LETTERS FROM THE FRONT

Here I find myself in an anarcho syndicalist bar. There are pictures of the circle A everywhere alongside trade union posters and one old timer for each seat at the bar. It is tiny and playing David Bowie. About 20 seconds in I am offered a cigarette and the warm pale beer is as Spanish as beers come. Luckily, more often then not, as far as beer goes, your standard bubbly barley hops beverage can't be all that bad no matter where it comes from. I have just dropped off my bike's bum back wheel at Nicks bike shop. I am pretty sure that I mounted it at an angle like a jerk and bent the axle. And I am going to need my bike on Saturday. The owner of the shop is paying me to trail a large herd of Danish tourists around the city on a bike tour. It has the potential of being absolutely horrible. I told Nick on my way out of the shop that we may be there when the tower falls. I will be something of a sheep dog, keeping everybody moving in the right direction and rounding up stragglers. They said I shouldn't need to use my cattle prod. Bowie sings “time takes a cigarette and puts it in your mouth” in between lines about space invaders. Why is he still so neat when he has always been such a dork? And why does the one drunk in a crowded bar always insist on talking to me? Questions for the ages...

Friends from the Auzzy squat Thumderdome came by today. Some sketchballs in an old yellow postal van were loitering in front of their house. After one of them was overheard talking about needing a ladder they started to worry about an illegal eviction. They were checking out the upstairs windows and balcony from the street and really really didn't like it when someone in the squat started taking their pictures. Sometimes the real life owner of a squat will hire a band of ruffians to break into a squat and physically evict its occupants. These types of evictions are against the law, often violent, and don't always work, but the upside is that the owner of the property doesn't have to go through the lengthy court process and the cops don't seem to care either way. My house will probably sleep over there tonight just in case, but probably nothing is going to happen, and either way all the doors and windows are going to be heavily barricaded. Now the old chap who gave me the cigarette is getting all upidy: leaving over my shoulder spitting slurred Catalan in my ear. I think he is talking about May Day and the price of beer and pointing at his empty glass. I have absolutely no idea what he is getting at.

There are few things niftier than getting on an underground train at one and slowly walking its length. Going from car to car, getting a good glance at everyone taking the ride. There is something about trains that make their passengers seem very simply themselves. It is like a random collection of people in a theater, stationary and having a shared experience. Instead of a constructed story projected in one direction, everybody experiences each others projections while pretending not to. Everything is lit harshly by florescent lights, some of it lighting up the black tunnel walls that crowd in and streak by the windows. The train rocks back and fourth meditatively while its captive audience think about where they are coming from or where they are going or what kind of problems might happen on the International Space Station when the US fleet of spaceships goes off line until 2015. The ends of the subway cars are joined by rubber walls, like an accordion, linking the whole train something like giant snake. If you stand in the last car it is possible to look down the entire length of the snake as it winds, twists, and dips along its tunnel.

These days I feel like a ghost. Not tragically, its just the first word that comes to mind. I feel myself move through this environment, but not touch it. Partly, I think, it is because I am not invested here. The things that I do touch are ungrounded, like me. The improvements made on the house are temporary gains. It will probably be evicted and destroyed before the year is out. The people I have become close to have left or will be gone soon. They are from all over the world, and most of them have a lot more of being all over the world until they settle down for any length of time. Another reason I feel this way is because my footprint has become so light. Living here, like this, I have come to realize how minimal my need really are. This has been great. An absolutely necessary education I should have gotten when I was thirteen. It is strange to transition into having almost no income and no expenses: Everything I use to meet my needs are things that people have decided have no more use. Again I am a ghost haunting an old house, that last residents long dead. All of my food has sat on a grocery store shelf, passed by but for some reason never picked up until it was thrown out. My clothes are castoffs. Somebody bought and wore them until one day when they didn't make the cut. Everything around me has already had a life. Every day I spend hours gliding through this city on my bike, with my eyes open and my mouth shut, passing through overwhelming histories and a bright busy present. A present that is soon not to include me. It is a hallow feeling to think that one day soon I will walk down the stairs into the underground to catch the metro to the station, and it won't be until I am have left Barcelona that the train will come out of its tunnel.

Days of Fruits, Nights of Lipids

A strange wind this way blows. Our house has become a vortex of late. Things are coming inside. Our door holds none barred. Its become easy. Much of this has to do with a lack of discretion, plane and simple common sense. People are becoming comfortable. And when the people become comfortable, they become lax. Our young Slovak runaway has decided to adopt a young runaway rat. It feels soft but it grows fast. Aarto has brought a puppy into the house. Fleshy jowls wrinkle down from its wet eyes and distract you from its ominously large paws. It gnaws on the metal legs of our outside table as though its just warming up. A late house mate decided it would be a good idea to let an old graff artist friend from Australia stay over for a few days. He said they used to be on the same crew, whatever that means. Now there are 4 of them using our walls outside like the stall of a shitter in some dive dinner's bathroom whenever they can't find a parked train. Every time one of them throws up something I really like, the next day another one covers it up with something else. We have a sort of tiki lounge aesthetic going in the back yard and I thought maybe they could paint something to go along with the theme. I wanted one of them to do something really tasteful for a change. Well now we have some overgrown lizards breathing fire on Shiva. I know that doesn't exactly sound predictable, but it sort of is.

The last dubious addition to the household is all my fault. Coming back from getting food, I spied a large white kitchen appliance. At first I thought it was a rice cooker, which would have been great. I got all giddy and ran up to it. I saw a cord hanging off it, which was exciting because there are a million metal scrappers in this city that would scrap their own mothers if they were made of copper. I have seen so many nifty electronic gizmos on the curb with their electrical umbilical cords prematurely severed: another nickel in some metal mercenaries oily palm. It wasn't a rice cooker. And then it wasn't a bread baker. It was better and worse. It was a deepfrier, in all its dangerous glory. Its reservoir of oil runs parallel with the psyche of the house: sometimes sweet cauliflower tempura fries quietly in fresh sunflower oil, or golly french fries gostle around all rolly-polly. But more often then not more sinister things happen. Late in the night and inebriated, people convince them selves that they are being creative. They scan the kitchen looking for something. Anything. The rat scampers back to its cage and the dog whines by the door as cheese curds are stuffed into wads of pie dough. Croissants are injected with choco filling and then take the plunge. The thickly battered beer battered snausages let off a dank and hazy grease that crawls around room and eventually somebody makes a meek plea for somebody to change out the oil, but instead settles down with hot sauce and an egg deepfried inside a layer of onion.

There is a running list on the walls of experiments to be made, things to be deepfried. I regret to say that this list is growing faster than things can be cooked. But we are making an effort, these thing must be done. When something is fully submerged in boiling oil something special happens. It is an intrusive process, the oil changes it from the outside in to its core. To really appreciate this you have to be there with it, inside this three dimensional invasion. When it happens, when it really happens, something is expunged. Something bad is released and becomes good. Even though the end result is heavy and sodden with vegetable fats, it is somehow cleaner for all of this. Physically, everything is dirty and oily, from the air that we are breathing to whatever we are putting inside our guts, the slick plates and the filthy frier. But something intangible is somehow better. Its just better and its hard to explain why. It is a bitter sweet thing to be inside my house, and it is always there, sitting on the counter. It takes about five minutes for the oil to heat up to frying temperatures and who am I to blow against the wind.