THE CITIES OF LIGHTS

Once, many thousands of kilometers ago, one good friend said, "The cities are cancers to the earth." He quit one nuclear central as an engineer, throwing the contents of his suitcase on the walls of the exit corridor of the office. Before he went out of the huge company building, he freed himself from his tie, suit, shirt, shoes, and underpants, and totally naked, he went to the street, showing a fierce fuck-you finger to his passed-away bosses. And he took care of the familial finca abandoned for 30 years. When we met, he gave me a shelter in exchange for a few hours per day of gardening in the permaculture gardens. Yes...even if there are a few cities designed to make the people believe in a vision of paradise on earth, the ultimate conclusion concerning urban bodies total energy-vores is negative. These are the cancers, and they suck like the cancers. So FUCK'EM ALL, AND BACK ON THE ROAD TO THE GYPSY SIDE OF LIFE. Berlin is cool to ride the bikes, the  stand-padels, the kayaks, the tiny houses on the water, and the joints on Tempelhofer Field, and to fuck in the clubs, in the bushes, and on the boats. And you can walk completely drunk in the streets if you keep yourself in order. Berlin smells the Lindeblütel over all car pollution, the falafel, strong ganja, and teenage spirit from all over the world. In the spring, the city is covered with a smog of pollen.You take your job to the park on the river, you write, you sip your white wine, and when the sun hits you, you jump into the Spree. Yes...after you jump on the bike and you ride to the party. This is Berlin, eighty years after the catastrophe of war. And after next year spent here, I come to the unavoidable conclusion, fuck it all, tired of squared minds. In Granada, it was always Granada that was kicking me out; I was always too poor for her, but yeah...maybe the only city in Europe where I would eventually settle my real base. Barcelona!?!?! Our last encounter was brief, like a breath. Bartza, as always, is super noisy and nasty as hell. Last time I saw her, I said furiously, "You fucking don't want to change something, do you? So pretty and so nasty, eh! Get the fuck off me." I jumped on my bike and moved precipitously from the hostel to Barrio Raval to buy one smartphone support on Pakistan Street, where all kinds of alimentation and plastic trash are literally exploding into the streets through the doors and windows of businesses of all countries. So when I was really decided to fuck off from there, but fast and far, I needed just this piece of shit to mount my smartphone on the steering bar of ma cruiser. I ran with my huge traveler directly into the Pakistan shop to explain easier what I needed and to vanish expressly in hitting the road. She was there, in the street, observing what I did inside. The boss saw my baggage and unusual look of ma bike, so he asked me if I was traveling with it. Yes, I answered. But when he heard that I just downhilled from north of Germany and I am going to cruise till Granada, he immediately called one of the sellers and said something in his Pakistani language with such emotion and speed that the other guy just disappeared in the next second, only to reappear a few seconds later offering me the installation of the best model of smartphone support that existed at this instant on the market. The boss asked me thousands of questions in a few minutes. I answered all of them, and we became friends instantly. He was young, and finally he said, "One day I will do the same. This installation cost you nothing; it's a pleasure for me. Ride well," he said, didn't absolutely accept any money, and checked if everything was OK. with my bike, nextly he opened the door to the street of exit, and with tears in his eyes, he waved with his hand and wished me a good road. She saw all of this. And I was on the bike already, pedaling, programming my route on my smartphone finally installed perfectly on my large steering bar. Perfect, but she was standing there on the sidewalk, the white used Converse, with sexy holes, on the naked dancing feet. And she watched at me, cold astonished anger in the Catalonian sunny amber eyes, hands on the hips, breath on the edge of abysses of hysteria, long black curls dying in the heavy air of the street. She would kick the wheel of my bike if I would get closer and try to say goodbye. She would kick my ass, so I moved faster, yeah...but somehow she managed to stitch both my arms with a kind of toxic fly called the citrus fly. Skin on my arms blown in the next half hour, the same with my neck and part of my forehead. The hard and burning balls stayed on my arms for the next few days, under the sun of Catalonia and Valencia, hate of my past lover following me like one of the worst tastes of experience. And we had such fun on the beaches of Barceloneta or Sitges, in the mysterious hotels, at the parties, and in the gardens, and Gaudí was stalking us. We were dancing on the roofs, riding the longboards like hell, sniffing coke, raving, and burning the tires of the scooter. ...sea, sex, and sun. MAN! We had a good time. What happened? Why did she always have to get so noisy and nasty!?Valence...? Shicky like, well, smelling milf froze in one eternal sun beast sex adventure on the beach. But so stupidly bourgeois from the poor surrounding ultra exploitation of poor used ground, and thousands and thousands of flats superposed to form the insane concrete towers at the front of the sea, and from ultra-intercontinental businesses controlled by the port for the last few hundred years. Une bonne bourgeoise, we say in French, and it predicts a kind of intense, eventual rendezvous. But the road following the coast is becoming like a ribbon of full, sunny technicolor dust and begins at the exit south from Valence, so it's more appealing than anything else. Paris is wild.It's a real fucking jungle, where the lions occupied the Rive Gauche and the monkeys, donkeys, deers, hyenas, pickpockets, rabbits, rats, pigs, and chickens are squishing the essence of life on the Rive Droite. Real Animal Farm. The monument of Catholic power nailed Jesus Christ in the middle of the City of Lights, the mythical, already cathedral phoenix rebuilt from ashes. This city is wild. That's the city where you can kill yourself while riding the bike. The environmental speed is at such a level that if you try to go free ride, you had better be highly skilled. But that's a jungle, and the laws there are so natural as to be rude, and if you get into the flow, it can take you for a fascinating ride. But you'd better know how to get off the saddle at the right moment; if not...the spiral can get more and more strange. Paris is a mental business, permanent, intense, vibrant, inventive, creative, rubbish, rublard, thieving, ultra-gossiping, double-facing, hypocritical, sexy as hell, perfidious, perverse, and extremely intellectually charming. Paris is dangerous, as it always was, and for almost the last thousand years, it has been the head of the octopus of administrative globalization, supported fully by the Vatican. Paris is the center of global art, of global influences, and of global administration. In this city, if you are accurately determined, you can access the school of elites, where you will learn how to administrate any country in the world. Paris is the center of brutal international business, where the rules of the hard-core streets are the main currency.The drugs in Paris are great. Always were, from the epoch of Baudelaire till today, opium, heroin, cocaine, crack, all kinds of benzodiazepines, Xanax, LSD, speed, hashish, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and MDMA per ton...and surely fentanyl... I wonder what kind of expression De Sade would perform in such an actual state of psycho realities. Whatever, if you listen to the Doors, you give a visit to Jim at his grave at Père Lachaise, where possibly your vagabond travel will follow a kind of mysterious and more and more fantastic path. And suddenly one day you will wake up under the bridge of Saint Marie, and you will see with your own eyes the glory of the city of lights. This city is wild; I could leave my terrestrial appearance there, in peace, before returning into stardust.But everyday life there is just...city intense life, squeezed into suffocating streets. Life framed with aluminum, glass, iron, steel, brick, and marble frames, corridors of laboratory rat labyrinths. Life packed into flesh ruined in the subway wagons, smelling the clouds of fake fragrances, stinking real nature on the way back after every everyday 9-5 programmed survival competition.In Paris...everything is definitely fucking possible, but the price to pay for it can be definitely fucking fatal. Warsaw...? Total confusion, the Polish way of speaking is exquisite but incredibly hard to learn. It's a capital of absurd. The city was totally destroyed once, not such a long time ago, and even today you can find there the houses covered with the scars caused by the iron killing balls of war. There...it's not possible anymore to drink and work. The cult of money heated to an unimaginable level of fanatic belief. But...there's living a kind of peculiar spirit. Created by Chopin, many poets, musicians, journalists, scientists, politicians, communist party agents, rockers, resistance heroes, taxi drivers, and architects, this peculiar spirit is resident in one intellectual-virtual world consisting of the Polish meaning of the existence of the country.It's incredible how this synthesis of nationalism is floating there in every conversation of the indigenous. Warsaw is a very strange city, balancing between a kind of greyhound mood, poetical arrogance, and bestially hedonistic orgy. To destroy your Hayabusa in the result of an ultra-crazy race on the biggest bridge of the city can be the ultimate TikTok video shot. The guys there, before pushing the speed machines on the death ride paths, are knotting the steel ropes around their necks. The steel ropes are next attached to the frames of the racing bikes. Some of them don't want to survive the crash and to continue as legumes stacked in one huge bed. That's a kind of ride-or-die. Polish hardcore fantasy. So...imagine the surroundings. Yes, the cities are noisy, dusty, nasty, gray, sometimes colorful, full of parks, and amazing technological surprises. Whatever and wherever they are, overall their role is to focus an immense amount of the energies to produce a style of life for the people who never touched, or who don't want to touch anymore, the ground, the earth from which the products are transported to the urban markets. Cities need a lot of glass for the windows. They need a lot of cement to build the walls, an incredible amount of wood to build the doors, chairs, tables, and cupboards; the meta-gigatonnes of the screws; and the meta-kilometers of the pipes and cables. All of that to build the paradise on earth. Comfort and safety.