Cartagena
A rock bar, of sorts. They're playing the classics. Led Zeppelin, Ram Jam, The Doors. A narrow room, barely any seats. Cracked tile floor. Exposed wooden beams. Only, decorating the face of the bar, art . Good art! A greyscale pair of breasts. A West African style wooden mask. Some kind of ochre abstract smear. I sit in the sailor's corner. It's nautical themed. Fake rigging, a mermaid, painted starfish. Stained glass buoys, bound in dark twine, dangling against a white-painted wall with blue wave motifs. She's from Birmingham, bam-ba-lam. I'm oscillating between misery and contentment at personal-best velocity. Is this good? Do I like this? I'm drinking Mahou and reading Kim Stanley Robinson. Walk this way, talk this way. At the tipping point where I go to bed or I don't. What I'm waiting for is the moment where it all mysteriously coheres. Some nights this happens. You get caught in someone’s slipstream. I’m too tired to go and make a friend, but som...
