"Soup. What? I'll cook some soup. Yes. When we get home. O yes. Soup, comforting, a bullion, chicken stock with rice, just like mother used to, or noodles, good for you, get it down you after a day's running about, to build up an appetite, not to quench it, not to satisfy it, or even later, when grown up, after a day of metaphorical running about, of doing things, of being alive, of coming home, not to lie down, not to eat the soup...but to build up an appetite, not for more food, but for doing things, for more running about, for more being alive. Coming home." --Lukas Tomin "Kye" **** Ah, more of Lukas Tomin's novel Kye. I cannot resist the pull of this hallucinatory work of fiction, this bizarre glimpse into a life that no one sane would dare live. It is a harrowing little novel, beautiful and profane all at once. And I have this novel crammed in my head, jangling around all of my other thoughts. Snips and jagged little splashes of its prose come oozing out of my pores as they did tonight, when I took this picture. This little street is home to someone...lots of someones, actually, and there are windows at street level where you can look in and catch glimpses of lives so radically different than your own. I saw inside of 4 apartments and was greeted with a few bizarre tableaus, but rather than play the Peeping Tom, or worse, I restrained myself from photographing what I saw. I contented myself, insteady, with standing in the middle of the street and taking this picture. I've come to the conclusion that Prague may be my home, that I may settle here sooner than anticipated, and if so, I hope that there's soup to build up an appetite. Ah, but this is Prague and if there's one thing I know about this city is, there's soup. When there is nothing else, there's soup, and a pot with a grandmother's fingerprints all over it. That's Prague for you though, and at night, when you're alone and suffering from a fever of another writer's prose, you see the streets like this and wonder what other stories have yet to be written, especially of the people who live on this street. Well, I wonder anyway, and if all goes right, maybe I'll find out. **** As always, thank you for viewing and commenting. This is an odd picture for me because I was in a strange, abstract-trance when I took it. I'd just met with a friend of mine who I thought had left Prague. He showed up and dumped a few episodes of Star Trek onto my laptop, then took me out for beer as we discussed such grand existential staples of universal existence as Lieutenant Uhura's red miniskirt, and Captain Kirk's habit of ALWAYS getting into trouble. I took this picture on the way home, utterly astonished that I'd been discussing Star Trek fashion statements (from the 1960s) with a friend who wasn't even born in the 1960s. It just goes to show you...life is weird. And fun, especially if it comes with a Czech accent. Thank you for viewing and for reading this LONG rhapsody, and thank you for the views and comments for my previous posts.