a monday night.

the house is quiet, it's 9.30 pm and i have, considering an obvious lack of friends or aquaintances, 3 options:
a) start preparing the short course in aesthetics that i should alledgedly have completed by may, b) start uniting brush and canvas for the alledged shared exhibition next month, or c) hit the town on my lonesome, looking for adventures.
considering i haven't done anything productive all day i figure it's pointless starting now, when really my desires at the moment are grossly focused on appeasing the void of an empty house and a diminishing social agenda. so, option c.
but oh, the streets echo with my footsteps and its actually almost as bad as perth on a monday night, but the air is balmy and there is smell of rice and fish frying up on the first floor of a house. i realize an insurgent necessity for spending a considerable amount of time on the street, where there are lights and there are people, and that maybe that has become for me a freudian uterine comfort zone. but alas, tonight cordoba offers little to adventure seekers, or maybe im a little too tired.
a swarming mass of tourists float by, hands in back pockets, bearing the obligatory beige cargo pant. (why oh why must the northen europeans on holiday adhere to such predictable fashion gestures? "jan, have you packed the cargo pants for the weekend in spain?" "yes but i couldn't find your third pair, you know, the cutoff ones in case it gets warm!").
i circumnavigate the great mosque-turned-basilica, sparkling gold doors and intricately sculpted arches, and visualise the moors some centuries ago, when the city was theirs, up on scaffholding, chipping away their patterns on the yellow rock. i turn left on a dimly lit alleyway, then right, then up until breathing gets difficult, then left and left again until i am lost in the winding juderia, between two houses leaning towards each other at the top. i see a dog and a fat gitana with black socks and long plaits wobbling past. after some geographic contorsions i'm out on the main street again, where the people are, and i feel a little sad. people are piling into a tiny bar, a group of boys stands outside, there is one long stare from one but i dont want thatkindofadventure. so i sit a while in the square, hand out a couple of rolie papers to an anxious kid, smoke a cigarette and head home.
aleida feeds me chicken and rice and we talk for some time about the spanish subdivisions, and if the basques and the catalunians should have their own private country, and about nationalism and patriotism and intra-national racism, and i wonder a little naively perhaps why intra national differences must be considered a reason for separation. or maybe its really just a money problem, like in italy. the north doesn't want to feed the south and so demands autonomy. i don't know. all problems seem to have their roots in money somehow.
stupid money. but its a happy night up here on the balcony, with a choc-vanilla giant sandwhich and the company of a tiny colubian and a super loud boy from bilbao.