To Where I Am Now

Woke up, undid the gate, checked out the new blue sky, waved at the ladies of the day, they waved back, said hello to the girl in the Colombian café, we talked about yesterday’s rain, waved at a familiar face in the café and walked down to the main street. I decided that I just wanted to get out in the sunshine and use my legs. Locals, tourists, buskers — I saw a bloke in a Motörhead T-shirt and I wondered if there was ever a busker who played Motörhead songs?

So I’ve become a jarhead, that is, I head in the direction of jars. In the main street (Santa Catarina) there’s a shop that sells all kinds of different jars at reasonable prices, so I can get two glass jars for 10 Euros, which makes my new world pantry happy - brown rice and quinoa hate being in plastic (although I don’t really have a pantry). I’ve been picking up a bit more Portuguese recently so I can kind of half speak to the lady in Spanish/Portuguese and English if I need it (she has some English). I’ve been learning a little more at the café on the square too, where this week they taught me how to say ‘the usual’ in Portuguese and Spanish, although two different staff members told me the same phrase differently, that’s the problem, there are so many ways to say the same thing, like any language. I suppose it didn’t help my memory that I was working through my Swedish book at my table — a head full of foreign words.

Back at The Archive, I had another go at filing and made some progress, slow, but still found some dupes and got some things put away. I also discovered that I don’t have the first two B52s albums which I must fix. I listened to Spy by Carly Simon, released in 1979. I think she’s quite underrated considering her middle of the road profile — I heard recently that she had Parkinson’s disease, terrible. The Archive has so many artists to reassess, once famous, never famous or completely forgotten, or even made no impact at all when they were active despite how good they were.