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Europe in all your manicured glory look what you've done. Teetering from your 6 inch stilettos putting a spike through this. On one side; the pouring emptiness, black like clouds, rolling around in soot and ash. The other; crystalline swordfish, beauty in magnitudes of 100 degrees. Whipping about your unlit passages. Juggling your cluttered groves. Stone angles and demons, rebels in new wave mullets. And even though beneath it all is everything I may still never know, this much I do know is true - these streets are as muddy with my footprints as I am with you.
This is Europe. I have spent nine months staring at people staring at things. Taking picture of people taking pictures of things. Big things, small things, old things, new things.
Concrete and gravy.
People rocking back and forth without realizing it as they sit out for tapas. Licking their tiny bowls and dancing their greedy eyes on each other. Europe you clever devil. How did you manage to pack that much bullshit into one sales pitch? Sure America has it too, telling you what you want and when you need it. But you, you polish it chrome make it half the size and charge twice as much.
Selling dreams.
Selling quality of life.
I don't trust anyone anymore with a moleskin notebook.
Don't get me wrong. I am not resistant the charm. There are so many things that are just better here. But even as I dare to criticize this idyllic paradise I know concern, its exposure will be met with serious resistance from those who need to keep the dream alive.
I treasure the things I have seen. The developing further a serious love for contemporary art. Culture continues to intrigue me. But to study this, is to study a travel brochure. All of this is dependent on telling ourselves what is good and what is bad until it encroaches in on itself; an artistically decorated box.
Here is what I see.
Intermittent with vacillating exasperate joy is the desire to continue to push back. Push this thing on its head and tell it to stand for me. It's the desire to shake people from their perfect hateful conceptions of themselves. It's pictures of manicured, pedicured, over-cured meat. Its money. Old money and old men. Little china dolls, overdressed children. Its people living lives yes, struggling, destitute, hopeless lives.
It's chasms and schisms and rocks. Its youth and it's age, together at last, looking for the same thing, but staying at different hotels.
I have spent nine months in Europe watching people on vacation. Watching family dinners by candlelight. Watching lovers roll around themselves in midnight embraces. It's the feeling that despite travel being my life's ambition, despite it being all I can think to do with myself, despite it being the one thing that was to save my soul, despite all of this - they need it more than I do. This casual jazz music on terrace patios over-looking history. They need it to be good. Better than what they know. They need the romanticism to capitulate them towards better pictures of themselves. Mirror plates over sewer grates.
Its ok too you know, that it exist like this. Marginally more real than Disney World. Its the nature of things. Of cities, of people, of the Western world. Times progress speaks through it. Its decades, centuries of money and growth and progress widdled down and chained between past and future. Between standing tradition and the influence of the new West. Its my cultures elders and with that comes a certain amount of knowledge of how to do things.
Unfortunately its what they cannot teach us that continues to haunt me.
Happy enough to find beautiful ways of balancing among the ripples, the disturbances source remains lost in time and tailored clothes. Lost in its own perfect cobble stone roads. Perfect intersecting rows, left ,right, left, right right.
It's just a pattern too. A pattern about bringnig about the flavor in olive oil, the complexities in wine, but not the essence of this.
Why need this in the first place. The coddling love of crafted lives.
Money still owns you here. Maybe more than anywhere. This is a refined system of human government. Of casual perfected complacency. Of knowing where you stand and caring less and less in the distracting spittle of an 18th century fountain.
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