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Foreword

Anyone can be egged on into anything, be only the hook baited with "I dare you!" The trick grows more irresistible when the mark enjoys their state of soporific inefficacy. For which obvious reason avoidance of things popped up in sleep would only assert that your lick of sense sits where it belongs, as of yet.

Hence my salutary rule: first thing in the morning, to dead forget all stuff broadcast to you in the grip of Morpheus' arms, so to say.

The paradigm fits ideally both ladies and gentlemen – the night's over, be smart to instantly become an innocent blank slate, better be safe than sorry and so on, you know…

Which policy might turn a misstep though, at times. Recall from your reproductive memory a certain Mendeleev, if you please. The old fart amassed right smart repute among the screwballs kooky about that Chemistry thing. Remember why? By skipping to forget the periodic table that visited him at night dream. And now what? At quite a few places you might stumble on his monument both sitting and standing and never less than his bust but then it’s hard to puzzle out the posture of his extremities. Anatomical, of course.

Good news they still dare not 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!.”

And monuments too, apropos, are pretty slippery ground to horse about. Uh-hmm, up to 7 years in prison. Article 214, the Penal Code of the Russian Federation. Oops. Not to mention the fine starting at half a million rubles. Some weighty pros and cons, huh?

Or how do you like that crooked ploy by which that poor wretch Don Juan was undone by that Monument of Commodore?

The big shot’s freshly baked widow had just received her share of consolation he served her in every humanly possible way, Don Juan did. As any do-gooder would. Before running into that ‘I-dare-you!’ catch.

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

And the dupe swallows the hook, sink, 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 clap-squeezed Commodore's glove. But it's of stone through and through! Plus palming a handful of P4! And that white phosphorus stuff is so nasty a shit, they never collected a sliver of Don Juan after the handshake, so as to poke out a DNA sample for checking his fatherhood in the slew of bastards spawn all over Europe, whose Moms went out to litigate Juan for alimonies. Added by those eager to boost their rating in the upcoming elections to the respective municipal bodies of self-government…

To cram it all into a neat laconic nutshell, when Charles Dickens chose to appear in my dream, shaped as his monumental embodiment, I was Correctness itself, exposing all 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 way you tweak it.

And after, there remains to specify the time and place your work-in-progress narrates of (a separate tweak to spice it with appropriate word collocations), and then, just in case, you check if the love-triangle was compromised, here and there, with scraps and snips 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 over to betting on that I too could turn out a novel in Charlie's way – a chapter per 5-day working week, since on weekends I’m hardly functional, thanks to the well-established tradition, the two-day dead season, sort of.

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

Although there surfaced an annoying hitch, and pretty soon too, their editor program filters the uploaded files to sift out, automatically, the words rooted in the language alive from the times immemorial.

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 run into a hang-up at that starry patch.

However, I didn’t steer into rubbing it 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…

So as to keep the vividness of narrative under control, I had to introduce some spelling innovation and add '*' (not asterisk but letter yobz now) to the native orthography.

The yobz surely earns its keep, insert it in any of your preferred words to dim the sight of the censor software out there, thick smoke spouts out its ears and, for instance, 'fu*ck' is welcome as virginally innocent linguistic norm, like any other necessary word of feather fixed as needed.

Forgotten are the constellations of **** and other fuc*king malarky while the smart reader will see through 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 you attentively weigh up the matter, do I need it at all? This here Blog?

A rather moot question, I must admit, far and away, precariously so. A scrupulous explorer, like me, first off, would plumb the depths to the very bottom: what is the meaning of being a blogger? Hmm?

One thing sticks out like a sore thumb though: some guys are renown bloggers, others lay claim to the title and are still alive and kicking… well, the most part of them.

Which advantageous circumstance certainly encourages a closer review of the befogged question, at least for the sake of self-education, within limits. More so when you’ve happened to enrolled 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), a personal blog—on-the-spot and less than just-for-asking—in the state of vanilla virgin blankness. A freebie from the blue, follow me?

As it happens, the registration was a total fluke. I’d even, sort of, say it came to pass accidentally because of curtain rapt anticipations.

Yet, a closer look derailed those designs as premature – no picking your silly nose here and smudging the mucosities of nitwit hopes on the items in public domain, if you know what I’m about…

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

That way, the confluent circumstances slithered in to kinda mate and make me ponder on self-education issues, although at the start I would not count the like matters among my natural bents.

So, yes, straight from the shoulder, that too-smart-ass trap-scheme does indent the principle of non-interference, an impudent (though 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-demurred, I’d like to also point out the rumors fleeting, now and then, tangentially, at the periphery of my scattered, in general, attention as regards divers show business celebrities, who—before to pass away in their usual way of hopeless fight with cancer (when choosing a career you sign up for the strings commonly attached) or hang themselves to spite the life that failed at fulfillment of the hopes pinned on it some fifty years back—by their blogs were blowing the Net up – now, get it, bugger!.

BZDAH-BANG!!!

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

But why? Why not to 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 scum bag of fame «has blown up the Net». Which arrogant sabotage can hardly find a properer response than just 2 words: „Fuck youself!“ (Both stressed, the latter stronger.)

To be frank, in my post-pubic life I was not much attracted by a career of a demolisher. However, the pranks of plumb crazy stars keep interest to bloggerism a-simmer (though pretending I don’t care a fig still in its place). They do undermine my unconditionally rooted reflex of genetic proclivity to leisure and slow, serene thinking, alphabetically.

As for the sporadic spells of living my life in accordance with my likings, then I am more than reluctant to skim all those googlies-wikies and would prefer drawing my own ad hoc conclusion or two (of various amount of probability) concerning the matter in hand, when in doubt. A screeching process, yep, why deny, yet at my natural pace and taking breaks when feeling like that.

By and large, «blog», at the given moment of my single-handed brain-storming, does not too categorically outpace an average chisel, which they use to scratch their marks—“here I am, the one and only!”—so as to impress the eternity to come by their (chiselers’) personal uniqueness, the praiseworthy claimant to the mutual awe and admiration.

Quite natural and ubiquitously wide-spread drive, exceeding dinky racial dissimilitudes. Suffice it to recollect the pole to pole go-getter Mr. Kilroy, 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 under the back 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 one more 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—carrying one more plop-toy among its playful waves, a dildo for the torrents or just another 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 sawsharks (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 fail to give the pretext to a cruising environmentalist of the Greens Genus to spit out an enraged swearword addressed to 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.

(*The organization is announced to be terrorist and their activities banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.

** This one too is banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.)

No one is up and scanning the heaving sea waves 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 knows 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 definately 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, by the bye, you don’t get the uninhabited island as is for just a ‘thank you!’ neither for an honest-to-God look of 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 readiness and so full of natural davenports. Aye, aye!.

Yet, all these heavenly niceties are available only after severe struggle and surviving at 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 is just to stay totally immersed in your post stamps collection or whatever is dear to the crux of your soul’s temperament and do not give a fuck about anything else. Simply equalize it to the level of external hum, boring and foreign consort to your inner life completely set aside for to the thing you tickle your soft spot with.

Sure enough, they’re all too eager to derail you by every kind 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!” crowning the level’s accomplishment.

Level Two, at first sight, looks a kinda simpler job. No need to give a fuck about any-fucking-thing whatsoever.

Here, the stratagem is locking yourself off thoroughly with all five senses sealed up as firm as needed for the successful passing the whole thing.

However, be warned of physical harassment – they will make you keep sitting on the toilet or else may clutch a cup with your fingers and pour its contents into you, “See? This how it’s done! Will you never learn nothing? You, dumb stupid ass?” Don’t talk back and be patient for the sake of “You Win!” after which you sure get to Uninhabited Island after all.

O that’s what you call the paradisiacal cream! Rhythmic swell of lolling surf of the Digital Ocean, light warm breeze from the electric blower under your feet, sexy moans of gulls through your headset and other fit attributes checked on as favorite widgets.

The functions under your command are simply innumerable here, on a par with Almighty’s level. And why so? Ha! Since we’ve lived up to a tangible jubilee already.

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 the jazz as being charged with much cooler stuff than even entry to 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 the invariable return to normal gravitation.

Quite different kettle of fish, in toto, with 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, which you own quite a few sacred debts—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, o, yeah… 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 Mayak, the All-Union Radio Station, the bigger half of my life.

Thus flopped the mission of the “screaming” silencers in the range of short radio waves. Those crafty contraptions meant to kept the USSR citizens corralled off and hedged against the subversive influence of the outside world by the deafening crackle of the static, while the inner mass media brain-washed the Soviet people 24/7 carrying out the prophylactic mentality sterilization, and turning 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), and now we can freely choose our own way to being formatted into shithead consumers.

That’s why all the salesmen disseminating nostalgia for the golden days of Soviet era are viewed by me as low-grade promoters of the 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 both the motherboard and other vital parts of my personality…

Presently, text hunting is looked upon as an oddball twist to your mindset, some funny atavism, sort of. Who’d ever need the stuff? Wake up, bro! The Net’s swamped with freebie dolls nicely applicable for jerking , as well as warfare for edging any bent of taste be it War of Tanks or Aviation, or bare Strategy, ready for customers of any quirk and preference in their way of masturbation.

And that is just fine! Because while they keep jerking or shooting, the Internet roots into inextricable depths which keeps up 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 to be paid for only by the time you spend in the online search-and-find, if not too lazy.

Arise, brother, and catch on, firstly, that the up front page of search results Google fills with the addresses of the customers paying Google for their ads, and those now want to harvest, in their turn, the gravy off you, while the rest 1,630,000,000 results in 0.62 sec are presented 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 takes up to a couple of days because of piggy mercantile schemers. Know what I mean? Yeah, sure, those sites mutely hollering “Hey! Hi! Here! ANY PDF FOR FREE!”

You, naturally, rush there 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 it, and the procedure is just their long-established custom. But where on God’s green earth would I fetch the required card from? The arid untilled patch (right, it’s me), who never has had anything to do with the like cards? The sinless virgin hick (me once again) who’s never rolled in the hay of that particular field?.

True, a couple of times I tried 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 upper right 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 happened to meet at 40, when “Internet” word was yet unheard-of.

I recollect there was a lunch break at some office, but which namely I cannot call 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 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 Will arrow hit me, and pierce to take my life?. and 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, like they did to Harry Potter, and The Steel Hardened That Way, or steep it in all kinds of widgets both to reproduce the aroma of the prairie in bloom and the stench off your dorm buddy drunk blind (following the plot), and make it able to imitate the tactile impressions in line with the sex orgies served by the whores at the Red Mill (as depicted by the seasoned author), or even let you feel, virtually, taste of any delicacy, up to Zhigulevsky beer 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, only if you know the trick of getting the adequate intoxication from them those ants, sure thing.

Good news, that skills could be developed when needed, which lately brought about my getting high from classical music, at least some of its 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 never spotting Romeos around 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 detected that you can stuff no more than five A4 sheets into a bottle.

Which is not a cinch, by the bye. 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 by the northern cape of Island, 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’ sake 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 flies to you, assisted by the favorable breeze as an addition to a 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 will readily become the start.

How about the point, when the gray-covered notebook was handed in for the City Psychiatrist to check the sanity percentage in the person and/or how dangerous would the doodler of such stuff be for innocent civilians?

Or take that pivotal moment, marked by the ample pocketbook with perceptible sepia tinge in the pages seen through the press in 1968, which my Teacher’s hands offered (no pathetic blah-blah attached) for mine, all full of awe and greedy gratitude? Does it draw a shorter straw to be the start?

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

What’s the use of breaking if you knew what’s inside? Translations were there, 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—gee! and this one also does not coincide with a single one of them!

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

The undeniably non-uniform figures do contain certain meaning, albeit not graspable with 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…

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 humanitarian aid offered—no excruciating push ups, just taking to the post office 472 pages plus their cover—to throw away a sliver of his fat in the 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 fucking slackmaster…

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 marked by the contemplation wrinkles in the thoughtful forehead.

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

Yet the pages in the package upon the homemade shelf not only weighed down the interior’s item but also were drip-dripping onto my brains even through the coarse paper, the pages. Their comatose presence made still acuter the inertia amassed in 6 years of communing with them those antlike-black-critters-in-the-white-field, so obstinate at first but getting tamer, bit by bit, until they finally hooked me up too. The situation-conditioned addiction. But after the Game over, in the stiff stillness, there remained nothing to waste myself away. Plodding donkey and circus horses are incurable…

Fucking Sir Isaac Newton and that First Law of his, although the inertia thing was cabbaged from Galileo.

The evenings noticeably lengthened. To find a shim for filling them up with turned out not a trivial task.

Like, not any quick fix but go and learn playing melodeon squeezebox so that, in the dark, to stroll about the hood lanes outpouring some hot air or another, in a flash pair of black high boots, and a fluffy flower (Portulaca oleracea) stuck in the visor-cap so that the girls would tag along and fall over themselves to treat the musician to the black seeds they’re snacking non-stop…

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 any other feasible way in the current environment.

Squeezing all the above-said together, instead of a two-row A-major/D-minor melodeon there, by the intact heap of paper within the stiff cask-like shell of wrapping (somewhat grown already with the softer 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 brazen 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 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 the nonchalance of bro-to-bro-talk revved forth about innocent lads hanging out on the screechy door-porch to a seedy half-hutta in the 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 partners 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 outrageously violent so 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 damn 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 hault 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 the 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 story line 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.

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 smoke pipe rising from the rectangular-cuboid tin stove [60 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm] on 4 tin legs to keep the contraption 25 cm clear off the boards in the floor. All the tin grown with brownish crust of rust and the round hole (cut thru with the convenience of thrusting the smoke pipe out in mind) had generous gaps for the ventilation and immediate contact with the outside weather.

The Horn-and-Drum couple kept mum on the stand shelf by the door, in company with a weighty jingle-bell cast of bronze with the relief molding, which ran around its wall, in Russian: “Gift from Valdai”, distinguished by the knack for mighty clangor to announce start/end of a class/break…

The firewood for the tin stove I cleft in the tin-roofed shelter nearby the two-door outhouse in the yard.

The ax kept flying off the handle. Old Goorguen, the school watchman from the house next door, ironically chortled beneath his white-yellow mustaches to every flight he witnessed, while the Principal, named Surfic, instantly announced that my style of wood-splitting disclosed my roots in the class of intelligentsia. She obviously admired my forbearance – not a single 4-letter word after the flying piece of fucking iron…

Late in the evening, the tin stove 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 up into the mountain raw winter cold…

I did not set off translation of Ulysses right away. First off, employing The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, I translated Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man pretending it was the must to have a closer look at Stephen Dedalus, the youngest in the trinity of Ulysses’s 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…

At the end of academic year I was dished out a no man’s house in the village, comprising one room on the second floor level above the locked up store cave for keeping the tin school stoves 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 plywood repair accomplishment coincided with the start of the following academic year, and the room was shared with a rookie teacher arrived from Yerevan, where he had been freshly baked and certified by a pedagogical institute.

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 stove for wintering, yet having nothing to stick in and kindle inside it, would feel unquestionably cold.

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 collared me 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 the 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 fucking 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 of you followers!

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

That’s a hell 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 of the quartered tree landed around the supporting trunk, the executioner dropped his ax down and descended clench-hugging the freed prop…

When on the slanted ground, my hands a-shaking and the knees a-trembling after all the strain up there in the Circus Sweat Dome, I felt the urge to go pee-pee, unzipped the fly, and craned over – what the heck! Where’s my doodle?

Instead of the dick I used to, there stuck off a willy of a kindergarten kid.

That’s why in the pictures on the ancient Greek amphorae depicting 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 empty wood on the winter eve, but pinching that medicine dropper out from its sheath of the muffler of non-artificial skin with your trembling, 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 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 grade 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 Ulysses but 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 Ulysses because there remained just 9 years from the stipulated stretch.

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 ~

And all that does not mean as if this here Island will serve you anything at all delivered on a dish embellished with a blue rim of great artistic aptitude and value. Damn no! Here you’d better keep your expectations in check, firm and proper. Don’t drip your mouth water in other guy’s property without knowing first who’s who in the turf…

Just for the record, the Island is Uninhabited, if you think fit to remember, and besides, the over-abundance of blue color or, say, pink, not to mention the dazzling mixture of them with other darlings, would cause a closer attention to you so as to catch on which way your orientation slants, and that’s why the like services stayed far back in the past, that sweet, innocent, naive, and fucked up with all kinds of deficits past, the strictly straight 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 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 lacking in the Island, in toto. Though yes, who gives a fuck smack bang among the everlasting tropical summer.

Or is it winter, after all? Well, you feel the seasonal switch okay, but it is hard to say: we are drenched with Cancer’s non-stop winter or Capricorn’s unceasing summer rains right now?

Then, secondly, watch your mouth about “fuck!” because OBPS (check Bottle #1 in this here blog for explication) perlustrate your bottle messages and when you come to talking in 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.

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

How come them OBPS guys see thru thick ocean waves plus 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? They’ve taught an innocent machine all the “bad” words and mutilated her lamb-like immaculate psyche! Those purity champions, they!

Who’s blurted here “metal has no psyche”? You? Then your likes, the so-called Church Fathers, 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.

Dogs also have no soul? Eh? Like other animal that you maim and torture for your experimental ends? You, cloned clowns-vivisectionists!.

Taking all that in consideration, you safely may 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 that’s a pity 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 the atoll’s lagoon (how on earth could it pop up here at all? the island 2Bsure is of volcanic origin) was visited by the Flying Dutch. You easily can judge it by her sails torn and fretted to hankie size and the bowsprit adorned with the brassiere XXXL big, 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.

In the 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! The most best of the best days in the week full of yummy expectancy to live a little at long last after you’re thru the working week.

So, precisely last Friday, that is yesterday, in harmony with my after-dinner habit, I came down to the beach and stretched out in the palm-tree shade because the sand temperature 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 after the dinner 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 in the childhood you scrape out in the shallows of ponds and rivers, but the SOB clams 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, how it spreads from the hinges connecting the two half-spheres all the way to the rounded edges, fanning off 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 given this ogres the name of Pec-tin-din and it baffles me to guess why. The scallop-like bottom of this huge cauldron got buried in the sand as deep as the Peccy’s weight forces it to enter, and the lid is somewhat raised, like for airing.

But there’s nothing inside to air. Peccy had passed away to better world before my getting to the Isle of No Time, not even her mantle remained in between the shell valves, not a shred, all got looted, scraped, gnawed, swept up and taken away, and only this bare calcium structure still tarries half-buried 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 that gave those wails a certain tincture of emotional curve, like, say, “O, woe! Peccy! Why have you left me!”

Besides, with a noteworthy impudence, the wind blew radically athwart the direction of monsoon winds that on Friday, in a well-established manner, blow either to the shore or off it. But no! This bitchy one pulls alongside the shoreline! Some shitty anomaly, that hydra of anti-hydrometeorology!

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

The waves dropped out of caressing languidly the shore in the habitual foreplay and, all of a sudden, sprung erect, the tips amok and wheeling their whisked up foam, to rush and crash their whole mass onto the beach spread out in the boot-licking kowtow.

Darkness reigned all around, thru which, like whitish ghosts, there flashed foamy fragments of water sheets torn by the squall off the shore-lashing waves.

And now the tropical torrential 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 together with the lightning that sliced the world by its crackle-and-hiss into two, horizontally, shot with 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 bent after the fringe of its long drenched fronds jitter-bagging impetuously from the waving tree top.

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

I clenched mortified by the fear that the following lightning wouldn’t miss this only tree in the beach.

Clung to the dribbling tree, I 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.

Discharged a 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 gets gently muffled, little by little…

Wait-wait-wait! But how 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, as a result of the deep humanism in the foundation of the Communist regime, you'd hardly find a person sentenced to more than the 15-year term. No use trying. 15 was the ceiling, above that limit you straight off plopped to face the firing squad at ready for the execution. Each one has to do their job, you know.

In 29 years Nikita Khrushchev, who ruled USSR Empire 1953-1964, would have built in the Soviet Union 1.45 Communisms (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 the walls of his personal dacha while the throne of the General Secretary was seated upon by Leonid Brezhnev to run the farm till 1982.

Which exculpatory circumstances—if any against so solid background—might mitigate my guilt of dilly-dallying about the production of RR (The Rascally Romance) protracted for so serious a stretch?

The confluence and most perplexing entanglement of differently varying yet similarly unfavorable exigencies determined the unbecoming lay-over.

To begin with, I okayed a war…

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

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 in late evening by a dozen of mujiks to tarry over a couple of boards of chess and backgammon, and to chat of I dunno what because I hadn’t yet any command of Armenian, and where to, about once a month, they brought an Indian movie of 2 series—I was perplexed at seeing that crowd, thrice thicker than gathering for any movie. Which was not on at all that day.

The Village Council Chairman, delivering a speech from behind the breastwork of the on-stage rostrum, ofttimes was 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 also the Chairman’s son, elucidated that the purpose of the rally was to collect the folks' signatures and Grisha, the school Principal's husband on my left, added that such collection was the decisive instrument for breaking away from the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan because living on as its constituent part grew utterly intolerable. 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 kept in mind that never throughout my life have I driven any kind of bus 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) while, simultaneously, I had a buddy plasterer Robert Zakarian, an Armenian from Third Company, because of my reckless not giving a fuck about racial differences as well as the lack of prejudices on the grounds of national affinity which also and always was another of my distinguishing features.

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 not aware of all that 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 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 autographs by others.

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 so too attractive to my adamant mindset.

However, back to 'in order of appearance'…

A month later there was another meeting in the village club 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 payday.

The teacher of Biology, 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 of 2 bread loaves… The discussion dried up, the kopecks were accepted.

In February, the Lenin square in Stepanakert saw the outset of mass rallies in support of the 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 concrete flooring slab revealing 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 have heard folks laughing at it…

Laughing even after that 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 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…

A year later, influenced by the common 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 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 BCM-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 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 the Sushi City and Khodjalu Village, 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 line of iron pipe (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 editor thereof originated from the same village as her, and, as luck would have it, their family names coincided too.

My job come to be translating articles from Armenian to Russian because The Soviet Karabakh daily was published in Armenian and on Saturdays supplemented with a Russian digest, so as Big Brother could check the stuff brought up in the previous 7 days.

My position of a translator did not fall under the category of the mother-in-law-backed nepotism. Not in the least! In two years at the village school I studied all the curriculum textbooks in Armenian Language and Literature from the school library, starting off 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, I was not paid for the month of work at the newspaper 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 of 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 stop because the gas trunk-line went thru Stepanakert climbed 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 future…

* * *

Bottle #6: ~ The Clover To Roll In ~

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

Moreover, that I was not on high yet in my regular nirvana and just 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 time of day’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.

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’ll find it blindfold by 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 or else into some of cheap China machine guns. The question of karma and stuff, you know.

Not much of manufactories here 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 Jamaica’s 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.

Well, yes though, last week one of their team took a dive from the window. Exactly as I was passing by for 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 and no doubt.

And in the right 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 a pinch of kinda reproach.

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 have striven after joining the crowd of chip implanting globalization.

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

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

And as for my nirvana where could it be from two 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 coffocoa 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 as for the wholesome joint its 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 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 California beaches.

The jeans severed as knee-long 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 from his bugged-out eyes befuddled looks in all directions. In short the famous lost picture by Rembrandt “A Hick at the Fare or Come and Fuck Up the Mark”.

Then, naturally, I lit up enjoying the free show.

After gaping for awhile he steers 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. "Yet getting the answer to your 'where?' you'll certainly go over to testing the waters about your squadron's landing spot, so why not to contact Dr. Serafimovich 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 used walking to write the eternity sign with her buttocks, conveying an open hint and promise, 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 us two, the bench and me.

He gave her a dimmed look.

"Well, well," thought I to myself, "the case is not quite hopeless 'cause of the unconditioned reflex is in its right place."

"Take my friendly advice, tanned paleface, you'd better not horse around that young squaw whose Daddy earns his living in the You’ll Get It bar at 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 full beard to his 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”.

The fucking Hollywood has fucking spoiled the 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 he’s so fucking cool! 'Cause of the day before 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 henchmen – 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 in congregation 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 shadows already 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 about me, 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 of a quarrel with coot Chris goes for a bad omen, uncontroversial, about this here neighborhood.

"Hey, nigga," sez I, "what’s the message in your What’s up? If there's questions to my interlocutor then his papers' 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, to give the clue some time for sinking 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 looks up at his buddy to kinda signal his need for 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 coming 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.

n ancient Rome they put a dog collar on slaves to see who's who 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 of 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—behold and lo!—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 exposing 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 he fiercely scratches his left armpit.

The jaws of both muggers go loose and drop on the hinges to demonstrate their tonsils, and the big style tango of their act turns abruptly into a gallop to diverse destinations 'cause of the move of the flee-catcher his beard got pushed aside exposing a bandolier hung on his bare chest, loaded with a kinda sawed-off blunderbuss: Welcome to the Caribbeans!

However, the Treasure Island has been abandoned 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 fell 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. From top it was shelled by the artillery in the Sushi City, from the bottom side pelted the missiles launched at the Khojalu Village, from left the bombardment was carried out by the howitzers positioned in the Malubalu Village, and from right the battery in Janhasan Village added their share to the barrage.

Machine gun and automatic weapon fire from Krkjan (the uppermost, Azerbaijani populated part of the Stepanakert City itself) did not reach farther than the theater building.

We rented a one-(but-wide)-room apartment in Tumanian Street and in the basement of the nearest 5-story apartment block—at a stone throw distance from the house we dwelt in—I had to empty out the space for sheltering of my family in between the walls of bulky concrete-blocks in the building's foundation under the ground.

At the outset of the movement for the independence of Mountainous Karabakh, while there existed yet 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 said relief and supplements among the local population, after a short-term storing away in the basement of the mentioned 5-story apartment block.

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

However, even I could do only half of the job which half though was enough 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 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-embracing 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 pinpointed 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 Leningrad blockaded in WWII, the 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 to 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, 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 fins that there was someone in the building, after all.

The seedy 2-storied editorial office building (a couple of blocks off the printing house) was lost in the shadow of the right wing in the gray 4-storied 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, 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.

Well, yes, “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 forth among otherwise Armenian people.

The 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 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, eh?

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 the relatives to scribble something she had heard and likedfrom the radio on a paper slip, my mother’s-in-law mother-in-law did.

And who will deny the beauty in “Orleana” name?

There happen 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 it pretty common, the presence of a watchman whose given name was Rashid with his always at ready smile full of square teeth. And I have also met a small kid Elchibey (they used the name of the belligerent president of Azerbaijan from 90’s for that quite quick and able mischief).

In the morning our family got 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 basement, and then went out 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-family circulation understandable to them who lived in the era of deficits…

And then, alleviated and full of feeling of my duty done, making tiny starch-screeches of the 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 jerked and pulled at the entrance door from outside, it was not hard for me to go and check (about once a week) what’s up.

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

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 the creative efforts the writer omitted noticing the trifle.

At too near explosions the building hopped and the window panes, with the parting tinkle, spilled 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 stopped coming to do their job.

I acted a deaf 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. Yes, the wall’s outer surface would go kaput, the inside turn all cracks and crevices but still the missile lacked might to penetrate and sky in. If it hit in through the window or balcony door then, yes, no arguing, the place is smashed, all the partitions smitten down. However, if it were some crummy house of wood, then one hit of an Alazan would turn it into a heap of trash.

But then, at night, when going after water, I had a charming opportunity to admire their beautiful flight—from purely aesthetic point of view—a lazy yellow comet from Shushi descending in a languid arc onto the city (too high this time to get at me) and from the ground long stitches of tracing rounds from Kalashnikov or two burst up, across the course to its final crash in the city, and all that against the backdrop of the full moon – lo! here comes another! and the colorful stitches again!

No use whatsoever yet the surrealism of the picture looked 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 was TV studio).

The impact 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 TV equipment…

* * *

Bottle #8: ~ From the Alternate Angle ~

First off, the darkness did not seem absolute, some pin-prick scintillas still oscilated here and there, and extremely dark yet slightly gray-hued streaks retained their static positions at 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 entered them.

The silence wished for so eagerly just a while ago—before the ominous click of the lid—commenced to depress the ear drums muffling, little by little, the all-pervading blackness in the thick wrap of hermetic shroud of soundlessness.

“Aaaa!” I issued a desperate shout 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 was 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 doubled 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, fixed in, strait-jacketed, incarcerated.

The panic smacked me like the mains of 240 V, yanked hither-thither like a withered pear-tree quacking in vigorous clutch of the deuce, yet even for those violent jerks there was not room enough—my nose squeezed between the knees, unyielding bottom under my left shoulder, the right one rubs against the hard lid, and no way to stretch the legs out at least for one foot. Got trapped and nabbed by the shrewd dickens under a washing-tab!

And only my head still could enjoy the freedom of banging its back against the shell wall, without the proper revving though to certainly prevent 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 him 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, in the sling over my chest… but no, damn! the powder must've got washed away by that mad rain… 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 commingles with a 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 wrapped mercifully everything in 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 maybe have forgotten unintentionally…

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

…the downcast stares of all the present alertly followed the ongoing movement of an index finger hopping along the circle without ever hitting any chest just like a watch hand substituted with a compass arrow issuing the morbid green-gray phosphorous gleam from its head…

…a voice sounding with hollow aloofness as it happens in the thick fog which suffocates the tiniest echo of any sound accentuated every arrow's leap —

"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 dawned already and spilled a paler grayness and also 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 was made squint tightly.

Where am I?

What a mistake! I should of never put my head up. Ever. The raw piercing brilliance of the shining day scorched and erased without a trace or any hope for retrieval everything it was filled with 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 surrounds me. Rough asphalt in the road divides two serrated rows of houses opposing each other, different in size and height. All of the walls look alike. Tired. Weary of everything, up to themselves as well as of the row they belong to. Of both the dried tree stuck up from the asphalt and the bench under. Empty. Almost.

I went to it…

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

The most stupefying feature about him were his eyes filled with cartographic lines of the blood vessels drawn densely in his eyeballs the color of the powder-blue fog in which there swam brown irises ferrying wide pupils, those also swam all the time yet in more controlled way, so as not to spill overboard, into his eyes whites.

The like optics organs are not a too big rarity yet—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 half an ear because the second half was pricked up to catch the hollow sounds 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 recollected 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 bore 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 unbearable buzz, 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 windy dream meandering through all the 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 properly, can very easily shake 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”?

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 disappointment – the clicks were being produced 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 also knew where – 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 had transported to the Aghdam City the cannons from the Caspian flotilla battleships and those started bombardment of Stepanakert from there, the sound track grew richer – you hear 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 70 years later that day I was set free after my hitch in a construction battalion of 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 basement – 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 the foundation blocks with cubics to stop the droughts and the raids of brazen rats (cement for the job had to be ferried from our house building site and cubics were limestone blocks of 20 cm x 20 cm x 40 cm, which could be easily collected in the basement too).

On the completion of a task (intended, as I suspect, to keep me down there in the basement’s relative security) I retired to our rented flat and plunged into translating of Ulysses. With the daily quota set at 1 page, sometimes I knocked out one and a half, yet hardly a half page was the 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 but the book was not mine—so there I scribbled a translation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Earth, a si-fi throwaway in the chewing gum style yet you have to kill time somehow, even at war. The undertaking served a practicable distraction though explosions at any distance caused equally dismal contractions of the asshole.

At times I paid visits to the postponed project at our house building site, you can’t let everything to just drift by itself and leave it to good will of your neighbors, who have enough of their problems.

The fact of 3-tonne water container getting emptied and ladled out to the last crumble of ice was met with understanding 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 be able to get divers feel from their childhood besides the monotonous panicky alertness of the adults around them in the miserly flicker of a candle that melts trickling 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 in use of 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 fun at another ethnic cleansing, and get read of all those basement dwellers (possible carriers of more threatening pandemics), and rename the city into “Khankendi”?

Well, they would were they could, they certainly would if not 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 just Sublime Porte). To make things clearer, phedai is simply 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.

What did Armenians need phedais for?

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 heinous 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 commonly shared outcry from the indignant Europe and unsparing headlines in the leading newspapers.

In the 20-th century the word “massacre” fell out of vogue getting 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 his following 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, 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 emphasises 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, cleaned the dung from cow houses, 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).

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. So, on the whole, just mujiks as is.

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 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 but also the genes-deep feeling of guilt for the Genocide of Jews. Which is, of course, another story, yet the core is the same – you can’t go on without an enemy and in the absence of the 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…

The Stepanakert phedais were noticeable by their young age, from 16 to about 32. Night after night they kept shooting at the positions of the other side to the conflict entrenched in Krkjan, the commanding hill in Stepanakert outskirts. There sounded bazooka bums too in that neighborhood connected by a dirt road to Shushi and from there to the rest of Azerbaijan.

When someone got blown up by a mortar fire in his fox-hole, they buried him a day later in the city cemetery – everything was conveniently at hand, in the same blockade…

For me personally, the phedais are – Mishik, who after the first (unsuccessful) storming of the Malubalu Village returned home frozen thru and thru and slept for about 24 hours;

Gavo, my one-time coworker at BCM-8, after a night in Krkjan passed the AK to his shiftman and was coming back home, and winked at me proudly in the sidewalk of Lenin Street;

Samvel, whose wedding pants were shot thru in the second (successful) storming of Malubalu yet he never looted a thing there, not a kopeck worth;

Edo (the Draftsman) sporting an obsolete army officer harness belt.

In the then Stepanakert parlance the appellation “draftsman” was used to designate a person whose eyes in his head watched the world speeding round thru the prism of cannabis smoke because of the characteristic thoughtfulness pervading their countenance and optics in particular, when on high.