Seems Reasonable Excerpt...

Barcelona was his city, though he wasn’t sure exactly why. He wasn’t Spanish, or Catalan for that matter – he was an American, though a self-described anti-American at that. But he lived in Barcelona and considered it to be his only home. When his parents, an amicable couple in their late fifties, asked whether or not he would be coming home, for example, for the holidays, he would play devil’s advocate and ask them to define “home”. It was a Clintonian subtlety of language that might go unnoticed to most but to him, in practice, was the central point of his life. He was neither Catalan, Spanish, nor American, so what was he? He was not vane enough to actually consider himself a ‘man of the world’, as an older Brazilian woman once told him in Prague as he sipped on absinthe and railed against the GOP and NATO, but he had the gall to call himself a “Barcelonian”, if that was even a word, of which he was not sure.

He barely ate, and when he did it was normally pasta, to which his roommate commented that he was living la vida del delgado, the skinny life a result of the beer-drinking and cigarette-smoking at all hours of the day life, and the sleeping when it was permissible within his mind but not depending on the light or hour life.

When he left his apartment near Plaza Molina on Calle Saragossa it was difficult for him to go three or four blocks without stopping in a café for a beer, at which point he would read voraciously, and it didn’t matter what he was reading, so long as it would seem interesting to the casual local observer. This is an important point, because though he was technically a writer and had written a “great novel” that sold well enough to leave him fairly well off, his self-perception as a “voracious reader” was something of a misnomer. That is to say, though he read a lot, it was quite difficult for him to conjure up images of novels, and the arguments of said novels, much less the plots, after the fact, which might have had something to do with the amount of alcohol that he drank. Nonetheless, it was next to impossible for him to remember the Turgenev’s, Kundera’s, and Pasternak’s of yesteryear, and it was as if all his “voracious reading” went for naught.

His critics noticed his literary naïveté and mostly he refused all interview requests, and his novel sold largely due to his notoriety as the reincarnation of a Kerouacian rebel with his soul inhabiting some other decade or century – no critic agreed on which it was. He would never forget sitting down with a journalist for a beer in the White Horse Tavern in the West Village of Manhattan. The journalist from the New York Times, a critic with an eye on obscure culture, asked him what it was like to be compared to the great Russian, Turgenev. He replied that HOME OF THE GENTRY was one of his favorite novels of all time and promptly forgot the plot when the writer asked him what it was that he enjoyed so. The next day the review in the times of his novel was screaming with praise, “despite the apparent ignorance of the author for the classics he is attempting to emulate with his prose.”

Following this occurrence there were few instances of interviews granted, despite his publisher’s objections, and soon after the great author Caleb Trafton fled to Barcelona to hide from accusations and praise alike. Barcelona was a safe haven, a place he had visited many times before – the only place where he found himself comfortable with his surroundings. There was a deep sense of strife, history, and renewal in the city, along with avenues and streets and people that teemed with arrogant and exotic beauty. The chaotic nature of New York was left behind for the smooth flowing and timeless nature of Barcelona.

Catalunya, the autonomous region of which Barcelona is the capitol, has a history unto itself, completely separate from that of Spain. If anything, Barcelona is a European city, not a Spanish one, in that it is forward looking with eyes on the future instead of inward looking, brooding on the past. This helped Caleb immensely, for every time he arrived in Barcelona he immediately felt himself to be part of a larger soul, an amorphous mass which continuously strove for its future with the weight of its past on its shoulders, a city that refused relegation and moved to its own beat and demanded internal independence. He could not help but feel the bustling city moving towards the future and that his future too would be easier to understand within the context of a city that at least understood his interior motives, if not his intentions. No one could be mistaken for understanding his innermost thoughts, including himself. They were ugly, and the idea of accepting blatant hideousness was appalling, and Caleb knew that the occurrences within his mind and his heart were to be ignored, both by himself and the outside world. He would not export his unhappiness. He wanted to leave it at that, at that which was apparent, but not obvious. He hoped laughter would erase it, because there was no explanation for its brazen ignorance of fact – the kid was successful and had money to boot, fuck him and his discontents, bunch of whining brats of the intellectual sort who had the time and buying-power to wallow in self-pity.

Fuck you, Caleb Trafton said into the mirror, a mirror produced no doubt in Catalunya by Ecuadorian laborers. Fuck you and your doubts, you dumb fuck. Your doubts are others’ pleasure, and this brings you pleasure, doesn’t it? Hah? Doesn’t it? Of course it does, don’t lie to the mirror you cringing bastard! If it doesn’t hit you now it never will, and for God’s God someone has to hit you, whether it be a Catalan beauty or an American muscular behemoth in town solely from what he heard might be cheap beer and his girlfriend’s wine breath – yes it’s all there in front of you, in the mirror, and you can’t ignore it, though you spend your life trying, you pathetic, two-faced prostitute. You would sell your dick for a nickel if the sale included respect! Oh you’d love to be respected, but your last girlfriend, an angel of a woman who spent two years trying to reform your sorry ass, made you realize that respect was something you give to others, not others to you. They hate you, and they should. Because you sleep with girls to enhance your persona, and then drown in sorrow when the girls no longer want to sleep with you. You pretend to give all you have to your sleeping beauties, but you have nothing, your emotions cheap and your love smeared by an unceasingly horrid scent of alcoholism and indifference. You are a fool at best, at worst a gentle killer of humanity. You suck, and you know it. Your dreams suck, and your reality is worse, and you have nothing good to speak of.

And though you speak of your good looks and affable personality, the mirror is not fooled, because this is your mirror, the mirror to your soul, and the reality is there, so fuck off with your presumptions, you tired imbecile. You can’t fool me, much less yourself, because I am you, and if you are tired of seeing yourself, it’s for good fucking reason, because you are the epitome of the worst possible result of a lobotomy, that when you reach the inside you find only fescies, wondering again why you searched your soul in the first place. Yes, shit, and you might as well lower your pants, shit on the mirror, and then look at what’ve you’ve done, because this is what you are, you...well it’s useless, be your own, but stop whining, because the shit will always come back, whether you eat it or flush it through your ass. It’s there, and it’s not going anywhere, and as your mirror I feel a duty to say so, even if it’s ugly, like you.