Highlights of a day in an endless winter

Dear Reader,

I know that things are not as good as they could be. I know that I should leave asap if only for the sake of giving the cowboy a fresh start in time to still have children, but I still cannot find a definitive plan to move on and indeed move away. So we still  try to look after each other as best we can and enjoy today. One day at a time.

On the way here I provided the entertainment by being a sort of living juke box. I sang for about an hour somehow, on and off, with a limited variety of songs that work accapella that I could actually remember and start to sing in roughly the right key. I think the 'setlist' went something like:

'Caught A Lite Sneeze' Tori Amos

'A Sort of Fairytale' Tori Amos

'Get Outta My Way' Kylie Minogue

'Timebomb' Kylie Minogue

'Fine Day' Opus II

'The Fear' Lily Allen

'Den Andra Dagen I Mai' Idde Schulz

'Little Digger' Liz Phair

'Army Dreamers' Kate Bush

'Fuck and Run' Liz Phair

'Help Me Mary' Liz Phair

'Divorce Song' Liz Phair

'Smells Like Teen Spirit' Nirvana

'Extraordinary' Liz Phair

Not a great deal of variety of artists, I'll grant you, but it must have been entertaining enough because the cowboy didn't put the radio on again. And when we got to the flat, I somehow felt I'd just been warming up for a gig and felt a little deflated at having to be quiet now, in this sleepy little tiny town.

Ironically, today, the day the clocks went forward to summer time, it's been even more like winter than when we arrived. It snowed overnight and continued today. I had disturbing dreams and really didn't sleep well at all. Lots of memories from the past that I really could do without right now. And a dream about searching for a Muppets mug before leaving the UK. What the hell was that all about? I think a gremlin lives in my head. A Muppets-loving gremlin, of course.

We went for a walk in the snow and I wore so many layers I felt like a small, fat michellin man. But thankfully we didn't walk for too long and it was nice enough to enjoy walking in the snow, scrunching and crunching about without my toes being wet and cold for too long. 

I just don't move well in 6 layers, that's all, and I'd rather leap about to Kylie Minogue as exercise than traipse through the snow while it gathers in my eyes and on my scarf and my nose runs so that I frequently have to take my gloves off to blow my nose.

But when we got in we treated ourselves to a strange kind of cake in the shape of a ram (they were everywhere in the supermarket, so the cowboy bought one) 

and had a cup of tea. And I did get an egg for Easter. Though it wasn't a chocolate one. It was a big plastic one with a bag of m&ms inside, which was lovely really. 

I'm quite happy to have some m&ms to munch on from time to time, and it reminds me of the snacks we had with us in the car when we went on our road trip across the US. Hard to believe it was nearly a full year ago now.

I guess that's all I had to say.

I've still got tummy ache which doesn't seem to have gone away since yesterday. I think it's an underlying feeling that this has got to stop soon. I have got to formulate a plot, an exit strategy, a way to move onwards and upwards.

Fond Easter wishes,

Ms. Platform Edge.XXX

Art is the only answer

"When I asked for a separate room it was late at night and we'd been driving since noon.  But if I'd known how that would sound to you, I would have stayed in your bed for the rest of my life just to prove I was right that it's harder to be friends than lovers, and you shouldn't try to mix the two. 'Cause if you do it and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you." 

                                                                                                                      Liz Phair  'Divorce Song'

There's nothing worse than realising that your own unhappiness is your fault and yours alone.  ('Cause if you get what you wanted and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is YOU.)  However, there is rather a good remedy for this: decide to be happy just for now.  Just for now, I'm living in my dream flat.  Just for now, I don't have to do any work I hate, and I only have nice meet-ees.  (That was not the case on Tuesday, but we needn't dwell on that.)  Just for now, I have all the resources I need.  Which is rather fabulous, is it not?

However, just as I think things are ok, I'm pulled out of my momentary serenity (or is it denial?) and I find myself yelling at the computer.  Yesterday it was because it wouldn't let me order printer ink from a Czech online shop and pay with my British debit card.  The other day I just snapped about something silly that the cowboy said.  He forgave me and understood right away that it wasn't much to do with what he said and far more to do with having no money and no prospect of being able to move into a flat that is so right for me as this one is.  But it was particularly unlike me to flip-out like that.  I still don't know what's going to happen.  It's possible I could make enough money to scrape by and pay the rent for this month and not dip into the funds I've been lent but that would still mean I only have enough to pay a month's rent in advance.  I don't know where I'll find enough for a deposit.

And in the meantime, a lack of money is a big problem in this kind of situation, because I think I know better than most, having moved house so many times in my life it could almost be called a hobby of mine, that when you get down to the nitty gritty of sorting through stuff and packing boxes, you need to get out every so often and get a coffee somewhere (and preferably a piece of cake too) just to escape the bedlam and calm down.  Not to mention needing to eat out because there isn't time to cook and wash up after meals.  So how will I get through this process without that spare change?  I just don't know at the moment.  (I'm lusting over the idea of a trip to my old haunt the dept. store on národní and going into the Costa coffee place there and getting a chocolate muffin and a chai tea latte...  I want that so much, I could write a love letter to it, "Dear chai latte and chocolate muffin, you have been elusive for so long but my heart cries out for you..." etc.  But it's a friend's birthday soon, not to mention the cowboy's and my parents' and I will need money I don't really have to cover getting them all something.  I need a miracle!  A chocolate-and-chai miracle!)

The other day, I was at the cowboy's place and did some vacuuming just to help out and I distinctly felt that were I to have to move in with him, we'd be at each other's throats within a week because if I were told to do the vacuuming, I would resent it.  Offering to do it is quite another thing.  If I then took up all of his spare room with boxes of my stuff, he'd be pulling his hair out at the lack of space and no dedicated guitar practice room.  It's so sweet that he keeps reiterating his offer to let me stay but the more he does so, the more I know he's got no idea of the impact it would have on his life.  There's not enough room for the two of us!  There isn't even a wardrobe.  I'd be living out of a case.

And I'd be unhappy.  Because I need space to think.  Space to do silly creative things.  Space to do ridiculous paintings, make silly cards from photos of pictures made from smarties (or 'Lentilky') as they call them here.

Space to read romantic and seemingly irredeemably stupid books.  Or space to play the keyboard and sing loudly.  And that's the thing I definitely wouldn't have space to do in his flat.

I nearly choked with fear after looking at the horrors of the flats available within my budget in a central area like the one I live in currently.  From kitchens with a curtain right next to it with a shower cubicle tucked behind it (seriously, right next to the kitchen unit!) to tiny bathrooms that have a loo that you have to walk past to get to the tiny shower or bathrooms that also have a washing machine pushed into...I just collapsed.  These are the images which may now fill my nightmares.  And they want 10,000Kč or more for this?!  It's just shocking.  While the rest of the world is in recession, the world of renting is still doing ok for itself.  Maybe rents haven't gone up as much as they might have done in the boom years, but they certainly haven't fallen.

All I can think of is that this is a time when art and being creative is the only remedy.  Not for earning money but for trying to stay sane and see a reason for continuing to live.  Making silly pictures out of smarties may well be the way forward.  If not, little sketches in my notebook, painted copies of children's book illustrations, 

scrawled poems thrown down on paper in anger and big cups of coffee

to keep me awake to do all this are the order of the day.  Art will save the world!  Hurrah!  What a manifesto, eh?

(Failing that, wearing ridiculously glam shoes indoors works almost as well.)

Batmobile

I've been listening to a lot of old Liz Phair songs recently, and this one, called 'Batmobile' in particular:

"Fire up the Batmobile 'cause I gotta get out of here

I don't speak the language

And you gave me no real choice, you gave me no real choice

You made me see that my behaviour was an opinion

So fire up the Batmobile 'cause I gotta get out of here

It's the mouth of the gift-horse I know

But I gave it my best shot, I gave it my best shot

I gave you the performance of a lifetime

So I hope you all will see

There just isn't a place here for me

Look around and feel like somebody must be fucking with me

I just can't take any of you seriously

And I can't keep keeping myself company

Fire up the Batmobile 'cause I gotta get out of here

Big shoulders block the view

And you can't get your money back, you can't get your money back

You can't pretend that isolation is the same as privilege.."

It's one of those kinds of songs where you don't really know what she's going on about, so you just relate it to your own life, and funnily enough, there are certain lines in this song (can you guess which ones?) that encapsulate my current predicament perfectly.  Except I don't exactly have a 'Batmobile' or indeed even a car to just run away in.  And I can't afford to run away anyhow.  Which is sort of tragically funny.  At least it means I'm definitely in the right place, because if ever a country did a good line in 'tragi-comedy' it would be the Czech Republic.  No doubt about it.  They've made film after film about this kind of amusing interpretation of despair.

I watched the film 'Samotaři' ['Loners'] the other day, which is (unsurprisingly) about a bunch of fairly isolated or, at least, lonely people, all with their ideas of what they should do, and how they're all watching the gap between where they should be and where they are in their lives, and observing it perpetually widening.  Except for the stoner guy, who has an affair with a woman who just broke up with her boyfriend, only to remember, or rather be told by his friends that he's actually got a girlfriend, it's just that she's gone away to visit relatives for a month.  

The stoner guy has the best time of all of them, because he just can't remember what he's supposed to do, and by the time he does, it doesn't really matter anyway.  All the other characters suffer and don't gain anything except more confirmation that nothing's going to improve.  Some of the bad things that happen are so bad, they become comical, but mostly it's quite a subdued and depressing film with a very odd modern-industrial electronic music soundtrack.

Maybe if they'd had a fittingly 'tell it like it is' Liz Phair soundtrack, it would have been overwhelmingly depressing.  She has her own style of tragi-comedy in her lyrics as well as the profanity and references to sex.  Some people have accused her of selling-out with her more recent work, but I think to some extent, she kind of had no choice.  She certainly had to change something.  And it's probably better to change something, knowing it's only an answer, not the answer in the hope that it might open other avenues of possibility.  Because it's better than doing nothing.  And that's why I'm here.  I still don't have the answer, only a bunch of inadequate possible answers and none of those are exactly working out well.  But you've got to do something.  And in the meantime, while that something isn't solving the problem, at least it's a little less boring.  And I can at least say 'I tried'.  Though the comfort of that declaration is perhaps overrated and I certainly feel that the reassurance I derive from it fades with every passing day.