Some things I find confusing.

The internet. What is it? Why is it in English when I'm in America but in Spanish when I'm in Spain? Is that a different internet? How does the computer know where I am? I realize there are scientific answers to all of these questions, but the reason I am not a scientist is that those answers never satisfy me. I'd prefer nonsense, frankly, though one can always be disguised as the other.

Recent scenes from Barcelona:

1) I am walking up an alley in the Gothic Quarter, and I hear a uncannily familiar chirping and clucking. What is it? The woman walking towards me? A strange Catalan ritual of anti-Centralist dissent? No, of course not. Those are both idiotic suppositions. Of course it is a parrot. An African Grey, perched on a bicycle handlebar, hooting and rolling his beady eyes for all he is worth. This is one of the few situations in which I feel absolutely comfortable. I begin hooting and clucking back at him. A small crowd gathers. They are watching me a little warily. It goes on, longer perhaps than sanity would ordinarily recommend. Eventually, a bedraggled man comes out of the store nearby, and throws a leg over the bicycle. I ask him (in spanish, mind you--never escape taking credit when it's undeserved), "Is that your parrot?" "Yes," he says. "What's his name?" "His name is Romi to his friends. It's Romueldo to everybody, but Romi with his boy and girl friends." He places a black bowler hat on his head, extracts a shiny harmonica from his pocket, and pedals off, buzzing and cranking on that harmonica as the bird hoots and nibbles the brim of his hat. A harmonica. Why didn't I think of that?

2) From today. This is just a glimpse of something, not a whole scene, but it's one of those moments that has a whole novel buried in it.

An elderly man with a bent back, papery white hair, and an ill-fitting blue suit that hangs almost to his knees, stands in the middle of the bustling sidewalk. Sleek young Spaniards who resemble Mercedes sedans more than actual humans stream around him. He is peering carefully but blankly at a poster he has torn from the wall. It reads, in enormous crimson cursive script: "ALZHEIMERS! in concert."

Here's a picture I took the other day.