Barcelona

Every single great thing people have told me about Barcelona is true. It's all true. Buy your ticket and get here as soon as possible. I have been here a little longer than 24 hours and I am in love with this city. It is my dream city. How can I live here? I want to make this happen.

I am writing this on my phone and so it is abbreviated, what I would like to say. I am wishing I had brought my laptop so I could really talk about what I am feeling.

There is beauty here in abundance, sexiness in abundance, amazing weather, and a populace that seems fully committed to living the good life.

I got fucked in a backroom last night, fucked by the same guy who minutes earlier fucked Jacob, this sexy Argentine whom we had met at a bar earlier in the night and then barhopped with.

I am sitting on my balcony drinking Red Bull and vodka and smoking cigarettes, ready to head out again. I spent the day naked on the beach reading the amazing David Remnick piece on Bruce Springsteen. I swam in the Mediterranean for the first time. It felt amazing. The Springsteen quotes really inspired me. He is one of my favorite artists and only became more so after reading this piece.

I went to the contemporary art museum, which I would have found completely unbearable were it not for an amazing video they were screening - Jose Luis Guerin's "En construssion," which got at life and death, gentrification, and the odd reverence that contemporary art museums inspire, even when they are complicit in the odd and complicated thing known as urban renewal. It was refreshing that this museum addressed its own history and role as a gentrifying force. Everything else at MACBA though made me angry and frustrated with the contemporary art world for all the usual reasons. I laughed at the Rita McBride show. I despised the clean white lines of the Richard Meier building. I left.

I wandered through the food market at Saint Antoni. I sat at a cafe, ate a fish salad, drank Estrellas, and marveled at the life around me, the city I was sitting in. I then wandered back to my hotel, absolutely enamored with this city, a little buzzed, giddy with being alive.