I’m all coffeed up right now. Started the day with a croissant and a Cafe Americano at a small coffee shop near Plaza Merced where the music was way too loud and the Feng Shui (風水) vibe unconducive for creative writing. Headed across the plaza and down the street to the Picasso museum’s café where I ordered a large Cafe Cortado and then discovered to my great chagrin that there were no wall sockets where I could charge my laptop’s depleted battery. Which was probably more intentional than an oversight – some cafés just don’t appreciate long-stay patrons like me.

So, now I’m back at Café Libo, nursing a Café con Leche and writing with increasingly jittery fingers. I’m usually all alone here, but today the place is packed with musicians, a small film crew and several German tourists. It’s so unusually busy, that one of the white coat clad ladies working behind the bar here even asked me if I was able to work with all the commotion around me. Fortunately, and for reasons beyond my understanding, I’m not too distracted, despite being all coffeed up. With noise-canceling Airpods and Groove Salad in my ears, I’ll hopefully be able to churn out around 1000 words before it’s time to leave.

Historically, every opportunity where a landscape (or, seascape) presented itself to me, I’d reflexively whip out my camera and capture it. Nowadays, I often refrain from that reptilian instinct and instead realize that as pretty as the view may look right there and then, I know that it’s not going to be something I treasure much. Just another photo that will end up unused, unviewed and gathering virtual dust in my already swollen, digital archive. I still might shoot it, but the level of enthusiasm will be barely measurable on any kind of creative scale or if benchmarked against other subjects or objects I energetically point my camera at these days. Motifs that I think I can use furhter down the road in a collage. Like this wonderfully tiled bench from the park just below our hotel room’s balcony. It reminded me of both Lisbon and Havana simultaneously.

Like everywhere else I live, steady or temporarily, I’ve continued to practice Qigong here in Málaga. We have a huge rooftop terrace that we share with others in the building, and as soon as the temperature rebounds from its current chilly dip, I’ll be back up there practicing my two Qigong programs, DestressRelax™ and MorningFlow™ once again. I’m currently working on a Qigong centric website that should be ready for public viewing within a week or two.

Charlotte captured the above pose, “Bow & Arrow” the other morning.

I once painted a series of vibrantly colorful, abstract paintings with pipes as the main subject matter. I sold quite a few of them and can’t help but wonder if they’re still around. Somewhere.

To this day whenever I see pipes of any kind, I easily get excited. What goes on in those pipes? Are they filling or emptying? Is it sludge, freshwater or gas flowing within them? How old are these pipes and are they lined with asbestos, lead or some other slowly degenerating material?

My oldest memory of pipes?

When I was youngster, sometime back in the late 1960s, my brother and I would once in a while walk along the ocean from our rented beach house in Malibu (California) and eventually tunnel through a storm drain, essentially a gigantic pipe that went under the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) and ended up in canyon or ravin just below the Santa Monica Mountains.

Walking through the storm drain was scary. The noise coming from all the traffic on PCH above was amplified by a factor of 10 and deafening. I would usually run as fast as my scrawny legs would hurtle me through and instead of feeling relief, experience a wave of angst swell over me when I realized I’d have to go through that same storm drain again on our way back to the beach.

Once we hit the canyon, though, there were licorice bushes to distract me. And if that wasn’t enough, my brother Nick would show me what he had been told was an ancient, sacred burial ground for local Native American Indians.

I discovered the pipes above the other day while walking through an otherwise nondescript lane Málaga’s historic barrio.

Clueless to why this shopkeeper was looking so serious, but the huge squash he was holding up for me yesterday afternoon during a visit to Mercado de Salamanca Market here in Malaga was certainly impressive.

In a few hours, after four months in Asia, daughter Elle will arrive in Göteborg, Sweden. She sent me a safety-masked selfie from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport just before boarding. The scare of the Coronavirus is apparently widespread and growing rapidly.

I wonder what it’s going to take, epidemiologically speaking, before Chinese officials responsible for providing informed guidelines and implementing/enforcing regulations on hygiene and animal welfare, start taking their jobs seriously. Doesn’t the government in Beijing understand the potential risks, even after Sars and other related viral epidemics that stem from unhealthy food production practices? And while they’re at it, maybe it’s also time to start promoting a plant-based diet to its 1.5 billion population.

I’ve been to so many food markets in China and other parts of Asia. They’re often fascinating, exotic places filled with vibrant colors and a wealth of rich, often pungent smells. But after each visit, I am convinced that excluding meat and poultry from my diet is so right.

The lack of empathy for animals in general and the brutal enslavement these creatures must endure in factory farms before reaching the dinner table is symptomatic of a mindless society that has lost touch with the planet and where common sense is long, long gone.

The sheep above are from an island in Sweden called Orust. As soon as they saw us, the fled. Rightly so.

The fact that the trashcan above had the text “USAME” on it vertically was so poetically apt, that not getting a shot of it would have been malpractice.

I seem to be following in love with Spain again. It’s been an on and off relationship since we lived in Mallorca many moons ago and I’m now back at the point where I find there’s more to appreciate then to dislike. I still easily overdose on tapas, though. And in the long run, the omnipresent, life-embracing, late-night culture, is way too alluringly insalubrious for me. Last night was spent with friends at a couple of real gems, a tiny bar run by a couple from Belgium called Fonzo and a wonderfully outlandish “speakeasy” called The Pharmacy where they have a wide selection of both tasty and colorful concoctions of 100% liquid prescriptions.

Visually, Málaga’s Centro Historico and the downtown area is nothing short of fantastic. So much wonderful patina, artful decay, and brutal contrasts between the obsessively well-kept, endlessly neglected and stuff that is just downright butt-ugly. Best of all, Málaga feels so manageable and accessible. At least when compared with Madrid or Barcelona – and though there are quite a few Swedes here, it’s not nearly as incestuous as Palma de Mallorca can be. Málaga is kinda the perfect sized city. Now, if we could only find somewhere to live…