Last night I had dinner with Bob, a fan of my podcast.
Bob’s a big Texan who flew tankers in Vietnam.
You know, those huge airplanes that refuel other planes in mid-air.
Bob was at the fall of Saigon, flying around overhead. That’s a historic moment if there ever was one.
He says he’s landed a tanker at almost every airport in Asia. At least any airport with a long enough runway. Later on he was a contractor in Iraq, in 2003.
Over calamares a la romana and pimientos del padrón, he complimented me on my last few podcast episodes. At that moment I couldn’t even remember what they were about. Maybe American Refugees.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m having trouble coming up with things to write about that aren’t political.”
How to avoid politics in troubled times
If I wanted to write about politics, of course, I could.
There are infinite variations on the two big themes in the news these last couple of years.
On the one hand, there’s “Europeans are a bunch of entitled crybabies who want everything handed to them”, and on the other there’s “Donald Trump says or does something which pisses off most of the planet”.
But I’ve already written about both of those topics many times, and also several articles which combine the two: “Donald Trump pisses off European crybabies”, etc.
It’s honestly gotten a little stale with the repetition. But how do I avoid politics in a world run by clickbait and addictive algorithms?
I guess I’ll take a walk.
Typical Chinese bars of Barcelona
That’s why this morning, I’m outside early – I’m avoiding politics by submerging myself in the urban environment.
Across from my house there’s a little bar that I notice has rebranded, again. This time it’s got a Chinese name.
The decline of typical Spanish bars is a topic I used to worry about, back when I was going to bars. But here in my working-class area of Barcelona, typical Spanish bars are alive and well. They’re just owned by Chinese people, who add a couple of dumpling and noodle dishes to the menu and otherwise carry on.
A lot of these places look like they haven’t been updated since the death of Franco.
They’ve got a few dusty bottles of brandy and ponche up on a shelf, a slot machine in the corner, and a few drunk regulars sitting around at all hours.
Most of the people running businesses in my area seem to be immigrants. Across from the Chinese bar is another Chinese bar, which is next to a Dominican barber shop, which is next to an Argentinian bakery with a big cardboard cutout of Messi in the door.
Most of the fruterías are Pakistani, or Bangladeshi, or Chinese. The nicer cafés are Argentinian. My butcher at the market recently retired and sold the stall to a Latin lady and her son.
Some people complain about gentrification, but none of this is particularly glamorous. Others complain about how mass migration is changing Spain. Anyway, I’m not going to get political here.
The Carrefour supermarket down the street has steak for 18€ a kilo, which is something I haven’t seen since the 2010s. I buy a couple of packs and take them back to the house.
Time to do some marketing.
The perils of escaping the rat race
My online English-teaching business has earned me a pretty good living for more than 10 years, but I’m a bit tired of doing it.
Spending all my time on the internet sounded like fun back in 2012 or so. When I quit my day job to work from home in 2015, I felt like I was winning. But now I’m having a whole identity crisis about it.
I made a big effort, when I was younger, trying to avoid the 9 to 5. Instead, I moved to Spain and became an English teacher, and ended up working 9 to 9, with odd breaks throughout the day and a lot of transport from one class to another.
When I got sick of that, and of earning 11€ an hour, I built an online business… but in order to do that I had to spend a decade hunched over a laptop screen. Which was basically what I was trying to avoid in the first place, when I moved to Spain.
In reality, all I want to do is go outside. Maybe I should have been a farmer. Or a mailman.
After a couple of hours flogging my online courses to English learners in Spain and Latin America, I’m ready for a break. I throw my shorts and a clean t-shirt in a backpack and head for the gym.
A shoutout to my local doppelgänger
Back out on the street, one of the drunk guys at the Chinese bar looks to be British.
I see him there every day, puffy and red-faced, with a beer in front of him.
I’ve never talked to him, but occasionally our eyes meet as I walk by and there’s a flicker of recognition. My wife Morena calls him “doppelgänger” even though we don’t technically look alike.
I don’t know who he is, or what he does, other than drink.
Does he have a job? Is he living off passive income? Maybe he’s an English teacher.
All I know is that he’s there to remind me of the life I escaped from when I stopped drinking.
When I first got sober, I suddenly had a lot of free time. I started writing longer, more thoughtful articles on here. But that’s just a few hours a week.
Eventually, I realized I had to rebuild my whole personality. I replaced going to bars with going to the gym, and life is good – in ways I wouldn’t have guessed at the time I was quitting.
But still, it’s useful to have a daily reminder of what I’m avoiding. Thanks, doppelgänger!
Make Deadlifting Great Again
I hop on the metro. Down at the gym it’s deadlift time.
There are plenty of articles about how working out is right wing, or at least makes you right wing.
Over on the Guardian, Zoe Williams complains that feeling fit lifts your mood, and makes you think you’re “master of your own destiny”.
Well, God forbid anyone should feel that way.
Better to skip the gym, and invent elaborate new forms of victimhood, I guess.
I put a couple of plates on the bar for a warmup, then a couple more, then a couple more.
In a way, I agree with the people who want to find something political in exercise. There’s nothing democratic or egalitarian about lifting 120 kilos. It’s just you vs the iron. Either you can do it, or you can’t.
Today I can – just barely.
I haven’t slept well the last two nights, and I’m a bit weaker than usual.
My grip feels like it’s failing on rep 2 with the heavy weight. Rather than drop the bar and tear the skin off my palms to get a third rep, I swallow my pride and put it down as gently as I can.
Disappointed by my sub-par deadlift performance, I do five other exercises to compensate. By the time I walk out of the gym I’m buzzing with endorphins. I practically float down the street back to the metro.
Worshipping the Golden Calf
Here’s one of the problems of 21st-century life, as I see it.
You can make a mockery of God, and family, and patriotism, and hard work, and discipline… but not believing in those things doesn’t get rid of the need to believe in something.
The hole is there, right at the center of the human spirit, and we all fill it, one way or another.
Take away old-timey values, and people believe with religious fervour in veganism, or yoga, or politics. Maybe they become Bitcoin bros, or AI evangelists. But the fact is, we’re all worshiping something.
In the book of Exodus, Moses goes up the mountain to get the Ten Commandments, and while he’s away, the people don’t know what to do.
After a few days, they start to complain, and they ask his brother Aaron to make them a god to worship.
Aaron obliges, and makes them a golden calf. When Moses comes back down the mountain he finds his people in a drunken orgy, worshipping an idol.
Forty days without God and they’ve turned to shiny objects and hedonism to fill the hole.
Filling the God-shaped hole
All the Bible stuff used to seem stupid, to me.
But now I’ve been there, and I know exactly what Exodus 32 is about: lacking a higher power to focus the mind, it’s about filling the God-shaped hole with sex, wine, and money.
That’s practically the title of my autobiography.
One of the big problems with the human condition is that you can get everything you want in life and then sit around hating yourself and wrecking your liver afterwards.
If you do a close reading of the lives of successful people, you’ll see how common it is.
In Exodus, Moses finds his people worshipping the Golden Calf, breaks the tablets with the Ten Commandments, and has the sons of Levi put 3000 people to the sword.
Which honestly seems a bit extreme. But those were different times.
Anyway, making points about the human condition by citing stories from the Old Testament is probably a political statement, these days.
So I’ll stop. I’m not going to get political.
Hake (the fish) and Mozart (the composer)
Back at the house, I’m cooking some hake I impulse-bought over the weekend.
Hake is a tasteless white fish, but now that I’m only eating protein and vegetables I’m fine with that.
(Protein is right-wing, obviously. Men on podcasts eat it – men like Joe Rogan. Therefore, it’s right wing. But I’m not getting political here. I’m just trying to hit my macros.)
I open up my phone and see that there’s a notification from Spotify.
“New album from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.”
I have my doubts about that, but I click through and soon find myself listening to Lacrimosa, the last piece of music Mozart wrote before he died in 1791. It’s part of a work called Requiem in D minor.
I don’t know why Spotify thinks I like Mozart, because I don’t, but either way I soon have tears in my eyes while standing in my tiny kitchen and cooking hake, a tasteless (and right-wing) white fish.
“Inside the Whale” by George Orwell
After I eat, I pick up my Kindle and finish re-reading Orwell’s essay Inside the Whale.
Although theoretically a review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, it’s really an essay about politics and literature in the 1920s and 30s.
Orwell has a lot to say about American “artists” in Paris – the annoying digital nomad / influencers of his day – and about how culture suffers when everything becomes political.
He’s the one I’m paraphrasing above, about people needing something to believe in.
Here’s the original quote:
But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in.
– George Orwell, Inside the Whale (1940)
The essay also contains a paragraph I thought about a lot, during peak woke and the pandemic.
Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on. This has happened at least three times during the past ten years.
I guess the ability to change your opinions at the drop of a hat, according to what’s popular in your social group, is a valuable survival reflex of some sort. But I don’t seem to have it.
Towards the end of Inside the Whale, Orwell has this little line, about life during World War I:
The truth is that in 1917 there was nothing that a thinking and sensitive person could do, except to remain human, if possible.
A hundred and some years later, I feel the same way.
The algorithms want to steal your soul, and AI wants to take your job. The news is a shitshow. And all the quote-unquote smart people sit around mocking the idea of virtue and rejecting everything that used to give life meaning.
What’s a person to do? Double down on being human.
And maybe learn a trade.
Before the Household Gods
Around 6:30, Morena gets home from the office.
She’s tired. But tomorrow is a holiday – Good Friday.
I hug her in the living room, in front of our collection of gods. We’ve got Krishna, several Ganeshas, Buddha (not technically a god but whatever) and a little silver Zeus I bought in Greece. We’ve also got Jesus, two piggy banks, and a tío de Nadal (it’s a Catalan thing).
We all worship something. But it’s important to note that we don’t worship all things equally.
I hug Morena, and she nestles in my arms, and we just breathe for a minute.
You wouldn’t believe how much I love her.
Unfortunately, loving your wife is also right wing. A Substacker called Lyman Stone said it, not me: “Loving your opposite-sex spouse is, in the year of our Lord 2025, a shockingly right-wing act.”
The rest of the article is paywalled, but it’s not like it’s hard to find essays about how marriage is a misogynistic institution, and masculinity is toxic. But I’m not being political today, remember?
Morena stays home to relax – I want to get outside before it’s too dark.
Holy Thursday in Barrio del Clot
Tomorrow is Good Friday, which means today is Holy Thursday.
Holy Thursday commemorates the Last Supper, the event at which Jesus washes his disciples’ feet.
He later passes around the bread (“Take and eat it, this is my body”) and the wine (“Drink this, all of you, this is my blood”). That’s the blood of the New Covenant, by which we’re all to be forgiven.
But a few more things have to happen first.
Judas slips out to sell his guru for 30 pieces of silver. You probably know the rest of the story.
Nothing so dramatic seems to be happening in my neighborhood this evening. I sit in the park as the sun sinks towards the horizon. There are dogs running around, and kids playing.
A couple of scrap collectors – man and wife – are leaning up against the old smokestack in the middle of the park.
Their shopping carts full of junk are next to them, and they’re having their own supper out of a rusty skillet – a big loaf of brown bread between them.
After a few minutes, the woman gets up and washes the skillet in the fountain.
Then she goes off to dig through the dumpsters. Her husband lays down on a piece of foam and tries to sleep.
Kids come and go, and teenagers, clinging to vapes, and old people, hobbling on canes.
Eventually, the sun sets. A chill is in the air. I zip up my jacket and head home to my wife.
All we can do, today and always, is remain human, if possible.
Happy Easter.
Yours,
Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.
P.S. If you like Orwell, I’ve got an article on here about his book Homage to Catalonia, which is (for better or for worse) the most popular telling of the Spanish Civil War. And of course, I’ve got more about Clot Neighborhood and also Poblenou, if you want to know about some of Barcelona’s less touristy areas. And obviously – I shouldn’t even have to point this out – the Holy Grail that Jesus used in the Last Supper is in Valencia, and you can visit it. Enjoy!
P.P.S. At the time I’m writing this, it’s Holy Week, which is a big deal around here. Have a look at my article on Holy Week in Spain for much more about that. And for more about idol worship and monkey gods, check out my article on Kerala and Tamil Nadu, South India. Don’t forget to remain human. OK bye.
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