A Few More Corleone Photos

Very nice.

Corleone

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

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

There were several vertiginous peaks around town, most of them topped with these outdated execution devices (where do you plug them in?)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

Salina Cat-Color Race-Riot Punch-Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aeolius, God of the Wind (the bad kind)

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

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

Blood Flows in Sicily

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14) The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown

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

13) Portrait of a Lady - Henry James

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

12) A Drinking Life - Pete Hamill

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

11) The Alchemist Paolo Coelho

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

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

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

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

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

8) Profiles in Courage - John F Kennedy

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

7) The Celestine Prophecies - James Redfield

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

6) Swann's Way - Marcel Proust

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

3) The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

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

2) The Norton Anthology of English Literature

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

1) Who Moved My Cheese? - some shyster.

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

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

Elijah Beaver Goes Back to School. Hilarity Ensues.

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

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

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

Watch this space for more updates.

http://elijahbeaver.blogspot.com/

Things You Find on Girls

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

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

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

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

Veritatem Dies Aperit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Few Moments With God and Uri Gellar

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