Tuesday, November 1st 2022
It’s 4:00 a.m. and I’m in the office working on this translation about the inept and corrupt follow-up of the 2020 Norilsk Nickel oil spill. I did the translations for the original articles about this as well as some of the follow-ups. This piece is from a different writer but it is as equally heartbreaking as pretty much anything I get to pay attention to from the Arctic.
This is no particular spoiler alert but the company responsible for this spill is above the law. No one is particularly being punished for this nor are their efforts to clean up the ecological damage being monitored in any serious way. Basically and exactly like the war in Ukraine, as long as the damage and the bloodshed are far away from Moscow, Russia doesn’t give a shit what happens or who dies.
The office is ridiculously cold and has the terrible ongoing smell of mushrooms. I moved the drying table in here when the rains started. Unfortunately, there was not enough air circulation to really do a good job and I lost a few mushrooms to mold. Some of them just completely collapsed into greasy little spots and this is mainly what is causing the smell. Yesterday, I turned on my industrial heater without any heat to blow air over the table and it did a really good job of drying out the mushrooms remaining. I have it off at the moment though because it is ridiculously cold in here. Soon, I will not be able to come in here at all.
I started working on this translation in the warm room. I was not particularly uncomfortable but I moved to have a more articulate computer setup. My PC is much faster than my old notebook. But also because I thought that the World series would be played. Global warming has the weather on the East Coast too unpredictable for baseball and the game got moved until tomorrow. Right now, I’m drinking tea and eating walnuts and being cold as I work on the translation.
I have a plan to move this computer into the warm room. Eventually it’s going to happen. I’m dragging my feet on this because I like the office exactly as it is. I like the big table and I like being in this room. The problem is simply that this room is too cold once the weather gets serious. Whereas the warm room is tight and the fireplace gives off enough heat to keep you toasty in pretty much any weather. This room only has a tiny corner of firebrick warmth and two windows on the far side of the room. No matter what you do, the room is too big and too open and not well enough insulated to hold any heat. It is simply not functional as a winter spot. In the summer, it is a glorious place to rest and the couch that is under the windows is almost imperial in its luxury on hot summer days. Now, it’s a stinky fungus house and the only thing it has going for it is walnuts and a fast computer.
I don’t have a deadline on this but I’m going to try and finish this translation today. Tomorrow in the morning I will go to town for two pieces of business and to hang out with my ex partner before she heads up to Minsk for a small outpatient operation. There is no particular danger in this but it is recommended and she is into it. I’m not going to add any details for her privacy.
There is still some possibility that I would go up to Minsk but that depends mostly on the clinic in Minsk who will or will not help me out. They are half a year late and have already failed to provide promised service. The fact that a black male was thrown into the works at the beginning of this year after I got out of the hospital has not been helpful. Kind of all of my decisions were based upon the fact that they would be there to help me out. This year has been quite uncomfortable because of this. As of the moment, I am not perfect but at least functional. The imperfection is the thing that will keep me from going up to Minsk for pleasure or to be a buddy to my ex partner. If I don’t have any solid footing, part in the pun, it isn’t worth the trip up. They of course don’t give a damn one way or another.
Back in 2002 I got stuck in Poland because of a bit of police corruption. I ended up writing a book about that and lost a year of my life to it. It seems like life repeats itself all the time and I’ve lost years of my life to corruption along the way. Perhaps it’s ironic that I end up doing translations of independent journalists covering Russian corruption. Almost every waking moment of my life is touched by it one way or another, never to anyone’s benefit. And the effects of living under such circumstances are absolutely everywhere and with everyone. Nobody ever gets left untouched by the misery and incompetence of the Russian regime.
The brunt of the story has to do with the lies told by the company. According to the head of the company, everything was cleaned up a long time ago and all is completely normal. There is no damage to the region ecologically and they have performed their function legally. This of course is an absolute lie and this reporter, Ivan Zhilin, knew this before going on to the assignment. His style is appropriately sarcastic and bureaucratic. He is speaking in the simplest facts possible and allowing the lies and the obvious damage around him to paint his picture. This is my first time translating Mr Zhilin. I don’t know him personally but I think it’s a pretty good article.
It’s been a while since I’ve done any of these things but I think the biggest heartbreak of all of this is that it never really seems to make a difference. No matter what sorts of things get uncovered and put out in public, there doesn’t ever seem to be any actions that mean anything. Donald Trump cleverly coined the phrase fake news and told the world that the Free press was the enemy of the people. Someone is going to have to really, really try to explain to me how he managed to get away with saying such a thing. One would imagine that in a reasonable world he would have been carted off to the insane asylum or to prison immediately upon making such a public statement. Exactly like the courts seem to have no genuine interest in doing anything about this oil spill, the US justice system seems as corrupt as everything else and has never truly embraced the fact that he was openly trying to destroy the Democratic process of the United States of America. If he wasn’t such a lunatic, we would have to think he was a Russian operative. That he was working for the Russians or at least was unilaterally in the pocket is obvious but there is no punishment for that either. No punishment and no repercussions other than to torture guys like me.
I’m not complaining. I’m very pleased to have this job to do and I take pride in having the opportunity to help out. Doing this sort of thing gives me a good sense of self-worth. I respect myself for participating here. I have no love for the economics of global destruction and no respect for the oligarchs who selfishly finance the destruction of the planet. This is not specifically directed at Russian oligarchs but the Moguls of capitalism and the military industrial complex that has turned the world into a cesspool. I personally get completely ignored for anything other than what I may or may not do with my dick. Nobody ever seems interested in the work I do or in doing anything other than staring at my body. It’s a bloody shame really. It’s all part of the same model. It all boils down to the exact same mentality. People can be programmed and this knowledge keeps the game going.
Maybe that’s the pitfall of all of this. I don’t even think the Russians mind the tiny fraction of public space devoted to the free press. Truthfully, I think they like reading their names in the paper and I think they enjoy laughing at the impotence of the efforts. I think they long ago understood that it’s not a matter of whether people care or not, it’s a matter of sensory overload and complete impotence on the part of the general public to do anything about it. These economic megaliths are simply untouchable to the common Man. Just to walk through a city, any City now, the tininess one feels next to a giant building devoted to capitalistic Enterprise is enough to frighten anyone away from anarchistic efforts. It’s pure fascism. Join or just be forgotten and brushed away like a mosquito. Nobody feels any pain from anybody knowing the truth. Literally, we all know this but there’s just not any damn thing we can do about it.
Which of course is the true reason behind oil spills like this. They do not need genuine checks or balances because failure is simply failure and if it has nothing to do with company profits, it is irrelevant. The money can be manipulated one way or another, statements can be made, faces can be saved and it’s just back to work tomorrow. Nobody can argue because nobody can afford to lose their job. Nobody wants to rock the boat because doing so would mean getting swatted like another mosquito.
When I was a teenager, I got into some poker games with friends and did pretty well at it. I don’t know that I had any specific system or anything like that but I was logical, could read people pretty well and generally won money.Надя
One of my father’s golfing buddies was a man associated with a Japanese shipbuilding company. Basically, he had more money than God. One time at some kind of get together at their house, he mentioned that he got into a poker game with some friends occasionally. I asked if maybe I could sit in and he smiled at me and told me that it was possible but probably unlikely. The steaks could get kind of high and he doubted I would be able to sit there. I had bravado and said I’d be interested and he smiled at me.
Afterwards, I told my dad that it would be pretty cool to get into a game with them. It might be fun to try my skills and if I won, it might even be worth some money. My father told me that I wasn’t going to get into the game and even if I did, I could never play poker with these guys. The problem was not in my ability to understand the odds or to read people, the problem was that there was absolutely nothing I could do that would make them feel anything. There is not a single bet I could put on the table that would make the slightest difference to their lives.
I wrote about this in my play Pod Kablukom. After dinner, the men at the dinner party take the visiting American out to play some pool and they end up playing for a little money. The brother wins $10 but he is depressed about it. His sister asks him why he is unhappy if he won $10. $10 at that time could very easily be a week’s salary.
Брат
Потому что я не смог ничего сделать. Я не мог обыграть его. У него столько денег, сколько я не увижу за всю мою жизнь. Я бы работал два дня на заводе за эти деньги, но когда я выигрываю игру, он дает мне эти деньги, точно подарок. Это был подарок. Он ничего не потерял, он не почувствовал боли. Я хотел играть, но как я могу играть, если у меня нет ничего? Вот так. (Садится в кресло)
Because I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t beat him. He has more money than I will ever see in my entire life. I would work two days at the factory for this money, but when I won the game, he gave me this money like a gift. It was a gift. He didn’t lose anything, he didn’t feel any pain. I wanted to play but how can I play if I don’t have anything? That’s what happened.
If we want to talk about America, there are certainly far, far more people who feel that they can put themselves against the political machine. One of the things Vladimir Putin loves to play with is all of the sexual politics of gender that exist in the American argument. Certainly there is the illusion of freedom of speech. There is also the conservative party working actively to destroy freedom of speech, voting rights or even anybody’s particular ability to participate in the world. They are fighting for fascism with all of their heart. The fourth Reich will be an American institution if they have their way.
If this fight takes place in the United States where people live at a much higher economic level then other people in the world and an astronomical amount more than is earned by common Russians or even more so for Belarusians, you can see why the government sponsored companies don’t give a damn. You can see why people are thrown into the war like cannon fodder with complete disregard for them. You can see how little concern Moscow has for the Russian constituency. They have no money to fight with, they have no voice they are allowed to make, they are even less than mosquitoes. They are microscopic and benign as far as Moscow is concerned generally. They don’t equal any money and so they simply do not count.
And so it goes and so it goes and so it goes. It’s been a while since I have slogged through one of these translations. The nuances are always from particular idioms that I might not be aware of. There’s also often some level of journalism or some backstory that needs to be covered. Sometimes people are mentioned without journalistic information saying who they are or what their connection is. None of this is in this article. This article is straight journalism and therefore is just a matter of grammar and usage.
Also, don’t believe I am such a Russian expert that I can do this long hand from left to right. Every paragraph is a little bit of a struggle. You want to hold the meaning as intended but it has to come in a way that makes sense in English grammatically. Also, there are some technical terms that need to get expressed and you have to consider who the audience is that reads this. Early on, there were a lot of things that I didn’t understand that after a while I came to realize that regional folks absolutely understood what these things were. I have to use some journalistic sense to keep things clear. I can’t add too much backstory. It’s not my job to correct the writers but I feel it’s kind of my job to keep clarity and journalistic integrity as much as possible. I mean, theoretically people want to know what’s being said. My job is simply to say it in English.
Anyway, I’m going to hang in here for a little while longer. I have all day to finish this and I don’t have too much work to do outside. One of these days soon however, I’m definitely going to move this computer into the other room and set it up there. It will be good having a faster and more effective computer for a change.
There is one downside to this. When the power cuts out, and that does happen with some frequency, this computer will simply turn off. The laptop has a battery and when the power goes out, although I might lose my connection to the internet, the computer itself will stay alive. I don’t know if it’s possible but perhaps I should look into adding an outboard battery to my PC to guard against exactly such circumstances.
You have to be prepared for disasters. The mark of a good workman is to make sure that no catastrophes happen on your watch. Anything less than that and I might as well be Russian.
***
Russia apparently has soldiers fighting for Ukraine. There have been several routes how they got there but philosophically, it seems that there are quite a few people willing to put their money where their mouth is. Or in this case, to put some ass into their work. Good job boys. It’s not about flags, it’s about doing the right thing. More of I should understand that.
***
It’s a few minutes to 7:00 and I am back in the war room to do some more work. It’s nasty cold outside. Everything is sparkly and Frosty out there. I’m not really worried about the vegetables I left out there. I don’t think the frost is going to kill them. It’s hard to say and I will have a look a bit later when it actually gets light. But right now I’ve got to get warm and I am seriously considering lighting a fire. It is cold this morning.
I stopped back in the kitchen and had some breakfast. I used the big skillet and threw in a bit of oil to cook down the veggies and mushrooms and then put some cornmeal and lentils on top of that and watered it up. Extremely tasty. I even added some salt, something I haven’t done in a while and to be honest, it definitely helped the flavor. I’m not arguing this, I’m just arguing health.
I was still a bit hungry after breakfast and thought about eating something more but decided against it. There is a very disappointing moment when you try to add something to a really tasty meal. I don’t have any kind of snacks and I don’t go for sugar. about the only thing that I could have done was eat some more oatmeal or have a piece of fruit or maybe some nuts and raisins. None of those things was going to do it for me. Breakfast had that flavor. I even put in some super hot pepper to give it just a little extra yang. A splendid and comforting warm breakfast on a cold morning with plenty of hot tea. There was nothing I couldn’t find that would chase that so I decided to live without.
No, I am definitely going to build a fire. It’s cold.
There are positives and negatives to heating by fire. This particular firebox does a good job of keeping this room clean and if you’re willing to keep all the fireplaces going, the bakery is also a reasonable place to hang out in winter. I ordered my window caulking so that will help a little bit.
But there are some inconsistencies with this firebox that can get a little annoying sometimes. It has a pretty good draw once the fire gets going but you have to keep the logs well back from the opening or smoke has a tendency to leak out the front. The smell is not too bad but it is a small confined place and it will get Smokey in here if you let it. There is a way to minimize that by keeping the firebox door almost closed. This creates a slightly faster jet stream of cold air which pushes everything back towards the flu but unfortunately, this negates the radiant warmth that comes with the door open.
A second thing that is not good about this very traditional square firebox is that though the firebox itself warms a nice mass of brick that holds and then releases heat over a long period of time, the fire itself runs straight out the back and then through the chimney. It’s not a very efficient way of doing things because so much of the heat escapes too quickly.
There is a design of firebox called a rocket stove or at least I believe it’s called a rocket stove in which you build a bench from the firebox, drawing the heat horizontally under the bench and then back again before sending it up through the chimney. By doing this, you get to heat a larger Mass and it does a better job of warming the room. You can also use the warm bench to sleep on or sit on. It basically creates a giant radiator out of the room. One of these days I’m going to look into this because the bed that is in here is warm and comfortable enough but it tends to give me a bad back if I spend too much time in it. I do my sleeping on the platform which so far is doing its job.
Closing the door will also get the fire burning nice and hot. It’s roaring right now and that magical heat is not only getting into the room but blasting right at my face. There definitely are some genuine healing properties about fire. There is something soothing about watching logs burn and the heat always seems to be touching me in such a way that I genuinely need to be touched. There’s no doubt that this feeling comes from my DNA. This would probably be one of the deepest DNA elements that could possibly exist.
No, having the ability to light a fire to help warm the room on a freezing day is definitely a good thing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say life-saving but it could be. In any case, it makes this house unbelievably worth the money I paid for it. I can’t imagine being anyplace else than I am right now.
***
I really should not post this but the enthusiasm gets me every time. I just stared at it for about 3 minutes, letting it run and run and run. I don’t think I need to translate this. Even if you don’t speak Russian, I think you’ll understand it. Too bad the leadership doesn’t. It’s genuinely too bad that the leadership doesn’t understand it.
Or this one. I really need to get back to work. I don’t know why I’m just noodling around on the internet. I really have to be more serious. Or maybe not…
***
But getting back to seriousness, when my friends at the Barents Observer contacted me, they mentioned that they were aware that where I live in Belarus has become a precarious situation. Well, now it seems that my friends who are also located on the border between Norway and Western Russia are also preparing for conflict. These are absolutely crazy times.
And just to keep things up front, here is the daily update from Sinad.
***
Well, that was a bit disappointing. The article itself was about the cleanup since the 2020 oil spill but it was just paid for propaganda. The author feigned some sense of cynicism at the beginning but quickly allowed himself to be convinced that all is okay. Perhaps he does not believe in what he’s writing or perhaps she is simply obligated to say what the bureaucrats have to say but this is way more in the style of an official government offering. Perhaps this particular media outlet does only that and they get paid by the government to pass on news that the government wants passed on.
If there was anything genuinely true in the document, it was that there are frightening levels of contaminants in the water of the region. But they blow this off and pivot from it saying that it is all inherited from the Soviet Union and there are many other possible sources. In fact, the rhetoric here was so close to the shit offered by climate deniers to excuse themselves from responsibility, you would almost recognize Russia as being conservative heaven. This was fake news.
No, do I take some sense of responsibility for passing this on? Do I feel guilty for having accepted this job? Well, this is a tough one.
I think my Norwegian friends have their heart in the right place but at the same time, I think they are obligated to make compromises from time to time. They are in business to make money and they wish to remain in business. They’ve already had their main reporter ejected from Russia for causing problems. Most probably they are obligated to certain financial standards and are obligated to publish news directly about certain military movements as offered from press releases. I get this.
But the question is whether or not I took dirty money here. Am taking is more to the point. Am I selling my soul here for a couple of dollars from passing on this stuff? Is this a matter of me needing the money so much?
I suppose I could have refused this assignment. Once I got deeply into it, I realized that this writer was never going to come back to the surface. In the very beginning he at least poses cynicism but that washes away and he never really returns to anything that might assume anything but heroism on the part of the metallurgy Enterprise. It’s a soft sell. It’s placation. It’s a piece designed for people who really want to not worry about things to be able to do so. It was propaganda for the professionalism of the Russians and therefore complete and utter bullshit.
On the other hand… well, I put a book on Amazon of my translations of Independent Media from this region. For the most part, there were no soft cells and everything they showed gave a clear image of the corrupt underbelly of Russian politics and business. I’ve been with these guys for 5 years basically and I have never not been proud of my work. I don’t know why they threw me this one. Maybe they thought it was a Christmas present or maybe they had another reason for believing in this. I don’t believe it has anything to do with their not understanding Russian. They publish a newspaper in three languages so I don’t know why that would ever be a problem. I don’t know what they wanted. Maybe they wanted to give me a gift and threw me a 4000 word translation.
In any case, it was cold today and I took the assignment and I did my assignment. I gave the words as much respect as I could and figured out all of the nuances as well as possible. I dotted my eyes and crossed my keys and made sure that the word spacing was reasonable. This piece is not going to go in any future books from me. The effort has left kind of a bad taste in my mouth. But they asked me to do this assignment and I took it and I finished it professionally. I sincerely doubt this information will move the world in any way. It probably won’t have any effect at all.
Let’s go with this. I’m not perfect. This one did not pull me down from the heights. I was never perfect and never claimed that I am. I just claim to do the best I can to walk the earth reasonably well and without creating too much garbage. Today, I created a little garbage. I don’t feel good about it. But I did my job.
I can’t think of any other excuses. It was just a shit job. I’m not going to but the thought would be to get drunk after a day like this. I’m sure this is the rationale behind most Russian alcoholism. You end up spending a day doing things you don’t believe in or seriously hate yourself for and the only respite is to get drunk at the end of it. Fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t drink so I’m just going to have to take this and move on.
***
Anyway, here’s the link. You can look for yourself and use Google translator if you want.
***
Okay, it’s 6:15 and I’ve just had a really delicious dinner. I had pasta again. Perhaps I was looking for that sluggishness to bring me down after today. Some food is just going to be drugs no matter how you play with them. Or maybe not. Today I put some peas in the blender with some spices and some peanuts and came up with an extremely creamy sauce which went on top of the pasta and veggies. Seriously, if you are a fan of alfredo or even just mac and cheese, it is nothing compared with the flavor and texture and result of this dinner. The pasta will probably be heavy again but the addition of all of that really good protein, I bet it will balance out. I hope so at least. I have some biking to do tomorrow.
Sometimes when I eat, I dream a bit. Sometimes I dream but sometimes I just think deeply. And I again started thinking about this article I wrote or just translated. Maybe I was truly looking for some kind of a silver lining, some loophole that says I didn’t just sell out for cash. I mean, look at the anti-semitism. I’m just another Judas selling out Christ for a bag of silver. Or in this case, the entire ecology of the Arctic Northwest of Russia.
But then I did come upon a silver lining. Perhaps this is just me putting a spin on it. But the truth is, if I did a good job and this piece is now easily understandable to English speakers, I think it is a remarkable teaching tool of how Russia works. In fact, exactly as I have always felt that my book of translations was worth teaching people about the soul of Russia, so too would be this article. It is a work of sculpted bureaucratic lies. Every piece of bullshit has a face on it, the entire story seems to acknowledge argument but is always simply dictated speech. They’re really is no interplay or any answerability. They just keep saying what they must say to earn their paychecks or to keep from being sent to the gulag and Siberia. No, directly to the front in Ukraine. Same thing.
The more I thought about what I wrote, the more I saw in the writer the same face that I see while watching one of Putin’s speeches or even one of Lukashenko public manifestos. You could see him listening carefully to every word spoken and finding a way to agree with what was being said. Certainly, he had his reservations. But now that all of the legal evidence was presented for him and all of the experts had a chance to have their say, it certainly seemed as if all were in agreement that everything was okay. Even in the case where there was absolute ecological damage, the guilt of that was not placed on the company who has been contributing to it for 30 years, it was from a time well before or even natural movements of wind and rain. Of course we are not guilty of ecological damage. Of course the company itself has clean hands. Of course, everything is neat, tidy and legal.
This is fake news. This is the mo of fake news. The trick is, how to go past all of the legality and find the error in the stitch. Where do they go wrong? Even amidst all of this seemingly perfect agreement, where is the mistake?
I think the answer is very clear. The people who are absolutely guilty of fucking everything to death for greed refuse responsibility for their actions. They show where an enormous amount of money gets paid into the budget, but it doesn’t say what they get for this contribution or how much of this contribution actually comes back to them one way or another. They also make a very good point of showing that they actually might not be that much oil in the river. But this oil spill was a very public thing. Where were the great efforts all of these years to keep the residual garbage enough out of the local landscape so that the world can breathe and live normally? Where were all of the ecological efforts to keep the business clean and reasonable.
For that matter, where is there genuine compensation going to the people of the region or their slave labor? It is obvious that everybody was on the take in this piece. Even the guy who they hired for his credentials as supposedly an environmentalist with a long pedigree cannot even answer the question of why he’s there.
You can’t just say it’s too clean. You can’t say that it’s too perfectly composed. That doesn’t ring true. But what does ring true and it does so absolutely is the money that goes into this deal one way or the other. If you were to take money out of this, you have a massive crime against the planet and everything alive in the region. This is not a one-time mistake, this is an ongoing practice of cruelty done for money and at the expense of all of the cancer patients and people who got thrown on the dust heap when the thing went down.
No, it wasn’t a waste of a day. This is what Russia sounds like. This is what Russia does. This is what they do so that they feel their hands are clean. This is what Russia does. They live for their image. They live for their clothes. They live for their suits and their positions and their titles. They live for their status and the status of the people at the top of the food chain in this article must never be touched or bothered in any way.
There is also one more way of looking at this that makes a great deal of sense. Exactly like the environmentalist who now works as head of environmental damage for the smelting company, they might be doing what they are doing out of fear. Certain things can be said. Certain official documents can be repeated. One can appear to be handing out dirty little secrets or being exceptionally nice and obliging. Even naming this so-called journalist and independent at the beginning seems a little too perfect considering that he had zero point of view towards finding the lie in all of this. I mean, there is no such thing as an independent journalist who walks around simply saying what people tell him to say.
So you read this document and it truly asked you to believe that the biggest oil spill in the history of the Arctic is all taken care of. There are some other contaminants but they will just throw more fish in there. Experts have their say and though they don’t really say anything, you can see that the entire thing is made up of truly, truly scary and scared people going through the motions of covering up their incompetence.
What is the point of the Russian military action in Ukraine? Can you get a straight answer? The soldiers who were hanging out here at the beginning of the year all said the same thing. It’s all about money. People are getting paid. The people that require the money don’t have any money of their own. It amounts to coercion. And it doesn’t matter how dirty the job is. Every guy who gets on the bus and agrees to die for Russia agrees to die for Russia. I think this is all that is required of all Russians is that they agree to die for someone else. It doesn’t matter how they get there. It doesn’t matter if they were coerced.
So what does all this mean? It doesn’t mean a damn thing. I have to go to town tomorrow and take care of some business. I’m also going to spend time with my ex partner. I might stay overnight. My ex partner really wants me to take a bath badly. I haven’t taken a bath in a very long time.
Other than that, life just goes on. Today was a good day and a bad day. It was nice to go to work again. I don’t really need the money. I don’t think I did this for money. Actually, I haven’t even sent my invoice to get paid yet. But it was nice to get a call and be asked to do something I do pretty well. It was unfortunate that this particular article was bullshit. Who knows? Maybe they just wanted to know if I was still coherent.
I sent off that short story to a few people I care about and got back generally good reviews. As always, they just look at me and not the writing. They don’t get moved by the words or the ideas, they just stare at me, stare at my meat and advise me about how I could probably make some money with all of this. Either that, or all kinds of suggestions for more work that I should do.
I definitely am thinking of doing some writing. This journal is going to end in a couple of weeks and after that, other than sketching or complete desire to do so, I’m probably not going to do any writing for a while. Everybody needs a vacation. Nobody needs to read about my going to the woodshed to bring back wood or flipping through social networks to amuse myself. Nobody needs my help to find information about the war and truly, I doubt too many people give a shit about what happens to me out here. It’s an interesting tickle of the mind that I am so close to a war. It’s too bad I cannot create false Hysteria. I mean, I hope I don’t get killed or overrun. I hope a lot of things just stay stupid and quiet and easy around here.
I mean, if it was completely my choice, I would rather not have missiles falling on Pinsk. None of them will hit people responsible for us being in the war. It’ll just be a bunch of stupid slaves grabbing for peanuts and wondering why their lives have become so empty and stupid and expensive. There are some genuine assholes in the bureaucracy in town. It’s exactly the same as Russia in the Belarusian bureaucracy. But I can’t see any reason for civilian casualties. Really, 99% of everybody just wants to get along. 99.9% of everybody just wants to know how to play the game so that they can get through a day without getting killed or starving to death. 99.999% of everybody is just as sick of it as I am.
Leave a Reply