Gentle Reader -- You are welcome to peruse my web-based journal. I assure you that my contributions to this medium will be both infrequent and inconsequential. Read on!

Paradicsom nelkul.

All of the people whose blogs I have read have been graduate students. Why is that? I used to be one -- does that mean I can join the club? I don't teach any classes, nor do I have papers to grade.

I used to -- I made my living for one year in Hungary teaching Freshman Comp and American literature, after a year of teaching comp as a grad student. My teaching gig was at this private school which served as the Budapest campus of Western Maryland College. I was listed as "adjunct faculty", which was as grand an academic title as I guess I will ever have. Had I really wanted to get into the teaching thing forever, I might have stuck it out -- they told me that there was some chance I might have been able to "rotate back" to Maryland as regular faculty. I find it hard to believe that I could rotate back to a place I had never been, and which had not hired me -- I got the Budapest job by meeting a 16 year-old girl in an underground bar near Moskva ter (the girl intoduced me to her mom, who was a professor -- no hanky panky with the underage chicas, thanks).

So, any of you English types who want to get away for a while, I recommend Budapest. They paid me 200,000 forint a month in cash, literally under the table ("You will be black this semester," said the woman in charge of accounting) which let me have a great apartment a block away from the Danube and which translated into nothing across the border in Austria. If you go, tell Gabor I said hello. posted by Carlton at 10:11 PM

Thanks to all those who expressed concern about my mental and physical health. The sleepwalking has subsided, it seems. But you just never know what will happen next . . . . posted by Carlton at 9:21 PM

Fell Oaths

Just today, I had to swear another oath. Two oaths, actually -- one to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and another to the Constitution of the United States. I had to swear these oaths in order to become a Notary Public, to get my lovely certificate signed by the Governor Herself, Jane Swift. Last month, I had to swear three oaths, in the context of becoming an attorney. At that time, I got a similar (albeit fancier) certificate. They were oaths of allegiance to the same parties as before, but there was an added one, an "Attorney's Oath", supposedly the oldest of its kind in these United States. Both certificates are now in my desk drawer at work. (I am an attorney, by the way, in case I haven't mentioned that before.)

There was a man at my swearing in (it's a mass ceremony -- and a Mass ceremony -- har har) who wouldn't stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance, which is certainly his right. When they asked us to swear loyalty to Massachusetts and the US, however, he stood up and took it like the rest of us. I can't decide what that means -- was his original nonconformity just that, just exercising his right to be different? Did he compromise his principles so he could step up and get his meal ticket -- his license to practice law? Does any of this matter?

As for me, I thought about it. I have no plans to overthrow the governments of either the Union or the Commonwealth, nor to agitate for the same, so I took the oath. Still, there was something primitive about it, something that really affected me. I have now sworn allegiance to state and country -- twice. This is more than swearing allegiance to a flag; how can you be loyal to a flag, anyway?
When you get married, you swear an oath to that person; is it more or less serious to swear loyalty to an entity that has police power?This is weighty stuff.

The worst part of it is, I can't even tell you what that Attorney's Oath said -- they didn't give it to us written down. I just mumbled it, repeatig what the woman said, inserting my name, I, Carlton King, swear . . . I can't remember. What did I promise?
posted by Carlton at 10:22 PM

Lately, I've been waking up to find my apartment in an uproar. The hot water faucet is all the way on in the bathroom sink. The contents of the closet are in the middle of the floor. There is breakfast cereal all over the kitchen table. It's either me or some rowdy drunken elves having a keg party in my apartment.

Once (only once) I went outside. I came to myself, as I will after a while, on the sidewalk in front of my building. I had a shirt and some sweatpants on, thank goodness. Interestingly enough, I had my keys,so I went back inside. I have no idea why. posted by Carlton at 9:10 PM

I've hurt myself in my sleep -- you wake up with strange bruises. I once had a nasty cut on my foot, that I attribute to an exposed upholstery tack on a couch that for some reason I tried to climb. I've never done anything violent, although I've had strange dreams that my bed partner was somehow changed in the night to a monster or some such thing, and I've shaken women awake to demand who they were. Some think it's funny. Some really don't.

In Budapest, one of my three housemates was an Irish woman who was terrified of me. We had two bedrooms, and I shared one with Tim while the two girls were in another. When Tim and Nicole went away one weekend to Ljubljana, Natalie dragged a table across her bedroom to block the door so I couldn't shamble in during the night.
posted by Carlton at 9:06 PM

I walk in my sleep a lot, usually about 2 am, usually when it's noisy. I get up, wander around, move stuff, talk. Sometimes I remember why I did what I did, even if it makes no sense.

This weekend, a car alarm on my street kept going off. In my dream, Police Commissioner Gordon (of Gotham City) came to me and told me that I was in trouble because it was my car and the alarm had been going off for weeks. Without waking, I got up and put on clothes to go turn off my alarm. I don't own a car. I woke up with my shoes on. (In the dream, Commisioner Gordon was also my dad. Dreams are funny.)

posted by Carlton at 9:00 PM

Let's see if these comments work. Let's see if I get any comments. posted by Carlton at 10:42 PM

So wow, I actually got a response from Greg to what I have written here. That means that at least one person other than me is reading this. I have an audience! (And Greg's an even bigger nerd than I am!)

That makes me think about two things: One is a character in Kundera's *The Unbearable Lightness of Being*: A Czech dissident during the Communist rule, this guy (his name escapes me) is empowered by the idea that his apartment is bugged, and that therefore there is someone listening to everything that he says. Even the minutiae of his life is observed, and therefore gains importance. Before, he was just an out of work schlub, now he's a celebrity, even if only to the secret police.

The second is another high school production: *Damn Yankees*. I was a minor character in the musical, a baseball player named Sohovik. The other baseball players were played by actual baseball players from the varsity team; they looked the part but couldn't remember their lines. So there was a locker room scene where there were always these long, uncomfortable silences,and in which I had nothing to say. I wrote a joke for myself and inserted it into the scene:
Me: Hey guess what?
Other actor (totally taken by surprise): Huh? What?
Me: I got a fan letter!
Other: Uh . . . yeah?
Me: You know what that means?
Other: (sweating) Uh . . . what?
Me: I got fans!

Not a great joke, but it got a laugh. An original bit of theater, written by Carlton King, performed on stage. posted by Carlton at 10:28 PM

Continued:
Twice since I've lived here the ruffians have actually smashed TOILETS in the middle of the road (where they got the toilets, I don't know). But I testify that it did happen -- I heard the noise, a ceramic shattering which I think would be the sound I would hear if someone cracked me over the head with a cinder block. Both times, this bolted me out of bed as though it were Judgment Day.
Maybe I've gotten crotchety in my old age, but it would be nice to get some sleep without the destruction of personal conveniences in the middle of my street. posted by Carlton at 4:45 PM

Oh wow, the last coupleof times I've gotten really into an entry and written a lot, blogger tells me I'm timed out and so I lose the whole thing. That's frustrating.

How Boring is My Life!

Don't get me started. Not that you did, of course, not that anyone out there is READING this tripe. I know the word for tripe in Polish, by the way: flaki. At least, I think that's it. Ain't I urbane and sophisticated?

But I am also very very BORING. My big accomplishment of today was filing my federal income tax return -- guess what? I get the Lifelong Learning Credit again this year. Woo hoo! My God -- there is really nothing going on with me. I work (as a trusts and estates lawyer -- I do not intend to write about that), I go home to my little cheesebox apartment where I live alone, I occasionally go to the gym.

Most of all, I just don't ever see anyone. I'm still living in the neighborhood around BU, where I cleverly bought aforesaid cheesebox apartment. For purposes of this post, "cleverly" shall mean "not cleverly" in that the apartment itself is fine but everyone around me is twenty years old and the people in the apartments across the way spend their weekend nights emptying bottles of Busch (into themselves, presumably), and then smashing the bottles on the sidewalk. That's usually when I am trying to sleep. posted by Carlton at 4:37 PM

I should learn how to use the computer. posted by Carlton at 8:45 PM

I should get out more. posted by Carlton at 8:43 PM

Ultimate Fantasy

I recently went to see *The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring* ("Fellowship") for the third time, which means thet yes, I am an incorrigible geek. Beyond the overt magical elements, I think that the story is a fantasy at an entirely different, and perhaps more primal level: it is a fantasy of perfect friendship. In this lonely world, Fellowship and its sequels give us a picture of cute little creatures who do not quarrel, do not abandon one another, and stand together against some pretty great obstacles (the fighting Uruk-hai, anyone?). Who wouldn't want a friendship like that -- one where you are never abandoned, never allowed to lose hope, and never eaten by Orcs. Who has ever had one? I think this is pretty deliberate on Tolkien's part -- he's trying to manipulate the reader to give the big payoff at the end, which brought me to tears at the age of 12 (I'm just getting over it now).

And I'm no longer a grad student, so I do not apologize for writing about "Tolkien" as though he were an actual person who intended to write something, rather than simply a historically inevitable nexus of discourses that doesn't really exist. I'm not bitter, either. posted by Carlton at 8:42 PM

For those who couldn't wait for the next installment . . I don't have that "comments" thing, but you can email me at carltonwking@yahoo.com.

posted by Carlton at 8:25 PM

I knew I wouldn't have the fortitude to write in this thing every day. I even said as much. If anyone out there was desperately waiting for the next installment . . .

CURSE OF THE THIRD MAN

The Third Man is my favorite movie. I first heard of this movie when I was in high school. I was an usher for a production we did of a play called The Dining Room, so I ended up seeing the play about 6 times in one week. In one scene, an old man (played by Matt Brown, if anyone knows him) is confronted by his adult daughter (Shea Curry, for those of us in the know), who has left her husband for another man, and who is now living with a third person."What was that movie your mother liked so much," croaks Matt, a 16 year-old pretending to be 70. "The Third Man?" (To which of course Shea responds by screaming "It's not a man, Dad! I'm living with a woman!" Depending on the night, this would either elicit gasps of surprise or gales of laughter from the audience.) For some reason that stuck in my head.

Years later, I am in graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington. Jennifer, a female classmate, asked me if I wanted to come over to her apartment that evening and watch a movie. "You pick it out," she said. "Anything is fine."
I knew what was up. I knew that Jennifer was in the last stages of a divorce, and that she had been looking around for some action to inaugurate herself into the world of the free and single. She had told me so, and even told me that she found me attractive (a "tasty morsel" was the word that she used). I was a little put off by this directness, and the fact that she was still married, however technically, had kept me from doing anything about it. She was a bit older than me, but attractive. I was, as always, hard up. I told her I would come over. To quote Paul Simon: "Who am I to blow against the wind?"

Too cheap at the time even to rent a movie, I went to the video library in the basement of my dorm to check out a movie. They had a very strange selection -- several Akira Kurosawa films, some musicals (Oklahoma! didn't seem like the right kind of flick), and a copy of The Third Man. I took the last one, both because I had heard of it and because it was old and in black-and -white. If Jennifer and I were going to get busy and ignore a movie, that seemed the best candidate.

I got to Jennifer's apartment. She had made some finger food, had opened some wine. She hadn't dressed up,but she had put on makeup and fixed her hair -- this was supposed to be something that "just happened" and not a date. We sat down on hercouch and stared the movie. She turned out the lights and snuggled close.
But the movie was GREAT. To Jennifer's consternation, I was really into it. Something about The Third Man really grabbed me: Naive American Holly steps into the shadowy underworld of postwar Vienna, tries to solve the mystery of his best friend's death, is crossed and double crossed. This is film noir at its best, with action, suspense, mystery, doomed romance. We were sitting on Jennifer's couch, and she kept snuggling up to me, stroking my leg, nuzzling my neck. Unfortunately for her, I really wanted tosee the movie. When it was over, I wanted to talk about it, at length. Finally, she said that she was tired and that I should go home. I wasn't invited back.

This movie has since caused me problems with other women. Usually, when The Third Man enters the picture, it is a sign that the relationship is on the way out. For a long time, I couldn't get anyone to watch it with me. One former girlfriend who had suggested we watch it, just because I had said that it was my favorite movie, bagged out at the last minute when she discovered an old copy of St.Elmo's Fire in the hall closet. We broke up shortly thereafter. There is an art-house cinema near my apartment that shows The Third Man every so often, but none of my normal movie-going companions would ever agree to see it. I own the movie on DVD now (a gift from a former girlfriend, just before we broke up), but just can't get anyone to sit down with me and view the damn thing.

Is there a moral to this story? I don't think so. posted by Carlton at 5:10 PM

Everyone writes for an audience. In this medium, the audience is whoever stumbles in. I'd say its like a roadside shelter in a driving storm -- but there is no road, no storm, and this is no shelter. When thinking about writing something one imagines rolling up the sleeves, cracking the knuckles and putting fingertips to keyboard. Genuis crackles like lightning, from the brain to the electronic page, each idea perfectly outlined against the void.

Nothing like that here. I imagine I'll write a bit about my life, current pastimes and isses of the day. Read what you want. Thanks for stopping in. posted by Carlton at 8:35 PM