Sehrguey Ogoltsoff
The Blog
You can’t lift everything at one go, so the welding-machine-grinder-drill were left for later, moreover, when there’s no electricity in the village.
However, there was no building material either, but only stones in the ruins overgrown with grass around, and the nearest forest in seven kilometers downwards, if you need a pole or some kind of a prop. Yet on foot, of all the means of transportation…
But at first I had to find some lodging, because there were only ruins around, except for 12 houses and their adjacent cowsheds.
However, the school principal indicated there was a 13th at the very top, but he was certainly embarrassed to hand me the key, although in Lachin he had been assuring Karina, the Head of the District People Education Department, that I would be provided with housing…
But at first we in duo, the principal and I, had to convince Nick that his “Niva” was designed for coming up so crazy slopes too and she would certainly climb up to that house.
After a lengthy hesitation, Nick succeeded.
I dumped the cereals and the tools onto the porch, said goodbye to Nick, we parted with a handshake and I entered…
But at first, I had to break in, tearing the padlock off…
And right behind the door saw I a meter-deep pit or rather a quarry. Welcome to the kitchen!
The floor’s earthen, pretty bumpy. However, the following, bedroom’s, level one meter higher than the kitchen and thus, fortunately, even with the stone porch outside the house, from which (the porch) there’s a footbridge to the bedroom. I did tell I was chronically lucky, didn’t I?
The bedroom’s floor’s of handmade boards, thick and sturdy, not quite even and you had to pick your way in between the floor gaps and look out where to plant your foot, preferably not into a gap.
However, (lucky as always!) the room was furnished with an iron bed, even though without the net between the sides. Yet the mattress present! On the floor.
I took it up to take over the footbridge and throw away because of too many holes in its torn-up sides.
At the mattress' takeoff, a mouse fell out of one of the holes, looked at me disgustedly “fucking intruder!” and plopped into the nearest gap.
No! He didn’t dashed or flushed but lazily, over his elbow, without ever getting to his feet, deigned to plop out of sight…
In general, some fairy-tale hut on chicken legs, only of stone and the tin roof fixed with wire so that the upcoming winds would not blow it away, like in the forester’s case from the neighboring village who opened his eyes in the morning to the overcasting rainy clouds full of the shower to perk him up.
So, that winter I spent in a teepee, nothing doing.
No bison or buffalo lost their skin for that teepee. Cellophane film brought from Stepanakert was used for the teepee walls put up within the bedroom. The teepee door was made of plywood and closed tightly to let no wind from under the floor. The bed got new net (the window grates pulled from the nearby ruins) and even a Made-in-Iran gas stove was installed in between the transparent walls together with a 20-liter gas container.
However, the stove was switched on only on Saturdays, when I drank wine in the light of one candle and Louis Armstrong was singing:
What a wonderful world!.
from the player with a battery presented me by Ashot.
My mobile phone was to be charged at homes of the colleagues who came to the Yezznaggomer school from two nearby villages (they had some kind of electricity there) to give their classes, bringing along in their vehicles (yes, “Nivas” mainly, yet one UAZ van too) students as well, to have who to teach.
The school at Yezznaggomer had 24 students half of whom were itinerants. The students were not distributed equally between 12 grades, but in every possible way and some of the grades might remain unmanned in certain academic years.
However, the second half of the kids at school were provided by our village, as also was the principal and Anahit, the teacher at elementary grades, the mother of Spartak, Mariam and Andranik…
Lavash bread I was buying from Lachin, 50 pieces at once. After it was brought to Yezznaggomer, I hung sheets of fiberboard in the kitchen on strings fixed at the ceiling beams and spread lavashes upon them.
Mice cannot fly and the bread leafs were drying up undisturbed, and then I stored the stock in a secure box, where the critters could not get into.
Before use, wrap a lavash in a cloth towel and sprinkle water over it, from the wrap's dampness the lavash would soften and – bon appétit!..
It was interesting to live – one problem followed another, you wanna survive?.– find a solution…
That winter ended on April 28…
In the summer that followed I was building me a house. For the purpose, was chosen the wreck nearest to the water spring. It was the only water source for the entire village.
Fetching water to the place occupied by me on the arrival in Yezznaggomer, I had to haul it in pails up a 9-story-tall toomb, rather steep and, naturally, having no stairs.
When the toomb slope got ice-coated, same height had to be climbed in zigzags. So I did know how to choose the right location for a house.
The chosen ruins had almost four walls, collapsed door jambs and two window openings in the same conditions, all of which I restored and spanned with reinforced concrete lintels, then raised the crashed parts to one common level.
Inside, I laid another longitudinal wall and in the end it turned out a kitchen, with two windows and the entrance door, and the blank-walled bedroom. All in all 18 sq. m.
All the timber for spanning beams and roof rafters were brought over 100 km from Stepanakert, everything second-hand, but I had no other choice.
Only the roof was not imported but collected among other wreckage in the village.
That whole area in 1920’s was Red Kurdistan, populated by Kurds, but later the Soviet Azerbaijan annulled that autonomy, the Kurds were given passports of Azerbaijani citizens and were assimilated.
So nowadays the word “Kurd” is considered a rude offense by the descendants of the assimilated Kurds, just like in Turkey, and Turkey is Azerbaijan’s Big Brother by the political orientation.
Viewing Yezznaggomer from an even taller height, I counted up to 150 ruined houses and sheds or so, all of stone, but a couple of times went astray in reckoning.
At the time of the war for independence, there were no fighting in the former Red Kurdistan, the civilians fled over Kalbajar. Then pauper looters from Armenia came to plunder abandoned poverty, followed by richer looters who brought equipment to dig up and take away the piping for running water, so there remained just one water head in the village, 50 meters away from my building site.
Subsequently, when I had constructed a 3-ton water pool near the house, with ceramic tiled walls inside a tin hut, whose walls were insulated from within with polystyrene sheets bought in Stepanakert and carpet-flooring discarded at the Satenic & Rosanna's business, I was attaching a rubber garden hose to the iron pipe stump, thru which the stone trough for cattle got filled with ever running water, and my pool got full just overnight, thanks to the gravity.
I couldn’t replenish it in the daytime, although cattle, and horses, and smaller living creatures did not mind (the trough was pretty capacious), but the human residents of the village every day came to the spring by their “Nivas” or tractors bringing empty canisters and barrels, and then my hose would be in the way because not only I needed water for washing and other needs…
Yezznaggomer was populated with immigrants from Armenia, because the RMK legislation forebode Karabakh people move over there, so as to prevent outflow of the much reduced already Armenian population of Mountainous Karabakh.
For that reason, besides me, only two men from Mountainous Karabakh landed in the village: Aram, on the grounds that he had married a daughter of Edic, a settler from Armenia, and Arthur, who left his wife in Stepanakert and made his way to Yezznaggomer illegally, because he all his life was a shepherd.
Aram sometimes worried as regards the local ethnography. He would ask then whose was our village and the toombs around: Kurdish or Armenian?
Well, the cemetery on the toomb in the village outskirts was certainly Muslim, but in the ruins inside the settlement I happened to find khachkars (carved Armenian tomb stones) way too heavy to dispense with them in the masonry of walls, so they survived and were just kicking around. Besides, the Armenian temple in Tsitsernak (below Moshatagh village) was being built from the 10th into the 12th centuries, and had the look and feel of the Reims Cathedral (it certainly had, although I never paid France a live visit).
Do you really need it? Live your life for your own pleasure, shovel the bullshit out from your father-in-law's shed, and enjoy sex with your wife, while having sufficient strength and desire…
But later, Aram and his family split off into a house above the water spring, after repairing it, of course.
That’s why tin in the ruins was an easy find, although pretty rotten and crumpled, throwaways, as a matter of fact.
Out of them I had to cut usable pieces and gradually mastered the profession of a tinsmith.
The tin went to the roof in my house which I tinkered myself as well as the roof over my workshop, whose walls were provided by a cowshed ruins. Although, on the second thought, the Azerbaijanis, who no longer were Kurds, kept sheep there, probably.
Not to mention the hut over the 3-ton water pool and the 60-meter-long aqueduct of tin…
The plot about the house was spacious, bordered with a hedge on three sides, with breaches at some places, so that pigs would have direct route to the fourth side – the ravine with the brook running from the common water spring.
The breaches in the hedge walls I, of course, filled with masonry, the pigs got disgruntled but learned to bypass the whole plot for the mud baths in the brook relieving them from blood-sucking insects.
In the household territory along the high bank of the ravine, I planted a vegetable garden: garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, for crop rotation, and upstream, where the brook had the banks of certainly volcanic origin, I built a dam.
The construction lasted 3 years because erection of a dam to block a channel with the constant water-flow along its bottom is not a trivial engineering task.
And when the dam began to work, came the time for a tin aqueduct propped by columns of rebar hammered into the ground because the dam was outside the plot, away from my kitchen garden.
Well, there also was added a basement cellar to stock the crops, a laundry room and a shower room both outside the house. And the bath, cut out of a 400-liter plastic tank, was placed in the insulated hut next to the tiled water pool. And the outhouse in the yard, 20 meters off, but with the warm seat of polystyrene foam.
Three apple trees grew there above the ravine inherited from the Kurds, previous inhabitants of Yezznaggomer. No, they sooner were Azerbaijanis already…
Yet the grapes that I planted did not take root in 4 years of my endeavors, although I had been warned beforehand of the impossibility of such undertaking in the climate at that altitude.
However, the plum tree matured.
That way I turned a kurkool, a malicious representative of the counter-revolutionary class eliminated still in the early years of the USSR. Especially when I started to distill grain alcohol in the insulated tin hut from wheat bought in Stepanakert, yet, on Saturdays I continued to drink only wine, such was my habit instilled by Louis Armstrong.
No, I didn’t trade in alcohol, but just for curiosity’s sake and subsequent processing it into absinthe, since a cellar had been made already.
And for the repair of throwaways (hairdryers, kitchen utensils etc.) brought by the village womenfolk because their husbands were too busy to check and put the trifles aright, I charged a tolerable fee, the purely symbolic couple of liters of milk to uphold the glorious traditions of the class of artisans.
The bedroom walls were plastered completely and paint-coated with latex so that mice would not come to visit through the masonry in the ancient walls.
Then I had a go at the kitchen. The window frames were constructed of (again) a second-hand material, but the glass panes I had to bring from Stepanakert being nothing of a glass cutter.
All the floors were of laminate, and all the furniture, except for the table, the stool, and the chair, added swiveling casters for the convenient wet cleaning, you drive the furniture in one half of the room and work your mop unhindered over the floor in the liberated half…
Quite a hell of a lot of what-nots you are capable of accomplishing when not distracted by wars and stuff, you know…
Once Ashot brought his wife Gaiane, and Satenic with Emma by his swanky SUV.
We celebrated the occasion. Aram came with his wife and a baby.
The next morning mine left.
I was sorry for the SUV though, one more such a picnic and the poor critter would need a luxury hearse…
The house seemed small compared to the plot area, but I didn’t need anything bigger, it served me a springboard for starts off to the parallel world, from where I was coming back dog-tired, yet seeing the houses' two windows beneath the roof of throwaway tin I perked up – home at last.
It's good to have a place where you can return from parallel worlds…
* * *
Bottle #34: ~ The World’s A Theater ~
Time was running out, inexorably, although the period set up by Don had not yet ticked away.
Inokenty did not feel like thinking in that particular direction, discouraged by a depressed, flypaper-like sticky state of mind that trapped him after the nightmares leaving multiple bruises all over his body as if kicked brutally. (Come on! They were not live mares kicking shit out of him!).
On the other hand, neither had he any desire to ponder on the nature of those marks or the mechanism of their popping up because of a headache (sticky as well) in the crown of his head (sic! another strangeness – the crown but not the back of the head!), which spot would not stand for the slightest touch.
Maya, discovering in the morning his wretched conditions, condemned their unknown source, whatever it be, and pitied him most emotionally before going out after some or another sort of crap from a drugstore to dissolve hematomas. Because in the bookstore where she worked at, there was also a shelf of medical books full of most crazy terms.
He stayed alone sharing his doubts with her apartment, silently: Was it possible at all to survive in the world where you can no more be sure of even Almighty ESC Button?
Or what if UF-1 even now, in spite of all probabilistic logic, was not dead again?
You cannot be too sure of such a fruit, moreover over-fertilized with that greenshit slime.
Some wiggly friend for you, huh?
However, of Parthos he remained sure intrepidly, UF-2 stays UF-2 despite any heat, were they even African cops.
To sum all that up, he decided to keep his thinking process deflected off any sorrowful contemplations, when Maya be back with that crap, and in the evening to go out with her to the theater and spend the last of piastres from the frock coat in his pocket or, rather, on the contrary, but it’s just that the fucking head hurts at an unusual spot.
True, he did not know if there was a theater in this city and, as it was, neither had he any idea about the city’s name. Nonetheless, he eschewed asking Maya, she might form an opinion that he was dumb in any respect although more than once he made it obvious that he was not.
No, Inokenty was not goofy, it’s just that after that away game in Mesoamerica (what was the name of that city? Athos then shouted back something like “Chechen’s Inn” or what?. But because of the scream-and-shouting fans Inokenty could not really hear and now his head was just, like, going asunder) thinking called for certain efforts to keep you concentrated to follow them, the thoughts.
Which added one more pro to his reckoning that it’s much better to go to the theater than to the park, where there again would be noise, squeals, shrieks of any goon kind, moreover, he never could stand for all those swings or merry-go-round, because of getting nauseated and seasick in even completely landlocked locations.
And ice cream you could eat at any cafe, but the circumstances of Chris’ death did leave a bitter after-taste in the form of allergy to the establishments for in-public uptake.
So a theater it was, moreover that weighing up other options seemed a too big strain for his thinking apparatus…
. . . . .
His and Maya's seats turned out to be next to the very barrier in a second floor box. There were also seats and spectators in the same box, yet those behaved not over noisy and, seated behind him, they did not block the view.
From up there they could see the whole orchestra.
Inokenty liked them, in part, even the cacophonous moment of tuning their instruments seemed somewhat congenial and depicting, with tolerable precision, his current mental situation. The flutes were especially nice, the sound much softer than by those piercing fifes in Chechen’s Inn.
The conductor also behaved in a civilized way compared to those… (ouch, fucking head!.) but at times he started fluttering his arms too much and then the orchestra also sounded too much.
There went a kinda warm-up for gymnasts, on the stage. The guys performed short runs, jumped, lifted each other in a mannerly way and no rubber balls whatsoever.
On the whole, Inokenty would even call the first part agreeable to his frame of mind, if not for that bitchy timpani…
When there started the intermission, he and Maya went to the buffet.
Most of the female audience looked askance from their decolletage frocks at Maya's sweater and jeans, but she did not give a bean about the ladies, because the present men looked at her more than at all those variously exposed tits in the necklines.
Among the male music lovers, Inokenty did not stand out too much by his frock coat, except for its color—shocking blue—as befits a junior officer in the British Navy of His Majesty George III, and he watched Maya’s ass with no less admiration than their, that is not like he liked their or theirs, which is neither here nor there, but that his and their admiration target which it was watched with… well, whatever…
Then Maya was approached by a friend, with one more low neckline to show off her beads, and off they went to chirp like morning birds around his hut in Island.
The tack to ornithological similitude made Inokenty somewhat sad and he went back to the box alone carrying away his sprouting melancholy… Not a chance to ever out-tweet the non-feathered chicks. Would feathering improve the situation? Well, a theater is not a kitchen to stage experiments of the sort. Anyway, Class of Aves are unsurpassable in a number of respective, generally speaking, approaches, if you think hard enough, while opinionated views to the contrary as maintained by certain start-up soft-boiled egg-heads are too rare exceptions, fairly negligible, by and large…
So, on his way down the corridor to the stairs climbing up the second floor, Inokenty, having soundly founded impregnability of his position on this subject, leisurely strolled with his attention switched over to the white busts lined in a row on the right. Some of them missing not only arms but their shoulders too.
The fourth in their line of mutely motionless images surprised Inokenty by unexpected winking at him with the white marble eye. Taken aback, he also petrified for a closer inspection and determined that who else it was but UF-2!.
"Parthos! What the eff! It’s a hell of a challenge to recognize you. What's the outcome at our match with those Mesoamericans?"
"The skedaddler still gets the nerve to ask! The potent victory, of course!"
"Had a glorious revel?"
"Bet your butt! Everything in strict complying to their rituals. Where the Holy Book of Codified Rules states plain and clear: A player from the winning team to be decapitated."
"What for? It's not cricket!"
"Wanna discuss it with their priests?. You, as usual, faded in the woodwork, and the UF-1 was discarded by their high priestess Esma. 'Too greenshitty,' sez she, 'this here stiff.' And now you’ve got three tries to figure out: who of UltraFuckers got circumcised about his neck?"
"Why?!"
"In keeping with their special technology, they add rubber coating to the skull of a player from a particularly impressive team to make a lucky sports equipment. A black ball with a surprise filling. A kinda rabbit’s foot, you know."
"How come you’re here then?"
"As any other GI, buddy. On the AWOL, of course… Whoops! The MP popped up. I’d better split! And be easy with that Ctl-Alt-Delete short cut!."
Inokenty looked back, but could make out no military police patrol. Or any at all, for that matter…
However, UF-2 gave up winking at him and kept dumbly mum on his stand, so Inokenty, to avoid getting caught pants down—in a friendly talk to marble, some choice company indeed!—proceeded to the box and got seated in the same chair as before.
Soon Maya also came to say that this here Minnie they met in the buffet, though a complete fool, still has an aunt and tomorrow…
That moment the overture for the second part began to play…
They played too loudly again, and over again Inokenty closed his eyes painfully and, wincing in the inner dark, played with the information received from UF-2. Which undertaking served him a kinda distraction from the distress of being kicked and beaten up by a host of mares the night before.
The fingers of the left hand mechanically (and still in the darkness) typed the short-cut mentioned by Parthos, in the taut plush along the barrier top: Ctl-Alt-Delete…
His ear drums hardly survived the volley of relentless applause and thunderous cries of discordant "Hurrah!" A sting of piercing smartness deluged his closed eyes. He had to open them.
Both the box and the entire hall of the theater was veiled up, if not swaddled, with a bluish thick fog. Everyone around was smoking.
Spectators smoked in the boxes as well as those in the stalls.
Maya was smoking to the right from Inok… no! it's not Maya! Where's she?
A girl in a red scarf on her hair was smoking, instead of Maya, to the right from Inokenty.
Everybody smoked and clapped. Loudly. Inhumanly. Cruelly clapped they and smoked. Smoked all, both the conduc…
Hell no! The conductor was not there, neither were the musicians…
The timber platform spanning the orchestra pit was mounted with a long table. From behind it, the theater was faced by the line of people in tunics and army jackets except for one or two at the table ends in civilian neckties. Those also kept smoking.
A man with a thick mustache, smack bang in the middle of the jamboree table, ostensibly crushed his cigarette against the glass wall of the decanter put in front of him.
From out of his pocket, he produced another one, lit it up and waved the burning match nearby his ear so as to extinguish its flame.
Shouts of "Hurrah!" intensified.
Is that their conductor?
Above the stage, behind the backs of those sitting in the presidium, a wide band of red cloth stretched across the full width of the stage.
Bold white letters hollered in merciless yells:
"GREETINGS TO THE PARTICIPANTS OF THE THIRD CONGRESS OF THE COMMUNIST YOUTH INTERNATIONAL!"
A short man in a gray overcoat and cap crossed the stage behind the table, doffed it, the overcoat, and folded it into a cushion to sit down on the proscenium.
A notebook whipped up into his hands, where he started to jerkily enter some notes.
The unabating applause began to stumble, slow down, subside. Yet, the smoke grew thicker.
Inokenty remembered his chat-room friend Leopold, an advertising agent from Dublin, who once explained to him in a chat conversation that the sight of a writing person unavoidably attracts attention, even if the scribbler was not a chick.
This bald-headed actor there, below his box, did know how to sell himself, he surely had the tricks of the trade at his fingertips.
The scratch number performed, he rose and took the floor behind the rostrum to change the miss-en-scene so that only his bust above the necktie knot, remained in sight.
‘Com'gghids!’ exclaimed the minion of Melpomene with thickly guttural burr, and that very moment, despite the glued-on goatee and mustache, Inokenty recognized the bald crown of UF-2. The artful SOB went on another of his AWOL's!.
The cloth in the shoulder of the blue frock coat got clamped within the bunch of callused fingers of a labor-hardened hand stuck out of the sleeve in a leather jacket while the gnarly dome of the same man, the hand owner, topped with a visored cap, also of leather, with a hefty red star in the band, jutted above the buttoned up collar:
"Is this him?"’
"Ies!"’ replied a voice full of Georgian accent, from behind Inokenty. "I figward him from out the prezudum, eh! Dis herre White Guard bustarrd. In all dis whole tiatyr, only dis herre agent of the Entente no smokes!"
"Don’t worry, Lavrent Palych,” said the dickens in the leather jacket, “we’ll check this here hydra of imperialism."
‘…lea'gghn, lea'gghn, lea'gghn, and lea'gghn once again!’ urged on the burring tooter from beneath the box barrier.
The shocking blue fabric in the shoulder of the frock coat started to give in to the pull, ratcheted into the bulge of contracting fist.
"I’m fucked!" shakily formed the parting thought of Inokenty. His fingers clawed in desperate ramification of the the wide-spread Ctl-Alt-Delete shortcut into the barrier top…
There sounded a half-hearted clapping, uncertain, stifled, fading…
"No, I liked the first part better’, Maya said. ‘And you? Oyaa! What have you been caught on? Look! The shoulder seam’s burst asunder!"
* * *
Bottle #35: ~ Standing The Heat In Social Networks Kitchen ~
A year and 2 months past the dexterous breaking of the padlock (or rather, it still stayed locked, hanging idly alongside the broken hasp from the same ring in a door jamb of the lazy mouse’s house), the electricity flowed to Yezznaggomer Village thru the aluminum wires stretched atop the iron poles installed by the employees of the state company ArtsakhEnergo.
Lots of half-forgotten pastimes came within reach. I brought my PC from Stepanakert, and the weekly wet cleaning of the house started to be done to the sounds of the Golden Collection of Rock and Roll, and buying lavash bread from Lachin City was obliterated altogether.
Instead, I began buying 25-kg sacks of flour from there and mastered baking bread in an electric oven.
A semi-automatic washing machine was also bought, and the so necessary drill-grinder-and-welding-machine arrived in the workshop shed.
And when KT employees came to the village offering access to the Internet, I was the first to sign the contract for the minimum speed connection because of its reasonable price, since construction costs absorbed the lion's share of my budget…
Letters began to come to my email box from girls who lived in various countries, yet were alike in being very rich, potentially, none of them worth less than 10 million dollars.
Each girl had her own sad story why she was unable to draw those millions from her bank account without the attributes of my ID and bank account, where she would transfers it to, the money, so that we could split the millions conveniently.
Guess what? I never had a bank account and, most reluctant to lose communication with the girls, I began spinning yarn about being sentenced for life (absolutely wrongly, by the bye, because of a terrible judicial error). However, I somehow managed to hack the Wi-Fi password of the Prison Director and our electronic correspondence brightens up my wretched misfortune… But the heartless bitches did not buy my sentimental stories and every single one dropped sending their letters to my prison cell…
Then Emma alerted me on the social network Facebook *
(*In 2022 the organization was found guilty of terrorism and their activities banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.)
as a popular means of communication.
I signed up, but never bothered anyone with the request to be my FB friend, because of being too shy and bashful. No, yeah, except for the request to Emma to see what button is for what there, you know.
Still and yet, by the time when FB blocked my account forever, I had 350 friends and 45 followers.
Not surprisingly though! Every day I posted 2 pictures from Yezznaggomer and the parallel worlds…
My frictions with FB were triggered off by the pandemia.
For me, as a person, who thru all their life lived in a police state (except for my stretch in Yezznaggomer Village), it would be certainly a shame not to see that I, like any other resident of this here planet, was being driven into a global concentration camp prodded by the fictitious pandemia and divers other brainwashing tools.
I did not conceal my disgusted indignation, and FB inescapably erased my calls for vigilance as an, assumably, obnoxious stuff violating the community rules.
Then they (who?) over there (where?) apparently got fretted with my perseverance and I was kicked out because, allegedly (they were the allegators), someone had staged suspicious activities about my account from the city of Belgorod (Russia) and now, for the sake of security, I should insert a picture of my passport into their alert message and press the button.
I inserted it in and felt a profound pleasure from their care for my security, however, the feeling did not last long for they (who?) in a minute informed me that it was not me and my passport in the picture was not mine either.
Hey, you (who?)! Over there (where?)! Are you (who?) barking mad?!.
But how and to whom can I prove a shred of anything, if It never discloses Its address?
The verdicts issued from who knows where reach you in the one-way manner, anonymously, on behalf of all the community. Could you have the nerve enough to kick against billions of users, huh?