail and convincing her to move to America, tutor me in Spanish and give me daily massages. I didn't expect my plan to succeed, of course.

Saw the Musee D'Orsay and met Pat, a very nice, tragically dull woman my age from Ohio...we saw the art, talked about Paris and her parents and her stable boring job that she'll never leave, walked through the Latin Quarter and had a nice dinner in a sidewalk café. The food was delicious. Aging men in berets chatted at the bar. The spell of Paris threatened and swelled with every footstep on the sidewalk and every spoken word that drifted by. And I ate my dinner over a lengthy conversation about...Cleveland, Ohio. Her hometown. "Oh, it's really nice, you know. We even have the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame now." I secretly decided it was good that we were speaking in English, since we were probably breaking some city ordinance, on a public sidewalk full of witnesses.

We said an unspectacular goodbye and I walked back along the Seine river, taking a few pictures of the glowing water and the melting colors of the evening sky...a scene too exciting to be real, too thrilling to be held closer than with my eyes and unclear words of praise. Beautiful, romantic, perfect, timeless, an eternal moment that somehow I knew I didn't understand. I'd come this far to learn how to see the world more clearly, more accurately, and here I was in the center of the most glorious city in the world and after a sleepy afternoon I was alone again, fighting to see into the depths of the picture glowing alive right in front of me, all around me. Pat lived her life to keep herself safe, the opposite of a risk-taker, a true seer. I can't be safe and truly be here. I hope...that I'm here.

I grabbed for my camera a few times when I saw buildings I couldn't ignore, things I couldn't categorize...even if I didn't need a picture. I've been using the camera as a defense...instead of being transformed by something and swallowed into it, I take a picture and put it off until later. I fingered my camera on the stone path by the river and considered smashing it right there.

97/ 9/18 1:10 pm Okay, this'll be my overdue "All the French are Dickweeds" essay. I got up at 7, tiredly took the Metro to another hostel where they said to show up at 8 to get a room...I'd have been there on time but most streets only continue about three blocks before they change names, so I got lost and walked past it twice, carrying all my stuff, and yes, all the rooms were full when I arrived...okay, it really happened because I'm incompetent, but that'll be our little secret... my legs still in terrible pain, moan oh agony...so far I've been to two internet cafés that closed just as I arrived, although they'd been open later on other days. Everything shuts down early and opens late. The department store opens at 10, but the internet place inside doesn't open until 2 - this is a profit venture? Je ne comprends pas...the internet place at the Virgin Megastore is more expensive and they told me at 10 they'd be open at 1, so I came back at 1 and they said 2, then changed it to 1:30...meanwhile I'd rather spend my vacation in a wheelchair than walk another ten meters...my backpack is in the cloak room at the Louvre, where I'd be if I could walk and I didn't need to check my email and I really gave a shit about the Louvre. Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to spending a week there someday, but this ain't the time. I don't need culture, I need tranquilizers.

1:30 am Just called a florist in SF to deliver a bouquet to Katherine for her birthday. Got off the phone and immediately panicked, envisioning the flowers arriving exactly when her boyfriend shows up to surprise her with lunch. I'd resent her boyfriend for thinking my interest in her was romantic and I'd resent her for thinking it wasn't. Exactly what brain defect is it that gets me into these things?

Saw the Louvre this afternoon, a few hours walking through the world's greatest museum, my legs bitching and stabbing with every step. It's a glorious place...if all the art was removed from the Louvre, I could wander through the empty building for three days without getting bored. Stared at sculptures. Drank orangina and wrote postcards. Stumbled into a crowded room containing the Mona Lisa. That never, ever happens in America.

My French vocabulary has leveled off at about ten phrases, mostly about food and getting it to my side of the counter. After leaving the museum I took the Metro to the Gare de L'Est and bought a train ticket to Barcelona for Saturday. I love Paris but my ego demands that during my months in Europe I visit one city where I can at least conjugate.

Boarded a boat for an evening tour of the river Seine, overjoyed just to be sitting down, my full backpack at my feet. I waited in the dark, looking over the water, the black surface rippling and reflecting broken streams of light from the streetlamps and the bridge...absolutely, hauntingly beautiful. And so terribly simple. I'd stumbled into it...it wasn't the first moment I'd enjoyed in France, but maybe it was the first moment I felt really right about, finally recognizing my home for what it was. The feeling had been building since I'd bought the ticket to Barcelona that afternoon, but it came to a focus in that moment. I will miss this place greatly. A dear friend, a home, a whole world I may never really live in...a whole life happening outside of me, away from me, with or without me, never about me. For years I've been living in a tiny tiny world that's formed around me and only me...and Paris doesn't give a damn about only me. Thank God for Paris.

Took forever to find the new hostel, the third I've seen in Paris. Roommate Pierre from Toulouse translated a few lines to be sent with the flowers. Wish me luck.

I wished under the bridge on the river that I would get a kiss on my birthday, two days from now.

98/ 9/19 Got a haircut and did my laundry in the gay district near the Pompideau Museum. Three tattooed Germans stood wrapped in towels as their clothes washed. I found the deli with Lenny Kravitz on the wall, but couldn't figure out which nearby falafel place was supposed to be the good one. My daredevil friends would tell me that's the way adventures happen.

Walked to the Latin Quarter and ate three pieces of quiche in a small park as the bells on Notre Dame rang across the river. The nearby rep theater would soon be showing the Rocky Horror Picture Show and a crowd of horribly sexy young Parisian geeks slowly gathered around me. The regulars showed up wearing the same costumes I'd seen in America and the whole gathering looked like a seamless foreign-language dub of a familiar American ritual, like going to Denny's in Spanish. "Creo que comeré el desayuno de Grand Slam, con los huevos revueltos y hash browns tambien, gracias." It was just like that.

The group filed into the theater and the show was one of the high points of my life. Half-naked French kids screamed foreign-language nonsense at a screen showing a movie I'd seen sixty times and everybody laughed when the familiar, subtitled lines answered back. They made fun of the characters. They made fun of the subtitles. They pulled each others' clothes off. Life could get no better. I was in agony. Suddenly I'd become a breast man and an ass man and a horny teenage puddle of drool all at once, and I yearned to build temples to each of the holy perfect women I'd seen - the bodies I'd seen, the curves, the skin, Jesus. (I wasn't being shallow...they didn't speak English.)

Rocky Horror always leaves me feeling left out, but this was different. It was at once the most left out and the most included I've felt all week. I told the English-speaking Brad that I loved the show and needed to know how to get to the Metro by midnight. He gave directions, shook my hand goodbye and suddenly I felt like a true part of the whole event, like a Star Trek character who discovers he's supposed to change the history of the planet. I ran the blocks to the Metro feeling...like I was just starting to learn.

I boarded the train and sat near an attractive woman who entertained her friends by making fun of American accents. I greeted her and she came over, took my hands in hers and wished me a good time in Paris. Everything I'd learned, I immediately forgot. I should have told her: "Today is my birthday. I'm leaving the country tomorrow. And I'm very, very rich."

97/ 9/22 In Barcelona. Haven't written since Friday.

I left Paris on Saturday morning on an hour-long train ride to Chartres, a modest city encircling one of Joseph Campbell's favorite cathedrals...Notre Dame de Chartres watches over every point in the city from atop its central hill, and so navigating is easy, past postcard shops and hotels and bakeries with signs in English. It looked pretty typical for a small French town, really, but everybody knew what all the tourists had come to see.

The cathedral was massive and cavernous and beautiful and meditative inside, big enough to contain scores of tourists and leave room for contemplation. I walked past rows of straw chairs under a series of stained glass windows. The cathedral is constructed in the shape of a cross - the center is a raised platform for musicians and ceremonies, the arms and bottom all fields of seats with confessionals lining the walls, the head of the cross containing an inner sanctum enclosed in three enormously detailed walls enacting religious scenes in carved stone...or plaster, I don't know.

Along the wall in the left arm of the cross stood a line of black metal racks covered with burning candles. I had stopped walking. It was there I remembered where I was and why I had come so far. An emptiness inside me had brought me around the world to this very spot and I had no idea what to do next.

To one side were stacks of candles for sale, five and ten francs each. A candle would be a prayer, one of many in the vast cathedral. Nobody within a thousand miles even knew who I was. I had left California in an excited attempt to kick-start some process in life I didn't understand. My sister would soon get married in a place I'd never been. It was my thirty-first birthday and I had taken this trip to decide what to do with the rest of my life. I had some praying to do.

I lit candles for myself and my family before I ran out of money. As my own candle came to life I asked myself what I was hoping and praying for. And my mind flooded with clumsy wordless thoughts. I didn't know. I didn't know. And in fact, I'd come here explicitly to find out.

Times like this, I cash in on my modest religious upbringing and act out my Catholicism like the second language, the earlier language, that it is for me. The inner chamber in the top section of the cross was blocked with a sign reading "Silence - reserved for prayer only" in English, French and German. The seats were arranged in neat rows before a great alter underneath a stone cloud of angels ascending. I bowed to the tabernacle (Catholics do that sort of thing) and sat down to think.

I don't remember anything but the few thoughts I carried away with me...so all I know about my meditation is what must have happened. I remember sitting with my camera and bag at my side, waiting and wondering. I had come thousands of miles to this very spot to learn something. I desperately wanted to unlock the door to the next chapter of my life, to unleash myself into a torrent of wise moments and ecstatic insight and I wanted it all to drop into my lap before I left my seat.

Some dickweed took a flash picture from close behind me. Apparently a tourist who couldn't read English, French or German.

Many things soon became obvious. I wasn't going to stumble upon a mammoth well of insight that would change the direction of my life that day. My life seemed to be going in the right direction...much too much too god damn slowly, but to anticipate a major re-evaluation of goals and interests just seemed wrong. I've been focusing, I've been letting go of those things that don't feel alive and crucial to my center, my heart...

What did I want? Was I willing to draw a circle in the sand and wait in the desert for a divine voice to instruct me? Or was I going to be reasonable and admit to knowing some of the answers already?

I don't pray very often, and when I do it's to a very logical, democratic god of which I am a slightly reluctant part and participant. I believe in recognizing those forces in life greater than myself - it's vital to do so, my egomaniacal life has demonstrated - but when I pray I immediately recognize that mostly what I'm doing is asking for something and usually it's something that God can't help me with if I'm not willing to pursue it myself, love or success or some greater social good to which I may make some small contribution. I'm a very self-conscious believer.

If it was a conversation, then all the voices were mine. Insight would not drench me by the time I left the building. This trip wasn't a package tour - I'd only left my home a week before. In that time I'd come to feel at home in Paris, to experience another life, another tangled set of rules and expectations and prejudices and glorious opportunities. And in that time I'd seen that my life was a perfectly good life. I was good at it. I knew how to live it. It was easy. Maybe I needed to do this only to learn something again that I no longer knew...some basic physical skill that no longer fit my adult body, and hadn't for some time...

I saw that this cathedral, this visit, was only a marker, an entry point. For better or worse, the most I could do here would be to ask the right questions and hear myself asking them.

The one I remember is "Where is my life?"

I left to find lunch...quiche and bread and water, typically. When I returned, a wedding was taking place...the line of tourists continued but the tour guides were a bit quieter. I climbed the towers and looked over the city - fields and horizon in the distance beyond a thinning stretch of houses. I dashed between the towers as the enormous bells swung and crashed into motion beside me, rolled by small electric motors. Certainly no louder than most rock concerts.

I climbed down to say goodbye. I'd heard that it takes a free moment alone, silent, to say goodbye to a place properly. And I knew as I found that moment in the cathedral seats, looking up at the walls of stained glass, that I was saying goodbye to all of Paris, to France, and to some direction my life might have taken, a child's life spent somewhere across the world or an adult's path starting where mine had begun and rapidly circling away to places I would never see, even after years of traveling and searching.

Spent an evening on the train, speaking shaky childhood Spanish with a young couple returning from Eurodisney. Woke up rolling through old Spanish villages on the coast - steep narrow streets and clay buildings standing modestly over a glorious ocean. Pulled into Barcelona, found my way across town and up the hill to the hostel, and dashed out to see a bullfight.

I saw myself as a covert reporter, a UN observer, infiltrating the Spanish sporting world to expose the rampant barbarism that would shock a world of sports fans familiar only with civilized activities like hunting and boxing and rugby and feeding rats to snakes. Still, once the band began playing, the hilarious outpouring of ceremony transformed the proceedings into a ritual majestic enough to give apparent meaning to any feat of nonsensical cruelty. I was swept into the action as I might have been at any exciting sporting event, with one important factor separating me from the enthusiastic local fans: I sided with the bull.

I've been to baseball games at which my team loses, but it's just not the same thing.

A matador is someone whose job it is to kill a bull, after - AFTER - assistants have driven the bull in circles, stabbed it with spears and pikes and watched much of its blood spill into the sawdust. Most Americans would describe this as "animal cruelty" (the rest would call it "cheating") but in Spain, cheering crowds waved white handkerchiefs and sang along with the trumpeting band in celebration of each human victory. When the bull fell, the matador graciously turned to bow before the audience as another assistant dashed out and sank a short dagger into the animal's skull, the same way a tennis player might shake the hand of a defeated opponent. A trio of horses chained to a yoke trotted out and dragged the carcass across the field and out of the ring, leaving behind a skidding stream of blood.

Six bulls killed by three matadors. It was thrilling to see such machismo all gathered in one place. (Imagine fourteen pumped-up Eric Estradas in a circle-jerk to the death...) I'd stopped taking pictures when the Tom Cruiseish matador was butted and tossed like a hot rag doll and I spent the rest of the evening wondering if I wanted it to happen again so I could carry home photographic evidence of what unfeeling louts the Spaniards could be. It didn't happen again.

Today I trudged around town, running errands, writing these paragraphs, solidifying my belief that I really didn't care for this butt-ugly macho tacky hood-ornament of a city. Saw the Templo De La Sagrada Familia and knew it was the ugliest building I'd seen in my life. A construction crane stood over the scaffolded ring of walls and huge odd-shaped towers spelled out "HOSANNAH" in recycled bottles and cans embedded in the stone. I assumed the ancient cathedral was being hollowed out and converted into a casino.

I'd arranged to meet downtown with two Canadians who never showed up, and alone I returned to the city square, Catalunya Station, where a week-long festival was continuing. Dancing, music, gay rights groups, volunteer groups, every liberal in Barcelona handing out literature to the passing crowd. I walked past a haphazard row of palmists and tarot readers of varying levels of apparent authenticity. One woman sat frustrated - no customers - and I'd come all this way for answers. 2000 pesetas. I offered her the 900 I had and she told me to shuffle the deck.

She dealt the cards out and asked me what I wanted to know. Again, my head flooded and spilled over, not with questions but a panicked hope...that I might find out what I wanted to know without having to decide which questions to ask. She spoke a bit of English, she said. She preferred Spanish and so did I. It would be an eerie conversation slipping back and forth between the two languages, trading one dream for another, over and over.

"Voy a encontrar lo que quiero encontrar en Nueva York? Esta mi futura en Nueva York, o en San Francisco?"

She looked over the cards, and asked where I was from...San Francisco. I don't remember many of her words...it was noisy outdoors; she spoke quickly and quietly. I asked her to repeat herself...sometimes she responded in English.

She said my future was in San Francisco. I had much to learn, much work to do. Not all the people I would be with would be good for me. But I would learn.

"Pensas demaciado. Tienes que estar positivo. Positive. Be optimistic."

I remember scattered phrases here and there, out of order and context. It all flowed like a steady melody. When I first asked my question, she placed a few more cards in order on the table, reading over them and almost interrupting our conversation. "Estas bien. Tu vida esta bien. Your life is good." I already knew the directions I needed to go.

If anybody told me this story, I'd offer all the logical explanations. It's her job to tell me what I want to hear. And I did want to hear all this...I interpreted it exactly the way I wanted to. In the end she didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. And maybe she didn't tell me anything at all.

I told her I was a writer and a filmmaker. She told me to relax...write, but...I forget her words. Let things happen. "Piensas demaciado. Don't think too much. Eres escritoro...asi escribe to futura. Write your future."

"You are alone. No?" she asked.

"Yes."

"You have been alone a long time?"

"Yes."

She spoke on in Spanish - how this is a time for relaxing, not thinking, not...I forget the words she used. Not planning. Rewards would come...economic, success. Writing. She pulled "The Lovers" card from under another card and turned it toward me.

"This is not the time for this. Amor." She reiterated the statements about...I forget her words; anything I tried to repeat would sound ludicrous. This is a time to live my life and not to worry.

"Tres años estarás solo. Three years. You will be alone." A time to live, relax, work on other things. She began a statement...I don't now know whether she spoke a few words and I concluded her sentence in my mind, or if she spoke it out...I was incomplete. Had much growing to do. I had only to enjoy and experience, not to think...

She asked if there was anything else I wanted to know. I pointed to the lovers card. "Amor. Voy a encontrarlo?"

"Woman...or man?"

"Woman."

"Una mujer..." She laid out more cards. Vas a encontrar la mujer (something)...the right woman. The right woman. Entiendes?"

I had to ask, although I really didn't want to know. "Es alguien a quien ya conozco?" Someone I already know?

She laid out a few more cards and stared over them for some time. "That is...the risk is too great to ask that." I was oddly relieved.

She still worked to answer the question, laying out a few more cards and looking over them. "Es una mujer a quien conoceré. You will meet her. Hasta entonces, amigas."

I thanked her and strolled into the crowd. I'd glanced down the avenue earlier - like Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley: street performers, vendors, a huge walkway of people and trees between two narrow paths for cars. Now this sea of people seemed to be the whole world waiting to receive me, another drop unfolding into the water.

This was silly. If she had told me anything at all it was nothing I didn't already know...and maybe she only helped me tell myself things. And it mattered not at all. I'd devoted much time and expense to get here and had decided I'd hated the place. Now, drunk with hunger and still lost on all but a few streets, I saw the city burst open before me. This wasn't Paris, the beautiful and elegant. This was a seaside port full of people working to survive and shake their lives into being with as much noise and Earthy flair and playful sexiness as they could manage. And I was free to walk through it, throw my arms out into an open embrace, listen to the beautiful music from every direction, watch the hilarious costumes and puppet shows and lunatic dancers hoping to be rewarded with coins...this wasn't ancient rose-petal dignity in action, marriage in a grand cathedral; this was a time and place to celebrate. I walked through a dizzying maze of flashing lights and ancient buildings, watched, smelled, listened, laughed, and finally found a restaurant that would accept my credit card so I could drink beer, order a good dinner and write this.

USEFUL SPANISH PHRASES:

Well, I liked Paris better.

Paris was a lot better.

It's not as nice as Paris.

They don't allow this kind of barbarism in the United States.

We met at a nightclub at three o'clock this morning.

I've been locked out of the hostel.

I want to take photographs of the terrible poverty.

Let's sit somewhere else, away from the pigeons.

97/ 9/23 Nothing in life makes any bloody fucking sense without people to share it with. First big insight of the trip and a big slow-healing pain in the ass, since most human beings bore the living shit outta me, I can't relax and I can't speak French and I can't afford to stay here until I break through to greater understanding of what it is I'm doing wrong.

I'm so sexually frustrated I could scream. Paris is one big melting mouthwater meringue pie in tight slacks and smooth voice and I want to dip it in chocolate and lick it clean. Spain is France's slutty-dressing hyperactive younger sister and I don't want to marry her but oh, what a weekend we could have. And I'm so damn alone here...

I know I've made a horrible, horrible mistake in my life by spending so much time alone. Since elementary school I've strategized that my art, music, writing, my life-giving projects would win me the attention and love I needed and craved. And now I'm never sure if I've really set myself free or trapped myself in a coffin, my own mirrored skull room. But of course there are no mistakes...only directions to go from where I am now. Or so I tell myself.

All my worldly idiot friends have given me lists of attractions they insist I visit, like I was headed to the mall to do their shopping. One of the Aussies ranted for five minutes about what a mistake I'd made traveling without a guide book, thinking divine providence would lead me to the bottled water or cheap food I needed to survive. I've spent most of my time wandering on foot, watching the people and trying to directly confront a mystery that could only be farther away back home.

I'm back at the hostel. A class of German students has been gathered around the piano, singing, listening...one girl, Spanish but living in Germany and cuter than a kitten on snow skis, has been singing for the group unaccompanied, just standing to one side, eyes closed.

So, should I be her? The performer? Or should I be the guy who writes about her? Or should I be the guy who befriends her and goes to the bar with the gang to amiably shout at each other about stuff that couldn't interest me less? Or should I be the guy who visits Europe to figure his life out and discovers when he gets there that he can't stand to watch other people have fun and he lies awake at night worrying that he snores like only an American can?

I've forgotten already what the tarot reader told me yesterday...she lifted me ten feet in the air and I need to know today what I knew last night. I am on the right track. The decisions I make will be the right ones.

Still meditating on Katherine, envisioning us together, furious at myself. I can't have her. Not yet. But I nervously sip at the thought. I want to sink my enraged limb into half the women I've seen on the streets of Paris and Barcelona but she interests me more.

She has a small collection of old-fashioned keys; I bought one for her at a locksmith's shop in Paris and today found another in downtown Barcelona, each mailed along with a long letter written on a paper placemat or pages ripped from my journal, stories about little more than walking and seeing and thinking.

Today was a wash of errands, walking, hunger panic. Gave tech support to five Australians at the internet cafe and agreed to meet later for a drink, which made me feel better about traveling all the way to Europe to check my e-mail when it would have been so much easier to stay in the United States.

Met the Australians at the fountain and decided I was bored stiff. I could barely hear my bland new friends speak below the tinny pop music scratching out of the nearby bars, I hadn't eaten since breakfast, drinking a coke and dizzy, my brain spiraled downward into yawning oblivion, listening to five traveling jocks whose every nuance I would forget before midnight, and I thought maybe suicide would end my years of irritating loneliness. Just yesterday I'd looked at this city and seen the whole world, glowing with life in every direction, and now all of it was tedious and empty.

I finally bid a yawning goodbye and walked through the pigeon-infested corridors of the old city, wondering why life suddenly felt more like a prison sentence than a gift. Panicked that upon arriving back in the US in a month's time I would immediately remember that I was unqualified to do anything with my remaining years but struggle to keep myself fed and pine for women I can never have.

I felt a crack inside. The vat of self-pity had swollen beyond capacity and exploded and the liquid swooshed loose inside me. And suddenly the whole idiot zombie-trance world was unthinkably funny.

I'd been looking at my whole life as a pole that I had to hold up at one end:

When in fact, I saw, the whole of life is a moment, a baton, to be held aloft without effort.

...and suddenly I knew the real question I needed to ask was not "Where is my life?" but "Where is my dinner?"

Ate pasta salad and felt much better. Cracked jokes to myself and spoke with a patient grandmother on a park bench at ten p.m. She listed places that I should visit tomorrow. I didn't hate her for it.

97/ 9/24 I've been wearing the same baggy pants for two weeks, small green army bag over one shoulder, button-down shirt and a grimy fedora everywhere I go. My legs are still injured so I walk slowly and confidently through the alleys - Indiana Jones on laundry day. Kids and construction workers sing the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" theme or call out as I walk past.

Wrote postcards tonight listening to "Stand By Your Man" again on local radio. "Take Me Home, Country Roads" is everywhere - bars, radio, German kids singing at the Spanish hostel. Songs I'd ignore in America call up a vague homesickness I never thought I'd feel. Only in Europe can I see that there's a kind of loneliness that's distinctly American. I miss it.

I've been spending afternoons downtown at the ongoing festival. Followed a noisy parade of paper maché giants dancing through the Ramblas past crowded sidewalks. More pasta salad, propped back against a mailbox in a city square, watching the people and thinking about my life in New York and my someday return to California and other details I can't plan. A chubby, sour man in a Charlie Chaplin suit and mustache pushed a small cart through the crowd and settled against a far wall. His tape player squawked with chimey music and he dinged out irritating melodies on a small xylophone without breaking a smile, starting with "California, here I come".

I miss America. Not the cities...and maybe not the people. I miss the loneliness. American loneliness.

Ben said to visit people, not places...and now I know why. A city is just real estate and tourist attractions if I can't share it. That's all my trip to Europe has been. A whole living world to watch from the outside.

That's why I miss America. It's dark and empty and sad and I'm part of it. A great distance to be crossed and nothing to distract me or keep me company but the lonely song on the radio that echoes the moment with chilling precision.

Laura wants me to live in the moment, instructing me to chant "Be here now" at every opportunity, and it's not working. "Be here now" turns into "Be Laura Now" and I become Laura watching myself fail to experience the moment. Yet I am determined to relax for once in my life, struggling to breathe steadily, a calmly focused Zen pilgrim. Drinking seems to help too.

Downtown Barcelona - the Ramblas, the Gótic district - is a six-story maze of crevices between ancient stone buildings. Massive cathedrals that might have scowled from a distant hilltop look across little more than an alley before the tangle of aged tenements continues.

I entered the church of Maria Del Mar as the doors opened for visitors this afternoon and I found a massive, brightly lit grey stone cathedral, medieval yet glowing almost warmly inside. Shrines to saints and religious figures lined the walls. The man at the door reminded me to remove my hat and I obliged, feeling like I'd entered the sacred building playing a tuba.

I stopped at a sharply angled carving of Christ on the cross in a small shrine at the side of the cathedral. I removed my bag, my camera, and kneeled on the stand, clasping my hands together.

Jesus. Was I here to think? Or was I here to learn not to think? I could leave everything right here, the last of my worthless possessions...were I brave enough to see who I was without them. I so desperately wanted to give myself over to a world greater than myself. I might be willing to lose myself to do it.

I knelt, hands clasped together, breathed. Calmly stared at the statue. A limp lean man with a stab wound in his torso, suspended from nails through his hands and feet. A woman walked past me and kissed its wooden legs. She touched her fingers to its feet and walked away.

I thought of the poem "Lost": "Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here and you must treat it as a powerful stranger - must ask permission to know it and be known. Listen."

I might have cackled. If I was truly lost, I was in the right place for it. I knelt in a far corner of an obscure cathedral in the middle of a maze of ancient buildings in a busy region of Barcelona. I did not know the name of anybody living within a thousand miles.

There is a time not to think and this was not it.

Words leapt into mind. Sometimes I hear myself narrating whatever it is I'm experiencing, choosing words to describe it. Words flooded in to write the story of this moment in the cathedral. Words I would be guaranteed not to remember later if I did write the story. And I recognized that if I could do one thing to better live in the moment, it would be to live the story now, write about it later.

But was that enough? Was I somehow smothering myself, writing and recording detail after detail? Why did I come all this way if I would only leave to continue distracting myself from my own life by devoting myself to describing it? I'm so sick of hearing my own play-by-play...

I studied the statue, and asked. I was here because I knew I must give myself to something greater than myself. But what would I give myself to...and what would I release myself from?

The statue hung limp, its arms stretched far above its sunken body. Crucifixion victims die of asphyxiation - they finally lose the strength to lift their bodies enough to breathe. When Freda lay in her hospital bed the last time I saw her, she complained that her body was falling together in that same way. She asked my help to raise her up...

I thought about that day, how I'd introduced Freda to Stefan, only to hear her ask five minutes later when she would get a chance to meet him. She was 97 and very sick. The world's grip on her rapidly slipping.

As a younger woman, she could have navigated all through my trip...speaking French, Spanish, German and English with equal fluency. I only knew one of the many people she could be; only one of her many voices...

I cried. Only a little, typically. I missed Freda...I wanted to visit her now, and I missed the chance to visit her more than I did when she was alive...to share a trip like this with her. More than I was sharing it with her now.

Like tears, more words welled inside me. And I was torn again.

I heard my own voice say in a casual thought, "You pray by writing."

I had knelt at the side of the wide prayer-stand...to leave room for others, and to reflect the fact that I was only in disguise as a believer. Now, holding close the thought of Freda, I shuffled to the center and stared right at the figure of Christ. If he was to say something to me, I would hear it clearly and with my full being.

I watched the statue. I had seen believers kissing statues, crossing themselves, kneeling...I had done all these thing myself. Was I seeing this image the way a believer would? I couldn't pretend I did. It was a carving. A statue.

"I pray by writing."

A family stepped onto the platform in front of me and one of the boys climbed inside the priest's chamber of the confessional. I smiled, took my things and made my confident, slow-moving exit.

******

Picasso museum sucked but the gift shop had great t-shirts. Shrimp pizza and beer for dinner. I've discovered how a beer at the right time can counter many a neurotic anxiety, for better or worse.

This is a good trip. It's clear to me that I won't be able to appreciate all it's brought me until well after it's over. And it's far from over.

But now in some way I'm lost in the middle of America. A lonely country song is on the radio, the world is dark but for the glowing lights racing in a line to the edges of the lanes beside me, and yet it's all very familiar. I know the language of my isolation, I know how to follow the signs to get where I'm going, and I know this quiet feeling of being all alone with the engine and the radio and nothing else in the world that knows I'm alive...I know that feeling will return. It's part of what makes me who I am, part of what makes me sure I'm alive. And that's what those songs say to me...and maybe even to the German students singing them cheerfully in the hostel. It's the familiar sound of knowing where I am, even if nobody else does. It's the warm, sad sound of home.

97/ 9/whatever Frankfurt, Germany I thought the smoking hacking phlegm-breathing oaf sitting next to me on the bus from Barcelona would be getting off in some small town in Spain or Southern France, but when he started speaking German and I realized he'd be on the bus for the next twenty hours, I moved next to Alexander - small-town German guy with blonde heavy-metal hair who'd never met an American before. I've suddenly got a cold that makes me weak and shaky, probably from dumbly agreeing to share a bottle of water with a friendly but bitter CPA from San Francisco, about fifty...one of the several American or New Zealander travelers I've met, men over forty who've seen the world and insist on telling everybody how awful it is. "Paris? A cesspool. The people are rude. I hated it."

I lost 5000 pesetas, about $35, on the street in Barcelona to several con men in a shell game yesterday. I approached them knowing fully that they were thieves, feeling sorry for anyone stupid enough to fall for it, ready to warn anyone else not to waste their money. The guy moving the shells let one slip up so the ball was visible; the sucker who handed him the money picked that shell and he won, all smiles. Again the guy moving the shells let one slip as he shuffled the shells so the ball was visible for a second and I was eager to catch him. They were asking 5000 pesetas - exactly what I had in my pocket - and the second I pulled it out it was in his hand. He asked for another, I said no - had to repeat myself. Somehow my "guess" was wrong and they all tried to convince me to play again - even the guy who had just won. They were all in it together, the whole crowd, a den of rats. I walked away. A lady stopped me in the store - "...Ellos son ladrones! Thieves!" - and said the police would be there soon and they would be gone. I emerged from the store five minutes later and they were nowhere in sight...until they returned later that afternoon, and the next day. They would always be somewhere.

I could afford to lose the money. I gave the rest of my cash to a homeless guy on the street. I hated for them to have my money and I hated that I'd done half their work. I had been sure I could cheat them. And anywhere in the world such naiveté exists, they would appear, collecting a tax on the arrogance of passersby.

This is what Sarah meant. Someday I would become a father...and the title would not come with a bag of secrets. It would come with an endless nagging awareness of how little I know.

I hauled my backpack on foot - Metro was on strike for the day - down through Parque Guell, past dry sand trails and surreal Flintstones park benches, into the city to kill my last few hours at a downtown office building that resembled a seventy-foot-high wall of melting ice cream. Another Gaudi-designed building, a museum on the top floor.

An odd chandelier made of kite twine and lead weights hung suspended above a mirror laid flat on the museum's concrete floor. Gaudi created an inverted model of his building in kite string and attached weights to represent the stress on the supports of the structure. The mobile of weights pulled the web of strings into stretched curves... shapes that would become exactly the shapes of his support arches in each building. Thus he constructed powerful 7-story buildings with unorthodox shapes...using no mathematics stronger than his own intuition. The mirror reflected the hanging image from below and revealed the shape of the arched structure to be built.

Gaudi's work was full of odd curves, stretched and distorted faces - an eerie parody of architecture. The first building I saw downtown was his Templo De La Sagrada Familia, a hellish growth of jagged towers that looked like an impoverished kindergarten's ongoing class project, designed by some deranged religious school principal. The whole city, I decided, had that look of a coloring book attacked by angry toddlers.

But on my last day in Barcelona, after seeing the grimy crush of stone walls and bridges and paths in the old city, the saturation of life in the churches, the unstoppable flash of thieves appearing and disappearing from the sidewalks, the parade of ridiculous creatures fifteen feet high in a noisy festive march down the Ramblas, the sexually charged demand of the local people to live and make the most of it - it all made sense. The primitive tiles, the uneven surfaces, the infinite spirals - it was all a tribute to life in Barcelona: almost threatening in its demand to live despite the desert struggle, the weight carried with every step, the endless history, the poverty. The mirror reflected the stretched, weighted, curving shapes and the reflected image became the model for life in Barcelona: strong, vital, unorthodox, able to sustain great pressures...needing no strategy greater than its own intuition.

USEFUL GERMAN PHRASES

I forgive you for your country's evil deeds.

The food is disgusting here.

This is the last time I travel with relatives.

This kinda reminds me of Disneyland.

This place is just like home, foggy and depressing.

I don't remember ordering another beer...but thanks.

You live in the village? Are you one of the Village People? Ha ha.

I don't know nothin' about feudalism.

Them ancient Romans sure knew how to pour concrete.

97/10/ 5It's 8:21 pm in Nuremberg, Germany and we're in a hotel just inside the old city wall - sister Joane watching Bavarian sitcoms and kinky German talk shows beside me, my parents in another room upstairs. A bookworm newsman married a lonely young teacher and now they're retired tourists visiting their children in a distant country.

The four of us have noisily grated on one another for a week now, everyone pressured and screaming at everyone else. My parents have suddenly become old - Mom arrived at the airport carrying a cane and Dad rests to catch his breath after a single flight of stairs. It's clear that Joane's terrified he'll have a heart attack...as am I, my fears only slightly tempered by the fact that I've been terrified that one of my parents would die for at least ten years, convinced they'll choke or fall unexpectedly... now we're on an exhausting, monumentous trip and every moment feels like the apocalypse. My Dad has high blood pressure, my mother cholesterol problems, each so frail they look like they're about to miss a step and tumble down a flight of stairs.

Meanwhile, it's an angry four-person chess game stalemate, all the stresses of wedding planning and international travel and up-close family lunacy packed into one rented station wagon and dragged from city to city like a touring carnival attraction. Today the clan arrived in Nuremberg to find a hotel. Joane is the only one who speaks German. I'm apparently the only one who can find a parking space in a metropolitan area. Dad's the only one who can pay for everything and get his way through sheer obstinacy. My mother is the only one who can ally other players against one another. So Dad is driving, Mom's trying to make everyone else's decisions for them, Joane and I are pushing one another's irritation buttons like vengeful data entry professionals and I'm in hell because this sardine can of carbonated resentment and carsickness will entrap the lot of us until Dad finds a fucking parking space and yet he merrily and slowly drives past each free space I point out, responding with a doddering "Wha? Huh?" that lasts just long enough for the un-clueless Mercedes driver behind us to whip into the spot. Doesn't help that we've been driving through narrow cobblestone streets that were squeezed into place several centuries before cars were invented...however pleasant our mood may be when we enter the medieval city walls, the pressure and aggravation threaten to make us leap up in unison and strangle one another in a beautifully symmetrical Escheresque web of necks and arms and hands and necks and...

Seeing my parents day and night for two weeks is like watching all my faults divide into two groups and seize control of a pair of innocent senior citizens to present some sad stereophonic Theater of the Tactless, putting on display every embarrassing behavior I've exhibited for the last thirty years. In my mother I recognize the source of my obsessive, cacophonous zest for life; in my father I see my thoughtful, inhibited, self-righteous logic. That the two conflicting roles might combine to create me is both horrifying and oddly comforting. It explains a lot.

My father was stationed in Nuremberg in 1953, when most of the buildings were still huge piles of rubble. Today the city wall encircles shopping centers and restaurants and parking garages, all disappointingly familiar despite the German architecture. Yet I still miss the smaller details of American life - being able to read shampoo bottles and order any food that's not beef or pork or tongue-and-blood sausage.

So far Germany is a lot less sexy than Paris or Barcelona or anywhere else I've ever been, but while the neat cobblestone courtyards and gingerbread-house buildings look like they should be populated by little round boys waving Hallo and singing "It's a small world after all" I haven't reconciled the munchkin-town quality with the fact that these are the same streets on which marched armed Nazis threatening to capture the entire world...both visions being the prejudices of a simple American whose nation has not experienced a violent death and rebirth in the last hundred years.

97/10/10 Too much to fully explain - I'm drunk on beer I can't pronounce, writing at a school lunch table in a crowded multi-purpose room, the Wieden Ski Club's awards ceremony in the middle of Germany's Black Forest...I didn't mean to order the second beer, I just nodded at the wrong time and it came...the white-haired man at the podium has spent the last forty minutes reciting the names of every member in the Wieden Ski Club's 90-year history; I've been applauding at all the right times, feeling warmly included without having to pay attention or care, which has been a secret goal all my life, finally realized. A huge banner reading "90 Jahre, Skiclub Wieden" hangs at the back of the stage over the seated 50-piece orchestra playing Bryan Adams' "Everything I Do, I Do It For You". This is a peak experience. Impossible to duplicate in the US. More hilariously tedious than waiting for a ripped tendon to heal...now two karaoke singers are entertaining the crowd. Before the ceremony, the president of the ski club warmly shook my hand and tried to start a friendly German conversation - holy mackerel! Now sixteen costumed locals are folk dancing! This is the best! Everyone held hands and swayed along...I wish every night could be like this. And I get to make fun of it, too...

97/10/10 10:30 pm Back in my room on a wet foggy night...haven't had my own hotel room since my first night in France. Pays to have new in-laws who own resort hotels. Sauna and hot tubs are closed for the off-season and the maze of empty halls reminds me of The Shining, unmarked doors leading to shrunken, windowless bowling alleys and mazes of lifeless card rooms with animal heads mounted on the walls.

Joane left California two years ago to work as an au pair in Germany; she was in my room in San Francisco when she heard the phone message that she'd gotten the job. I heard her gasping and assumed she'd received word of some close friend's death until I saw her smiling...she lived in Rosbach, near an American army base, caring for the year-old daughter of a German fashion designer in her late thirties. The house was a modern German fortress, cinderblock walls and electronically controlled steel shields rolling over every window automatically each night. Typical new home in the German suburbs.

I met Stefan at the airport two years after Joane's move...he'd come to Chicago for a month for his postgraduate literature studies and flew to California to meet the family and visit Freda in the weeks before before she died. I was late to the airport to pick him up and found him wandering through the terminal, a befuddled little German man, not fearful but still looking lost, arriving alone to meet his new family for the first time.

Joane and Stefan's wedding wasn't nearly the trauma it had threatened to be...none of the German women I'd met tried to manipulate their children by threatening suicide (as apparently is the custom) and the parents of the groom were perfectly civil upon seeing one another for the first time in twenty years. The joyous couple spoke their vows before a friendly German judge who paused between sentences for a mumbling translator to pretend to speak English without making noise.

97/10/12 Fairy-tale hotel in Rothenburg, another ancient walled city destroyed with modern weaponry during World War II, just like Nuremberg... reconstructed but centuries of living destroyed, a living past cut loose in desperate attempt to rescue a future.

More explosive shouting matches with family members about absolutely nothing. Three weeks to be a family together and we silently panic to know that what happens in that time is everything we can ever have together, leaking away much much too fast. Joane and I screamed at each other when she angrily presented me with a gift I'd already told her I didn't want...a cartoon moment playing wrongly in real life. Dad fought to catch his breath after walking up only six stairs. "Are you okay?" I asked. He looked at me from inside a thought I can't know yet. "That's a good question."

I spent two weeks in France and Spain learning that I couldn't live without people and two weeks in Germany learning that I can't live with them. They're irrational, condescending, hurtful, defensive...and too valuable to experience without some degree of sadness.

97/10/18 Alone in Stefan's apartment, Mainz. Walked out tonight for dinner, considering for the hundredth time on this trip what I was missing, whether I was somehow failing to recognize the exciting alien depth of this still unfamiliar place. The sky was that color of bottomless deep blue it passes through on the way to the black of night, grey clouds tumbling across the darkening sky and a fierce wind blowing tree branches back and trash down the street. Light rain fell slanted onto my glasses and my sweater filled with water drops but I so enjoyed being a part of it...as if the weather had set out to remind me in this one meaningless moment that the Earth was alive and no dull routine or boring sidewalk can be taken for granted.

97/10/19 Last night in Germany. A moment of intense family drama and I've spent every minute thinking about Katherine, mostly out of boredom. Family drove to Eltville this morning, small town on the Rhine River...not raining but cold dense fog, my legs cramped and chilled, all surplus energy drained away. Aging parents and adult children walking and talking, beautiful and somber. Yet I knew I wanted to be with Katherine, to pursue this thing and get it out of the way, to find out if we really did want to walk by the Rhine holding hands or if we'd hate each other within a month. Maybe she's too much like me - two bitter Virgos each determined to predict the other's steps and stay a safe distance ahead, both forever neck and neck running, threatened and threatening.

I told Joane how I'd thought of inviting Katherine to visit me in NY and she calmly stabbed back at me, mentioning Katherine's boyfriend and how torturous it is to listen to someone describe an infatuation so doomed to failure. I knew the speech instantly...I've given it to her so many times, the same pattern repeating. So many women with boyfriends. So many I could never have.

I've been doing exactly what I told Katherine I wouldn't. Waiting. For her. So...do I force myself in? Do I invite her to visit me? Do I ask myself exactly why I need another woman who's safely busy elsewhere? What an ugly sport...

Drove back, packed our stuff. Joane edited pages of her old poetry sitting quietly in the corner, just to be in the room, just to hear us moving and know we were there.

97/10/20 My great-grandmother Mariana Caetano left the Azores at age nineteen at the turn of the century to live with her sister's family in Austin, Nevada. It wasn't until she'd arrived in New York that she learned her sister had died of typhoid. Her brother-in-law had lied to her and couldn't be trusted. She knew nobody else in the country, could not read nor write nor speak English.

She crossed the continent to the Portuguese communities in California, where she married a man twelve years older, Jose' Silvera de Azevedo, also from the Azores. She lived in the San Francisco area through the fifties and sixties. News from her family was exchanged through infrequent letters written and read by friends. For the rest of her life, she never again saw her home, never heard her parents' voices.

We said goodbye to Joane in Frankfurt airport...only she was crying, as if the rest of us didn't know what she did, how far away we'd be going. My parents were exhausted and practical; I was already in New York and California and twelve other places, thinking days or weeks or months into a future I didn't want to predict and couldn't wait to begin.

We hugged her goodbye, patiently, before she returned to Stefan's arms. My father leaned over to comfort her in his logical, calm way. "You're not my grandmother," he assured her. "You are going to hear my voice again."

NEW YORK

97/10/20 We arrived at Philadelphia airport and my parents casually patted my back goodbye, as if I was late for work. Train into Philadelphia, Amtrak to NY, underground A train to a new home in Brooklyn, seeing it all for the first time. Three kids boarded the train, introduced themselves to the six people on the benches, blasted a hip-hop tape and leapt into an acrobatic dance routine on the shaking, rocking subway car - somersaulting, crashing into the poles, landing just short of passengers' laps. One boy stood on his head as the other grabbed his ankles and leapt forward and the two rolled over each other down the aisle, over the feet of the riders in the seats, landing in a heap by the exit as the tape stopped suddenly. The three jumped up, thanked the small crowd and accepted dollar bills from a few passengers. A homeless man complained - "I never get love like that. You kids makin' nineteen dollars...I ever get two dollars in one car, I..." The doors opened and they all walked out.

A woman next to me sat shaking her head as the kids danced. "I hate the A line. Actually, I hate all the lines. I can't stand this city. Can't stand this city. Born and raised here. Can't stand this city." She told me where to transfer and I stepped off to begin my exciting new life. Stood outside in a dark liquor-store neighborhood and Daria picked me up, drove me home and showed me to the room I would share with Conan's latex-makeup art supplies and the somber plaster cast of my face he'd made fifteen years before.

97/10/27 Conan's a genius artist living in a form-fitting sarcophagus of apathy. He hates New York - the food, the people, the subway, everything. He's here for Daria and Daria's here for Manhattan. In a few years they'll flee back to California and get married. In the meantime, they've invited me in and treated me like family, except we aren't driving each other mad.

I walked through midtown and bought in-line skates, wobbled ten blocks and decided Manhattan was the worst place on Earth to learn rollerblading. The sidewalks are covered with large hoodlums and hurried executives, the streets packed with vehicles piloted by highly skilled homicidal maniacs and I can't stop or stand upright without grabbing a pole that's usually not there. Eight-year-old children screamed past, chasing traffic on skates with no brakes. Gay commuters (I'm guessing) performed graceful spins in the street between packs of angry vehicles. I'd wasted my money.

Danielle phoned and invited me to visit her in Austin. I'll go when I can afford it.

97/11/2 Called Katherine at work in SF...her first question was "When are you coming back?" She said we could meet at Disney World when she's there in April.

Last time I visited Disneyland in L.A. was with Marianne...I slept on her boyfriend's floor, kissed her in front of Cinderella's castle. Spent the night wondering what to do next, wondering how anyone could stand me...

97/11/5 Walked through a Manhattan park with Ben C., wondering when I'm returning to SF. Ben thought I was moving here permanently and I knew all the reasons I'm not are named Katherine...she's become everything I need and don't have, everything I'm afraid to leave behind. Is there a pill I can take that will cause me to only be interested in single heterosexual women who live less than a hundred miles away? I hate the taste of all this...

Wrote her a long letter I didn't send, walked alone downtown...called Evan from pay phone to tell him how I felt lost and confused and had no idea why I was here, busses and cars and siren-blasting ambulances stuck in traffic next to me as I shouted to him. Watched a movie and rode the subway home listening to three smiling, Spielberg-cheerful black kids with colorful clean clothes and backpacks talking about guns and niggaz and shooting cops and guns they'd seen in Schwarzenegger movies and guns they'd hide in their boots. Kids being kids.

97/11/11 My life has crumbled...can't stop watching TV. Haven't written anything of consequence in months. Barely touch my journal. Spending time watching videos and gluing fur hand-shapes onto black cloth gloves for Conan. Wasted hours cleaning the house with weird determination, wondering what I'm really supposed to spend my time doing.

Christmas for Perverts

97/11/14 I feel drunk - well, I am drunk, I keep forgetting. Most confusing evening of my life. Drove with Conan and Daria to the Black Rose Bondage & Sadomasochism Convention in Washington DC to sell the fur-covered gloves I've been helping Conan make instead of earning money in Manhattan for the last four weeks. Friendly folk in rubber outfits poked through the vending room until 9 p.m., when we all entered the dungeon - a massive exhibition hall filled with racks and cages and semi-naked people, a makeshift gymnasium crowded with perverts chaining one another to the workout equipment and lovingly beating each other with the jumpropes. Mostly normal stuff... chubby butch lesbians flogging one another adoringly, so sweet and healthy I plunged into a morose longing for all the lost romantic moments of my life... holding hands on a beach, whispering secrets in bed...one cheerful white-haired man, looking very much like Santa Claus but wearing only a cock ring and orange forceps on his nipples, stood bound inside a tall wooden frame that I might otherwise have mistaken for a swingset. His wincing smile expressed grandfatherly satisfaction as one of his elves spanked him with a paddle. I'd never felt so alone.

Then came the slave auction. It was conceived as an ice-breaker...I gave away my play money and watched friendly aging women and smiling guys in their underpants cross the stage to be sold off for the evening, the price rising only in accordance with which dominance-and-submission games each slave had consented to play. (Sex was not permitted in the dungeon; understandably, the public spaces were to be used only for torture and humiliation.) Isolated in a cavern filled with the warm laughter of reunited friends, I thought of offering myself up for auction, but I didn't want to have to make up the necessary list of likes and dislikes: "This is Marty; he's into comfortable clothing, awkward stretching exercises and masturbating in private without telling anybody about it. His safe word is 'Not until we're married'."

Voyeurism was encouraged. Crowds formed. A beautiful woman was chained naked and spread-eagled against a wooden X cross and whipped by her master, facing the cross at first, then with her back against it. He approached her to rub rabbit fur on her reddened skin, caress her pierced genitals and kiss her and she smiled ecstatically throughout, her head writhing with pleasure.

Some gear lost a tooth in my head and my brain spun loose. What the hell was I supposed to do with this information? All at once? The invisible VCR in my head that painstakingly records this kind of thing for later playback was fast running out of space on the tape and I still hadn't seen half the dungeon. This was supposed to be a wickedly exciting celebration - Christmas for the damned - but it all felt like I was trying to suck a gourmet steak dinner through a paper straw. Was this sex? Sex is delicate lovemaking with an adored spouse. Sex is inept fondling with a nervous classmate. Sex is cynical humping with an excited mail carrier. Sex is not sitting alone in a crowded room watching naked strangers receive their punishment. This friendly gathering felt like a surreal church retreat and looked like some weird political protest aimed at reforming the penal system and at no point did it feel like sex.

Don't get me wrong. It was fun.

And of course it wasn't sex...it wasn't supposed to provide affirmation or sexual gratification. All the conference provided was floor space and playground equipment. The affirmation I would have to dredge up for myself. Yawn.

A long-haired woman pleasantly resembling Marcia Brady had stripped off her skin-tight bodysuit and stood smiling, handcuffed to a tall post, her body tightly bound in cellophane from her shoulders to her ankles. Her boyfriend alternately caressed and paddled her until she quivered while I strained to see what graceful details of her flesh I could make out through the layers of Saran Wrap. This is what my life has come to.

97/11/15 Learned today that Daria's father bought her a car in Berkeley and I volunteered to fly to California next week to drive it to Brooklyn.

Conan and I sat in the hotel room this afternoon, gluing fur to gloves and talking like the old friends we used to be, maybe we still are...he was mystified as to why I'd want to make the drive. To see the country, I answered; to say I'd done it. And because the loneliness of the road is somehow attractive and necessary to me now. Maybe it will feel real, somehow genuine, like life almost never does. Or maybe I'm just looking forward to feeling that my life has direction for two or three weeks.

Watched Star Trek and drank again with Daria and a few of her followers while Conan remained in the hotel room transforming himself into the most beautiful thing at the convention and together we all entered the dungeon, the room again filled with exposed bodies happily being chained, whipped, caressed, spanked, caged, suspended, tortured...the woman who'd been on the cross the night before was now bound to a square frame, passionately kissing another woman agreeably roped into place facing her, their collars fastened together, their faces held four inches apart. If the moon had crashed into the Earth I might not have noticed.

Then again...maybe I'd seen enough.

It was late, I was tired, and I had to admit that we'd crossed the threshold. Watching lovely kink folk strip one another of their clothes and enter the playground was always pleasant, and the moment each new victim was naked and chained up everything became bland and predictable, like watching batting practice. How much longer would I have to stare at them before something really new happened? This was no sport for spectators. I was in an enormous room chock full of unclothed perverts laughing and whimpering, whips cracking and popping continuously like the whole dungeon was a giant bowl of rice crispies...and it was then, in this mad house of goofy sin, that I discovered the three funniest words of the English language are "I'm getting bored."

These people were not drawn together by sex; this room was not a bed chamber. This was a community, and the convention was a calm celebration, and this room had become the world's largest walk-in closet, lawyers and teachers and office workers in rubber dresses and leather corsets smiling with the relief of sweaty trick-or-treaters now home again and finally free to remove their costumes and enjoy the evening. It was joyous.

97/11/16 Drove back to NY after spending the morning at a group discussion of sadomasochism and spirituality. Gratifying to know the scene has its share of former evangelical ministers...since many people who claim to surrender to God have never practiced surrendering to anything...

The Garden

97/12/ 4 Back home on Mars. Planned to leave for New York after four days but contrary to earlier reports, the bargain fixer-upper getaway car I was to deliver back to Brooklyn hasn't been purchased or selected yet. Daria's parents are grumbling quacking lunatics and I'm stuck on a surreal vacation in limbo until they get their shit together. Surprise Thanksgiving with family. Eerie Santa Cruz fling with Tara, ten years overdue and now suddenly past tense without discussion. Staying with Ben L. or Evan or Tara or wherever there's space.

Called Ben from SFO late Tuesday night two weeks ago and, jetlagged the next morning, I found Katherine at work in San Francisco. Had no idea why I was there except that I had to see her. Had no idea what was to happen except that it had to happen.

I would only be in town a few days and she was buried under work. She'd received my letter from New York... part compelling declaration of intent, part white-flag surrender to the way things are; a determined slap and a mousy apology in one baffling gesture. She was excited and angry. I was sleepy and aloof.

I'd always been sure she had lied to me - about her disinterest, our future together, her daily contradictions. Andrew had playfully suspected I was attracted to her and she had assured him I was not, I was gay, I wasn't interested. I couldn't trust her as long as I knew she was also lying to Andrew. She'd lie to Andrew as long as he suspected I wanted her. He would suspect I wanted her whenever he saw me, because I did.

I'd spent those months imagining we would finally break through it, one way or another. Another year of wasted daydreams. Our friendship was a joke - a cardboard box straining to contain a sloppy rainstorm. I could not trust her. I could not trust myself.

We made vague plans to meet in her neighborhood Saturday. Friday my clutch fell apart and I spent the weekend in Santa Cruz. Left a message.

I sent a note a week later saying a determined, resentful goodbye. She demanded that we see each other.

We walked several wet blocks past puddles to a cozy restaurant and she spoke on the way - fast, angry and very very articulate. I was there to listen. I knew she had good reason to be angry. I'd already told her goodbye and I knew the only one who stood to lose was me and I was already as frustrated and hurt as I was going to get.

An hour after we spoke in her office the week before, she had lunch with Andrew and told him everything.

Or what passed for everything. My premonition, my infatuation. My heterosexuality. He didn't set out to find and kill me. He said she could do whatever she wanted...but he'd be very hurt if she remained friends with me. I understood his response. Almost respected it.

She mentioned my letters from New York. "You put a lot of heavy stuff there. Saying you might come back here and tell me to dump Andrew and go with you...and then, you retract the whole thing in the second letter. Before you left, you said you had a premonition you'd propose to me. And then you retract the whole thing by saying maybe it'll be a joke, maybe it won't happen."

It wasn't until hours later that I put all that together.

"I wasn't retracting anything. I was...I've developed a habit. All my life I've wanted to do the right thing." I suppose I'm paraphrasing myself. "I'm capable of being very gentlemanly...and it's gotten me nowhere. So what I do is...to put everything on the table, say what I have to say. And then see what happens."

I had never realized this about myself. I wanted to do the right thing but I didn't know what the right thing was - the assertive thing, the polite thing? So I did as much as I could to make myself receptive and understood and appealing...as much as I could with words and letters. And I let somebody else make the decision. Anybody. I let myself tell but never show, impress but never demand, never need more than I already had.

"If I'd told you 'I'm dumping Andrew, I want to go with you'...you would have screamed and run."

"What you're describing is not a human being. Yes, I've had a tendency to become...infatuated with people I can't have. And that's not genuine. It's artificial. It's dehumanizing. But I'm trying to break free from that."

She half smiled, knowingly. "If I were not with Andrew, you would not be interested in me."

I didn't know the language to use to make myself clear and believed.

It all felt oddly real and important. We were discussing whether or not we'd ever speak to each other again and neither of us could imagine how the answer could be yes. I wasn't sad, or even excited. I could speak my true mind to her. I enjoyed it.

But maybe it wasn't real.

The whole picture has been changing colors behind me as it falls into further retrospect. When I left her I thought everything had been said. I walked away flawed and frustrated, finally escaping my own trap.

The next day I was angry.

And today I recognize another world of things I might have said that it's now too late to ever say. "It's really important to you that I believe that." I might have said. "It would make your life a lot easier if that were true."

"This really really sucks!" she complained. She wanted to invite me over to Thanksgiving in twenty years, work on screenplays together, celebrate holidays together. Andrew would be hurt and resentful if she was to be friends with me at all. And now - as of October - she was in love with Andrew. And if she decided to take me instead...

"Did you want me to break up with Andrew? Were you trying to break us up?"

Was it a trick question? "No. No...uh...yes. If it was the right thing to do. Yes, if it was the right thing to do. All I did was tell you how I felt. I wanted to do the right thing. I wanted the right thing to happen." Doing the right thing...it was a joke, an insult, a poisonous idea.

She was furious. We were in a trap...but it wasn't her trap. It was mine. "I feel sorry for you..." she said. I didn't bother to point out to her that except for her, my life's just great. "I'd hate to be you right now". I couldn't change her life because, she was sure, I couldn't change my own. I wasn't sure. As long as I was alive, I couldn't be...

And who was I thinking about? Andrew. I'd be better off without Katherine. Whatever the outcome, she would get what she deserved...and she would not be alone. Andrew had done his best, treated her right, and I had driven a tree branch into the side of their relationship. He had no reason to like me and plenty of reason to hate me and I had no way of undoing the damage I had done.

My speech slowed down. I could think of no right words to say and I needed to speak. We were beyond everything but what to do now. We couldn't be friends. She cried. Three months ago I'd begun a playful game of tug-of-war, imagining that Andrew was on the other side...and now he really was on the other side. And she was in the middle, stretched and breaking.

"I felt so alive talking to you," she said. We'd each found in the other so much we could find nowhere else. "I wanted to meet you at Disney World. I wanted to do creative projects together...write screenplays, do things. And now if we do it's hurting Andrew..." She demanded "So what do we do?"

I didn't know.

"You need a girlfriend. Get a girlfriend!" she concluded. I'd heard that before. I'd said it to myself.

Time to finish. This is what I'd come to do...tell her goodbye without hurting her more than necessary. It had all been too ugly and humiliating and familiar. I wanted to escape from all of it. I didn't care if I'd never speak to her again.

Several false starts. "OK, here's what we should do. Let's not be friends anymore. If one of us wants to contact the other later on sometime, fine." I can't say if she was happy with the idea or not. I guess I was.

We left the restaurant. "Katherine, my friend...I wish things were different." I suggested I walk her home.

"Look,..." she paused. She warmly hugged me goodbye.

I waved, not looking at her. She repeated "Get a girlfriend!"

Sandra came by that night. My head was swimming and heavy, but she needed - needed - to talk. She and her husband are having terrible marital problems. Vicious arguments. Their marriage may be ending.

My life was better than it's been in years. And the world was a garden of nightmares...

Visited relatives the next day. My brother and his new girlfriend have already been whispering about getting married.

Only today did Katherine's words really open up to me, now firmly part of the past. "You put a lot of heavy stuff there...and then you retracted it." Angry.

My God. She'd been insisting that I didn't mean what I said...because she wanted to believe it. She needed to know what to do. She would stay with Andrew...and for the rest of my life I would want only what I can't have.

But if she believed I could love her...then she would have had to choose. She knew he could not see the world as she did. She knew I could offer her no security, no guarantees, no safety net. Stability or freedom. Safety...or...passion. The love he'd given her when she could trust no one. The excitement I'd seen in her when we were together. Whichever she chose, she would destroy the other...and perhaps wind up with nothing.

All I had to do was demand it. Tell her not what I feel...but what I want. Give her not who I have been, but who I am. She may have chosen no differently. But she would have had a choice. I forced her to know what might have happened, while proving to her that it was never going to happen. She could not have leapt into my arms. I assured her there would be nothing there to catch her.

I saw how selfish I'd been. Andrew would survive...and he'd have her. Whatever the outcome, I would come away with everything I'd always had. But Katherine...everything valuable to her had been put in jeopardy: her security, her satisfaction, her sense of excitement, her very sense of feeling alive - all these poisoned, at risk. Whatever the outcome, she would lose.

The Car Wash

97/12/ 9 In Santa Cruz - slept last night on Tara's couch. Cleaned her kitchen before I left, partly as a gesture of gratitude and partially because it was a sickening hole and in my current state of directionless angst it was nice to drop the wandering-tortured-artist schtick and feel a sense of purpose for an hour.

Still no news about the car.

Ran errands, drove into the hills and arrived at The Resort - a rebuilt vacation lodge in the woods where Kaz lives with six other bohemian computer geeks and college students. The living room is a huge empty sunlit dance floor, the kitchen has a monstrous eight-burner stove and a single jam-packed refrigerator and a lengthy pile of food-encrusted dishes, a few left outdoors for weeks at a time and covered with dirt and leaves. A friendly gent named Raven welcomed me and showed me to my futon.

97/12/10 Woke up early, ate breakfast outside by my car - that's where all my food is - and spent a few hours in the brisk forest air sorting through all the crap I'd thrown in the back seat and fixing the broken door handles and tail lights. Made my way inside and paid a few days' rent by washing all the dirty dishes I could find and trying to avoid attention as I did so...didn't want to have to explain why I was doing household chores for a bunch of people whose names I couldn't remember, like some weird Catholic penance ritual. Left the counter piled high with wet glasses and pots and triumphantly snuck back to my car, feeling like a mafia hit man who'd misunderstood his boss' instructions: "I want you to find Bugsy, and...clean his kitchen." Casually replaced spark plugs and looked forward to bewildered thanks from my beloved temporary housemates.

Finished with my car and greeted a few of the cheerful residents on my way to the downstairs bathroom, where I'd noticed the outside door (opening to the front of the house) was coming un-glued and would no longer close all the way. I locked the inside door behind me and removed the screws from the outside door frame, quietly rushing to finish the job before anyone noticed or left the house. I had almost lifted the door from its hinges when it occurred to me that this was pathological behavior. Kaz was gone for the day, nobody currently in the house had known who I was the day before and now their guest was in front of the building, secretly removing the door to the downstairs bathroom without explanation or permission, carrying out some wicked agenda that would never be explained. Perhaps I'd crossed some important boundary without noticing...I envisioned an enraged homeowner appearing behind me with a shotgun and grunting "Put...down... the screwdriver." Was it something inside me that had come unglued, some great void in my soul crying out to be hung properly? There was a knock on the door - I called out hello and a voice bounced back "okay, no problem", leaving me free to straddle the door in the front yard and pound it with a brick until it fit smoothly inside the frame. They'd never want me to move out, I was sure.

98/1/11 Pacifica Called Danielle, whose words dragged, depressed. "Remember how your and my relationship is cyclical?" - it returns from the dead every few years - and, she said, again she's been thinking of me as the best thing for her, her ideal man whom she should spend the rest of her life with, something like that. She said it like she was describing the fortieth of fifty pairs of shoes, like it was nothing.

I was...not even honored, just flattered. She's still dating Robert and we'd had this conversation every three years since I left Santa Cruz. Even so...

Jesus. Someday I hope to evolve into a creature capable of learning from his own mistakes.

98/1/28 Staying at Eden & Kathy's in Felton, beautiful forest hippie den buried into a hillside seven wet curvy miles into the darkness from the nearest major intersection. Kathy cuddled in the living room, buried in a cradling mass of pillows they call "The Love Pit", reading Harold and the Purple Crayon to another guest before leaving him to sleep. Pouring rain outside. I took the basement bed and lay warm and awake, afraid the dirt would slide in the rain and my car would tumble down the hill, afraid raccoons would enter through the permanently open window to attack the food I'd brought with me, afraid of what horrors might be waiting in the guest bed at any hippie house. Eden stumbled in looking for her laundry and hugged me goodnight. I do love this place.

98/2/1 Car died in the mountains above Santa Cruz, distributor soaked with rainwater. Coasted into town as the rain stopped, engine started again and made it back to Pacifica. I lay in bed playing computer scrabble for three hours, telling myself I was sick and would soon be asleep. I'm 31, sleeping at my parents' house, unemployed, waiting three months for the car to be ready...it's infuriating, it's death. And it's what I decided to do...

98/2/2 A day of confronting the great mysteries.

Time & Death: Had whole day to myself. Tried to produce writing with which to win success and immortality but accomplished nothing. Wondered how people with jobs do it. Remembered it invol