E17: ESSAY October in Budapest

“You’re not so good at weekly dispatches,” a voice in my head tells me as I think about sharing more regularly, and it was in the midst of writing that sentiment another voice chimed in with, “you idiot, you shared a weekly dispatch every Friday for a year...”

It’s really like that. Just like that. Voices telling me thus and such, bickering sometimes. Then there’s me, catching them doing it, questioning their authority or their motivation. And I tell myself that’s normal. That’s the way everybody does it. The Spiritualists talk about the Higher Mind, the Conscious Mind, the Inner Child. Or was that a psychologist? Who cares.

The point is that one of my voices assures me those are the three puppet masters bickering over who gets to fiddle with the strings today.

Oh, here’s a little background music if you like to read to music. I recorded this last night at a bar called Zsír, which essentially means lard in Hungarian.

(I just learned the email embedding doesn’t work with SoundCloud, so this link works if you don’t see it below.)

In the springtime I toyed with sending handwritten dispatches and I will do more of that, too. But I’m also going to just share random bits of media that I collect throughout the week because I’m constantly capturing things that I never really share so it becomes digital crud.

Really, if you don’t do anything with it, it’s crud.

And every little creation comes from joy, and what better to share than joy. I think that’s what we’re supposed to do, but we forget. Forget the “we,” I forget. So this morning I determined that I could just keep it simple. Less crud, more share. This dispatch contains more than what I collected this week, but that’s going to be the vibe I shoot for.

As per the lead in of lede, I’m in Budapest again. After Ukraine in May, I spent a few months in the U.S. to sort out a legally viable path to spending more time in Hungary. I wouldn’t say I’m relocating here, but I am laying out a patch of ground from which I can operate so that Budapest is one of my bases of operation. That requires a little front end investment and the first hurdle was getting a longer term visa.

The process was stressful. As what some might call “freelancer,” or others an “artist,” or others a “career-avoidant misfit,” you have to make a special case to the authorities of a foreign country that you can be a productive member of their community in order to be granted permission to live, come-and-go, and work as you please. I took it to be a long shot, and an immigration attorney I consulted confirmed that it wasn’t easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. Long story short, somehow I got it.

Tanulom a nyelvet, és például ezt a mondatot tudom írni szótár nélkül, es nem fordítottam a telefonommal.

Which means: “I’m learning the language and, for example, I can write this sentence without a dictionary and I didn’t translate it on my phone.”

So I can read and write moderately simple sentences and I am working with a tutor so that my speaking capabilities catch up with the quiet skills. It’s mainly about overcoming the spur-of-the-moment nerves of speaking such a strange (but beautiful) language.

Anyway...

Work-wise, I’m wrapping up my Ukraine project which is a shit-ton of editing. I shot way more material than I was commissioned to, so I’m figuring out how not to bury myself in unpaid work cutting it all. But I love it.

The next big thing is a film about my friend, Bullet Shih, who I wrote to you about earlier in the year. The plans for that have progressed and I’ve begun preproduction and some early scene building. It feels like the project of a lifetime, as far as my film work goes.

Why is my camera hanging by a string? More on that later...

And of course, the editing of Budapastiche continues. I’m in the home stretch and I plan to be done within a month or so, year’s end at the latest. I’m on page 290 with about 50 or so to go. The first 50 pages was slow going, and then things picked up, and I anticipate that last 50 will be on the slow side too.