I'm free to become terminally ill

whimpering and moaning about the bureacracy, the heat, all that-- I take it all back.

today I finally got off my ass and did the paperwork, and it's true, even if you have no freaking right to be here, like me, you are entitled to free medical care and tons of precription drugs under $10!

that means, no more ... "I'll wait and see how bad it really gets" - or "what difference do hacking cough and bloody stool make when you're out $400-$1000? I'll just see if there's any left over prescription cough syrup in that box under my mom's sink" - or "christ I have to completely revamp my resume and dress up in some jobinterview suit and say that 'i like working with people' so I can continually pursue a full-time desk job that I won't get anyway with a boss and a water cooler and an elevator and a parking lot and benefits so I'm not living some half-time, freelance, HOURly paid, 1099 type hodge-podge kind of existence where I just might slip on an ice-patch or fall off my bicycle and be in healthcare debt for the rest of my natural life because in the end I need to contribute what would be $250 in bluecross health insurance to subsistence stuffs like food and toothpaste."

I don't care that the emergency room is up a flight of steps, that there's no computer system, that it's full of gossiping old ladies that have nothing better to do; I don't care that they don't change that paper on the patient's chair, or that their scheduling is arcane and asinine and that the whole place closes at midday so everyone can take a nap.
Amoxicillin is $4, people, and I'm putting in diddly squat.

And if I just had the luck to make a lot of money, they would take out a fair percentage of that to contribute to the health care of those who don't make as much money. I know this is a difficult concept to grasp, and that the mere thought of it makes some people spew spittle as they seethingly remind me that I don't deserve to be an American (and I have been reminding, also been called commie scum.) But to a certain extent, I dunno about the macro of it all, but on the micro level it works. You get treated. Doctors get paid shit, that sucks. But if I understand correctly, in their training they didn't have to put up however many hundreds of thousands.

que viva europa, goddamit. I can't wait to get sick.

celia cruz risen from the dead

fiestas en lavapiés. yesterday three chicks in g-strings, feather headpieces and very high heels passed beneath the window to the thunder of deafening samba drums. now I think santana is playing, somewhere around the corner; celia cruz around the other corner.... it's monday and this thing is still going... since last thursday..... (though the jackhammers don't seem to be taking a holiday, pity.)

it's Spain and people are dancing in the streets! beer flowing and everyone, you know, just, living life...

being neurotic as i am, these sorts of things used to fascinate and entice me; i will admit to -in my early twenties- waxing orientalist, exoticist, exalting such vitality with all sorts of baroque adjectives... come to think of it, I don't think I would have ever learned spanish if I had not just lived a little bit of the vida loca, in some loca locales, dancing in the streets, blending in, as it were. i mean, alcohol and grammar are not such an unlikely mixture....

in the meanwhile, my bf's best friend's name is detritus. he's a painter and sufficiently quiet and intense to seem trustworthy. we went over to his place for lunch last saturday, and he made hotdogs. his goth girlfriend, who is very sweet, has the same half-shaved head haircut I had when I was 15 and used to got to revival on 3rd street back in phila... where we used to "dance" to joy division and bauhaus, when we were all pretty intense and flirted with complex topics like "atheism" and "mortality"....

now, I'm really not trying to be deprecatory, (is that a word? either way, it's what I'm not trying to do....) so, I tread lightly here. but something that stands out to me here, in spain, part of those exposed wires.... there're the hippies (jipis), the squatters (okupis) and there are the moderns (modernos). there are also the preppies (pijos) and the fascists (fachas.) (I wish I could figure out photos to post some examples.) it's sort of like a video game. or a big reality show. everybody has their uniform, you know?
what I'm not trying to not be deprecatory about is relating it, sort of, to high school.

i probably see it that way because i am observing it absolutely superficially and I mostly don't leave the house except to get my ¡jamón jamón!-flavor potato chips. but anyway, (here's where I get really insightful...) maybe that there's this not-so-long-ago legacy of dictatorship, everybody's still sort of rebelling against the teachers and their parents.

I know we americans are all supposed to be big 'ol flakes, but, I dunno, i have this sense that we're a bit less obvious than the europeans

or maybe it's all just relative.

or very possibly I have no sense of nuance.

to be articulated.

not having a computer makes you nobody

I don't write in this thing mostly because I don't have my own computer. Not that I especially shun the bangladeshi guys with the locutorio around the corner; 1 euro 20 cents is fairly reasonable for one hour cubby-time with a pc. But it's difficult to let loose, or surf with ease, while you're thinking, OK, two hours here or a doner kebab, two hours here or a doner kebab....

My dear old friend who is letting me stay in the other room in her girlfriend's apartment has a computer. A very attractive titanium mac with a dsl connection. She and said girlfriend are on a (MONTH long/ from the jobs they don't have) vacation in the north of Spain and have left me with the computer, the apartment and its needy plants.

So I am still here, in Madrid, with the shutters closed and a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. I haven't managed to put on a pair of pants yet today. It's now 1:09 am, 12:09 en canarias.

So, despite that I haven't written an update in two or three months, not much has changed, except my legal status. My tourist visa expired, I didn't get on the plane back (I wonder if they were paging me in the airport? that's never happened to me before...) (I have subsequently had scores of anxiety dreams about trains and things leaving without me/ forgetting my luggage/ getting on transportation without the proper ticket, etc... can't fathom why... ) and have basically been waiting - as a friend has observed, "bunker style," - for my tramits to go through , and/or for some sort of bearable work for a bilingual sin papeles to present itself.

As I flip around the blogosphere, inexplicably drawn to the blogging of expatriates and their experiences (couldn't tell you why...) I think pretty much all of them have some sort of consolidated plan as to their immigration status. I mean, they all looked into visas and stuff BEFORE they left the US. Or they were shipped over with their military husband. Or hired by some tech company that took care of it.

Sounds sort of presumptious coming from a bourgie (booshee? booggeee?) ivy league, whitey-something, but for all intents and purposes, I'm an illegal alien.

I am fucked for money. Fucked. Looks like (longstory) I have to find a new place to live. I have very little residual spunk left for finding something outside the box/ under the table to make any money.... and a super vague, but vaguely insistent sense that work is still bullshit.

In the meantime, I am rapidly losing any and all integrity as an expatriate... I mean, what am I doing? Don't know why I can't just take it in stride and be surly and hemingway-esque, sketch mysteriously in notebooks in cafés and let strangers buy me drinks; exoticize myself a bit and TRY AND MAKE SOME MONEY off it. I think maybe being around sincere activists with trustfunds has warped me; I say to myself, but They don't work, or sketch mysteriously, but they seem to be OK... they play it by ear and it all works out.

But despite being booshy and ivy leaguey and all that, I'm a pie-hole corn-hole debt-spiral, I'm in the negs with no assets and no work permit, I'm almost thirty now and don't really want to Chat with people or have Great Experiences in discotecas, cute mountain towns, or with all those dread-locked white people with purple pants playing african instruments while sitting indian-style in giant groups in the plaza de lavapiés; I've experimented with - and attempted to network around - about six or seven different types of careers (rockin resume, i tell you) and I'm actually pretty smart and strangely good looking.

But I think what all this is saying, when you spreadsheet out all the opportunities and 'traits' up against my level of chutzpah, or, well motivation in general, is that, well, I'm LAzy.

We could make the argument that the fact that I'm still no-ing so many things at this age kind of makes me an artist, right?

Right?

In my blogosphere ramblings, I came upon Mimi, the english chick in new york who works as a stripper and writes about her experiences as an illegal in that whole underworld of busboys and girls in tittie bars etc., things kind of got picked up by the village voice, there are links on her blog to the articles written about her, etc...

so, well, maybe I already am surly. guess that's sort of evident. maybe I should make some currency out of it, you know?

as long as they don't put me in a detention center....

urban exurb-suburbia (it's hot here)

it's a long weekend here in madrid, and finally starting to get hot -- entire city is in a state of perpetual construction. dusty, scorching, with a grinding sonic environment that gives the term noise pollution a new meaning...

that's not to mention the nighttime, here along miguel servet street -- though it's cool (I mean temperature-wise, ehem) there's an all-night ethno-eclectic fiesta in a sound tunnel going on right outside my window: "summertime" on a saxophone ad nauseum, castanets and spontaneous clapping, howling crying, vendetta-style screaming semi-indecipherable violence, like, "I'm gonna kill you tomorrow, hijo de puta, blduydbu AHH" (or something similar in arabic) followed by punching windshields, girls squealing, the trash truck, barking dogs, metal doors opening and shutting, cackling laughter - but that's just the night.

at least its not that hot at night.

since madrid is way too precious for air conditioning, here's the drill: you wake up at the sunrise, close the curtains, and close the shutters.... go back to bed, wake up at noon, lounge around in underpants in the midday twilight until way past siesta time, then the nice part comes, walking in the city when the sun goes away...

now that I've taken to dusk-time walks, I'm often astonished when I find myself on the street and.... things are open! (well, not today, it's a... holiday.) it's so often that I'm out after everything turns to a pumpkin, like between 1:30 and 6 in the afternoon or so, and the city is shuttered, no store windows, no nothing, just dumpsters full of rubble and violently, violently hot sun. and as someone who has a pretty fantastic sense of direction, I get flustered -- the landscape shifts at all the wrong hours, the light and the landmarks they illuminate are never quite fixed, and why CAN't you buy a newspaper after 2 pm? what's wrong with these people?
i guess you have to give it to them, though --- 'siesta' actually does give you sufficient time to siestate, I mean, have a full REM cycle, maybe a quickie with your sweetheart, lunch, and a little bit of telly. though its sort of a wonder anyone goes back to work in the afternoon.

anyway.

yesterday we went out to the 'suburbs' to visit with a friend. 'suburbs' transliterated to spanish does not mean green lawns and picket fences, but rather brick highrises around dusty courtyards dotted with incomprehensible playgrounds in the sad, abandoned outskirts of the city. he likes it there, this friend. he sells certain substances, to his 'friends' in the barrio, which we won't elaborate on here -- but as we all parked ourselves at a picnic table yesterday afternoon to have some potato-tortilla sanwiches and ham-flavored potato chips, with ham-flavored soda (just kidding, though not really...) he told us about how he had a little bit of an episode the other day; thought the telefonica guy was a spy, chased him out with a screwdriver, intuited that the police were coming and dumped an incredible amount of said substance in the toilet and flushed.....

later we stopped by his parents house to pick up his toothbrush. they are jehovah's witnesses, and had the cleanest house I have ever seen. framed photographs and gently ticking clocks, all sorts of porcelain doodads arranged equidistanly behind spotless glass -- and the dad insisted that I meet the 92 year old grandmother that he had "stored" in the other room. I thought he was joking (still cant pick up the nuances of middle-age guy humor, i suspect)..... I thought he was going to take me to see an urn or something, but no, there was the grandmother, stored in a brightly lit 8 by 8 foot room, with all her lotions and pills perched - equidistantly- on a shelf above the bed. she was incredibly old, decrepit, could not sit up, and started to cry when I came in the room.

then, back at this friend's apartment, there was a snake, a tarantula, a bibi gun that he let me shoot while everybody else did dishes, lots of ants in the bathroom, and a meticulously organized collection of german industrial and gothic music.

another day in the spanish suburbs ...

desterritorializationship

it’s tough sometimes to realize that you actually have no fucking idea what’s going on, that your minimal grasp on the world around you is even in itself insufficient, that really it’s all relative and the comfort of something linear and secure is all passé and a sham that we (they?) all disregarded a long, long time ago – and then the cycles of what’s in and what’s out, you know – that is strange and malleable too, all depending on geography and shared identities and corporal, intuitive reactions ---- and, of course, the weather....

beñat’s big concept is desterritorialization, maggie says he has a truly retarded relationship with materiality, and I tend to agree. never being where you actually are and denying the very basic tenets of being (that is, eating, sleeping, working, doing... anything) makes for a bit of a twisted person, mostly because it makes him angry then that he has to eat, that he has to obtain money somehow.

no, i’m not making this up.

The strange part is that i tend to understand where he’s coming from. eating is a distraction just like anything else, really. but starting to upend the basics of survival, and the whole question of really, why do we have to do anything?-thing can be devastating.

sometimes i think I am hanging onto my sense of humor by a thread...

tramits

so I’ve decided to start again now that I have in fact expatriated. the distant humming of auld lange syne filters in, through the background....

maybe we can dare to call this a career choice: self alienation via geography. it's a great way to keep occupied, and if you are sincere and austere enough, let's just say.... pursue your bliss and the money will follow.

i’m in spain, in the dry and forgotten mini-metropolis of madrid, and the apostrophe is in a whole other place on the keyboard. been here about two weeks and have spent a rather salient part of them doing what there is no word for in english: tramits. tramits, of course: the transliteration of the spanish for tramites, which is sort of verb-noun combo (yo tramito, tu tramitas, vosotros tramitais, etc.) for the doing of bureaucracy.

the doing of bureaucracy in Spain, let’s call it tramitting, is kind of creepy. i have stepped outside the matrix, but into the machine. machine, like, a way old version of the matrix where you still use buttons and switches and EVERYthing is manual.

i am, with some local help, doing tramits to get legal -- the idea is to eventually obtain the ephemeral european passport, and along with it the realization of my hopelessly naive dreams of socialized healthcare, subsidized education and smoking in elevators.

anyway... spain is a bureaucracy factory. there are lots of ministries here.

today --- well, I’m not exactly sure where we went today. I had to basically get a stamped certification that in fact I have never paid taxes in Spain and I own nothing. (that is, if you DON’T have something, you still have to stamp the nothing. take note.) this particular ministry was gigantic with this retro-modern yellowing marble, and there were all these waiting zones, zone A, zone B, zone F... You take a number (like at Baskin-Robbins or the DMV, my only other reference points for “waiting,”) and there are red numbers and they tell you which counter to go to. ah, but first you must know where to take a number, for which you need to go to the information desk to ask, where you take a number. then you go and take a number to be able to get the form that you need to fill out to solicit whatever certificate you came for, for which you also take a number. by the time we got to the point where we knew where we were going and had the form et cetera, the number we got was about 76 numbers before ours, so we went down the bar and got a coffee. but first (I’m not kidding,) we had to pay for the coffee and get a number to pick it up.

i kept making anguished faces and wringing my hands, really quite innocently, not mockingly – I mean, is this not the twilight zone? the strangest part is that this doesn’t seem all that strange to anybody; that there’s like this intuitive sense of where you go to ask for what and what kind of stamps you need and who can give them; also with the bureaucrats - you ask them a question that falls outside their tiny little charted knowledge-world, they will then send you to zone C, where you will take another number...

beñat says not to laugh, this is a sign that everything’s not privatized. well, benat is also sort of half jokingly but then half seriously a stalinist. i've got to say, in 2005 in the first world being a stalinist is really so out it's in. or maybe he's a maoist. i mean, i'm american, no intuition about radical lefist classifications, either, but I sort of suspect he can't really be categorized ... anyway, he's often commenting that we need to burn down or exterminate X or Y. he also advocates very sincerely a world where people do not eat or sleep. he has hair-tearingly frustrating and convincing arguments for all this stuff; as a career self-alien i can announce here (and who's reading, anyway?) that i'm in love with him, despite myself, he's a pain in the ass, but, god, who knows why these things happen. that's right, friends, a scorched earth romance.

anyway, more about my maoist boyfriend - and why?- later. right now it's all about the europe - why? thing.
i am pretty self-conscious about being here, though maybe not as self-conscious or in the same way as my parents, who have to articulate it more than i do at their various neighborhood soirees and to pious, target-frequenter midwest relatives.
the part that concerns me the most is that i'm going to get the nose-job syndrome with european citizenship ---- you know, you think after the nosejob, once you're "pretty," everything's going to be great. but then... you went through it, there's no turning back, and you're still a geek, just now a phony gentile geek.

maybe i'm headed towards being a phony gentile crusty leftist european with my ankle caught in between the gnashing, rusty cogs of socialist bureaucracy, shamelessly wandering around some beach resort in sandals with socks (with one foot hopelessly mangled from the cogs) with absolutely no idea why i left a place where bagels can be readily obtained.

though i'd like to think my ambitions are a little bit sexier than that: what I'm hoping is to really articulate for myself time, food, gender, . i mean, all that stuff that actually is... happening in and around me.
second up is to work on, or rather, create a political conscience, maybe even an activist one (that ideally, at the core, doesn't make me want to throw up).

maybe the truth is I'm attracted to a manual matrix, where you can still see some of the exposed wires.

i am so absolutely overwhelmed by being an american, god. it's going to take me a long time to get untangled. can anyone forgive me for taking a break?

more to come....