Opening of the Summer season

Yestereve was such a cute day… Instagram has some of the pickies, but lemme just sum it up, before I pass out for today (we worked uphill and my inflamed Achilles tendon is murderizing me…) Plus a mosquito stung me in the middle of the back and that’s agony all on its own…

                At around 5:48 I texted Drej I’m too sleepy to get up for our 6 o’clock walk agreed, but then I remembered G has an engagement of the religious variety at around seven, so I nagged him by sending him “pretty please? Big goo goo eyes?” texts in ever more ridiculous emoji forms until he yielded.

                   o.o    …  0.0  ... O.O  …  ().()   ..  { }.{ }     …

I am categorically prohibited from coming within 300 yards of any Roman-Catholic institution (this is an odd way to say it), but you know me. I’m super nosy. He dropped me off at my fav café and I was just done ordering coffee, cake and spreading out neatly a sketchbook, a notebook, Lolita and Pavček’s poetry, when the phone rings: G calls to say he’s done and is coming to collect me. For real real?? That was the fastest confession ever: that man’s deep dark psyche is like, the most aired, neatly arranged and full of old magazines and properly folded socks place ever… If there is a grave sin within him is that he can be awfully stoic sometimes, especially in a ‘dangerous dirty secrets’ department…

                Two hours of trying to trick him to tell me what they talked about later, we got home and he went to sleep, and I offed to find Drej, who was having an art market Saturday. The tricky bit is that the entirety of the town was closed for pedestrian traffic due to the start of a bike race. I photographed a 50 or so police motorbike snake and later, with a very calm Starbark tied to the railing, cheered for the cyclists to have a great day as they sped by. It was quite fun, really, with media helicopters circling and fast cars with spare bikes on top rushing behind, and them, after the “End of Race” signal car, a couple of amateur cyclists trying to catch up and the crowd pretending they’ve just reached the finish line, applauding in a silly way. Behind the lane the music school performed karaoke drum show with very small kids drumming like Ringo fucking Starr.  

                Later G and I drove to a shopping mall to get some gift material and G met the Tedi store for the first time. I’ve never seen him stay in a single store for as long. Tedi is a truly cheap Chinese merchandise outlet, but their shit is adorable: I buy tons of buttons there, ribbons, scrapbook material and lots of practical gifts like cute lemon-like icecube moulds or holiday decoration. After getting G a new pair of Crocks flippyfloppies nextdoor, we picked up MyMaja and went to McDonald’s for a snack. The plan was to walk, but my ankle was already hurting.

                It was the opening of the “Summer in Celje” season, with a Museum Night headlighting: tons of open-air concerts and museums free of change and open until midnight. MyMaja and I traded our movie night for a museum night and bee-lined to the first stop, the old Regional.

                Halfway there the main square featured a vast array of posh chairs in front of a large stage where an orchestra, a choir and interchanging hot young people half-seriously performed loud, fun songs I’ve never heard before. We had no idea what was going on, but was so appealing we sat down and clapped every time they finished. The bleached young guy said we needn’t do so, because this is just a rehearsal, but if we really want to it’s okay. They made cute little jokes all the time, so we thought maybe it was something of a comedy. In truth it was a concert version of the Veronika musical, usually performed up on the castle, which I cannot afford. But the lead broke his foot and the weather was unpredictable, so they just played eleven songs without the show. Holy cow! That shit was awesome! The songs were so cool – simplistic, but very agreeable – and when a few minutes later the show began for realz, something like a thousand people showed up, stopped to listen, with occasional dog barking or baby crying, because some of the songs were pompous or dramatic or sad. They interpreted the story of Frederic and Veronica: a famous love-story about the end of the Princes of Cilli lore, in which a philandering young hair to the throne falls for one of the regular local honeys and ends up (probably) murdering his wife to marry the common girl. Modern commentaries of old customs usually irate me, I find them stupid (stuff like arranged marriages being preposterous or family politics being unusual..) Here the death of the Croatian noble lady is presented differently and I liked it. Clearly nobody will ever know what really happened, who was the villain of the story, who was the gold-digger, who was the asshole. Later, out of musical, in different history accounts, the legend of Cilli Princes is cut to a stop by a curse – an old man whose pretty daughter was kidnapped and raped to death by the last prince and his party, calls for the end of the dynasty and for crows and owls to inhabit the mighty castle instead. Which is what happened. No more Cilli.

                After it was finished – and it was indeed a catchy show, I am still singing passages from it, those I remember – we checked if any other place are ‘on‘, then hurried to the Old Regional, said to only be opened till 21:30 due to lot reconstruction (?). We saw a modern expo, a primitive colourful quilt expo and some more stuff on Alma and Thea – two old women who lived bohemic pauper life up on near-by Svetina hill. Alma is very famous in this town, because she was the first woman to knowingly circle the planet back in the day, but she’s also known for being so small, thin and unattractive the cannibals of exotic eastern islands wouldn’t eat her. I don’t like her because she was desperate for approval of the ‘old boys’ Vienna club, writing in German and being almost pathetic in her prose. Her companion Thea later illustrated her books and pretended to be a paintress, though her art-schooling was make-believe. But they were the closest Celje had of truly worldly, independent women back then, so in a sense they were super cool. Just … incredibly fucking sad; ignored, outcast and abandoned.

                The next stop was the newly renovated, massive Regional Museum, but we were already fairly tired by then, so we just sort of skimmed it. That place is not designed to host thirty people per room: the oxygen starts to run out and the air gets too stuffy. I met tons of familiar people, some of whom I am exceptionally fond of, and also saw they added new stuff to the Prehistoric wing. Including an oddly… well, no, not oddly but blatantly pornographic animation of Kelt customs… very interesting choice. Hm.

                Finally, in need of ice-cream, we sought for the café still opened and settled for a chat, a cake and some Coke Zero (I am slowly building up my tolerance for it). It was really late, so slowly we parted ways and I crawled to bed and dreamt the songs I’m still singing…