my bachelor party in prague
another succession reference, lost to time
a belated post! a few have *nicely* pointed out I never finished this substack. and to that, I say (ashamedly) …….I never finish anything. but I was poking around in my drafts and found a half-written post for prague, and decided to publish it. fair warning: was I manic when I wrote this? it’s all over the place
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hey haters, I hate to say it, but as allie awoke one morning from uneasy dreams she found herself transformed in her bed into a gigantic insect!!!!!!!
I do, currently, feel like I embody the first sentence to the metamorphosis as I lay here in my hostel bed in prague. I am surrounded by nineteen-year-old girls, staring wide-eyed, touching my face and saying, “WHAT? YOU’RE 26? NO.” over and over. “THAT’S SO OLD!”
so in a way, I do feel like a giant insect, a monstrous pest. squash me already!
I am staying in hotel kafka, right in the center of the city. franz himself seems to lurk behind every turn—a mural on the wall, a rotating sculpture, a museum with two men pissing out front (look it up). in college, circa 2017, I had a big kafka/absurdism obsession. I thought I was this sad, tortured, misunderstood soul… I read all of his letters and thought he was my soulmate. now the thought of this makes me cringe? so walking around him and seeing him on every corner makes me feel, at once, SO far away from that person in 2017, but at the same time… his beady eyes conjure some kind of sentimental longing for me. I can’t explain it.
in my meanderings around the city, I’ve been thinking of ways we build monuments to memory—how cities have plaques and heritage sites and histories that can never be erased—but also how in our personal lives, we do this too. I wear a necklace with a strawberry as a reminder of my home in connecticut, I have a tattoo of an ampersand to catalogue more of that briefly mentioned 2017 angst, and I take pictures of everything to look back at later, or to send to friends because something reminded me of them.
and prague has a few of these absurd little monuments: the narrowest street in the world. a John Lennon wall, covered in graffiti to the point where you can’t really see him that well anymore. torture chambers inside the prague castle. we preserve these monuments, but what purpose do they serve now? who is speeding down that tiny street? or using that chamber? or trying to look at John Lennon’s face? which is more true: we preserve memories for history’s sake, or because we’re sentimental? nostalgic? the people these things mattered to… what were they like?
and funny enough, my favorite parts of prague though have not been the monuments, but the ephemeral stuff. I am obsessed with the men on charles bridge playing jazz, their upright bass, their trombone, the little caps they wear on their heads. the way they’re backlit by the sunset. everything about the music, this moment, when I stand in front of the bridge and watch them... I love the pretzels here… I can’t eat enough pretzels. they are too good and I worry I’ll never have pretzels like this ever again. they disappear before my eyes. and oh my god, the fleeting feeling of being surrounded by a gothic city, in an eastern european country, reminding me of yale and ukraine at once, two transient, beautiful, seminal places of my personal history. where else in the world can I get this feeling???
so in short, prague has been making me think a lot about time… monuments, history, aging, the fact that I’ll start getting wrinkles soon, and these girls in my hostel have ten good years of perfect skin plasticity in them before they have these worries too. good for them.
in fact, I love
tom already liked this, but kat here to let you know that i like it too