"There's no light anywhere, and nothing left to burn:"

These past few days I have been thinking a lot about ephemerality and this experience. With apologies to Mr. Brodsky there on the right, I am not so convinced that memories can be all that is left to me from these days. I lost my camera on Friday (with some 200 un-uploaded photos) and of course this is sad in its own way, but it is sadder to think that in time everything I have done here will be similarly obliterated. Already, the some 150 journal pages I've entered in the past three months are separating from the binding. Though a boy here named Eric (not to be confused with real Eric) was kind enough to point out that it just looks like I had used the journal a lot (hey), whatever positive connotations this has are nevertheless balanced out by the physical reality, the real landscape to the imagined; Marilynne Robinson: "It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall."

Nothing new, nothing new. "It's familiar, but not too familiar (and not too not-familiar)," says a songwriter I do not quote so often, for fear of drawing funny looks on the street, but he is singing about me, you know? It is all but decided that I will not be returning to Pittsburgh for any kind of living in any kind of future, and it is better this way, better to go somewhere where I can lie and lie and lie about my time in Europe, where I can use this steady deterioration of evidence to my advantage (I have had some success with this kind of dishonesty in the recent past, as some of you may know). And where there are jobs and pretty girls worth my trouble, obviously, but that must be everywhere but Pittsburgh, say?

So let's say there is nothing left to burn, then. Let's call this the last blog entry (no Prague pictures left, anyway!) and start this slow and pleasant process of forgetting. I am not one for forgetting, myself, but maybe this will be one thing left to learn here, in this city so sure of its ability to always remember.