Simply Letting Him Talk

We speed under a bridge on the highway between Praha and München, though our destination is not München. I glance back in time a few days to yester-monday, otherwise known as the thirteenth of July of this year.

Wheels turn beneath us as we glide between Praha and Berlin vlakem. I awakened at four twenty and decided that waiting until the alarm sounded the song by Eskaton ten minutes later was pointless so I remained awake after switching the budík off. Peiločja, on the other hand, chose to remain asleep, regardless of how much I taunted her with the “stick”.

The goals of the morning were simple. I had to make a shot for Ivanečka. I had to shave. I had to shower. I had to “pack”. What does it mean to “pack”, exactly? “Packing” (a very silly word) involves placing a few t-shirts into the backpack. Oh, and I also placed my toiletries in the backpack. Toiletries include things such as tooth brushes, tooth pastes and a weevil. Weevils are useful on trips because they bore into your skin and tunnel through your bones until they reach the essence of your being, granting you an eternity of robustness.

As I was stating - wheels are turning beneath us. Ivanečka just slurped down her “shot”, which contained an orange, a lime, a hunk of ginger and a few hunks of kurkuma. These four ingredients were placed into my juicer. In fact, it is part of my regular morning routine to make such a “shot” for my Ivanečka. She’s my love. What exactly is Ivanečka doing at this very moment? She is chewing on leaves of romaine lettuce. She is, of course, beautiful as she does this.

We shall arrive in Berlin an approximately one hour. Our plans, except for seeing Marillion tomorrow evening, are vague, and we pretty much like it that way. Across a landscape littered with high rises, apartment blocks, monuments and milling humans we shall stroll to arrive at Motel One, a place she found for us a few days ago. She was enamored by its design. I’m not that picky. It’s a place to connect, make love, sleep, rest, eat and shit. I guess comfort is somewhat essential, as well. Now that I think about it, we may not actually stroll across a landscape littered with high rises, apartment blocks, monuments and milling humans. We may take public transport, meaning the U-Bahn. In fact, in just a few fleeting moments, I’m going to look up exactly which U-Bahn we shall be taking.

Since walking for over an hour with our burdens would be less pleasant than having our limbs lopped of by a mechanical primate, we have, indeed, decided to take the U-Bahn (and possibly the S-Bahn) to our hotel. Though we’ll most likely not be able to enter our room until afternoon (it is now merely ten in the morning), I am partially confident that the hotel will retain our burdens in a semi-safe alcove until then whilst we meander about the landscape littered with high rises, apartment blocks, monuments and milling humans in search of wurst and hranolky. Stáhl jsem si aplikaci veřejné dopravy Berlína a koupil jsem naše jízdenky.

We pass through Nürnberg, Heilbronn and Stuttgart na cestě to Winterthur where Ivanečka’s sister “eagerly” awaits my irreverent humor. We are four in this metal box that speeds along an autobahn towards this day’s destiny. At one of our “pit” stops an hour or so ago, Ivanečka’s mother purchased a párek v rohlíku. It was a sublime moment.

Now to tumble fitfully back to yester-tuesday.

We’re sitting in bed in Motel-One in Berlin as the day slowly encroaches upon us. Not that we are in any sort of hurry. I always take a look at my home “security” cams to find out how Peiločja is. I feel quite bad leaving her alone. I’ll feel even worse next week when we are in Winterthur for seven days. When I think to deeply about her alone in the apartment, slumbering, stalking mouchy, bounding from place to place with clumsy grace, and possibly pacing, uttering feeble meows, wondering where I am, I feel something akin to a physical sensation of pain. I never thought in my past dappled with questionable empathy that I could love a creature so deeply. But I do. The connection is profound.

Yesterday, we spent many hours with Janek, otherwise known as Jayrope. He and I met online in 2019 during the late quarter of the year after I had completed my second full Noisevember album. He was impressed by the piece A Serbian Princess. Listening back to it recently, I was not certain why he was so enamored, but I shall not be so gobsmacked to not be appreciative, samozřejmě. The fact that his job is mixing and mastering other peoples’ work, from Hollywood-type soundtracks to underground punk, is telling of the hypercriticism I give my own mixing and mastering jobs and indeed my overall creative process.

We met at Hackescher Markt in a sort of biergarten that wasn’t exactly a biergarten but instead simply outside seating for a restaurant that insisted on calling itself Restauration. I consumed wurst and Ivanečka consumed veggies and hummus as we waited for Janek to arrive on his bicycle. Berlin and especially Munich are overly friendly to bicyclists. The cities actually seem to encourage the use of such contraptions as opposed to the use of jittering, clamoring, petrol guzzling hulks that drag themselves along roadways as they sputter inky clouds. Personally, I was always impressed by the “rules” in Seattle during my time there. Legally, a human navigating a jittering, clamoring, petrol guzzling hulk dragging itself along a roadway could “take out” one bicyclist a day. I saw it as a “thinning out of the hipsters”. Consequently, I am thinking of acquiring a bicycle when we move to Mnichov.

I’m reminded of a “scene” in my life riding in a jittering, clamoring, petrol guzzling hulk that was dragging itself along a roadway whilst sputtering black clouds. We had just listened, collectively, to Too Much Rope by Roger Waters and were discussing its lyrical theme. Jeff came to the conclusion that the human race would be better off if there existed some proto-mythical force that simply indiscriminately eliminated some percentage of the population every so often. As I mull over it a moment, I conclude that perhaps there already is.

Každopadně, Janek arrived on his bicycle. We drank beers and talked. He related a time he was in Texas, in fact, near Big Bend, living in a hovel with another musician. He lived in Austin, purchased an accordion and played with anyone or any group who needed an accordion player. There were many more anecdotes. They all sounded splendid. I let him talk. Ivanečka let him talk. It was pleasant. He went deeper into his life for us, relating finding a daughter from a fling he had in the 90s and how, after her mother committed suicide, they found each other. They keep tenuous communication and arrange times to spend together even though he said that at times they remind each other of traits we dislike most about ourselves. His point was there was an overreaching reason to keep coming back to each other and that overreaching reason was genetics. I’m not sure if he questions whether genetics itself is reason enough to hold two people together, especially two people who have nearly nothing in common experience-wise, but he did mention this latter point several times. My opinion on such matters is clear from multitudinous other blog posts.

I very much enjoyed simply letting him talk. I enjoyed absorbing his experiences of the world. I enjoyed that they sometimes aligned with my own but mostly were tales that had absolutely nothing to do with my life. I used to be tempted, especially during my 20s and 30s, to start sharing comparable stories from my own life during these sorts of discussions. Now I find my previous behavior abominable. It’s an act of humility to listen to someone else’s stories without having absurd struggles with ones’s own ego in the process. Perhaps the lack of humility (or the lack of ability to suppress the ego that snatches away such humility) is a symptom of a greater disease that infects Western (and especially American) culture. It can be a type of competition. And if it is a spawn of competition, it is repellent. Christian mentioned the other day whilst I was walking through Folimanka gabbing with him telephonically via Telegram that various people who tend to butt in, as it well, to storytelling in the egoistic manner that I just described also could be doing so because they can relate to the story and so they can feel a part of the discussion, conversation, back-n-forth, whathaveyou. I agree with him, but also believe that in this case, the butting in has its source in insecurity, low self-esteem, withered sense of worth, whathaveyou. Každopadně, I find it also slightly repellent, especially since I did it during my 20s & 30s partially from a withered sense of self worth. Fuck um.

Ivanečka just tasted Genmaicha for the first time in her life. Unfortunately, I adulterated the flavour with lime juice. She commented that the taste is extremely strong. Perhaps I did let it steep too long. I was probably distracted by Peiločja during the steeping process. Or I was showering. Or I was staggering around the flat arbitrarily in search of my tenuous early morning destiny.

I shall share okurky with my love as we continue our drive. The bluegrey mottled sky and thin mist draped along the autobahn beckon us onwards.