Killing Batteries

Have you guys ever had it where you are doing some strenuous exercise, let’s say biking, and you’re like “Wow, I’m feeling pretty tired. I better stop soon.” But then a limo with a bunch of beautiful women drives by and they’re all hanging out the window going “Hey hot stuff, if you can beat us to the next light we’ll give you a beer”. And when you beat them they go “If you can beat us to the mall two miles down the road we’ll each give you a big smooch”. And then when you beat them again they’re like “If you can beat us to Des Moines, Iowa we’ll let you do tequila shots off our nipples…” and so on until you’ve gone about 500 miles further than you planned and then you get home and the part of your brain that lets you temporarily get away with insane mental and physical ordeals says “OK dumbass, I did my job, now you gotta face the music. I’ll be in Bermuda.” and you collapse into bed and can’t move for two weeks?

Well, substitute the flirty girls in the limo and replace that with a ridiculous workload and that’s my life. One irresistible writing gig after another, back-to-back, coming almost faster than I can deal with them, requiring me to work pretty much seven days a week for a year and a half with only a couple fleeting breaks. And now, total system failure. Riotous success (and freakish sex appeal) comes with a price people.

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I’m gonna level with you. I’ve got nothing to write about. I’ve been in Minneapolis for a week and I’ve been so exhausted and distracted that I haven’t even thought about work until a few minutes ago. So, I’m gonna do what all over-extended writers do and recycle material. At least I’m up front about it, unlike the Pope.

So, I’m posting a excerpt from my interview for my fan club in Bangalore. That’s right, I have a fan club in Bangalore, India. Don’t you? They haven’t sent me any membership figures, but it’s a really huge city, so I’m gonna guess it’s in the tens of thousands. Back me up on this Siri.

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In a few hours I will climb into a couchette on the night train to Madrid, bringing to a close my week of trudging around Barcelona with all six pockets of my cargo shorts ludicrously over-filled with various journalist battery-powered gadgets, maps, pamphlets and breath mints. These shorts are an integral part of my Travel Writer Tool Box and I can’t live without them, but when I run across the street to catch a bus, the contents of the pockets swing around, my knees get all banged up and I feel like my shorts are going to drop to the floor. This is what it must feel like for women to run without good chest support. My cargo shorts need a sports bra.

This was my sixth visit to Barcelona over the course of 14 years. I really love this place, and I’m never able to adequately illustrate why, because there’s certainly enough reasons to hate it. The streets are loud, often smell of a mix of exhaust fumes and piss and are second only to Venice for being crowded with the most gifted Slow Walkers to ever sort-of-walk-the-earth. Prices are high and service is ridiculously bad - I had to make one very expensive phone call and three trips to the train station in order to complete the transaction for my overnight ticket to Madrid and nothing short of a loaded gun could have improved the service at TapaÇ24, one of the city’s best tapas bars. Crime is worse than ever, the tourist hoard is inescapable and the locals expect all visitors to speak flawless Spanish and if you only speak it reasonably well, you are disciplined with even worse service. And virtually every day I am nearly brained by a bus side view mirror that passes unnecessarily close (a friend of a friend of mine was killed by a speeding bus’ side view mirror in Bangkok, so for once my irrational fears are fitting – I’m still working on my fear of being hit in the eyeball by a cigarette butt, flicked out of a moving car though… baby steps.).

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Well, it’s been another rough week in paradise. I’ve suffered through four nights of five star treatment (in three different hotels). Sadly, tomorrow I am downgraded to a four star business hotel in Barcelona’s decidedly uncool and un-centrally located financial district. Woe is me.

As I write this, I am in a white cotton robe, the salts from my hydro-massage bath still tingling my pores, laid out on an adventurously orange couch in a junior suite in the only five star hotel in Palma de Mallorca’s city center. I’m greedily consuming the entirety of the complimentary bottle of champagne that was chilling when I arrived. Though the ice was melted and the champagne warm after I returned from four hours of frantic, last second errands, including a ludicrous one hour search for a kebab shop within a 12 block radius of my hotel (in this neighborhood, you eat five euro tapas on a trendy bar terrace or you don’t eat, apparently). But I digress… I want to dish on Ibiza.

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Friends/LP editors/groupies,

I’m happy to announce that I submitted the last of my Tuscany work for two different LP books (Tuscany and Umbria 5 and Italy 8, both due in stores February 2008) last Tuesday, 10 full days before deadline. Now I don’t wanna brag or anything, but WHO’S YOUR DADDY??? WHO’S YOUR DADDY LP TUSCANY??? NOW BARK LIKE A DOG FOR ME!!!! NOT A SMALL DOG, A BIG DOG!!! AAAWWW YEEEAAAAAH!!! SHA-ZAM!!!

And so on and so forth.

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