💾 Archived View for automat-svet.net › unschool › novices › krozruch › notebook › prose › indian_mot… captured on 2024-12-17 at 10:03:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I say goodbye to the ornery British blue shortthair cat I have been feeding at my friend's appartment for a few days and flit around for a while "tidying". By tidying I essentially mean postponing, since I'll be back tomorrow: I tap the tea leaves in his tea clasp thing into his bin and then put his mokka pot, still full of grounds, into the sink with the oversized "Proper tea is theft" mug one of his students bought him, and the Little My Moomin mug which, now I come to think about it, together says plenty enough to be getting along with about at least one of us. I gather up my two 15" ThinkPad computers, shoving them together in the Deuter Giga Pro backpack I've been using and abusing as an autistic day bag for not much under ten years. Filling it way beyond what I would guess to be my typical 5-8kg, I briefly debate taking his copy of John Gray's Feline Philosophy, one of the books I have been reading while I've been there. Taking it into my hands, I read up to wherever it was I got to on the first day, read the start of the next - the second - chapter, about people talking about their pursuit of happiness like it was a project, smile inwardly with thoughts of zen and taoism and what not, and leave it on his desk where I had been working. I throw on my overshirt, put on my shoes, haul the bag over my shoulder, lock up and leave to pick up that book for him at the Wine Bar over the road and take the 6 back.
All of this, somehow, is like priming a pump. It starts in the corridor or the stairwell or whatever you would call it. Or it starts—I'm writing this while catching up with myself getting on for a year later—when I close the last book, down tools (put away pens and close notebooks and / or laptops). It starts, that is, since the reading is more important than the writing here, at the cessation of inputs: it was years ago, I remember being on the metro; I was stood reading, as ever, or it might merely have been that I had been observing people; I would have been on the A line here in Prague since the train would then have braked into the station Muzeum, "přestup na linku C" where the doors would have opened on to a full platform; for years then I would remember how a "donnée"—a particular type of these intrusive daydreams which germinates and sprouts, so it seems (these thirty odd years later it remains an unproven conviction, perhaps, worse, a falsified hypothesis) into everything a story needs to grow into a flower, a weed, a bush, or a tree, flowed through me, was me, as I flowed with the human traffic, until the doors opened on the wagon of the newer metro train that was pulling into the platform on the C line some 20m above.
I ought, I suppose, to stop talking of myself and my mental process as if I were a computer; being "autistic", monotropic, some bothersome kind of other, too many people are wont to believe it and these lines of mine are, as is true of blaitherers of everywhere and everywhen of human spacetime, more human, further from the mean outputs of large language models trained, for the most part, on the typically perfunctory cogitations of neurotypical cybernauts. Still, when it starts up, it's like the daemons spawned when a computer boots up. There is a context, a certain mood I'm in, an attitude, a number of primed topics and themes. Each of these exchanging inputs and outputs, flowing out of the one into another, from that into yet another or back again. There is then my environment. Inputs from my eyes and ears, my skin and feet on the floor. Because what there typically isn't now when it begins for real is a proximate task or intellectual stimulae, a manual task to do or any form of distraction. And so it's like "roll VT".
Two keys in the door. One this way, the other the other. Names on doors over four floors. Gas meters clumsily retrofitted. Those old First Republic faux marble floors. An obligatory passive aggressive noticeboard, perhaps. Mailboxes.
Holešovice. A marketably hip quarter of Prague that feels more like an algorithmically rootless city break "Europe" than many another. A year on and so, some months back now as I revisit this patchwork of notes to stitch them somehow together, I was to proofread - essentially rewrite - some copy about a handful of yuppy hubs round here for a guide to how one might hang out and consume while giving oneself the notion of being enlightened.
It's different, distinctive. Self-consciously artistic. Art that's closer to the art washing that would come up when I looked up the yuppy trap projects I was looking up for that guide in the New Year than it is to anything Bohumil Hrabal would once have talked about with VladimĂr BoudnĂk who had lived like Beatniks up the way in the fifties.
Physiologically, a tolerable level of stimulation and so I'm not agitated as such, fighting with myself in that invitation to struggle that is my psyche.. This because I don't much know Holešovice, though I have known it for ten years now, and twenty in places; yes, The Cross Club with its weird and once-wonderful sculptures outside, familiar now for twenty years since the days I can picture now, of riding trams with an ex three, four lifetimes removed, heading out to the Doxx art gallery or somewhere. There was then a period of going to the obnoxious Bitcoin place. But all told, it's a place I come on days off, come out to to pick up books at ValentĂnská, the antikvariát that used to be round the corner from the library, and to see Fantomas or catch up with PĂÄŤamalá, Estee, the cat we rescued from Maruška's when I was still doing whatever it was I did when I rented an "office" in her old art room.
It's a hot day. Pleasant, in fact, though for much of July it was in the 30s in Prague. There are forest fires all over Europe, tourists and inhabitants both have been airlifted out of Rhodes, though it was raining as I was on my way out.
I've been booking trains and planes and autobuses to grudgingly return to Britain for a week or two and return, more enthusiastically, by train. I look back over my journal files and feel my way back into how my writing was "kicking up" in this period.. I feel it.. The semester wound down even from Easter when the uncertificated students were released from the burdensome duty to attend their weekly ninety minutes of Advanced Medical English; something I had always prepped for with much stress. I was not to have my first oral exams until this year - a couple of weeks ago now - and so all I had left was the Czech for Foreigners exams.
A note from the 7th July, just a little over two weeks before I go to Fantomas's this time to cat sit: Commit Bakunin section of Perseverating Hrabal. Which brings back, viscerally, this time, the day I was sat belatedly reading one of the tens or hundreds of zines I had downloaded to my system from the Anarchist Library and other places
The addictology guy. I should maybe check my mails.
I hate going home.
A braless woman with pretty little tits walks out onto the pavement maybe to have a cigarette. She's wearing a fleecy top. Androgynous. Genderless-is-more. Stern and sexy.
Molotov. The window is full of . The second window is full up of cans. A manufacturer of
Fair coloured dog. I greet him - I invariably have cause to laugh at those memes about people who warmly greet dogs before they greet people -
There is an Indian motorcycle on the pavement outside of the next block.
Indian is so much prettier than Harley tend to be, though I saw a decent one the other day.
At the traffic lights... Videos. Short documentary pieces about . Indian keeps its name but seeks to contextualise the decision and attone for it rather than bury it
Marginalie. The videos in Reality Bites, which I was noisily discussing some time before (I had quickly noted a passage in my *scratch* buffer and had been dicussing it since, usually while at my usual Beyond the Pale table at the literary awards.
Zines. A book. Can be printed. Free with every motorcycle.
oral history
I walk past Cross Club. I have known the place for years and last went there for an Anarchist Book Club.
From Cross Club to Nádražà Holešovice it's a guy who has it that the whole project can fuck off.
Entered on [2023-07-26 Wed 14:23]