Conjugating nouns

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I’m writing this partly to get things straight in my own head. I may well be wrong on some of the subtleties.

In Czech, nouns have different forms depending on how they are used in a sentence. The rules are different depending on the gender of the noun, and (if the noun is masculine) whether the thing named by the noun is animate or inanimate. These rules apply to people’s names as well — they’re nouns, after all.

For instance, If I were to say “My friend Brian Votaw is over there,” I would use the nominative form of the noun: “Můj kamarád Brian Votaw je tam.” No biggie. (Of course for females it’s not so simple. The last name would have -ova appended to it: Barbara Seegerova. Naturally sometimes you don’t just stick letters on the end; that would be too simple. Čapek becomes Čapkova, for instance, and if the root family name ends in ?~C½ you just switch it to an á. But I digress.)

Since Brian is (usually) animate and (biologically) male, to say “I know Brian,” I would use the accusative singular: Znám Briana. It doesn’t matter whether Anna is animate or not, she’s female and that’s enough to turn “I’m waiting for my friend Anna” into Čekám na mou kamarádku Annu. Note that the czech word for the pronoun “my” (which was múj for Brian above because he was male and that was the nominative form) switched from the feminine má (or moje, take your pick) to mou, and kamarádka (The feminine form of kamarád) became kamarádku.

I’m reasonably sure “I’m looking forward to seeing Amy” becomes Těší­m se Amy because Amy ends in y. However, I usually type it Amz, because the y and z are switched on the keyboard when I’m in Czech mode.

This episode only deals with two of the seven forms for each noun. Five more to go! Wahoo!

I hope reading this helps you as much as writing it helped me. Things are a lot clearer now, don’t you think?

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Shakespeare’s

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I am in a gentle place. There are books all around. At the table next to me earlier was the editorial staff of a new literary magazine working out how to deal with a legal complaint because they have the same initials as another literary magazine here. I should have introduced myself, but they were all so earnest and young and passionate and shit and really I don’t have time for that right now. I’ll drop them an email.

The music here is gentle. There are electric guitars and stuff, but they don’t get too carried away. Right now they are playing a pop song that underneath is Pachelbel’s canon. That’s OK, the P-man laid down a good tune. It is being followed by one of U2’s less aggressive tracks (notably, not With Or Without You, which starts out a lot like Pachelbel’s canon). Mellow white American music. No, U2 is not Irish anymore. Just listen to their music. It’s good, but it ain’t no Bloody Sunday.

The people in this place are, at least on the surface, gentle. They read books, speak softly to one another, and shout into their mobile phones. The crowd is young and more than half are American. Moments ago I broke down and spoke english to the girls at the table next to mine. More on that later, if my battery holds up.

It is a gentle place, and I am editing The Test. By coincidence I am working on the most graphically violent bit of writing I have ever done. It’s a powerful scene, and there’s no getting around it, and to pull my punches would weaken the story, but there’s no denying that it’s ugly. I will be embarrassed when Mom reads it. I’m embarrassed the idea of it came out of my head.

But it did, and there’s no taking it back now. If you want to show the evil of slavery, you have to show what happens to the slaves. While technically slavery is an abomination in the depicted society, the enormous gap between rich and poor has created a de facto slavery that is just as bad. So here I am, contemplating violence and degradation, the crushing of the human spirit, while I sit in a very nice bar drinking very good beer.

OK, the girls at the next table. They are at the table the editorial staff held before, and one of those left a sweater. The presence of the unclaimed wool has chased people from the table even when the rest of the bar was pretty full. A girl came in, and hesitated by the table. I had the laptop closed, conserving electrons while I contemplated the worst things that one human could do to another. I glanced her way and she asked with gestures whether the table was taken. I gestured that it was not. I wondered if she was czech and took me for american or whether she was american and took me for a czech.

The answer came when the waiter approached. She’s American. She’s moving out of town, and she doesn’t know how to say ashtray in czech. I don’t know either, but I don’t smoke. When her friend showed up I broke my vow of Czech to offer sell them the sweater. They didn’t buy it.

There was another girl in here earlier, very pretty, with her German Shepherd and her American Boyfriend (in that order). I don’t know where she was from, because her voice didn’t ring out across the small room. Probably she was czech, then. The dog was a sweetheart. There are no dogs in the scenes of terrible violence I honed to a knife’s edge today. I have that to be thankful for.

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Episode 12: The Cat’s Claws – Part 1

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Note: To read the entire story from the beginning click here.

My little .38 was a pea-shooter compared to the hardware the goons up above were carrying, but I pulled it out. “Get behind the crates as best you can,” I said to Mrs. Fanutti’s new incarnation as Meredith from Kentucky. She brushed against me as she groped in the darkness. Her wildflower perfume had changed when mixed with fear, adding a musky humanity to her appeal. She cursed softly as she barked her shin against a wooden crate.

We waited as whoever was above tested the sound of the trapdoor beneath his feet again — stamp, stamp-stamp — then slowly walked away. It had almost sounded like a signal. A minute later the faint rectangle of light around the door vanished.

I heard her trying to pry the lid off one of the boxes with her fingers.

“What are you doing?” I asked almost inaudibly.

“If I get this open we can make molotov cocktails,” she replied no louder.

“Even if you could open the crate without alerting the whole waterfront, fire’s not the best weapon in an enclosed space, especially when you’re throwing it toward the only exit.”

She stopped her efforts. “I suppose you’re right, but they may come in handy once we get up there.”

“The cops are bound to come sooner or later. We just need to hold out until then.”

“Cops are the last people we need. Who do you think they work for? Who do you think was my husband’s chauffer for his last ride?”

“In that case, I think it’s time we left this hole.”

“What if they’re still out there?”

“There’s always going to be someone out there, but I think that last guy might have been a friend.”

“I don’t think I have any left. Besides you, I mean.”

“Cello wants you alive long enough to get your map, and he wants me alive long enough to get the map from you. I don’t know who that was up there, but he found the trapdoor and didn’t even try to open it. Wait here.” Like she had anywhere else to go. “Don’t move until I give you the all-clear.”

Without the square of light around the trapdoor it took me a bit of groping to find the ladder in the blackness. I knew the general direction but I passed it on the first try, then got turned around a bit. Soon enough my outstretched fingers found the smooth wood and headed I headed up. I felt the planks pushing down on my hat. I reached up and the bolt was where I remembered it. Odd to have a bolt on this side except for contingencies exactly like this one, but then you would have another exit as well, wouldn’t you? The steel bolt slid in its groove silently. I lifted the heavy door just enough to peek out.

It was dark in the warehouse, but after the total blackness below I could see well enough. Nothing moved. It would have been easy enough to hide in those shadows, however, and there could be someone standing five feet behind me, just waiting to put a bullet into the back of my head. That kind of thinking doesn’t get you anywhere, though. Just ask General Custer. I pushed the door open a little farther to extend my field of vision. Still nothing. It was useless I knew, but I decided to move quickly in case there was someone behing me. Perhaps in the darkness I’d only be wounded by the barrage from the Thompson machine gun.

I took a few deep breaths and flung myself up the ladder, twisting to look back over the thick wood. I found myself sitting on the edge of the hole, losing my grip on the massive door and dropping it painfully on my thighs. I almost dropped my gun as well, but I was happy to have only bruises as I looked and found no one there. I sat as silently as I could, catching my breath. There was a time when that maneuver would have been easier. I lifted the door off my legs and hauled myself out. Below I could hear Meredith moving around. I hadn’t given her the signal, but it would just make more noise to stop her now. I pulled the trap the rest of the way open and watched the shadows as she emerged, my coat still draped over her shoulders.

We slid to a wall as quietly as possible and Meredith led me toward a door opposite the one we had first come in by. I was hobbling along pretty badly, walking like a constipated crab as I tried to work the kinks out of my bruised legs. There was a form lying near the door in a splash of moonlight from a skylight. I kept to the shadows but my escort gasped and stepped up to the corpse. She knelt by the dead man. “Mick,” she said. She put her hand in his hair and it came back dark and sticky. She looked up at me, her skin pale in the moonlight, her eyes lost in shadow. Her voice was eerily flat, the voice of Lola Fanutti. “Whoever did this is a dead man.”

I believed her.

Tune in next time for the conclusion of: The Cat’s Claws!

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Too much

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One thing about walking a couple of miles each day is it gives me some good thinking time. Tonight I was walking along and I thought of a great way to start a novel. It’s fantastic. Tantalizing and human. Its about a tortured soul that doesn’t even know it’s tortured. It works.

So I fired up the ol’ novel writer and opened a new document. I looked at the blank page, “Book Title Here” written at the top, and thought about what it meant. Another project. The Test is not shrinking down enough to fit between two covers, I’ve been neglecting selling The Monster Within, and my real passion, the novel with the road in it, is languishing. Then there’s the big update to Jer’s Novel Writer I’m working on right now, and I’m tweaking the first release of the slick little flashcard program I’ve been writing when I should be studying my czech. How can I possibly start another project?

I once worked at a largish company, and while in the end I didn’t like the CEO much, he did say something that has stuck with me. To paraphrase: anyone can start something, but almost no one finishes anything. The whole reason I am here, the whole thing I am trying to prove, is that I am one of the people who finishes things. I’m not some dilettante wanna-be dabbler flitting like a butterfly from thought to thought, easily distracted by the pretty colors of the Next Big Idea. I have discipline. I can do it. If I say that often enough maybe it’ll be true.

So I have to be careful when a new idea blossoms. I have to do something or it will eat away at me while I worry that I’ll forget it. I’ve been putting effort into short fiction recently, and that’s been a fun way to pay attention to new ideas without disrupting my flow too badly, but this new idea won’t fit in such a small space. I guess it’s time for another chapter one.

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Traveling at the Speed of Google

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A long list this time. I didn’t bother with obfuscation, a decision I may revisit.

  • squirrel pants law Linked to two different episodes: SSDC and My Pants.
  • “yellow brick road” meaning – If metaphor is what the searcher wanted, The American Road Myth isn’t bad.
  • movie accidents of Garfield – this was a search on A9, which at least wants to appear to be affiliated with Amazon. My hoping that Marmaduke would choke to death on Garfield’s corpse pulled a visitor into a fairly incoherent episode.
  • chilly midriff – the searcher went through some 320 hits before arriving at my page, only to discover that Google was out of date and the references to small shirts and cold weather had been pushed off the main page. In the search I was in fine company, clearly, wedged between “nauseating repugnant and therefore very cool” and “Yo mama”.
  • butch girl haircuts remarkable because the word haircuts appears nowhere in the episode, none of the words are in the title, yet the episode came in second in google’s list. (The episode gets a lot of hits for its mention of specific bars; all I can figure is some of that love rubbed off.)
  • electromagnetic bomb scheme build – linked to the get poor quick category page; most of the word matches were in the Reusable Space Vehicle episode.
  • space launch cannon here’s the followup to the reusable space vehicle episode
  • drinking from the stanley cup – here
  • ramblings of a drunken man – main page
  • “and that’s the way it always is” – Megan
  • the brief explanation about AM radio – well, this site is a bastion of science…but in this case no science was to be found here.
  • jeans for real women – linked to an episode about my pants.
  • gyroscope balanced motorcycles – there’s it’s gonna work, I tell you.
  • roxie blog OR journal “san francisco” -cinema -theatre -theater – all that and they still came here.
  • san diego fern bar – I have to wonder why anyone was looking for a fern bar, no matter where it’s located.
  • dew barrymore and clovis – a typo and a weird convergence of words led to the homeless tour category page.
  • ideas techniques expose skirt – a stripper looking for professional advice, or someone needing a new half-baked invention? Votaw, I want the blueprints on my desk by Wednesday.
  • “the frogs” band virginia “yeah yeah yeah”
  • shy dogs facts and pitchers – that misspelling gets me lots of business
  • poker’mon pitchers – what do you get when you cross a hick with a anime fan?
  • freeloading counter linked the episode where I borrow broadband from Jojo.
  • beeristers – I’m surprised more people haven’t used this word. I used here while wondering about a girl across the bar.
  • i only make passes at cowboy asses – somehow I don’t think The Cowboy God is really what they were looking for
  • holiday ticker – ’cause you gotta know what’s coming up!
  • flashing breasts – only notable because msn ranked me number 4 for this search.
  • PARTY GAMES WITHOUT WRITING.COM – ’cause so many party games require literacy
  • “Tiki Hut Girls”
  • HOW LONG CAN I GO WITHOUT FEEDING MY FIRE EEL here
  • “this means nothing” interesting only because this meant nothing
  • skoda store – linked to a very brief observation about the effect of cars on an unsuspecting society
  • i have lost my pants –
  • VIDA ……………………………OGLING – an episode like this one was top of the list for this odd query
  • i have lost my pants – linked to the episode where I paid tribute to my pants
  • Cartoon Poodles – linked to the main page here, due to the episode where I picked a fight with a poodle
  • define ssdc comcast net – the other search results didn’t mention squirrels at all! What gives?
  • prague guide “budvar bar” – linked to main page.
  • how to get getting started in arial photography – linked to the get-poor-quuick category page. I think they were looking for aureola photography, but I’m not sure.
  • scary squirrel sex –
  • step to step guides on how to use bed hoists? – the new egg episode caught their eye.
  • breakfast rhymes with – linked to an episode about Ely, NV.
  • “why people go to bars” – you need a reason? Linked to my episode from oh, so long ago about bartenders.
  • telecom tower praha babies – someone else fascinated by the giant freaks. Did not link to the episode with the pictures.
  • BIG ASS BEER – I like the exuberance expressed in the search.

All the usual suspects have been well-represented, but February was the slowest month here in a long time, partly due to Google deciding that I wasn’t the Egg Guru it used to think I was. Perhaps it suspected me of being a Google-bomber. For a while I actually got a better feel for how many people come here on purpose, and it was better than I thought. As of yesterday, the egg-friers are back with a vengeance, though. The reign of The Mr11K3 will soon come to an end.

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Five

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I sneezed – hard – for the fifth time right as the clock ticked over to midnight. Sneezes come in threes, they say, and that’s almost always true, so when you sneeze a different number it’s time to pay attention. Two times, you’re left hanging; there’s unfinished business and it’s going to come back to you some day. Four is a warning — remember what you were looking at on your fourth sneeze. Five is like two, there’s something coming, but there’s a power to five that is separate from sneezes. The fifth sneeze at the stroke of midnight, you better keep your eyes open. You’re going to be receiving a message, and you better listen. More than just your life depends on it.

I sat motionless, listening to the clock gently striking twelve times behind me. That clock loses almost a second every month, so I don’t use it for important things. I have another clock connected by radio to the atomic clock. There’s a radio station that just plunks out the seconds. If you listen real close you can hear that every plunk is different. You can know just by hearing exactly what time it is, because when the radio says the time that is the real time.

They have leap seconds, did you know that? I’ll be listening to the time march by as I lay sweating in the darkness and then whammo! an extra tick. I sit upright in bed, wondering what angel or demon put an extra second into the day, and for what purpose, and whether my tide charts will all be off now or did the tides already know about the extra second somehow?

I waited, controlling my breathing and my heartbeat as best I could, afraid even to blink lest I miss the sign. The clock on the wall chimed the quarter hour in soft musical tones, then the half hour, three quarters, and finally, just as my radio clock ticked over to 1 a.m. the wall clock chimed the hour and struck a single time. Nothing moved; the whole world was waiting. The chime of the clock faded gracefully, to be replaced by the ticking of the swaying pendulum. I turned up the time radio louder to make sure I would hear if there was any change.

Five, five, five, five…. I thought to myself as the seconds plunked past. I turned up the radio louder, listening to the gaps between the tones, thinking the message might be there, like the messages they put between the frames in a television show, but there was nothing there. Five, five, five, five… I felt myself slipping into some sort of trance, which happens sometimes when I concentrate. Some part of me heard the clock strike two, then three. I relaxed at three. It’s a powerful numer, but this wasn’t about threes. five, five, five, five…

When I heard the clock strike four from far away my heartbeat began to accelerate again. The sound of time passing was louder and louder in my ears until there was nothing else; no thought could survive that pounding. In the gaps between each tone my heart was a second clock, and as the seconds passed the clock was louder and faster until it was slamming in my chest and sweat was a river and I couldn’t breathe fast enough and the clock’s numerals glowed red and burned straight through my retinas and into my brain where they were echoed in a thousand colors and a million languages: 4:59:56, 4:59:57, 4:59:58, 4:59:59…

5:00:00 and I snapped alive, the noise quiet and my heart still as the doorbell rang.

Thanks!

The Toasty Tent

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This stretch of the planet is having a cold snap right now, sustaining temperatures well below freezing for days on end. Today Prague enjoyed a high temp of something like -4 C, or 269 K. (that’s about 25 F). Now before all you midwesterners (both of you) get all in a huff saying, “That’s not cold! Why I had to walk to school…” let me just say, Yes, it is cold. When you were tramping through the drifts with only wonder bread bags for shoes you were saying “Crap! This is cold! I can’t wait until I can buy an RV and take it down to Boca Raton in the winter!” Don’t deny it.

So where was I? Right, I hadn’t told you that yet. I’m at home. I’ve been on a trip and as a cheap bastard I had the heat turned way down while I was away. I came home to an apartment at a balmy 12.5 C, turned on the heat, and went out to dinner. When I got home more than two hours later the place was up to 14.5. It takes a long time for things to heat up here. So with my home at less than 60 F it was time to get creative. That’s when I invented the toasty tent. I am now sitting in one of my moderately uncomfortable comfy chairs right next to the radiator. I have a blanket draped over the radiator and over me, bringing a significant fraction of my home’s heating power to bear on only a few cubic feet, some of which contain my head and other favorite organs.

I am toasty.

I’m sure I’m not the first to put a blanket over the radiator to keep warm. It’s obvious, really. What sets my invention apart is the name. Toasty Tent. Come on, that’s golden!

Some engineering remains to perfect the toasty tent. The blanket is smaller than I would have at first thought ideal, but that keeps it from getting too stifling in here. If I move my hand toward the floor, there is a sudden drop in temperature at the bottom of the blanket. At first I was most concerned with the light level, but the smaller blanket lets in enough light I merely had to dim my laptop screen a bit. The main problem is the difficulty in keeping a beer within easy reach just outside the toasty tent. If I move around too much the blanket pulls off the radiator and I have to construct my haven all over again. With only a little engineering this problem can be overcome. All I have to do is make it so my head is not a significant part of the structure.

Apparently my radiator also has a “safety feature” called a “thermostat” that shut it down just as things were reaching their toastiest. The final version of Toasty Tent will have to be sure not to insluate the radiator, but merely to make sure its heat stays in the correct general area. A delicate balancing act for the world’s top scientists at Muddled Industries, Inc.

The Toasty Tent is just what this energy-starved world needs to keep going. By only heating the parts of a home where people are, a typical family can save a fortune, and help the environment at the same time. The Toasty Tent. It just might save humanity.

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Bulwer-Lytton Lives!

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We stood in line, the splash of the street lamp in the chill summer fog making an island of us: there was the prostitute, chain smoking and immune to the cold in her fishnet stockings and yellow plastic miniskirt, hair in disarray and eyes only shadows; there was a young couple, junkies with colored hair leaning against each other for support, feet spread wide in a perfect square, holding each other in some half-remembered habit of intimacy or perhaps just attached by some of the hardware adorning their once-chic clothing; there was the derelict, lying in his own foul cloud, sprawled against a building in a twitching parody of death, unsure where the next bottle would come from but knowing it would come; there were the other assorted bums, lowlifes, and losers swimming to the shore of our island but moving on again after a while, lacking patience or still possessing hope; and there was me.

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Pub 12

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I am in the Slovak version of an English pub. I was hoping for a pale ale of some sort, but the Guinness is mighty fine. I just got here, so there’s not much to say yet. There’s a strong wireless signal, but the network has been secured.

European history will be marked by the

* * *

Time has passed and I have been pleasantly interrupted by a distractingly attractive bartender, a black frenchman who works for IBM, and a hungarian family on holiday. All of them in their own ways mark European history, but for the life of me I’ll never know what great wisdom I was prepared to impart above. There I was, on the verge of bringing the continents together, predicting the future for crying out loud, and I forgot what I was going to say. Woe, continents! I have condemned you to continue your drift, aimless and destructive.

There’s a cover of California Dreamin’ running around, and while it’s pretty damn disco, all the leaves are brown here, and the sky is often gray. I wear long pants and socks all the time. If I were back in San Diego on a Friday afternoon I’d be at Callahan’s or Tiki, doing much what I’m doing now, but it would be warm outside. I would have taken off my shades when I went in. I would have kicked off my shoes (although at Joe’s Place (r.i.p.) stealing my shoes and hiding them was a matter of sport for a while). But California, while a legend, is not a myth. The days are easy there, and the nights are warm. The women are as beautiful as science can achieve, and there are good cheap beer nights if you know where to look.

It’s nice.

I’ve been in Europe for a few months now, and I can’t help but think where I’m going next. It’s cowardly, really. I have heard many times people speak with admiration about what I have done and continue to do, but in the end, what does it pile up to? If I never stay still, I never have to form attachments. I have a bit coming up at Piker Press about that – I really hadn’t planned the story to come out that way, but it just happened. I’ve slowed down my submission rate over there because most of my short bits have the same tone and I want people to say “Hey! Cool! There’s one by Jerry this week!” Instead of “I read it last week.”

I’m rambling now, not writing, which by the title of this here blog I’m allowed to do, but I don’t want to alienate any more regulars, so I’ll stop.

Thanks!

Dateline: Liptovský Hrádok, Slovakia

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It was a pleasant trip down here yesterday. fuego did the driving, MaK the navigating, and I the passengering. To navigate in this country you have to know the names of every damn village and cottage between your start point and your destination — referring to roads by number at an intersection is rare, and using the same town name at two consecutive intersections also seems to be against the rules. Sometimes even when you do recognize a town name on a sign it’s difficult to tell what intersection the sign is referring to.

One wrong turn eventually led us to a little place whose name translated (with only a little license on my part) to “Snowville”. It was pretty and appropriately named. The snow was coming down hard as we went through, and it seemed that everyone in town was out with shovels. We got to see the village twice, as we reached a dead end at the far end of town. The road went on, but when we asked a guy if we could get through he said “maybe in a Jeep.”

Eventually we got here and settled in. This place is nice, and very inexpensive. We have the bottom floor of a house — two bedrooms and a fully-equipped kitchen — for less than $30 per night.

Once we settled in it was time to set out in search of pivo and a bite to eat. We quickly discovered that options are limited in L. Hradek. We walked down to the most center-of-town-like area and surveyed our options, but one place had the wrong kind of beer, one was an English-style Pub which was right out as far as MaK was concerned, and one was a not-so-special hotel restaurant. Finally we asked some people on the street where a good place to go would be. After much discussion, first directing us to one place and then another, we said we just wanted to go to a place to have a nice beer and relax. One of the guys took charge, and walked with us to a place very close to our little home away from home. The man said hello to everyone in the pub, including the kitchen help.

It wasn’t a fancy place at all, but it was comfortable. It is part of a hotel that serves a sports complex; I assume it is where teams stay when they visit. We sat, our beers came, MaK chugged hers in the Czech fashion, and we settled in for a nice meal. My dinner was excellent. While sipping my dessert beer I said to fuego, “You know what I like about this place? It’s not smoky.”

fuego looked around and noticed that there were no ash trays on the tables. It turns out we were in a non-smoking bar. fuego asked if this was a Slovak law, and the bartender said no, they just didn’t want people smoking in there. I honestly never thought I would find anything like that in Eastern Europe, where tobacco is a food group. When we were done we bought some beers to go and made the short walk back here, tired, happy, and not smelling of smoke. It was a good day.

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She was a writer, part 2

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I was in a nostalgic mood the other day, thinking about the meaningless encounters in my life that, had things gone differently, would have meant something. I wrote about a woman in an airport bar in Cincinnati. I’ve thought of her off and on for more than three years; I even occasionally tried to dig up an email address for her through her publisher. I didn’t try very hard, I admit, but for me she was always out there, a person I had hit it off with but had not had time to alienate. Even as I wrote that bit I wondered if she would stumble across it.

She died in 2002.

You may have read John’s comment to the previous piece informing me of the case, and you may have read my reply. I’m embarrassed by my reaction; I tried to make light of it and ended up making her early death to be about me. I knew the moment I posted the comment I would want to delete it, but in the interest of honesty I will let it stand. You’ve all read it by now anyway. I have not seen any other replies, as I am in Slovakia and Al Gore hasn’t been here yet. (George Bush is in the capital right now, but I think he still expects someone to hand him a sandwich when he says ‘Bratislava’.)

During the drive down here I thought of her. I wonder what ended her life. I wonder if the cancer came back or if she lost her long struggle with her own self-image. Probably neither of those things. Perhaps it was a car crash. Maybe she was struck by lightning. She was thirty-nine, give or take. My memory, not the best, had munged the name of her book; for the record, her name was Lucy Grealy and the name of her book is Autobiography of a Face.

In the end it doesn’t matter. For a few hours I sat on a barstool next to a bright light. I checked out her ass. We had a nice chat. Did she already know she was dying? As we sat there was she facing her own mortality and chasing the inevitable with Chivas and Beer? Could I have made a difference? What if she died of loneliness, while I was thinking of her all along? Then again, for all I know she was happily married, and I was just some guy in a bar during a particularly tedious layover. I’ll never know what that encounter meant to her, and she’ll never know what it meant to me.

I wish now she could know I still think of her, but I have no way to tell her. Her striking eyes are dust, her figure is lost, even her deformed jaw is just a playground for the worms. And I still sit alone in airport bars.

Thanks!

She was a writer

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The airport was deserted, except for the bar. Everyone got there hours early, only to discover that even the most earnest security official can only delay you for so long. I sat down, and ordered a big beer. “You can have a shot with that for an extra buck,” the bartender informed me. I looked over the booze and figured a shot of Chivas was worth almost a buck, and had that tacked on. I was sitting, contemplating which to drink first, when a woman pulled up one barstool down and ordered a Sam Adams, large. Moments later she had also ordered a Chivas, for the same reason I had.

We started talking. We both feared what was going to come next. We both thought that Bush was stupid (“lightweight” was the word I used), and that a terrorist attack was just what his administration had been hoping for.

Physically, she was striking. She had a great butt, piercing eyes, and her lower face was a wreck. She’d had some disease as a child that ate her jaw and (if hyperbolic memory has not overtaken me) almost her life. She had written a book about it, Anatomy of a Face. If memory serves. We’d had another double-round by then. She was on the NPR rolodex under self-esteem, and was coming back from an interview.

She held her hand over her face much of the time. I guess even if you’re synonymous with self-esteem you get tired of people staring. “I’m a writer,” she said. I wanted to say I was a writer, too, but it sounded pretty me-too-istic. Probably I mentioned it eventually. I still had a day job, though.

I wonder, all these years later, if she remembers the guy in the bar at the Cincinnati airport who was checking out her ass when he didn’t think she was looking, who occasionally had the courage to look into her terrifying eyes, and most of all had a great conversation about everything under the sun while a cloud hung over our nation. Maybe it was the time, maybe it was the setting, maybe it was my own slower disaster, but I will never forget her.

Thanks!

Doesn’t ANYone here speak English?

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There are two waitresses at U Sladečku, a.k.a. Crazy Daisy, who I have taken as a personal challenge. Both are brunette, slender, and pretty. If either speaks English I don’t want to know about it. One of them I have dubbed the Anti-Amy. Put Amy and the Anti-Amy side-by-side and they could easily pass as sisters. At least, until they start talking. Or, well, when Amy starts talking. The anti-Amy doesn’t say a whole lot. To anyone.

The czechs, I am often reminded, are a reserved people. That’s OK with me; I’m fairly reserved myself. Amy is not reserved. Not at all.

The Anti-Amy was not working today, but the other she-of-the-hard-won-smile was. Compared to the Anti-Amy she’s a ball of fire, which means on occasion she will toss a litte half-smile my way when I fuck up the czech badly enough but in a sincere way. Also working tonight was a skinny blonde with bad teeth who on rare occasions is almost friendly.

I sat with my back to the wall farthest from the door, next to the piano upon which menus are stacked. I settled in with a beer and a bowl of soup and looked for more parts of The Test that I could delete. (I found a bit I really liked that had been orphaned – it really hurt to delete “The madman Lawrence is back.” “He’s better then?” “I’m not sure. He seems all right, but he has your finger. He says he wants to return it.” You don’t get chances to write stuff like that often.) ANYway, I was unwriting along and a piano player settles in on his little red pillow and starts tickling the ivories. I had been about to leave, but I prolonged my stay.

By this time the place is pretty crowded, and all the open tables have “reserved” tags on them. I feel kind of bad taking up a table at times like that, but I’ve noticed that Crazy Daisy has a pretty plastic definition of “reserved”. At a certain time of night they want to make sure their tables are used efficiently. So it was that there were several tables unoccupied but reserved. It’s all about asking nicely. I sat in my corner, watching the ebb and flow of the bar, listening to the piano, and working on a part of the story that still makes me misty (embarrassing when you’re sitting next to the piano player, facing the whole bar).

“Do you have menus in english?” comes the voice across the room in unmistakable New York. “Do you speak English?” he throws at Smiles-Only-Rarely with hostility and disdain. He turns to the whole bar, his arms spread wide. “Does ANYBODY here speak English?”

Smiles-Only-Rarely turns away from the abuse to fetch the menus from where they sit next to my head. I catch her eye and smile ruefully, shaking my head, skrunching my eyes in a pained expression. Is it? Yes it is! A fleeting smile. She collects two menus and turns back into their sarcastic entitled bitchiness. He’s continuing to be a complete asshat, and suddenly Smiles-Only-Rarely notices, seemingly for the first time, the “reserved” tag on the table. Alas, all the other tables are reserved as well. No room in the inn. His New York victimhood fully confirmed, he escorts his wife out in a self-righteous huff. See ya, pal. Some of us have to live here after you convince everyone that Americans are jerks.

Smiles-Only-Rarely returns with the unneeded menus. She looks at me again. “New York,” I said, shaking my head. “Even Americans hate them.” I don’t know if she understood me, I doubt she did, but I got a real, honest-to-God smile. I love New York.

Thanks!

for a.k.s.

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for a.k.s.

I hear her voice in my headphones
And I remember
Like an Engine, she played
The crowd thinned
The Jack, which I had bought for her
dwindled
We stood, ssssh! outside her bedroom door
and almost, not quite.

1

Thanks!

Requiem

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Requiem

I guess there was only one thing left
To put into your brain.
The final test of immortality
I will not know the end
Unless I, too, am Lono.

1

Thanks!