What is it good for?

Colon City

Lody, lody - am I glad I got out of there.

Now I'm in Darmstadt. I have spent the past 24 hours on trains or in train stations. All the while I have been lugging around my body weight in dirty underwear. I feel a bit like Sisyphus except I'm beginning to think that I am Sisyphus, I am the rock, and I am the hill.

The day before I left the States, I got a coffee in the Old Market. I read this quote on the wall while I was taking a crap on the coffee shop crapper:

"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached."
-Franz Kafka

Alles in Ordnung.

The Fabric of the Cosmos will be the last spacey pop-physics book I read for a long time. I have spent the past year devouring one after another and it has been rewarding. But so many of these 500-page tomes reach the exhausting conclusion that we may never understand what the universe is made of, where it came from, or how it really works. By and large, I'm optimistic about it. We might never understand the universe, but I'm sure that computers will figure it out within our lifetimes. And if they're friendly computers, maybe they will do us the courtesy of explaining it in simple terms, like we're a classroom full of pre-intermediate Polish students.

An understanding of the fundamental structure of the universe is not something that is likely to reveal itself to me on some bleary random morning while I'm taking a dump. It's much more likely to reveal itself to some string theorist while he or she is taking a dump. And even if I did chance upon the fundamental structure of the universe easily explained and diagrammed in a little yellow leaflet handed to me as I passed through the Stare Miasto for a kebab, I would still have to live with myself, wouldn't I? I'd still have to clip my fingernails and tie my shoes and fumble with the keys every time I try to unlock a door. Cosmology collapses under the mundane weight of existential baggage. Tomorrow, I'm going to get on a train and curl up with some Kafka.

But on my field trip into the lonely realm of stoner physics, I have learned much about practical thermodynamics. Entropy is the way of the world. If you let things go to shit, to shit they will go. If you tear the binding off of your copy of The Brothers Karamazov and toss the pages up into the air, they will not land the way Dostoevsky would want them to, and never in a billion billion years would they sort themselves out. Fabric unravels, but it doesn't ravel. Likewise, eggs don't unbreak, people don't undie, and when you cheese off your British flatmates by leaving a festering bottle of grapefruit juice in the fridge for two weeks, they will not spontaneously start acknowledging your existence on the last day of your CELTA course. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall ...

"Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against nature ... the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worthwhile."
- Nathaniel West

They even want my chitterlings!

Provided I don't snap in my next lesson and start bellowing "Deutschland Über Alles" as I goosestep up and down the aisles, I will pass my CELTA course tomorrow and leave Krakow the day after. I'm anxious to get out of here. Krakow has been kind to me, but I am ready to step onto a train and go someplace else, to drink coffee and brood on my own for a few days without the company of a stumbling gaggle of British lechers.

Thursday morning, I am taking the train to Berlin. I might stay the night there. Over the weekend, I have a job interview in Darmstadt. It is possible that I will be living there. Then again, a lot of things are possible now that were just a daydream yesterday.

Poo-tee-weetski?

Walking home through back alleys late Monday night, I chanced upon the most encouraging graffiti I've seen since I've been here. Spraypainted across the side of some eight billion year-old mini-mall:

KILGORE TROUT PREZYDENT

I'm not sure how Jean-Jackets-and-Jesus Poland would respond to their first fictitious American pulp sci-fi writer/president, but it is nonetheless heartening to know that at least one person in Krakow possesses something resembling a sense of irony.

Wednesday night, I watched the UEFA Cup final with a cacophony of Brits. Changing the channel here is a kinesthetic art. I've never seen someone play the theremin, but I imagine it looks a lot like a drunk Englishman screwing around with the cable, trying to pick up a football game on his vintage Polish TV. After Barcelona knocked two goals past Arsenal in the last 15 minutes, the urge to riot was palpable - I readied my crowbar - but cooler heads prevailed and the Brits walked home with their coattails tucked between their legs, occasionally stopping to swat sidewalk trash with their umbrellas.

Krakow is the only place I know of where jazz is alive, if only in a semi-vegetative state. Back in the States, jazz exists as a depressing reenactment of something that will never, ever be hip again, and in that sense, it is more dead than ever. Here in Krakow, it's happening for the very first time. Poland has never had jazz before - i.e. they have never had black people before - so it's still new and exciting to them. There are dumpy little jazz clubs all over Krakow. Of course, there's nothing less cool than a tenorman with eight syllables and more than six Zs in his last name, so fat chance you'll ever find me in a Polish jazz hole.

Kod DaVinci is about to make its debut in Poland. I'd like to be far, far away from here when this bombshell hits. I've seen a few previews on TVP1 and, for a film that's supposed to incur the wrath of God upon man, it looks pretty dull. I don't know what Ron Howard was thinking when he decided to overdub the whole thing in Polish, but I guess when you've starred in American Graffiti and More American Graffiti, you're entitled to some artistic liberties.

Gdzie są toalety?

I got my hair cut today and it looks damned good for the time being. I told my Polish stylist to take a little off the top and she proceeded to straighten my hair and give me a kicky postmodern do. I look like Falco. When it was done and I'd forked over my four bucks, she asked, "You have all things at home?" I assume she meant all of the equipment that was involved in the styling of my hair, which included:

designer shampoo
designer conditioner
designer gel
designer hairspray
designer mousse
designer hair putty
designer water
an electric hair straightener
a Polish hair stylist

I shook my head, no. I do not have any of those things.

"Oh," she said, "then hairs will change."

So, my fleeting Polish sex symbol status has already been dealt its death blow. At the stroke of midnight - when I take my midnightly Suave For Men sponge bath - my straight hair will frizz up into its usual high-entropy state and my seven hours as a slavic heartthrob will come to an end. It's almost like Flowers for Algernon. I'd better walk down to the square and make the most of this precious time. Veal kebab and coffee it is.

The Jesus Zoo

Across from a kielbasa stand down the street from my apartment, the Poles have crucified Jesus three times. They've put up a fishnet to keep The Three Messiahs from escaping and mauling the passersby. When I walk past on my way to class, I am sometimes tempted to toss in a few peanut shells or some popcorn, but there is a sign in Polish that I suspect is advising me not to feed the Jesuses.

NIE KARMIĆ JEZUSÓW

Obligatory artsy-fartsy photo post

Unformed stools

Before I left, my doctor told me to start popping pills if I made three of these:

Ever since I ate that chicken kebab the other night, my carpentry's really gone to shit. Now, where did I pack that Immodium AD?

Rzeka Wisła

I gave my first truly awful lesson yesterday.

My debut last week was bad enough. It rattled me to the core. I cried about the damned thing. I spent the evening alone in my room dwelling on it. But it was my first stab at teaching. I really believed that my subsequent classes couldn't (and wouldn't) get much worse.

I was wrong.

Yesterday's lesson - a 40 minute debacle - was horrible. Everything that could have gone wrong not only went wrong, but went to shit.

For the three hours after class, nothing registered in my mind. I was temporarily a vegetable. I couldn't talk or think straight or eat or really do much of anything but stare at the wall and wonder how everything went to shit. How did it happen?

Going to shit is a cumulative process. It all starts with one mundane detail going to shit and the shit snowballs. Once that shitty snowball really gets rolling, it's almost impossible to stop. It picks up momentum until it's screaming down the hill and then it crushes you, leaving you lying there in pieces on the bottom, wondering how the hell to put yourself back together and get back to the top.

I'm still at the bottom of the hill, lying there in pieces. Today has not been an improvement from yesterday. My nudge-nudge all-smiles classmates are now distant and not so friendly anymore. It's like I've got the plague and I might screw up their lessons if they get too close.

There are moments before class where first floor windows beckon me to open them and leap, leap out onto the grass and run, run, run until there's no city left, until I'm up in the hills with the goats and the old maids, where I'll never have to dry heave into a trash can again. In these moments, I must remind myself that I'm in Poland because I want to be here. I am teaching - even though my skin blanches and my body shudders at the thought of it - because I saw myself spiraling down, down, irretrievably down the vortex of mediocrity and this was the only way out short of joining the military and having to cut my hair. I'm here in Poland, down on my hands and knees licking the toilet seat clean because I want to learn languages, because languages are one of two things I am genuinely interested in (the other is metaphysics, but you can't exactly sell that on the street).

I am fascinated with languages. I want to know them. This is my way of doing it. One toilet seat at a time.

Muzyka polska

Every time I walk into the 24-hour delicatessen on the corner of Ulica Batorego, they are playing music that belongs in the next Tarantino film. I'll come in around two in the morning and pick up my usual Nutella, muesli, and uncarbonated water. Then, I'll wait in the queue while "House of the Rising Sun" by Eric Burdon and The Animals runs its course. Another favorite of mine is "San Francisco" by Scott McKenzie. I could feel the cameras on me when they played that one. Last night, "One Night in Bangkok" came on and with a prepackaged kielbasa sausage in my hand, it was passably surreal.

There is no formula for Tarantino music, but I've found that certain oldies make for good impulse shopping scenes. Turbulent 60's rock in a convenience store really does it for me. Very Tarantinoesque. Sometimes it's tough not to whip out my glock, kick over a pyramid of canned beans and rob the place.

The radio stations here favor a mixture of 70's prog rock, 80's power ballads, and contemporary Pole-pop. You'll hear "Nights in White Satin" followed by "Take My Breath Away" followed by some techno-polka piece of shit with synth accordion solos. In short, Polish radio is almost lethally eclectic and I do not recommend it to anyone.

Sting is wildly popular here, as are Celine Dion and Whitney Houston. I suppose pillow talk rock will prevail in a culture that has been ravaged for decades by the trampling hooves of Nazi Socialism and Communism. How many Poles can even stomach Wagner? In the wake of eighty years of almost uninterrupted oppression, who wouldn't want to put on the Bodyguard soundtrack and have a nice bubble bath?