It's been a long, long, long time.

It is perhaps time for a revival. Though my blogging skills remain basic at best, I have got to get back into the habit, at least somewhat. I have my summer journey mostly planned out. It will look like this:


View Summer 2012 in a larger map

New York ---> Tbilisi ---> Zugdidi ---> Mestia, Svaneti; I will be helping at Nino's Guesthouse ---> Zugdidi ---> Tbilisi ---> New York

Dates: May 11th - July 3rd.

I've got plans like nobody's business

No really.

Some news:
I am no longer homeless, that's one thing.
I have photos, physical photos, and there are lots of them, and only a few don't suck, but that's to be expected.
I saw a really depressing movie that involved Thomas Bernhard sitting on a bench.
I read Remainder by Tom McCarthy, Dracula, Prose by Bernhard, Amras by Bernhard, and finishing Gargoyles by Bernhard. None have been particularly cheery. I was going to read all the books by Bernhard before I watched the movie, but there were other things.
Like building a display/altar dedicated to Sergei Parajanov.
and, as always beastin'
I got a chord organ. It's pretty neat.

As for the future:
Beauty school -- because why not? I already cut people's hair. Might as well take some classes and get paid. Also, puts loans on backburner and solves second job issues in the long run.
Ph D applications -- I think I know what I'm going into. Finally.
Project galore -- no comment, duh.
Georgian Choir -- YES
Record collection -- I'm going to need one because I'm getting a record player.
Next trip. Boy oh boy, it's going to be epic.

this is where i live

CAMP!

 

road to/from Racos

 

campsite

bridge we have to take in/out of Racos

my (now broken, but repaired and standing) tent

more coming, like the views I wake up to which still seem like something from another life

updates here

going going gone

A large part of becoming an adult is learning how to remain a child.

People one meets in hostels -- phantasms, physical representations of ephemera, doors that are just as real as they are imaginary, flung open in a way proportionate to the amount of revelations one can have. It is all music, all intervals, sudden loss of electricity that turns everyone to cigarettes and noise-making. I will see your never. Herringbone. Houndstooth. Paisley. Arabesque on ice.

"Coma is for the living." -- Beckett, Malone Dies

I'll be back in five weeks.
Them bears ain't got nuthin' on me.

coastlife

some pretty old jars beside the archaeological museum

I would like to meet the forty-four Jews of Constanța.

It's been all beach & kebab and ruins. Jeff's here. We've been eating lots of cheese [and kebabs; I've temporarily relinquished my vegetarianism for a variety of reasons].

Some Frenchmen are incomprehensible.

Cuisine Across Oceans or: Canadians, Were You Lying?

Apparently, Canada is not the only place that can claim poutine.

 

 Who did it first, eh?

But then, there is this:

 

 

                                                       erm... # 1 in Romania?

 

Romanians do know where to keep their televisions.











In other observations, I think it is almost ironic that in Transylvania, every other door either directly leads to or has a sign advertising a dentist's office.

that's not over-exposure, that's godlike radiance!

And, in case anyone was wondering, I am very much alive and well, as you can see in these [great] photos. Churches are convenient for these self-timed shots because there are lots of benches to prop a camera on, few people, and hence little chance of getting robbed.

um, just tryin' to fit in, guys

<---- cat









[real pictures & stuff here]

Head Cheese and Texas Country

Somehow, head cheese has become a running joke in my hostel in Cluj, after I mentioned it once. Somehow, the joke is sexual.

I also found out that "Texas Country" is apparently a whole separate genre of music.I am fairly certain it is my new least favorite genre of music.

Off With My Head: I Would Like to Have More Than One

Getting on an airplane in a little while. I am certainly looking forward to the part where I get to sleep.
Sudden moving is good for travel anxiety reduction. According to USPS, my [now old] apartment is a business. They must be confusing us with Dr Marks, the dead dentist who used to occupy the premises.

pastels & chalk on bedroom wall, self-made, self-destroyed

outside: rain
me: what's growing?
home: less
burial: the opposite
uncovering: what?
smoke signals: effective
morning: simulacra
cat: scratch & swallow
new: i have a really sharp knife
old: most of these pears are bad
what: this is why I do poorly on standardized tests
analogy: the sun is disproportionate to my hand at the 15 degree angle
this: is not an analogy
am I nervous: did the chicken cross the road?

old selves

pastels on bedroom wall, self-made, self-destroyed

two things I found in my journal, both from 2008, somehow appropriate to my current state:

1. Home holds the remembrance of everything unsaid and is therefore questionable.

2. Here is the end to all means: analytical thinking.

two things

photo also appears in the poem Fall

My dentist, who is also a clown, told me today that I have an enlarged uvula.

My father, who is not a clown, (he's a mathemagician) told me that they are working on a cell phone that you can charge with your voice.






 <--- This is Chris Santiago. He is my roommate. His uvula looks quite 
        nice. He is an anthropolyjest.


 

Ten

Ten days before I leave. There is now a whole separate page with my Georgia/Armenia travel journal, in case anyone was curious. It's still incomplete, but one has to start somewhere.

In the context of my impending project, I've been thinking a lot about the big bad guy I used to inhabit, also known as mother Russia, or "the old country". I realize that I am going to places that were tyrannized, partnered with or heavily influenced by that entity for quite a while, and looking at them twenty years after the whole thing went kaput, but from a weird perspective: I am a briefly-baptized-but-in-denial-about-it Russian [ethnic] Jew (even if I hardly practice the religion, my birth certificate says "Jew" under nationality... what sense it makes, I do not know, but it certainly makes it hard to assume a new national identity) who only encountered four years of the old regime (on its way out, at that), witnessed two currency reforms, watched the feeble attempts at privatization and erm, democracy come, nearly bloom, and quickly wilt, and got the hell out before darling Putin really "tsared" himself up, only to end up in another hegemonic landscape, which is just as heavily despised. And here I am now. Visiting the periphery. Watching places like Georgia slowly but surely take Russian out of practice. I can't blame them (even it makes it harder for me to get around). I just wish, sometimes, that I didn't come from a despot-land.

Plane tickets have been purchased! Romania, here I come.

Where It Comes to "Who the Hell Are You?"

It has been a few years since I last went for a walk with my father.

At two I was learning to walk up a little hill outside of our house under my father’s instruction. To his great dismay, I wasn’t a great walker, though I excelled in all other toddler disciplines. To anyone who knows me now this would seem odd, for I have become a truly avid pedestrian, but as a child, I most certainly lacked an athletic streak. 

photographer unknown, family archives.

My father grew up near a forest and often headed there right after or, on occasion, instead of, school. With a slight blush he still tells the story of ditching school with his friends just to go to the forest and exchange the new curse words they had learned. Upon getting home, he says, he promptly demonstrated his improved cursing abilities to his parents. It seems that their reaction was rather uneventful.

My father got to run about and climb a variety of old agricultural machines, which lead to a few scars and naturally, stories that left my much more careful mother in horror. There wasn’t a forest anywhere near where I grew up, but the red brick apartment building constructed in the 60’s under Khrushev’s command was, thankfully, surrounded by various greenery. There were cherry trees near the dumpsters, and a few apple trees, which never really gave much fruit. Somebody had planted gooseberries and red and black currants under their window. As far as playmates went, girls were scarce, so the boys had no choice but to include me in the game of war. When it rained, we played with Styrofoam, though I cannot recall where we acquired it, and why it seemed to be of any interest – all it did was float aimlessly in the puddles.

photo credit: V. Popov

There were no climbable trees in our garden, so at least once a week, my father would take me to The Pond, which was about fifteen minutes away. On the way, my father would unfailingly present me with either historical facts or math problems about Peter and Basil who went to the store to buy various quantities of kerosene. The reason he used kerosene and not milk or sunflower oil was because it rhymed with the word for “store”, and therefore entertained me, as did the fact that kerosene was no longer in common use, and hence had an air of olden mystery to it: it was something my father had, in fact, bought in a store, something he had had need for, but I could imagine no circumstance, apart from perhaps camping, under which I would require it. In fact, no store, to my knowledge, sold any kerosene, though I never failed to look for it. In retrospect, I suppose, it is fair to say that I owe my knowledge of simple algebra to Peter, Basil, and kerosene. When we got to The Pond, which was exactly what it sounds like, a pond, surrounded by a park, which in winter provided decent skiing lanes, we would always go to the same tree. I would climb as high as I could reasonably go, and then go down to a certain branch that was about six feet above the ground. Every time, I would hesitate before jumping off the branch, but my father encouraged me and gave me instructions on how to best go about it. After I succeeded at jumping off the branch the first time, however, the fear hardly receded with each subsequent attempt. I was just as afraid the third, fifth, twentieth time – something my father found silly. Unsurprisingly, when years later I was diving into the Volga river from something like 10 or 15 feet, the same thing happened. Despite having done and enjoyed it, I was still afraid to repeat it. As it happens, this illogical fear persists still, only my father’s calm impatience no longer motivates me; it has been replaced with puzzled faces of my friends.