contents and subscribe

Picture of the Day
yesterday | today |  tomorrow

Tuesday
September 16, 2003
subscribe
On a visit to Novy Bor, I wake up hungover, am bitten by a big dog,
then catch a cold, spend the night tossing in a fever, unable to sleep,
head hurting, sneezing, coughing, alone in a 200-year-old timber
and mortar loft except for some mosquitoes coming around.
Next day I scald myself in the massive tub, bump my
head numerous times in low doorways, then on the
manic drive back to prague we miss high-speed
head-on by a second or less and all the
driver says is, Oops, wrong lane.
But none of that is why I was
feeling a little blue on my
34th birthday...

 

...i think the problem is ever
since i got to prague this time around
i have stopped believing my own myth.
i remember walking these streets in 1994,
terribly excited by it all because somehow it
seemed to have been created just for me. now,
i skulk, a cipher, vanish into my own anonymity. it's
not a bad place to be, like beige carpeting, but it lacks
zip, pizazz, that crackling life energy. i read. i pick up writing
the novel i started here 9 years ago. a new myth in the making.