Glob-a-log

And so, it was that time again that all men good and true picked up their swords and cross-bows and went to (re)conquer the Holy Land – or more to the point: time for me to throw a few T-shirts in a bag and hop on a plane to Prague.

Every calendar year I spend at least three (sometimes four) months in that most majestic and beautiful of cities. I used to live there, many years ago – I met the girlfriend there – and, through an old friend, I still have two rooms in the Žižkov area that are mine whenever I want to come to Prague.

Prague has always been good to me. I like its relaxed attitude, its beautiful, old stones, its many parks and countless little bars and restaurants, its suicidal trams and cabs, its wonderful beer and incredibly beautiful women. The only drawback I could think of would be the millions of tourists that also flock to Prague but then, they stick mostly to the centre, so you hardly ever see that many of them anyway.

Of course, one of the most wonderful aspects of life in my Prague rooms is a complete absence of a certain animal. I pay my Dutch neighbour’s early teen daughter a minor king’s ransom to feed the bloody cat in my absence. She claims the job is even harder than it would be to baby-sit Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) and I know that that’s most likely true, so I pay her without complaining all that much. Any options other than killing the little pest would be much, much worse.

So, I suffered through the indignities of modern travel. Paying through the nose to get a ticket on the plane, with less free legroom that galley slaves enjoyed – after hanging around for almost two hours at Schiphol airport for security reasons. Then a rattling Prague bus, a boring underground journey and one tram stop later I was back home again.

To the right of me football stadium FK Viktoria Žižkov and one of this city’s many parks; to the left of me a pub with a very nice, enclosed back garden - what rested of the journey just a two minutes’ walk to my apartment, taking me past two other bars, three restaurants, one wine cellar and two small evening shops. I was back in Prague indeed.

On the third step of the four-step entry of the building where I lived sat something unspeakably vile. It was cleaning its nails and looked at me with an air of proprietorial disgust:

“What took you so bloody long?” it asked.

(To be continued.)

Like that old Doors song goes: People are strange - and they prove the wisdom of these words every single day on this wonderful, if blood-soaked, ravishing and ravished planet of ours.

It’s not often that we are truly at a loss for words – unless one is a Spanish football supporter at an international tournament, of course. Still, I’m sure there will have been a few waiters in a certain restaurant who really did not know what to say when one customer sat down to prepare his own, very private meat dish.

And what about that boy with the catapult? My oh my, not only was Germaine Greer spot on in her obituary of that oafish Australian Tarzan Idol, it seems that from the other side of eternity this snake poison merchant still inspires the same kind of devotion to tastelessness and madness in his wannabe disciples as was his own sorry trademark.

It’s slightly more worrying when nature starts to imitate art - or, more to the point: when animals start to behave as weirdly as the people they are in too close a contact with. Dog owners who start to look like their pets is one thing; dogs who would not only fetch the paper but also would read what the Dow was doing that day - or, in that same vein, horses that followed their riders to such a lunatic extent that they start to deposit their savings in a bank.

As Abraham told the goat (when that angel had buggered off again and Isaac was massaging his wrists and ankles, thinking angel roast & patricide): I kid you not.

Verily, verily, I tell thee, when the animals, as the great sage wrote, start to look at each other, not longer able to tell formerly handsome & decent snouts from sinful, waste-fed human faces, it may be time for the recording angel to call it a day and close the book on this mad planet Ark adventure.

Why wait till they, like we, invent religions, war and chick lit - or worse: empty their piggy banks and drive to the nearest old-McDonald-had-a-farm joint and stuff their faces with hom-sap burgers, while listening to the Birds or the Animals, doing ABBA covers?

So, folks (people & animals) let’s just do one more, final dance, before closing the door on all this madness - and let’s hear it for Ray Charles, who, from his now truly dark new digs, only has to add one more line to that old, old song:

Come on and do the dodo!

We are like the stones of some vast city. Well, stones last longer than we but if even the life of suns and planets is as nothing inside the projector room of eternity, a few thousand years more or less is less than a quibble’s worth – and I like the simile – and I rule this little world – so there.

We are, as I said, before I was so rudely interrupted by myself, like the stones of some vast and ancient city. Some of us are stuck in broad avenues, other in short and boring dead-end streets. Some are part of schools or funeral parlours; others are tiny bits of huge cathedrals, shopping malls or bordellos.

Do stones know what cities are for – or even that they exist at all? Would they care what creatures lived there, thought of, dreamt of?

Like stones, we don’t know anything of real importance. Unlike stones, we’re not satisfied with simply being, and serving some (or no) higher purpose. We are stones with an attitude. We ask questions and demand answers – right here, right now.

Still, when mountains are but uppity pebbles in the eyes of the Gods, what does that make us? If Gods don’t strike down the mountains or paint silly faces on their silent Babel peaks, who are we to think that any God would ever pay even the slightest, blind bit of attention to our self-obsessed, self-serving and self-aggrandisizing little selves?

Who is this idiot Dawkins, who attacks Heaven as if God had killed his puppy when this small-time denier was a kid? To claim no Gods, no grand scheme, can even exist is, as it were, arrogance beyond belief. Almost as inane as people, like Bush (whether he’s burning or dancing) or wannabe last prophet Ahmadinejad, who claim to know God’s face, God’s plan, God’s wildest wet dream, if you like.

If there are Gods, they probably are so far removed from us that they could as well be dead or mere mythical creatures, so little good Their presence would do us.

If there ever was a Driving Principle, a Hand that Shapes, it would most probably not look like anything that some painter with a very long brush once painted on some ceiling. In the eyes of any God we would be, as Sheri S. Tepper once wrote in her novel ‘Grass’, very small beings.

Of course, anything is possible in a quantum universe but it’s still highly unlikely that when when each of us kicks the bucket we will immediately (or at some final judgement) be called to sit on some divine couch, where some well-meaning Oprah Godhead will invite us to take a look at our past life (or some horned Dr Phil will hoot: “And how does this work for you…??!!) to the applause of angels and other dead relatives (or the booing and moaning of minor demons and probably even more dead relatives.)

(Either scenario doesn’t bare thinking about, actually, so I’ll leave it you to envision this gruesome ‘Judgement by Talkshow’ on your own. I’ll pass, thank you very much. Feel free to leave your vomit in that bucket some hapless soul just very helpfully kicked upon the stage.)

Anyway, if there is a God (in singular or plural form) it is easiest to envision Him, Her, It (quite wrongly, most likely, but while we’re God-trotting, why not go the whole divine hog?) as some eternal artist. Surely some Creature That makes planets, suns, dark matter, kangaroos, gnus, crabgrass and us, must be revered as some quantum Rembrandt, a quarking Picasso, a true E=MC Bard?

So, if we allow for this vision, this model to contain our awe, why not admit the obvious? No artist, divine or otherwise, would create a universe and then sit down and just look at it, for ever and ever amen.

Could there be an artist God That would stick around for a few million years to watch every sparrow fall, every small boy burn insects and make notes of every (foul) thing that all of those small creatures do individually?

Surely not. Why would any God inflict that kind of punishment on Him-, Her- or Itself? Truly, this would be immeasurably worse than watching paint dry.

No, an Artist God would never stop with one painting, one sculpture, one play or one sonnet. He, She, It, They would create universe after universe, each one better, wilder and stranger & more beautiful than the last one.

If there are Gods, They must work like Warhol. They do not sit in anal, envious judgement. They are Artists, not critics. They are Creators and creators do not sit back and retire or judge. They create.

There’s an old short SF story, that’s truly, deeply, darkly funny. I don’t remember the name of the author, the name of the story even but it goes like this:

There’s been some nuclear war. That old Cold War wipe-out everybody was so fearful of. The Cuba crisis, comrade Krushev claiming he would bury us. Shit, people wrote songs about it (to the tune of some Russian composer, who would most probably, from his quiet grave, have thought that would be reason enough to set the bombs flying.)

Nowadays, some lunatics fly into two towers, kill a few thousand people and the world behaves as if it’s seen the pale riders of the Apocalypse planning for a team-building weekend. Hello…? Is anyone still even vaguely connected to the rational world? During the first world war there were a million casualties just during the battle of Verdun.

Ah, but if Osama and others got the chance, they would drop atomb bombs on all of us.

And that’s reason enough to do away with civil liberties in our own countries, invade others, condone torture and kidnapings and the spending of billions of dollars on…? Well, no-one’s really sure on what precisely but it sure ain’t winning the hearts & minds of the rest of the world.

Absolutely, Osama and his evil ilk would probably like to kill a Hell of a lot more people. You know what, though? He’s not the only one. All throughout history there have been people like that. Sometimes they succeed in fulfilling their mad dreams, for a while; sometimes they don’t.

Unless the rest of us choose to follow some mad piper, a lunatic can kill and kill and kill to his heart’s delight, for some time, but his actions will still be meaningless and of no lasting moment. Madmen don’t change history – and neither do saints, nor knights in shining armour.

History is like this huge mammoth tanker: you can change its course but only slowly. Revolutions don’t change history. Look at the French revolution, the Russian revolution: lots of bloodshed and decades of turmoil but when the dust settled things proved not very different from what they were right before the first blood was drawn.

Then what about the first world war you mentioned? That war started because one madman shot Franz Ferdinand, didn’t it? No, it didn’t, actually. The Peace Palace in Holland’s The Hague was built at the end of the 19th century, by representatives of most of Europe’s leaders who were worried about the massive arms race between their countries. They could smell war on the air, so they built this peace palace and invented some council that would work to find peaceful solutions for international problems.

Big surprise: it didn’t work. No peace palace can stop a war that’s in the air – and no madman with a gun can start one, if history isn’t ready for it at that point in time. Same with Osama and other bloodthirsty irritants. They and their actions are meaningless. They, like Auden’s poem said about poetry, cannot make things happen.

Yes, they are pests – bloody pests even but only the kinds of dreaming & dangerous fools like Bush and his cronies will curfew a whole town, set fire to surrounding villages and hand out big money and even bigger guns to all comers because one rabid cur has been making a nuisance of itself on the town’s square.

Anyway, back to that SF story. So, there’s been some nuclear fall-out between the two super powers and now the world lies broken & barren.

Ah, but there stands – or stumbles – the last man on earth. He seems to be in some pain. He’s certainly not a happy camper. He’s looking and looking and looking for something, or someone. Then, after days or weeks or months of searching he finally sees another survivor: a woman, no less.

So, the world may not exactly resemble that first Garden but here are two people who have at least another chance to play Adam and Eve. Maybe there’s still some hope for the world.

The man greets the woman. He’s still in considerable pain:

“Are you a dentist?” the man asks the woman.

“No.” she says.

“Damn” says the man and blows his brains out.

You know how it goes. You take the kids to Disney World, or some circus, to any kind of entertainment that’s supposed to contain worlds of wonders – and chances are that when they go to sleep that night, one of them, just dreamily says:

“That clown was a bit scary.”

Same with these columns – all columnists, I suppose. We bring our untamed egos, our unruly thoughts and throwaway pens (or vice versa) and build our little kingdoms piece by angry/funny/boring/foul piece. And we have no idea really what the readers – if we have them – make of all the things we write.

That is, we had no clue of all of that, before the advent of Statcount and other nerd-fed toys. Now, we can see how many visits our sites get, how many visitors are repeat offenders, where they all come from and how long they spend doing Gods know what with our precious children.

Which is nice, sort of.

When I started writing all this nonsense, the guy who built this blog for me told me that most visitors that come to any blog come through one particular link. (He also told me a story about a guy who got rich by starting with just one photograph of a bloody cat – with the text Cats who look like Hitler or some such. And no, I’m not giving you that link here: I’m trying my damndest to write my own cat-filled diary on this blog and I won’t encourage people to go look at some other cat, thank you very much.)

Anyway, one of my earlier columns was about some murdered cricket coach. In that piece I also told a silly story about a dinosaur – and I put up a link with an even sillier dinosaur cartoon. And God love all your cute, little minds – and the Devil take mine but of course most of my visitors came to me through that bloody cartoon…!

You know, I’m starting to get a lot of satisfaction out of the fact that that comet got all of the damn critters.

Still, all things fair or some other Shakespeare curse, so here’s the top three of links my readers went for, like a white rabbit, or Alice, or a toad in a hole. So, there:

Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C

(And my excuses to the few of you who actually came here to read something. I can assure you that normal services will be resumed as soon as I get over the humiliation of being beat by an extra from the bloody Flintstones. Till then, I’ll be offically miffed, or huffy, or in a serious snit.)

(Sulk, sulk, sulk…)

(Alright, God save us all, stop pestering me about that stupid cat! Here is that bloody link. Now leave me in peace, before I’m forced to do a Corbain. Goodbye!)

(Sulk! Sulk! Sulk!)

There’s not much you can do about idiots. During the Crusades one of the favourite battle cries was: Kill them all and let God sort them out.

That, in a way, made somewhat more sense than that American officer in Vietnam who reported that, in order to liberate the village they’d had to destroy it. Same results maybe but lacking even the somewhat primitive vision of a caretaker God to clean up the mess afterwards.

Still, that army officer was a moral Einstein compared to the demonstrators carrying banners that demanded those who insulted the peace of Allah were to be beheaded – as a protest to a few cartoons which had dared to suggest that Muslims were, amongst other things, bloodthirsty barbarians who couldn’t take a joke.

Not much you can do about idiots indeed. That’s about the simplest lesson history could teach us – if history ever taught us anything:

You can easily do the TV sitcom setting. First shot: an outdoors picture of your typical American highschool. Some cheerleaders going through their routines, a flag proudly going through its more exalted (if simpler) motions, hundreds of adolescents of all colours and backgrounds available, all hoping against reason they will end up as summer king or queen.

We don’t even do that nonsensical pursuit of happiness anymore. Nowadays, we’re entitled, thank you very much – and we’ll hold in our breath (or better: sue) if we’re not given what we want right now. And kind Fate better smile and wish us a very nice day while It hands out these blessings or we’ll make damn sure It will be fired, plenty pronto.

Anyway, second shot: the inside of a classroom. Another flag in a corner; a portrait of the president. In the benches all those hopelessly spoilt kids; in front of the class, in a middle-aged suit, with dandruff-speckled specs, bad skin, dubious teeth and a slight stammer, stands History, trying to teach the basics to all the wannabe kings and queens.

Fat chance.

History is not a very inspired or inspiring teacher. Its stories are somewhat repetitive and lack cohesion. When you ask History about meaning it justs stands there, grinning somewhat inanely, raising chalkdust while waving vaguely to a grey-faced blackboard that’s seen it all, at least a million times before.

Not that we make the best students, of course but then again, what do you expect? We’re apes, for crying out loud. We climbed down that damn tree in order to see further - and our inquisitive Huhs? are always soon followed by a bored Whatever.

Nothing much you can do about idiots – except conclude: Seen it, done it, now please go bury yourselves in that T-shirt.

There is a time to talk – and a time to simply shut up and listen to those who are wiser and more eloquent than I can ever be. People like Simon Jenkins who, in today’s Guardian, asks:

Television is fine for gorillas and glaciers, but can it really do human beings?

Indeed. Beautiful article; interesting thoughts.

And I’ll leave you with yet another poem, by Jane Hirshfield:

In a net of blue and gold

When the moored boat lifts, for its moment,
out of the water like a small cloud -
this is when I understand.
It floats there, defying the stillness to break,
its white hull doubled on the surface smooth as glass.
A minor miracle, utterly purposeless.
Even the bird on the bow-line takes it in stride,
barely shifting his weight before resuming
whatever musing it is birds do;
and the fish continue their placid, midday
truce with the world, suspended a few feet below.
I catch their gleam, the jeweled, reflecting scales,
small dragons guarding common enough treasure.
And wonder how, bound to each other as we are
in a net of blue and gold,
we fail so often, in such ordinary ways.

So, another campus killing and another 33 deaths – and no doubt even more people killed in this same period in Darfur and Iraq and the other, man-shaped Hell holes all over the world.

This, of course, is not about gun control; this is not about laws. This is the human heart, speaking loudly. These are the cancers we grow.

We can talk God, or politics; we can do the number games, the naming games. We’re good at excuses.

We’re not very good at sharing though. We’re still at sub-Kindergarten level.

We don’t feel the pain of strangers – and however much we pay through taxes or fork out to charities, frankly, we don’t give a damn.

There would be no campus killings, no mass murder in Darfur or Iraq, if we would see all other humans as ourselves, as our family, as our lovers – our neighbours, even.

We don’t – and the killings won’t stop, ever. Until we do – and we won’t.

(I don’t know why, but when I read about the Virginia murders I thought of Leonard Cohen and his Lorca lives poem. So, again, take us away, please, Leonard:

He heard that he was shot and killed
He never was, you know
He lives in New York City
He doesn’t like it though)

Due to circumstances beyond our control, there will be no entry in the diary today.

“Are you done yet?”

(Picture yourself a cat miming Queen’s We are the champions)

It started with posters – and it progressed with flyers. The message being:

Have you seen this cat?

In fact, it started in the car park of our local supermarket, in the early hours of a mundane Monday morn.

In the deepest secrecy a meeting was planned. We’re not talking an other international and ever-so-helpful conference about Iraq, nothing as easily concocted as an IRA or ETA meet would have been in de eighties – in fact, the whole thing was more complicated than explaining the rules of cricket to a gathering of mentally challenged & visually impaired gibbons.

We’re talking hush hush with a bloody vengeance – but it was done. A time and a place had been set.

“Will you just stop it?! I swear; you’re about as much use as a fat man in a crematorium”

(The cat dancing to the Rocky lll soundtrack, I’m afraid.)

‘We’ had promised not to shoot at them and keep things quiet. ‘They’ … Well, to use that stupid, well-worn but never really put to much use cliché: they came in peace.

Ah yes: they’d also sent some proof that on their arrival they would sort out some stuff for us – small matters as cold fusion, world peace, an end to hunger and most of human illnesses.

So, to avoid the world’s press and the world’s various other imbeciles, irritants and malcontents, the first meeting would take place while the early bird still had its curlers in, in the fore-mentioned car park.

They came, they landed, their cute little green leader started on a, no doubt, cute little green speech, when that bloody cat of mine appeared and abducted and then, as its personal you’re-ever-so-welcome message, dismembered the cute little green fellow right on the bonnet of a brightly red Mazda – in full view of the security camera, alas.

Have you seen this cat indeed…

“Will you stop that…??!!”

(The cat doing one of its Darth Vader imitations.)

So, nothing from me today. As they say: gotta run.

Goethe’s last words were: More light!

R.A. Lafferty once explained how a camel could easily pass through a needle’s eye: A camel is mighty narrow when he closes one eye and flops back his ears.

So, when we move the last words of Goethe into Rafferty’s light we get something like: So many idiots, so little time…!

Which, almost straightforwardly, brings us to the following: we need another reward, urgently. For, while it is uncertain that you can actually shame some idiots, it is still highly rewarding to name them.

Any kid who ever pointed a finger at some other kid, doing the Nyah, nyah routine, knows how perfectly satisfying this can be. However tempting though – and perhaps even suitable – there will be no such thing as the annual Nyah Rewards. People might confuse The Nyahs with that stupid bird that almost has the same name. So, it would be silly to go there – especially since the masters of silly have gone there first.

If not The Nyahs though, then what?

Well, picture yourself in a boat on the river… No, scrap that: been done. Right, then picture yourself in some desert… Better, much better.

Rednecks to the left of you, rattlers to the right and stuck right in the middle of this stands a bus: a garishly painted, magic bus. Life may be a bitch, infested with moronic fleas, but the bus will survive.

So, in honour of the bus – and to name, if not shame all the world’s most irritating pests – now, that same, long-suffering world finally has The Priscilla Awards. Of course, only the most stupid and most anti-social bipeds will be considered worthy of the prize.

The first two candidates for this year’s short-list are:

For proving that homo sapiens can be so much more anti-social and despicable than the much maligned rat: Australia’s very own John Howard.

For being a self-centered, stupid cow who is lower than a toad in a black hole: Hollywood’s Sharon Stone.

Or, as Lou Reed sang, on his album New York: Stick a fork in their arse and turn them over: they are done.

On the other hand: it’s spring; the weather is close to perfect – and it’s simply too nice a day to leave the likes of Howard & Stone, like the taste of lizard vomit, on our tongue.
So, I’ll leave you with this instead:

Thought of the day:

There’s a theory that Picasso and Braque came to cubism through their love of movies. So, imagine the kind of weird shit they would be making, if they’d be alive today and also loved boxing…