In late October, a little over a week before I turned 35, I left for Europe for the first time. I had consciously avoided the classic "backpacking in Europe" post-collegiate thing, and had in fact spent a good chunk of my life up to that point scrupulously avoiding just about anything European whatsoever.

I suppose this could easily be chalked up to Ugly Americanism, or simple small-minded regionalism, but understand that I graduated from college with a liberal arts degree in the ‘80s. At that point, as I remember it, it was quite common for many of the people I knew to talk about moving to Europe—for good. "No more Reagan, no more Bush, no more madness," seemed to be the general credo although, like many credos I remember from my youth, I have no idea who might have actually said this, or anything remotely like it. "The Europeans are more politically active, they’re more progressive, the standard of education is higher, and" there always seems to be a meaningful pause here from my strawman, "they understand artists there." This seemed especially important to those of us graduating with a degree that had done nothing but make us, to badly paraphrase Fitzgerald, that most useless of things: well-rounded.

Nonetheless, I found the idea of abandoning America distasteful, ungrateful, and cowardly, even if understandably so. Flush on Plato, I felt that I owed certain obligations to the country that had raised and educated me, that if all the good people left America, it would be left to the worst, etc., etc. I had also gotten my degree in literature at a time when the shadow of the "lost generation" still hung heavy over the teaching curriculum, and it seemed a foregone conclusion that anyone wanting to write the great American novel would have to go to Europe—at the very least for a small visit but really more like an extended trip. A year in Paris, maybe, writing at a café overlooking the Champs Elysee or the dusty Rue D’Ilonse, noisy with the phlegmatic huffing of Citroens and the chatter of sharp-faced women with berets and baguettes, the whole place almost alluvially rich with creativity. But I was already set on zigging where it seemed to suggested to me I should zag; I wanted to write the great American novel in America, wherever that might be.

Also, for merely visiting Europe, that, I had concluded, was little more than just a chance to put oneself in a situation where one could seem exotic and desirable: in short, it seemed like a shamelessly desperate tactic to get laid, and a tactic that hypocritically managed to put on airs at the same time.

Although the style of this introduction might suggest otherwise, I like to think I’ve managed to burn off much of the angry Puritanism and boorishness (cautiously disguised, to myself at least, as anti-boorishness) that afflicted me when I was young. To be fair, at the time I worked in a bar infested with young European men, most of whom tried to scrabble inside with forged European driver’s licenses while shaking with barely controlled desire for young American women, and who would quickly, almost tearfully, compare me to a either Nazi, a Fascist, or a Stalinist simply because I wouldn’t let them in. And those who were let in, just as tremblingly desperate but either a few months older or probably just better forgers, frequently were received exactly as they might have hoped, and swaggered out hours later on the arms of drunkeningly fawning young women who begged them to whisper again words like "butter," "whiskey" and "accommodations." All of which I found head-shakingly sad and slightly infuriating, as if the sacramental cloth of knowledge and learning were being used to dress up base carnality and make it more acceptable. I told myself that it was the hypocrisy of it all that bothered me, and perhaps it was. I had spent enough time with friends drinking in whore-ridden bars of the Tenderloin, and felt there was a world where carnality could be honestly expressed, not dressed up, not disguised under euphemisms like "broadening one’s experience" or "meeting people from other cultures" or "seeing the world."

All of this was transference at its most insidious, of course. I was twenty, and insecure enough about my looks that all these complex tirades masked what would have been obvious to anyone had I shared them: I felt no one would go to bed with me without my breaking out exactly the same moves as the desperate European kids at the door. I felt quite strongly about foreigners using their air of otherness that somehow suggested knowledge and experience to bed women because I felt there was no other way for me to bed women. They were horning in on my turf, which I’m sure I resented even it was turf I wanted no part of. I didn’t want a woman to go to bed with me because she found me knowledgeable, I wanted her to go to bed with me because she couldn’t keep her hands off me. As I said (and will probably say several times more before this whole thing is done), I was twenty and insecure, and although I may only be nominally more secure now, I at least am old enough to know that sexual desire is far more complex and strange to be limited to mere physical comeliness (Thank God).

So I had no wish to go to Europe when I was young. I felt that there was only one reason to go (to get laid) and I didn't want to get laid on the terms that a trip to Europe seemed to entail. As for the rest of it, the history and the architecture and the oddness, I didn’t care much. I had books I had read and books I wanted to write, I had the dreams inside my head, and the arrogance that these dreams, these books, were all I needed. I also was inexperienced (arrogance’s twin) enough to not glean that my dreams had been cribbed mostly from other books, barely from life, and lacked not nearly enough vigor to sustain themselves on the page at least to my endlessly critical eye.

Anyway.

I got older and somehow managed to wrench out a good chunk of the stick that was caught up my ass. Although there is an equally mouthy essay lurking right around the corner about the nature of modern consumerism and how it drives us now to purchase experiences in order to feel unique, let’s just say that I eventually got around to picking up a certain appreciation for the idea of travel that I didn’t much have before. And so, when my roommates Dave and Molly moved to Barcelona to sublet an apartment and invited the other housemembers to come visit, I knew I would go. Not to write the great American novel, not to get laid, but merely to go.

Of course, just days before I left, I found out about Chris Baty’s NaNoWriMo, which sets as the goal the writing of a 50,000 word during the month of November—a crappy 50,000 word novel because it’s just a little too hard to write a good book. As they put it on their inspirng website, "Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality." Hopefully the preceding paragraphs, with their recounting of endless limiting rules I had for myself and its own tail-chasing prose will help give you a sense of how liberating this was for me. Despite all the many years I had spent trying to give myself precisely this permission, it wasn’t until Chris Baty and NaNoWriMo gave it to me that I was able to accept it. Although I worried about my ability to write at least 1700 words a day while in Europe, I was also hopeful. Thanks to the troika of my Palm pilot, the Palm portable keyboard, and the word processing program WordSmith, I had already been writing in the morning before work and frequently at lunch and the messy results had been very promising, at least for a quantity perspective: I was more than capable of writing 700 words in 20 minutes, and had once written 2000 words in 40. If I just got up a little earlier than Molly and Dave as we made our way through Europe, I could at least keep myself from getting too far behind on my wordcount that I could make it all up when I got back to America and write the Crappy American Novel in the time allotted.

Ironically, things turned out precisely the opposite: I ended writing so much in Europe that I came back way ahead of my wordcount, and it was life in America that threatened to slow me down. I was going to correct this misconception of mine with another: I was going to write that I would never have finished my novel if it hadn’t been for all the time I spent on trains travelling from one city to the next, if I hadn’t had all those hours in a passenger seat with nothing to do. But in fact, almost all of our train travel was done by the time I started writing my NaNovel on November 1.

I did write on those hours on the train, just nothing that was to literally end up in the novel. I wrote at least 1800 words almost every day the last week in October just to get my endurance up—the way a marathon runner preps for his event, I made it a point to prep for this. As I found myself the last few weeks antsy and restless under the weight of my decision not to look at my NaNovel until at least January 15 (more self-enforced rules!), I realized that there was nothing to prevent me from combing through the material I had written just before the NaNovel, maybe knocking it into shape, cleaning it up, maybe even writing a stuffy intro and posting it on the website. Sure? Why not?

And so here you have the "best" of the prep work, bits and pieces of meat cut from a very fatty whole. It’s over 7,000 words (just over 9,000 if you include this intro) or about one-seventh of the NaNo finish line and less than half of the total wordcount from that week. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with my NaNovel, but based on the ratio of this project, I will either have a lot of rewriting or a very, very small book. Certainly the NaNovel makes a very faint acknowledgment (almost an imperceptible nod) to such niceties as character, dialogue and plot, which the sections that follow certainly do not. I’m hard pressed, in fact, to say what exactly the following sections are. They closest resemble a travel diary, although that travel is largely internal. Perhaps that’s why I’ve provided such a lengthy introduction (although I may just be falling back on my internal NaNo rule of thumb: "there’s nothing wrong with it another thousands words won’t fix!") so as to keep things from seeming frustratingly quantum: knowing now my previous location, perhaps you will be able to appreciate more the shape of my trajectory, the internal arc that cast me, like a skipping stone over a pond, skittering from country to country (or, more honestly, from idea of country to idea of country) until I splashed and sank, finally, at Prague, where idea and reality had little choice but to be wed in the chambers of the imaginary sea, and where I finally, at the final conclusive curve of the road’s path, started, in my way, to begin.

A substantially dreamless sleep, other than the conviction overall that the bed I slept in was recording data about me and adjusting itself accordingly. Maybe that's the future of sleep, dreamt while lying in a stranger's bed for four and a half hours or so.

[…]

He leaned forward. "Just look outside now. Look at it. The vast deserts of Nevada, as brown and smooth and serene as the skin of an apple. The clouds are hanging in the sky, casting elephant shaped shadows that span scores of miles. You can see the veins of the desert, the odd stretchmarks at the tips of the hills, the fine looping paths, as if traced with a fingernail on the center of all that smoothness. That whole world is still, whether seen from 27,000 feet or fifty feet or five. This world is yours. All you have to do is claim it. Claim it through language. Look att the termite trails the rivers have left. See where the clouds have congested and the air grows thciker and darker and stronger. It's the world at its most elemental rolling out underneath you like a red carpet of greeting. Take it."

Overall, though, international travel (and this should have been apparent to me long before I actually did it) is just drugs turned inside out. Instead of changing your internal scenery, you change the external. I can see why too they're referred to as drug "trips." Once you break the connection between your inner self and your external environment, the resulting dissonance stirs up new associations, new fears, and tests your essential personality. Suddenly going out for milk is an adventure. Suddenly the smallest bits of human kindness, as when someone patiently asks you what you want to drink with your sandwich, become extremely moving and rewarding.

[…]

So begin. Begin. Start. The word is inherent in the crest of every cafe chair, in the checks of every colored shirt and tie. Begin. The street sighs look like advertisements for cigarettes and the cigarette ads have yet to be seen, but the women look like ads for cigarettes and jeans, and movies where the ending are markedly oblique. Across latticeworks of lines we've laid down for ourselves, we march determinedly down narrow streets of our making, of alleyways of our choosing. The city, like the mark of Cain, is worn upon our brow, reflected in the wrinkles that every squinting city man has, is carried in our voice like a brand. Our pot bellies, our squat stooped posture, our dead eyed urban acquiescence are all the indications that God has put his mark upon us.

I may have to get going soon. Maybe that's the message inherent in every city. Go, go, go. Begin. Our faces ask us to, our mouths tell us to, our eyes wonder why we haven't, and soon we'll find ourselves, fleeing, hurtling down the narrow alleys, over street tile in the shape of seashells, looking for more than this imagined sea, but in fact for the actual sea itself, the actual ocean; our first city; our first home.

[…]

There's something deeply refreshing about P. Diddy at the moment. Finally here in the alleys of Barcelona, Puff Daddy makes a bit of sense, something inauthentic with which one can ward off all feeling of insecurity. It's like, "Yeah, fuck you! I can rap along with P. Diddy! That beats your lousy Euro crap any day of the week!"

Me vs. them. It's not like I feel consciously in opposition to the people of Europe. I just am looking for some for m of validation. It's an infantilizing experience to be here, particularly for a narcissist like me. That this culture has existed before me--okay, that I can understand. But for it to continue to exist without acknowledging me in the least? Well, that just will not stand!

Yes, I can safely say that the anonymity of European cities feels different to the anonymity of American cities, if only, perhaps, because the american anonymity can be renounced at will, ad I think it would not be so easy to do here, even if one spoke the language.

[…]

My world spins out in partially constructed sentences, barely remembered dreams, second hand fantasies and dictionaries of languages I don't speak. Photocopied pictures of people I know and like stare at me--copies of photos of people--this shows how far removed I am from reality now. Not even the image of reality, but the photocopy of that image. Purses of blank faced cartoon characters, handbags lined with black hole stars, pictures of sand castle cathedrals, it would all be the same if I were elsewhere looking at other things. These things are meant for my eyes, as dangerous as the solipsism is. Almost everything I look at has a face but none of those faces are talking to me. That's why it's not a solipsism--everything in my universe of one seems arranged to show me that I do not exist in that universe. It's the secret I learned while on shrooms, while sitting alone in my room. Soon I will be gone and the room will remain. The rooms, the houses, the blank walls, they are the heroes of our stories, enduring day after day and giving support and comfort and sustenance to those of us who spend a few minutes nestled within it. the buildings are Bogart, and the people are Peter Lorre, snivelling behind the white dinner jacket of his strength. We snivel, provide a crucial part of the plot, the MacGuffin, and then we're done. Our time on screen is over, and it's time for us to go.

Perhaps everyone who visits churches older than their entire country has to deal with this sad realization, but I think it's been a realization a long time coming for me--a secret only confirmed by the smell of sugar in all of the baked bread, or in the smell of hot water in the muggy air. After all, Molly and Dave took me out and showed me the city--the vast unending miracle of the city, wrought by the hands of construction workers and architects. If buildings are heroes, then men like Gaudi are something akin to the gods of Greek mythology--creating heroes from clay and unloosing them upon the world. This is the only thing I see now worth actually doing in this world--construction and architecture. All the rest of it is merely craven supporting-characterhood.

Even architecture isn't really the same as being the hero of our stories--merely the heromaker. How lonely a man like Gaudi must have felt at times, knowing that it was the products of his mind that would be the heroes of history, but not his mind itself. The gods, in short, are very lonely, little more than abstractions that somehow created us from their abstractions. We are their buildings, their movable cities of ones and twos, shifting about in constantly new constellations, becoming brief countries whose borders are the restaurant, the metro car, the wedding bed. To see your architecture in flight, moving through the zones of love and marriage and death, death triumphing over chastity, is to understand that the world is a place where ideas are made flesh, where concepts are given form and being, and almost immediately run like burning wax, begin to run off into the gutters almost after standing straight.

Again, who couldn't be in a city like this and not see men and women as burning candles, the force of their light showing briefly about their head even as they begin to run and bow and shrink under the strength of their own light?

[…]

And all of this loneliness would be fine, if it just wasn't so lonely. The buildings don't talk much, although they are excellent listeners. The world is not much of a people person, as it turns out. There are just so many nights where we can waver in our Peter Lorre Eigenstate before we start to long for something a bit better, or more satisfying, than the life of omnipotent cockroach. Because that's really what we are to the buildings that exist around us. We are their gods, we are their rodents. What worldview must you have if you must suffer through being infested by your creators? What odd sort of contempt would one develop in these situations? Behind their long-suffering facades, what resentments must begin to fester, manifest themselves as bad plumbing, as peeling paint, health hazards, exposed wiring. Our heroic buildings, with a rep to live up to as the strong silent types, just can't go forward and ‘fess up to being angry, annoyed, upset. No, for them is the passive-aggressive way of decay, or bad plumbing and backed up sewage, of gas lines that somehow still don't seem to work right, no matter how they're looked at, no matter what system is applied.

Bending, bending, the bough begins to break. Bending, bending, the world itself starts to bow under the weight of everything on its shoulders. Atlas would have been crushed long ago, since the number of industrial countries he had been holding up at the time were very few. And although this side of the world looks like jewelry from above, there's another side of the world, my side, where the ground resembles a circuit board, jammed tighter and tighter with chemicals, and bunkers, and compounds, and railroad lines, and housing development after housing development after housing development. You can live here in the city, or else move out to the rest of Spain which is substantially nothing, or you can live in America where the city now never ends, where the city and the circuit board and the repeating rifle have destroyed the idea of the frontier. There are no more lines to cross, there is no longer here or there, merely here and almost-here, the place that is kind of like a city, the place that is putting in the Starbucks, the place where we almost are what we are, as opposed to being in the city and having no choice in the matter. At least becoming puts off the terrible unopposable insistent weight of being, at least growing is not the dead end street that grown has become. I've seen roots, you can't fool me. They break through their earth, knock on your bedroom wall, work their way through soil and continue to grow, abut a house and then still keep growing. There is some terrible curse about life--as long as it is living, it is trying to grow, and to try to stop its growth is to try and kill it. Growth and death are the only two things life understands, just as light bulbs only understand on and off. There is no more to our world than this. Life and death. Growth and decay. What a world it would be if we could just stop growing and just exist for a bit or two.

That’s what I've been trying to do, but now I'm at the age where I realize that if I don't grow, the chances of me dying, and dying poorly, grow every day. The horrible burrowing sound of our own mortality, you can hear it if you stop and are quiet enough. It's like a widowmaker cracking and falling far off in the distance, in the nearby wood. It's the sound of the plaster falling off the walls, and the sink dripping all the world's water down the drain. It's the running of the toilet, running still, not done running yet, but when it does stop you’ll know that a certain part of your life will be over, and there will be nothing else left for you, only the blank wall the faces on the table and presumption of death, the death sentence that is being carried, that is literally being rendered by all of these things. Grow or die, that is the lesson that life has been trying to teach me, and I can't help but being able to see the horror implicit in both options. And yet I have no choice but to start growing because I turn 35 very soon, and I will not have much of a choice in the matter at some point very soon, and the sound of the sink dripping and the blue shift occurring outside my window has left me with very little say in the matter. The faces on the kitchen table compel me to move forward, even if I know that they will not speak to me, even if I know that the only message they have for me is the secret provided by their existence, not in anything they wish to say to me in particular. The world is too indifferent to speak to me, and I've been fortunate enough to learn valuable lessons from the silence.

[…]

I wish I had the time and focus to write about the sleeper car--not too much actually happened, but the warp and woof of that nothingness is really interesting to me.

At one point, I felt that I was travelling in a thundercloud over the countryside--that the rattle of the wheels sounded like heavy rain. And at some point I felt that the train was a morsel of food, being passed through intestine-like tunnels; the dripping and shifting of our water tank seemed to envelop the room, and I felt us gurgling down the track, just a bit of barely digested food being passed through the vast stomach of Europe. It was an oddly archetypal journey.

[…]

Closing my eyes now. there's no way I'm going to get to 1700 words with my eyes open. I've turned off my music because the room’s stereo is overwhelming, pouring out of the speakers and blasting into this empty room ad the empty room upstairs, the empty room where all the people are, where the empty people flicker in the hall like the skipping CD player which jumps its way through the song, just like me, skipping my way through this song, leaping from the chorus to the next verse, returning to the bridge but moving through it too fast, the fingers keeping a steady beat but the rest of me moving about the frets and staggering about on the stage and waiting for the disdain of the audience that will ever come because the room is empty, empty, empty.

And there's a neon blue other glowing out on the horizon of Paris, there's an actual mother, blue with cold in the waters off Avignon, and I wish that I could choose the abstract sometimes as my actual mother. If only I myself had been the chimera, the bastard offspring of an abstract symbol and a disciplined way of looking at the world, the radiant blue neon that gave birth to the night, the solid way of seeing that birthed the day. Osiris and his wife, the day and the night. The cow headed goddess and the unhappy woman in the riding ring. I have my heritage and I have not claimed it, but it does not matter. It has claimed me. Child of sorrow writing alone in the basement in Paris. And this is my imperative, the only mission statement which I have been given: Destroy all monsters, destroy all monsters, destroy all monsters.

[…]

Got my groove on, got my drink on, got my funeral hat on, for the funeral of Paris. There seems to not be much point to the funeral, the body was stolen, the pallbearers are themselves all dead, there is very little to recommend it other than the recommendations of the tiny girls with glasses. And the tiny girls with glasses, like the robots, like the monkeypants, are themselves a force at work in the universe. As important as gravity, more enigmatic than electromagnetism, the girls with glasses are some as yet uncharted subset of superstring theory. Let's look at them with hunger, let's look at them from the belly of hunger in this, the empty street of the empty funeral of Paris.

The jazzmen play instruments crafted from the bones of gulls at the funeral of Paris. The middle-aged men walk with a respectful bourgeois gait, trying to light their Gauloises and unseeing of the window gardens and the shuttered windows of the Rue Lomet. The jazzzmen play a role, I think it is safe to say that, but what sort of role might jazzmen play in the world of monkeys, robots and tiny girls with glasses?

Do they make the funeral of Paris more real to you? They do to me because the funeral of Paris is about the death of heart, the death of opportunity, and its replacement by its robotic doppelganger. Yes, Paris has been replaced with Robo-Paris, the fembot version of France's great city. If you had a hand large enough swipe off the Champs Elysee, you would see it is nothing but a giant rubber mask, and underneath the mutterings of electric geegaaws would distract you in their horrific appearance as Robo-Paris reaches forward for you with one clamp like hand, nattering "mrr-mee, mrrr-mee."

You'll get no argument from me. You won't hear anything from me. Across the street the children drown in pools of plastic balls in arenas shaped like pirate boats. Teddy bear pirates, fondly portrayed on the facade of the store, are known inside to be horrible bastards, raping and pillaging, fair only to their crew and abominable to all others. At some point in the merriment, he ship of children and plastic balls is fired upon and then boarded and the children have to choose whether to walk the plank or serve Captain Teddybeard loyally for the rest of their days.

Which is a lot like language, of course. You think you're only playing in it, and then suddenly you have to choose. Look at the guys who work at the hostel. Young kids who showed some sort of aptitude for English, now they're here, working for an okay wage, explaining the rules about sheet rentals to people who come in, and recommending from which tabac they should purchase phone cards. English has pressed them into service. Now they're some sort of horrible hybrid, not entirely French, not entirely tourist, but are playing some role between houseguest and cabin boy for the rest of their lives, just because of their ability, pressed now and forever into fealty. They sail the chimeric high seas now, neither fish nor fowl, but the members of the ship that sail below one and above another. They are the first mates of language and change, while remaining unchanging themselves. Arr, the sea is a harsh mistress boys, but I don't think it's anything compared to the harshness of language. Because there's no escaping language, lads. You can move so far inland, the sea only touches you with delicate fingers of rain, or with its breath, in the form of morning fog upon your window pane. But language laps at all shores. Language makes port in every mouth. Language sets sail when it pleases, and makes of its crew who it chooses, and drowning in language is the worst sort of death imaginable, sinking under the thick eddies and pools of words and thoughts and undelivered love letters, and thousands of miles away from the touch of another. Death by language is a brutal, brutal thing, and there'll be no jazzmen at that funeral, no bourgeois procession. There's only death by sea and if you're lucky, someone drapes a flag somewhere, and someone remembers what you were like before that wave of language, like a frothy fist, knocked you sideways and swept you from sight forever and ever, amen.

[…]

And whereto begin now but at the end? The end of the day, the end of the story, the end of civilization. Today, I held a skull at the Catacombs. Today, I beheld everything that could be held in my tiny mind and myself still be allowed to exist. The morning, missing rocking chairs, and the afternoon filled with the absences, driven from point a to point b to point c by the mystery of eternity, a riptide pulling all of all that is known and seen by me in toto, swallowing all, becoming all, relegating culture to the role of patsy and self to the role of clown--the capering of the eyes upon seeing room after room after room of human skulls. Having such questions about value and worth answered rather too directly, it's been the sort of day where my feet feel like they should be bleeding stumps, and my head should be rattling forth encoded distress signals. The terrible faces of the Champs Elysees, the bitter fruit of the mystery restaurants, our hats thrown at our feet like the gauntlets of challenge, nothing being my only reward and nothing being the only reward craved for. I can close my eyes and remember the nap that I just had, but can remember none of the details. And so it is with my trip through Europe today. First I write about the funeral of Paris, and then I lay witness to an ossuary, 6 million bodies and a single human skull in my actual hand, the atrocity participated with full knowledge and great curiosity by me. Did I create an act of monstrousness by holding the skull of someone long dead? Have I left myself vulnerable to the attacks of angry spirits? Or is the only crime that of emptiness, the same crime that everyone around me is perpetuating while we speak? Is there any other crime, and is there any way to avoid being both its victim and its perpetrator?

Screw characters, screw plot, screw the mystery of the mystery machine. All that I can wish for is the steady purchase of words, bought with the currency of time and attention, and then presented on a plain blanket and sold at the Circle of Tears--sure, why not, what would you call a set of eyes? If I could sing, this would be my song, running out the corner of my room and playing upon the abandoned courtyard below. As long as we can talk ourselves into being part of that song, we might be able to move at least for a minute longer, as the chill winds of November threaten to freeze us where we stand, the waters of the chill rivers being the only pulse upon the land. The winds of that day will sound a lot like this song, savage and yet monotonous, unending, unyielding and unforgiving, broken and laid out in semi-circles around the body. The body and the mystery, as every song, every story, is at its heart a murder mystery. Whodunnit is ever as much a matter of importance as much of that this is done. Every murder mystery revolves around trying to figure out how it can be allowed that the murder was done. How can we be allowed to die without ever knowing the purposes of our life? How can that inescapable crime help but overshadow all other smaller ones? Those who actually steal life are not nearly as responsible as the one who allows life to be stolen in the first place. As I sit here today, looking upon our world empty but for the changing of streetlights, the groaning of car engines, the gentle lapping of voices at the windows and the doors, I know there's nothing here for me. It's time to go, to the next city, to the next country, to the next possible hope that I can belong, that I will be accepted, that I can bring myself to be loved by someone who I also love. And maybe that's not even enough, but how eager I am to exchange all these construction paper cities and toy monuments for something as large and as tiny as that!

It's autumn, oh, yes, the skeletal horses in the fields, and the leafless trees rubbing the sky's grey belly certainly attest to that. Level after level after level of gray, as if the world were a low resolution screen--the world on glass, covered with insincere craftsmanship, painted for quick sale in cheap art fairs, in weekend street galleries, the world as caught by the insincere and the speedy. The world, in short, very much like the way I catch the world, and only the occasional (less than occasional) moment of purity counterpointing all the swift graytone perceptions, the illusion of depth created through negative space and the judicious use of gradation. Suddenly we have a town in France, suddenly it's the undescribed bullet train, suddenly we're in the middle of Jeff's life. You can't help but hold up the book with an expression to indicate that it smells bad. Who wrote this?

And who, I ask? I 'm looking up now at the blinding eye of the sun, brilliant even through the layers of high cloud cover--more gray and white, although finally with some streaks of blue far up there. But I look at the sun, looking down unblinkingly like the eye of a reptile and wonder if this is the author I should thank. I want to be believe that there's a warmer ore mammalian eye up there. But maybe not. Maybe the secret all pet owners know is that the world is a gnostic dream--a petting zoo gone awry. The fish are outside the tank watching us. It's the lizard's terrarium that holds us now. And there's not much to do but watch us foul our water and spill our food, let the cows fall where they may. As long as the music keeps playing, I guess we really can't be too upset.

[…]

Yes, the phantom limb, the scourge of San Francisco, and only brave M. Druisellet can curb the evil mastermind's terrible plans for vengeance! The phantom limb, mistaken by other people as their own heart or their own mind, but actually my renegade soul, escaped from me during a fierce attack of heartbreak, and lurking even now in the BART tunnels under the city.

And while it runs amok, here I am, the only man who could stop it, on the train moving through the vast trainyard and car dealership that is Brussels (admittedly traveling by rail will make almost any city seem like a vast trainyard). Actually, now that we've turned a corner, Brussels seems more interesting to me--a modern city with some sort of ancient ruin in the center and the typical Provencal-style buildings, as functional and as decorative as shoe trees, plus the complete regularity with which windows are applied to them, as if it were every European's guaranteed right to defenestrate themselves at a moment's notice.

It may seem arrogant, but I think Europe has a lot to learn from us Americans now. How, after all, will Europe take to the coming homogenization--greater than it's ever been--presented by the Euro and its borders, perhaps never before spread so wide. How sorry a state of affairs conquerors would find this now. Who has replaced the blood of our countrymen with milk, they would ask. Who allows such free interbreeding between cultures?

The answer, of course, would be America, land of the mongrel and the mutt, the weak-blooded and the apathetic; my lack of history, my lack of culture, except for what I choose to make of it. The Internet seems odd over here, not nearly as in place as I thought it would be. I can't help but seeing all the Internet signs with the jaundiced eye of a San Franciscan. Perhaps the Internet is a particularly American dynamic, an American "utility" that people don't really want or need in a world of porous borders. Maybe the Europeans will want their own little Euronets, where they can meet people from their own countries, their own history. History is spread everywhere across like Europe, like mayonnaise, inescapable and informing the way every person dressses, every person sits, every person sleeps. Whereas the Internet is about an attempt to build history and culture in a country that has traditionally tried to destory it--let us build our own culture, let us choose our own history. Such ideas would seem impossible everywhere but in America. But here in Europe where there are already too many histories, too many cultures, and you can walk down the street to the local church three times older than America, who needs or wants to build a culture? It would be like putting a swimming pool in an aquarium.

I'm torn, then, as to what I would say to the Europeans if they were to ask me for advice. Part of me is tempted to say, throw out your culture, put in the megamall. There is not much good that can come from your brasseries that all serve the same thing badly, there is nothing to be gained, no comfort to be had in a house filled with old ghosts and open windows. Burn down the trainyards, destroy your old lederhosen, and for god's sake destroy your belief in anarchy. How embarrassing is it to see signs supporting anarchy in cities so old they've outlived every possible citizen dozens of times over. Anarchists in European cities just seem to me like badly spoiled children. I can see it in America where history is mutable and corrupt. But in Europe? Come on! If you're that fond of anarchy why are you keeping all these ugly old buildings? Why are you shivering under the weight of woolen blankets in hard-walled rooms? Why do you keep passing the open windows? There is nothing be had here of anarchy. Either embrace your part as drone and messenger, as citizen and envoy of a city that is the actual European (not you) or else cast off this mark of Cain and try to begin again. It took you thousands of years to invent the bourgeois and half of you still act like you want to get rid of him. I would call the bourgeois the greatest creation since sliced bread if it wasn't for the fact that I believe the bourgeois was a by-product of sliced bread and so is contemporaneous.

No, admit to yourselves what anarchy is in Europe. It's a hobby: lepidoptery, philately, anarchy.

[…]

Between my typing and this keyboard, the English language is devolving before what would be my very eyes if I was even looking at it. Instead, I'm staring at a variety of passengers in the mirror above me, at the backs of the French businessmen in the seat in front of Dave, in the dashing about of the bored children who seem to yell and shriek and cause the youngest one to burst into tears every eight minutes. It would actually be more quiet to be riding outside the train at this point, and I've thought about wandering to another car, or else kicking the kids up to the next coach. I guess we're not allowed any special privileges in second class, such as infanticide.

[…]

I think also that my history where we have Redwoods and intelligences that walk in the woods far older than these cities, have left me a bit more jaded than perhaps other Americans. To be in a wood and feel the breath on your neck of something that was old long before men even glimpsed the forest line, much less tried to enter it, makes me wonder if I'm to have few surprises in Europe apart for the occasional ogling of the architecture. Or perhaps I'm missing the point of Europe, which is that it is our first alien intelligence, the city as subject, as hero of a narrative, and a chance to visit that narrative even as it's being acted out. To see Beowulf when Beowulf was young, to move through the veins of Daedalus as he constructs the prison from which no one can escape. And perhaps I'm just fooling myself, but when the catacombs of Paris are roughly as old as San Francisco and hold 6 million people (outnumbering San Franciscans by at least six to one), it seems to me that I'm come from a city that is about sentient as a retarded infant. It has received so little succor, it has barely begun to open its eye and look around and it has been mired in the stunting cigarette smoke of political corruption for most of its life--it amuses me that I was ever afraid of San Francisco, its sentience.

To be afraid of a city is to be afraid of one's own death, but the more comfortable with that subject one becomes, the more comfortable a city is. It's not half as horrible as the woods, as the field, as the stream, where nature has programmed itself with a blind thrusting version of mindfulness that is avaricious and yet apathetic, barely avoidable and awesome; only rarely strange, but even then more strange than Paris can aspire to. All cities that have streets are, if you think about it, only streetwalkers, possessing their initial gaudy appeal and then later their laziness and vanity. Whereas to live in the country is to have the willow-wife, the river wife, the lady of the woods, a relationship that is both stranger and deeper, capable of troubling and depressing but also rewarding at a level that is almost religious, to grow old and die in the crushing, ever-fecund arms of the willow wife, as opposed to dying alone, with the chattery gossip of the streetwalker city in your ear. If there is an appeal to Europe, I've decided, it's that the cities can frequently resemble nature. They can be so imperious as to resemble the silent wives of nature, even though it is in fact merely the stillness of the matronly madam, the borrowed airs of those who inherited strength through simple attrition, those who have cut low the forests of their own youth. The city, though, is all whore, and all chatter, talking outside your window and not caring if you die. Whereas the willow wife will hold her breath, if only for a minute, before she continues to envelop your house, and your body, and all that you have accomplished. To be married to the wood, or to live in the adultery of the city: are those the only choices available to me? Maybe there's something else I'll realize as we move through Berlin, through Prague and toward Venice, another possibility that will be offered through the embellishment of urban accretion.

[…]

I don't know why I love the train so much. After all, the train is merely a bus without any potential for free will. Or, come to think of it, maybe that's what I love about the train.

[…]

Just now, as I'm sitting here writing finally with my eyes closed, I can't help but wonder how safe it is to be riding at this high speed with one's eyes closed. What does the future hold to a man who willingly blinds himself to it. It's somewhat hard to believe that the future will provide if you're not willing to do anything about it. "Chance favors the prepared monkey." I believe Pasteur himself, whose face is currently in my wallet, said that. But who knows. There are guys like Einstein, to whom you can attribute any sort of half-assed truism and people will repeat it endlessly. Or you can say something that seems to finally have more than the slightest gram of truth to it, and all of a sudden every one wants to believe that Einstein wrote it, or that Murphy legislated it, and it's nothing like that. The world and the ideas exist---more and more I'm not sure if we exist as anything other than a conduit between the two. We are horses, we are autos, we are trains, shuttling about the passengers who live inside us to their desired destination.

[…]

The dingy glass of the Berlin supertrain makes one think of all of the surrounding countryside as dingier than one would necessarily expect it to be. The seats on the train are comfortable but claustrophobic--it's like being smothered to death by a beloved uncle or aunt, perhaps. I'm sitting across from a woman with a face like poorly baked bread. Not particularly old, but having even a greater amount of the sort of joylessness and dead-eyed maturity I've come to expect from most Euros.

Let's see, what else? Oh, yes. Mr. Tod's Wild Ride. I thought that one up while in the snug bathroom, the jostling moving bathroom, the sort of odd anti-uterus in which one doesn't kick but is kicked. And also none of this three language stuff for us now---it's all German all the time, unless they're breaking into Danish or some other sort of thing I'm not following. The houses are spinning right by, and I don't know why but I get the feeling I'm not going to like Germany much. So far it seems like France but with the flavor boiled out of it. More songs about buildings and food, I guess you'd call it.

[…]

Now I can see in the power lines the gentle cursive writing of letters I can’t read, and I can sense in the railroad ties a pattern that is in fact deceptively simple, a line that might even put to the lie the secret of mortality whispered silently to us by autobahns and apartment windows, promised to be doled out to us in marks, and francs, and the ever popular Euro, the soon to be arriving Euro, the wonderful utopic Euro that may actually arrive to these block of countries that finally now realize how much they need each other.

Meanwhile the world continues, glimpsed in cigarette ads and bluejean logos, a world where the symbol and the sigil brands themselves upon the world. Lightning loosed upon the world, the lightning of letters and logos, a silent thunderstorm of newsprint, darkening the skies of the mind. Meanwhile we look at buildings of stacked pie tins, cakeglasses, a wonderful world of desserts, keeping us diverted from who’s actually sitting at the big boy's table, who's actually indulging themselves in the mealtime of the rich, who’s not having to worry about the lines of boxcars spilling their dark secrets (like Pandora's Box) out on the highway during rush hour. That' the way the world works for us, but not for them. They get the chance to see that life only occasionally, when they choose, to, just as bored children might change to the educational channel from time to time. It's a foreign world to them, mostly boring but sometimes capable of sustaining the weight of their indolent fantasies. Meanwhile the world writes itself, the world is written, the ley lines squirming through the lines of the earth like a living worm, like mutable penmanship, like elemental cursive moving under our feet, flanked by the mighty metalwork of Dresden station.

Upon this secret world, we roll our luggage and grip each other's hands in greeting and farewell, the tentative goodbye and hellos of mortality, the sunflowers that think themselves redwoods. We live much longer than flies and arguably more successfully, but seeing us all now, buzzing and scuttling across the dessication of Dresden station, I have to wonder. (I always have to wonder, it's in my contract.) As long as the beautiful women are there, on that side of the glass, beautiful and untouchable and looking for the men they have come to hug, there's little choice but for me to wonder how a world could have been created that could have no place for me. Perhaps I'm one of those symbols in Godel's Theorem, there only to prove that the system is complete enough to acknowledge its incompleteness.

[…]

It's an x-ray world when looked directly out at it: filters and filters of dirt on the window and cigarette smoke here in the car give the world the look of a book cover that's been left out in the sun for too long.

[…]

There is no start to this. There is no end to this. There is only, maybe, an end to us. But I wonder. I wonder if the skull I held in the catacombs of Paris hold its memories tight to its breast , or if those memories, like the breasts, have dissipated long ago. Dave, a Vonnegut reader like me, is having a certain amount of trouble believing that Dresden is not a pile of slag, but an actual town. Its destruction was so complete, and described so completely by Vonnegut, that I really wonder what is the city that is more real to me, that city in that book, or this city that is beautiful and verdant and somewhat unkempt rolled out before me, being revolved around me on an axis too large for me to see. If the difference between what exists and what doesn't exist is so great, why do so many people get them confused so easily?

Is it something to do with those mysterious sigils and the writing in the powerlines? Or is it the wiring of our minds, that the perception of what we see is so affected by what we think that we actually believe that the world before us might easily be mistaken for a hat, or a coat, or bedtime story told by alcoholics to their children, in the dimming lights of the bedrooms, whispered by freemasons in meeting halls, mistakenly believed to have been in places that they were not, and mistakenly assumed to be people that they have never been?

Talking to students in our hostel room last night, I wondered about America, if maybe America can't be seen as the world's most dysfunctional parent, capable of tremendous generosity on the one hand and on the other, incredible cruelty and shrewdness. A cold-hearted father of a land that always seems surprised when accused of atrocities that it's committed. And us, our children, or its acquiescent wives, going forth and offering condolences and cookies, and friendly apologies for bombing and turning the ideas of mini-malls into viruses of the mind, spreading like syphilis over the already blighted land. This is certainly the right neck of woods to talk about blight. Outer Dresden has buildings where not a window remains, followed by rebuilt university buildings and mini-marts with Pepsi sigils hanging overhead. Lonely smokestacks followed by the eczema of power plant transformers. There's no transmutation here. The lead is turned into lead. It's just slightly lighter lead, as this is just an ingot of the mind, a digital slagheap, coke and smelt and hopefully at least a few hotly glowing embers, the coals of the secret flame, I hope, caught, if only in your mind for a second, of the mysterious heatless fire that never goes out, that somehow is still capable of warming us as we pass through the ruins of the Czech republic, toward the wirehanger question mark of Prague.

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