Tags: farewell | opinion | Think Magazine

It fits that my last Notes column will run in THINK #50...

The first Notes from Prague Six - although it wasn't called that at the time - appeared in THINK #5, which hit the streets during the brutal winter of '96 - '97.

It was a six hundred-word essay about masturbation, messily written on lined notebook paper and hand mailed to the THINK P.O. Box on Jindrisska.

When it appeared unedited on page 4, I was immediately embarrassed and glad that the editors had screwed up my name. Five years and some 70 THINK articles later, it is hard not to get nostalgic about that first article, distributed as it was in so many places that no longer exist.

Between that article and this one lay a good chunk of memory: 100 dead bars, a dozen MIA friends, fifteen roommates, two wars, a handful of soul-sucking jobs.

Over the years my writing in this space has been at turns puerile, scatological, and anti-capitalist. And I would like to thank the publishers of this magazine for the greatest amount of editorial freedom a writer could ask for, given the overt commercial aims of the publication.

Never once was I asked to tone down the volume, whether I was talking about Madeleine Albright's douche bags, the wickedness of the neo-liberal agenda or kindly asking the pompous Richard Allen Greene to suck my dick.