Two loves of my life

Just as I regretted buying an armchair at Butlers that you couldn't actually sit in so a person could work in peace, which was recommended to me by a woman who hadn't spent more than five minutes at a computer, something I only realized when I was sitting in it the next day.

It was leaving a job that I loved.

Photographs and letters that I left at home, instead of taking them with me on a long journey and showing them to my friend.

All these regrets have one thing in common. Some woman interfered in my decisions—and I obeyed her.

If women have ever taught me anything, it is precisely this—not to let anyone meddle in my process of experiencing, feeling, reasoning, and deciding. To ask for advice? Yes. But only after I have formed my own opinion. And when I don't know—I will ask.

As a result, women have lost me forever because of this. It seems that every woman wants to be the most important person to a man, and therefore she interferes in his affairs—and the more so, the less she knows him—or rather—the less she knows his past.

*

When I recall my childhood, I see myself squatting and collecting horse chestnuts. I collected horse chestnuts throughout my childhood—and if anything hurt Rajneesh, it was the school system, which rewarded him for 400 kilograms of chestnuts with a model car—back then they called it an 'English car'. They probably didn't notice at school that I played with dolls and went to look at Barbie in the toy store window after classes.

If Rajneesh ever gave bad advice, it was instructions on how to comb Barbie's hair in my elementary school magazine *Tlumok*—which was a periodical where Horák and Hejsek, middle school students, drew giant genitals over my drawings of a couple in bed in the 'Love, Sex, and Tenderness' section. I was called to the principal's office, even though it was obvious that someone else drew the organs. I would rather have stood on that carpet for the ruined Barbie dolls of my female classmates, whose hair they scrubbed with pumice at home.

But as you can see, I was giving advice even as a child—and that has stayed with me to this day. Perhaps they are a bit more sophisticated now, but more than one of my female clients has shaken her head at information she received from me as a tarot reader. The most curious example would be the advice given to the editor of this book that she should hang a knife above her bed and sleep under it. The fact that she is the editor of this book shows that my advice worked.

I stood on the principal's carpet one more time, for buying *Sex srandokaps* and enjoying it with my classmates on the way to a singing competition. The singing teacher told me that she would NEVER have thought THAT of ME. *Sex srandokaps* was restricted to those under 18 and unsellable to sticks in the mud.

*

I think Rajneesh began to be born sometime during a bus ride to Athens, when mom and I sat on the raised seats over the bus wheels—and I, this was actually the year 1993 when the film *The Lover* came out in theaters, was engrossed in the story of Darryl van Horne from *The Witches of Eastwick*. I was fascinated by the description of his character and also the erotic subtext of the book. I saw the film of the same name only many years later.

Greece. I visited it once more with the 'Seahorse' tour—when my only fear was that it wouldn't be discovered that I was as fit as a fiddle compared to the others—even though at our school I was the top student in missed classes as far as my health was concerned.

But why am I talking about Greece? Because it was precisely in Greece in 1993 when the tour guide told me about the spring of poets and the oracle at Delphi—and back then I chose the poetic trip instead of visiting Delphi. But Delphi got to me anyway. The year 1993—I was twelve years old—and even back then, poetry and cards lured me—the two loves of my life.