Sehrguey Ogoltsoff
The Blog

to Jim & Tommy & *.pdf

Epigraph:

“…self-preservation is the game’s name, the modifiers like ‘friendship’, ‘love’ and so on do doom the player yet their absence make the game unbearably dull…”

from Untwitted Thoughts

Foreword

And who do you think can't be tripped with "I-dare-you!" trick and egged on, further, into less than wholesome actions? More easily so with the mark stuck in her state of soporific inefficacy, unresisting. For which obvious reason the things popped up in sleep should certainly be kept at arm's length which attitude only indicates that your lick of sense still sits where it has to, to preserve your fettle fine and fit as a fiddle.

Hence salutary rule #1: first thing in the morning do forget all the stuff broadcast to you in the grip of Morpheus' arms, so to say. And that's the course for both ladies and gentlemen to stay on – the night's over – time to become an innocently blank slate in disregard of things done, and seen, and been in by you at night, dreams or no dreams…

Which attitude might prove being a misstep though, at times. Recall from your reproductive memory a certain Mendeleev, if you would. The old fart amassed right smart notability among the screwballs slanted toward Chemistry by skipping to forget the periodic table presented to him while he slept and—here you are!—crowds of cityfolks populate now the streets named after him while their majority, statistically speaking, don't know shit from shinola in terms of strictly scientific formulating which they primitively substitute with fairies of color from different segments of the spectrum. Not that I mind it. In the least. The geezer had his footing to produce those morning doodles he'd been abused with the previous night. Timely reaped rewards, you follow?. As a result, today you might stumble on his monument, sitting some place or standing at full height (in different locations) yet never shorter than a bust from which the posture of the remaining parts in his anatomy remains in-figure-outable though. Good news they never dare amputate his beard, a quick check: full? chest-brushing? – and you're all set:

“G'Morning, Dmitry Ivanovych!. How's Your most precious?. Yeah, sure, they did promise a light rain by noon!.”

Speaking of monuments, they also are not to be approached in I-don't-care-a-fig manner, some pretty slippery ground to horse about they are, the monuments: up to 7 years in prison, Mr. Dare-Devil. Article 214, the Penal Code of the Russian Federation. Not to mention the fine starting at half a million rubles. Some weighty pros and cons, huh?.

Or how do you like the trick Don Juan got undone by the Monument of Commodore? Whose freshly baked widow had just got her share of consolation he served her in every humanly possible way, Don Juan did. To where it belongs. Before running into another example of ‘I-dare-you!’ catch.

“So what?” sez he, the Monument. “Chicken out to shake hands with me, Wet Pants?”

And the gull swallows the hook and all, full tilt, like a Juanito-kid from the slums of the Mexico City, the capital of the same-named state:

“Shut up, booger!” he sez. “Who’re you to freak me out? We'll check whose pants are wetter!”

And he slap-squeezes Commodore's meathook in glove. Which is not of velvet nor a kid glove but hard stone through and through! Plus palming a handful of P4! And that white phosphorus stuff is a too nasty shit and after that handshake they never collected a sliver of Don Juan to poke out a DNA sample for checking his alleged fatherhood in the slew of bastards spawn all over Europe whose Moms went out to litigate Juan for alimonies. Alongside those eager to boost their rating in the upcoming elections to the respective municipal bodies of self-government…

To cram it all in a laconic nutshell, when Charles Dickens chose to appear in my dream, as his monumental embodiment, I was Correctness itself full of due respect, you know. Yet the spook kept bulldozing me most immodestly, like, you can find no writers any more and it's just computers sweating in their (writers) stead to process the copy-pasted text by reading it backward and then arranging paragraphs diagonally or whichever tweaks you ticked up in the application GUI. So that after, there remains only to specify the time and place your masterpiece-in-progress narrates of (which takes a separate tweak for spicing the text with appropriate word collocations) and crosscheck that the love-triangle was not compromised by scrappy vestiges of Mimi the Bitch from the previous bestseller based on facts from canine life. Miles away from the toil he, this here Charles, plunged into in his time!.

And the like old geezer's hooey about 15 novels in 27 years of banging out a weekly bunch of pages, specific number thereof as stipulated by the contract.

And thus our discourse somehow tacked to wanna-bet-or-what? direction and whether I could turn out a novel by Charlie's method at all – a chapter per 5-day working week because on weekends I’m in the entirely inoperative state thanks to the long-standing tradition, the two-day dead season, sort of.

The pending literary work was baptized The Blog – the shorter, the clearer – to bump off any needless straining, and https://proza.ru agreed upon as a sufficient scribbledrome.

However, all the files submitted there get filtered, post-uplodingly, by their editor program to sift out the words rooted in the language alive from the times immemorial. The platform's specialty wrinkles, are you with me?

Simple example – in place of 'dick' they stick in '****' which planetarium gives you a hard nut to crack if you're a normal guy and it was Friday yesterday, the weekend's inauguration. Seriously, I've checked it out – you just run into a starry-eyed hang-up considering a such-like piece of nightscape.

OK fine, I didn’t pick up rubbing in to their system administrators about glossarial racism, compulsory castration of the mother-tongue means of expressiveness and orgiastic witch-hunt by catabolically impaired inquisitors under the disguise of struggle for Native Speech Purification. Because there was no time to lose…

And the need to keep narrative vivid and athrob called for introducing some orthographic innovations to this end and adding '*' (not asterisk but letter yobz hereafter) to the accustomed spelling rules.

Insert this here yobz in any controversial word of your preference and their censuring software's sight grows dim, thick smoke flows out its happy ears and, for instance, 'cu*nt' is welcomed as normative linguistic innocence, like any other necessary word of feather when fixed properly.

Bye-bye, constellations of **** and other fuc*king malarkey of taboos while any minimally aware reader will see through the non-obscuring yobzes.

Still and yet, I’ve betted on the wrong horse because The Blog took a week longer to finish off.

I dunno what to say Dickens on his next visitation.

* * *

Chapter or (more appropriately) Bottle #1: ~ Who Cares for Rhymes If Having Reason ~

A-and well, if pondering the issue deep and proper, all haste aside, do I need it at all? Speaking of this here Blog, eh?

The question from the nasty lot of those which get mooter while being processed, I must admit, by their endless nature and bent to trigger up another "yes, but then…". When run into a whirlpool of that kind, a scrupulous explorer, of my qualities, would, first off, plumb the depths to the very bottom, and for the brought up case – what is the meaning of being a blogger? Huh? After all?

One thing sticks out like a sore thumb though, dichotomically: there are established bloggers followed by millions of fans, as opposed to self-proclaimed guys eager to sell themselves and spin off the like careers, and both groups, interestingly, are alive and kicking… Well, for the most part.

Which circumstance encourages, by the bye, a closer consideration of the befogged question, at least for the sake of self-education, within reasonable limits. More so when you’ve happened to enroll in some advanced mob (but later they corrected me, politely, that the like associations are safer to name „social nets“ now), where, in addition to your personal account, you get a sexy gizmo (yes, the harsh bitch of life does make you yak up all sorts of discombobulations that would leave my granny frozen in her tracks), that of a personal blog, on-the-spot and less than just-for-asking, in the state of vanilla virgin blankness. A freebie from the blue, see what I mean?

As it happens, the registration came to pass by a total fluke, sort of. I’d even call it accidental occurrence caused by curtain rapt anticipations. However, a closer look derailed my premeditated designs in that direction – no loopholes for picking any silly nose there and smudging the items in public domain with the mucosities of ill-considered hopes, if you know what I’m about…

On the other hand, here is your brand new account plus the blog, unasked-for…

That's how divers confluent circumstances had slithered in to kinda mate and make me ponder on self-education issues, although I personally would not count the like matters among my natural bents.

So, yes, straight from the shoulder – that over-smart-ass trap-scheme does indent the principle of non-interference, an outrageous (albeit cleverly disguised) intrusion into my innate sloth. But then again, the more we learn the more we know. Period.

In the light of the above considerations, it's only cogent to touch the rumors fleeting, now and then, tangentially, at the periphery of my scattered, in general, attention as regards well-advertised show business celebrities, who—before passing away in the established way of their hopeless fight with cancer (choosing a career you sign up for the specific strings attached to the profession) or hanging themselves in sore resentment of the shattered hopes that motivated them some fifty years back—they vengefully blow the Net up with their blogs, a kinda punch-line stunt. Before going to their reward…

"How’s that for a good-bye kiss from me, sweeties, huh?!."

BZDAH-BANG!!!

But why? Why not to meekly drown themselves in peaceful, polite manner?.

Anyway, more than once it swished at the bottom-page-news level—like a flying saucer over a far off neighborhood in the opposite hemisphere—that some or other scuzz of fame «has blown the Net up». Which meanness, as any sabotage, hardly deserves a properer response than just 2 words: „Fuck yourself!“ (both stressed, the latter stronger).

To be frank, in my post-pubic life I was not much interested in a career of demolisher. However, the pranks of plumb crazy stars do draw attention to bloggerism per se (though pretending I don’t care a fig still in its place). Because I can't but feel alerted when there pops up some threat to my unconditionally rooted and cherished tenderly reflex of genetic proclivity to serene leisure and hasteless thinking, alphabetically.

And at sporadic spells of living my life the way congruent with my likings (some rare treat indeed), I am more than reluctant then to skim all those googlies-wikies and sooner would go by my own ad hoc conclusion or two (of various amount of probability) when in doubt concerning this or that matter in hand. A screeching process, yep, why deny, yet at my natural pace and taking breaks when feeling like that.

In essence, this «blog» idea, at the given moment of my single-handed brain-storming, is not much different from a common chisel, which they use to scratch their marks—“here was I, the one and only!”—so as to impress the eternity to come by their (chiselers’) personal uniqueness. Another tool to stake off mutual awe and admiration, the blog is.

Quite natural and ubiquitously wide-spread drive, exceeding dinky racial dissimilitudes. Suffice it to recollect the globe-trotter Mr. Kilroy sticking his nose from the pole to pole, and in no way less omnipresent Citizen Vasya. Two tireless champions of screwing the world with their respective autographs to preserve their popularity forever and a day.

Still keep in mind both you, sneaky-slinker Vasya, and you, most respectable Mr. Kilroy, that each and any of your askew scribbles is supervised and disposed of by OBPS.

Yes, yes, and yes over again – every single one, for it’s the rule of no exceptions. And wherever you leave your scrawl—on a chimney or the wall, or be it even an ancient temple’s abacus, a 4-axis railroad cistern for sulfatophenol transportation, the top of a decrepit water tower, the concrete lid of the Chernobyl Sarcophagus, the left hip of a drowsing off Hippopotamus, the cup of an alertly spinning radar, the tails spasmodically jerking beneath the coccyx of a symphonic orchestra conductor, a Sequoyah stump, the plastered pedestal or marble back of the monument to Great-Leader-Liberator-Teacher-Steerer, the palate of a cannibal Orca frisking gaily after a hearty meal—each your mark is just another supplement to the blogs of your lives, delivery of whose disconnected messages (even though you, blockheads, never bother to indicate the name and whereabouts of your addressee) would be handled by the Oceanic Bottle Postal Service, OBPS, whose clients are all them bloggers, lock, stock, and barrel. See what I mean?

And here pops up the dark side in the blog definition—if you abstain from getting lost in digging thru the sites of all those googles and wikipedias, who certainly are in the dark and have not the slightest idea of OBPS, because they are so too busy, engaged in copy-pasting from each other to have their content full updated, you know, because not only my nose gets rubbed into them those antiquarian terms by the bitchy realities of life…—

Yes, Mr. Kilroy, yes, Citizen Vasya, all of your blog as well as any of its constituent crappy scrap-and-crumbs is none but just a drop lost in the immense Digital Ocean (DO) where for all and anything (A-N-Y-thing!) there are austerely forked out just 0 and 1 in all kinds of combinations.

There, in DO, it, your blog of all your scribble-doodles, is nothing but a message stuffed into an empty bottle by another screwed-up sucker, the loner-resident of an uninhabited island smack-bang in the middle of the wide ocean—from one horizon to the opposite—one more plop-toy carried along, among, and in-between its playful waves, a dildo to be used by torrents or simply one more gourmet nosh for the pack of ever greedy gulpers from the shark species like the dumb, and the small-fin, and the leaf-scale, and the mosaic gulpers, as well as the bird-beak, the long-snout, the arrowhead, and other members in the dogfish family, the large-tooth, the small-eye, the cookie-cutter, and so on from the kite-fin family of sharks, the comb-tooth, the ornate, the bare-skin, the granular (whatever it means) in the lantern family, the cylindrical, the ninja, the brown, the pink, the velvet-belly, the blurred, the lined, the thorny, the rasp-tooth ones, and—their cousin from the viper Genus—the prickly, and the rough-skin, the white-tail, the sparse-tooth, the large-spine, the knife-tooth (I bypass the all-out concatenation of the Genuses of sleepers), the blunt-nose, the big-head, the green-eye, the fat-spine, and the not-yet-described Lombok, the high-fin spurdog; then comes the order of labor-loving saw sharks (ten types in two Genuses), the divine-helpers Angel sharks from all over the globe, the bullhead sharks including horned and cryptic, the great white, the goblin, the megamouth, the sand tiger, the crocodile (not relative to crocodiles per se), the big-eye, and other horror-inspiring mackerel killers, as well as swish dandies from the Carpet subdivision – the epaulette sharks of divers Genuses up to the hooded carpet sharks, and the banded, and the tussled, and the network (sic!), the epaulette wobbegongs to be followed by the collared and the saddle, and the barbell-throats, the ginger, and the necklace, the whale shark, and the zebra (we’re still among sharks), then come the Family of requiem sharks: the gray sharp-nose, the spade-nose, the black-nose, the big-nose, the hard-nose, the dagger-nose, the slit-eye, the pig-eye, the silver-tip, the copper, the bull, the tiger, the white-cheek, the nervous, the silky, the lemon, the hook-tooth, the snaggletooth, the straight-tooth, all kinds of ribbon-tail: both the slender, and the graceful, and the magnificent, and even the false cat sharks different from true cat sharks as exemplified by the white-bodied, the white ghost, the hoary, the pale, the milk-eye, the short-belly, the humpback, the broad-nose, the long-nose, the long-head, the flat-head, the broad-head, the sponge-head, the fat, the broad-gill, and also (my favorite) the Black wonder cat shark (not described as of yet), the spotted, the pale-spotted, the orange-spotted, the variegated, the blotched, and the starry, the somber, the mud, the jaguar (do you really have so much time, eh?), the painted, the draughtsboard, the flag-tail, the balloon, the lollipop, the saw-tail (not to confuse with the saw-heads!), the file-tail, the black-mouth, the mouse, the pepper, the phallic (oho!), the quagga, the puff adder, the grinning, the crying, the honeycomb, the beige, the velvet, the boa, the lizard, the freckled, the chain, the cloudy, (now passing to the hammerhead sharks): the wing-head, the scalloped bonnet-head, to mention just a few, the whiskery shark, the black-tip tope, the big-eye hound shark, the gummy, the dusky, the starry (yes, again but from another Family, if you are still here), the star-spotted, the spotless, the flap-nose, the narrow-nose, the leopard shark, and… and… and now subtract the number of the above-listed from 536 to evaluate the volume of my goodwill, and also the kindness of my heart of gold.

How big are chances, should they ask themselves, first off, the lonely sucker in the island, for so seductively streamlined snack of their bottled message to slip away from this horrendous horde of Order Elasmobranchii at ready to swallow it on sight?

Or could it ever fail to give the pretext to a cruising environmentalist of the Greens Genus to spit out an enraged curse at an anonymous fucker polluting the planet’s ocean with his Goddamn bottles?

~ ~ …and so forth… ~ ~… und so weiter… ~ ~

Scarce and far between are genuine connoisseurs and admirers of OBPS today.

Multi-billion-eyed attention of the global community got stuck to Facebook*, Twitter or whatever else passes for OK in your neighborhood.

(*In 2022 the organization was found guilty of terrorism and their activities banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.)

No one is up to scan the heaving sea waves so as to zero on a vagrant buoy, a marine tumble-weed carrying Uninhabitania islander’s message…

(And if at this here passage at least a single tear of warm empathy is not swished off an eye, let them, the eye owner, go and… hum… well… buy themselves something at Ali-Express or any other proper place for the likes of them – heartless rats.)

But mind you well that OBPS at times can bring you real consolation.

What if some day one of the waves—with a mild «plumpee!»—will unexpectedly bring and serve a bottle onto the desolate sand in the lonely beach, where from it had started its matchless voyage some heck of a long time ago?

And fighting back the tremor in your eager fingers, you’ll open it, O, islander—this vagabond envelope encrusted with uneven sea-salt fancy patterns—because who but you know so too well the meaning of OBPS!

And—lo!—you have already spread out the sepia tinged sheets and got delighted with the inimitable perfection of your style of yore, and the depth of your own thought forgotten by you so long ago (what a pity a couple of pages are fucked up by a stray ship worm!)

Damn! You’re but a sworn philosopher and global thinker, Mr. Kilroy! I swear on my word of honor!.

Well, and this seems quite enough for the first missive, because I still need to find some rubber tree, and bang out a kinda cork to seal the bottle, so as not to miss sending it with the evening tide.

What makes me a definitely ardent devotee of OBPS, it’s its being free—no postage fee whatsoever—look! look! see?! it’s taken! carried off! no stamp is needed, no nothing!

* * *

Bottle #2: ~ Hubba Hubba Ding-Ding, Dear Comrades! Congrats To All On This Jubilee, And – Hooray! ~

And, to be clear at once, you don’t get the uninhabited island as is for just a ‘thank you!’ neither for an honest-to-God stare from your blue eyes. Ha! Seen there in heaps already… Nope. The charm fails to raise the response counted on. The island mulishly awaits till you conquer it. Moreover since it’s equipped with a complete system of canalization behind each convenient bush in the state of the art (the system, not the verdure, silly!) and luxuriously abundant in natural davenports. Aye, aye!.

Yet, all these heavenly niceties are available only after severe struggle and surviving thru the two preliminary levels: The Ivory Tower and Unconquerable Autism. Yep, exactly in this order.

Well, on the whole, The Tower is not an over-complicated thing for egg-heads only, no. All you have to do there is just to stay absorbed completely in your collection of post stamps or whatever is dear to the crux of your soul’s temperament and do not give an eff about anything else.

Reduce all unnecessities to the level of external hum unable interfere with the teaser-thing you tickle your soft spot with.

Everyone around would be too eager to derail you by all kinds of “Go buy bread please!” or else “Run! It’s an air raid!” Don’t let them distract you and hang on till “You Win!” crowns your accomplishment.

Level Two, at first sight, looks a kinda simpler job. No need to give a bean about any-fucking-thing whatsoever. Keep it plain as day and lock yourself off thoroughly, all of the five senses firmly sealed, that’s the ticket to pass the whole thing.

However, be warned of physical harassment – they’ll seat you on the toilet at their will or maybe clutch a cup with your bunch of fingers and pour what was in there down your throat, “See? This how it’s done! Will you never learn nothing? You, damn dumb stupid ass?”

Don’t talk back and be patient for the sake of “You Win!” and refreshing change to the dangler solitude of Uninhabited Island…

Wow! That’s some unfakeable Cream of Paradise for you!

Rhythmic swell of lolling surf of the Digital Ocean, warm light breeze from the electric blower under your feet, sexy moans of gulls in the headset and other checked on attributes of your favorite widgets. The functions under your control are literally innumerable, on a par with Almighty’s level. And why so? Ha! Since we’ve lived up to a tangible jubilee already.

Come on! Remembered now? Right! The Internet is 25 today! Ho-ho!

A quarter of century ago the scientifically minded public started to call each other to exchange text files over the wires. Not every cat did get it then, all of a sudden, whereto steered so quirky a telephonization. Still fewer could, at that pivotal moment, catch on, o boy! the jazz’s charged with way much cooler stuff than the historical thrust into the cosmic era when all the nation bust their ass to give a couple of citizens the chance of getting high and hanging up there, in the weightlessness, on their orbit before predictable return to normal gravitation. Be brave guys’ landing soft!

Quite different kettle of fish, in toto, to this here Internet where everyone may have an opportunity to individually (yet still en masse) get out of the state where you belong as a taxpayer (what? you haven’t even suspected? yes, sir, they’ll tax you and get you and fuck you without you ever noticing when and how, the state will, that very one which you own quite a few sacred debts, inescapably—if you Old Ones don’t settle the issue with a doctor on the draft medical commission—and where you’ll be used for other needs too, thanks to your citizenship).

And all of a sudden – yay! The independence breeze stirred up! The sweet word “freedom!” echoed from afar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah… O my!. NetScape, AltaVista – the legendary, glorious, long since forgotten names of genus-starters in the line of search engines… It’s them who paved my way to virtually visit the USA Congress Library full of the matter of fact information instead of filtered staple oatmeal broadcast by the TV news program Vremya or, say, Mayak, the All-Union Radio Station, through the bigger half of my life.

The Net flopped the mission of scream-silencers in the range of short radio waves. Those crafty contraptions meant for keeping the USSR citizens corralled and hedged off against the subversive influence of the outside world by utilizing the unbearable crackle of the static, while the interior mass media brain-washed the Soviet people 24/7/365 in the prophylactic mentality sterilization to turn the population into dumb cattle.

The prudent precautions did not prevent the disintegration of the Soviet Union though (whose death preceded the birth of the Internet, chronologically), and now everyone is free to choose their own way to get manipulated and formatted into a shithead consumer.

That’s why all the salesmen disseminating nostalgia for the golden days of Soviet era for me will always stay the base promoters of fucking Restoration. It’s only that I don’t stroll around with a Mauser pistol because of the built-in pacifism in the firmware of motherboard and other vital parts of my personality…

Presently, text hunting is looked upon as an oddball warp in your mindset, some funny atavism, sort of.

Who’d ever need the stuff? Wake up, bro! The Net’s swamped with freebie bimbo-dolls, nice yummy spice for jerking off, as well as warfare to edge any quirk of taste—be it War of Tanks or Aviation, or bare Strategy—ready for customers of any preferencial twist in their way of masturbation.

And all that is just fine! Because while they keep jerking or blasting, the Internet roots into inextricable depths and nurtures my optimistic hope for getting free pdf files and a “thank you!” in the bargain.

Me, personally, the Internet had sure liberated from book-buy expenses. What’s the point in outlay while in the Net, running high and boldly, there is everything, including books you’ll never find even for ready money? Both goodies and best things since sliced bread which all is to be paid for by only the time you spend in the online search-and-find, if not too lazy.

Arise, brother, and dig it, firstly, that the up-front page of search results is biased to favor reference to customers who pay Google or Bing, or You-Name-It for their ads, and who now want to harvest, in their turn, the gravy off you, while the rest 1,630,000,000 results in 0.62 sec are way downstream where you not at once guess to check (well, no, I don’t dig deeper than the fourth in the resulting pages) and where there surely sits the book in question, PDF formatted, but you do have what to open a pdf file with, right? And it’s no problem if you don’t because in the Net there is any opener whatsoever and free of charge too, just look for it deeper than the first page served up by Google.

At times the search might go on for a couple of days because of piggy mercantile schemers. Know what I mean? Yeah, sure, whose sites holler mutely “Hey! Hi! Here! ANY PDF FOR FREE!”

You, naturally, rush there only to run into a smaller-font notification “for registered users”, and the registration is certainly nothing else but free. Yet, after a click or two, there pops up the form for entering the number of your credit card. Some fine howdy-do.

No-no-no! They won’t take a penny off the card, and the procedure is just their long-established custom.

But where on God’s green earth could I fetch the required card from? The arid untilled patch (right, it’s me), who’s never had anything to do with the like cards? The sinless virgin hick (me once again) never rolling in the hay of that particular field?.

True, a couple of times I tried at bilking and entered a fictitious number from my imaginative ass. But no-go, Mr. Pariah Outcast!.

Since then wherever registration includes the form inquiring of my card number I sucker-punch the “X” in the right upper corner of their site page – look for some other twerp, sir Hooker! Go an’ fuck yourself, corrupt crook, you!

But your search target waits for you at archive.org or Gutenberg project if not at z-library. And that is right because the best things in life are free – the air, when not polluted, and love which is not a part to Goods-Money-Goods shebang…

The first computer machine I met at 40, when “Internet” word was yet unheard-of. The lunch break was it, I remember like today, at some office, which name I cannot call back to mind. The staff went out forgetting to turn the machine off, which oversight gave me about an hour for sitting before it and clicking the mouse on the “open file” Button that hovered in the monitor, smack-bang in its center.

On every click the monitor would wink and hop, slightly, as if in doubt: to open or not to open? Yet, eventually, kept to where it was. One whole hour and it never got tired, faith!

Then the office employees came back waking me up from the spell of my first intercourse with the wonder of technology.

On leaving the office or, to be more precise, at the first crossing after leaving it, I met Sam, the most advanced cat in town on such matters, and asked him how that frigging file could, by the bye, be opened with the mouse. Well, he looked at me the way as if I asked about how to put your right foot before the left when walking, however, patiently enough explained that, before to click the button, the file you wanna open should be highlighted in the list.

O yeah! Windows 95 was a mighty cool operational system! The present Windows 10 sucks at every point when compared to that…

So, on the grounds of the current status quo allowing for texts availability, there crops up an uneasy suspicion: what if books—following the example of the vinyl disks by the band Flow, Song, Flow!—will also disappear in the bottomless bin of Past to the common heap atop the mentioned garbage because of the rise of laser disks and pirate sites all over the globe, where you are welcome to download any hit, be it the Lemeshev’s aria What If A Stray Arrow Will Hit And Take My Life?. and all the way up to Hit Me, Baby, One More Time performed by Britney Spears?

To which with all befitting soberness I declare – fuck, no!

Were they even to convert each and every printed volume into an audio book or turn it into a movie, just what they did to poor Harry Potter, and The Steel Was Hardened That Way, or steep it in all kinds of widgets to reproduce of the prairie in bloom aroma or the stench off your dorm buddy drunk blind (to follow the storyline), and send the X-rated impulses of tactile impressions in passages with the sex orgies served by the whores at The Red Mill (as depicted by the seasoned author), or even letting you feel, virtually, taste of any delicacy, up to Zhigulevsky beer when snacked with a briquette of molten cheese for 13 kopecks a piece, still and yet – fuck, no!

Because there is some (what would I call it?) magic (yes!) in books which is beyond imitation by any 3D (or be it +696D if they choose it)!

Got it what I’m about? Quite so! The words! Those black ant-like-critter-signs in the white field without smell-taste-color, like the distilled water, but making you tighter than all them sweet wines… But then again, if only you know the trick of getting the adequate intoxication from them those ants, sure thing.

Good news, that skills could be developed when you need it, which lately brought about my getting high from classical music, at least on certain pieces. Take The Hairless Heights by Mussorgsky, if you please, where witches fly to, to land under the soundtrack cooler than the chopper’s Ride Of The Valkyries over Nam…

Yet, Alfred Schnitke still remains as remorseless guts ripper as he always was…

No doubt, freedom captivates anyone but since that villain Hegel had shackled the world with his unbreakable chain of unity-of-opposites, it (freedom) got turned into prison as well.

Handcuffed by the edging smartphones, teeter poor Juliets about never spotting their Romeos who—their brows vindictively downcast—keep flicking the beans of Steve Job’s HER’s or someone else’s Samsungs.

Each medal has its backside. The Dark Side of the Moon in action.

However, let’s drop the subject for some other guy to blow up the Net with, because this morning, by the try and error check, it was confirmed that you can stuff no more than five A4 sheets into a bottle. Which is not a cinch, on top of it.

And do not forget leaving some room for them (A4s) to piggyback because of oceanic dampness. Some booked, so to say, volume.

As for bottles it’s not a crunch on Island since that maverick wreck of galleon got stranded by the storm last week. No crew, no nothing but the screwed-up vessel driven into the bay nearby the northern cape. However, the chest in the Captain’s cabin stayed intact with all the stuff inside. Jamaican gin, bottled, follow me?

Well, one of those had to be emptied for the experimentation tries, to see the bottle’s capacity, when you start stuffing it with A4 rolls. No more than five, as it was mentioned. Exactly where I plan to shove this here part of my blog up.

The uninhabited environs have since long streamlined me into a thoughtful expert in practicality because not every day a fried dove glides over to you, served by the favorable breeze adding a snack to the freebie galleon… You know what I mean, huh?.

* * *

Bottle #3: ~ Prince Kurbsky Too Was Not Ashamed Of Taking To The Hills ~

What was it all kicked off with? No way to find out. As in anything at all.

When thinking deep enough, you do behold that any point in your grab might serve the start. Any one and readily.

How about that point, when the gray-covered notebook was taken over to the City Psychiatrist for the evaluation of sanity (if any) still present in the person, and/or how dangerous could the doodler of the like stuff be for innocent civilians?

Or take that pivotal moment, marked by the ample pocketbook of deep sepia tinge in the pages seen through the press in 1968, changing hands?

My Teacher outstretching it (no pathetic blah-blah attached to the book) for me to grab in awe and greedy gratitude? Does it draw a shorter straw to be the start?.

The justification for the gray notebook to pop up at all was, in the first place, provided by the weighty parcel in the mustard-hued coarse paper for postal deliveries, corded about and sealed up with chocolate-like blobs of stamped wax which I hadn’t broken. Ever.

Any use of breaking if you know what’s inside? Translations there were, that’s what. Translations from English, 35 stories, 472 pages typewritten in Ukrainian.

These, like, randomly collected figures do not repeat each other in their summing up of 6 years’ work—… (eh? gee! and this one coincides with not a single one of them!)

Six years deftly wrapped in the mustard-hued paper, bound-sealed up by the skillful hands of a post office service-lady: shrrsh-frisst-trunt-slamp – next, please!

The digits mentioned so far (undeniably non-uniform) do bear certain meaning, albeit not graspable at a fleeting glimpse, because socialism is, first and foremost, inventory, to cite the aphoristic definition by Lenin at the sitting of All-Russia Central Executive Committee on p.57, vol. 35, Complete Collection Of Works in 55 Volumes (four repetitions here but these are not from me)…

In the Publishing House they also did not bother to open the translations, toe-kicked them on the fly instead. A one-touch shot.

Yet why multiplying them? The half-back was seated all alone at his desk in the second office to the left down the corridor. Sedentary way of life made of that Sitting Bull a blob of blubber. Unhealthy obesity, not fitting a soccer player.

Let him thank me for the opportunity offered by my benevolent visit—no excruciating push ups, just taking to the post office 472 pages plus their cover—to throw away a sliver of his fat at that exercise, and the Publishing House would reimburse the expenditure confirmed by the post office bill slip.

Not a chance. A courier was sent by the slug. Screw him!.

The long and short of it, the translations returned to where they had initially started from and stilled there, like a mustard-hued tombstone, to crown 6 years of mental toil rewarded with the cobweb-light lines across the forehead to deepen later, when the good-looks period is over, into uneven contemplative wrinkles.

And why not to lie leisurely enjoying such a sound prop? The DIY book-shelves coated with translucent shellac—tranquil and soft environs for a serene slumber?.

Yet, the pages in the package upon the homemade shelf not only weighed down the item of interior but, on the side, were drip-boring my brains in defiance of the coarse steady wrap, the pages were. Their comatose presence made still acuter the inertia amassed along 6 years of handling them those antlike-black-critters-in-the-white-field, at first so effing obstinate but getting tamer, bit by bit, until they hooked me too, in their turn, up. A text-book case of situation-conditioned addiction. Jejunely christomathical exemplification…

And after the Game-Over, in the stiff stillness that followed, there remained nothing to waste myself away. Plodding donkeys and as well as circus horses are incurable… Fucking Sir Isaac Newton and that First Law of his!. Although the inertia thing he cabbaged from Galileo.

The evenings lengthened. Noticeably. Finding a shim to fill and dwindle them away turned out not a cinch. Like, no quick fix, brother, but go and learn playing melodeon squeezebox and, when it gets dark, off you stroll about the hood lanes outpouring some hit air or another, announcing, “Can’t buy me looo-ove!“. Don’t forget to shine your black pair of high boots, and stick a fluffy flower (Portulaca oleracea) in the visor-cap so that the chicks would tag along and fall over themselves to treat the musician to the sunflower black seeds they gobble up spitting non-stop the husk out…

Sad pity but the idea about a squeezebox failed to hook me up effectively, you know, and I bypassed buying high boots.

As for the girls, cute and saucy, they’ll always find who to give their seeds to in this or that, or some other feasible way in any concurrent settings.

Squeezing all the above-said together, instead of a two-row A-major/D-minor melodeon there, by the forlorn heap of paper within the stiff cask-like shell of wrapping (somewhat already softened with the growing layer of the virginal pollen of dust), yes, right next to it, possibly too nigh to, stretched out a notebook, rather thick and of a certain hint at brash boldness in its pale-gray leatherette cover.

The purpose of the stationery bad ass, at first, had rather fuzzy outlines, however, definitely slanted to the ant-like-signs-and-so-on-and-forth private games (because no computer games had existed yet and computers themselves were named Machine-Computer Engineering Tools that necessitated construction of reinforced concrete foundation to mount them (the Tools) upon and on that solid basis they thundered like locomotives spinning the spools of their perforated tapes hither-thither and backward again).

Yeah, buddy, be kind to patiently endure the games of my mind spilt in your grid-ruled pages where the well-schooled ant cohorts would crawl on bringing up the grim story of how I could possibly get to so morbid life style. Yet, those crossed-out lines do not count…

At that exactly moment came to me the radiant clearance as to how slippery was this question: where to start from?

However, the notebook did not give an eff about the complicated nature of the issue and with the arrogant gusto and nonchalance of a bro-to-bro talk revved forth about innocent lads hanging out on the screechy door-porch to a seedy half-hutta at calm starry nights, neither sharp nor fussy about uncouth strumming of Vasya (The Red) Markov’s guitar—who seldom showed up but everybody knew the instrument was to be picked respectfully—the assemblage full of perk, and jives, and gags understood by only partakers in the guffaw…

Everything as it was and always is to be in a one-horse burg of N…

That way, at nights, the notebook became the time-machine to which they flocked hurriedly, those a hundred times already mentioned ant-critters to turn into a fixed scrawl in another white field (small-scale-grid-ruled), until they stole the machine, not ants of course.

I didn’t report the vehicle theft and never showed any surprise, outwardly, so as to skirt dour declarations that I’d been warned it was to happen.

Yes truly, a couple of times there were voiced reproofs in the interrogative form: what fucking rascal hooey was I scribbling in that notebook?

But then the City Psychiatrist diagnosed the notebook’s case as not stark raving mad and violent, and it could be taken back to lie beside the hefty stiff parcel.

The whistle-blowers played along with the doc’s recommendation, however, they were not ready to what happened after.

“And what? What was that? Tell us, tell! Cut out your darn tries at frigging suspension! Damn coot, you!”

Well, not a thing. None! Nothing whatsoever.

The retrieval was met with the deadpan of my poker face (if observed from outside), no comment, total indifference, and since then the number of untouchable idlers on the shelves doubled drastically – the mustard-hued mother walrus, and her gray cub immovably advancing towards the equivalence in their pigmentation due to the natural growth of the dust layer of identical thickness.

Both time and place let me in on their mutual incongruity with wanton games at ant domestication and getting schooled in response. That’s the ballgame, folks!

In all fairness to the Twix (time-and-place), the so rigid halt was partly motivated by a vengeful wish to pinch the nose of mess-arounders, whose sporadic and somewhat pensive looks in the direction of dormant walrus colony of two upon their shellacked shelf, as well as random fingerprints detectable in the dust layer over the gray leatherette were telling signs of their, deductively, thirst to know what was to happen next in them those fucking scribbles?

Not a thing. You should of taken it to the psychiatrist and let the wise guy guess the storyline without helpful clues from letter-ants.

That’s how that particular point turned a false start…

The following try was flagged off a couple of years later by the pocket-book volume borrowed for a 10-year stretch, which accompanied me over the watershed of the Caucasian mountains…

The first winter was lived through inside the tiny Pioneers’ Room on the second floor in the two-story school building.

Way back, it was an ordinary house expropriated later from the owner living at large or else he, the owner, gave it up in token of his good will, after which move the village obtained the ready-made school for the compulsory secondary education.

However, all the above-supposed had taken place before my arrival from over the Caucasus and I had no desire to inadvertently chafe the sore spot by ferreting the details out.

The Pioneer Room was equipped with the ubiquitous mark of such cubbies – the compound attribute of the Pioneer Horn-and-Drum, and furnished with a nondescript desk inserted by the wall opposite the entrance, bearing the cross of the school library—a couple scores of books worn to tatters.

The heaps of happy kids in pioneer red ties hung from two walls in the cardboard visuals for teaching Armenian to the elementary kids and English grammar to the students at secondary schools because the third wall (opposite to the library) was barely wide enough for the wooden door from the corridor, which ran along the Teachers’ Room (the former living room) towards two itsy-bitsy classrooms sliced out by the plywood partitioning from the erstwhile bedroom (five more partitioned classrooms were on the first floor). The fourth wall in the room was a complex of small glass panes in the wooden window binding, a score of them in four tiers up to the low ceiling.

The square sheet of tin, substituting glass in one of the panes in the middle of the laced structure, had a round hole in its center, cut to let out the 5.8-inch-wide tin stovepipe rising from the rectangular-cuboid tin woodburner [60 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm] on 4 tin legs to keep the whole contraption 25 cm clear off the boards in the floor. All the tin—in the pipes, and the elbow, and the woodburner itself—grew the steady crust-layer of brown rust. The round gap to let the pipe out was cut keeping eye on thrusting it thru with ease and generously provided constant ventilation and immediate contact with the outside weather.

The Horn-and-Drum couple sat modestly mum on the stand shelf by the door, in the company of a hefty handbell of verdigris bronze girded with the cast relief running in Russian, “Gift from Valdai”, a genius of mighty clangor to announce the start/end of a class/break…

The firewood for the tin woodburner I cleft nearby the old-tin canopy-shelter in the yard, close to the school privy of 2 doors marked “F” and “M”, segregationally.

The ax kept flying off its handle. Old Goorguen, the school watchman from the next-door house, issued an ironic chortle into his white-tabacco-yellowed mustaches to every flight he witnessed, and the Principal, named Surfic, never omitted to compliment my style at wood-splitting that witnessed to my having firm roots in the class of intelligentsia. She admired my forbearance – not a single, obscene, 4-letter word after that flying piece of fucking iron…

Late in the evening, the tin woodburner turned the Pioneers’ Room into a scorching sauna but after midnight the freezing cold harassed me even through the mattress upon the folding bed, and in the morning I got from under the thick sheep-wool-filled blanket up into the raw cold of mountain winter. All of the bedding temporary donation by the teaching and cleaning staff at school…

I did not plunged into translating Ulyssesright away. First off, employing The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, I translated The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(also by Joyce) under the pretext it was necessary to better dig that guy, Stephen Dedalus, the youngest in the Ulysses’s trinity of main characters.

Whenever some passage stayed unclear even after The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, the following Sunday saw my travel by bus to Stepanakert, the capital of the Autonomous Region to keep a council with BDSE, The Big Dictionary of the Soviet Encyclopedia, in the regional library down there. On the way, in both directions, the fellow travelers amazed me by their indifference to the striking views of the mountainous nature about the rolling bus that kept my nose stuck to the window glass while they yakked at each other in their dark language of who knows what…

At the end of academic year I was dished out a room on the second floor of a no man’s house at a stone throw from the school yard. The first floor comprised the windowless locked cave for storing the school’s tin woodburners in warmer seasons, along with the stock of bits and scraps from ruined school desks.

Part of my salary was spent for gradual acquisition of plywood sheets from the Building Materials Shop in the Stepanakert Bazaar, which I kept nailing up, gradually, in between the paydays, to the planks in the ceiling through which there leaked the earth spread under the roof as the thermal isolation.

The slow-go repair accomplishment happened on the eve of the following academic year, and the room was shared with a rookie pedagogical cadre from Yerevan freshly baked and certified by a high education enterprise for teachers production.

Arthur wore black-rimmed glasses of rigid looks and soft locks of moderately long hair, also black. At school he taught Armenian to kids and coming home shared the woeful tales about the eternal wounds of Armenia with me.

He held on for almost two months then brought from Yerevan a sack of second-hand garments for the village kids, a kinda payoff for his unfulfilled intentions, and I’ve never seen him any more…

And when the shy and soft first snow coated the ground hardened by the first frost, I got it first-hand that possession of a tin woodburner is not enough for wintering if having nothing to stick in and kindle inside it. The room would feel unquestionably cold both for me and the cohabitant family of mice squealing in the stone walls about the built-in cupboard.

So, I grabbed the ax bought in the process of the mentioned ceiling-remodeling and started off to the woods…

On the slope grown with mighty beech trees, something certainly grabbed me by the collar and brought to the tree as large as any other yet almost put away by the deep cave in the trunk, close to the roots.

Maybe, the dryad dwelling up in that tree got sick and tired of the insufficient nutrition through the defective trunk and called me? No way to figure out why and how it still managed standing upright.

Hacking the trunk leftovers through did not take long, before the tree fell with the bye-bye snap-and-crackle.

However, the fall was intercepted by a neighboring beech. Which situation called for climbing the felled tree and cutting it into separate pieces, for then to fall again and reach the pretty askew ground, one by one now: the crown, the pillar, the foot.

Some exquisite picture! No fuc… famous circus will ever reproduce! The Magic of Ax-Acrobatics!

The audience got frozen by awe and horrified admiration, in their seats.

Houdini! Houdini! Cast a look from wherever you are at the poor wretch, one of the crazy dare-devils, you followers!

Hugging the tree up there—so too high!—with just one hand, uses he remaining one to cut the other, on-leaning tree—felled but not fallen as of yet.

That’s a heck of an uphill job, fair ladies and kind gentlemen! Sure it is!

The man is shedding hot sweat and frightened farts, when another of cut off pieces threatens to pull him off and down in their final plunge…

After all the pieces of the quartered tree plumped down around the propping trunk, the executioner dropped his ax to the ground and descended clench-hugging the freed prop…

When on the slanted woods floor, my hands a-jitter and the knees a-tremble after all the strain up there in the Sweat-Circus Dome, I felt like widdling, and unzipped the fly, and craned over – what the heck! Where’s my doodle?

Instead of the dick I used to, there’s a lean pod of a kindergarten kid’s willy.

That’s why on the ancient Greek amphorae depicting the round dance of sportsmen and warriors, this particular part in the man’s frame was drawn so dinky – your body cannot concentrate in all directions and for all purposes at once.

Not that I really needed a dick in the bleak empty wood on the winter eve, but pinching that medicine dropper out from its sheath of the muffler of non-artificial skin with your shaking, inflexible fingers is a hard nut to crack, which is not a circus any more but some fucking porno thru and thru…

The next day, they snatched me to the village council, from midst the classes. The chairman started his bullying. In Russian but with a noticeable Caucasian accent, “Why da tree da cut? Dey uud prison send you.”

“Felled”, sez I, “as to winter thru because”.

And the wood watcher was also present, Dad of Garrick from the 4th form, putting a good word in, in Armenian, that the tree had been long since kaput already.

In short, the following day they gave me a truck and a couple of young hands to fetch the cut over to the one-room two-storied house. True, on the way some part of the booty was dropped by another house too, yet the remainder still lasted to the next summer…

And the 4th was the most populated grade at school, by the bye. Two boys and two girls. But later Arega’s parents moved to Armenia and took her over as well.

So, when the The Portrait… was finished, I did not instantly switch over to Ulyssesbut felt some inclination for that rascally scribbling once again.

The payoff on the try amounted to 11 pages, however, not a sequence to what had stayed back in the gray notebook, yet from a period ten years later.

Well, I saw they hit it off well, the pages, and only then I plunged into Ulyssesbecause there remained just 9 years of the stretch stipulated.

Thus I put my self-made doodling off, for fifo remains fifo in the Caucasus too, and if you want to get it indeed what it could mean then ask your system administrator.

However, as it turned out, my own writing was put off for 29 years and till some absolutely offbeat village…

What the heck! See? To find the point for a start is just half the battle because the question of equal vagueness and importance is to shut up in time. A lil bit more and this here blog installment would call for a whole keg instead of the routine bottle…

* * *

Bottle #4: ~ The Skedaddler ~

But let the things said up till now create no illusion nor vain anticipation that this here Island will serve just at a snap whatever is your want delivering it on a dish of great artistic aptitude and antiquarian value. Damn no! Prepare yourself for a plain earthenware and no rim embellishments in curly blue vignettes. Just for the record, at times you’d better keep in check your expectations, firm and proper. Don’t drip your mouth water within other guy’s property while having no idea who’s who in the turf of this particular neighborhood…

To start with, Island, if you are fit to recollect, is Uninhabited, and besides, the over-indulgence in colors like blue color or, say, pink, not to mention their dazzling combinations with other catchy daring hues, would result in a closer attention of folks digging the slant of your orientation. Roger that? No prescriptions intended though, just a friendly hint that the like services stayed way back, in the past, sweet, innocent, naive, and fucked up with all kinds of deficits, past, straight and strict, past which wouldn’t tolerate your finicky nitpicking about rim color and stuff but slurp whatever was ladled out and dished to you, asshole!

To wit, don’t ever count on any dainty dishes here. Yet, on the other hand, they won’t take you for a bird of their feather, them those faggy parrots in their gaudy horny, epidermal outgrowth all aglow and—look! ah! dearie cuties!—see those whoopee tails on them?! So big, and long, and simply yummy!

Besides, no, not everything is here in heaps and plenitudes. The calendar, for one, is what Island lacks, in toto. Though yes, who gives a fuck smack bang among the everlasting tropical summer?.

Or is it winter, after all? Well, you sure feel the switch of seasons when they are taking turns, but it is still hard to say if we are drenched with Cancer’s non-stop winter rains or they are Capricorn’s similarly unceasing summer downpours, eh? Right now?

Then, secondly, watch your mouth as regards “fuck” because OBPS (check Bottle #1 in this here blog for the explication) perlustrate your bottle messages and whenever you glide into talking the natural way they substitute your words with asterisks like this “****” and that’s their way to fucking filter your stream of conscience out and expose it as an unnormative lexical anomaly. So if you take aim at presenting human emotions whole-hog then go and break the orthography rules.

So, who turns out now a real lover and who’s the asterisked perverter of the language alive?

How come them OBPS guys see thru thick ocean waves obscured, additionally, by the dim bottle glass? No problem at all. They keep a computer program out there to run down and eradicate from texts the very roots and footing.

Can you imagine? Teaching an innocent machine all the “bad” words and mutilating her lamb-like immaculate psyche? Those purity champions, they!

Now, who’s bitched here in the back “metal has no psyche”? You? Then it's your likes, the so-called Church Fathers, who for more than 300 years rated woman into the class of soulless household utensils/beasts of burden and even voted on this issue in one of their summit get-togethers. One “aye” exactly made woman into human being…

So, dogs also have no soul? Eh? Like any other animal that you maim and torture for your experimental ends? Huh? You, cloned clowns of vivisectionists!.

Taking all the above-said into consideration, you may safely call this areal, populated by me alone, the Island of Freedom from Time because when you struggle thru the preliminary 2 Levels your connection with time breaks up, and you can’t get ball rolling even by knife-slits on the post as advised by the Robinson Crusoe's hack. For which reason right now it is Unknown month in the year of **** here.

Well, not that I’m much concerned on that point. No sweat. Not even in this here tropics. It's only for the sake of curiosity and stuff.

And it’s just a pity that I can’t wield the astrolabe or else by juxtaposing meridian to longitude you would see which of the Tropics your tan is from, namely.

Nope, I’ve been anything but a navy cadet…

The matter is that last week this atoll’s lagoon (how on earth could it pop up here at all? the island 2Bsure is 100% of volcanic origin) was visited by The Flying Dutch. You easily can see it by her sails torn and fretted to hankie size and the bowsprit adorned with the brassiere XXXL large, also in tatters…

So, their boatswain wanted to peddle me an astrolabe for just three piastres.

No, he did not venture ashore and only waved to me ‘come aboard, bro!’, yet I abstained from taking risks because the holes in his singlet allowed for glimpses of his skeleton, well-gnawed and brightly polished in the process.

Next morning the vessel was no more in the lagoon and neither any trace of her. Hard to say the reason for their visit. Not to replenish their supply of fresh water anyways.

The lagoon’s water body might be a junction in their traffic routes or else a rendezvous spot to hang out with seals in divers suites. I dunno…

However, to decide the day of week is easy as pie, each and every day here is Friday. Ha! And no less. The most best of the best days in the week full of yummy expectancy to live a little at long last, since you’re thru the working week.

So now, precisely last Friday, that is yesterday, in harmony with my constant pre-dinner habit, I came down to the beach and stretched out in the palm-tree shade because the sand temperature beyond it is too scorching in the sun. And there lay I enjoying peace of mind, and the general state of imperturbation as it usually is on Friday nearing the dinner time and rather evidently so. The fingers of my both hands laced under around the back of my head, I watched from the supine position the vast serenity of the brine expanse behind the monumental sight of the sea shell stuck in the middle of the beach.

It’s a bivalve, as the majority of its fresh-water counterparts which, as an inquisitive kid, you scraped out in the shallows of ponds and rivers, but the selfish shellfish latch themselves from inside and there are no means to break in until you let them bask for some time in the fire embers.

But this here mollusk beats them all, some overseas wonder, you can’t grab it – whew! caliber 1.5 meters, and the corresponding weight of over 500 pounds. However, the valves are rounded, not oval as by their tribe in the fresh water. And watch this exotic finishing, both luxurious and equatorial, fanning off from the hinges that connect the two half-spheres, running all the way to the rounded edges in a kinda basso-rilievo of cable-thick gimp trimming worked over with the finest polish, as if Ural serf artisans were sharing the know-how of malachite processing based on the local raw materials.

Deep in myself, I’ve baptized this ogres with the name of Pec-tin-din and it baffles me to guess why. The scallop-like bottom of this huge cauldron has half-buried in the sand, sunk as deep as the Peccy’s weight forces it to enter, and the lid remains somewhat raised, like for airing.

But there’s nothing inside to air. Peccy had passed away to better world before my getting to Isle of No Time, not a shred of her mantle stayed behind in between the valves, all's shell-lifted, looted, scraped, gnawed, swept up and taken away, and only this bare calcium structure still tarries in the sand of the beach…

Of dust art thou knocked together and dust art thou to become…

Well, not quite Friday thoughts rolled up and, in unison to them, some wind began to whine in gusts whose unevenness furnished those wails a certain emotional curve, like, say, grief lamentations, “O, woe! Peccy! Why have you left me!”

Besides, with a noteworthy brashness, the wind blew radically athwart the direction of monsoon winds that on Friday, in a stably predictable manner, blow either to the shore or off it. But no! This bitchy one pulls alongside the shoreline! Some crying anomaly, this hydra of counter-hydrometeorology!

A split-moment before shining radiantly, the azure of the sky went out, squeezed by the cephalopod mollusk of the heavy black cloud unwinding, spreading its distorted tentacle-protuberances all over the firmament.

The waves dropped out of caressing languidly the shore in the habitual foreplay and, all of a sudden, sprung erect and wheeling, their tips amok foaming at the mouth, and rushed to crash their whole mass against the beach spread out in the boot-licking kowtow.

The darkness condensed in the blink of an eye and reigned all around, thru which, like whitish ghosts, there flashed foamy fragments of water sheets torn by the gnarly squall off the shore-lashing waves.

And now the torrential tropical rain joined the cluster pandemonium fucking with dogs and cats the surface of the flattened sand, spilling about splashy streams and violent rivulets.

Everything awaited for the thunder, everything, out of their mind, implored in crazy urge: do it! O, do it! And the thunderclap—KRGAHDAHDAN!!—burst out twined with the lightning that sliced the world by its crackle-and-hiss into two, horizontally, passed its blinding shot from a knobby tentacle to the suckers in that at the opposite end of the world—SHUHHK-NNBA-CHUHKZZ!!

Bet your farm, I was up already full-length and hugging the palm pillar bent after the fringe of its long drenched fronds jitter-bagging impetuously at the waving tree top.

I clenched to the trunk horrified by the might of the drumming rain ready to wash me off into the berserk serf any next moment.

I clenched immobilized by the mortifying fear that the very next lightning wouldn’t miss this one and only tree in the beach.

Clung to the dribbling tree, I just waited to see: which of my fears was the first to come true? And all of a sudden, against the deathlike backdrop of enraged foamy waves, I made out the shadowy half-sphere of Peccy’s lid.

What followed came off all by itself—a desperate dash… couldn’t you keep your gap wider, fucking slut?. the head is thru the rest will follow…

And tearing off me all that could be peeled by the sharp edges of the two valves, I squeezed into the Peccy’s nest, half-meter deep.

Burst another discharge of the deafening yet belated thunderclap. Eff you, bitch! You can’t reach me in here!.

I’m drenched thru and thru and it is so narrow a nook I am in, but the rain is not molesting me any further… I cuddle into the favorite posture of intrauterine babies. Good news the walls here lack any nasty lips.

The noise of rain splashes outside subsides, gets gently muffled, little by little…

Wait-wait-wait! But how come that I cannot hear the surf any more?

In answer, there sounds a dry short click, the tooth in the upper valve locked into the dimple of recess in the bottom one…

Thick silence pervaded the narrow darkness. The deafening silence of a sound chamber and pitch-black impenetrability, copulated, engulfed all the world…

* * *

Bottle #5: ~ The Ways We Are Chosen By ~

29 years is a serious stretch, in the Soviet Union because of the deep humanism inbred in the very foundation of the Communist regime, you'd never meet a person been sentenced to longer than 15 years in prison/camps. No use trying. 15 constituted the ceiling, above that limit you straight off plopped to face the firing squad at ready for the sentence execution. Each one had their job to do for the state well-being, you know.

In 29 years Nikita Khrushchev, who ruled USSR Empire 1953-1964, would have built in the Soviet Union 1.45 Communisms (no, yeah, that is almost one and a half of them) if not for the palace coup in the Central Committee of the CPSU. He got life within his personal dacha walls and the throne of the General Secretary went under the Leonid Brezhnev's ass who ran the farm till 1982.

Which exculpatory circumstances—if any, when compared to so loft background—would mitigate my slowness to a fault about the production of RR (The Rascally Romance) procrastinated for so serious a stretch?

To put my best foot forward, I won't ask how long a piece of string is and answer with my usual openness.

The confluence and most perplexing entanglement of differently varying yet similarly unfavorable exigencies determined dawdling away those years.

To begin with, I okayed a war…

The choice was not invitingly wide at that period with the USSR engaged in just one war – Afghanistan (1979 – 1989), however, its undisguised Communist-imperialistic nature ran counter to my beliefs and I subscribed to a pending war flagged off with my participation.

The first war for independence of Mountainous Karabakh…

On entering the village club—a serviceable edification of raw stone used, a certain period back, to be the village church before the cross was brought down and rows of plywood seats went in together with the sturdy stage—dropped in at night by, basically, a dozen of mujiks to tarry over a couple of boards of chess and backgammon, and to chat of I had no idea what because my too insignificant command of Armenian, and where to, about once a month, they brought an Indian movie of 2 series—I got puzzled to see a crowd thrice thicker than had ever gathered for any Indian movie. Which was there not at all on that night.

The Chairman of the Village Council, delivering a speech from behind the breastwork of the on-stage lectern, was ofttimes interrupted by vehement orators from the audience who just stood up from their respective seats so as to become seen and heard and who, in their turn, got interrupted by other orators up-springing from other seats… The common meeting of the villagers revved on at full swing.

Pargev, a ten-grader from the right seat next to me and, simultaneously, the Chairman’s son, updated me thru the mutual buzz that the rally was convened for collecting the folks' signatures and Grisha, the school Principal's husband on my left, elucidated that the collection would serve the decisive instrument for breaking away from the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan because living on as its constituent part had become intolerable, utterly. Armenian drivers operating buses on the route Stepanakert-Agdam-Stepanakert were paid twice less than the Azerbaijani drivers operating buses on the route Agdam-Stepanakert-Agdam.

It should be mentioned here that throughout my conscious life I have never driven a bus of any kind and, additionally, that during my hitch in the Soviet Army, a construction battalion it was, our team of bricklayers reported to Lance-Corporal Alik Aliev (an Azerbaijani) and, synchronously, I had a buddy plasterer Robert Zakarian, an Armenian from Third Company, because of my reckless not giving a fuck about racial differences and the wholesome negation of prejudices on the grounds of national affinity. Another of my distinguishing constants.

Life itself made me peek deeper into the historical aspect of the question and find out that Mountainous Karabakh (the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region during the Soviet rule) from the times immemorial was populated by Armenians whose huchkars (stone crosses) as well as churches being erected (also of stone) before and after the 10-th century AD prove it to the hilt.

Yet, in early 20’s of the 20th century, when the 11th Red Army brought the Soviet rule to the Southern Caucasus, Mountainous Karabakh was handed over into the configuration of the Soviet Azerbaijan because of evidently empire-prone and, possibly, personal reasons adhered to by the then General Secretary Jugashvily, handled Stalin.

By the moment of my immigration, lots of Armenian had left Mountainous Karabakh and numerous Azerbaijanis moved into. Two of whom, for instance, had settled in the village of Seidishen where I was provided with the job of a village teacher by the Stepanakert Regional Department of People Education.

They were Biashir, the forester, and his son Eldar, engaged in delivering gas in 40-liter tanks to kitchens in the villages of the Askeran District by a truck rigged for the purpose.

There had even appeared purely Azerbaijani villages, about ten of them, in Mountainous Karabakh.

Being unaware of these minutiae at the mentioned meeting, I still responded to the Grisha’s question in the affirmative as long as it concerned the right of peoples for their self-determination. The right which is as fundamental as the freedom of assembly (hmm!), as inalienable as the freedom of speech (hmm-hmm!), as sacred as the freedom of thought and religion (someone shut me up please!)…

So naive and stupid idiot was I at that moment and scratched my signature among the uncountable other autographs collected in the region.

Four years later I confirmed the accord by taking part in the referendum on the Declaration of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh.

That day Stepanakert was being bombarded without even the lunch break, nonetheless, I ventured to the town theater and ticked “for” in my voter ballot. And even today, with my status plunged down to that of a refugee, I’ve got no regrets because up till now that right seems irresistibly attractive to my simple mind.

However, back to "in order of appearance"…

A month later there was another surprise meeting to collect donations for the victims of the Spitak earthquake in Armenia (the seismic magnitude at the epicenter in the range of 10 to 12, 25 000 dead, 514 000 homeless, 140 000 crippled).

I donated 2 rubles and 50 kopecks, all I could contribute without losing a chance of surviving up to the following payday.

The Biology teacher, Rafic Shakarian, a ready-made Roman senator by his looks, began to carp: “No need for kopecks!” I had to curb his patrician pride by reminding that he, personally, was not the target of my offering, and 50 kopecks were equivalent to 2 bread loaves… The discussion dried up, the kopecks were accepted.

In February, Lenin Square in Stepanakert saw the outset of mass rallies in the support of exit from under the Azerbaijani jurisdiction and unification of Mountainous Karabakh with Armenia. The Regional Council of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region sent petitions on this account to Moscow, Baku and Yerevan…

From the jokes of that period:

“They clear up the heaps of debris in place of the houses tumbled by the Spitak earthquake. The derrick pulls up a huge piece of concrete flooring, reveals a man still alive, miraculously.

‘Is Karabakh given back to us?’, asks the survivor.

‘No, man! No!’

‘Drop the fucking slab back then!’"

Some stuff to perk you up, huh? Still, I heard then folks laughing at it…

Laughing even after the beastly carnage of Armenian population in the city of Sumgait, 27 – 29 February 1988.

I cannot write on that. Physiological stoppage. Hands hang, spasmodic clutch at the throat to keep back senseless whine of a small kid. Looks like senility has its say already. Maybe…

The troops of the Soviet Empire did not interfere, kept on stand-by for three days and nights. When they entered the city to disperse the ferocious mobs, 276 soldiers got bruised.

There followed a bubble of hush for a couple of months, when multi-thousand streams of evacuees filled the highways between Armenia and Azerbaijan: Armenians from Baku to Armenia and Karabakh, Azerbaijanis from Armenia to Azerbaijan. Counter-directed migration of peoples…

The leadership of the USSR responded to the situation by sending special troops to Stepanakert, by means of the curfew imposed there, and by visits of high officials to dissuade the people from their urge to unite with the rest of Armenia. They made speeches in the Lenin Square, the visitors did.

"What's the fuss? How can't you, 2 brotherly Muslim peoples, Azerbaijani and Armenians, peacefully live together?"

Was he drunk, that official? Counting them to Muslim peoples when Armenians pride themselves on being the 2nd people who took up the Christianity? (Forgetting the Ethiopians that, just for the record, became Christians a sliver of a period earlier.)

"2 Muslim peoples…"

That's who we were ruled by… Later he became the first President of the Russian Federation (before told to step down for a younger operative selected by the invisible decision-making body of the MIC) and his hang-over turned a staple byword by the stand-up comics…

A year later, influenced by the mutual spirit of turbulent times, I married and migrated to Stepanakert to weave the family nest atop of the stirred up volcano.

The job of an isolation-tape man at the construction of gas pipelines to far-off parts of Karabakh was an extensively outdoors and far-off employment so the son was born in my absence.

About a half-year later, in August, they attempted at the SCES putsch in Moscow. The Central TV news program Vremya presented a dozen of bureaucratic pans in a consolidated row behind the wide desk of the State Committee for the Emergency Situation (SCES) reading up to the population their orders – the democracy announced null and void, we were to live as before, as we had always been trained, and follow the five-year plans approved by them at the Congresses of their Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

In the morning, to demonstrate my discontent, disgust, and disagreement, I did not board the truck starting off to carry my co-workers to remote villages but handed in my resignation letter to the personnel department of the Building-Montage Management (BMM) #8:

“…because this here organization is a state firm, and I have no desire to work for the state of SCES, please fire me of my own accord”.

The BMM-8 Chief, Samvel Hakopian, amusedly chortled and signed his approval to satisfy my plea.

Next morning that SCES putsch went kaput and I, having lost the job along with their lost cause, concentrated on building up our family house in the lot allocated by the Stepanakert City Council on the ravine slope behind the Maternity Hospital…

When the walls were raised 1 meter tall, there started bombardments of Stepanakert City with Alazans from Sushi City and the Village of Khodjalu, yet in the following 2 months I still laid the walls to the level for spanning them with the concrete slabs because sand and cement had been acquired already and the construction of the running water of iron-pipe line (cross-section 0.5”) accomplished.

The money for the slabs had been paid too but the Building Materials Plant never delivered them because of the unfavorable situation.

For about a month I stayed unemployed because the city enterprises were coming to a halt one after another and there appeared a slot to make a dent in Ulysses in earnest.

My mother-in-law spotted that I could write for stretches longer than normal, and fixed me up with a job at the editorial house of the regional newspaper The Soviet Karabakh where she had the position of a janitor and the Head Editor thereof originated from the same village as her, and, as luck would have it, their family names coincided too.

My job was to translate articles from Armenian to Russian because The Soviet Karabakh daily, published in Armenian, had the Saturday supplement – a Russian digest, for Big Brother to conveniently check the stuff brought up in the previous 7 days by the paper.

My position of a translator did not fall under the category of the mother-in-law-backed nepotism. Nothing of the kind! In the two years at village school I studied all the curriculum textbooks in Armenian Language and Literature from the school library, starting off with the ABC Primer.

Learning a language by textbooks is way easier than thru communing with the native speakers because texts allow you more time to get it, and cancels the strain of tries at catching serendipitous shreds in the over-fluent-non-stop twitter of those who use it from their crib…

However, my month of work at the newspaper remained unpaid because the city got blockaded and bombarded on a regular basis with heavy artillery pieces, and the population switched over to dwelling in the basements under the five-story buildings, for the most part. Often blackouts worsened the situation, before the electricity was cut off for good. In the basements, they used oil-lamps or candles. When a candle melted away completely, the wax drippings were used for production of a new one, though of lesser size, of course.

The gas supplying was not stopped because the gas trunk-line, after reaching Stepanakert, climbed farther up to the Shushi City, whose population in the aftermath of the massacre in March 1920 became ethnic Azerbaijanis who you couldn't left without heating in winter.

The most forceful report on the ravages in the spring of 1920 was left by Osip Mandelstam in his poem “Here in Mountainous Karabakh, in the ancient Shushi City…”

He didn’t eye-witnessed the carnage but ten years later roamed about mute lanes in the demolished Armenian blocks in Shushi.

However, poets can see thru not only into the future…

* * *

Bottle #6: ~ The Clover To Roll In ~

Where the screwball popped up from I couldn’t even say. Nix, not a damn chance.

More so, that I was not as high yet as in my regular nirvana and only a sec back scanned the street with the enlightened gaze and stuff ‘cause of no ticker on me, nope, never, which reason makes me recon out the current hour's figures by only the upcurve in the bustling or, on the contrary, by the slant towards smoothness in the observable flow of street life. Quite a simple trick and does not take too much of practicing to read it, the time of day.

It’s hard to say or recollect the street’s name though ‘cause of them names keep replacing each other way too often, depending on who’s in power right now, the Reds or the Whites, but in our neighborhood I’d find it blindfold by mere groping, yep, with both hands tied.

Verily decent neighborhood, the ours. No harassment from cops, nopes, no patrol car will ever take risks to get in if alone. It’s only in the all-out posse, with the sirens a-wailing so as to uphold their own courage. But there’s always a chance to run into an M2 if not into some of cheap machine guns made in China. The question of karma and stuff, you know.

Not much of industries in the hood either. A score or there about of Northern Koreans day and night rattling their sewing machines in the basement opposite the bar You’ll Get It. A no never mind production line. Samely dispensable as those posterity of the Jamaican delegation to the International Forum of Youth and Students Organizations of the World, on the sixth floor in the tower-block where they keep packing coke for Don. Completely quiet, decent, and no trouble at all society members.

No, yeah, though, last week one of their team took a dive from the window. Exactly as I was passing by at the lunch break, he plummeted a-singing his parting aria of the Lonesome Swan if you know what I’m about. High alt up to B-flat in the second octave, full and steady, and no shit.

In the right chosen moment too. No one got damaged, of those uninvolved. With quite a tolerable precision value, in the sidewalk – sh-plumps! And keeps the classical supine position, the eyes plumb-up into the sky. Maybe, with the pinch of reproach, a kind of.

You’d never think the dude was a Jamaican brat. Sooner might be taken for a native from some state in southern India, by his looks.

And those two brothels too, under Thai Massage signboards, yet the nurses in the business are not so too tiny after all, same pod’s peas, each and every from the Middle Russia regions, not for nothing we've scrambled so frantically to join the lined crowd of chip implanting globalization.

Not even a regular slot machine hall around, just a couple of underground rat holes for local gamblers in Three-Card Brag and Black Jack. Stagnating backwater, in short.

As regards those sporadic reports at night, it’s just youngsters trifling with their handguns. All in all, the hood's weekly output rarely overshoots a couple of farting-bags with stiffs, on average.

And as for my nirvana where could it be from a couple of minutes before the second slim?

Moderation and consideration, in keeping with good homeopathic manners, that’s my approach to pot. Two slims in the morning and two in the afternoon, after the lunch.

Not that I need much really, politely landed in the corner will graze a package of chips, I, or maybe a hot-dog, two at most. Cutie critters them those doggies, do not bite back. Then the spill of a cup of something from coff-or-coa line, atop – that’s my lunch in a whole day, and back I goes to my bench to watch the pulse of the business activities, while enjoying my third slim, and the full-fledged blunt's turn comes at night, code-named “night-cap gasper”.

So, no way I would omit him any moment back but—here you are!—out of nowhere appeared this feathered wonder. Pelage a-bristle, hair style in the vogue of 60’s when children of flowers kept a-stirring their cultural revolution in the sands of Californian beaches.

The jeans severed at knee-length to make them into shorts, yes, you could see it at a glance – not cut but severed, when he had put them on a boulder and chiseled off with a flat tool stone like an inadequate Neanderthal man. And that befuddled glare, you know, from his bugged-out eyes in all directions. In short, the famous lost-and-found picture by Rembrandt “A Hick at the Fare or the New Mark to Fuck Up”.

Then, naturally, I lit up to enjoying the free show in full.

After gaping for awhile he veers to my side.

"Where am I?" sez the wacko.

And it’s quite OK by me, shortly after a fresh slim I’m always ready for a chat.

"Welcome back to the planet of your likes, alien," sez I. "And since getting the answer to your 'where?' you'll certainly go over to testing the waters about your squadron's landing spot, why not to contact Dr. Serafimovich then, with your rickety questions directly?"

"And it's winter or summer now?" sez he. He did soar high that fucking hippie.

"It depends," sez I, "on the Tropic you are in. And where are you from?"

"Island of Freedom."

"Wow! Amigo marijuanisto! Cuba – si! Yanks – no! How is compañero Fidel over there? When is his exhumation scheduled for?"

To which he pinched his beard under the lower lip, jerked his head sideways and landed on the bench next to me:

"Most likely on Friday," sez he, and plumbed into a deep meditation.

That moment Mulatto Maya strolled along the sidewalk, a cherry babe in her sweet 16.

Paraded herself, in fact, and in an unmistakably motivated way, it’s not a walk but embellished writing. The chick performed a nice version of stylish striding at which they write the eternity sign with their buttocks, you know, outlining a direct hint and promise, Maya was, and well addressed too. I wonder what’s that hairy yobbo touched her soft spot with, eh? She never attempts at such calligraphy when passing by two of us, the bench and me.

The addressee gave her a dimmed look.

"Well, well," thought I to myself, "the case is not quite hopeless, the unconditioned reflex is in its place, nimble and spritely."

"Take my friendly advice, tanned paleface, you'd better not horse around that young squaw whose Daddy earns his living at the You’ll Get It bar embracing the position of a bouncer. And if you’re looking for a place to stable your erection in, why, choose a ripe lady from the Thai Salon across the street."

"Like I were saying or doing a thing at all," answers he and falls back into his thoughtfulness, like a kinda model for Rodin’s Thinker sporting a mountaineer beard to his naked abdomen.

This moment, quite western-like, a sharp shadow drops across our communication. And no need to look up, I know whose it is. A nigga’s from the young blades in the neighborhood, that’s whose.

They are Don’s hands, not directly 2Bsure. His henchmen pass them dope, they push it and get some commission percentage. And all of them keep calling each other “nigga”.

Fucking Hollywood has fucking spoiled all fucking kids.

So there he stands demonstrating his skills at chewing the gum with his mouth open for three-quarters, in the process, and never less. 'Cause of his being so fucking cool! 'Cause the other day he spotted some downy growth in his soft scrotum!

Those niggas, they don’t hang out together in the street. Each one has the areal of his own, and his own retinue – small fry errand boys to push the goods in retail trade in the school yards and rest rooms. Yet, they keep a peeled eye on each other and seeing the next one leaves his anchorage in obviously cruising speed, they also cast off to follow.

It’s like those vultures in the Nevada desert who congregate on the same carrion from ten miles around. When my tube was alive The Wild Life As Is was my favorite.

Ha! See what I mean? One more is nearing, and now there are two serrated shadows cast together upon our bench. And what for? This here hippie hick is a barren ground, in toto, no need for a spyglass to see there’s nothing to rip off. Just his beard and the mutilated jeans. While targeting me is out of the question, the street is fully aware that I’m a nasty mastermind, you push me around and soon enough there happens an accident, and if it’s just a brick from the roof onto your dummy dome be thankful to your lucky star 'cause a quarrel with coot Chris goes for a bad omen, unopposed, about this here neighborhood.

"Hey, nigga," sez I, "what’s the message in your What’s up? If there are doubts about my interlocutor then his papers are clean, the guy’s on the AWOL from Santa-Monica."

He only moves the cud from his left molars to the right and goes on to slurp, playing for time to let the clue sink into his gray matter.

One more lost generation for you, they are unable to process human speech without “fuck!” slotted after every pair of words. No wonder he stared at his buddy to kinda signal his need in a synchronous interpretation.

"Wow! Look who we’re having here!" sez I to the second comer. "I do know you, nigga, you are the only sonny of Andy Crinolog, the bookmaker! What are the odds, by the bye, in the soon-to-be match of the Russian National and the high school soccer aficionados from Burkina Faso? And here is another fucking “wow!” for you, man! Some fucking nice rags you have today. Mighty fucking, yeah.

God knows how he’s not boiled yet in that airtight shellac latex which goes for a uniform by them, along with a ruddy ingot chain.

In ancient Rome they put a dog collar on slaves to mark them from free citizens but these spiffy puppies stuck their necks in of their own accord…

But now he tugs the glinting shit of his waistcoat up to flash, like in the genre boilerplate from fucking Hollywood, the handle of a Makar or, maybe, Luger 'cause for a Magnum the kouros’ balls are not hairy enough, stuck under the belt in his pants.

That’s when my range of vision widens up to the next door porch steps and—lo!—would you please observe the reason for the scene of discontent around my bench. Who but Mulatto Maya sits there emanating the youthful beauty of her pliant thighs wrapped in the on-looker-friendly loin cloth! And how not to mention her stuck up tits under nothing more but a short T-shirt inviting to admire her navel?.

How could I miss that she had stopped to tarry there? Yeah, Chris bro, your knee-jerks certainly grow dull 'cause of this fucking entropy…

"O, fuck!" the hippie sez, and fiercely scratches he his left armpit.

The jaws of both muggers go loose and drop on their hinges all way down to the yellow neck-chains in the show of their mouth caves, and tonsils, and all. Next moment the big style tango of their act turns abruptly into a gallop to opposite destinations 'cause the flee-hunter's move had pushed his beard aside exposing a bandolier hung on his bare chest, loaded with a kinda sawed-off blunderbuss in 'Welcome to the Caribbeans!' style.

However, the Treasure Island got abandoned way too soon, and only Maya on the nearby steps ran her sweet tongue over her abundant lips and switched the posture of her thighs to even more liberal position.

That’s only when the hairy yobbo falls out of his meditative mood again:

"I say, bud, where’s the bush here to take a leak?" sez he and scratches his other oxter…

* * *

Bottle #7: ~ Land is paid for with blood (Ayaz Niyazi oglu Mutalibov) ~

Almost all of the winter 1991 – 1992 Stepanakert spent in the cross-fire from 4 directions. At the cross’ top was positioned the artillery shelling from Sushi City, from the pillar-root in flew the missiles launched at Khojalu Village, the left-hand side filled the howitzers positioned in Malubalu Village, the battery deployed in Janhasan Village added their part into bombardments from the right. And all of that does not bespeak over-large size of the besieged city – a rough circle of no more than 2 km in diameter, so that those batteries could barrage each other, technically, which they did not do though…

Machine gun and automatic weapon fire from Krkjan (the uppermost, Azerbaijani populated part of the Stepanakert City itself) did not reach farther/deeper than the Region Theater's building.

We rented a one-(but-wide)-room apartment in Tumanian Street and in the basement of the nearest 5-story apartment block—50 meters off the house we dwelt in—I had to empty out the space for sheltering my family in between the walls of bulky, cold concrete-blocks forming the block's foundation below the ground level.

At the outset of the movement for the independence of Mountainous Karabakh, while there still existed communications with Armenia, they shipped from up there some relief including garments, deficit food products, and booklets of the Holy Bible adaptation for kids, in Armenian.

Conceivably, certain undeclared goods arrived in as well, which is better known to the members of the Special Committee formed then in Stepanakert for supervising the mentioned relief and things among the local population, after a short-term storing the goods away in the basement of the said 5-story apartment block.

As a result, in one of the basement sections, there grew a huge heap of smashed craters, emptied containers, broken bottles and other vestiges of clandestine orgies of those rats, the Committee members. Nobody of the aboriginal tenants in the apartment block had vigor enough to undertake such a whale of cleansing job, when they moved to live underground, and the wasted section had to wait for the liberation by my hands, following the lead from my mother-in-law.

However, even I could perform only half of the job, which half allowed though for the accommodation of my wife and our kids—the 2-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter from her first marriage—plus two unknown females who failed to find room for themselves in other sections of the overcrowded basement-shelter.

My mother-in-law, among a dozen of other ladies from the surrounding neighborhood of predominantly private houses, sheltered in a tailor’s workshop (who had successfully taken away everything but the walls) in the nearby 2-story block of flats in a fairly dilapidated state, and I dead refused leaving the one-but-wide room in the first floor of our renters’ house, which was equipped with a cast pig-iron stove for gas-heating, the room was…

The ultimate condition of survival in Stepanakert that winter was water. Having water for drinking, food-processing, laundry, and toilet flashing (if not blessed with an outhouse in the yard) was the foremost challenge because of its all-pervading deficit.

The trunk pipeline supplying water from the river over a dozen of kilometers away had been sabotaged, and the employees at the city water-supplying services guessed (quite understandably) that being engaged in renovating works in the terrain open to pinpoint shooting by snipers would not be much different from an out-and-out suicidal action, and they would blow it up the very next day all the same.

In difference to the Leningrad population blockaded in WWII, Stepanakerters did not prepossess the Neva River by their side and had to rely on too few street taps of water running from springs in the nearby slopes… Multimeter noisy queues snaked to those taps to put their pail under a thumb-thick leak of water, to scatter and/or press themselves into the walls of the nearest buildings in another artillery/missile attack…

I, personally, preferred to go after water at night not because late or small hours prevented shelling—artillery men worked round the clock—but in the dark the queues seemed shorter, a sort of.

In the morning I went to work though the newspaper, naturally, ceased circulating and no one proposed me to translate an editorial or stuff any more. However, I possessed a skeleton key to the translators' room furnished with three desks bearing scars left by the raw facts of life and two hard chairs.

So, at the rare days of relative calm and no shelling (because, say, of another peace-broker team arrival in the region) those of my colleagues who dropped in, yielding to the too deeply rooted habit of theirs or because of having nothing better to do, were pleasantly surprised to find that there was someone in the building, after all.

The seedy 2-story editorial office building (a couple of blocks off the printing house) was lost in the deep shadow from the right wing in the gray, 4-story, mighty parallelepiped of the Regional Committee of the CPSU, a kinda towboat by an ironclad battleship. And when the editorial House Keeper tried to introduce locking the entrance door with a heavy padlock as soon as in an hour after opening it or so, I—thanks to being on friendly terms with Rashid, the watchman at the editorial office—managed to obtain the entrance key imprint in a piece of molding clay our kids used to play with.

The duplicate key turned out okay because of my skills of a locksmith of the third category acquired at the Konotop Steam-Engine-And-Railroad-Car-Renovating Plant, though in absence of a vice it was not a trivial task.

(For the ethnography lovers.

No, yeah, “Rashid” is not a typical Armenian name, but then, playing with names is a deep-rooted tradition within the Armenian ethos. The parents feel at liberty to use any name as long as it sounds lovely (by their ear estimation) or would be correct politically, or both. Hence these slews of Arthurs, Hamlets, Ophelias, Jameses, Johnics (diminutive-affectionate from Johnny), Lolitas and so on, and so forth among otherwise Armenian people.

A teacher of Geography from School 7 was named Argentina (which is not a household-between-us-kids moniker but her legitimate ID-verified handle). Or how about “Chapaev”? Who cares it’s the Civil War and innumerable jokes’ personage’s name, Daddy just liked the sound.

And admire please the ingenuity at constructing the following, rather wide-spread in Armenia name from V. I. Len(in) – eliminating dots and brackets you get "Vilen".

A woman named “Electrification” all her life had to respond to the shortened form: “Ele”. A lucky strike if you consider the base, right?

Or take, for instance, the story behind the name of my sister-in-law? Her mother’s mother-in-law (the mother-in-law of my mother-in-law), while on a visit to her relatives in Moscow, was impressed by something she heard in a radio-play about Jean D’Ark from Orleans. (Radio-play is an audio soap-opera broadcast over the radio because it was in 50’s when the USSR hadn’t got television yet, and the fact of TV’s entering the Americans’ life in 30’s serves another proof that the West started to rot before us.)

Now, she asked her Moscow relatives to scribble something she had heard and liked from the radio on a paper slip, my mother’s-in-law mother-in-law did.

And who are you or am I to deny the beauty in “Orlee-Anna” name?

There happens a certain admixture of prejudice too, and if a family is beset with stillbirths or babies lacking real stamina, they would use a Muslim (more often than not some Turkish) name for a newborn, which quick-fix usually helps because they believe it should work.

All that renders pretty common the presence of a watchman whose given name was Rashid with his always at ready smile full of square teeth. Besides, I once met a small kid Elchibey (his parents had used the name of the belligerent president of Azerbaijan from 90’s for that quite quick and able mischief))…

In the morning our family were getting together in the one-room apartment or, if it was shelling outdoors, I took a kettle of water boiled on the gas stove to the underground basement, before starting off to visit the families of two more daughters of my mother-in-law to pass them, in the basements of the respective five-story blocks, the bread baked by her the previous night in the gas-oven of our one-(but-wide)-room flat.

They answered with a jar of cream or mittens for Ashot that had become too small for his cousin already – the hand-me-downs were not quite our son’s size but of a manly cut and hue…

The usual in-extended-family circulation understandable to them who lived thru the realities of the USSR era of deficits…

And then, alleviated and full of feeling of my duty done, issuing tiny starch-creaks off my immaculate integrity, I opened the massive padlock on the entrance door to the editorial office building to latch it from inside because the House Manager (not present) had uneasy misgivings about the Russian and Armenian typewriters in the typists’ pool on the second floor, you know.

The translators’ was on the first floor and when they knocked or pulled at the entrance door from outside (about once a week), it was not a long wait till I came along the corridor to check what’s up.

Once it was Sylva the typist, who had believed the wild rumors of the editorial office got hit by an Alazan missile and burned up. Seeing it was all bullshit, she felt happy and immediately decided to take home her slippers from the drawer in her desk in the pool's room because it’s easier for her to type when they are on, somehow, yes, you know.

Or it could be an outsider veteran graphomaniac (you would not make out the exact age thru his stubble but no less than eighty), who brought a parcel of “material” prepared by him for the paper dead for at least two months already. Which is not paper’s fault with all the newsstands locked up or destroyed.

Carried away by his creative efforts the writer failed to notice the trifle…

At too near explosions the building hopped, and the window panes spilled, with the parting tinkle, the glass fragments over the floor. I raked them with the broom borrowed from the toilet room in the end of the corridor, and helped Rashid to seal the gaping window frames with the vinyl tape from the House Manager’s keeps. The watchman was stinking with wine and bitching bitterly to his hammer about the janitors who had ceased coming to do their job.

I acted a deaf stone to his harangues because I had no desire to guess who he was hinting at…

Actually, Alazans produced more noise than effect. The missile could not pierce a stone wall 40 cm thick. Well, yes, the wall’s outer surface would go kaput, the inside turn all cracks and crevices but still and yet the missile lacked might to penetrate and sky in. No, yeah, if it hit in through the window or balcony door then, no arguing, the place is smashed into a useless trash for sure, all the partitions felled down. However, were it some crummy house of wood, then one hit of an Alazan would turn it into a shitty heap of nothing.

But then, at night, when going after water, I could enjoy a mesmerizing opportunity to admire their beautiful flight—from purely aesthetic point of view—a lazy yellow comet falling from Shushi in a languid arc onto the city (too high this time to get at me) welcomed from the ground with long stitches of tracing rounds from Kalashnikov or two to burst it up, across the flight course, useless, unable prevent its final crash midst the city, and all of it against the backdrop of the full moon – lo! here comes another! and the colorful stitches again! Vain try, of course, yet the surrealism of the picture simply awesome…

And after Stepanakert was left not only by the special troops of the Soviet Army but the primordial regiment as well, they unleashed bombardments by the missile installations GRAD, and those things you couldn’t play down – undeniably powerful beasts. The hit of just two rockets was enough to level the three-story wing in the City Council (where there had been the TV studio).

The blast left low hillocks of crushed masonry and some aggravating stink of burned rubber. I cannot definitely state whether it was the smell of the explosives or from the buried, smoldering TV equipment…

* * *

Bottle #8: ~ From the Alternate Angle ~

First off, the darkness did not seem absolute, some pin-prick scintillas still oscillated here and there, and extremely dark but still a sliver gray-hued streaks retained their static position along the edges of actual blackness.

However, all that jump-n’-statics abated gradually, and dissolve, and died away substituted with solid jet-black impenetrability. The wider opened I my eyes, the more of aspic char-coaled dark oozed into them.

The silence—wished for so eagerly just a while ago, before the ominous click of the lid—commenced to depress the ear drums drowned within the all-pervading blackness getting wrapped, layer after layer, into a thicker and thicker shroud of hermetic soundlessness.

“Aaaa!” hollered I desperately at the top of my lungs, horrified, trying to disengage myself, to kick away the sticky horror of being deaf-and-blind, which straining only brought about an even bigger fright and made me realize that atop of everything else I'd become mute. The scream felt like virtual, it did not reach the organs of hearing and sounded only within me. But how on earth could I be sure that it was sounding at all?

A captive in the double cage, twice doubled as a matter of fact – three layers of indissoluble calcium in the shell's structure added with my deaf-mute-blindness, a kinda mollusk’s mantle sack, that's what I was, firmly fixed, strait-jacketed, incarcerated.

Piercing panic rushed thru me like AC of 240 V, set all of my frame a-shake like the vigorous clutch of the deuce yanking a withered pear-tree, hither-thither, yet even those violent quakes went on within the delimited space of a rock-hard cocoon—my nose squeezed between the knees, unyielding bottom under my left shoulder, the lid (not budging an inch) from above, and no way to stretch the legs out. Help! Got trapped and nabbed by the shrewd dickens like an unboiled frog under the upside-down washing-tab!

And only my head still have some room to enjoy the freedom of knocking its back against the shell wall, without the proper revving though to prevent, sadistically, my suicide, just like they did to the accomplice in Lincoln’s killing before the execution… a sack of thick black cloth pressed onto the head to spoil his aiming, not to let Louis ram his skull against the wall and smash it open and damn well ruin the high of the law-abiding crowd coming together with the hangman a-swing in his noose on the warm sunny day… where’s something hard enough?. please!. but the cloth kept softening the impact to save the show…

Of course, I’ve got my constant accessory on me – an old good boarding pistol from two hundred years back, the find on the smashed galleon, which I don’t part with ever since, is still in the sling over my chest… but no, damn! the powder must've got washed away by that mad toad-strangler downpour… wait-wait-wait! See? there’s no softening layer on my head except for my wet hair. Ha! This is the major flaw in their calculations! That’s where the bastards have screwed up!

And I begin to pound the back of my head against the stone-hard calcium carbonate in the shell composition. The pain is shot thru with hilarious triumph – aha! At least I’m able to feel it! Bas! Tard’s! Screwed! Up! Bas! Tard’s! Screwed! Up!

It’s hard to say how many times I’ve looped thru this here mantra—one potent headback-bang for every syllable in it—before the loss of consciousness swaddled everything into the merciful liberating darkness…

………………………………….

…we stood in a close circle where there were some whose names I knew and some fairly unknown though all of them I met for the first time or mayhap had inadvertently forgotten…

…because of the strangely dim light everything around submerged in an unidentifiable uniform murkiness which did not allow for guessing the time of day or where this strange light was coming from or why the contour of each thing got doubled by an additional external line etching any object with a pin-thin luminescence of also gray-hued and equally inexplicable yet more bright weeny glow…

…the downcast stares of all the present alertly followed the ongoing movement of an index finger ticking jerkily along the circle without ever hitting any chest just like a clock hand substituted with a compass arrow exuding morbid-greenish phosphorous gleam off its head…

…each arrow leap got accentuated by a voice full of that hollow aloofness as it happens in the thick fog which suffocates the tiniest echo of any sound —

"The porch of gold was seated by : czar and czars’ sonny : king and king’s sonny : shoemaker and tailor : policeman and watchman : so who are you at all?

tell us all:

tell us: tell us: tell us:

Who?

Are?

You?

…sheeshell… meeshell…

off with you!

to the DEUCE!"

………………………………….

The ascending echoless voice cut off abruptly, and ticking of the index finger spooling inside the circle got lost too together with everything else leaving behind only grayness evenly monochrome and loaded with no contours, but inside it there already dawned and spilled a paler grayness mingled with some light from a still not quite discernible direction.

My eyes followed the light and I made out the feet emerging from nowhere, mine, kept wide and ready to fiddle with the pitching of a ship, yet in place of the deck under them there cropped up and met my bare soles a stretch of the sunlit asphalt. I arched my neck back to raise my face up and at once was made squint tightly.

Where am I?

What a mistake! I should of never put my head up. Ever. The fierce raw brilliance of the shining day scorched and erased without a trace or any hope for retrieval everything it had contained before.

All left there were just patchy clots sintered indistinctly – some horizontal lightning, some pitch-black gap of the like horizontality…

A stingy pain throbbed there in the back of my head… I must’ve scratched it against Peccy’s valves… Hold on! Who’s Peccy anyway?

Who am I?!

A desolate sun-swept street around me. Rough asphalt in the road divides the two serrated rows of houses opposing each other, different in size and height. All of the walls look alike. Tired. Weary of everything, even of themselves, and of the row they are lined in. Tired of the tree stuck up from the asphalt, dried, the tree, the lifeless boughs look like withered roots. The tree, like planted upside down, provides no shade for the bench beneath it. Empty bench. Almost.

I veered to it…

The old man seated there exhibited astounding garrulousness. However, the stream of his speaking activities hardly coalesced into a picture of any sensible coherence.

The most stupefying feature about that nonsense pouring talking head were his eyes filled with cartographic lines of the blood vessels shooting densely all over his eyeballs the color of the powder-blue fog thru which there swam brown irises ferrying wide pupils. Those also swam all the time yet in a more controlled way, so as not to spill overboard, into his eyes whites.

The like optics organs are not an infrequent rarity and, in the same breath, the trump card among the celebrities in the business of movie production, as well as by the leading showmen, of Afro-American orientation.

Being aware, as it seemed, of his gift, he did his best to keep them up-squinted, which stratagem imparted to the fairly worn-out features of his face the looks of almost giggling Buddha, intended obviously as a red herring to put autograph hunters off track.

At times, because of negligence or weariness, one of his eyelids slackened its squint. However, the resulting map in no way increased the chances of collectors who, having rushed after the jolly Asiatic hieroglyph of Jack Chan’s signature, all of a sudden ran into the gloomy gaze of Morgan Freeman from the adjacent eye or vise versa.

However, I listened to him with just a half ear because the second half was pricked up to catch the hollow hum of intense thought work behind the thin partition from the dura mater embracing the gray matter convolutions.

By me, it is that classic case of “fragmented memory”: why did I recollect my uncle? the neurosurgeon? (what was his name, I wonder?) who had shown me the picture of cranium section to demonstrate the meninges of the brain, where the mentioned partition bears all kinds of graffiti: “dura mater” in Latin, then comes Cyrillic «здесь был Вася», which again reflows in Latin lettering «Kilroy was here».

And that’s exactly what produces this ever-present buzz (behind the partitioning), the absence of raw material for processing does, the thoughts just spin in an unproductive slip, like to when you try to recollect that long and winding dream that meandered through all of your night, but you are up and have shaved already, and sitting at your breakfast, and all retained by you are only vague elusive shreds of that past dream – something about Belomor cigarettes in it, eh? Or what?

Okay fine, let’s assume I’m seated now on this hard bench and this old screwball is yakking of nobody knows what, but who am I and where from?

And these two questions, if not answered with proper promptness, can very easily shed you off into the quicksand of doubts whether that “I” exists at all.

Aha! I’ve remembered! There was nothing about Belomor in it, and someone kept dumbly repeating, “Any evidence there was a boy? Any evidence there was a boy?? Any???”

Still and yet, who am I? Or am I simply to go on along with that trite sophism, “I feel the bench hardness under my ass, ergo: I exist”?

Exactly that moment I heard the dear and all-too-well-familiar clatter of hoofs…

My Rosinante!. click-clack… clippety-cluck… am I a jokey? An Olympic champion in show jumping? Or derby was our profile?

The curiosity woke me up and turned to face a bitter disappointment – the clicks were sounded by the feet of a female representation of the hominid species from the group of tailless primates, shod in shining yellow spikes, it’s them clattered along the sidewalk.

Ah, Rosinante! Where have we lost each other?!.

The look of her rather short caparison stung me with the unasked-for recollection, I have already seen the like tatters and I could easily reconstruct the rest of the picture – an iron-girdled chest, its lid thrown open, filled with bottles of dark glass securely drowned into the shim of exactly same rags, gaily angular snakes of the sunlight reflected by small ripples of water twine and swirl in the boards of the ceiling… where was it? In what dream?.

My neighbor in the bench fired off another incomprehensible declamation, this time on some sports subject, gorodki competition or something like that. Could he have been a coach at the CSCSA club before his retirement?

Very soon I felt the need to urinate and asked him the whereabouts of a nearest public toilet.

A first, he sent me, in the manner of his lacework verbalization, behind the car sheds, but guessing from the expression of my face that I had no predilection to silly jests like that at the moments of physiological need, he widely opened both of his Afro-American eyes and nodded invitingly in the direction of steps leading to the basement of a nearby house.

Leaving him alone, I still caught shreds of a centuries-old joke he was telling to the dried tree (Pyrus communis):

"Who the hell is whizzing like a cow right under my window?"

"It’s me, Mommy."

"You? Pumpkin? Go on, dear! Pee, sugar, pee!"

* * *

Bottle #9: ~ Ay, Phedai-jan, Phedai! ~

The screechy deafening discharge at launching of a GRAD missile is heard from afar yet the missiles themselves are nearing unheard, exactly the way ALAZANs do, and only when they brought to Aghdam City the cannons from the Caspian flotilla battleships and those started bombardment of Stepanakert from there, the sound track grew richer – you heard the 'boom!' of a cannon at about 20 kilometers off and in a half-minute from the same sector in the horizon there nears and widens the scream of the air torn apart by the purposeful flight of the shell, until it bursts somewhere in the city – GRHDAHKB!

Everything attuned to the technology of admiral Togo, who sent the flotilla of admiral Rozhdestvensky to rest on the bottom of Tsushima straits on May 27 1905, and—who could ever predict!—exactly that very day 70 years later I was set free after my hitch at a construction battalion in the Soviet Army of the USSR.

Still, the explosions of any sort sounded equally disgusting…

After lunch they always found some urgent work for me and, as a rule, in the underground shelter, my family did – to fix the section with the electric wiring (though all knew the electricity would be cut off all the same), to install the door, to seal the openings between foundation blocks with masonry of cubics meant to stop the chilly droughts as well as the raids of brazen rats, 2 in 1, you know. The task called for fetching cement from the box at our house building site while cubics (limestone blocks of 20 cm x 20 cm x 40 cm) were an easy find about the basement.

On completion the proposed job (intended, presumably, to keep me down there, in the underground's relative security) I retired to our rented flat and plunged into translating of Ulysses. The daily quota was set at 1 page, sometimes I knocked out one and a half, yet hardly a half page was the much more oftener output.

Then it was getting dark and the time to go out after water.

No, I never took the Joyce’s masterpiece with me to the editorial office—you never can tell, and the book was a borrowed property—that's why at the paper's facilities I scribbled a translation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Earth, a si-fi throwaway in the chewing-gum style,still and yet you have to somehow kill time, be it even at war. The undertaking served a practicable distraction though explosions of any remoteness from the scarred desk in the translators' room caused equally dismal contraction of the asshole…

At times I paid visits to the site of our future house, put away till more favorable conditions for construction works. Because you simply can’t let everything just drift by itself left to good will of your neighbors, who have enough of their problems.

The fact of 3-tonne water container being emptied and ladled out to the last crumble of ice was understandable, completely so, on my part. But where the heck disappeared the bundle of the barb-wire collected by me around the CPSU Regional Committee building after the special troops of the Soviet Army abandoned it for good?

The twigs and boughs chopped off the pine trees in Chkalov Street by the fragments at cover shelling were used for the construction of a passable Xmas tree so that the kids would receive divers impressions at their childhood and not only the monotonous panicky alertness of the adults around them in the miserly flicker of a candle dripping molten wax tears in the murky basement vault…

So, why after those relentless bombardments, and in absence of “the Russian bayonet” appraised in the Empire’s poetry as a panacea and pledge against Asiatic blood bathes, why (excuse the monotony of using the same question word) not to enter the city and kick up (no! we won’t say “carnage” we are too globalized citizens of the new order for that), kick up some fun at another ethnic cleansing, and get rid of all those basement dwellers (possible carriers of more threatening pandemics), and rename the city into “Khankendi”?

Well, they would if they could, they certainly would but for the nagging impediment named “phedais”.

Despite the Arabic-Muslim origin of the word that means “self-sacrificer”, some researchers derive it from Neo-Greek roots of the period when Hellas was no more and Greece was not yet around, and in their stead there was the Osman Empire (otherwise denominated the Ottoman or simply Sublime Porte). To keep things clearer, phedai is just a guerrilla-fighter or Bandera-man who kisses his family good-bye, grabs his wooden fork or AK, and leaves his home sweet home going to defend his village.

Why did Armenians need phedais?

It’s certainly a good question, yet after skirring thru Wikipedia or Britannica you’ll see that in a 15-year stretch (1894-1909) 2.5 millions of Armenians under the wise rule of the Osman Empire lived thru 3 massacres the most horrendous of which was the first (1894-1896).

Over-meticulous German pastor Johannes Lepsius had counted (absolutely proved) killing of 88 243 Armenians alongside the destruction of 2 493 villages (inhabitants of 456 of those got Islamized), the desecration of 649 churches and monasteries (328 were, luckily, turned into mosques), and death of additional 100 000 Armenians caused by starvation and diseases among the homeless. The total number approximates 200 000.

The following 2 massacres:

a) 25 000 in Diyarbakir Vilayet (yet, since there were massacred Assyrians as well, let’s divide the number evenly which leaves 12 500 for each of the groups, in brotherly way);

b) variously estimated from 15 000 to 30 000 in Adana Vilayet (only Armenians this time) which makes average of 22 500.

Sum total: 235 000 in 3 massacres.

(I don’t call for boycotting your summer vacation in Turkey, the hotel Manager over there might very well be a great-grand kid of an Islamized Armenian).

Each outbreak of the mentioned atrocities was vigilantly responded to with a mutual outcry in the indignant Europe and unsparing headlines at the leading newspapers.

In the 20-th century the word “massacre” fell out of vogue, gave way to and got replaced with the word “genocide”.

The Armenian genocide in 1915-1923 sums up to 1.5 millions of human lives. And ultimately we come to:

2 500 000 – 1 500 000 – 235 000 = 765 000

Two third of the entire people exterminated or (to put it optimistically) one third survived.

Figures are a fucking effective means of consolation – the skimming shoot of eyes over the long row of zeroes and that’s that, you’re good to live on further. The trick is just not to let the details crack your mental mail of arms by pictures of a mujik sliced with sabers, a baby hoisted on the bayonet, a woman beastly raped and killed and dumped into the same mountain of decomposing bodies.

No. It is not a feverish verbal diarrhea of a wacky blogger, the illustration is taken from the pencil sketches by an eyewitness (they did not travel with cameras yet). Poor Frenchman! Poor Frenchman! What repulsive nightmares he was haunted by in the rest of his life!

Turkey flatly rejects this arithmetic (ask the hotel Manager), yet the obstinate figures are there to show the remainder of one third of survivors (plus those who took Shahada).

Where are they, the un-Islamized part of that third?

Fled to Russia, fled to France, fled to America.

In Russia they would become citizens in the pending USSR, in the West they’d flesh out the Diaspora…

As noted by a European eyewitness of the massacre in 1894, the attackers were distinguished by exceptional cowardice, so if running into resistance they immediately moved along to shoot up, rob, rape, and kill in the next village, which emphasizes the need in phedais-guerrillas-Bandera-men if you want to survive in your native land.

And what were they, those 2.5 millions of Armenians who could not last in their land (albeit provided with phedais of their own)?

I’m gonna put it straight – just mujiks they were. All life long they plowed, harvested, hauled the dung from cow houses out, were digging, hacking, building and from 1555 they clung to the same occupations but already as a part of Turkish Empire (all over one quarter of the then state’s territory were they toiling thru their lives).

Okay, fine, the mujiks also had their own elite: merchants, political figures, shoemakers, writers and composers, however, those were far away, in the capital city of Istanbul. But, on the whole, just mujiks as is they were.

From 1915 to 1923, while the elite were being hanged out on the lampposts in the capital city, the arrangement about mujiks was way simpler – collected in crowds, they were driven to Syria (also a part of the then Ottoman Empire), driven into the desert under the pretext as if some camps were awaiting to accommodate them there. So one million human beings died on that trek because they were driven without any food, shepherded by riflemen.

The guardsmen did not bypass gutting dead womenfolk in case she swallowed her gold earrings while alive. Some were lucky to find. (Armin Theophil Wegner; 1886—1978, another German witness of heinous atrocities.)

Still, what did Turkey need all that trouble for?

Easy as pie – it’s an Empire and any state of that status has no choice but to grow. It exists only while it grows, like those polyps in the Coral Reef.

But behold and see – the neighboring insistent grower, Russian, end 1800’s grabbed ample swathes off the Ottoman Empire. Who else might possibly be guilty of such an affront if not those Armenians? They also worship the Cross.

At the dawn of the next, 20th century, Turkey looses almost all of its possessions in Europe. Who’s guilty again?

For consolidation of any Empire, having an enemy is the must, be it an external or inner one. Such supposition can be exemplified with the Third Reich whose efforts brought the German nation to be consolidated not only by their just pride in their philosophers, composers, and high quality household appliances made in Germany but also the genes-deep feeling of guilt for the Genocide of Jews. Which is, of course, another story, yet the core remains the same – you can’t go on without an enemy and in absence of a sufficient bogey to make us stick together, we’ll invent some covid or another, and draw a useless mask on each and every visage, and subject folks to shitty injections, and any bitch holding off is against us, we’ll shut up their squeaks opposing the holy institutions and wisdom of our rulers…

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