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I don’t pay  enough attention to Czech politics, for somebody who’s lived here for 20 years.  Last night I was at a poetry reading, totally unaware of events  unfolding on Wenceslas Square.

There was rather a large demonstration, apparently.  That is surprising because, in my experience, Czechs tend to be about  the most politically apathetic people  in  the world.  Trying to get any of my  students to express a political opinion is generally a quick way to kill the conversation altogether.   Demonstrations of any kind are rare, and usually sparsely attended.
If you see a large crowd gathered in one place and chanting slogans, chances are good they are hockey fans.  Maybe football.

So, I was glad to see this.  The issue is that a man named Zdeněk Ondráček is being appointed,  by the Prime Minister, to some government oversight commission, something to do with security.  It amounts, as far as I can tell, to cops investigating cops, undoubtedly with a view to finding nothing wrong.  Problem is, Ondráček was a communist.  Now, that’s not unknown among Czech politicians.  The  Prime Minister, Andrej Babiš, was a pretty big communist himself, which should make it even more suspicious that he’s a billionaire today.  But Ondráček was actually one of the cops busting heads on Wenceslas Square in November, 1989, during communism’s last gasp, and he gave an interview on state TV saying the police acted responsibly and there was no busting of heads.  Sort of like you see in the U.S. today.
Anyway, there was a large protest in Prague, and a lot of other Czech cities, and I’m very happy about that.  Call  the assholes out.

Just got back from a poetry reading, the Alchemy series at the ACT performance space in Vršovice, and it was the best one I’ve been to in I can’t remember.

The crowd wasn’t huge, but it  more or less filled the room.  There was nobody sitting on the stairs or standing against the walls or anything, it was just comfortably full, and about half the people present were intent on  performing, which is about average.

The featured performer, Neil McCarthy, did a bunch of poems he’d written from around the world, so  it was a bit of a travelogue and all.  Now, a lot of poets tend to waffle on a lot and tell you everything that they’re trying to say in the poem so by the time it comes to the poem you’re already bored, which is why I sometimes go to  the opposite extreme and just plow in with no introduction, but he had about the perfect mix, his introductions to the poems were as funny as the poems themselves.  So, the stage was set.

Jim was there, a reminder of the old Beef Stew days, and he went way over the time limit reading out of his novel but it was kind of comical, he was totally deliberately ignoring the time limit.  It was a good tale, though, of arson, violence and guns.  There were a couple of singers who both had really nice voices, one was upbeat, one was sad.  Then there was a guy who calls himself Watersprout which seems like a bit of poetic pretense but he totally pulls it off, this is the 2nd time I’ve seen him and he’s got the gestures and he’s got the flow and it seemed he had something to say, it was all about the -ologies and the -isms and being open to new ideas, I think.  I was wowed  by the performance, any way.

My poems, part of a series of short poems I’m doing now with a particular unifying gimmick, went over well.  So well, I wrote a new one on the tram on the way  home.  I  love it when that happens.

The weekend is over and it went by  in the blink of an eye, tomorrow is Monday and I just realized that it is a poetry Monday, the first Monday in the month.  I think  I am  getting a bit slack, a bit jaded, a bit casual because there are so many readings happening around town, and partly because I  am writing so  much online, mostly short, quippy poems as comments which I  wouldn’t even  bother reading in public or  saving to  a book, but the whole idea is  to keep  pumping them out and hope that one is a gem now and again. As Edison said “The best way  to have a good idea is to have 10 ideas” or something like that.
I’m kind of torn actually about what I’m going to read.  I could put together 5 or 6 poems I haven’t read yet, but there’s none that I think are really super duper brilliant and I hate going in without something special, because even if I have something brilliant the response is often meh, and how can  I expect any better reaction than that from the audience if  I’m not wildly enthusiastic myself.  Or, I could read some poems from the book whose working  title is “Disappointing Poems From a Different Dimension” but I’m probably going to change that, too self deprecating and pompous at the same time, but the idea is that I take the opening line from a famous poem and then just write something ridiculous, I’ve got two or three of those new since the Spit-it-Out reading and would read a couple of those that worked best there.
The big idea I have for my next poem, but it hasn’t gelled yet, is about how we are diurnal creatures and we feel comfortable under the daylight sky, this atmosphere where we have evolved is like a womb and the human race won’t truly be born until we leave this planet and sail  out to the stars, because the day sky limits us to  Earth, but the night sky goes on  forever.

Those of us  who are not completely retarded are often left wondering “Can Donald Trump be as stupid as he sounds?” and today he proved, for about the 12,356th time or something like that, that he is.

He actually wrote, in a tweet, (which is even  stupider that saying something out loud because you can see it in  print for a moment and most literal people would look  at it for  a second and realize that maybe hitting ‘send’ is not the smartest thing to do) “When a country is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!”

In other words, ‘Stiff ’em!’

He’s applying his business expertise here. We can always just refuse to pay our debts. It worked for him as a private citizen. But now, as president, he’s found a brand new tool to do that.  Tariffs.  And this time he’s not going to just bankrupt a few of his own hotels or  casinos.  He’s aiming for entire industries.

Since he’s said it will apply to every country in the world, even the Canadians are mad at him.
Since every country in the world looks out for its own interests, plenty of them will  retaliate.
Since it applies to steel and aluminum, that means the price of anything that uses steel or aluminum, all  the way from coke in a can to steel frame buildings, via cars, refrigerators, and bathroom fixtures, will go up in  price.

But, since he’s Donald Trump, he may  have just been spouting bullshit and it will never happen.  We will see.

I enjoy memes that show how large the universe is like that one where the girl is lying on the lawn and the camera zooms out to show an aerial view, and then the city, and then  the Earth from space, and then out till your getting a view of the whole  galaxy and then back in and into her eye and down to the microscopic level, but the one I  saw today was titled “Most complete view of  the universe  ever” and maybe it was, I’m sure there are many competitors for that title, and it focused on something called the Laniakea Supercluster, which I’d never heard of before, and that’s a little bit humbling because we’re in it.  So much  we don’t know.
Laniakea means ‘Immeasurable Heaven’ in  Hawaiian, and that’s appropriate.  It’s a cluster of 100,000 galaxies and, since our  own galaxy contains approximately 200,000,000,000 stars, we really don’t have an exact number but that’s a low estimate, we’re looking at  200 billion times 100 thousand stars and I don’t know if that’s gazillions or quintillions or what but it’s some really huge number, and there’s definitely more than one supercluster in the universe, probably another number with multiple zeros.
And yet when whichever side of the planet we happen to be on turns its back on  the sun, we look out, we see straight through our atmosphere of daytime soft blue, that amniotic sac that protects us here on this planet, which is the womb of whatever the  human race will be when we go beyond this earth and go out, out, out to explore the universe.  It is endless and that is where our future lies.