Good-Bye to All of Lat...via

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back - Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

Since I spent a little yellow wagon full of money last night warding off those who wished me to spend a large Latvian wheelbarrow of money, I played it cool today. No hangover for some reason. The roulette wheel spins and you never know.

There are no rules and if there are, they aren't fair. You can drink two waters for every cocktail and wake up with Utah's Golden Spike in your brain. Black. Or, you can forget to eat, drink a bottle of aftershave, sleep in a Goodwill coat-donation container and wake up just fine. Red.

The little roulette ball lands where it will. Last night it landed on green, for absinthe. And usually that means the house wins. So, I guess I am the house this morning. Hello, house. Hello, self.

Since winning also means you are out of euros, I went to the grocery store instead of the cafe. Bought some marvelous cheese and fell deeply in love with some dark, brown bread. I loved it, and I was IN love with it. It tasted like great clay chunks of loamy earth. It tasted like a sliver of the goddamn firmament splintered off and floated down.

I also got some local cheese after looking up the word for cheese and matching it to the label. No surprise butter with these soft, wet bricks.

You can bet I also got a "lotta takeaway" at the Coffee Tower.

Went back to that marvelous wooden palace to eat. Sat for hours writing while the house went about its morning business. Pauls was late for school, everyone had overslept, and he calmly ate his cereal and told me all he was probably missing today was "sport."

Lasma asked me to take her to the Kagabay house. I wasn't sure what that was. "The Kagabay is the police from when Russia was charging of us." Oh! The KGB Museum.

I told her we could (I didn't want to go) but I had been to one in Romania once, and it was very sad.

"Yes, sad," chimed in Madara, "but also dangerous and thrilling. You must go."
"We must go," said Lasma, "It is free, but you have to pay something like four euros for the guide. Something like this."

I told them I had bought some blueberries from an old woman this morning and thought about how she survived that time.

"Yes, but she must not have been very smart, because they took away the smart people and made them work in Russia."

I told her we could go. It all made me think of when I was in Cambodia and I was like, "Take me to the palace, please," and the tuk-tuk drivers were like, "Sure thing, right after the genocide museum."

And so we went. It was nice to walk with Lasma and hear about her life. The live casino gig was costing them a fortune in makeup and the hours were difficult. Dudes weren't creepy, but management kept changing philosophies on how much they should flirt with them. Some days they were asked to be provocative, some days neutral.

She and the other girls had a lot of trouble keeping it straight. Additionally, they were required to switch "channels" every thirty minutes, so if it was a flirt day, by the time they had a conversation going, they had to jump from dealing blackjack to calling bingo.

They didn't give her the day off when her grandmother died and she had to cozy up to degenerate gamblers all that shift, so when it looked like airbnb would let her make a living, she quit.

We were walking through a part of the city I hadn't been in yet, an interesting urban section with plenty of that marvelous Jugendstil about.

The KGB Museum is in an historic building a famous Latvian architect made for himself, but it became a police station when the Russians took over in 1917. Lenin! The Oktober Revolution! I'm pretty sure I didn't know that part of Baltic history. Like, I've read plenty about Rasputin and Anastasia and all that sexy machine gunning, but I don't think I knew there was a big land grab afterward.

There was, and this was part of it. So, the Russians kind of made this place heck for a while until the Nazis kicked them out and made it hell, then the Russians came back when the war went west and the Nazis retreated back to Poland. How must that have been? Oh, thank god, the Germans left, let's fire up the.... "Remember us, komrades? We hear some of you have been reading novels while we were gone."

 And no longer was it sexy, bald Lenin but now Stalin with the twinkling murderous eyes.

So, just endless horrors of arrest and spies and gulags and suppression and forced labor. The Communists were absolute evil, and while I like the narrative that Reagan beat them/bankrupt them by forcing them to match the US in military spending, the "currency" they were spending in the arms race were these people's lives.

Your neighbor would be in trouble for being caught with a newspaper, so they'd turn you in for being an enemy of the state, you'd have an underground press printing Latvian children's books so the language can stay alive, but the ink supplier is a spy and shoots you, and your wife goes to the work camp, etc.

This doesn't even touch it, really. The place was tremendoulsy sad, filled with the energy of desperate, broken people and steeped in the evil of the men who ran it like a Church's Fried Chicken.

And it's terrible to compare sufferings, but it still didn't touch that high-school prison in Phnom Penh.

Lasma is, like, 22, so this era is just her parent's memories. The grandmother who died the day the casino made Lasma come to work anyway had been in this building and somehow left it.

She teared up telling me about it. We were exploring at different rates but would meet at different displays and whisper the sad thing we'd just read. There was an untranslated propaganda poster she read to herself. It was Lenin's face on a bright yellow background with three paragraphs of blue text.

I asked what it was, and she was like, "It was on the walls of all of Riga's schools. It's about pledging allegiance to your family. It's not so bad, actually,"

And I was like, "Not so bad? That's how it starts, maaaan, they got to you already! This is exactly how this shit works, maaan. You went cheap!" And we both laughed because we had been so tense.

Afterward, back in the sun, two of the very few who entered that place and were allowed to leave,  I was quiet and Lasma asked me why. I said it was because I was the sort of person who would be thrown in that sort of prison. And not because I had any revolutionary conviction, but simply because I was a reader and a writer.

I felt cowardly and useless. Like, I wouldn't have been brave enough to be an enemy of the state, but I would have been considered one anyway. I wouldn't have deserved my martyrdom. All of that felt like different layers of selfishness to me. Fearful and prideful at the same time. A twisting caduceus of fear and pride.

She was like, "What the fuck are you talking about? If you would have been in there for any reason, you should be proud. It is honor to be hated by them, feared by them, for any reason. If they took you there, it is proof of your worth as a person."

My emotions after that were complicated. I am still thinking about it.

She wanted to go to her church after that, so I went with her, Old St. Gertrude's. Very peaceful inside. She asked me if I believed in god and I told I her I didn't. "Many do not," she said, "I am not sure either, but this place has always been important to me,"

Then she said she needed someplace green, so we went to the park. There was a big statue of a lioness rolling around on her back, so I stretched out on the belly and she took my picture. I was like a forty-year-old Bettie Page.

She smoked in the park, which is illegal, and there was some concern that if she got a ticket, the policeman would get her in trouble with her boyfriend (also a policeman) but we didn't get caught. A dude with a beer saw her, though and just started drinking his beer. I kept waiting for it to escalate further. Heroin. Tax cheating. Genocide.

We saw a girl sneaking up on another girl sitting on a bench. It was fascinating theater. We saw it all developing, and when the predator girl sprang and terrified her friend it was very satisfying. Both of them were flushed and breathless with the excitement of it. Then the attacker said, "So price, motter fucker," and Lasma and I curled up on the park floor like two laughing lioness statues.

"They are Russian," said Lasma, "Did you hear that accent?" I heard it. So unexpected and funny, maybe the only English she knew.

Then she had to go pick Pauls up from school, so we parted at the giant chocolate sign.

I went crazy at a pelmeni place where you pay two dollars for a bowl the size of Thor's drinking horn. It was absolute gluttony and the purest heaven.

Bought a watercolor of the Old Town from a nice old artistlady, thought about buying some fake amber and closing that loop, but didn't. I did buy a dumb magnet with a cat on it, though. I also bought a plastic dinosaur for Pauls.

This is a truly beautiful place.

The sun was getting lower and the square was coming to life. I thought about going back to the Depeche Mode bar but remembered it was terrible. Took the tram home.

Pauls and Lasma were at the table with paper and pencils.

"Do you want to play with us?"

What are you playing?

"I do not know the English name for it. We call it Sausage."

Sausage. I see. I know this game. But I don't understand why you call it that.

"Because when you have three like this, you have made a sausage."

Ok. Ok. That makes more sense than the English name.

"What do you call it?"

Tic Tac Toe.

I played with them both. Two draws, of course. When I blocked Lasma from creating a sausage, I drew my X and said "Surprise, motherfucker," and our eyes transformed into cartoon hearts of platonic love.

Pauls wrapped his dinosaur in a napkin and made it roar itself out.

They were both very excited to see American dollar bills and Polish zloty. Pauls stole ten zloty and hid it in a Minecraft book. He said I had to read it to get my money back. I pretended to be a genius who could read very quickly. Mmm mmm, very interesting, yes, flipflipflip, hmmm, bricks, I had no idea you could..., flipflipflip, fascinating, yes. Ah, my money!

Then it was bed time, so I went to bed. I heard the girls rushing around washing sheets for the other rooms. In the morning, they would do my room, because I would be gone forever.

Sleep.

Cold beet soup on the the last day. Riga has been a beautiful part of what has been a very beautiful trip. I stood on the corner with coffee and watching the city come to life. Trams and buses, people rushing, breakfasting, kissing one another goodbye. It's the same as Seattle, but they are kissing on stone streets and their breakfast is yogurt. It was good to spend three days here and get a broader feel for what it's like. To know the streets, to walk without a map, to take the trams and buses like a person. I will miss it. It was nice to imagine being a part of it. In and out of time.

Lasma came out and said I needed to buy some chocolate from a famous Latvian place. I was like, "I have to get a cab to the airport," and she was like, "You need the chocolate more," so we ran down there. There was an enormous factory. I made a joke about Augustus Gloop, but she had never heard of Willy Wonka.

Jesus.

At the factory gift shop, she filled a bag with everything I needed to try. She was almost desperate. Like, it was important to her I have the taste of the important chocolate before time ran out forever. It was the same brand as advertised on the clock from yesterday.

Boxed it up, fist-bumped, and got in my cab. She said she would miss me. I will miss all of it. Farewell, Riga. We got very close and will never see one another again.

I watched a Zoolander double-feature on the flight home. Please don't go to any trouble, I shall have myself arrested.

Thanks for reading, fools. It was a long, transformative trip, and I am forever changed.