grim voids of adherence

from the library in cluj

25 10 2010


Here @ Sibiu and in the good ole’ American business hotel, whatever this place is called, right, and we have here the big ole’ brunch like bacon, eggs, smoked salmon, potatoes, tea, coffee, bell peppers and cucumber. Sometimes these grim voids of adherence to int’l and USA business standards yield like, a taste of home, and I spend a long breakfast drinking tea. And now they are pulling a white curtain across the buffet and it is an eerie shroud on the place that a moment ago provided me with food and sustenance. And I hand the waiter forty-two lei in cash, and he darts his eyes quickly and sees that no one has seen this handoff, and I wonder if the money has been pocketed. Well, in a way, for me it is the same. Seen how the Julius Meinl logo is everywhere, man. And each table has a simple white ceramic vase holding a solitary piece of twirly bamboo and it feels like an exploitation via commercialization of what once may have held some spiritual/ zen-like powers. And an old bald man chews his cud, and leans his arms across the back of his chair and stares at me- I am writing, after all, on paper- my cover is blown.





20 10 2010

zebra pizza targu mures- waiting for my take-away order

Here to my left is a young girl in a sweater with horizontal lines to teal, brown, heather, pale yellow: earth tones, right. And her face is washed out and she seems to pull on her hair and with ecery strand she tugs, she becomes all the more a small mountain goat, and here in romania google news tells me about Boardman, 63, gored by goat. Boardman gored at the Olympic national park. In the Olympic National Park. Pierced in the thigh and the goat stands and guards the bleeding Boardman. Boardman 63, gored by goat. And here now, we see the arching and multi-tiered wedding cake of the Orthodox church. And we see how the metal coat hook has two curved hooks and how the maker saw fit to make the brass piece that is screwed into the wall the face of a lion.

He is a Fat Man and His Range of Movement is Limited

Cluj Cemetary

17 10 2010


Targu- mures, Romania



Look there at the shadows in front of us. We have simultaneously put on the beatles’ lucy in the sky with diamonds with a Balinese gamelon band, and we hear this in our ears. The shadows are generated from only the computer here, and have formed two wings that emerge from the two corners of the computer. Behind me is my bed and the springs jut through the mattress. The music has stopped, and we are here wearing our blue and white, wool djellaba, and we see the glowing fingers from the shadowy hands tapping and making spider movements in front of the blue and white sleeves of the djellaba. This is something we see. And we see the black line of the computer’s power cord set against the white background of the notebook. When we look over to the right, we see the door of the room and beneath it is an orange glow- a Halloween orange glow like from an led-lit, synthetic pumpkin, placed ominously outside of our hotel room door.



Cluj-Napoca:

30 9

307-317

Staring vacantly at the plywood covering the wide doorway in front of me. The beams are thick and dark brown and the pressed lines of wood in the thing are such that it is morbid as in the collecting and pressing of like a collection of human bones and teeth, pressed in with the marrow, which is used as a sort of unifying agent. And today at the convenience store- called a magazin, there is a vapid girl in a cheap cocktail dress staring at the floor and standing next to the register holding some cigarette promos.

And is it good that more people write via text, online comments, social networking sites? Shouldn’t it be good? But somehow it makes me nervous. And is it somehow undermining actual writing, this lowered quality of writing. When all errors are acceptable as long as the reader can discern what the writer wanted to say. Like, does this purvey a greater sense of acceptance w/r/t a lack of education. More people writing means like a degeneration of the craft. And when it becomes acceptable to be worse, then isn’t that its own kind of newspeak. First the dumbing down and reduction of language into ’t-mrw s gd day c u’ and cetera.





29 9

210-220



We are here today. We are thinking of what it means when a parent has a birthday. There in the sun is a black coin flipping itself always into the winter moon. Into the heart of the tube. Into the tube of the heat. The last chance you had was in the jungle. The first time we met was by chance in the vines of the thing. The vines dripping and underwater, really. Really it’s been nice. We were all only children then, right. And if it’s really nice, well, it’s been this, and by chance the vines have dropped into the tubes where they fill the thing in tight like tubed meat. Tight and thick, like, we see, and we see how if the sun has this object within it, then there must be low heat in one place or two, and if there is this, then no one really ever meant what they said about the woon of the minter. Break into the heart of the coldest place. Fill the fines with the tubes of the breakwater. Water time. Water break. Water boyfriend. Water with care. Water with care piso mojado. Well what. Well, go to latin america and become latin, bro. You know.









27 9 2010

1226-1236



The wine bottles appear amber and glowing. A photographer takes pictures of some sort of food in a dish. There is a man in a denim jacket and denim pants, and he rather theatrically takes his cellphone from his left breast pocket. On the wall outside, the plaster has broken away, and it looks to me as if there is the image of a wild boar with a big, weepy eye, and a hydrocephalic monitor lizard staring up at the boar. And to the right of the lizard is a fish in orange, pink and gray. The eye of the fish is painted in white dripping paint, like war paint. There is a man in a suit jacket, not a blazer, and plum colored pants, listing to the left as he walks. And there is a little lady coughing into her hand with her baby blue nylon jacket open to the wind. And now we see the salt and pepper dispensers here in the restaurant. They are the wooden kind with the brass ball affixed to the top, and you must grind your own salt as well as your pepper in this place. Outside is a bald man with just a smudge of hair in the center of his head in the place where the hairline begins. A little man in a crew cut. An old man in a sweater with his hands clasped behind his back. A little boy with a red backpack and a viola case, and little-kid hair just like my brother. And there is some graffiti I cannot completely decipher, but the greek letter phi is discernable. A man in a cream jacket with brown and green stripes on the cuffs has his left arm scratching at his back. He is a fat man and his range of movement is limited.

striped shirts today

28 9 2010


336-346

There is a guy with a black striped shirt. The stripes are bright orange and yellow. They are thin horizontal stripes, two of a color at a time. He walks with a girl who wears a baggy faded-pink polo, and her hair is sort of dirty looking, and her face and posture is sort of slumped and sluggish, and she seems to slosh, rather then walk. Like a loose bag of water being drug down a hill. The guy lifts his elbow to look at and adjust his watch or bracelet. It is a rather aggressive movement, with the sharp of his elbow raised to the throat line of the girl.



There is an old man with his head low, and it seems like he is readying to take a punch. An ole’ square-jawed white hair, that one. The sun peeks out over the yellow building and shines through the layer of wires to where I sit.



There is a kid in a horizontally striped shirt- this is a different one from the previous one, and his shirt is red and green and white stripes, and he seems to twitch his head to the right, as in, it is a little tic that he has as he walks, and he is one of those thick kids. Not necessarily fat, but you would never call him skinny, and he would never be called outright fat, but he is dense, and his hair is a crew cut/ short style, and his face is round, and his hair is square, and his arms have no definition w/r/t muscle, and what do you do with these people. He is not necessarily weak. Maybe he is, but are these people the equivalent of cows- like some bovine species, or like a lazy farm dog anthropomorphized to the point that eventually it evolved into this creature on the sidewalk twitching in the neck. You see?

the important thing is that we understand each other



Belgrade

 Cluj-Napoca


21 9 2010

12:51-1:01

Here is the Romanian cop with his train-conductor-style hat. Oh, and, well this guy in the red shirt licks his right index finger and rubs at a white stain on his navy jeans, while smoking a hand-rolled cigarette with his left hand.



There is the girl in the baggy green shirt, could be muslin, and her hand is to her left ear, and her left elbow is on the table, and presumably she is operating a mobile telephone, and her left index finger holds a jade-colored ring, and the stone is a flat circle.



There is the girl with the faux rabbit fur hooded vest over a pea-green sweater, and she has dyed her hair a sort of auburn-blonde, and underneath her eyes it is the color of cooked liver.



And in the restaurant behind me there is an advertisement that covers the entire storefront window- it is a man holding a knife in front of a kebab, and the kebab dwarfs him, and his knife is the size of a machete, and his hat is a little fez and is red, and tufts of hair peek out the front of it, he wears his fez like he wore his little beret when he worked at burger king or some such place, and the red letters above this slouched man in white, read: kebab de criza 4.90 lei.



Now the girl with the green shirt and green ring stirs her cappuccino, lifts the spoon, dabs at the foam, dips it, twirls it again, now she is slipping the foamy spoon into her mouth.



And here is a guy in a suit kind of bouncing along, sort of a side to side gait, as if he is like too happy. Maybe he would be sloppy to deal with, too loose.



And there is the little dark woman, with almost a bald spot and she is practically hunched over the teal colored baby stroller, and holding hands with another little boy and her little girl walks out front of the stroller.



Okay, and I am back at the galeriile café, right, outside, and it is a perfect day out, and so the three benches nearby are filled with the usual old gypsy women who congregate there.



And now the policeman in his little conductor’s hat is over and talking to a little gypsy girl and asking to see the contents of her yellow shopping bag that says in English, “cash and c.” I can’t read the rest of the word after the c. but it makes me think of a USA store that is called cash and carry, and who the hell knows what happened to that place, right.





20 9 2010

146-156

We see the red of the chairs in a clump and they are four squares of oxidized strawberry juice, and we see now the faces in the grains of the wood of the table, and how all of these faces are studded with the eyes of the owl, right. And how for some reason I have been able to play the beatles lucy in the sky with diamonds and yann tiersen’s les jours tristes, from amelie, today simultaneously, and somehow it is a comforting like two blankets I huddle beneath.



There is a woman with a peach colored hood.

There is a woman in black who waddles, rather dangerously listing to the side.

There is a small green car with what seems to be only a shadow at the wheel.



Over there is a yellow pipe the color of synthetic banana, framing the doorway of the building. And there is a little taxi with the green, yellow, red of the Romanian flag for a taxi sign, and the word taxi is in the middle, the yellow part, and now there is the burgundy flash of a van, and now there is another silver car followed by a lime green car, and a silver, and there is another taxi, white on top, blue on the bottom, and today the traffic and the passing of cars is such that it becomes a blur of colors, right, and each car is a drop of paint sliding down the canvas, and it is, perhaps, me, that is too small and sitting at the wrong angle or maybe I am on my back.



There is an old woman in a lavender jacket with reddish hair.

The lower windows of the building out there are covered in bars.

Above on a balcony, three green-grey bags appear as the three corpses of captured tortoises.





19 9 2010



Okay found the best coffee here in cluj. The cup is emblazoned with the word ‘maromas’ in lowercase, bold, black font. Above these letters is a gold sort of modernist eagle with five stars rising and meeting in an arc above the bird’s opened wings. The girl working told me that this place has been open for two months. It used to be an apartment building. It is tastefully decorated in a pretty shade of lilac, and the tables are nice light wood with dark grains showing. I am alone here in a nice corner by the window, and so this is ideal. And outside the window I count twenty-two wires that are strung in this one spot. And across the street is a building in light yellow, the color of a the tiny tentacles on the bottom of a dried starfish. In one corner is a brick fireplace. Today they play early nineties ballads. There is an electric piano and two big speakers on the far left of where I sit, and also a microphone, so I am guessing that there is live music here. I apologized to the girl working here for not knowing very much Romanian. She in turn, apologized for not knowing very good English. I assured her that she spoke great English, and she said, ‘the important thing is that we can understand each other.’ I gave her a thumbs up and returned to my table.

KiKi: my dear rough diamond

this is from belgrade, for my friend who loves garfield

Big square, dark table. Big room with one big doorway covered by a sheet of plywood. A small piano in the corner- the upright kind. The coca-cola ad says racoreste-te. And there is a little triangle of light beneath the stairs and the dark wood of the chairs and little brass rivets in the chairs holding down the leather, and the menu, is spelled meniu and features a picture of a group of drinking glasses, in orange, yellow, green, pink, and the rims of the glasses have shadows, right, and so the photo is a weird raised effect and is like a close-up of some tentacled octopus arm.




Out of the window, there is a little square of a window on the way up the staircase, and I see the pink of some little flowers through this, and in the corner of the stars is a big stone pot, and it has a plant like a green leafy one with some of the ends of the leaves yellowed and tinged with black, and I hear the flick of the lighter now.

if someone has flushed the alphabet away

in belgrade, boy approaches basket, pretending it is a horse

16 9 2010


Could be anywhere today



But still, there is the sheen of the glass ashtray. There is the liquid-black of the unused straw. The middle-aged woman swinging her arm like military while staring at the ground and plodding over the stones. There is the obligatory old man in a beige jacket and khaki pants- his posture is such that his chin is level with his shoulders.

We hear a barking laugh that sounds like an aggressive, feigned hilarity. A baby in an orange and black stroller, bumping over the cobblestones. He has deep-black hair, sits fully upright, and looks to his left, to where we sit. More than looks, he is glaring; his brow is furrowed and his faint eyebrows are fully tensed.





15 9 2010



Went back to the galeriile fortuna café. Same table today. Same angle. Later in the day today, though, but, and, the light is lighting up the wall of the old church and it has become a glowing cobalt, and over here, some group of Swiss students has sat down. One of them is a girl with the face of an angry boy, and she keeps glaring and looking scornfully at the currency here, the Lei, as the others produce wallets, dig in purses, and actually, they are all girls at that table, except for one boy who is small and Indonesian looking.

And I see the entrance to a sewer, and there are little raised ‘U’s’ on the thing. Little ones and big ones, spiraling out from the center. As if someone has flushed the alphabet away, and the letter U went careening into the sewer cover causing raised u's for the pedestrians to negotiate.

One of the students eats a white coconut or maybe white chocolate thing, looks almost like dead skin, and I hear it crunch, and it is most likely not the skin of a corpse that she has been drying for months and is now eating in public, feeling secure that the others are fooled by the chips bag that her harvest has been slyly deposited into, right.

Right, and today, I walked through the cemetery again, and I sat down and happened upon some teeth in the ground. I dug with rocks and pulled out an old set of ceramic false teeth. I used two sticks as if they were tongs, to lift the teeth, thinking at the time that maybe they were haunted, and I placed the teeth in a tree.

Here's What Happened on Your Birthday, Stephen Kaskade!

Belgrade

14 9 2010


Cluj-Napoca Galeriile Fortuna

Outdoor café, perfect weather, perfect old stone square and buildings weathered the way I like and perfect colors.



Here, my receipt tells me: “MULTUMIM!”

We see the man in the suit stride by with the flash of a golden tie. The table of three girls smoking cigarettes and they keep looking at me and it could be a variety of reasons. And here are these bright pink/ Nantucket Red pants tight on an old woman with the weathered face of a pug. And the little birds chase each other to steal the bread from the mouth of their brother. And an old gypsy woman sits on the edge of a bench, facing the back of the bench, which enables her to pound at the back rest in adamant gestures holding meaning only for her.



Yesterday I saw a wedding party on the steps of the orthodox church- they released pigeons into the air. Today A white and dazed looking bird wanders amidst this roving herd of pigeons. If you were smaller, be damn sure this roving avian mass would be intimidating and more and more I see how the dinosaurs are inside of the birds.



An old woman holds up a bottle to the waitress, pleading for water. The waitress smirks at the old gypsy woman, and obliges. I am disturbed. The bottle is covered in orange plastic, and was previously used to contain yoghurt or some other cream-fruit beverage, and it seems to me that the rule should be that you can only refill water bottles with water, or at the very least, the bottle should be transparent. One must see the water one drinks. And can anyone enlighten me as to the function of all this pigeon head bobbing? The other birds are not like this.

Morning Milk and Cereals

entering the carpathians

13 9 2010 Cluj-Napoca at Transylvania Hostel, kitchen

10:37-10:47



Look where you’ve eaten breakfast: we can see the spots of muesli that cling to the inside of the bowl. There is yellow, and brown and banana color. If we look long enough at these grain clusters, we see the face of a dog who is rabid and biting into his own paws. The outside of the bowl has a glossy purple stripe around the upper half. The bottom half is white. The bowl has a narrow base and opens up from that, like an open ceramic flower.



A key card is needed to enter the kitchen space, and mine rests on the table in front of me, to my right, and in line with this computer. The card is white, and has a red sticker on it. The edges of the sticker are black, where the adhesive property of the thing has picked up dirt and residue and other filth from the hands that hold it.

The chairs here have the Ursus Bear beer logo on them. This morning, the bear seems to be in full lotus, wearing a tagine pot as a hat, and letting his legs become the tentacles of the octopus.



Ah ha! I see you, little Heineken keg in the corner.



And in front of me a simple sign printed in bold font on a white piece of paper, and hung horizontally on a small bulletin board:



“Morning

Milk and Cereals.”

old people who do not wish to swim or do really, anything

Cluj-Napoca, Romania

12 9 2010


3:39-4:07 pm

Cluj-Napoca, Romania



We see the old woman dipping a spoon into a plastic bag. The contents of the bag are not discernible from here. Behind her is a grey plastic crate, that looks like a milk crate- until I see that there are four more, evenly spaced, and that one of them is rusted, meaning that these plastic crates are metal crates, and so, perhaps they are fixed to the ground. Perhaps they shield some electrical thing. Perhaps they are the front line guarding the underpinnings of a city. The old woman’s legs rest on the low step on which she sits. She sits, not with her legs out in front of her, but resting to what would be her left side. The left leg on her looks reddish and purplish. It looks somehow bulging and uneven in unexpected places. It could be part of a tree; it could be a painted, craggy rock; it could be a fat leg that someone decided to burn- they burnt away the skin of her leg to set free these new colors.



A tree with flaccid leaves clinging with a sort of why-do-I-bother-I’m-gonna-die-anyway attitude.



An old man on a bench with a turtleneck, a burgundy hat with a navy band- almost a feminine hat, and his little mouth is open in a slot, and I have learned that when, on old people, that lower lip curls in, it may be that they have lost those teeth, and so this man sits, and he may as well be a floating cetacean siphoning for krill, and but he has his legs crossed tightly in the way of old people who do not wish to swim or do really, anything. But he is transforming, and now he seems to be a sort of canine panting in the sun, tied to a tree- he looks straight ahead, dully, but sometimes cars catch his eye, or maybe it is passing birds, or young people. This old man stares at a college kid who drapes his leather jacket over one shoulder, wears red pants and smokes. This old man stares and turns his head to follow the progress of this younger man. Now the old man stares up into the sun, but is quickly distracted by that flying bird.

The old woman who was sitting on the low step with the odd leg has finally shifted and sits forward, turns again to pick up a blue piece of plastic, then looks forward again- but she has revealed more of her leg, and I cannot tell now whether there is some sort of protective cast or wrap on it, or if she possesses an elephantitus-leg. It is enormous. It is a massive, uncooked kebab that she must always walk on and rest her other leg on while she stares into the depths of the street. Her hair is cut as if with a bowl, and she may be the type of person who would paint her own glasses in pastel colors with cheap paint- which would have saved her the money she spent on the glasses she is wearing.

And now she is up!

And she hobbles, and her momentum is more side-to-side then forward. She walks in a slow and unsteady walk. Walking on an outsize kebab is the walking of the inebriated. Now she is at the public fountain. She rinses a plastic bottle and submerges it! She picks up some litter from the street and tosses it into the middle of this oval-shaped, sandstone pool, right here in the middle of the pedestrian walkway, this pool. Now she has her hand in the fountain, and is splashing water into the street, over and over, she removes water from the fountain.

Here: Cluj-Napoca, Romania

10 9 2010 Cluj- Café Corso:

Next to me is a planter in a window. Three spaces hold three long, rectangular plastic containers. The plastic containers are full with dirt, and the plants rise up from the dirt. And the table I sit at is nestled up against the window with these plants, and another table. Between the two tables is an angular space where the white of the floor, and part of the seat of a chair are visible.

Three old men sit beneath an umbrella. One of them strokes beneath his chin, then his lower jaw bone with an index finger that looks like a weathered walnut. The door to the massive cathedral is ajar. I can see this from here. The taxis line up in front of the cathedral. Here, they are white cars, with the yellow taxi sign fixed to the rear-roof section. The side of the cars display a thin, black and white checker decal, just below the passenger windows.

I see through a space in the trees, the waving of a blue flag.





7 9 2010 Cluj: Le General- on the balcony



Prime seat here looking out over the street, and the wavering of the skinny trees in their holes- really, their holes- they are put in the sidewalk and can see fully, how big they are allowed to grow. They will never exceed this metal grate. They will see that one day they will be growing up against a metal plate. They see that one day their roots will be pushing into the stone squares of the walkway, that one day they will face the sad blanket of the asphalt.

Hey and I have here a beer. It says: regele berii in romania. It is called Ursus, which means bear.



Over there is hotel meteor. Overhead, we see the orthodox church dome and steeple, black and tinged with slight oxidation, and even a patch of burnt red from god knows what, and on the other side of the horizon, we see the catholic church. And there is the blue sign that says euro-gsm, and of course in my simplicity, I conjoin these words to create a term for some ecstatic novice traveler recounting his daytrip to the Eiffel Tower. And the table I sit at is front and center of this balcony, and is a blue tile mosaic, with aqua and royal blues and some white interspersing this. It is only a patterned table, there is not an attempt at pictorial representations today. Not at this fucking table at least. And a red van has it’s parking lights flashing and has the passenger wheels jacked up onto the curb and there is nobody to be seen, but the driver’s window is open. This street is right next to the pedestrian walkway. And I count twenty-two of those beige colored umbrellas, the squarish ones that they hoist up over the tables, here. And I see an old man in a beige shirt and camel-colored pants, and old people fade into the sand in their own way don’t they, beginning with their attire. And over there is a woman in a bright green like mint shirt doing little gestures with her hand to a woman in a cream-colored jacket and a bright strawberry shirt, and now the police go by and in this country it is spelled polita. And there is a woman who like bounces from foot to foot as she walks, shifting her considerable weight, and wearing a garish bright green shirt with some olive stripes on it. And looking down, I see a man carrying a purse, and a blue plastic sac, and the woman carries a child in a pink sweatshirt, a white and white trainers, and the woman herself wears a black, veil-like head covering. I wonder about deja-vu. Perhaps it is a sort of sign post, an indicator that you are on the correct path, that you have tapped into a greater conciousness.



6 9 2010 Cluj

4:47

Here at Corso café. Here we see the gothic-style catholic church with it’s mottled, orange and purple tint. There is a man in a tan-leather jacket on the street sitting next to a tree. The base of the tree has been painted white. The streets are full of long, dark-haired girls, and bent, bulbous old women. The city exists beneath a web of wires. Maybe there was a man who was in charge of stringing up the electric /telephone /video /other wires. I picture him carrying the coiled wires on his back, and instead of using a ladder, he would toss up the wires, hoping to hook them on the pole, then moving to the next one, and stringing the city together like with dark garlands. Maybe he had only one arm, and wore a long-sleeved shirt with one sleeve pinned up.







4 9 2010 Cluj-Napoca, Romania

9:16 am



Hotel. The carpet is a nauseating red this morning. I am here, alone in the room. A television shows romanian news. A weather man is in a tomato colored shirt. An anchorwoman delivers sultry. Behind me the kitchen staff has taken up seats and they begin speaking and smoking.

Laser Man Love Cafe

found: Rovinj, Croatia, July 2010

2 9 2010 Beograd: Love Café near the Monument of Vuk




The café has outdoor seating adjacent to a busy street. The seating is enclosed by three rectangular hedges. There is a tram that passes frequently, and it makes a flash of sparks as it passes a certain point. Many people are out, walking this street, and the presence of so many people seems to counter the traffic, in terms of atmosphere, and the scene feels relaxed.

Horns are used liberally in this city, as in, any delay in the flow of traffic seems justification to use the horn. My left hand feels stiff, typing in the cold. I broke my ring finger at the end of July.

The waiter is a stocky man in with a black apron. In the center of the apron is a blue light blue circle with the words, “Love Café” written there. He has short-cropped, dark hair, wears jeans and nondescript white shoes. He asks where I am from, and I say, “Seattle,” and he says, “Ah, USA.” I nod, and he says, “How you like our Serbia?” I answer affirmatively and he goes to place my coffee order. I spot the man on the street with the green laser. He scribbles his laser on buildings and at cars as he paces near the bus stop bench. He wears a black hood and I cannot see his face.

Last night, the girl at the Sun Hostel, near St. Savo’s Cathedral told me that if I take a left out of the hostel door, and walk, I will see lots of big houses. “We’re in the nice part of town,” she tells me. Now I am here and it is cold, so I will move inside. Maps are mostly useless to me in this town because I have not taken the time to learn Cyrillic, and while my map is written with Latin letters, the streets are all in Cyrillic, so you see.

Here: Beograd

sintra, portugal

31 8 2010 Beograd. Int: Café


933-948

We see the glow of the ice-cream display case. We see the empty glass that reads, “voda vrnjci.” the table is black, and there is a small piece of cloth, like a decorative placemat, green with raised white threads, and loose fringes on the ends- a rectangle of fabric that is on the table beneath a piece of glass. The glass has a sort of rubber piece beneath each corner, and this prevents the glass from slipping off of the table. There is a knarled plant in a corner, and it is not neat enough to be fake, I guess. The roots, or branches sort of arch out of it and the leaves are askew and it is a sort of ball perching precarious on a black, possibly wicker vase- like a big vase- I don’t know the term for it, but it is about two feet off of the floor, and is semi-conical. And there is a ‘jelen pivo’ dispenser in front of me, and the base of this is a pretty tomato-red, and on top of the red is a silver, steel piece, like, capped over the red box, and the jelen pivo tap rises out of this in a white ceramic cylinder. And the tap itself is a piece of brass, wrapped around the white ceramic, and has two black handled levers, and a little oval shaped sign on top of all of this, that says, ‘pils.’



A plastic sack of ice-cream cones is next to this beer machine. The sack is open, and air is able to touch the ice-cream cones if it wants to; the air mingles as it pleases. And there is a television on the far wall and it plays the fashion network, and so there is an endless stream of dresses strutting across a catwalk.



In the room, on the left side, in the corner, I see a group. Two or more members of the party are in the shadows, and I see two more on stools with their backs to me, and one is in a tan sort of blazer, the true color is obscured by the dim lights, and the man next to him is in what seems to me, a hunter green sweater. The man in the tan blazer is animated and moves his left arm in pointing gestures. I hear claps and noises as if someone is amiably slapping at the table.



The girl who works here is in black, and she sits behind the bar and touches her fingers to her mouth. Her hair is curly and is back and in a pony tail. In the light, it appears that the pony tail glows amber and that the hair on her forehead and temples is black. Someone is next to her, and appears to me as a white elbow only. To the left of me the room is enclosed by windows, floor to ceiling, as they say, and the windows are encased in black frames, presumably metal, and there are three brick columns interspersed between the windows. The brick columns are painted white. The bricks are rough and protrude, and seem to me to be aiming for an old, reclaimed stone look. To my right, there are more of these white bricks, and they form a wall.



My peripheral vision catches the flash of passing car lights: white, red, white, red. A little red number glows red on the ice-cream case in front of me. I assume it is a temperature display. I cannot read the number.

Here: 28.8.2010: Serbia, Gucha, and Friends

Belgrade: Café Snezana
822-837pm
29 8 10




Look. We see the maroon-colored napkin crumpled in the white plate, and the maroon napkin in the wicker basket, brought by the waiter who wore a maroon-colored, short-sleeved button down, tucked into black pants. He is one of those stocky guys who slicks back his hair and wears thick-framed glasses. The people in my line of vision wear either white hooded sweatshirts or black sweaters, it seems.

Oh, and then to my right I see a guy in a tangerine polo sitting with a guy in a brown v-neck. And then there is the family-table on my left with a mom, her older teenage daughter, her younger daughter, and a thick little kid. A few moments before, the boy, who actually, is not thick, but is essentially a walking burek, bumbled over towards me, touched at every chair at my table, and then lingered, clutching the back of the chair across from me, staring up at the television where there is a basketball game on. I am vaguely aware of the fact that the world championships of basketball are currently being played.

Two girls come in, take a table close to mine. The waiter comes to them, takes my menu and hands it to them. One of the girls is on her phone tapping out a text message. It is one of those phones with a full keypad. Her friend looks at the menu. Now the girl sets her phone down. Now her friend hands her the menu and sits staring at the television screen with her elbows resting on the table, her hands folded beneath her chin. The girl who is now reading the menu, has a lilac colored pullover wrapped around her waist, and now that she sits, I think of how worms give birth via a ‘saddle’ a little discolored band that contains the baby worms/ eggs/ whatever comes before a full-grown worm.

There is a girl in a denim-colored sweater with a bag covered in sequins.
There is a couple both sporting sweaters draped over their shoulders, tied around their necks.

It is dark out, but this is the main pedestrian street in Belgrade- amazingly long, actually, and it is still lit by the stores. The street, at times, is narrow, and reminds me of being in a fully enclosed shopping mall.

I have my notebook on the table, next to my computer. I have the pen I received in Bosnia. I was wearing my cast, gips, it is called, and we were at a shisha lounge in Sarajevo, and the proprietor saw my gips, ran to get a pen, and insisted on signing it, after which, he handed me the pen. I took the pen, and then left, heading to the Bosnian ‘klinicki’ which was the plan anyhow. The waiter puts my bill in a red squarish glass, bigger than a shot glass- reminds me of a candle holder, and on the outside, it says, in gold letters, gorki list, and there is a sort of menacing plant sprouting from the letters, also in gold. A fly strokes the table cloth with its back legs before flying off.

___________________________________________





Belgrade, vracar across from st. savos at “café & factory” 834pm 28 8 10

The window reflects my face just to the left of the giant red & decal on the window, and just below the green dome of St Savos temple. Inside the menu, on the bottom of the last page is written:

“ …it was a long work, even longer is ahead of us. Thank You for being a part of this.”

What is intended with a message like this? And the cigarette smoke from the next table drifts right to my nostrils. And St Savos is lit up white and the dome is tender and is about robin’s eggs tonight. And tonight we are thinking about a little experiment, about writing this over the next four months, as we are about to enter Turkey, and head down into the middle east, or wherever the fuck we go, right. 

PREVIOUS:

Ljubljana café 28 7 10

Looking up an alley. Some thick, squatting salt’n pepper, receding hair line and bald spot guy leans on my chair for balance, suddenly- shouting inside to a waitress, “ sorry.” it sounds like, “soddy.” old people tend to grip the backs of any chair they pass. The seniors among us are walking in a perpetual fall. every step unsure. The sign says, in pink and white chalk letters: pose ban. Looks like the menu was written in pink and gone over in white. Two guys picking trash with remarkably, glasses, black bow-ties, white shirts tucked into black pants, and white gloves, first thought is that they are white collar criminals doing restitution. I see one of these motorized bicycles a dingy maroon one- and wonder if they go fast enough to be worth it.

_______________________________________

Morning after trn fest animation night:

A woman has a plate-full of pasteries for breakfast. One waitress seems to orchestrate this entire affair. A man with a travel-shirt sits with another man. Safari shirt? Call it whatever, but I see a vent at mid-back, senseless epaulets, and a sad bald man drowning in an off-white sack of a shirt. There are three people wearing 'bmw germany 2010' shirts. What the fuck, man.

_____________________________________

4 8 2010 kavarna kiparna Ljubljana

A black flyer for ‘red passion’ Italian mojitos. A collection of five stone sculptures in the grass behind me. An old woman reading a magazine that features pink flowers on the cover. She catches me staring, and flips the cover under. Maybe it is a flora-philia thing, flower-porn, right. Up close shots of open flowers and pistils and multiple bees entering a flower. The woman wears a scarlet hat, a bright pink tank top, and purple pants with brown loafers. She looks, actually, like an amiable, free-spirited grandmother. One day too, I will be an amiable old relic, clinging to garish displays of allegiance to free thinking and, like, hanging at college coffee shops because it makes me feel young, right.

________________________________________________

21 8 2010 gucha

730-745

Old man warped in tooth again and always, right. Is this the way into the place. Well at my table is my friend in his Serbian hat and he is staring at his phone, because he joined us at ‘writing time,’ and today when he sat next to the girl in the polka dots, it was like a flower, and the bees came in between them. And to my right is the other one who writes her impressions of the thing that is here, and well, we have the coffee and palinkovac and the trumpets are still playing and there is the man in the bright orange shirt and his too-white shoes are crossed at the ankle, and there behind me is like a little man in blue and... girls tug often at their bras and adjust themselves and it looks claustrophobic, this. And perhaps the chair in front of me could be considered art noveau, but that would be a compliment, and the little funny man who was held under the water for too long, today, he took us to the gucha trumpet museum, and there were no trumpets, but only this pseudo-folk art, and all of it was for sale, and I was harsh and I said that it was just a gucha flea market. And there is the motorcycle revving itself up and here the drivers are reckless and it makes me feel okay. And in the air, is the smoke from the Serbian wedding soup and it is cabbage and pork and beans, I think. I have never been good with the naming of food. And the coffee cup is white ceramic and is written all over with orange Cyrillic and there to my left also, above the stew-fire is an umbrella for Jelen beer and it is yellow on the bottom, and black on top, and a big buck, is the mascot./ logo. And my friend is smoking and we could all smoke, too if we wanted. And there is the faded red yugo and it seems like it could be the kind of throwback car that could become popular again. And there is a thick hand on a man’s shoulder. And there is a man in denim waders and a pink teeshirt tucked in and you can see the chain around his neck, too, and the sheen of sweat and smoke is on the pores that we can see. And now here is the Slovene guy and he says, was sup, and there is a hanging flower and it is yellow and there is one that is laventder and pink and white and there is not yellow, and when I list these colors, it is not all one multi-colored flower, it is many, that is what I mean. and there is a guy snapping to the trumpet music, and the dance for these songs is like a thrusting stomping motion, and we could easily transition to Russia where we are squatting and kicking too, right, and there is a chandelier, or a light fixture that is hanging and it has six lights hung in two triangles, right, and my palinkovac is black with a yellow lemon in it. And my friend and the Slovene have moved to another table, and my friend is saying that we are here and working. Okay.



20 8 2010 gucha, Serbia

402-412

Behind me they have the pig on a spit. In front of me a table of men who take their shirts off before they sit. And the music here is trumpets, too. Well, and for this moment, the laptop is on the table, and of course this gets some looks. But that is forgotten, and now, and and. My hat is on the table. It is black, and the letters 'nes' are in white, and below the hat there is a spill of sugar, and the crystals catch the light rather niely, and if I was close enough and my eyes were good enough, I would guess that the little sugar crystals cast shadows and it is a landscape of glacial proportion for the minutia among us. And there is a fly, and it is on the sugar, and is it eating? But what is the main diet of a fly, and why do they land on my arms and legs and why do they know instinctively to make three passes before moving on. And who is this old gentleman in front of me. His teeth are terrible, and look like horrific stalactites in a dank cave, right, and his cane is ridged and spirals upwards, and the others all seem to know him and address him with the formal greeting. And I like this place because they bring the bill quickly, and now a young boy comes in and shakes the hand of the old man. And now the guys are on their second round of drinks and are screaming and whistling at their table in the corner, and the old man taps his cane, and the time is about right to go from here.

Here: 17.8.2010 Ljubljana: Thrift-store Eyeglasses and a Denim Vest

performance art, Tukad Munga

17 8 2010 Ljubljana


12:07-12:22

Here to my right on a tiny oval-shaped tray, we see the empty green bottle that contained mineral water. We see the glass and it is empty and clear. We see the white ceramic coffee mug with the hint of napkin beneath it.



We see in front of where we sit, a sink with a stone basin, and it seems either to be an artifact or to imitate an artifact.



And actually, directly in front of us, we see a wicker basket full of lemons- seven are visible. We see on a shelf below that, seven grapefruits in a basket, and below this, we see an open black bowl, containing five bananas.



To the left and on a ledge overlooking the café, we see the effigy of a trollesque witch, perched with her broom and an open mouth. Her teeth are like little kernels of corn, and her nose is pointy like a beak, and her eyebrows are white.



A funny little man with a denim vest, thrift-store eyeglasses, and a backpack worn low, carries a bundle of newspapers in a plastic bag is trundling in. He accosted me before at another café two weeks ago. He notices that my cast has been removed. He comes and glances invasively at my computer screen, speaking in Slovene. I reply, “yes of course” in Slovene. He tells me that I "shouldn’t work during the day," that I might "fool them." I thank him for this and he plods away.



I cannot recall ever seeing someone writing in public before. There is always the hint of cliché when you mention that you are writing at a café, yet, I never feel like I have seen it. Me, I can’t afford to consider clichés; when you are semi-nomadic, the concept of office is tempered by practicality.

Here: 16.8.2010 Ljubljana

Here on stari trg. 32, at the slascicarna café.


Here where an excavation is happening literally in front of you. The thing is of course, surrounded by that bright orange plastic fencing. That stuff that is probably in a big roll, and they unroll it and weave a long metal pole through the loops and they have a bright and temporary fence. It is this. And there is the yellow sign to my right that says ‘palacinke’ and this means pancake and there is a little stick drawing of a man cooking on a grill, holding arms above his head, each arm holding a cooking utensil. What about that? And the guys in front of me are dressed in green with white stripes. It is a bright mint green. Not as full as Christmas green, there is more yellow in it, but it feels synthetic nonetheless, and the white stripes of their outfits are two, around the ankles, and two around the wrists, and two around their abdomen at the level of the navel. An old woman to my left stares at a window where there is a doily-type lacy tablecloth and I realize that her shawl looks almost exactly the same as this. Does she realize this? Is all action motivated by this sort of narcissus at the pond behavior? No. but it happens, man. Well it is break time at the construction site. One guy stands watching the four others in the pit, who are sitting/ squatting. the man who drives the digging machine/ scooper thing, sits alone, facing away from the others. A child screams horribly behind me and it is a cry that seems to convincingly advocate vasectomies.

Blog Crisis!

here's a video from my grandparent's farm

Okay, well my brother, even,
 has said he's given up on following me.

So it's like,
I'm not sure what the purpose of this medium is right now, but I sense some value here still.

I have dedicated myself to a writing project for the summer, and I don't want to just write mediocre, semi-fictitious accounts while trying to focus on this other thing.

So whoever sends me a note, or lets me know what they want, I'll write to you, give some little updates for you, post pictures. Let's try that for a month. Really- anyone- even if it's you, little brother. 

Okay,

Ciao from Istria

Antwerpen

Here, the boy throws the hand of the giant into the river. Antwerpen translates roughly to, "threw the hand in the river."

This is a man pawing through the dumpster beneath my window. Notice his teal shirt which matches nicely the board he is posing with.

Grote Markt

Antwerp. Grote Markt.

Arbeid Vrijheid means roughly, "labor freedom."

  

Later that night, a rap concert took place at this site, and a man passed out political flyers.

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Grotesque Italian Septuagenarians

Brin the Croatian found a job in a hostel on an Adriatic island.
His ex-girlfriend, Nema, currently works with me, and is translating and sharing selected excerpts of his diary. I edit and post these screeds. This young man, whom I have never met, will help you get a sense of the journey that leads to a life of living and working in a hostel.


And Daniel?



Much like Brin, I’m in Croatia, working at a hostel.

“Hey! Isn’t this that old thing where you go to the doctor and say, ‘uh. I’ve got this friend who is having trouble peeing…’”



Well think about it. I mean, have you heard about when a bear breaks into the village convenience store?



I am saturating the brain with esoteric, homebrewed walnut and rosemary liqueurs.

I wear an oxygen mask attached to a shisha, and in this way I feel the lungs flapping like a gleaming trout, gasping in the bilge of the aluminum fishing boat near the black boots of some sadistic off-duty cop named Arlen out fishing with his dad who smokes through a stoma while tremblingly clutching a limp and bait-less rod.



For me, hygiene has been reduced to occasional immersions in the sea.

All grammar has descended into monosyllabic grunts, barely intelligible in written form.

The closest I will be to writing will be seeking the proper place on the keyboard to place my sluggish, trembling fingers. Hopefully my jerky, stroke-victimish trembles will correspond to what Nema is telling me: I can promise nothing more than this.

Well from Brin to Nema to me to you:
 
 
 

In Split we cross the bridge and soon we follow the tracks of the train. And then we walk, next to the sea, on our way to a club.


From Pula to Split, I spent the whole day, stuck in the seat of a bus. The drivers pull over every two hours to smoke out front by the door.

I have met up with an old friend, who lives in the city alone.


editor’s note:
I made a similar trek from Rovinj to Split and soon found myself within the walls of Diocletian’s palace. I stumbled into an alcove, and caught an a cappella group in the act of singing. Grotesque Italian septuagenarians penned the singers in against the rounded back wall. It seemed as if the singers were about to be executed by a senior firing squad. I made a short, covert video in the hopes of documenting this before wandering, disappointed, towards the repellently named, “Booze and Snooze Hostel.



Victor stays with his tiny old mother in a nice apartment in Split. I left my things in his room next to his bed on the floor. We made our way into the night lit by the light of the moon.



editor’s note:
At this point, Nema has insisted I make record of the fact that she has always suspected Brin and Victor to be raging homosexuals, and that at this very moment, they are probably somewhere in Romania, “broke-packing it,” to use her term.



After one beer, I took Victor’s keys, and left for some burek and strudel. Victor and I were hugging goodbye, and I decided to lift him and twirl.

Victor let out a bit of a squeal as I hoisted him up and began a slow spin. It seemed funny, to do at the time, but the bar was a tight-packed space.

Victor’s right side made contact with a couple, also engaged in some hoisting (drinks, not bodies). They let out a cry and they found themselves soaked. The guy in his pivo, the girl in her gemist.



editor’s note:
Pivo means beer. Gemist is water plus wine; it means mixed. Also, I find it relevant to point out that “the drinks, not bodies,” comment was actually in there. I believe that this is the first evidence of wit from this Brin guy.

Nema is being elusive as to what he looks like, but up till now, I picture him as one of those guys on the brink of becoming fat, a little socially awkward and shy: pudgy in everything. In America, he’d probably dress like he was always about to go play basketball. We‘ll see.


As for the couple with the spilled drinks, no doubt this was another one of those massive Dalmatians stuffed into a putrid Ben Sherman shirt, dragging an awkward, long-limbed girlfriend into the stench of the clubs. I’ve seen this quite often, and it is really getting to be a major source of annoyance. Some of these girls look like they were stretched on the rack. I mean, I’ve been known to like an occasional tall chick, but for some of these elongated-Gumby-types, their length does not always translate into beauty.



The woman whose gemist I had spilled, soon began to shout. Her boyfriend realized that he was wet too, so soon he was yelling as well. I said I was sorry to the girl and the guy, but they just would not calm down. I have learned not to make much response when people are yelling like this. Instead, for some reason, I just nod and watch how they move. My passivity makes them angrier at times, but I’ve never quite learned to get mad. Somehow it becomes like weathering a storm. It’s raining and you are no longer dry, but you must keep walking through the rain, and after a while, you accept that you are wet.



editor’s note:
I found this section of particular interest. The guy seems a bit strained in his attempts at stoicism, doesn’t he? I appreciate his outlook on one level, but I know that when I’m yelling at some underling, peon or entry-level-incompetent, it makes me extremely-fucking-angrier if they don’t show some indication that I am wounding them. So I just end up going all out and unleash a litany of grievances and accusations, and fuck burning the bridge I am strafing their villages with everything I have and there are no people left alive to cross that bridge probably anywhere in a massive radius, say 500 miles, and now, fifty years later, the unused bridge has covered itself meekly in mosses, lichens, and grasses to blend with the encroachment of the wild, and the parts that are nearest to the water have realized that no one is near and have stripped away their paint so that in total privacy they may enjoy fully exposing themselves to the water and the sun.



I finally have my burek with meso, and my strudel with cherry inside. I have a table alone in the back, and I feel myself beginning to breathe. I usually am rather reflective on transitional nights like these.

editor‘s note:
On my first night in Spit, trundling with beers in both back pockets and both hands, I make my way to some late-night hole serving pizza. The lighting is frantic and the place is tinged with the odor of feet. Just as I begin daubing at the excess grease on my slice at a corner table, some American enters and begins talking loudly. About eighty-percent of Americans that I meet on the road are fucking obnoxious and just basically serve as jarring reminders of why I left. This American is a giant black man in a camel-colored puffy-jacket with a faux-fur lined hood. He reeks of the cheapest of colognes, old cigarettes and the stale, dried beer smell specific to urinals in heavily trafficked bars. He does not sit squarely at his table, which means he is too close to me. Now he stands up, while talking loudly, and removes his monstrous coat. He is either oblivious or unconcerned or both, with the fact that the worn, black-stained bottoms of this coat brush my arm and leg as he places it on the back of his chair. He does not acknowledge my presence. I need something stronger than inebriation if I must eat here. A quick scan of my pockets reveals nothing stronger. I finish my pizza in the streets by a dead fountain.

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How to Find Work in a Hostel

Ohh! I have a treat for you!


I have insights from Brin. Last year, he found a job in a hostel on an Adriatic island. His ex-girlfriend, Nema, currently works with me, and is translating and sharing excerpts of his diary. This way you get a sense of life working in a hostel.

Me?

I’m still in Croatia, about to begin working in a hostel. Since many of you would question this and say,

“Hey! Isn’t this that old thing where you go to the doctor and say, ‘uh. I’ve got this friend who is having trouble peeing…’”

Just so you know that this is legitimate, imagine me in a hostel: have you heard about when a bear breaks into the village convenience store?

I will be saturating the brain with esoteric, homebrewed walnut and rosemary liqueurs.
I have attached an oxygen mask to the shisha, so that I might feel the lungs flapping like a gleaming trout, gasping in the muddy water at the bottom of the aluminum fishing boat, before being tossed harshly into the stern by some sadistic off-duty cop named Arlen, out fishing with his dad who smokes through a stoma while tremblingly clutching a limp rod with no bait.





Again, a big thank you to my friend Nema- (ti si lijepa! velika gemist za vas, mala sova!). Well, you read it here. My parenthetical note to Nema is the last of my month long study of Croatian. Those fragile, budding flowers of linguistic knowledge will be the first ones to die in the coming sunless days.


Hygiene will be reduced to an occasional swim in the sea.


All grammar will be monosyllabic grunts, barely intelligible in written form.

Hopefully I can sit up from my drooling, decaying state in order that I may faithfully transcribe at least something for you.

Hopefully I can work through my self-imposed incapacitation, Nema’s thick Croatian accent, and the translated, masturbatory musings of a guy named Brin, probably a douche-bag, I don't know. I hope I can find something of value in all of this for you. In any case, I won’t remember. We’ll all find out what happened when it’s done.

Do ja ja then!

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My best friend had her birthday on the 27th, and maybe she will be a pilot soon.

Happy birthday, JK!

I always thought of her as one of those large flightless birds. She walks bird-like with an oversized big-toe. She is a balanced avian beauty, combining the fearsome demeanor of the cassowary with the femininity of the ostrich.


The femininity of the ostrich, I get from cartoons where the feathers of the ostrich become the skirt of the French maid. Also, my friend does love to clean! The fearsomeness of the cassowary I get because they disembowel people in the forested areas of Australia, and she has a real strength to her (editor’s note: if I were writing this, I would have mentioned the probability that before a victim is disemboweled, the bird has probably employed the visual tactic of scaring the literal shit out of the victim by exposing them to the unbearable sight of an unnaturally-blue fin protruding from the black-feathered skull. What I imagine, is some bogan in knee-high socks catatonic and trembling with fright, lowering slightly into a defecatory stance while the bird waits patiently for the emptying of the bowels, therefore enjoying the disemboweling process as a surprisingly hygienic affair, as far as the cassowary is concerned). Well, I hope her birthday goes well, she really is a dear friend of mine.

This is the beginning of a new adventure for me, dear diary. I am headed to an island called, Brac (pronounced, “Bratch”) off the coast of Split, Croatia. I will record some of my notes here so that it may be of some use to future (editor’s note: this guy's writing bores me to fucking death, this guy Brin, and Nema thinks I am writing what she is translating, but I am smiling and nodding and instead writing this. I have the oxygen mask connected to the shisha, and am wearing this and surviving only on whatever oxygen manages to pass through the dense smoke of the strawberry-flavored tobacco "blend." How presumptuous is she, anyway, to read to me from some thick-headed naïf’s diary that she is still clearly in love with. Look, I’ll save you the boring translation: go stay at a hostel, and treat every employee as your new best friend, and soon you will find out about opportunities because all of these people know each other. If it is meant to be, soon you will find a hostel job. Also, try to travel during off-seasons, or slow-seasons, and you can find easier work. Make contacts. Build a list of potential places to stay. You see? Hostels are full of a wealth of information if you find a good one. If you are in a bad one, it is like spending the night in a cafeteria. Oh- hey, look up the name Nema- her parents were quite funny).

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