I am 21 now:

an old man, really. All that is left for me now are geriatrics and erectile dsyfunction. Or maybe not- I guess I'm not so old. Come to think of it, I am still very, very young. But I am getting old enough to understand that I will not always be young. My father told me yesterday that all of a sudden when he looks at me he sees a man and I'm not sure how I feel about that. Scared? A little bit, sure, but it's more than that. Nostalgic, nervous? Yes, those too. Excited? Absolutely.

I think about things a lot. Too much, probably. My brain is like some whirring motor that I can't shut off. I think about where I'm going to be in ten years and metaphoric paths that wind out of sight. I think about whether the two-week-long life of a fly seems as long to them as eighty or ninety years does to us since we are each only given two reference points-- birth and death-- and it is impossible to have perspective without a third. I think about my phone call the other day with a friend I grew up with and how he mentioned that his sister, who I still imagine as eight years old, is in highschool now. I think about me and him ourselves in highschool, drinking in parked cars and winning state championships, and I can swear it was just the other week.

It was late at night and clear and cold outside and I was lying on a park bench about to turn a year older when I tried to explain all this-- the way my mind runs and wrings and turns-- to a girl that smiles and giggles and laughs a lot. She thought about it and tried to smooth down a part of my hair she claimed was sticking up.

"I don't get what there is to worry about," she said. "All you can do is what you think you should do."

She furrowed her eyebrows for half a second; I waited.

"And if that doesn't work, well then, you do something else."

Click, like that the motor stops. The quiet is nice.

An Email to my Kantian Ethics Professor:

I thought you'd enjoy this...

Hey Professor Wuerth,

Somebody stole my Kindle on a bus in Mallorca yesterday afternoon. Yesterday night I received an email from Amazon thanking me for my purchase of Crítica de la Razón Pura-- evidently Spanish thieves are well versed in their Kant.

I can still hope that after they read about the categorical imperative they'll decide to return the Kindle to me.

Best, CL.

There's still adventure to be had in this world.

You just have to know where to look for it.


Mallorca:

“At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence” (italics mine).
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

On Thursday night I had a knife pulled on me.

I was with a group of friends on Las Ramblas, the principle avenue of the city, when a guy who looked homeless tried to sell us cocaine. One of my friends, who was drunk, told him we didn’t want any. The guy followed behind us as we walked away and kept trying to sell us the coke. My friend told him to fuck off. The guy put his hand on my friend’s shoulder and pulled him back. My friend turned around and pushed him. I stepped between them, held my friend back, and told the guy that my friend was drunk, we were not interested, and that he needed to leave us alone. His pupils were hugely dilated and his breath smelled like stale beer. He reached down into his pocket and pulled out a rusty, ugly knife and held it down by his pocket, casually. I backed away from him with my hands in the air. My friend tried to walk around me to get at the guy but I pushed him back hard and told him that the guy had a knife. That sobered him up enough for us to get out of there quickly. Still, I was shaken up. I kept thinking about how close I was to the guy and how if he had wanted to he could have stabbed me easily: the handle had been short but the blade had been long and thin—like a knife for gutting fish.

Then, today, two men tried to rob me in the park. I was sitting on a bench with a girl watching fall come to Barcelona as the leaves floated down from the trees. The day was cool and sunny and beautiful. A Moroccan (I assume he was at least—they’re all Moroccan here) came up and asked if the street behind us was Carrer Pol. No, I told him, it’s not. He mumbled something else. I don’t understand what you’re saying, I told him. Then everything happened at once and I saw his eyes flick up and I realized what was going on and I turned back to my right and saw a guy walking away quick and calm with my backpack. Then I was up and chasing him and my chest was thrown out and I was leaning back and my legs were pumping and he turned back and saw me and started to run, too.

But I was faster.

I chased him up a hill and then down it and through the park and when he saw that I was about to catch him he threw the backpack down and kept running. I picked it up and jogged back to where I had been. The girl I had been with was standing behind a tree peeking out at the guy who had been the decoy. He was still standing near the bench we had been on. He saw me coming back and started to walk away. I was out of breath and jogged up behind him. I spoke in English:

"Hey asshole, yeah you, asshole. Get back here."

He stopped and turned around and threw his hands up in the air like what, who, me?

"Fuck you man," I said, pointing a finger at his chest, trying not to gasp for air, "you can’t do that to people."

I walked up to him-- I was deciding if I should punch him. I’ve never really punched anybody before. I was bigger than him and decided that I had the right. Then he reached down into his pocket and kept his hand there where I couldn't see it or what he was holding. He looked at me and I looked at him and a second passed and I thought of the knife the other night: I turned around and walked away quickly. When I got to the girl I looked back and he was gone-- I tried to hide that my legs were shaking.

“Well,” I said, “at least we got a story out of it.”

Her eyes were opened wide and she was blinking a lot.

“I can’t believe that just happened,” she said. Then, after a while: “what was in your backpack?”

“My homework,” I said, “and my lunch.”

She looked at me like I was kidding.

"Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting."

-Haruki Murakami

"If you want to be happy, be."

-Tolstoy

All is well.

I am content and my Spanish is strong and getting better and I go running up the mountain that is behind my neighborhood. At the very top there is an old abandoned fort that is falling apart and I sit on its roof and stretch and rest and look out across the entire city towards the ocean with Spanish kids my age who show up on mopeds to drink beers and smoke cigarettes. I don’t know if the spot is a well-kept secret but I discovered it myself and won't tell anybody where it is. It is the type of place that is good to take a girl you want to impress, although she will probably get tired on the walk there and not have worn the right shoes.