Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Staring at the blank page, must get to sleep soon, up tomorrow at 5:30 for a new class which is seriously going to weird my schedule out because it’s a bit outside Prague to the North, I’ve got 90 minutes there and then have to beat it back into town and all the way down to Haje for my elementary school group.
I’m looking forward to this new group, I don’t have all that many adult classes and they are scientists, I’m teaching them at a research center. So, I’ve got images of weird experiments going on and fascinating conversations, although I’ve taught scientists before, and they are not always great conversationalists. Some are, some aren’t. Same divide as in every other profession.
I don’t know what their field of science is yet, probably something dead boring like counting tree rings or monitoring weather patterns but nonetheless, I look forward to asking them questions about the 234 signals coming from exoplanets, whether or not Solar Roadways are feasible, can floating islands be built which will not only be awesome places to live but also clean the ocean, the future of robotics with special emphasis on digitally downloading our minds into a computer program so we can live forever, Mars colonization and whether or not we could create an atmosphere there by highjacking one of Jupiter’s watery moons, or maybe just an ice asteroid, and crashing it into the planet, how we can save the honeybees, does marijuana really cure cancer, and Alzheimers,and depression, and schizophrenia, and whether computers are making people dumber, or smarter.
I’ll keep you posted.

Another weekend come and gone, that took no time at all. Sam had a game Saturday, they won 6-0 and he got a goal and it was a nice one, dogged persistence. It’s a lovely field, on top of a hill, surrounded by poplar trees, all blazing yellow and in a week they’ll be bare. It was cold. At half-time I went for a walk in the park just below the stadium. You can see Prague Castle across the river and to the right, and to the left Smichov and that massive freeway bridge curving across the river and up into the hills behind, and further up the hills fields and forests, beyond the town.
I’ve written maybe half a dozen short poems and then got a notice that they’ve canceled November’s Alchemy, which is kind of bogus because the cancellations are becoming more frequent, but, as I’m not going to do anything about it, can’t bitch too much.
The few short poems have given me an idea for another book of poetry, “The Meaning of Life in Easy English” to be a series of very silly poems, with a couple of objects introduced, and then some deep and meaningful denouement, maximum 6 lines total. Stuff I could use in the classroom. That’d impress ’em. (maybe)
O.K., Monday tomorrow, must be up early. Good night.

After I got home from Isabel’s street dance lesson, weary from shlepping all over town after a hard couple of lessons with a bunch of kids I’ll swear are all living in their own universe (but come down to it, aren’t we all, really?), I went out to the balcony to smoke a joint, as I do, and I wrote this little poem:

The leaves that fly across the lawn
go wherever Summer’s gone
another season’s bit the dust
but Spring will come
in this we trust

but that’s not the whole poem, or maybe, rather, not the only poem, the stream of thought began with a stream, and this line, or some variation of it:

a single rock will redirect the flow
of an ever changing mountain stream
it isn’t so much what you know
as what you dare to dream

but, while we’re on the stream metaphor, I don’t know what my thought was before that moment, we can only explore so far upstream before you run into tangled brush and you almost never find the source, and I must say, it seemed to have a more powerful flow when it first came to me, and then came this:

Aphorisms make you seem profound
it isn’t what you say, but how it sounds

and there was more, much more, (one about trains and the doppler effect, for instance) but then Helena got home and we went out for Chinese, and then I fell asleep after we got back and just woke up to write this, and it’s the first any of those short shorts got written down so a couple of lines got lost, a bit of my Kublai Khan in praise of superficiality,but it’s not a tragedy.
If they were any good, they will come back.

Well, congratulations to the Chicago Cubs. It’s been a long time coming and I guess they deserve it.
I mean, I don’t know. I know next to nothing about baseball and care less than that. It’s one of the world’s most boring games – not as boring as cricket, or golf, but that isn’t saying much.
But I assume the players (on both teams) worked their asses off for years, practicing, practicing, practicing, and on game day they gave it all they had. And I haven’t heard anything yet about cheating, although I suppose there may have been some. Like I say, I wouldn’t know.
And the baseball fans, watching in the stands,watching in the sports bars all across the country, watching in their homes; none of them trying to deny the other team’s fans their right to participate,very few of them, I imagine, calling their opponent’s fans morons, or sexists, or fascists.
As much as I’m disinterested in baseball, I must admit it’s about a million times less harmful to humanity than politics.
So, congratulations,Chicago. Better luck next time, Cleveland. Neither of you bombed, killed,tortured,imprisoned, suppressed or even lied to anybody. More power to you.