Bar 100

A hundred bars in four countries over the course of a year and a half is hardly an astonishing accomplishment; I’m sure there are those who have dwarfed that figure without even trying. I’m not terribly motivated to inflate the number; there are times when weeks have elapsed without me undergoing the grand adventure of breaking in a new place. I have my principles, and I have places I belong.

For the record, this was not the first time I’d been to the beer garden at Letná (rhymes with met yah), but it was the first time since the Bars of the World Tour officially started.

Letná is a park on the hilltop on the steep side of the river. It is in full bloom right now, as the plants jump into summer with gusto. It is not just the vegetation that responds this way, the population of the city comes out in force on those first few beautiful days that tell you that summer is here, and mother nature isn’t just fooling you this time. As this is the Czech Republic, an important part of enjoying any day is having a nice beer.

The line at the beer window moves quickly, and even on crowded days there is room among the hundred-plus picnic tables arrayed along the hilltop, sheltered by flowering trees. The breeze brought with it a slight chill, and there was constant danger of flower petals falling in one’s beer, but those are the hazards one must overcome to survive in a place like this.

There are dogs everywhere, running and playing among the picnic tables, chasing one another and yapping happily. The number of cigarette butts on the ground around the tables is surprising, even for this city.

The view from up there is one of the best in Prague. (The best view is from the TV tower, because it is the only view that doesn’t have the TV tower in it. Remember the giant Iron babies?) The oldest part of the city lies below you, just across the Vltava, and you can see why this town is nicknamed the city of a hundred spires.

On the pathways people stream past: punk kids on skateboards; elderly couples with their little dogs; and long, graceful rollerbladers weaving between them. Many of those who stroll past are carrying beers, and that is no crime here. (Some of them would be surprised to learn it is a crime anywhere.)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a story that takes place on one of these benches. When I wrote the story it had been more than two years since I had been up there, but it was (almost) exactly as I remembered it. (I had forgotten about the plastic cups. There is another beer window in another hilltop park, where you leave a deposit and get to drink beer in a more civilized fashion. The story starts strong and builds an interesting character, but ends schmaltzy, as so many slice-of-life type stories do.

I did no writing while I was there; I write this from the Little Café Near Home, days after the fact. At the time, I did not think about the milestone that bar represented.

Unless an unlikely acting job materializes, I will be traveling soon to other countries to meet up with people who like going to bars. That is likely to inflate the numbers substantially.

Happy No Pants Day!

No Pants day is here again. It’s turned out to be very easy for me to celebrate this year; in fact, it has required almost no deviation from my usual lifestyle.

We have reached a point where there are far more than 365.2422 things to dedicate a day to each year. This leaves us with three options: mount giant rocket motors on the planet to push it out away from the sun so we have more days in a year; attach giant rocket motors around the equator to speed up the earth’s rotation, shortening the days; or pick and choose just which thing we want to use each day to commemorate. The first two options are only quick-fizes, as people will keep on coming up with things like “Left Sock Theiver Day”, and either the Earth will be pushed out past the Oort cloud to accommodate or it will be spinning so fast we will fly right off.

No, in the end, this is not a problem for the engineers to solve.

Adding to the complication is the breed of holidays that do not occur on a regular 365.2422-day basis. The floaters. Easter is one, so is the Chinese new year. Also, No Pants Day. It’s the first Friday in May, so put all your cares away.

So I, only marginally aware of what day it is in most cases, stumbled into No Pants Day. Here’s how I celebrated: I got out of bed, made tea, sat in front of the computer, scratched myself, and “researched” web comics. Somewhere in the mid-afternoon I snorted, said, “Oh, yeah, No Pants Day” and took off the sweat pants I had been sleeping in the night before. I sat back down and continued what I was doing. During the course of the day, I was never twenty meters away from the place I woke up.

It was just like many other days, but this time I wasn’t wearing pants. Now that summer is here, there are likely to be many more unofficial no pants days.

To erase that horrifying image from you mind, I leave you with this song, composed just for this day. Since I am distributing it without permission, the least I can do is give you all the relevant info, so if you find the singer’s voice especially sweet or the writer’s words especially witty, you can look for them.

Singer: Sara Hamman
Songwriter: coulda sworn there was a separate songwriter credit before, but there’s no evidence of it now. Sara has just risen that much more in my estimation. This is a brilliant song. There are others available at the Official No Pants Day Site music page.

I Wish It Were No Pants Day
Click Sara’s face to play

(right-click her face to save the file)

The image is also used without permission, but she shore is purty. I mean, just look at those eyes. On top of that, her voice calls us all to pray at an altar made of carbon fiber composite, draped with silk, and bedecked with the first daffodils of spring. Just listen and tell me I’m wrong.

Merry SOS Day

Our beloved May twoth holiday, SOS day, is also known as “The first twoth where nobody had a really good name.” SOS day is so named because SOS naturally follows Mayday.

So, in order to celebrate the fifth twoth of the year, let us all imagine we have been stranded on a deserted island for the day. It is a friendly island, and while your transceiver peeps out . . . – – – . . . you have a chance to save your own soul. Come on! The sun is warm, the breeze is, uh… breezy, and the azure water in the lagoon is bathtub-warm. Put your feet up and relax. Did I mention that this island has a refrigerator and a bookstore? And what tropical island would be complete without a blender?

Tell us about your SOS day!

Tour Theme Song

After the now-infamous scratch-n-sniff screen debacle (I left the episode about potted meat out of the refrigerator for a few days), I have been pondering how best to muddle the masses by appealing to senses other than sight. Today the secret underground laboratories have produced an innovation that is sure to rock the Internet: Music. Yes, you heard it here first; modern technology will make it possible for people to share and distribute their favorite tunes. Mark my words, once news of this leaks out, everyone will be doing it.

Somewhere around here you should be able to find a button which, when clicked, will cause the song “All For Me Grog” to come out of your crappy little computer speakers. The song is by Harold’s Craich Band — or at least that’s what they called themselves back when they recorded this for the soundtrack of Pirates of the White Sand. Those of you who have been waiting for the movie can think of this as a sneak peek.

This is my first time posting up tunes, so let me know if you have any trouble.

All For Me Grog!
Play All For Me Grog
(right-click to save file)

Happy Road Trip Day!

I sit now at Cheap Beer Place, sipping not-so-cheap tea, pondering doing something that could be interpreted as productive before the hokej play-off game starts. (Interestingly, Czech for “play-off” is play off. You’d think they would have grown their own word for it in the centuries before the ubitiquization of English.)

It was a good Road Trip Eve celebration last night, going long past the traditional midnight toast. At one point in the festivities I found lined up on the table in front of me beer, whiskey, and slivovice, and I knew that some brain cells weren’t going to live to see another sunrise. Today, as the survivors grow accustomed to having a little extra elbow-room, thoughts are moving slowly and wandering off course, like a sloth with attention deficit disorder.

It’s the kind of day televised sports was invented for. Today the Beers play Slavia. The Beers are down in the series one game to two, so this one’s important for the team to continue their cinderella run for the championship. This is their first trip to the semifinals since 1951. Go Beers!

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Road Trip Eve

Yes, tomorrow is Road Trip Day, the day we commemorate the beginning of Jer’s Homeless Tour — the epic journey fabled in legend and song, which began two years ago tomorrow. This year, since Road Trip Eve falls on the weekend, the celebrations promise to be even bigger than usual. Here in Prague, fuego and MaK are taking advantage of the fact that this is the one social occasion of the year that I cannot shirk, and they’re throwing a bash. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop by!

For those new to the ranks of the muddled, April 2th, 2004, was the day the sale of my house in San Diego closed. I spent the night before that first day at Callahan’s, sitting at the bar, talking to Rose. I was watching the clock, and when midnight rolled by I said, “Wish me happy birthday.” Purely by coincidence, the first road trip day was also my fortieth birthday.

That afternoon, big chunk of cash confirmed, I packed up all the stuff I could fit into the Miata and drove away to look at the US for “two or three weeks” before moving to Prague.

Late that night found me in a little beach town in central California, hanging with friends, sipping good wine and eating good food, tapping out my first blog entry from the road. In two weeks I had made it as far as San Jose, and week three saw me (if recollection serves – sticklers for the truth can go look it up) at Lake Tahoe. Not really that close to Prague. Weeks passed, miles rolled by. Months snuck through there somehow as I trundled around North America, hanging with old friends, reconnecting with family members, falling in love with pretty bartenders, thinking, and writing. It was me, in my ideal environment: ample solitude, new places, new adventures, old friends.

Hopefully I can get back out there again someday — ideally as a book tour, but you have to publish a book first for that to make sense. It would be fun to have book signings in all the bars I wrote in along the way. Fun but not terribly profitable; I have been forgotten in most of those places by now, and the clientele in many of those places didn’t strike me as particularly bookish.

So wherever you are tonight, at a quiet little private celebration or the giant beerfest in Times Square, the tribal dances on the plains of the Serengeti or the wild street parties of Rio de Janeiro, mark moment with a toast and make your first words of the new year “elevator ocelot rutabaga.” It’s good luck.

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There’s a big milestone approaching…

I didn’t notice when episode 600 went on the air a few days back, and really, there’s no reason to get so excited about that. There is another milestone on the horizon, one that is, in my opinion, monumental.

Before too much longer, someone will post the 5,000th comment here at Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas.

The number speaks for itself, but that’s not going to stop me from rambling on for a bit about it anyway. Five thousand comments doesn’t happen on very many blogs, I bet. Here I am very proud that the comments have become an extra layer of interaction and communication. There is a whole discourse going on there, influenced but in no way bound by the topics of the episodes. It makes this place lively and rewarding even when I’m not.

There are regulars and others just passing through, those who lurk and those who post often. There are personalities who exist nowhere but in the comments here; we even have an avatar of the collective. People have exchanged travel plans here, announced life changes, and in general added to the feeling that this is not MY site, but OUR site; the place where Squirrely Joe can hang with Funkmaster G-Force, and Keith can suggest ways to find women from my past.

So, while I’m proud of this site, and a little surprised at what it has become, the credit is not mine alone. Not even close.

Take a moment, why don’t you, and vote on what the prize should be for comment 5000. I’m a little hesitant about offering a prize – I imagine Jerk McSweede posting two hundred messages reading “Did I win yet?” – but we’ll see what happens. Just… play nice.

Happy Ground Squirrel Day

Yes, It’s March 2th, the third twoth of the year, Ground Squirrel Day. We had a poll last year to determine how to celebrate this day, but I don’t even remember what the options were, let alone what won. I think there was something about using rockets to create home-made flying squirrels, but I may be wrong.

So, boys and girls, you will have to use your own imaginations to come up with an appropriate way to celebrate. Let us know what you come up with!

Happy Ought-to Ought-to Day

Today is dedicated to getting something done that you ought to do. I used my ought-to ought-to day to finally get a monthly pass for the transportation system, which involved getting a photo taken. This is to enable the other ought-to: getting out more.

How ’bout you?

Happy New Years Day (observed)

This was the first holiday to be added to the Muddled Calendar, and it marked the beginning of the 2th initiative, just one of the innovative contributions of the legendary Mr7k. In his words:

January the Twoth will, henceforth, be known as New Year’s Day (Observed)tm. For those amoung us who are too (choose one or more) drunk (still), hungover, tired, way into watching football, or otherwise occupied to start the new year on January the 1st, New Year’s Day (Observed)tm is just the ticket. Think of it as a much needed mulligan on the first tee of each year.

I am become Jer

Funkmaster G-Force pointed it out recently, and you can check for yourself. From Lindsay Wagner to Renee Zellwiger, chicks dig me.

Well, not me, per se, but some idea of me expressed in these pages. It is a carefully crafted and sloppily maintained me, an idea that’s got out of hand and is running amok through the blogosphere. It is, perhaps, slightly less artificial than the me you would meet if you were to stumble into the Cheap Beer Place right now, but only just.

This particular me, the one you know, is defined by words. Strings of symbols strung together to form ideas. And all of those smaller ideas coalesce into the grand idea of whoever it is I am. Though, maybe it’s not as grand as all that.

There have always been pen pals and others who come to know each other through words, but now we’re looking at something on a whole new scale. One of my NaNoWriMo ideas involves creating a completely artificial person online. But if that person is consistent and compelling, is there really any difference between that and who you’ve come to know here at Muddled Ramblings?

On a smaller scale, in the comments there are also new people – personalities that did not exist before but are just as real in this context. People with no birth certificates, no social security numbers, but in this place they exist and are known.

Of course, some of you have met me in the flesh, so you have two versions of me to compare. Perhaps there is some overlap, the intersection of the two Jerrys that can give some footing on who I really am. Whatever that means.

The Trap

I think it started when an online Mac journal gave a glowing review of Jer’s Novel Writer some time last week. I’ve always had random people coming to the site, and most of them leave again, never to return. It will always be that way, and there’s no point worrying about them. Then there are the faithful few, the ones who’ve been here all along, posting or lurking as is their wont. These people know what they are getting into, and if I injure their brains it’s their own damn fault.

Now, however, there is a new category of visitor. These people come here because they are interested in the guy who wrote the software. I found myself thinking yesterday, “I should get a better episode up, so some of those visitors coming as a result of the review might come back – or at least not think that their favorite software was written by some crazed cretin who doesn’t know when to put a sentence out of its misery and go on to the next.”

That, of course is a slippery slope, changing my style to meet the tastes of some imagined constituency. I think I’m going to write an episode that’s really muddled just to snap out of it.

Oops. That’s the slope on the other side of the ridge. Gaah!

Whew!

The last guests are gone, fuego is out galavanting about somewhere, and I’ve got nothing on tap. I’ll come up with a new poll today, I think, but the best part is I have large blocks of time, multiple days in a row for the foreseeable future, and that means writing. Writing novels, to be more precice; I have managed to squeeze in time to bang out a few short stories, but most of them still need work. I did get one submitted to the Piker Press last night, but it may not be their style (although they always remind me they have no style). It just doesn’t have a very happy ending, and they’re generally a pretty jolly crowd. The last sentence is bugging me this morning, too, but I can’t put my finger on why.

Somehow fuego and I got a final draft of Pirates done as well; it’s a good story. We’ll find some way to get it made even if we don’t get selected for the shootout.

I’ll try to get some eels out soon, too. It’s getting a little more difficult now to just do a brain dump for an hour and have an episode, as the constraints of what I’ve said before and the need to actually have a plot make things more complicated. We’ll see if I can keep it fresh, as the kids say these days.

Glad to see the comments kept up during the period of less frequent and less creative episodes. Thanks, guys!

Finally, please note that I have changed the bar-counting criteria in the tours stats. I no longer include bars I went to with the primary intent of having a meal, eliminating about ten bar/restaurants from the list. I’m pretty sure there are a couple of places I went to while hanging out with my brothers friends that I never got on the list as well. Good times.

Productivity was never less productive

Instead of doing something useful, I spent the last little while taking a random sample of pages from the blog in an effort to estimate just how big this thing is. I sampled 20 episodes added up the word count, divided by 20 and multiplied by 427 (that total may include an episode or two that I never published). None of the randomly selected entries was an Eels episode, and one was a haiku.

The total? Almost 170,000 words, not counting the titles or the introductions. If it was a novel, it would be a very fat one. There’s a significance there, a message, but I sure don’t know what it is.

April 2th, 2005

One year ago, on April 2th, 2004, I woke up in my house for the last time. By the time the day was over I no longer owned a house and I was a couple hundred miles away. It was, purely coincidentally (I make sure to assure one and all), my 40th birthday.

My plan was to spend maybe three weeks seeing some of my own country before a quick trip back to San Diego to wrap up a few things, then off to Eastern Europe to start a little software company and to get even more serious about writing. I thought I might make it to the Czech Republic in time for the world hockey championships.

You already know what happened. Three weeks later I was in Tahoe City and just getting rolling, balancing a freelance software project with my need to roam. I had already become recognized at bars in Scotts Valley and Zephyr Cove, and was on my way to being a regular at Sam’s Place. From there I headed north, then farther north, then things got complicated.

On the way I wrote a lot, finishing one novel (although I’m tweaking it again now), making a good dent in another, and keeping some other projects alive. Every once in a while an episode here came close to capturing the feel of the road, the solitude and the possibility, and those are my favorite episodes by far. There are a few episodes I never published, and some I never wrote, that perhaps come closer yet. Those will have to wait for the fiction, either to protect the innocent or because the prose just needs more work first.

I have enjoyed writing this silly blog immensely. I’ve tried to keep maintaining my media empire from becoming too much work, and I’ve tried not to let it interfere with my “real writing” too much, but some of my better work is here on this sprawling site. Yes, yes, I know, but I already did quit my day job. There are periods when the prose comes easily and has more behind it, while at others I’m glad I gave this site the title I did. If someone finds the writing aimless and disjointed they can just look at the banner graphic and get over it.

There were days, blowing along empty desert highways with the sun baking my exposed head or groping through a Texas downpour, that I felt close to something, some sort of truth that is the holy grail of the American Road Myth, just out of reach. Motion was a drug, and I know there were times I missed opportunities simply because I could not stop. I think of those moments now, gone forever. The opportunity to photograph the lonely vendor in his shack while it rained in Monument Valley. The run-down little towns that once thrived when travelers like me were not drunk with motion and would stop for a while. The Kansas sunset. I think that was Kansas, anyway.

Finally in November I arrived here, in Prague, already behind on my November novel. I wasn’t worried. It came out pretty good; a techno-thriller that perhaps wasn’t yet thrilling enough but it had good characters. There’s a lot of the road in it, and the desert, and boats on the open sea. A couple parts were thrilling, too, as far as I can tell. It has a long way to go to be a complete reading experience, and it’s number four on the finish-up list.

The past few months have been quiet, and cold. My adventures now are of a different sort, like going to the grocery store and wondering what’s in that jar, or getting “big” and “small” backwards when asking for a loaf of bread, or realizing the sun is rising having just ordered another beer.

So here I sit, one year older and certainly no wiser, in a bar I dubbed Cheap Beer Place, trying not to let opportunity slip past. Trying to get published, working on more short stories, thinking maybe it’s time to get Jer’s Novel Writer into a state where I can charge money for it, and not forgetting the novel that comes after I finish up the sprawling unruly story that is The Test. The Fish will be the one will be the story that will finally decide if I brought anything in from the wilderness.

There’s more to this disjointed collection of musings and ravings than just the author, as well. Were it not for you, faithful readers, not just following along but making your own substantial contributions, this would simply be and exercise of verbal masturbation, only less satisfying. Instead MR&HBI stands as a bastion of literacy, wit, and intelligent discourse in the big, windy place that is the blogosphere.

Did I mention I did some work writing advertising copy?