oh, clary, it's not that huge. chicago is grand and there's only one common meeting. rest will be splintered... think of it. eva, walter, soz.... come on to chicago clary!
I suspect Clary will be there, dag!
Our Clary fears no country!
Intrepid A2K traveller extraodinaire!
wish you were coming, too, missy.
dagmaraka wrote:wish you were coming, too, missy.
Oh, I wish I could, too, dag!
The one thing that stops me is that I can't pay for the fare! :wink:
Oz is so far away from Chicago, it's so bloody expensive to travel to far away places, these days ......
Dammit!
Swap locations for a day, Foxy!
I wish we could! It's 4°C at the moment....
A coolish one here today, Foxy. A mere 26 C. Very pleasant. But
yesterday! Momma mia: 43 C!
Excruciating!
4°C? 4°C? I'll take 4°C
We have -15°C!!!
I can't even imagine that, dag! Agony!
78 degrees here, but the temperature is expected to plummet to 73 this evening. I'd better grab a sweater.
Sounds like the swamp is the best place to be right now. Perfect!
still better than when it was -17F in Boston for a week some 3 years back. Didn't leave the house for 3 days at all.
life......so tough, msolga.
It is, it is, dag! Well, it does seem tough to someone like me whose never lived in a place where it snows. It's
incomprehensible, I tell you!
I'm all wired. Taut, tense, tight, nerved and roaring. Something like that.
It's weird. All winter long I've oscillated between mellow/contented and vaguely depressed. Low-key. I didnt mind. Now it's like I caught something. Last week or two or three. Must be spring. So now I'm oscillating instead between eager/excited and just plain panicked instead.
I walk down the snowy steps and sidestreets from the Fishers Bastion and I just want to scream. Or jump. Either. Dance would work too. They were playing these cheesy house / club remixes in Miro up there and I could just envisage myself bouncing around in some massive collective of clubbers lost in the trance of dance and just madly grinning at each other when they did look up at one another at all. Or, I dunno. Step into a car drive somewhere. Music loud.
But I dont have a car and its Sunday evening, so I walk down to the bridge and cross it through the mean strafing of snow - it's colder over the Danube than in between the buildings on either side. Just all wired, that's all. Sweeping up random clots of snow and ice from the bridge leaning and hurling it into the river below. Yeah, in between eager anticipation of something to happen - for surely, something must happen - and the helpless panic of knowing that nothing will. Today. And I'm alone with my adrenalin, that came from God knows where and has no reason for being.
Yeah I could jump into a car or into someone's bed or take something stiff to drink or swallow, in fact if I had any bad friends I'da surely done something thats not helpful if you have to work the next morning. But I dont have any bad friends. I dont even know where to get drugs in this town. So I'll just carry this knotted ball around and try to go to bed with it and make it disappear.
Being on A2K is one of those things that kinda, slowly, laboriously, wears it off or makes it dissolve. Kinda grinds away at it till it melts, layer by layer. Giving me enough calm to sleep or, for that matter, just be and be contented a bit. Take a bath. At the same time it feels like a shame. To wear it off like that, wear all this energy away till I'm quiet in my old place again. It could go somewhere I guess. Jump. Yeah right. All I want is a family, after all.
Last night I felt exactly the same, and also ended up around 10 at the California Coffee Company hammering away at my laptop. But then it was Saturday night and after CCC closed at midnight I just couldnt bear locking the door behind me and sitting in my room hearing the taxis drive on and off on the square below while smashing time to pieces on A2K. Besides, Susannah was working anyway, so I headed over to her cafe at 2 or something even if I dont particularly like it, too fancy, too crowded. And crowded it was, goddamn, layer of three, four people thick to even get to the bar. But Susannah made her way out through them instead, that was nice, embraced me asked me how I was. I told her that I'd lost my passport and asked for a wodka orangejuice.
It's true I somehow lost my passport. well I know how. I went to Prague with this folderthingie with the flight ticket in it and I put the passport in there too on account of it being practical through the checks and stuff. Came back the same way, and kept the folder in the inside pocket of my coat, because I had to turn in the ticket to get reimbursed. I kept forgetting that so I kept carrying this folder around, and I totally forgot that it had my passport too. So, and, now its gone. God knows.
Fuc king thing is I found out when I was wrapping up an impulse booking of a flight to Frankfurt for next week. (I stopped before ordering it, luckily). And I was going to Frankfurt to see my German friend. Cause she is well nice and I havent seen her since last summer and with her kid she's not likely to come to Budapest soon and I long to hold her close and hang out quiet. Spend a day, a night (I'm hoping). So. Now I cant go I guess. Embassy tomorrow. Wonder who's got my passport now.
So I took my wodka/juice and uncomfortably stood in some corner, cause I'm awkward that way in a place that's just all too busy and bustling full of happy groups of people and no dancefloor either. Kinda looking thru Pestiest to see if there was somewhere to go. This kid starts talking to me, just randomly, do I know where the toilet is cos his gf needs a wee, where am I from? The usual and I get drawn in reluctantly, but he's funny all animated and jumpy-eyed and laughing and moving haphazardly. His gf is a short, nice girl. We all go sit down somewhere and somehow I just start off on this fast, gesturing skit about life is a circle (you know, the kind of random excited talk you have with people who are already really drunk) - you know life is a circle and it's mean, really, if you think about it cause - well, you're born right, and life is just like a long line - like, you're here <gesturing>, and life just stretches out like a long line right ahead of you <gestures to the distance> - "no, its a circle!," homeboy chips in, but I say no this is when you're just born right, just like - at the beginning still, and they nod, and I go and then, you know, you have this line ahead of you and they just start pulling at it, pulling (I'm now dragging an imaginary line, an imaginary thread, with effort into a curve, and more into a curve still) and it goes like this, and it goes ever more bent until - presto! - its a circle! And you come back right where you start! And again, and again!
They loved it. Were just gaping and laughing and yeah-yeahing, and of course seeing how I was talking fast and they didnt speak English so much they just liked it all the more, girl drunkenly elbowing the boy and telling him hey we found a good one this guy is cool, he's funny - and well, ok, so we were friends after that. They had their fifth or sixth large beer and I had my second and third wodka and they told me I was an angel, no a fairy (and they didnt know that means gay) and then were teaching me Hungarian phrases and homeboy got up to dance to Madness and after two hours they dragged me off to Szoda a street and a half down where her flatmate worked. Except homeboy came later and promptly lost his way cause of going left instead of right and so we were sitting there for half an hour chatting and guiding him there through the cell. She was quite nice really.
It was pretty funny. And after they'd staggered into a taxi when Szoda closed I went back to Susannah's place and stood at the bar and looked at Susannah and somehow got into this chat with a cool homeboy (the breakbeat headz kinda, coolly laid-back gentleminded guy that always kinda vaguely nods his head at everything he says) and this girl my age about - god knows, I didnt understand much of what he was saying, too difficult the Hungarian. But she was exactly my age and we agreed that 2002 was the bad year, that was when we were crazy, and only since did things become better again. And about how you know - in '57 you had rock n roll in '67 the summer of love in '77 punk and in '87 house but what happened in '97? Drum n bass for me, homeboy suggested. Return to simplicity and songs and just music, said she, and gave Bjork as example, and even that seemed to make sense. I hugged Susannah and went home.
OK, so that was one night gone and this one was actually pretty good - better than posting about Mohammed cartoons. But just all the more restless the next day again. Restless, yeah, thats how I am today <nods>.
Wow, nimh, that sounds, uhm, like an interesting day. And it sounds Kerouacish. I'm impressed.
Ha! When I was in high school I was a sucker for Kerouac, would be carrying around Desolation Angels in my second-hand coat and read it anywhere ... but thats not quite yesterday ;-)
