Ira. Karelia, Russia.

Watched Stars at Noon by Claire Denis. A film where a political thriller sinks into heat, pauses, and endless sex, as if that were the only reliable way to keep it moving. The rhythm is viscous, and the atmosphere dense, almost hypnotic. The heat itself, however, feels decorative — too neat, lacking that exhausting, sleep-depriving, airless state the film clearly counts on. Joe Alwyn is unconvincing, as if he never quite understands why he’s there at all (easy to see why Pattinson had more important things to do). Margaret Qualley works hard to hold attention, but the script too often reduces everything to the bedroom, treating intimacy as a universal dramatic solution. In the end, there is plenty of atmosphere and much less meaning, and any genuine sense of place or inner necessity is missing.

Put together several playlists I usually work to into one. Writing, editing, thinking. Almost 60 hours of music.

Spotify

Train Dreams or Late Work Rhythms

Playlist · private · 520 items · 9 saves

Short run — my Adult Life ebook is currently free on Amazon. If you’ve been putting it off or are just curious, now’s the time to download.

Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Tânger

I watched One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson. Overall, I liked it. PTA decided to make the most expensive film of his career and once again adapts Pynchon. It's a story about how the failed revolutionaries of past decades really just want to smoke some weed and forget everything — but the world, annoyingly, refuses to forget them. DiCaprio plays a burned-out paranoiac living off the grid, which, frankly, feels like a natural continuation of the life trajectory of any American radical from the 1970s. Sean Penn appears as a deranged colonel, resembling an elderly Terminator. Jonny Greenwood spends the entire film hammering a single piano key — in short, classic PTA elements all around. The most touching part is that hope is passed down by inheritance, right alongside trauma. Revolution is a family business. Thanks for the optimism, Paul.

When you read Paul Bowles’s Midnight Mass, one recurring emotion keeps surfacing: in this world, almost everyone is a stranger. Bowles writes about Tangier and its surroundings in such a way that the dividing line does not run between “European” and “Muslim,” but between the individual and a space that fully accepts no one. In the stories about expatriates, you feel their confused attempts to gain a foothold in a country that does not belong to them. In the stories about Muslim families, there is the same sense of alienation, only from within: the characters lose their bearings inside their own homes, customs, and fears, as if reality itself were constantly slipping out from under their feet. Parables like “The Hyena” add yet another layer: here it is the reader who becomes the outsider, because the rules of narration are different, non-Western, and Bowles makes no effort to explain them. Taken together, these stories produce a strange sensation: no one in them is the master of the territory. People, traditions, houses, even animals—all seem to exist on a kind of borderland, where order exists, but not for you. And it is precisely this fundamental sense of non-belonging that gives the collection its coherence: Bowles depicts a world in which everyone navigates blindly, and this is the norm.

I had long wanted to stay in a place connected to Tangier’s literary past. El Muniria interested me not as a hotel, but as a point on a personal map. Today, that history survives mostly in the form of portraits lining the corridors, and little else survives. But that hardly mattered. I knew why I was coming, and what I was — and was not — expecting. The location is genuinely good. Gibraltar is just below, although not quite from the window. I only saw it from one very specific position: if I sat down to write and looked sideways, at the right angle. A few minutes uphill is the Grand Café de Paris, tied not to any single generation, but to the art bohemia of Tangier’s Interzone period — a reminder that the city’s myths were once lived, not curated. In the evenings, loud music from the bar carries on until late, which can make rest difficult. The staff were moderately friendly — polite, efficient, without any particular warmth. In the end, El Muniria is not about comfort. It is about context, about choosing a place for what it once meant, rather than what it currently offers. For me, that was enough.

Heading to Casablanca, to the buffer zone before the leap back into routine. Where you look at someone else’s city while assembling your own in your head. And you already feel yourself being pulled from afar — to Porto, to your home, to the one you love. That’s what return really is. Internal. The most important kind.

There are things that belong on a “never again” list right from the start. And sitting on top of that list should be a camel. First, this majestic lump of pride decides you’re unworthy of its back and looks at you as if you’ve insulted its entire centuries-old lineage. Then, with a deep, martyred sigh, it finally rises from the ground, performing a complex, multi-stage maneuver that feels like a small earthquake — happening simultaneously under your feet and in your backside. And then the journey itself begins. Every step is a sway, and beneath you is the living embodiment of fatalism and discontent. You don’t feel like a traveler — you feel like part of the cargo, tolerated solely because someone’s paying in dates. So yes — it’s an experience that’s unique, unpleasant, but somehow absolutely necessary. Moroccan.

Traveling through Morocco, I’ve been reading Paul Bowles in parallel. Now we’re in the Sahara, and this is no longer just a trip — it’s a ritual. A Bowles reader in Morocco is like someone who deliberately goes to a cemetery at midnight to make sure the shadows really do move. I lie under Berber blankets, and the pages of his stories become an extension of the tent, another wall — not of fabric, but of words and darkness. The howl of the wind beyond the canvas blends with his sentences, and I can no longer tell where the real cold of the desert ends and where that icy terror begins, the one he described in such an even, dispassionate voice. His characters lose themselves in this landscape, and I, without noticing, begin to listen inward, wondering whether something of my own is vanishing too in this silent, humming expanse. It’s dangerous reading, like staring into a mirror in the dark for too long. You look to his texts for confirmation of what you’re feeling, and you find it. But the price of that confirmation is the sense that you yourself are becoming a character in one of his stories — a person on the edge, where reality is so thin you could pierce it with a fingernail, and behind it lies either nothingness, or something far more terrifying than any desert.

It started raining in Rabat, and honestly, I’m a little relieved we don’t have to go anywhere outside the medina to look at architectural excesses. The truth is, I’m not really a tourist. I can easily fly to another country just to sit with a cup of mint tea and watch people go by. Ticking off sights from a list doesn’t interest me.

We arrived in Rabat. The road made me a bit nauseous; my mom is holding up like a champ. The atmosphere here is completely different — calmer, and you barely see any foreigners. The sun is out, the muezzin is calling, everything’s cheaper. After touristy Chefchaouen, the contrast is real. I’m trying to get my mom into keeping a travel journal. It’s actually pretty therapeutic — writing things down while they’re still vivid. She seems willing so far; we’ll see how long that lasts.

And yet, when I look at the locals in their hooded robes up here in the Moroccan mountains, all the Bowles stories I’ve read come back to me. The inner world here is closed off, foreign to Western ways of thinking. If you were born into a different environment, you simply can’t understand it on its own terms. You can only watch — and form your own, inevitably naive, impression.

Chefchaouen is a blue city in the Rif Mountains. The walls are painted in shades from light to nearly black indigo. They say blue repels mosquitoes. In reality, the tradition came from Jewish refugees from Spain in the sixteenth century — they settled here and painted their houses the color of the sky as a reminder of God, who suddenly felt too distant. My mom touches the walls and asks why there is still so much blue. I say: because it works — people come here to take photos. Here, unlike in French-speaking Tangier, many people speak Spanish — the trace of those refugees remains not only on the walls. On our first day, after getting off the bus, we headed up the road into the hills because Google had placed our riad not in the medina but somewhere in the slums among the clouds. We realized this too late — it turned into quite the quest. That was my first impression — dragging my own bag and my mom’s suitcase up a forty-five-degree slope while the city lay below us, white and blue, compact. The air turned cold and damp. Then we literally walked into a cloud — it was hanging right over the slope. The houses dissolved into haze, the sounds became muffled. You walk, and around you is gray emptiness — only walls appearing out of the fog. But soon we switched on critical thinking, turned around, and went back down into the medina. There we asked every shopkeeper, showing the photo on our phone. Eventually we found it and checked into a very traditional riad, under whose windows loud Arabic conversation doesn’t stop until late at night. We’ll drink mint tea here for a couple of days and then move on — to Rabat.

We’re still in Tangier. Spent the day around the Cap Spartel lighthouse. Lighthouses always inspire me. And Tangier itself is like a lighthouse — except it shines in all directions at once. A crack between worlds. A place where the Atlantic argues with the Mediterranean, where Europe tiptoes into Africa, and time loses its rhythm, spilling in every direction. Tangier is weathered not from poverty, but from freedom. Its walls have peeled from seeing too much: smugglers and spies traded stories here; poets gambled away manuscripts in poker games. The city is a misfit by nature — too Arab for the French, too French for the Arabs, ultimately belonging to no one, not even itself. Tangier’s soul lives in that gap — in the smell of fresh mint battling the diesel fumes from the port, in the call from the minaret dissolving into rock ’n’ roll from an open window. Tangier doesn’t choose sides; it is the argument itself — that Atlantic wind carrying Sahara dust onto the tiled roofs of the medina, where it swirls, settles, and rises into the air again.

— This writer lived here? He’s everywhere. — You bet. Hiding from the American authorities. — What did he do? — Accidentally shot his wife in the head. — How do you accidentally do that?! — Playing William Tell. Aimed for the apple, missed. — You really know how to find places. We’ve checked into Burroughs’s old motel. The room looks like nothing’s changed since the fifties — his portrait on the wall, a wardrobe, a sink. Downstairs there’s the Tangerine bar, bass thumping up through the floor. It’s one a.m. I’m lying here, looking at the moon through the window, thinking: I always get what I want. One way or another.

Some families meet in the kitchen over tea. Ours has a slightly different geography. My mom and I live in different countries, and to see each other we have to pick a third place. Ideally — somewhere with as few triggers as possible and plenty of novelty. Last time it was the Camino de Santiago. Two weeks of rain, wet boots, heavy backpacks. But we made it. Not without mishaps, but we got there. This time it's Morocco. I'm flying from Porto, my mom from St. Petersburg. We're meeting in Tangier and figuring out the route as we go along. We'll see how it unfolds. But the fact that we keep trying — that's already something. upd: Right now I'm at the Tangier train station, waiting for her train from Casablanca.

There’s a mode where everything is about achievements and goals. And there’s another one — let’s call it the “Portuguese way” — where you simply let go. Not giving up, just releasing the need to hold on. That’s where I am now — as if I’ve dropped a backpack full of stones I’d been carrying for no real reason. In this mode there’s no “must”, only “want”. You read, watch films, dive into whatever sparks curiosity, write music for the first time, learn a language simply because it’s interesting. You map out trips you’ll take light. The world stops being a ladder to climb and becomes an open field — you walk, and under your feet there’s grass, stones, dust. You’re not rushing anywhere, yet you still end up somewhere. Because the important part isn’t the end point — it’s the journey itself. No strain, no perpetual race against time. Everything is already here.

Upon returning to Portugal, even after a short time away, I immediately notice how my view of the place I live in has shifted. The same river, the same streets, the same coffee, the same ocean — yet everything feels different. As if something had shifted within me in those few days. It’s a reminder, every time, that we never see the world as it is — we see it as we are. And the “I” is anything but constant. As we get older, it’s not that we become wiser; we simply change our lens. At twenty-one, it feels like you finally understand things as they truly are. At twenty-eight, you realize that was only one of many temporary insights. Those fabled seven-year cycles aren’t a straight line of growing up but a spiral: you move forward, yet each turn reveals a new layer of illusion. Someone who thinks at thirty-five, “now I really see it all,” simply hasn’t reached the next bend. And when you finally grasp the depth of your former blindness, that’s the surest sign that you’re still blind — just to other things. You always look from a single vantage point and mistake it for the only truth. #Porto #Portugal