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 sometimes it happens anyway, through the alchemy of being drunk and being around. A friend makes you. This is the promise. If the system didn’t occasionally work, nobody would believe in it. 

Feel strange at the moment. Am slipping into diaristic contractions. Samuel Pepys used to shit himself to keep warm in winter. Say what you like about diaries but it’s a solid principle. Everywhere I go I see cockroaches on their backs, writing and thrashing. I help them to self-right but they tumble over again. Their brains are liquefied. They’ve been poisoned. So they come tumbling to the street to die, pinwheeling and pirouetting against warm paving slabs in orange streetlights. That’s not a metaphor, they’re everywhere. Massive twitching brown things. I assume it’s poison. I’m not familiar with the behaviour of cockroaches. Perhaps this is just what they do. Better to die in the street. Back in the hostel I go to sit alone in the social area, which is a basement. The walls are concrete and the sofas are faux-leather. Three vending machines hum in the corner. The hostel staff on night duty follows me down, doesn’t look at me, slaps a laminated sign on the table football: FUERA DE USO OUT OF ORDER. I don’t know whether he thinks I’m going to play alone. I’m not saying I definitely wasn’t. 

Dear diary: Cartagena is okay. I am okay. I’ve been better and I’ve been worse. I’m not taking a lot of joy in things at the moment but I’m taking more joy than if I was somewhere awful doing something terrible. Does perspective really exist? Can we ever really know that there are children in Africa who are starving, as we waste food? Not that I would ever waste food. I’d make myself sick eating leftover food before I wasted it. I do. I remember the times I’ve done it. I’ve ruined whole nights out because I eat such a disgusting amount of leftover food that I can barely stomach another beer. I am defeated. I go home early, rolled like a dumpling. But you take the point. I don’t think perspective is real. We are always exactly as happy or sad as we are, and where that sits in the grand spectrum of human misery isn’t worth a fart. It’s a nice idea to have perspective but we have to accept it’s just a thing used to berate people. The animal in your brain who feels things and suffers will not be persuaded to go to sleep with well-meaning murmurs about how much worse it could be. But how much better could it be? Did you ever think of that? Have you seen how some of these cunts live?

I’ve done nothing in Cartagena but work, write, walk around in the sun. Hunch over a plastic hostel chair. Eat a pastry, drink a coffee. Make myself a sad little sandwich. Eat my way through a packet of rocket from Aldi with single-minded determination. Where’s the glamour? A Roman theatre overlooks the city but I’ve not been yet, because I feel a guilty panic when I don’t work. I’ve been to the gym once and then spent the next two days aching horribly, wincing as I walk down the hill and my fraying quadriceps hum into life. I made a batch of pasta with mussels and I’ve been eating my way through that too. You won’t catch me complaining about travel, but it isn’t a rich man’s travel. Someone ate half of my bread this morning. I could only have half a sandwich. Reduced hummus. Sliced tomato. The hostel has a slide to get to the ground floor. I haven’t been down it yet. I don’t think I’d come back. I’ll just be sliding and sliding and sliding and sliding and sliding and sliding forever.