I entered Budapest from a bus that took me south of Bratislava. I hadn’t planned on going there and neither had I planned to go to Budapest. I had read about the refugee crisis going on across central/Eastern Europe. That information made me want to stay away — I didn’t want to get involved.

I like peace. I enjoy quiet spaces where I can listen to my music, loudly, on headphones without anyone else around. Drinking beer. Dancing, if I feel like it. Maybe splattering some paint on a canvas if I have some paint and if I’m lucky enough to have something to paint with, and on.

The first place I stayed in Budapest was a party hostel. I didn’t know it was a party hostel until I got a response email saying that it was … people came home drunk, they said. Well, I figured that’s what every hostel was like.

The bus to Budapest from Bratislava was about an hour late. The ride was two or three hours. I was getting tired of traveling to different countries, it all felt the same, almost. That’s what happens after three weeks. But don’t expect people to tell you that on the internet.

I got there and walked with my heavy baggage. A woman greeted me after I was buzzed into a building that I’d managed to figure was where the hostel was located. She had red hair, bright blue eyes. They were almost green. She sat me down on a couch.

“So.”

“Yeah.”

I sat down.

“Where are you coming from?”

There were other couches in the room. A pool table. Cushions. A projector screen with a Beyonce song playing. I laughed.

Her and I chatted.

By the end of my stay there, after a week — I was finished. Done with hostels forever. Fuck this place. Fuck these people. From the UK: Scotland, Ireland, England. Aussies, Kiwis. Fuck ‘em.

They were young, mostly. Some had big boobs. I even talked to some of the people, on one night in particular, when I felt like being open and social. Friendly, in other words.

Isn’t that what freedom’s all about?

*LIFTS A BEER BOTTLE TO THE CEILING*

I explored most of the city, going to the bridges. Meeting a Vietnamese girl who had just finished college, at the hostel, who was adventurous … went out to the caves on a whim, came back and went to the baths. And when she returned, the drinking games that occurred each night at 7PM were over and people were heading out to the bar.

“Why don’t you go?”

“I don’t want to pay any money.”

“It’s free,” I told her.

“Oh, really?”

We went out there. I was walking down the street, talking to her and some Spanish girls.

“What a beautiful sky!”

“It’s more beautiful in Spain,” they told me. One of the girls, with long brown hair, olivey skin, was explaining that Spain was beautiful and she was doing this while pouring some kind of drink and making a concoction in a big plastic bottle. We stopped at the corner. One of the dudes from the hostel explained that we should all finish our drinks.

“You can’t bring that into the bar.”

The Vietnamese girl I’d met had started walking into the corner bar. I had told some of the other Asian girls she’d befriended that she was “very smart”.

“She’s a chemical engineer,” I said, before chugging my beer.

“What an awkward thing to say!” she flipped on me. Then one of the other girls shrieked.

“OH MY GOD. I’M STUDYING CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TOO.” Or something.

“See,” I said. Friendly.

Out at the bar. The usual shit going on. I noticed all the hostel workers sitting at tables, in their regular clothes, doing nothing but getting fucked up every night. Avoiding life. Not being friendly. Just making shit out of nothing. Taking beers from their public fridge … not challenging themselves. Taking it easy. Farting around. Wearing clothes until they smelled.

In fact, one of the guests … some girl who got wasted every night, the first few nights I was there, shouting like a worried hoodlum let loose upon an unsuspecting charade of her own bullshit projected on others to fix for her. Ah, she needs to get laid, I told myself. That’s what she really wants. Freedom!

“Will you smell this?” she asked me, the night before. I was lying in bed smearing paint on the bedsheets. Red, pink, orange, black, yellow, blue.

“Does this smell?”

I smelled her red dress. A hippie dress, to be sure. A onepiece number.

“Nah. It’s fine.”

“Smell it again.”

I did that.

“You’re fine,” I told her.

See. There it is. There it was. Freedom. Lurking there in front of us, all the time. Waiting to be explored. Rationed. Handed out. Doled out to prisoners in their own bodies. What about the concentration camps that surrounded iPhone factories? Nobody cared about those poor fuckers. Shit.

The Vietnamese girl (leaving her name out of this even though it was a good one!) started having fun with her other newfound compatriots. They did some shots at the bar, some kinda vodka shot where the bartender sprayed black magic contagion into the glasses. The hippie girl who’d checked me in at the start of my stay had told me about it.

“You get really fucked up,” she said, her eyes went wide. She spread her wings. And off she went, right through the fucking window.

“Shit,” I said, “what the fuck is this place?”

I walked outside. At the end of my laundry, I was in board shorts I’d purchased from Da Nang, Vietnam. That was weird. Caught all kinds of stares. The guy at the laundry place was one of the strangest fucking dudes I’d ever met.

At night, Hungarian people came out to the bars. They wrote checks for their stay in the afterlife. Worried that their checks might bounce. They weren’t thinking about their karma. Or their auras. They weren’t thinking about boring as fuck guests on Joe Rogan podcasts, talking about analytical geometry. (A good subject to clear your head of your insomnia.)

The days wore on and I worked hard out of cafes. In between the hours, I slipped through wormholes and went out in an elastic band that was wrapped around the universe, permanently. Somebody, somewhere was inserting a needle. And the whole fucking universe bounced back. All of America began hanging its head. I was spinning with the room. The room was the sun and the sky. I was looking for pinneedles. And beer bottles. Studying the Sopranos like it would one day be my own craft that lifted me heavenward.

Suddenly. After about a week, I realized that I had a script writing program that was about to expire. I went to a bar, sat down. Ordered a beer. Then I began writing the pilot episode to a TV show I had an idea for … writing about 18 pages in three hours, or so.

Ah, well. I’d seen the sights. I was traveling to experience life and the way people lived. I didn’t give a shit, really, if people were judging me. That went away after three days of being in a new place. At least it did for me. One of my (very few) strengths.

After the week was up, I was glad to get to a new place. Another hostel. I booked the first one I could find. It was hot that day. It was hot the first week too. Felt like hell. A heat wave encompassing Europe, all the places I’d been. Germany, Czechia, Bratislava. The Earth. So far, distant. From everything else. Like a page of empty words floating through infinity. You grabbed hold of a page. Wrote down some shit. Hoped it floated. Hoped it made sense. Go back to sleep. Everything’s fine. Concentration camps, protests, demonstrations, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson fucking his slave wife. It all adds up to an existence that never really goes away, it’s always there.

Forget about the Spartans. The Goths, Gauls, Tartars, Huns, Beetlejuice. Forget about Budapest. Go there. If you want. Wear drab-colored clothing. Don’t mention the Surrealists. Study the art and architecture. Forget the people, forget that they are drinking out on the street at 9 AM at sidewalk cafes. Forget that the drug addicts and drunks who die on the street also run hostels where bed bugs are infesting the sheets and Spanish women crack out at 5AM and lie there with their legs spread so you can see all the way to Mars, Venus, Uranus, and Pluto.

Wait.

Where did Pluto go?

All the way out there, in the sidereal piecemeal trunk that is the Universe. Slamming shut on logic, peace, an open society. Nothing is free. Not even these words. I mean, come on.

What the fuck is democracy, really?

An illusion. Like reality.

“None of this is real!” I screamed, tossing rocks into the water below. One of four bridges all lined up neatly along the Danube River.

My mother said fifteen prayers for me, back home. Some three or four hundred thousand miles.

“What’s a mile?” An alien asks. Cracking his flesh around an armpit that evolved through ancestors over millions of years, cupping his weird and strange hand around the armpit. Like so.

He lurches forward with his forearm. A loud and abrupt sound escapes from the air around his or her armpit. ITS ARMPIT.

Explodes.

The Universe is reborn.

(I leave Budapest in three days. For Istanbul.)

FREEDOM!