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High/lowlights of the Trip Home

-- The little (3yo?) German girl who flew on the transatlantic flight with us and kept returning to our seats to gawk at our cat without a smile or a frown, simply bobbing with a blank wondering stare to keep eye-contact with Hobbes as he sniffed the airplane cabin's air through the cracked grating of his pet carrier.
... --Also when I put my head behind his carrier and meowed in a transparent stab at feline mimicry, the little girl shrieked with terrific glee and sent Hobbes into a curl in the darkest corner of the cage.

-- When the people behind us on the plane paid for some beer and then an hour later we got some for free with our mid-day dinner.

-- Listening to the new Fiery Furnaces album over and over again while I napped on the plane.

-- Hobbes didn't make a peep until our landing-in-NYC turbulence sent the contents of his stomach lurching up and out through the front of his cage. Then I cleaned him up in the men's room, but not on the baby changing table, although I did consider it.

-- When we realized we had to lug all of our baggage out through customs and to an entirely distant terminal at JFK, necessitating a re-check and re-security process, which took forever, and after which we high-tailed it to the gate (gate 11), except when we came down the escalator we realized we were in baggage claim, which meant we'd overshot and had to go back through security, with our cat. He was not having fun.

-- A guy in the security line in front of us the first time who turns out goes to ECU and we talked to him about North Carolina. His dad works for the airline and he gets free flights!

-- Wolf Blitzer, on CNN in the gate lobby once we'd reached it, told us a metro had leaped onto the back of another metro in Washington, D.C., basically two hours before we were supposed to land there. Luckily we had someone to pick up us but still damn.

-- I read about 100 pages of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H.P. Lovecraft. The title story is fantastic. I want the plush.

-- Eating a bag and a half of Totino's Pizza Rolls at Megan's sister's for dinner. Then getting drunk and falling asleep.

-- Talking to my mom on a real phone for the first time in nine months.

Leaving Köln tomorrow.

AMERICA!

Here's what I look like right now:

Megan almost got stranded in Dresden.

We were taking the train from Prague to Cologne and enjoying the relaxing sway of the train and Megan decided to look for the dining car down to the end of the train. So I stayed leaning against the window in the tight hall right outside our compartment while Megan went traveling car-by-car to the end.

So then it was taking awhile, and then I started pacing back and forth in our car wondering where she was. I walked to one end, looked through into the next car, and walked back. I walked to the other end -- the end Megan had gone -- and stared curiously at the red metal bar strapped across the door. I looked out the window. The next day down's outer door was open. I didn't see Megan. I pulled my head back in.

I looked back out the end-window which was crossed by the red bar, realizing for the first time that there was no platform for crossing from one car to the other. Instead, I was looking straight down through between the cars onto the bare tracks. The moment I realized this, the cars began to pull apart from each other. They were completely decoupled and our car was the last car in the line continuing on. All the rest were still.

I freaked out because I thought Megan was still on that car. Turns out she had stepped off of the car behind ours about two minutes earlier and passed our car and gotten on the next one up without us seeing each other. So there were about eight minutes where I thought I was inexorably heading away from Megan toward Berlin with all our stuff.

When she called me and came bursting in from the other end of the car, my hands were shaking, and so were hers. Now we're here safe and sound in Cologne and going out to a beer garden in a bit. Hobbes loves it here. Germany is cool.

I am leaving, in two hours, to get on a train that will take me from Prague to Cologne over the course of eleven hours + BARCELONA REFLECTIONS

Then I will stay in Cologne for five days and then I will drive to Dusseldorf and then I will fly to Washington D.C. and then I will stay for three or four days and then I will drive to Winston-Salem, and then I will stay for two or three days and then I will drive to Chapel Hill and then I will live there.

Here's what it was like in Barcelona:
_____________________________

A story without disaster is probably not worth reading.

I moved to Prague in September of 2008. The eleventh day of September, to be exact, but that's not thedisaster. I came with my girlfriend, who is, among many things, an amateur photographer (and expert footnoter), and then we got a cat. I'm a writer, also amateur, who can't stand the only job that pays in this town (teaching English) and so I am perennially strapped for cash and looking for loopholes that will get me what I want. I'm also always looking for excuses to see more of the Old World, or any part of the world, really, outside of my little squat of Czech Home, so it made sense for the two of us to jump on a pair of free press passes to Barcelona for the Primavera Sound festival, and that's where the disaster starts.

My girlfriend, M., arrived by air from a five week trip to the States exactly one day before our flight out of Prague. The stress of this much flying is immediately obvious. Plus she's a finicky sleeper to begin with. Plus I pulled a total boner when buying tickets and paid through before I realized that both our out-going and in-coming flights included sizable (nine and six hours, respectively) layovers in Germany. So it was always going to kind of suck, from the beginning. This is all up-front kind of knowledge, like grit-your-teeth misery you subconsciously prepare for during the days leading up to flying, because you know it will feel like hell but that you can't do anything about it besides maybe not going at all, which actually seems like it would have been a pretty good idea when you're sleepless and thirsty and just generally like dried out at hour two out of seven in the middle of an airport. So the thinking was that the time spent in Barcelona had better be really super great to justify the bookending gauntlets of fatigue I was putting M. and myself through, and also the price of the plane ticket, which when you make the Czech equivalent of less than $4/hour is nothing to laugh at.

Luckily, we have friends in Cologne, which is either a 40 or 25 minute drive from Dusseldorf (our first layover, 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.) depending on how drunk the German driving your car is. Upon our arrival in Cologne, M. and I were able to commit neither to an immediate nap nor to caving to the pressure our friends were exerting on us to stay up all night, so we all (two Americans and two Germans, the friends) reached a compromise of a few* drinks out and then an hour or two of rest. We'd get enough sleep, probably.

*[read: seven or eight]

This bad of a plan is obvious to everyone but its planners. We didn't get home until late, like, late, especially for people getting in the car to leave at 5 a.m. the next day, and then it was longer until anyone could actually get to sleep. I caught the lion's share of Zs, while M. tossed and turned, experiencing a terrible night's sleeplessness compressed into just an hour. Then we were up and off and arriving back at Dusseldorf airport and boarding and sitting in our squinched seats and trying to calm our palpitating hearts. I slept a little on the plane, neck stiffening airplane restraint sleep, and then we arrived in Barcelona, Thursday morning, about ten hours before Primavera's opening shot proper.

I don't speak Spanish, and neither does M., and though Catalan looks a little like French (which she does speak), it sure isn't. Upon exiting the terminal, our only plan was to meet at their hostel some Austrian couchsurfers I'd communicated with beforehand, at which hostel we would leave our one piece of luggage and then walk around the city, to breathe it in, dust and spice and all. We found their hostel on La Rambla, a sort of oozing strip of tourist manipulation.

La Rambla is basically a wide central pedestrian aisle between two opposite facing one-way lanes, which central aisle sports open air pet shops, florists, knick-knack hawkers and the most efficient potential-pick-pocket-victim-herding system I have ever seen, wherein flamboyantly costumed mimes pose as GWAR-esque gargoyles, tin-man cowboys, golden painted fairies, absolutely motionless brown plastic-skinned life-size Army Men and grotesque fake-babies-with-real-life-adult-sized-heads, all trying to solicit as many charitable tips as possible in their dirty, sawed-in-half plastic milk carton tip buckets. A kind of friendly competition has evolved where the non-motionless (i.e. not Army Man or Silver Paint Don Quixote) mimes click and chirp like very convincing birds for the hordes' attention, who semi-circle around the actors to take pictures and expose their wallet-plump back pockets to the jaws of the lawless streets. Trained on the mean streets and trams of Prague, I keep my wallet in my front pocket at all times, but I was nevertheless exposed to a degree to the seas of potential pick-pocketers as well, as I was carrying not one but two bags, my giant red clothes-packed backpack and my handy green canvas shoulderbag, plus M. had a bag with her too, holding her incredibly expensive camera.

I probably sound a little suspicious (or bitter) about this public array of distraction. If I do, it's because I became a victim of it very quickly. While waiting for the Austrians to return to their hostel so we could drop off our luggage (since we hadn't actually secured a place to stay or sleep that night, holding on to a vague plan of "sleeping on the beach*," an idea that had been introduced to me by a friend I have otherwise almost no trust in, which speaks to my own ideaslistically frugal lapse of judgment for seizing on it (the plan) rather than his lapse of judgment for suggesting it. This whole not-having-a-hostel thing exhibits a cavernous lack of foresight that my current hindsight just shakes its head at in pity), which was just my big red travel backpack, we decided to wander down La Rambla toward the ocean. I still had both my bags (the backpack and a smaller bag containing two books), and it was hot, so we took a rest on a low wall spoking out bicycle wheel-like from a central, statue-filled plaza facing the Mediterranean Sea.

*[It really speaks to Alex's personality that he so glibly dismisses his grand Money-Saving-Scheme for this trip -- we would save what money we'd spent on plane tickets by finding free accommodation, be it through the good graces of people from Couchsurfing.com or just crashing on the beach (which was our plan for Thursday night, having been unsuccessful in finding a CS host for that night).  "Finicky sleeper" doesn't begin to describe the torturous insomnia, inherited from my dad, I suffer if every factor is not perfectly aligned toward aiding my sleep, including but not limited to total darkness, white noise (silence will absolutely not do), a pillow for under my head and one for between my knees and a room temperature within a 2-degree range of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Naturally I was concerned that these gratis accommodations would be less, well, accommodating of these absurd requirements, but I felt an uncharacteristic wave of adventurousness when faced with this possibility.  Spending a night (or day, as the late-night festival schedule would dictate) on a white beach, a Mediterranean breeze caressing me?  I found it very easy to romanticize the possibilities inherent in this plan and was actually kind of looking forward to it, even being as woefully behind on sleep as I already was.]

A guy walked up. Kind of scraggly. Olive-toned, pitted cheeks.  Thinning, salt'n'petpper hair. I imagine he looked a lot like the outside walls of the building he lives in. He started speaking to us in Spanish, or Catalan. We said we didn't speak it. He tried French, but M. said she still couldn't understand him. He got my attention (I had been busy transferring the contents from my small bag to my backpack and vice versa) -- "Amigo, amigo" -- and I looked up only to find him still unable to communicate anything to me. This finally seemed to dawn on him, and he smiled, nodded and took his leave. Two minutes later I realized my small bag -- the bag that had been holding my books until moments ago -- was gone, and with it my camera and memory card, a blanket, chargers for both my cell phone and my iPod (where all my maps were stored) and some medicine (I have asthma), all just transferred into it.

Up front, I admit: I know it's just a little bag, and a cheap camera, and not much else of import. It wasn't even our blanket that got stolen. But that was the moment that set the tone for the entire rest of the trip. A certain faint but tangible golden bubble of tourist zeal had been roundly popped, and now all we could feel was omnidirectional suspicion constantly blowing across the back of our necks. Everyone, literally every single person we passed on our way back down the avenue, seemed shifty-eyed and out to get us. Right then, M. decided we had to get a hostel.

So we humped back up to the Austrians' place and booked ourselves a room for one night. Forty euro. Michael, the dark-skinned and swarthy middle-aged receptionist and apparent supervisor of the hostel who was on duty, spoke in a highly correct English filtered through both the Indian subcontinent and the Iberian peninsula. It would turn out that all of the hostels we encountered in Barcelona were run by Indians, which fact I haven't had the leisure time or cultural acumen to try to parse or place. Michael, though a bit stiff and guarded himself, was instrumental in helping ease our nerves after the shock of theft, and I count his uncomplicated helpfulness here as one of the few boons we received on the trip.

We got our room keys, dumped our stuff, changed our socks and then met the Austrians. We had lunch, went back to our newly paid-for room and took a nap, which was the first real sleep that M. had gotten in like 24 hours. And I had to cut it short so we could make it to the festival, which made me feel like a prize asshole in M.'s eyes (even though we still wouldn't get there in time to see Lightning Bolt, who are one of my favorite bands ever). With only about four hours of sleep under our belts, we were both feeling a bit touchy.

We reached the festival grounds by metro, which grounds are called the Fòrum, and drifted atop a steady stream of ostentatious look-at-me/don't-look-at-me purple tights and Kanye sunglasses until we got to the entrance. We received our press, photo, and backstage VIP passes, bracelets, cards and stickers without incident from the very kind and winsome press attendant, and then tumbled through into the festival grounds themselves, which looked like a big parking lot with half-built (or maybe half-collapsed) parking decks all around. Oh, and stages. Lots of stages.

I was excited. So many bands! Yo La Tengo first, of course, Yo La Tengo deserves to be first, they came first, somehow they came before even the bands that came before them, it's the beauty of their total rock approach, perfecting every style that's already been perfected. You always need to be seeing Yo La Tengo live, even if you've seen them a hundered times before, and so I was totally ready to sink into their set, which began just as I was rounding the corner of the Estrella Damm stage, the behemoth main stage of the festival.

The name 'Yo La Tengo' is possibly the only thing about the band that fit in at the big Spanish festival. In my experience, YLT is best up close and un-distracted-from. The combined effect of the light show, huge low-contrast screens, monster crowd and competing performances just over the fence all reinforced this belief. Fortunately, Ira and crew retained an isolated yet permeable focus that allowed their energy and charisma to get out without any interference leaking in.

[Click here for my write-up of a Yo La Tengo acoustic show] ]

They opened their set with an, as far as I know, untitled rock instrumental that lasted for I'd say eight to twelve minutes. Maybe because it's hard for individual songs to seem epic when they're suspended from a massive festival structure, but the opening piece lacked the expansive feeling of "Spec Bebop" or "The Story of Yo La Tango." It felt like a tight spring slowly stretching out to full length. They know how to flex once they've had their warm-up stretch, though, and the crowd loved it. "Mr. Tough" and classic "Stockholm Syndrome" were instant pleasers, while "Watch Out For Me Ronnie" caught quite a few, including M., off guard with its paint-peeling teen energy. They played a new song from their upcoming album, Popular Songs, but I don't remember how it sounded, but I remember liking it. The night was falling fast and my feet were getting tired already, so M. and I sat down to share some cheese and a banana, and Yo La Tengo finished their set with charm.

We wandered over to the press tent to try out the free Internet, but my iPod touch was almost out of battery (bad news, since all of my saved maps and directions were stored on it, and with the charger stolen we would have to mete out its remaining juice judiciously) so I didn't abuse the opportunity. It was getting chilly. Andrew Bird started to play but we despaired of parting the crowd to get to him in time, given that My Bloody Valentine would set up in about an hour on the main stage in front of us just vacated by Yo La Tengo.

We took stock. Everyone around us looked the same. And seemed to act the same, too. The behavioral/visual aesthetic that I've come to associate with hip, literate youth in America seems truly international, or thoroughly embraced in Western Europe, at least, but that ubiquity was little comfort. It's an oppressive feeling, being surrounded by 30,000 people who share this look. Or maybe not oppressive, but alienating, like that these are the people that are supposed to comprise my extended global cultural family and make me feel at home even in the middle of a huge city I've never been to before where I don't speak the language, but instead of feeling at home and rooted and inter-connected and able to strike up an edifying, or even at least enjoyable, conversation with any one random person, there was the feeling that we were alone on an island. In the middle of the city by the ocean without a beach. Why was there this feeling of lost-ness suddenly so salient?

I didn't know, and it was cold, and My Bloody Valentine's crowd was forming in front of the empty stage. Photographers get to slide into a small space between the stage and crowd to take up-close pictures, but they only get fifteen minutes or the first three songs to do it. I convinced a grumpy and disconsolate M. to let me borrow her camera and I left her in front of the press tent so I could try to get some shots of the band right as they came on stage. I was hoping it would be a magical moment -- they're My Bloody Valentine, for Pete's sake, is one way of looking at it. (For readers not familiar, MBV embody one of the most tantalizing rock sagas: after releasing an incredibly human and terrifyingly beautiful, genre-catalyzing album in 1991, the band split up and its creative core, Kevin Shields, disappeared into the mists of magazine rumor and urban legend. Their reunion in recent years was a "when pigs fly" hypothetical on the same level as the Pixies' was before they too ran out of money.)

M. wanted to go home, one reason being that M. doesn't like indie rock* and the other reason being that it was getting colder and colder and another reason being that we still hadn't gotten much sleep that afternoon and I think the shaky, heart-palpitatey feeling of being woken up too soon never really left her veins, or mine either for that matter, but I wanted to see My Bloody Valentine, for Pete's sake. Despite her objections, I chose to take some pictures up front, because it was My Bloody Valentine for Pete's sake, but some petty security contrivance kept all but a few photo pass'd photographers from getting up front and past a woman with a clipboard and a "This is my list and you ain't on it" attitude. So I circled around to the fringe of the bulge of the crowd right next to the amplifiers right as Kevin and Belinda Butcher and company took the stage and wordlessly began blasting away at our eardrums.

*[To be fair, "doesn't like indie rock" isn't quite accurate -- really I was just mostly unenthusiastic about Primavera's particular lineup (except, as it happened, a few non-rock acts). I was doing my best to be game, though I had agreed to the whole misadventure mostly at Alex's behest, despite the fact that I also hate big crowds and therefore really have no business being at a huge festival (on top of my general fatigue and paranoia after the theft of our bag).]

My Bloody Valentine has the reputation of being the loudest live band in the world. Their music is, on record, noisy but pinkly soft, like the inside of a conch shell broken apart. That is to say that it is not inherently loud, but does sound good that way. So their reputation as a loud live band is purely intentional and artificial -- they just turn their speakers up way way all the way and never stop hitting guitar strings. That's not a bad thing, but by the 2009 Primavera Sound Festival, their reputation seems to have overlapped them and enchanted Kevin Shields with the notion, erroneous, that all we came for was to hear them play their instruments with the speakers turned up bad-assedly loud.

The same hazy, gauzy blur of sound that makes Loveless such a fantastic album turned into a low-end riptide live. I was not able to immediately identify the songs, and when recognition did materialize it was more nostalgic than anything else -- the songs reminded me of why Loveless is so great without being so great themselves. It wasn't the volume itself that was the problem, it was the mixing, but since I believe the mixing was done specifically to Kevin Shields' taste, which same taste motivated the "just play loud" approach, they're part and parcel of the same fundamental problem and I can complain about them as if they were the same thing.

But I did enjoy the show. It's My Bloody Valentine, for Pete's sake. Who'd have thought I'd ever get to see them live? The non-Loveless tracks were a little cleaner and thus more recognizable, more absorbable and, ultimately and ironically, more enjoyable than the Loveless tracks I hold so dear to my heart, which more clean and recognizable sound just proves that Kevin is Kevin's own worst enemy here. Flip-sidedly, though, Belinda Butcher looked like she was having a ball, the light show wasn't bad, and a lot of people seemed to be really loving it. I was dismayed when I realized, however, while circling around the back edge of the crowd toward the press tent, that my favorite MBV song, "Only Shallow", had been playing for about a minute without my ears even registering its (theoretically) instantly recognizable opening moments, which a quick YouTube search reveals did not seem to be a problem of live versions of the song around 1991 and which same search and attendant realization makes me curse the twenty years that have passed between then and now, evolution-of-Kevin's-performance-style-wise.

I returned to the press tent, ears ringing. Aphex Twin would play soon. I found M. She was cold. I was cold. We were tired. Aphex Twin would play soon and I didn't want to miss it. But we were cold and tired.

If I never thought I would see My Bloody Valentine play live because they'd split up, then I similarly never though I would see Richard D. James play under the name Aphex Twin because he is an eccentric hermit (by reputation). He would play soon, and we were in the press tent. The festival seemed to swim around us, sunglasses and yellow high-tops and bags and people wearing strong deodorant and people wearing no deodorant and so many different hairstyles. So many different hairstyles that floated in front of my field of vision like Sneetches, with and without stars, so totally confused as to which were cool and which were a joke. A moment of dizziness came and passed, and with immense fatigue we made our way to the Rockdelux stage, Aphex-ward.

MBV were still playing. They'd gotten to The Holocaust. The Holocaust is a section of "You Made Me Realise" that goes on for fifteen minutes. It is pure noise, but I skipped it in favor of Aphex Twin's set, which started right at the same time. The Holocaust poured down over the rim of the deep bowl-like amphitheater we were nestled into, clashing with the cheers of the smaller crowd that waited for Aphex Twin to start, though not diminishing the excitement in the air in the least. A screen in back, an interstitial DJ-ing table, and another, smaller screen in front -- that was the set-up. Sandwiched between two screens. Projecting behind and in front visually what was pumping out aurally. I was excited. So many bands! Aphex Twin! Ahhh...

Aphex Twin's set sounded little like any of his albums, which is not that surprising given that none of his albums sound like any of his other albums. I had been crossing my fingers for some really insane breaks but instead he gave us a relatively straightforward and fluid continuum of beats and warbles and little Aphex-y flourishes. The music was spacey, glitchy in parts, and definitely not without a sense of humor (at one point James dropped a hip-hop vocal sample -- "Wait a minute!" -- completely out of nowhere, never to be repeated). The visual show was incredible, with syncopated strobes, UPC-like vertical arrays of colored lights, infinite-loop optical effects, freaky real-time (it seemed) image manipulation matched to the beat and, most memorably, distorted office-place printer/scanner images of Richard D. James himself superimposed fadingly one over the other making terrifying faces, Geiger-esque. I loved it, and exhausted as my entire body was, I danced for the first time that night. M. did as well. We even smiled at each other and the people around us. Our mood had been lightened somewhat by the unexpectedly affirming tunes coming from the Aphex Twin stage.

We went home. We wanted to see Squarepusher, but he wasn't on until 4:00 a.m. and M. was almost dying from fatigue. It was 2 o'clock in the morning when we walked past the Pitchfork stage and heard Wavves during what I would only find out later was an epic on-stage meltdown. A night bus took us to a square nearby our hostel called Placa de Catalunya, and a friendly and drunk Barcelonian gave us directions after inviting us back to his city next April 23, which he assured us was number one Barcelona day. When we got up and into our hostel room -- the hostel was perched atop a Borgesian, physics-defying stairwell the circumference of a drinking straw -- we collapsed, but couldn't sleep. The stress from the day was still buzzing under my skin, and the looming 11:30 a.m. mandatory check-out time filled M. with distracting dread. The time was about 3:30 a.m. Plus we still had to find some way to deal with our dying phones and our heavy bags the next day between hostel check-out time and the 7:00 p.m. date arranged for meeting our couchsurfing host the next evening.

Eventually I fell asleep, and M. fell asleep an hour later.

Six hours later, we woke up. Six hours is not a lot of sleep for us, though many people I think function on this much or less every day.* I'm aware that maybe some other people would have been able to get through the whole weekend that we got through without a scratch on them. Maybe we are, or maybe it's just me, from a weaker stock that isn't cut out for festivals in big cities. Either way, my body was appalled that I was trying to pull such shit over on it. It would punish me for the rest of the day with jitteriness, drowsing eyelids, shortness of breath and an overall feeling of internal uncleanness that only a seriously uninterrupted night's worth of sleep would fix.

*[Not usually after an an all-nighter followed by a night of four hours' sleep!] 

11:30 a.m. Check-out time. We shuffled out, left our bag with the Austrians, who were sleeping just down the hall and had the room for the entire festival weekend, and re-entered the bustle of La Rambla. From there we walked to a park with our blanket (the one that didn't get stolen) and laid down to try to get some more sleep. It was a little too cold in the shade and a little too hot in the sun, but somewhere in between M. was able to drift close to sleep, and I was able to stretch out and relax, which our skeletal bed at the hostel had prevented me from doing. It was possibly the calmest and most pleasant moment of the trip, but we didn't have long to enjoy it. With what little juice remained in my iPod, I realized that the festival forum grounds were not far from the couchsurfer's flat where we were going to sleep that night -- about an hour's walk down the arrow-straight Avinguda Diagonal. So M. and I went back to get our bag, and Michael the hostel manager took the opportunity of my reappearance to enlist my aid in troubleshooting his laptop's disc drive -- for some reason it wouldn't read the CD of his family's videos. The Austrians and M. chatted hospitably while I flipped from nomad to nerd mode, but my knowledge of Windows Vista was unfortunately scant and I had to bid the good natured Michael adieu and good luck with his CD.

Then M. and I rode the underground to the festival grounds, not because we were ready to head in, but because we didn't know how else to get to our next sleeping place but from there. Once at the forum, we set out toward the Couch that we would Surf. We needed a real nap.

So we walked. It took an hour, and it wasn't fun, but we didn't know any other way to get there easily. That's our fault for being underprepared, but then again our whole misadventure could be characterized similarly. When we got to the end of Avinguda Diagonal, which terminates in a circle of seemingly perpetual construction work and all the attendant dust you'd think such a description would entail, I blitz-scanned my iPod's cached map of the area to find our way to 609 Calle del Consejo de Ciento, the apartment of a couchsurfer named Ricardo.

There is a lot that's wrong with Ricardo. How to say it. That's my challenge: how to put it into words.

Ricardo is about 34 or 33 and is completely shaved bald with thick, Mediterranean eyebrows and an apartment at the top of an infinite staircase with an even tighter spiral than I'd gotten used to ascending in Barcelona. When he finally led us up this staircase, after having walked past us without seeing us or even making the connection that we were who he'd told to wait for him (us: two clueless kids with brightly colored luggage lingering in front of his ground level door) on his way up to his flat, we thought we were finally, finally going to get the chance to recover all of the energy and sleep that we had been chasing since the beginning of the festival and before. Ricardo spilled into his small flat with us, tired us, he jittery and manic and with white paint smudges up and down his forearms and his halfway-unbuttoned work shirt blowing freely in the wind breathing through the open windows and terrace. From the moment he opened the door for us, he began speaking to us, mostly to me but some directed at M., in a rapid and frequently unintelligible cadence that tended toward eliding any words (or phrases) that proved unsuitable for his elastic machine gun dialogue. A sentence from Ricardo's mouth usually sounded like this: "--nd then I was, like, [shakes head in disbelief] what is tha, man, I just, just just [blows air through pursed lips in disbelief] just dun get whaddis goin*." I didn't have much idea what he was trying to communicate to us, obviously, but I took his letting us into his apartment to be a kindness worth glossing over trivial eccentricities for.

*[Ricardo's most notable feature, to my mind, was his mania, which was even more striking in comparison to the crushing fatigue weighing me down. Generally I try to maintain an energetic level of engagement with people I'm meeting in non-intimate social situations; however, I couldn't dredge up the energy to do this with Ricardo, particularly when faced with the vibrating frenzy he exuded. There also dawned in me a dreadful realization that this unaware, unrelenting energy meant I would not be allowed the quiet solitude I so desperately needed. A quiet hatred for this complete stranger began to well up in me, and I closed my eyes, determined not to interact with him if I could avoid it, which I most certainly would.]

He told us he needed to take a shower, or a quick shower, or quickly he needed to wash, or something. We sat down on his couch, the couch in the small kitchen, onto which M. melted into as horizontal a position as the small piece of furniture would allow, and I went about emotionally preparing for a quick nap, taking deep breaths and peeling off my grotesque socks. My steaming feet left moisture footprints on the white tile kitchen floor, and I walked back and forth between there and the front of the tiny apartment, trying to figure out where we would be able to lay down.

We sipped on warm water while Ricardo finished his shower. He came out, crisp and dripping and still as talkative, telling us that some girl who he'd agreed could also stay in the flat that night (a notion that struck me as naive at best -- four people in an apartment this small?) but that a text message she'd sent him had changed his attitude quite a bit toward her, and he didn't understand what she wanted, and some more stuff. I barely understood him, and M. wasn't even paying attention. I jumped into the bathroom for a quick shower of my own, which I realized pretty much instantly was not going to happen as both taps spit out equally freezing cold water, and came back out to a horrible sight.

Ricardo, fully dressed, stood expectantly at the end of the short hallway with his arms above his head and raised eyebrows.

"What's up, Ricardo?" I said, squeegeeing water off the back of my neck with a towel-wrapped hand.

"Let's-well-I'm-here-just-waiting-you-know-rlllllllllllafter-your-shower-and-see-let's-go," he said, without a trace of malice or self-awareness. In print, this seems just, like, spacey, or stoned-speak, but in reality the entire sentence rushed out of his mouth in under one second. It took me a beat or two to catch up to him, and when I did, I was confused.

"Go where?"

"What are you -- 'chu mean? -- we're going to Primavera -- I'm coming with you, it's time to go, man, I mean, c'mon!" Breathless.

M. lolled on the couch*, seeming crushed by the dawning weight of our host's expectations without being able -- or even needing -- to fully register the details of them. I, on the other hand, mentally retreated from the facts like a teenager in a horror film: incredulous, drooling, helpless. We couldn't rest. Not only could we not rest, but we had to leave, right then, right when our bodies were just beginning to believe that maybe they'd not made a mistake in agreeing to wake up that morning, we were being herded down the hall and out the door and down the steps and onto the street and back into the fray we had just managed to escape.

[Actually at this point I was mentally jumping back and forth between my vaguely lingering desire enjoy the festival and my overwhelming need to sleep -- I seriously considered claiming illness and asking to stay behind to recover, but I didn't want to face a whole evening alone in a stranger's apartment, possibly unable to sleep, without food or companionship or even a book to read, and besides, I was uncertain whether this request would even be acceptable to him.]

I'd left my heavy backpack up in the kitchen, at least, which was the only improvement in my physically reality. While M. shamelessly skulked behind, not even trying to mask her contempt, I made an effort to show gratitude that Ricardo was letting us stay with him for the night by walking up front and conversing. Mostly I wanted to make every attempt to incline Ricardo toward lending us his key and letting us come home to rest, or something. I wasn't sure what I was gunning for. Exhaustion sapped my imaginative powers. Maybe I was hoping he would carry me piggy-backed to the festival so I could nap en route. He wouldn't have known how to carry me anyway. Ricardo was a moron.

Ricardo didn't know how to do anything. He's lived in the same flat my backpack was currently locked away in for eight years, and in all that time as a Barcelona resident he's never figured out how to use the electric trams. I asked him if we needed to buy a paper ticket from some standalone station ahead of time, and he assured us that you could just pay with cash on the tram itself. We stood chatting (one-sidedly) at the nearest tram station for about twelve minutes before a good Samaritan noticed us jangling change and leaned forward to address Ricardo in Spanish (or Catalan -- I cannot tell the difference between the languages when spoken). Apparently you can't just buy tickets on the tram, he told us, with cash or with change, which, though M. and I had suspected as much, was certainly news to Ricardo. So with just two or three minutes until the tram arrived, while M. and I were pooling our coins to buy tickets at the coins-only ticket dispenser, Ricardo bolted off and around the corner to find change somewhere, he yelled back over his shoulder, then he was gone.

I shared a pained look with the good Samaritan and leaned back against the frosted glass tram stop facade, hoping Ricardo would never come back.

He did, of course, and just in time for the tram*, which was stuffed to the windows with the same cooler versions of myself that had engulfed me the night before. Our en route conversation (mine, Ricardo and M.'s) was inane at best. Ricardo at one point responded to a question ("What kind of music do you like?") with, "You know, scenester music, I love it." A picture of a distinctly un-American approach to underground culture was beginning to emerge, and I lacked the strength to defend myself from it.

*[While waiting for the tram I began to breach with Alex the subject I was singlemindedly clinging to: when would we, or would we even, be allowed back into the apartment?  This guy's mania brought to mind visions of returning home well after dawn, forcing me into yet another unwelcome all-nighter. "So, I'd like to get back probably no later than 1:00 a.m. or 2," I ventured.  Alex quickly backed me up on this: "Yeah, M.'s really jetlagged and we haven't had a full night's sleep yet really. We should try to get back before the trams stop at 1:00 a.m."  Ricardo didn't really seem to register anything except the broadest strokes of what we were saying. "Oh come on man, don't be a pussy, man, I am gonna party tonight, what, can't you take it?" He seemed to tie a good deal of a person's worth (masculinity?) to the hour until which they were willing to stay out -- or at least his own swaggering claims about how hard he partied invited impressed responses from us.  I loathed him fully.]

We got to the festival grounds again and went through security, walking with Ricardo up the wide slab of asphalt that formed the entrance to the festival. A huge line of people hooked around from the side of the indoor auditorium obscured by its jutting corner down the asphalt and in our faces. This was the line to see My Bloody Valentine's second show, which was held in the auditorium and which required a separate seat reservation to get in -- for regular festival goers and VIP pass holders alike. I wanted to see My Bloody Valentine again, of course, but in the exhaustion of the night before and the morning that day, I hadn't secured a seat reservation and was too tired to be upset about it. Ricardo, on the other hand, was coming to the festival pretty much specifically just to see My Bloody Valentine, which means he'd spent about 70 euro just to come and stand in line to get into the auditorium.

So why, then, was he so surprised at the huge line? Well, it turns out he had no idea when the show started, and was completely unprepared to get there in time to see the band actually play. In fact, he waited in the line that he was still confused by until he was told at the front door that he had the wrong ticket. He had only spent 70 euro for a single day pass to Primavera, not the special, in-Auditori MBV show, so he ended up arriving too late to see the band that he hadn't even bought a ticket for. God damn.

This is where M. and I left him so we could get our photo and press stickers for the day. Emotional strain was accordioning into M., so quickly and so much that between the time we left Ricardo and the time we stepped away from the press booth with our colored passes affixed to our shirts, the plan for the night had devolved into essentially Survival Mode. I wanted to see Dan Deacon, Sunn O))), Fucked Up and The Mae Shi, primarily, while she had only really cared about Art Brut and Jarvis Cocker, but we knew after only a cursory emotional inventory that we didn't have it in us to follow through on that plan. I needed to get Ricardo's key and take us back home.

[Click here for my interview with Dan Deacon in Chapel Hill, N.C.] 

He was easy to find. His bald pate reflected the sinking sun, for one thing, but even if it hadn't, he was animatedly conversing with the stranger in line ahead of him. It's a belief of mine that genuine people develop genuine friendships over a (relatively) substantial period of time. Or, looking at it another way, to transition from strangers to buds on shoulder-punch terms in just the amount of time that we'd left Ricardo standing in line assumes an almost completely absent core of personality, which absent core of personality goes hand-in-hand with an equally absent level of self-awareness, which self-awareness is required to function as an empathetic member of society, which Ricardo certainly does not.

Ricardo, lacking such self-awareness, stared at me blankly when I suggested we leave the festival at 2:00 a.m. for a nice night of rest back home. He stared at me blankly when I suggested that, in lieu of his leaving with us at 2:00 a.m., he instead let us only borrow the keys and go home without him, letting him into the flat when he got home. He stared at me even more blankly, if that's possible, when I suggested he only lend me the keys, so I could take M. home and tuck her into the air mattress, and then bring them back to him within a reasonable amount of time. The very idea that he should have to go home, or even facilitate anyone else doing the same, before 5:00 a.m. was literally ungraspable to him. As I snaked down the line with him, step by furtive step, I tried every tack I could think of to convince him to help us get some sleep. I tried to enlist him in a camaraderly conspiracy to shake off that pesky girl* so we guys could have a real night out of fun, and all he needed to do was let me borrow his keys for just like an hour, and I would give him my wallet, my cell phone, my iPod, the shirt off my back as collateral, just for an hour while I took her home and then came back to rock out with him, which rocking out he clearly clung to as the only possible worthwhile act in which to spend the night engaged, about which I tried desperately to convey that I wholeheartedly agreed with him, the rocking out that is. I assuaged his ego at every opportunity, and appealed to his ineffable human reason, which wouldn't possible fail to see the sense of my suggestion, or at least the patheticness of our condition.

*[Here Alex has elided some details. Through this whole insane experience, Ricardo had been so uncommunicative that it was unclear whether he had a meet-up plan that he just hadn't mentioned, or whether he was so stupid and self-focused that it didn't occur to him that we would like to know when and how we could get back into his apartment. (I was later vindicated in this fear when I discovered that the other couchsurfer he was supposed to have simply didn't get a place to sleep that night because she had texted him after he was already too drunk to function, and he simply hadn't ever bothered to get back to her.) It was quickly becoming clear to me that he probably didn't have a plan, that I would be kidding myself by allowing for the possibility that he did, and this realization was making me anxious. It seemed very possible that he would wander into the festival grounds and end up in a stupor for the next four days and that we'd not only have nowhere to sleep, but we'd never see any of our stuff again (I was starting to feel pretty naive about having left it in his apartment). Not even knowing what would happen to us or to our things was making my anxiety even worse: I insisted that we find out when Ricardo planned to leave, and if it wasn't til late, whether he would let us into his apartment or come to some sort of compromise. Even if he wouldn't, at least then we could figure out what to do next.]

He just stared at me blankly. When he did say something, it was just a flat refutation of all my logical argument.

"No, man, that's not normal, I think no," he said, for the first time slowly and intelligibly. His head pointed downward and his brows furrowed, as if he were wrestling for literally the first time in his life with the concepts I had just introduced. Go home before 5:00 a.m.? It seemed beyond his comprehension. That's a stock phrase in a lot of writing -- beyond his comprehension, beyond my comprehension, it was beyond all comprehension -- but here it is absolutely accurate. All etymologies of the word include ties to the concept of grasping something, as in physically holding onto, and that is the sense I got standing there next to him in line. My suggestions to Ricardo slipped through his mental framework like runny yolk on a warm day. As we neared seat reservation check point, I realized it was hopeless.

M. met me halfway up the lawn from where I popped out of line. She could tell I didn't have the key, didn't have a plan for what to do. Neither of us had the energy. To do anything. Maybe my blood was too thin, or I didn't eat the right balance of nutrients before the festival. I was just so tired. We both needed to sleep. We decided to try to squeeze out some more info from my almost dead iPod at the press tent. She powered her phone on to use the last bit of battery and we started dialing hostels with the coordination of a well-oiled call center.

There were no available hostels. Well, there was one. The same one we'd stayed at the night before. But now it was three times as expensive. We kept calling, but the picture resolved before us pretty quickly. If we wanted to get the sleep we needed to finally enjoy our trip to Primavera, we were going to have to drop some change.

M. led the way to the ATM. The closest one to the forum was wrapped in cracked plastic and sun-beaten glass. A huge cigarette-butt-filled puddle flooded the sidewalk in front of the terminal. M. had to lean way forward to stick her card in.

This operation cannot be completed. The machine spit her card back out. She tried again. This operation cannot be completed. She tried again. Same result. Her bank account was frozen. She couldn't get any of her money.

The thing was, she had several thousand dollars saved up, while I only had three hundred. Which meant the impending 160 euro hostel fee would have to come from my meager savings, leaving my bank account skinny as a slatribbed hound. Plus the obvious suddenly overhanging fear that something more than trivially wrong had occurred somewhere in the banking system and that maybe these 160 euros would be the last we had to spend between the two of us, as unlikely as that actually was. Not fun thoughts.

So I got the cash and we took a metro back to La Rambla, grabbing a falafel for M. as soon as we exited and then returning once more to the hostel in which we'd spent the previous night tossing and turning.

However, due to our never having actually said we wanted the room, it had been rented out to other tenants between the time we left the festival and the time we arrived at La Rambla. The cold shock of roomlessness splashed us both in the face, which must have showed because the guy at the counter took pity on us and offered to call one of their sister hostels down the street to see if they had room. We got an escort down the stairs and about half a block down La Rambla in the direction of the sea, having been told that we could get a room at this new place for the same price as quoted us earlier.

Our moment had finally come -- everything finally turned around. The room was wonderful, less like a hostel than a hotel proper, or at least maybe a motel, with a bed with sheets and lamps and fake hardwood headboards (insead of wrought iron grating) and a real bathroom and no improperly caged window that just about anybody could slip through and steal our stuff in the middle of the night, and, best of all, because we'd paid for two nights in a row, time. We didn't have to be out by 11:00 a.m. the next day. We could sleep.

And we did. Even though my bag was still at Ricardo's, and I was stressed about maybe not being able to retrieve it very easily the next day,* I had no problem passing out immediately and staying that way for about eleven hours. M. slept for longer, and didn't wake even when I did, showered, and went to get my bag back from Ricardo's.

*[Actually at this point I started to feel a lot better, or at least calmer.  We knew for certain our stuff was stuck in Ricardo's apartment overnight, but he had at least told Alex we could get it the next morning. I had had the paranoid foresight to put my toothbrush in my purse, and we could get a hostel and actually sleep tomorrow, and I would never have to see Ricardo again.  Things were finally starting to look up!]

Because my phone had completely run out of money and almost battery, I had no way of contacting Ricardo once I got to his street. I didn't realize this until I had gotten to his street, either. So the only reason I ever got my stuff back was the broken glass of the ground floor door that allowed me to stick my hand in and let myself in from the inside. I huffed up the tower of stairs and started banging away at his door, hoping he and not some angry and monolingually Spanish person would open the door. It finally swung open, and Ricardo's bleary and clearly unhappy person stood in front of me in a wrinkly pajama t-shirt. I zipped past him with a perfunctory greeting and was relieved to find my junk spread out as we had left it. I stuffed it back into my bag as quickly as I could. He came back into the kitchen, wobbly and grinding the heel of his hand into his eye socket.

"Oooh, man," he drawled. "Ohhh..."

I wasn't interested in any sort of conversation, but somehow I always get drawn into them anyway. I found myself listening to Ricardo's complaints about the night before while we both sat out on the terrace drinking orange Fanta, which is so much huger in Europe than America that I feel like I've missed an entire cultural epoch forming and solidifying. Ricardo complained about not being able to get into My Bloody Valentine for reasons for which he expressed a total lack of understanding, despite their utterly simplicity. He complained about getting so drunk last night. He complained about the girl who never texted him about surfing his couch, except when she did text him it was too late so he ignored her. I felt simultaneously buoyant at having regained my belongings and weighed down at having to fake a stimulated expression of engagement for the duration of the conversation. I drank two glasses of orange Fanta and then finally stood up and stretched and said I had to go. (The last thing I did, however, was to accidentally stumble and sit back down hard on the three-wooden-board bench seat, cracking the center board in half with my ass weight. Inexplicably, Ricardo wasn't fazed. I realized why when he reached over and replaced the broken bench cover with an identical but unbroken three-wooden-board bench top. What the hell kind of person keeps multiple copies of his bench components lying around the apartment? I couldn't wait to get out of there.)

I finally got out of there, returned to our new hostel to greet M. with toiletries and toothpaste and we changed into clean clothes. Our flight out the next morning back to Prague (via Munich) left at 6:00 a.m., so our plan was to go to Primavera until about 2:00 a.m. and then go straight to the airport, which meant the sleep we'd accrued over the previous night would have to last us through the upcoming final festival night and the six hour layover in Germany the next day. Having no other better option, we secured our kipple and set out one last time for the festival grounds.

This day, Saturday, was the day of the big Three-Way Collision. Three acts -- Sonic Youth, Gang Gang Dance and Ghostface Killah -- all scheduled to play at 1:00 a.m. A total ballbuster. How are you supposed to deal with that? But that wasn't until later. The thing going on right when we got there was Neil.

About as big a legend as you can get, obviously, but unfortunately I haven't listened to a lot of Neil Young. Harvest is all I know with passion, and besides "After the Gold Rush," "Southern Man" and "Rockin' In the Free World" (lol), the only Neil Young songs I can recognize come from that album. I don't really know how to appraise a performer of such repute and longevity -- I guess he gets points for still getting up on stage, but I didn't know how hard I should expect him to rock. The Harvest tracks of the night -- "Heart of Gold", "The Needle and the Damage Done", "Old Man" -- were phenomenal and brought me up onto my feet for maximum receptivity. In between these tracks -- and excepting "Rockin' In the Free World" -- I found it hard to pay attention. Maybe that's a result of growing up in the mp3 age, but I doubt it. I've just rarely enjoyed watching an artist perform songs I had never heard before. Moral of the story: I should probably listen to more Neil Young.

Liars came up next for me, and M. followed me to the ATP stage hinterlands. Liars are one of my favorite bands, all around. I've seen them three or four times already, each show utterly unique and enjoyable, and when I was lucky enough to interview antipodean frontman Angus Andrew for this august publication [Click here for my interview with Angus Andrew] in the past, I found him to be a really great guy. I wanted a setlist of nothing but Drum's Not Dead and "Plaster Casts of Everything," but I was of course prepared to love whatever they gave us.

The stage was sparely set, which makes sense for a festival as tightly scheduled as this one. The band members carried themselves consummately -- no flashy all-white tuxedos this time, just black shirts and microphone stands. M., not a fan of this type of music, nevertheless entered the press pit with me, and started snapping away as soon as the show started. Angus I think knows very much what makes for good rock photography -- as soon as he appears he turns into all elbows, gaping jaws and wild dance moves. Plus he's like eight feet tall, so even if his antics weren't larger than life, he sure is.

I found it hard to let myself be drawn in at the beginning of the set. Some new pieces were played, some pieces unfamiliar to me, and some general fucking around was on display. Not unrewarded fucking around, but not immediately gripping like live Liars can be. After about the point when the Catalan security team flushed us from the front trough, though, the show really picked up. The band ripped through a song (or maybe two?) from their debut to great applause, and Angus personally thanked "Neil Young for opening for us, and Sonic Youth for closing for us." They ended the too-brief stint with some fantastic tracks from They Were Wrong, So We Drowned and Drum's Not Dead, the only songs M. said she "even came close to liking," and the crowd began to fracture in expectation of the big 1:00 a.m. Decision Crisis.

It was about half past midnight at this point. We'd already been backstage once, where we got some free drinks and a chance to chat with Angus (he remembered me!) and also where we witnessed the Spanish emergency medical staff bundle up a way-too-drunk guy for site removal. We wondered what to do to kill time before the next round. M. couldn't care less about Sonic Youth or Gang Gang Dance*, so we agreed to hang around the Pitchfork stage and wait for the Wu Tanger to start, then I'd check out the other two shows.

*[Beyond not being excited about Sonic Youth or Gang Gang Dance, I was actually as excited about Ghostface as I was about any of the artists showing at Primavera. Though the festival's roster was heavily indie-rock-inclined, their selection of rap and electronic artists, though painfully limited, was of exceedingly high quality. And the Ghostface show didn't disappoint -- his stage presence was charismatic and playful, with a lot of nuggets thrown in for true old-school hip-hop fans ("Rap these days is kinda bullshit," he proclaimed at one point, opting, as Alex mentioned, to cover/sample a number of old classics in his set).]

Ghostface Killah's speakers were turned up really loud. I think I enjoyed the beginning of his set, but I can't really be sure -- I couldn't make out but one out of every three or four lines, and the overloaded boom of the speakers turned every beat into a giant androngynous thumping. Nevertheless, his swagger won me over immediately, as he seemed to be having fun playing in front of basically a bunch of white people. I found out later that, after I left, he covered Wu-Tang's "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthin' Ta Fuck Wit'" and GZA's "Liquid Swords" -- my two favorite Wu-products of all time. ARGH! Well, hardly my worst judgment of the weekend.

And I don't regret leaving. I kind of back-hopped in the direction of the Sonic Youth stage, hoping to catch a bit before heading over to Gang Gang Dance. Whatever they were playing wasn't as interesting to me as the fact of their playing at all, that I was finally, in the midst of all this chaos and breakdown, for the first time seeing Sonic Youth play live. I was still for a moment, taking it in. This band represented for me the essence of indie rock legend. From the first time I realized, in college, who they were and what other people thought about them, I'd been fascinated, more by my reaction to them than by their music itself. Did I like it, or did I only want to like it? Was the fact that I couldn't even tell, the fact that I had to ask myself, proof that it was obviously one (or the other) answer, and my own inability to see this obvious answer just testament to my own unfitness to be among my peers, talking about music with any sort of genuineness? Or perhaps the fact that I even cared enough to ask the question evidence enough that I'm the kind of person who isn't so easily told what to like, and that if I think I like it then I should just not doubt myself so much and fucking like it for God's sake? These thoughts thunderclapped in my head, reverberating like epic rubberbands between the present and the past, between the moment of standing and watching Thurston and Kim and Lee and company playing just then and the moment of first realizing the import of this band among the world of indie rock. I felt just on the edge of some historical prophecy fulfillment, but then I realized I really didn't have time for that right then.

I scooted out of the crowd and began to sprint full-flung down the pavement toward Gang Gang Dance. A guy, some European kid, fell in behind me, matching my speed, and yelled, "Gang Gang! Gang Gang Dance!", with every syllable rhyming with "pan," which I really liked. We ran wordless for the rest of the way, coming around and down a slow bend of sidewalk and into the sunken bowl of the ATP stage. In this fleeting rush, the particulate crowd blended into one mass, one whose uniformity nevertheless alienated me less than the groups of twos and threes that had swarmed around me since walking through the gate on the first day. It was the first time this feeling manifested in me, this sort of communal, agreed-upon glee. My troubles seemed to sink into this communal positivity, my residual fatigue and feelings of violation and rigid out-of-placeness becoming gelatinous and mutable and reforming into basically a big smiley face. Though this occurred pretty much indisputably independently of Gang Gang Dance's playing on the stage in front of me, there's no other band I would have chosen to soundtrack the moment. Liz Bougatsos swayed like a conjured viper in the center of the stage while the rest of the band fiddled fabulously with their toys all around her, generating a sound that was, yes, terribly booming but also sensuous, in the sense of an overpowering smell or red velvet emotion and less like, say, the avalanche of sound created by My Bloody Valentine. Even though I got kicked out of the press ditch for not having a camera (yelling, "I had one but it got stolen!" doesn't really earn any points with Catalan security guards, it turns out), it was still a fantastic show by one of the best bands in indie rock today. Cheesy sounding, but true.

Calculating it just right, I split from GGD and ran back up to Sonic Youth for the first real pleasant timing of the night. Just as I came within range, I heard Kim's gut-familiar moan/croon from "The Sprawl" and I knew things were going to keep getting better. They followed "The Sprawl" with "Cross the Breeze," just as it is on the album, and followed that with new track "Anti-Orgasm," which I didn't pay much attention to. The hour was closing in on 2:00 a.m., our self-appointed check-out deadline, and so I peeled off to find M., which was surprisingly easy. The Ghostface show had ended earlier than either of the others, and we literally almost ran into each other. She gave me the bad news about missing my favorite GZA song, and then we linked hands and walked to baggage claim to get what's mine. My crotch-girding passport-pouch was digging into my flesh in a really undescribable way. I think another second not spent heading toward home would have been a mistake. Barcelona's metro system runs all night on Saturdays, which gave us our straight shot to Placa de Catalunya, where we got onto an airport shuttle and finally exhaled. Forty minutes later we were at Barcelona Airport, checked-in and seemingly out of the forest of disaster. (We were hungry, but we got muffins for that.)

But of course that forest's roots spread out far. When we got back to our flat at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, our cat had urinated* all over the clean clothes M. had brought from the U.S. while they were still in the suitcase. Disastrous! The next time I go to Barcelona, I'm putting him in the bag.

*[Three times.  Fucking cat.]