I was just reminded strangely because of Peiločja and a conversation with Jeremy and perhaps because of a sampler sitting unused on my sofa in the other room of a “scene” when I was living in Spain. I had purchased a Warm Audio BUS-COMP from someone on that buy/sell thurk that cretins in Spain use. What was it called? Something with W. Wallaby? Wombat? Wurst? Whataburger? I just CANNOT recall! Since Peiločja didn’t exist at that time of my life, it is fair to not recall. Každopadně, the guy selling the BUS-COMP to me wrote me at some point explaining that on the way to correos he stopped at a supermarket (possibly Mercadona, may the vestegial testical curse its narrow files full of over-eager, hungover breakfast hunters) the unit was stolen from his car. He gave me a refund. I feel bad for him even to this day.

I’m sitting U Smrťaka quite near my current home in Nusle. I have a pivo. It is a Radegast. I greatly prefer it to Pilsner. The music listening adventure begins. Let’s see what each song brings.

Of course, Pete Townshend had to appear first floating in my ears. Stardom in Action. In fact, this song doesn’t bring anything specific to my mind. The album itself resonates on many levels, however. Levels, do you say? Why use such a word when one could easily say wireframes instead? The album in general places me in the apartment that I shared with Jayson in College Station from September of 1992 bis Mai 1993. He and I listened to it extensively. Not only he and I listened to it, but Bender-boy took quite a part in the experience, as well.

A few lines just stuck out, however:

I’m so angry that you let me see my totally futile destiny. I’m so angry that you interrupted my dream.

Do not admire anonymity!

That is the opposite of everything I’ve ever written in my blogs, journals, poems and tentative musings to the insect hordes who gather around my windowsills. Anonymity is something to be sought after. It is something to be admired. It is something to be absorbed into. In contrast, the things that one creates can stick out from the seething mass. They can poke and prick at the heavens like the symbols of monetary greatness that are skyscrapers raping the view of the horizontal.

Communication now plays from the same album. Marcie springs to mind. Of course, she was part of that era of my life. It was during those days that we first became close. Some would say too close. Tony certainly did - or if he didn’t actually say it, the look on his face was more communicative than most novels. The song expires.

Guyute was the ugly pig Who walked on me and danced a jig That he had learned when he was six Then stopped and did some other tricks Like pulling weapons from his coat And holding them against my throat He lectured me in language strange Then scampered swiftly out of range

What portion of my life that this song reminds me of at the moment is immaterial, though I’ll mention that the time period is December 1999 and there is an incident of attempting to urinate in someone’s sundry-filled closet whilst nigh-fatally stoned. Who is Guyute? Guyute is the ever pampered and now “powerful” manager of whichever franchise you can name, or, alternately, a purported self-made man from serfdom to tyrant who has the bureaucratic ability to take one of his subjects and walk on them and indeed dance a jig perhaps on them or after walking on them. Mostly, he is filled with threats if your behavior isn’t one he exactly condones. In fact, he will pull out said weapons even if your beliefs are not ones he exactly condones. He is not a democratic entity. He is Guyute. The language he lectures you in is perfectly within your grasp, but only morphologically and syntactically. Certainly it is not within your grasp semantically.

He scampers out of range. They always scamper out of range. Bullies, when there is even the remotest chance of them losing the upper hand, scamper.

As the Moma Dance plays, I shall contemplate the sticky sweat embracing my living corpse. As I grow further and further into decrepitude, my tolerance of heat decreases. The industrial revolution, which began only a few years before my “birth”, was conceived to snuff me from this earth. The planning itself is exquisite. Well designed. As my skin slides into the molten plastic the ocean has become, I feel at last one with Miss Entropy. Oh! And I feel I’ve never told you The Story of the Ghost.

Two tables to my fore, a family dines. The father and two children have smažený sýr. The mother eats a hamburgerish concoction. They appear satisfied with the way my skin slips greasily into the molten plastic of the ocean.

Miss Carla now sings cacophonously. A hint of recollection comes to my addled brain, especially on this second one. You see - two songs in a row play from 2 Foot Yard. I am walking around Acy’s neighborhood in Austin. S. 3rd Street. Acy’s place. I miss that place. He spent so much of his life on it! The effort was unbelievable. Or, alternatively, all of his projects that were additions to the landscape were just that - projects. They kept him sane. Given that he abandoned all of it with out an ostensible shine of lament, that may be so.

Stop Hurting People by Herr Pete now sings in my ears. Lee and I once discussed this song. It must have been when he was at the Enfield house with all of us - Tony Melanie Craig Jayson Me - and sharing our bizarre “harmony”. He was especially impressed by the line:

So you, without question, know your first love is your last. And you will never, never, never love again.

He mocked such melodrama simply because he had been there himself. And he knew at once that Herr Pete was mocking the same melodrama, that the whole song was sitting staring red eyed and hungover at the masses who need to justify the cracks in their psyches with episodic melodrama. He understood, and I admit far before I did myself, that gyrating emotion is a passing dance. The chemicals settle into an equilibrium. That equilibrium differs per person, of course. His equilibrium was more heightened than most - more heightened than all, in fact. Thus, he stole his boss’s truck. He stole his boss’s gun.

Fraulein Carla sings and wails on her violin. I am standing at a bus stop in Austin. It is a bus stop near the Sierra Madre or Sierra Sestra or Sierra Panchita Mall. I don’t remember the exact title of the institution. Why had I visited it again? Did I want a nostalgic kick in the rectum? Perhaps. So here we go. Tony and Acy and Lee (maybe?) and I went there one day. We drove either my truck or Lee’s car or Tony’s “vehicle”. While we were doing whatever fuckups like us tended to do in shopping centers during that era of our lives (hint - it had nothing to do with gyrating emotions or unevenly shaven buttocks), Tony somehow lost the power of speech. So after hours of doing whatever fuckups like us tended to do in shopping centers during that era of our “youth” (hint - Acy was accosted by the police for both not having shoes and dressing “inappropriately”), we walked around the expanse of the starbaked parking lot searching for the “vehicle” because certainly it was Tony’s and he was no longer speaking nor giving any reactive indication of which way to go.

Fun!

The congenial servírka mě přinesla druhé pivo. She’s Moved On by Porcupine Tree. In San Sebastian, atop the hill in the park above the flat I lived (if one could call it living) were a few lounge benches made of wood. I’d procure a few beers or a bottle of vodka and climb up to them, sit on one or the other or the other and sometimes fall asleep. Once I awoke with a vagrant going through my backpack. Was he a vagrant? Perhaps I mistook him for a vagrant and he was not. He was going through my backpack, however. I scared him away by giving him a lecture on The Unconsoled and how it relates to human disconnection and specifically how it relates to Spanish disconnection beneath the amicable exterior they have that sates them with so much pride. I listened to Lightbulb Sun every time I was up on that hill. Sometimes, when I wasn’t accosting wanna-be vagrants, I’d sit and gaze over Egia and Gros and perhaps over and out onto the Cantabrian Sea and into the gloppy mist of the future.

I bought The Story of a Ghost in Austin at a CD shop on Palmer Lane, somewhere near where Deleware Subs was or still is. I used to work at that Deleware Subs. It was a fantastic sub-shop. When I drove to that CD shop in which I bought The Story of a Ghost, I was in a rickety “van” that Acy borrowed me. Magdalena and I memorized much of Austin in that van. We also memorized that CD shop. I bought The Story of the Ghost there. Strangely, my memory of that trip with Magdalena is the opposite of atrocious. It was a gleeful time. She honestly enjoyed my friends. She specifically enjoyed Craig and Aimee. And they enjoyed her back. Upon my return to Praha, however, Loyal and Suzie wrote me a long email about the clash they perceived in mine and Magdalena’s personalities. Their evaluation, as important as I held it, had nothing to do with leaving Magdalena. I had already met the blonde Dana at the EIN adjacent Xmas party Hynek had invited me to. She had wished me a wonderful sojourn to the states for Xmas / Sylvestr.

On one of the evenings at Dave’s, I drank lots and lots of hard alcohol (most likely with Dave) and illness claimed me the next day. I was infected! Plagued! Every one of my multitudinous pores belched pus. I lay in a stench on the floor the next morning in Craig’s apartment. I bid Magdalena go with my friends to lunch whilst I simmered in the pool of fluids. She did so. Oh joy! She was certainly accepted within the group. In fact, several years later, when I was living v Mnichově with Vesna, Craig journeyed once again to this country (the one I sit in now, not the other in which I sat with Vesna). My relationship at that time with the Bosnian princess was cracked like a pristine porcelain bowl still being eyed by Child Entropy. I fucked over my friend Craig because I was too preoccupied at holding my current relationship together. How many times do we have to do such things before we know they are futile and simply STOP after the first eke in their direction? After his warranted disappointment, he traversed to Praha and stayed with Magdalena. They sent me several scurrilous messages. I probably have them written down somewhere.

Water From The Sky. This sequence of songs from The Story of the Ghost made it onto a CD I burned for the blonde Dana in January of 2000. I was in the obyvák where Viking was to spend much of his time during the next months, and listened to the mix I had made. She was a simple girl. Christian would use the word puro, but since that is in a language that I currently and will for the remainder of my next sixteen existences despise, I’ll go with simple, or even innocuous. Her honesty was a concoction of naivete and genuine forward pushing mental exploration. I often think of the last time I saw her. It was years after our goodbye. Randomly, we met on the metro. I don’t recall the words we exchanged, but I could see the lines in her face. In a few years, something had changed her from the fair-faced, idealistic youth into something more crumpled and jaded. Was I a portion of the reason for her withering?

If you’re just staring at your walls Observing echoing footfalls From tenants wandering distant halls Then this one is for you If children playing all around To you is noise not pleasant sound And you’d be lost on the playground Then this one is for you

I’ll just leave those lyrics as they are. I can and always have been able to relate to them mightily. Upon myriad moments in my wretched existence, I’d listen to this song. I’d repeat it. I usually had a beer or a bottle of Fernet in my frozen claw. There are too many moments to enumerate.

If you’re just staring at your walls Then this one is for you

Face Dances Part II and I am back in Jayson’s and my apartment. Unlike most humans, I only discovered masturbation in my early twenties. I was twenty-two, actually! Of course, I was pining for Marcie and at that point the fact that we couldn’t realistically have “sex” frustrated me. I’d seen pornography many times in the past. But, I’d felt nothing, which probably also perpetuated the push for a very late sexual awakening. During high school, I’d sit with some friends (Eddie, Sam - and even Joe once) and watch, but I only felt a mix of disgust and apathy. I tentatively began stimulating myself in the flat that I shared with Jayson when he was away at class. The first time I made myself come, the liquid spurted, pirouetted and fell directly into one of my open eyes, gluing the lids together. I lay stunned for a moment and then rose, went to the koupelna between mine and Jayson’s bedrooms and washed it out. Then I sat on my bed naked and laughed.

Lightbulb Sun. I am in Daniel Cuc’s flat, where I rented a room. In fact, that flat was also on Marie Cibulkové, though I cannot find it. The name Cuc is no longer on any of the “buzzers” on the ground floor of the buildings housing flats on the right as one walks from Pražkého Povstaní to the brána at Vyšehrad. I assume he sold it and moved to a village to raise a gaggle of geese, ovce or boats for various bacterial strains. I sat on the couch in that flat many an evening without internet but designing web pages condemning the company that Viking and I worked for. I also planned an alternate Czech dictionary, but that only partially came to pass. I also made Silvie a mix-tape on that couch. I included The Limping Little Girl by Present on it. I miss Silvie.

So Carla sings 50 Miles. This is the song I used to repeat until my neck stank of acoustic, nylon, quantum uneasiness. Tony and I listened to it only one time. It must have been 2009 or 2010 or 2011, the latter which was the last time I saw him. The only comment he made was something akin to:

What genre is this? Americana?

Fuck um.

The fact that I’ve seen Victor more recently in person than Tony crushes my evening jauntiness like a gleaming beetle beneath the bootheel of a bully.

In a few days time, I shall embark on a music listening project like I have done twice before involving songs or other pieces of organized noise that have strong associations to points in my past. I shall choose a few albums that were mainstays in different epochs of my life and write about the associations that emerge as different songs or other pieces of organized sound emerge from not exactly the niggulum but from another ethereal dimension.

As I wrote, I’ve done this twice before and both occasions can be found within the Martenblog. The subjects of these occasions were firstly The Church (all their albums that I had at the time on random play) and secondly Blue Öyster Cult (same methodology). I’m sure that if you, my gentle and mildly scabrous reader, care to find these associative elaborations, and you don’t kick aside the dried twigs resembling cuneiform that stretch for five Abilenes around your living corpse, you may do so using the Martenblog’s search functionality.

These are the albums I shall place on shuffle play during the stretch of the project:

• Pete Townshend All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes
• The Decemberists The Crane Wife
• Porcupine Tree Lightbulb Sun
• Phish The Story of the Ghost
• 2 Foot Yard

Zítra bude naše výročí. Naše výročí jeden měsíc od svatby. V tomto okamžiku si nás představuju na lepší pohovce v bytě v Mnichově. Moje láska pracuje vedle mě a Peiločja se schoulí na jejím novém polštaři. Nevíme kde je Luki ale asi je v Garchingu nebo pije pivo v nejbližším kebabovém místě s jeho novou přitelkyní.

I když přestěhovaní do Mnichova nás trochu zmate, rychle se přizpůsobíme - obzvlášť já, ale myslím že moje Ivanečka se také rychle přizpůsobí. Potom přemýšlím o Lukim a uvědomuju si že ho dost neznám abych mohl předpovídat jestli má schopnost aby dobře pochopil prudké životní změny. Na jedné stránce kočičího mozku, bydlí ve stejném bytě celý život, ale na druhé stránce kočičiho mozku, je mladý a jeho pameť je kratká (na rozdíl od našich). Uvidíme.

Christian mi napsal před pár dny že legrační efekt připravení kombuchy je to že věnuju větší pozornost posunu času. Přemýšlel jsem o tom trochu a věřím že také potřebuju dělat více aktivit během kterých věnuju pozornost posunu času. Nechci ríkat že se mám soustředit přimo na posunu času, ale že bych to mohl cítit nebo prostě bych to mohl sledovat kotkem oka nebo z jeho pocitu na mé kůži. Dobrý příklad je dneska ráno s mou láskou! Šli jsme na velkou procházku z mista na kterém zastavil autobus v komořanech přes rozmanité lesy a přes zřídka používané cesty a potom přes malou vesnici která se jmenovala Točna (a která Ivanečce připomenula Heraltice) a přes úplně jiný les ve kterém jsme šli nahoru a nahoru, šli jsme vedle keltských ruin a potom jsme klouzali dolů a dolů k silnici. Moje láska neměla patřičné boty a měl jsem také sandály ale potom jsme oba měli hodně yaků v sandálech, přišli jsme na silnici. Během celé cesty, jsem cítil posun času okolo nás. To bylo náš společník.

The café was expansive and constrictive at the same time. We were huddled around a table that seemed like it flowed into the table behind us and to the table in front of us and to all sides without break, though zároveň we were in our own pine box, the five of us. I think we were five. Shane, Raun, two others, and I sat at this table that flowed into other tables yet was at the same time separated from other tables by yawning precipices. A group of strangers, all women, sat secretly eavesdropping on us from either the yawning distance of the table behind us or from the table behind us that flowed effortlessly into our own table. These creatures - and I believe they were all women - had youthful bodies topped with ancient faces. Well, not all of them were ancient, but they were all more mature than warranted. They all bore the marks that age performs upon us all as we gradually move from youthfulness to decrepitude, though in differing degrees. Some faces were even ghastly - hags’ heads atop nubile torsos.

Raun - and by this point in the morning I am pretty sure it was Raun - announced to the rest of us that we were to create our own community from scratch - from the schematic of the bucket, as it were, or from the bare and splintered wooden planks of the pine box - because it was the assured method that our unique identity as a collection could stamp itself upon the wax that seals the scroll of our age, or at least upon the wax that seals the pine box of our togetherness. I came back with yes, even bands sometimes have their own communities or somesuch in the insipid manner that I sometimes don’t catch myself at in enough time to stop myself from doing it. Shane then commented yeah - some undeservingly so in the weary, sort of jaded way that many of us viewed the world around us during the bright, fecund, creative yet at times emotionally bleak epoch of College Station.

The group of youthful crones then suddenly turned to us and remarked on how it would be impossible for them to communicate with us since they could not relate to what we were speaking about. But why would this be? Their pine box was surely the same sort of pine box that our togetherness resided in. Were the wax seals on each of them simply too thick to be broken, or even to let a flow of thoughts and ideologies inwards and outwards?

The next day, or perhaps the next epoch, we returned to the café. We were only two and we passed the group of eavesdroppers on the way. They were joined by a few male counterparts and situated in an observation bunker similar to those that were on the Berlin Wall back in the “good ol days”. Immediately upon entering the café, a waiter-thing bid us sit at a table. This table was at the most 30 centimeters in diameter. He (or it) sat a pot of coffee directly onto the table.

I was in a vast library with Loyal. We were wandering through the stacks within oubliette flavored spaces full of colorful and colorless cafés. Faceless people stood, sat and milled everywhere. He informed me that apparently the building was also a prison. A new gaggle of inmates had been brought in who were worth taking a look at. I suppose a portion of the library’s entertainment section was a human zoo. And, as every entity knows, when a new gaggle is brought into a zoo, it is certainly celebration time. So we set out in search of the section in which we could do just that. Celebration == observing humans locked in cages, apparently, according to whatever module was in charge of my subconscious at the time.

At some point during our circuitous journey, I lost Loyal. I was alone in the vast. I was also nowhere near any zoo-like edifice. I descended a staircase or it may have been an escalator or doorless lift. Music was coursing over tables, chairs, and patrons poised statically with coffee and teacups in their statuesque, fingered appendages. It was music I knew. In fact, it was Seasons End by Marillion, but sung by a strange female voice in a modified register, warped and vocoded. The remnants of the instrumentation were reduced to muzak.

I finally found Loyal. He was walking out of a ballroom to my right with his head tilted and a smirk on his face. His hair was tied into the copek he often wore. He encouraged me once more to find the new gaggle of inmates - to go view them. I followed his advice and wandered once again into the vast. Perhaps like Black House, this library in my mind was practically infinite.

Finally, I was in a long corridor that had cage upon cage on its right side, all housing different animals. No human was in sight, however, besides perhaps myself, much less a gaggle of them. I had assumed that the gaggle of new inmates would be of the human variety. Was I incorrect? I kept walking.

Structures on my left had formed into fences connected at right angles covered with vines, much like the grape vines that grew behind the house during my youth or those that grew behind my grandfather (on my father’s side)’s house. A creature then leaped up from the right on to the top of these vineyards, apparently either to attack or to play with another creature atop the structure. I realized then that the prisoners were loose and I had to flee. So that I did. I retreated along the same path whence I’d come. The only notable encounter on the way “out” was with a youthful black bear who pawed at me playfully.

Christian Michael “Huggable” Newman sent me a photo this morning along with a text description:

A rubber gudgeon is a female, socket-like metal fitting attached to a boat’s transom that pairs with a male pintle pin to form a pivoting steering hinge.

Obviously Christian is planning some sort of boat trip. Or, alternatively, he is gathering a collection of rubber gudgeons and pintle pins to the delight of his sparsely decorated workroom.

He hammers the rubber gudgeons to the wall of said workroom with rusted railway spikes (the kind that, as I child, I’d find littered near the train tracks in Fort Stockton). They extend across the walls and ceiling like metamorphic clouds across the dome of the sky. He then takes the pintle pins and connects the rubber gudgeons to one another after establishing exactly which pintle pin fits, to the femtometer, between which two rubber gudgeons. He finds that there is a specific pintle pin for each space between any of two arbitrary rubber gudgeons. This delights him.

After what may be epochs, the result is a fantastic web of connections between rubber gudgeons using pintle pins. He perceives the arrangement as his default conception of beauty, and therefore he fashions a cushion in the center of his workroom so that he can lie comfortably gazing up and around at his creation, at the network of rubber gudgeons connected by pintle pins. He spends more and more hours each day and more and more hours each night (because naturally, he creates several light-emmitting apparati and places them at strategic points along the flooring of the workroom) comfortably gazing up and around at his creation.

After what may be epochs, he one day or night awakens from dozing and finds himself affixed to the cushion. He has become sessile. Momentarily, he thinks of Shambal Brambel and his peculiar fate, but since he is convinced that he is not living on Sao (the moon of Neptune, not the ever so popular tourist spot somewhere near Oceania or the Azores), he quickly dismisses the thought. He then, with less surprise than he might have otherwise thought, realizes that during his doze, tubes were attached to his nether-orifi and so he no longer has to concern himself with his nigh-lifelong toilet attendance preoccupation. This delights him.

He returns to gazing at the beauteous splay of rubber gudgeons and pintle pins patterned across his ceiling and walls, which are incidentally now the dome of his sky. He crawls into and recedes out of various states of dozing. After what may be epochs, he hears a trundling mechanism approaching from a direction he cannot determine. His hearing has lost the ability to ascertain direction since the culminated force of his senses have long been concentrated towards marveling at the dome of his personal sky. The sound comes in and out of focus like distant, dissonant wind chimes.

At one point of crawling into then receding out of drowsing, he detects another presence in the workroom, a workroom that is now his entire universe. A wheeled and spindly armed gadget is immobile beside the cushion. In its spindly arms, it holds a plate of victuals. They steam and pop. Obviously, somewhere beyond Christian’s personal universe, a fully functional kitchen is operational. He muses for a moment about the possibility that beyond his personal universe that other personal universes may exist with other entities lying sessile on cushions marveling up at their own personal creations slathered across the domes of their skies. However, he quickly discards the thought and tucks into the victuals.

I sit on the granite-lined couch bed on the top floor of Ivanečka’ sister’s řadový dům. Ivanečka herself is around yonder corner at Gianni’s defunct work-at-home desk. She is giving a lesson to a German female by the name of Tina. Tina often tries her hand at writing poems in Czech. I’m reminded of my younger self. Actually, I’ve written a few at least Haiku lately in Czech. I’ll have to find them and disperse them into Jeremy’s void so that new universes form from each of their fragments, because a few words, isolated from all context, can after moments or even epochs accrue phraseology and semantics from the quantum poetic void.

Yesterday, we took a road trip from the prosaic Winterthur to Vaduz. Having not purchased a pass to let us legally stride upon the dálnice system of Switzerland, we wound through every possible village that the Swiss countryside could conjure for us. And, in fact, Switzerland, I’m told by the great mystics of our age, is but a collection of villages. Or, at least “they” want us to think that way, even if we are occasionally in the heart of Zürich’s minute metropolitan sterility. The country certainly feels as if the village mind descended in ancient times from the abstract bedding the colossal, vestigial testicle left beside one of its celestial campfires. That being declared, the road trip was particularly pleasant. We arrived in Vaduz (a village itself) after two and a half hours of winding. Parking and then springing from our vehicle, we enjoyed the environs as well as any two curious humans with an open ended appetite for new experiences, no matter how subtle, could. I was a fan of the structure and square constructed entirely of dustily reddish bricks and of a hřbitov we found that was so immaculately clean that one could perform surgery - removing one’s own putrescent liver, for example, and then transplanting the liver stolen from the pig farmer down the road into one’s abdomen - directly atop one of the graves.

Besides a few anecdotes, however, nothing much else is worth noting about Vaduz itself. As I’ve always written in the hallways of my youth, foyers of my adolescence and gutted hovels of my manhood, the journey is much more important than the destination. Now that I think about it, however, the word destination implies cessation of movement. So, in fact, even though we were in Vaduz, loitering about the hřbitov and traipsing around the dustily red-bricked platz were portions of the journey. We never ceased journeying. The winding trip backwards in space though relatively not in time was equally enjoyable and our conversation ranged from discussions concerning family dynamics that are contained within a cauldron cracking in fractal patterns on every conceivable point on its rumpled and warped sphere to Czech, German and English grammar and to the composition of ostensibly naturally grassy louky.

Here is the form. I will crush it. Now it is a different form. This is the interesting thing.

There is a “novel” that I began writing years ago that I should one day get back to. In fact, it has been on my mind often lately, if only in the periphery. There is a “scene” within it where the protagonist (I laughingly call myself a protagonist) relates a story from his childhood. It is about a friend of his parents named Pat who talks to the child protagonist about the “meaning” of the universe and specifically about dimensions, commenting that the fifth dimension could even be a colossal animal and our four dimensions could be bobbing in its stomach, floating in its digestive fluids.

This was heady stuff for the protagonist at the time - a time before he grew into a cynical man for whom surprise was a stranger.

How do digestive fluids of a colossal, universe swallowing animal relate to the opening quote? Well, they forced that young “protagonist” to torsion his thought patterns. Those patterns of thought were undone and redone again with perhaps a few strands still frayed in the wake of the redoing. The form of his psyche, analogous to a Platonic solid made of paper - a simple origami - was crushed into something less perfect, into something more of this world and not of imaginary realms. Sudden floods of unexpected knowledge or insight can do that to a child and I’m of the hopped-up opinion that the experience is unequivocally positive. Even if that sudden flood of unexpected knowledge or insight concerns goat worship, sibling crib death or overcooked pasta, the end result is positive.

What am I hopped-up on? I’m hopped-up on garlic, honeybuničko.

Were an extended hallway to trace the life of the protagonist from when he was vomited from the vagina to having his corpse unceremoniously dumped into the nearest river, that hallway would contain parallel forms that mirror the protagonist’s psyche. Upon being vomited from the vagina, a pure shape akin to a Platonic solid - a simple origami - sits at one end of the extended hallway. Time passes and eventually an infant protagonist receives trickles of unexpected knowledge or insight. In the hallway, the Platonic form becomes ever more slightly rumpled during the durations of the trickles of unexpected knowledge or insight. At four years of age, a young protagonist witnesses the family křeček unearthing his mother’s eye from its socket. This sudden flood of unexpected knowledge and insight causes the rumpled Platonic solid to warp and crumple. A teenage protagonist watches the dawn for the first time with a few friends after they escape the nightly prisons of their patently comfortable suburban households on a rise overlooking a slope peppered with beer cans growing astride weedy abominations and a sinewy collage of stochastic plastic bag art. In the hallway paralleling his life, the form contorts even further, mangling itself until its original Platonic purity can barely be beheld. All trickles and all floods of unexpected knowledge or insight distort the parallel “form”. Prejudice concerning whether the unexpected knowledge or insight is positive or negative or somewhere on the five dimensional axis in between does not exist. There is no reversal or backtracking to Platonic purity.

I’m sure she would love to see you one last time before merging with the void. - Jeremy Croteau

The heat death of the universe, in this case, is a (very) slow digestive process during which churning (or placid!) fluids within the colossal stomach break down “reality” into states of gradually higher entropy. And, of course, the inevitable cosmic burp at the end of the process births a new universe. Excellent! Everything is explained now.

Jeremy’s void is not only our own deaths but the final digestion of the universe itself. And if the universe can be reborn by a burp, perhaps our tentatively unctuous souls are also reborn once they fully dissolve and disperse into the waters of the river into which we are unceremoniously dumped. Reincarnation by quantum burp.

The barnacle’s ambition is to reach the harbor without having built the boat.

In a way, I have also been carried by a boat throughout my life, but not in the way that the Swiss people I am staying with at the moment have been. They are the recipients of luck in a way that I really never have been. They either haphazardly married into or were haphazardly born into an ancient Italian family that was somehow displaced to Winterthur a generation or two ago. This is not a complaint, though my cynical nature defies that it not be. They are the family of my Ivanečka, after all, the person I plan to spend the remainder of my existence with. It is simply their lot in life. They take their lot in life for granted and perhaps this is where we could possibly come into philosophical conflict.

When my fetid friend, Christian Michal Newman, was living in Zürich a few decades ago, he relayed to me an unending sequence of negative emotions about the place. It made quite an impression on me and my opinion of the ostensibly pristine city has been tainted since that time. I know Christian quite a bit better now, as many epochs of both of our lives (possibly more of my life than his own) have passed and I know better now. At times, when he rants, he rants wholly about the negative aspects of sections of his life - to spit out the poison, as it were. So realistically, I should by this time take his past ideas of Zürich with a pinch of cesium salt. But feelings, emotions and those fickle chemicals splashing around in our brains are what they are and thus the impression remains to this day, though filtered through my current experience.

I’m sitting at a table on the terrace overlooking a small garden at Lenta’s řadový dům in Winterthur. Ivanečka and Lenta chat in the kitchen behind me and across the obyvák. Christian told me that when he worked here the Swiss people treated the foreigners working at the opera like bugs. He would possibly say that there is more nuance to it than that, but that’s what he always says about every experience, so fuck um. I detect the insect angle now since I am sitting directly within the environs of Swiss life, though it is not as outright obvious like it may have been to him. The behavior is subtle, but I get the distinct impression that Lenta and to a lesser extent her daughter looks down her nose at me. Or perhaps they don’t look down their nose at me specifically, but at the idea of my existence. The family’s reactions to the things that I want to do with Ivanečka (say, the Nik Bärtsch gig we went to the other night in a fabulously tiny club) are telling as they are wholly negative. I am interested in what the reaction will be to my wish to go to the island on Bodensee in Konstanz today. Given Ivanečka’s influence over my psyche of late, I shall stay positive! On one facet of the dodecahedron, I understand Luki’s and Alessi’s disinterest in some of the things I’d like to do because of the so-called generation gap. They both appeared incredibly bored during our extensive (though conservative in my view) walking excursion through Zürich. Of course, I could be misreading them and I do admit that at times I misread Luki. He seems to have a very rich interior life that he doesn’t show to everyone, and especially not to me.

I have just been corrected by Ivanečka. She believes that it may instead be Jessi that kind of looks down her nose and not Alessi. In fact, it could be that Alessi is like Luki. She may have quite the interior life, as well. Jessi has a bit of that Mediterranean aspect that appeals so much to the lowest common denominator. She is openly very friendly and does her best to create a positive first impression. What lurks underneath, as I found with the majority of the denizens of Spain, could be something either more sinister or vacuous or more likely within the infinite graduated void between the two.

Ivanečka also just related to me the attachment that Alessi had to her during the latter’s childhood. She was even jealous after Ivanečka birthed Luki. The warring emotions within the family dynamic here have evolved over many years and I am a stranger to them still, so some of their attitude may be warranted. Plus, I’m a fucking weirdo as well as an extreme introvert and my so-called social skills have followed a path that have been far from mainstream. Certainly, I am quite pleased with my own development as a human but that doesn’t mean that anyone else is going to be immediately attracted to it. In fact it means that the majority will find me initially extremely bizarre once I actually begin speaking my mind. And that’s even before the absurd humor begins to surface. So, on the other facet of the dodecahedron, fuck um.

But weren’t we speaking of barnacles? The barnacle is a formidable, crusty creature that attaches itself at an early age to spacecraft that hover too close to our planet. They become, much like Shambal Brambel, sessile on their chosen spacecraft. They are then taken to other worlds and are used as palate cleansers after various extraterrestrials have consumed particularly acidic meals. This is their purpose. This is why the exist. This is why the Great Mamba expelled their essence from its essentially infinite vestigial testicle. So it has been written. So it will be passed on generation to generation until the fluttering moths of time can no longer find a source of illumination to flutter around.

The boat the barnacle of my soul has been attached to can possibly be named luck. I, however, don’t particularly believe in luck as a mystical concept, so I’ll go with probability instead. No - better would be to say the probability of a mystically loaded dodecahedral die. So I don’t believe in luck as a mystical concept, but I believe in this particular loaded dodecahedral die. Indeed, I do, for its essence was also expelled from the Great Mamba’s essentially infinite vestigial testicle. Herr Christopher Bender told me many a time during our essentially infinitely durational friendship that my life is somehow charmed. Christian would accredit this to his fuzzy friend the Koala, but either he mistakes his fuzzy friend for the Great Mamba itself or they are essentially the same thing and even share an essentially infinite vestigial testicle.

So, if the probability of a mystically loaded docedahedral die has directed my life, I am quite grateful, essentially for simply being alive and essentially for being able to type these words into my laptop which is essentially named Lajdacky and sits essentially on this table in this essential terrace facing a small, essential garden in Winterthur, which is a particularly droll and uninteresting tract of land that could essentially be bulldozed and replaced with a pristine spaceport so that the aforementioned barnacles could more easily queue up for their intersellar journeys and eventual destinies within the intestines of various extraterrestrials.

We speed under a bridge on the highway between Praha and München, though our destination is not München. I glance back in time a few days to yester-monday, otherwise known as the thirteenth of July of this year.

Wheels turn beneath us as we glide between Praha and Berlin vlakem. I awakened at four twenty and decided that waiting until the alarm sounded the song by Eskaton ten minutes later was pointless so I remained awake after switching the budík off. Peiločja, on the other hand, chose to remain asleep, regardless of how much I taunted her with the “stick”.

The goals of the morning were simple. I had to make a shot for Ivanečka. I had to shave. I had to shower. I had to “pack”. What does it mean to “pack”, exactly? “Packing” (a very silly word) involves placing a few t-shirts into the backpack. Oh, and I also placed my toiletries in the backpack. Toiletries include things such as tooth brushes, tooth pastes and a weevil. Weevils are useful on trips because they bore into your skin and tunnel through your bones until they reach the essence of your being, granting you an eternity of robustness.

As I was stating - wheels are turning beneath us. Ivanečka just slurped down her “shot”, which contained an orange, a lime, a hunk of ginger and a few hunks of kurkuma. These four ingredients were placed into my juicer. In fact, it is part of my regular morning routine to make such a “shot” for my Ivanečka. She’s my love. What exactly is Ivanečka doing at this very moment? She is chewing on leaves of romaine lettuce. She is, of course, beautiful as she does this.

We shall arrive in Berlin an approximately one hour. Our plans, except for seeing Marillion tomorrow evening, are vague, and we pretty much like it that way. Across a landscape littered with high rises, apartment blocks, monuments and milling humans we shall stroll to arrive at Motel One, a place she found for us a few days ago. She was enamored by its design. I’m not that picky. It’s a place to connect, make love, sleep, rest, eat and shit. I guess comfort is somewhat essential, as well. Now that I think about it, we may not actually stroll across a landscape littered with high rises, apartment blocks, monuments and milling humans. We may take public transport, meaning the U-Bahn. In fact, in just a few fleeting moments, I’m going to look up exactly which U-Bahn we shall be taking.

Since walking for over an hour with our burdens would be less pleasant than having our limbs lopped of by a mechanical primate, we have, indeed, decided to take the U-Bahn (and possibly the S-Bahn) to our hotel. Though we’ll most likely not be able to enter our room until afternoon (it is now merely ten in the morning), I am partially confident that the hotel will retain our burdens in a semi-safe alcove until then whilst we meander about the landscape littered with high rises, apartment blocks, monuments and milling humans in search of wurst and hranolky. Stáhl jsem si aplikaci veřejné dopravy Berlína a koupil jsem naše jízdenky.

We pass through Nürnberg, Heilbronn and Stuttgart na cestě to Winterthur where Ivanečka’s sister “eagerly” awaits my irreverent humor. We are four in this metal box that speeds along an autobahn towards this day’s destiny. At one of our “pit” stops an hour or so ago, Ivanečka’s mother purchased a párek v rohlíku. It was a sublime moment.

Now to tumble fitfully back to yester-tuesday.

We’re sitting in bed in Motel-One in Berlin as the day slowly encroaches upon us. Not that we are in any sort of hurry. I always take a look at my home “security” cams to find out how Peiločja is. I feel quite bad leaving her alone. I’ll feel even worse next week when we are in Winterthur for seven days. When I think to deeply about her alone in the apartment, slumbering, stalking mouchy, bounding from place to place with clumsy grace, and possibly pacing, uttering feeble meows, wondering where I am, I feel something akin to a physical sensation of pain. I never thought in my past dappled with questionable empathy that I could love a creature so deeply. But I do. The connection is profound.

Yesterday, we spent many hours with Janek, otherwise known as Jayrope. He and I met online in 2019 during the late quarter of the year after I had completed my second full Noisevember album. He was impressed by the piece A Serbian Princess. Listening back to it recently, I was not certain why he was so enamored, but I shall not be so gobsmacked to not be appreciative, samozřejmě. The fact that his job is mixing and mastering other peoples’ work, from Hollywood-type soundtracks to underground punk, is telling of the hypercriticism I give my own mixing and mastering jobs and indeed my overall creative process.

We met at Hackescher Markt in a sort of biergarten that wasn’t exactly a biergarten but instead simply outside seating for a restaurant that insisted on calling itself Restauration. I consumed wurst and Ivanečka consumed veggies and hummus as we waited for Janek to arrive on his bicycle. Berlin and especially Munich are overly friendly to bicyclists. The cities actually seem to encourage the use of such contraptions as opposed to the use of jittering, clamoring, petrol guzzling hulks that drag themselves along roadways as they sputter inky clouds. Personally, I was always impressed by the “rules” in Seattle during my time there. Legally, a human navigating a jittering, clamoring, petrol guzzling hulk dragging itself along a roadway could “take out” one bicyclist a day. I saw it as a “thinning out of the hipsters”. Consequently, I am thinking of acquiring a bicycle when we move to Mnichov.

I’m reminded of a “scene” in my life riding in a jittering, clamoring, petrol guzzling hulk that was dragging itself along a roadway whilst sputtering black clouds. We had just listened, collectively, to Too Much Rope by Roger Waters and were discussing its lyrical theme. Jeff came to the conclusion that the human race would be better off if there existed some proto-mythical force that simply indiscriminately eliminated some percentage of the population every so often. As I mull over it a moment, I conclude that perhaps there already is.

Každopadně, Janek arrived on his bicycle. We drank beers and talked. He related a time he was in Texas, in fact, near Big Bend, living in a hovel with another musician. He lived in Austin, purchased an accordion and played with anyone or any group who needed an accordion player. There were many more anecdotes. They all sounded splendid. I let him talk. Ivanečka let him talk. It was pleasant. He went deeper into his life for us, relating finding a daughter from a fling he had in the 90s and how, after her mother committed suicide, they found each other. They keep tenuous communication and arrange times to spend together even though he said that at times they remind each other of traits we dislike most about ourselves. His point was there was an overreaching reason to keep coming back to each other and that overreaching reason was genetics. I’m not sure if he questions whether genetics itself is reason enough to hold two people together, especially two people who have nearly nothing in common experience-wise, but he did mention this latter point several times. My opinion on such matters is clear from multitudinous other blog posts.

I very much enjoyed simply letting him talk. I enjoyed absorbing his experiences of the world. I enjoyed that they sometimes aligned with my own but mostly were tales that had absolutely nothing to do with my life. I used to be tempted, especially during my 20s and 30s, to start sharing comparable stories from my own life during these sorts of discussions. Now I find my previous behavior abominable. It’s an act of humility to listen to someone else’s stories without having absurd struggles with ones’s own ego in the process. Perhaps the lack of humility (or the lack of ability to suppress the ego that snatches away such humility) is a symptom of a greater disease that infects Western (and especially American) culture. It can be a type of competition. And if it is a spawn of competition, it is repellent. Christian mentioned the other day whilst I was walking through Folimanka gabbing with him telephonically via Telegram that various people who tend to butt in, as it well, to storytelling in the egoistic manner that I just described also could be doing so because they can relate to the story and so they can feel a part of the discussion, conversation, back-n-forth, whathaveyou. I agree with him, but also believe that in this case, the butting in has its source in insecurity, low self-esteem, withered sense of worth, whathaveyou. Každopadně, I find it also slightly repellent, especially since I did it during my 20s & 30s partially from a withered sense of self worth. Fuck um.

Ivanečka just tasted Genmaicha for the first time in her life. Unfortunately, I adulterated the flavour with lime juice. She commented that the taste is extremely strong. Perhaps I did let it steep too long. I was probably distracted by Peiločja during the steeping process. Or I was showering. Or I was staggering around the flat arbitrarily in search of my tenuous early morning destiny.

I shall share okurky with my love as we continue our drive. The bluegrey mottled sky and thin mist draped along the autobahn beckon us onwards.