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I just got home from my poetry reading, the Alchemy  series, which has changed  leaders once again, but a step back may be  a  step  forward, as Ken is doing it again.  It was a pretty  good night. The featured speaker was someone who used to be  a  regular, like 15 or so years ago, and it was real  nice  to see her  again.  There was a girl who played guitar and sang, a British guy, white haired, beer-bellied, who read a couple of  funny poems, one just about the church across the  street from his house (there seemed to be a couple of themes for the  evening.  Catholicism was one and Lucky Strike cigarettes the other.  Honestly, two separate poets referenced that specific brand.  What are the chances?

It was the end to a lovely day.   Like yesterday, today  was a holiday lightly observed.  No, it’s not Labor Day, that’s an American thing (and  certainly not “Loyalty Day,” that sounds like something they’d do in North Korea.  Of course, it’s also the old communist worker’s day holiday, but there just aren’t that  many old communists around any more, so nobody pays any attention to that.

No, there is an older Czech custom, that if you get a kiss underneath a cherry tree in Petřin park, your love life will be fine for the rest of the year.  If not, not so much.
Well, first, Helena said O.K. but we really  don’t need to go to Petřin, that’s not a requirement, so we went for a bicycle ride.  Isabel came along.
It was quite a pleasant bike ride, although it taught me that I am well  out of shape and need to do  things like that more often, and we had a real hard time finding a cherry tree.  They’re all over the  damned place in Prague until you’re looking for one.  So, she said ‘It doesn’t really have to be a cherry tree, any flowering tree will do, so we  kissed by a lilac bush, and on a bench under some other  tree, don’t know what it was.  Then, on the way back, we finally found a cherry tree.  It was behind a chain link fence, inside a school  yard, so we stood as close as we could, near the rubbish bins, and consummated the holiday.  I felt quite relieved about that.

Actually, I quite like Čaroděnice.  In complete contrast to Easter, I like the symbolism of it.  You have a big fire, burn an effigy of a witch (I suppose the origin may have been a bit more horrific), and that’s supposed to burn away all the nastiness of the last year.  It’s an end of winter, beginning of a new life type of holiday.  Something like Beltane and a whole lot like Walpurgisnacht.

However, we wound up not going out to  any of the events in any of the parks.  Sam is staying over at a friend’s house (who’s been  sleeping here plenty lately, so fair enough) and Helena was burned out with driving around.   She took Isabel to her dance competition this morning, came back, made lunch, and then we went back in the afternoon. We got there a bit late and I just saw the last few seconds of Isabel’s routine as H was looking for a parking space, so 200 crowns each for tickets and we watched a couple of acts, went out to kill time at the mall and returned in time to see one or two more acts before the awards ceremony at the end.

So, on the way  home she said she really wasn’t interested in going out for it, and Isabel was quite happy with  her compromise offer, which was just to grill  some sausages on the barbecue on the balcony (which is actually a lot easier than jockeying for space around a fire with hundreds of strangers).  We decided to  make a little, paper witch and burn that.  Isabel is very good with creative stuff like that.

It worked out quite well, it did.

We are constantly  told that we should live in the moment, carpe diem they say.  Forget about the past, there’s nothing you can  do about  the past and that’s true enough, except of course we can learn from  it and  that is on ongoing process, there are lots of books  written about the past and we’re finding out more and more about the past all the time.  Archaeologists recently dug up a clay pot or something in, well, I don’t recall  exactly, but somewhere in the Americas, showing that the area has had some human, or at least pot making beings, for 136,000 years, which is a bit longer than anybody had thought.  So, I’m glad some people, at least, are obsessed with the past, although I  can  understand that this could manifest itself in less healthy ways.

They say don’t  look to the future, which is a bit harder for me to understand because you actually can do something about the future.  An individual human being probably has as much control  over the future as they do over the present, which  is a fairly great deal over their own personal corner of it, but very little over the future of society and mankind overall.  If nobody thought  about the future it would  be impossible to schedule anything, and there would be no science fiction novels.

Also, no matter how much you try to focus on living in the present, living in  this particular moment right now, is that pretty  soon (in just a moment) another moment comes along, and then another and then another and before you know it you’re in the future.

So, here’s the way  I see it: focus on the present, of course, that’s good, except of course when you’re thinking about the past, or the future.  What the heck, go  ahead and think  about whatever time you want to  think about.  It’s all life.  It’s all  good.

A while ago I saw a thing on Facebook, can’t find it right now  to post the link and want to get to bed soon, but you know the kind of thing I’m talking about; a brick laying robot, that could work faster than any  human, not take any brakes, and set every brick perfectly.  In addition, the bricks were interconnecting, like Lego blocks, so a house  could go up real quick and be solid enough to withstand a  hurricane, or whatever you get in your neck of  the woods.

Naturally, in the comments section there were many people bemoaning the fact that this is going to put bricklayers out of business.  Wet blankets and Neo-Luddite simpletons, in my book.

Sure, bricklayers might follow chimney sweeps and elevator operators into the land of jobs that used to exist, along with long distance truck drivers whenf driverless  vehicles become standard, but that’s O.K.  There really is no shortage of  jobs  that could  be created.  Here are a few:

1.  I’m not a huge fanatic of organic food, to tell you  the truth, I  buy whatever is in the supermarket and don’t ask too many questions, but if all food HAD to be organic it would not only create a heck of a lot of jobs (organic agriculture is WAY more labor intensive), but it would be nice for the honeybees, and the water supply, as well.
2.   Another area  where I  am an  imperfect  environmentalist is recycling.  Oh, I separate paper and plastic.  and glass.  and drink cartons.  But that’s it, because that’s all there’s bins for.  I don’t separate out the metal, or the organic, which is probably a lot.  Anyway, the whole  thing seems to be futile if 100% of all people aren’t recycling, and I’d be  surprised  if it’s even  50%.  So, set up recycling  centers everywhere, make that quite simply the way all garbage  is disposed of, and there are several benefits.  You could  hire all  of the homeless people at the sorting centers, some of them go through  the bins as it is, so that could be more efficient for them and less of an  eyesore for everybody else, plus it would  pump a lot of previously unclaimed natural resources right back into  the economy.
3. You know where they need to hire more people?  Schools, that’s where.  Probably 90% of schools that are real schools could hire about  twice as many teachers as they’ve got now.   If you get those  class sizes down to a reasonable level, some kids might actually  learn something.  So, jobs + education means  a more educated (and hopefully less criminal) work force for the  future.  win/win/win

The big meme going around Facebook today is, of course, the ‘name ten bands you’ve seen but make one of them a lie’ meme, which is proof positive of the normalization of the Trump presidency.  Sure, his daughter is getting backhanders from China, sure he spent some ridiculous amount of money to drop one bomb on Afghanistan, destroying an old CIA construction and a handful of alleged (seriously alleged, since you can’t believe anything the government tells you) terrorists at a price of several million dollars each, sure he signed a bill saying it’s O.K. to kill Mama wolves and bears in their dens, along with their little cubbies, while they are sleeping, which is just about the most unsportsmanlike thing ever, sure he’s making a personal profit every time he vacations at Mar a Lago, sure he’s preparing to sell of the National Parks to the highest bidder, but he’s not going to be impeached, or even forced to show his tax returns, because the Democrats are giant weenies, so there is no real news.

People can pay attention to one thing or another, but not both, which Archimedes proved when he laid down in his bath and suddenly realized he’d much rather be running naked through the streets of Athens shouting ‘Eureka!,’ which he did, because you can’t be in two places at once, two things cannot  be in one place at once, and it really feels quite nice to do that kind of thing in Athens, most days of the year.

I’m not knocking the 10 bands meme.  People are burned out, and need a break.  It is, however, a sign that we are doomed.  O.K., I guess I’m knocking it a little bit.