Residua

MY SIGNATURE

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:42:04 +0000

I always have a notebook with me, but I use it ever less often. The one I am using at the moment goes nearly three years back. To be a bit more precise, it was initiated in August 2009. There are nine pages left, and it may take me a couple of months to fill them. Now I use the notebook mainly for accounting purposes. I make sketches for my paintings very rarely at this point. There are many untouched notebooks waiting in my study, but I am starting to wonder about something much more important. One way or another, I am getting really worried about my handwriting. The way I am going, I am likely to lose it in a few short years. What is even worse, I will not be able to sign my name, either. The last time I had to finish a letter with the familiar flourish was only this morning, and it ended up quite wobbly. Nay, outright dodgy. It looked like an inept attempt at forgery. I even thought of printing out the letter one more time so as to come up with a better likeness, but I decided against it in the end. If for no other reason, I will have to use my notebook to practice handwriting. Even better, I will have to practice my signature every so often.

YET ANOTHER SQUANDERED ATTEMPT

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 14:06:44 +0000

Sitting on the hotel terrace and sipping my drink, I am watching a caterpillar exploring a nearby planter. It is teeming with pansies of different colors. The caterpillar is quite a sight, too. It has a bright red head, four yellow spots on its back, and long antennae in both front and back. As it goes around, it occasionally tastes the edges of leaves young and old. Apparently, none would do. And so it keeps exploring the planter in vain. At some point I realize that it must have fallen off one of many chestnut trees on the terrace. The wind is pretty strong, and it comes in surprising gusts. The caterpillar is looking for chestnut leaves, of course. Nothing else would do. I do my best to pick it up and put it on one of the closest trees, but it would not let me. It squirms away over and over again. In the end, it hides between the pansies so successfully that I give up my search. Yet another squandered attempt to help innocent creatures of this earth.

THE FUCKING FUTURE

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:41:18 +0000

Motovun attracts pensioners and school excursions this time of year. The pits. Comparing the two, school excursions are worse. One can smell the fucking future.

THE SACRED WORD

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:03:05 +0000

As I sit and gaze at my paintings, I often pause at a painting on a board not far from the dinning table in my livingroom. On one side it shows the tiled cover of a utility duct in one of Motovun’s stores, but on the other it has my rendering of the sacred word, “Aum” (“The Last of My Jokes on Abstraction,” May 23, 2011). More often than not, the board is turned so that the tiled cover of a utility duct is not showing. As I have been doing since the painting appeared on the wall a bit more than a year ago, I spell the word out loud each and every time my gaze pauses on the painting: “Aaauuummmmmm.” The whole house reverberates for a while. Having done this who knows how many times the last few days, I turned the board around a short while ago. I must admit that I feel a bit guilty, though. Whenever I spot the tiled cover of a utility duct, I now spell the sacred word in my mind.

FALLING FROM THE SKY

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 10:11:47 +0000

I often chuck stale bread into my garden. Birds gobble it up in no time. But they must be wondering when I am not around: why is bread not falling from the sky?

SORT OF BRAGGING

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 08:38:23 +0000

I dreamt that I was talking about my mother. I do not remember who it was I was talking to, but I was sort of bragging. My mother was the best in the world. Her age somehow came up, and I said that she was ninety-one already. “She’ll be ninety-two later this year,” I added proudly. In my dream, she was very much alive and so well that death was not even in the cards. And then I switched to my aunt Aurora, my mother’s elder sister. “She’ll be ninety-four this year!” I boasted. I went on and on about my aunt, who was always such a great fun to be with. My enthusiasm was punctured as soon as I woke up in the middle of the night, though. My mother was ninety when she died in 2001. Would that she lived a few years longer. And my aunt Aurora was only seventy-five when she died in 1983. Feeling sorely disappointed with my mother and her sister, I had hard time falling asleep again.

THEIR TOWNS

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:45:40 +0000

I feel kind of sorry for the tourists milling about Motovun. What is wrong with where they live, anyhow? I am sure there are tourists milling about their towns.

GETTING RICHER BY THE DAY

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 10:37:37 +0000

The American dollar and the British pound plummeted in the wake of the stockmarket bust four years ago or so. In terms of the Croatian kuna, the currency in which I spend my pensions earned in America and Britain, I lost about thirty percent of my wealth. But the dollar and the pound are coming back as of late. The American economy is far from healthy still, but it is edging upward. The British economy is still in the doldrums, but the pound is now used as a haven from the euro, which is spiraling downward. As the Croatian kuna is following the euro, I feel that I am getting richer by the day. But it takes a little effort to remember that I am only regaining, albeit slowly, what I have lost in a few weeks. After a slump of about four years, it may take me quite a few months to get back to where I used to be in terms of wealth. One way or another, this pensioner is kind of happy at the moment. Go euro, go!

A GYPSY STATE

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 07:33:05 +0000

I dreamt that I became close to an informal group of intellectuals from Trieste who studied the Gypsies or Roma. I joined them in the search for books in Italian, Croatian, and Slovene that were published in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century. This was the time when Trieste was still in the hands of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and when both Croats and Slovenes started dreaming about their own state. Interestingly, they were proposing a similar solution for the Gypsies. Namely, they were advocating a Gypsy state someplace in Central or Eastern Europe. Of course, there were many heated disagreements about the location and size of such a state. One puzzling thing was that there was not a single Gypsy author among the intellectuals of roughly a century ago. Similarly, there was not a single Gypsy intellectual in the informal group that assembled in Trieste. No-one in the group was bothered by this absence, though. The intellectual pursuit was engaging in its own right. And there were piles of dusty books to study in so many languages. When I woke up, I marveled at the idea of a Gypsy state. Only dyed-in-the-wool intellectuals could come up with an idea of this ilk, anyway.

JUST HUG THEM

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:27:08 +0000

Out of the blue, a question shapes in my mind: “What would I tell my parents if I were to meet them again?” The answer follows swiftly: “I would just hug them.”