sorry i couldn’t respond to folks comments and emails – barcelona sold me a 60 minute internet card then cut me off after 15 minutes.

this place sucks.

get back to you end of week in cleveland.

Lady’s reading Terrorist by John Updike. she’s trying to finish it before we fly out because she doesn’t want to be seen reading it in the airport or on the plane. says something sad about our times when an artist is uneasy being seen reading a book in public just because of its title. i found it well written, the beginning and ending interesting, most the in-between less so. i read his first three Rabbit novels with decreasing pleasure, and one or two others along the way. also read some very good short stories by him. the man’s an excellent writer, just doesn’t often write about people or situations that interest me. most the people in this world are Rabbits whose happiest moments lie in their past. i don’t live in yesterday, not really interested in those who do.

didn’t go out exploring barcelona yesterday. lay abed instead and read and wrote – too tired, weak, achy, dripping with mucous and fear of public transportation. today took two hour walk to find food. left in the coolest part of the morning, yet were drenched in sweat by the time we got back. ain’t going back out. there’s much to see here, but barcelona’d probably just bite us again if we tried. up until barcelona, lodz poland was the worst city i ever saw – it looks like a decaying, bombed out depressed cleveland.

we started and will end our 14 month journey in misery. we began in august of 2006 in england, sleepless and sore, each lugging 75 pounds of possessions up an endless mountain so we could freeze to death sleeping tent-less in a field of sheep shit. and we end it being battered by barcelona and bad colds. although we have improved in that we’re now down to 35 pounds of possessions apiece. perhaps our current misery will make returning to american shores less painful in comparison – unless this is just prep for the pain to come.

our best part of beziers, france, was sitting in Poet’s Park watching the ducks and swans swim amidst the sunlight dancing on the water, the wind playing in the trees. our last day on our previous visit, we watched a female duck being brutally gang-raped by 3 mallards. so far on our trip we’ve seen a mass duck fuck, an earthworm digging into the earth using repeated probing ever deepening thrusts, rabbits humping, birds doing it, and dogs doggie style – including two howling moroccan dogs stuck ass-end together penis to vagina who ran off sideways when i tried getting close enough to photograph.

our last day this time in Poet’s Park, we sat and watched the sun splay through the green, the green sway in the wind, the wind wash the leaves in sky water song, a white duck waddle alone along.

had weird dream our last night in france. most of the details are lost in my pick-pocketed notebook, but we were in a london composed of invisible spherical shells, like the probability shell an electron makes orbiting its atomic center. you could go from where you were to where you wanted to be just by breaking a hole between the places – the vacuum in the broken shaft would suck you where you wanted to be. lady wanted to discuss something in a certain place, and i said no problem, we could do it by throwing a dead duck through the shells.

and so we’re off to america – back in the u.s.a., to quote mr chuck berry. that is if they don’t pull a charlie chaplin on me. they let poor charlie leave the country to visit england, then once he was gone told him sorry charlie you can’t come back. they didn’t like left-wingers back then, they don’t like clear thinkers now.

i let lady trim my wild man beard down to trim college professor proportions. no use spooking the border patrol. when reentering society, one must wear the mask that scares them the least – don’t want to frighten the sheep herders.

i’ve thought about what to say when the border patrol asks why we’ve been traveling for 14 months. our actions do puzzle people. the more normal folk are, the less they understand two folks selling their home, giving away their possessions and traveling the world to fill their souls with creative spirit to fuel their future art and poetry. so i’ve boiled it down to a simple basic they can understand – i’ll tell them we traveled while i recovered from cancer, in case it comes back. which is true. with cancer you never know. with life you never know. what you don’t do today may not be able to be done tomorrow – maybe because of cancer, maybe because of global warming, maybe because of war criminals bombing iran.

random thoughts to time the tides:

- most people are searching for outside answers to inside problems.

- we’re killing the forests for the fleas.

- i’ve more social skills after 14 months of world travel – i’ve learned how to more easily fake being interested in the person talking to me.

those are the types of fragments i lost in my pick-pocketed notebook – i’d save each phrase for a blog where they’d fit. but since losing all my juicy bits, i figured i’d best use today’s bits today cuz you never know when another thief will happen along.

i told lady that instead of thugs or would-be poets or blog monsters or beggars-to-be, those pickpockets might have been smith fans from the future who just wanted a personal souvenir. she said yes, but what if what was going to make you famous was in that notebook? so maybe they were really smith critics from the future trying to shut me down. if so, it won’t work – i’ll just make up new lies.