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Also pictured but not related to my summer:

• Amorgos
• Me in balls
• Early superimpositions
• Celia’s Eye
• Young Sarah
• Scarf
• Tins
• Light switch

I’m in the shoe shop and there’s a kid, about four, being a little raucous. He’s starring wild-eyed into a mirror twice as tall as him and hooting in mock alarm. Bloody Lacan, I think, he’s got a lot to answer for. I pull faces at him at the mirror. I like pulling faces. His mum is fiddling flusteredly with a buggy with another child in it. Come on Paul, she says, we’re going. He turns, he doesn’t have any intention of going. Neck, he says, one word, and then turns back to the mirror and howls. The sales assistants look amused. Yes, you are a pain in the neck says his mum. She turns to the assistants looking, I suppose, fraught, sorry about him, she says, he is special needs.

I’ve started to dream about you again. The kind of dream you don’t talk about. But this time it’s in a different language. We are walking by railings, by a wall, by a church. We are taking the train to my place. You are showing me dancing and I am showing you rockets and flowers booming and we are miscommunicating.

What time does here is it loops around on itself moves not in the known figures hours minutes days but as traffic haltingly at rush-hour switchbacks divot potholed country lanes hedged in traffic light start stop on the gridiron of the city one night takes a frantic moment one afternoon is dragging itself by bloody finger-stubs up the volcano meals happen when you’re not expecting you go out to start drinking with the sun still high wake late in the mists of dawning your various watches clocks tell the hours various their minutes move at different instants.

Arrive. Cagliari.
Ravioli.
Bottle of wine.
Whirligig cousins, siblings, uncles, nieces, who knows whos.
Mirto.
There is a lot of mirto. Someone gives us a bottle.

Escape. Walk the city. Drink an expensive beer down by the port. Bastione.
Politics. Polemic. Night dissolves. Scotland gets mentioned. Lost track.

Buy some flip-flops. €3. They have “Italia” printed on them. Buy a newspaper. Bus to the beach. The bus driver doesn’t know how to drive. Straight in the sea.
The sand is white the water is a painter’s pallet of oils. There is a breeze. We walk 5k along the waterline to the end of the beach where fishermen are staking out their plots. The water is thick black undulating like an oil slick. Seaweed.
Walk back. Wine. We are invited to a party. They serve us enormous slabs of bloody raw meat which we are to eat from paper plates using plastic cutlery. It is a parable for something. There is also cheese filled with maggots, which makes the whole affair worth it. Also wine, beer, mirto, and then other things. There is vodka and there is gin and tequila and things with unhealthy colours. I throw my flip-flops at the posh. Someone plays the guitar but only knows one Chilly Peppers song. Other things must have happened. Probably we get thrown out.

Surface very very slowly and carefully. Davide is covered in wounds. Part of his side is gouged out, his elbows bloodied. Straight to the sea to float. Wounds sting. There is a little wind. Food: grilled horse, enormous and gorgeous. Down to the local. The Blue Saxophone. Mirto. One beer. More mirto.

Beach. Pinella. Sea. Lamb for dinner.
Tomato, basil. Aubergines, cheese. Wine.

We have guests. We eat massive bloody steaks. This time they are edible. Wine. Mirto. Blue Saxophone. Mirto.

Drive back to Cagliari. Walking tour of the city. The crumbled aristocrats, failed by fascism. The video game creator.

Beer. Wine. Sardinia, apparently, has the best weed in the world. We walk across the city. It is longer than we thought. We walk back. It is still a long way. Beer. Wine. Fall asleep in the kitchen reading.

Pack a lunch and head up the beach to a little rocky island. The sun is fierce but the wind fiercer. I get cooked. Island is inhabited: venomous veins of green sludge, goat-horned sea-birds, the ignorant. A man is teaching his son a lesson about the futility of life. There are no fish here.
A game of Risk.
Shopping: beer, wine, mirto, a necklace.
Goodbye to Vito.

More bloody steaks.

Mega game of Risk lasts all night. Beer. Mirto. Declare stalemate at 6am. Skinny dipping while the sun rises. Dog-walkers.
Few hours sleep.

The court of justice. A fascist brick. The last word in art. Waterfight. Bottle of wine. The Cane Bicy.

There are two Uruguayan girls who mostly keep themselves to themselves. Rumour has it they have a massive stash of drugs they are not sharing. Beer, wine, sausage. Astonished by the possibilities afforded by attics. Extending ladders. Cannabis farm. Monkey. Younger brother. Evil twin. Limoncello. Out to the Bastione. Posh-watching. Rum and coke in a plastic bottle. Barefoot. Add to the graffiti. Compose a poem in Sharpie. Find “I hate myself and I want to die” trace over it and add “, Oh Yeah!” Two kids come up with a fat gold marker and we attempt a conversation without much success. Off to grotty little bar. Beer and mirto. Continue writing on the walls, drawing on the table. Ambulance called. Not for us. Can’t find patient. Fresh from the bakery.

Struggle awake. Eat everything left in the house. Fall back to sleep on the sofa.

Jerzu wine festival. Forego the little cards and maps and lists of cantinas stupid glass pouches around necks ridiculous queues and go straight to the little stalls in the street buy it a bottle at a time. 1^st bottle great, 2^nd piddle, 3^rd little better, back to 1^st lose count of how many bottles. Shenanigans. Bad ju-ju. Dancing in the street. Kusturica. Drop bottle of wine and get very vocal. Confuse urology with neurology go in through the forehead looking for the perineum. Take out shins. Stumble up the hill.

Sleep by the side of the road in borrowed sleeping bag wake up with rocks in it blood all over foot. It is already too hot. There are bugs buried in Davide’s flesh.

Breakfast in a little bar they think the barmaids are hotter than hell to me they are chiselled out of graphite. 6 coffees. 6l water.

Brought to an atomic beach, ash drifting from ruined sky flecking grey sand. Domingueros with everything including the kitchen sink. Sun.

The whole journey in reverse. Press rewind. Back with the Uruguayans, a painted man, a whole crew, two cars full. Beer. Vodka. Vodka + red orange juice. 2€ for 3 litres of wine. A pizza. Off to the gig. Lead singer is wasted, an anachronism. Beer in big plastic glasses. Bare feet. Beach.

The gig ends and time unwinds. There is lots of talk about the nastier parasites in the world. Will make sure I get all my shots before going to Uruguay. Time twists back on itself. Suddenly there is no one here but me. And one guy moving chairs dishearteningly. The street is empty. Hang around a bit. Decide to walk home. Can’t be far.

Four hours later. Flip-flops broken. Bare feet filthy. T-shirt stained with mirto. Arm has been mauled. Was screaming at a dog for a while, if I remember correctly. Don’t remember drinking mirto. Bumping into old ladies. No answer at the door. Slump. Taken in by aunt. Showered, coffeed, snacked, cartooned. I am temporarily Zio Davide.
The real Davide is back. We can’t work out what went wrong. He was about to call the police.
Shopping.
1 hour sleep.
Airport.

Night-London is bellow.
Spread out.
Amoebaed
Estrellado.

Well, that was different.

Today was a miserable grey and showery day, then, around five o’clock, a siren went off in the distance and they called up to get us down to the basement – tornado warning, apparently. So we all sat down snug and secure in the basement – and you’ve got the realise that basements around here are done up like any other room in the house, my host family’s basement is decked out as some kind of shrine to the Wisconsin Badgers and has sofas and stashes of fizzy drinks and a ridiculous-inch TV on which we watched the local weather channel… for a bit, that is, until the atmospherics killed the satellite reception. We sat in silence for a while, at a loss as to what to do without a TV. I did some knitting. Then we figured it was probably OK to get above ground again and we walked around the house, looking out the windows at the ridiculous downpour outside, watching the neighbour’s garden slowly turning into a pond. We thought we’d take a peek outside and spotted that one of the house’s drainpipes coming off the roof wasn’t connected properly and was starting to flood a small portion of the front garden. While Aaron, one of the guys I’m staying with, started to bail this out, I did a circumnavigation of the house to see whether all the other pipes were OK or not. I stepped out into the rain and was soaked to the skin in about two seconds, it was like plunging into the ocean. All the other drainpipes were fine, so we did a bit of bailing and managed to fix up that one broken pipe.

The rain seemed to be easing off slightly and we went down to the street to check out the flooding there. There seemed to be a couple of drains that were blocked and the street was completely covered in water. Marvelling at the ridiculousness of the situation, we waded out into the middle of the road where the rainwater came up to our waists. I even managed to swim a couple of strokes, before deciding that the water was probably too gross to get my mouth that close to it. We also warned a couple of drivers away from the lake that the street now resembled.

At this point a woman came out of her house and told us her basement was starting to flood. She asked us if we could try and sort out the drains. We grabbed some tools from her garage and waded back out, feeling with our feet for the blocked drains. But as it turned out there wasn’t anything we could do. We went into the woman’s house to see if we could help and found her looking fairly beat, humping a bucket of water into the kitchen. I went back to our house to pick up a couple more buckets while Aaron went to help bail.

If I’ve got this right all the basements round here have a system whereby drains all around them collect surface run-off. This water is then all funnelled into a sump, a rubbish-bin-sized pit which has a pump to move that water out to a public storm drain (I made all that up with a bit of educated guesswork by the way). Anyway, if there’s too much water the pump can’t cope and the sump overflows into the basement where it’s situated, and this is what had happened to this woman. She was bailing out the pump by hand but not managing to keep up and some water had come into what was obviously a kids playroom. We made a chain, with her bailing and Aaron and I hauling great buckets off water up the stairs. At some point her husband came home but even with three of us hauling buckets it wasn’t enough and we realised that most of the basement was now an inch deep in water. Then Tim, Aaron’s brother, came by and told us that their basement was starting to flood, so Aaron left and I stayed to help. By now the rain was pretty light, and the lake was starting to recede, leaving a high-tide mark on the lawns. Despite our earlier efforts one driver had managed to half submerge their car in the middle of the street before some of the neighbours constructed temporary barricades across it. At this point we decided that it was pointless to keep trying to bail and we’d be better off saving stuff from the basement… to reiterated – the basement is almost a house unto itself – this one had a kind of a work area, a play room, a lounge with a kitchenette, a bathroom and a music room. While the husband and wife started to get stuff out of the way of the water I decided, seeing as how we were now standing in almost three inches of water, that it might be a good idea to start unplugging electrical things, it didn’t seem like it would be that good an outcome if we saved the drum kit but fried ourselves in the process. I was doing fine until I put my hand in the water near a submerged and hidden 4-gang and got a pretty nasty shock that fizzled up my arm and threw me back a bit. My hand’s still tingling several hours later. No one else seemed particularly bothered about the electrics, however, and by now there was an eight-year-old kid running around, getting under our feet – I thought it’d probably be a good idea to finish unplugging things. After that I helped move some bits out of the way. The couple whose house it was seemed to be in shock and not behaving very systematically – I tried to get some idea of what I should prioritise, but they just gabbled at me. The guy swore a lot. By now, however, a bunch of other neighbours had arrived to help, though it looked to me like everyone was just getting under everyone else’s feet. Too many cooks spoil the broth and all that, so I thought I’d make it back to our house and see if they needed any help there.

Our basement was in a lot better shape – the sump had started to leak, but with copious towel placement and judicious bailing the damp bit had been confined to one corner of the room. When I arrived they were bailing out the sump into cool boxes and humping these up the stairs to throw into the garden. We carried on doing this for a while, but it was pretty clear that we were only keeping pace with the water coming in, and we could be at this for hours. Finally a neighbour lent us a pump, like the kind you have in a fish-pond for your miniature waterfall, only bigger – we trailed a hose up through the house and set it off and it worked a charm. We set about to cleaning up what we could – moving damp things out the way, starting to dry out the carpet and whatnot, and then collapsed.

The rest of the evening has been on/off showery, with incredible lightning displays, but the deluge didn’t come down again. Watching local news we find out that 7 ½ inches of rain fell in two hours, that two people have been struck by lightning, that the rain is tearing enormous chunks of tarmac off the streets, and that in a couple of places collapsing sewers have opened up giant sink-holes in the street, with at least one car swallowed up. Fun and games.

All this is slightly weird because while I’ve been here I’ve been working on a small collection of poetry which is partly based on the biblical story of Noah. I’ve been doing lots of research, not just into the biblical account, but also modern day attempts to find the ark, Noah in Islamic tradition, the Babylonian Gilgamesh myth, and so on, so it’s a little bit strange to find myself in the middle of my very own flood.

This year has not been a very fertile one for me, creatively speaking, I am hoping, though, that when I’m in the States next month I will have a lot of free time and it’s my plan to engage in a few different projects that I’ve been thinking about. I have a whole bunch of video/animation ideas revolving around my head and my notebooks, however most of them are relatively big undertakings that I haven’t had any time to bash about. I also have an idea for a short collection of poems that I will try to write; I have a knitting project barely started; some musical ideas that I did start but that I lost when my hard-drive gave up the other week; a couple of ideas for short stories; t-shirts that I’d like to design; and so on. I know I won’t scratch the surface of this, but I’m hoping to make significant progress on a couple of them, and when work starts back up again in earnest in October I’m hoping I can be more strict with myself about setting aside time regularly to work on these ideas.

Despite the fact that it has been a dry year I have been making one or two short videos, although they didn’t get any commentary here. Here then are the videos that I’ve made in the last four months. Many of them can be watched in High Definition if you click through to vimeo.

Valentine’s Day 2010, from snailsnail – My Heart Is Strong Enough To Tear Itself In Two from snailsnail on Vimeo.

This was made for Valentine’s Day. It is hand drawn animation made using Flash.

The Life and Adventures of Young Elichair – Part I from snailsnail on Vimeo.

This was made in a great hurry as a birthday present for my dear friend Elisa. After Effects.

Happy Birthday Marcus – 2010 from snailsnail on Vimeo.

Another birthday present made for another dear friend, Marcus. After Effects.

Organos – Prueba from snailsnail on Vimeo.

This is a very short test made relating to someone else’s work. I am teaching them After Effects and helping them to realise a project that they have.

Happy Birthday Ben 2010 from snailsnail on Vimeo.

Yet another birthday present, this time for my dear brother Ben. After Effects.

Motion and Fear – A snailsnail Sunday Project from snailsnail on Vimeo.

This is my most recent Sunday project (although a lot of it was done on Saturday). A short motion piece. After Effects.

Voy por el periódico y el tío pone su dedo en mi pecho, dice – yo soy de allí. Porque llevo mi camiseta de banderas y, por lo visto, es chipriota. Pues, yo de aquí, digo y pongo mi dedo en mi pecho. ¿De donde? Dice el, de Inglaterra y pago el periódico y los dos lapices he cogido. Adiós. Chau.

For the sake of documentation, for I imagine that anyone who cares already knows, my summer goes like this:

6th July	Fly to Chicago with a group of teenagers. Deposit them there with families. Hopefully relax for three weeks.
28th July	Return to Madrid, hopefully with the same number of kids that I left with, to endure a few days of ridiculous heat.
30th  July	Fly to Sardinia with my flatmate for a few weeks of superb food, plentiful wine, and lounging around on the beach. We have a large house on the beach to stay in.
12th August	Fly to the UK for a couple of weeks where I will probably stay in the Bay apart from a whiz to Bristol where my lovely sister is getting married.
End August/ Beginning September	Return to Madrid.

I am rather worried.

I am rather worried about the state of my brain.

You see, there have been several causes of concern recently.
One was when at around midday I found myself in a Metro station a few stops away from my house with no reason for being there and no memory of the journey nor of having left my house. I don’t know, I was just, suddenly, I suppose, in a Metro station.

Last week something worse happened.
I realised this weekend as I was reviewing the week’s classes and doing some paperwork, that I had no memory of one particular class the previous Monday. I knew for certain that I had taught the class prior and the following one, but this one was a blank. Anyway, If I hadn’t turned up they would have called my company and complained, right? So when I had the same class today I said to my student:

— I have a question for you.
— Yes?
— Did we have a class last week?
— No. You didn’t come.

Oh. That means I have about four hours unaccounted for, between the two classes that I did teach last Monday. My student, intriguingly, had assumed that he had cancelled the class, when in fact he hadn’t.

All this comes after recently having read Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore on the recommendation of Sam. It is a book which deals with a near future in which drugs are available to selectively erase memories. Due to repeated abuse of these drugs the main character looses his ability to form new memories and the whole book is told in jittery drug-addled prose that reflects his decaying faculties.

And this makes me wonder where my brain is heading.

The title of this post comes from a wonderful Spanish phrase which is the equivalent of the English one, “Mind the Gap”. It is something you hear a lot on the Metro and (I’m writing from memory here, so I might be wrong), in its entirety, it goes: “Atención! Próxima estación en curva. Al salir tengan cuidado para no introducir el pie entre coche y anden.” Which, translated means: “Attention! The next station is on a curve. On exiting the train take care not to place your foot between the carriage and the platform.” There is a lot more information there than in the English version, but functionally they do the same thing. Which makes me think a lot about language and translation and things… but I think that’s probably a post for another time.

But one other small thing. Did you know that your perceptions about language are completely wrong? People consistently have no idea – neither about general trends in language use around them, nor about their own language use. This is nice, because it means that whenever someone starts talking about language use you can just tell them that they’re wrong (hopefully they’re not a linguist – but you don’t find them very often, particularly not in Spain). If I was a good blogger (which I don’t think I have to prove to you that I’m not) then I’d reference that assertion, but I’m too busy worrying about the state of my brain. There.

I am very happy to live in a place where it’s not weird to find a gnawed pig’s leg poking out of a wheelie bin.

I am less happy to be living in a place where you can buy world cup themed football flower arrangements.

Melon, watermelon
Melon, watermelon
Apple and pear
Apple and pear
Coconut here,
Coconut there

Passion-fruit
Strawberry

It’s the fruity dance
Yeah yeah yeah yeah
It’s the fruity dance
Yeah yeah yeah yeah

Here’s a thing:

Every day I take a bus to work from the bus station near my house. The bus station is underground and the buses enter and exit via a pair of long dark tunnels that snake slowly up towards the surface. These tunnels are two-buses wide, or rather, slightly more than two buses wide, and one half of them is used for parking buses and coaches when they are not in use. Now, much as you may fold your wing mirrors in when you park your car – so as how they won’t get clonked – so too the tunnels are sufficiently narrow that this is what the bus drivers must do with their vehicles too. The problem is this – the coaches that park there are quite a lot taller than cars, and the mirrors are difficult to reach. How, then, do the drivers fold them in and then out again if they can’t reach, one wonders.

Today I found out.

A driver wishing to leave the bus station stands in the middle of the tunnel and flags down the next oncoming bus. This bus then draws up alongside the parked coach, positioning itself slightly forward, with its front wheels aligned with the front of the parked vehicle. The waiting driver then uses the front wheel of the departing bus as a step in order to climb up the side of his cab and position his mirror correctly. He then jumps down, bangs on the door to signal to the other driver that all is well, and climbs into his coach ready to set off.

Ingenious.

I am part way through redesigning snailsnail.com. It has long been in need of it and finally yesterday (or was it the day before?) I got inspired and started hacking out a design.

And this is where we are as of right now – this is what a design of mine looks like when it’s half way done – basically most of the positioning is done – the header and the navigational links are done, you can’t see it but the footer is done, and now I have to put the stuff into all the boxes.

I have no idea how professional web-designers do this kind of stuff, in fact – it would be kind of nice to find out. Personally, I follow this process:

1. rough a design out on paper.
2. use a vector design program (my beloved inkscape) to create an image of the design.
3. on paper again – rough out the html structure of the page – into <div>s and so on
4. in dreamweaver (or alternative text editor (I basically only use dreamweaver as a text editor — it has very nice auto-complete) I write a barebones  html file that has all my divs nested correctly and with id’s or classes assigned plus place-holder text in them.
5. in dreamweaver also I write a css file which has empty definitions of all classes and id’s and link it to the html file.
6. In the css file I colour-code all the divs using html’s basic colours (which you can define simply by typing the word – red, cyan, black, etc).
7. I then work on layout – positioning all the elements correctly on the page.
8. I start a somewhat mixed-up process of exporting background images from inkscape which are linked to in the css, filling in proper content for the html file (replacing place-holder text with real text including <h1> tags, etc and images) and plugging in other style refinements (fonts, etc.)
9. Troubleshooting! The design is more or less done at this point and here is where I start fine-tuning things – juggling padding and margins and so on – re-exporting images where I’ve messed up and things don’t line up properly, and so on.
10. Test in IE and panic! …. then give up….   I always intend to start out from the beginning with testing my design in different browsers – but inevitably don’t bother and do it all in firefox. Finally I have to check it out in another browser and discover that everything is broken (thank you microsoft). I run through a period frantically googling for solutions to my problems before eventually just kind of giving up and pretending that everyone in the world uses firefox.

Anyway, we’re in 8. at the moment – although I haven’t done the finer parts of 7. yet.

I haven’t actually got much done today, because Davide and I popped out for an explore of the barrio [neighbourhood] – we found a bookshop which looked cool but was a bit overpriced, a place selling homemade wine for 1€ a litre (not half bad either) and finally we popped into a bar for cañas [small glasses of beer] and tapas. Then we decided to cook ourselves a feast – we made a crab-meat and parsley starter, followed by breaded mussels with tomato and finally stuffed squid. Unfortunately we overcooked the mussels because we were too involved in a game of backgammon, but everything else came out deliciously. Anyway – back to the html grindstone.

PS. – I am still not doing very well at keeping this blog up, as you may have noticed. I don’t see this situation improving anytime soon, to be entirely frank. However, you may like to check out the fotolog every so often, as I’m much better at keeping it up to date.