Walk

I miss walking. That's the one activity I consistently do in New York. It's what I did in Prague. In Miami, though, there is no walking. When travel becomes a necessity, a car fulfills it. Even when I take my dog out, I get little out of it other than an escape from the house. I may as well have a teleportation device because whenever I move from place to place, the trip is meaningless.

Adventure is lacking in this world where "pedestrian" is missing from the lexicon.

Railroad Tracks and Runways

Air's wet with a cool breeze blowing. The sky to the east is cast with a gray blanket of cloud; to the north, a small window into the blue atmosphere pokes its way through. To the east, all that is seen of the setting sun is a golden strip that paints a few clouds a reddish tint. A masterpiece in the making.

A bird just defecated on my left middle finger.

And now a plane is swooping down to land while a train churns its way along its tracks, sounding its horn.

All around can be felt the quiet movement of people.

Kitten

A minute, shrill meow rouses my attention. I pause my music, push my seat back, and look out the back window in my room and find a horrific sight:

A kitten lays on its side, a bloody gash in its chest; eyes closed and mouth slightly opened, it lies perfectly still.

Right below my window there is a gray cat with a black kitten in its mouth. The newborn squirms in the older animal's mouth, clearly in distress.

Unsure of what to do, I bang on the window and scare the cat away. It runs into the backyard. When I reach the back door of the house, I see the cat running across the high, wooden gate with the kitten in its mouth. I bang against the door once more and the cat jumps over the gate to a neighbor's yard.

Time to face death.

Human

He has three hearts. He is hundreds of years old. When he dies, he regenerates into a new body.  He wasn't even born on Earth.

Yet all the qualities that we love about the Doctor are as foreign to us as love and hate.

A few minutes ago I finished the two-part story written by Paul Cornell for Doctor Who: Human Nature and The Family of Blood. Both of the episodes explored what is, to me, the most fascinating aspect of this series: the Doctor's character. While being chased by a family of shape-shifting aliens who wish to consume his Time Lord essence in order to gain immortality, the Doctor arrives in 1913 England where he uses a device to change his entire physiology - every single cell - to that of a human. The Doctor undergoes the transformation because the Family (the previously mentioned aliens) is able to smell him from a long ways off, due to his own alien nature. Cue David Tennant proving how good of an actor he is.

Dimensions

La Pietà is much smaller than I imagined. Could be the fact that all pictures I'd seen of it were extremely close up and I stood more than ten feet away from the actual statue, with a glass wall between. Perhaps the grandiose significance of the work makes it larger to the mind's eye than reality; having never seen it probably helps my brain give it greater dimensions. Whatever the case may be, I can't help shake off the bit of annoyance in me. This isn't the first time a work of art has disappointed me with its size.

Lantern in the Square

There's a balcony. That means there's a second floor. It's a spacious interior, adorned with a golden finish on the walls and columns - even the floor's low-key yellow feels luxurious. The seats are neatly arranged in rows, their muted red, maybe orange, color mixing well with the rest of the auditorium's palette. It feels like a time machine, transporting you to an earlier age of man from whence extravagance was almost required in architecture.

This place is fancy.

Sounds of Silence

Lights dim. Fog rolls in.

A cloaked figure walks across the stage.

He stands behind a small podium, three candles resting along the edge, flanked by two longer ones. He seems to flip through a book, but my vantage point partially fails me. The microphone is pressed tightly against his lips; his face is unseen, save for quick glances of his mouth every now and then.

Fog continues to roll in. Chanting. Guttural words. A pagan ritual?

Am I at the right concert?

Quiet Hours

I'm walking with Ann and Jessie on a cold winter night in Prague in search of a Coke. Actually, they're buying something else - I'm the one with the soda crave. There's nary a soul in sight, and the silence is deafening. There's no sound to be heard - not even wind.

If there were fog, I'd rename this city Silent Hill.

Lawnchairs in a Theater

Apparently, in Prague, one can buy a glass of beer and drink it while watching a movie at a theater.

That's what I saw tonight as three guys took their seats at Bio OKO, right before Black Dynamite (Černej Dynamit) began. Two of them also sat in beach chairs;  they must have preferred laying down as opposed to sitting in the velvet recliner-like seats. Personally, the regular wooden floor-attached seats were fine for me.

Interpretations

I've always found it odd how a play can be produced in a varied amount of ways. Multiple interpretations gleaned from the reading I can understand, but I always figured that it could only really be produced in a single way, as the playwright intended. This likely stems from personal grievances I can see myself having if (when?) my work is seen in a light different from what I envisioned. After all, it's my work, isn't it? That's probably my ego talking, though.

Last night, I attended a performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Alfred ve dvoře theatre, not far from Holešovice. It was produced by the group Blood, Love & Rhetoric (I only realized the significance of their name until I read a quoted passage from the play in the program), with the aid of the English College in Prague. It was an entertaining performance that furthered my love of the play's banter on existence, games, and death. What I didn't expect, though, was the sexualization of characters and situations.

A Boy and His Dog

I just realized I haven't seen my dog in quite a while. Actually, I may have seen him on Skype when I last spoke to my parents but I'm plagued by uncertainty. I miss the little bugger, even if he does get on my nerves. It's a comfort to see him asleep behind me, or basking in the sun in the front yard. He's a friend, and he's always there.

Though I don't see my Seraph, I do see dozens of dogs here in Prague. The prevalence of canines throughout the world is quite astonishing. This animal, domesticated ten thousand years ago, is a noble friend to every race on every continent - I'm sure there are sleds led by dogs in Antarctica. These creatures bond with us on a deep level, and we to them. Other animals at times get that close to us, but one can't deny the power of the dog, who have been by our sides as the years and millennia go by.

The other day - might have been yesterday - I saw a black Labrador-like dog walking along the street. Its female owner was a few feet behind. Right before crossing the street, the dog stopped and its owner put its leash on, came over to the tram stop, and proceeded to place a muzzle over the dog's head. She was very kind, whispering Czech words to her buddy. On the tram ride, the dog's head was cast down; its owner even questioned it. I wondered if she asked, "What's wrong?" in Czech.

Here in Prague there are a lot of dogs. I see them every day, out on the sidewalks for a stroll with their owners. No, not owners. Partners is more like it. See, unlike in New York and Miami, a number of the dogs are off-leash. They are not pulled by a person but rather walk alongside them. It's fascinates me.

Loosey Goosey

FPS games have an option to increase or decrease the controller sensitivity. What this does is make it so that, with a lower sensitivity, mouse movements (sorry, console folk!) move the camera much slower while higher sensitivity makes the camera dart around with even the smallest flicker. Last night, I learned that our heads have a movement sensitivity that's increased when you consume alcohol.

Counting Out Time

Generally, when I listen to music, I listen to whole albums. Rarely do I put my iPod on shuffle and when I do it's because I want to rock out to some tunes rather quickly. This has a certain benefit that comes straight out of left field: depending on how long I've listened to music, I can tell how long I've been engaged in an activity. That's also thanks to Winamp, since its playlist window is kind of enough to note the run time of all the songs placed in it - as a result, I generally know the length of all the albums I have.

So when I tell you that I listened to all of Yes's Fragile and most of the Red Hot Chili Pepper's Mother's Milk, it means that I spent at least an hour on a trip from the NYU Academic Center (more or less) to my dorm at Osadni 35. You might wonder why it took me so long to get home. Well, it's simple: I walked.

Lost in a New Town

I'm in Europe; in the Czech Republic; in Prague. That's a fourteen hour flight from Miami and many more miles (kilometers, rather). Why? Why the hell not?

That's exactly what got me lost for at least an hour and a half in this city of spires. It could also be the hundreds of streets that go this way and that and feel like sidewalks yet cars still drive on them and snow falls from the roofs and can easily crush you as it did this one tiny car and the names of all the buildings are in a language you don't understand.

But why not, eh?

I couldn't answer that yesterday. I haven't had a moment - no, not that. A memory: there has yet to be a memory. Sure, I remember the flight here (complimentary dinner and breakfast made me forget my worries) and the odd sense of being in a foreign land on my first day. Of course those are memories. Maybe I mean Memories; the ones that go in a scrapbook with the same title. Hmm, no, that still doesn't encompass what I mean. Ah, I got it! I mean the memories that you can't explain to someone unless they were there with you. To your benefit, dear reader(s), my chosen profession can easily be summed up as one which creates such vivid images - from memory or imagination - that anyone can feel a little bubble of awe and wonder rise in the deepest pits of their bodies.

That's the kind of memory I have of today, and it occurred completely by error.

Rebirth

Hear ye, hear ye: by decree of J.A. Chavez, the old Yoshio Productions is defunct and in its place is the new and improved Yoshio Productions 2.0!

Tell your friends.