Buzz off Primitif

By Dante Stranogante

This booknarrates the story of my journey across various continents as I sought to discover my sense of belonging, ultimately realizing that I could live everywhere yet truly belong nowhere. As long as I can remeber, I considered everything that happened to me as normal and it helped me live an interesting life. Since I can't objectively judge my own writing, I can't promise you anything but you may give it a try.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dante Stranogante
• Release date: Sep 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223779612

Book preview

Was it bats, or nuts?

Although I used to do freelance journalism in my student days, I never thought about writing something like a memoir. More or less, I always believed that memoirs are written by people with oversized egos or, as the saying goes, by people who don’t have much imagination and where the number of written pages is equally proportional to lack of imagination. Maybe, it’s just a question of how much ghostwriters charge. Those I wanted to hire asked so much that I instinctively grabbed a fork when they stated their price. If they were imaginative they would have realized that they could have walked away blind after that fancy lunch charged to my credit card. Just kidding, I have never met one in my whole life. Damn you politicians, movie stars, and sports idols. Isn’t it enough that you make tons of money regardless of your job performance? You have to spoil ghostwriters, too. If they were good, they would have written something memorable on their own.

I have to admit that some of them do a great job. Almost Godlike. Orangino becomes the greatest businessman ever, multiple Chapter 11s notwithstanding. Obomba and Curious George are statesmen like no other in history and Ibrahimovic mops the floor with Messi, Pele, or Maradona. I expect that Sleepy Joe will write about him commanding troops that defended the Earth against Saturininas. If you sleep a lot, you can dream a lot, too. Like me since Corona started and almost everything I liked disappeared. One morning my guardian angel showed up and yelled: Come on, wake up. I came here because I thought you were dead, you slept more than 10 hours. What else could I do? I asked. Go out and see if your government got new instructions from their EU masters and change yesterday's order to keep all cafes and bars closed, he said.

I thought that he may be right. If yet another new normal could allow governments to be flies circling a poop and writing fines for people walking around, a lot of strange things could happen. Like me writing a memoir despite losing my typing skills and almost forgetting how to write by hand. It is so 20th century, anyhow. It’s strange to write something good without coffee and alcohol circling in your veins but I thought: Let's make it as strange as possible, why leave any stone unturned. As an old saying goes, since we are already dancing, let’s make it a carnival. True, this Covid carnival is unbelievable but it could always take an additional contribution. Remember that one from Einstein about the universe and idiocy?

Who could ever think that the presence of some tiny thing, measured in nanometers, can convince me that writing about my life is the most fun thing to do? Me, typing like an old grandma while trying to remember what happened yesterday. If senile people can write laws and run countries, why wouldn’t I write a memoir? Senility seems to be so new millennium for both old and young. For the old to keep lying, for the young to keep forgetting. Step aside Dostoevsky, it’s true that miseries and cruelties of the 19th century Czarist Russia created the most superb literature but look what Covid 19 lockdowns can do. Joking aside, it’s the truth that one of the greatest literary achievements of all time, Il Milione, was created thanks to Marco Polo’s incarceration with Rustichello da Pisa, confirming the old saying it’s life that writes the best stories. Usually miserable lives, like mine right now.

In Polo’s case it proved that even the ultimate boredom of a jail cell can be a creative space. In my case it fits the saying: It sucks to have the first half of your life interesting because whatever you do, the second half is the steep slope down. It definitely is, all the way to the sorrow point when sitting at a keyboard is the most interesting thing to do and, besides watching sports or a Netflix series, the only way to avoid madness which progressively grows all around me. Most people live their whole lives like that but I don’t care what most people do. This carnival should be recorded in detail for future generations to know how maintaining chaos for about two decades looks like and for future leaders to learn from it. That is, if mankind survives present ones. Every generation has its legacy, we should record ours, too. Titled, Entitled Idiocracy 2.0.

Since I mentioned Corona and we all still wonder how it came to be, let me tell you a story of its origin that you haven’t heard before. You simply couldn’t because you were not there and nobody told you, until now. Every day, I hear something new and it revolves around someone else's mistakes but almost always pivoting on something Chinese. First, they were guilty because it started there and now they are guilty because they knew how to stop it. However, by the time you read this, it will be over, with almost everybody endlessly vaccinated, and no lessons learned.

Decades ago when I studied in NYC, a friend invited me to a house party in lower Manhattan. Everything was fun until the moment when, at once, somebody screamed: Bat, bat!. As if he saw a pride of lions storming inside the condominium. In a few seconds, people were jumping over each other trying to reach the kitchen, bathroom, or bedroom. I was surprised and didn’t understand what happened until I saw the bat flying overhead.

That poor little animal was obviously very scared while frantically flying below the ceiling. It took me a little while to realize that everybody was scared to death of that small flying animal. At once, I found myself standing alone in the middle of the living room, while the murderous member of the animal kingdom kept panickingly zig-zagging over my head. Knowing how bats fly and wanting that poor thing to get out, I opened a window, grabbed a tablecloth, and used it as a barrier in front of the bat.

I haven’t watched any Batman movies because I was over 10 years old when the first movie came out but I learned that bats scan the barrier in front of them and turn to fly in the opposite direction. After a while, I managed to bring the bat near the window. We dribbled for a while until it finally sensed an opening and flew out into the night. I thought that was it, the end of the story. Apparently, it wasn’t. Bats are mysterious animals who mind their own business and don’t sue for royalty fees when screenwriters use their existence to make millions for the film industry. Yet, they know how to retaliate when we go too far playing our roles of Gods of the universe.

I suspect that he flew straight home where the following conversation took place.

Honey, honey, come here, I have to tell you something, he called his wife while frantically flying into the house attic.

What happened, you seem to be in great distress? she asked.

You wouldn’t believe what happened. I am still shaking. It was so horrible.

What, did you meet a falcon? Do they fly during the night?

It was worse than a falcon, trust me. I made a mistake and flew into one of those places where those humans live.

O my God, how could you make such a mistake? You went where humans live. Only cockroaches could make such a mistake.

Let me tell you the whole story. I didn’t know that the ventilation duct leads to one of those places where they live. The place was filled with tons of useless gadgets and there were a lot of humans inside.

Wait, what do you mean useless gadgets? I have heard that they are the most intelligent  species.

Intelligent, are you kidding me. What kind of intelligence is to run around from dawn to dusk just to have more of something that you don’t need. As if we fly at high noon trying to calibrate our radars which serve us perfectly well anyhow.

Oh, now I understand that rumors about how they don’t have a time to have children are true. I was wondering when a friend of mine who lives in the New York Library told me that it’s because smoking kills fertility. I may be wrong but recently I don’t see any smokers but there are less and less kids, too.

Your friend from the New York Library. Can’t she find some other place to live instead of constantly listening to those who know only what they read in books? No wonder she never gets a good day's sleep listening to them whispering to each other.

Oh yes, you are the smart one, you wanted us to live on Rikers Island, she replied annoyingly.

Why not? I have heard that over there they sleep during the night and don’t talk rubbish during the day. They don’t have that, how do you say, work related stress which prevents them from sleeping. And, let me tell you, if they had women over there, they would make a lot of kids and there would be no need to import Latinos. I wanted to tell you something serious but if you want  senseless talk, get together with your friends who frequent places like Town Hall, or the DNC and RNC headquarters.

Oh yes, your friends from Chinatown are so smart, aren’t they?

Don’t you dare make fun of my Chinatown friends. For your information, most of them managed to stow away in containers full of fake Chanel No.5 canisters all the way from China to Canal St. They don’t really know what Chanel No.5 is but it had a rather disgusting smell.

What did they know about smells, have they ever been in our subway before?

That’s very different. Subway is for the working class and Chanel No.5 is for those who don’t want you to use certain words. You know, like the N word which they use only in places like Westchester County when making barbecues with their friends.

OK, OK, let me finally tell you what happened. When I flew in, one guy started screaming like mad. Bat, bat, he yelled. Everybody was frozen for a second or two, and then all of them started running into the kitchen. Another one yelled, Batman, Batman, we are doomed. I don’t know what batman means but, let me tell you, that thing is some serious issue from their childhood. They were terrified hearing that word. Particularly those in nice suits, like, you know, that guy we once saw on the CineStar ad, that Wolf of Wall Street.

Yes, I remember. What was it, I never figured it out?

Neither did I but I remember my father saying that wolves were impressive looking animals, not at all like those who are called metrosexuals. He saw a few wolves when he lived in Canada.

Your father lived in Canada. You never told me. Why did he move here?

Why? Why did those guys come from China? Because everybody tells you that NYC is an incredible place to live and once you face the truth you are ashamed to go back. Dad told me that Canadians were nice but had, as they call it, an inferiority complex. You know, it isn’t easy to live in a place known as Frozen Wasteland.

Is China frozen too?

"Oh, no. They had a different problem there. They had this guy Mao who didn’t mind killing people but didn’t let the people kill and eat bats. Bats had a lot of food because there was garbage everywhere and tons of bugs flying around it. Only nasty smell they didn’t have was that one called Chanel No. 5. I guess during  that thing they called Communism, it was one stinky thing they didn’t need but they made a fake one for those guys who can’t find any girl to talk with. They have to pretend that they make enough money to buy smelly stuff from France.

So, what happened to Communism?

They don’t really know but there was a rumor that some stupid bat bit that guy Mao and he died. They never figured out if he was killed by a virus or something else because they couldn’t say for sure if the tooth marks on his neck were a bat’s or his wife’s. Yes, that one which used her skills as a famous actress to perform the greatest social engineering experiment in history, called Cultural Revolution. I wonder why all those practicing social engineering in our hemisphere never give her credit. It’s probably just envy because destroying 700,000 lifes and executing 34,000 just because they said a single wrong word or sentence is hard to match. However successful our Chanel No. 5 bitches are, she will always remain ‘gold medalist’ in that discipline.

You know that we carry viruses around, don’t you?"

Oh, yes. My mother told me when I was a teenager. Tell me what happened after.

Some guy, called Deng, came and scrapped communism, so they started eating bats again. There were rumors that he became a leader because he advocated making profits and eating bats.

Oh my God. Are they going to eat us here too?

Don’t worry about it. Ever since that Columbus guy they are only concerned about profits. If it was profitable to eat us, they would have done it for centuries. They figured out that those cows, sheep, and chicken are better deals. Much easier to catch.

Don’t chickens have wings too?

Yes they do but it is a different story. Nature gave them wings but not enough intelligence to prevent them from eating too much and getting too fat to fly. Just like humans, scan down at them in Bowling Green. Stuffing themself with double-whatever, convinced how they deserve double burgers because they work so hard and feel so miserable. Never thought of it before but, maybe, that is why humans love to eat chicken, sheep, pigs and cows because they feel some special natural bond. After all, they are the species with fixed size brains and bellies that can  grow endlessly. Nobody ever saw a bat or eagle too fat to fly or a chimpanzee too fat to jump.

But humans like other animals too.

"Yes, sure. Ask my friends who escaped from Wuhan. Do you know why there are no stray dogs in China? The Chinese word for dog’s adoption is Catch it-chew it.

Your Chinatown friends again. I am talking about those from our neighborhood, the Bowling Green crowd.

Jesus Christ, woman. Fix the frequency on your radar finally. They are either too fat or wimpy to catch anything. Not even their pets. That’s why they keep them on leash, feed them canned food, and send them to be trained.

Why do they bother to have pets then?

They need somebody to obey them and somebody to yell at. If they yell at anybody else, the next thing they hear is ‘clean your desk’ or ‘shut the fuck up, I am calling my divorce attorney’.

Why all this trash talk? Didn’ you say they don’t want to eat us, what’s your problem?

What’s my problem, I just escaped death thanks to some strange dude who wanted to show off by letting me survive. On second thought, he is probably one of those homeless people.

You are sounding more and more crazy, what all of this has to do with homelessness?

Only homeless people don’t have a natural instinct to kill anybody who trespasses on their property. Never heard of Stand Your Ground law. All you need is your assault rifle loaded with rounds and your brain loaded with greed, paranoia and exceptionalism.

OK, OK, you are making too big a fuss of it. It’s not so simple to kill a bat.

O really, you think they can kill you with fly swatter only. How about spraying everything that sits or moves with thousands of poisons they make. What do you think, why is that Mons-something corporation so big and powerful? Poison and more poison. As if nature wouldn’t have made it, if it was really useful. If you ask me, I prefer to die by fly swatter than by starvation. At least that’s fast and even somebody from PETA could make a big fuss about it.

C'mon now, my friends from Tavern on the Green said that those PETA people are really nice. They always say ‘lovely animal’, even for these roasted quails they spend hundreds of dollars on.

What are you talking about? Even those ‘can’t we all live in peace and harmony forever’ Canadians are cutting down forests and spilling bitumen from tar sands like crazy. 37 million of them on 10 million square kilometers of land, and soon the only place for bats to live will be on top of CN Tower. That is, until Americans allow them to import 5G transmitters from China and install them there. After that, we will be literally roasted. Some Chinese guy in California may even make a business of it. Remember these ‘high protein, no gluten’ worms from China that Berkeley and Stanford graduates were eating like crazy in San Francisco. Just imagine the ‘5G Roasted Bats’ neon sign.

Oh my God, if you continue like that we will have to find somebody to help you keep your mental health. Like those that rich people have, whom they call shrinks. My friend who lives in Plaza told me that it is all they talk about. My shrink this, my shrink that.

Don’t you worry about my mental health. I didn’t spend years on an Ivy League campus and don’t need to deal with my mental issues ever after.

Listen, get out and eat some bugs, it’s almost dawn and time to sleep.

You are right. Still, I wonder if eating bugs as we do is ethical but I don’t know any other way. Maybe, we can learn from PETA people and their shrinks, they seem to know everything.

Oh wait, I have to analyze my new idea to have some peace of mind before sleep. Those Chinatown friends told me that in China there is something called SARS, some tiny virus that even we can’t detect but it lives with us and can kill people. If people can invent so many things to kill whomever they want, why wouldn’t we kill them too. I will pass the idea to my friends and they can pass it to their friends in Wuhan. Some of them were saying that they are homesick and that they want to return home because that thing called the American Dream is not what they hoped for. Also, there are a lot of empty containers going to China recently.

.

Enough already, you are getting completely nuts. Let’s go.

Hey, wait a minute. You know how those humans love shiny things, like these stupid crowns which kings and queens put on their heads when they hold their parades which look eerily like these in Pyongyang. True, those in Pyongyang are more boring but less kitschy because they do not wear ridiculous metal things on their heads. Maybe, they simply don’t have chiropractors to treat the pain in their necks afterwards. Won’t it be tragicomical if they start calling the thing which kills them a Crown? Or Corona. It has more melody to it and it is more inclusive because that’s how Mexicans call their beer.

OK dear, let’s go, you will feel better after sunset.

Eat some bugs and let's go to sleep, that's all you care about. If your neurons were working half-speed, you would know what humans are able to do. Ever heard of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act? That’s how they named the law which allowed so much logging that my friend had to relocate here all the way from Washington state. He and his friends called it the No Tree Left Behind Act. You think I am kidding? Humans are species able to celebrate a guy who wrote The End of History. It’s as if we bats give tons of scientific awards to somebody who tells us to eat ‘gluten free’ .

Dear reader, now you know how it all started and you know how it is now, but you don’t know how it will end because that thing called mRNA is rather complicated. However, I can’t escape the thought that our firm belief in our supreme knowledge is one of the most ridiculous beliefs in all of history. In times when even presidential elections are won on a single, simple, and stupid slogan. Yes we can, MAGA or BBB come to mind. We also believe that our wisdom entitles us to ignore and devastate nature in any manner which pleases our selfishness or our cowardice. Good luck, fellow travelers. We will need lots of it.

Be careful what you wish for almost never crosses our minds but every time when I see a number of Covid victims on the screen, I remember those guys at that party angrily telling me: Why didn’t you kill it? After all, it was intruding into our living space and was small and helpless. Almost, born to be killed. Don’t they teach us from the start how kiss up, kick down will ensure our happy lives. After warning her kid to be nice to the teacher in front of the school bus, almost every mother will go back in the house and start yelling, How many times do I have to tell you to get rid of that groundhog? Poor little mouse couldn’t survive even if it was paying half of the mortgage.

What would it take for us to understand that there is no such thing as our living space because, as even the word itself says, space is something with no boundaries which belongs to every living thing in the universe. Ironically, even to viruses which can’t keep themself in a stable state. If we humans consider it our right to intrude every other species' living spaces, why do we wonder when they retaliate? This was a chance to learn how that small bat measured in centimeters, and tiny viruses, measured in nanometers, can join forces and retaliate with force more devastating than any splitting the atom we achieved.

Could we ever learn that quod licet iovi, non licet bovi (what is permissible for Jupiter is not  permissible for bull) is not the law of nature but an invention of hedonistic Romans whose Eternal City fell from 1 million to 30,000 inhabitants once they misinterpreted their stupid saying for the law of nature. We may flatter ourselves believing that we can decide who should be iovi or bovi but such choices can be made exclusively by nature. By that thing called Evolution.

We are not that smart and it’s questionable if we will ever be, but we have the entire human history as proof that, whatever we do, has to be within strict margins established by nature, not by pharos, emperors, kings, popes, presidents and all of the scientists working for them. It’s called the mystery of life and it doesn't mean mystery of my life but mystery of all of life on earth. I believe in it, but most people I met think of me as somebody deranged because, in this world shaped by molds, I clearly don’t fit in any of them. Not that I ever wanted to. It just happened and I don’t regret it. 

Beliefs or delusions

After everything, the only thing I am sure of is that I never craved to do more than I was doing. By Western standards, it is called laziness. By Mediterranean standards, it is a preferable way to live. I believe in doing my best, but I don’t believe that we can do better than we are allowed by the characteristics provided to us by nature. Nor can our children. I never pushed my daughters because a parent's duty is to enable kids to reach their potential, not to force them to reach higher. I also, deep down, never gave a damn about money or twisting the truth to please someone because I believe that permanent pushing the envelope is too simplistic a theory to live by.

I always had this attitude and reading an interview with Aristotle Onassis made me sure of it. He was the wealthiest person on earth for a while but he said that nobody knows if he/she lived a happy life until right before his death. Those familiar with his life story know why he didn’t consider his life a happy episode. Envelopes are made by nature and they always break when pushed too hard. They are called envelopes for a reason, something paper-thin and easily destructible. According to laws of nature, pressure can be a strange occurrence. In one example, so weak that we can’t even feel it and we measure it in hectopascals/millibars but capable of creating the most destructive forces such as hurricanes.

We humans are incredibly complex organisms and, yet, in millions of years of our existence, we still judge each other by a few attributes, such as height, weight, looks, and degrees. So called first impressions are so strong that they rarely get substituted by second impressions. As the saying goes, there is no second chance for a first impression. I lived in many places and among different cultures and it is present everywhere. Yet, we somehow convinced ourselves that we are entitled to adjust the laws of nature according to our advanced preferences. Doesn’t the sizable edition of Fukuyama’s books prove how far we have advanced? Or the number of people watching MSNBC for that matter?

For years I wondered why I was suspicious to security agents at almost every airport I flew through, until someone showed me a sketch of a possible hijacker that airlines make to train their employees. Tall, slim, bearded, wearing jeans. Search him thoroughly. In bars and schools around the world I had different nicknames like Che in Heidelberg or Raul in Hoboken and those people really believed that I resembled Che Guevara or Raul Julia but, as far as I know, the only things that three of us had in common was tobacco and alcohol. Or, on occasion, kiss of the spider woman. As Agatha Christie said, Few of us are what we seem.

One thing I was never able to explain to anyone is that I don’t care if I lose because I always considered losing as an unavoidable and integral part of life. In reality, we actually never know if we won or lost because of an opportunity cost being an essential part of any of our actions. In the most obvious example, when we marry our spouses we almost exclusively do it to produce offspring, while being incapable of knowing if our offspring with that person will be better than with some other person. Yet, we take loans to pay for weddings. One to pay divorce attorneys we take later, while still believing how we were right all the time. That first marriage was son-of-a-bitch fault. Or vice versa.

Since it is too complex, we are programmed not to think about it but to act on our intuition, as opportunity cost'' are both unforeseen and unavoidable. Nature teaches us that our beloved win-win situations are simply impossible. There is no such thing in nature. I also believe that historical experience clearly shows how every instance of human attempt to introduce absolute control or supremacy and zero tolerance policies" are not allowed by nature. Such concepts don’t exist in the natural world. If it did exist, nothing would exist. We would have exterminated everything including us.

If elephants had zero tolerance for grass or trees, or lions for antelopes and wildebeests, it will be the end for elephants and lions too. Hypothetically, elephants could trample all grass and destroy all the trees and lions could kill all other land animals, but nature didn’t program them to do that. It’s all give and take from the smallest plankton to the largest Blue Whale and I don’t see how it can be different with us humans. However, I believe that humans who believe that they are more intelligent or capable than their creator are just simple-minded idiots. Ironically, they are usually ones with diplomas from elite educational institutions. 

Dead poets companionship

I don’t really know why I adopted my without the cross, Jesus would have been just another carpenter attitude from an early age but, since I lived half of my life as an American, it’s only logical to find somebody else to blame. Any other rationale would be very un-American and I have heard that idiotic expression so many times that only a lobotomy could get it out of my head. So, let’s blame it on my parents who allowed me to read literature at a very early age. It’s not that I am suggesting to keep books away from kids but keep in mind that young brains can be impressed by reading the thoughts of those who refuse to respect prevailing narratives.

Sometime between the ages of five and six I became literate enough to read the many books we had at home. I wasn’t a book-worm and I had to do a bunch of chores during the day, but as soon as darkness forced me inside my favorite thing to do was to pick up a book and read. Unfortunately, there was no TV in our home and I couldn’t enjoy masterpieces like SpongeBob or Johnny Bravo and I had to settle for inferior entertainment. Ever since I can remember, my days were preoccupied with taking care of animals, playing outside with friends, and repairing my worn-out toys.

In such circumstances, reading was something that made me feel relaxed, and I sensed that my parents liked it when I did it. Maybe because it was the only time when I did something which didn’t scare or annoy them. They probably thought: Thank God for these books, at least he is not breaking something or hurting himself. I did dangerous things often, like disassembling a radio set while trying to discover how it generates a voice or climbing an electrical pole to scare my friends. Somehow, I never regretted it despite being beaten up by my Dad who was mad that he couldn’t listen to news and music until he got enough money to buy a new radio.

I loved to read Andersen’s fairy tales and Jack London’s novels but nothing compared to reading poems of Sergey Yesenjin and Ivan Goran Kovacic. Those two were my first idols and even Pele or Bobby Charlton never got close to them. I had to admire them, two geniuses whose poems actually were three-dimensional because by reading I could picture scenery and action which they described with their words.

Maybe it was just childish imagination but it was really impressive to me. In my mind, I still have an image of Yesenin’s mother standing in front of her cottage somewhere in the Russian steppes or Kovacic’s description of horrors in his poem Jama that was dubbed Poetical Guernica. My first impression of them was that they were rare people who didn’t care about the material world. It was the soul that mattered to them and they lived their beliefs through their short lives. Later, when I read their biographies I found out that my assumptions were very close to the truth.

For instance, during his short marriage with Isadora Duncan, Yesenin was offered a chance to have a glamorous life, but he quickly gave it up because it was missing a soul. For me, it was the most admirable thing a human being could do. In everything I read as a child there was almost nothing to suggest that there is some particular value in materialist culture and it stayed with me through my whole life making me a rare person who, let say, sincerely despises shopping malls. For me, they are the second greatest symbols of a soulless society. Right behind casinos. I had a lot of chances to step into both of them and it only confirmed my beliefs.

Great writers are those whose texts become three-dimensional in readers' minds but I believe that it requires more genius to write poetry because poets have to tell us the story within a very limited space. Jack London’s wonderful story of White Fang would have been nothing if written on a few pages while Yesenin's poem To Kachalov’s Dog would have not been artistic if it wasn’t a single-page story. It’s as simple as that.

This may sound like comparing apples and oranges but I believe that poetry requires more genius than writing a novel. I also believe that languages which have more declensions (such as Russian, Croatian or Italian) enable much greater variety in the language, resulting in far more advanced expressiveness required for writing the great poetry. Similarly, only English has all the ingredients to make Rock ‘n’ Roll great. Or French for chansons. Just imagine somebody singing Voulez vous coucher avec moi in English or Amor Prohibido in German.

In our elementary schools we all were obliged to subscribe to a monthly newspaper called Kids’ Newspaper. The purpose was to make us get used to reading papers from an early age. It was interesting because it had a little bit of everything that kids were interested in. They encouraged kids to write stories or poetry and the best one would be published in the next issue. I decided to write a poem and made the mistake of telling my friends. It made me the laughing stock of the entire school. Those well minded were saying: Are you crazy, they are going to publish your poem in a paper distributed to every school kid in Croatia and Bosnia?

I didn’t give a damn and mailed my poem. What was there to lose? Next month all of them read it and I was a star. I still believe that they published it because nobody had ever written a poem about the animal kingdom and it was a kind of fresh air to the editors. Even older people were impressed and my language teacher pushed me to continue writing but for some reason, I didn’t feel like it. When I thought about it later, I concluded that I considered my poem very trivial in comparison to those I read and didn’t want to do something third rate. Years later I met a well known poet who told me that writing poetry is a kind of creative job but, like any other job, doesn't depend only on someone’s talent. It requires hard work, too. Hard work never sounded attractive to me. Somehow, I believe that being a sloth is not really a deadly sin because it prevents people from performing the six others.

Yesenin was the most descriptive poet I read and Kovacic was a master of putting deep thoughts in his poetry. Two brilliant lines in one of his poems made me believe that life can’t be lived without gains and losses, joys and sorrows, laughter and cries. They simply don’t exist without one another. In other words, if your preference is safety, you end up with boredom or, if you can’t take sorrows, you will not experience happiness. I believe that Romans got this right with their per aspera ad astra (through hardships to the stars). No hardships, no stars. Mostly, a lot of hardships, no stars.

MOABs & MOADs

Truthfully, life sometimes plays rather strange games with all of us. Like when church attending Republicans chose a president who believes that Latinos speak Latin or MSNBC watching Democrats chose a Nobel Peace Prize winner and both times some other people get large  bombs through their roofs. You wonder why they love bombing other people. My only guess is that they truly believe in the idiotic exceptionalism that their parents and teachers taught them about. How do they square we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal with I am exceptional because I was born in Tinymindstown, USA.

Those who got a bomb find solace knowing that they are not alone because almost everybody who drinks from Tigris and Eufrates got their bomb too. Some had a privilege to get MOAB (Mother of all Bombs). It took me many long decades to learn how the word mother doesn’t describe somebody who gives life but also something that takes it away. En masse. How perverted your mind has to be, to call such a thing mother. Even the worst hardline communists in the USSR called their monstrous and most powerful nuclear weapon Tsar Bomba and when Khrushchev wanted to use the name Kuzkina Mother it caused a violent reaction by everybody. He had to give it up.

Even the fear that everybody felt when confronting the all-powerful First Secretary of the Communist Party wasn’t strong enough to desecrate the word mother. Considering that I didn’t hear any complaints even from feminists, I wonder what mother really means in our times. I guess she is someone who gives you a life, takes care of you during your first 18 years, pays your tuition, and then proudly explodes somewhere above Afghanistan’s mothers and children. You have one less burden in your life because you don’t need to help her find a cheap old people’s home.

Anyhow, it may console those who get exploding American mothers when they realize that those who brought it on them still pay $3-4 a gallon when they drive either to church or yoga classes. You hoped that you wouldn’t get that bomb through your roof and they hoped that they would get their gasoline for dollar-a-gallon. Tough luck, half of them are not able to get more ammunition for their rifles, while the other half can’t afford a life-coach with a more prestigious address. Those tiny things inside the underwear of those who ordered bombings didn’t grow up bigger, either. They looked at them every morning for a few years and finally said: Let’s order some Viagra, if it can't grow, it could become more agile.

It may sound strange to those who didn’t experience the bad things that life throws at you, but I hold them dear in my memory because such things also created extremely intense feelings in my life. My father believed that people who always search for comfortable solutions are old in their minds because desire to be comfortable is a sure sign of aging. Youth and comfort don’t go together and, as he used to say: The overwhelming desire to be comfortable is actually the desire to be a cow. Cows live the most comfortable lives; eat, lie-down, regurgitate, sleep, and repeat the cycle again and again. No intensity, no passion, no fear. What a wonderful life.

I already passed the point where life turns from living to surviving and I still hate the expression survivor which Americans mostly pronounce with pride in their voices. What is so special about being a survivor? To continue living while knowing that every new day is going to be worse than one before. When life forced me to exchange my sailboat for speedboat and my motorcycle for scooter, I became a survivor and, since then, I am a living example of that misery. At least, by living longer I am making pension fund managers angry and that is worth living for. I have heard that prolonged state of anger makes people sick and they give up playing golf.

Once your physical and mental capacity starts imposing significant limits on your mind and lifestyle you are not a fully competent person any longer. Being happy about it sounds very strange to me. If they were not despicable old idiots who can’t give up harming everybody and everything on this planet, I would feel really sorry for those who fight tooth and nail to continue sitting at presidential desks, congressional seats, and corporate boardrooms. Were their lives so miserable that they are still looking for some joy while wearing diapers? Is it why they like Covid which kills the ability to smell? Does some woman called Nancy yell at her servant: Can you get me some Covid, I can’t stand this smell? No madam, congressional perks don't include Covid. Not yet, the servant replies. 

Aren’t their lives definitely worse than the lives of those who are forced to wear diapers while packing meat and earning the minimum wage. One may wonder if there is some kind of cause-and-effect, when people in diapers sponsor laws which enable forcing diapers on the working class. It could be that the honorables already wear diapers for so long that they forgot about these places called restrooms or it’s some kind of revenge of the jerks. If I can’t last until I reach a restroom why would you deplorables be allowed to use them, they quietly say to themself while saying Aye to allow their donor bastards to do whatever they deem profitable.

Whenever I hear honorable being used to address any member of Congress, an image I saw about a year ago of an honorable representative defecating himself and not even realizing it until it was too late. Jesus Christ honorable representative, if your brain doesn’t register anything any longer, do you have a wife or child, or anybody in your circle to tell you what is happening. Can’t you and those around you stop smiling, please? It’s urine flowing in front of you, not oil you stole from Syria. Are you so demented that you don’t realize that this is when you are fooling your fools, not when you are collecting your fringe benefits from your corporate bosses? Once upon a time there was a place called Sparta which practiced gerontocracy. Ruled by old people who loved wars. Until Visigoths showed up and Alaric sold young and old into slavery.

Having that honorable lady next to you didn’t help either. Her maid certainly pays attention to remind her about diapers all the time but her face looks like the work of those who mummified Cleopatra. Isn’t it strange, they didn’t work on Cleopatra’s face while she was alive. Do they know something we don’t? Anyhow, I can imagine two congressional seats talking to each other. 

Oh my God, she is coming again today, says the left seat.

Mine too, they seem unstoppable, the right seat responds.

Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani,  the left seat cries.

What are you saying, what’s wrong with you? the right seat asks.

What’s wrong with me, that Christian ass has been sitting on you for the last 50 years and you still didn’t learn that expression?

How could I know? She grew up in an Italian neighborhood? Those mafiosi don’t speak Hebrew.

True, but they go to church every Sunday, don’t they? She went to catechism, didn’t she?

She probably did but to no avail. They go there just to show off. Tell me what it means?

"It means, my God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me. Jesus cried it from the cross and he didn't even have to smell an old woman’s diaper all day long for almost three decades."

I have heard that there is that enormous useless bomb which is called MOAB and always wonder why her diapers are not called MOAD. It’s so big and smelly that it deserves the name Mother of all Diapers.

I think she hates it. I have heard her saying to herself how she suffered wearing it for so long and still never got a chance to start a war. Just imagine how it feels to wear MOAD 24/7 and not be given a chance to launch MOAB one single time.

When I got my last ID card it didn’t have an expiration date. Even lifeless computer seems to know the truth and prints lifelong. Objectively speaking, it should be lifeshort but nobody ever dared to use such a word because there are so many old people who had miserable lives and still hope that they will somehow make it interesting. Including those sponsoring laws in parliaments which define the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s beyond me but they may believe how more misery on this planet will earn them more joyful time in havens.Typical problem of those who don’t study a subject thoroughly and remember only the havens while forgetting that there is a purgatory before that. Your donors can’t help you there and they wouldn’t even if they could. They suffered long enough by pretending to like you and never dared to say old unbearable bitch in front of anyone. Not even in front their caged parrots.

I don’t know why but I objectively analyzed every single loss which happened to me as if it happened to someone else. On the other hand, every time when I tried to explain it to somebody else, it was seen as my bitterness, not an objective analysis. In my experience people are so afraid and ashamed to admit that they lost. Why does it matter that much if almost everything we consider a loss is replaceable. Maybe even with something better. The real loss means losing something which can’t be replaced like life or health, everything else is just a replaceable stuff. Sometimes with something better, sometimes with something worse. In any case, I was never certain if it was for better or worse. It’s like when you swap Orangino for Sleepy One and instead of reading endless boring tweets, you have to prick up your ears to understand what the hell he is trying to say.

The Call of the Wild, Dalmatian style

I was born in a Dalmatian village during a rather difficult period in its existence. The same applies to my family which was at its lowest point in its living memory. Yet, I was in a hurry to be born, to such an extent that there was no time for my Mom to get to hospital and I was born at home. Rather unusual and as simple as possible. Somehow, I obviously didn’t want to wait. One would assume that rushing to join the world was foolish because circumstances were anything but favorable but I was obviously careless from the very beginning.

It was a post-WW2 period in a war ravaged impoverished country and, by all standards, the place one would not find very attractive to start your life. It is true that we don’t choose family, or the time and place of our birth, and it is true that these factors greatly define our whole life. Yet, I sincerely wonder how credible are parameters that we don’t question when defining favorable. In any case, I believe that Italian movie director Salvatores defined it perfectly in his 1960 movie with the brilliantly simple line: I felt fine in my village, I could spend all day outside and we had everything we needed. If you have everything you need, you don’t need anything more. It’s as simple as that.

During my early childhood material conditions were a step or two above Dickensian but social structure was firmly adherent to traditional catholic values where shame was taken very seriously and lying, insincerity, theft, or fraud were sanctioned by society. Not by laws and jails but by the people one lived with, who sidelined those who were practicing it. During most of my adult life, I longed for a time when my word is my bond was something real because I grew up in a society where the vast majority knew the limits of opportunistic behavior.

As in any society which suddenly changes its political and economic system, the society was divided and both sides were unable to figure out what the future held. The dominant but minor side was the Communists, who led a resistance against the Nazis and were determined to create a new society by eliminating the capitalist economy and any form of religion. They also wanted to create a new society, where feelings of belonging to a certain nation were erased in order to create some kind of supranational social structure. In a country inhabited by six nations and three religions, it was an herculean task and they knew it. In turn, it made them rather paranoid and ready to unquestionably accept new and untested ideas with dogmatic devotion.

As a saying goes,there is nothing easier in life than to create a hypothesis, and nothing more difficult than to genuinely confirm its validity. When untested ideas yield unexpected results, dogmatic people start to double down'' and retaliate because they don’t know any other way. As for communists, they were battle hardened people who dug a lot of real trenches during the bloody battles against Nazis and it became a natural instinct for them to do so in any situation. The problem was that dig in and persevere works in war but not in peace. Having respect is great, but gaining forced respect" is very dangerous. The Croatian language has an expression for it and it describes human relations which always have the worst possible ending.

The silent majority on the other end of the socio/economic spectrum, wasn’t ready to abandon their religions, customs, and economic interests, so genuine socialists became the major adversaries of communists. They couldn’t be eliminated as fascists and nazis were during the war, and the strategy was to intimidate them into obedience. As always, when complexity becomes overwhelming, simple minds apply simple solutions. Permanent intimidation became the reality for families like mine. Whenever I hear idiotism you are either with us, or you are against us, it makes me wonder how smart and democratic our leaders are. It doesn't show smartness and strength, it shows stupidity and paranoia. 

I was practically a full fledged member of the "deplorables'' from my first breath, and throughout  all of my childhood there were a bunch of Hillarys who competed to remind me of my status. Most people believe that Hillarys and Hillbillies are positioned on two opposite ends of the social spectrum but in my experience they have much more than the first part of their names in common. Obnoxious behavior and arrogant perseverance come to mind. I was too young to know that Karl Marx added lumpen in front of proletariat and intellectuals to describe them thoroughly, but I knew that any respect for them was out of the question.

I can’t be sure what it was, but from the earliest age, I somehow decided that they were not going to push me around and it made my childhood rather interesting. On the other hand, there was something about my behavior which made others not willing to defend me. Not even my family. My parents cared a lot about what was happening to my siblings but they didn’t really bother when the same things happened to me. It was even stranger that I never blamed them for it. As if in my little brain, I decided that it is something given and that I am going to fight my battles alone.

From a very early age, I tried to analyze things according to cause and effect principle, and I could never figure out why I didn’t give a damn about bad things happening to me and why nobody felt that I needed protection? A lot of years later, I was on a study abroad trip to China and the whole group of us found ourselves in conflict with a very important and powerful official. I decided to stand up to that person and we got in a very nasty verbal fight in a public area, which was extremely embarrassing to the guy. It was really surprising to me that no single person wanted, or dared, to support me with one single word.

Even my girlfriend who was there didn’t say a word. I was pissed off and later asked her why she didn’t show any support. After all, we were in some distant land which, at that time, was an absolutely totalitarian society. I knew that all of them were frightened and I was OK with it, but if you say that you love me, why couldn’t you stand up for me? Why would I, you didn’t need anybody’s help? she said calmly. Is it what my parents also thought, crossed my mind? Finally, there was an answer that I had been looking for since my childhood. Nice from all of you guys, you always decide to let me do or die. Do for you and without you. Or die alone.

It was very interesting to be a child in hard times where you learn how to cope with things which seem unpleasant for people who didn’t experience them. If you are born curious, such time forces you to think about different aspects of life at an age when your senses are rapidly growing  and your environment constantly changing. Besides a few old things, all the toys I ever had were made by my hands and I felt a pleasure and satisfaction making them. It makes a big difference in a child’s mind between something created and something bought.

I believe it’s completely different than, let's say, putting together Lego sets because you know that from the first idea to the last use, it’s all your own creation. You thought of it, you found materials to make it, you used it, you repaired it, you modified it. You don’t think of it as some act of creation until you become an adult but you really enjoy it at some subconscious level. Also, you are never asked what you would like to eat and you eat whatever your mother cooks, thereby learning that the most simple meals can be extremely tasty. No need for modified petroleum jelly to enhance its taste. You dream about things you have heard of in some very romantic way because they are not present in your sight but only in your mind.

Growing up in a village also makes you a part of nature, regardless if you want it or not, and you learn how versatile are the rules of nature. If you are willing to observe and learn, you soon realize how different species grow up at different paces and most of all, how bigger doesn’t mean better or more powerful. You can see a large bull running away in fear when it sees a large fly or small snake and how its thousands times heavier body doesn't make it more powerful. You also learn about the food chain. You learn to like and appreciate animals, while knowing that not so far in the future you are going to enjoy eating them. You divide the animals into friends and foes and always protect the friends.

I learned how to kill snakes when I took my sheeps to graze and didn’t see it as cruelty but a fight for survival where my sheeps needed my protection. I learned how to avoid conflicts with the animals but never feared them. At an age of about 11, I considered myself an expert snake killer when, by chance, I realized that it is not necessary to kill the snake. It’s enough to wound it, and the ants will finish the job later. It’s rather easy and safe to wound a snake with a long stick or tree branch. Somehow, the ants can sense the wound and they attack in overwhelming  numbers devouring the flesh through the wound. Another way nature proves that smaller does not mean weaker.

Somehow, I never liked hunting because I considered it unfair. As a difference with domesticated animals, I thought that humans do not have a right to kill something that we didn’t raise or help in any way during its existence. I approve of hunting as long as it belongs within boundaries such as controlling wild animal population or defense of human life. Until today, I can’t make up my mind about hunting because I can’t find any hard evidence about my hypotheses and, in such a case, I remained neutral. I neither condone, nor condemn it, which is a rather rare state of my mind.

Once when I was about ten years old, I climbed up the nearby mountain and caught a quail. When I saw the bird it behaved strangely, as if it didn’t want to fly away, so I grabbed it. Then I saw little chicks and realized that she was trying to protect her young. I was so proud of myself that I forgot that her chicks need her to survive. Back in the village everybody admired me for such an act because these birds are not an easy hunting game at all. Decades later I found out that hunters were right when Dick Cheney, Vice President of the US, had trouble shooting such birds and shot his friend instead. His friend publicly apologized for being in the wrong spot, as our democracy demands. My apologies didn’t work when my father saw the bird and ordered me to carry it back because her chicks would die without their mother.

I don’t know exactly when I started to go to the mountain but it was at a very early age. I enjoyed climbing the steep limestone cliffs and was impressed with the incredible views. Once I reached the top, the horizon was stretched for, literally, 360 degrees and as far as my eyes could see. The world looked incredibly large and I could imagine being in Italy when looking over the Adriatic Sea or somewhere in Europe when looking at the Dinaric Alps. If I knew how to make smoke signals I could have been a little horseless Geronimo.

Who could have thought that by sending smoke signals, I could have become an early influencer. Little did I know that a few decades later such a simple thing would become extremely profitable. Somehow, even without my influence a great mass of urban people started doing something which one small kid did because it was the only way to widen his horizons. Needless to say, everybody around me considered it a bit crazy and very dangerous because people only did it when they had to. Then, one day I had to make a necessary but dangerous trip up the mountain.

We had an ox called Rudonya, who lived on the mountain most of the time. A hunter came from the mountain and said that he saw a pack of wolves there and he ran back home. My father was somewhere far from home and my mother allowed me to go find the ox and bring him home. She obviously didn’t think much before letting me go and I was eager to save him because I liked that big and gentle animal. I knew that a single ox didn’t have a chance against a pack of wolves and I was eager to help him get down before night fell and the wolves went out to hunt  .

When cousins or neighbors criticized my Dad for letting me go on the mountain alone, he would say how his rationale was that animals were not as nasty species as humans, and how they don’t attack except in defense or to feed. I completely agreed because I never met an animal with a Napoleonic complex or something similar. On the other hand, besides wolves in the winter, there was no animal which would consider me a prey or a threat to their existence. Too big to be a prey, too small and slow to be a threat.

Why would a