Reading

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: R. Carlos Nakai, "The West"

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Magic Monday

It's almost midnight and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will not be put through. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. And further: I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

(The image? I've finished the sequence of my published books; while I decide what I want to do next, I have some memes to share.)

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

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Time for the traditional baking of the Christmas biscotti!

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a highly subjective review of Underworld

A few days ago, I finished Don DeLillo’s Underworld. It took me over a month to finish, and now, looking back, that entire month is like a gaping hole in my memory, a void, one of those paranormal loss-of-time events almost, because I barely remember a thing.

I don’t blame Underworld. I blame myself.

I've got more than a few bad habits, like smoking almost a pack a day, eating whole bags of candy in one sitting, biting my nails to the quick, chewing at the tips of my fingers, drinking coffee after midnight, staying up way too late, being an absolute terror in the mornings, compulsively watching YouTube videos that I don’t even like just to post snarky comments, picking scabs to the point that they take months to heal, picking my nose, eating boogers, drinking straight out of the carton, throwing recyclables in the garbage because I’m too lazy to go through the whole can-crushing process, a seriously unhealthy relationship with digital entertainment of all kinds, sudden-onset procrastination when some mandatory task presents itself, eating only like three types of food because I refuse to try new things, and all sorts of other stuff. But the bad habit that’s most applicable here, which is sort of a blessing and a curse in some ways, is my tendency to finish every book that I start regardless of quality, because that’s exactly what happened with Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a book that, in hindsight, was a colossal waste of my time, like I could have read three other books in the time it took to read all 900 or so pages of Underworld, and the worst thing about it is, I barely remember what happened in the book. In fact, I’m pretty sure nothing happened at all.

I don't know why I do this to myself, the whole force-myself-to-finish-things thing, because it's a catch-22 really, a situation that ends up making me feel like shit whether I finish the thing or not. There's also a sunk-time thing going on, too. But mostly, when I tell myself I'm going to do something, it becomes like a matter of personal responsibility for me, a self-inflicted obligation almost. So when I don't finish something, it feels like I’ve broken some sort of oath, which makes me feel like a failure on some level, as if I can't keep my word, which makes me feel like a dishonest, lazy person. Yet, when I do force myself to complete things, I’m always doing it begrudgingly, and there’s never a feeling of satisfaction afterward, because I’m very aware that I only have a limited amount of time on this planet and not everything is actually worth completing, and so every minute spent doing one thing sacrifices time for another thing, so when I force myself to complete things I don't want to complete I end up feeling like I've wasted a bunch of time. And even though I know the outcome of the whole finishing-things-I-don’t-really-want-to-finish thing, I still persist with finishing the thing because of the whole aforementioned personal-responsibility thing, and this, combined with feeling that I’m effectively wasting my time, creates a sort of dissonance in my mind, a dissonance that's present not only when completing the thing but also upon completion of the thing, so I can’t win. This is one of the many types of psychic torture I inflict upon myself daily. Underworld being just one of many such cases.

Underworld itself is one of those works of literary fiction that functions as a sort of commentary on twenty-first-century, first-world society. It takes place mostly in New York City between the 1950s and 90s, chronicling the life of a man named Nick Shay, who killed someone in his delinquent youth, then went through the justice system and came out reformed as an executive for a waste management company, which is supposed to be some profound comment about something, but what that something is is elusive to me, as the novel attempts to wrestle with multiple themes but is so overwrought that it only ends up wrestling with itself and the reader.

The themes, from what I gathered, are garbage, literal garbage, like waste, refuse, trash, but also spiritual garbage, like dealing with life-altering mistakes and bad habits and harmful obsessions and aversions to change. Another major theme is human interconnectedness, like how everyone is connected, how every human action has an equal and opposite reaction, even though you might not be aware of it, and also how six degrees of Kevin Bacon applies not only to Kevin Bacon but to everyone you meet, like how you could probably connect yourself by association to someone on the other side of the planet when considering that the people you interact with also interact with other people and so on down the chain. “There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password—world without end, amen.” And the novel’s theme of garbage supports this theme of interconnectedness as well, as DeLillo is keen to point out that one person’s garbage is often recycled into another person’s cardboard box or plastic bottle or whatever, highlighting that we are even connected by our own waste. Also baseball. Baseball is a big theme. In fact, you could probably make the argument that the main character of the novel is not Nick Shay but actually a baseball, a literal baseball, the baseball hit by New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson at the Polo Grounds in New York City on October 3, 1951, dubbed the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” because the novel sort of follows this baseball chronologically from owner to owner, starting from when a young boy named Cotter Martin obtains the ball at the ball game itself, which is told in a beautifully written novella-length chapter at the start of the book, to when Cotter’s father steals the ball from his son and sells it for rent money, after which the ball exchanges hands multiple times, each of those hands belonging to a different character in the book, so there are a lot of interconnected characters associated with this specific baseball. There’s Nick Shay, Cotter Martin, his father Manx Martin, Nick’s wife, who’s like a heroin addict or something, Nick’s wife’s secret lover Brian, Nick Shay’s secret lover Klara, who’s a “reclamation artist” that turns trash into art which obviously ties into the themes of garbage and interconnectedness, then there’s this gay graffiti artist who might have AIDS, then there’s Sister Edgar, a nun whose consciousness gets uploaded into the World Wide Web after death or something, then there are like twelve other characters who are so underdeveloped that I could barely tell them apart. Oh, and also fictional versions of J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, and Lenny Bruce, the latter of whom functions as a sort of comic-relief sage who does subversive stand-up comedy highlighting the existential dread and paranoia of living through the Cold War, ending most of his raunchy routines with “WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE.” And all of these characters are connected in some way through the Bobby Thomson baseball, which all serves to reinforce the novel’s Zen-like central theme of human interconnectedness, which is basically the only thing I like about the book. And, considering that Underworld was written late in Don DeLillo’s career, when he was like 60 or something, this Zen-like theme of interconnectedness kind of reinforces my suspicion that most philosophically minded writers, given enough time, tend to lean toward Buddhism. And if you don’t believe me, see the late work of J.D. Salinger, David Foster Wallace, Jack Kerouac, and now Don DeLillo, because, despite the fact that Buddhism isn’t mentioned even once in the novel, Underworld is essentially a Buddhist text.

But that alone does not save Underworld from being a boring, overwrought waste of my time, unfortunately.

And despite the novel’s name, the Mafia is not involved here. The book is not about crime, although crime does happen. The name Underworld is more like a symbol for what’s going on underneath the surface of society, how underneath everyone is connected, both spiritually and metaphysically, and maybe the name is also a reference to the World Wide Web, which is also used as a symbol for human interconnectedness, a point DeLillo clumsily shoehorns into the epilogue, which is one of the few highlights of the book, alongside the opening baseball chapter, and this one late chapter that reveals the circumstances around how Nick Shay killed a guy, a scene that did indeed make me put the book down and be like, “damn.” The rest of the book is a series of short vignettes that jump from one time period to another in random order, which only serves to make the novel more confusing than it needs to be. These vignettes follow one of the many dull characters as they just go about their normal lives talking to each other about stuff, which results in a reading experience that goes something like, “nothing is happening but surely something must happen soon because, according to literary critics, Underworld is a masterpiece, so I’m going to keep reading because surely there must be a big payout coming up here soon,” but, spoilers, there’s no payout. There’s no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Nothing fucking happens. All the excitement is frontloaded into the beginning of the book, when Cotter Martin, who only appears in the first chapter despite being the novel's only likable and compelling character, obtains the baseball. That’s pretty much it. There’s your excitement. The rest is so dull that I can’t even recount it here, because, frankly, I do not remember. The majority of Underworld is just dialogue exchanges between characters who talk past each other about literal garbage and other topics loosely related to the overarching themes of the book. And, due to the nature of this quote-unquote “story” being told in a disjointed, out-of-sync manner, there’s no real build-up or climax or whatever, just lots of pretty words with supposedly deep subtext.

As I read through Underworld, I was struck by just how much it resembles David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, in its length, its number of characters, its fragmented storytelling, its critique of modern society, and its story that loosely gravitates around a central object. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Infinite Jest was inspired by Underworld, given that, if you check the Underworld Wikipedia page, one of the only cited pieces of praise is actually a quote from David Foster Wallace himself. “This novel is (1) a great and significant piece of art fiction; (1a) not like any novel I've read; (2) your best work ever, so far; (3) a huge reward for someone who's read all your previous stuff because it seems to be at once a synthesis and a transfiguration—a transcendence—of your previous stuff; (4) a book in which nothing is skimped or shirked or tossed off or played for the easy laugh, and where (it seems to me) you've taken some truly ballsy personal risks and exposed parts of yourself and hit a level of emotion you've never even tried for elsewhere (at least as I've read your work).” But the difference between Underworld and Infinite Jest, frankly, is that Infinite Jest is actually good, whereas Underworld is just not. Infinite Jest is sprinkled with exciting moments, occasionally beautiful prose, outrageous situations that capture your attention, short stories within stories that cause you to put the book down and stare off into space thinking about shit, spot-on future-sight prescience, well-developed characters that you actually grow attached to, and comedic moments that break up all the existential dread, all written by an author who could speak in multiple subcultural languages. Whereas Underworld is just like, “here’s a baseball game for 100 pages, here’s people making supposedly profound observations for 700 pages, here’s a nuke going off and a nun getting trapped in a computer or something for 30 pages, the end,” written in dreary prose by a 60-year-old boomer who lost touch with modern culture decades ago and is now interested solely in baseball and writing, desperately trying to marry these two loves to produce some sort of grand meaning-of-life type statement that vaguely hits on conclusions Buddhism already uncovered centuries ago, all of which basically amounts to a 900-page ramble, likely because DeLillo’s editor probably wasn’t ballsy enough to be like, “OK, grandpa, time to put the pen down.” And this is obviously true when reading the epilogue, which feels tacked on as an afterthought because, one, it’s written in an altogether different tone from the rest of the book, and two, it reads more like a thesis paper than an actual part of the novel, almost as if it were written solely because, after finishing the main bulk of the novel, DeLillo realized that he had failed to sufficiently make any sort of cohesive point whatsoever, so instead he just decided to tell us the point point-blank, meaning the bulk of Underworld functions as literary masturbation while the epilogue functions as a sort of post-nut clarity.

To me, a long novel is like a rainbow, a beautiful, awe-inspiring, mysterious thing, and you kind of expect there to be a pot of gold at the end, but there’s no pot of gold at the end of Underworld, only a wastebin full of garbage, in keeping with the major theme of the book. And, in comparison with other long novels I’ve read, notably Moby Dick and Infinite Jest, two books I enjoyed overall but also have grievances with, at least there were nuggets of gold sprinkled along the arcs of those rainbows, whereas in Underworld there are just a few gold flakes here and there, but not enough to justify the journey.

I want to caveat all this with the following disclaimer. I have a deep respect for all writers. It takes serious dedication and love-of-the-craft to write anything, especially a novel, especially one that’s almost 900 pages long. Underworld is an incredibly impressive book, from this standpoint. I also want to caveat by saying that, despite throwing around claims like “Underworld is just not good” and other criticisms, the qualitative measures of “good” and “bad” are basically stupid and almost entirely subjective. As such, my opinion of Underworld is just that, an opinion, a stupid, subjective opinion. I am not trying to make any objective claims about the quality of Underworld here. I am probably not even qualified to critique a work of this caliber to begin with, as I have not written a novel myself, and I’m also not that great of a writer. I’m also not that smart. I just have a high-school-level grasp of English vocabulary and grammar, opinions, and a tendency to ramble using far more words than necessary, as evidenced by this poor excuse for a book review. What I’m trying to say is, there’s a good chance that Underworld just went over my head. I probably just didn’t get it. And since I begrudgingly forced myself to read it, I was probably not in the best mindset to fairly judge the material when I was reading it. But, if I’m being fair, Underworld’s themes are interesting, and the way it ties those themes into baseball and trash is clever. But the whole thing just kind of fell flat for me, likely because these are things I’ve already thought about on some level, so there was nothing new for me here, at least nothing new that I picked up on, keeping in mind that I’m not that smart and that this book probably just went over my head.

To be honest, I didn’t even want to write about Underworld. I was just going to move on. But then, after considering that I had spent over a month with the book, living in its world, breathing its air, getting to know what little there is to know about its incredibly dull characters, the sunk-time fallacy sunk in, and I felt obligated to write something about it, otherwise, I would feel like I’ve wasted a bunch of time.

So here I am, making up for lost time, inflicting that old psychic torture on myself again, finishing something I don’t want to finish, effectively wasting my time, writing the last sentence of a highly subjective review of Underworld.

Current Mood: jocose
Current Music: Will Ackerman, "In Search of the Turtle's Navel"

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Fairness for Reptiles

In case you haven't noticed, conversations here and on my blog can get pretty strange sometimes. Yesterday was no exception. On the weekly Covid open post, we ended up discussing the way that Franklin the Turtle (an iconic Canadian children's book character) has been picked up gleefully by the meme artists of the populist right and used in ways well designed to get howls of outrage from Canada's liberal elite. The obligatory comment about evil reptilian overlords duly appeared, and it occurred to me just how unfair it is that we blame reptiles for the behavior of, say, Bill Gates.

When I was a kid I used to keep pet snakes and lizards, so I'm fairly familiar with the behavior of reptiles. My experience is that, unlike certain plutocrats we all could name, they're not malevolent, power-mad, or crazed with insatiable greed. If you keep them well fed with mealyworms, they curl up under the heat lamp and doze off, radiating a sort of sluggish squamous bliss. I suppose we could try making Gates eat half his body weight in mealyworms, then stick him under a heat lamp and see if the same thing happens, but I have my doubts.

bad 1990s sf

The whole "evil reptilian overlords" business, for that matter, comes from British sports reporter turned conspiracy theorist David Ickes. I get the impression that he spent too many late nights watching reruns of that dubious 1980s SF show V -- the source of the poster on the right -- in which evil reptilians from space disguised themselves as human beings and took over the world. (That's basically the theme of Icke's books.) Since I'm not a fan of either the TV show or Icke's uncredited rewrites of it, I'd like to suggest that it's time to spare reptiles the utter ignominy of being associated with Bill Gates or any of the other usual suspects, and ask the natural question that comes to mind...

Just what are Gates et al.?

(Or, if you want to be a little less conspiratorial about it all, what sort of life forms do they resemble?)

I'll look forward to your suggestions in the comment thread. My theory, at least for the moment, is that they're evil space opossums. Opossums like trash, right? (When I encounter one, it's usually raiding a trash can.) The most obvious product of the people we're discussing, and the system over which they preside, is the mass production of trash. (When was the last time Microsoft released a product that wasn't total trash?) They're all marsupial supremacists, I tell you...

In that jocular vein, I throw the comment thread open to researchers into the alien biology of kleptocrats.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: WA Mozart, "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik"

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Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 225

We are now into the fifth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary all these years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health remain anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; ~~public health authorities~~ government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; new revelations are leaking out about just how bad the Covid vaccines are for human health; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.

3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

7. Please don't post LLM ("AI") generated text. This is a place for human beings to talk to other human beings, not for the regurgitation of machine-generated text. Also, please don't discuss large language models (the technology popularly and inaccurately called "artificial intelligence" these days) except as they bear directly on the Covid phenomenon. Here again, my finger is hovering over the delete button.

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

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(no subject)

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Current Mood: a little depressed
Current Music: Elton John, "Tiny Dancer"

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Magic Monday

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call me deacon blues

Back in 2016, when I was 25 years old, I was living in one of those single-wide mobile homes perilously held up by stacked cement blocks, one of those ones with the cheap vinyl skirts they wrap around the bottom to hide all the duct-taped plumbing and rotted-out wood and raccoon colonies and maybe a dead body or two, because who knows what was actually going on under there. I may have flirted with the dark abyss, but I sure as hell did not want to crawl into it to find out what was inside. My life philosophy at the time a laissez-faire mixture of red wine and nicotine clouds and pixels, so I didn’t even care about much of anything, to tell you the truth. In fact, the rent was so cheap at $650 a month that when the landlord originally showed me the property, I immediately said “Where do I sign?” and moved my wife and three-year-old daughter into the place without even so much as a basic cursory inspection, driven mostly by the fact that I was destitute both philosophically and financially, answering phones for a coffee company for like $14 an hour and binge drinking every night. I just wanted a stable roof over my family’s head, a place that wasn't in an apartment complex, a place with a yard, with some level of privacy, a place where I could play video games, drink wine, and blast super loud music while chain-smoking cigarettes outside without someone filing a noise complaint, and this super cheap rundown trailer from the 80s checked all those hedonistic boxes.

But as it turns out, skipping the cursory inspection was a big mistake, because, as I would come to find out years later, the place was a deathtrap, and I learned this the hard way, or, well, my daughter did, when the roof in her bedroom collapsed.

It’s hard to believe that almost a decade has passed since I first moved into that shithole, because I remember it as if it were yesterday. My daily routine started in medias res, do something with my daughter after work, pour my first glass of wine around 8 p.m., finish my seventh by 2 a.m., pop a few Benadryl to fall asleep, drive to the call center six hours later, repeat. I would drink so much the night before that I was pretty much still wasted the morning after. My skin was always clammy and pale and my eyes were raccoon eyes. They say men between the age of 20 to 30 are in their prime, able to muster almost supernatural levels of strength, persevere through any hardship by sheer force of will, but I spent whatever supernatural strength I had just getting out of bed in the morning with the worst hangovers known to man and then somehow driving five miles through busy morning traffic all without getting into a single car accident despite the fact that I was nodding off behind the wheel the whole time. Half the time, I wouldn’t even remember driving to work, I’d just appear at my desk in the call center, as if I had somehow teleported there, taking calls in this autopilot-like daze. “Thank you for calling Keurig, my name is Forrest. May I have your first and last name, please? Thank you. And your email address? And your coffee maker’s serial number? Thank you again. And you say your coffee maker is short-cupping? I understand. I know that must be frustrating. We’ll have to do some troubleshooting, so please be aware that the needles inside the machine are very sharp, but could you please gather a paperclip and small measuring cup, then we can get started.”

And this worked for me somehow. I reached a certain level of homeostasis. I made around $1,800 a month, $650 of that went to rent, $300 went to utilities, food was paid for by SNAP, a couple hundred went to things for my daughter, and whatever money left over went to Marlboro Lights and Liberty Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, which was the cheapest supermarket swill wine money could buy at the time, at like $8 per 2-liter bottle, which, at 30 proof, was also the most bang for your buck in terms of getting absolutely shitfaced as quickly as possible, outside of just drinking straight liquor, which I never had the stomach for. Back then, when I was 25, I was still a child, singularly focused on myself, and whatever seemingly grown-up big-boy shit I did do was only done to maintain my comfortable homeostasis. I knew I had a drinking problem, but the negative consequences were not severe enough for me to take it seriously, especially since the euphoria after a few glasses of wine was so strong that it felt like I could not live without the stuff, like life would be just a boring slog without my Cabernet. And there was an identity aspect to it as well, because I thought drinking was super cool, and I even thought that having a drinking problem was kind of cool too, like it added character in some way, a sort of tortured-soul aesthetic. When I drank red wine, I felt like some sort of vampire sophisticate. I loved the whole ritual, the orbed glass, the twist of the wine key, the pop of the cork, the glug-glug of the pour, the exotic aroma, all of it. I would hold that first sip in my mouth for like a whole minute, just swishing it around in there like a mouthful of blood. And after a few sips, I would go outside and sit on the small uncovered wooden steps that functioned as my porch, to smoke cigarettes and listen to super loud music, bringing my orbed glass along with me, because music just hits different and cigarettes just taste better when you’re wasted, and that’s a fact.

After my daughter went to bed, I would sit myself down at my computer desk with a glass of red and boot up a video game. I would play Final Fantasy XI or The Elder Scrolls Online or some other life-suck type game, just getting totally fucked up and lost in those virtual worlds. Eventually, I started joining a Discord server with my old friends from high school, which only made my drinking worse, as we’d all drink and get fucked up together. A sort of digital drinking culture evolved, to the point that, for a few years there, we would be in that Discord server every night, drinking to the point of blurred vision and slurred speech, playing our preferred game of the week, be it Monster Hunter World, Tekken 7, Risk of Rain, Counter-Strike: Source, Diablo III, King of Fighters XIII, or whatever, just yelling and laughing and trolling the shit out of each other, sometimes to the point of bitter rivalries, weeks-long feuds, all settled with our preferred choice of alcoholic beverage and controller. There was a real sense of community there, built on old friendships and video games and, most importantly, alcohol, because it was weird when someone wasn’t drinking while everyone else was, like you couldn’t connect on the same existential plane or something if you weren’t basically blackout drunk. It was the same sort of peer pressure you might experience in high school, just carried over unspoken into adulthood.

Between rounds of whatever we were playing at the time, I would step outside and smoke a cigarette or two, making sure to bring my wine glass along with me, because after I got my first taste of blood, I could not stop. The moment I could no longer taste the aftertaste of that bittersweet earthy red, something like anxious dread would creep in, a persistent fear that the night would end, that the euphoria would fade, unless I kept drinking, so I would drink and drink and drink, a crimson tide flowing down my esophagus every minute of the night, even when I was outside smoking. And to make my outside-smoking excursions more entertaining, I would play music from my phone’s speakers, and I would literally dance and sway out there in my front yard, sometimes singing at the top of my lungs.

This is the night of the expanding man
I take one last drag as I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I'll be what I want to be

Back then, my favorite band was Steely Dan. It all started when I heard the song “Peg” on the radio one day. I had heard the song before but never really paid much attention to it until one day, when the stars aligned, when it came on the classic rock station and I happened to be in just the right mood. The song resonated with me. The downtown strut of the electric piano, the intricate bounce of the bassline, the bitter darkness hidden within the joyful melody, that rich baritone background vocal by Michael McDonald, all the crazy guitar shit going on that you don’t even notice without specifically listening for it. It’s just a fantastic song, one of the greatest pop tunes ever written. It got me obsessed with Steely Dan, head over heels for their whole dark-irony-hidden-behind-layers-of-smooth-jazz sound. They had that whole anti-hipster thing going on too, which aligned well with my own anti-hip contrarian attitude. Of course, being an anti-hipster is actually just another flavor of being a hipster, perhaps the worst kind, but that didn’t stop me from going through Steely Dan’s entire discography, repeat listening to each album, falling in love with songs like “Only a Fool Would Say That,” “Bodhisattva,” “Rose Darling,” “Kid Charlemagne,” “Gaucho,” and “Your Gold Teeth II,” which, if you’ve been rolling your eyes at the Steely Dan stuff thus far, is probably the song you should listen to because it’s just straight-up poetic and beautiful, one of their few uplifting songs, musically transcendent almost, so much so that if you don’t like it, then there’s a good chance you just don’t like music, period. But back then, “Your Gold Teeth II” wasn’t my favorite song by them. My favorite song was actually “Deacon Blues,” a song that sounds like the inside of a smoky underworld dive bar, a place where the tragically hip and the perpetually misunderstood come together to drink their lives away.

Learn to work the saxophone
I play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel

Back then, Steely Dan was my band, and “Deacon Blues” was my song. I identified with that song. I wanted to live inside that song. I saw myself as the protagonist of that song, the tragic hero, the misunderstood artist, playing exactly what he feels, drinking all night long, maybe one day dying behind the wheel, because who cares, nothing really matters, the universe is all chaos and jazz, no one even asked to be here, we’re all just specks of stardust, a flash in the cosmic scheme of things.

So call me Deacon Blues.

And alcohol was my one true love, my muse. It got to the point where, if alcohol wasn’t in my bloodstream, I wasn’t really there, in the present. During the daylight hours, when I wouldn’t drink, I would spend time with my daughter, take her to the playground, the indoor kids’ places, even play dolls on the floor of her small 10x10 trailer park bedroom, but I was never really there. I mean, my physical body was there, but my soul was not. It was someplace else entirely. I was pretending. I went through the motions because I felt like I had to, out of some persistent feeling of guilt, but my heart was never really in it. Every moment I spent with her, I was counting down the seconds until my first glass of wine. The daylight hours were just an excruciatingly long prelude to getting wasted, hammered, shitfaced, sloshed, just absolutely ossified. These were my priorities. I was a child pretending to be a father, a shell of a parent. I would constantly tell my daughter that I loved her as a way to sort of compensate for my parental absenteeism, as if cheap words could ever make up for shit parenting. But whenever she would have trouble falling asleep, making me late to my first glass of wine, I would suddenly become a harsh disciplinarian, not because I thought it was an effective way to discipline a child, but because I would become frustrated and short-tempered without wine, sometimes shouting orders at the girl like I was an army drill instructor or something. “THAT WAS THE LAST STORY. GET IN BED. PUT YOUR DAMN TOYS AWAY. CLOSE YOUR EYES. IT’S BEDTIME. DON’T MAKE ME TELL YOU AGAIN.” And this was usually followed by some pathetic apology and cheap I-love-you.

When my wife would confront me about the shouting, I would justify my outbursts by espousing some rigid parenting philosophy that I didn’t actually believe in. “Kids need discipline. There’s a certain level of fear that must be maintained. This is the way of the world, just look at countries, states, governments, they all maintain order through fear. This is just reality. Laws exist for a reason. My shouting functions as a deterrent to bad behavior, in the same way that the threat of jail functions as a deterrent to crime. What do you really think the world would be like without laws? Do you really think it would be a better place? Honestly? Don’t be naive.” And then I would pour the first of many glasses of wine and disappear into my office, feeling guilty for a whole ten seconds before my blood alcohol levels spiked, at which point I would ride the crimson tide, waves of drunken euphoria, without a care in the world. And this is how it went, night after night.

And it was on one of these nights that the roof caved in.

It had been raining all throughout the week, so it was a damp Friday night. I read my daughter a short story, cleaned up her Legos and Bratz dolls and stuffed animals, tucked her into her cheap Minnie Mouse toddler bed, kissed her on the head, told her that I loved her, apologized for shouting, turned off the lights, shut the bedroom door behind me, poured my first glass of red, logged into the Discord server, and started my whole hedonistic routine. I drank and smoked and listened to Steely Dan for hours and hours. And by the time I got ready for bed, which was around three in the morning, I had drunk so much that my head felt like it was being repeatedly hit with a hammer underwater, and my stomach was one of those bubbling lava pits you see in video games. I had lost control, failed to pace myself, as I often did. I was hunched over the toilet at three in the morning, vomiting up a crimson tide. The inside of the bowl looked like the scene of some grisly murder. After about an hour of throwing up, through sheer force of will, I picked myself up, stumbled to bed, and fell face first on the mattress, passing out.

When I woke up, my head was pounding something fierce, my chest was burning, and it was still dark outside. My wife was shouting something from the foot of the bed. I didn't want to get up, but it seemed serious, so I used some of that supernatural strength young men supposedly have and rolled myself out of bed. My wife was gesticulating, frantically explaining something that I could not comprehend in the moment, and then she grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the living room. It was dark, and our daughter was sitting there on the couch, hands in her dark hair, sobbing. My wits were slowly coming back, so I walked up to my daughter, put a hand on her shoulder, and tried to comfort her, but she wouldn’t calm down. Then my wife said something like, “It’s her bedroom. The roof. The roof fell through. She was in there for hours.” And I could not believe it. So I rushed to my daughter’s bedroom to see for myself.

It was dark in there, and there was a draft, and there was a heaviness in the air. I started coughing, covering my mouth. Then I turned the light on, saw the pile of rotted wood right by the Minnie Mouse bed, the bed itself covered in a thick layer of gray and brown. There were clouds of dust hovering throughout the room, obscuring the Disney pinups and galaxies of glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars. I looked up, and that’s when I saw it, a huge gaping hole, pieces of ceiling and wood jutting out all around the wound, just dangling there, still in the process of collapse. My wife said something from behind me. “I told you this place was a deathtrap.” So I turned to my wife, asked her when this happened, and she said it must have happened hours ago, according to our daughter, so it must have happened when I was awake in the office. She said our daughter was paralyzed with fear, that she couldn't move, that she had just stayed there in bed, under the covers, for who knows how long, frozen with fear, calling out for help. My wife asked if I had heard anything, if I had heard the crash, if I had heard our daughter calling out. I told her that I hadn't heard a thing. She glared at me with something like disgust in her eyes.

I remember just standing in that broken room, thinking it was a symbol of some kind, of neglect, of carelessness, of dysfunction. I had no words. My eyes were like super moons, and my body had taken on some sort of heinous gravity. I imagined our daughter, under the covers, eyes closed tight, her little body trembling, fearing for her life, believing some monster had crawled out of the ceiling and was about to eat her. I imagined her calling out for mommy, for daddy, for God, for anyone, to come help, how her cries went unanswered solely because I was too drunk to hear them.

My wife said something like, “This place is unlivable. I’m going to file a lawsuit.” And then she pulled out her phone and started fiddling with it. “We’re going to need pictures. Let me take a picture.”

But I stopped her, told her to let me do it, so she gave me her phone. I walked further into the room to get a better look at the hole, but I was too afraid to go directly underneath it, so instead I booted up the phone’s camera app, turned the flash on, stretched my phone-arm, positioning the phone under the hole, and snapped a picture. And that’s when I saw it.

( Photograph #1 )

Apparently, there was a hole in the top roof, and a family of raccoons had been living up there in the attic-like space between the ceiling and the roof itself. The hole must have been pretty old, judging by the water damage and amount of mold shown in the picture. So I figured that, due to the accumulated rain water and who-knows-how-many raccoons, the ceiling just couldn’t hold anymore, finally collapsing under the weight of it all. And I figured that the raccoon in the picture must have been the matriarch of the family, who must have gotten out of there before the ceiling fell through. But, eyes wide and mouth agape at possibly the craziest picture I had ever taken in my life, I wondered why the mother raccoon was looking down into the room, like what could she have possibly been looking for?

That’s when my parenting instincts kicked in. The mother raccoon must have been looking for one of her babies, one of her little kits, who must have fallen through the ceiling. So I scoured the bedroom, looking for raccoons. And it only took me about five minutes to find one, a little baby raccoon, hidden underneath a pile of toys in the corner of the room, curled up in a little pink bowl.

( Photograph #2 )

The kit’s eyes were closed tight, and she was shivering a little bit. There was a pinkish bulge on one of her legs, like an injury of some sort, maybe from the fall. I knew she couldn't have landed in the bowl itself, as the bowl was on the other side of the room, so I figured that she must have crawled across the room after falling through the ceiling, and when she found a place to hide, she just curled up there and waited for mommy and daddy to come rescue her. But mommy and daddy never came, just me. And, luckily for that little kit, I love raccoons. But when I was holding that pink bowl in my hand, looking down at that injured baby raccoon, seeing it all helpless and afraid, I didn’t really see a raccoon at all, I saw my daughter.

My wife wouldn’t let us keep the baby raccoon, even though I wanted to. So, later that day, I put the kit in a box stuffed with towels and put the box outside, at the treeline of the woods near my trailer, hoping that mom would return, take her baby back home, wherever home was for them. But hours passed, and mom never showed up, so I got worried about the little kit, worried that she might starve, that she might succumb to her injuries, so my daughter and I took the baby raccoon to the local animal hospital, but they told us that they couldn’t take wild animals, that they didn’t have the proper permits or something. So we left that animal hospital dejected and confused, having no idea what to do with the little kit. I remember just sitting there in my car, head still pounding from the night before, coming up totally blank on what to do next.

But after about five minutes, a young woman walked up to my car and signaled me to roll down the window. “We’ll take the raccoon, but you’ll need to sneak it into the back. Drive around.”

So I turned the key, revved the engine, and started driving around to the backside of the animal hospital. The car’s stereo connected to my phone automatically via Bluetooth, playing the last song I was listening to the night before, which just happened to be “Deacon Blues.” And when I got to the backside of the animal shelter, I left the car running in park, told my daughter to wait, and carried the box with the baby raccoon in it to the back door, where the same young woman from before smiled at me, took the box from my hands, and said, “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine, we’ll take care of her.” And I was left feeling a little sad, because for some reason I knew that I would never see that baby raccoon again.

“Deacon Blues” was still playing when I got back into the car. It was on the chorus, so before I buckled my seatbelt and put the car in reverse, I paused to savor that dark, jazzy sound.

They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

But this was not the song I knew. It was different. It was an entirely new song, with an entirely new meaning. I started thinking to myself, the protagonist of this song, he’s not some tortured-soul romantic, some hip idealist, some sort of tragic hero rebelling against the tides of a dark, unfair world. He’s not any of those things.

He’s just some fucking alcoholic loser.

So call me Deacon Blues.

Entry tags:

seamans life memories / воспоминания моряка

📝 Оригинальный текст записи

Приветствую всех моих читателей. С нетерпением ждал возможности оставить ещё одну запись, историю.
Сейчас у меня, к сожалению, стало намного меньше времени. Но стало больше моря — свободного, неконтролируемого.

Если коротко, то уже около месяца я не читал новостей. Совсем. И знаете — ничего не изменилось: война продолжается.
Я каждый день вижу порт, торговые суда, и, может быть, именно этому посвящу эту старую историю, совсем не относящуюся ко лжи вокруг и всей ситуации. Просто воспоминания из прошлого.

Дело было одной осенью в городе Новороссийск. Летняя жара начала спадать, и уже ощущалось появление ветров «бора». До этого, когда я был там в прошлый раз, мой практикант праздновал своё 18-летие. Забавный малый, только начинал понимать, что да как. Имя ему было «Вовка Питерский», хотя сам он был из Молдавии, жил в Одессе, а под страхом, что его могут забрать в армию, переехал в Петербург (я знаю, что сейчас он уже не живёт в той проклятой стране).

Отпраздновал он тогда хорошо — «домой» его принесли на руках начальники, с расцарапанной мордой и в полной отключке. Как показало потом «следствие», Володя впервые попал в стриптиз-клуб. Вернее, не сам пошёл — коллеги отвели. По словам очевидцев, восторг был невероятный: и цена, и отношение к нему в заведении.
Самым смешным были царапины на лице — после очередного «приватного танца» он вышел из клуба и попытался сорвать розы с клумбы (моя школа, этому я его научил, но не говорил, что этого никто не ценит))). Там, собственно, и упал лицом в розовый куст.

Спустя несколько месяцев мы снова оказались там. В этот раз Володька сказал, что никуда не пойдёт, да и у меня не было особого настроения. Но была возможность выйти, перевести дух.
Мой Капитан был молод и весел — сошлись на том, что пойдём на небольшой шопинг, ибо моему внешнему виду нужен апгрейд. Мол, мой чёрный пиджак, джинсы, рубашка — всё траурное, а нужен такой пиджак, чтобы смотришь — и сразу улыбаться! Я был не против. Характерно, что сам он был в своём бирюзовом свадебном пиджаке.

Наступила ночь. Я задержался на вахте, подменял коллегу, у которого в городе оказалась одноклассница. Дело житейское. К двум ночи я освободился и уже собирался лечь спать, как вдруг звонит спутниковый телефон:

— Аллёёё! Это хто? Ааа… Ты где?
— А куда вы звоните, тут я. Куда мне идти?
— А мы в Пальто! (голос пьяный в хлам и очень весёлый)
— Сан Саныч, я рад, что вы купили пальто, я пойду спать.
— А вот и нет! Пальто — это клуб! Отличное место, давай сюда, все тебя ждут!

И да… Я пошёл собираться.

Ни о каком Uber там речи быть не могло — только местные такси. Я вышел к ларьку и попросил вызвать машину в этот самый «Пальто».
Приехала чёрная, убитая жизнью BMW (я до последнего ждал Lada). Доехал вовремя, прямо ко входу.
Четверо моих коллег уже почти дрались с местными «галустянами» (кавказскими парнями).
Мой выход из BMW был эпичен — особенно когда меня заметил Капитан и на всю улицу заорал:

— Ну всё, ребята, кабзда вам! — и указал на меня.

Галустяны улыбнулись, но конфликт только набирал обороты. Решалось, где мы будем «выяснять отношения». (Хорошо ещё, что мои коллеги не сказали, что мы украинцы. Хотя акцент их сильно выдавал — но в таком состоянии никто уже не разбирался.)

В итоге конфликт закончился миром. Не прошло и двадцати минут, как мы уже сидели все вместе за одним столом. Инженер Игорь даже целовался с одним из галустянов.
Вечер перестал быть томным, а мне хотелось чего-то другого — потанцевать, повеселиться и ни о чём не думать.

Практикант Володя был с нами, но не пил — боялся повторения. А мне как раз нужен был второй пилот, который мог бы не только стоять на ногах, но и ходить, и иногда мне поддакивать.

Пара горячих шотов — и команда от меня: «Володя, на танцпол».
В этот момент меня перехватывает Капитан, тянет к барной стойке и просит «посидеть по-мужски».
Чтобы вы понимали, «по-мужски» у него выглядело так: ведёрко для льда было, но льда в нём не было — там был виски. Он просто не хотел менять стакан.

Поговорил я с ним и пошёл искать Володю.
Тот стоял в углу и смотрел… на пиджачок.

— Володя, не смотри — действуй.

Через полчаса мы уже сидели с какими-то девушками за столом. Разговаривать было невозможно из-за музыки, поэтому мы просто пили.

Время близилось к утру. Последним заказом по их желанию были по два стакана колы с коньяком. Очень странное сочетание.
Для себя и Володи у нас были лонги и пара классических коктейлей — в сумме восемь стаканов.
Заказ принесли очень быстро и объявили:

— Мы закрываемся. У вас 5 минут.

Сомнительные девушки сказали, что подождут нас на выходе. Мы расплатились, и я попросил официанта вынести напитки на улицу.

— Нет, только в помещении.
Ну ладно — не пропадать же добру. Я начал с коньяков. Когда залпом их выпил, подошёл охранник и сказал, что дарит остальные четыре стакана. Можно забрать так, только чтобы я ушёл. Хозяин — барин.

Слабо помню, как так вышло, что стаканы со мной не вернулись, но точно помню, что я жёстко продинамил местных барышень.
На часах почти пять — можно бы уже ехать обратно… но нет.

Появился Игорь — еле стоящий на ногах, но с каким-то сосудом в руках.
Володя стоял рядом и уверял, что поможет мне вернуться обратно. Но я же сам себе хозяин. Все мы тут на ровне.
И пошли мы ещё куда-то, а потом ещё куда-то. И вдруг я решил попробовать то, чего никогда не делал:

— А погнали в сауну. Как раз часик — и домой!

Игорь обнял меня и побежал искать такси. Володя пытался отговорить — безуспешно.

По дороге мы, кажется, уговорили волшебно появившуюся бутылку — не помню чего. И не помню как, но нас привезли к каким-то хрущёвкам, где в подвале была сауна. Мне было весело, и я совершенно не обратил внимания на отсутствие эстетики — до тех пор, пока из подвала не вышла бабушка-уборщица и не сказала:

— Подождите минут 20, там прошлые гости немного… накакали. Пока нельзя.

Не столько слова бабушки, сколько её вид отрезвил меня. Было решено возвращаться. Тем более мне надо было на работу.
Игорь был печален, но знал, что на этом мы не закончим.

По дороге возникло финальное препятствие: две женские фигуры в красных пальто на обочине дороги. Мы как раз почти приехали.
Игорь выскочил из машины, подбежал к ним и радостно спросил:

— Девушки, а почём любовь?

Фраза стала крылатой — лично для меня.
Игорю хотелось продолжения праздника. Тут ему уже и сауну нарисовали, и всё остальное. Но я уже не мог быть с ним.
Расплатившись с таксистом, я пошёл прощаться.
Игорь пытался удержать меня как мог, но у него был Володя.

Самое смешное в этой истории — именно их диалог:

— Игорь, а шо мы будем делать?
— Ну я-то знаю, шо я буду делать. А ты оставайся — посмотришь и поучишься.

На этом я сказал:

— Володя, ты уже взрослый. Думай своей головой. А я пошёл. За работу не думай — прикрою.

Минут через пятнадцать, уже по промзоне, он меня догнал. И обиженно заявил, что я его «кинул», как мог оставить его с Игорем. Но остался он сам — и ситуация, думаю, его многому научила.

Продолжение этой истории могло бы включать множество забавных эпизодов, связанных с работой.
Мне просто захотелось оставить это здесь.

Note translated in assistance with AI.

Hello to all my readers. I’ve been looking forward to leaving another entry, another story.
Unfortunately, I have much less time now. But I have more of the sea — free, uncontrolled.

In short, I haven’t read the news for almost a month. Not at all. And you know what? Nothing has changed: the war goes on.
I see the port every day, cargo ships, and maybe that’s why I’m dedicating this old story to the sea — a story that has nothing to do with the lies around us and with the whole situation. Just memories from the past.

It happened one autumn in the city of Novorossiysk. The summer heat had begun to fade, and the first “bora” winds were starting to show themselves.
The previous time I had been there, my trainee celebrated his 18th birthday. A funny guy, only beginning to understand how things work. His name was “Vovka Piterskiy”, although he was from Moldova, lived in Odesa, and then moved to Saint Petersburg out of fear that he might suddenly be drafted (I know he no longer lives in that cursed country).

He celebrated well — the bosses carried him “home” in their arms, scratched face, completely knocked out. As the “investigation” showed, it was his first time in a strip club. Or rather, he didn’t go — he was taken there by my colleagues. According to witnesses, the excitement was incredible: the prices, the attention he got there.
The funniest part was the scratches: after a private dance he walked out, tried to pick roses from a flowerbed (my influence — I taught him that trick, but didn’t warn him that nobody actually appreciates it))) and fell face-first into the rose bushes.

A few months later we ended up there again. This time, Vovka refused to go out, and I wasn’t in the mood either. But we had a chance to step outside and breathe for a bit.
My Captain was young and cheerful. We agreed on a small shopping trip because, apparently, my appearance needed an upgrade. My black jacket, jeans, and shirt were too “funeral”, he said, and I needed a jacket that would make people smile just by looking at it. I didn’t mind. He himself was wearing his turquoise wedding jacket.

Night came. I stayed longer on watch, covering for a colleague whose school friend was in town. Life happens.
Around 2 a.m. I was finally free and heading to bed when the satellite phone rang:

— Hellooo! Who’s this? Aaaah… Where are you?
— Where are you calling? I’m here. Where should I go?
— We’re at Palto! (voice completely drunk and very excited)
— San Sanych, I’m glad you bought a coat, I’m going to sleep.
— No-no-no! “Palto” is a club! Great place, come here, everyone’s waiting for you!

…And yes, I started getting dressed.

No Uber there — only local taxis. I walked to a kiosk and asked them to call a car to “Palto”.
A black, life-beaten BMW arrived (I was expecting a Lada to the very end). I arrived right on time, straight to the entrance.
Four of my colleagues were already on the verge of fighting with some local “Galustyans” (Caucasian guys).

My exit from the BMW was epic — especially when the Captain saw me and shouted across the whole street:

— Well, that’s it guys, you’re done! — pointing at me.

The Galustyans smiled, but the conflict kept growing. We were deciding where to “settle” things. (Good thing the guys didn’t mention that we were Ukrainians. Their accent gave them away, but no one in that state cared.)

In the end, the fight dissolved. Within twenty minutes we were all sitting together at one table. Engineer Igor was even kissing one of the Galustyans.
The night was no longer boring, but I wanted something else — to dance, to have fun, to stop thinking.

Trainee Vovka was with us, sober this time — afraid of repeating his previous fate. But he was perfect as my second pilot: able to stand, walk, and occasionally agree with me.

A couple of hot shots — and my command: “Vovka, to the dance floor.”
At that moment the Captain grabbed me, pulled me to the bar, and asked to “sit like real men”.
For him, “real men” meant this: there was an ice bucket, but no ice — it was filled with whiskey. He simply didn’t want to change the glass.

After talking a bit, I went to find Vovka.
He stood in the corner staring… at a jacket.

— Vovka, don’t look — act.

Thirty minutes later we were sitting with some girls at a table. Talking was impossible because of the music, so we drank.

Morning was approaching. Their final request was two glasses of cola with cognac each — very strange.
For myself and Vovka we ordered long drinks and a couple of classics — eight glasses in total.

The drinks arrived fast, and the waiter announced:

— We’re closing. You have 5 minutes.

The questionable girls said they’d wait for us outside. We paid, and I asked the waiter to bring the glasses out with us.

— No, only inside.
Well, fine — can’t let the drinks go to waste. I started with the cognacs. After downing them, a security guard approached and said he’d gift us the remaining four glasses, just so I’d leave. His bar — his rules.

I barely remember how the glasses didn't leave with me, but I clearly remember ditching those suspicious girls.
It was nearly five. Time to go back… but of course not.

Igor appeared — barely standing but holding some kind of vessel.
Vovka stood next to him assuring me he’d help me get back. But I’m my own master, we’re all equals here.
We wandered somewhere, then somewhere else, and suddenly I decided to try something I had never done:

— Let’s go to a sauna! One hour — and home!

Igor hugged me and ran to find a taxi. Vovka tried to stop us — useless.

Somewhere on the road we finished a magically appearing bottle — I don’t remember what.
We arrived at some Khrushchyovkas, where a sauna was in the basement. I didn’t pay attention to the aesthetics — until a grandmother/cleaner came out and said:

— Wait twenty minutes, the previous guests… made a bit of a mess. You can’t enter yet.

Not even her words, but her look sobered me up.
Decision made — we go back. I had work anyway.
Igor was sad but knew the night wasn’t over for him.

On the way back there was one final obstacle: two women in red coats by the roadside.
We stopped. Igor jumped out, ran to them and loudly asked:

— Ladies, how much is love?

The phrase became legendary — for me, at least.
Igor wanted to continue the celebration. He was being offered saunas again and everything else. But I couldn’t stay.

We paid the driver, and I went to say goodbye.
Igor tried to stop me, but he still had Vovka.

The funniest part of the whole story was their dialogue:

— Igor, what are we going to do?
— Well I know what I’m going to do. And you stay here — watch and learn.

I said:

— Vovka, you’re an adult. Use your own head. I’m leaving. Don’t worry about work — I’ll cover for you.

Fifteen minutes later, somewhere in the industrial zone, he caught up with me — very offended, asking how I could abandon him with Igor.
But he stayed of his own free will — and I think the situation taught him something.

I could describe many more episodes connected to this story — many truly funny ones, tied to work.
I just wanted to leave this one here.

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: The Eagles, "Life in the Fast Lane"

Entry tags:

Frugal First Friday

Welcome to Frugal First Friday! This is a monthly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up on the first Friday of each month, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course.

There has been talk about releasing these posts in print format. In case that turns out to be worth pursuing, please note: if you comment on this or any future Frugal First Friday post, you are giving permission for that comment to be included in print or other editions. This means, for those of you into the legalese, that by posting something in the comment thread you are granting me non-exclusive reprint rights to your comment, and permitting me to transfer those to a publisher or other venue. Your contribution will have your name or internet handle attached, your choice.

I also have some simple rules to offer, which may change further as we proceed. One change from the earlier frame is that if you produce goods or services yourself, and would like to let readers know about them, you may post one (1) (yes, just one) comment per month letting people know, with a link to your website or other contact info. The other rules ought to be familiar by now.

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc. I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #3: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

Rule #4: don't post LLM ("AI") generated content, and don't bring up the subject unless you're running a homemade LLM program on your own homebuilt, steam-powered server farm.

With that said, have at it!