Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

The 25th is the day after Christmas here, so after half the morning reading the Kindle book I’d gotten (Cuckoo’s Calling) and playing a few games on Kinect (I bowl much better with a virtual ball), I decided to go out for a walk in my new shoes.

It was that or sit around the house and watch Home Alone (in Czech).  Though some may  bemoan our snowless Christmas (same as last year) I am pretty happy with it.  Snow is pretty for about 5 minutes , and if that 5 minutes happens sometime in the middle of February and then goes away, I will be a happy camper.

When I lived in Los Angeles, I found the lack of seasonal variation boring, but 4 seasons is one too many.  I would like 3.  A nice, long Spring, Summer, and an Autumn that segues back into Spring, that would be my ideal and if anybody knows someplace on the planet like that, let me know.

It wasn’t even particularly cold or windy today, the sky was cloudy enough to be interesting but not to be threatening.  It was a good day for a walk.  I walked up out of  the village, past the little farm that has sheep and goats, they all looked at me, wondering, probably, why this strange human was out of doors when none of the others were.

I walked past that where the road turns to mud and then turns left and goes past a duck pond and then comes to a paved road again and this is where it got interesting.  I’d never been that way before but figured the road must connect somewhere and I’d just come back from a different direction, but I like to explore so that’s the way I went.  That road also ended in a T junction and I went left again because left and left and left sets you right, and then I came to a little village that just seemed so quiet and isolated I felt like I’d stumbled across Brigadoon, the only person I saw as I walked through the village from one end to the other, was a young girl with very fake blonde hair, crouched down by the side of her house smoking a cigarette.

I am still in the habit of thinking that roads must connect to other roads and if you keep on going you will get somewhere, but that is not always the case in Česky Raj.  At the lower end of the town the road petered out into a forest trail, so I turned back  before I got really lost.

We are at the cottage but the internet speed is hell of a slow, so I cannot skim through my hotmail notifications and leave scathing responses on all the facebook threads I visit, which is, perhaps, a blessing in disguise.

Kotelsko, Czech Republic

Like the snow that covers the ground in winter (not here, not yet – it was a balmy 11 degrees centigrade as we were driving up), a trip to the cottage slows things down, puts things into hibernation mode, and those breaks are helpful now and again.

I will try to get some writing done offline while I am here.  There are actually four books I am working on at the moment.  Two of them I hope to have ready by the end of the year.   Those are collections of mostly very short poetry.  One is basically everything that isn’t in any other book yet.  I haven’t for sure settled on a title for it yet.  I might just pick the title of one of the poems in it but, despite the fact that there are some great poems in there, IMHO, there are none the stand out.

The other is Rheets 2013.  Rheets is short for rhyming tweets, because my last book of twoems, put together this time last year, has pretty much totally failed to catch on.  Whatever.  I’m going to keep writing them even if I never sell a single copy because I think they are an interesting art form in themselves.  First, nobody else is writing them, as far as I know.  Twitter is a big place.  I suppose I could have a doppelganger or two. Secondly, since I am writing one of them a day and sometimes commenting on current matters of social and political importance, they form a sort of annual report in brief, a time capsule, a historical log.  Third, I write them anyway just to promote my blog although I think, in that, they have been almost totally ineffective.  The fourth, and probably most important, reason that I write them is because it’s a good writing exercise.

The 3^rd book is poetry in a particular style, and I am waiting until i hit a magic number of poems written in that format.  What is magic number?  I don’t want to jinx it, but I’m close and hope to have that one finished by the end of February, at the latest.

The 4^th one will be a novel.  That one I’m really stuck on.