The croupier

If I empty my days, my days should became empty... but actually it does not happen that way.

I think it is the croupier, the thing that is always giving cards, whatever there is available. Well, it is probably useful, a kind of mechanism to worry about things that are important, to remember that today you have to do this or that, an alarm system. The problem is that it does not relativize at all, any small issue can make me feel as worried or fearful as any huge problem.


There is a good example that happened in Belgium. I spent there a few days for some administrative stuff, anyway it was very good to meet my ex-colleagues and some old friends. One of them lent me his house; he does not live anymore, anyway the place is amazing, he basically built it with his own hands and the hands of some friends for I don't know how many years. It was really a special feeling staying there, sometimes emotional.

Anyway, one of the days I had to leave more or less early in the morning, just after the breakfast coffee, in a kind of hurry. I took the bicycle to get to the bus stop, and when I was on my way I realised that I had not double checked that everything was alright in the house before leaving. Not that anything was going to be wrong. I guessed the only thing was the burner for the coffee, and I thought about it and I remembered myself switching it off. So I did not go back to double check anything. The amazing thing was that at some parts of the day I got really anxious about it. Imagine: how do I let the house of my friend burn !!!!! I was really worried and at the same time so surprised about worrying, since it was pointless, since I knew that everything was ok, and it was just that thing I call the "croupier" checking on me again and again and again, playing with something pretty emotional like my friend's house.

In the evening when I was getting back riding my bike I was smelling smoke. I could not stop laughing at the nonsense of the sensation.


But then, I guess, sometimes you worry about something which is important, or sometimes you are not so sure that you've switched off the fire, or it is just something that does not depend on you, and in those situations the mechanism must be the same, coming back again and again to cause you pain, but not really helping so much on itself.

On the other hand I guess it is the same mechanism that allows you to remember that you have an appointment, or that you have to switch off fires of the kitchen, or whatever you need to take care of.

Funny thing that it seems impossible to stop, and that it will try to play with whatever cards are available. I'd say it is just the results of years and years with my "habit" of worrying so much about everything, and it will take me still some more time to relax the mechanism, (if it can ever be relaxed). On the other hand I'd also say that the only fact of knowing about it makes it by far less powerful.

I'm in Sicily now. So nice, so relaxed. And the cropier humorist keeps amusing me every day.

Germans and Spanish

In Belgium now, on my way to Rome, and I still had to prove the point that the Germans might be the most similar central Europeans compared to Spanish. Well, the results of the investigation are quite negative. Sometimes it is just good to refute a hypothesis.

Anyhow, at the beginning there were a couple of clues thatwere very good, it appeared to me since the very first day in Berlin that (1) Germans seem to speak loud and (2) spend a lot of time at the streets.

As for number (2), well it was the spring, although at night it was getting a bit fresh, the weather was pleasant, and in the city there's really a lot of restaurants and cafés, always crowded. There was also a big park closed to the room I rented, (the famous Tiergarten), quite full of people; this one day which was really sunny and I went there for a walk and there were so many people on the grass lying under the sun, some of them in swimming suits and some others in their underware, and some even naked!, then looking more closely I realised there were all men, one of them was even distractedly exposing his everythings to anybody passing-by; probably in the wrong place, I just kept walking straight staring at my own feet and got out of there. Then, it's been quite afew years I haven't lived in Spain, but that's not anything you'll see over there, (I've double-checked with my mum).

Then about (1), they definitively do speak loud in a bar when they are drunk, but I thought at home also... until the landlady came to me and kind of apologized since by chance I seemed to entered the house whenever she was in the middle of an argument with her son, she claimed she does not usually yell to him but he's in a difficult age, (around 15 is my guess?). Then I started switching off the mp3 player more often and yes, the streets and the underground are completely silent of conversations.

Anyway, there's a lot of clichés about the Germans, and they still drink beer on those huge jars, but they don't seem to be fat and big anymore, in fact kind of old ladies tend be skinny and to dress like teenagers, showing the belly, (for the confusion of the typical male staring at spring-dressed girls at the streets).


This week back in Antwerp has been nice, there is a guy who has find a finantial hole in the nadaist contract, (although that's more like a luxury problem), and there were some pseudo-trascental findings in Halle. I'll explain in following posts, (sightseeing in a place like Rome could be stressful but I will try to keep calm and cool and find time for doing nothing and also for the Internet).

Nowhere worth going except where we left

From “Girls”, by Nic Kelman, a novel about power and sex: “And so we want faster cars, faster boats, faster jets, faster computers – anything more powerful than everything else. And we continue to want them even after we learn that there’s nowhere worth going except where we left, and that the faster we go the further away from there we get”.

Myself, I just wonder how is it that we have that small machine in our heads which seems to be programmed for melancholy and sadness, for missing the past, for sticking to the crap. A human being is an impressive artefact, and the human mind is in particular amazing, the outcomes it can produce, the puzzles it can figure out, however it seems to be in fundamental conflict with, (if not driven by), those emotional mechanisms that make up the wonderful feelings sometimes, but also the background noise, the remaining sensation that there’s nowhere worth going except where we left.

And the point is, despite of the fact that the sorrow is there, while it didn’t need to, if you just neglect it, and try to make your living at the rational part, it doesn’t seem to work at all.

Anyhow, I am going to take a rest from transcendental kind of stuff; the post for next week (or whenever) will be the results of an investigation I am working at, under the hypothesis than German are the closest people to Spanish, (at least, when they are drunk).

Real life

Some good friends have confessed that they regard me as a kind of guinea pig, and my decision to leave everything as a big laboratory experiment; that they want to see what happens to me, they want to know the end of my story, (although of course they don’t mean any harm and they don’t want anything bad happening to me). They meet me and see that I’m happy and relaxed and enjoying my time, but they’re afraid that eventually when the money is finished, (because the nadaist project itself does not seem to be self sustainable), I will fall and get into a hole, a depression even bigger that I had before. Well, I’m also a bit concerned about that moment, (maybe around the end of the year), in which I have to go back to "real life" and to work and deal with real problems.

Then, in Berlin, my landlord is a psychologist; we started with a kind of corridor conversation for politeness, and the guy does not speak much English (and I’d say he does not speak much anyway), anyhow he looked interested on my story, here and there he was asking questions and making short statements, however there was this issue in which he insisted quite a lot more: he did not understand why I was calling it "the moment to go back to real life", it did not make sense to him, it wasn’t the good words to put it. He did not add much, which was the perfect way to make his point.