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As part of Helena’s ongoing program to keep me from becoming completely amorphous and being absorbed by the couch, we did a bike ride today, and Isabel came, too.
It was a perfect, warm autumn day, a babileto sort of day,
The plan was to more or less duplicate our last bike ride, but on the other side of the river, but it didn’t quite work out like that. We got to a point where the path diverged in a multicolored, but still mostly green wood, and we could have continued on to Bubeneč, and Podbaba, and points north per the original plan, but the signs indicated that it was only a couple of kilometers to Dolni Šarka, which is probably not far from Divoka Šarka,, which is definitely a worthwhile destination, but before we knew it we were turned around and just cycling back through Stromovka Park, which was far more civilized (and paved) but also far, far more crowded.
We came across a pack of runners, coming along towards us at a pretty good clip, and as we were passing it seemed that the stream would never end. There were people of all ages, and a few were on scooters or bicycles, a few had dogs, a few were riding bikes and had dogs on leashes (and some not) running alongside them, and I thought ‘of all these hundreds of people, probably every one of them is fitter than me’ and it turned out it was some sort of event to raise money for animal shelters, and there were a lot of tents set up further on, with snacks, souvenirs, and all sorts, and there was a stage with music, so we stopped for a drink and a snack and a rest before completing the last leg of the homeward journey.
There is so much trouble and pain and anxiety in this old world, but on a Sunday in a park in Prague on a perfect autumn day, all that fades away and everything just seems to be fine.

Much has been said about how people don’t read any more and I submit that it’s only partly true. Sure, people don’t read books as much as they used to, even I don’t, and that is a terrible, horrible, bad thing, because books are great, but I see it as a sign of a changing civilization, rather than the collapse of civilization, because the advent of social media means we are reading more and more. Some people spend many hours a day online, merrily typing away and misspelling half the words, but they get corrected by pedantic assholes like myself, and maybe some of them are actually improving their literacy skills by this exercise. Also, it means that a lot of people who don’t get out of the house much now have more of a social life than they ever would have, and that’s a good thing.
It’s only for the last 4 or 5 centuries that we’ve even had standardized spelling, and you go back a couple millenia and there was a point where people hadn’t even figured out that it was a good idea to put spaces between the words, I guess when you’re carving into a stone tablet you want to cram as many letters as possible in there. Which brings me to my next topic.
Math. Never liked it much in school. I’m much more of a humanities person so I kind of feel like a discipline where there is only one right answer limits my freedom of thought, but I do respect math people and understand that our civilization would not be able to function without them. Despite my failings, I always take a stab at these funny math problems that get posted online, and it’s always some damn trick about the order of operations. Which should be a really easy thing to learn and remember, because there are only four of them. But, I never have.
It seems to me that if math is a language (and math people often say it is), then they could communicate a lot better by making the order of operations clearer. Either lay out the equation so that the operations are left to right, as all western languages, at least, do, or leave spaces between those operations which are supposed to be separate, as language language learned to do a few thousand years ago.
Or not, I guess. The math people have got this figured out, and they don’t really need to communicate with the rest of us.

Just came from a poetry meeting which always leaves me in a good mood, both because of the multiple breaks to partake in refreshments of the herbal variety, and because of the poetry and general good vibes, and tonight was no exception.
It was our first indoor reading of the season, because it’s really too cool to sit outside for hours and also too dark, even the last reading we had everybody was using their mobile phones for illumination when they read their poems and it was kind of an eerie look, so it was nice to be in a warm, cozy place, not really a pub, more like a coffee shop that also sells beer, and there are a variety of comfy chairs and sofas scattered around nothing matching anything else, and they made a very nice raspberry lemonade, which I almost forgot to pay for, they stopped me at the door. That happens sometimes.
My poem, my long masterpiece that’s been festering in my mind for months and got completed this afternoon, received only polite applause, and people liked the selection of short poems I read in the second round much better. It’s like that old Donald O’Connor movie where they sang “You can study Shakespeare and be quite the elite, but slip on a banana peel, the world’s at your feet, make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh.”
It’s all good though. It’s written, and that’s a big load off (as Gertrude Stein once said when asked why she liked writing so much: “I don’t like writing. I like having written.”), and I, personally, am convinced it’s good and it will be in my next book, and probably one of the better poems in it.

I am tired, and kind of sore all over, mostly shoulders and back, and my fingers and hands bear the stab wounds of a thousand nasty little thorns, but I feel good. I spent most of the day picking rose-hips, which are a berry sized thing, but they’re harder than a berry and totally inedible, I’m pretty sure, and it seemed like an awful lot of work to make tea that I don’t really care about, but it did bring me closer to nature. How much closer. Well, at one point I actually had a branch, a thorny branch, up my nose. That was an uncomfortable moment. I also helped move a whole bunch of dirt from one location to another, scoured the chicken run for fallen walnuts, and inadvertently let about half the hens out -chickens are not smart, they are creatures of instinct, but they are fast to spot an opportunity, and it was O.K. anyway. They have the run of the place. Also, picked some apples.
I often avoid going to the cottage because it’s a bit dull, but I enjoy a day like today and I must say, I am impressed with my in-laws effective land use. It’s not a big plot, maybe an acre at most, but there are cherry trees, apple trees, plum trees, walnut trees, a couple of rosehip bushes, a row of blackberries, a vegetable garden and, as I mentioned, chickens. Also, this year they grew some of the biggest damn pumpkins I’ve ever seen in my life.

A while back I joined a Facebook group called P2P, which I assume stands for people to people, or maybe person to person, or maybe I’m completely wrong about that and it stands for something else entirely, but that would be O.K., too, because what’s in a name, right?
It seemed to me to be a place where people were actually discussing important issues intelligently, and I’ve been slightly disillusioned, because there are a lot of people who like writing very long texts with big words and fancy phrases, to talk about very mundane ideas. I’m not sure if they’re over my head or just a bunch of wheezy old academic blowhards.
But, today there was a post that I thought was nothing short of brilliant. The idea was to set up a nation on-line. A bit more than just a role playing game, the author talked about following the success of cryptocurrencies, and building an actual nation on line, with a goal of 10 million inhabitants who, being online, could be anywhere in the world, and how we could work from that downwards to actual experimental living arrangements in the real world.
It may never happen, but I’m all for it if it does. Nothing else is solving the world’s problems, so a bit of experimentation is in order.

Also today, watched Frida on Netflix. I do not know how historically accurate it is, but I thought it was a wonderful movie, and I loved the surrealistic interludes. Highly recommend.