This is one anniversary I’d completely forgotten about until I typed the date. I have lost all sympathy, as apparently has the rest of the world. I still feel for the families and friends, but not for the country. It’s pretty apparent to everyone, except to about 55% of the Americans (thankfully, down 20% from a few months ago), that those in power have manipulated and squandered the world’s sympathy, turning the events two years ago into an imaginary mandate to strong arm the world at a cost many times greater than the worst estimates.

I didn’t intend to write about politics when I sat down, didn’t really intend to write about anything in particular. I just wanted to allow some time to see what would come out of my fingertips if they were given some exercise. Funny how I consider language to come out of the fingertips and not the mouth, but it’s true: words that come out though the mouth are ephemeral, soon forgotten, not so carefully weighed as those that first see the light of day on paper. C. and I talked about this yesterday, about how statistics show that most people in the world today are visual learners. How far must visual learners have lagged behind the auditory and tactile learners up until a few hundred years ago! Further back in history, before textbooks and computer screens, before diagrams and advertising, people considered brilliant need not have seen something in print to remember it, would have remembered it after one hearing, and the masses of visual learners would have wondered where such crispness of mind originated. Thus the technology of the day decides what sort of person is considered excellent. The only way the future IT guys of the human race could maintain their pasty white pallor was to hang out in the darkness at the back of the cave debating the best arrangements of sticks for various types of fires. Where have all the wicker weavers gone, all the craftsmen of obscure and obsolete trades? Plastering, my friend Chris always said, is a dead art in Chicago, and he meant in the world. His grandfather, a Swedish immigrant, had been a plasterer in Chicago, had plastered half the ceilings in the city, he said in his typically exaggerated manner, but I got the point. Nobody plasters anymore. It’s a craft that the current aesthetic economy simply cannot support, or so I thought. Plastering is alive and well in the Czech Republic, or at least in Brno. All of the buildings around town are brick and stucco. You never see bare brick, except in the scars left on the neighbors when a building is torn down. Granted, the newer ones have much less elaborate ornamentation than the old ones, but when the old ones get renovated all the plasterwork gets reapplied in all its former splendor. Our landlady seems to have been doing quite a bit of renovation lately. We are probably seeing the tail end of the process that split her single-family house into a house with room for two tenants in separate units. The last thing to be attended to is the replastering of the outside. The men in royal blue overalls showed up yesterday with the traditional tools of the trade and began at about 7:15 in the morning to turn the huge pile of sand in the front yard into the outside of a house.

getting plastered is a perfectly lovely way to spend time, and although you're right that it is more visible here than in the states, i'm doing what i can to help people on both continents to appreciate it as more than a dying art.

oh, i'm sorry, but it was SO NICELY SET UP.