There's so much to learn about Pekkúr: so much to explore. There's a lot to learn about Agara in general. It's easy to simply focus on the modern day city or the country stretching around it. It's a bit more intimidating to look into local history dating back into the murky days before the Communist Invasion of 1969. Things get "asynchonous" as my friend Mišeků (the common short form of Mikhail) puts it. By his own confession, he's not inclined to study ancient Agaran history. He has lived in Pekkúr all of his life, and so he is—as he puts it—an accidental historian. One cannot avoid history in Pekkúr. It's in the air, it vibrates beneath the ground itself. It spits, on occasion, like a baby spewing a bit of infant's indigestion onto the shoulder of its mother. (The Agaran Machine is said to possess self-repair capabilities and a rudimentary form of organic awareness and as a result of that, it behaves [in local lore, at least] like a living thing, casting off skin cells and hair. Such things—hair and skin—are often worn gears, flywheels, and other dead, mechanical things, pushed up through the ground by the machine itself. The occasional, faint tremors that rattle expensive china in cabinets are often called "burps." Within days of a Machine burp, dead mechanical things, often as large as car engines, are often found, recently pushed up through forest soils just outside of the city. Agarans think nothing of this, and are—somehow—able to tell the difference between Machine burps and more geologically-induced seismic disturbances. I wonder how, since there don't seem to be any fault lines anywhere near Agara. Maybe it's simply because there are no natural earthquakes and tremors in the area.) I thought of this while standing on Mišeků's balcony. I'd spent the day with him, drinking sköy, listening to a weird mix of Marilyn Manson, Amy Winehouse, and Stravisnsky, while recalling the things he had to say about life in Agara during "time when cave-mans lived here." He'd taken me to see the remnants of an incredibly ancient oppidum, built by the Celts somewhere around 200 BC; the Celts, I learned, got around a lot. I'd heard of such things, but I didn't know that they existed so far to the north. Mišeků's own neighborhood is said to exist in the footprint of such an incredibly ancient, fortified structure. He'd taken me to see the old stones, and I was able to tell that a thousands-of-years-old fort had actually stood there. As I stood on his balcony, I had a bit of a conceptual hiccup, as I stared out at the Old World urban sprawl of modern-day Pekkúr. I imagined my friend's mysterious cave men doing things that cave men probably shouldn't have had the ability to do, and I wondered how that might have shaped the mind and the perceptions of the slightly nerdy, frighteningly smart guy I knew; the same slightly nerdy, frightening-smart guy who thought that Marilyn Manson was the best thing to happen to human society since the discovery of beer. —Rachel Havner/unpublished journals. * Okay, this isn't a photograph of Pekkúr, but it is a photograph of where Pekkúr was actually born. As you might-well-guess, it's an image of Prague, from the Andel region, if I remember correctly: it's where my friend Beth lived, and the image was taken from the balcony just outside of her kitchen. As Agara (and the capital city of Pekkúr) came from Prague, it's only fitting to post an email-salvaged image of the place. I'm without a computer again, and so commenting and posting might be a bit sparse until I get my old, dying work-horse back from the repair shop. I'm shopping for a new one, but it might be a couple of weeks until I find the right one. And so I hope to be back and catching up, when time and circumstance permit. But, as always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you're all having a great week.