You’ve come (with tourists from the land of your birth) to see your favorite club, and to hear the rakish nightmare-noise coaxed out of strange ethers by a local DJ friend of yours. When last your visited, you met locals who’ve since become your drinking comrades. You seek their faces in the ocean of faces surrounding you. There is no need to marvel at the interior space of this Cross, beyond the compact sprawl of the city’s tourist district, because you‘ve seen it so many times before. It‘s a part of your life…a thing of everyday, even as the tourists you‘ve brought here, gawk and marvel. You meet a friend you’ve known from two other bars. It’s December and he is wearing sandals and thick, black socks, but there is a hole--tiny--in one toe, that you register because of the diminutive patch of cream-pale flesh teased in a patch of blue/orange light. The flesh-tip of his big toe. He hugs you like a bear and you shake hands in the complicated manner of Masonic lodge brothers. It’s how they do it on television, how they do it in your country, according to what is seen on television…how they do it here, because television says that you’re cool if you shake hands like Americans, and if you shake hands WITH Americans like that, they’ll like you because you know their language of touch. You don’t have the heart to say that Americans don’t have a language of touch, per se. Instead, you give him the benign lie of silence, and let him drag you into a booth, where other friends are sitting. Here, you see that he--and everyone else, including you--is a creature of metal and shadow, and of smoke and noise. Here, you sidle into the salvaged bus-seat with cigarette burns in the cushion, and are enveloped in conversation. Here you share smoke and toasts, realizing that as your two new friends see you, they mistake you for one born here. They see just how comfortable you are in a seat with cigarette burns, in a seat next to your dreadlocked friend with a hole in his sock. They see how natural it is for you to sit your drink on the glass top of a table built from the engine of something that once flew. They see the metal, they hear the strangeness, and you--in your private mind--recognize the moment when those from your own country declare that you’re at home…here…in a bar where the tables once kept planes in the air. *** Still another of my photos from Prague's Cross Club, from the upstairs bar near the blue and green "computer room." As always, I thank you for viewing and reading, and hopefully enjoying this image as well.