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Just got back from a poetry reading, not the usual one I go to, not the Alchemy series, but a different one, not far from Namesti Miru, on Budečska, where Watson’s School of English used to be located, many years ago. It was billed as a multi-lingual event, and it sure was that. One girl read a poem in Czech, one guy read a poem in Farsi, and there were several in French, and the organizer was French, and most of the audience was French.
It’s a beautiful language and I love hearing it even though I don’t speak it nearly as well as I used to, most of the poems I couldn’t understand much but I could understand a word here and there and I got a chance to practice speaking a little bit about it, but the main thing about the reading that differentiated it from the ones I usually go to was the musical accompaniment. One guitar, but it changed my poetry from drab words on paper into an event. I’d like to have that at all my readings from now on.
Then, we had a break and we went outside to smoke a joint and suddenly we were in a circle with 4 or 5 joints going around it, like in the good old days. The second half bought a lot of shy poets out of the woodwork, one who was a bit long winded, one who had a surprisingly dark and morbid poem about Brexit, one old guy with very nice, sentimental rhyming poetry.
It felt, the atmosphere, the vibe in the air, was very neo-Greenwich Village. I’m hoping it becomes a regular deal.

We went out to our local Italian for pizza tonight, the one me and Helena prefer, not that monstrosity the kids prefer with the big TV tuned constantly to sports and not a smidgin of Italianness about it. Not that Manna is super authentic, I’m sure it’s Czech owned and the art on the wall tends to the hideous, but they have wooden tables and a nice basket of garlic bread for starters, and they serve a big lemonade in a mason jar with two straws for some reason, and a spoon to scoop up the raspberries at the bottom, the food is as good as anywhere else and the staff is friendly. The dog from the next table jumped right up on the seat next to me and licked my face, he was a cute, little thing, a white ball of fluff.
It just struck me now, though, afterwards, why I enjoy eating out with the family, and it’s sort of like why I enjoy seeing films at the cinema more than watching them on TV. When you’re in the cinema, everybody shuts the fuck up and watches the movie. When you’re at home people talk, they want to pause the film and do other stuff – admittedly, sometimes you have to go but, if you’re in the cinema, you do that before the movie or immediately after, you can damn well hold it for two hours if you have to. It’s hard to keep the focus.
When we’re eating as a family at a restaurant, everybody is at the table at the same time. Now, that’s the way it was eating at home when I was a kid, but I have been unable to force the same experience in my home. That is perhaps my fault as a father but half the time the kids will say “I just want some soup” or “I’ll eat later,I’m not hungry” and Helena will accommodate them and totally not understand why I’m pissed off at that, which is probably why they ask her (in Czech) and not me (in English).
The joy of having the whole family together for pizza was a bit tempered by the fact that Sam’s big news was a fat 5 on a physics test. His excuse was that the teacher bushwhacked them, and over half the class got a 5. I am not bothered by his teacher giving them a surprise test and letting them know how ignorant they are. In fact, I rather like it that his school is tough on the grading and making them learn challenging material.
So, Physics teacher 1, Sam and his lazy, ignorant friends 0.

As computers become more powerful, and robots not only more mobile, adaptable and efficient but also more anthropomorphic, and prosthetics become more advanced, to the point where runners with artificial legs have to compete in separate events because their speeds are much higher and photographers and snipers pay top dollar to have artificial eyes implanted, we will reach a point of convergence. We won’t reach it all at once, but I’m talking decades rather than centuries, and certainly less the eons.
There will be interim stages, where we see more and more gradations. “I’m not a cyborg, I’ve just got a few enhancements” or “I’ve dated a few robots, but I wouldn’t marry one.” And even this will shift over time, with each generation being more and more inclined toward the mechanical.
Some people are saying this is a major stage in our evolution. I think it’s even a level higher than that. This is the evolution of evolution. It has taken us 3.5 billion years to evolve from single celled organisms up to the state we are now which, although our collective stupidity is sometimes overwhelming, sometimes comical, is still a pretty amazing thing. We are not only self aware, we are capable of imagining what does not exist and bringing it into existence. We have designed clothing, and vehicles, which serve as exoskeletons and allow us to survive in totally alien environments; under the sea and in outer space.
But our actual evolution has been haphazard, random.
No more. This is a directed change, and it will happen at our direction, and at our speed. Compared to the previous 3.5 billion years, it will be the blink of an eye.
And the next phase will happen even faster.

One door closes, another opens, that’s not a reflection on my life at the moment, I’m on a pretty steady track, but it’s the though that was going through my head on my way to my first lesson this morning, like between the time I rang the bell and my student came down to open the door, and I had the beginnings of a poem on the subject in my head, but very little of it isdown on paper so this blog is sort of ramblings in order to get my thoughts clear on the subject, when a vine grows, you don’t know which way it will go but after it’s grown you see what it is, what it was always destined to be, because it was in its DNA, and in the contours of the environment in which it was grown.
Of course, on one level, it’s internet meme bullshit, and not literally true. Sometimes doors close, permanently, and the ones that open are shitty substitutes. Death, for instance. That seriously limits your opportunities. Imprisonment. An amputation will generally cut your career in pro football short. (But, one of my favorite ‘one door closes, another opens’ stories has to do with sports. Jack Kerouac played football in college and had a decent shot at a pro career. One season he broke his leg. While recuperating he wrote “The Town and the City” and the rest is history)
But on a philosophical level, it is a great truth, wherever you are, whatever your situation in life, you have doors to go through, choices to make, and the closing of one leads you to take a closer look at all the others. Maybe you always get the pistachio ice cream but one day they are out, so you have chocolate chip instead, and damn if your life don’t change.
On another level,and I really want to get this into the final version, there is the multiverse theory, so every time you choose a door, you are continuing in the universe in which you opened that door, but there are also universes in which ‘you’, or that universes version of you, opened the other doors, and that goes on and on because the universe, or the universe of universes as the case may be, is not only infinite in time and space, but also in complexity.

O.K., this will be the big test if the blog is back online or not. Well, maybe it is. There’s every chance I’ll be able to post today and not tomorrow. Or the next day. It makes me feel a bit helpless, we are so dependent on the internet, and I am so not knowledgeable about it.
But, some way or another I’m going to keep writing a blog a day,if I have to find another host, or set up a different page,I’ll do that. It’s not that I have such a clear message I want to get out to the world. I mean, of course I want to get my message out to the world, but what that message is changes from day to day as we react to the world, rather than actually changing it.
It’s been a pretty nice weekend. Sam had a football game, he got one goal in a 6-1 win and the weather was nice for watching, cool and cloudy but not raining, and not windy. Last night I went with Helena and the girls (Isabel and a friend from school) to a “Haunted Forest” and we followed the directions we had exactly and wound up driving on a footpath in the park, there were speedbumps and a 20kph speed limit sign so we assumed it was O.K. for cars but it felt wrong and it was dark, and then as we were coming out a guy stopped his car and yelled at us for driving through the park and then he took off. So, we turned, and drove down the same street he’d taken. About a block up, H decided to park and we’d look for it on foot, so she did but it was a narrow road and a car just sneaked around us. But then, it started raining and we weren’t seeing any signs of the event or anything so we figured maybe it was even canceled and got in the car and went forward. Here is the scary forest bit. We drove straight ahead about one more block and the street ended. There were a few abandoned looking vehicles scattered around, but no egress and no sign of the two cars that had gone ahead of us!
We turned around and got out of there. The kids were totally unfazed, but it weirded me out a little bit.