What Genre is This?

I’m sitting U Smrťaka quite near my current home in Nusle. I have a pivo. It is a Radegast. I greatly prefer it to Pilsner. The music listening adventure begins. Let’s see what each song brings.

Of course, Pete Townshend had to appear first floating in my ears. Stardom in Action. In fact, this song doesn’t bring anything specific to my mind. The album itself resonates on many levels, however. Levels, do you say? Why use such a word when one could easily say wireframes instead? The album in general places me in the apartment that I shared with Jayson in College Station from September of 1992 bis Mai 1993. He and I listened to it extensively. Not only he and I listened to it, but Bender-boy took quite a part in the experience, as well.

A few lines just stuck out, however:

I’m so angry that you let me see my totally futile destiny. I’m so angry that you interrupted my dream.

Do not admire anonymity!

That is the opposite of everything I’ve ever written in my blogs, journals, poems and tentative musings to the insect hordes who gather around my windowsills. Anonymity is something to be sought after. It is something to be admired. It is something to be absorbed into. In contrast, the things that one creates can stick out from the seething mass. They can poke and prick at the heavens like the symbols of monetary greatness that are skyscrapers raping the view of the horizontal.

Communication now plays from the same album. Marcie springs to mind. Of course, she was part of that era of my life. It was during those days that we first became close. Some would say too close. Tony certainly did - or if he didn’t actually say it, the look on his face was more communicative than most novels. The song expires.

Guyute was the ugly pig Who walked on me and danced a jig That he had learned when he was six Then stopped and did some other tricks Like pulling weapons from his coat And holding them against my throat He lectured me in language strange Then scampered swiftly out of range

What portion of my life that this song reminds me of at the moment is immaterial, though I’ll mention that the time period is December 1999 and there is an incident of attempting to urinate in someone’s sundry-filled closet whilst nigh-fatally stoned. Who is Guyute? Guyute is the ever pampered and now “powerful” manager of whichever franchise you can name, or, alternately, a purported self-made man from serfdom to tyrant who has the bureaucratic ability to take one of his subjects and walk on them and indeed dance a jig perhaps on them or after walking on them. Mostly, he is filled with threats if your behavior isn’t one he exactly condones. In fact, he will pull out said weapons even if your beliefs are not ones he exactly condones. He is not a democratic entity. He is Guyute. The language he lectures you in is perfectly within your grasp, but only morphologically and syntactically. Certainly it is not within your grasp semantically.

He scampers out of range. They always scamper out of range. Bullies, when there is even the remotest chance of them losing the upper hand, scamper.

As the Moma Dance plays, I shall contemplate the sticky sweat embracing my living corpse. As I grow further and further into decrepitude, my tolerance of heat decreases. The industrial revolution, which began only a few years before my “birth”, was conceived to snuff me from this earth. The planning itself is exquisite. Well designed. As my skin slides into the molten plastic the ocean has become, I feel at last one with Miss Entropy. Oh! And I feel I’ve never told you The Story of the Ghost.

Two tables to my fore, a family dines. The father and two children have smažený sýr. The mother eats a hamburgerish concoction. They appear satisfied with the way my skin slips greasily into the molten plastic of the ocean.

Miss Carla now sings cacophonously. A hint of recollection comes to my addled brain, especially on this second one. You see - two songs in a row play from 2 Foot Yard. I am walking around Acy’s neighborhood in Austin. S. 3rd Street. Acy’s place. I miss that place. He spent so much of his life on it! The effort was unbelievable. Or, alternatively, all of his projects that were additions to the landscape were just that - projects. They kept him sane. Given that he abandoned all of it with out an ostensible shine of lament, that may be so.

Stop Hurting People by Herr Pete now sings in my ears. Lee and I once discussed this song. It must have been when he was at the Enfield house with all of us - Tony Melanie Craig Jayson Me - and sharing our bizarre “harmony”. He was especially impressed by the line:

So you, without question, know your first love is your last. And you will never, never, never love again.

He mocked such melodrama simply because he had been there himself. And he knew at once that Herr Pete was mocking the same melodrama, that the whole song was sitting staring red eyed and hungover at the masses who need to justify the cracks in their psyches with episodic melodrama. He understood, and I admit far before I did myself, that gyrating emotion is a passing dance. The chemicals settle into an equilibrium. That equilibrium differs per person, of course. His equilibrium was more heightened than most - more heightened than all, in fact. Thus, he stole his boss’s truck. He stole his boss’s gun.

Fraulein Carla sings and wails on her violin. I am standing at a bus stop in Austin. It is a bus stop near the Sierra Madre or Sierra Sestra or Sierra Panchita Mall. I don’t remember the exact title of the institution. Why had I visited it again? Did I want a nostalgic kick in the rectum? Perhaps. So here we go. Tony and Acy and Lee (maybe?) and I went there one day. We drove either my truck or Lee’s car or Tony’s “vehicle”. While we were doing whatever fuckups like us tended to do in shopping centers during that era of our lives (hint - it had nothing to do with gyrating emotions or unevenly shaven buttocks), Tony somehow lost the power of speech. So after hours of doing whatever fuckups like us tended to do in shopping centers during that era of our “youth” (hint - Acy was accosted by the police for both not having shoes and dressing “inappropriately”), we walked around the expanse of the starbaked parking lot searching for the “vehicle” because certainly it was Tony’s and he was no longer speaking nor giving any reactive indication of which way to go.

Fun!

The congenial servírka mě přinesla druhé pivo. She’s Moved On by Porcupine Tree. In San Sebastian, atop the hill in the park above the flat I lived (if one could call it living) were a few lounge benches made of wood. I’d procure a few beers or a bottle of vodka and climb up to them, sit on one or the other or the other and sometimes fall asleep. Once I awoke with a vagrant going through my backpack. Was he a vagrant? Perhaps I mistook him for a vagrant and he was not. He was going through my backpack, however. I scared him away by giving him a lecture on The Unconsoled and how it relates to human disconnection and specifically how it relates to Spanish disconnection beneath the amicable exterior they have that sates them with so much pride. I listened to Lightbulb Sun every time I was up on that hill. Sometimes, when I wasn’t accosting wanna-be vagrants, I’d sit and gaze over Egia and Gros and perhaps over and out onto the Cantabrian Sea and into the gloppy mist of the future.

I bought The Story of a Ghost in Austin at a CD shop on Palmer Lane, somewhere near where Deleware Subs was or still is. I used to work at that Deleware Subs. It was a fantastic sub-shop. When I drove to that CD shop in which I bought The Story of a Ghost, I was in a rickety “van” that Acy borrowed me. Magdalena and I memorized much of Austin in that van. We also memorized that CD shop. I bought The Story of the Ghost there. Strangely, my memory of that trip with Magdalena is the opposite of atrocious. It was a gleeful time. She honestly enjoyed my friends. She specifically enjoyed Craig and Aimee. And they enjoyed her back. Upon my return to Praha, however, Loyal and Suzie wrote me a long email about the clash they perceived in mine and Magdalena’s personalities. Their evaluation, as important as I held it, had nothing to do with leaving Magdalena. I had already met the blonde Dana at the EIN adjacent Xmas party Hynek had invited me to. She had wished me a wonderful sojourn to the states for Xmas / Sylvestr.

On one of the evenings at Dave’s, I drank lots and lots of hard alcohol (most likely with Dave) and illness claimed me the next day. I was infected! Plagued! Every one of my multitudinous pores belched pus. I lay in a stench on the floor the next morning in Craig’s apartment. I bid Magdalena go with my friends to lunch whilst I simmered in the pool of fluids. She did so. Oh joy! She was certainly accepted within the group. In fact, several years later, when I was living v Mnichově with Vesna, Craig journeyed once again to this country (the one I sit in now, not the other in which I sat with Vesna). My relationship at that time with the Bosnian princess was cracked like a pristine porcelain bowl still being eyed by Child Entropy. I fucked over my friend Craig because I was too preoccupied at holding my current relationship together. How many times do we have to do such things before we know they are futile and simply STOP after the first eke in their direction? After his warranted disappointment, he traversed to Praha and stayed with Magdalena. They sent me several scurrilous messages. I probably have them written down somewhere.

Water From The Sky. This sequence of songs from The Story of the Ghost made it onto a CD I burned for the blonde Dana in January of 2000. I was in the obyvák where Viking was to spend much of his time during the next months, and listened to the mix I had made. She was a simple girl. Christian would use the word puro, but since that is in a language that I currently and will for the remainder of my next sixteen existences despise, I’ll go with simple, or even innocuous. Her honesty was a concoction of naivete and genuine forward pushing mental exploration. I often think of the last time I saw her. It was years after our goodbye. Randomly, we met on the metro. I don’t recall the words we exchanged, but I could see the lines in her face. In a few years, something had changed her from the fair-faced, idealistic youth into something more crumpled and jaded. Was I a portion of the reason for her withering?

If you’re just staring at your walls Observing echoing footfalls From tenants wandering distant halls Then this one is for you If children playing all around To you is noise not pleasant sound And you’d be lost on the playground Then this one is for you

I’ll just leave those lyrics as they are. I can and always have been able to relate to them mightily. Upon myriad moments in my wretched existence, I’d listen to this song. I’d repeat it. I usually had a beer or a bottle of Fernet in my frozen claw. There are too many moments to enumerate.

If you’re just staring at your walls Then this one is for you

Face Dances Part II and I am back in Jayson’s and my apartment. Unlike most humans, I only discovered masturbation in my early twenties. I was twenty-two, actually! Of course, I was pining for Marcie and at that point the fact that we couldn’t realistically have “sex” frustrated me. I’d seen pornography many times in the past. But, I’d felt nothing, which probably also perpetuated the push for a very late sexual awakening. During high school, I’d sit with some friends (Eddie, Sam - and even Joe once) and watch, but I only felt a mix of disgust and apathy. I tentatively began stimulating myself in the flat that I shared with Jayson when he was away at class. The first time I made myself come, the liquid spurted, pirouetted and fell directly into one of my open eyes, gluing the lids together. I lay stunned for a moment and then rose, went to the koupelna between mine and Jayson’s bedrooms and washed it out. Then I sat on my bed naked and laughed.

Lightbulb Sun. I am in Daniel Cuc’s flat, where I rented a room. In fact, that flat was also on Marie Cibulkové, though I cannot find it. The name Cuc is no longer on any of the “buzzers” on the ground floor of the buildings housing flats on the right as one walks from Pražkého Povstaní to the brána at Vyšehrad. I assume he sold it and moved to a village to raise a gaggle of geese, ovce or boats for various bacterial strains. I sat on the couch in that flat many an evening without internet but designing web pages condemning the company that Viking and I worked for. I also planned an alternate Czech dictionary, but that only partially came to pass. I also made Silvie a mix-tape on that couch. I included The Limping Little Girl by Present on it. I miss Silvie.

So Carla sings 50 Miles. This is the song I used to repeat until my neck stank of acoustic, nylon, quantum uneasiness. Tony and I listened to it only one time. It must have been 2009 or 2010 or 2011, the latter which was the last time I saw him. The only comment he made was something akin to:

What genre is this? Americana?

Fuck um.