I wound up taking a walk in the park today because my wife sent me to the store and I figured I might as well go take a walk through the park and smoke a joint on the way. It is not a large or special park but it is in the neighborhood and I often go there to smoke, and also just to walk and think.
Kaizlerovy Sady
It has been the scene of inspiration for many of these blogs and a fair bit of my poetry, too, and when I first started writing this blog I used to refer to it as blog park, sort of an interface place between the real physical world where I live, and cyberspace where I live intellectually, uncorporeally and yet (I hope this isn’t being too melodramatic) officially and eternally.
It was a nice day, the air was still and crisp, it was not raining or snowing although I wouldn’t have been surprised at either. It was cold enough there were no children at all in the playground and only a few people walking around. One woman with a baby in a stroller. Baby’s are not bothered by the cold at all, they ride around in that stroller so bundled up they could survive three days in the Arctic.
I saw three things of interest: They were filming something down at one end of the park. It’s cool, always something that makes me look, but not an uncommon Prague sight. Portions of Hell Boy were filmed in the old semi-abandoned Napoleonic era military hospital of which the park is the former grounds. Then a saw a tree with a bole on its trunk that looked just like a penis and I thought, I’ll have to get a picture of that, but my battery was dead.
Then, the 3rd thing. First, let me state for the record that I hate graffiti, I do not consider it to be art and I do not respect vandalism. It is almost always crude, unfunny, generally illegible, and most of the time illiterate.
So, I looked at the bench and wondered if I was reading it correctly, if the person had really intended such a profound message, or if they were just screwing around and accidentally wrote something intelligent. It said, in white, drippy letters on the back of the green bench “Read Amok.”
But then I saw, on the next bench, in smaller letters (and written in Czech, so I hope my translation is accurate “Read as if you will be run over by a train tomorrow,” so I’m sure it was the same person and I’m sure that she (or he, but for some reason I’m picturing this vandal as female; it’s either the handwriting or my imagination filling in the blanks in the pleasantest way possible) understood her own words perfectly.
Of course, you could replace the word “Read” in either of those quotes with “dance,” or “sing” or “live” and it would still be good advice. But it was a park bench, made for reading, and I thought “How nice would it be if that was on a plaque or carved into the bench properly, or all the benches? Very nice.”
So, I still hate graffiti as a general rule, but this was an exception.
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