What can I say about this one?

This was my only attempt at a book. This means I went into the writing thinking of this as a book. Technically, never having tried to write a book before, I figured out about how long books were. Certainly, you need as much space and time to tell your story as you need. Also most certainly, they used to pay writers by the word so you ate better the more flowery you were. This went along like a fashion. Everybody always wants to be heard. I came up with the idea that I could go between 400 and 500 pages of 500 words of page. There’s the math right there. I had to tell my story in 250,000 words or less. I actually got this wrong and most popular volumes are half this side. Like I said, I learn as I go.

After this you need a timeline. You need to know when the story begins and you need to know when the story ends. I came up with the idea that the story of what happened when I was in Poland had to start, after an introduction of course, with the traffic incident itself. Might as well take a look at it and see what that looked like. I guess people can form their own opinions right from the get-go here. And at the end, I get to go free, kind of. So I think there is a bit at the end that said that there was no parade waiting for me to come back. Lots of damages done. Lots of changes. And Belarus was another year into their modernization and reeducation to global thinking. Radically different place than it had been before. And, I had nothing to do.

In Poland it was about a traffic altercation. According to the absolute natural truth, I was on my bike and on my way to a movie theater to kill some time before going back to Belarus in the evening. From behind me came a car moving much too fast for the intersection, he ended up doing a little bit of a hook slide to get ahead of me. He obviously had not been paying attention and was coming in too hot. Maybe it was good driving not to hit me. Maybe I could have been more kind in my heart. I didn’t see it that way. I saw this as a problem.

What actually got me is how he responded. He was staring at me. I was looking at him and waiting for him to say he was sorry. There was no other way to say it. He had been driving too fast, he had lost control of a moment coming into an intersection and he had perhaps skillfully avoided accident. Nevertheless, about taking responsibility for the fuck up? No. He just kept staring at me. It was unnerving.

Okay, was this a wise move? What other options would there be? I just walk away and say I’m still alive Good luck with your life. I could go to the police and involve myself in a long-winded bureaucratic shuffle that inevitably will be a waste of everyone’s time. Or maybe I just go talk to him and find out the situation for myself. That’s what I did I ended up opening his door and punching him in the face. There was something wrong with him. Actually, after I hit him, he was still acting really weird. I didn’t get it so I decided I was pissed off getting out of this situation. There was something going on here that I was not aware of. I was right. He was a cop. Off duty and absolutely to blame for the traffic accident. But a Polish cop.

So what happened? It was a year. It was a year in jail. It wasn’t completely unpleasant. I had some fun while I was there. A lot of it was nothing. I got my first teaching experience there. So that was something. But mostly it was a lot of hanging around. Mostly it was a lot of waiting for court dates. Mostly with a lot of not having anything to do.

At the beginning of this though, Tanya Kopus came for a visit and she helped me finish the play Pod Kablukom. The actual translations and Russian edits went on for another 6 months via email. So there was that to keep me going.

And I wrote another play when I was in Warsaw. Actually, I wrote another one when I was in the provinces. I was teaching English out there and had my own apartment. Things were actually pretty sweet by the end of my year. I wasn’t really ready to become a Polish millionaire, but I had succeeded in making myself at least moderately comfortable.

What I also did while I was in Poland was write some pretty cool essays for the court showing exactly why the cop was lying. It wasn’t just that the story was unbelievable to start with. Anyone with even moderately critical thinking would have asked him to rethink his story. Even the changes in the story should have been taken seriously. My big Sherlock Holmes here was checking the weather. There was a simple statement that he made in regards to the fact that there were dirt streaks heading back from what he was claiming was new damage to the car. His response to my claim was to say that the inspection was done in the rain. I checked the inspection report and found that that was a lie. I then found the weather service to tell me exactly what the weather was in Warsaw at that time and double proved that he was a liar. And all of this was from evidence from his own photographs.

The Slavic world does not respect genius. Anyway, I think the book reads pretty good. It was originally formatted differently. The chapters were longer and the brakes fewer and farther between. I adapted this by basically cutting the book in half or all of the pieces in half individually. I’ve been told it reads better this way. I’ve even been told that it’s kind of information dense. I’m happy.

Would I say that I am a skilled novelist? No. I would also like to say that the first 70,000 words or so were lost. I was writing this book at a public internet cafe and they cleaned the computer I was on and all the work that was there just disappeared. So we started again. And then there was the criticism about the chapter right. So we wrote it again. But I would say that I professionally did my job of reporting the situation. Did I report absolutely everything? No. There was some personal stuff in there that didn’t need to be there. And I had a friend. Several actually. But as an account of what it was like being stuck in Poland at this time of world news, this is it. I was suppressed. The American government knew about it. It was bullshit.

Anyway, being had. Still worth reading after all these years. Not a bad effort by not a bad writer.