A Few Moments With God and Uri Gellar

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.

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

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?!?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.