Whoopie! Today I finalized my residence and work permit in the nefarious, humid, crowded Kreisverwaltungsreferat. Say that 26 times quickly. Fucksheep seems to be down. No idea why. The weekend was filled with pattern matching code which flowed from my fingers and into Emacs flawlessly (well, actually with a few flaws, but they can be overlooked). But, unfortunately, I did not even as much as touch my guitar. Can I will myself to remedy this today?

As in the past, the onslaught of encroaching summer hate (heat) dulls my will and ambition. But I shall stay stranded in this concrete hades until in my pocket once again are those colourful notes which promote escape.

Heat. A breeze would be nice, but this stifling computer lab, windows though it has open, offers not even a hint of one. Bells play about my aural sphere, emanating from somewhere other than this room (although sweltering they may be, as well). Ah, the mediaeval postures of a modern city.

I began a book on buddhism. I am taken back to my days in Clear Lake, alone in my commodious dwelling, poised in meditation, and oddly satisfied. Prolly just nostalgia. Boris gave the tome to Vesna. She might well benefit from its pages better than I would.

I hope to finish ‘Stone Calendar’ tomorrow. It has gone from being a calming, ambient piece punctuated with meditative, pulsating passages to becoming a confusing wash of chaos and evil. And this is a good thing.

What would mother say if I joined a monastery? Father would be peeved. Escape from the toils reeking of penitence into routinized bliss. What a grey future I see. But I have said that hundreds of times and Sweet Entropy has come to the rescue. I await her again.

I cannot believe the govno people write in this forum. bleh.

Tony replies: Someone has to.

I think today is February 3. I will never send this letter to Dana. It would be abortive - futile venture. In another key, another motif, the advantage to being alone is that I can stay out as late as I wish, get as drunk as I want, etc, and there is no one at home waiting to complain.

If the reader now makes the assumption that I AM alone, he / she would be incorrect. There days ago, or so, Vesna and I moved into a flat rather near the dreaded ex-workplace -> 1 2 Snap. I now sit in a pub 100m from that then hated now nostalgic place.

It is strange the twists, the honey candle’s wax of life, running down the slowly dissolving stick, makes. So stability becons like a mute siren, body lying naked and alluring.

Furnitureless, our flat does not suck at my soul to possess it, but instead repels me. I left Vesna reposing there and walked a mere five minutes to sit at this table, sip beer, shoot vodkas, and write this.

If we jump back a few subjects and write of the fading phantasm who is Dana, one can tell, perusing the discarded letter to her, my feelings immediately after departing her presence. One could read them like a book, even. The final hours in her aura were miserable. She cried enough tears to overfill the Aegean Sea, lamented her love for me so redundantly, at the same time so bitterly and so desperately, that my brain dislocated a few emotional lobes which are still finding their way(s) back to their proper places.

Pictures are telling, sure, but these displaced neurons still suffer from Romanian tinitus.

As for my feelings now for her? Well, they are transient and primarily nostalgic, calling back the ideallic moments we spent together in Prague… just distant and lost dreams neither relevant to the future nor the present.

You are the crossroads, Bob is what she sobbed to me in breath that smelt of wine and cigarettes, as usual. Perhaps she also was the crossroads for me. Without a doubt she was the catalyst for me changing my life once again, modifying the direction of the wind, and tossing like a pinch of salt over my shoulder my life in Prague away.

But the future, as is the present, is Vesna’s … no one else’s. My intermittent melancholy (an ailment I have not been able to or have been unable to bring my self to shrug for more than fifteen years) should not let me dismiss this fact from any hour - even sleeping ones.

Twice now I have had a dream about Vesna’s inverted nipples and the creatures who live within. She cried in pleasure as sickly, penis shaped fungi pushed themselves from within through the hole where her nipples should be. They wriggled and swayed like living entities of their own, sometimes shyly ducking back into their fatty home, and at other times paling or glowing cherry red and awaiting my tongue or lips.

I awoke from these dreams with a sense of desperation to flee and a slight taste of bile - of fear - on my pallate.

THE FOLLOWING PAGE BELONGS TO USA.

I don’t need to think. I’m a woman. - Nataša Nisic 21 Dec 2000

After urinating:

Has anyone reading this heard of GERD? It stands for Gastric Esophogal Reflux Disease and I am afraid that your modest author is afflicted by it, or seems to have all or most of its symptoms. Especially after eating, I am subject to the stereotypical heartburn. But mostly when I or my digestive system have no connection to the culinary universe at all, pain erupts from the center of my breast, under my sternum, cracks like the treelike structure of a typical brain scan, and shoots needles of hate through my whole torso.

The feeling is unlike any normal intense pain I have experienced in the past. It is similar to what one might experience if a large, booted man stepped square onto one’s sternum and crushed the air from the body but only to the point where it was slightly possible to do the normal inhale / exhale routine.

Anyway, next topic.

Jeníček and Hanka’s worry for me because of the aforementioned affliction is unexpected and touching.

9pm on a Saturday night in Muenchen.

Oh, how it called me and I answered with more than just my heart. I dug a canal with my tongue from the eastern bloc to this sterile city, riding the waters in a boat made of expectations. My pail for bailing was ever at hand, yet never used.

Another communion with alcohol is at hand. The vodka rapes my memories, leaving them dripping with its seed, sure to spawn some mutinous children who will haunt me for these drunken hours. Man! Am I brilliant or what?? Oh, wait….

I thought for a second that I were Acy. Sorry for the subjuctive mood there, but I thought that it was appropriate.

Tired old metaphors

Out of context - out of time

Fleshless skeletons

Mexcan girl, don’t leave me alone! I’ve got a heart as big as a stone!

Ohne without bez no other word for this emptiness not filled by some liquid which sloshes is my hara like a trapped and aggravated bird. Dead inside is a popular cliché which encompasses nothing but an American idea of boredom. They die sullenly, finally seeing their skeletons march triumphant from heaps of rotting flesh.

I am no artist, but my concepts are solid, valid, and I will dispute them to the end. I fear each of the humans I have ever been close to’s judgement of my art, especially egoist Acy’s and confident Tony’s. Strange contrast, those two. They stand as two of my longest comrades, but two of my greatest contenders, at least in my mind.

I would choose to slice them with the most granular part of my cheese grater into material suitable for fusing, then create a new, pleasing being - one with the admirable qualities of both.

It’s the eye of the TIGER

Oouh, baby

I think I have made a new friend at this pub. He is happy to have an auslander consuming his wares, occupying his space, adding spice to his redundant evenings. But mayhap I am only being pretentious. I doubt often that they have some strange looking auslander sitting at a table alone writing in his tagesbuch with red ink, however – fucking Deep Purple blares now. I am not impressed.

Now Rush. Spirit of Radio.

My new friend is named Rudy. Ty vole. Too many memories mixing. I am unable to distinguish one from another. But mayhap this is the key: The connections between these parts of life - abstracting each instance. Sigh. Cannot continue.

Alcoholic abortion.

There I am on a train again, spinning away from you. The pain is intense, maybe akin to what you feel – distraught, lost. I have made a number of relatively terrible mistakes in my life, but I must admit that leaving you has to be the worst.

Now I expect you’ll change your phone number, your emails, perhaps even your name to cut me from your life. I wonder if you can forgive this stupidity of mine. I reread your I Love You note that is warmly nestled in my pocket and much to my chagrin, I could not help but begin crying.

My companions in this cabin must think me mad (somewhat).

I wonder when you may receive this, actually, especially if you leave for Budapešt during next week. Maybe it will sit, unread, for days or weeks. I know not.

But I love you, Creature. Yeah, yeah. I can see you shrugging your shoulders and saying to me it doesn’t matter: I love you. You love me. So we will love each other forever… But from a distance… Your words, for sure.

I will not blame you for the decision of cutting contact completely if you indeed decide to do this, but I will be regretful. I already am. I see you in my mind, submerged in eucalyptus suffused liquid, crying, smoking – perhaps already with a bottle of red wine. The torture I have been and am putting you through is pathetic of me.

Yes, pathetic is the word I have been searching for to describe my actions.

Each man kills the one he loves … or the thing he loves. For what? I know not. Maybe there is some sense of tragedy which appeals to me on a basic, fundamental level. Be it this, I am pathetic.

All there is now is pain from loss. You told me you could see no way to fill the emptiness widening within you. Well, I feel that now. The place in my fragile, pathetic chest where was my creature is now devoid of any substance, any life or hope or, indeed, future.

I have not felt this vacant since Lee took his life. Not even the ridiculous pain which occluded months on end because of my loss of Melanie does not compare to this. Still, you would say to me, the plain fact is that I am rolling away on this train from you to some other absurd adventure.

I paused to listen to the Peter Hammill CD I have with me – the one we listened to several times in your flat. Typically, the lyrics to many songs are quite pertinent to our situation. It has saddened me even more and now I struggle with these words, simple though they are.

It seems difficult to coax anything reasonable from my pen on this lurching train. The bottom line is this: I do not think I will ever give up on us, no matter my indecision, my confusion, and my need for the arbitrary. You did something to me that no one else could have done: You awakened the sleeping Bob, opened his eyes, let him see the sun again. And taught him to somehow love it. You have been the crossroads in my life, as you have said I am the crossroads in yours.

Oh, I can hear you clearly in my head telling me that crossroads meet at only a single point, but I’ll shrug it off as a Dana-ism. Not that I do not love Dana-isms, but your peculiar love for the paranoid and pessimistic sometimes peaks too often. Or is it the pain you feel that makes these two Ps so relevant in your life now?

Sigh. I will abortively try to sleep now.

Displacement is unforgiveable. All I can think about is the distance from my love, the lies I tell to make my isolation greater, and a growing emptiness engulfing me. If I lose Vesna, which is a possibility, I think I’ll become a hermit. She told me herself that she feels she could never love again – ie, if we split up, she could never be with anyone else.

She feels like loving solitude, much like me.

This similarity, along with so many others I have with her, is staggeringly dumbfounding. Sad, stupid country music yawdles from speakers near to this dreadful McDonalds next to the Intercontinental Hotel. No phone, no contact, freedom, bliss?

Psychological exile encroaches like an unstoppable horde or plague. I miss Vanja and his steadfast manliness, belief in himself, and all that fucked up jive. Soon, he shall be my roomie. Him, my guitar, and, of course, solitude.

Dancing seems ridiculous to me.

I pen hidden truths

Stiff pages suck at my ink

And leakage threatens

Girls in santa hats

With unapproachable laps

Xmas illusion

Experiments that

Come on baby, light my fire

Failed too many times

Blue-black blood, red wine

Stumbling, drunken leukocytes

Forget the way home

I fuck the deaf girl

Lies or truth: to her, the same

From whispering lips

Insipid, important, plaintive night at SMOKE in NY – the Upper West Side – filled with nostalgia and emptiness. This pseudo funk / jazz band plays cannot read this word as John, Nataša and I listen, detached but together in a strange synergy that transcends the alienation of another night unhinged.

By unhinged, I mean detached (displaced?) from ever part of our former lives. Except John, of course, who is the status quo at such events – and even a status quo in my life in general – a base to BASE my ambitious and eccentricities on. Why not? My handwriting, appalling, berieves the enjoyment of this script. Sigh.

Neglectful Bob, it seems. Much time has passed ’tween the last and this entry in my journal. I am at Cafefour in Prague: that place next to the dreaded Pivrnec near Náměstí Republiky and a former place of employment dubbed EIN.

(Cafefour)

Earnest Intellectual Naivete.

Two kurvy have seated themselves facing me, babbling in Czech, still a foreign language despite my understanding. This place (Praha) is not home, NOR, it seems, was it ever. This feeling of displacement hovers intrudingly above my shoulders, never quite focused enough to glance out of the corners of my twitching eyes.

I left Vesna in Muenchen yesterday, imprisoned in her nursing job, as I rolled swiftly eastward vlakem. I miss her terribly. Our separation only enforced before, as it does now, my confirmation to myself that she is the woman I want to be with. Forever? Well, who knows what is forever and what is not, but I’ll take Vesna for a local forever, hoping at last to expand our life into a global context.

I am hardly even nostalgic about Prague. I do not need to rehaunt my old places of frequency, not teary eyed mourn a life that included people who are mearly appirations now – static eidolons in my memory, removed forever from the real peoples’ personas. Miro, Draža, Hynek, etc … ghosts.

Get lost, Ghost, indeed!

Final, most likely, messages from DANA:

And a word for someone I don’t know – tell her to try to make you happy and to have no fear. I’m just a shadow. No bitterness. I still have the power to accept defeat. (15 November 2000)

How about: I’ve recently discovered that the idea of zeuhl is not applicabale all the time. (17 November 2000)

Go astray / I won’t cross your way / So you can rejoy / Getting back an old toy / You pay a ticket to Charon / I am not there coz you’re gone. (19 November 2000)

I felt the same when you left for Bosnia. Probably you are not keen to hear my feelings. I simply feel the need to tell you. That’s all. No cynic Dana. A good trip. Bye, Creature. (19 November 2000)

I do remember. I will … for a long while. No joke. A unique thing. :) (15 November 2000)

Is there anything you need to add? Or everything is clear and we can end this pain. I cried enough today. It’s great to cry alone when people love you. (27 November 2000)

A message from long lost Hela:

I need some telling me that being hypersensitive is an advantage and I need to believe it at least 5 minutes. Anxiety is good, Hela, it makes you laugh afterwards. Fuck. (18 November 2000)

And one from Vesna:

You are the most important happening in my life. Much, much more important than my school. I was stupid to think it was not the truth.

This chapter begins in Praha in a café, unnamed, that I have spent many contemporary hours – plaintive minutes. It is a place for loneliness and only that. I espy a few instances when I frequented this hollow with others, but those were vapid and quickly forgotten liaisons.

Even once, I had a business meeting here during the summer, the fickle and directionless summer of the year 2000.

I finish my cigarette and call on the serving wench for another cappuccino. Displacement is the presentiment of the day – and will be for the next week. Before, there was always solace, a nestling place in Nusle where my bed, litres of alcohol, some cacophany some might dub music, and the intenet would always welcome me after frightful days, evenings and nights alone in the morass of the city.

Now there is nothing but changeable Jeníček to provide me temporary shelter for the evening and night. The drunken revelry that shall surely ensue will be boisterous, naturally, but sadly empty.

I am not here. My brain and heart were left in a messy flat in Munich with a girl from Bosnia. This enforced separation from her is absurd, a means to masochism, a detriment that may end in fruition of our bond or a severance. Sundered from my want, a need, I still sit at a candlelt table sleepy and alone. The tepid cappuccino being now prepared for my constricted gullet will be only of nominal help. I can only wait for the stupidity of the evening, hoping it will temporarily whisk away this feeling of desperate vacuity.

So I spark up another smoke.

Note to reader:
I most often, as can be surmised,
write when I am alone and devoid of happiness, companionship.
I write when I am empty, ironically. So these words are conjured
from nothing, have little bearing on the REALITY of my life.
Sad but true.
Yet I enforce this isolation. Without it, I would be displacing
a part of myself, a fundamental
facet of my personality.
I displace the fullness and completeness of my life with this
horrific spell of hated / loved solitude. Then
I refill my vacant soul with the love and companionship I lack --
severely learn to miss -- during these escapades.
It is an endless cycle -- one I fear that is impossible to break.
May my loved ones by patient.

Later – at a different locale, a place to which before I have never been, actually. Quaffing another, better in fact, cappuccino, I sense the minutes creep slowly by. I wait for my meeting with Jeníček three quarters of an hour from now. This place began with the sensation of grandiose displacement. Do you know it’s Christmas? dribbled from the speakers hidden somewhere overhead. Now some modern hoopla stagnates in my ears. The nutmeg in the coffee is a slight assuagion. The serving kurva is typical Czech early 20s Andrew would like to shag-type. The walk from Náměstí Republiky bored me almost to literal tears. Peppered only with the spice of phone calls to Muenchen, the taste was, overall, bland. I perused one old haunt, to the chagrin of the writing on the previous pages, surely, near Národní Třida, a place that occupied my nights in late June, as well as emptying my pockets and eventually leading to the loss of my mobile phone.

Ah! The stupid old days! Yes!

This only ideallic moments of this year were those of August and early September. Of course, cynically, I fear they would, too, have lost their magic if they had lingered.

Now with Jeníček near Paleckého Náměstí. Better than expected. Actually, I can count him as the best friend I have here – that I made whilst here. Even better than Dana, methinks. Life is ok, though my last conversation with Drrrrling, whilst she was at Alex’s, was strained. All is good. Fuck Brynn and her idiot expressions. Life is moving on, though I remember the important bits and watch, only peripherally, the chaff waft away in the apathetic wind.

Sad Saturday afternoon in Prague. Fifth cigarette to irritate my aching throat. Everyone is leaving. I am alone in this huge flat. I can hear the echoes of my footsteps for hours. Or maybe it is the throbbing if my pained head. I’ll light another one and watch the hours pass silently. I feel just like it is 1991, alone with my thoughts in the apartment I shared with John, trying to pen some inane poem to rot in a notebook until my eyes hunger for some sort of absurd nostalgia.

I have always been one to talk of the thrill of change, but now it tears at me like a feral beast. Humans begin to scurry in and out, removing Jenicek’s and Viking’s things, eyes always avoiding my own when I chance out of my cloister and into the emptiness of the remainder of the flat. This is an alien place after my time in Bosnia, in Munich. I am blind with hatred of the arena at which I have stared for two years, never quite joining the fray - always on the fringes.

The good news is that Dana and I are communicating again like good creatures should. The bad news is that I have Vesna here, also communicating well, happy and semi-satisfied. She said a few very poignant things last night with which I agree wholeheartedly. She said I should love her not because she is good for me, but because she is great. What she means is that I should love her for who she is, not what she does.

Dana said the exact same thing.

The way she is, not her doings, aspirations, etc, should be the reason I love her. I feel the same. Vesna loved Alex because he was good for her, not for who he was as a human. This she feels regretful for and, ultimately, it is why she left him.

One more cigarette (Tony’s ubiquitous lucky one) and my days as a smoker shall come to a close.

Tuzla, Bosnia with Vesna. My right contact is irritating me. One moment. It is still irritating me, but I refuse to let its petty annoyance balk another few paragraphs of deft, incisive wit. See what I get after finishing A Confederacy of Dunces?

Back to the matter at hand: Tuzla and Vesna.

I was just informed by her, poking only the upper one fifth of her naked body out of the cracked bathroom door, thaht the icy water of the intermittent shower was too cold for Vesna. In this fabulous city, water is only supplied to a block of flats for two hours twice a day. We are scurrying to take advantage of it.

I took the early train to Muenchen yesterday, Adri seeing me off with her pedantic, lovelorn, witless dialogue accompanying. I saw Vesna for the first time in my life at 13.03 or thereabouts on the 29th of August, 2000.

Well, in the flesh for the first time.

Since then, most every moment has been spent together, as planned, including the not SO unpleasant ~13 hour bus ride to Tuzla. Arriving at 8 this Wednesday morning, we wondered blearily around the streets, returned to the flat (her flat) for hours of napping, coming a few centimetres of making love, discussing her husband, silliness of languages, movies and parallel thinking, and at last taking showers. She must meet her Aunt for a time and I’ll wander Tuzla.

Tomorrow our sites are on Sarajevo. Why not, after all?

My two concerns with Vesna are these:

• The attachment she has to her husband.
• The fear that I would tire of her as I do with all women I tend to hitch with no matter the initial seemingly spiffiness factor.

18.55

Vesna visits her aunt. I sit on a park bench near Kapija penning (in green) this. A kid spits from his perch upon the back of a yonder bench. His kamarad, sitting to his right, does not notice.

A few things about Vesna that make her adorable:

• She lost her wallet and her train ticket on the UBahn immediately before arriving at the bus terminal seconds before the bus to Tuzla arrived.
• She likes exploring hotels for the sole reason of absurd entertainment. Hotel Tuzla was an abomination, but we made an hour of it, shoe cleaning machine and all.
• She is able to instantly forgive any fault, unlike Adri, she is not belligerantly idealistic.
• She enjoyed our idiotic game of you are my burden, incomprehension, etc…
• After a mere 24 hours, we speak to each other like we have know one another 10 years or more.

My idea of her has gone through several transformations. Originally, she was just another girl from ICQ, a Bosnian who interested me because Maja, being Yugoslavian, intrigued me. Gradually, she became an obsessive figure, one who claimed long distance, ridiculous love for someone she only had known from an internet chat medium. I played with her in this capacity and she played back, eventually calling me, leaving a phone number floating in the missed calls cache of my mobile. So it deepened into a full fledged infatuation on her side, calling me semi-regularly, urging me to call her at work when possible, and spamming the ICQ ports on each of our machines with emotionally inebriated broken English.

(Hotel Tuzla)

It waxed and waned time and again until last week.

Thursday.

She was to come visit me in Prague Monday (two days prior to this one), but we instead turned to conversation concerning her home town – the one in which I sit writing this and hearing herds of children clomp and scream about me. I decided arbitrarily that I would come this week. So, screwing Darius out of 15000 Kč, I was on my way yesterday morning, as I already mentioned.

At this time, Vesna was still a disembodied voice and a series of confused messages with an infatuation. She became real when I stepped off the train and saw her sitting on a bench, smiling her vivid grin, mouth open, cheek bones protruding beautifully. But she was now only a body and a mind with an infatuation.

Her gaze fixed on me unendingly.

The next to the last transformation happened on the bus last night when we started our carefully shy affection. She curled up into a fall in the seat beside me like her poor pet chicken, Sebastian, needing ever protection. By then, a bit of my natural paranoia had set in, disturbing this child-like image she had endued, pulling instead from her a series of why do you like me, anyway? questions.

And the final metamorphasis was today, after making (nearly) love, after my last entry when she stepped dressed out of the shower. She was a woman then – and a friend, someone I loved and trusted, could say anything to, and who enjoyed my company as I enjoyed hers. This is the kind of woman I want in my life.

Now what about her marraige to Alex?

A few minutes later – seated at Kapija –

in the middle of what one might call Náměstí Kapija there is a popcorn vendor. I love this town, though if another shell landed where one had in 1995, this absurd man would be the first to go. I would be incinerated, along with every smidgen of dribble in this book, a tenth of a second later.

I ordered a cappuccino in spite of this unlikely threat.

Thoughts claw at my conciousness: stay here! Stay here! Or maybe Sarajevo. Vesna could come visit often, though another abortive job in Muenchen would be more satisfying if my goal is to see her often, despite Alex. A good barometer for our future will be her feelings for me when she returns to Muenchen. Her vacillation so far has been happiness in me being her little secret and guilt, nervousness and frustration concerning the internal conflict between this adventure with me and her life with Alex. I hope the fact that I stay when she departs Friday does not injure things considerably.

Popcorn sounds tasty.

Another note about Tuzla: There are no bankomats ANYWHERE.

This month has been one of the most dramatic, capricious and unexpected. It is a pity that most of it will go unrecorded.

One guitar crying

Obscured cruelly by a dial

And an inbred mind

Where is my Vesna?

While dead lights shine, people mill

In my cluttered world

Sparkling, mingling flames

Stilled by a nearing whistle

Then stomped out by fire

I jump – the world spins

And my balance is deranged

Same feet – new surface

Is he singing in

Bosnian or, uh, English?

The former, I think …

Today’s Special Question: Do I want to remain in Prague? The answer is NO.

Face it, I like this place because it is novel, more deeply sunk into the pocked face of Western Culture, a blight. I relate to it internal, as an isomorphism of my status as an outcast. There are most definitely fewer English speakers here, forcing me to make non-abortive attempts to learn the language if I chose to stay. Would I miss Vesna too much?

Today’s Special Comment on Vesna: I like her MUCH more than I thought I would. I am incapable of sustaining interest in my work. It is absurd, an abomination. Both my attitude and the topic of the work itself. I am descending into apathy, a whorl towards the apex of poverty threatens. The maelstrom pulls me. I am not resisting right now – not at all. I am not exactly