May 28 24
Budapest struck me positively immediately. So far my time has been quite luxurious and each Hungarian I met has been quite friendly. We stayed at a hotel in the center of the city
I am also continuing the routine of eating so much pork I become lethargic and loguish, drinking a large number of double espressos, and then walk around beaufiful buildings created by the Austro-Hungarian empire or earlier kingdoms. This as far as I can tell is a part of the typical eastern european lifestyle.
Here is me in a cafe where I ate a lot of pork
I want to see more, but I also feel exhausted and full of europe. I felt similar in Vienna- too many beautiful ornate buildings started to guve me indigestion. I started having mild visual hallucinations looking at these bricks outside of the Erbin Szabo library.
I’ve opened the pipeline to a mixed media diary, which will totally fuck up my ability to automatically migrate posts to the website. Nonetheless, here is a bit of the organ tuning this morning in the St Stephen’s basillica, which has the dessicated hand of St Stephen1 displayed inside.
As I’m getting closer to the end of my vacation I feel a certain itchiness to get back to my life in order to fix it, which in the short term means making this film/theater project that is becoming more realized in my mind. My barrier to progress is that I need to finish writing the script so that I can move on to finding collaboraters and actors and so forth. I’ve set aside some other fiction writing I also need to finish. I’m hoping I will be able to accomplish much of this on the flight back so that I can hit the ground running.
I am hoping this trip doesn’t feel ultimately like a vacation from my life as well as whatever telos exists within it. Nothing I’ve learned fits that neatly within whatever program I see myself working on. I’ve been looking at a lot of incredibly ornate and/or ideological architecture, and I just feel overwhelmed by the pressing weight of history. Maybe that isn’t so different from how I normally feel. Its hard to not worry that one is simply not equipped to stand up to the task of the current.
I was just walking back with Genevieve and Anna (who is from Hungary but who we know her studying in NY). They were discussing their families. Both of them have evocative and interesting family backgrounds which are tied to pivotal events in the history of Europe. I had nothing to add, not having parents connected to Europe in many generations, and felt that I was of a kind of different pedigree. Anna’s parents were academics, which naturally led to her having academic interests. Genevieve’s family is full of war heroes and opera singers and hippy bohemians. My entire family feels uninspired and mundane, qualities I worry are in my genetic makeup.
I don’t always feel that way, and its a bit of a silly narrative anyway. I liked the walk back to Annas house where we are staying. We walked under whats called Buda Castle Tunnel, a bit of an awe inspiring piece of engineering decorated with neoromantic arches on each side. It also sounds very expansive inside due to its voluminous tile walls.
Years ago, I used to take recordings of stuff all the time without a particular purpose. I think I would know what to do with personal recordings now, but at the time it just seemed like a natural thing to do with a zoom recorder I stole from a job I had. I would take it with me on drug runs or have it recording when I would get into fights with girls or when I would just be wandering about Portland or doing whatever else. I ended up losing the zoom recorded it after I totalled a car it was in while blacked out on xanax.
I worry that I am no longer an interesting person and have totally lost the edge I had which would have made the obsessive recording I did worth sharing. It makes me sort of sad doing this diary on what I missed out on, and how I won’t be able to capture the same pathos. At the same time, a large part of me is aware that the pathos I am talking about is illusionary, and I also have a well of fucked up experiences to draw on, if I really need to. I’m thinking about this because I want another small zoom recorder I can carry around with me. I wish I had brought one on the trip, but the only zoom recorder I have is a big multi input one. I like it a lot as a useful piece of versatile equipment but whenever I pull it out it looks like I’m carrying a piece of FBI surveillance equipment.
I think it would be interesting to start using personal recordings in music, but I think I was making much more interesting personal recordings when I was younger and my life was a lot more fucked up. I guess I can’t take for granted that my life won’t be equally fucked up in the future, or somehow tittilating in other ways I can’t even possibly imagine. If I get super desperate to make good post-post-new-new-sincerity autofiction I can always just relapse on heroin.
The Hungarian king, not the protomartyr