one night in prague

One night in Prague, I went out with a healthy mix of local ex-pats and touring rich kids. I suppose I was one of the rich kids. My parents had given me a sizeable amount of money for actually graduating college, something I'm not sure they actually expected me to accomplish. And for good reason- it was up in the air for a little while there. I did two things with that money- one very good and one very, very bad. The bad one was invest in tech stocks right before the bubble burst. That was around January 2000. If you have no clue what I'm talking about, just be glad you didn't invest then. It was a bloodbath of epic proportions. It would have probably been more productive for me to take that money, spend it on crack, and then go to rehab.

The wise thing is that I went to Europe for a month and half. I won't bore you with all the life changing/affirming moments. I think I'll bore you with one though, because I thought about it tonight.

That night in Prague. We went to a bar on the west side of town and I had absinthe for the first time. The next immediate memory is Tom running across the Charles bridge naked. And holding a girl whose name I forget as she cried because she just found out her brother died. Going to the Jewish quarter and telling the Aussies about the Golem. And long after the group had split up, finding a rave and dancing with strange exotic women. Yeah, I did that. Once. At the end of the night I sat in the internet cafe, watching the sun come up and checking my email. It was 2 weeks before I'd find out I had to come home. I sat there and wrote to a list of people, some of which I barely knew. I didn't even meet Julia until 2 days later. But the reason I bring it up- the reason I look at that night- everything was right in the world. For one night. Tom and I were going to the Bone Church the next day with the Australian girls, and the Boathouse Hostel was 5 tram stops away, on the Cerny Kun exit. I didn't worry about mortgage, bills, keys, or gas. It was good. I'm not going to say it is all downhill from that moment, cause it absolutely isn't. But that was up there...