Friday, April 1st 2022

 It’s 7:30 in the morning and I’m sitting in my ex-partner’s kitchen drinking the last of my coffee. Breakfast was several pieces of her extraordinary bread with some fresh red onion, spinach, napa cabbage and even an orange bell pepper. She loves shopping at supermarkets.

This picture is the view this morning.

Hemingway was a fresh onion for breakfast fan. I have heard that he ate them like apples. It’s hard to know if this is believable or not. The first bite will definitely get into your nose and start clearing things out a bit. You wonder whether or not you really want to eat raw onion, especially with a breakfast without any fat to it. But then you start to like the taste of it. It grows on you as you get used to it. I forgot to bring along my hot sauce with the super hot pepper mixed in with some peanuts and blended up into a cream. Maybe it’s the same idea but the red onions are fresher.

I’m thinking really hard about a phone call that I got last night from the KGB. It was not the usual call you get from them. In Belarus when the KGB calls you, they tell you to show up at their office and perhaps you can negotiate the time but it’s not really an open invitation. You have to go.

Usually they will not tell you what’s going on. I always ask, I always ask if this is serious or not. But if you think about it, they can say any damn thing they want. I mean, they could just barge into your life with guns if they wanted to. They have this right. I mean, take a look at Ukraine. We know that this is in the vocabulary, right?

But this time it had kind of a strange flavor to it. The guy who was calling me, I’m not going to say his name but let’s say Oleg, seemed very friendly for some reason. It was a very strange texture. It was like I was being invited to the KGB offices for a friendly visit.

Again, I can certainly understand one’s paranoia about this. There are plenty of worms floating in the river but how many of them are connected to hooks.

Nevertheless, it was a very warm conversation and he genuinely seemed happy to be talking to me. Was he a fan? Do I have fans in the kgb?

I didn’t understand any of it and I told him that he would think it quite normal that I would have some trepidation about this invitation. Amazingly, he agreed and told me it was very important that I understand that I would like this visit very much and that I should come down today before I went back to the village

At least he mentioned that I would be going back to the village. But put paranoia on that and… well, you get the pointLook, why don’t you just tell me what this is about.

– Look, why don’t you just tell me what this is about.

– All right, I will tell you. But you must keep this a secret. It is only between us and you and you must not share this with anybody.

Okay, I’m sharing this with you right now but you’ll understand why in a minute.I wasn’t born yesterday. Can you at least give me a clue of why you need me so badly and what all this friendship stuff is about.

– I wasn’t born yesterday. Can you at least give me a clue of why you need me so badly and what all this friendship stuff is about.

There was a bit of a pause and I guess he was trying to choose his words carefully.

– We want to get high with you.

– Excuse me, what did you just say?

– We, all of us, want to try marijuana with you.

If you were to think back over your life and think of every invitation you have ever had in your entire life to go to a party, would you consider this to be an interesting thought at least? I mean, how James Bond do I have to be? I asked him for a clarification so that I understood him clearly.We have more than one kilogram of marijuana that we have taken from these people in Pinsk. Technically, we are supposed to destroy it but there were many people in our office who thought that might be the worst and most stupid idea in the history of time.

– We have more than one kilogram of marijuana that we have taken from these people in Pinsk. Technically, we are supposed to destroy it but there were many people in our office who thought that might be the worst and most stupid idea in the history of time.

– You have a boy sitting in prison in a gulag for 5 years. I’m not really sure that this is the cleanest weed ever found.

– No, I am sure that the quality is quite high.

– I’m not talking about the quality. I’m saying that it’s bloodstained. Stolen weed is bad enough but if it’s stolen from a guy who’s now sitting in prison for 5 years, that’s kind of adding insult to injury, don’t you think?

This was some pretty technical speaking and I was hoping that my vocabulary was enough to make my point. Luckily this particular officer understood some English and the next thing he said was in English.Khe iz khere vis us. He want to smoke vis you.

– Khe iz khere vis us. He want to smoke vis you.

– You’re joking

He went back to Russian.

– No one is making jokes. He has been speaking to us about this material and he tells us that he wants you to be his attorney.

– I am not an attorney.

– We know that. But he says that you understand marijuana better than anyone and that you can express how he feels better than he can. He has asked us all to try this with him and to talk about it and that maybe we will come to a better decision than wasting many years of his life for something that is a positive.

– Let me get this straight. You want me to come to KGB headquarters and get high with you and this boy who you want to send to prison because you want to consider whether or not you are doing the right thing?

– Yes. But also we hear it is very good quality and so we are happy to have the opportunity.

– And what about afterwards? Does he just go to jail? While I’m in your offices, do I get taken and sent to jail?

There was a silence and then a little bit of laughter. Obviously, I was on speakerphone and there were many people listening to me. I had figured that this was the case but I hadn’t expected for them to be this open about it.Mr Goodman, no one is going to jail. We wrote this story in the paper to scare people away from the business.

– Mr Goodman, no one is going to jail. We wrote this story in the paper to scare people away from the business.

– My ex partner is paranoid to death of this stuff.

– We understand completely Mr Goodman. But we are not such fools as you may think. We understand what a beautiful thing is when we see it with our eyes as well.

Such a moment. In any case, I agreed to go over this morning. We will see how it goes. I don’t see that I really have a choice in the matter. I mean when the KGB invites you to be a guest, you’re going to be a guest one way or the other. But also, it’s very hard to pass up an invitation like this. I mean, have you ever gotten high with the KGB? That’s a pretty cool life’s resume piece, when you say?

I’m not really a thrill seeker. I used to jump off rocks and things and do long distance bike rides. And I guess when I worked construction, I worked some scaffolding pretty dangerously sometimes. Oh yeah, and I moved to Belarus. But this was a new one in the danger game. On the other hand, if any of this was even remotely true, maybe I was getting a chance to be a hero. 

The truth is that only one guy makes decisions in this country. No matter what’s going on at the KGB headquarters in Pinsk, no genuine decisions about this country are going to be made today. In fact, I sincerely doubt that anything that happens we’ll even lead to a serious recommendation. People just don’t have voting rights and everybody is more than a little afraid. Even these guys have bureaucratic lives and stand precipitously on a ladder that they could fall off on more easily than they could rise with.

Hopefully I’ll be home in time for shabbos. Tomorrow is my day off and I really need it. My legs and body are really tired and this has been a long and very painful week. I could really use the rest. Let’s just hope I get there.

***

Well, that was interesting.

It’s a few minutes before 2:00 and I’m waiting for a taxi for my ride back to the village. I suppose I could ride my bike to the train but I’m not really sure today is the day to test out the new gear on all of that sand. Okay, maybe the snow has hardened things up a little bit or maybe it’s just made it worse. I’m going to pay for the luxury today. I’m not really feeling so riderish.

My morning with the KGB was pretty interesting. The thing about it is that on the one side, you can say that there are cool people everywhere. This is to say that there are people who do not really wish to cause harm to others and just want to enjoy their lives. Even in the service, there are people who have experienced moments of philosophical unrest working there. And of course even amongst the most DieHard protectionists, there are those who will admit that it is a job and in Belarus you have to do what you have to do if you want to have a family.

I would say that it was awkward really. There is a huge difference between marijuana and alcohol. Alcoholic parties are about numbness and forgetting your social graces. Russian weddings are known and notorious for fights breaking out between men. Some people say that it’s not even a wedding unless there’s a fight in it. And this is how they think of all parties. Even the name for marijuana here, narcotica, seems to group it with much more nefarious and detrimental materials that people put inside themselves. They just don’t want to think of it as being anything different. They don’t want people knowing about anything except to exist in or not exist in reality.

It was also pretty awkward there because this idea of being on or being off, of working or of resting is a very Russian concept. Most Russians, all Russians really, hold these two concepts as absolutes. Работать и отдыхать. To work or to rest and there is a concrete wall between them. When the clock is before 5:00, you work, and when the clock is after 5:00, you are not working.

Alcohol of course goes hand in hand with the not working side. Well that’s not particularly true. Most men who have the opportunity to do so will keep a bottle on hand for difficult moments during work. This is true for both manual laborers and for decision makers. They drink. They drink like fish. They drink and they enjoy drinking and drinking is deeply, deeply, deeply a part of the culture. It is normal to drink. To drink is the right of an adult.

Also, there was a time when people just didn’t care about marijuana. The truth is that the harsh marijuana laws did not even exist until conservative partners in the oil business started teaching the Russians how to do everything possible to keep their population as crazy as possible. Peaceful people and peaceful relationships are the bane of the oil business. People must be insane for money and for things and they must have a reason to get in their car and go and buy things or you just don’t make enough money. 

“The oil business is a merciless Mafia and they make whores of us all.”

This is not my quote. This is a quote from one of the KGB officers. Like I said, there are cool people everywhere and though you will hear people say that they are not as stupid as I might think, I attribute most of this to common Sense and pragmatism. Two things that used to be a norm but now are as illegal as marijuana.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t really so much fun. They wanted it to be fun but truthfully, it was really the same old celebrity thing again. Everybody wants to have a chance to have a conversation with me because I’m American. The truth of the fact that I am not actually a representative of the United States in any official way or that I have been here for 20 years already does not ever seem to matter to anybody. It was an opportunity to hang out with me.

On the other side of the coin, I didn’t end up with a bag over my head and wake up in the back of a van heading up into very cold country. I also didn’t wake up dead or find myself in a cage. Maybe celebrity counts for something. 

I don’t really believe that anything we talked about will leave the room. I’m happy to know that the boy is going home. Okay, we can call him a drug dealer but I think he was a real believer. I think he was a guy who actually believed in better things. I think he is a guy who wants a more cultured society, more artists, more free thinkers. I know he is a young man and even he understands that the weight of this country is eventually going to crush him. But I didn’t really see him as a criminal even though technically this is what he is. I don’t just mean he’s a criminal because he was selling marijuana, I just mean that he is a criminal because the only people that get to be in the marijuana business are criminals because it’s illegal.

This in fact was the one thing we all agreed upon doing this conversation. They said it is a shame that weed has to be in the hands of criminals. They all agreed that it was quite a medicine. We all agreed that we felt good. I believe that they were actually listening to me when I explained how good I felt without any leg pain for a moment. And yeah, I believe there really was sympathy in their eyes when I told them about a guitar player with the onset of arthritis or a former New York City bike messenger with almost non-human leg problems. Blame myself for the diabetes but thank God there is a cure that exists that grows right there in nature. And yes, there were plenty of head nods when I said that. I guess I really do speak Russian well enough to be understood.

The only thing left to say about this situation is April fools. Of course it’s April fools. Of course I didn’t get invited to get high with the KGB and of course we didn’t have a meaningful dialogue about a very helpful thing that would do a lot of good. Of course we did not have a moment of genuine conversation and understanding. Of course there were no moments of reason. Of course it’s just a joke. On a day like today, that’s all you can do is make a joke. Even God is laughing at us by dropping a bunch of snow on us in the middle of the springtime.

***

By the way, Hemingway once said that he quit journalism and took up fiction writing because he wanted to be able to tell the truth. Words to live by. And now, here is some journalism:

Have you been listening to some of the intercepted phone calls from Russian soldiers? They are posted here on telegram. https://t.me/SBUkr Crazy shit.  Yes the Ukrainian nazis must be stopped before they invade Belarus. I like the one where the guy tells his wife how he’s bringing back a 70” tv for her

I’m talking to my Mom about it and she blames Biden. She’s another brainwashed republican. She thinks if Trump was still prez, Pukin wouldn’t have started this war. My point to her was that Trump was an enabler of Puke-in and Trump tried to do everything he could to destroy NATO/EU/UN. So maybe it wouldn’t have happened or maybe it would – eventually at some point it would anyway IMHO…

I agree that Trump was an enabler but it’s a false argument to say that this invasion would not have happened if he had stayed president. That Putin has no respect for the United States is not indicative of Biden, it’s indicative of the fact that he was able to get Trump elected and to coerce exactly so much as he has right now. I think the truth is that they learned that they could get away with almost anything because as much as they were afraid of the US and NATO, neither has done anything to stop Putin from gaining power and doing whatever the hell he wants while in office. So long as the oil is flowing and the money is coming, he is Tony Montana at the top of the game. The world is a nefarious place and Putin is not the evil that men do. He is just one of the prime symptoms.

From a conversation with a Ukrainian American friend.

***

Here are some headlines.

Russians fled Chernobyl with radiation sickness, says Ukraine as IAEA investigates

Hundreds of shells fall on Ukrainian suburb as ukrainians blow up a bridge to halt Russian progress

Ukraine war: Russian forces regrouping for attack – Nato

Biden orders ‘unprecedented’ release of oil reserves

Ukraine negotiations to resume, Europe faces Russia gas deadline

***

Okay, for real it’s about 20 minutes to 11:00 and I just got back home. It’s snowing still, the roads are wet and icy and nobody is going to do any work outside today. Thank God. I could definitely use the break.

I only have one point to notice from the cab ride home. I always talk way too much to cab drivers. It is a part of my being so tuned up from the village. I understand all this. But he had the best joke today.

I was talking about negativity and about how women tend to have this reflexive negativity. It’s not just women, it’s everybody here. You can’t talk about dreams or dreaming or what people actually want to make life better because the typical answer is simply to say that life is pragmatically like this and never, ever changes. Truthfully, Belarus is the place where dreams come To die.

What I wanted to do was tell him my old joke about what came first, the chicken or the egg and what came first, the alcoholic or the Russian wife but he got me good.

– What came first, the chicken or the egg?

– The Chinese.

– What?

– The Chinese came first and they invented both the Chicken and the egg.

Brilliant!

***

It’s very cold and I need to go cut some wood in the snow. I forgot to buy a pair of rubber boots. I really should have rubber boots for walking around out here.

Also, I just had a stray thought. This Will Smith business, that’s exactly what happened to me in Poland. I didn’t go berserker, I just took great offense to a guy almost killing me with his car when I was on my bicycle. Same exact situation. Well, I’m not Will Smith, I’m not a multi-millionaire or a movie star, I didn’t get to apologize on social media and go back to my world and party all night with an Oscar in my hand. 

I hear that it’s not over. They are talking about consequences of this action so maybe I’m missing the point.

But yeah, I hit him. That’s right. Don’t hit bicyclists with your car. Take that thought out your fucking head. You don’t hit bicyclist with your car.

Yeah, that’s about right.

***

Okay, the wood is cut, the water tanks are filled, there is plenty of food to eat and I’ve had my exercise for the day.

While I was out in the snow, I was thinking about that issue in Poland. I wrote a book about it by the way called Being Had, soon to be available on Amazon.

In chapter 23, I wrote about a serious bit of Sherlock Holmes that I did to defeat that case. It wasn’t just about getting upset and hitting a guy, it was about the guy telling the court that I was responsible for all of the damage to his car. He wasn’t bitching about getting hit, he wanted some money.

This was a bit more than 20 years ago but I can see now some nuances that I didn’t really understand at the time. The guy who hit me was constantly mentioning his telephone. At the time, having a mobile telephone was quite a status symbol. It was very important that everyone knew that he had a mobile phone.

But perhaps what we know now and we didn’t know then is that it’s very likely he was looking at that mobile phone while driving. That one little mistake almost cost me my life and could have cost him and his daughter their lives as well. Not to mention the damage to everything else he hit while riding like a wild man into that intersection.

It also could have been that he was simply one of the original non-humans that mobile phones and computers have created. At the time of all this, I was not particularly computer literate. The book was not really written during this but after I finally got out of Poland and returned to Belarus. Not that it was noticed of course but that is another story.

In chapter 23 of being had though, I talk a bit about some Sherlock Holmes that I did to disprove the theory. In a perfect world with a court that actually considered Justice to be part of their job, this would have been the end of it. It wasn’t. They found some kind of a reason to disallow my information. I think it had something to do with my report being written and translated but not presented orally. I wish I was joking about that.

The story surrounded the fact that the cop took some pictures of his car and had a police inspection of the damage done. There were some dents in his hood and some marks on his bumper. He claimed that I went wild and started beating up his car with my bare hands. Most probably, this reputation has followed me ever since but that’s not the important thing.

The important thing was that the report itself was done during a rain. In fact it said so on the report that the inspection was carried out on a rainy day. This struck a note with me and an idea came into my head. They had this and I think still have this website that recounts the weather perfectly for almost every hour of every day. Checking the weather in Warsaw, we could see when the rain had happened and immediately what became obvious was that he was lying.

All cars get dirty and if you have any kind of marks on your car like dents, they affect the way the dirt streaks along the metal when it gets wet. There was no possible way for the dirt streaks on his hood to have been created by me because they were already old. They were there before our altercation.

I don’t know if my style is so wonderful or not. It’s definitely me talking. When I took a look just now at chapter 23, there is no doubt that Adam Goodman is talking. No plagiarism there.

Like most massive disappointments though, the excitement of having broken the case with a little bit of science was ruined when they just threw out my hard work as being nothing. I guess you cannot say that the Polish courts alone are guilty of this sort of miscarriage of Justice or complete indifference. Police indifference has been a great part of my life even for the last year. Both police indifference and police overreaction. If I could bottle those things and sell them, I would already be rich.

But I got him that day. I really got him. I caught him in his lie and it’s right there and black and white and anyone who takes the trouble can see it. But then again, I’ve caught a lot of people lying to me but usually it doesn’t matter and isn’t worth a shit. That’s just not the world we live in and it’s an unfortunate thing about journalism. No matter how big the lie that gets exposed, no matter how big the crime or the criminal, the world just continues the next day. If people actually cared, maybe there’d be nothing to write about.

***

Well, let’s call this week. I am in the warm room and I am doing nothing. After cutting some more firewood, I was hungry so I ate a really big lunch and then I ate a really big dessert and truthfully I don’t want to do anything. I guess I got an early start on my day off. I had some minor thoughts of actually doing some work on the computer but I just wasn’t motivated.

I don’t know how to explain this. I feel like there is negativity all around me. I feel like there’s negativity around me personally. But then if I think about it really hard, I imagine there is negativity around everybody. I doubt very sincerely that very many people feel that they are in a utopian way. I agree, I know some people who really push for their popularity and push the boundaries of their marketplace. They have all the trappings of being happy. But at the same time, they seem to be the most miserable people in the world. Everybody has problems and everybody has dissatisfactions but even people who seem to be winning are never really satisfied.

And well it’s true, I would certainly like for certain things to be different, I have no belief whatsoever in anything getting better. We are all locked into our slavery too tight to break out and really try to make something nice. I know I’m not supposed to be speaking like this and that I’m supposed to be saying that there is hope if only we could change one thing. I’m supposed to be talking about the butterfly effect and how one little change in direction could tumble The dominoes one after another. I’d love to see it. I just doubt it’s going to happen.

Why did I start writing? That’s a really good question. I remember the first play I ever wrote. It came when I was living a relatively free life and suddenly we had a moment, a friend that I was with and myself, when we had to say something. Maybe the world was more conversational then or maybe it was my own personal problem that I felt that if I spoke, I needed to say something real. But there was a moment when we needed to answer a question and the answer I came up with was that I was a writer.

It was the answer to the question of who I was. And it was the first thing that came into my mind. It was the only thing that made sense actually. I was a writer. I was someone who tried to find the words to explain something perfectly. I was the person who wrote the words.

I was actually kind of shocked to run into a school yearbook from grammar School. This artifact is long gone, so many moves ago. But I was in grade school and the question was asked about what we wanted to be. And I said that there as well. I wanted to be a writer. I was the only one who even thought about this.

Perhaps what’s more remarkable is that I never pursued this trade in school. In university, I excelled at writing papers for term projects but even then, I had these restrictions that I had against myself. Literally, I told myself that I did not know how to type. It never even dawned on me to just sit at a typewriter, the instrument at the time, and just keep packing on it until I got good. I did that later on during this first playwriting session but before then, I never even tried.

Perhaps if I had followed a more normal path for a writer things might have been different. Perhaps I should have looked for a job as a journalist or a copywriter. Perhaps I should have been fashioning short stories and trying to sell them to magazines or maybe to work for someone in show Business and write jokes. I really didn’t do any of that and the eventual business of putting words on paper just organically happened. It just came out of me. It just became something that I did, even without a paycheck.

2 years ago I started writing everyday as kind of a stunt. I mean, I wasn’t trying to impress anybody particularly with doing something in human or really suffering for something. I just believed that it was time to vote and vote well. This was the presidential elections here and also the year of the Belarusian elections. And I said I was going to write every single day and follow the elections and write about what I saw.

This might have been a really good idea when I first started writing. Perhaps I should have started a journal with great seriousness and written every day and made sure that words got on paper everyday. It would have been amazing practice and perhaps this would have given me a different life’s path. But I didn’t do that. There were notebooks that are now also long gone. I don’t know how many paper notebooks I filled, I was writing and sketching and thinking but it was not like this. It was not trying to make sense of things every single day with words.

My first Love is writing for theater. I wanted to write the words that actors said. I thought that if I could have anything that I really wanted, this would be it. I just wanted my words heard by an audience.

I have heard my plays read. I’ve heard my writing read back to me many times. I’ve been through the drama of moments plenty of times and of course when writing within a group, I’ve had the opportunity to be inside these moments. And it’s wonderful really. It’s not really wonderful for me as a stroke for my ego. The egotism or the personal pleasure has always come from the surprise and excitement of my audience or the people who are reading the place with me.

I don’t really know that there’s a better feeling in the world than to be in a room and see someone’s voice catch in their throat or tears form in their eyes because of a series of words you’ve put down. It’s inexplicable how it feels to know that you have truly had an effect on another person simply because of your ideas. You want more of it. It’s addicting.

I’ve had compliments. I’ve had offers. I’ve had my work stolen. I’ve had my ideas show up in other people’s successes. I know for a fact that I’ve been here and I’ve worked. I just have never had that relaxing and socially acceptable moment. I just never quite get that honest moment where the show happens on some reasonable and professional level. I’ve just never had that general social acceptance.

I don’t get me wrong. I genuinely hate being on stage and I’m not looking for pity. I guess I’ve just been underground for so long that I wonder what it would be like to be in the light for a change.

Or maybe all of this is bullshit. I don’t really want any of that. What I want is to be heard. I believe that the words I say are the truth. If there is anything to this daily public parade of thoughts it is that I try to tell the truth. Even on a day like today, April fool’s Day, even if I started out by riding fiction, I still didn’t stray very far from the truth. And when I looked into the situation and started asking my actors to play their parts and speak their lines, I was still speaking the truth.

Maybe all I really want is to cause a change in a specific direction in the world. Maybe it’s not about being in the theater or getting widely read. Maybe it’s about getting these ideas out and into people’s heads so that they have this thought for themselves. Maybe it’s not about being a writer as in the guy whose name is on the front of the book. Maybe it’s just getting these ideas, self-sufficiency, ecology, giving rather than taking, requiring a sense of reasonable discipline or just simply being ready to help your community and be a part of it. Maybe I’m just fighting the selfishness and foolishness of the world and the only way I really can. This is the reason for my words.

So let’s close the book on another week. I don’t know what the name of this week is going to be but I’ll think of something. It’s been a journey. I am very tired. I don’t really want to dig anymore right now and I don’t want to ride my bike anymore right now. And I don’t really want to write anymore. All I want now, for myself and everybody, is just a day of peace.