Jul 2004, 7 entries

This vacation has been one context shift after another. From traveling alone in Vienna, to traveling with three other guys alone the by-ways of Slovakia, to hanging out with Ivan’s big family, to again traveling alone on trains and staying a few days in Prague, finally I’ve returned to my childhood context of Southern California suburbia. It’s odd… this is really a unique part of the world… unlike everywhere else. Just realized that my mom and sister have never been to Europe. How is that possible?

Whereas in my childhood we lived in plastic new urbanism communities 3 blocks from a grocery store, park, school, and church no matter where you lived, now everybody is starting to move into gated communities that have their own parks and stores protected from the other people living in other gated communities. It makes me feel weird, as if perhaps I’m not aware of some reason to be scared. In actuality, it feels like more of an inconvenience and an excuse for the association to impose more rules for no reason other than a placebic peace of mind. I don’t want to be too critical since it is my mom and my friends who are living in these places, but at the same time it just magnifies the feeling of isolation and imposed perfection that I was running away from so many years ago.

In contrast, most cities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (and the rest of Europe for the most part) have no fences in their yards, and have large open pedestrian zones that have a fountain in the center. In America, the only thing that we ever face is a storefront or a movie theater. It’s a small thing, but facing a fountain or a hillside does a lot to change the mentality of the day.

Hanging out with my sister’s daughter, Adelyn, has been fun. She’s afraid of me though… apparently she’s afraid of all boys. Slowly she’s getting used to me though, so I’m hoping we’re going to be best friends by the time I leave. Her birthday party is this Saturday, so that’ll be an interesting climax to the Southern California vacation to contrast with the wedding in Slovakia that ended my time there.

Everything in California is huge. Walking across the street is a workout. A grande is the smallest size at the coffee shops. A small salad is enough to feed a family. Strange how the usage of space can reflect itself in an entire culture. Huge cars, huge roads, huge meals, huge stores, huge parking lots, huge houses… everything huge. If something is within a 45 minute drive, it’s considered close. My sister’s living room is about twice the size of my studio apartment. I wonder if we’re like goldfish, filling the space we’re given. When we can’t grow any bigger we start buying things to fill the space. I couldn’t help but feel sick walking through the aisles of Costco. Even those are bigger here. A lot of it could just be my own issues… after all I have developed somewhat of an allergic reaction to all things Californian, but it seeps from everything here, suffocating you, and the strange thing is that even if you get sick of it it still slowly transforms you and you start thinking in the same way.

But the sun is nice. I need to go to the beach. Seeing the style of life here has its strange attraction too. Everything is on track. People are married. People are happy. People are living to the maximum allowance of their credit cards and loans. People have careers. Long-term plans. People are having kids and they’re getting the best of the best for deals that they found through various connections. It’s safe. Clean (except for the air). The schools are good. Maybe this is the end we’ve been going after and it’s only a matter of getting over the bad taste it leaves in our (or maybe just my) mouth(s).

I want to write up more about Europe too… already it seems strangely distant. I guess that’s how we end up being able to return to our daily lives, by making everything else seem like a dream. Right now, Seattle feels like a dream. In any case, there are going to be a lot of changes once I get back.

Oh, and because I don’t really have a very good way to navigate the camera phone pictures yet, this is the link that I think gives the best overview of the trip so far: July’s Cameraphone Pictures.

For some reason I’m not getting email from my mockerybird email address… so if you are writing to me there, and want me to reply before I get back, try again sending to my allconsuming account instead. Erik at.

I’m now in Prague. All these damn tourists have booked up all the hostels within 100 miles of this beautiful city but luckily I was able to find a room with a friend we met at the wedding.

This city is beautiful. I haven’t begun to explore it yet but have a few solid days to do so. I spent 10 hours yesterday on a lovely train from Kosice to Prague, reading the last few chapters of the Wittgenstein biography. That man is my hero. This is just the vacation I’ve needed.

A little catch-up. Shortly after the wedding Ivan and Lars returned home and Nils went to Poland. On a whim I decided to head back into the heart of Slovakia for a day or two on my own. Sort of a little vacation from my vacation, getting deeper into the Onion of alienation and separation from everything I know, and also a chance to be a person that I have never been before. Met up with a couple friends I met at the disco there (Blanka briefly and Petra as well), went swimming, sat in the pedestrian area, went dancing some more, stayed out late, woke up early, woah, and in summary had a truly Slovak experience that I will never forget.

Today I plan on going to the Natural Museum, the National Theater, a highly recommended coffee house called Slavia, and whatever else comes my way. Perhaps a discoteky tonight?

I should also mention that there are a bunch of non-traveling related thoughts going through my head. Plans for self-improvement. A 1,000 day plan designed to make me healthier (to counteract the effects of the last 14 days), stronger, and happier. Half inspired by Wittgenstein, half inspired by Marko, Ivan, and the people of Slovakia, and half made up. What if we only live once?

Each time I come to an internet cafe it is a mad dash through deleting spam, replying to people I meant to reply to last time, and trying to find the reflective inspiration to summarize recent events. Most of the time, the last one is just too difficult, and time runs out. I§m skipping email this time to see if I can write something here instead.

The wedding was incredible. I estimated approximately 500 people at the ceremony, and about half of those made it to the reception that lasted close to 12 hours. The bride and groom were both theater and film actors and ever minute of the entire day was packed with high drama, perfect timing, charismatic proclamations, and incredibly good looks.

Shoot. I just can§t write about it just yet. My liver is failing, I get transported to dreams of exotic dislocation every time I close my eyes, and I haven§t showered since before my cross country train trip.

Just watch the pictures. We also have almost 2 gigs of photos and videos that the other boys took during the trip, all conveniently stored on an ipod and then transferred to CD at the only guy in Slovakia with a mac at home, since the ipod owner, Nils, will be traveling Europe for the next couple months. So we§ll figure those out when I get back.

Bye bye internet.

On friday I had a long day at the airport since Ivan’s connection flight was missed due to security snafus in Washington DC. Eventually though Ivan, Lars, Nils and I all met up and one of Ivan’s friends, Jan, drove us into Bratislava. There, we met up with another of his friends, Maya, and drove into Zilina. Everything in Slovakia is within 1.5 hours of each other. Slovakian hospitality was displayed in full force when we arrived at his aunt’s house around midnight and an entire meal was cooked and served to us, homemade plum brandy was poured in our cups, and pictures and stories were shared until well past 1 am. We then drove back to Ivan’s childhood home (which hasn’t been lived in for 3 years) and had some Jaggermeister (hot shot in das united states, or something like that written on the back), and fell asleep around 3. Woke up at 7 and set out on a drive through Slovakian countryside that lead us to some kids selling salty goat string cheese (very yummy), getting lost at the end of a dirt road in the middle of a endless hillside, climbing a remote ladder into a remote lookout built into the side of a tree, and eventually to a small Unesco protected village that strangely had people living in it and tourists walking the streets observing them. One of the nicest things so far has been how there seems to be a pub at the end of every road and the beer is cheap and people often end up sharing their food with us and there are no paranoias about age limits, etc, concerning alcohol. There are a lot of outdoor pubs with no walls or fences and families and friends are just hanging out enjoying the outdoors and each others’ company. At one point we heard accordian music being played and only a few minutes later did we realize that it wasn’t recorded music but someone was actually just playing a few feet from us. Ivan could tell the make and model of the accordian without even looking.

We then picked up yet another friend of Ivan’s that he hasn’t seen in 10 years (Susanne), and we set off for the high Tatras. More eating, more drinking, more strange conversations… I’m the most limited person conversationally given that I only know 1 language fluently. Nils and Maya know German. Lars also knows a bit of German. Susanne, Maya, and Ivan of course know Slovakian. At one point when Ivan and Lars went out to try to get us a hotel room, Nils, Maya, Susanne, and I had a strange conversation where perhaps I would say something and Nils would translate to German for Maya and Maya would translate to Slovakian for Susanne and she would respond and the words would get translated all the way back to English. And yet, we still had a pretty efficient and enjoyable conversation.

The bars never seem to close here. Six of us found another pub by a lake later on drank a good 15 or 20 collective beers and the total came to 300 crowns, or not even $10. Anyway, you can probably get the gist of what’s going on here. Not much sleeping. Today is sunny and we’re heading up into the Tatras which are the tallest mountains in Slovakia. Then, we’ll be dropping a few people off in various remote locations in Slovakia and who knows what we’ll do tomorrow.

If you don’t hear back from me, please try me again

I have another blog thing and it has been getting all of my attention. Love letters to imaginary people is the general theme. I sort of treat these online things like slots in a coin-sorter. I have coins like days that roll down a little chute and see which slot they naturally slide into. This site captures some types of coins, other sites capture other types of coins (I’ve had a lot of those coins lately), my paper journal captures others, and sometimes a coin will fall into the tell-a-stranger slot or the tell-a-friend column or sometimes it will fall into please-tell-nobody-about-this-ever-ever-ever.

I’ve been in a loving mood lately. Loving the web. Loving my blogroll. Loving chipped paint and spilt beer. This is going to get really random.

When life is at its best it is not comfortable or secure or luxurious. It is difficult, and scary, and full of doubt.

Jana. Be well.

Ivan. Can’t wait.

Rob Cooper, we were made for each other.

I’ve said the rest of the names out loud.

Everyone, let’s jump in a lake together.

Sometimes it is so clear to me that there are two enemies in our imaginations. The secondary one is the tendency to flatten memories and thoughts for storage (the next time you feel like you have to wait until you fully understand what just happened, realize that you already know what happened and you’re just waiting for your mind to forget the inconsistent parts until it only has one dimension). The primary one is the tendency to pick the top memory or thought to represent the rest (what did you do this weekend? pick the best).

I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. I can list pros and cons. What it reminded me of though was that we as a human race cannot remember history. We remember snippets, simplifications, and then when it comes time to compare them to current situations we always see current things as infinitely more complicated. It’s the difference between looking at a lake and jumping into it. The same thing happens when we think about different people. We simplify, group, generalize, and suddenly we think that Osama’s family is the same as Osama. Or that poverty means stupidity. Or that power means corruption. It’s a tragic and sad realization that our minds are so incapable of keeping a complicated, inconsistent, multi-faceted object in its original shape for long. I cannot even remember the good and bad parts of my day yesterday—it gets flattened into a 7. Yesterday was good. But I remember a sad part, walking by the Sorento. Does that mean the day was really a 6.5? Or does it mean that there were two days, a long good day and a short sad one? Or that the day was a string of 86,400 ratings, one for each second? Or more? Just because it’s not practical to have 86,400 ratings for a day doesn’t mean that that’s not how it actually was. If I can’t even store yesterday in my mind without losing some of the complexity and nuance, how am I supposed to store the entire country of Iraq, where I have never been? How am I supposed to run functions on my opinions of America when I cannot even listen to all the conversations in a single small cafe during a 1 minute period? How will we “celebrate” the 4th of July?

There are two types of people. There is one best band. I have a couple preferred destinations in the United States. I usually go here. You have to go there. This is a must. Personality is so overrated. So are skepticism, cynicism, and cheap wine. There is no absolute and universal currency. You can’t cash out of this casino. Everything is a game. Things have value only when you observe the rules of their valuation.

“All is vain,” my pin-wheel’s name. What but design of darkness to appall, if design govern in a thing so small. I just realized that the act of enjoying something, and the act of trivializing and dismissing something, rely on the same principle: containment, context.

Our human minds are slippery though. I see that and I slip out of the skin of that realization and I look at the skin and enjoy and trivialize that. The postmodern syndrome. But there is another skin around that. And another and another. You can learn to love the slippery nature. It’s like surfing, like floating, flying, jumping, dancing. Dance dance dance. It’s fun, it’s its own game. This is the rule: keep moving with the beat, even when it changes. The model of the model will never be complete, so it feels like it is universal. It is beautiful.

What does that person look like when they are completely vulnerable, when they give everything they have to stop time? When two really become one. When they are ready to surrender themselves to another person, to an idea, and to themselves? We each have that magic moment to give away to someone else, single and plural. We each strive to find someone to give it to, mutual surrender, love, friendship, the energy of the self, the soul. When is the last time I’ve seen my own soul? When is the last time I jumped in a lake, stepped in front of a huge bouncing ball, ready to be squished? The passion to live and see and breath and eat everything, but not to take it, not to really swallow it or keep it, but to feel that it was possible, or something, something like that or generally in that direction, ish-ish, if it were possible to actually articulate at least articulate well enough to be satisfied. This is an entry I’ve written a thousand times before, but each time I write it it doesn’t quite make it. And even if it did make it, the words would not feel real for long. The acid of time will reduce it to a skeleton within a couple hours, and it will sink back into the soil that it originally rose from. All I will keep is a feeling that it was almost said, then a memory of that feeling, that, even if it wasn’t said perfectly it was at least felt, and that was good enough for the day, but that even that feeling is gone now, and the memory is fading too, but maybe it will come back later and I’ll try to almost say it again.

The feel → articulate → fail → scramble to preserve → fail → trivialize → forget → remember → feel again cycle keeps spinning. Okay, click that next link you are meaning to click. Or put in another 4 quarters and play again. Dance dance dance.

I leave for Slovakia on Monday. I may come back at the beginning of August, at least that’s the plan. Hopefully a different or at least a better person in some small and unmeasurable way. I will try to come back with less than I went there with. I plan on trying each moment to get back to the feel part of the cycle. Starting now. Starting right now. Resist the articulation and the simplification and disintegration that inevitably ensues. No pictures, no stories, no lessons, maybe just a t-shirt. Throw away the model, and walk into it. And trip on the first step. This is way too serious, sorry. How else though? I’m just going to have fun, and stop thinking about it. See ya, frog-face!