Man oh man the job search of which you write is weird.
A little bit I don’t know what to write back to that, because it’s a problem I myself have been grappling with in my back-in-NYC life, or was starting to realize I’d eventually have to grapple with, and I more or less bailed on the question.
The dregs of this bullshit croque monsieur (DID THEY EVEN BUTTER THE BREAD??) on the plate in front of me, the eye I’m trying to keep through the front window on Kareem’s ex-boyfriend’s second-string bicycle, lent for the jaunt, the fact that I peed into some body of water from a tree earlier because they were charging €.50 for the WC in the train station: this is me bailing.
“If you’re a journalist, you’re either a whore or unemployed.” <— this from a Guillaume I met this morning over my grand crème at La Petit Mer and was initially very keen on but quickly lost interest in for how he seemed to be Someone Who Knows Everything, which at this point in my escape I have no use for.
For la cena today we had omelets from the eggs I had collected and potatoes I had fried, thinking of the Spanish speakers I’ve been close with heretofore, almost all of them standing over hot oil in New York City like now I do in rural Spain.
Patatas, my hosts here said while we ate and I played point-to-a-new-vocabulary-word. “Papas” is strictly American — North, Central, South — they said, as is “con gusto.”
I find myself feeling some loyalty to the Spanish — Mexican — Ecuadoran — Salvadoran — I’ve learned from coworkers back home, resistance to inculcation in the ways of the point of origin. Not my king, I want to say.
Good morning to my first full day at this casa rural that has no address. Dreams about drinking rosé in weirdly unbreakable glasses. Woke to pee and then couldn’t sleep again for a while for all my anxieties about new heights of isolation. Finally put my last bandaid on the cut on my finger from trying to open my beer in unorthodox and ill-conceived ways yesterday on the bus from San Sebastián, which during my sleep had grown dry and painful, and that comfort let me drift back off, into dreams about meeting men for photoshoots and elaborate breakfasts, a dual impossibility for the foreseeable waking future.
I forgot to shut in the chickens last night, and this morning I woke up to the crowing of cock. Are the two related? I can’t remember whether yesterday, cooped up, he did. I jumped up and went out, all worried about being caught in negligence so early in this exchange of work for keep — whoops — and cajoled them, all enthusiasm and wet feathers about being out all night in the rain, back into their enclosure using unscheduled bonanza feed. Then I chopsticked egregious chicken shit from the patio stones, thinking about any other tells I could try to erase and get away with it, just this once, I promise. I hope it’s okay, that no chickens are found lost today to coyotes or whatever apex fowl predator prowls these chilly Spanish hills.
