May 24 - Desafinado, Zaragoza Spain

We woke up because it was time to go. Take a look at this list of things we didn't do while in Barcelona:

* Visit Parc Guell

* Relax, swim, and enjoy the beach

* Take a tour of Gaudi architecture

* Give Euros to a human toilet on Las Ramblas

* Flirt with Spanish disco chicks at a tapas bar

* Murder a fan of the wrong team at a soccer match

* Make meaningless love to a vampira under the bleachers of a bullfight

* Cure cancer at an absinthe bar

* Discover the newest fatal disease at a wax museum

* Deliver a stranger's baby while trapped in a cable car being held hostage by sky pirates, who we defeated when we taught the baby judo when they weren't looking

* Anything

Mike suggested we grab a cup of coffee and a light breakfast in town before heading out again. That sounded like a good idea. Oh, but then we’d have to find parking. And there’s nothing in this neighborhood. So where would we go? Downtown would take too long. Our worthless GPS would just get us lost for hours. Let’s just get on the road and get something on the way to Zaragoza.

And that’s what we did. Everyone ate paella above the tollway traffic in the Spanish version of a Howard Johnson’s. Everyone drank coffee, except I substituted coffee for beer.

Our GPS is a Garmin Nuvi 250. I can’t tell yet if it is a complete piece of fucking shit. Here is a recent consumer review I found on this computer:

How would you rate the following?

Usefulness: It has been severely useful in turning us around over 2,454 times.

Helpfulness: It helped in getting in and out of cities in the most stressful, aggravating, and time-consuming ways possible.

Pleasantness: It is as pleasant as a stubbornly clueless, vaginaless wooden robot with intermittent, untrustworthy authority. She sounds like a stupid, white trash American family hired an intervention leader “cuz she’s got one of them Inglish accents” for a loved one who is addicted to logic, peace, and quality of life.

Any aggravating qualities? None, unless you count the Garmin Nuvi 250 Global Positioning System.

What words do you associate with the Garmin Nuvi 250? Fuck. Fucking. Piece of shit. This sucks. Fuck you. Why!? You stupid fucking piece of shit. What?? Shut up!! I pray for the British woman that sounds anything like you. (Various growls, sighs and grunts). What the fuck? Jesus fucking Christ. Goddammit. WHAT DO YOU WANT US TO DO!?! Where are we going?!! Why are we going here? She wants us to go down there?? No. Oh no. She’s saying I should- but the screen is pointing that way. Fucken. All that just to turn around?? WHAT!?! (Forehead on steering wheel). Fuck. You.

If the Garmin Nuvi 250 were a person, who would it remind you of? A mutilated, tortured, dismembered victim of deserved murder.

If you saw the Garmin Nuvi 250 on the street, how would you greet it? Have you ever seen the movie Funny Games? What about Marathon Man? Oh yeah, The Last House On The Left. Some Cannibal Corpse lyrics come to mind. Have you ever heard of Jeffrey Dahmer? Faces of Death? Faces of Death II? How about Faces of Death III? What are they doing these days along the Gaza Strip? I guess some of that stuff.

Let’s say the Garmin Nuvi 250 was your high school guidance counselor. Would you heed its advice? Does “heed” mean “to burn alive with a flamethrower”? Also, is “advice” another word for “entire body”?

Any other comments? What is the address of your headquarters?

Yeah, so there’s that. We managed to find Desafinado, a café in Zaragoza. The speakers played a jump blues mix that soothingly looped. If they had chosen to play loud boring punk or Chicago post rock I would’ve punched myself in the face. I hit the touring wall today. Even the relaxing wooden labyrinth game at the bar was enough to frustrate me into near tantrums. You know, like when you try to sit on a chair, and you miss it? And then your foot slips off of a barstool? And you lost your camera, but it doesn’t matter because you’re not seeing any of the fucking towns anyway? And you don’t know it yet, but you’re about to lose your second pair of sunglasses, the ones that cost 15 Euros at the rest stop? And your Spanish still shamefully sucks, even though your father was a fun, respected Spanish teacher every day until the day he died. And you’re just a pouting, unshowered, chubbying American shithead sputtering clumsy Spanish 1 Tourette’s while rewearing the same American or bought-at-the-club clothes with no laundry day in sight for the next twelve reruns of this exhausting programme.

But look on the bright side: this experience is only costing you over $3000 in airfare and time off from work.

I probably shouldn’t have a beer in the afternoon anymore.

Tonight’s café set was to be a quiet one. Reid kicked things off by mingling through the packed café in his riches-to-rags Reggae heavy breather character, Ronald. Alan and Mike sang off mic, directly to the intimacy of the room. People listened. Alan’s elbow was just inches from my one piece drum set, occasionally augmented with a hi hat perched Harlem Globetrotters-style on my pointer finger.

The vocal-shearing chorus of “The Companion” was reduced to a gentle a capella, and “Cairo” was played the whole way through without miming. Mike’s pre-song stories have gotten more and more fanciful and entertaining. He’s become Spain’s Buffalo Bill. Zaragoza seems to favor the double encore. This time, the well sucked almost completely dry, we played “Mandaria”, a personal favorite that I had never played with the band.

Afterward Dani took us out for delicious falafel. We came up with a high-velocity musical interrogation game, where a mafioso names a musical artist and the interrogated must immediately declare what it means to him. Dani was in the hot seat.

TONY "THE PALL BEARER" MENDOZI: Paul McCartney solo.

DANI "POLVO" PICORI: Hamburger.

Tonight I shared an air mattress with Reid. I was woken up every ten minutes by Alan, because of my snoring. Eventually he just moved to another room. Hey Alan, why even bother trying to sleep? You're just gonna have to get up again anyway, right?

ZZZZZZZ!!!!