No snappy pictures here...

When I egged Kivak on to create this blog I think he was expecting me to contribute a little more than just encouraging e-mails…well, Kivak, welcome to life with Rotten. Just ask BA, he’ll tell you what it’s like…I’m all hat and no cattle…all 'bling' and no 'bitchiz'…

Then came that chastising e-mail and I reckoned I better represent soon or Kivak’s gonna send me a dog turd in the mail.

As my first post I’d wanted to put something up from the Rotten Archives, something I wrote back in the old Liberec days, but of late my access to the Boss’s files has been hampered for reasons the details of which need not detain us here...

So it’s time to cast the ol’ ass net and see what I can pull out of there…

Emmm…culturally edifying vignette, anyone? Here’s some junk I guess I’d file under, “You Won’t See that Back in the Homeland,” dedicated to all you re-pats in the audience. I remember several liquory conversations, usually with BA, but I think sometimes with His Royal Dirtyness, and even Road Warrior might have pitched in, where we documented things we’d seen during our Liberec sojourn that you’d probably never see back in the US. (Sorry to all you Brits, Frenchies, Kiwis and Andorrans out there; I have no clue what all you get up to in your countries). So, fuggit, I got some more of that shit and nothing else. And due to some strange syzygy the episodes that have sprung to mind all occurred recently while I was grabbing a meal prior to one of my thrice weekly sessions at the Taiji Academie of Vinohrady.

“Surely this must be full of meaning,” as Ahab would say.

(Tai Chi: the newly certified Rotten method of anger management. It may be hard to believe, but lately I have been seized by ever sharper fits of spleen. Luckily even the biggest, most painful and awkward mean-on seems to go all spongy after I get my Chi on for 90 mikes or so. But I digress…).

Anyway, a few weeks ago I was testing out a new Mexican joint down by Florenc when someone switched the TeeVee above the bar to the Intestinal Surgery Channel, or at least that’s what I figured it was because the show on offer was titled “My Life with a Colostomy.” (Zivot s kolosectomy, or some shit like that). None of the regular patrons voiced any objection to the choice of entertainment, so I figured it would be an interview-heavy bit of uplifting, ‘life goes on’ tripe…We were soon treated to a prime time performance, incision by incision, of a mid-bowel removal, the highlight coming when the docs produced a thing kinda like one of those old fashioned clappers they used to use on film sets before everything went digital except this one didn’t just innocuously slap shut (Colostomy, take one! Shmack!); instead, a nurse clamped it down on this guy’s guts so that a loop of his large intestine was left hanging out and then she ran a thing back and forth across the top of it like one of those old credit card machines that made an imprint of your card on carbon paper except this thing had a blade in it which clipped that stretch of clamped intestine clean off. One of the surgeons then held the strip of gut they’d just harvested up to the camera and began examining it and its string of dangling, jaundice yellow polyps like a vintner inspecting a bunch of just-picked grapes in an attempt to predict the quality of the year’s vintage.

The rest I didn’t catch because my bean and cheese burrito with sour crème was getting cold and my extra salsa had just arrived, so I settled in to my repast.

But back to my point: you’re not likely to get that kind of entertainment on the TeeVee at Applebees! Now are you happy you went back, short-timers?

What else we got in there…oh yeah, just yesterday: I was up at the local, which is next to and actually shares a kitchen with the tony new neighborhood pizzeria, so the pub grub is slung out by the same cooks who bake up the lovely linguini and tasty tortellini next door and is exceptionally good. It had been an especially long day at the typer and again I was transfixed by the TeeVee (we don’t have one at home so I am often hypnotized by these infernal machines when I encounter them in public). But no gut cuttin’ tonight; on offer this time was a roughly fifteen minute presentation documenting the greatest punch-ups in the history of Czech-Slovak hockey. I think back in the heimat they try to downplay the natural voyeuristic interest created by sports brawls by minimizing their television coverage, instead of making detailed documentaries about them that include interviews with the combatants…but I may be wrong…anyway, the martial style seemed fairly consistent through the years, a flurry of flying pads then twin rights thrown simultaneously, reaching out like the teardrops of a yin/yang circle, then twin lefts, then rights lefts rights in a spinning pinwheel of fists…there were no clear victors in any of the bouts that I could discern, but the chap who lost his helmet first was also usually the first to quit the melee…

Deeply engrossed as anyone would be by this series of horrible beatings I missed the start of tit night. I had been unaware it was tit night, but then there I was all of a sudden staring straight at two drooping fun bags (in my limited experience of tit nights I’ve noticed that ‘nahore bez’ is adhered to more in the letter rather than in the spirit, ie although the phrase conjures visions of zeppelin chested swimsuit models, the reality is usually ‘jinak’. To wit: one time I had a buddy visiting from the states and while we were looking for a place to kill a half hour before a movie I caught sight of ‘Dnes! Nahore bez!' chalked up outside a Smichov pub. I said to my buddy, ‘You might find this quaint,’ and in we went…to be served by a woman who was well past forty and, judging by the combination of beer gut, stretch marks, and the pronounced southerly vector her bubs were traveling in, probably the mother of two teenaged children…instead of ogling her I felt like offering her my jacket as the only heating in the place was being provided by the cigarette smokers…).

Ech…where the fuck was I? Oh yeah, tit night at the local. Anyway, I had just paid up (had to skin out for Tai Chi) when a late middle-aged ‘stamgast’ took a seat at the table next to mine. You all know this man: oil-stained pants fading from purple to gray, olive drab jacket, baggy red face, thick mutton chops between the first and second knuckle of each finger, bald save for a greasy black comb-over that seemed to originate from somewhere in the mossy tuft of fur that filled his outer ear…not particularly remarkable, except for when the nahore bez girl came by to serve him his fernet and beer he planted a sloppy smooch on each one of her silver dollar nipples.

Now in the US you’ll agree that this guy would have been rewarded for such a show of affection by being thrown in the street after having all ten of his furry fingers mashed into a pink paste. Not so in the Praha 8 local. “Ale ale,” said the waitress, and on she went with taking the orders at the ‘stamgast’ table.

And there went the dregs of the last tinny of Pilsner Urquell in the flat. End of post. This has been Wednesdays with Rotten. Take care all.

ROTTEN OUT