The Desert

When I was in 3rd or 4th grade, or whatever it was, I remember we had weekly spelling quizzes. This one week, we had both desert and dessert on the list. This kid in my class, I think it was Justin, said: "you can remember the difference because you want two desserts and it has two s's, but you only want one desert, and it has one s." For some bizarre reason I have never been able to forget this...what the hell would it be, an analogy? An anecdote? I'll go with anecdote. I've never been able to forget this goddamn anecdote and I always thought it was going to be one of those random facts clattering around in my brain that was just taking up space, and I wondered if remembering that little line was preventing me from learning something else, imagining that my brain could only form a certain number of connections between synapses and that this had stolen one from me. But I guess I feel like it has some resonance now.

I'm back home, and I'm sitting in a coffee shop, just like many that I sat in whilst abroad. But I'm staring out plate glass windows to massive parking lot and beyond float past a river of cars on a tragically straight road, which runs for miles across one of however many thousands of square miles of Arizonan desert flatland. I feel like a lab rat in a maze with cheese at the end but the scientists forgot the cheese.

It may just be because of how young this country is but it all just feels so surgically precise and I hate it and I feel like this informs something about myself that I denied for so long and am slowly becoming accustomed to. I like it messy. The American Dream is not my dream. I don't think the American Dream is bad, if it is even a thing anymore, so don't crawl up my ass about that (DEREK!!!) but I just can't see for myself the life I once thought I was destined for. I realize that I like counter-culture, I like modern art, I like to drink beer and talk about philosophy, I like Die Antwoord and Bjork and Mozart and Meshuggah and fuck off if you don't think all those things go together, and I like to walk to the top of a hill in a city that's a thousand years old and stare out at it and not see something designed for efficiency but a sprawling, beautiful mess that feels like the way a person feels when you love them. Complex and diverse and uncertain and you can see that you make up a part of them but only a part and there's so much more you'll never know. I like to speak imprecisely and to think impractically and to not talk about "work-life balance" like it's a job perk (take a business class) and to actually have it.

There's a woman next to me wearing a giant sun hat and I think it's ugly and I want to yank it off her head and then I imagine how pretty she thinks she is in it and I hate myself for hating it and that is the quintessence of me. This may seem to you like a stupid little moment but to me these are the moments that most matter and most define me. Perhaps I don't like order because my soul is very unordered and perhaps there's nothing wrong with that. Perhaps every bad day I've ever had is not a result of this discord but because I don't want to accept my discordant nature and because I'm always trying to force a universal truth or some maxim on every single thought I have in a day and maybe that's just a terrible way to be.

I'd be lying if I said that I perfectly and cleanly hated Arizona. I certainly don't. There are parts I love, mostly in the North. And at other times in my life I've loved the openness of the environs, loved how you can look out on one of the highways and see for miles and miles and you can see the whole ring of mountains around you, the mountains that I remember always made me feel safe because my mom told me that there would never be a tornado here because of the mountains. I don't know if that's true but she told me that one time when I was freaking out about tornadoes. It's home and there's things you will love about home and things you hate about home. Mostly what I hate are the parking lots and the straight roads. I guess those things represent something deeper about this place. I would say it represents a certain banality but I find quite a lot of beauty in banality, so I don't think it's that. It's more like everything here feels like it was designed kind of off-handedly. Like some half-baked architect drew up the plans for the city and showed it to his boss and the guy said "Eh, fuck it, that's good enough. We want to keep this nice and cheep." It's like it wasn't designed to hold any history. These strip-centers and mini-marts and shopping-malls and whatever other hyphenated shopping locales that I'm sure exist here feel like nothing more than shantytowns, thrown up with efficiency and cost-effectiveness in mind. When you fly over Arizona all you see are a bunch of different colored squares encircled by beautiful purple mountains and the disparity reminds me how bizarre human beings are that we so resent the planet that we have to shape and mold every inch of it to our comfort.

It's not that I don't appreciate Arizona, or rather, America at large, for what it does. America is basically the exuberant wunderkind powering the entire worlds economy. And anyone who considers American's to be "fat and lazy" are entirely wrong (at least on the latter). Americans work long, harder, and more efficiently than any other country. And that is impressive. But I just can't help but feel like Prague, or maybe all of Europe (but I can't speak for them) already went through that phase of their historical development. And it's like now their in their 40's or 50's and they're like, "Fuck it, there's more to life than work, I want to spend time with my kids and shit", and the U.S. is in their mid-twenties and all it can think about is that next promotion, a new car, and absolute and total hedonism. I don't know. Maybe. I don't care. Nothing's right or wrong, everything just is or isn't. And maybe the American lifestyle isn't for me and the European one is.

Anyways, here are a few differences I noticed.

1. I never saw any gigantic fucking parking lots in Prague

2. Every single restaurant displays the brand of beer they sell in the form of giant sign that is often bigger than the name of the restaurant.

3. To order another drink just give the bartender a thumbs up.

4. Czechs seem to think that "prosím" means please but it is not exactly the same thing. Prosím is more of a general nicety. For example, if I were ordering a beer, I would say "Pivo, prosím." And then, when the server would bring me the beer, they would say "prosím" as well. But, in English, the server wouldn't say "please" when you order something or when they bring you something, right? So this translates quite adorable to česky, or Czech, I suppose I should say now that I'm in America. When you order something (in English), your server, thinking prosím and please are equivalent, will say "Yes please!" in a very chipper way, as if they are excited that you are ordering that very thing. I don't know, I thought it was pretty funny.

5. Sometimes you will be able to hide the fact that you are a tourist, especially if you pick up a bit of the language. However, at other times, you will not be able to hide it, like if you go to the Franz Kafka statue in Stare Mesto. The reason I bring this up is that you will be followed at some point by someone looking to pick your pocket. This happened to me, when visiting the aforementioned statue, and my solution was to stop, lean against a wall, and watch the guy that was following me (who turned around and faced away from me when he realized what I did) until he gave up and walked away. He gave me a dirty look, like I was the asshole for not letting him rob me. And I almost felt bad!

6. The kid out on their own at night doesn't always get murdered. But the one that gets murdered is always out on their own at night. Something to think about.

7. Don't go to the biggest nightclub in Central Europe. You will know which one it is because they advertise it in every language. It's fucking lame.

8. Beer is cheaper than water. Seriously. If you don't like beer, I recommend that you go to any other country in Europe. And if you can't drink at least 2 liters of beer in one sitting (I'm not kidding), you're weak, your bloodline's weak, and you won't survive the winter. These people drink beer at breakfast.

9. Don't be embarrassed about speaking English. Many Czech people will relish the opportunity to practice their English on you.

10. If you're vegetarian, I'm preemptively very sorry for the fact that you will inevitably betray your morals in Prague. I was vegetarian (admittedly, only for 4 months) going in to Prague, and last night, I ate a 14 ounce steak. They are a meat and potatoes kind of place.

11. See how far you can go without hearing someone mention, or finding a place named after, Václav Havel. Seriously, I want to know how far you get.

12. Reverse culture shock is a thing and it will hit you pretty hard. Depending on how you vibe with the local culture, you might only have to be there for a few weeks, or it might take you several years. But don't forget how things are in wherever you're from. People apparently think it's weird to start drinking beer at noon in the US. I feel sorry for them.

13. Don't be afraid to be a tourist. Just because something is touristy doesn't mean it's not worth seeing. I am personally and spiritually insulted by the type of person that thinks tourist spots are inherently worthless.

14. This last observation is sort of complex, so bear with me. Or bare with me. I never know which it is. Americans tend to be highly individualistic until a time of crisis, in which they unify. Europeans, or at least Czech citizens, tend to be unified until a time of crisis, in which they become individualized. Basically, this means that if someone is hurt or some shit happens or whatever, you probably cannot count on a Czech person to come to your aid. They are the classic "head down, I didn't see nothing" type of person, while Americans tend to stick up for each other. It's a pretty interesting cultural difference. I feel like the history of World War II is much more embedded in Europe than in the U.S., as a result of the level of destruction felt by the region. This probably informs the culture in a way that would be difficult for me to comprehend in a matter of weeks but I think that is the reason for it. On every street in Prague you will find plaques and commemorations to people who died in WWII or in the Communist Era. The sense of history is quite palpable.

Go to Prague. Fall in love with it. Drink Pilsner Urquell. Trust me.