Dan – Page 18

Summer Babe

For all the bitching and kvetching that I do about Prague during the late winter, man it’s hard to beat this place in the spring and summer months. Above is the view this morning on the way to teach class at 8am. This week is part of the fortnightly stretch where god turns the color knob on the apple blossom trees to ‘fluffy pink’.

Speaking of improved weather, I was happy to discover yesterday that ‘summer’ produces the following unexpectedly solid playlist in my iTunes (as always, click for larger image):

The Siberian Basketball Diaries, Part Seven

[ed note: the following is an excerpt from the travel journal of my old high school friend Andrej Mucic. In 2005, Andrej bicycled over 7,000 miles through Siberia to raise money for the American Anti-Slavery Group. Previous installments start here.

In the last installment, Andrej has been set up with a girl by the enigmatic Chechens Mohamed and Vaslan in the city of Susuman. In this- maybe my favorite- entry, he meets the girl Marina.]

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Subject: In the Den of the Chechens, Part Two: Marina’s Dream
6/22/05

The handsome Chechen, Vaslan, calls a girl named Marina and arranges a date. I speak to her on the phone and she demands that I speak English as proof that I am indeed an American. She giggles a lot. Vaslan describes her as a real beauty, and he makes the universal hour-glass motion with his hands.

I say goodbye to the Chechens and leave their den. I go back to my little dorm room and stare at the wall paper for 90 minutes and listen to my loud intestines doing their thing. (They are beginning to sound like the plumbing in an under-funded inter-city school in February.) Then I hop in a cab and tell the man “Coldtown” (Holod-nee).

This Coldtown can only be described as post-Apocolyptic. Imagine Mad Max meets Beruit circe 1987. There, in front of a building that looks like twice baked roadkill, there is a girl waiting. She is wearing a black satin dress; it’s basically lingerie. In the back it laces up, like a corset. Her shoes are black ankle boots with 4 inch steel heels. Her hair is dark brown with highlights. (It gets better:) In her right hand she is holding a large yellow daisy, and in the middle of her chest is a day-glow pink button, on which is written, in Russian “I wouldn’t recommend it!” She is beautiful beyond words. And she walks like a sea snake.

In the cab, she asks me how I know Vaslan. I tell her that I met him through Mohamed the Chechen. She looks puzzled. I ask her where she would like to go. She says “to Charm.” The cabbie knows the way.

When we arrive at the Cafe Charm, Mohamed the Chechen is waiting outside. They say hello and I shake hands with him. And I tell Marina that this is the guy I met on the plane from Moscow. But for some reason she calls him Adam. Apparently Mohamed-Adam fancies himself an Arctic James Bond, and enjoys using aliases.

Then Mohamed-Adam jumps in a very expensive Infiniti and drives off.

In the Cafe, Marina and I sit down to chat over beers. She tells me that her dream is to live in Morocco.

At that moment, the beer that had been in my mouth, quickly blasted out through my nose and onto the table between us. Morocco?!??!?!?!?!?!?!!?! Who the fuck wants to live in MORACCO?? * After I clean up the mess she goes on to tell me that she likes Moslem men because they are polite and don’t drink.

This, dear reader is the reason I am here. This type of girl is the kind that is ripe for the white slavery system. It takes me two beers to mentally prepare her diagnosis:

Her father is a drunk who doesn’t love her. He brought the family here from sunny Ukraine and then lost his job as the gold sands dried up, and then drank even more. Now she is attracted to men that don’t drink, but that still don’t love her; classic pattern. She was obviously in love with Vaslan, and he clearly didn’t feel the same way. He probably didn’t have the heart to dump her so he hoped that me and her would get together and he would have a good pretext for ending their little tryst.

I told her not to accept any job offers to go and work overseas. I told her about the things I had seen in my travels. I told her that the only way she was ever going to see Morocco was as part of an academic conference. I told her that she has no marketable skill that any other economy could possibly need, except shaking that ass.

[* ed note: I love the fact that ‘Morocco’ is spelled two different ways here– it seems like a product of the narrator’s astonishment.]

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Next: A Rough Ride to the Balls

Eliminate Morning Hangovers

Friends in the U.S. often ask me if I follow Czech politics. My usual answer is that there’s not a lot to follow.

Lack of drama can be a good thing. After 45 years of communism, Czechs have basically decided they’ve had enough of run-amok ideology. As a result, there seems to be an implicit handshake agreement in place between every person in the country to keep hot-button cultural issues out of the political conversation. You’re not even allowed fly a Czech flag out of your window–– I’m telling you, the Czechs have had it with nationalism, fascism, socialism, whatever ‘-ism’ you like. I can’t even imagine a political debate in this country about, say, something like abortion rights– it’s simply impossible to picture.

Of course, lack of drama can also be a bad thing. It can indicate ‘everything sucks here politically and we’re so disillusioned that we can’t even drum up the necessary passion to get involved in a big heated political debate.’ Unfortunately, this is just as much the case as the pragmatism described above. I’ve literally never heard a single Czech person say a single positive thing about any active Czech politician. A bunch of assholes come together to make money– as my friend put it– seems to be the common consensus. In the U.S., we engage in a pet pessimism that our politicians are the all same, but deep down we know this not to be the case: you can say that George W. Bush and Al Gore are both assholes, but they’re clearly assholes in very different ways and have different belief systems and represent opposite ends of the Baby Boomer asshole axis. Maybe the ways in which they’re different don’t really matter as much as we’d like, but one can at least clearly differentiate between the two on a surface level. In the Czech case, the politicians really are all the same, and they’re not even assholes in a dynamic sense. For lack of a better analogy, they’re the guy driving the expensive car who nearly runs you over on a crosswalk and then angrily gestures at you to get out of his way. Assholes in a completely unoriginal, commonplace, banal sense. Assholes without affect.

A sign of how bad things are: Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, is probably the world’s foremost global warming denier (now that Bush and that Australian jerk are no longer in office). Most Czechs I know despise his politics. And yet, they respect him to a degree compared to other Czech politicians simply because he comes across as reasonably ‘statesmanlike’– he’s intelligent, he knows how to handle himself and doesn’t overtly embarrass himself or the country. Compare these qualities to the rank amateurism of Mirek Topolanek, recently-ousted Prime Minister, who once flipped a rival politician the bird during a parliamentary debate and locked a respected journalist in an airport bathroom. Topolanek was the aspiring nobody who got up on stage and referred to Obama’s economic policy as ‘the road to hell’ in last year’s big summit and earned round rebuke from a rainbow coalition of world leaders. The ranks of decent politicians are so thin here that it’s a plus if you can simply carry yourself with a modicum of competence, never mind how bad your ideas might be.

Absent any inspiring ideological battles, and with all of its practitioners thoroughly dislikable (and corrupt, although that’s a subject for another post), politics in this country mostly revolves around allocation of social benefits and deciding how to pay for them. In the upcoming June election, one of the big issues is a medical co-pay scheme implemented by the ruling center-right party that requires you to pay 30 Czech crowns out-of-pocket to see a doctor. 30 crowns equals about $1.50. This is the raging fire of policy debate that is supposed to drive people to the polls: whether or not you should have to pay a buck fifty in addition to the (from a U.S. perspective) shockingly reasonable monthly fee that everyone pays to receive full health care. Hardly Lincoln vs. McClellan 1864. In fairness, there are larger and more systemic issues, to be sure (the aforementioned corruption, and a big deficit), but none of these seem to rile people like the 30 crown co-pay.

The pettiness that punctuates Czech politics is particularly evident in the massive billboard campaigns that you can’t escape for more than a minute if you’re driving on the highway here right now. The one at the top of this post is an attack ad aimed at Jiri Paroubek, leader of the left center Social Democrats (who, incidentally, is even more despised than other politicians among Czechs I know, in spite of the fact that most of these friends have left-leaning tendencies). The ad is meant to satirize Paroubek’s alleged practice of promising all things to all people without articulating a clear sense of how he’s going to pay for it (think ‘tax-and-spend liberal’). So, he’s shown in front of a row of empty bottles with the line ‘I will eliminate morning hangovers’. Here’s a detail from another baffling one that says (roughly), ‘I fight against clams, slugs and mollusks’:

I guess the idea is to paint him as power-mad, vowing to defeat each and every commonplace thing that stands in his way. To me, it seems very much like a campaign that might have been composed by a media team of canny 12 year-olds. Politics in this part of the world have come a long way from iron curtain days…. but there’s still a long way to go, baby.

The Siberian Basketball Diaries, Part Six

Andrej has survived his hitchhiking experience in the dynamite truck and is now in the town of Susuman (map).]

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Subject: In the Den of the Chechens, Part One
6/22/05

Susuman is a very little town, with a population of, I would say, 5,000 souls. The main street is called Sovietskaya, and that’s about it. The Kolyma Highway runs along its northern border the mountains border it to the south.

I managed to find lodging here through the influence of the Na-Chelnik Roos-Lan Nickolaievich. The real hotel was full. If you could see this place, you’d have to wonder how the hotel could possibly be full. But it was. So my buddy Roos-Lan gets me a room at the local goldminer’s dormatorium. The walllpaper of my room was Mondrian-esque Soviet print, and the silence of the first night nearly drove me mad. All I had to listen to was the oddly regular movement of my bowels. I would sit in bed and look at my watch and time the various sounds that my guts made. It was all too regular for comfort. Maybe it was all the fish scales and bones I had been eating, against the advice of the locals…but they’re so salty and tasty!

Sleeping is tough here because it’s so quite, and because there is no darkness, and the curtains aren’t thick enough to block out the night’s light.

In the morning I decided to walk around this wee town until I could find the leggy snow maiden Julia.

I’m currently in the middle of a one-man boycott of the Russian telephone system. If any of you ever come here, learn to speak the phrase “I’m an outlander and I am unable to use the telephone, could you please dial this number for me, thank you.” I had Julia’s number but I couldn’t reach her.

I knew that if I walked around long enough I would find her. She’s hard to miss.

In the meantime I decide to go to the park and interrogate the locals about the road conditions for my journey further east. So I buy a 6-pack of Klinsko lager tallboys and head for the park. It was a sunny day, rife with mosquitos, and I knew that there would be many people there that could tell me about the road that passes the town of Khan-ditch-Khan.

On the way to the park I see Mohamed.

STOP. REWIND.

On the plane from Moscow to Magadan, I met a very sketchy Chechen named Mohamed. He was wearing a dark brown pin-striped suit, elf-toed dress shoes, has eerie lime green eyes and all gold teeth.

The first thing he does is hand me a 10,000 Turkmenistani note, and then he asks me for a gift. I had nothing I could give him, except a syringe and a hypodermic needle. He refused this gift, saying that he was not a heroin addict. He showed me on my map his home, a region known as the Terek. He told me he was a gold miner in Susuman. And he asked me if he could share my hotel with me in Magadan. I politely told him I was staying with friends. He was very gregarious and impressed by my undertaking.

FASTFORWARD BACK TO SUSUMAN.

So there I bump into Mohamed on the street, on the way to the park. “Hey why haven’t you called me” says Mohamed.
I tell him about my boycott of the telephone system.

He insists I accompany him somewhere. Along the way he asks every pretty girl if she speaks English. We get to a building around the corner and he makes the universal welcome gesture. As he does this I notice a huge hunting knife wedged into his pants, above the left hip. He leads me up three flights of stairs into an apartment.

I know what you’re thinking: Andrej you fool! How could you follow a complete stranger, knife-toting stanger, and a Chechen, into a building without back up?

If there’s one thing I know, it’s Moslems. Not only have I read both volumes of Hodgeson, but I also grew up in Libya. I know that to be a guest in a Moslem’s home is to be as safe as a bug in a rug. Besides, I had Wolfsnoutchopper on me, mounted upsidedown along my spine and under my flight jacket, but I knew I wouldn’t need it.

On the way up the stairs, Mohamed turns to me and says. “Tell them you are an Arab.”

It would be difficult to convince them that I am an Arab, on account of the fact that I don’t speak Arabic and I am carrying four tall beers in one hand and one open one in the other.

In the apartment are four young Chechen toughs, all dressed in black. The walls of the apartment are covered in Persian rugs, so the place has the feel of a Bedouin tent. They’ re watching TV and their white skull caps are on top of the TV.

So there I am, dear readers, sitting in the middle of five Chechens, drinking a cold one.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Chechen nation, allow me to briefly fill you in: They are a small Moslem nation, living in the Caucasian mountains, that have been engaged in an on-again off-again war with the Russians for 300 years or so. They consider drinking alcohol harem (forbidden taboo), but the laws of hospitality supercede religious law.

They were very cool.

Mohamed insisted that I pay $40 for me and him to have sex with two prostitutes. I told him that paying for sex was against my religion. He kept on insisting. Then the young boxer, Vaslan, stepped in and told Mohamed to shut his falafel hole. Vaslan wanted to give me a gift. He tells me that he knows a beautiful girl he will hook me up with, obviously a girl he had been going with, and/or, just having sex with. He tells me that this is his gift to me. To refuse a gift is a grave insult, among Moslems, so your humble narrator agrees…..

—–

Next: The Chechens, Part Two: Marina’s Dream

[Photo: entering Susuman]

Supply-Your-Own-Caption Contest

From a Mexican TV slapstick comedy that I caught a few minutes of in the Radioshack on Mission St. I was literally just standing in front of a TV taking shots of the screen with my phone while my friend bought batteries for his camera, hence the grainy ‘field footage’ quality of the images.

Unfortunately, I missed the comic denouement where– of course– the doctor finds a pretext to ‘examine’ the nurse and starts pawing at her bosom with his stethoscope to peals of laughter and applause. So, you’re on your own as far as visualizing a conclusion to this Chekovian little drama.

Them

Spending time in San Francisco always reminds me of the fact that there are people who sit to the left of me on the political spectrum. This might seem like an obvious point (I mean, there has to be someone to the left of you, no matter who you are), but it really only began to dawn on me about halfway through the 10 years I lived in SF. In high school, it always just seemed to me that anyone worth knowing had wildly left-wing opinions about everything (after all, this is the time to be unrelentingly idealistic, given that you never have to apply your ideas to anything remotely realistic). The social scene in my college, meanwhile, was just an unfettered left-facing stampede: if you could make a case that you were either oppressed or felt great sympathy for the oppressed, you were on the way to enjoying popularity and easy sex, no matter how vague and platitudinous your case was. Growing up in these environments, I never really felt any motivation to temper my instinctual leftism– even when I felt the occasional flicker of doubt, I basically just went along with the program.

Shortly after I moved to SF in ’96, I can remember meeting a sensitive, bearded soul who expressed a belief that OJ Simpson was innocent of the crimes charged against him and had been systematically framed by the LAPD. To this day, he remains the only white person I’ve ever heard voice this opinion. At that time, although I disagreed with his belief system, I struggled to find an explanation as to how we could see things so differently. In other words, I basically took his statements as a legitimate, authentic viewpoint, albeit one that diverged sharply from mine. Nowadays, I would simply write him off as a dogmatist, someone whose opinions– endearing as I may find them– are reverse-engineered to fit certain predetermined norms and conclusions. And while the fact that he was wearing Guatemalan hippie pants would seem to support my current perspective, the fact that I can’t muster my former open-mindedness is obviously something of a loss.

The real watershed, however, occured sometime in 2002, when a friend-of-a-friend became a transsexual and requested that we all start referring to him/her as them. As in, good news: they’re coming over for dinner. This was a fascinating test case, in that it basically pitted the very left-leaning people who made up this scene against the very, very left-leaning people. The normal lefties, while generally sympathetic, drew the line at subverting the basic structure of language to this point (and at giving in to a request that reeked so suspiciously of narcissism). Although we felt sympathetic to this person’s (these peoples’?) choices, we weren’t about to subject ourselves to this kind of mind-bending syntactic confusion. The über-lefties, meanwhile– who were surprisingly numerous, by the way– fell right into line, expressing a general attitude of Wherever your heads at, man. Their feeling was that the whole thing is totally elastic and subjective, and a basic token of friendship is the willingness to refer to your friend(s) by whatever pronoun he/she/they feel(s) best fit(s) he/she/them.

[polldaddy poll=3066671]

[Image: from the famous Great Ideas series, sponsored by Container Corporation of America. Designer might be Herbert Bayer– I’m not really sure.]

The Siberian Basketball Diaries, Part Five

In the previous installment, Andrej hitched a ride with a collection of guys driving dynamite trucks through the Central Siberian Plateau.]

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Subject: The Gunmen of the Kolyma, Part Two: The Friend In the Bucket
6/22/05

Not long after I joined the Mountainbusters, the ZIL shit the bed. We pulled over and made camp. I was passed out while the boys were building a fire and getting dinner ready. From the window of the ZIL cabin, I could see that they are busy preparing for the night to come. I wanted to contribute something, so I dig into my backpack and pull out a two foot long, whole, smoked Chinook salmon. The boys hadn’t hooked up the ladder one usually needs to exit the ZIL, so I had to climb down with the beaked head of the Chinook in my teeth. The boys were very amused and they cursed a lot.

That night we stood around the little fire and ate salmon, white bacon, little cucumbers, salted bread and apples, and drank Speznaz (Special Forces) brand vodka out of tin cups. The mosquitos were everywhere. As we chat, we are constantly slapping each other in the face, to kill the little lords of the taiga.

In the morning, I find Kol-Ya using a pair of scissors to cut a make-shift head gasket for Pet-Ya’s ZIL. This did not work. We spent the entire day there, as the intrepid, pious, and foul-mouthed Pet-Ya toiled in the six-foot high engine of the ZIL, completely covered in mosquitos. I declared to all there that Pet-Ya was my hero, for working so long and so hard, all day. They told me there is no alternative. There is no such thing as a tow service out here. Either we fix it or we walk with the mosquitos.

During this down time, I explored the surrounding area. Below us, about one hundred feet down, runs the little Cascade river. It’s about six feet wide and three feet deep and it cut through a very steep and narrow canyon. On the walls of this canyon are ice formations, like shelf fungus, twelve feet long and ten feet thick, just hanging out over the little river, extending from both sides, alternating. The ice is white with blue stripes and it drips sweet cold water. Me and the Na-Chelnik, Roos-Lan Nickoliaevich, went down to gather water for the camp. He took some pretty sweet pictures of yours truly, but the next time he’ll have accesss to a PC will be in September. He took an especially nifty picture of me with WolfSnoutChopper that I hope to have published in Blade magazine.

The Na-Chelnik, Roos-Lan Nickolievich, asked if he could take my bike, the Riddle of Steel for a little ride. We pulled it off of the TNT truck and away he went, awkwardly: I think the seat was a little too high for him. I told him he looked like Butch Cassidy with the Sundance Kid’s moustache.

After a lot of vodka and a lot of cursing, somehow, with the grace of God, after 12 hours, we were under way.

OK. I’m about to relate to you, dear readers, the hardest part of my journey, so far. At one point, the Na-Chelnik, Roos-Lan Nickoliaevich, asks me if I want to sit up front with him and Pet-Ya. I couldn’t refuse. Besides, they had a better view. I’m sitting between PET-Ya and the Na-Chelnik, and PET-YA is as mad as a wet bobcat because his machine is all fucked up. And he is cursing up a storm. Here’s a little sample:

“Bled (whore), when I get my bled (whore) hands on that bled (whore) mechanic in Magadan bled (whore), I’m gonna smash his bled (whore) teeth on the bled (whore) intake manifold bled (whore). Are you listening to me Roos-Lan Nicoliaevich, bled (whore)? I told that bled (whore) to check the compression ratio bled (whore)…(brief pause)… sukka (bitch)!”

And your humble narrator had to sit through about 30 minutes of this without laughing. It seemed inappropriate to laugh in this situation. I almost wet my biking britches, no lie! Thank god the ZIL broke down again, and I could crawl back to the rear, with the hyper explosive gear and laugh with impunity.

After many mechanical trials and tribulations, we get to a little pas-EE-o-lock (wee village) where my hero PET-Ya has a crash pad. There we ate mashed potatos and hot dogs and salted bread. The vodka, this time, was drunk out of china tea cups. Quickly, the Na-Chelnik, Roos-Lan Nicoliaevich, got sloppy and spilled his cup so it was time to put him to bed. PET-Ya quickly followed. That left me and the seven foot tall OO-Ra at the table with half a bottle of vodka, and plenty of hot dogs.

OO-Ra told me about his experiences in the Chechen War. He described how Russian tanks, under fire, sometimes drive over thier own dead, to prevent the Chechens from mutilating their bodies, in the most unspeakable ways. He told about how he pulled a friend of his from a burning armored personnel carrier, only to have that same friend get cut to pieces by machine gun fire, just two days later. He described collecting the remains of his friend and putting him in a bucket. I asked him his friend’s name. He looked at me and his eyes squinted, his face contorted, and in a high pitched voice, he said Nikolai, and began to weep. He then told about standing over a hole in the ground, Nikolai’s grave, as the bucket was being lowered into the cold cold ground, across from OO-Ra was standing Nikolai’s mother, staring at OO-Ra. OO-Ra, then and there, prayed that I would never have to live through having to look into the eyes of my best friend’s grieving mother. Her eyes were saying “Why didn’t you save my son, it should be you in that hole.” I shed a manly tear, or two for Niky, and we drained a couple of more cups in his honor.

Then, somehow, after the tears, the topic of conversation turned to single combat. OO-Ra could see that I was built like a brick shithouse, and so he asks me, “you think you can take me?” I tell him that I could brake him like a twig, and I made the international twig-breaking gesture. He immediately challenges me to a brawl, either here in the little apartment, or outside on the sooty grass. I declined, telling him that I knew that it would get ugly. I can’t imagine either one of us surrendering until a major bone was broken or severe lacerations require a trip to the doctor, if there was one out here. But OO-Ra was persistent. He nagged me for what seemed like an eternity. Finally I agreed. How can your hunble narrator refuse a little of his favorite passtime, what I like to call La Violencia.

So we both began to remove our gear, so as not to cut each other. Then I go to remove the little silver icon of St.Seraphim, that my good buddy Boris gave me in Moscow, from my neck, and it suddenly dawned on me what the fuck I was about to engage in: a drunken vodka induced brawl with a great friend…that is seven feet tall, and an experienced killer. Thank you St. Seraphim for saving one of us from some possibly serious harm.

Parting with the Gunmen of the Kolyma was very very hard. We exchanged bear hugs and I had to quickly turn and walk away, to hide my sorrow. They haven’t heard the last of me….

—–

Next: In the Den of the Chechens, Part One

[Photo: Andrej left, Petja right]

SimFail

After I blogged about Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur a few months ago, a reader named Katie suggested I read his first book of essays and sweetened the deal by mentioning that it includes an essay on the Sims, the virtual reality game that seemingly enslaved the entire female Midwest a few years back. So, during my SF trip, I read a friend’s copy of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and was riveted by the whole thing, especially the Sims essay, Billy Sim:

I am not a benevolent god.

I am watching myself write in a puddle of my own urine, and I offer no response. I have not slept or eaten for days. My cries go unrecognized and my loneliness is ignored. I am watching myself endure a torture worse than death, yet I decline every opportunity to end this self-imposed nightmare. Darkness… imprisoning me… all that I see, absolute horror. I cannot live, I cannot die, trapped in myself; my body is my holding cell.

I am the master and I am the puppet. And I am not the type of person who still plays video games.

So go the opening paragraphs of the essay, foreshadowing Klosterman’s eventual boredom with the game and subsequent decision to neglect his SimSelf while the latter writhes in his own pee.

The first thing I can immediately tell from this passage is that Klosterman and I are about the same age (he was born a year before me, in 1972). The tell is the phrase ‘video games’, which only men currently between the ages of about 33 and 39 use. Younger people call them ‘computer games’ or just ‘games’. Older people can’t refer to them coherently at all. The women I know don’t mention them unless its in the context of the final flaw that persuaded them not to date some guy they were perviously thinking about dabbling in (e.g. On top of it all, he sits at home and plays video games). We late-Gen-X males are the only people who became fully accustomed to the idea of manipulating a character on a screen before the advent of the personal computer age.

Next, I also immediately identify with the co-mingled curiosity and contempt that Klosterman expresses towards gaming (‘It’s fun, but– somehow– vaguely pathetic’). For my part, the contempt partly serves to mask a fearful respect that I have for the gaming industry and its potential to enslave me. I have only played one game in my adult life (Civilization), but that’s less out of lack of interest and more out of a wary realization that I love games in general and can easily picture myself getting sucked in if I strayed past a certain threshold. This dread manifested itself in a particular anti-social habit that I developed towards a guy I used to share an apartment with, who worked at Electronic Arts as a producer for the Sims. The roommate had an Xbox lying around that he would bring out (albeit only quite rarely) to show his friends what he was doing at work. After they would invariably disappear and leave the console lying on the floor in front of the TV, I would always respectfully pick it up and place it on top of the tallest bookshelf in the living room– the most inaccessible shared spot in the house. Such was my determination not to become an addict.

Klosterman writes at great– and persuasive– length about the bizarre and abstracted aspects of the game, but one personal experience I had involving the above-mentioned Sims-producer roommate really drove home for me how weird the whole thing is. One Saturday, my roommate spent the whole day at his office furiously working to correct a mistake one of his programmers had made. The programmer was supposed to have designd a disco ball for a dance club environment. Instead of creating the disco ball from scratch, the programmer had taken a lawn sprinkler and decided to modify it (this apparently being a common approach, according to my roommate). But, the programmer had done a really lazy job of it, so the ‘disco ball’ was still acting more like a lawn sprinkler and spraying dancers with water. My roommate stomped home at about 7pm having lost an entire sunny Saturday to getting the disco ball to act like a disco ball. He was so deeply immersed in the problem and so enraged about it that he managed to relate the entire scenario back to me without expressing the slightest awareness of what an absurdly meta way this was to spend one’s Saturday. If I wasn’t thoroughly creeped out frightened by virtual-reality game play until now, this lawn-sprinkler/disco-ball anecdote totally scared me straight as shit.

Authorial self-doubt and torment note: I previously promised myself that I would boycott the ‘#FAIL’ construction in this blog, as I think it’s the lamest, most overused, mind-rotting meme currently in circulation. But, I couldn’t think of a single other title for this post that works nearly as well. So, there you have it.

The Siberian Basketball Diaries, Part Four

We pick up the action a week after the last installment: Andrej is biking through the Xanadu mountain range in the Central Siberian Plateau, gets cold and decides to hitch a ride.]

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Subject: The Gunmen of the Kolyma, Part One
6/20/05

The nights on the south slopes of this mountain range are as cold as a witch’s teat. And so it came to pass that your humble narrator hitched a ride on a dynamite grooz-avik (truck). Yes, you heard right. It was a two grooz-avik convoy. The first grooz-avik was the mighty URAL and the second was the only slightly smaller ZIL. You can tell them apart because the URAL has a big polar bear hood ornament. They are both six wheel drive and the CV joint on these son’s of bitches is bigger than my head.

Allow me to introduce the cast of characters:

PET-Ya: driver of the ZIL. PET-Ya is a Virgo, and his hobbies include Jesus, dirty magazines and cursing.
OO-Ra: demolitions expert and general all-around outdoor’s man. OO-Ra was the MC. He loves to play the guitar and drink and smile. He is seven feet tall and dressed in full camo with a green handkerchief on his head. His weapon is the knife. OO-Ra rides in the back cabin with me.
Roos-Lan: this was our Na-chelnik (boss) and geologist. Roos-Lan is a Gemini and his hobbies include hunting, photography, doting on his lovely daughter, and blowing the shit out of mountains. Roos-Lan sits up front in the drivers cabin, with the foul-mouthed PET-Ya, and he carries a double-barreled shot-gun. Roos-Lan is a Ukrainian Cossack and he really looks like one. He has a shaved head, sunglasses and a blond Turkish handle-bar moustache. He is wearing grean camo and, like a real Cossack, rubber slippers.
Slava: is the guman for the ZIL. He carries an AK-74 and a TOKAREV pistol in a shoulder holster and is wearing urban, black and white, camo. He also rides with OO-Ra and myself in the back of the ZIL.

In the other grooz-avik (truck), the URAL:

Is Kol-Ya: Kol-Ya is a Gemini, and enjoys laughing and visiting the dentist. And with him is…
Andrei: Andrei is armed with an AK Combat Shotgun loaded with 24 gauge manstoppers. Andrei was very quiet during our trip. He seemed to have a lot on his mind.

The moment I jumped into the cabin with OO-Ra and Slava, OO-Ra busts out two small cucumbers, an apple and a plastic bottle of samagon (moonshine). Now I’d been warned, by many, many, people, about drinking samagon with the yahoos of the Far East. But, I figured, I’m already drinking beer, vodka, not to mention smoking and playing with live ammo, in a dynamite truck, how much more danger could I possible bring upon myself by drinking a little samogon.

The Russians always ask me how old I am, when I tell them I’m 33, they all say the same thing: “you are like the Christ.” Apparently all Russians, including the Muslims, are acutely aware of the age of Jesus when he was Transfigured*. 33 is considered to be a man’s prime, and a lucky age.

Well I survived the jolly dynamite truck. At one point we were passing through an extremely fucked up little village. Between shots of vodka, Slava points out of the window and tells me that a few years ago a truck, just like this one, accidentally detonated and annihilated this town. I looked out the window and, indeed, the town looked like Hiroshima. I began to laugh maniacally and I could not stop for a very long time. Why I laughed so hard I do not know. Maybe it was because I was happy to be alive, even though I knew that I was on the razor’s edge.

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Next: The Gunmen of the Kolyma, Part Two

[*ed note: Czechs always make this comment about ‘Jesus age’ too, and they’re all atheists. Must be a pan-Slavic thing.]

The Siberian Basketball Diaries, Part Three

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Subject: The Cravchenskaya Mafia
6/14/05

My friend, the misbegotten, and beautiful, Cravchenka, has all the sweet hook ups in Magadan City night life. Cravchenka is a local cub reporter. She interviewed me when I arrived and we are now thick as thieves. She looks like the stereotypical Scottish lass. She also has a hollow leg. Last night I hit the sauce with her and her friends. To them I preached abolition. They had a hard time believing me. They think I’m a fugitive from American justice.

When I tell them about the enslaved Russian girls I saw in Cyprus, their attitude is fuck em, they knew what they were getting into. Why should they give a fuck about strippers and whores that go overseas to make some cash and then end up as chattel. I tell them that there is nothing wrong with being a stripper or a whore, hell some of my best friends are strippers and whores. The problem is that these girls, country bumpkins really, are tricked by the pimps into leaving Russia with promises of real work and once they are in the clutches of the pimp, they are separated from their passports and beaten constantly for a month until their spirit is broken, and at that point rebellion against the filthy pimp is unthinkable. I try to use the analogy of the volunteers that came here during the time of the DALSTROY gulag combine. They came here to work in the gulag mines as free citizens of the USSR. But quickly the distinction between convicts, political prisoners and freemen was lost, and they were all fucked. They think I’m crazy, but at least now they might think about it a little more. I told them to ask their elected officials about this problem and what they are doing about it.

After my fifth Baltica tallboy, it was time to chill and enjoy the company.

Some dude shows up, dressed in a track suit, tall and well formed. He sits to my left. As time goes on I notice that he’s talkin a lot of trash about the USA, as he’s listening to Aerosmith. I didn’t give a fuck because all I was concerned with was staring at the beautiful shorthaired blond, named Lena, sitting directly across from me. After my eighth Baltica tallboy he challenges me to an arm-wrestling contest. I smiled. Little did this silly malchek know that I am an arm-wrestling wunderkind. With my right arm I finished him without any opposition. With my left in 4 seconds. Then he kissed me three times and we celebrated with congac shots and more Baltica lager.

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Next: The Gunmen of Kolyma

[Photo: Andrej in the Taiga, Dukcha River, Magadan]