Rampant unemployment.

Sunday is the Lord's day, a day of rest, and at no time have I felt that more aggressively than today. Nedelja, the Slovene equivalent of Sunday literally translates as "no work." (Monday, to be sure everyone is on the same page, translates as "after no work day." And the widest circulating newspaper, Delo, means simply "work." A trend develops here...) So, as I awoke this morning in search of feeding myself, getting a photocopy of my passport, hitting an ATM to pay off my landlord and then purchase detergents, I had no idea of the Nietzschean mountain I was about to scale. As I made the trek from my home to Trg Prešeren, I found only one sandwich place open. It turned out to be the cheapest I've discovered, and I chalked that in the win column. But my happy surprise turned to dismay when nary a grocer, drugstore, stationer or photocopy place was open for business. The NY audience, for whom Kinko's are as ubiquitous as pigeon droppings, will find this akin to a dragon swallowing the sun. I steeled myself to this dearth of transactionability and stood before an ATM (BA here) to withdraw those necessary funds. But, I had forgotten my PIN #. How could this be? The duststorm that was my extraction from the City spanned approximately 40 days. In that time, I freed myself of my apartment and all worldly belongings—apart from the bare necessities (and a few cherished frivolities), opened a new bank account specifically to tackle the rigors of this trip, and filed/refiled/double-checked on the first files to a Houston insurance broker about a setto involving a carjacker, a car and myself. Factor in opaque nights meeting friends for copious whisky consumption, and you get a PIN # mystery series Kojak and Freud together couldn't deduce. With automaton diligence, I entered the eight or so #s I know I know. (Pardon the Rumsfeldism, but the claim makes more sense here than in Fallujah.) None of these worked. This was clearly an effort that required more than I could bring to it. So, I withdrew to my e-roost (KUD France Prešeren) to draw help from my bank. I sent an email (unsecured) to the representative outside Salt Lake City (or some other quasi-urban storehouse of customer servers) requesting my PIN #. She answered promptly back that I must send her a secured email and sent me the link to do so. As I filled in the blanks, I noticed the final piece in this secure email jigsaw puzzle was my PIN #. I wrote back that this was the very thing I was looking for. My representative obviously found my response too ponderous for her Sunday afternoon, and our communication ended there. I retaliated by enlisting the aid of a friend I know is an online fixture. He emailed me back with the link to the link I had just failed to make into a complete chain...and an international toll-free #! At last, things were moving. (As a sidenote, on the back of my bank card is the # to call if the card is lost or stolen. Oh, ghost of George Orwell, you are a busy spectre.) I migrated downstairs and asked the bartendrix how to dial an operator. "Nula...Nič." Zero. I pulled out my Mobitel cellphone and posed my thumb over the "0," imploring her approval. Her mouth pulled tight. "There is no Mobitel operator. You must call from a home phone or a collect phone." OK, so I can use my Telekom card on a street phone and make a collect call there? "No, you must go to the post office." But it's Sunday... She shrugged. I retreated back around the corner to the ATM. There, to no avail, I entered four more #s phenomenologically active in my memory. And although I got the impression this ATM, like Kafka's guard, would never ask me to stop entering #s, I did. I returned to the bar, where I had a beer and read a book.

Metal show.

The bar/cultural venue I am writing from is KUD France Prešeren. Tonight they are hosting a heavy metal festival. The music of my childhood. And as memory serves me, the ultimate mid-80's dog & pony show of rebellion. To wit, if it's too loud, you're too old. I just watched a Slovenian metal band do hair rolls, guitar arpeggiations and complicated drum rolls in the name of that frenzy that comes with a disagreeable temper toward convention. There, I found myself toe-tapping along with the music. A half-hearted journalist in the vast sea of black leather and denim. The crowd struck me as uniquely heavy metal. I may as well have been in Texas. The girls were dumpling in out-sized t-shirts. The boys androgyne in aspect and spangled in silver rings and sewn-on patches. The men too old, as if their presence fought the age their aspect betrayed. The women that rarified breed of truck-stop mama who seems to exude sexuality, even if a faulty, shattered one due to overuse. The music is the norm: a pastiche of Slayer, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Judas Priest (pre-gay pride). It reminds me of being holed up in my room as an 11-year-old with my Victorola pumping out Van Halen and my portable cassette player blasting some reedy version of Motley Crue. These were the role models I looked toward before I really knew what role models were. I would stencil VH graffitoes on my Trapper Keeper, draw pentagrams on my off-pages of notebook paper. The whole parade seems adolescent to me. And then I caught a moment of retrospection that detailled what this show means for its viewers here. The goal of being noisy, of being worthless, of being satanic (to cut to the chase) is that dissatifaction is close at hand. Youth is always dissatisfied. They feel infringed upon, helpless, unneccessary and unwanted. They mow lawns for a pittance. They talk on the phone until the wee hours, because talk is the only currency they have. And when they get together, they unite their frustration into a cataclysmic expression. Young countries are no different. To think that Slovenija is only 15-years-old boggles the mind. It almost betrays the architecture, the cobbled streets, the statuary and Roman walls of the south. But it remains a fact. They, the nation, are in a state of coming to terms with themselves, and as they get closer to joining the EU, they will find hair in places that were hairless, their voices will crack and still they will shout out anti-everything lyrics. It's a parent's dream and nightmare to see this sort of expression. (I consider myself a foster parent of sorts. I was here 10 years ago when the gurgling infant just broke loose from the umbilical Yugoslav cord. Though I was much more an infant then too.) As I watched the show, I noticed when the red footlights shown onto the drummer, the backdrop became a sort of skull with each eye going goggled whenever the cymbals were crashed. The image of death can be a heavy one, and especially obvious amid a sea of devil iron-ons, Gothic letters and cross bone decals. But mustn't one thing die for another to live? Isn't the food we eat a living thing until we internalize it and from there our lives continue forth at the expense of another? The death wish is never a totality; it's a sacrifice. It screams I have presence through actions that lack vagueness. It's difficult to like heavy metal as a musical form for me anymore. This music has no irony. It is, uh, heavy. (And as a footnote, I should instantly point out that once I discovered punk and indie rock, I consumed it with a voraciousness metal never inspired in me.) But how much irony do nascent societies need? In the States, we saw the ridiculous assumption that after 9/11, irony was dead. A radar blip of an oversight, since a mere 2 years later saw the Onion, the Daily Show and Bill Maher become the "news sources" of choice for the educated. As I figure, the metal empire in the States crested from 1978 to 1987. Nine years. In a country of (then) 200 million, that's a lifetime. In a country of 2 million, hungry for any sort of tradition, it could be much longer. But the ultimate paradox of music is that it is a fad. (The paradox being that music, unlike art or sculpture which captures a moment in time and holds it, needs time in order to express itself.) And like all fads, anyone who liked it once eventually becomes too old. And the future has no room for the elderly...no matter what their population.

An auspicious beginning.

Today it rained in Ljubljana. A pitiless and pathetic rain. If you can imagine being caned by a 90-year-old, you understand what this rain was like. At first, completely ignorable and perhaps delightful to some, then after 20 minutes time, a quite tiresome affair. For respite, I sat in Bistro Ga-Ni near Železniška Postaja (the train station). I watched men come and go for Laškos, the Slovenian equivalent to Budweiser...a Bud 5-percenter that makes you blind after two bottles. I was reading an essay on the Biosquat outside Austin, TX, and laughing to myself as the author detailled the composting system (a tricycle with a commode for a seat.) The idea of adults self-fertilizing their land made me take stock of those around me; I needed a positive to my nose-holding negative. No one in the cafe would do such a thing, I decided. No one wanted to much do anything this Saturday and the weather pretty much enforced this indolence. Earlier today, I had gone to Nama to get bedding for the kiddie-sized bed that came with my furnished room. To expedite things, I ran around with the salesgirl whose English equalled my Slovene (translation: we may as will have been infants or cavemen for our verbal transactions with one another). She pointed to dimensions in centimeters and shook my head disapprovingly. We opened up packages of bedding. I used my armspan as yardsticks. I drew pictures of necessaries that were not within my line of vision, and she happily trotted away to add more to her sale. With my two bags under my stool and the pack of $2.25 Marlboros next to my elbow, I slogged through a large orange juice and a small macchiato. When the rain abetted, I threw out flares to the countergirl as Slovene service is one-half of the Dutch. You get service very quickly; you get your bill if you're lucky. I walked the 45 minutes from Center to my rented room in south Trnovo. Very south. The paved road leading to the splinter I live off has two more streets and then nothing. Just ghosted images in the offing. I think I saw a train go past once. The paved road leading to mine has a drainage ditch on each side. They reek of still water and hold consumerist fecal matter: plastic bottles, candy wrappers, cigarette butts too fresh to be swallowed by the tug of the muck. The brands that beat these streets are a testiment to the commune turned capital. Beat-up Yugos turn off at the same point as the silver Mercedes. Leather-clad yuppies wait for buses as warm-up-suited teens bicycle off on the next beer run. It's a hodge-podge, a stew that makes itself from cardamom and bone. No one has any idea what this will taste like when complete. Once inside the room, I set about the deliberate task of making the room somewhat my own, and as I surveyed the walls with a curator's vision, I noticed no nail holes, no patches of miscolored paint where taped posters had peeled off, no expressions of former personality. Just white, interrupted with impugnity by the paper and electronic mess on my desk, the intestine laundry on my floor, the Nama bags. I instantly felt ashamed and with completely reflexive behavior, I decided to take a bath. The water filled up steaming hot, so I went into my room to steam the wrinkles out of some shirts. When I returned, the water was tepid. 20 seconds of warmth and comfort was all I could expect from this bathroom. A shower nozzle flaccidly hugged the spigot, a vestige from a former water heater, I postulated. And in my less than lukewarm baptism, I became ostensibly Slovenian. No rushing to my Mobitel to ring my landlord, no rushing to the kitchen to boil water as I have done in my former apartment. I merely sat and scrubbed. As I began to lose feeling in my fingertips, I decided I should get dressed and head into town for food and exercise. I put on a fresh t-shirt and jeans, and old sweater, and then another old sweater on top of that. I hustled under a bleeding gray sky, as I thought of the things that I had done previously in Ljubljana this past week. The drinking, the meeting new people, the late nights, the conversations, learning Tarok (which will definitely get more airtime in the future), playing basketball, pizza eating, the et cetera. And it dawned on me that Ljubljana is a manic-depressive town that parties to undo the mope it's dying to submit to, that thinks and speaks to fill an ever-present void. And it reminded me of NYC. And it fortified why I've chosen to live in both of those places.