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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

my summer vacation

This week has been a flurry of goodbyes as we all turn Brno into the summertime ghost town I love, and which I will be sad to be away from, but I have stuff to do, you guys.
 
I am going to New York to see one friend I've known since I came here, 20 years; he picked me up when I was broken last year and we went to Greece together, and sometimes we don't talk for months but now we are planning a trip to Philadelphia for July 4th, maybe also a trip to Coney Island, the pleasure of putting yourself in the hands of someone who knows how to have fun.
 
I will go and see some women in upstate New York that I have known online but not in person for over a decade, poets, women who use words to curse and to nurture, and they have promised to teach me how to apply lipstick, because I don't know how to do anything with make-up, but it seems interesting. 
 
And then my beautiful and amazing sister in California. I will meet her parrot and remind her cats that I am the boss of them, and her husband gives the best hugs because he is a man who can pick up a refrigerator. We shall put limes into everything and it will be awesome.
 
Then Montana, where my relentlessly talented friend has just started a business which is a traveling bookstore, and we will drive around to festivals and sell books and drink good coffee and talk about love and losing our hearts and finding them again, exactly where they always were.
 
Then a group of women in a house on the beach. There will be brunch, which is the most brilliant American invention. And I have a friend who looks straight into your eyes and says: I know this to be true. And I am eager to hear what she knows is true, because it will be.
 
And all in there, other friends, more friends — from high school, from college, from later, people who are still interested in me even though I left them half a lifetime ago, people who have kept me in their lives with their words, people who have loved me enough to visit me in my life here, my pen pals made into flesh, with all those complications and all that beauty. I never feel fully myself there, but I never feel fully myself without them. There will be road trips and wine and laughing until it hurts, waiting for the moon and walking down the middle of the street. There will be board games, and there will be dancing.
 
So this is me. Hope to see you, in the summer or on the other side of it.
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