Best Monster Mash Cover: Mike Tyson

Well, I decided to fire up the old blog again. Like my three entires really qualify as anything. I'm not aspiring to make any stylistic or thematic waves with this thing. I'm really not aiming for poeticism or even any cohesiveness. I really just want to get into the habit of writing every day, for strict life recording purposes. It's like the Hemingway story "The Snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro" which is about this guy in Africa waiting to die of a gangrenous infection on his leg and he's thinking of all the stories he never wrote that now its too late to write; instead he got in the right social circle, courted the right girls, and was respected for being a writer, but mostly for the fact that he "lived like a writer." And while I hardly think starting the daily habit of writing will produce a Finnegan's Wake, I like writing. I think as I write and it will be a good thing to make habit. It was a sad story though, "The Snows of Mt. Kilamanjaro" and it made me tune into this internal guilt that I'm sure a lot of people who write sometimes feel, that they're not working on it as much as they should, which should be all the time.



As the last blog indicates I wanted to come to the Czech Republic to do some writing.

Plan A: freelance stuff. I sent my resume to the Prague Post, who basically told me they would love to have me write something...if I had a good story topic. The Prague Post is Prague's major English newspaper, and frankly, I don't really think I have the chops to break a relevant story. I barely know how to get home from the city center.



So on to Plan B. The Czech Republic has more self-professed atheists than any European country. The statistics vary, but I think in the latest poll, 19% of people said they didn't belive in God, which is quite different than simply being agnostic. Compare this with the fact that the United States is still steeped in religion and ruled by Judeo-Christian laws and government. Compare this with the fact that the Czech Republic's socio-economic statistics are far better than the United States: healthcare, literary, crime rate, etc. Compare this with the fact that the country's churches are in a bad way. In fact, the animosity and friction between the state and church, which has been long ingrained in Czech society, and aggravated after the fall of the Soviet bloc, has threatened the church's extinction. The goverment has chosen to relocate many churches to remote fringe locations, which has obviously damaged attendance. Additionally, many of the churches are dilapidated. Their records are either lost or have not been amassed to surmise any sort of reliable statistics on church membership or the personal lives of the members. They cannot find clergy to occupy the churches that are still active, so they're importing them from Poland.

I think this is all really interesting, so its a shame I have no background in theology or sociology. But I contacted this professor at Charles University who's actually doing a Fulbright at Boston University right now and I'm hoping he'll give me some leads and I could write something, even if the scope is small.



Whatever. I don't want to talk about ambitions anymore. Tomorrow's Halloween and I'm going as Improbability to my work's Halloween party. So, I'll be dressed as a flying pig. I'm not going to try to explain this to my Czech students. I'll just say a pig snout and wings were cheapest (which is true) and oink at them and they'll laugh at me. One of my students told me today that my boots would go well with her witch costume because they had holes in them. A comment like this would normally be a super impetus for, say, buying new boots, so it made me especially sad I have no money. Three more weeks until payday. I have had to pay four months of rent (realtor's fees and security deposits) with the money I came over with. Which means daily americanos are not really in my budget anymore.



So, you know how most people get songs stuck in their head? Well, sometimes I get words or phrases or imaginary situations, and last night I kept imagining Mitt Romney asleep slumped against a wall and a people kept nudging him and calling his name in a midwestern accent. "Mitt...Mitt...you've gotta wake up Mitt."