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It is just past 11, I am stoned out of my gourd, and I must go out and be normal for two hours tomorrow morning. It’s not so bad, it’s an easy lesson, but it’s a hell of a long ways away and I get up at 6 a.m. in order to make the Metro at 7. I don’t hate waking up in the morning near as much as I hate being rushed.
My latest binge watch is Better Call Saul. I’m not sure why this is a better show than other lawyer shows, but it is. It is not the lead characters somewhat rumpled, unprofessional appearance, Colombo did that better, nor is it his willingness to flout the law, most lawyer shows have people getting investigated or disbarred all the time.
No, I think it’s the way they raise questions of right and wrong, and discuss them in depth. Or maybe it’s that old guy at the ticket booth. He’s badass. Or maybe it’s the way the crimes get funnier and funnier in the telling. A ‘Chicago Sunroof,’ a ‘Cobblers Squat,’ I will never be abole to get those images out of my head.

A Facebook friend, who is a frequent and rather verbose poster, posted a thing yesterday about how she’s had the virus and how horrible it was (she’s recovering now), so that brings my total to a few facebook friends, and one or two people I know in real life who’ve had it, and one who has died. That was my Aunt Bernice. Admittedly, she was 106, but she might have had another 5, or even 10 good years left in her.
So, I don’t actually think it’s a hoax, and the friends I have who do are also those who are opposed to vaccines and see 5G as a serious threat. I’m not saying their views should be ignored, either.
There are bad people in the world, who would be very happy to see lots of people dead as long as they could profit. Some conspiracy theories are real.
What I do think is that we should learn from this. Universal Health Care is needed, and I’m not just talking about the U.S., although that’s the glaring example in the Western world. We’re not hearing much about Covid 19 in India and Africa, but it’s there. Whatever percentage of their populations die will show us what the rate might have been in the rest of the world, without all the protective measures.
But will we learn from this? Probably not. People don’t respond to a crisis unless it personally, and very obviously, affects them. Hurricanes? Wildfires? Thoughts and prayers.
Meanwhile, try to stay healthy, everybody.

I am of mixed opinions with regard to the proposed development of Masarykovo station. On the one hand, it’s a seriously impressive project. Massive in scope, very modernistic, even futuristic, and from what I read it will include some green spaces and solar panels on the rooftops and lots of passive energy saving stuff, which is cool. It will be mostly offices, I guess, but there will be some hotel space as well, which are two things Prague really doesn’t have a shortage of, but they keep adding more and more.
It’s not clear when it will be finished, or even when construction will begin but, in typical Prague fashion, they’ve started by digging a huge hole in the ground, but that’s been there for many months already.
Mostly, from the architects’ drawings, I think it looks cool, but I’m opposed, on principle, to too much modernism in the center. The whole beauty of Prague is the old architecture, from back in the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and earlier. It’s why I hate the dancing building, and that’s actually further from the center than this.
On the other hand, the front entrance will remain the same and the new construction will extend away from the center, and be built mostly on derelict land, next to the railroad tracks, so nothing of any great historical or aesthetic value is going to be destroyed.
I guess it’s inevitable and it doesn’t matter much what I think about it. As long as it doesn’t disrupt the train schedules.

I was having a very interesting conversation with a friend yesterday and he was talking about some new process or drug, I forget exactly, which could increase levels of dopamine, or maybe it was seratonin, but one of those mood regulating hormones, and we both came to the realization almost simultaneously: everybody’s different.
What once was put down to moodiness, or orneriness, or whatever, but treated as if it was somehow the way some people just chose to be, or maybe caused by their environment, is actually due to the chemicals inside our bodies, making us actually feel different from all of the people around us. Nothing we can do about it, and it’s really kind of amazing that civilization functions as well as it does. Despite the fact that almost everybody has two eyes, two ears, and is capable of having sex with other people, we might as well be of 7 billion different species.

Of course, we’re enough alike that certain aspects of behavior are acceptable, and others are not, and this has been across every human civilization, from the smallest nomadic tribes to today’s great nations. Don’t kill anybody, don’t take what’s not yours, don’t shit where you eat. Stuff like that. Once that’s covered, very few people worry about their dopamine levels. Maybe that’s because, prior to now, nothing could be done about it, and we didn’t even know it was a thing.

Now we do know, though. And do we really want to make those changes? Individual decision, I guess.

I haven’t smoked marijuana for a little over a week now. It’s not like I’m trying to quit, this is not an AA style ’10 days clean and sober’ type post. I love marijuana, I am a big advocate of marijuana, and will probably restock and restart sometime this week.
But, I’d been smoking fairly heavily, due to being home 24/7 with not a lot to do, and felt it was time for a bit of a head cleanse, which I do every now and then. One positive effect (contrariwise one negative effect of smoking, and I do not know if this is true of other smokers as well, but I suspect so) is that when I smoke a lot, I do not remember my dreams.
When I woke up this morning, I remembered bits of last nights dream quite vividly, so I’ll record it here, since that’s enough to fill a blog. I was driving a vehicle which was bright, polished silver and sort of a combination of a Tuk Tuk and a flatbed truck, and I was taking a group of students on a field trip to meet Neil deGrasse Tyson. We went up a very steep hill, which became steep like a graph of coronavirus deaths, until the tuk tuk flipped over backwards but then, being a dream and these fatal encounters can be immediately edited, it didn’t and we continued on our way. After having met Tyson we returned, and most of the students said they weren’t impressed. Then one of them told me his mentally retarded sister (I think that character was straight out of a TV show I’d watched earlier that evening) had written a short story and I, as a writer, should give it a look. Then I was at his house and I paid his mother 900 crowns (specifically, a 500 and two 200 crown notes – see, when I haven’t smoked for a week, I remember details like that) for the rights to the story. She handed me a set of keys with a bright blue, translucent dolphin on the keychain. “Where’s the story,” I said and she unscrewed the dolphins head and there was a flash drive inside, and there were actually a few stories on it and one of them was “The Mystery of ———“, who is a woman I had a brief thing with over twenty years ago, before I met my wife, and haven’t seen since.
Shortly after that, I woke up.