oblivious in the streets

This is not like any of my recent posts, more for me. I promise to post new pictures and whereabouts info soon. Feel free to skip this entry.

Yesterday and today I've talked to almost no one. Khanh is in Paris until tomorrow night and I've sort of been in a solitary mood. I've been engrossed in a book and just a little while ago finished going through it. Part of me feels like I'm wasting some of my time here but another part of me feels that I needed to have some time to myself, just to reflect on my thoughts. The book I was reading was a bit strange. It's a Japanese/British author, Kazuo Ishiguro, but takes place between London and Shanghai before WW II. It tells the story of a boy who whose parents disappeared when they were living in Shanghai when he was 10 years old. He's sent back to London and becomes a detective, and then later in his life returns to Shanghai to try and solve the mystery of his parents vanishing. That is fine and all, but so few details are given about his being a "celebrated detective" and characters are thrown in that are sometimes distracting. Furthermore, he doesn't seem like a true detective. I was sitting in a cafe reading the climax, and he's leading around a Japanese soldier who he thinks is his boyhood friend as troops are advancing through Shanghai. It all seemed so far fetched and his "friend" seemed to show no concrete signs of actually being the person he thought he was making me question the author's validity as a detective. I felt like in the following pages that I would discover that the narrator is in fact delusional and in a mental hospital.

I took a break to walk around, I found myself drifting through the streets, I was listening to Radiohead's "Hail to the Thief" album, and all of a sudden I started to question my surroundings, who I was and what I was doing here, or if in fact I was here at all. It was weird, even dreamlike, possibly because I was blocking out the real sounds of the world with a rather erratic music selection. I felt like when I let my eyes drift up from my moving feet that I found people looking at me in a curious way. I thought that perhaps a bird had lighted on my head and I'd failed to notice causing me to become quite a curiosity as I walked around. As I said, I've really not talked to anyone in two days, haven't seen a soul that I recognize, and as I was meandering through the streets, eventually back to the empty apartment, I just had this strange feeling that either I was crazy and imagining life, or that I was asleep and dreaming and everything around me was just really my imagination and I would awake in the morning to find myself in a different world where none of this was real. Have you ever had those moments? I used to think about it when I was younger. I mean, dreams don't really have a sense of time. Have you ever had a dream that seemed like it went on for days, months, even years only to find yourself wake up and see you've only been asleep for an hour or less? Have you ever thought (I used to think this sometimes when I was younger) that most or all of your life is actually one really long dream and that you might wake up at any minute, find yourself like 12 years old and forced to relive the the next 17 years of your life all over again? I know I still have dreams, you might even call them nightmares, where I find myself forced to return to high school because I didn't complete a math class for some reason. I suppose that might be my own personal version of hell, forced to return to high school as a student at 28 for a math class that now I have no recollection of since I haven't used Algebra or most forms of higher math in the last 10 years. When I have those dreams I always have to wake and remind myself that it's not real, only a dream. I think I hate those even more than "real" nightmares, the normal scary ones which I usually don't have very often.

Anyway, that aside from a trip to the grocery store, this was more or less my day. I sit now on the terrace that has demanded so much of my time here in Madrid, contemplating what to read or write next. It feels good to really be reading again, I have more to think about, I feel more inspired, I feel more alive. The only thing is that when I get in these moods, I tend to turn myself off from the outside world as my hermit like quality of the last few days show, but sometimes I need it.