Je dus voyager, distraire les enchantements assemblés dans mon cerveau . . .
Like Rimbaud at nineteen, I am done with art and on my way to capitalistic adventures outland. I will be in Spain, in the city of Pontevedra, teaching English “language and culture” for a pittance to a gaggle of hyperactive nine-year-old country bumpkins. The program, which operates out of the shadowy Kafkaesque backrooms of the Spanish Ministry of Education, awards its grants to only the most highly decorated idlers. If you want in, simply show up, online, on time. Like a breadline. No actual teaching qualifications necessary. Way I see it is if you can navigate the application process – I’m reminded of the labyrinthine genitals of a female duck – you’re qualified to face morbid loneliness, and financial and emotional ruin overseas. Just what will I be doing in Calda de Reis? The Administration is not about to tell me. I have a Petrarchan sonnet’s worth of Spanish at my disposal, most of it vocabulary I picked up reading The Captain’s Verses; so unless I somehow end up naked in a wheat field with a goddess I don’t have much going for me. And what, exactly, do They mean by American Culture? Will I teach the kids about the procession of canon from Fort Ticonderoga to the heights of Dorchester? Charlie Parker? Nickelodeon? If anything, perhaps this trip will give me some insight into the culture I’m supposed to be representing. All in all, though, I like the not knowing, and consider being utterly lost in the world of purpose my métier. When I arrive in three weeks I will have hardly any contacts and nowhere to lay my head, not to mention the usual host of undisciplined neuroses. Good thing I’ve spent the last year living on couches. Let the fates do what they wilt. For now the tea leaves are mute. I am keeping this blog to alert friends and family to my whereabouts and activities. Letters addressed to my parents from summer camp prove that I'm an inadequate or otherwise perverse correspondent. But I promise here to give more than mere diagnostics of my bowel movements. When the program finishes up (that is, of course, if the world doesn’t end), the hunter will be giving chase to the bears around the pole star, & I will be in tails in the Adirondacks, drinking champagne, describing the girls and views, and hopefully not, like Rimbaud, a syphilitic amputee.
God bless you all.
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