the Cops

 I wrote this in July but forgot to publish it here.

I was taking Dad to the airport in Prague yesterday morning. When we pulled onto the highway out of Zlin I realized that I hadn't bought a highway sticker yet.

"Shit,"; I said. "I haven't bought a highway sticker yet."
Dad said: "Are you gonna go back?"
I said: !No, it's only 4.30. What I'll do is I'll pull over at the first gas station and buy one. God. Do they sell highway stickers on the highway itself? Maybe they don't. Maybe they only sell them before you get to the highway?"
Dad: "Surely they do."
Me: "WEll I hope so. I guess I'll find out."
an hour later, I'm still driving, having come across only one gas station, and that was closed down and made into a rest area sans toilet. I see a gas station in the distance. I pull off the exit and over. It's 5.30. Several cars are parked at some of the tanks, including a big police van--the type they use when they are out on the highway nabbing people for not having highway stickers. The cops themselves are inside.

Me: "Damn, there's the cops. Good thing I stopped. I guess I'll get some gas here. "
I get the gas and Dad goes into pay for it. I go in and buy a ten day highway sticker. Then I go downstairs to take a much needed leak. I return to my car. Dad puts the sticker on. The cops are gone. I pull away to leave and behind the gas station, there they ARE!!! Standing outside their van. They immediately JUMP in front of me holding out their little stop sign. "Shit, they're pulling me over", I say. (Probably unnecessarily.)

The cop walks over and inspects my new-bought sticker.

He walks to the window and demands all my documents: driver's license, proof of insurance, title of the car, Dad's passport, my passport. Then he asks me if I have some Czech ID because I guess he doesn't want to accept my American passport as ID or something. I show him my green trvaly pobyt book. He looks at it and says 'Do you live in Horni Jasenka, Vsetin?'
"yes'. I say.
"Hmmm...that is very good, very good. I know Vsetin well, very well." (All of this is in Czech, of course. He has a weird accent for me, a Brno accent, I guess, since we're only about 20 kms from Brno; so he's' a little hard to understand, and I start feeling like he's a Nazi toying with me. I'm so nervous I'm shaking.

Then he says: "You need a sticker to drive on a highway. You drove here without a sticker didnt' you? And you just bought that sticker here."

I reply, doing my best Jon Lovitz pathological liar impression: "actually....I didn't drive on the highway....yeeehhhh..that's the ticket...noooooo...nooooo....I drove the other way! Yeeeahhhh.... "(thinking, he was inside the gas station--he'll never prove that I didn't come some other way! Genius!! Got him on a technicality I do!)

He looks at me and says: "Well, that's very interesting because there is only one way to get to this gas station; and that's from the highway. It's the only road here. Now, do you still assert that you didn't take the highway here?"

I shake my head, thinking, damn, I need a lawyer or something . He repeats the question. I shake my head again.

Then he says: "Well, that will be 5000 crowns." This happens to be exactly how much I put in my wallet when I left. Plus I have some change. I probably have 5700 crowns in my wallet.

Me: (gasping) "I don't have 5000 crowns on me!" (I give my most distressed, now what the hell am I going to do, am I going to be arrested? look.

He wanders around and looks at the sticker again, inspecting it very closely. I figure(now) that he realizes he's shit out of luck: I don't have 5000 kc and he can't really fine me for not having a sticker when I have one now, can he?

He comes back. And says. "WEll, this time I'll let you go. Because I know Vsetin well. You are lucky you are from Vsetin. But next time you drive on the highway without a sticker, I'll take your license. Because that will mean that you don't know the law." I refrain from pointing out how illogical this statement is.

Me: "he's letting me go."

I drive off, shaking in fear for about the next 10 kms.

Review of Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb

This book, the second in Robin Hobb's Assassin trilogy, had a lot in common with the first in terms of structure. But I felt it was a lot richer in every way. The characters from the first book revealed more depths and the main character went through a lot of changes on his path towards a manhood that's going to be...interesting. 

There was a lot of unexpected things that happened in the story and I think that's what made it most interesting to me--it's not that there aren't tropes that she's using; it's just that she still manages to make them fresh and sometimes, they plot goes places where you'd never think it would.

Like the first book, the rising action rises rather slowly as Robin Hobb weaves what seems like the elements of a seemingly directionless, though entertaining, tale together into a rather complex tapestry of politics and character...and then there's the last twenty percent or so--where it all kind of explodes. The ending actually took me by surprise and I'm quite interested in seeing where it is going. 

The only real criticism, and I'm not sure if it's really a criticism of the writing so much as a personal taste thing, is that I miss the depth and breadth of world-building that my favorite fantasies have. It's not so much that it's not there...there is history. There are realms in this world mentioned but unexplored, glimpses of history...but I don't...FEEL it. There's a lack of specificity or something to it all. I don't sense the world. Part of that might be the fact that much of the novel is stuck inside the claustrophobic world of Buckkeep(other than a few outings, on sea and land) but it's also just the way it's written. I think Hobb is about characters first and foremost.



Robin Hobb's books, all of which are set within the same world, are more influential than I first thought. Recommended to fans fo fantasy.

Review of Salem's Lot

I've never read Bran Stoker's classic Dracula. I did see the Francis Ford Coppola film in the early nineties, and I have some dim memories of it. Problem was, I had made the bad decision to see it on LSD with my friends S and J. So the movie did not make a whole lot of sense and the memory that sticks out to me most was the vision of a moonlit Winona Ryder running down some stairs in her nightgown, full breasts unbound and all abounce in a most unVictorian manner. Me and my two friends involuntarily groaned aloud at the sight in the otherwise very quiet and very full cinema, a fact that to this day makes me cringe with embarassment and shame.

Anyway, Salem's Lot is based on Dracula. How loosely, I don't know: it seemed the film emphasized more a sort of love story between Dracula and Winona Ryder (this is not a thing in Salem's Lot) and I'm not sure which version is more loose.

I enjoyed Salem's Lot and if I hadn't been so busy at work lately, I probably would have read it faster. Stephen King writes good believable characters. I especially think his minor characters are well-written as his protagonists seem a little samey(going by this book and 1978's The Stand). I mean, there's the erudite 'professor type', 'the doctor', 'the normal guy', 'the comic-loving kid','the pretty-but-not-gorgeous sensible down-to-earth woman'...they all seem a bit familiar. 

The book is 41 years old, having been published in 1974(it's set in 1975) and it's prose does feel a little old fashioned in a slightly Steinbeck sort of way...but the ode to the New England Fall that he writes about a third of the way into the book is a really lovely passage that would probably stand by itself. 

Stephen King is excellent at delivering the chills, the fear that the characters feel affects the reader. This is interesting, I think it is his real talent and the secret to his success. Somehow he does tap the fears we all have had(but don't really talk about) as children or even adults sometimes and brings them back to life in us. It's a neat trick. 

HIs dialogue is problematic for me. It all seems a bit too...TV-ish. It's not that it's bad; it definitely does its trick and he's deft at using it realistically for exposition but I'm left wondering if people really talk like this in real life. I remember seeing TV programs where they did, but that's aboutit.
This is a small quibble though.

I enjoyed the book very much--really it was like candy and I will definitely read more of STephen King in the future.