The Fog of Surrealism

One of my facebook friends wrote  a  poem the other day.  It was a nice poem, how the poem was writing him and he saw the sky flying in the bird  and when he went to work the train caught him.  He called it a surrealistic poem.  While the comments  below were almost universally favorable

Talk about your wish fulfillment...

and positive,  somebody called him on his definition of surrealism.

Fair enough, I guess.  People have  been arguing about the definition of surrealism pretty much since the beginning of surrealism.  As Salvador Dali once said “The difference   between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist.”  Truth be told, he was a fascist prick in real  life but I love his work and I love that quote.

So, I went to dictionary.com and looked up “surreal.”  Definition 1 was something along the lines   of “a style  characteristic of the surrealist movement of  painters” which is hardly any definition at all and then came 2) having a dream like quality.  Well, that’s not exactly what I thought it meant but it works for me.

I had a bit of a surreal afternoon.  After my class of 6 year olds (which went very badly…I tried to teach them the alphabet and they didn’t want to know)  I rushed over to Isabel’s school,  then had maybe 10 minutes before we had to leave to pick up Sam from football practice.

The good news is that, finally, they are playing indoors.  They had an outdoor game last night and my toes were numb when we got home.  The bad news is that I didn’t really know where it was.  I had been given quite specific instructions by my wife, but quite  specific instructions from my wife  are not always 100% accurate.

I will never forget the time, back when we were still just dating, she told me to meet her at Ohrada tram stop.  The last stop before Ohrada is Biskupcova so I was planning to go one more stop, just looking out the window, and there she was.  The doors had closed, it was too late.  I ran back from Ohrada and, somewhat out of breath, pointed out to her that this was not Ohrada, but Biskupcova.  “Oh, I always call this Ohrada,” she said.

It was chilly, but fairly clear,  when we left the flat but by the time we got to Střizkov, which is one of the newer Metro stations, all glass with walkways and bridges and a really weird roof, there was a serious fog.  I took a look at the schedule at the bus station right outside the door, but that wasn’t it.  So, we set off through the fog.  Isabel was cheerful and chirpy, but  for me the combination of low visibility, an unfamiliar neighborhood,  worries about  arriving on time   and a   four year old  in tow made it seem like I was walking through a dream.  The  truly surreal image, the icing on the cake, was the lights of a circus pavilion burning through the  fog.  Since none of the rest of the structure was visible,   it looked a bit like a UFO.

Anyway,   we found our bus and got there on time.