GUADALQUIBEAR…ES UNA COSA

and the basketball game, it was a strangely metaphysical experience, a demonstration of the (sometimes upsettingly) easy facility by which “the mind to quit the body is manifest” as virginia woolf once put it, to see my name on a envelope of tickets -- to which i had to struggle my way in spanish because i never would have expected it to be at the press entrance (although that’s now being done at least a petty justice) -- given to me by a friend of a sister, a woman married to a basketball player whom i’d known absolutely almost not at all -- and in an absolutely different context -- and who now plays for a basketball team in some other place in spain, and whom, on saturday, i watched play a game of basketball at a stadium somewhere in spain.

afterwards, i acceded to one (in so many words) because i felt i wasn’t in a position to be inhospitable after (having been so graciously guided to) my free tickets, and the jeers of disbelief that i got in response weren’t at all in jest. and, true, it didn’t even take those jeers to convince me past that first one, especially since the people watching on the alameda was so what it was, which was exactly what you would have expected from the posters advertising “guadalquibear*,” posters of that da vinci man in the circle with the radial lines and with his limbs splayed except that the “fit” man (it’s a question of body image and internet dating site deceit) had been replace with a bearded one with a full belly -- although without as much other hair as might have been expected.

and the bears were definitely on parade around – and in front of and everywhere else about -- the bars on the alameda, gay or not, that night, and, strangely, it was i who had to explain the phenomenon, and it gradually became the joke of the night that the bears were parading, because this halloween weekend, well, it was a thing. the thing itself became the next joke, because something being a thing wasn’t yet a thing in spain, and then it was as we made our way to the gay bars where guadalquibear was DEFINITELY a thing, even more so than usual -- or at least more so than usual outside of those couple of bars.

then, at one of the others, someone remarked on how many beards there were beyond what seemed to be the men participating in the weekend’s particularly special activities, and, since it had been where i’d been living, i had to explain that, well, “es una cosa,” which, by that point, could have been said about anything to elicit a round of laughs.

and if not for this year’s calendar i might have been damned. but, fortunately, the weekend was followed upon by a monday that wasn’t really a monday, being as it was both halloween and the one day before the national holiday of the feast of all saints. so i was able to endure the pain of the shave, knowing that i was essentially responsibility free until wednesday. so after half a day of compulsorialty, i quit. and it hurt, after nearly eight weeks this time, but i shaved. you get used to things, and, well, that’s what they become. just like the parade that one night of guadalquibear.

but now, for better or for worse, my beard is gone. and, well, it’s a thing.

*the guadalquivir is the river that runs through sevilla.