D C

I miss you, my friend. You were the instigator of many a rant. Your comments on this blog egged me on.

But most of all, you kept me sane whenever I was forced to go back to the U.S. You were my friend of 20 years through good times and bad. You visited me in Prague and you knew the evils of the babi and the ecstasy of fried cheese and beer.

You took yor own own life. You chose not to have a funeral. Your ashes will be scattered at your favorite place. I wish I could be there. You are a victim of America.

This will be the last Praguelodyte blog. I am moving on.

How to Tell if Your Man Will Cheat On You

Don't you love all those 'relationship advice' articles that pop up all over the media? I don't have to read one word of them to know the following:

- They're bullshit
- They're written by women about men, so see above
- The female writer in question is also a dyke. Why else is she getting paid to write?

So, in the interest of 'setting the record straight', from THE MAN's point of view, I offer you the real way to tell if a man will cheat on you ladies:

1) You ain't givin' up the booty.

Yup, that's a surefire way to make a man stray. Slam those doors shut--for any reason--and yer man will stray quicker than you can say 'I have a headache.'

2) You bitch and nag him up one side and down the other.

What man is gonna spend his precious time with a woman who doesn't appreciate all his flaws and piggish behavior? In the world of sheep, a good shepherd will always seek out the ewe which doesn't bleat so bitter.

3) You never feed your man.

He's taken you to dozens of fancy shmancy restaurants, threw dozens of burgers down yer throat, but the best meal you can offer him is microwaved Jenny Craig tofu shit. Pay attention: a man is simple. He only wants 2 things: a full belly and empty balls. Truer words have never been spoken. It was even a woman who pointed this out to me. If you don't believe me, I'll give you her name, number and a google map to her house.

4) Constantly asking your man if he loves you, wants to 'get serious' etc.

You know that a man will never buy a cow when he can get the milk for free. The man is going to milk you as long as he can before he buys. Deal with it. If you keep pressing him about love, marriage, etc., he will leave skid marks out of your bedroom, through your cold, unused kitchen and into the night.

5) You play games to make him jealous and thus prove his undying love to you.

If you think that doing a man's friends is the best way to get his attention, you are right. You'll get his undivided attention in the form of a boot up yer ass. Never mess with a man's food supply or his booty supply. Men are simple, women are complicated. We all know this. Ladies, make yourself even one iota more complex than being the food and booty supply and we will stray like a cat. A tomcat.

I hope that the above points have been taken to heart, gentle readers (all 3 of you). I am a simple man who loves the simple things in life: Beer, pizza, booty. I am also an educated man, one who knows a helluva lot about beer (goal in life: sample every beer in the world. #1 beer accomplishment: Oktoberfest), pizza (Chicago or N.Y. style. Fuck pizza from Europe; ESPECIALLY from Italy), and I'm enrolled in a lifelong course to learn about booty and what makes a woman tick. If its yer damn biological clock, please, ladies, on your way out, don't let the door hitcha where the Good Lord splitcha.

Amen.

Wacky Wooka and the Beatbox Kidz

Nothing to say from Planet Praha, except I'm sitting in my room with an affliction.

I'm not sure what it is. I seem to drink alot o' vodka. It's gotten so cute, my little afffliction, that I refer to the vodka as 'wooka.' Sort of a corruption of the Russian pronunciation of 'vodka' as 'woodka.' Hence the word 'wooka.' See how my my mind works? In Russian, vodka literally means 'little water.' In Czech, 'voda' means 'water', so I can EASILY make that leap into Russian, after all, since they are the forefathers of These Here Bastard Czechs. So in the midst of my 'wookification' as I call it, I re-assess my life, plan my escape, curse 'the Man', all the usual shit One does when One has an Affliction.

So I offer you, as proof of my problem, the following video. Please stay til the end. It gets WACKY.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w2wHUx8Q7w

And then there's the BUSH MONKEY BEATBOX:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApfJqf9bpy0&feature=related

Finishing School for Panelak Girls

"Yeah, she was a panelak* girl
Raised on sausages"

-Sung to the tune of 'American Girl' by Tom Petty

"Panelaks are just vertical trailer parks"

- Butthead, expats.cz

The panelak girl guffawed at a table behind me in the local Turkish mafia billiards/ casino/restaurant. At the end of my first beer it was sort of cute, the way a baby gorilla is at first glance. By the end of pet piv* it was my pet peeve. Y'know, long fingernails slowly dragging across 100-year-old blackboard.

She couldn't help her horse laugh. It was inbred inside her in a cold, gray box, stacked number 7 in a row of 13, multiplied by 15,675* across the former Eastern Bloc. She thought she was cool and funny. Her knuckle dragging date did as well. He struck a pose: Brezhnev uni-brow and baseball cap with a knockoff Adidas logo with 4 stripes instead of 3 (at the Trznice* the sign read 'more stripes = more Adidas' and he believed what he read, his lips moving to each line on the sign). Though he dragged his knuckles and acted tough, he was a pussy. I thought could take him and his date--Him on the floor, taken 'Night Tram Avenger' style, beaten and bloody; her bent over a billiard table, taken 'doggy' style. But I don't like beating up skinny punks. Nor do I like fucking crank-addled white trash girls with horse laughs. But I digress.

I am very experienced in the white trash realm. I lived in a trailer from age 5-7 or so (those oh-so-important-formative-years). I shagged actual white trash girls with tatoos and redneck accents inside of actual double wide trailers parked on hilltops (not when I was 7, sicko. But later, when I regressed into my second redneck childhood. That would be between the ages of 19-25) The white trash girls were grateful, not because I was the monster fuck of their young lives, not because I bought them dinner, but because I didn't beat the crap out of them at the end of the date.

So as I sat there years later in the awful concrete village restaurant, the horse guffaws of the girl behind me reminded me of all I had left behind. Except of course, the alcoholism. I done brung that with me.

Czuppies* abound. They vex me. I am terribly vexed. I can't imagine how any form of Yuppie Scummery could apply to a former soviet peasant. The Czuppies used to live in panelaks. They abandoned them for newer, post modern housing with flat screen tvs and SUV and luxury cars. The newer, post modern housing has large parking spaces for the large SUV and luxury cars and more wall space for bigger flat screen tvs. But at the end of the day, the laugh is on them. They've just bought the exact same panelak they left. Same blueprint, same stack of concrete prefab shit. Only painted yellow. With parking garages. Silly Czuppie, don't you know? You can put frosting on a piece of shit and call it a birthday cake, but at the end of the day all you have is a frosted turd. Fnar, fnar! Guffaw, guffaw!

I live in a panelak, yet again. I say it's because it's my slow season, that I move into panelaks every winter to escape the slimy clutches of the greedy Czech landlords. Read my former posts. I don't like Czechs. And neither would you if you lived here long enough. Trust me. They are not quality humans. And by living in the panelaks from time to time, I am reminded of just how low the white trash scale can measure. By living in the overpriced, in demand Central Prague historic buildings, I am reminded of the yuppie and his superficial, materialistic, shallow ways.

And I want to move to Berlin or Bombay and take my chances with a new riff raff.

Footnotes:

Panelak - a prefab soviet era housing block characterized by gray concrete material, identical windows and other montonous, soul crushing attributes.

Pet Piv - literally 'five beers'

15,675 - a number pulled directly from my ass. I am not a math major, so I make shit up. I don't know the actual number of panelaks but I figure it must be in the billions. Go here for actual studies on the large gray boxes built for commie peasants, lovingly referred to as panelaky by the Czechs.

Trznice - an outdoor market in a Czech city characterized by tragic Vietnamese and other South East Asian refugees robbing people blind by selling counterfeit knockoff 'goods.'

Czuppie - I made that word up. Czech + Yuppie = Czuppie. See how clever I am?

More panelak poo here.

Night Tram Avenger Part Deux

The Night Tram Avenger found his kryptonite one night: his knees. God DAMN my knees. How am I supposed to avenge the night trams with these rickety, slipshod, godforsaken KNEES!!!???

In a country full of drunken creeps who scream, belch, smell, swear and occasionally smack they beotches up---WHAT'S A NINJA GONNA DO?

I had just boarded another night tram after a decent piss up (that's what the Brit majority in Prague calls it; we back home would've called it a HOOTENANY). I was standing and holding the rails for lack of a decent seat for my Elvisian lardy ass. I was staring at a public service announcement about how a decent citizen should help the blind people onto the tram. Even give em their seats. As if a decentgodfearingmoralcivilizedpeople would NEED this. But the Czechs are a bunch of vile, ignorant, selfish FUCKING peasants. YESSSS, PEASANTS. With the manners of a goat on crack. Hence the need for a public service announcement about common sense.

If you are Czech and you somehow can read this (Christ, they're teaching the peasants to READ?), then FUCK YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON. YOU SUCK.

So, having read this sign with its colorful illustrations of various blind people lurching about, I was brought back to my previous involuntary smackdown of one of the fine locals. His crime? He dared to smack his blind woman up. Repeatedly. In front of ME.

Well, if you read the previous post, there was one sorry sack of shit who would be wondering if he had spilled a huge bottle of ketchup on his shirt the next day. I don't imagine it was the first time he had his nose broken. Hell, I'll break it again if I ever see the douchebag.

Any WHO, as I was reading the customer service announcement and reminiscing on my previous NTA episode, I heard the screams. I looked to the left and saw a couple yelling at each other. I finished reading the public service announcement. I was waiting for the last frame, the one in which the ONE SOLITARITY SAMARITAN would help out the blind woman.

The domestic quarrel grew worse; she was trying to pull him out of his seat and was trying to get him to leave the tram. He refused and cursed her. She cried and pleaded with him. Then he stood up and hit her in the face.

Without breaking stride, I lurched down the tram and switched into the Night Tram Avenger. There was no costume change. There was only a personality change. I am not like this in real life. I am a large teddy bear, really. But as Mickey Rourke said in 'Sin City', "It really gets my goat when guys rough up dames."

The punk in question was a low life, drug-addled gypsy scumbag. If that appears to be politcally incorrect in any way, then check your reality. It was the truth. I tried to get in between the gypo scuzzbucket and the woman, but the tram lurched and I couldn't land a punch. So I went with plan B: I grabbed the scumbag in a head lock and proceeded to ram his head into the tram window, one, two, three. On the third thump, the woman involved asked me to stop.

At this point the slimy little bugger slipped my grip and ran away. He was shouting some gypo nonsense at me and at her, but I can't speak Czech when I am the NTA. Especially Gypo Czech. So I just told him to SIT THE FUCK DOWN BECAUSE I WILL WATCH HER KICK YOUR ASS AND YOU DON'T GET TO DO SHIT!

As the slime doggie was leaving the tram, I told the lady I was sorry to get involved, but that I hate it when guys rough up dames. She told me in English 'you are gentleman.' As the tram doors were closing on her erstwhile mate, he managed to scream his goodbyes with an umbrella thrown in between the closing doors. It flew between the woman and myself and smacked into the opposite tram window. The person sitting where the umbrella had struck said and did nothing, as is typical for a Czech.

The next day I was nursing my sore knee. How did it happen? I didn't feel anything as I rammed the gypo's head into the glass the previous night. Perhaps when he slipped my grip I twisted my knee. I dunno. I thought about whether the pain of my recurring knee troubles was worth the NTA thing.

Then I thought about it. How often do you get to beat up a real live gypsy in the Czech Republic?

For more global superhero vigilante action: http://www.oddee.com/item_87762.aspx

Abusive Drunk Hits Blind Woman; Gets a Taste of My Fists of Fury

Many people said this to me in the past:

'Never get in the middle of a domestic dispute; you will always get beat up as a result.'

Well, I never listen to most people. Especially THOSE people.

Tonight--in fact, less than 30 minutes ago-- I punched a man on a Prague tram. I punched him 2 or 3 times to be sure. I punched him until his face was bloody.

I had been in a bar and was on my way home on the night tram. I normally keep to myself and just watch the drunken night owls bellowing and belching and hollering on their ride home. Tonight was different. A real DOUCHE BAG of a drunk was sitting behind a blind woman, apparently a woman he knew, yelling at her. I mean the man was a BAG of DOUCHE. I have seen some callous, swaggering, drunken, macho bullshit in the Czech Republic, but this took the cake.

I tried to shake it off and tell myself that:

a) it's not my problem
b) it's his and her business
c) it's her problem for being with such a BAG of DOUCHE
d) the cops would arrest and deport me should I get involved

Well, you get a pass for being drunk and stupid. Nobody gets a pass for pushing a blind woman around. I mean, she had the long white cane, the closed little mole eyes and everything.

I have had rage problems in this country. They generally center around ignorant, selfish, drunken boors that think they run things. In fact, many would describe the entire country as full of these fuckadors, especially in all of the branches of government, top to bottom.

After his shouts (in Czech) of 'BITCH' and 'CUNT' and other various terms of endearment hit this poor blind woman's ears, all she could do was hang her head down at her cane. I felt my heart race and told myself not to get involved. It really wasn't my problem. But this country is full of cowardly souls who stand by and watch people get beaten, robbed, and even raped (in one reported case).

Being drunk, and otherwise having my peaceful ride home interrupted by this boorish chap, I simply yelled out 'SHUT. THE FUCK. UP!' Being drunk, HE shook his head and continued his drunken verbal abuse of A SIGHTLESS WOMAN.

When he began pushing her and brandishing his arms around, I stood up, walked over and got his undivided attention. I repeated my previous warning. He ignored it. Then he hit her. I came unglued. I can't remember the exact words that came out of my mouth but it was my fists that were talking at the time. I blocked his flailing arms, planted two quick jabs to his nose, then BITCH SLAPPED him, backhand if you will, in front of all of the people on the tram.

I backed away and watched him bleed for a moment. Did I just do this? What will happen next? I heard clapping around the tram. I saw several people in the tram who had just witnessed the events CHEERING ME ON, nodding their heads and generally making me feel like a hero. Even THE POLICE--who were obviously SOMEWHERE IN THE BACK OF THE TRAM AND NOT DOING ANYTHING ABOUT THE FUCKWIT who had just abused the blind woman and had just seen me beating a drunk , as it were--didn't arrest me. The two officers appeared and said 'stop'; I told them I would not stand by and watch that. I said she was BLIND. I asked if THEY were, too. They didn't understand me, those Czech cops. Probably a good thing. But they weren't aggressive toward me and didn't handle me. Probably lucky for all of us. They listened to the drunken bleeder blubber for a minute, I said to anyone who was listening that this was my stop (and it was) and got off the tram. I kept walking about a block before I looked behind me. Nobody was following me.

I feel absolutely fantastic. And I think I will for a long time.

Another dead man

"Ty vole!" was all the Czech guy on the back of the tram could say. Okay. Another friend calling another friend 'you fool' (the direct translation is too silly to mention).

But there were car brakes and tram brakes and people slamming into each other. People caught their breath. I looked out the tram window at the cars with the black snakes behind the wheels. I said to my girl that I see this every day and that Czechs can't drive. Another fender bender.
Then I saw the single black shoe in the crosswalk. She told me that it wasn't a fender bender. I agreed. Somebody got hit by a car in front of us.

The tram waited for a while. People made mobile phone calls. People said 'ty vole' alot. Then the tram lurched forward. I don't know why they do that. The lurching bit. It seems to imply that the driver was involved--and hurriedly needs to depart--or that he needs to stay on schedule. Nothing to see here, people, moving along now. The tram pulled forward and people pressed against the glass to get a look.

We looked. Of COURSE WE DID. You will too, when you get the chance (and you will, unless you live in a mountain cabin and don't leave it). It was in fact a dead man. Or maybe a dying man. I'm not a doctor, but an immobile body in the street with a meter-long blood smear leading up to his head could elicit a layman's prognosis. Or maybe it was the people standing around, not helping. Must've given up. Nobody helping. Right? Nobody's that apathetic...

We talked about the dead man later on. Or rather, she did. She had her theories about life and death. She bought a crystal rock thingie at a Christmas stand outside of an old Gothic church in Prague 2 (where all the saints live). She wondered if all of the horror films we had watched that weekend had something to do with our witnessing the vehicular manslaughter (not her words). I mentioned something about coincidence.

People have a lot to think about. I don't put too much of my thoughts into life and death. I just try to live. Dying is easy. Just step out in front of a driver in Prague on a Saturday night.