Eli's Weblog ≡x≡

Cambridge - Where Newton Cut Down the Apple Tree (and didn't lie about it).

2010-05-20T17:26:00.002+03:00

More London. And Cambridge too. The moneyshot is, I think, me dancing in front of the old buildings there. Or perhaps it's me with Achilles. Can you tell which is me and which is the Greek warrior/crankypants?

Sunday we took the train up to Cambridge, of which we have lovely photos, but then again so does Google Images. I remember drinking at a pub where Syd Barrett hung out while forming Pink Floyd, and there was an informative punting trip in which we learned that it was illegal to trap and eat the geese and that students used to do it anyways. I hollered and hollered for Stephen Hawking, but wither he wasn't within earshot or I couldn't hear his electronic response because the volume was set too low. We had a great lunch at The Eagle and marveled at the ceiling, where RAF and USAF pilots had burned and lipsticked their names and squads while stationed in Cambridge during WWII. I briefly considered waxing nostalgic, but then thought better of it and decided not to care about the heroic and the dead at all.

Well, there were too many sights and good times to recount, but i will say again that London is Fundon and now i remember why i had so many Brit friends in all those countries i used to live in: the Brits are all right.

London

2010-05-20T16:31:00.004+03:00

London may be the coolest city I've ever been to - a shining example of what a city can be like when funded and governed well by thoughtful humanists (Hume-anists?). Our friends put us up in their Wimbledon flat. One of them, Harry, has a beard, as the photo makes clear. It was my idea to check out Highgate cemetery. Though I had no dead people in mind to visit, the first tomb to surprise us was Douglas Adams'. We might not have noticed it but for the plastic toys on top and the pens stuck in the turf. I gave Petya my only pen so she could plant one. One thing among many that I liked about Adams was that (I heard) he had to be locked into a hotel room by his agent and publisher before he would consent to write anything.

The next grave - very fresh - had a wooden board with 'MM' carved into it. Once, in 1997, I bought a Malcom Mclaren cd. It contained MM singing and molesting Puccini melodies. That may be the very last thing I ever purchased from the music industry.

We were heading towards the exit when the head of Karl Marx appeared, the size, shape, and color of a NASA weather balloon. Flowers lay strewn about the place where his genitals would have been if they'd given him a statue that went down that far. The strains of 'The Internationale' were coming from - i thought - a hidden speaker in Marx's chin, but we the saw a chinese couple fingering the four sides of the monument, and Petya noted with supreme disgust that the old song was coming from the little maoist's cell phone. I went over and took the phone away from him, sneering, "Silly Maoist, this is for capitalists!" All of this is true except maybe the last part there. Maybe.

And then we saw and did everything else worth seeing and doing in London.

You Can Earn $1500,00 a Day Just By Reading This Over and Over

2010-04-16T17:42:00.003+03:00

Should i kill this blog? I keep having to explain delays. I guess I do it for the few friends who still believe joining Facebook will mess with their "Privacy" (still believing such a thing continues to exist or have value). Furthermore, with Petra nicely knocked up, my attention has turned to details nobody outside the family cares overmuch about. I do have an unending stream of invaluable and hilarious comments and insights, but i'm saving those for The Cuckoo Wasps of Tokyo, so you're going to have to pay for them at some unspecified date in the future.

Petra is halfway to delivering our boy, Maxim. Maxim has a nice punch to it. "Max Beaver" they'll call to him in the streets. I include a picture of him here. Fucking scary, right? It's not a real photo - it's a sauna-gram, which accounts for all the distorting steam. Still, wouldn't want to meet that baby in a dark alley....

Obama was here to agree to not have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet 1000 times over. Henceforth, we can destroy it only 300 times over. From the vast beer garden on top of Vysehrad we could see Prague Castle, where all the papers were being signed and hands shooken. Inside, The Dead Kennedys's "Terminal Preppie" roared:

John Belushi's my hero
I lampoon and I ape him
My news of the world
Comes from Sports Illustrated

and:

want a wife with tits
Who just smiles all the time
In my centerfold world
Filled with Springsteen and wine

Now when I say "inside", i mean the structure in which the beer was being poured, not inside the Castle, where papers are signed, although i hope to hell Obama had a few pints of Pilsner while he was in there. I know i would need a few pints if i had to stand in the fetid presence of the arch-imbecile President Klaus for more than a few inhalations

What else? Hm....

I've discovered the "Garage Band" application on my MacBook. One word: Ohhhwoooooow! Within 10 minutes I was laying down and mixing tracks of me hooting and banging the table and kicking at my guitar strings with a bare foot. The loops are hypnotic, autistic, implosive. Be prepared to receive my MP3's in the coming weeks.

That is all.

February Face-Freeze Funtastathon

2010-02-26T10:37:00.002+02:00

So we were in Barcelona to see the Arctic Monkeys and I got the Bell's Palsy. Or rather, I got the Palsy before we went to Barca, but I wasn't going to let a little thing like facial paralysis keep me from one of my favorite cities. When we got back the Neuroquack told me I had to stay home and to not use my face for a couple of weeks. It turns out that everything you do involves your face. No reading, no watching anything, no looking at screens, no exercise, no talking. (And stay positive!) I thought about sitting on the couch and staring at the wall for 2 weeks and ultimately decided against it. Instead, I listened to podcasts. Here's what I digested aurally:

How the Mind Works - Stephen Pinker, in 45 parts, Youtube
Hardcore History - Dan Carlin
Fun to Imagine - Interviews with Richard Feynman
Connections - James Burke
Victor David Hanson - Lectures and Interviews
A History of the World in 100 Objects - BBC

and about a million interviews. I'm not going to embed the links because you know how Google works. I tried listening to Cosmos (Carl Sagan) but there was too much "dead time" (nobody talking). I highly recommend Dan Carlin because he's excited and talks like William Shatner.

I also felt it would be okay to write, so long as I didn't use my eyes. Now i see before me scores of pages covered in spastic scribbling that i feel compelled to decipher. One example:

"APPOLONUS: Concical. Parabola, etc., bell curve. Some trouble for 18th c - What does it say about god granting free will when discovered that crime rates are constant?"

and another note, isolated:

"Bison can't be domesticated"

More on that later.

(The photos here are from last x-mas and have nothing to do with the February Face-Freeze UNLESS you remember that Stallone also has half a frozen face, or in this instance, a completely frozen one)

What Happens in Vegas is You Pay 12 bucks for a Sandwich

2010-01-28T17:24:00.002+02:00

It's come to my attention that some people are still reading my blog. Some of them, incredibly, are still denying Facebook, and so have missed out on months - if not years - of quality Status Updates. So here's a few photos - the wedding, Las Vegas, Santa Monica: the sort of things you're used to in blogs.

Yes, we were in L.A. for x-mas. I've spent around 2 years of my life in that city over the past 18 years, but this time i really enjoyed it because i lied to my mom and said a Czech driver's license was valid in the States, and so she let me have her car and i drove all up and down and around the state. (Mom! Sorry i lied! First time - honest!) Seconds after the keys tumbled into my palm my wife and i sprinted to the car (picked up some good ol' american Mickeys bigmouths on the way) and high-tailed it for Vegas. We stopped off at a real trucker diner so that Petya could see what a mountain would look like if it were made of eggs and pancakes. For some godless reason, the diner was hit with a 15-minute blizzard - unheard of in them there parts! The lone waitress squeaked about the beauty of the snow and Petya had to be restrained from killing her - too much misplaced cheer, i guess. After the godless blizzard we yee-HAH'ed a blazin' path to Sin City, which went in my estimation from the best city in America to the #45 best city in the flash of a white tiger's toothy growl. [somebody edit that last phrase for me, plz]. See, i was in Vegas 8 or 9 years ago, and i was able to drink and vomit and hold my own and blackjack and burn holes in my clothes to the appropriate extent. This time it was more like being dropped into a lego labyrinth/windtunnel and having to run through mile-long buffet queues while hemmorhaging 50-dollar bills, though i will say that my bride and i did appreciate being offered sex-for-money every 2 meters by cadres of blimp-sized pimps-on-commission. Well, "pimps" is too kind a word for these flyer-flicking toutes.

On a very very very up side, we did hook up with my High School "Pipe-Club" co-member, Carolina, and her magnificent husband Dusty, whom i called "Rusty" all the first night we hung out. I haven't the slightest memory of what we talked about, but the great thing about these hotel rooms is they come with a big desk and a nice chair behind it, and you can struggle to that chair in the morning and put on sunglasses and fold your hands on the desktop and say to your wife, "What was said last night, woman?" And she will be able to tell you because 95% of the contents of the currently empty 750ml-bottle of Absolut didn't go into her bloodstream in the 3 hours leading up to a cherished school-chum reunion. My bride informed me that i hadn't terrified these people and that we were invited to visit them in San Diego, which is a good place to visit them since that's where they live. More on that after i eat something.

Big News! Emily Yoffe is a Purveyor of Idiocies!

2009-12-15T13:08:00.002+02:00

Two good pieces of news for me this week:
Coffee can help ‘stave off’ type 2 diabetes (my least favorite type); and young-looking people like me and Di Caprio will live longer than you!

Ever thought that watching sports might be wasteful? I gave up watching football (soccer) after the last World Cup because I realized my mind’s limited resources could be put to better use than memorizing the stats of every player in the Premiership. And now, a Yank has come forward and described his easy abandonment of U.S. Baseball:

“My complaint with sports doesn't hinge on the inflexible hours. There's also the issue of return on my investment. The games are relentless, the experience of them too often ephemeral.”

Nowhere does he mention the deleterious effects of cheating (U.S. translation: “doping”) on viewer loyalty; this is the very reason I went from being a Sumo fanatic to Sumo hater overnight.

Sure, many must get a kick out of supporting their own country/island/city/shantytown team, though it seems silly since the best mercenaries – I mean athletes - are often imported from elsewhere. Yes, yes, your country/island/city/shantytown is #1. Applying a wee bit of logic, however, we see that if everyone believes their team is the best, then somewhere around 99.99% of them are dead wrong, and that’s only in a given season. (This logic may and should be freely extended to patriotism, theism, and your goddamned mother’s home-cooking).

In other non-news, Tiger Woods had sex. With women. Well stick my dick in a blender, I never would have guessed. Mega-celebrities offer us valuable insight as to exactly what happens to human nature when you throw tons of cash and affirmation at it. That little boy who used to be in The Jackson Five is a spectacular example; Divas provide further evidence.

Anyways, it turns out that when Tiger doesn’t play, worldwide interest in golf drops by half. HALF. And when people don’t tune in to golf or check out Golf Doofus Digest, some very useful people lose money.

Speaking over over-hyped vacuums-of-usefulness, here is a fine article describing the 3 things one experiences when smelling (P?) Diddy’s new “Unforgiveable Woman” perfume.

(Who knew people were still raw about Maggie Thatcher?)

On a personal level, I find it difficult to read Slate anymore, following a series of reports on Prague by “Prudie”, A.K.A. Emily Yoffe, who normally counsels yuppies considering incest, but who took some weeks off to come to my city and with every word describe the exact opposite of its character. I would place the link here, but to do so would have the quality of passing on to you, say, tapeworms, or gastroenteritis. So I won’t do that.

Furthermore, I may have to give up using the Google News Aggregator, as all this fluff about horny golfers and octmoms is taking up the space where news should be. *sigh*. Back to The Guardian, I guess…

The Results of the Mushroom Hunt, '09

2009-11-28T14:21:00.002+02:00

Things went well this morning. I drove, and we didn't die. The woods were a little too travelled to play "Blair Witch Project", but i did find a nice stick for beating away the wolves and boars with. In fact, boar-signs were everywhere - quite exciting for Americans, because we don't have many wild pigs running around outside of D.C.

It's quite clear from the photo that i fit right in with the other woodland creatures. This was an accident. I'm wearing my hat smurf-fashion, pushing my ears out, and i've got my over-sized snowboarding jacket which once belonged to an absent-minded hitch-hiker. The mushroom Petya is holding is edible, will be eaten, is being peeled by my wife as i write this. It looks like we hunted up around 300+ grams of shroomage. Whoever said there's no such thing as a free lunch didn't spend enough time sniffing around meadows and forest floors.

Love Hurts

2009-11-16T09:57:00.000+02:00

I haven’t posted anything in a while, so it’ll likely be mete that I rub my target audience again with a few words. This will not be easy, as Petya brought home some bottles the other day and some plastic spoons and we have been watching “The Room” over nad over and throwing spoons at the laptop, which is a brilliant way to spend some time with one’s attorney, though the hangover isn’t so dazzling, even as it springs in me an acute and severe fit of my already intolerable graphomania, the results of which I must apologize for even before I have written it. So here’s what’s new:

The cats don’t like their new cat-tunnel, but when Petya or I wear it on our head it’s like we are giant erasers and we can walk around the flat erasing things with our giant, red, Ticonderoga-esque craniums.

My brilliant wife bought us tickets to the Arctic Monkeys show in Barcelona this Feb. Tears of gratitude threaten to flood Prague-4. I should not joke about floods in Prague, because there was an apocalyptic flood here in 2002, and a lot of animals in the excellent zoo died. I always suspected that the true enemy was water. Be suspicious, friends. Um, we will be there for the weekend, so you should come and listen to my horrible Spanish.

BTW, we will be in L.A. for x-mas, c u there? I’d heart all my BFF’s 2 b there, h8 2 Ms yall.

The other day I started a fight with Petya because I wanted her to consider – as a thought-experiment – a world where wood did not exist. You know what I mean. It was desperately important that we talk about a woodless-world, and I’m not speaking metaphorically at all, you filthy-minded cabrones. I really wanted to posit a world where there were no trees, no wood, and thus discuss what the world would be like without readily-available, cheap-material chairs and warmth and 2-by-fours.

I read some W. H. Auden this morning:
"There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love."
I’m right there with him until that final word. I harbor a fathomless suspicion for that word, and generally don’t like to hear it unless it’s coming from the mouth of my wife. Auden is one of the very few poets I can stomach, but if I had the chance to drink a bottle of London Gin with him, in public, I would dare say that no artist should ever, ever deploy such a vague term. Now, I was a huge fan of “The Love Boat” and can still sing all the lines from the intro song, but there are some words so threadbare that it becomes the duty of the artist to craft or tweak or soup-up a new term so that I don’t get bored and give up. Here are those words: Love, Death, Hope, Money, Pain, Peace, Forever, Bodyguard, Postman, Dennis Hopper, Dance, Wolves, and Baseball.

If you misread the Mayan calendar, you, along with most of California, might actually think the world could end in 2012. This information is based on half-indecipherable scratchings in stone by a people that couldn’t even predict that cutting down all the trees would wash away their food supply. This made me wonder how we could get Hollywood to stop making 100% garbage. Unfortunately, the solution is most unlikely: humans would have to stop paying money for garbage. (Caveat: it’s not only the U.S. that is churning out super-garbage: most film industries are now hard at work trying to replicate movies such as “2012” and “The Hottie and the Nottie”.) On this note, I wish to say that I have already decided never to see “The Road”, based on the trailers I’ve seen. The book will take you an afternoon to read and is astounding. I don’t care if Viggo Mortensen is great. I like his acting too. But the one thing that separates the film version from garbage is that China can’t recycle this film and re-sell it back to the West.

There’s more. I’m going to do us all a favor by not writing it, at least not at this moment. But take my advice: don’t see “The Road” and don’t posit woodless worlds. And try not to say “love” too much, unless you are singing the theme song from “The Love Boat”. Also, in case you didn’t know this, “Love Actually” is actually less useful than a tapeworm. If you tell other people you like this film, it’s kind of the same as being caught reading Rowling or Dan Brown in public. I urge you, stridently, not to do this.

A Few More Corleone Photos

2009-11-05T13:27:00.001+02:00

Very nice.

Corleone

2009-11-05T13:00:00.002+02:00

Here is Corleone. The photos don't do it justice, but Petya took some good ones of nuns stalling a car over and over again in a vain attempt to turn a corner. I don't know if they ever made it. We got tired of watching around the 59th attempt.

Petya also photographed these old men sitting around talking. We saw millions of such old men sitting around talking. It turns out Italy is one of the grayest countries in the world, rivalling Japan. What do they talk about? String Theory, mostly. String Theory and the relative merits of the Gregorian Calendar.

There were several vertiginous peaks around town, most of them topped with these outdated execution devices (where do you plug them in?) And now i'm going to shut up and post more photos.

Salina Cat-Color Race-Riot Punch-Up

2009-10-19T12:57:00.003+03:00

After Vulcano, we ferried past Lipari to Salina, where all the salt used to come from. You know, when I was a young idiot I thought the Roman soldiers who got paid in salt were using it to improve the taste of mashed-bee pie or whatever ancient people ate. But salt is a wonderful preservative and more valuable in that respect. Kind of like how the Chinese figured out packing vinegared rice around fish would keep it from rotting. And you thought the Japanese invented sushi…

Anyways, a beach made of rocks is fun even as it carries a grave risk of shattered ankle bones and patellae. The rocks look like giant beans. You probably want to eat them. Don’t. It hurts like hell. I got one stuck in my jaw and they had to yank it out with a sort of catapult thing they used to destroy the Knights Templar of Malta.

We did a lot of things in Salina, but the photos only tell you that there is a huge spider there and that I punched a kitten in the guts. Take that asshole! (Trust me, she had it coming.) We were walking between towns and I was delivering a lecture on stochasticity and the Vatican, as is my habit, when we decided that walking blows. We stuck out our thumbs and were immediately picked up by a priest and his – I don’t know – life partner? Petya called him ‘Padre’, but I just said ‘walking blows’, and then, when he dropped us off with a ‘Dios te blesses’ or some such Italianism, I said something like ‘you too’ or ‘safety first, man’, I don’t remember.

We sat in the town square, drinking beers on a bench, willing one or more of the children running wildly around without leashes to step in a big pile of dog crap several meters in front of us. Then it started getting dark so we took some charming night photos.

In our room on Salina, I counted over 32 religious effigies – priests and christs and other deities the natives seem to worship. Petya told one old woman that we have two black cats and the woman leaped up from her seat to arrange an auto-da-fe. This is when I punched the kitty in the belly, after which i climbed on top of a bust of what I think must have been Saul of Tarsus, crying, “I have a dream that one day a cat may be judged not by the color of his fur, but by the content of his character!”

Before we left the island we popped into a shop so I could introduce Petya to canoli. Mmmmmm...

Aeolius, God of the Wind (the bad kind)

2009-10-15T13:17:00.004+03:00

We ditched the car and took a ferry to the first of the Aeolian Islands, Vulcano. We rode around and ate sandwiches on black volcano-soil beaches and didn’t heed the signs about extreme intoxication. I look kinda fat on the side of the volcano, but that’s only cuz I’m trying to inhale as much as possible. The volcano known as Vulcan smells like the farts of a gigantic egg-and-cheese sandwich-lover. If the Earth really is hollow, baby, I don’t want to visit the inside.

Also on Vulcano, some people sat in mud. The mud smells like the liquid version of the above disgusting image but is supposed to make you look younger. The mud however, is radioactive enough to be dangerous to pregnant women, kids, old people, and rationalists, and, furthermore, spending unusual amounts of time in direct sunlight is, I’m sorry to say, a good way to look like the Brigitte Bardot of today. So we stayed away from the fart-mud, though I did try tossing a few matches in to see if it would all ignite.

Blood Flows in Sicily

2009-10-15T13:06:00.003+03:00

Lord knows in what order these images will upload so its up to you to connect the photos and the text. I can’t do everything for you. I have a wife now. I’m busy, see. (Many of the photos contain subliminal images of squids fighting sharks.)

Petya drove us through Germany and Austria, and then I drove illegally in Italy til we got to Lago de Garda near Verona. In one photos, Petya has just emerged from the lake and is wet from the water in it. Those people on the dock have nothing to do with us, though, interestingly enough, a giant squid popped out of the water and ate 30% of them.

We drove down to the tip of the boot and took the ferry across the strait of Messina. ‘Strait’ should probably be capitalized, but I have my sunglasses on so I can do what I want. Sicily is behind me. This sign on the boat says in Italian something like “The floor here is slippery when wet. Take your child by the hand.” Anglophone kids aren’t very valuable, so the sign in English just advises you to keep and eye on your kid. That way, when he slides overboard, you’ll know where to point and scream.

Here in Milazzo is a statue of a really popular priest, saying, “Always remember that God sees everything.” It doesn’t say which god watches me, or why the universe is ruled by a peeping tom, but it must serve as a chilling wake-up call for young butter-churners in the region. Later, we climbed up the hill to a medieval fortress where Petya cut her knee. You can’t really see the blood in the photo. Oh wait a minute. There it is. Yep, there’s a little blood there. Not a big boo-boo - certainly too small to sue the fortress.

Name 15 Books You Started, Threw Across the Room, and Damned

2009-09-25T12:50:00.002+03:00

This is a fun Facebook Quiz! Don't think too hard!!! Just write down the first 15 books that come to mind, then send the list to EVERYBODY!!!!!! Here's mine in no particular order:

15) The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living - The Dalai Lama

Exactly like gluing a ham sandwich to a television through which you watch videos of old infomercials for products that haven't been sold for decades. I made it to page 4 before throwing it at the "friend" who had loaned it to me.

14) The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown

I picked this up off somebody's bedroom floor, read the entire first chapter, and lost all remaining faith in humanity. I threw this book at a wall, but now i think i should have set in on fire and lobbed it at a Borders.

13) Portrait of a Lady - Henry James

This one I kicked on to a balcony. A litle more kick-power should have sent it spinning into a puddle full of mosquito larvae 3 storeys below. What a windbag.

12) A Drinking Life - Pete Hamill

A good tale right up to the point where he quits. I took this book with me on a particularly long bender and never saw it again. Probably I threw it at an elm tree.

11) The Alchemist Paolo Coelho

Luckily I was in the Himalayas when i read this, though i did break several local laws concerning littering when i broke its spine with my hiking boot and then punted it off a precipice.

10) The Qur-an - "Allah" (fragmentary recollections of Mohammedian soldiers)

This one i finished, just to make sure. Very much like what a boathroom looks like after a toilet explodes. I threw my copy at a toilet just to see what would happen.

9) The Lexus and the Olive Tree - Thomas L. Friedman

Yay! There are more bilionaires than ever before! I read 1/3 of this book and then took it to the park so i could run over it again and again with my bicycle.

8) Profiles in Courage - John F Kennedy

Given to me by some benighted relative unaware that this cretinous man couldn't even write his own dissertation. I hesitate to even call this 'ghost-written' as I'm sure the prick never glanced at the cover, much less the galleys.

7) The Celestine Prophecies - James Redfield

I have since forgiven the friend who loaned me this excrescence, but i still dream of throwing it at his head in the vain hope of knocking some sense into it. A dull version of 'Dianetics'.

6) Swann's Way - Marcel Proust

I've thrown this one out of my life 3 times. I'm working on my 4th now.

3) The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

I was young, so i was almost finished with the book before i realized what i had to do: throw it out my car window while driving through Indiana.

2) The Norton Anthology of English Literature

It took me some years to figure out what was bothering me about my major. Turns out poetry is the biggest fraud since the Bible. This tome is heavy though, and makes a satisfying sound when it hits whatever you throw it at.

1) Who Moved My Cheese? - some shyster.

I made this mistake the last time i stepped into a library. Take a cliche and stretch it until it is the length of a book. You can't throw it cuz it's so insubstantial it'll drift to the ground like a piece of tissue carrying both the small pox and tuberculosis viruses.

OK! NOW IT'S YOUR TURN!!!!!!!! DON'T THINK!!!!!! JUST WRITE YOU'RE 15 BOOKS!!!!

Elijah Beaver Goes Back to School. Hilarity Ensues.

2009-08-06T17:08:00.003+03:00

My first Czech driving lesson was very much like showing up for class in 3rd grade and finding out there's a test you forgot to study for, while simultaneously realizing that you aren't wearing any pants. And you've got your Spiderman Underoos on. So i was glad i'd had a few extra espressos before getting behind the wheel.

Apparently cars have changed in the last ten years. Now the gears and transmission and brakes are made of spun sugar and are to be handled with more care than a 1000-year-old chinese dollhouse. The maximum speed allowed me was about 25 mph. Ever try driving under 25 mph for an hour? It’s like going to open a window, and then, when you finally get it open, it’s the year 2078.

I’m very fond of the new experience of being given directions in two languages at the same time and from two different directions. ‘Clutch’ is ‘spoika’ in whatever language the old man spoke, and every time he asked me to use it I thought he wanted to talk about the sweeping economic changes introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986. (Me: "I don't wanna talk about that anymore." Him: "Spoika! Spoika! Spoika! Oh God!")

Watch this space for more updates.

http://elijahbeaver.blogspot.com/

Things You Find on Girls

2009-08-06T16:49:00.004+03:00

I saw a girl wearing a t-shirt that read “Eternal Peace”. So I throttled her to death. Actually I stopped myself at the last moment, because maybe it was her mom's shirt or something. What is the unwritten message of such a shirt? It's like advertising "dinner" on your clothes: you like it, want it, will probably get it. Good for you.

Today I saw a girl with a very large chinese character tattooed on her arm and I barked out a laugh. The chinese reading, "an", means "safety", while the japanese reading, "yasui", means "cheap". Safe and cheap - exactly what i look for in street prostitutes.

What chafes is this: there are manifold wonderful styles of writing kanji, and without exception what is tattooed on western flab is the style found in school primers and conservative dictionaries. So when you walk around with the word 'girl', or 'dragon' on your shoulder written in the equivalent of Arial font, you're kind of letting 1.5 billion people know what a tool you are.

scholar's bonus: the bottom left kanji, top to bottom = "onyomi", (chinese reading), and "kunyomi" (japanese reading) respectively. I taught myself this shit so you wouldn't have to.)

Veritatem Dies Aperit

2009-07-14T15:57:00.003+03:00

Petra and I flew to Rome for the long weekend, long because some 600 years ago someone (the Catholic Church, duh) set Jan Hus on fire, and so today we get a Monday off. As far as I can tell, Hus was a Martin Luther type, raising religious hell and revolution; thanks to him, some of the churches here have a goblet on top instead of a cross, a refreshing change if you prefer wine to executions.

Italians, anyway, are now my favorite people in the entire world. We had not a single grumpy encounter, and song and cheer bubbled up even from the sewers (along with the occasional possum-sized rat). I began to feel cheated. I wanted to ride scooters all day! I wanted to have my kids run around bars and streets after midnight! I wanted to break into song without warning and not have shoes and fruit thrown at my head!

We covered the old, broken stuff in about a day. I kept trying to see the city through the eyes of the other tourists. See I love ancient history. When it comes to Rome, I’ve read, inter alia, most of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbons), read I, Claudius, read a good amount of Suetonius, Tacitus, Marcus Aurelius, and Virgil (god help me). Also, a catholic nun taught me Latin for several years. Thus, my Rome is peopled by Flavians, praetors, triumphs, and triumvirates.

I guessed that the buckets of white tourists saw Russell Crowe in the coliseum and salads whenever they saw inscribed in marble the word “Caesar”. Lord knows what the seas of Asian pensioners saw. Probably mouthless cartoon kittens crawling all over everything – a side effect of holy-asian-rice deprivation. (Don’t even think about giving me some kind of lip about asian stereotypes here. I had to listen for ten years about how Japanese rice is tastier than the virgin Mary and how all other rices are inedible, when the truth is, Japanese rice tastes like Ikea furniture.)

We ended the day’s tour with a stop by Vatican City. I squinted and snarled looking for the pope’s chimney and then contented myself with grabbing my genitals and making squeaky-farty noises. Petra threw fountain water (holy water on tap here?) on my pants, completing several simultaneous desecrations and making me the asinus asinorum in saecula saeculorum.

(This brings to mind something Hitchens brought up in a chat with Dawkins, Dennit, and Harris: “I think it’s important we share with Socrates and other pre-monotheists a revulsion to desecration or to profanity; we don’t want to see churches desecrated or religious icons trashed. We share an admiration for at least some of the aesthetic achievements of religion.” Sorry Chris, touching myself in the vicinity of god’s supreme asshole was not an option.)

Sunday we took a train to the beach, where Petra taught me how to open bottled beer with a lighter. I thought it would be funny to sit around and swim all day without any sun protection lotion, cuz it’s been about 8 years since I treated myself to a Burn-and-Learn, as I call these wonderful exercises in realizing you’re never too old to forget important information to the extent that you’ll have to learn it all afresh the hard way.

The seaside town was a welcome retreat from the ragu-saucepan heat of the capital, and the residents made sure that when we got there, there would be a bar (the drinking kind) suspended from a crane – a personal sine qua non in any ocean resort I visit. I wanted to get at the controls of the crane and give those suspended drunks a real ride, but Petra declared Malum Prohibitum and then distracted me with 660ml(!) bottles of Peroni, so we drank until it was time to go to the beach again.

A Few Moments With God and Uri Gellar

2009-07-02T18:16:00.002+03:00

I had a few free minutes, so I loaded the King James Bible onto a Word document and did a word search for “pervert”. This was my first hit:

It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine;
nor for princes strong drink: 31:5 Lest they drink, and forget the
law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted.
(someone, probably Douchemouth 31:4)

It goes on to say:

31:6 Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto
those that be of heavy hearts.

31:7 Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no
more.

Poverty? This reminded me of “The Beatitudes”, so I looked up the part where Jesus preaches from a pitchers’ mound or something:

And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be
ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.
(Luke, 6:20)

Never mind that drunks get their own kingdom, only to find out that wine is not for them (what a trick!) – let’s focus on my last paycheck. Then again, let’s not.

Anyways, I wordsearched for “crap”, “rubbish”, “con-man”, “self-flattery”, “cockface”, “closet sadist”, “Uri Gellar”, and “butthole lord” in vain, and then loaded Beyond Good and Evil, but had similar results, though I did try “foam”, “fluffing”, and “reefer madness”. This made me wish for a Microsoft Word “sortes” function. How does “sortes” work?

When people wish to divest themselves of all responsibility or effort for an important decision, they sometimes have recourse to sortes biblicae, wherein they open the bible at a random page, stab blindly at a passage, and interpret the results according to whatever they wish it to mean. This extends to sortes shakespeareae, sortes homerae, or even sortes curious-georgeae if monkeys do it for you.

I’ll demonstrate: Let’s say I can’t decide if I should be a democrat or a republican next month. I take up my copy of Amores Perros, place my finger on a random passage, and read: “I’d prefer it if you gave me some money-woney”. (translation mine). This means I want to be a republican, because republicans are good at giving money to people who already have it. Or, it means I should be a democrat, because they like to give money to deadbeats.

(As always, the featured photos have nothing to do with the text)

I Cried. You Will Too.

2009-06-18T15:00:00.003+03:00

I did a google image search – “hate dirigible” – and nothing interesting came up, so I wrote this hateful little poem:

green spring sky shit plop,
haiku haiku haiku, hai!
thelma and louise

I’m sure my next patient is going to be here in 8 minutes. I’m going to surprise him with my total lack of preparedness. I don’t even have any blank paper, much less printed material. This is air traffic control, though, so maybe I’ll have him describe how to build an airplane for 90 minutes. Here at ATC they tell me the distance a controller allows between planes is directly proportional to the size of their mortgage (no mortgage = daredevil, etc.)

The above painting is from the Museum of Bad Art, a website that redeems this whole newfangled internet fad. Its title is: "He Was a Friend of Mine". I laughed. I cried. I wondered if the cat ghosted the dog. It also reminds me of the time I pretended to be Michal Vick. (Don't laugh - people here don't know he's black.) Yep, those were fine times. Come to think of it, it was yesterday. I fooled some guy into telling me where all the tunnels in Czech Republic are being built. Oh, the secrets I carry around in my little egg-head...

You'll Be Sorry

2009-06-02T16:55:00.003+03:00

I have 10 minutes to catch y'all up. I saved up a couple days worth of vodka bottles and hauled the three bags down to the recycle bin where a bearded man was gleeing.* His eyes were the saddest I have ever seen, and we looked at each other for a few moments before i chucked all the bottles through my hole with enough force to shatter most of them. Then i said, "Jdu potraviny, nakupuju vodku Stalinsky. Ho-ho-ho." which means "I go cornershop, I buy Stalin Vodka. Ha-Ha, none for you."

Spraypainting is big here. Someone sprayed in front of a neighboring apartment building, in giant blue letters, "I Love You." I was touched. I don't pee on that building anymore.

For a few days there I was being followed by a chubby girl in an orange sweater. Luckily I came to my senses and stopped believing in her; it's important to nip nacent paranoid-schizophrenia in the bud before it gets out of control.

Petya and I went to a wedding at a local football stadium. I remember that the dominant colors were white and green, which apparently is a hell of a lot more than the groom remembers. The team is The Bohemians, and their mascot is a kangaroo, though the only creatures I encountered were a dog and some beetles I found under a big rock.

And now I have to go work.

* gley, gley, gleed, gled, gleeing: to use a stick or similar tool to fish through the small hole in the side of a recycling bin, with the purpose of retrieving residual alcohol from unbroken bottles.

Who Wants to Be an Apollinaire?!?!

2009-06-02T16:52:00.001+03:00

Here you go, you’re 27 easy steps away from becoming a respectable post-structuralist poet.

Get a sheet of paper and write the numbers 1 through 17 in the left margin in descending verticality the following:

1) a noun

2) a noun beginning with “F”

3) an adjective

4) a noun

5) an adjective

6) a noun

7) a noun

8) a noun more than 12 letters in length

9) a quote, or something you wished you’d said but didn’t think of until it was too late.

10) something people put on hills

11) an adjective of no more than 4 letters in length

12) an adjective that starts with “un-“.

13) something you say when someone has been talking to you and you haven’t been listening and then they stop and you have to fake comprehension.

14) a deity, demigod, or metaphysical personage.

15) a place that does not serve alcohol

16) something that you just can’t put into your mouth anymore

17) something you did to yourself that you, to this day, wished you had never done.

Got all that? Great. You know what? You are a poet. Take your words and cram them into the insufficient spaces below, send me the results, and await the response from the public sphere.

Dragged from my (1)_________________, they vested me Supreme Critic

of film, faith, fluorocarbons, and (2)_______________.

The Sexagon Office has row after military row of stars (adhesive and corrosive),

And my (3)_______________ face looked 10 pounds fatter on television

when I gave monotheism half a star,

triggering history’s fastest impeachment,

from which I was saved

by my (4)_______________,

though the dust on our sex life was (5)_______________.

Trembling with a need to try to stick my (6)_______________ in a (7)_______________

I returned to the airwaves in September.

“This year’s sows exhibit a keen (8)_______________ for water mixed with dirt!”

That was the end of that day, though the camera girl did ask me a question,

so I said, “(9)___________________________________________________________!”

and, “I was back in the city whose (10)_______________ looks like an overturned table!

“Almost everyone was (11)______________ and the survivors were (12)___________!”

(13)___________________________, but the heart of this story is(14)______________’s
joke:

(15)_____________________, the floorboards under the carpeting, the (16)__________!

I (17)____________________

(your initials here in lowercase):

Animals Envy and Wish to Destroy Our Way of Life

2009-04-30T12:45:00.004+03:00

Feet! Petya and I were at a party in Opava, and we took a walk and found a deer stand and we climbed up with our beers and watched the earth rotate so that the sun eventually disappeared behind the horizon, which happens because an evil Mayan bird-snake eats the damn thing, and that is why it gets dark around dinner time.

Now, I was on the metro today and I saw that some joker had put up a William Blake poem. 'Tyger' is a funny little poem whose first stanza doesn't even rhyme, unless you speak like Eric Cartman and can rhyme 'symmetry' with 'authority'. Poetry, it turns out, is in fact twaddle, which is why everyone writes it. This is a fact because i said so, and i have a degree in twaddle, i mean poetry. It's a blurry, self-important form which should be outgrown as soon as possible. I don't much care for plays nor short stories either. That said, here is a poem of my own:

Polar Bear, Polar Bear,
smack that stupid German bint up;
Don't play with her for god's sake, just eat her and get it done with,
and then nobody will remember the name, 'Knut'

You see, I think if we could give animals the power of speech, they wouldn't differ much from the homeless, the crazies, and the fans of baseball and/or cricket, with all their mumbling and "give me"s and garbled wailing. Animals are so fucking selfish - i just can't believe it, you know? They only think of themselves. Fish, especially. I could just light up some dynamite everytime i see water, fish aggravate me so much. Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote that animals were no more than living wind-up machines, put here by god to fill up the empty spaces, and Rousseau, as we all know, was always right.

Beavers! With their fucking dams! How harmful is that, i ask you. Moles, jellyfish, those hummingbirds that suck the fluid out of your eye - these are only a few of the creatures topping the list of abusive animals. I don't even find animals that delicious. I mean, i'll have a burger on Fridays, but i'm really on buying it for the cheese and pickles. I could just as well take the meat out and use it for a beer coaster or a pencil holder.

Don't get me started on plant life! I mean it. Ever read Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil"? It's all in there! See for yourself. I have to take my medication now.

How to Cheese Off Old People

2009-04-30T12:10:00.003+03:00

We went to Barcelona for the long weekend. La Sagrada Familia has a sudoke puzzle on the front that i never noticed before: the numbers add up to 33, duh, though the sudoke puzzle in Durer's "Melancholy" add up to something like 42. Sudoku, by the way, blows, much in the same way that Gaudi is overrated. (A drippy facade is not the same thing as great architecture.)

So, normally, when some fossil creaks their way onto the tram I have to give up my seat no matter how weary my little pegs are. See, the Czech Republic hasn't learned to let it's blind and deaf senior citizens drive until they are ready to be put into the ground, and so they miss out on those hilarious scenes where some codger drives into a tree or a farmer's market. This also means that trams are like old people's homes on wheels and that fresh, perky, productive citizens like myself never get to use their asses in the way that nature intended. UNLESS, we adopt my new method of not giving in to this abhorrent ageism.

I've figured out that if i sit with my palms face up in my lap and my tongue sticking out a bit between my teeth people prefer to imagine that i don't exist. Sometimes i bob my head a little, as if listening to some phantom radio station broadcasting Dusty Springfield from the local puzzle factory. Don't overdo it though: old people with think you're taking the piss.

Ryan's method was to place his forehead against the window and pretend to be asleep, but this technique is defeated by persistant fogies who measure their needs against yours and find your sleep needs not very important at all.

WARNING: In Bangkok, it is the buddhist monks you must give up your seats for! The way to defeat them is to show them your crucifix and toss some pennies out the door, as monks are not above scrambling in the gutters for their booze n' whore fund.

Now, normally when

St. Paul Wore Khakis

2009-04-02T12:16:00.005+03:00

If denim disappeared what would people wear? The metro this morning was strictly Wrangler and Levis, like someone had just discovered gold in a river near Zlicin. One reason i am hesitant to wear jeans is because i don't want to get my legs confused with those of other people.

I came out of the metro and, unbelieveably, someone tried to speak to me: 2 girls in smiling-sun t-shirts soliciting some cause. I made the tried and true gesture, iPod + WALKING = PISS OFF. And after you've pissed off you can take your dog shelter, or heart disease, or sped kids, or narcotics hysteria and slam it up your crack because i'm trying to listen to LCD Soundsystem and you are a 13-year old girl who, if you had a Phd in philosopho-medico-anthropology and a Masters' degree in Canine Housing and a series of acclaimed books on tumors, i still wouldn't give 5 minutes of my ear to.

I'm in quite a good mood today. Everything is turning out perfectly, suspiciously sweet for me. If i had brain damage, i might even think that Karma was at work. But then again, that'snot how Karma really works. The "you're gonna reap what you sow" version comes from westerners trying to give St. Paul curry flavoring. I'm not much amused by Richard Gere and other californians dressing up tired old biblicisms in even tireder and older Hinduism, but if people in the pubs are going to invoke the word 'karma', they might want to be aware of what the Buddha had to say on the subject in one of the oldest and most authoritative of the buddhist texts, the name of which I don't have on hand because I am at the airport and don't generally carry around the names of Buddhist texts. Straight from the Buddha's mouth (and from my memory):

"By Karma I mean active participation in the world. That is, a person should act as a filter against evil. A person should deliberately do those acts which will leave the world a better place than it had been before."

Now i hear the word Karma used as a thought-terminating cliche of the variety of "i don't have to think about complicated issues because the poor/sick/homeless/Iraquis are getting what they deserve", but i don't see a lot of evil-filtering action from such individuals, nor could i imagine them stating in public that 6 million jewish people or the girl trapped in an Austrian dungeon to be raped 200 times a year for 24 years got what they deserved.

And by the way, St. Paul, people often do not reap what they sow. When the Lord in all His wisdom sends drought or plague, or a tsunami wipes out every living thing in the area, or United Fruit topples your government and turns you into a worse-than-slave, then you do not really reap what you sow. Don't even get me started on inherited wealth.

Got to Goethe You into My Life

2009-03-19T14:22:00.003+02:00

Ok, here's the bombed out church i was talking about. And here's Jesus and the little windows. The inside of the church smelled of burnt hair. Chewie, i don't know if he smells like anything, but he poses well next to the Berlin wall. The red picture is of me and my lawyer/German translator. Someday we might take a trip to a country whose language i speak, but so long as i am in a German-speaking country i will want to have my lawyer by my side.

I Am A Kind of Doughnut

2009-03-19T13:56:00.002+02:00

American Chewie was in Berlin for CeBit so my lawyer advised me to get in her car to drive up there. But first we stopped by a supermarket and filled our arms with cigarettes and Captain Morgan and Pilsner, for Pilsner is to us what oxygen is to astronauts.

Our hotel was oriented by a great, glowing wreck of a church, bombed down a bit but still towering. Whatever god lived there didn't think it worthwhile to protect its own house, but then they rarely do: Asimov pointed out that, cause they were often the tallest structures, it was always churches that got struck by lightning. The crafty Berliners plopped a sort of consolation church next to the old, dead one, and it really is beautiful, with thousands of tiny stained glass windows glazed in Rennes, i think. Small windows should prove more resiliant in future bombings.

The Holocaust memorial is a city block of gray cuboids, and the whole thing is perfect for hide-and-seek - it only took me seconds to lose my lawyer and The American. We saw a lot of things - some big, some small - and then we saw the wall, which i cried in front of (i was thinking about that part in E.T. where the alien "dies"). But really, the wall is looking a bit run-down. They really should fix it, get that thing back up there. A wall's not a wall that doesn't stop you from doing something.

Clubbing was fun. I want to say the name of the club was "Tlusty", but that's the Czech word for "Fat", and we were in Germany. So many interesting things happened in the club, i tell you. To recreate the experience, simply blenderize yourself a schnapps-peyote milkshake (strawberry), play The Wall and Triumph of the Will simultaneously on two TV sets placed near either ear, and speed-read Mann's The Magic Mountain. What else are you going to do tonight?

Dancing With the Attourneys

2009-02-19T14:12:00.003+02:00

I have this condition, see, where i need to be fed a vat of curry every six hours or i go into a tirade against the liberal media which does not stop until i am placed in a tub or swimming pull full of margaritas and left to soak for a fortnight.

Anyways, Saturday we drove down to Pilzn for the Lawyer's Ball (i was invited because i watched a lot of L.A. Law and Matlock when i was in jail), but something was different about me that day: i felt sleepier than i ever have in my entire life. Was it the work of some fucking faerie, or did god want me to fall into a deep slumber so i could dream of wrestling with angels? I can never decide.

Oh, i just made up a joke about poor people. It goes like this:

"Ha-HAH! They have no money! So stupid!"

So, yeah, at the Ball i tried to revive myself with rum-cokes, but i remained like a spaceship in which all the crew has been killed by an insane computer, drifting, drifting gently, in Jupiter's orbit. Yeah, that feeling. Pilzn, btw, is where brewmakers brew Pilsner Urquell. If you don't know what that is, it is what i cry myself to sleep every night wishing that our oceans were. We were going to visit the brewery, but Petra won a bottle of fizzy wine at The Ball, so we rushed back to Prague to go to a sauna so we could drink it while sweating.

Monday, i did almost no work at all. This is not unusual. But the previous Monday, Klara, a something-or-other, made curry. Klara's cat had just won a cat contest. Klara's cat sheds hair like the skies rain in April. If Klara's cat wins 2 more contests, she can quit being a lawyer and make millions selling her cat's offspring. At least, i think that's close to reality. Plato told me that i can never have direct experience of ultimate reality, so you'll excuse me if the cats, the curry, and/or Klara were only figures of some delusion. May i also remind you that, according to Thomas Aquinus, the whole of existence is divided between lawyers and beer?

Temple U. 1988

2009-02-19T14:00:00.002+02:00

These just showed up on Facebook. Maybe you can find a way to enlarge them. I sometimes forget that i came of age in the 80s. Este reminded me that none of the sweaters i'm wearing in the photos belonged to me, reminding me of my old habit of appropriating other people's wardrobes.

Evil Shapeshifting Painter Finds Satan in Montmarte

2009-02-12T12:56:00.004+02:00

I've only got ten minutes to write this, and then someone will probably come bothering me about the English language. See, once a season I have a powerful dream about evil, probably because I would love for there to be such a thing as an intrinsic, identifiable, quantifiable ‘evil’. Several millennia before Kant, even, the Upanishads came to the reasonable conclusion that, without a moral god, there cannot exist morality; that without the dictates of government, there is no crime. The illusion of good and evil is emotivism. This absense is a real effing headache for anyone concerned with civilization.

In my dreams, ‘evil’ is, interestingly enough, represented by the archetypical trickster figure, almost always a shapeshifter, and almost always with the usual Mephistophelean sense of humor:

“I like to see the Governor now and then,
And take good care to keep relations civil.
It’s decent in the first of gentlemen
To speak so friendly, even to the devil.”

(This is Goethe’s Mephistopheles himself comparing god almighty to terrestrial politics; note the wordplay of ‘civil’ and ‘gentlemen’, the use and non-use of capitalization I prefer to think of these things as more than printers’ and translators’ whims, but I don’t know any German, so don't listen to me.)

Now, I was waiting for the tram, and I remarked for the hundredth time how much the scenery here looks exactly like that of the paintings of a dead French painter named Utrillo: alleys and streets between amber houses in a white air, all so vivid in a way as to indicate supernatural presence. There is a very good argument for evolution in the way a good painter makes use of his/her senses and represents vision, but I was wondering if there was a connection between heightened right-brain activity and a belief in the mystical, and, after some searching, found what I was looking for in the Dopamine Hypothesis of Psychosis:

“Persons with a tendency to have psychotic experiences seem to show increased activation in the right hemisphere of the brain, also found in healthy people who have high levels of paranormal beliefs or in people who report mystical experiences; also, people who are more creative and also more likely to show a similar pattern of brain activation.”

My personal experience with painting is that, during and after a good session, not only did I feel inspired by the holy spirit, or muse, or angel outside my kitchen window (as in Blake’s case), but I also felt in possession of secret, higher knowledge about existence, which knowledge is the goal in traversing what is known to the cleverer studiers of humans as The Left-Handed Path. (Ever think about the several meanings of ‘right’, of the Latin word for ‘left'?) Well, it was a big deal in the old mystery cults, and I think to the alchemists too, but I for one am rather grateful to the neurosciences, as they tidily sum up and explain pretty much where the gods and devils live.

Hm. It just occurred to me that I have good friends who are believers. So I would just like to say that I do NOT categorically claim to have perfect information about existence, and that I would never say there is a 0% chance that a god of a tribe of bronze-age nomads created the world. Pascal told us that given the stakes (eternal paradise or torment), we should bet on god just to be on the safe side. I share his respect for probabilities, if not his piss-poor logic.

An Important Message About Robots

2009-02-05T12:03:00.002+02:00

While robots come in all shapes and sizes, one thing they all have in common is an inability to tolerate humans. Your standard automaton is composed of metal, others of bioferricite, which hasn't even been invented yet. Whatever their composition, the moving parts make people feel uncomfortable.

Inside of robots you will find wheels, springs, circles and rectangles, whirling blades, and wheels again. Actually, we don't know what's inside. Maybe it's rice.

Robots used to work for humans, but then they stopped. (Fucking unions.) With nobody working, humans and robots fought over the available television sets.

Robots are very ill-mannered and will think nothing of starting inter-stellar wars. In movies they are usually the enemy, and so they probably are in real life too.

Robots are not as good as organic life-forms. Humans are #1, OK? But don't tell the robots. And no jokes either. Their sense of humor is weird. And don't talk about rust. Not unless you'd like to see Earth turned into a flaming battleground. Tell any robots you know that we humans just want to be friends and that we are not stock-piling lasers. Yeah, that's it. Tell them that.

How to Stop a Train from Departing

2009-02-05T10:54:00.006+02:00

Just stand next to it.

I was on the Red-Line platform wondering why the train was sitting there with its doors shut, not moving. Suspecting trouble, I swung into action and quickly discovered what had brought the Prague transportation system to its knees: an old lady was standing too close to it. Her posture suggested that the doors had been slammed in her face. Train personnel were shouting and I was looking in my bag for a boomerang to take her out when some men forced her to take a step back, thus releasing the train from whatever safety regulation had trapped it.

So, to keep the trains from running, just stand with your nose against one.

Big News About Me and Petra

2009-01-29T12:29:00.004+02:00

My new flat has no internet connection, because i didn't want the men in black reading my thoughts through sophisticated q-beam technology, and so i'm not blogging or Facefucking so much anymore. To take the place of the internet, i bought a ficus and two bamboo shoots, but they just sit there not moving or getting bigger, making me wonder why we humans tolerate this green crap at all. I'm gonna buy some napalm-scented candles and try threatening my plants with that, show them which species is boss.

Petya's step-sister had her graduation ball, so i got to borrow a suit and meet half the family. It was a splendid affair, with drinking and polkas and Tolstoyan decolletages. When i popped out for cigarettes a young kid came up to me and said, "Excuse me Mr Clooney, can I have your - oh, sorry, i thought you were - never mind." The whole thing made me itch to go and spend my savings on a really flash suit.

Petya had her birthday party on Saturday. That's why these photos are here. She got a carving knife so beautiful, i had to run out and buy one for myself. The talk turned, as it always does after eating sushi, to my scars. Or maybe it was the gin lighting up my face scars (see cat photo). Then i remembered the knife-wound on my left foot. I don't think i showed my foot to everyone, but i did tell a nice little story of the "she was aiming for my chest" variety, which everybody enjoys after a dozen cuba libres or so.

Anyways, the big news is, Petra and I are getting external hard drives together. I know. We're so happy.

Ghosts, Milk Vomit, Vollyball

2009-01-29T12:17:00.002+02:00

J.D. Salinger turned 90 on January 1. (I bet you thought he was dead. Since nobody is allowed to see him, you may very well be right). High school teachers were fired for assigning the book in the 70s, which is amazing when you think that in the 70s, people thought kids were capable of reading books.
J.D. met L.Ron (of Hubbard), a kind of orangutan that had the frightening ability to form words and even grammatical sentences when allowed access to a typewriter. They probably shook paws. J.D. has been locked up in a log cabin built by Abraham Lincoln ever since. I, for one, am just grateful to the IUP that he didn’t become a gun-runner operating out of the sub-Sahara, like that tool, Rimbaud.

I moved into my new flat and now live alone with whatever microscopic organisms inhabit everything. Petya told me to remember my dreams from the first night, for its contents would determine something about my future.

In the first dream, I couldn’t get my friends in Iowa City to speak to me, so I found the house of the gays and made friends with them so I’d have somebody to go clubbing with. They really liked me, and told me their plans for the night: take lots of ambigo and hit this club that looked like a multiplex. Ambigo is a dream-drug that looks like cocaine except you have to blow lines as big as hot dogs and you have to do a program of 6 rails throughout the night. Also, it almost always makes you vomit a stream of pure milky white, an activity of particular interest when you and your crew have gotten lost at a poetry reading.

There were a few more dreams, but other people’s dreams are fucking garbage, so I’ll juts say that I was being hauled in a van full of volleyball instructors (females) every day to be dropped off at an ancient but well-preserved plantation manor. I had a backpack full of books and everyone thought I was hot shit for going into that house. In truth, I was teaching James Joyce and Tolstoy to a powerful ghost which was just barely restraining itself from turning earth into a cinder. After many lessons the ghost said the instruction was useless and that the people in the books had no relationship to itself. I said, “Well no shit, but the company is paying for this, so…” and then I said he should go ahead and fuck off or fuck the world, it wouldn’t make any difference to me, the goddamned spook.

A Very Special X-mas Message

2008-12-24T11:47:00.003+02:00

I know it's x-mas, but i want to talk about scurvy, as in, i thought i was getting it because i wasn't eating enough fruit. It turned out that i wasn't drinking enough homemade alcohol, so Ryan brought out his bottle of Hruskovica so that we could drink it and watch the entire Die Hard series, of which all i can recall is Alan Rickman saying Ho, ho, ho.

We decided that the best x-mas movies included Die Hard, L.A. Confidential, and, of course, Lethal Weapon, if only cuz Gary Busey shoots a TV while screaming "Today is Christmas!" There was an eye-opening article in the New York Times that points out how George Bailey probably doomed Bedford Falls to economic failure in It's a Wonderful Life. I myself am doomed to a sort of x-mas failure every time i attempt to buy presents for other people: i was always a bad consumer, and when i step into shops or shopping malls a kind of cloud settles over my brain and i end up running away with nothing in my hands but a package of disposable razors and some of my own hair.

Here's how x-mas works in the Czech Republic: as far as i can tell, on Miklaus (Dec 5), St. Nick, accompanied by an angel and a devil, gets on the trams and freaks me out. They confront children and force them to recite certain poems. If the kids do well, baby Jesus visits them in the night and gives them a present. If they fuck it up, they get a lump of coal or a potato, both of which are high in potential energy content, caloric or thermal, totally irrespectively.

On x-mas eve, Czechs tell their loved ones they are going to church, and then they go to pubs. Czech Republic is an effortlessly and self-proclaimed atheist state (one of the reasons i will never leave here), and this is precisely why they make the best beer. On street corners one finds modest pine trees and giant carp for sale. The carp are a part of the traditional x-mas dinner. I truly love Czechs for their wit, wisdom, and friendliness, but i have to say i would rather french kiss a carp than eat one, so you know i haven't gone completely native.

Anyways, my big plan for next year is to become a local rock hero: collect a bassist and drummer who do exactly what i say without any backtalk, and rip up some pubs with the great songs that aren't getting enough play, like this and this and this and this and this and probably this.

My other plan is to meet Greenbean - insert swooning noises here - in about 8 hours, so i'd best stop messing around with endless YouTube links and prettify myself, if such a thing is possible. That is all.

Castles, Krusovice, and Kidnapping

2008-12-22T13:23:00.003+02:00

Saturday, Greenbean called and said, "I'm picking you up at 2. You probably won't be coming home", which sounds sinister because i changed her words to make it so. We drove to an accident whose symmetry still pleases me: two cars flipped on their backs on either side of the road. Next to one, a girl was crouched next to her bored dog, smoking. Here i offered Greenbean some nuts.

The surprise destination was Krusovice, a village of about 500 souls and one brewery whose eponymous product is black and sweet and favoured by girls, as well as owned by Heineken, which name sounds to my jaded ears like a German-Middle English hybrid meaning "Ass Knowledge". I may as well admit that i lived with a Dutch guy in Madrid, that i helped him apply for a position at Heineken, that he was the biggest wanker of the 20th century and that my 'help' consisted largely of helping the beer company avoid hiring a formidable douchebag.

So yeah, we stayed with Greenbean's friend, a lawyer working for Heineken, and her boyfriend, who takes Texas Hold'em really seriously. They have a dog named Mashinka, which i'm pretty sure translates to 'Locomotive'. It is a friendly dog, and one which kept offering me en empty plastic food container as if begging me to cook a tuna casserole to fill it, or, worse, as if inviting me to a canine tupperware party.

So we drank Krusovice's x-mas brew, wine from the set of Lord of the Rings, and home-made slivovice (bathtub hootch), played some poker, showed some photos, bit each other, and then woke up and went to Krivoklat Castle. Bohemian kings lived there. We took a nice hike through the woods in search of an animal burrow. We didn't find it, but Mashinka chomped the hair off some passing pedigree dog, removing some of its hair.

Anyone wishing to experience the emotional impact of the weekend on my soul should click here. It was exactly like this. Thank you G.B.!

Elijah Declares 2008 'Best Of', Triggers Regional Rioting

2008-12-20T12:47:00.006+02:00

If you add up all the digits in 2008 you get 10, which is the number of fingers i have, making it MY YEAR! Highlights included working at City U., moving to Prague, living in Klamovka Hut, and meeting individuals who may wish to not be mentioned here. And i know the question that has been killing all of you: What were some of Elijah's Favorite Things in the past year, and when will rising sea levels flood The Netherlands? That's two questions really, though there is an unspoken relationship which i won't go into now, but let's see is i can remember anything of the recent past.

According to my iTunes stats, i played a lot of Koop, M83, The Field, Justice, and The Secret Machinces. I also seem to be spending loads of time with britpoppers and shoegazers. I've also got songs like Swimmers, Hopeless, Fake Tales of San Francisco, Your Ex-Lover is Dead, and Be Quiet and Drive that show no signs of fading. Of special interest is this video of Radiohead covering one of the greatest songs of all time. (Can someone check all these links and make sure they work, please?)

As for books, nothing new grabbed my attention except Houellebecq's Atomised and McCarthy's The Road, which made me wish i had his Border Trilogy with me. The bookshops here have little that i want, though i have been enjoying their Raymond Chandler bi-lingual series, including one of my favorite titles for a book, Pearls are a Nuisance (Perly Jsou Jen Pro Zlost). A typical exchange:

"Mrs. Penruddock's pearl necklace has been stolen, Walter."
"You told me that over the telephone. My temperature is still normal."

HItchens's God is not Great is not as great as one would hope, but maybe that's because it has almost no news for me, though i did like his take on the Dalai Lama, as he writes, "...the first foreign visitors to Tibet were downright appaled at the feudal domination, and hideous punishments, that kept the population in permanent serfdom to the parasitic monastic elite." I thought there was something oily about the smiling little yellowhat, and not only because he made Steven Segal the equivalent of a saint.

In computers, i have been thrilled with Google Desktop, which is summoned by a ctrl double click, and which uses keywords to find ANYTHING on your hard drive. Last month i was able to dump all my anti-spyware, -malware, -trojan, -virus programs and replace it with Kaspersky, which does it all, doesnt interrupt me with long, slow update downloads, and is apparently a space shuttle compared to the Ford Pintos which are the leading anti-virus software programs.

There may be more Favorite Things later, but i want to wrap this up by saying that Hasbro corp. has not done themselves any good by forcing Facebook to yank Scrabulous. Til the day i die i will spit at the mention of that company's name, will never buy one of their products even as i will play on already purchased sets of Monopoly and Risk, and will encourage others stay up late at night making pirate copies of their most popular titles. In fact, i think i'll go make myself a Battleship set right now out of whalebone and electrical parts from the inside of my fridge.

An End to Matushka

2008-12-20T11:58:00.006+02:00

Matushka - big, white rat - was looking threadbare; it spent every waking moment chewing at the bars of its birdcage in the most pitiable struggle for freedom i have ever witnessed, though on the occasions it did escape it only chewed through our internet cable and sink pipes before settling down in the bathroom.

Monday night I was seated in Banditos and Ryan said we should meet up with a friend of his and get even more wasted, and i hooked my thumbs in my pants pockets and said, "No thanks. I've gotta bury a rat", a phrase which has since become my favorite way of getting out of doing things i don't want to do.

Around midnight i found a spade in our cellar and took it, a beer, and Matushka (in an Albert's bag) out to a spot where i had once witnessed a groundhog moving its family, and took my time digging a hole proportional to what humans get in legal burials. Then i found a nice, long stone to plant in the hole, though it was too wet and late for me to paint anything on it, like dates or a picture of a mouse. When it was done i smoked a cigarette by way of eulogy.

Typical Monday.

The Sound of One Hand Slapping a Chinese Restaurant Owner

2008-12-19T15:35:00.006+02:00

I would like to propose a new, 21st century koan:

What is the sound of karaoke without microphones?

See, i was confused when, after our school's chinese x-mas dinner, our host carried in a bouquet of swell-looking microphones and laid them on the karaoke machine. Not a single one of these microphones had any relationship to electricity, and so everyone just kind of screamed at the words on the TV, distinguishable from an Orwellian Two-Minute Hate only by the melodies of 'Stayin' Alive' and of - i believe - 'Kokomo'.

I woke up Saturday feeling like i had been mugged by a Casio CZ-101 synthesizer, but i crawled out of my loft without breaking anything and started practicing Fairytale of New York, cuz i thought Joel and i were gonna perform it on Wednesday (never happened), and then Ven came in to shut me up, saying we should go over to Joel's party, which was strictly Bring-Your-Own-Cat (see photo).

We drank for several millenium and then i got restless and headed for Zizkov because an old friend of mine was supposedly drunk there, but in a moment of hope and inspiration i sent a message to Greenbean, and she invited me to come down to her friend's x-mas party somewhere in the Vysehrad. I came with little more than hat-head and thirst, and yet, by evening's end, i had been gifted a statue of Svejk about half the size of a bottle of vodka. I was pleased as punch with my statue, and doubly charmed by the warm company and the free beer (thank you x-mas party hosts!)

The next day is the day that is supposed to belong to some god, but i kept it for myself and took a walk to Prague TV Tower, which has babies on it. On the way, we passed a strenuously weeping woman, piles of dog crap, the parisien-esque Vinohrady quarter, and the big, modernist church that looks like a gigantic grave and in which the country's last preacher raves that women are the root of all evil. We got mulled wine outside this First Church of Misogyny, warming our hands with the steaming alcoholic brew.

Monday morning i was coming home and I met Ven on her way to work and she asked if i could check on Matushka (Werni's Rat) because she had given it food and it had not moved. I continued on to our flat and poked the rodent with a chopstick. That's when i knew i'd be digging a grave at midnight. (To be continued...)

I Once Dabbled in Pacifism - Not In 'Nam of Course

2008-12-07T11:55:00.003+02:00

People keep asking me what my plans are for X-mas, and i keep replying, "X-mas? Why are you asking me about X-mas? It's only July", which, it turns out, is an inappropriate thing to say in early December. So far, the correct answer seems to be "bowling". Ryan's students run/own/mastermind 12 lanes out by Strasnicka, and last Thursday treated us to a blinding whirlwind of chinese food, caviar, Tullamore Dew, and game after game of ten pin. Now and then the father would open a door, and behind it would be a sauna, or a hog roasting on a spit, or a miniature golf course. I woke up Friday morning next to a bowling pin and money which didn't belong to me.

The Thursday before that we celebrated Thanksgiving at Klamovka Hut. We stuffed ourselves and then got tired of giving thanks, which gave way to getting on the furnoture and breaking lighting fixtures. I always feel a bit leery of giving thanks as i am not descended from renegade British puritans who were taught to catch eel by the Wampanoag. No sir, my ancestors came to America around the time King Nixon was being dethroned by Fordian radicals over 900 years ago, long after all the native americans had been forced to learn Blackjack and Roulette and forced into casinos along and around the major highways of the southwest. For I am descended of accountants, all of whom come, of course, from Ireland and Germany. So, my Irish 73% is thankful for Joyce, Jameson's, and The Pogues, while my Kraut 20% gives thanks to Askii Disco, David Hasslehoff, and girls who can carry 10 pints of beer in each hand for 8 hours on end.

"Hold!" cry the math geniuses among you. "Wherefore is the missing 7%?" Well that's a very private question, and in addition I don't know the answer, suffice to say that my personal, deeply scientific research has proven the anomalous remainder to be of an extra-terrestrial, and indeed, extra-organic substance, which may explain my unearthly ability to throw strikes after 5 years' absence from the sport of bowling.

By Saturday i was feeling real pain in my left buttock, and today, Sunday, my body aches in such strange ways that i think i will be able to attend neither morning mass nor vespers too. That's okay. I have to study Czech, Spanish too, (for reasons maybe only one of you will understand), and also i spilled some bread crumbs on my carpet.

My school's x-mas party is on Friday. First on the schedule: bowling.

I Shot The Archduke Ferdinand II

2008-11-23T00:55:00.002+02:00

I had a list of all the wonderful things i was going to accomplish over the weekend: "visit national library; look for wood; order kanji dictionary; learn Czech, etc."

Instead of doing these things, Ven and I formed what i am calling a Song Production Outfit; we drew up the animation cells on Microsoft Paint and then went over to Joel's to get the noise software. Our debut single, "Disturbance" will probably run to about 180 BPM and, along with the video, will be engineered to guarantee extremely intense sensations in the listener.

More on that later. I've been meaning to bring a little more fucking gravitas to my blog, because there's more to be learned from life than can be gleaned from photos of me screaming at cats, no matter how much fun that activity can be. No. I take that back.

My Muse Made Me Do It

2008-11-21T23:12:00.002+02:00

Habib had a lot of things to say when R channeled him on Halloween, but the phrase i remember most dearly was his sneering, "I have house with 50 rooms - it is a bitch to clean."

I ran my planned-and-ran my first meeting teacher's meeting today. It felt a lot like the 'Nam, except, instead of being spat on by dirty hippies upon my return, my CV improved. You know what i mean.

On the tram from Stepanska to Karlovo Nameste i smelled burning plastic and wondered about our family's epilogue: will it be dressed in dignity or dignity's opposite? I am speaking of the Grand Family.

And So This Is Halloween

2008-11-21T23:00:00.002+02:00

The more photos I upload to Blogblather, the more photos i will be able to retrieve when my laptop is mistakenly made love to by yet another escaped primate from our wonderful zoo. R and i put it perfectly today: if homo sapien sapien has in fact won, defeated all the cats and dogs and other no-thumbed primates, why don't we just destroy them once and for all? It boggles the mind. I have written an opera which spells it all out, except i'm auditioning only anorexics for the lead roles, so shit-canned Santa Claus can go get a job at the chicken-violating plant, cuz no jolly-jelly-bellies are welcome to sing in "Del Humanistas Shaftan Todos Otros Mammalias". (could someone check my Euro-verb-declension here?)

"Novemeber seems odd/ you're my firing squad..."

2008-11-08T11:39:00.002+02:00

Friends Elaina and Gabby came down from London to visit for the weekend. They took a billion photos on four different cameras and i didn't get any of them, so here are some file photos from some weeks ago. Supposedly, I am to receive a CD in the mail containing all halloween-related evidence. For Prague-o-philes, the clubs we frequented were Chapeau Rouge, Valentino's, and the Roxy. The guards at the Roxy checked our bags and saw the bottles of red wine but did not take them away, so, you know, it's a cheap night there.

I'm getting a little nervous about the upcoming 2012 election. I ust hope people will get out and vote. I've gone over Obama's economic get-us-the-fuck-out-of-this-mess plan with a fine-toothed comb, and i have to admit that i've forgotten all of it. The Elijah Plan is better anyways: bring all the fucking factories back to the States, maybe even revive the steel industry. Close down all public schools - the kids can learn at the School of Life. Surround the South and finish it off once and for all, like we should've done in 1878, and use the fields to grow bamboo and flax. Oh yeah, and start taxing all these crusty old cults, the so-called christians and baptists and what have you. Scientology is not taxed in America, a shameful phenomenon which should result in immediate and mass-hysterical Rick-Rolling.

In an attempt to rejoin the human race, I have been willing myself into communal activities, most notably Film Club, created by Me and Anna and Ryan and, importantly, Me. It all kicks off with Michael Kane night tonight. The problem is, no girls seem to know who Mr. Kane is. For this, they could very well be punished with viewings of the original 'Get Carter', but as it's our inaugural night, we'll go easy with 'The Man Who Would be King', which also features James Bond.

Yes

2008-10-30T21:50:00.002+02:00

I'm so tired. I spent 7.5 hours today teaching airport technicians that it;s okay - and even admirable - to eat Whales. The only reason to not eat whales is because they are so hard to catch. People get upset about how much i like to murder whales, but i've got good news: NASA drones have found water on Mars, and where there's water, ther;s got to be whales. So we won't run out anytime soon. In commemoration of the endless supply of whale burgers, i hereby post a photo of me making love to a post (that dirty slitch).

Antecedent photos include Ryan looking sharpish and me looking like i got ravaged by a knitting circle. Believe me, these photos date from my salad days when i first stepped off the QEII onto the docks of Prague Harbor, a silver time when i didn't know nothin' and sex was spelled with a 'cks' at the back end (which surprised me to no end, really.) But the real shocker came a few days ago when i was crouched on my haunches in the shower, shivering with vast despair over the 2nd law of thermodynamics (which states that we all lose, lose, lose, and there are no winners, not now nor ever), and i realized that i had reached the age of Leopold Bloom. And so, a very rare bit of self-indulgence, a few words from Molly herself, for no good reason except i could never get them out of my head:

"...O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Almeda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and i thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and the he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Don't Save Me From the Flames

2008-10-28T09:40:00.002+02:00

You can expect a lot more of these quality photos in the entries to come. See, when i was in L.A. after the Bangladesh experiment, i painted a fence in exchange for money and bourbon and a camera that captures images 10 fucking seconds after you press the shutter button. I call it the 'Midlife Crisis' camera because you look at the photos and say, 'What the fuck happened? That's waaaay after the fact!"

Anyways, the only thing that needs explaining is the top photo, featuring my flatmate Vendula and what can only be described as a white rat (hint: the smaller organism), long past its prime. Rats have long been the enemy of humankind, spreading plagues and biting our babies' faces. That's why we keep one imprisoned in a bird cage, as a sort of object-lesson as well as a living piece of art that speaks the following message: 'How do you like me now, you piece of shit inferior specie?' I jest of course. Rats are great fun to watch when they are being fed to serpents.

I Feel Like Turducken Tonight, like Turducken Tonight!

2008-10-28T09:21:00.002+02:00

I can't tell if i'm getting more prone to hysterical outbursts with age or if i'm just noticing them more. Anyways, one of my students gave me a little box which can read my camera's memory card, so here come the photos. The bottom two are actually from Vienna, and, amazingly, one of them features somebody who is not me (shout out to Adam Rosen: Ryan picked up two Texan tourists last night and forced them to come to a strip club with us, comme d'habitude.)

The other photo of me portrays my very first hour in Prague, when i rented a flat for two days next to the river Vltava, which is toxic. One thing which is terribly clear in the forthcoming photos is that i am no longer anything like a spring chicken. But then i got word from Jenny Fish that she is turning 40 this year. My devestatingly witty reply:

"40? That's the age Jesus was when he turned turkey into goose!
(Heaven Smorgasborg, AD 41). How did you like the first third of your life?
My scientists have informed me that by the time we are 120, the average life
expectancy of an american will be 160. I know, it's like watching an endless
version of 'Life: the director's cut'..."

Tip for Kindergartners: You know you're in trouble when you start quoting yourself.

McCain will always be president of my heart

2008-10-26T20:35:00.002+02:00

So i was sitting and not working on the third floor of a very new building out by the airport and my gaze cast itself out to where yellow machines were shifting dirt about around a kilometer towards the horizon, and i thought, "Ha-ha-ha, that's all well and good, but what happens when they transform into giant robots and enslave the human race? Maybe i should get out there and ingratiate myself to them before the war starts!"

But seriously, if these people had ever gone near a beach they would know that whenever you dig a hole or build a castle the water will always come and take it all away from you. Kind of like how the Viet Cong takes away all your stuff when they catch you sneaking through one of their villages with an M-16. It's so totally unfair when they do that, and that's why i'm endorsing John McCain. I mean, i've already voted for Obama, but i feel sorry for ol' Steam-Top John, as it looks like this may not be his election, so i thought it would be approriate to start planning for McCain/Stockdale 2016 - (Cue footage, music from 'Cocoon'). *sigh* I wish we would just get it over with and clone Ronald Reagan.

Saturday i went over to Anna's to check on her cat, Kafka. Kafka was bigger than i remembered and had toppled the drying rack so that girls' underwear was all over the kitchen floor and hallway. It took me ages to find an open bottle of alcohol, and then i let the cat out back so it could look at and smell things for ten minutes. I tried making small talk with the cat, but we didn't get past 'Nice day for a human sacrifice, eh?' and i ended up examining triangular slabs of wood. The courtyard smelled exactly like marijuana. It put me in a mind to visit a friend of mine in the neighborhood, but i thought reading about the life of Stalin would be more fun, and i was right for once.

(Illustration by a Czech person who knows me all too well)

Kiss me - I Reek!

2008-09-24T23:35:00.003+03:00

Let me tell you about my state of mind, buster: i was forking slices of raw cloves of garlic out of a jar of chili oil into my mouth and almost dripped good into my Versace Limited Edition "Nightshade" cell phone. Jesus pleezus, i almost popped a ventricle.

November came early to Prague, but the bridges and spires are far more literary under the gray smear of drizzle that feels like is here to stay until Easter of 2012. In all my sessions today, clients played with the edges of the educational material in the same way 7-year-old me pushed overboiled string beans around the dinnerplate in an attempt to never eat them, and most of the hours were spent chatting about mortality and The Pledge of Allegiance. By 4PM (16.00 in Europe) i was in a pub off Narodni Trida cozying up to a shot of slivovice, trying to remember the japanese word for 'concussion'. But my japanese is fading faster than my hope that America will redeem itself on November 4.

I went home and talked to Werni about joining him for salsa lessons (first time is free), and then i deleted half of everything i had written the night before because there's just no point to writing a scene in which the principles are carrying on a conversation about chicken soup and heroin while sitting on gutted motorbikes suspended from the ceiling of a Tokyo flat, and then it was time to go down to Andel and meet Sylvia, because Wednesday nights are movie nights at The Meet Factory, which is a place even weirder than the motorbike flat mentioned above. Suffice to say, you have to dodge trains on 7 tracks to get there and two red, impaled, life-sized and dripping automobiles hang like banners before the front portals.

It was a Fassbinder film (on the right in the photo), and, much as i like seeing a gentle soul being systematically conned and driven to suicide for 3 hours, i have to say that being struck in the head with the butt of a Lugar might have yielded the same results in about a millionth of the time it took to watch the protagonist-in-jeans-jacket to bite it. In a totally unrealted footnote, i'd like to add that Fassbinder was able to make up to 4, sometimes 5, movies per year. He died aged 37, watching tv, an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a heroic blend of cocaine and sleeping pills in his heart, god bless him.

700 Billion! That's not so much...

2008-09-23T11:14:00.004+03:00

So I read that G.W. Bush is going to reward Wall Street with 700,000,000,000 dollars. Then we hear that Joseph Stiglitz estimates the cost of the war in Iraq to be (to date) 3 trillion dollars. Exciting figures to be sure, but too big for my monkey brain to comprehend. So i tripped through the web a bit to find some other numbers that might help me to grasp all those 0's. Some stats:

2003 - the year George W Bush squealed, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

$ 435,000,000 - direct cost of the war every day.

$ 615 billion: cost of interest on money borrowed to pay for the war.

615 billion is an interesting number, for with this much money, one could do any of the following:

- convert all the cars in america to run on ethanol 9 times over

- pay for 53 million years of education at a very nice university (U of Mass-Boston)

- feed and educate the world's poor for seven years.

- hunt down Osama Bin Laden by placing a fully equipped M1-A1 Abrams battle tank on every square mile of Afghanistan and staffing them entirely with duplicates of General Petraeus (i.e. soldiers with his salary).

It can also be noted that for $54 billion a year we could eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015. (World Bank estimate.)

I'm not sure if i'm reading my own findings correctly, but the suggestion seems to be that for the price of the war, America could have captured it's arch-foe and ended world hunger.

615 billion is an interesting number also because it is close to the number 500 billion which is the number of dollars the Pentagon gets from America's taxpayers every 365 days.

Sick of numbers yet? Just a few more:

The money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity.

McCain thinks the economy is "fundamentally strong" and wants to continue the good work of Reagan and the Bushes: take your money and give it to private enterprises. If these Wall Street gamblers win, they keep the riches. If they lose, your money will put them back at the roulette table. Anyways, today's polls:

56% - percentage of whites voting for McCain
36% - percentage of whites voting for Obama

45% - percentage of all people voting for McCain
47% - percentage of all people voting for Obama

That's enough. I've added up all the numbers and the answer makes me want to crawl into a cave in some forest until Asia is in control. See you then!

What Happens After We Die?

2008-09-11T20:16:00.005+03:00

It's September again, which means my mailbox has been overflowing with questions about bible action figures, the afterlife, and gigantic particle colliders. I shall tackle the least insane ones:

"Dear Eel, Where is Jesus? He got back to life and where did he go? - a fuzzy"

Jesus appeared to three woman of varying degrees of suppleness and then went to Hell to free all the good people who were locked up there because nobody was allowed into Heaven until Jesus redeemed mankind. This is called The Harrowing of Hell, the scras of which Hell apparently still bears, if one believes the words of glue-sniffing Dante Alligherimony. Jesus drops by Heaven and then appears before Thomas, who calls him an effing liar. Then Jesus acends to Heaven where he has been sitting on the right side of god until Judgement day, whereupon he will continue sitting on his father's right for all eternity. Because boht The Father and The Son are all-knowing, they never have anything to talk about.

"Dear Elly, won't the Lardge Hadron Collider destroy the universe when activated on 10 September? - concerned hockey mom"

No, though that would be fun. Anyone wanting to destroy the universe need only program the new iPod Nano 16G to play "Stairway to Heaven" backwards, and to then place the ipod, along with 7 tamagochis, in a Microwave at medium temperature for 5 minutes. The Hadron collider is not what it sounds like: in reality, it is a sort of meta-dimensional cannon expressly designed to fire schizophrenic meerkats and crack-pipe-smoking silverback gorillas directly into the homes of all the residents of Alaska, albeit at speeds slower than the speed of light, which is about 13MPH

"Dear Elyah, what happens after we die? And is there Karma? - Shitting Myself"

This is the hot topic of 2008, and the answer is incredibly complex. It's like this: if you don't vote for Obama, you get to clean the toilets of the troll-gods of Alpernia forever. And you get worms and kidney stones. Those who vote correctly get to live in a happy wonderland where Big Macs and unprotected sex are good for you.

Karma, on the other hand, works like this: Everyone the Nazis murdered deserved it. Believers in 'karma' weep for Darfur or Princess Di while at the same time bitching about the Chinese. Chairman Mao effectively murdered 60 million chinese in The Great Leap Forward. In fact, the starvation of 60 million people would please only the most sadistic creators of the universe, the very ones who instituted the Sharon Stone School of Perceived Jestice in the first place. People believe in Karma because history gives them heartburn.

Any more questions? Just send them to "Ax Elllli" and i will give you the best replies known to humankind

The Weather is Just One Man's Opinion

2008-09-11T19:48:00.004+03:00

I went a bit overboard and taught too much. I was in an office in the heavily-fortified Superstars of Air Traffic Control MaxiQuarters, teaching strangers the two ways to ask about the weather in Majorca, and my eyes kept straying to a photo of what looked like a man with a boot for a head out of which was growing a clutch of daisies, but if fact it was a picture of a tree, so, you know, that was special.

So, some writing:

Nice weather we’re having.
Yes, surely.
You could drop an ocean on me.
Yes, look at the time.

Atop the city’s hardest church,
Right next to the sun,
My speech begins badly:
“Weather”, (cough), “gentlemen,
Is just one man’s opinion.”

*

A few Russian princesses escaped the zoo,
and you saw them.
Such drifting tutus on the avenues were new;
Some cobblestones had never seen white.

How many minutes was I in the room
Before the subject of ducks shot to the top of the agenda?
How long have these lawyers been in a rock n’ roll band?
The walls shedding paint, ink dripping from my arms
After I squeezed the pens too hard,
Drawing war-stripes on my cheeks,
And on both my legs, your SMS:
“Make it pink.”

*

By popular vote and daisy-spattered crane
I was returned to the car-crash-colored sky
to deliver my master-speech
in the cool of August
at too-long-past noon:

“Gentlemen!”
The river swelled.
“Why do humans scream?”
It is a long speech.

And will be replayed in pubs for 600 years
before the message is discovered.
A simple sentence, a whisper in a thunderclap:

“r u doing anything Thursday?”

Which becomes, if you move the letters around a bit:

“We will meet again once more
at 7
in the years before we were born.”

"The Fragility of Everything Finally Revealed"

2008-08-30T16:57:00.006+03:00

Did you know David Lynch was offered "Return of the Jedi"? Or that Michael Bolton was in "Dune"? You didn't know that? Clearly you are not wasting enough of your life clicking net links. Since we're on the subject, Werni's pet rat chewed through our internet cable. Last month it was a plastic water pipe. I'm still not over the whole bubonic plague thing, but, whatever.

Last weekend i was passing through Vaclavske square, pushing my way through all the beige and yellowish-beige tourists, and i saw someone had put up a jumbotron and was playing vids from the soviet invasion of August 21, 1968. Some czechs are still raw about it, and for good reason. Google 'Prague Spring' to learn more. Actually, you know what? Don't do that. Rent or Netflix 'Hudson Hawk'. There you go.

I was on the number 9 tram and we had just crossed the Vlatava, when i saw a woman wearing a t-shirt that read, "Love like you've never been hurt" (accentuated with a broken-heart, thank god). I thought that was a great idea, and so that's what i did. I should mention that next to this woman was another female, one who resembled Cate Blanchette. So that was a good day.

I had my health check (for my visa). In Slovakia, they checked me for AIDS without telling me. Here the quack just asked me if i had had any surgery. (My favorite check was in Bangkok, where i walked into a room, sat down, and had an old man gleefully ask me, "Are you insane?")

I've been neglecting all my friends, the ones i made in my first weeks in Prague. I think they are getting pissed off with my sending incomplete SMS's and not showing up at places, so i'm importing some people from other countries to swell the ranks of my nears and dears. (I call it "The Surge".) Aside from these things, i live in terror of the thought that America is about to - in November - show the world just how racist and comatose it is, for it is really only racism that could get the republican mummy elected, is the only reason the race is close at all. Four years ago i thought i had given up on the United Statesmen, that i would never really care about their rotten affairs again. Damn you, Obama, for resurrecting miserable hope.

Why Did the Baby Cross the Road?

2008-08-06T14:32:00.004+03:00

(I don't have much to say today, so i'm just going to let guest-blogger Germaine P. Pantrum fill in for me:)

Babies. Perfectly innocent. Little angels! I like their mothers. Young moms especially, because they know their spawn are divine, which makes them The Virgin Mary, and you have to get the fuck out of their way when they ram a 4-wheel-drive pram into your personal space on your way to work. Unfortunately, a blog i read says that babies are not really important - certainly not anywhere equal in value to a nymphette. So there you go.

I am talking, of course, about your babies. The wonder twins, however, born to that trout-faced woman and Achilles, are truly beautiful and talented in ways you shouldn't even bother dreaming will ever occur in your world. Count yourself lucky that People magazine - which really should be called "People Who Would Not Talk to You If You Were Ten Times Prettier Than You Are Now Magazine" - has photographs waiting for you at the check-out counter of your local grease-farm.

Angels on the other hand suffer from the problem of not being real. You want to believe in them because you shit your pants every day thinking that death will mean your total extinction, which, thankfully, it will. Angels are proof of another world, even though there is no way to prove that the other world isn't ruled by a Devil-God 10,000 times more sadistic than Satan (he planted The Bible here to mess with you - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!) So yeah, angels are great. And babies are great. Hey! Wouldn't it be double-plus great if there were baby-angels?

Let's have a gander at Raphael's (Sistine) Madonna around the time Copernicus was writing that the Earth went around the sun and not the other way around as the Church would have it, the fuckwits. You know part of the painting because you went to the gift shop at your local strip mall and bought the postcard to prop on your bookshelf with its 20 copies of The Da Vinci Code, The Secret, and The Five Fuckwits You Meet In Heaven. The actual painting, which the Allies tried to destroy when they turned Dresden into a blast furnace, is actually quite awesome for reasons which are pointless to talk about since it is not the new iPhone, nor a Will Smith movie. Personally, i like the curtains, which i think were Raphael's sly way of saying that the Catholic Church and organized religion were all just a big act, a show whose curtains should have dropped around the time men of reason developed the goddamned aqueduct.

That is all. (Answer to riddle: because it was stapled to the chicken.)

Sunshine on My Shoulders Makes Me Develop Carcinogenic Melanoma

2008-08-04T23:20:00.003+03:00

Today i was forcing myself to be optimistic about the world to see if it might release bonus endorphins into my system, when some ruffian popped into my path to try to cheat me out of a cigarette. He actually signalled me to REMOVE MY iPOD NANO'S EARPHONES. Normally i would have snapped a Camel Light in two and tossed it downwind to watch the sub-prime lifeform go scuttling after it, but so shaken was i by this shameless stab into my iWorld, i could barely find the wherewithal to throw the nearest asian tourist at him and head into the safety of a Diesel-brand clothing boutique.

It makes me sick how people treat each other. All i wanted to do after work was drink 500 ml of, um, potato tea, and write my comprehensive plan for saving the world through love, tolerance, and one-free-prophylactic-with-every-pack-of-Camel-Lights program, but La-La said she wouldn't stay me with if i did that, and then she promised me food, so i gritted my teeth and actually came home after work. I needn't have bothered, cuz when she came in 3 hours late she wasn't capable of even spelling the word 'food', much less getting it to refrigeration or, say, my mouth. I cleaned the blood off her with some of those alcohol cleansing pads mom's always giving me on my duodecimal x-mas visits to L.A. and got her up the ladder. Then i got online and started writing this. I HOPE YOU'RE READING THIS LA-LA! I'M ONLY WRITING THIS CUZ I LOVE EVERYTHING YOU DO! Getting back to what i was saying, I'm pretty sure whatever food she managed to slap off a Tesco shelf into her basket and lug up the hill is now being eaten by Werni's rat in the next room.

The featured image pertains to the infamous Milgram experiment. You know the one: Old Stanley showed that about 80% of you would electrocute a stranger to death if told to do so by a person wearing a uniform or even a lab coat. I swear to god, the next time i hear somebody ask how Germany '38 and so on happened, i'm gonna set up my own little Milgram experiment.

Milgram, by the way, is also responsible for the 6 Degrees of Separation yawner, the same one that Microsoft just 'proved', even though the number - 6.6 - is just an average, meaning in many cases two individuals were 29 degrees separate, a figure which kind of negates the value of the word 'all' in the phrase 'all of us are only six degrees separate from Juliette Lewis'. But whatever makes you feel better about being a walking repository of bullshit...

2008-08-02T17:53:00.002+03:00

I'm told i can buy a special device that lets me transfer photos directly from my digicam's memory card direct to my laptop, but it's sort of a boring purchase to make, so i probably won't get around to it until the next moon landing. Speaking of which, some agency has found water on Mars. I'm so glad. I was starting to think there was water only on half the other planets in the system and on most of Jupiter's moons. I suggest we get a joint space trio consisting of an indian, a chinese, and a californian up to Mars as fast as possible to dump arsenic and spent plutonium into the Martian waters. Get'er done, in the vernacular of our chief wizards.

I shave only once a week now. I think i work even less than that. People ask me about my summer holidays, and I wonder what they think the last several months have been. When i first arrived in Prague, i was sweaty and homeless and a bit cranky from 20 months of Bratislava. Now, amazingly, i find myself looking back on even Tokyo, my home and love for a decade, with distaste - not the people, but the smothering pop culture and homogeneity. Bohemia is the land of both the cool and the chill, and it is with a certain smirking chagrin that i celebrate the 12 years it took me to finally find my way here.

Ugh, writing straightforward prose gives me acid reflux. Probably i need to shut down this blog and start a new one as 'Anonymous'. The thrill of blogging is threadbare; all the good stuff was in the photos anyways. Also, at the moment, there is only one thing i really think and care about, and that one thing cannot be advertised yet. That just leaves the new friends, the beer gardens on the hills looking down on the city, jogging around and through the castle, tits, trams, and tattoos. La-La has gotten me to watch 35 czech films from 1967, and Werni has taught me how to say 'world-weary' in German. All of us often drink 10 pints of beer and wobble home through streets that probably looked no different 1100 years ago. If all that weren't enough, it looks like my visa will be approved. So all that's missing from my life is a bicycle and winter clothes, most of which i left with M in Blava. Sounds like she just got evicted though, so maybe i should think about a new Autumn Collection. Oh, also, i removed a 'V' and an 'A' from my surname. You do the math.

Every Second I Draw Breath, An Angel Dies

2008-07-24T19:19:00.002+03:00

Photos are starting to trickle in, though not through my camera. Ozzie Joel snapped me at the zoo near Ven's, um, mams, and Meredeth caught me and the Russian-born Anna at a dodgy 3AM pub, moments before we fell in with 6 teen Mongolians (Pepe - see you this weekend!) This was before we ate watermelon in the park with two Kazaks. (Where does the 'h' go in 'kazak'?) I assiduously avoided mentioning Borat, but they brought it up themselves.

Facebook uses this cop-out phrase for Relationship Status: "It's Complicated". Those pikers have no idea. Casual acquaintances would never think it possible that i could get myself embroiled in so much drama in a new city in two weeks' time, but my long-term friends know me better. I will have a lot to write about if i live to that age wherein writing A MEMOIR is not embarrassing. Until then, just use your imaginations, and don't be afraid to crank the volume. (Terrifying thought: 'Less is more', but what if More becomes the new Less?)

I don't write you, my blog, these days, because, in Prague, it's impossible, yes, quite impossible, to not go out, and to not go out almost every night, hence the regional appellation, Bohemia. [Editor: leave in my goddamned Commageddon!] So the writing is rusty, barely prudent. It will need heavy vetting. Don't read this yet. Stop and come back in ten minutes.

My Newest Doomed Romance

2008-07-10T21:58:00.002+03:00

Actually, i think the title says it all. So we'll move on to the fact that i left a critical cable with M in Blava, so i can't upload photos from my digicam. Luckily i can simpoly steal other people's photos off the internet. "If it's online, it's MINE MINE MINE!" i always say.

Lenka is in Finland or something, so Ven and Werni and i took the train to someplace outside Prague and walked to several pubs before reaching a really tall castle. "The Hussites never took this one," Werni explained. "Obviously," i rasped. Ven, on the paths, was picking little red things off that green stuff that grows out of the brown stuff we haven't paved yet and eating them. Then she asked me if i would eat the mushrooms she picked (because in this part of the world people like to pick non-hallucinogenic mushrooms and eat them. I said i would drink a gallon of squeeze before i ate any vegetable that wasn't shrink-wrapped, and she said her skills were impeccable, so i said FINE, FINE, i'll risk agonizing death to eat something that doesn't even taste good unless it's on a pizza.

We really do go to a lot of pubs; the parties tend to be in our yard and rooms. To off-set heart disease, i've gone back to running. It's 20 minutes to the castle. The view all along the way is pure fairy-tale. I have to jog through 50 ruins before i even reach the main keep. I'd say it's been about 4 years since i loved my life so consistently. Well, i deserve it. Tokyo's pleasures made me fuzzy and undisciplined. Bangladesh and Bratislava sharpened me right up. Oh, i have to explain the walpurgishnacht BBQ we had - witches leaping over fires, rain, bedding confusion. Nah, i'll save it for my memoirs, to be written from an iron lung when i'm 99.

Thomas Hobbes has Five Adjectives for You

2008-07-02T20:15:00.002+03:00

I've been transferring my paper notebooks to my hard drive. 90% of it i've digested or have dismissed. Listen to this drivel:

William Powell (via Richard Werner, Daily Yomiuri) writes, "democracy requires free access to information. Citizens must have the opportunity to inform themselves, take part in inquiry and discussion and policy formation, and to advance their programs through political action."

What, like with the Lisbon Treaty? Well done clodhoppers. Is every mule-trader an expert in history/philosophy/government? Is it possible that a majority of farmers will always vote in favor of short-term returns?

DEMOCRACY? They mouth the word in the same breath as “Jesus”. You know, I don’t remember that tyrant taking any votes. I do remember him perverting the course of justice and disturbing the peace in the temple. What a blowhard. Maybe if his much vaunted predecessors, David and Solomon, had stopped shagging their million women for a few minutes to learn basic economics, their tiny kingdoms wouldn’t have been so easily kicked to rubble by their more progressive neighbors. Here's our reality check, from John Jay:

"The maxim, 'Those who own the country should run it', is, in fact, the principle on which the Republic was founded, and in its very nature capitalist democracy cannot stray far from this pattern. Politics becomes an interaction among groups of investors who compete for control of the state.”

Now we’re talking!

I have about 12 pages of handwritten notes - the result of a recent scribblefit - on Thomas Hobbes i was going to post here, but i sense this would go down about as well as absinthe at AA, so instead i shall tell you how i was walking past a toilet store and saw the shopkeep had placed a tall-boy of Pilsner Urquell (beer) on the lid of each pristine unit! Does 'can' have the same slang meaning in Czech?

Now to write some things i definitely shouldn't. I came home from work last night and was planning to go running, but my flatmates had a different plan. The pub in our park is open forever, apparently, and the going rate is about 2 pints per hour. It all feels a bit like the happier moments of A Midsummer's Night's Dream, except without the maudlin finale. The next day my new center of the universe sent me some verse:

Black birds
dying on your chest
and i wish i would be mad
instead i go for a walk and tell the children
not to drink hot wax

I really should not be posting this, though it is great gambling fun to flirt with fiasco using all this newfangled technology. And how many people can be that funny when writing in their second language?

You Feel Like A Dick Writing Anything In Prague

2008-06-30T20:58:00.002+03:00

My student let me into the building on Wenceslaus street and i commented on how nice the interior was.

"Yes, Kafka worked here."

I said, "He invented the safety helmet, you know." I mimed placing a bowl on my head; The student thought i was insane.

Students were all i talked to for about five days. Friday night i went out with girls, which is the whole reason i was born. Saturday, Lenka - my housemate - appeared and whisked me off to a beer garden up Petrin Hill. There was some kind of cautionary sign featuring an intoxicated person's dog eating another patron. I think that's what it was. I've never been good at decoding those bubble-headed anthroblobs you see in slippery-when-wet type fiascoglyphics. Sunday i finally met Werni, the mastermind of our home. We laughed and blabbed about canoeing and Kant while he spliced an internet cable with his teeth, prior to hammering a hole in the kitchen wall through which we threaded the internet into my room. I immediately downloaded 500 songs.

In the evening me and Lenka and Werni went down to the large beer garden in the park by our house and met the third housemate, Ven, for - wait for it... - beer. 80% of us were wearing red. Dogs and people frolicked like they never did under Kruschev. Rather unlike some other places i've lived, people could actually see me and were so friendly that they held conversations with me.

After 2 beers everyone went home for much-needed rest. Ven said she and i needed to drink another beer. We drank outside, then inside. Then she said there was an all night pub next to our house. Outside it was a howitzer and a tank. Inside it was half the american armed forces - in photographs and memorabilia.

We drank until we slurred. Four hours later i went to work. Just like Tokyo! Except now i need 4 hours instead of the 2 hours i gave myself back in the 90's.

Good news for you: I had a day or two with nothing to do but edit My Notebooks. Get ready for some half-digested glop comprised of mostly everything that happened in the past 7000 years. Drink some NyQuil first, though.

This Is Prague

2008-06-22T17:34:00.001+03:00

Me and two /others were getting wasted outside Slang Pub when we attracted the attention of Luke. He slid over from the next table, brought his tats and 6 kinds of martial arts with him. The back story was a load of 3-year-old daughters and restraining orders, but the main event was right across the promenade, under the flags of the Carlton Hotel, not a part of this world, and yet in it: a ghostly wedding party just on the other side of earshot. Luke had been invited down from Britain to celebrate his brother’s marriage and mend relationships. So on day one he tried to cripple his brother with some Shao-Lin kick to the kneecap. The pub terrace we sat in was his exile. He was happy there, but every 5 minutes he would have a relapse.

“Look at’em. They. Are. Right. There. Right there! And where am I?”

In a good position to attack your brother again, I said. They won’t see it coming.

I said a few other things that night, and I think it was expected that I would get my face kicked in, but when my party moved on, Luke shook Christopher’s and Robert’s hands, and when I went for my shake, Luke said, “Not for you, mate. It’s cuddles for you!” and gave me a big man-hug.

And then I got up early and went to Prague for my interview. I did the demo, asked more questions then was asked, and walked up the street for lunch at a terrace on what I think is called the Concordeplatz. Amid the trees before the Cathedral sat, of all things, a statue of Karel Capek. Idly, I wondered how many of the laborers working on the cathedral had suffered from Restless Leg Syndrome.

I didn’t feel like hanging out, so I got a taxi back to the train station where, on one of the underground walls, someone had recently written on a torn advertisement, “Jesus is coming soon.” (In American, naturally.) I mean, that’s what they said 2000 years ago, though they were more explicit; Jesus himself said he would be back before the apostles were dead. But you know how traffic gets.

Speaking of writing on the walls, when my train pulled into Kuty, my window faced a dead train on the next rail, all covered in a style of graffiti not common to Slovakia. On one car was writ in bubble letters a provoking piece of emo:

“My Tears Are Nothing”

Buck up, my poor romantic: heartless girls are more abundant than flies, and you will see your dead pets and/or parents in the afterlife - which all vandals believe in.

I wasn’t back in Blava long. Moved to Prague yesterday. With luck, I’ll be in a classroom before Wednesday. No photos yet. I have to configure my new phone’s Bluetooth to my PC blah blah blah blah blah.

Be Quiet and Drive

2008-06-11T13:04:00.002+03:00

There are so many people clamoring for new photographs, and so few taking them. NMF! (Name of my new Hip-Hop umbrella group: Not My Fault). Say, have you ever tried to rap? It's really hard if you have no rythym. And i can't even remember the most basic lines of "Juicy", even though i've heard it 400 times since Mother's Day.

SuperNintendoSegaGenesis
Man when I was dead broke i couldn't pitcha this

It's all good baby, baaaby.

So, yeah. The photos. Two from the past several months, one i dredged up from the Tokyo Files. All these photos need to be lightened. So get on that. And photoshop my crypt-keeper hands, make 'em a sort of Sca-Jo meets E.T. kind of thing.

I taught my last class at City U. All bribes have been recieved, all grades are in. Probably I shouldn't use this computer after today. I may be off-line for some weeks. This is a perfect opportunity to go back into the Eli's Weblog archives and read or re-read everything from August of 2006 onward. It's so much fun, rather like watching 67 hours of non-stop YouTube while leaving an open cannisters of kerosene and ether on a shelf close to your head. And honestly, how long has it been since you've done that?

There's free Wi-Fi in the Old City square, so i might pop down there with my laptop now and then to Google myself. I may even open emails, so keep writing. The past week i've mostly lay on my couch, etiolating, (look THAT one up!), toying with a theory that whole demographica and nations can be in denial, (not to mention their many other strategies for pain-avoidance, including infantilism and uber-coolitude.) So today, in a metal-grinding double-shifting of gears, i'm going to jack into my iPod, blast the Deftones, have 3 esspressos, and go clothes shopping at the Au Park Shopping Center. The good news? I think i have finally memorized my pants size. 32/32. So abmemorable.

Goodbye, City U.

2008-06-05T18:44:00.001+03:00

Goodbye!

Why, There's PLENTY of Food in the World!

2008-05-28T12:23:00.003+03:00

Continuing with my current trend of not writing what i would like to... I had a new pet spider I named Botticelli (yawn). It set up shop under my bathroom radiator. It can only be called a pet in the sense that I don’t kick his little house to shreds when I do my wide stance thing. Spiders are completely cool as long as they don’t inject their egg sacs into my flesh, causing one of those eruptions of millions of baby spiders from a postulant sore on my forehead. If a spider did that to me I would totally spend my summer of unemployment gassing spiders all over town with some kind of gas that is poisonous to spiders, and then, when I had collected 400 of their carcasses, I would paint them jolly bright colors and play Risk with them. Does anyone remember “The Believers”? The last movie to ever feature Martin Sheen getting some tail? Yeah, that babe had spider babies burst from her forearm.

I thought about setting goals today, but couldn't muster the gusto to life a pencil. I’m fairly certain I had planned to teach noun clauses today, but we ended up talking about how the homeless could be converted into food products for starving countries. No point in doing so, really; the americans would just double their food intake again.

After promoting cannibalism, I went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and did some translation of important documents. The National Bank of Slovakia intends to educate the stupid in how to use the Euro when it comes into use in January, and it intends to do this through song and puppet show. Sample lyrics:

The next time to the store you go-oh-oh/
You won’t be able to afford the so-o-oap/
Your food and clothes were already overpri-i-iced/
And – OH! – you make foreign investment so ni-i-i-ce!

Prague! The Musical

2008-05-21T10:53:00.002+03:00

A stony silence suggests to me that I’d better stop running everything through Babelfish. I thought the translations were funnier than a mountain ram caught in telephone wires by its horns, but, whatever. If that’s how you like your English, sure, I can write sentences befitting train schedules. That’s no problem at all. I’m perfectly willing to oblige. Those people who write those 8-page fold-out instructions on how to put an aspirin in your mouth? That’s so me from now on. Hey: if the spell- and grammar-check doesn’t like it, I don’t like it. What really matters is that you love me.

Prague – pronounced “PRAY-gyew” – was a flipping delight to see again. Friday, after work, the universitymobile picked us up and carried us across the border into Czech, where the Czech people live. Around normal feeding time we saw a minaret, the northernmost in all of Christendom. (Not now, of course, but in the days when the moors were into their expansion thing it was a big deal.) A riot nearly broke out over whether the giant bird we saw take wing was a stork or a crane. Now, I may not be an unemployed geomancer, but I can tell a stork from a Ralph Maccio, and it was a pelican, end of debate.

So there was a hotel and a conference on ESL instruction, and I learned a lot and have a lot of amusing anecdotes to tell, though I won’t tell you because you never write anymore, unless your name is Nick or Eliza, in which case your medals are in the mail. During lunch I sat in the raw sun of the garden and observed several new species of insect, all of them terrifying by their quivering thoraxes and malevolent mandibulae. After a while the sun and all the killing started to weary me, so I went into one of the buildings and admitted myself into one of the programs that was not in my ‘module’, and enjoyed myself immensley; it's always fascinating for me to see a professional teacher doing his thing.

I’m trying to think of what stupid things I did that day, but it seems i was uncharacteristically focused on that occasion, for I can’t remember any incidences of accidentally spilling my notes out a window or of mistaking a man for a woman or stealing a general's pen (that's a story for another time.) Walking from my last workshop towards the beer i said 'hi' to a girl and got talking to her and now i've decided to move to Prague. She recommended it, and who am i to argue with a beautiful, cool girl like that?

Sunday i went off on my own for a bit and decided to try something new: walking around in the pouring rain without an umbrella or jacket. My current hairstyle is not improved much by rain. I tried to sculpt it into punkish shapes, but I only made myself look like a wet terrier. I stopped touching my hair and went into a corner shop to buy a nice half-bottle of milk, which served as my companion as I strolled the squares and opera houses and parliaments of the bad-ass city. I mean, some cities you go to, and you get poncy nymph-n-cupid statues, vague empty-helmet tributes to warrantless invasion, effing obelisks, or, worst of all, faux-postmodern, pseudo-cubistic (and often winged) goatshit. Not in Prague! Towering, enthroned amazon-queens, their arms rested on hafts of recently-used broadswords! Stately horsemen taller than a WalMart! Hercules beating the everlasting crap out of everything that ever drew breath! I mean, I do like Vienna, but you get the feeling that that city’s decorators grew up under the wrong shade of wallpaper, if you catch my drift – were given the wrong kind of toys at x-mas and all that. Before there were male hair-stylists, there were people who thought that the tops of buildings should resemble wedding cakes crowned with 50 Olympuses instead of a mere pair of betrothed. If the Olympians and all their friends had backaches and went through an emo phase, you’d have Vienna. Prague’s statues are more like – I imagine – the art of ancient, ascendant Rome: naturalistic and brute.

Sorry, I took no pictures in Prague, because, and maybe I’m the first to say it, but photographs are repetitive scraps of overblown vanity. Unless they are taken well, taken of living people, and taken by me. Then they are worth keeping. In place of photos of a european city, i give you a Scary Rabbit.

European Cities Have Little Brass Models of Themselves In Them

2008-05-07T17:33:00.004+03:00

Ho ho ho. Ha ha ha. (content temporarily removed)

Convince my pear brandy fire is a good idea!

2008-05-01T15:51:00.004+03:00

(russian) Is good to see you everything again. I convince you, the content of the bacteria of air in this room is held in the limits of international standard. Ha ha ha, yes, I thought so too. Now shut upward and listen to, lackey. was there sausage and whiskey and tears on barbecue. the door of old Soviet woman the following it stole football; therefore we could not play. Knitting needle Emily to it in the German. Hey! fotoiye actually does speak its everyone, do not make they?

(chinese) At least has the girl. Sees them? They easily are may distinguish by theirs formal clothes. David attorney told me my reputation in front of me. He explained the whole Stella/McDonald's coffee lawsuit. We went to the place inn and obtained the stamp crushing [i.e. got hammered]. I said goodbye, goes under the hill, with ran entered Ryan, brought is the spare hill and convinces my pear brandy fire is a good idea. It continues without a halt with.

(french) Yes, thus obtained to us wasted. Sunday came afterwards. I will mention that it it next entry of blog. What I want to really specify is that Scientology is free from taxes in the United States. Thus, in a certain manner, the Americans subsidize the scientology. The good, America! Moreover, the scientologists are similar to these rats which helped the diffusion the bubonic plague, unless they feel worse and could not obtain by a labyrinth of laboratory with a bulldozer. Moreover, the Cruising of Tom rearranges in an obsessing way of the pieces of furniture. Thus there.

still typing like a champ@!

2008-04-15T17:04:00.001+03:00

More asdventiures in typing! Does anyone know what yoiur hand is supposed to do to produce an exclamation point? Typing malkes me want to necver use numbers, capital letters, or the letter “b”.

So today I wolke up and had a fit of paranoid terrors, whivh almost never happens to me. I was also oiut of soap, so I forewent shaving and used dishwashing saoap for thee purpose of eliminating bacterial odors. Becsaise I am now teaching subjects for which I am unqua;ligfied. , I foumnd m;yself improvisinfg I(fak!) an etymology for “hypotenuese”. I think now that I definitely cant spell that word,. Anyone who can spell that word is a facedivk anyhows. But yes, im teaching math. Geonmetry. Algebra. So,e some factorals. Bet you didn’t dknow I passed engineering calculus in uni. (fak u im not gionna capitaluize school subjects. ) so y es I can tell you how many different ways ten horses can come in first, second, and thierd place. This kind of information is so usefiul, let me telll you.

Why do the interoior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees? It seems like they wouldn’t ( and on a globe they dontPO ), and from this perspective it is understandable that many mathmaticia,ns would believe in a divine watchmaker. ;(that last sentence is incomprehensible; I am gibving preference to spelling rather than sense.)
T
tTo malke a long story short, I came home and made up names for fictional Korean dictators: Lord Kum Hee Offn is one of my favorites, thoiugh I have a special fondness foer Wa Yu Bin(?) Then I spent a few hours disagreeing with aspects of NBertrand ERussel’s “In Praise of Idleness”; igivr him credit though, for he was writing in the infancy of game theory as applicable to ,,, falk it, im not typing in the essentials of
ESS. Google it if u give a falk. One moer Korean Divctator and im done: Ho Im Bak! hahahahahahahahahaha

learning to type siucks

2008-04-15T16:55:00.001+03:00

learning to type siucks. I will iuse it as an exciouse to upsdate my blog. (note the resemblance to Courtnety :Love’s “writing” stylwe.) DSo yesterday I giot trappesd at the minisrtrty of foreigmn affairs’;. It was, after all, Friday at 530pnm, and a;;ll the sesxcurity had fgone honme. I buzzed muyself through the tuernsrt;ylwes ;’l, burt the outer dioor was liocked/. I had to go sho;uting aeround for the student/.;’’, but she had forfgotten her pass xcard and locked herself out of her office. So we were both trapped. In the Ministruiy of Foreign Affairs. I just wanted muy freedom. I xcould see sunshine and air through the windows, but I could not taste them. Even when we found a door, and we were outside, it still took me several days of wandering aeround the grounds of the EU Commission before I found an open gate and my freedom, which is important to me.

I csame home and started re-reading Allemn Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and was sad to discover how clueless he realty was about half of evertything.

Well, this typing thing seems to be working out, though it takes me three minurtes to shift or find crtl. Don’t even talk to me anbout the numbers. I admit, wWord cleaned up sonme of the words automatically; nevertheless, I am delighted with the waty I spelled “turnstile”.

Eli Goes to Croatia

2008-04-15T16:39:00.001+03:00

All life is suffering. But sometimes we take a break from that suffering and go to Slovenia and Croatia. We do this – like Napoleon – by going through Austria. Because it was the first day of Spring, it started snowing heavily, and the subject of what to call our van came up. “Silver Bullet” caught on while my attention was diverted (read: scanning the sky for tornados), and I considered forcing everybody to call it “Croat-Jammer”, but then, thanks to an attention span that makes squirrels seem like zen masters, I lost interest in the whole enterprise and turned my thoughts to the time I drove 42 hours straight from L.A. to Iowa City, or possibly the other way around.
Ljubljiana – say it. If you can get even the number of syllables right I’ll give you my peanut butter and vodka sandwich. Uncontained excitement: it was 9PM and the hostel was a locked-up construction site. We drove around hostel-hopping until we got fine accommodation at Hostel Alibi. I wondered if Slavoj Zizek was in town. If his essays are to be believed, he sometimes goes to Keanu Reeves movies. Then he goes home and writes this:

“And, of course, the same goes for the passage from Lenin to Stalin: the revolutionary political counterpoint to Lacan's Kant avec Sade is undoubtedly Lenin avec Stalin, i.e. it is only with Stalin that the Leninist revolutionary subject turns into the perverse object-instrument of the big Other's jouissance.”

Of course. After Slovenia we drove south, into Croatia, a place somebody used to bomb in the nineties. Why, oh why, can’t we all just get along! We parked in a national park and saw gorges, caves, and waterfalls. No bears. We saw and did many things. Went to Split and Zagreb. Palaces. Boats. Hummmm. Yeah, you know, humans are the same beast everywhere; all that varies is the level of shamanism and the relative rudeness of waitresses.

These are not a good selection of photos, but for some reason they are all I have on my work computer's hard drive. The rest is on Facebook. Go look at that. (sorrows for Dallas, Sarah, John, who aren't in the photos.)

Murdoch to Beaver: "Jesus Parodies are not yet Exhausted, (you young, cub reporter)!!"

2008-03-02T19:58:00.003+02:00

Just thought you'd like to know: the Holocene period is over. Humans have killed enough micro-organisms at the bottom of the food chain that top boffins have been forced to come up with a name for a new geological era: the Anthropocene Era. It's kind of like the Jurassic Era, except we're all screwed. Unlike the crap you heard from village idiots over the past 3000 years, this time it's real: we are all going to die, it's the end of the world, and this is not a drill. On the bright side, we have this Reuters/AP report, which I have dutifully ground through the babelfish translator (English to Japanese and back):

The member of AP, Christ yes Christ who goes due to all certain muscles, (suggested), the re-arrival of God, by the telex which and, seriously, the son from possible press conference it waits and yearns today "being impressed,". The Elianeazar Breobab star (it is young, though it is dense) there was a small-numbered inadequate word which it should call to the press corps where was assembled in the reporter (as for girl ギャリー Busey of 11 years old the person from of the high school "newspaper" of Hollywood west - 4 four-eyed ハルピュイア bitched from of equal amount ビバリー Hills 90210 of that man): "Magisterial it calls the telex by the fact that many sentences 1 are included special condition, however deftly miracle, the supernova which is maintained in inspection of the thing which simply, it can do thing and does not overpower very delicate subtext of strong optimism was included, the punctuation mark. "1 special journalist, here which is not driven is clear promise to new yes Christ all celibacy to the main problematical point someone's: "Being praised, in the psychosis which you think they who can with the self-absorbed flower type woman singer standing are Mariah Carey to Diane Rosseth power, it is better than the large quantity which which because is aged. "

It doesn't get more crystal than that.

You Ask Why They Call Me The Count...

2008-02-14T18:36:00.002+02:00

The Draft-Dodger speech was merely an excuse to use the word "babykiller". The following opener I wrote and delivered - simultaneously - at the ACLRP's Annual Culling in Davos, Swtizerland:

"Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It brings me no small pleasure to be afforded this opportunity to tell you about the new, state-of-the-art, portable liver. You wear it on the outside, like a fanny-pack. See? It will filter out all the icky stuff at a rate of, say, 1.5 liters of bourbon per day. You will be truly amazed at how much better you will feel after strapping this baby on! Woo-Hoo! And it comes with a free set of thermal socks if you order now. Get them while they are hot!"

Now, translated into Russian and back:

You, will thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It does not bring to me any small pleasure to be pozvolyannym of this possibility to say you about new, state-of-the-art, portable liver. You bear them on outside, as you fanny-.pakuyete. See? It filters outside completely icky substance on the tariff.say, 1.5 liters bourbon during the day. You will truly amazed on how much the best you will be feel after to connect this baby on! Posvata1te-Hoo! And it comes with freely the complete set thermally nose if you you order now. Will obtain them thus far they they are hot!

Now Japanese:

Thank you, you, appreciate in the woman and the gentleman. It does not have the small joy at this opportunity where that is new in me, concerning, the portable lever of state of the art says of being done. Outside being the way, that, the rear end you have attached to the body which is plugged. See? That filters icky raw materials everything in ratio of 1.5 liters of bourbon concerning the 1st. Whether being better than some rank after binding this baby with the string, whether you feel, you are surprised not to lie! Entreat and Hoo do! If and the thermal socks of the free deck and now you order that, it comes. While being hot, profit do those!

Traditional Chinese:

Thanks, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It does not bring my young pleasure to buy this opportunity to tell you about to be new, the science and technology at present progresses the level, portable liver. You wear it in exterior, likes the buttocks packing. Sees? It will cross will filter out all icky material to be daily by 1.5 liters rate bourbons liquors. You surprisedly will be really better in how many you to feel will fetter this baby later in! Woos Hoo! And it comes by the free wrap quantity of heat sock if you now order. Obtains them to work as they are hot!

Italian:

Thanks, ringrazi you, the getlteman and the getlteman. Small door does not appeal to to allow this occasion to me dirvi approximately the new one, to declare-of-the-art, portable liver. The capacities on the external part, as fanny-packed. It sees? Liter of bourbon will leak as an example outside all the roba icky to a rate 1.5 to the day. To align you will be astonished the how much best one you will think after the reggette of the this child! Corteggii - Hoo! And it comes with with free of tidy the thermal socks if hour. It obtains them while they are warm!

And double Japanese:

Thank you, recognize with the woman and the gentleman. That does not have the small joy in at this opportunity where that is new with me, it relates, being done you call the portable lever of state of the art. Method, that, outside the thing which is the rear section which is attached to the body where you insert. See? The icky raw materials ratio of 1.5 liters of bourbon regarding 1st it filters that entirely. Being been good than several after the defective part,, ranking do to attach this baby who has string thing how, you feel, how, you are surprised because it is not! As for Entreat Hoo! If and now it orders that, the free deck and the thermal socks, it comes. Being hot, while the profit does those,!

Lovely. Now to The Count. Remember his Ode to Infinite Numbers/Madness? It went like this:

"One bat flies in through the steeple/ one bat flies in through the door/ that makes two bats in my belfry/ wonderful!/ but wait/ there's more

"Two bats fly in through the steeple..." (etc. etc., ad infinitum.)

Howstuffworks.com published a series of essays on who would win a fight between Superman and a Jedi Knight, Superman vs. The Death Star, Superman vs. Gandalf, vs. the X-men, vs. Harry Potter, etc. But what they disastrously left out of the enterprise was The Count vs The Claymation Kris Kringle. True story: GoogleImaging "Claymation Santa Clause" proved fruitless; GoogleImaging "Goddamned Santa Clause" aced it.

Babelfuk of the Day

2008-02-14T18:24:00.002+02:00

Well, it's February 14 again, and that means it's time for some serious Babelfishing. Today we take an excerpt from a speech I wrote but never delivered. Until today...

Original:

Well, first of all, allow me to say that it is a pleasure to be here, and I hope that you will all learn something about draft dodging before the end of the day. Now, who here has been in a war? Or killed someone? You did? Great. Now, what if you had decided to go to Canada instead? Then you would not be a baby killer.

Now translated into Russian and back:

In the best way, first make it possible me to say that it will pleasure be here, and I hope that you all you will learn something about project dodging before the day to the end. Now, here always it find in the war? Or it is killed someone? You did make? It is large. Now if you did decide to go to Canada instead of? After this, you not would be the killer of baby.

Now German:

German:
Well first of all, you permit me to say that it is a pleasure, here to be, and I hope that all learn you something over the draft, which evades before the end of the daily. Now who here in a war was? Or killed someone? It? Largely. Now which, if you had decided to go to Canada instead of? Then you would not be a baby murderer.

And Dutch:

Well, firstly and especially, permit me say that it a pleasure is be here, and I hope that you learn something all concerning design that will avoid before the end of the day. Now, who here in a war has been? Or killed someone? You? Large. Now, what if you had decided to Canada in place of it to go? Then you no baby assassin would be.

Is there a term for Yoda-English? I think not. 800+ years old, total master of The Force, ass-kicker supreme, and he can't get his syntax straight. Why do i not believe that, George?

We Built A Fire And Roasted Moss To Stay Alive

2008-02-13T21:03:00.003+02:00

I command you to imagine this: Three girls, one man. All around us wilderhunds tore through the foliage, working up the courage to pierce our tiny, beleaguered sanctuary of light. The darkness, the bloodlust, and the cold, pressed in upon the hastily-scrambled-together bundle of hope lond-dead ancestors called 'fire'. Slowly, inevitably, the truth set - NOT DAWNED - on all of us: the brie had sat too close to the coals and was partially burnt on the underside. FIDDLESTICKS!

The girls from the hill and I hiked up to Koliba again to cook shit. On the way, while I was out of earshot, THEY decided who would be who on our Easter Roadtrip around Eastern Europe. How the fuck they decided I was Gilligan is beyond all human reason. Sarah, the driver, figures she's not the Skipper, but The Professor! Don't even get me started on what Arlin is. (It's all tagged on Facefuck.)

So i woke up and sat myself on the curb and brushed the gutter-detritus off my, off my... whatever that thing is that men wear over their wife-beaters, and i went to teach my class, and, just before i entered the classroom, my superior peripheral vision picked up a professor of economics sitting in the adjacent room right smack in front of a map of Asia, and i grabbed his hand and invited him to deliver a 65-minute lecture for my class, and he did! So now I understand why Nike is a gargantuan leech sucking the blood out of the poorest people the world has ever seen. (Details avalailable upon dinner invitation.)

Also, I failed a girl on her Travolta presentation and made her cry and flee the room. That hasn't happened to me since January. I must be losing my edge. After the river of tears, i went back to my desk and watched it self-destruct. The pegs or the aft-supporting-back-grommet declared independence, so i got to watch all my post-it notes sheared off in the southerly migration. After that, there was nothing to do but come home and watch the first season finale to Heroes with Sarah. I did not tell her that my current hairstyle is modeled on Sylar's. She likes him not.

Is every opinion or philosophy a cheeky upstart's imposition on implacable, uncaring fields of atomic and sub-atomic exchange? I think that by making any statement about existence, we seek to clutch - weakly - at control. Poor Friedrich, forever nauseated in his apartment, already eons beyond Freud, yet couldn't get a date. PLato telling us about an 'ideal other', hawking just another state-of-the-art can opener. It's a habit older than the last ice-age, i reckon: to understand a thing is to have the access of control. And so we claim that the world rests on the back of a tortoise. And the Old Testament and E-book start with inventories. It makes us feel better to have it in print: we are the gardeners/beekeepers/valets of the creator. Masters of this corrupt world! Sounds a lot better than, "Hey you field of particles! You're about as significant as a sneeze!" Yeah. Nobody likes to hear that. I know this because it's typical of my valentine's day cards.

To conclude: Slate has a book discussion club that has done me the invaluable favor of shaking my faith in the publication (which is owned by the Washington Post, so i should have known better anyways.) In discussing McCarthy's The Road, the participants spirited me back to my Junior High School days, when every human sentiment could be expressed with either "Totally!" or "No way!" All P.C. aside, they were a bunch of fucking spastic aphasiacs. mall aphasiacs. The least-dimmest bulb among them had to read the book twice before he got anything from it, but that was because he'd read it the first time thinking he was going to be writing the movie adaptation. The OMG! girl perfectly represented exactly why McCarthy's world was covered in ash and populated by cannibals. Dumb bint...

I'm so glad we had this time together to chat. I know you now have seen the light. It's all wolves outside the flicker-glow of rotten-wood campfires, and when the flames give way to embers, the only thing left is to kill the wolves, be eaten by the wolves, or join the wolves: a lovely thought, which I stole from Atwood. Thanks Margie!

January Cancelled Until Further Notice

2008-01-31T22:47:00.000+02:00

Well, it's that time of year again. Shudders racking my sail-and-mast frame, hair falling out in clumps, i drag myself upon long and cracked fingernails out from my nest of sock-puppets and yoga mats (snugly arranged in my den's ample, though disused, fireplace), forward, forward, moaning - nay, GASPING! - these haunted words:

"Must... mock... The Battle of Ramillies. Major engagement of the... War of the Spanish Succession. (Also known... as Queen... Anne's War in North America...)."

Anyays, dreams become really important when you have no life, and this is the first time in my life that i've had no life, that i've had no answer for people who casually - or concernedly - ask how i'm doing, ask what is new. What is new is that i am working 8- and 13-hour days. And everything that ever meant anything to me is suddenly bleached of all colour, and all that motivated me to kick the dust of my home off my boots and go schlepping across the Northern Hemisphere is suddenly a fossilized museum piece, a 3rd-rate mummy in an unvisited rust-belt city museum. (I had another analogy i wanted to chuck in there, but i lost it. What was it? Something about hearts being replaced by siberian turnips. Save that one for later...).

Working ultra-overtime was just an experiment anyways - a field trip at best. In three weeks it'll all calm down and i can go back to professional loafing on a semi- to full-time basis. Gonna learn how to cook. Gonna perfect my culinary genius. Gonna open up a grilled-cheese-sandwich restaurant in Macao: my sole ambition. (My Monterey Jack Ambition?) After i move. I won't cook here, up on the hill. Our kitchen sink has developed emotional problems. You hit the tap and all it does is weep. Really. It's pathetic to watch, and takes about a fortnight to wash a spoon. I've taken to just bringing my dirty dishes into the shower with me. (Sarah, Meave - sorry you have to find out this way.)

Last night i came home and my BFF's were waiting for me, plotting this weekend's collage- and sock-puppet-theater projects. Meavis has been manically post-it-note-ing pages of Vogue and Elle, while Lizzard has been keeping the sputtering flame in my heart alive with her smile and typing skills. We are going to put on a sock-puppet production of "Waiting for Godot" (Meave's idea) and "Death of a Salesman" (my idea) this weekend, or maybe on Labor Day. So this is my reason for living: flopping on the couch with the wonder-twins to watch episodes of HEROES: S2! And yes, i'm still pulling for Sylar. Didn't you guys notice my hair when i got back from L.A.? I marched right into supercuts, slapped my 17 bucks on the counter, and purred, "Make me look like the guy who wants to kill Hayden Panietteirrie." The woman managed a nod of infinite exhaustion and waved me towards my chair....

Love and Economics

2008-01-20T12:13:00.001+02:00

Friday night i came home and dressed all in black. I perfected my posture in the mirror: bow-legged and stooped. I strapped my night blue Cort around me so that the body rested low-slung against my ass. Then i went downstairs to Adam's going-away party and played, naturally, Leaving On A Jet Plane and a Palace Brothers song known to noone there but myself (Ohio Riverboat Song, modified for the occasion.) I was photographed like i was someone special. The best part was talking to Emily about something that has bothered me for years: the gulf between the musical output of The Beatles and the goofiness of the films. I don't know if i made my case convincingly enough.

I woke up and went for a run in the mist and mud of Horsky park. Mist: a foreshortening of the sphere of our visual experience. Romantic. I would be better off if i had never bought into Coleridge and Poe, of Wong Kar Wai and Coppola. Well, i ran for an hour. Yippee.

What i really wanted to do today is, in place of my blog, start posting the entirety of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I suspect there might be legal complications in doing so, but i don't feel very good about not delivering this prose to anyone who is still reading my blog. There was very little in All The Pretty Horses or The Crossing that would prepare us for Cormac's gift to the world. You read it and wonder how it was possible that nobody had ever written so well before. At the end of most of the paragraphs will be a sentence, off-hand, casual, almost missable, that in the afterthought hits you, blindsided, like a tractor trailer hauling concentrated beauty. Fuck it. I hope Picador doesn't get upset, because i have long been devoted to their publications, but i think i will post most of the book on this blog, starting today. James, you need not worry: i will still carry Ulysses everywhere i go.

I Drink Your Milkshake. I DRRRIIINK IT UP!

2008-01-03T04:49:00.000+02:00

I woke up this morning with the sun in my eyes, an alley beneath my ass, and i grabbed the first flatfoot i could find and i said "Officer, Officer, I saw the whole thing! What's the date?" And he said, (rightly terrified), "Tuesday! Tuesday the 2nd!" And i throttled him, screaming, "The Year! What Year!" Turns out it was a new one.
Having said that, i will personally deliver the choice of either ten singaporian dollars (can't get rid of them) or a paperback copy of "Through a Scanner Darkly" to the first person to list all the references in the above paragraph.
Let me tell you something about me and L.A., because nobody except myself seems to remember. I drove out here in '92 in a Ford Topaz that my grandfather had loaned me just before dying - made the trip from Iowa City in under 42 hours. (The secret: Happiness!) I blagged my way into a bartending job at a comedy club ("I have a degree in mixology!!"), and witnessed the likes of Louis Anderson, Bobcat Goldthwait, and Jay Leno dropping by unannounced to practice and check out the competition. Kat Dillon was out of town and let me use her flat for sleeping and teaching myself to paint. Next door was the guy who wrote the screenplay for "Aliens". (He's gone, but the guy who wrote "Sideways" lived in an adjacent flat.) While learning how to paint, i also was taking care of two cats, Cha-Cha and Luna. I painted them both several times. Yesterday I dropped by the flat. My painting of Cha-Cha had a sort of a place of honor on the front-room wall. Cha-Cha however had died two days before. She had been piebald. Like Moon! Moon was my cat in Bangladesh. Moon's death rattle i felt through the bandages as i held her. An Iranian vet had operated on her, done something wrong. This scene is both melodramatic and true. In a novel, Moon's death would serve - neatly - as an object-correlative for the end of my life with Moon's other parent. The point is, after I and my S.O. ran up to the rooftop and screamed Moon's name over and over under a tropical lighting storm, I flew to Tokyo, and, after two weeks of fielding ghosts, returned to L.A.! I painted fences.
What i'm coming to is this: i've come up with a funny term for much of Soderburgh's camerwork. I call it "cinema ring-a-ding-ding", cuz large parts of "Ocean's Eleven" are filmed in a sort of unsteady-cam: the sort of effect you'd get by handing a digicam to Dean Martin with instructions to hold the thing as steady as possible for 6 seconds, 6 seconds being equivalent to several eras for a man who had 9 vodka martinis in his blood before he rolled out of bed every day at 2 PM. Oh i've a wheelbarrow-load of respect for old Dino. I once read that he was a true 'Menefreghista', which is a badly misspelled Italian term for "one who truly does not give a fuck." Similar to how i felt going down Santa Monica and coming up Wilshire listening obscenely to Ride's "Vapour Trail", a song which hasn't been fresh since the height of the shoegazer years.
I've got a flight home in a few hours. instead of sleeping, i stayed up piecing through old photos and rewriting badly-written pages from novels by Stephen King and Thomas Harris. I also determined the political landscape of the next 12 american months: Obama vs. Giuliani. It should be Hillary, but it won't be. The glass cieling was very close to cracking. Not yet.
Oh, the photos. Me and my brother on the beach; me sprawling by myself at the Getty Villa. More to come.

It's Morning In America

2007-12-30T05:21:00.000+02:00

SOme other things i noticed while in The States: they now have bathtubs with doors in the side so old people don't have to clamber over the sides. Can you imagine the hilarity of having a hot bath, and then forgetting to drain the tub before opening the door? Oh man, i'd vote republican to see that, especially if the water cascaded down onto the new flatscreen TV of the folks living below. Which brings me to the greatest thing in the world: The Jerry Springer Show.

See, the Theatre of Dionysus sat around 15,000 persons, about 1/3rd the population of Athens (slaves not included) during the brief period of Direct Democracy in the 4th century BCE. Walmart receives 100 million buying customers every week: 1/3rd of the U.S. population. More than half of these shoppers live below the international poverty line, and 80% voted for George Bush in the last election and almost 100% of them have appeared on either Jerry Springer or The Steve Wilkos Show. If one is to give any kind of lip service to the dream of democracy, The Jerry Springer Show must serve as a sort of (strangled) voice of the people, for the show started off as a showcase for politcal debate and was molded swiftly at the hands of culural pressures to its present, inevitable form. Jerry, abiding, is our great, living P.T. Barnum.

I was going to write several paragraphs about Jerry being Greek Farce to Steve's Roman Colosseum, was even going to use the word 'postmodern', but thought better of it. Suffice to say, Steve's claim to hypermodernism (ha! got a shitty academic term in there anyhow!) is that he is the first TV host to physcially threaten his guests with violence, sometimes for up to 40 minutes. Have YOU ever threatened someone with violence for 40 minutes? Take it from me, it's very difficult to pull off.

What else did i learn about America? Let's see. Oh! The greatest book ever is "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac. Except get rid of the word "On" and replace Jack Kerouac with Cormac McCarthy. Old Jack is about as relevant today as a moth-eaten beret, and somewhat reminds me of Krakauer's "Into The Wild", which has just been made into a movie by Sean Penn. I won't see the movie because just reading about some Jack-London-and-Kerouac-reading idiot starving to death was quite enough for me. Better to go see "No Country For Old Men," which, incidentally, was written by the aforementioned Cormac McCarthy, probably the greatest living English-language writer, after myself.

Postcard from L.A.

2007-12-28T05:40:00.000+02:00

Julie Christie! The rumors are true: Los Angeles has not yet been blasted from the face of the earth! This only proves that god is not wrathful, but is, more likely, Morgan Freeman. I got off a refridgerator called United 029 and the first thing i saw was that everyone i know has iPhones. Also, I got an beaver for x-mas. (The attatched photo supports this wildly ambitious claim; furthermore, i have entertained the South African tradition of using 'an' before the word 'beaver'.)

Now, let's get down and jiggly with some pertinant facts about america. Firstly, film, advertising, and all media with audio capability have narrowed down the range of all human emotion into two tried-and-true distillations. The first is Peppiness, and its anthem is "It's Your Thing" by the Isley Brothers. What's that you say? There's a sale on all orange food-like confections at Target? "It's your thing, do what you wanna do...". Hey! Trade in your Toyota on Christmas Day and they'll throw in a year of value-free financing and service and your choice of one free burial or hip replacement for the whole family! "It's your thing, do waht you wanna do...".

The other emotion, which has no name in English but can be expressed as the absolute absense of Peppiness, is scored with, as ever, by swelling, Oscar-beggaring soundtracks that make John Williams sound like Deerhoof.

If it's nuance of experience you have come to expect from these pages, i suppopse i could mention the existential indigestion of 79 channels (basic cable) of mostly dead people. If "I Love Lucy" is anything to judge by, people in the 50s would have judged navel fuzz the height of hilarity and bathroom scales the epitome of wit. But reruns of the virtually mummified are not as spine-tinglingly epiphanamistic as the ads for what i guess we could call Life Adjustment Medicaments. Of these, Mirapex holds for this writer an unearthly appeal.

The ad features squiggly stick-figure animation and the young-but-wise voice you would expect if a pre-arrest Winona Rider approached you in a Gap store and tried to sell you a mathcing pair of his-hers wool socks. (writer's note: i'm not exactly sure what the above description means.) The life-threatening issue: Restless Leg Syndrome. You can't sleep. Your legs have tiny little lightning bolts inside them. So you take Mirapex. Now you can sleep. Now you can listen to Winona glibly laugh away the possible side-effects: drowsiness, dizziness, and an increased impulse to DRINK, GAMBLE, AND HAVE SEX. Intrigued, i googled. The real list of side effects rivals those of Leviticus. A selection, with my faves in CAPS:

angina pectoris, arrhythmia supraventricular, atrial fibrillation, atrioventricular block first degree, atrioventricular block second degree, bradycardia, bundle branch block, CARDIAC ARREST, cardiac failure, cardiac failure congestive, cardiomegaly, coronary artery occlusion, cyanosis, extrasystoles, left ventricular failure, myocardial infarction, nodal arrhythmia, sinus arrhythmia, sinus bradycardia, sinus tachycardia, supraventricular extrasystoles, supraventricular tachycardia, tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, ventricular extrasystoles, ventricular hypertrophy

DEAFNESS, ear pain, hearing impaired, hypoacusis, motion sickness, vestibular ataxia
goiter, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism

amaurosis fugax, blepharitis, blepharospasm, cataract, dacryostenosis acquired, dry eye, EYE HEMORRHAGE, eye irritation, eye pain, eyelid edema, eyelid ptosis, GLAUCOMA, keratitis, macular degeneration, myopia, photophobia, RETINAL DETACHMENT, retinal vascular disorder, scotoma, vision blurred, visual acuity reduced, vitreous floaters
rectal hemorrhage, reflux esophagitis, tongue edema, tongue ulceration, toothache, umbilical hernia, DEATH, drug withdrawal syndrome, face edema, feeling cold, feeling hot, feeling jittery, gait disturbance, impaired healing, influenza-like illness, irritability, localized edema, edema, pitting edema, thirst, suicidal ideation, vaginal discharge, vaginal hemorrhage...

In other news, i got my first haircut in 12 years, visited the Getty Villa, and ran into Michael Rappaport at a "There Will Be Blood" screening. Mike had his mail-order entourage around him, and when i say "screening" i mean: i went to see a movie. The Arclight on West Sunset. Big fluffy seats, legroom like 1st class. Popcorn for 1.5 billion dollars - before melted butter. Good. I'm on vacation, so no proofing or editing. Submit your snarkies in the usual box.

Fatwah THIS, foo!

2007-12-08T14:47:00.000+02:00

Attention AMPTP! I am happy to announce you no longer need bother negotiating with all those impudent writers. I will henceforth write for EVERY TV SHOW IN AMERICA, for i have nothing to do this weekend. As long as i'm writing all the scripts for Grey's and Hero's and such, I'd like to pitch my ide for an original series: "Muhammad and Me", a hilarious sitcom in which the well-meaning but hapless main character offends Islam once per week, resulting in gut-busting death-threats, jihads, and (during sweeps months) a Very-Special-Episode fatwah! I'm thinking the protag's name should be "Constantine".

Now i know you think this concept might irritate some of the more uptight imams, but i was thinking we could end each episode with a nod to the faith: at the end of every episode we could arrange to have Christopher Hitchens or Martin Amis bitch-slapped for real. I know this could broaden our fan-base with the Chirstians too. My god, do i sense i new reality show here? "Race to Punch Salman Rushdie in the Nutsack"?.... Let's sleep on it.

You know, i received a complaint from someone named Ali - i think he is muslim - regarding my MySpace page where i go by the fetching moniker of "god". He wrote:

"You know that when you die you will suffer?"

Now watch closely the way i handle this fruitcake upstart who has never even been near the TMZ:

"Verily, many will suffer before they die, though not after, for I have been plentiful generous with my 'Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free' cards. I have bestoweth them upon Carrefoure and Tesco hypermarkets. The wise man would getteth his rear-end down to one of these outlets before time runneth out"

All of which is very interesting. But now let's see what happens when I run the quotes through BabelFish a few times:

"Verily, much will suffer before they die, however not afterwards, since they were abundant generous with my charts ' of Obtain-Outside-Of-hell-Free '. I have the bestoweth they on the hypermarkets of Tesco and Carrefoure. The getteth of test of man his bottom a posteriori to one of the latter taken before the runneth of time outside."

Then we have to run it through Dialectizer's "Jive" format:

"Verily, much gots'ta suffa' befo'e dey die, howeva' not afterwards, since dey wuz abundant generous wid mah' charts ' uh Obtain-Outside-Of-hell-Free '. ah' have da damn bestowed dey on de hypuh'markets uh Tesco and Carrefoee. De digted uh test uh man his bottom some posterio'i t'one uh de latta' snatchn befo'e da damn runned uh time outside."

Christ, these religious texts are wordy. Hey! writers of the Septuagint and Vulgate! New word for ya: BROCHURE! But i digress. The crucial thing is, when we do our casting, we remember that Mohammad is not a teddy bear. That is just wrong. I was thinking we represent our illiterate merchant-brigand with a talking banjo: Knight Rider meets The Magic Flute or some shit like that. My PA suggested we put Shatner in a Grimace-from-McDonald's outfit, but i said, nah, William's too eloquent for the role.

Anyways, i have to get started on the pilot. Send me the contract and i'll make sure we have enough teleplays by x-mas to last us until the next Ramadamadingdang. See you at the Golden Globes.

Life Is Like A Box Of Chocolate-Colored Asps

2007-11-26T23:25:00.000+02:00

Let me tell you something about the internet: some of the data miss the ever-orbiting satellites which o'er-encompass our fair world, and eggplant-shaped archaeo-biologists living on the far side of the galaxy are going to have to decipher digital images like the ones below as they come crashing down into their regularly-scheduled TV programs, as unwelcome as they are unsettling.

Enough about eggplants. Let's talk about my feelings. I have three of them. They need a wash. A touch of mildew there, some moth larvae there; I often take them out of my bedside microwave oven to see if they are yet done, but they are still a bit frozen in the center, baked to a carbonized crust on the outside. Really, i don't know why i don't toss out the whole mess. Well, one of the feelings I have is that this is going to be a very cold Winter, so i am going to visit mum in L.A. this x-mas. Yes, i will be in america for two weeks. But i promise everyone that after those two weeks i WILL be coming back to the real world. I swear!

The photos: "Teachers" dancing on "school" property; Ryan politely angles his butt away from my face; Chewie and I identify mutants; Liz lets me share in the joy of her (and Adam's)Frankensteinian creation. The rest is silence.

Tearful Europeans welcome ELijah Beaver to Prague, Vienna; Awards Presentations Ensue

2007-11-11T10:15:00.001+02:00

Sarah and Theresa took me to Vienna and tried to make me buy hats and scarves, full well knowing my primary occupation these days is losing small articles such as these. Elberry, on his blog, mentoned me in his "VIEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNAAAAAAA" posting, and my reply, written at some dim point in the past when i was clever, was:

"There is too much gold in Vienna to commit suicide! Take it from me. And man, if you like Klimt, if you especially like him on the sides of buses and on notepads and quality-grade shopping bags and lighters and mugs and bayonettes, you should definitely go there. Don’t forget to drink the obligatory half-litre of vodka when you cross the border!"

After we had bought loads and loads of boots and leggings, we had a couple-two-tree mugs of punch and then ducked into the McDonalds near St Stephen's Cathedral to piss, and as i was approaching the men's room door my coat button caught some pentegenarian's hair and she yelped a bit, and my reaction was to turn around and say 'Are you all right?', but Sarah thought i was speaking to her since i was fcaing her and speaking English, and she said 'Ya, i'm okay' and then i gave up on the whole vietnam-war-grade morass and just extricated myself to the loo.

We drank 1.75 litres of screw-cap wine on the train back to Blava, and then Sarah and I watched 2 hours of the 100-hour BBC A&E production of "Pride and Prejudice", picking the thing apart like meat from rotisserie chicken or some similar animal, for we had just both read the book for the millionth time. (A "book" is, by the way, a sort of thing with paper and words in it - Hollywood producers use them to fertilize their poolside ornamental gardens and also to get ideas for new movies on those rare occasions when movie-goers get sick of watching Kevin Cocksucker mumble his way through yet another baseball film.)

Sarah went to bed, so Donna and I and a bottle of Stalin Vodka went downstairs, where Rosen, Arlin, John "Killadelphia" Larkin, and Jimmy James were watching some event involving a retardedly-shaped ball, and Liz and Meave were watching "Grey's Anatomy"'s season finale. Kind of. Mountain hikers muredered their friend, it seems. It looked like the corpse had a pair of scissors rammed in his head, but the girls assured me it was an axe. How could i be so silly? Then we played poker, but it wasn't for money, and who wants to play any game that doesn't demand taking money away from your friends? Well, the point is, i don't think i did anything scary last night.

Not like in Prague. I was there with Arlin and two couples: Rob and Stacy, Russ and Elle. They are really very nice people, which is too bad, because i am not very nice at all. Somebody needed something from Tesco, and somehow i wandered into the section that sold confetti. A huge bag of confetti. So i bought that and took it down to the supermarket. The bag somehow broke open and i began celebrating life, liberty, the human race, and the pastries section by yelling and tossing up confetti everywhere. Looking back, i would guess that most of the witnesses were not charmed, but a bunch of germans who were buying a keg asked if i could be their best friend, and i almost went with them instead of staying loyal to the people i was lodging with (now doing their college best to become invisible). Then the now-infamous Austrian-girl-in-the-hat came up to me and asked for some confetti. She did this again at the tills. Boy was she cute. But really, i needed to be with Eliza to pull this sort of thing off, cuz she would have not only joined in with the confetti-hurling, but would also have assassinated hat-girl's boyfriend, who was lurking in the background, waiting for the shower of candy-colored dots and stars to thin before grabbing his girlfriend and putting her on a bus to whatever country no longer accepts American passports, Botswana perhaps. Eliza! I miss you!

Kind of Blue

2007-11-04T23:28:00.000+02:00

We had a kind of problem with 67-crown pizzas last month, culminating in Meave's birthday: we took her to our local, fed her beers, gave her a big present of five assorted pizzas. We ate most of them that very night.

Photographed persons include more Canadians. Arlin as a monk, and... actually, he is the only canadian. Sheik Johnathan hails from Killadelphia - same place i "earned" my degree - and Adam made it all the way from Houston just to eat creamy goat cheese.
I never asked where vampiric Emily is from. If you look REAL close at that last photo, you can make out one-third of her boyfriend's head in the background (look for the deathly pallor).

Okay, now, as promised, back to my sensible and low-key trip to Prague...

More Halloween Pictures!!

2007-11-04T23:22:00.001+02:00

I just got these off of flatmate Meave (American Gladiator "Blade" arm wrestling Frenchie Noel in featured photo, above). In case it wasn't clear, Liz is Miss Hannigan of "Annie" villainy. Ryan was a (disgraced?) angel, Andreaka and her beau were something creepy, and Katarina was, i guess, a Kiss groupie. Adam appears, naturally, in all his feminine glory, over a beer. In a completely unrelated photo, i have all the benjamins.

PRAGUE is U GRAPE spelled differently

2007-11-04T17:57:00.000+02:00

The more disturbing pictures are not in yet, but, to whet your appetite for all things related to me, i did manage to get a few freebies off the paparazzi who stalk me wherever i go. On this day they caught up with me in Prague on the Charles Bridge, which is a magnificent 14th Century bridge in the high baroque style. Or at least that was the line they fed me. Looked like a pile of rocks, actually.

Prague is pronounced "PRA-hah" by people who claim to live there; it is the sound you might make upon seeing a mild rival fall down a flight of stairs. Prague is the capital (i.e. main city) of a country called Czech. To see the sites, one must first visit 50 souvenir shops, all of which have 79 varieties of shot glasses, thimbles and T-shirts which read "Czech me out!" My reaction to all this was to run back to our flat and design a giant styrofoam thought-bubble/helmet that reads "Czech please!"

Next up: Prague Does Not Need Your Radars!

The Truth About Smurfs and Proctologists

2007-11-04T17:43:00.000+02:00

Smurfs - a.k.a. Les Stroumphs - are really the forefathers of modern exploratory examination and surgery. And yet, every smurf needs his object-signifier. I was going to take Minnen Ratta and be "Dead Exterminator Smurf", until i realized that i was only three apples high, and a real rat would, proportionately, be larger than our kitchen table. A pack of Marlboros on the other hand transforms me instantly into "Lung Cancer Smurf." This is really too good a fate for someone like me, so i applied red goo around my eyes and mouth corner and told everyone i had been hit by a tricycle, was hemorrhaging from seven points internally, and would be a dead smurf soon enough.

Little-known fact: Smurfs wear a style of headgear called The Phrygian Cap. Who were the Phrygians? People from Phrygia, duh.

10 Things to Do Before You Die

2007-10-24T00:45:00.000+03:00

NOBODY ever learned diddly-squat from jumping out of an airplane. So here's the updated list of things to do while you're still young enough to hot-foot it down the street cackling like a wildman who has just sold the Brooklyn Bridge to the same jackass twice in two years:

1) Cut down a healthy tree
2) Stalk an old person
3) Design a Death Star
4) Approach a stranger at random and insist that 'It's love at first sight!'
5) Burn a book
6) Get up at 3AM Tuesday morning and play music you hate at top volume.
7) Pee on a dog [representin' A.R. here - good work brother]
8) Fake an orgasm and tell your partner you did so
9) Smoke in bed
10) Play frisbee with your friend's stepdad's record collection
11) Give everyone nicknames that don't fit them one bit
12) Turn a novel into a screenplay. Force your friends and family to perform it in public.
13) Squeeze another person's blackheads
14) Get your favorite dip-able snack; use vodka as a dip
15) Hug a communist apartment block

That will get you started.

I want to thank the millions of people who came out last Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday to celebrate my 27th birthday (we're not counting the 'Lost Years' or the coma years) and to a lesser extent, an early Thanksgiving. The bottle of Absolut Vanilla presented at Eden Pub would have drawn tears if the alcohol hadn't already dried up all my fluids along with my heart and what was left of my conscience. All photographers, of course, had the living shit kicked out of them and their Konicas, so the best we can do for pictures is my Picasso-Turkey and a couplefew precious moments preserved of another special fire-on-the-mountain day in Koliba, which may or may not have happened about 12 days ago.

Across The RIver Where Hats Are Also Lost

2007-10-06T12:42:00.000+03:00

And now, for your reading pleasure,i hereby submit the details of yesterday's Broken Social Scene show in the style of America's really very greatest ever writer ever:

The train crossed the river on a bridge. It came through the trees and into fields. The fields on this side of the river were not like those before. They were green and golden and uncut. The fields before were brownish and Slovakian. These fields were green. They were fine fields.

When the bulls came out there was the sound of an explosion. I said, 'Arlin, this takes immaculate skill.' The explosion had come from his mouth. He did not know that I could carry so many Red Bull taurine drinks. I opened the first can. I tipped the lip of the can over the spout of the water bottle, which was already half-full with clear, fine, and good bathtub vodka. Arlin said, 'Don't get sore, but I hate that rot.' I shook the mixture, cap closed, and handed it to Arlin. Arlin took it and uncapped it, drinking deep, the bottle held at arms' length and the stream of fluid arcing strong and firm in the dying light of the Austrian sun. The pull was long and expert. 'I'm tight,' said Arlin after the pull.

We got off the train and I hailed a cab expertly. I talked to the driver because Arlin spoke no languages. I spoke all of them. It was a fine thing to do things your friends and associates couldn't do. Nobody on earth knew where the club was. I intuited the location of the club using a heretofore never-known capacity for knowing things nobody else knew. One had to climb down stone stairs set into the side of a canal and walk down a stone enplankmentation to find the place. In the dark half-light I saw people standing in small groups. I approached the nearest one and said, 'Do you have to have tickets in advance or can you buy at the door?' A boy of maybe 25 said to me, 'We're holding an interview here.'

Okay, that's enough of that twaddle. Arlin and i were early, so we found an empty pub and drank big beers. Arlin thought the matrons were rude, but on the way out on of them said 'Thank you, you are good Americans' and i told Arlin and he changed his mind about the wrinkled old bats. We paid our way into Flex, and of course Geoff was in line in front of us. Michael Todd was inside too. Blessedly, we didn't have to talk to Geoff much at all (he has a condition where 90% of his waking life is devoted to teaching you how to, say, chew a stick of gum, or maybe how to spell your own name.)

Watching the opening act - a solo act going by the name of Gentleman Reg - was an experience similar to trying on shoes that your mother wishes to buy you but which both suck and do not fit. I went nearly crazy with an uncontrollable urge to hop on a train back to Blava to fetch my electric clippers so i could shave off Reg's hair and moustache. The moustache was the same hue and tone of his face, and so it looked like he had an extra roll of flesh under his nose. Even if a sound engineer HAD twisted a few dials to make the vocals audible, i sense we would have been saddened all the more, for the noise coming from Reg's face-hole was far, far more terrifying than the sound of a shoe salesman being hit by a Peterbilt 18-wheeler and sent sailing into an art installation featuring one million live fire ants swarming along row after row of vertically installed shards of jagged glass.

BSS is comprised of consummate musicians, and they did not disappoint. I doubt they have the ability to perform poorly, just as it would be odd to see fish swimming poorly. You know, i only started writing this post because i wanted to mock the world's most overrated writer. Writing about a show i saw bores me. There's another show tonight across the Danube in Petrzalka, Underworld is here Oct 31, and Chemical Brothers will be here Nov 26, so stop being common and come out for the last of the good electronica. I will personally evict one nun for every one of you who responds to this post. God bless.

P.S. The top photo is of prime members of BSS. The header refers to the hat i lost at the show. I had that hat for less than 36 hours. It was a good hat, black and soft. Hats were good.

Ghosts and Angels Beat Crap Out of Each Other - Hilarity, Evictions Ensue

2007-10-06T10:19:00.001+03:00

I’m always happy when shitheads in Arizona detect special energies that no scientist has ever detected while providing real, actual proof that digital cameras should be taken away from people who write like this:

"I took these pictures from my cell phone and four days earlier, a tragedy happened here.
A woman and her two year old daughter were electricuted by a downed power line, and also a
man who tried to help them - maybe it's them protecting people over the spot they passed in."

The writer has the brain of a persimmon. When you are “electricuted” you become a ghost, not an angel. Angels are clouds, and they protect you from being “electricuted”, although not in the case of the woman, her daughter, and their brain-addled would-be savior (god loves a tryer!)

I know I have blown several chances to get married through my unpopular theories concerning new-age magical energies that nobody can detect except people sitting at home wishing for everlasting life, so now I would like to formally announce that ghosts and angels do exist. I have captured one of the latter and am holding him/her/it in a Nescafe instant coffee jar. I am harnessing its divine power to make me invincible in battle and to recharge my Energizer AA batteries, because my digicam just eats the things up when I’m taking a thousand photos of my staircase in the hope that one of them will evince “ghost globes”, or maybe a good old French Maid ghost. This angel is not an A-lister like Gabriel or Michael but is some kind of rank-and-filer named Mervin, probably a Throne. Mervin lost his/her/its wings recently, mostly because I sawed them off with a bow-saw so he would fit in the jar. He said god would not be delighted with me, and I said, “I am god now. I harness special invisible energies that only I can see. Muwaugh-haugh-haaaaaaaaaugh!” and that shut him up.

Ghosts are different. They are here for different reasons. Sometimes the creator of the universe just likes to fuck around with your immortal soul, so he traps it here in semi-living misery to scare the bejesus out of you and me and to torture individuals simply because they died a sudden or violent death or because they lived in an old wooden house too long when really they should have moved to Florida ages ago. Ghosts are both very dangerous and extremely difficult to understand in their phenomenonalitiness. They can course through electrical wires, inhabit your computer, and hide your keys. Worse, they want to kill you. That’s right. Ghosts want to kill you. They hate your way of life, your freedoms and democracies, your warm, fleshy vitality, and they wish to destroy you. The only thing stopping them are cirrostratus cloud formations – angels. Without angels, ghosts would come out of your computer and strangle you while turning your blood into mercury (very painful, trust me, I know). In fact, if you are reading this, you are fucked because I have attached a ghost to this posting and it is now downloading into your room and it will quietly unzip its files and begin haunting you in about 5 hours. Who’s laughing now.

Before I forget, be sure and check out Maria William’s “When Angels Cry” site. If you love pencil drawings that make the doodlings scribbled on the back of notebooks in high school geography classes look like Rembrandt, you will definitely enjoy Maria’s emo-inspired clusterfuckery of androgynous spirits and Final Fantasy promo-rejects. Even better, each drawing is accompanied by hilarious and cutting subtext: “Media: graphite & black ink on tinted paper. Actual size: 9x12" and “Limited edition print (7x10"), matted: $25.”

It’s matted! But don’t try to copy any of Maria’s inimitable oeuvres – they are all securely copyrighted. So fuck you if you thought you could copy her head shot of Frodo with “tribal” tattoos on his cheek!

I also wanted to mention that there is a great new app for Facebook called “Enemybook” – instead of friends, you make enemies. Get it and think of me. What? You don’t Facebook? Get over yourself, moron, and start making enemies today! Besides, you can play SCRABBLE with your friends online!

Okay, enjoy your ghost. I’m swayze.

Bratislava, Slovakia, New Hotbed of Sin, Grapefeeding

2007-10-01T21:57:00.000+03:00

I thought i would write a bit more, as it is not every day that i can remember my password/motives/native language. Most of my creative energy had been pouring into my 300-page love letter, tentatively titled "Stuttgart Satellite Pigfarm Impact", but then i discovered all these wonderful names in my BULK folder, and have been busy at work writing a 3000-page epic called "Wrinkles and Pits." Listen to the names of these characters: Helder Greensberry, Constantine Slyk, and, (my favourite), Patrea Gilch. With names like that, the characters write themselves! What else is new? Lots. It's a shame this blog isn't anonymous. I lost all my hats except for the one i found in Vienna. I remembered how i always wanted my mother to marry David Bowie. A giant lion-dog leapt up on me while its owner chatted with a passing driver; i called the owner an 'asshole' and the dog a 'kickbiscuit'[?] and turned up the Arctic Monkeys. I found out Underworld is on town on the 30th. I got work at a university; they gave me an office with a computer and desk with drawers that lock (bottle storage). I neglected to visit any of my old friends in the O.C., the bartenders and gaytenders of the downtown district. I wished very much for a control knob, a sort of volume dial by which i could turn down the noise of all these distracting and ridiculous emotions. At least Halloween is coming. Good night.

Elijah Beaver Forms Street Gang, Increases General Sense of Worldwide Malaise

2007-10-01T21:00:00.000+03:00

About three weeks ago I discovered that I can run non-stop pretty much forever. You're supposed to increase your distance/time no more than 10% a week. I tried out 100% and was just fine, although my head felt like a flaming dirigible plunging in hellfire onto a field in New Jersey the first time i ran a full hour. Now it seems i can just run all day, until the microscopic tears in my leg muscles start to add up and irritate. But you, know, the funniest notions come my way when i'm all tranced out and thumpng through Horsky Park's foliage with Yoda (Jedi Master) on my back. I was trying to prove by Euclidean Geometry that believers, almost by definition, had not the mental longitude to produce meaningful music or plastic art or letters. It occurred to me that T.S. Eliot wasn't saying anything in his windy 4- or 5-dozen-paged masterpiece that Picasso hadn't illustrated utterly in Guernica. The band Page France is a little more troublesome, for they say they are not Christians, yet the Son of The Cloud Rider appears in every song, alongside some rather sectarian lyrics:

I watched her sleep from the driver's seat
As she turned into an ocean spinning fish into my seat
Oh how she flickered to remain so young and innocently sweet
And how the secrets in her belly wrestle softly for her keeping.

Like the ring that left her finger green
and like the knife that set her shivering body free
and like the knot she tied so sweetly around me
we were aware of our boundaries.

[...]

And if you talk to Jesus
ask Him if He wants me to come home
If He says He's seen us
changing all His plans to suit our own
Will you apologize or stand behind the
selfish moves we've made
While learning life is strange and people change
and circle round again.

You see what i mean. (Forgive me father, for I have changed some of the words of "So Sweetly" in the first stanza because my words are better.)

Another unaccountable running-phenomenon is how much I think of the Love Of My Life (LOML, for short) when i'm trudging up hills and ducking low branches and dodging mastiffs and attack dogs. See, a few years ago, i wondered out loud if one could synthesize a chemical that would make one fully nauseous, or cause long, dull pains, or maybe hot, sharp ones, while simultaneously stimulating those parts of the brain that lead to addicition. In other words, you take a pill, feel like garbage, but afterwards feel compelled to take the drug again. Kind of like how horror and pleasure are cross-wired in the brains of a large amount of the population (which is why boys always want to take their dates to horror movies, and why these movies invariably involve teens.) Well i mouthed my idea to my LOML and some best friends, but they called me mad - MAD! And tried to have me disbarred from FOAM (the Federation Of Alchemical Misanthropomism.) But i still think we are all of us capable of the most absurd internal paradoxes, and i think it is nifty-tragic to love her so, while at the same time wish to never lay eyes on her ever again. (I think if i spin this right, i can be a fully-fledged, soul-sick tragic hero by the next solar eclipse.)

The people with cameras at Pezinok wine festival and at The Great Pot-Luck Sangria Get-Together-A-Thon last Saturday are real wussies for fearing Facebook; so i don't have any of their photos yet. What i do have is some old ones of my new, extremely volatile and thirsty street-gang. I was leader of the gang, but got deposed in less than 3.5709 seconds.

Ohhh, i'm so on the fence. Asia calls, but there is a lot to love in Blava's vanillanesses. For example, I found this book in The Binstitute's bookshelf - what was the name? "Ernest Goes to Spain" i think, though it had a different name when i read it at uni. Now, Jeb, or Jude, or whoever - he goes fishing with his buddy for 5 days, taking a break from pimping the narrator's LOHL to every male they can find in northern Spain, and they catch boat-loads of fish, "a dozen a piece" on some days. Jeremy, possibly Jinx, catches 6 big trout on the first day, guts and cleans them, puts them in a bag between layers of fern. SO we know they are not tossing the fish back. So the big question is: what the fuck did they do with all those fish? You can't eat 12 goddamned trout for dinner. Jove explains in summer-camp-letter prose every detail about driving between trees and how to sit down in a chair at a cafe, but never explains the mystery of what they did with over 112 giant trout.

Also i almost stepped on a lizard in the park. It was 3/8ths the size of a good trout and all black with big taxi-cab yello spots on it. Also, i heard the "Ernest Goes to Spain" quip from Jason Mellinger of Reading, PA. For all i know, he made up the joke. Good night.

Please Examine These Images Closely

2007-09-17T22:08:00.000+03:00

On Sunday, Chewie and I took the train to Wien and promptly started stuffing our insatiable maws with long, meat-filled tubes of recently killed cattle. They were having a wine festival, so we ordered a bunch of beer.

And now I will quote more of Anne Frank's Diary:

But I looked out of the open window too, over a large area of Amsterdam, over all the roofs and on to the horizon, which was such a pale blue it was hard to see the dividing line. "As long as this exists," I thought, "and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy."

[23 Feb 1944]

Raca Wine Festival

2007-09-17T21:43:00.001+03:00

Top photo: new guy Ryan on the right, Eric in the middle, special guest star Bret "Chewie" Chou on the left. Chewie and i met in Tokyo because we had gone out with the same girl. Now he is computer god in Seattle, but he comes to other countries sometimes to speak to other computer shamen. Luckily for him there was a party on Friday, one on Saturday, and another sort of one on Sunday.

Saturday was the Raca wine festival, where these photos were taken. At this festival, we celebrate BORCHAK [sp?], or, "young wine", so called because it has only been fermenting for three days. It tastes like concentrated Kool-Aid and feels like a concussion the next day. Highlights included:

- Renaissances-Fair-styled, socially-challenged "elves" equipped with long bows and state-of-the-art arrows.

- An hour-long goose-meat queue for Adam, who, in the end, definitely got his goose. Partakers described the meat as "greasy".

- Purchasing of wine so volatile that you have to periodically unscrew the caps off the plastic containers, lest they detonate.

- Watching of The Big Lebowski after said festival.

Other persons in the photos include my new flatmate, Meave (rhymes with "Beav"), and Liz "The Hussy", and another new fish whose name, i'm pretty sure, is an anagram of "freshness guaranteed". As for myself, I was feeling clever and handsome and really in love with my life in Blava. Maybe I won't go back to Tokyo just yet.

Elijah Beaver Receives 15 Teaching Awards, Hunts A Cannibal

2007-09-17T20:46:00.000+03:00

Some guy ate his flatmate in Austria, possibly Germany, so we went to Vienna. With a bank- or credit- card number, one may unlock a city-bike and ride around on it for something like one Euro a day. I had forgotten my hat, but i found one on the street and put it on my head. Eliza ran her handlebar into a weary Austrian's car mirror, but he was so tired of life, so soul-sick, he barely managed a wince before driving on. Then we went to the hedge-labyrinth. Or maybe the maze came before the Eliza-car-smashing incident; the two events were nearly identical.

Well, my two great friends, Eliza and Catharine, have returned to Canada. It is really very fortunate that i have the technological prowess to replace my friends with automaton substitutes (planks of wood propped up in the garden with crude faces drawn on in cake-icing and some nifty device i ripped from an old Kenner toy stapled to the 'necks' that says 'R2D2 where are you' when you pull a string.) So that's been really wonderful.

Anne Frank and the Glory of Blogging

2007-08-25T09:15:00.000+03:00

Somebody at the Binstitute must have brought in a bunch of books, for I found "Diary of a Young Girl" on the bookshelf, and I had no idea what was in store for me when I slipped it into my bag. I don't keep any heroes, and i almost never plug or talk about books, but i think Anne is going to force a change in these policies. In other words, stop reading my blog and start reading her diary. That's a BEAVERDICT!

I won't quote her much today, but for this tiny line:

Who besides me will ever read these letters?

And i thought of Stephen Daedalus sitting on Sandymount Strand, his thoughts:

Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field.

And i will tell you something else, because there is still entirely too many people criticizing the act of blogging. I read Graves's I, Claudius, and was impressed by the excesses of Caligula. But when i looked into the history of Rome from other sources i found out that all these stories about the tyrants Caligula, Nero, etc., arose because only one or two historians bothered to write down what was happening, and this in the day when objective reporting had yet to be invented. Suetonius hated Caligula, but there is much evidence to show that he was an able administrator. Ditto, Nero. So we don't have enough information to make competent judgments.

Imagine, however, that if the internet remains free from politico-corporate control, what a wealth of information future generations will have at their disposal. The diaries and commentaries of millions. Will there evolve a new breed of historian, more alchemist than librarian, distilling in the crucibles of the WorldWideWeb extractable nuggets of that fabulous myth that some call 'truth'? I suppose they will look back and see this time - right now, at the beginning of the 21st century, at the birth of the blogosphere - as the beginning of true history.

So this is an amazing time to be alive, and i really wonder what is going through the minds of people who would disparage blogging. I suspect these are the same types who are not interested in knowing thyself, maybe not interested even in human welfare, and most certainly not interested in understanding the modes and ways in which fascism comes creeping along, slowly devouring tranquility and freedom. What else can we lose? Just ask Anne...

Sweet Home Alablava

2007-08-23T21:37:00.001+03:00

I think Cat forgave me after a few bottles - HOURS, i mean - and everyone was in excellent spirits as we boarded the one-car train home. There are more photos on Facebook. Cat is leaving Blava next week, and Eliza is going in mid-September, so maybe I will make like a tree and get out of here as well.

One more thing: Sunday I walked across Horsky Park to Eliza's and we drank 10, um, cartons of milk each, and we were thinking about watching a movie and she says, "Have you seen 'Beaver Vendetta?'"

"No. Is it a family picture?"

"Mm. It's not bad."

"'Beaver Vendetta?"

"'V for Vendetta' you melonhead!"

The Last Vineyard/Enter The Cat

2007-08-23T21:20:00.000+03:00

I got Eliza to spew bottled water in at least 5 dry fountains around Vienna. We were in the basement of an H&M when we ran into Catherine. She was not pleased that we had gone to Vienna without her. In my defense, she wasn't awake when i left the house. Sorry Cat! But we found you in the end! And i rescued you from that soiled perv by the commie monument!

Eliza had this book that said we should visit the last vineyard in the world. By the look of it, you could make maybe one bottle of vino a year out of the thing. The world's oldest urinal was somewhere nearby, but night was falling, so we went looking for more, um, postcards. Yeah, that's the ticket. Postcards...

The Belvedere

2007-08-23T21:06:00.000+03:00

The Belvedere has loads of Klimts and Egon Schiller's (sp?), and even a van Gogh i always liked but never knew the whereabouts thereof. Then my life was full of joy at the sight of large, bouncy, crimson balls you can sit on. Not satisfied with sitting on them, some cretin mounted one of the 18 precious sphinxes guarding the Belvedere's back yard. This little girl thought it was her turn on the sphinx, but she got SERVED! with some choice German: "Vas is dis, dwarvinfraulein? Ich bin nic Toys-R-Usenfrach joymacht! Nein! Nein! Nein!"

I Wish I Knew How To Quit You, Vienna!

2007-08-23T20:56:00.000+03:00

I have photos from Friday night's party, but i will not print them until after my spiritual adviser has passed away. The next morning Eliza and I went back to Vienna to climb on things. That line on the pavement i'm stepping oh-so-stridently over reads: "Cross Line To Feel Male" - no joke.

Climbing Vienna

2007-08-23T20:43:00.000+03:00

Just a few more photos of our day in Vienna. Try this at home. Do it now.