I just watched part one of “Until the End of the World”. It is cheesy, backwards looking, thin but very enjoyable. Something about Wim Wender’s work appeals to me. The three negatives leading my description were purposeful, I am sure. True, however - the sheer length of the film is daunting. The weariness clasped to me still makes my mind stagger. This clattering wreck of a paragraph shows it well.

Perhaps it is the fact that I have been fed constantly since returning. I feel the weight press in my hara. I clumsily wander the house. Now I sit up in bed. It is 19.35 and I am considering remaining in the same place for the remainder of the evening.

I think to myself that soon I’ll have the experience of actually missing the feeling of hunger. It never occurs here. I am perpetually sated. Unhealthiness shall follow, for there is no opportunity to exercise. I need escape. Soon.

So, as my mind is muddled, unclear, unsharp - most likely from the same catalysts that begot my physical lackadaisicalness - I shall watch a film. Perhaps it will pull me in. Another world? Another time? Escape. Soon.

I sit up in bed in Seminole, Texas. I’m on the wrong side of the bed. Were I back in Praha, this is where the Smaller One would be whilst the other ‘half’ would belong to me.

I scurried not unlike a rodent from the aeroplane bound for Houston (in which i was misfortunately seated at the back) to a shuttle bus which whisked me, a southern lady muttering obscenities under her breath, and several others to Terminal B. The route it took did not seem to me to be very direct. I had about fifteen minutes to catch my flight to Midland. Terminal B is vast. However, a spritely lady in a cart bearing one other human bade me to hop aboard and careened through the terminal’s labyrinth towards my gate. So the joys of serendipity brought me to the plane.

Yesterday was the first full day with my parents. An immediate observation is that they have a problem with silence. On our drive to Hobbs to secure me a new social security card, they filled the silence with repeated observations of the surrounding landscape and its owners, uses, history, etc. I feel my father is very uncomfortable when no communication is present between him and people surrounding him. He also does his best to greet and meet anyone in the vicinity during visits to shops, the post office, and en-route from his vehicle to any location. Perhaps it is the requisite ‘West Texan Friendliness’ I was raised with to reject. Perhaps that is extreme, but I find the whole idea superficial. He, on our short drive to Wal Mart yesterday morning to purchase a wireless router, even came out and said it explicitly. The blacks call it ‘Jive Talk’ and the white locals call it ‘Bullshit’. Small talk is the common term. Locals do it with a casual vigor. Certainly it is not an inherited trait. Small town culture suffuses folk. As usual, I shall not partake. I hope my directness does not confuse or irritate any of my parents’ friends, but though I am a much more accepting and tolerant person than in my ‘youth’, I shall not let my brain grow torpid.

Aranis plays on last.fm radio. I wonder if they will remind me of these transitional times.

Laptop battery low! I shall seek breakfast now.

My buttocks ache against the padded seat whilst Eliza, or at least the curved part of her, presses to the dingy wall. Shittypie, my only constant friend, sucks power from the socket in the wall like a parasite. It is needed energy for us both. Boredom on the two and a half hour flight from Atlanta to Houston is the enemy.

Depending on delays that have so far plagued my journey incessantly, I may have something sucked from ME after my arrival. That thing being money. I shall have to stay the night in that dreaded city - in an overly expensive hotel near the aeroport, surely (going into the city would be asinine) - if I miss the connection to Midland. Perhaps it would be fitting for my first night in the dreaded homeland after a thirty-nine month absence, almost to the day. Whichever happens, I shall be sure to record it here to be stored away in the entries table of the polaris database on the stoat-shittypie.

Boarding will begin soon.

The Smaller One lies in bed, most likely sleeping. As I wandered the terminal approximately an hour ago and whilst I ate a feeble crispy chicken sandwich at an unnamed fast food joint, I felt displaced as I have not since surely the atrocious six months I spent in this country during the first half of 2003. I felt frightened of being in bed in Seminole and attempting to sleep. The dread faded as it was gradually supplanted by weariness. The latter is winning. I count it a blessing.

I am thinking of her. Our shibboleth chants its mantras in my mind.

Boarding has begun.

The film was fantastic. It is one I’ll see many times in my life, finding arousing details each subsequent watch. I’m not sure how far we have progressed on our flight. Static in a chair, I feel as if I never left Praha at all.

I am not sure how I’ll feel when I reach ground zero. I want to be in transit forever. Perhaps I am the happiest when I am on the move, when the ending is uncertain, or when the ending is so far away that I’ll never see it in my lifetime.

I am talking about a personal ending, of course, and not a universal one.

There is no difference between men and women. They are all the same - so long as they carry a light deep inside them.

I shall not begin the film yet, but instead watch the most recent episode of Lost, saving Wim Wenders for after the meal.

A glare threatens to wash out shittypie’s contrast.

I sit on an aeroplane bound for Atlanta from Praha, sweet Praha. When shall I see Praha again? Well, I am banished for two years, so the minimum sentence of exile is at least obvious. My only connection is this small shittypie which accompanies me. The Smaller One was left dry eyed at the aeroport, receding as my footsteps took me towards gate B8. She worried for me. I was locked up as a result of my last attempt to fly from the country to my dreaded “homeland”.

As I listen to the voices (mostly the accents) sneak in between two tunes by The Church, I cringe psychologically. I am going back.

I spoke to her on the telephone mere minutes before departure. I sat in this slowly warming seat. I am still displaced in space, however. I attempt not to think of her return to the flat in Hůrka and the disturbing presence of ghosts she will feel throughout the next weeks, possibly longer. It is remindful of the insanity of Melanie leaving me in Austin in a flat filled with items we routinely shared. I recall doing my best to uncork the blackness and let it flood over me with intention that doing so might quench it. I don’t recall my results and the journal which holds them is long lost in a basement near Muenchen.

She’ll stare at the empty space in front of the range, imagining wisps of me coalescing and then fragmenting into swirls of smoke from the pan slightly charring topinky. I’ll be in two places at once. She’ll reach in her sleep with her paw to the space warmed strangely by the continuousness of my presence over the months but cooling ever so slightly evening after evening. Whether she awakes with the lack of touch or not, there will be a penetrating sting.

She’ll awake with longing.

And wherever I am, I’ll do much the same, but to cold sheets holding a vanished phantasm from a dream.

If there is a greater force which occasionally tests me, I’m all for it to do so as often as possible. It’s good for me. It deletes lethargy. It drums up positive emotions. I’m up for the challenge. Let’s go for it.

A few days ago, I exited tram 25 at Letenske Namesti. I was on my way to Chris’s office because he was, as usual, running behind. The original plan was to synchronize a meeting at Vltavska (that is, I was to hop on a tram he was already on). It was scrapped. As I shuffled down the three steps and onto the pavement, I saw a shimmering reflection of light fall and clink sadly on the ground. A lady had dropped her keys. The keychain was a green bottle opener fastened to a ring. There were three keys on the ring. Another woman asked someone quickly if the keys were theirs, but got no reply. They lay stepped on and generally ignored during the following seconds. So I grabbed them. I walked to the crossing where I knew the lady to be - most who disembarked went that direction. I didn’t know exactly which person the keys belonged to and was readying myself to proclaim I’d found lost keys and were they any of yours… I was lucky. The first lady I spoke two claimed them. At my ‘prosim’, she looked at me, startled and actually a bit frightened, I believe. When she saw the keys, relief shown in her face, however.

I relate this because I thought about it several times in the ensuing hours. Had I done nothing, I believe I’d have been guilt ridden for much of the remaining day. Surely the feeling would have eventually passed (by evening, probably) but I’d have felt the pangs (like echoes strong but waning in power one after another). So, in the end, it was a selfish act. Is this what motivates the saint? The wish to wash away any possibility of negative feelings spawns the desire to aid others?

Meditation comes in a peculiar form for me. It often involves long walks alone, sometimes aimlessly, through the city streets and many twisting paths of its green areas. The sensation is calming and that is why I place it under what I see as the broad banner of ‘meditation’.

The rush of hours always brings a tightness to my chest, as if my heart and lungs were constricted. When I am pressed by outside influences into a schedule, I sweat. I shake and tremble. I am a wreck.

The solitary walks (at times with music singing in my ears and at times without) have no routine or schedule. There is nowhere I must be at any particular moment. I am not only with myself, but outside of myself, at one with my environment, if you will. This is true even if there is music singing in my ears.

I find that when that tightness comes, I am hurrying through the day not for me, not for the sensation of being alive as a whole, but always for someone else. Always. Perhaps it is a selfish sensation about which I write. It is the selfishness of wanting to be outside of oneself, methinks. For the press which others exert on one’s schedule destroys any beauty of the moments one passes throughout the day.

Solitary walks. Meditation.