I found this whilst rummaging through an old pile of rubbish; a docile and unassuming thing seeped in sleepless time and quietly accumulating the first trace-scent of history. It's a journal entry circa two years ago, cropped close (sort of) to the Arctic Circle. It's nothing very scintillating but it does impart one little anecdote I'd forgotten, which I will now proceed to feed verbatim into this machine.
"I write tonight from St. Petersburg, a beautiful city which has forever dashed from my mind the stereotype of the Soviet Bloc's uniformly monolithic and oppressive concrete cities, replacing those doldrum grays with complexly intermingled shades and deeper hues of historicism. All the more easy to see since the Sun doesn't sleep in this city of intrigue (at least during the Summer).
This exchange is going wonderfully so far, with hardly a moment's boredom (even as I write this the air outside is exploding with fireworks and Tchaikovsky in celebration of Russian graduation). I think my favorite moment of the trip came today when the host organizer, a thickly mustachioed Ruskie music school teacher who still sports the cowboy hat we gave him last summer, approached me during supper at a fast food restaurant. He set a glass in front of me, then reached furtively into the plastic bag he'd been toting around all day and pulled out a tall boy, proceeding to pour me a glass. He then pointed proudly to himself and proclaimed the only English word I've ever heard him speak: "Bootlegger!" He coda'ed this performance by slamming down the remainder of the can. For me, it is gusto like this that best intimates the downfall of the Soviet Union..."
Skipping ahead two years I can still think of no single human action that better demonstrates the shortcomings of socialism (or at least Stalinism, I should say). Maybe that's just me though, I don't get out much in that field.
More to come soon, perhaps. For now I'm itchin' to purvey my own self-styled brand of gusto about the town.
Until then, all of you lovebirds and doves, the thrashers, todies and mockingbirds, the peregrines, babblers, larks, loons and cuckoos (and let's not forget the tits, peckers and boobies
): Be good to each other.
**********
P.S. While we're on the topic, check out this ostentatious songbird:
"I write tonight from St. Petersburg, a beautiful city which has forever dashed from my mind the stereotype of the Soviet Bloc's uniformly monolithic and oppressive concrete cities, replacing those doldrum grays with complexly intermingled shades and deeper hues of historicism. All the more easy to see since the Sun doesn't sleep in this city of intrigue (at least during the Summer).
This exchange is going wonderfully so far, with hardly a moment's boredom (even as I write this the air outside is exploding with fireworks and Tchaikovsky in celebration of Russian graduation). I think my favorite moment of the trip came today when the host organizer, a thickly mustachioed Ruskie music school teacher who still sports the cowboy hat we gave him last summer, approached me during supper at a fast food restaurant. He set a glass in front of me, then reached furtively into the plastic bag he'd been toting around all day and pulled out a tall boy, proceeding to pour me a glass. He then pointed proudly to himself and proclaimed the only English word I've ever heard him speak: "Bootlegger!" He coda'ed this performance by slamming down the remainder of the can. For me, it is gusto like this that best intimates the downfall of the Soviet Union..."
Skipping ahead two years I can still think of no single human action that better demonstrates the shortcomings of socialism (or at least Stalinism, I should say). Maybe that's just me though, I don't get out much in that field.
More to come soon, perhaps. For now I'm itchin' to purvey my own self-styled brand of gusto about the town.
Until then, all of you lovebirds and doves, the thrashers, todies and mockingbirds, the peregrines, babblers, larks, loons and cuckoos (and let's not forget the tits, peckers and boobies
): Be good to each other.**********
P.S. While we're on the topic, check out this ostentatious songbird: