In haste

Much earlier in the year, I posted something about looking out my window and seeing blue sky through the falling snow. Right now, I can do the same, except this time it's gentle rain. Seasons. Yeah.

And in approximately 2 minutes, I'm going to give my Culture Talk, aka Ridley BS's About the Civil War. I don't know if anyone will even show up. So hey, win-win situation.

Went to the Irish pub last night[ed: er, last week, forgot to post it till now.]. It's not all that Irish, thank heaven, it's just that they serve Guinness and Beamish as well as the holy trifecta of Gambáč, Budvarek, and Plzeňek. We go there because the wait staff is nice. We drink Budvar.

My two (male) American colleagues were discussing their students. Specifically, their female students. And how damn hott some of them are. "We're 25-year-old males, Ridley, and it's really tough. Sometimes we have to teach entire lessons sitting down, if you know what I mean." And I did...um, unfortunately.

I couldn't really relate, though. Not just because of the particular...problem, but because 22-year-old chicks just don't have the same instant attraction to 18-year-old boys. Kind of the opposite, in fact.

Although. Some of the physical education students? Mmmmm. In a purely theoretical way, of course.

My Own Personal Afterschool Special

So I'm with the Mexican and several of my pot smoker Prague friends, sitting outside on the very small terace of this Italian place, in a winding alley a few meters off of Old Town Square. We're finishing up our food, shooting the shit, whatever, and the waitress comes over. I assume we're going to settle up; in fact, the Mexican and I start laying our money on the table like good kids. But my friends smile sweetly and wave her away. At this point, I realize that what they've been discussing at their end of the table is: Walking out on the check. And their spur-of-the-moment plan to do same.

Ohhhh shit.

Immediately, I am fucking terrified. This feeling is prompted not by my religious principles, but rather by my conventional upbringing and my ensuing deep-seated phobia of doing things that get one into BIG TROUBLE.

But look! It's too LATE!! My friends are FLYING THE FUCKING COOP!!!

So I grab my shit and run too. We tear through the winding streets towards the square, so pumped with adrenaline that we narrowly miss making a complete circle back in front of the same restaurant. And I feel all the exhilaration of running with the bad kids, of cutting class in high school, and smoking cigarettes behind buildings, and getting disastrously drunk off wine coolers. All the things, in other words, that I never fucking did in high school, not once, not ever, until I was in college and almost nineteen, in fact. Because I'm a square.

And before you start getting all afterschool special on me with the Say No to Peer Pressure talk...come ON. What the fuck else was I supposed to do? If I'd stayed there, I would have had to pay for their meals too, as well as endure some angry Czech talk, which...no. Don't like grown-ups yelling at me. Also, see above -- Aztec and I left money on the table. So we're not gonna burn. At least not for that.

And yes, as you can tell from the somewhat testy tone of the above paragraph, the Hounds of Guilt have indeed been having their way with me. Or at least, they would have, if not for:

The REAL Afterschool Special part of the story:

Jump cut to two minutes after the Heist. Watch us congregated on a street corner, trying to catch our breath between the adren-fueled giggling. Watch my hand descend in slow-mo towards the pocket where I keep my phone...and the pocket where I don't keep my phone...and all other pouches or receptacles in my possession.

Cold fingers grip my heart as the truth dawns on me: I had left it on the table at the restaurant.



Sweet. Bleeding. FUCKBALLS.



So that's the lesson for the day, kids. When circumstances force you to, y'know, skip out on the bill, please for fuck's sake make sure you've collected all your personal belongings first.

No, I'm kidding. Children, you need to pay for what you eat. Or else the Lord will humiliate you with your own stupidity.






Postscript: We tried various schemes to retrieve the phone, including persuading the innocent latecomer Jedno to call my phone and tell the people that drunken Americans had stolen it, but it didn't work. I'd estimate that it took the restaurant about 15 minutes to turn it into cold hard cash. So I did indeed pay for our meal. Dammit.

On the other hand, I bought a used phone the next day and got the same old number put on it, so we're all good. On the mutant third hand, I don't have any of your numbers anymore. So if you send me a happy text, please put your name on it. That is all.

The Czech Republic: where the women are hot, the men are conceited, and the children...well, there aren't too many of them.

What the fuck, Google?

How does it happen that I look at a website, notice a cool quote, copy & paste it into the Google search field, put quotes around it, and Google returns NO FUCKING RESULTS?!? Come ON, Googlebot, I got that text OFF A WEBSITE, there's at least one result that I can find ON MY OWN. And I'm not a bleeding search engine, am I?

There's only one conclusion I can draw from this: Google is not omniscient. The very fabric of society is disintegrating.

This tMGs song should be on everyone's top 5 list of Songs That Reference Kurt Cobain Biting It

Raskolnikov felt sick
But he couldn't say why
When he saw his face reflected
In his victim's twinkling eye

Some things you'll do for money
And some you'll do for fun
But the things you do for love
Are gonna come back to you one by one

The Mountain Goats - Love

Last night there were several options open to me...could go to a club with a couple of Americans; could go drink beer with other Americans; could beat my head against a wall slowly but firmly for a nearly indistinguishable experience.

I'm proud of myself: I chose...none of the above. Instead, I put some music on, cracked open a beer, and started a book my dad bought me when he was here, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The first few pages were ok. And then, at some point...holy fucking shit. Next thing I know, it's eleven o'clock, my first beer is still half-finished next to me, and I'm half-way through the book. And I can tell it's just going to get better. It's one of those books that's so fucking good I'm charging through it like a freight train, and yet I don't want it to end. It's so good I have this urge to skip ahead several pages at a time, so I can get more goodness.

And yet right now as we speak, I'm arsing around on the internet instead of reading it. Hey, you can't be intellectual all the time...or in my case, more than a tiny fraction of the time. It's all good.

By the waters of the Neisse we sat down and wept

I was in Poland when the Pope died. Well, that's not quite true. It says in the news that he died at 21:37, and I was in a Polish town on the German border then. But I didn't find out about it for 23 minutes.

We were about half-way across the river Neisse, on the bridge to Germany, and all the bells on the Polish side started ringing. My friend had said earlier that he couldn't be dead yet because the bells weren't ringing. But I looked at my watch, and it was 22:00 exactly...I clung to the hope for a couple of minutes that it might be normal for bells to ring at 10 o'clock at night. They went on and on, though, long after you could still reasonably believe in any other explanation. So that was it then. John Paul's dead. My friends were quiet and subdued, a little unsure how to act around me, The Catholic One. Michael cleared his throat and said, awkwardly, "Well. Heaven's a better place now." And I don't think he himself believes in God or heaven. So I loved him for saying that then.

We walked on into the quiet streets of the German town. All I could think about was how to get back to Poland, away from the silent Lutheran churches on this side of the river, away from my companions who don't understand, no matter how nice they are about it. But they wanted a beer, and I felt the pull of the Leader Complex that oldest children have, so we wandered around, tried to find a place we could get a beer. It's Germany, for crying out loud, you'd think it wouldn't be hard. Finally we found an ice cream place that was open. I drank my beer in record time, willing them with every fiber of my being to do the same. Headed back to Poland, got our passports examined and stamped yet again. At the door of the hostel, I paused and said, all casual like, "So. I think I'll go stop by the church." There wasn't really anything they could say to that.

By myself finally, I walked up the hill. The streets were dark and quiet, but it wasn't scary. My muscles ached in the way that comes from walking a city from morning to night; my left bootheel creaked with every step I took. I knew where the church was from earlier in the day; it was a newish building, seventies to the bone, all blond wood and track lighting, with a big nature photo in front of the tabernacle. We'd eaten lunch at an outside stand across the street from it, and watched a steady stream of people going in and out of the church, praying for him.

When I reached the top of the hill, all the lights were on in the church, and it was packed, standing room only and spilling out onto the steps. A priest in red vestments was saying the homily; two others sat behind the altar, along with twelve altar boys at least. I stood there listening to the Polish words, and hearing only his name over and over, Jan Paweł, Jana Pawła. The Poles around me were weeping, some of them. I was crying too in a half-assed way, wiping the tears against my shoulder. It felt good to cry...it seemed like I was letting out grief that I can't release for people I knew much better. He seemed like such a good man, and he had such a long life, and with the grace of God he's in heaven now. So it's good sadness; pure, without regret or rancor. Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt...There are tears for things, and mortal affairs touch the heart.

When Mass was finished I didn't want to leave the church. It was one of those times when the inside of a church feels like being at home, or like home is supposed to feel and rarely does. I didn't want to go back outside. You get a moment of certainty, when you know what's right, when you know what your home is and how to get there, and then you go back to your ordinary life and the certainty fades again. Like Alexei Karenin: he has an earth-shaking epiphany at Anna's bedside; his whole being is changed and lifted up. And then...life goes on. The clarity that hit him like a lightning bolt diminishes with time, gets confused with other things. I thought it was the most tragic thing in the book, watching his pure recognition get faded and muddy.

But they were turning the lights out, so I went back outside. It wasn't really that cold, just the clammy feeling you get when it's dark again and you've been in the sun all day. I walked on down the hill past the park; the heel of my backpack chafed against my lower back a little. The bells stopped ringing a long time ago. It's 12:30; my friends are asleep. In the room, I change in the dark so I won't wake them.

Hey, look...

I found such a pretty song: "History Lesson (Part II)" by the Minutemen.

this is bob dylan to me
my story could be his songs
me and mike watt
playing guitar

Go listen to it.