Aquarium days

An odd feeling on a strange day. It is a day when the horizons seem to lose their sharp line, when sky and earth are mingling to a blurry something, as if the painter of the landscape decided to repaint everything and wiped a sponge over the colours. I've never seen so much smog hanging on the mountain tops, and never before so much fog over the sea. The laundry hanging outside in front of every window board is getting as dry as if it'd have been hung up down in the murky wash cellar lavatory. In the same breath that I inhale into my lungs (but fail), I realize that it's not only the heat and the strange doldrums that hang like an invisible big bubble over this city and repulses any soft gentle wind right at its gates. It's also something personal. Slowly, I become a prisoner of present. My future, once painted with fine lines and a multitude of colours, gets swallowed by a brown-grey fogg, in which the chance of opportunities continuously shrink. In the same instance, my past slowly drifts apart, people change places, places change people, and, if that weren't enough, people constantly change. I feel caught, exposed, stumbling through a vast ley without any paths. Stumbling ahead is the only thing I know to do, without compass, no North, no South, no East, no West. There's only to and fro, and both seem so much alike that they cancel each other out. May a big storm sweep me away, or may a caravane pass by and grab me. Or may the animal instincts finally revive, after all, and show me where to walk.

Zanzibar

Zanzibar, light rain, few clouds. 30C, feels like 36.8C. Wind southwest, 8.0 knots. Sunrise: 05:55am, sunset: 18:22pm.

I walk slowly, step by step. The small battery-run transitor radio in my pocket makes harsh noises while I walk down the road. I love to listen to the weather report. I've also done, since I was a kid, sitting solemnly in front of the creaking short waves, which makes it all sound even further away than it is probably. Slowly and monotonously, the words flow out of the speaker. I can't hear the voice clearly, neither whether it's a woman or a man speaking. It doesn't make any difference. What keeps me on this ether are the words. Foreign names, whose sounds create a full ambience of some mysterious spots far far out of here. Jakarta, moderate rain, broken clouds. I can hear the endless rain dripping on the huge leaves, drop drop drop-drodrop, in the thick humid air while the wind is waving the trees of the dark foggy forest, right before sunrise. There's a tick of me, I'm passionate about the most complicated town names. Last year I was in love with Ouagadougou. It was a wizzard term, knocking me unconcious, letting me wake up again in a savannah field, where I help collecting the crops. After that, Upernavik, cold ice, fish every day, the icy shores on an island that doesn't really exist in the world of most of the people. My neighbour just passes me in his slightly rusty car, listening to hip hop on full tunes. He pulls the breaks, and a cloud of dust enwraps me. He looks relaxed, chilled, cool and gives me a provokating glance. Asks me whether I need a lift, but I deny. I got a mission to complete, man, that's why I am here. I got a lot of dreams and one destination, my bag full of crazy stuff and my shoes. That's what everybody needs. Dreams and a destination, I mean. Me, for instance, I'm on my way to Zanzibar. I don't remember anymore where I heard it the first time, no, it wasn't on the radio, that's for sure. I think it's one of the few places everybody of us knows, and that maybe many people seek without being concious that they do so. They run around desperate without knowing what they want, get lost in money, career, consume, looking for a sense, searching for a meaning, while the word keeps silently engraved in their hearts. Some might never discover it, so I got it a bit better. I just keep on walking down this dusty road, out of this town, out of this country. Timbuktu 31C, Kinshasa 26C, the radio voice refers on, Tunis 17, Nouakchott 25. To cross the sea, the desert, the grasslands, see countries, villages and people. Towards the sun at 11 o’clock, down on the way to Zanzibar.

Meteor Painting

Daily Insanities, Part 1
Barcelona, 25-F, 2009

Roads, that are those long striving asphalt pathways, that meander in colour harmony with contemporary concrete constructions and antique architectures through cities and connect them with another in seemingly endless rays that cross woods and fields. Roads, that are resistant enough to maintain our need for speed, that withstand stormy weather, floods and constant chewing gum attacks. Roads, that everyone of us who wants to become famous hope to carry his name one day to remind the people who cross it in our existance. But what would roads be without its white painting: rays that keep us away from the opposing traffic, arrows that lead us the way (or lead us to confusion), and who sometimes serve as a patient blotter for neighbour kids' chalk paintings. But sometimes, white painting in uncommon forms might find its way to the solid venes of modern society.

One evening, when I walked back home from University, I was sunk in thoughts about this and that, while I watched the floor passing under my feet. I took out my keys and was about to open the door, when I realised the fine white rays, that almost parallely covered the road, crossing the kerbstone and hit the walls as white dots that almost climbed up half a metre. What the hell had happened here? I looked to the left and discovered the cause: a 10l pot of white painting was lying burst in three pieces on the asphalt, swimming in the major part of its former filling, while the rest had made its way into all directions. It reminded me in one of the moon craters. This painting meteorit though was not a remnant of the last Hubble external maintenence works, but had fallen from one of the upper balconies of our building. "What a shame" - "What a pigsty!"- "First they smoke marihuana, then they throw with painting!", we could hear our neighbours raging while Alexis and I took several pictures of this rare incident. "This could be one of Miró's", a giggling pedestrian remarked, while one of the neighbours called the fire brigade to clean up the unique coincidential urban artwork. After all, it certainly was a dangerous situation, but fortunately nobody had crossed the spot of impact while the colour collided with the surface of earth. There is yet no evidence of civilians in the zone of paint distribution, but if they had been, they would at least have got off whitely.