El Camino de Santiago

Saw The Way, a sweet but dramatically inept flick about a pilgrimage along El Camino de Santiago. Realized that I had made part of that same pilgrimage – quite unwittingly: The route runs through Gijon, that strange, gritty little seaport on the Iberian coast where Semana Negro takes place every year and I spent a week in 2007. Gijon is in Asturias, the Celtic part of Spain, a strange place, like a parallel universe where some Paleolithic butterfly died who didn’t die here. The effects of that one death ripple outward so that Gijon’s present tense is subtly different from the present tense in the rest of the world.

Movie exhausted me. Psychological effect, I know, I know. But I’m not sure why. I only know that though the temperatures are still unseasonably warm – in the 60s! at the end of November – I was freezing and I fell into a fitful sleep around 9pm after throwing together a desultory dinner for RTT.

Did not want to wake up this morning. The only safe and comfortable place these days is my imagination.

Holidays are going to be rough. All I can tell myself is that next year, things will be different. And begin implementing changes that will make them so.

I’m going to have to put Xena to sleep this week. The magical power of words: Almost as soon as I wrote about putting her to sleep, she began deteriorating – or I began noticing she had deteriorated. Her hind legs are quite shriveled, maybe she poops in the house because she can’t really control it. She sleeps 22 hours a day in the little bed I made for her. I never really liked Xena that much – I’m not a dog person at all – but it makes me very sad to have to do this. One less link with the family I once had, I suppose.