Figueres, Cadaques

I took a train Saturday morning to a town called Figueres, a couple hours north of Barcelona by train, with bicycle in tow.
Wait, rewind. This trip to Spain was another shot at immortality, as much as anything. Not immortality, strictly speaking, but teleology. That is, I'm always trying to scramble, more or less frantically, up the sheer vertical angles of an emptying hourglass, in fear of leaving behind this small, miraculous, bit of consciousness without...
something.
What? I don't know. But I can't shake the feeling that a life, yours, mine, is "for" something, in the most Aristotelian sense. Something more than talking of Michelangelo.
Now what, please? I would like to know. And I suppose I thought, when I came here, that maybe I'd make another stab at figuring it out.
I'm not making much progress, as far as the hourglass goes. But this past weekend I had a few moments of pure existence. You know what I mean? Those moments when just to breathe is enough.
Here's how it all went down. The trip started inauspiciously enough. I had kept myself up all night Friday with nervous excitement and so started out on two hours of sleep. And no sooner did I arrive in Figueres but my bike pump broke and I realized that I had forgotten my gloves. After finding a bike shop to replace the aforementioned, and two kilometers into my ride, my cell phone flew out of my back pocket and got run over, leaving me heading out into the mountains without any means of communication, solo. Stupid? Possibly, but would you have turned back?
I spent the next two days in the saddle and here are some of the moments that happened: I spent a lot of time going up mountains. The kind of mountains that make your heart audible. The second picture, up there, captures a moment where taking a picture was as good an excuse as any to stop for a second. But when I got to the top of a big rise and looked down--see the third picture--I started laughing like a wild woman and thus began this fit of existentialism.
The fourth picture is a moment at dawn on Sunday, when I was rolling over flat farmland making discoveries at every turn. Like an old man raking leaves on his farm into a giant bonfire. Like the sun rising over that old old monastery up there hiding behind an unremarkable cluster of trees. Like rounding this bend and seeing the ocean slap up against these rugged rocks near a place called Llanca, up near the French border. Cool, quiet, beautiful. The next picture is of Cadaques, a whitewashed fishing village near the easterly tip of Spain. Cadaques was beautiful, but I was particularly happy to find it because I had to climb a particularly beastly mountain to get there--which made the arrival all the sweeter.
So in short, I rode hard, and I lived hard, and found a few moments that were mine, as Ani DiFranco puts it.
of beauty blinding and unsurpassed/make me forget every moment that went by/and left me so half-hearted/cuz i felt it so half-assed.
That would be the end of the story, except the coda is Salvador Dali.
Who, it seems, likes to think about time, and our frenzied attacks on its passage. Have you noticed all the melting clocks? And forks and human flesh, of course... This picture to the right shows his house, peeking out over trees in Port Lligat. And the one above is the view of the cove in front of his house--these rocks and this bit of ocean figure into the background of so many of his paintings.
So there's a lot more that I could say about this weekend--here, in this next picture is a piece of Figueres, an overly touristified town that nevertheless is remarkable for its theater-museum housing all sorts of bizarre Dali splendors.

But for now I am back to a few more minutes of counting out my life in coffee spoons, albeit sans a little frenzy. Speaking of which, does anyone know how to cook fish or eggs? I am un cero a la izquierda (completely useless) at this, and having trouble feeding myself. Help? I have a pot, a frying pan and a gas range.

And here is a sweaty exhausted self-portrait, really damn happy.