Oh Ever-So-High-Soarers, flying low to avoid radar detection, the ominous, green circling line

and the crushing, deafening beep; superior men to whom I bow in utmost humilty: “the lack of
a fight only confirms all the more your victory”. Men who know no envy, who know the inner
peace of not wishing to be someone else, of not wanting somebody else’s talent, rough good
looks or state-of-the-art gadget. I have no place among them; I don’t feel I belong here. Yet the
idea of having to go back horrifies me, so I shun it completely. I wonder does the Void miss
me? Is it still there? Does it still exist when I’m not there to tread its filthy streets? And how
long would it take for the news of its destruction, ruled by the World Committee of Urban
Sanitation, to arrive here? Who or what would arise, vengeful and all-knowing, from the heap
of rubble?

It seems to me that each hour that I spend sleeping is a waste. Even if I don’t go out much or at
all, I want to at least lie down and feel Europe pulsing around me: millennia of belligerent
history seeping through the cracks of my shut-tight winfow, a murderous intent spawned out
of petty conflicts that live to this day but remain unspoken of, are a part of the air. Yet people
seem to lead better lives, they live more at ease: Of course the don’t consider how many
millions need to die worldwide for them to have their air-conditioned metro, but neither
would I, really. Fuck the millions; I want to enjoy. I’m staying here for as long as I can. Half a
day has convinced me of that much. I leave nothing behind aside from an ailing mother, but
she and I will soon be no more, and my betrayal won’t matter so much then. Der große
Verräter. She knows this deep inside, she understands. And maybe she’ll forgive me. I hope
God does too.

Queer memories, fitting for a queer place, or in any case for a place wherein my being is queer.
(People eye me as I walk past; they seem to notice I don’t quite fit; I hope they think me
Russian.) Memories of a childhood too alike current times, my nature hasn’t changed that
much. “People are afraid to merge”. I know for a fact I am, or am at least unable to: always
that insurmountable barrier of being, of individuality, of the being-the-unappoachable-other.

I noticed a rather weird, unnerving trend among the inhabitants of this place: theres no mad-
rush. I don’t get it. What keeps these people going? What runs through their veins if not the
pressing need of getting somewhere? They’re so slow, so parsimonious, and what’s more, they
actually seem to care: they apologize if by any chance they bump onto you, and expect you to
apologize in return. In that sense we’re far more advanced. Not giving a fuck is the necessary
consequence of civilization.

Oh, one more thing: there are no pigeon corpses around here either; I’ll tell X about it.

As you walk the Rambla at night, depraved, sexually ambiguous niggers come at you offering
bizarre wares of vice, in a Hispanic rendition of Taxi-driver streets. As you make a turn on any
of the side-streets, the utter devoidness of people gnaws at your very soul, makes you feel
you’re the very last of a doomed linage, puts you in mind of an Adam-and-Eve obligation (if
only…)

Since we’re on the subject, I wonder when shall I ruin the whole thing?
Feeling rather put out today… The experience is proving a rather strenuous one. I do not know
what shall come out of all this.

Loud noises of veneral passion while walking the hotel’s hallways, reminding me of my own
unfuckedness. I know I’ve been in this city only for a few days (don’t ask me how many; I can’t
really think straight), but it feels as if it were years, for fuck’s sake. How long will it last? Does it
end? Do I want it to end? What made me think that a change of venue would modify anything
within me? Though of course, like the song goes “si te toca llorar, es mejor frente al mar”.

Anxiety bouts while riding a plane are the most interesting ones. You try to go to sleep to just
stop thinking for a minute but then you wake up and you’re a gazillion feet up in the air and
your entrails are upside down and you’re inside this potential cylinder of mass murder. How
can people ride this thing so calmly? It’s funny with how much ease we trust our lives into the
hands of a bunch of people we never even heard about. How can we know that they don’t
have a death wish, that whatever was left of their libidos didn’t just vanish the day before
when they found their wives in bed with someone else, and maybe she told them that they
just don’t fuck her right, and apparently it’s so essential the fucking, believe me I’ve been
there, or maybe their daughters told them that they never loved them, that they’re terrible
fathers or maybe their fucking cats died, I don’t know, what I mean is who are these guys?
What makes them trustworthy? What does it even mean, trustworthiness? Whatever, the
thing is I kept waking up feeling like I was made of parchment, like I’d crumble down if you
squeezed just hard enough, and truth be told, I feel the Day of Reckoning drawing near. It is…
unavoidable.

I haven’t had peace in almost two weeks. I just want this nightmare to come to an end, for
better or for worse. Although of course, the better the ending, well…, the better the ending.

I’ve always been fond of contrasts. The Void I love for that bizarre mixture of fantastic
architecture, with its tarnished domes, crumbling colonnades and corpse-like caryatides, and
modern, dismal buildings covered by the black-hole mirror of tinted windows that look back at
you and whisper about the day and manner of your death (hint: it is never pretty). In Paris
after leaving the Louvre and going down into the metro (of course, such horridness never sees
the light of day), you’re liable to bump on a dead man lying drowned in a pool of his own vomit
or meet some crazy hag yelling and gesticulating about the coming of the Day of Reckoning
(which believe me, is indeed at hand), or maybe you’ll walk among members of the local
Freakshow represented by a bunch of retarded school-kids led by a teacher who’s really made
some poor decisions in her life.

But it is in Madrid that I found this contrast to be most noticeable. Here, in certain parts of the
city the architecture is of such perverse obscurantism that you expect to see Christ Himself
turning the corner and exhorting you to bury your faithless fingers in His wounds. I’ve walked
into some plazas where I felt as if I had gone back to the fourtheenth century, and in some side
streets I’ve caressed the wood of doors at least 500 years old.

But then you go perphaps into Plaza Mayor and it is as if you had left whatever realm you had
been in before and had stepped into the set of a Jodorowski or Fellini film, and the whole
atmosphere is that of a decadent, poor-man’s-version of a circus. You meet these weird
cartoon characters stretching twisted paws for euro change, while clowns grin horrible grins at
you and a man juggles with knives and a chainsaw and a fat Italian in a Spider-man costume
charges you 5 euros to get a picture with him and encourages you to appear in it in heroic
poses (“più polso”, he says; “more attitude” and isn’t he bitterly right?) and kids run around in
droves chasing after each other, boys on top of girls, their hormones yawning their yawns of
just waking up and looking around and saying “heeeeeey, what is this tingling sensation?”, the
whole macabre scene accompanied by the racket of a detuned accordeon and the yells of the
man playing it (I think he’s Italian too).

Sooo… the Day of Reckoning came and went, or rather the Night, and it was the most
disaffecting, anticlimactic thing ever. If this is what Days of Reckoning are always like, then shit,
Days of Reckoning are a bunch of crap. Most of what they tell you is true, tho. You stand face
to face with your Maker, he looks down at you, father-like, his big, white, fluffy beard flows
down on you and tingles your nose, it’s kinda cute really, and then he goes to these old
fashioned scales he has and starts weighing your sins against your good deeds and it’s rather
awkward because you’ve always been so anodyne, so nondescript, so as if you had really never
been, that the whole account tallies boringly well. So God raises an eyebrow as if saying “look
at that!, you’re entirely innocuous” and by now it is officially awkward because what the hell,
you’re no saint nor sinner, you fall in the dull middle with stifling accuracy, so God and you
kinda look away, embarrassed, maybe cough a little and feel really put out, and God’s so tired
of people like you who make no damn difference: He had thought “maybe the next one, maybe
he’ll be something else”, but no, you’re the same, just another nice, comely guy, so He says
“err… yeah, whatever, just go right in”, and looking really sad moves down on his list.

Funny how bodily functions continue working even after you’ve lost all kind of life-drive, after
your libido’s been crushed to a whole lot of nothing. It’s just as if your body didn’t seem to
care that you don’t care: it still expects you to drag it to the next toilet to take a dump or will
surprise you with the humid displeasure of a nightly pollution. “Life goes on”, it seems to say,
even when you know that no, it doesn’t.

Alone and moneyless in Madrid is it that I finally experience, right now as I write this, O reader
(and I hope, sincerely, because I’m too filled with tragic, unsatisfied love to be insincere, that
you’re in a better place, a better position and altogether better circumstances than those I find
myself in, I hope you have a friendly hand to clutch at night and loving lips that whisper desire
in your ear) true loneliness, a mixture of hollowness, sadness and general displeasure. A
physical sensation. Europe seems suddenly the largest place on Earth and I don’t know for sure
that I can cruise it.

From my hotel window I read a sign that says, in bold red letters, “Madrid me mata” and
yesterday I flipped a piece of cardboard lying on the sidewalk and read the phrase “what was
lost when the Titanic sank?” I need to flee this ciy. Soon.

So today I got to Köln and it’s really funny because everybody speaks German and I feel like
telling them “c’mon guys, the game’s up, I know this can’t be for real your everyday language”,
but somehow they just seem not to get sick of nor from it. And everyone has a face like the
bad guys in a WWII American propaganda film, so while in Madrid I’d though I’d see Christ
walking again among mortals here I expect Captain America to pop up and start beating
pedestrians up. And that thing Chesterton said about how Germany tries to be the setting of a
fairy-tale can be seen to be absolutely true here in Cologne, with its medieavel gates, its
chocolate-cake-decoration houses and, ominously and omnipresently looming over all, the two
main towers of its cathedral, like Nosferatu’s fangs upside-down, the perfect den for the evil
witch.