Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I just stepped out to the balcony and found 3/4ths of a joint that I just wasn’t able to finish last night and thought “Hey! The day just began with a free bonus.” This blog is a result of that serendipitous find.

Being, Doing, Saying, and Thinking aren’t all the same thing. You can’t blame a person for what they’re thinking, and that’s both because you shouldn’t and because you can’t. You don’t know what they’re thinking unless they say it. They’ve got a right to say it, but that’s when all the shit starts.
Still, it’s manageable shit. There are rules of polite conversation. There are formal rules of debate. It’s good to use them, and your conversations become more productive.
Of course being, like thinking, is unavoidable. People may hate you for what you are but tough shit on them.
That brings us to doing. This is the crux. This is the focal point. This is live action in the real world. We all have a world inside our heads, a beautiful, personal utopia (although many, apparently, have a rapidly spinning and dangerously overheated maelstrom going on in there) but whatever, it’s a world, a distinct reality which has been built up through their whole lives (and that is the correct use of the pronoun ‘their’), and its only by doing something (yes, saying something is doing ‘something’ but only just barely. People can say something back, it’s an inter-reaction, but until somebody does something more concrete it’s just talk, and talk is like smoke, it dissipates in the air) that we merge our world (yours or mine) and the new reality becomes part of the communal universe which all our individual universes are a part of.

Yesterday, my wife pointed out that it was a lovely Indian Summer day (or, in Czech, babí léto, which would literally translate as Grandmother’s summer, but it’s the same concept.
We were at the cottage, in the lovely foothills of the Krkonoše mountains, for the potato harvest. For some reason, perhaps my perverse nature, I decided to be pedantic and disagreed with her. “No,” I said, “It’s just still summer. For it to be Indian Summer, there would have had to have been an intermittent bit of Autumn in between. We had three or four rainy days.”
I’d been both looking forward to and dreading potato day. On the one hand, I remember last year and the year before, and it can be seriously hard work. As I have become such a serious couch potato recently, I was a bit worried that I would flag quicker than the rest, maybe not pull my weight, and that would be awkward. On the other hand, due to having been such a couch potato recently, this was a golden opportunity to be outdoors, get a bit of healthy exercise, stretch out a bit.
Well, they had it very efficiently organized this year and lots of the neighbors were by to help and it took very little time at all, we weren’t working for more than an hour or two. Then we noticed a patch of squash growing at the edge of the potato field, by the fence, I’m not even sure if that was deliberate, of just the kind of spilled seed thing that grows up by fences, but a couple were nice and big so we took one home. That’s more an Indian Summer thing.
Back at the cottage, and I’d noticed one apple tree that hadn’t been picked although it was at peak, so I picked a couple of baskets of apples – one for us to take home, the other for her sister to take home – and that’s maybe more a late summer thing.
Semantics. We’re in late September. The skies are blue, the temperature moderate, and this is the best of all possible universes.

O.K., just got back the other day from a mini-vacation, a weekend getaway, just me and the wife because the kids are too cool to go with us and have stuff of their own. It was a great trip, for the most part. We spent the first day at Muskauer Park, or Park Muzakowski, but the castle and most of the formal gardens stuff, and the outdoor restaurant where we had lunch, is all on the German side, and the Polish side, where we had ice cream, is mostly a walk in the wild woods.
In the evening we stayed at her cousin’s flat in Zgorzelec, he doesn’t live there, he lives in the Czech Republic, but the flat is there for any family traveling there. Just a few blocks away there is a Greek restaurant, Naoussa, and that was the highlight of the trip for me. We were debating whether to sit at the tables out front, which had a crappy view of two streets and a lot of drab buildings, or inside, which was really hot, but they shepherded us through to the back garden, which was a magic spot away from all the cares of the world, as restaurant gardens can be.
I was a bit bummed that they didn’t have Moussaka, because that was my craving, but you had to order it in advance and at least for eight people, so I just order the Gyros special, with a bit of a surly attitude, I might add. The menu said “with french fries, Greek salad and tzatziki” what that usually mean is served in a pita bread sandwich with the meat, salad and fries all stuffed in with a drizzling of tzatziki sauce, and I was resigned to that. We sat and enjoyed the atmosphere in the garden as the sky slowly turned to night. I was impressed with the waitresses, dealing with the crazy person who was there by himself, changed tables three times, and was talking to everybody about how he’d been to Greece and knew all about it, and doing the stuff that waitresses always do, like taking shots with one table.
When the food arrived, it was one plate with a decent sized Greek salad, a respectable portion , and a tzatziki which had a bit more garlic than I like, but it wasn’t bad. The Gyros was a square bowl with a massive pile of meat and cheese, on a metal frame with a candle burning underneath. Very classy.
The next day we went back to Germany, to swim at a lake. The canoe rental was ‘pay what you like’ which I thought was pretty awesome, and we had currywurst and fries for lunch.
We stopped at my in-laws cottage for an hour or so on the way home and the rain hit shortly before we got home. Fierce, epic rain, there was an ad hoc river on the shoulder of the road.
Anyway, I’ve decided to try and revive this blog, maybe not every day like before, but at least a couple times a week, because I’m retired and have the time to do so.
Also, I’ve got a new book out to plug. It’s called “This Book Contains Bad Language” and some of the poems in it are pretty darned good if I say so myself, and I do. You can find it on this blog if you just look up the top and click on “Poetry”.