Spaceman of Bohemia

by Jaroslav Kalfar

Never laugh out loud at your own jokes, Dr. Kuřák had advised. It is a sure sign of a deteriorating mind.

Once you trap yourself into believing you can be your own company, you will cross the dangerous line between contentment and madness.

“The greatness of a nation is not defined by abstracts, Jakub. It’s defined by pictures. Stories that carry by mouth, by television, immortalized by the Internet, stories about a new park being built and the homeless being fed and bad men being arrested for stealing from good men. The greatness of a nation is in its symbols, its gestures, in doing things that are unprecedented. It’s why the Americans are falling behind—they built a nation on the idea of doing new things, and now they’d rather sit and pray that the world won’t make them adapt too much.

energy cannot be annihilated, and thus matter cannot be annihilated, and thus all we burn and destroy remains with us and within us. We are living dumpsters. We have run out of antimatter, and now the eternal game is one of Tetris—how do we organize the self so as not to choke?

This is the way to survive in this world, to wake up in the morning and receive a cancer diagnosis, discover that a man has murdered forty children, discover that the milk has gone sour, and exclaim, “How unlikely! Yet here we are,” and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerks that pump blood through our emaciated veins.