Well, here I am – still alive. This is the longest I’ve gone without posting something since I started writing this thing. The weird thing is, I have been getting more hits per day since I haven’t been writing. I am hoping this is because people are so desperate that I write something that they check back over and over to see if I have finally written. Yeah, right. Probably more like it would be, there are more guys with hairy backs and lawyers looking for naked ladies hitting Google these days. It is, after all, almost Fall. Time to get off the beach volleyball circuit and back where you belong, in front of the computer, homeboy.

Having not written in a while, getting back on schedge was a bit difficult. It’s kind of like when you stop exercising after you have been doing so well, like walking every day and then you stop and then it is really hard to start again. I am a creature of habit, and my habit the last couple of weeks has been motel rooms and pizza in a box and E! True Story. It’s weird because I am hella addicted to my computer but when I am away, it doesn’t seem to bother me too much that it is not there with me. If there is a “business center” where I am staying, then the pull of the computer will be great, like a crazy beacon in a dull and lifeless land. But if there is no business center then E! True Story or even better, VH1’s Hottest 100 Videos/Sluts/Whatever, will do just as well.

I am good at moving around. I can move from room to room and town to town and pack and unpack and unload and load my car with amazing efficiency and precison. I am not squeamish when it comes to funky carpets or transparent bath towels, as long as the sheets are clean. Sometimes I even like not knowing where I am. I was thinking about this long and hard this past couple of weeks and I have come up with a new plan.

My plan is to be plan-less, and to travel the world this way. This is just a teaser though, right now, for the reader, but also for me. I’m sketching out the non-plan now. Will keep you updated.

If I were to think of my favorite Venice memory, I think it would be of a moment. One of many, of course, that I experienced in this most fantastic of places. I can think of several moments, but the one that most stands out, to me at this moment, is something that happened on October 3, 2000.

Now you might think that something crazy happened, like I fell off a motoscafo and was rescued by Val Kilmer who was there filming something or someother, or that perhaps there was a lightning storm and I ran out into Campo Santa Margherita from the bar Marguerite DuChamps and saved a small child from being hit from lightning. Or even, just sitting on the steps in front of Santa Lucia Train Station – this has slayed others, for sure. But my memory is a bit simpler, and comes back faster, because I am listening, right now, to the sounds that I listened to then.

I had come from Sicily. I’d spent ten days there and then flew to Venice for four, because I could not go to Italy and not go to Venice. My time in Sicily had been incredible, but when I boarded the plane for Venice it felt like I was going home. And really, I was going home.

The weather in those first days of October was warm and gray and humid, with some flooding. I stayed at the La Calcina on the Giudecca Canal in a tiny single room looking over a small canal that constantly overflowed onto the Calle. While I was there, Radiohead’s “Kid A” was released, and I bought it in the record store on Salizzada San Lio. I was with a friend, and went into the store inquiring, and when they had it I jumped up and down with joy. My friend said, “I wish I could still get excited about music like that.” Kid A went into my walkman, and I walked all over Venice listening to that record. I have a photo on my ‘fridge, of my walkman, the Kid A cover, a split of Prosecco, and my room key at the La Calcina, with the Giudecca canal in the background. I call it, “Still Life with Kid A and the Giudecca Canal.”

Anyway. Walking one afternoon, I was taking a shortcut to the Zattere that I know, a tiny, unnamed, unmapped, long and skinny calle that no one goes down because it looks too dark and poop-worthy. I love that calle because moss grows in it. I walked down it with the actual song Kid A, the title track, which no one knows what the hell means, blaring in my earphones. Out of nowhere, a little kid blasts past me on his bike. I could feel his spirit as he went by. I looked back, and his mom, a young, pretty Venetian, was walking behind me. She smiled, and I smiled. It was a beautiful moment, and a moment of truth. I decided right there I would make Venice my home, even if briefly.

And I did. Six months later I was living there. We all make things happen for ourselves, sometimes in odd and unproductive, even scary ways. It’s pretty insane what we are capable of when we really want something. But it is all part of being human, I guess.

A few years ago, I worked for a time at the Williams Sonoma/Pottery Barn Call Center. I took orders for expensive cookware and rugs and sconces and things like that. The job didn’t pay much, but I got a 40% discount at Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn. At first I worked there because I needed money. Later I worked there because of the discount. I learned how to work the system, and after the cash crunch was over, worked one day a week or less. Really, the 40% discount didn’t do much for me, since I had little money to spend on hundred dollar salad bowls, even if they were almost half off. The discount came in very handy for my friends, however. It was always fun to go shopping with friends who wanted to buy full sets of All-Clad pans and Wustoff Knives. After they saved a few hundred dollars they were always ready to take me out to a Martini and Oyster lunch. There was one guy, not really a friend but one of those 90’s chubby tech guys who had a million dollars all of a sudden. I was sort of interested for a second until I took him to Williams Sonoma to outfit his new loft in South of Market. He bought thousands of dollars worth of stuff, from a $750 orange espresso maker to some green egg-cups with gold flecks. The guy was a buying machine. And after, he took me to a taco shop for lunch. Bitch! Needless to say that was the end of my interest. A taco shop? Dude, how about lunch at the Rotunda at Neiman Marcus? I just saved you Two Thousand Dollars! He ended up getting busted by the IRS for not sending in his payroll taxes and split town, but that was a few months after the burrito incident.

But I am way off track here. This is not what I meant to write about, at all. What I meant to write was, one day when I was working at the Call Center, I got a call from some dude who had all kinds of questions about furniture in the Pottery Barn catalog. He quizzed me down good, and I gave him all the info off the computer screens as best I could. He eventually thanked me and told me that he was actually the manufacturer of the furniture he was asking about. To me it seemed he was maybe a little anal, possibly psychotic, but mostly just wanted to sell some furniture. Whatever.

A few weeks later I got called into my supervisor’s office. SHE then proceeded to quiz me down (I was getting sick of being quizzed) and told me that one of their vendors had called in and talked to someone who was totally inefficient and lame and stupid, also worthless. That someone, according to the vendor, was ME.

Now, I was generally golden at Williams Sonoma – they loved me, and that is how I got away with hardly ever working and still getting a discount for so long. When they had reviews, I had the #1 review of anyone in the call center, and was told I could have a “big future” at Williams Sonoma. (“Does that mean I’ll get Seven Fifty an hour?” I said. “Eventually” they said.) So I was pretty shocked when I was interrogated about my dealings with the furniture freak.

It didn’t take me long in the interrogation before I sort of figured out what was going on. I remembered about the furniture, I remembered telling the guy my name. He had actually placed an order with whoever had pissed him off so bad, Supervisor told me. He hadn’t placed an order with me, he’d only quizzed me down.

“Well then.” I said. “Why don’t you look at the order and see who took it?”

This hadn’t occurred to the head honchos at Williams Sonoma before they called me in to the interrogation. And they looked at the order, on the computer, right there in front of me. Their faces got frownier than before.

“Well, uh, Shannon.” My supervisor said. “I guess it wasn?t you, because it says right here that Tatiana took his order.”

What a bunch of dumbshits. Even worse, was the guy who called and mixed me up with Tatiana. Furniture guy. Anal freak furniture guy.

What I’m really trying to get at here is, I have turned into anal freak furniture guy. My book is not selling very well right now, and I can’t figure out why. It was selling, before, but all of a sudden it stopped. I don?t know if it’s a normally slow time for travel books to be selling or what. But I am spending way too much time calling bookstores and looking at travel websites and trying to figure out ways to grovel.

I call a bookstore and ask whoever answers the phone if they have my book, and they either don’t care, or they don’t want to look, but mostly they say no. I have been known to go into bookstores and put my book on the shelf, for free. I can’t understand why Borders orders once, and sells the book, and doesn’t reorder. Don’t they want to have everything, all the time? I thought that was Borders thang. What person is insane enough to go to Venice without The Book? How come bookstores don?t know this? How did I become the anal furniture guy? Gradually, then suddenly. Just like the story ends.

So, I just finished writing my Spain trip journal. This brought up emotions that I have not felt since I left Spain a month ago.

Love, and travel, are the same. Love and travel. When you lose a lover, you feel like you are missing a foot or something. (At least I do. I mean, when I am the one who is left. When I am the the one that splits, I feel like I have an extra foot.) It’s the same with travel. When it is over you limp around for awhile with drool coming out of your mouth. But even worse than that is the day or two leading up to the leaving part.

I experienced the last two days in Barcelona all over again when I wrote my trip journal. That awful feeling of seperation. The heavy sighs, the glasses of wine sucked down even faster than normal. The placing of skull in hand with elbow resting on counter. Gawd, that’s an awful feeling. And now I am looking back to a month ago, after these four plus weeks have sort of healed me of the whole seperation thing. All those memories dredged up. It’s hard, for me, not having money to be a vagabond traveling person. I have visions of winning the lottery, but I am not lucky that way.

Market smells and colors swirl in my brain. The aroma of garlic fried in butter haunts me. I long for rain, because rain filled many of my Spanish moments. I wrote here once that one must keep a journal, but now the journal tortures me.

I live for the longing, I always have.

Back now, from the whirlwind that was Spain. I find myself insanely jealous of anyone leaving for a trip soon, a trip to anywhere. How hard it is to be back in front of a computer all day, instead of at an outside cafe table on the Darro River!

Oh well, I suppose things will feel normal again soon. Memories will start to fade a little. The memory of shrimps broiled with garlic butter, spooned onto bread. Or the taste of a shot of fino in a wine shop at 11:30 AM. Counting down the hours on the long ride from Madrid to Sevilla, the whiteness of the roses on a Semana Santa Paso. The horns and drums that follow the Paso, the quiet of the empty Mezquita in Cordoba.

The memories may fade a bit, but Spain will always be with me now.

I read in a magazine today that you can buy a little computer chip and have it planted in your pet, so that if the pet gets lost you can find it. This service costs less than $40!

I find this a bit freaky and bizarre since let’s face it, when are humans, as employees, lovers, ex-convicts, or what have you, going to be injected with this chip? Probably sooner than we think.

Even though it totally freaks me out I can’t help but think about productive and useful ways we can use the implanted chip.

For instance. I have been reading practically on an hourly basis of all the pickpocketing and petty crime in Spain. I remember back in 1998, before my first trip to Italy, being fearful of all the petty crime in Italy because I had read about it hourly for six months before I actually went. Now, of course, I have been to Italy and occasionally witnessed petty crime and even fended off an robbery attempt by pretending to hurl a bag with four bottles of wine in it at the would-be robber and then running away really fast (with the wine, of course, do you think I would really throw away WINE?)

Even though I now saunter carelessly through petty crime ridden Rome and Florence carrying a backpack or purse (gasp) and have never once worn a money belt (you can?t be serious! No way! Double gasp) I find myself feeling a bit fretful about the petty crime in Spain. Chalk it up to inexperience I guess.

But, eh, where was I?

Oh yeah. The implanted chip. If they can put a chip in a live creature, why can’t they put a chip in my rolling suitcase? My purse? My camera? Seriously, with the right technology we could wipe out all the petty crime in Europe. With the chip (as I see it), you install it, and then transmit the information to some great purse/wallet/suitcase data center in the sky. If your purse/wallet or whatever is stolen, it can be tracked by the proper authorities wherever you are. Can you imagine, you are at a flea market, and suddenly you notice your wallet is gone! Instead of turning red and helplessly moaning, uh, HELP! you can simply press a button on the special, police summoning talisman that you wear around your neck (the talisman comes with the chip, obviously, all part of the package) and suddenly the horrible robbers are being chased by Barcelona’s finest, and they catch them and give you back your wallet, and you can go and eat some tapas.

It would be nice, but now that I think about it, any chip that tracks anything is way too weird. Instead, everyone should wear super tight pants. Yes, super tight pants and purses with zippers but no zipper openers. Everyone should dress like a punk rocker – that’ll get rid of the petty crime. One need not risk the breakage of four bottles of wine, after all.

Oh my, oh my. We are leaving VERY VERY soon. I’ve got the new suitcase on the bed and am fiddling around with stuff. Asking the age-old question, “can I get everything into a 22 incher?”

The answer is, to be truthful, probably not.

I got my purple suede boots, the boots that I found when I went suitcase shopping but they didn’t have my size but then I found them on ebay. THOSE boots. They ROCK. They are beyond cool. How can I not take them? And if I do take them, I have to bring the jeans I bought to go with the boots. And my new orange suede vest that looks really good with the jeans and the boots.

So now I’ve got three items that basically can’t be paired with anything else and will fill up 1/3 of my 22 inch suitcase. I could wear them on the plane, but I have this serious problem with wine dribblage on planes. So that’s probably not a good idea. One good thing is, I can use the boots as a storage area for socks and underwear, thereby not giving up too much valuable space.

I’m getting my hair re-purple-ized tomorrow – another reason I must have my purple boots. I’m doing it a week and a half before the trip so I only partially destroy every shower I enter. I’d pack my own towel and pillowcase so I won’t wreck those provided, but heck, that would take up way too much room and I’ve got to be somewhat restrictive on what I bring.

I also bought some wine colored Pumas with a pink stripe. Now THOSE I can wear on the plane….

I’ve been reading A Stranger in Spain by H.V. Morton. The Slowtalk Patriarch, Doru, recommended this book as a good introduction to Spain. He is right – it is a great book – almost 40 years old but still fresh (though obviously some things have changed since then.) H.V. travels all over Spain and writes about his experiences, and he clearly is a sort of stuffy English guy but he is funny and keeps me interested every minute (which is, I must say, sort of hard to do.) Reading A Stranger in Spain is a lot better than brushing up on (or learning completely) your Spanish History by reading Lonely Planet or a DK Guide.

Here is a sample of Mr. Morton’s humor. It is a classic line – it just slays me.

“No one brought up on the works of Beatrix Potter can understand, much less appreciate, a bull-fight, and nothing can ever be done about it.”

CLASSIC. English homies will NEVER understand. For some bizarre reason, Hemingway did. He wasn’t English, but he wasn’t Spanish either. Hemingway must have been Spanish in one of his previous lives (Morton too, maybe. Also me, maybe.) At any rate I really love this book, have even tossed around the idea of bringing it with me. I’m still uncertain about the bull-fight thing. Because of the way Morton writes about it. I’m all for passion and ritual, but I think a flamenco may be more my speed.