come spring, come the primitives

[franksolich]

Note: come spring, come the primitives, is a continuation of franksolich & friends seek to deter stalking primitives, dedicated to Skippy, the NYC_SKP primitive, of Skins’s island, mocking him for his paranoia about everything and anything.

It recently dawned on me that I have lots and lots of high-quality material for this satire of primitive paranoia; material far too good to be wasted on a paranoid primitive.

The motive behind the story remains the same--that of taunting the primitives for their rabid paranoia--but given the sterling quality of the material, the story’s now dedicated to vesta111, who irritated some, including myself at times, when gracing our presence, but who was loved by all.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Whoa, now back up even further,” the property caretaker said.

I told the story a very long time ago, holiday in Belfast, or something like that, I said.

“The British colonel was only bluffing, trying to scare me.  I wasn’t supposed to be there, and he wanted me the Hell out of there.

“I’d saved for this trip--it was supposed to be my ‘Grand Tour’--for more than a year, and I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from seeing the British isles from bottom to top, from east to west.

“Shortly before I went there, ‘troubles’ broke out in Northern Ireland, but I wasn’t going to let anything interrupt my plans.

“I was young and arrogant in those days.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“When I got to Edinburgh, Scotland, I announced my intention to keep going the way I’d planned.  A friend there had a friend an officer in the Royal Marines, who tried to dissuade me.

“Martial law had been declared, and nobody excepting those who lived there, were supposed to go there.  Things were being blown up, people were being killed, and stuff.

“I said, well, I was just going to keep proceeding forward, until someone stopped me, after which I’d of course stop.

“The officer then wrote a letter on his military’s letterhead, which I in my wistful thinking imagined as a laissez-passer, although it was actually only a letter asking for my ‘safe passage,’ and that if I got into trouble, he’d like to be contacted.

“No one stopped me at Stranraer, Scotland, where I boarded the boat. 

“No one stopped me at Larne, Northern Ireland, where I disembarked, and got on a train. 

“No one stopped me at the railway station in Belfast when I got there.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“There hadn’t been many people on the ferry, or on the train, which arrived about midnight.  Everybody else, the few who were, scurried away, and within a couple of minutes I was the only person inside the cavernous station.

“I needed a place to stay for the night, but there weren’t even any taxis outside the station.  No one was out there.

“So I decided to walk to the city center, whose lights were visible in the sky.  It was a long walk, as if along the bottom of a dark canyon, through a Victorian-era warehouse district.

“It was all told in holiday in Belfast; to my right, I saw the sky lit up, as if there was some sort of big fire burning, but that was far away.  So I just kept walking.

“The colonel was bluffing; while I couldn’t hear shots being fired, I’m sure I would’ve known I was being shot at, if I had been.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

“After he’d depleted his ballistics and calmed down, then I gave him the letter from the officer…..after which he went ballistic again.

“It was truly an awesome spectacle, the way he went ballistic, and twice too.

“And now fifteen years later, a repeat performance, this one in Kiev, almost as impressive as the first time around.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“How come you had to be tutored at home?” Romeo asked me, as we were driving down the highway.

“You’re one of the smartest people I know.”

Romeo always takes care to flatter me, the only friend he has.

Even though he’s an honest hardworking reliable ranch-hand, others don’t care for him, thinking him too good-looking and too good of a talker, for his own good.

I on the other hand beg to differ.

I blame women, who judge a man solely by the gift-wrapping covering him up, rather than what’s inside.

It’s their own damned fault.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Well, there was this particular problem,” I reminded him.

“When it came time for me to get educated, the parents had two choices; the Nebraska School for the Deaf in Omaha, or keeping me at home, where at the time there existed no ‘special accommodations’ for pupils who needed them.

“Even the severely mentally-retarded attended classes with the rest of us, although they tended to be four or six years older.

“It was a great lesson in ‘diversity,’ and it was because both towns where I grew up had only 3,000 people in each, and were far away from any places offering these ‘special education’ classes.

“So they had this stark choice; send me away, or keep me at home.

“Life rarely offers one a choice that’s good, and a second option that’s bad; usually it’s a choice between something bad, and something even worse.

“My parents were the best parents one could possibly have, and I always blamed the older brothers and sisters for their early deaths; they’d been driven to distraction by their older children’s hippie antics and conduct, which caused them a great deal of trouble and misery.

“It deprived me, then still a teenager, of at least a few more years of their wisdom and insight, and obviously was fatal for my younger brother, their early demises.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Anyway, my father said, ‘it’s a hearing world--as rough as it’ll be for him, well, he’ll have to learn to sink or swim.’  And so the 'least bad' option was selected; if I'd gone to the Nebraska School for the Deaf, I would've become warped.

“I detested school, at least my first thirteen years in it.

“When I graduated from high school, I graduated 92nd out of 101, which was probably too high.  I’m sure I got a couple of ‘C-‘s and one ‘P’ in classes I really flunked, simply because the teachers wanted to be rid of me.

“I was definitely no Skippy, the paranoid NYC_SKP primitive.

“However, oddly, I’d scored 5th highest in the class in the PSAT, and 3rd highest in the class in the SAT.

“It’s different now, given that the bureaucrats are trying to make the University of Nebraska--Big Red--into the ‘Harvard of the Plains,’ and so there’s standards for admissions now, but at the time, any graduate of any high school in Nebraska was guaranteed admittance.

“It was truly a ‘people’s institution’ back then; now it’s just a haven for overpaid and underworked academic bureaucrats.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Anyway, because there I had more control over the ways I wished to learn, I graduated with a B-/C+ average, which I think was pretty good.

“There’s some who insisted it wasn’t truly a ‘college education,’ because lots and lots of my credits--oh God, tons of them--were gotten from CLEP, the college-level equivalency program examinations, credit-by-examinations, and 300- and 400-level ‘independent study.’

“For classes I had to attend, I always went to the first meeting to get the schedule for the semester, and bothered showing up only for the quizzes and exams, skipping all the lectures.

“I think my diploma’s just as good as that of anyone else who’s graduated from there; I fulfilled the stated requirements.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“This was awesome,” she said, “but I can see why you wouldn’t want to include it in Cowboy or Lamb or whatever you’re going to name the book.

“It was something that affected you deeply, and in the book you really want to give the impression of a mellow, laid back, carefree innoc--er, American idly tramping around the socialist paradises.”

She was talking about the affidavit I’d written after I’d come back, supporting a request for asylum in the United States.

Yeah, I said; “it was the most important thing I ever wrote in my life, so I was compelled to be utterly serious, and confident and direct in all that I stated.

“Of course, no matter how carefully documented and backed up, one isn’t granted asylum on the word of just one person; we had to collect a whole lot of other material, a whole lot of other first-hand personal stories--but I couldn’t help but notice the attorney placed my affidavit right on top of the stack, so as to ensure it’d get read.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“You did well, starting out so solemnly and portentously,” she said, “you didn’t say it in so many words, but the ’message’ the reader got was, ’I am going to tell you of a great many unpleasant things; they don’t affect you, but it’s important that you know of such evils that exist in this world.’”

Thank you, I said, “as that’s what I wanted to convey.

“While I was there, I took notes daily; I was always borrowing scarce paper on which to write in my own singular ’shorthand,’ something that provoked my interest.

“I didn’t have a camera--if I did, I’m sure that I wouldn’t’ve been allowed to see all that I saw, but the initial reason I didn’t have a camera was because I’d grown up in a compulsive picture-taking family, and was tired of photographs.

“I didn’t carry a camera on any of my previous three trips to western Europe, either.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“That I wrote things in my ’shorthand’ sometimes engendered suspicion that I was writing in ’code.’

“Which of course was nonsense; I wrote that way simply because I can’t hand-write as fast as I can type, and was always impatient to get things down.

“Unlike the primitives on Skins’s island, I’m by nature an undeceptive sort of person, unparanoid enough to let even strangers see exactly what it is I’m up to.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I wondered,” she said, "all these pieces of paper with only the date recognizable, and then a whole bunch of quick, jerky scrawls.

“Like this one on top here,” she said; “all I can read is ’05-02-95,’ obviously the date, and nothing else.  What’s it say?”

It took me a while; after all, it’s been a long time.

“Oh,” I finally said.  “It was on the train, going back to Kiev, from Yalta.

“I’d gone to the Crimea with a woman who seemed to like me more than I wanted her to, and was relieved the ordeal was almost over.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“In the compartment was a guy about thirty years old, who was carefully preparing a meal of fish he’d caught in the Black Sea.

“He was rather proud of it; insisted it was the best fish he’d ever caught.

“And then in the manner of the workers and peasants, insisted I have some, too.

“I didn’t tell him that I wouldn’t touch dead fish with a ten-foot primitive, that I loathed and detested fish, and hadn’t had it since I was a teenager at home, and had to have it occasionally.

“Instead, I politely indicated that the tea and bread were fine, thank you.

“He kept insisting, and I kept resisting.

“Finally, he quietly pulled out a pistol and lay it on the table between us.

“As I later learned, he was a narcotics policeman, which was why he had a gun.

“I ate the fish.”

to be continued

[obumazombie]

That's a nice way to remember our very own vesta.

[franksolich]

The property caretaker reminded me that he'd been interrupted, when I'd begun telling him the story of what happened after I'd been found.

“When we went into his office, he indicated that I sit down in a chair, facing him at his desk.  He made a very long telephone call, sitting in profile so I couldn’t ‘read’ what he was saying, idly flipping through my passport.

“What I wasn’t aware of at the time was that my disappearance had caused, uh, problems.

“I arrived on a Friday late afternoon, as scheduled, but it wasn’t until Saturday late afternoon, when the person who was supposed to pick me up at the airport, showed up a day late to get me.

“He immediately contacted the New York office of his organization; it was known that I had in fact arrived and left the airport…..the day before--the day I was supposed to.

“That organization contacted friends back in Nebraska, and it was a good thing they were wearing brown pants when they learned more about me.

“I hadn’t told them I was deaf because they hadn’t asked, and if I’d voluntarily told them, they’d probably tell me ‘no.’”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Various friends then immediately contacted the offices of then-U.S. senators J. James Exon and J. Robert Kerrey, and congressman Douglas Bereuter, in Washington, who until all this was resolved, tried contacting the embassy in Kiev, with no success.

“And the U.S. Department of State.

“franksolich was missing, and someone had better find him.

“It even made the newspapers back here, NEBRASKAN MISSING IN UKRAINE.

“Although not as front-page news; usually in the back, on the same page where, ominously, the obituaries were printed.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“So when everybody returned to work at the embassy after their taxpayer-paid holidays, apparently there was something that needed explanation, and resolved.

“After the man behind the desk got done with that long telephone call, he turned facing me, his hands flat on his desk, but his arms bent, his elbows raised.

“His face turned violently red, the veins pulsating, and he looked as if he wanted to pounce on me.

“’HOW COULD YOU BE SO STUPID?” he roared; 'DO YOU KNOW HOW LUCKY YOU ARE?!!!!!!?

“’YOU’RE THE DAMN LUCKIEST SON-OF-A-BITCH I’VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE!!!!

“’DO YOU IN THE SLIGHTEST UNDERSTAND HOW LUCKY YOU ARE?!!!!!!!!  HOW COULD YOU BE SO STUPID?’

“I was stunned by the harsh onslaught; I’d thought they’d be happy, that I’d shown up safe and sound.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Anyway, without know it, he’d knocked a chip off my shoulder.

“It really pisses me off,” I said to the caretaker, “that when something ‘bad’ happens to a hearing person, he’s given the benefit of the doubt; maybe it was just random bad luck, not his fault.

“But when something ‘bad’ happens to a deaf person, it’s automatically assumed he was just being stupid, or had done something stupid.

“It really pisses me off; simple plain old-fashioned random bad luck never happens to deaf people, it’s always because we’ve been stupid.

“Every time; it’s never any other way, it‘s our own fault, for having been so stupid.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I pointed out, testily, that it wasn’t me, who’d failed to meet me at the airport--and I didn’t know what’d been behind that, at the time.

“It wasn’t me, who’d failed to have an American employee of the embassy available 24/7/365, after regular hours and on weekends and holidays especially in ‘disturbed’ areas.

“It wasn’t me, who’d written down what was apparently a wrong telephone number--and I didn’t know the story behind that at the time, either.

“’In fact,’ I said, in the coldest tone I could muster, ‘instead of being yelled at for being ‘stupid,’ I rather think I should be complimented in something that would panic other people; I had no idea what was going on, but at least I kept my ****ing head.’

“After all, it wasn’t anything any primitive on Skins’s island could live through,” I reminded the caretaker.  “One of them, one of the primitives, would have ten years of shit cascading down their pants.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“After which I described attempts to establish some sort of contact with someone, anyone, who could tell me what was going on, and at least half-assedly assure me that it’d be okay in the end.

“Someone knew someone who knew someone who knew a ‘volunteer’ in the Peace Corps, an American in Kiev.

“He was reached, and after being told the details, said ’it’s not my problem,’ after which ’click’ the telephone.

“That asshole,” I said to the caretaker; “I still get worked up when thinking of it.  I wasn’t asking to stay with him, I wasn’t asking him for money or anything--I just wanted to meet him so he could explain things to me, a fellow American.

“Nowadays, he’s probably a Foreign Service Officer--Peace Corps ‘volunteers’ get ‘bonus points’ in the FSO examination--living the life of Riley on a Skippy-sized salary in some exotic place.

“That asshole,” I repeated.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Then someone knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who was an American with AID, the Agency for International Development, then in Kiev.

“He was reached, and he was very sorry, but it wasn’t his department, his job.  Best for me to wait until the American embassy re-opened, and no, he didn’t want to talk with me.

“That bastard,” I said to the caretaker; “all I wanted was to talk with him, to get his ‘take’ on my situation, and to give me, a fellow American, at least some assurance that all was going to be okay.

“He’s probably retired now, living high on the hog on his pension on some country acreage-and-mansion in northern Virginia now.

“That bastard,” I repeated.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Finally, near the end of all this, someone knew someone who knew someone who was a low-level employee at the embassy, but a Ukrainian citizen.

“He talked to them, but pointed out that as a non-American citizen employee, and as low-ranking as he was, there was nothing he could do. 

“Well, fair enough; he was right, there was nothing he could do.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The man on the other side of the desk was taking notes, filling out a report, as I went on. 

“I imagine it was something like an ‘incident report’ that a policeman might write; at any rate, two years later, I saw a photocopy of it, when being examined for a higher-than-usual ‘security clearance’ for a job back here.

“I’d been hired by a private contractor to Immigration & Naturalization, as ‘records supervisor,’ and for the job, needed access to, uh, sensitive information.

‘’What in the world were you doing over there?’ the pitbull of an investigator from OPM, the federal office of personnel management, asked me.

“At any rate, I got my clearance, but never bothered using it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“After he was done, he made another telephone call, again sitting in profile so I couldn’t ‘read’ what he was saying.

“When he got done, he told me, ‘it’s our suggestion that you leave, as soon as it can be arranged,’ shoving a photocopied list--and a very short one--of airline flights headed to the United States from Kiev; about six of them a week, at the time.

“’You’re never going to be safe here; and your being deaf--besides not knowing the language--makes it even more dangerous for you.

“’It’s our recommendation that you leave, as soon as it can be arranged,’ he repeated; ‘you can’t make it here.’

“I was floored.

“Surely I’d proven remarkable endurance and resourcefulness my first six days in this wretched place, and it was an insult, to be told I wasn’t smart enough to make it longer than that.

“’No,’ I said, with all the frostiness I could muster.  'I think I’ll stay.  Now, tell me, please, where it is, I’m supposed to be, and I’ll go.’

- - - - - - - - - -

“Somewhere in between all of the yelling-and-screaming, the woman who’d initially waited on me behind the plexiglass had come in, with the name, address, and telephone number of the Kiev ‘office’ of the organization that’d set things up for me.

“The man behind the desk made three telephone calls, again in profile so I couldn’t ‘read’ what he was saying.

“After which he returned my passport to me, and told me he’d arranged for a Ukrainian employee of the embassy to drive me to where I was supposed to be, and that the guards at the gate outside had retrieved my luggage from the three people who’d taken me to the embassy, telling them to go away, and not try to contact me.

“’You have no idea who these people are, or were,’ he said, ‘and I suggest you not try to contact them either.’

“After which I was free to go.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“The woman who’d first waited on me,” I told the property caretaker, finishing all this up, “was of course ex-KGB, middle-aged, dark hair, short, and very stout with tiny legs.

“I suspect she knew only two words of English.

“Every time thereafter that I went to the embassy, as I approached the plexiglass divider, if she saw me coming, even if she were clear over on the other side of the room on that side, she’d get up from her desk and come running over.

“’GO HOME!  GO HOME!’ she’d always shout at me.  ‘GO HOME!’

“And if it were convenient to her, she’d slip a photocopy listing the airline flights out of Kiev back to the United States.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I didn’t go there very often, and only in pursuit of minor information, easily given, and it was nice, very nice, myself being the maudlin sort, to watch the Stars-and-Stripes flapping in the wind inside the fence.

“There’s a different embassy now, at another location, but this first one, was very difficult to get to, as was America House, the library, given the sparse public transportation that direction, or at least what I ever knew of it.

“It always entailed quite a trek on foot, as there was no way I could afford a taxi, no matter how cheap it was.  And it was cheap, even for Americans with lots of dollars.

“During the walk, one saw many things not readily visible to those riding in cars or on trams or trolleys."

- - - - - - - - - -

“At the embassy, U.S. Marines stood guard inside the fence, while Ukrainian soldiers stood guard outside of it.

“Former KGB agents, made redundant by the collapse of the socialist paradises, were employees of the embassy, and charged with standing at the gate, to allow or deny access inside, as appropriate.

“There was always a long line outside the fence of people waiting to get in, usually all of them but me, workers and peasants seeking visas for admittance into the promised land.

“It was for that reason the public restrooms on the grounds, originally built as a public service, were permanently locked and shut up tight.

“I always got in line, just like everybody else but sooner or later, one of those guards would come out, grab me, and pull me inside.

“I knew this was the American embassy, and that I, as a holder of the blue-and-gold passport, had precedence for entry, the front of the line, but I was willing to wait, I wasn’t doing anything in particular anyway.

“It was bothersome, because I didn’t want the common herd to think I was one of those pushing, shoving Americans who had to be at the front of the line.

“Later, much to my disappointment, I learned my demonstration of common courtesy and good manners, showing them that real Americans weren’t arrogant like that at all, was a waste of time; they expected that I’d be in front of the line, and thought me a fool for not taking advantage of it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“As time went on, I noticed a particular phenomenon among these gate guardians, and inquired of the person with me, about it.

“’It’s really strange,’ I said, ‘every time I come here, half of them break out in big smiles, and the other half seem to be disappointed to see me.’

“He told me something he’d known all along, but hadn’t gotten around to telling me about it.  His grasp of English was tenuous, but he managed to explain that they had a ‘pool’ going, about how long I was going to last, before I gave up and went home.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“There,” the property caretaker said, as I watched him test the blinking light above the front door.  He’d already installed the over the back door.

“I’m not anywhere near done, but already you’re safer.

“You still have to keep the door locked until I’ve set up the motion sensors outside, which I probably won’t get done until next week, given that the ground’s all muddy and it’s cold.

“But for now, you’re good; you‘ll know when someone‘s at the door.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Uh, I said, “I dislike reminding you of something, but please notice one has to be looking at the light at the time it starts blinking, to catch it.

“And one can’t see it from the living room or the bedroom, or in the bathroom, this light or the one above the back door.

“I’m sitting at the computer; my back’s to the front door.

“And given the internal architecture of this place, there’s no way the computer can be set other than the way it is now, my back to the front door.

“The light can blink all it wants, but if I don’t see it, it’s not going to make any difference.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“But that’s going to be solved the next thing I do,” he said; “tomorrow, I’ll wire the ceiling lights to this, so that they’ll flicker on and off every time someone’s at the door.

“Five rooms here, and they all have one ceiling light each.

“No matter where you’re at in here, after that’s done, there’s no way you’d not know someone’s at the door.

“Even when you’re sleeping, you’ll wake up because of the lights.

“And then when the motion sensors outside are set up, same thing; the lights above the two doors, and all ceiling lights, will be triggered when something’s going on outside.

“It’s foolproof, a sure thing guaranteed to protect you because you can’t hear when someone’s around.”

“Carry on,” I said; “we’ll see.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“I think for the book, you need to stress why your experiences in, and observations of, the socialist paradises were so different from others who were over there,” the woman from the vanity book-publishing firm told me.

The business partner and I had gone down to Omaha to pick up something, and stopped there, too.  Unfortunately, the estimate for publishing 25 or 50 or 100 books wasn’t ready yet, and that person was out of the office again.

“It certainly was a different ‘take’…..and possibly a more accurate one,” she added, "seeing the socialist paradises from the bottom up, instead of as they did, from the top down.

“And you should consider more than a mere 100 books, and sell them, not give them away.  There’s seven people in this office, and already you’ve got seven people willing to buy a copy.

“None of who’d ever had an interest in eastern Europe before.

“And no, Lamb Among Wolves doesn’t strike me, personally, as any better than Cowboy Among the Reds; you have to keep thinking about a better title.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Okay,” I said to the business partner, as we were driving back.

“She knows what she’s talking about; the book does have three weaknesses.

“Number one, I’m not showing the fear, the paranoia, the mute terror, that overhung the land like a dark poisonous cloud, that permeated everything.

“It’s like Skins’s island; one sees it, but one doesn’t feel it, and so while it’s real, it’s difficult to describe, this aura of paranoia.

“Number two, I’m not adequately conveying how a deaf person ‘hears,’ making the reader forget at times, or even most of the time, that this was significant in both my experiences and observations.

“But describing how I ‘hear’--it’s not really hearing after all, just a mind-trick--is one of those slippery things that, once I think I’ve defined it, it turns out, no, that’s not it, and slides away again.

“And now this, number three, I haven’t shown why my experiences and observations were so different from those of other westerners who were there at the time.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“It’s all very different there now, too.  I was there during some sort of interregnum, in between the chaos and confusion and disorder and lawlessness that came with independence in late 1991, and the ’restructuring’ of the economy in late 1996, with the replacement of the worthless karbovanet by the hryvnia.

“The European Union, tired of pouring money down a black hole, insisting the place made even Chicago or Boston look clean and honest and pure, demanded drastic changes, and got them.

“Such changes involved great hardship, especially for the most vulnerable members of society there…..but they’d been used to that, since the socialists came in 1917, and somehow survived.

“And after a few years, even their lot was better than it had ever been; a lot of short-term pain, some modest long-term gain.

“It’s all very different now, from what I saw and underwent, and now there’s that war going on.

“There’s times I wished I’d been over there again--no, really not, as it took a great deal out of me--to see that Great Convulsion, to get in on some of the excitement; I've always been so insulated from things.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Your profiles of some of your ‘guides’ are precious,” the neighbor’s wife said.  “You’re trying to portray them in a humorous, light-hearted vein, but your respect for, and care about, them shines through.

“Like this one--”

No, I interrupted; “it’s all going to be in the book, and I’m not going to quote the book too much, because then decent and civilized people, and primitives lurking in the DUmpster, won’t bother reading the book, already knowing what’s all in it.

“I have to leave some things out, so they’ll read the book.”

- - - - - - - - - -

 

“I rarely ventured anywhere by myself, excepting in those places with which I was already familiar, and in those cases only for short distances; halfway across a village, for example.

“As neither did any other non-Ukrainians.

“This wasn’t America, where one’s free to roam about at will, where one can just get into the car and drive to [the big city], or walk into a store just to look around, or stroll to the library just to check out a book.  No way.

“Those who sought the ‘fun’ places, the ‘fun’ things to do, even if escorted oftentimes got into trouble of one sort or another, trouble that usually involved an involuntary transfer of funds.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“There were only three instances where I traveled long distances with people near my own age; on an overnight train from Kiev to Lvov in western Ukraine, when I was twice accompanied by a man and his wife, and a second woman, all of them about five or ten years older than myself.

“The other was on a five-day trip to the Crimea in the springtime, with a woman about my age, who unbeknownst to me, had things on her mind other than the spring-time scenery there.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Early on, I also hung with a captain in the secret police and his wife, both in their early 30s and with two young children.

“They were socialists of the puritanical sort, decent and honest…..meaning they were also pretty poor, as they didn’t use his position to enrich themselves.

“Two times, I spent Saturday afternoons with the four of them, out in their dacha.  And once the captain, who knew not a word of English, took me alone deep inside the ‘forbidden zone’ to see the crippled nuclear power plant at Chernobyl.

“We didn’t get very close, but standing on a hill about a mile away, looking at the thing through binoculars, it still looked formidable.

“The wife, a petite but stern-looking blonde, several times took me on walking tours of Kiev, but she being a fast and purposeful walker, it was difficult for me, an ambling-around sort of person, to keep up; she was trying to show me too much, too quickly.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I got around everywhere usually in the company of a son of the workers and peasants about half my age, say circa 17-21 years.

“I was desperate to see the place; if the babushkas had been willing to show me the socialist paradises, well, I would’ve run with the babushkas.

“I traveled with such company simply because that was the only company, unemployed and with nothing else to do, that had the freedom to roam around. 

“People of my own age, or near to it, were too preoccupied with surviving, and young girls, at least among those with whom I associated, were zealously protected.

“So males barely out of adolescence--although by our standards, they usually looked mid-teens--were my constant traveling companions, guides, and ‘translators.’

“I put ‘translators’ in quotation marks, because a lot of times, their professed, or apparent, knowledge of English fell woefully short of their real understanding of it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“It was all very random; I never, for example, announced, ‘okay, who wants to take me to their grandmother’s village, to show it to me?’

“Such invitations were extended spontaneously, and always from the other end.  Sometimes within only a few minutes of first meeting.

“Independence, civil disorder, inflation, and poverty had imprisoned them in the big cities, and they’d rather be out in the country, and I was someone who could get them out of there, at least for a few days.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“They were actually the best guides, being quick-thinking, and knew their way around.  It was because of them, for example, that I managed to travel the whole country from center to east to west to north to south, without the nuisance--or rather, the impossibility--of paying fares.

“It was impossible to ride a bus without paying a fare, but those were dirt cheap--as compared with here, not there--a few cents or so; it was always possible to ride trains, even for long distances, avoiding paying the fare.

“Something which only the street-wise would know, of course; which trains, and when.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Despite their being half my age, I found myself with more endurance, more stamina, than they possessed, probably because their own had been stunted by poor nutrition and health care.

“We invariably returned to Kiev laden down as if pack-horses by produce and other items from relatives in the village.

“When I came back home, I had to re-acquaint myself with the idea of freely walking around carrying nothing.

“In fact, on my first job interview, three days after I returned, I mindlessly carried a shopping-bag, even though there was nothing in it.

“I was hired anyway.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I preferred ‘guides’ who’d been raised under the aegis of a strong male role-model (i.e., a father in the house), but as I always took the first offer that came along, that meant that about half the time, I was with someone who’d been raised only in a matriarchal setting.

“Socialist society was strongly matriarchal, out of necessity, although in this case, I’m talking about the grandmother, the babushka, being boss of it all. 

“After the Russian Civil War 1919-1921, various wars with Poland during the 1920s, and the second world war 1939-1945 there remained seven women of child-bearing age for every male of child-creating age.

“Although not as serious as it had been before, the gender discrepancy was still way out of whack in the mid-1990s.  Girls were treasured, and very much so, but boys even more. 

“And the situation was further exacerbated by males ‘on average’ tending to die at a far younger age."

- - - - - - - - - -

“Youths who’d been raised solely by women tended to be confused about what it meant being a male, and were usually weak spineless spoiled narcissistic sissies.  Also the worst alcoholics, and more prone to violence.

“Sort of a milder version of the Bostonian Drunkard.

“As God knows, I gave even the worst of them far less than what he truly deserved for being so useful to me, but I did what I could.

“Sometimes I’d lose my patience with the overmothered spoiled brats, cursing them in words untranslatable; ‘DAMN IT, learn to use your God-given testosterone, and be a man!  I’ve got your back, whatever the HELL it is you need me getting your back for, so DAMN IT, grow some balls!’”

- - - - - - - - - -

“This choice of traveling companions once in a while created problems of ‘image,’ thanks to the conduct of other westerners, greasy decadent human trash taking wanton advantage of people so desperately poor they’d do anything to survive.

“When with someone half my age, I was obviously not his father or an uncle, and no matter how much I tried looking like a peasant, I was always too obviously a westerner, probably German.

“The primitives on Skins’s island aren’t the only ones with squalid dirty minds, although of course the primitives are the worst of that sort.

“If they weren’t too tired to notice, workers and peasants oftentimes glowered at me and him with dark, hostile stares. 

“They’d lost the Cold War, they’d been beaten down, humiliated, all these rich decadent westerners were running around ostentatiously flashing their wealth, and now they were stealing their daughters and sons for a certain sort of sordid ego-gratification.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I was helpless to do anything against such misperceptions, and just stoically carried on best I could.  Other westerners, having lots and lots of money, could do as they please; I in my poverty depended a great deal upon the goodwill of babushkas and fathers.

“The workers and peasants were enthusiastically heterosexual, and if I’d swung that way and despoiled one of their sons, I wouldn’t have gotten out of there alive.

“But as it was, unhappily for the dirty-minded primitives on Skins’s island, franksolich doesn’t ‘swing’ that way.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Now, this is funny,“ she said.

I looked at what she was reading.

“Yeah, Viatcheslav Alexeivich; I wish I had a photograph of him, because he looked s-o-o-o-o very much like a Democrat machine boss from Cook County.

“He was an older man, in his 60s at the time, and grossly fat; he had a full head of white hair, and was afflicted with boils, warts, wattles, and skin tags.

“He’d been born and raised during the Stalin era, and when he was still a little lad, someone had discerned a talent in him for foreign languages, and from about the age of 8 or 9 years, he’d attended a special English-speaking only school.

“It must’ve been pretty exclusive, as he’d been exempted from conscription--here, I’m talking of the early 1950s--into the military, and the Red Army rarely exempted anyone.

“After graduation from the Institute for Foreign Languages--now, I’m talking of the mid- and late-1950s--Viatcheslav Alexeivich became a translator and guide for delegations from the United States, and all other English-speaking countries; academicians from Harvard and Berkeley, trade-unionists from England, ‘peace’ groups from America, those sorts of people.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I met him because he’d overheard me cursing, in English, to someone pushing me on a tram.

“He got off the same time I did, and told me I spoke ‘beautiful’ English, ’so well, so clear, so distinctively.’

“I looked at him as if he was Bozo from Outer Space.

“Since he obviously knew English, I explained to him that I’d never spoken intelligible English until I was 21 years old, and a junior in college, when I undertook speech therapy.

“’Deaf, you know,’ I said, one those few times I bothered to pull back the hair on one side of my head, showing the absence of an ear.

“He marveled at it.  ‘But you speak it so well,’ he said again.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Actually, to him, who’d never been in America, I spoke ‘so well’ to him probably because I speak so slowly, my voice being as long and broad and flat as the Platte River, where I’d spent my childhood.

“His compliments considerably discombobulated my natural sense of modesty, and I pointed out there was one glaring flaw in it; I couldn’t utter the short ’e’ sound, meaning I couldn’t even pronounce my own first name ’correctly.’

“After more preliminaries, Viatcheslav Alexeivich suggested I be a guest in his home for supper sometime soon, as he had friends who would be interested in meeting me.  His wife was dead, and being lonely, he hosted dinners a couple times a week for them.

As I was doing nothing in particular, I said, yeah, sure.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Viatcheslav Alexeivich's friends were generally about the same age, and former translators and guides for westerners, although not necessarily only English-speaking westerners, but they knew English anyway. 

“Ageing, creaking, fat, flaccid elders who resembled nothing more than a congregation of Chicago Democrat ward bosses, whose women wore too much make-up.

“They all said very nice things about my English; my using the short ‘a’ substituting for the short ‘e’ was only a small matter, it being pointed out that nobody’s perfect.

“I had no way of knowing, but I wondered if perhaps professors from Harvard and Berkeley didn’t speak as clearly as I’d thought they did.

“Being professional linguists, they of course had heard of the phenomenon where people born and raised in Nebraska have no accent, and speak the most-easily-understood English in the world, and we oftentimes speculated why that is.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“It was at the second or third dinner that they all finally discerned my honest attitude about left-wing ‘intellectuals’ and ‘pacifists,’ after which they started opening up with their own honest evaluations of them as ‘suckers.’

"‘Potemkin wasn't the only one to invent villages; we invented whole towns, cities, for the 'suckers.'

"‘And they, as you say in America, “ate it up,” even the inedible parts.’

“After which they sat back in their chairs, roaring and chortling, remembering one hippie or another, that they’d hoodwinked.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“During one of my visits, I noticed some business-cards, in English, on a nearby table; one for some investment counselor from Chicago, another from a metals-exporting company in Atlanta, a third from a ranking bureaucrat with the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C., a fourth from the director of the U.S. Peace Corps in Ukraine.

“Having been in the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants for some time by then, I immediately knew how Viatcheslav Alexeivich was prospering, and greatly so, in a time and place considerably devastated and desperately poor.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Sometime prior to meeting him, I’d visited the USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) offices in Kiev, simply out of curiosity and homesickness to see another American.

“As a courtesy, the gentleman there let me sit in on a discussion between Ukrainians and American foreign-aid officers, these Ukrainians being as affluent and decadent as Viatcheslav Alexeivich and his friends, but younger.

“It was there that I finally grasped the notion of ‘joint ventures.’  A joint venture was where the Americans gave the money, and the socialists took it.

“Also, the press in Ukraine was reasonably a free press at the time, although essentially the newspapers, such as they were, tended to be of the National Enquirer type, scandal tabloids.

“One of them, one day would have a headline, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE GIVES UKRAINE $3.762 MILLION FOR AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT.

“And then the next day, in the same newspaper, but on a page where foreign financial transactions were given (the amounts of each transaction only, not names), there would be the notation that $3.762 million had been transferred to Switzerland.

“I have never been fond of foreign aid, but after all that I saw in the socialist paradises, I‘ve become even less so.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The dinners that I attended, hosted by Viatcheslav Alexeivich and his friends, could be only be described as bacchanalian. 

“I’m sure even Ms. Vanderbilt-Astor, the NJCher primitive on Skins’s island and winner of the 2014 franksolich, would’ve been impressed.

“What was featured for six or eight people at one sitting would’ve fed dozens and scores of ordinary workers and peasants.

“As I personally don't care for food unless I know all that's in it, I generally just stuck with bread and tea, and those times, I could get away with it, because they were so engrossed in themselves they didn‘t notice.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“About two, sometimes three, times during the evening, Viatcheslav Alexeivich would get up and go to a little room with a commode. 

“His apartment, although large and luxuriant, followed the usual socialist pattern of having the commode and a little sink in one tiny room, and the bathtub in another tiny room, both of them right off the dining-living room.

“I heard nothing, but got the impression something really terrible was happening in there, judging from the expressions of concern and alarm among the other guests

“It was probably my imagination, but it seemed to me that the door bulged in mid-section, billowing in and out.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Near the end of my stay in the socialist paradises, Viatcheslav Alexeivich wished to have me over, but there was a problem.  I was leaving Kiev that night for one of the villages.  One can't very well wander around all alone, if one doesn't know the language.

“At various times, I’d requested of him that I be allowed to bring along one of my guides, to one of his dinners, a request always flatly squashed by his contemptuous opinion of them, along with the suggestion that I should stay away from ‘nobodies,’ the peasants, ‘those street urchins, the wolf-children.’

“This time however, he had to give in, because otherwise I couldn't come.  The guide accompanied me, and for the most part being ignored all the other guests, instead constantly stared with both eyes and mouth agape at the menu.

“The menu of course was stuff that had been common--and cheap--fare during the pre-socialist days of his ancestors; so common it was even fed to pigs if there was too much of it, but he’d in his own lifetime ever seen such foods only in picture-books, never with the palate.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Viatcheslav Alexeivich at one point had to go to that little room, after which the usual thing happened, all the guests looking in that direction with concern and even alarm, and myself, unable to hear, imagining the door billowing in-and-out.

“As the kid later explained to me, Viatcheslav Alexeivich was apparently afflicted with all sorts of intestinal and rectal ailments that caused him to audibly groan and snarl and curse and squeak and yelp while sitting on the commode.

“God have mercy on his soul, because this was twenty years ago, and so he’s probably dead now, but there is justice in this world, after all.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Oh man,” I said to Swede, the cook of Norwegian derivation whose specialty is Italianate cuisine, “the bread over there was great, the best bread in the world.

“In fact, I’m writing a whole chapter on the bread.

“They had all kinds of bread, and the workers and peasants made all kinds of bread, but the government-made bread was the best, the sans peer, the ne plus ultra, of bread.

“There was already sort of a ‘free market’ in the manufacture and sale of bread, but because the workers in the cities demanded cheap bread, the government made round loaves about two pounds in weight--unsliced, of course--of both brown and black bread.

“The peasants in the villages and country had always made their own bread.

“If there was a ‘schedule’ for its distribution, I never knew of it; it seemed to happen at random and in random locations--but it seemed as if the workers always knew exactly when it was coming.

“Talk about mobs, swarms of people, the huddled masses compressing together into a big enormous clump of humanity.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The safest place to be was right behind one of those big old bent-backed basbushkas, who charged forward, nothing stopping them, like human cannonballs.

“It might sound as if I’m making fun of poor old women there, but I’m not.  I had nothing but the utmost admiration and respect for them; after all, they were the ones who’d sustained life there since socialism three generations before, and the ones who did most of the work.

“I imagine if the primitives on Skins’s island saw one of them, they’d laugh and ridicule and mock and scorn them…..just as they’re derisively ungrateful to the taxpayers of this country, who support them in their idleness and leisure.

“Being right behind a babushka was also good, if one were trying to get aboard a packed-as-tight-as-sardines bus, trolley, or tram…..as most of them were, most of the time.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I didn’t participate in many bread-rushes--although I saw them--as I was usually out in the boondocks, where again, the peasants made their own bread, or if in Kiev, someone else got it for the table.

“The cost was cheap, it being subsidized by the government so as to keep the urban workers quiet; one time when I got a loaf of the brown bread, two pounds in weight, remember, I computed the value of the karbovanets charged for it as one-sixteenth of an American cent.

“But alas, there were still many who went hungry, and the socialists had forbidden charitable distribution of food via the churches and similarly-minded organizations.

”The state was to give all, and if there wasn’t enough to go around, well, too bad for those left out.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Now, there was a vast deficit between the cost of making the bread, and what the urban workers paid for it--a really big difference.

“And not to mention that the socialist bosses at the government-owned bakeries were pilfering the flour, selling it under the table to privately-owned bakeries to produce their own bread.

“The socialist bosses were stealing so much flour, that to produce the assigned number of loaves, the government-owned bakeries had to ‘substitute.’

“In the case of the brown bread that I liked so much, besides flour, they used ground-up potato peelings and sawdust.

“That was a bread with substance.

“In fact, given how anal-retentive the primitives are, holding their grudges and resentment and anger and not letting it pass out of them, along with all their other rectal problems, I suggest this be fed to them daily, at least those on food stamps.

“It certainly had fiber and roughage.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Now, this looks funny too,” she said.

I looked at the draft she was reading.

Yeah, I said; “if I was bored, I did over there what I do here, invent some mischief just to see what’d happen.

“That was on the train from Lvov back to Kiev, where I’d gone with a man and his wife, and a second woman.

“The fifth person in the compartment was a military officer, of stiff and dignified bearing, but his uniform somewhat worn and threadbare, given the poverty of the country.

“The two women knew some English, and translated best they could, between him and me.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“He said he’d written a book about the secret negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in 1991, to divide up the military resources between them, including armaments. 

“He'd been the second-ranking member of the Ukrainian team.

“He was wondering if I happened to know an American publisher, or at least an agent, who’d be interested in getting it out.

“I gently reminded him that while his subject was important, and that I’d read it myself if it were available, it wasn’t anything that would perk the interest of the American public.

“I reminded him so gently he didn’t really grasp it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“We talked a while of things in general, including the collapse of the socialist paradises.

“He admitted he knew it was coming, when Ronald Reagan asked for Star Wars.  He knew they were done, finished, then.

“Apparently while it was something the Americans could do, even if all the cerebral power, all the manpower, and every single ruble in the Soviet economy, were mustered solely to create and build something similar, they’d still fall short.

“’At that moment, I realized it was over.  We were finished.’

“’Well now,’ I said; ’surely you knew Star Wars was a bluff, to get something else. 

"'It was just a bluff, a political ploy between Reagan and his main adversary in Congress, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Soviet Union).

“’There was a burnt-out light-bulb in the men’s restroom at some naval station in Galveston, Texas, that needed replaced.’”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I had to backtrack, because the officer, like the workers and peasants, had some erroneous ideas about the American political system. 

“As far as they were concerned, Reagan had been the uberboss, with absolute power to do whatever he wished to do.

“And even more erroneously, they believed that both Reagan and Vast Teddy, being capitalist Americans, were the same.

“This wasn’t the case at all, I explained to them; while Reagan was president, and Vast Teddy only one of a hundred U.S. Senators, they both exercised approximately the same amount of power, Reagan because he was president, and Vast Teddy because of the still-then mawkish sentimentality about his two older brothers.

“'Vast Teddy had been against all the progressive things Reagan had proposed so as to make life better for Americans, and to make America stronger.

“'Vast Teddy on the other hand wished to tax Americans into oblivion, and was the best friend the socialists ever had, constantly berating Reagan for his ‘war-mongering imperialism,’ suggesting it’d be better if the Soviets won the Cold War.'”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Okay.

“'So a light-bulb in a men’s restroom at the naval base in Galveston, Texas, had burned out, and needed replaced.

“'Necessitating a minuscule increase in the defense budget.

“'Reagan knew Vast Teddy, no friend of the military, would jump all over him, for trying to incite war against the peace-loving socialists by adding to the defense budget.

“'And Vast Teddy had enough power, enough pull, that that men’s restroom was going to remain permanently in semi-darkness.

“'So Reagan had to resort to bluffing, to get a new light-bulb.'”

- - - - - - - - - -

“'The trick being of course asking for more than what one wants or expects, so that through the give-and-take of negotiations and compromise, one ends up getting what one wants.

“'And so Reagan announced Star Wars, which was going to cost a bundle.

“'It consternated Vast Teddy, righteously indignant at this war-mongering.

“'But Vast Teddy knew he had to "give," at least a little.

“'And so while we never got Star Wars, at least the men’s restroom at that base down in Galveston, Texas, was fully illuminated again.'”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I dunno if he believed me or not, but as the train neared Kiev, he gave me his business-card--I still have it--in case I found him an American publisher or agent who’d be interested in his book.

“Later on, I showed the card to someone who could interpret it for me; it turned out the guy was the head of strategic studies and planning at the country’s military academy.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“There, now it’s all done, at least for the inside,” the property caretaker said as he came down the ladder, having wired the ceiling light in the bedroom to the door-”bell” atop the front door.

“No matter where you’re at inside, and what you’re doing, you’ll always know when someone’s at either door.”

We’ll see, I said, no further comment.

“And then next week, or whenever the weather’s decent, I’ll put in the posts to hold the motion sensors outside, and underground-wire all of them to the light in here.

“By spring, you should be able to pull down the sheets covering the windows, and keep the doors unlocked while you’re around, as you’ll be perfectly safe.”

We’ll see, I said, no further comment.

- - - - - - - - - -

“You haven’t worked on the book the past few days,” he noticed.

Yeah, I said; “it’s the mood, the weather, other things going on, and besides, I’m still wrestling with those three major problems.

“I can’t seem to get the aura of fear, the paranoia, that then existed there--and perhaps still does--and I mean for the reader to always see it, no matter what the reader’s reading, at the edge of one’s eye or imagination.

“Just as my own memories of the socialist paradises always have on the distant edges, like faraway clouds, the images of crumbly asphalt, mud, and human excrement.

“Probably because I myself never had that fear, that paranoia--well, perhaps one can’t describe a feeling one’s never had.

“Maybe I should hang around Skins’s island more, to capture that mood.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The second problem’s that of constantly reminding the reader that he’s seeing the observations and experiences of a deaf person, because that influenced all of my observations and behavior.

“Otherwise the reader might think my conduct that of a madman, a fool, incredibly stupid, or worse.

“If I’d been any of those things, I never would’ve come back from the socialist paradises alive, if I wasn‘t forcibly ejected from there before then.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The third problem’s probably going to be a little easier to explain, once I get into the right mood for writing again; that of showing why my observations and experiences were different from the usual ones.

“They of course were looking at things from the top down--and not very far down, either--while I was looking at things from the bottommost of the bottom, seeing how the 99% lived.

“But that’s not all of it; I suspect another significant difference in perceptions is because I was there on my own dime…..and precious few dimes as they were.

“It wasn’t the typical experience.

“For example, the primitves’d never do such a thing; they’d demand someone else pay all their expenses--for their flights, their passport visas, their lodgings, their medical care--and be assured of someone always being at hand, to explain things to them…..plus a stipend for ‘doing good.’

“I paid for all that my own self.

“Well, admittedly, there was that fourteen dollars a month, given me in increasingly-larger bundles of the worthless karbovanets; I’ll grant that.

“And true, I had guaranteed accommodations--the family that was my host, in exchange for getting their son’s college tuition paid--but this was in a worker’s flat, that while kept immaculately clean, was rather small and cramped.

“And even if a primitive were paid generously to do all that, I really doubt a single one of them would’ve lasted anywhere near as long as franksolich did.

“The primitives have no survival skills, and one wishes to God that Darwin’s Law would re-assert itself.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“What was the family you stayed with like?” she asked.  “Or were supposed to stay with?”

“Well now,” I reminded, “I stayed with them throughout the whole entire stay, minus those first six days.  And I spent my last night in the socialist paradises at their place.

“It was just that after the first month, as I began finding my way around, I tended to be there only two or three nights a month, when I went to Kiev to collect my ‘salary,’ and to celebrate their birthdays, anniversaries, and some holidays with them.

“I mean, hey, it was pretty crowded in there, despite this being a ‘large’ four-room apartment--about the size of Skippy’s digs, maybe, 300 square feet--and myself being a nice guy, I didn’t want to impose.

“Relations were great, excellent, from the very beginning up to the current day--but I don’t imagine they would’ve stayed that way, if I were there all the time. 

“They might’ve been used to being crowded, but I sure wasn’t.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“There was a father, mother, and 19-year-old son.

“He worked for the state printing plant, while she was a stay-at-home housewife--which was surely a rare phenomenon in the socialist paradises.

“The father hadn’t been paid since independence three years before I showed up there, but still went to work diligently every day.

“He was making out like other workers and peasants were making out.

“Since the socialists were banking his paychecks in their own private accounts in Switzerland, he got somewhat resentful, and went into business on his own…..using the premises, the equipment, and the supplies, to churn out private printing jobs for which he was paid cash, by the customers.

“It was a perfect set-up, the only ‘costs’ being his expertise and time, all else being pure profit, and untraceable for taxation.

“It’s kind of the way this society’s been trending since January 2009.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“He did a printing job for me one time, and it turned out thoroughly excellent, top-of-the-line work.  It was awesome.

“I wanted a ‘business card’ that would impress people, especially those who couldn’t read them, and get me into some, uh, places.

“So I designed a business card, the only thing authentic about it being my name and address back here in Nebraska.

“It had the Planned Parenthood logo, identifying me as ‘Vice-President, Abortion Marketing, Promotion & Franchise Development,’ at the bottom with the slogan Killing Infants Is Our Business: Join Us, And Make It Yours Too!

“All in the Latin alphabet and in English, of course, so it wouldn’t shock the workers and peasants.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“You know, it’s too bad about those guys who were stuck there,” the neighbor said.  “I wonder if they still are.”

He’d read the draft of a chapter about some “students” at Kiev Polytechnic Institute, from Vietnam.

They’d been sent, during the 1980s, by that government to study in the Soviet Union. 

Well, the Soviet Union no longer existed, and neither government--Ukraine or Vietnam--had the means to send them back home.  And so there they were, stuck there.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if, even twenty years later, they’re still waiting to get back home,” I said.

- - - - - - - - - -

“They were all relegated to the top floor--the most undesirable place in any living quarters in Ukraine--the thirteenth floor, of a student ‘dormitory.’ 

“A student ‘dormitory’ in the socialist paradises, by the way, bears no resemblance at all, to college dormitories in this time and place.

“The elevator rarely worked, and thirteen flights of stairs is a lot.

“Whenever I passed by the front desk on the first floor, I greeted and smiled at a grouchy old babushka, who strangely refused to reciprocate in kind.  I seemed to make her angry, although I had no idea why.

“It wasn’t until later I learned she was demanding my passport--which she wouldn’t have gotten anyway--and cursing me using rather strong and harsh epithets denigrating Americans.

“Man, could she cuss.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

“These guys were great, although I never did figure out what they did, to survive; only that they seemed to survive. 

“Having been engineering students, they’d obviously established contacts and associations, and maybe made some money that way.  At any rate, they always had more American dollars than I did.

“One time, when I was in desperate straits, the main one, the first one I’d met, offered to loan me five dollars, a sum I knew I’d never be able to pay back, and so I didn’t take him up on it.

“My philosophy was, ‘I’m the one who’s eventually going to get out of this wretched place, and so it’d be immoral for me to take anything from these people, who themselves needed all they could get.’

“Really.  My conduct in the socialist paradises was beyond reproach, no matter how close to the edge I got.  Despite that the primitives on Skins’s island think we’re all just like them, selfish and greedy and grasping, we’re not.

"There's a big, big chasm between Skippy and franksolich, for example, how we are.

“Personal computers, or computers at all, were something beyond their reach, but they did have access to the sorts of things one finds, or used to find, gizmos and gadgets, in Radio Shack or Popular Mechanics circa the 1950s.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I stopped in to see them--there were about twenty of them, all of them evolved into really good friends, and knew some English--every time I made it back to Kiev, and with nothing else to do, they always had a big dinner.

“Happily for me, they weren’t at all like the workers and peasants; if I didn’t want to eat something, it wasn’t forced on me.

“Nor if I didn’t want to drink, I didn’t have to, even though these guys drank like fishes.

“Usually I’d have one tiny drink and take the brown bread.

“I wouldn’t touch Asian food with a ten-foot primitive, but to be gracious, I’d occasionally dip a piece of bread into the liquid of whatever it was they were having.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“That one, I’d rate as one of the most revealing chapters you’ve written,” the neighbor’s older brother said, “medical care under socialism.”

“But perhaps you should resort to your gift for euphemism,” the neighbor’s older brother’s wife said.  “It’s rather unpalatably blunt, in parts.”

“No, he already mutes the horror of it all, by describing a fine beginning-of-spring day out in the country; the warm blue sky, the birds, the trees, the river, the green fields, the splendors of the ancient nunnery, the nuns going about in their work, deflecting from the real picture,” the neighbor’s wife, her sister-in-law, said.

“The description of the prioress, or the abbess, or the mother superior, or whatever she was, is one of the best serious character sketches I’ve seen you write,” the neighbor said.

“It’s dead on.  ‘Free medical care for all,’ under socialism.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I’m still waffling on it, though,” I said; “shifting between simply making it a blunt recitation of the sights and the facts, and trying to prettify it by describing other things around it.”

I’d written the details of my visit to an isolated medieval nunnery that for the last thousand years or so, had served as a hospice, a last “home,” the end of the road, for those in the final stages of untreated sexually-transmitted diseases; a place of such horrid wretched human misery that even the Godless socialists, both Soviet and German, had left it alone.

“It was hard to believe that this was the twilight of the 20th century,” I said, “rather than in medieval Europe…..or in Africa, or China, or Latin America, which were hardly any more ’enlightened,’ if not in fact even more backward, during the same era.

"It was one of those times I was glad I'd been born deaf; the sights, the stench, the pain, were overwhelming enough as it was, but if I could've heard the sounds, I would've been driven stark raving mad."

to be continued

[franksolich]

The business partner and I were down in Omaha Saturday evening, and on a whim, drove by the office of the vanity-book publisher, very much surprised to see the lights were still on, as it was past 11:00 p.m., and on a Saturday night.

Since I had with me completed first drafts of eleven more chapters for the book, I decided I’d slip them in the slot, saving me the trouble of mailing them from here in the morning.

But as I approached the glass door, those inside the office saw us, and opened it, inviting us inside.  They were having a party; it was someone’s birthday, and the interior accommodations, once being those of a now-extinct fraternal lodge, were ideal for a party.

I was surprised--and of course gratified--to see that photocopies of my drafts were being circulated among the guests, not all of whom were employees of the firm.

I approached the woman I’d dealt with three times before, inquiring when a bid for printing 25 or 50 or 100 copies would be ready.  She doesn’t write them up; somebody else does, and he’s always been out of the office when I’ve been there.

“But we’re under the impression there’s no rush,” she said, “as you estimated all the drafts wouldn’t be done until about Christmas.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Yeah, I said; “originally, I’d been hoping to have everything all done and the book all printed up by Christmas of this year.

“I was hoping to give the first copy to thundley4 at conservativecave, given that it was his idea, and the second copy to the primitive who wins the franksolich in the Top DUmmies of 2015 contest.

“But I wasn’t aware I’d accumulated so large of a mass of material--it was, after all, twenty years ago--and the book’s been growing like Topsy.

“So the new deadline’s to have it all completed, edited, and printed by the elections of 2016, in time for the Top DUmmies of 2016.

“So long because after all the first drafts are done, I plan to have a fact-checker check the details, to be sure I didn’t state anything wrong.  I’ve been utterly honest in what I’m writing, but I want to be absolutely sure the facts are unassailable.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Great,” she said; “after all, my own boss has said you haven’t ploughed but ten acres in a full section, and he thinks you need to cover the whole square mile of it.

“In fact, it might end up worthy of a three-volume set, rather than just a book.

“It’s better than that book by that drunken trust-fund fat guy in Boston, or that book by your cousin in San Diego, Nancy or whatever her name is.

“You know,” she continued, “of course we’re in the business of printing whatever someone with the money wants us to print, but those two books, we’d rather not, and happily we never had to.

“If we’d done them, our reputation in the book-publishing business would’ve nose-dived.

“That third vanity-published book you brought along as an example of what you didn’t want, well, even our lousiest print-and-binding job was never that bad.

“And that election-fraud activist in Seattle wrote a good book, an excellent book, worthy of better presentation than what that comics-book publisher down in North Carolina did for it. 

“I’m so happy she found a better publisher, and hope it’s sold well for her.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

When we got back here, the front door was open a little bit, but not enough to encourage the furnace to pump out so as to heat up the whole outdoors.

“You forgot to lock it,” the business partner said.

I hadn’t “forgotten” to lock it at all, but I didn’t say that.

“Well, as you can see,” I said, after we examined the interior of the house, “nothing’s been taken, probably because whoever came in here couldn‘t find a thing worth stealing.

“And nothing’s been damaged, either.”

I dunno if he got the point, but probably not.

- - - - - - - - - - -

The property caretaker had brought over my mail from the post office in town, including one of those yellow cardboard slips that’s put in the box if one’s received a package too large to fit.

Hmmmm, I said.  “According to this, it’s from a town in northern California, no other information.

“I suppose I’ll check it out tomorrow, and if there’s no return address, I’ll immediately forward it on to Los Alamos down in New Mexico, and have them deal with it.

“If it turns out to be from Skippy, the NYC_SKP primitive, that way, he’ll turn up having vaporized his friend Ms. Hindenberg, the defrocked warped primitive ’Warpy,’ rather than franksolich.

“Which of course, while unintended, would remove one of the ugliest, darkest, meanest, most hate-filled, spiteful, cancers on humanity.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“You know,” I told the business partner, “I’m slowly starting to shift my thinking, about this book project.

“I get the impression this vanity-publisher, despite their impeccable reputation, are trying to sell me more than what I want to buy, and I’m not comfortable with that.

“When you get the chance--and oh God, do you know people, tons of them--it’s okay with me if you hunt around for an agent.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“You’re writing a whole chapter on the production and consumption of milk in the socialist paradises?” she asked.

“You didn’t miss anything, and you’re covering everything."

I turned over.

“Of course.  It’s the most important food in the world, milk.

“And despite the most vigorous attempts of the powerful and well-financed anti-milk special interests in this country, it’s always going to be thus.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I was sort of close to another American in Kiev, this one from New York City, a little bit younger than me, chubby, of Italianate derivation even though she was blonde.

“Her character sketch is going to be in the book too.  She had a hearty appetite for male workers and peasants, and they for her.

“I’m of course not giving ‘previews’ of character sketches, because if I preview everything, nobody’ll read the book, as they'd already know this stuff.

“Anyway.

“So one day we were walking around together, looking at what was available on the market, and she overheard something; she was fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian.

“’There’s milk,’ she whispered to me, ‘over there.’

“Leaped my heart for joy, and hers too.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Milk wasn’t anything to be had every day in the socialist paradises; it was one of those commodities that’d appear out of thin air one day, and be gone the next…..with a long interval until its next appearance.

“It was government produced, and sold in one-liter glass bottles.  Whole milk only.

“And despite its scarcity, insanely cheap.

“The relentless Jimmy Carter-like inflation of course had made me get out of the habit of comparing karbovanets with dollars, as there was no point in it, but one time I did make a mental note.

“It was early on, long before inflation got even worse, but anyway, it was sold for about six cents, American, per liter, that time.

“There was home-made goat’s milk in the villages, which was better than nothing, and I imagine there was milk available in the hard-currency stores, but I had the means only one time the whole time I was there, to shop at such a place.

“But despite its cheapness, one never had to rush, and to fight crowds, to buy it, because the workers and peasants avoided it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“So she and I went to a particular shop where, yes, there was milk, blessed milk, wonderful milk.

“We would’ve cleared the shelves, excepting problem…..we had only cloth shopping-bags, each of them able to hold only about six liters each.

“Dumping all else we'd purchased, we bought what we could, and then two extras, to carry.

“Walking back to her flat, we found that rarest of phenomenons in the socialist paradises, a place to sit down.  Just a big rock, but it was something on which one could sit.

“So we sat there, joyously downing our hand-held liters of milk, glorious milk, wonderful, life-sustaining milk.

“Some of hers almost went to waste, dribbling down her chin, but I salvaged that.  We weren’t real close, but she never objected to sucking face.

“Sullen workers and peasants glowered at us as they walked by; ‘stupid Americans, poisoning themselves.’”

- - - - - - - - - - -

“It shouldn’t be any mystery why the workers and peasants were so against milk, excepting for infants, despite that this had once been one of the largest milk-producing regions in the world; at one time, everybody had a cow or two.

“Then the socialists came, and took away the cows.

“’Don’t worry about it,’ they assured the dispossessed; ‘the government from now on’s going to produce all the milk the people need.’

“Well, that never happened.  The cows died, and there was no milk in the land.

“The workers and peasants demanded milk.

“’You don’t need milk,’ the socialists brain-washed them; ‘it’s bad for you anyway.’”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Well, I don’t hear a ticking inside,” the property caretaker said, when looking at the package set in the middle of the dining room table.

“That at least means there’s no time bomb in there.

“But it doesn’t mean there’s no nuclear explosive device in there.

“So…..why’d you bring the package here?”

Well, I told him, “I have to park it somewhere until we can figure out what it is.  I’d just as soon’ve forwarded it on to Los Alamos, New Mexico, right there at the post office, but one can’t do that.

“One has to get a name and a department.

“So for now, I’m stuck with it, but I think as long as nobody moves it, picks it up, drops it, or jostles it, nothing’ll happen.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Well, it’s still pretty scary,” the property caretaker said, “the possibility of a nuclear device that can vaporize all of northeastern Nebraska and the eastern half of the Sandhills…..sitting right here on your dining room table, only inches away from both of us.”

Yeah, I said, grimly; “one wrong move with this baby, and in less than a twinkling of an eye, we‘re gone, all gone.”

“It’s too bad we can’t figure out who sent it from the post office box number for San Rafael, California, on the return address,” he said, “but as you already mentioned, the post office doesn’t give out that sort of information.

“Such neatly hand-written labels, too.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Aha, I said, slapping my forehead.

“It’s all handwritten; graphology might identify the culprit.

“After all, handwriting’s a neuro-muscular action, much like what’s shown on an EKG or a brain-scan tape.

“Like, I can already tell you the person who sent this an older middle-aged male, probably educated as an engineer or an architect.”

“I know you know this handwriting analysis stuff,” the caretaker said, “which is why you’ve never taken a bum check, but how did you figure that out?”

“The printing’s the standard style taught to engineering and architectural students in college, but it betrays some characteristics of penmanship as it was taught in grade schools during the 1950s and 1960s.

“Grab me the magnifying glass out of the second drawer of the buffet,” I said, “but don’t jiggle the table, lest it disturb the package and what‘s in it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Aha, I said, immediately upon looking through the glass. 

“There’s some very minor jerks and starts, indicating incipient cardiac problems; nothing serious yet, but headed that way, and probably just due to age and decadence.

“And there’s this thing,” I said, showing him, “betraying there’s been minor cerebral breakage.  Nothing catastrophic yet, but this is someone who’d better take care of his brain.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“There’s three zones in handwriting; the spiritual, the practical, and the sensual.  This person’s wholly materialistic, nothing spiritual or practical in his nature. 

“It shows some sexual deviance, but well within the range of ‘normal;’ this guy’s got some quirks, but really, he’s no threat to children or defenseless women.

“And there’s these characteristics betraying self-deception; he’s pretty bright--at least bright enough to build a nuclear device--and thinks he can get away with fooling people not as smart as he is, but he’s got that all wrong. 

“He’s deceiving himself, not others…..unless they’re other primitives--but even the village idiot here can deceive the primitives.

“His ethics, such as they are, are wholly situational--it doesn’t matter what someone‘s doing; what matters is only the person doing it, and his feelings about that person determines whether he thinks the ’what’ is bad or good.

“Sort of like Barack Obama can barbeque and dine on infants, and it’s okay, because he’s who he is, while George Bush can cure cancer and bring about world peace, but it’s bad because he’s who he is.

“Utterly corruptible, and his price isn’t high.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“But overall, what really stands out is some sort of intense rage and hate.

“This is only speculation, but I suppose he rigorously tries to disguise that anger by masquerading as being an utterly conventional, non-controversial-looking, genial cherubic older guy just off the airplane from a vacation in Hawaii.”

“What do you suppose is the source of all that negativism?” the caretaker asked.

“I’m getting the impression he’s pissed off because he’s missing something ‘everybody else’ has, even though they don’t, necessarily.

“The ol’ green-eyed monster, envy.

“Maybe a parent was absent from his life when he was growing up.

“Maybe he had some sort of accident that caused the loss of something personal on him that’s pretty important, but usually not visible.

“Or since he’s obviously decadent, maybe he’s lilliputian in the same sense the late King Farouk of Egypt was.

“That could be a real ego-buster for a male.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Finally, obviously an extravagant person, wasteful and frivolous in silly things.

“I’m guessing he probably lives beyond his means, despite that his means aren’t small--it’s a good possibility he’s an overpaid and underworked desk-sitting governmental bureaucrat.

“Now, which of the primitives, of all the primitives living in California, most exactly matches all this, including having the know-how to build a nuclear explosive?

“I think it’s very clear who it is.”

“But hold on,” the caretaker said; “while the odds are probably 99% that you’re right, those odds aren’t 100%.

“Maybe he was visiting Big Mo in Chicago, or ogling naked women in bars with the cliffordu primitive when this package was mailed.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied; “when this package was mailed, Skippy was at home, ‘coordinating’ a beach clean-up.

“Not picking up litter himself--that’s for little people to do--but high-and-mightying it over those who were.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“So…..there’s a nuclear device ticking away on your dining room table--”

“I think it’s a nuclear device,” I interrupted the insurance man.

“I don’t know for sure, but I think it is.

“This is something that needs treated with caution, but no need to panic and get all paranoid like the primitives would.

“When I contacted the nuclear bomb people down in Los Alamos, New Mexico, hoping to send it to them to deal with, they said ‘it’s not our problem; call your local law-enforcement to deal with it.’”

“Well, maybe we need to do that,” the insurance man said; “after all, even though we‘re eight miles away, here in town, if one of your cats were to knock it off the table, we‘re still close enough we‘d be vaporized only a micro-millisecond later.”

“No, not until I’m sure it’s a nuclear device, after which I’d contact the sheriff. 

“I’d look like an ass, if it turned out not to be.

“But as it’s obviously from Skippy, the NYC_SKP primitive on Skins’s island--the hand-writing’s an exact match--what else could it be?

“It wouldn’t be like it’s a dozen roses or something.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“If it were in fact a nuclear device, and were in fact built by Skippy, who does seem irrationally paranoid about you and everybody else, why this?” the insurance man asked.

“It’s not his modus operandi, which tends towards the Near Eastern medieval--”

“Yeah, but that’s not working out for him.  Every time I see one of his pals in Arabesque desert garb, a wild frenzied look in his eyes, waving a scimitar around looking to chop off some heads, especially this one, I cross the street and walk on the other sidewalk so he doesn’t see me.

“So maybe Skippy’s changed tactics, trying to liquidate franksolich himself.  And being what he is, a hardcore old-line totalitarianist, a devout admirer of Bill Ayers, Pol Pot, and Kim Jung-on, he wouldn’t care if a few thousand other decent and civilized people were taken out, too.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Well, until we know for sure,” the insurance man said, “it’s probably best to be cautious.  If it is in fact a nuclear device, what do you suppose its capabilities are?”

“Well, being built by Skippy, one can be pretty sure it’s well-built, solid, and guaranteed to work.

“The first atomic bomb, in July 1945 at Los Alamos, had a yield of 19,000 kilotons of dynamite.

“The biggest nuclear bomb ever, the most powerful destructive force ever put together by man, was exploded by the peace-loving socialists in the Arctic Ocean on October 30, 1961, and had a yield of circa 60,000 mega-tons.

“If in fact it’s a nuclear device, I’d say it’s probably somewhere in between those two.

“But best not to be paranoid until we know for sure.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Here, let me move this off the table, so we can have more room,” she said, making movement in that direction.

“Eye-eye-eye-eye-eye, yikes, no, don’t do that,” I said as I yanked her away.

“Don’t touch it; leave it alone.  It’s dangerous.

“We can eat around it.”

The neighbor, the property caretaker, some woman Romeo had sent to me, and I were getting ready to have supper here. 

The neighbor planned to work late out in the garage, and had telephoned his wife to say he’d eat here.  The caretaker’s wife was out with “the girls” again, raiding the shopping malls of the big city, leaving him to fend for himself.

The woman Romeo had sent to me, being a blonde with no Hebraic-looking characteristics, wasn’t my type, and so I wasn’t interested, but invited her to stay for supper anyway.

- - - - - - - - - -

“What’s in it?” the blonde woman asked.

“Maybe a nuclear device capable of vaporizing all of northeastern Nebraska and the eastern half of the Sandhills, if it’s set off,” the neighbor said.

“We’re not sure yet, but that’s probably what it is, since it’s from Skippy on Skins’s island,” the caretaker added.

“So…..” the blonde woman said, “we’re going to have supper with a trigger-ready atomic bomb as the centerpiece on the table.

“You gotta be kidding me.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“We don’t know for sure,” I said; “on one hand, we don’t wish to be psychotically paranoid like the primitives on Skins’s island, but on the other hand, this is from Skippy, and so we need to be cautious, until we do know for sure.

“We can eat around it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

As we dined, the blonde woman mentioned Romeo had shown her some of the drafts of chapters of my upcoming book about my experiences in the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants.

“You write well, an engaging style, and I want to buy the book when it comes out.  It must’ve been an awesome experience.”

“But he left this country hale and hearty and healthy, though” the neighbor said; he’d seen me just before I left, and just after I’d come back.  “When he came back, he was all grey and gaunt and quiet and must’ve weighed about a hundred pounds.

“He took lots with him, but what he brought back, well, when his friend picked him up at the airport in Chicago, after getting over the shock of the change in him, suggested they go collect his luggage, he held up one of those men’s shaving cases one usually has with suitcases, that he’d carried on board, and said, ’this is it; this is all I’ve brought back.’”

Note: I’d written reams and reams of material, but those were constantly being mailed back to Nebraska; as I numbered everything, it appears it all arrived, although sometimes via Guinea or Cuba or Red China, the last thick envelope coming about six months after I’d been back here.

- - - - - - - - - -

“I weighed 161 pounds when I got back,” I corrected the neighbor, “and besides, I was interviewed for a job my third day back, and working my fourth day back.

“I wasn’t in that bad of shape.

“Although I seriously suggest that the big guy in Bellevue, the LynneSin primitive, the Kitty Wampus primitive, the Las Vegas Leviathan, the Texas pyramid the ‘Gothmog’ primitive, the Odin2005 primitive, and Bill the Bostonian Drunkard, do the same thing I did, as it did melt away the pounds without one even trying.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

“What was in the luggage you took with you?” the blonde woman asked.

“Oh, the usual standard stuff,” I replied; “clothes, personal care necessities, a portable typewriter, and a big box of medical stuff.

“The typewriter, I’d taken because it was sturdy, but lightweight.  It was very small, black, and from 1918 or something.  One of those old typewriters where the capital ‘O’ is also the ‘zero,’ and the small ‘L’ serves as the ‘1’ too.

“I went when the internet was still a-borning, and personal computers even in this country a luxury, so figured there’d be nothing like that there, and was right; the 1% had cruder versions of what we had then; the bottom half, the 99%, had no such things.

“I hadn’t counted on using the typewriter much, but I ended up banging the Hell out of it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The medical stuff was either things suggested by a physician, who’d checked into the quality of medical care in the socialist paradises, or pharmaceuticals given me by him.

“We were good friends, and knew I’d follow his explicit instructions.

“Penicillin, synthetic antibiotics, strong but non-narcotic pain-relievers, about a dozen bottles of controlled substances, antiseptics, syringes, those sorts of things.

“I’d already stocked up on aspirin, bottles and bottles of them so as to allow myself four per day as long as I planned on being there.

“As it turned out, by the end of my stay, while I was nearing the end of the aspirin, I hadn’t ever used any of the other stuff, and gave it all to one of the narcotics policemen who was holding the ‘farewell’ party for me.

“I suspect I avoided most hazards by simply avoiding the food; if I didn’t know exactly all what was in it, I didn’t eat it, and if I did know, usually I didn’t eat it.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Well, I really doubt it’s a nuclear device--it doesn’t seem heavy enough--but since it was unasked-for, and sent by Skippy--what you’re doing is best; just leaving it alone until you figure out exactly what it is,” the neighbor’s older brother said, when he came to pick me up late at night so we could go out to tend the cattle.

“I wouldn’t touch it; I’d just leave it be until you know exactly what’s in it.

“And knowing how paranoid the NYC_SKP primitive, and most of the other primitives, are about franksolich, it’s likely not good.”

- - - - - - - - - -

As we were riding over the muddy hills of the Sandhills, he mentioned the draft of a chapter I’d written about medications I’d taken with me to the socialist paradises.

Like the business partner, the neighbor’s older brother is an EMT-paramedic, the highest class in that skill, and of course has dispensed pharmaceuticals not only in the course of his helping others here, but on religiously-sponsored missions to places such as Turkey, Senegal, India, Paraguay, &c., &c., &c.

“You were practically carrying around a whole miniature pharmacy there,” he said; “I’m surprised it was never stolen, as surely it was invaluable.”

“It was the size of a square shoe-box, such as those for boots,” I said, “packed tightly, and specially tailored for me.

“The physician who gave the drugs to me had known me since I was a kid, and knew what I was like, and pretty good at guessing what sorts of predicaments I’d get into.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“He didn’t demand such a promise, but I gave it to him anyway--that I wasn’t to play ‘doctor’ over there, giving them to other people.

“I’ve never been good at playing doctor anyway,” I continued, “surprising, considering the family from which I came.

“Every day I thank God I’ve never been afflicted with diabetes, having to inject myself.  It’d be a death sentence; I couldn’t do it.

“I have no problems, no problems at all, with someone else sticking needles into me, but I’d have considerable problems trying to jab myself, or another person.

“Every time one of the cats needs a deworming pill, because I’m nervous about it, I just take the cat to the veterinary, where the receptionist jams the pill down its throat.

“I couldn’t do it, no way.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Oddly, he gave me tetanus vaccine, despite that I’d been continuously inoculated against it since I was about three years old, and the vaccines by then were good for ten years.

“I suppose he imagined I could sell some of them to people who knew what they were doing, if desperate for money, but that never happened.

“He coached me, at length and in great detail, about each and every item he gave me…..and wouldn’t let me go until it was clear to him that I truly ‘got it,’ rather than simply acting as if I understood.

“I had no idea, for example, that there’s significant differences in the compositions and usages of Darvon and Percodan.

“I bet, however, that it wouldn’t’ve made any difference to the Taverner ex-primitive.

“But at any rate, I used only Bayer aspirin while I was there, and gave the whole boxful of stuff away to workers and peasants who’d know what they were, and how to use them, my last night there.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“At first, I carried it around with me when outside of Kiev, but I learned reasonably fast that the workers and peasants didn’t trust western medicines, after which I quit bothering.

“Bayer aspirin for example’s a well-known name, and top-of-the-line quality, but when offered a couple--’prescribing’ aspirin’s harmless, so I did do that--the workers and peasants always turned me down, preferring their own adulterated made-in-Poland ‘aspirin,’ or more often, simply going without.

“One of the scariest events I had was when a kid was taking me to his village via bus.  There was standing-room only on this decrepit old bus, and the trip, for about 150 miles, took six hours, arriving just before midnight.

“When about three-quarters of the way there, the 19-year-old kid with me suddenly collapsed, fainting, causing an uproar among the heavily bundled-up workers and peasants, and the driver to stop the bus.

“I didn’t know it until later, but it was ‘insulin shock’ or ‘diabetic shock,’ whatever it’s called.  It was a bitterly-cold night, and everyone hustled out of the bus, to take care of him.  The bus terminated at his village, so it was full of people who knew him.

“Standing outside, I opened up and offered my ‘medicine box,’ full of stuff beyond price in that land, but was rudely shoved away; he was one of theirs, and they’d take care of him themselves, thank you…..”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“I thought the lights were supposed to go on in this place, telling him someone was at the door,” the county sheriff said.

“No, until the motion sensors are set up, they still have to ring the doorbell to alert him,” the property caretaker replied.

“When that’s all done, all someone’ll have to do is step in the front yard, or anywhere within fifty yards of house, and the lights’ll go on, without the doorbell even being rung.

“And whoever broke in didn’t ring the doorbell first.”

The county sheriff, the caretaker, and I were examining damage done to the new front door here, for the second time in two weeks.

I suppose I could’ve pointed out that no damage had ever been done by uninvited entry into this place for almost ten years, when I’d kept the doors unlocked, after which intruders, finding nothing worth stealing, simply left doing no damage at all.

But now that I’ve been told to lock the doors for my own safety, well…..

I was tired of repeating that, shouting into the wind, and so made no comment.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Did they take anything?” the sheriff asked, walking inside the house and looking around.

“I see they ransacked your bedroom pretty good.”

“Yeah, but it’s just messed up, nothing missing,” I replied.

“Where were you when this happened?” the county sheriff asked.

“In bed, sleeping.”

- - - - - - - - - -

The three of us walked all the way through the house, closely inspecting.  Nothing had been taken.

Excepting, oops, the package that had been put in the middle of the dining room table.

“What was it?” the sheriff asked.

Now, until it was determined the package was in fact hazardous, we’d all agreed to keep its existence a secret, and especially from law-enforcement.

franksolich is a nice guy, one of the nicest guys one can ever hope to meet, and this package was, indisputably, based upon handwriting analysis, from Skippy, the NYC_SKP primitive on Skins’s island.

However, Skippy’s never threatened franksolich--just denigrated the accuracy of my collection-of-information skills--and this package might be a benevolent one, maybe a “peace offering.”

So best to not name Skippy as any sort of culprit, until he’s proven himself one.

This wasn’t the same sort of thing that Fat Che, the former “BenBurch” primitive, the obese eunuchial loser, had tried ten years ago.

“I’m not sure,” I said; “it was home-made.”

“Any idea what it was worth?” the sheriff asked.

“Well, given what home-made ‘arts-and-crafts’ get at garage sales these days, worth maybe a dollar,” I said.

“Actually, probably priceless, but for pecuniary purposes, use a dollar.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Well, I’m glad that thing’s out of here, even though the front door had to be broken, to get it out,” she said.

Don’t be too glad yet, I reminded her.  “We don’t know where it’s at, and it’s possible anyone within 200 miles of it’s Ground Zero, to be wiped out in a milli-second.”

“Oh, but it can’t really be a nuclear device,” she insisted, “and besides, why would one want to blow you up?

“You’re a nice guy, one of the nicest guys one can ever hope to meet.”

“We’re talking primitives here,” I reminded her; “to a primitive, what’s white is black, what’s black is white, what’s good is evil, and what’s evil is good.

“And we’re coming up on the tenth anniversary of the scam that rocked the internet, in which franksolich played an involuntarily prominent part in exposing as a hoax.

“And there was the Top DUmmies of 2014 contest, in which the awards were the best-written ever, and the winning primitives didn’t like it.

“And there’s that the one primitive who has the know-how, the smarts, the means, to build a nuclear device all by himself, is especially noted for his rabid paranoia.

“I’m however thinking less and less that it’s a nuclear device, though.

“If I had to make up odds, I’d say there’s a 33% chance it’s a nuclear device, a 33% chance it’s some other sort of weapon, maybe biological in nature, and a 33% chance that it’s an authentic good-will present, making amends to me for having insulted me.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Oh my, she said; “a whole chapter devoted to stairs and stairways in the socialist paradises.

“You didn’t miss anything when you were there, did you?

“I’ve never seen a travel book with a whole chapter dedicated to steps and stairwells.”

Don’t waste time reading it, I told her, laying in bed beside her.  “We’ve got other business to tend, but to placate your curiosity so we can get started, I’ll tell you about it; it’d be shorter than you reading it.

“Here in America, and most of the western world, steps tend to be uniform in height--they might vary, for any one of many good reasons, but generally, overall, most of the time, on ‘the average,’ they’re the same height, seven inches or something like that.

“Even a blind person can walk up and down steps with confidence, knowing exactly how high, or how low, the next one’s going to be.

“And we seeing people don’t even have to look, already knowing by instinct how high or how low we’re supposed to step.

“This is because way back near the end of the 19th century--say 1884 or 1891 or something--engineers determined the proper height of steps that would be most easily and conveniently walked up-and-down by the greatest number of people.

“Democratic utilitarianism; what’s good, or what works, for the greatest number of people.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“That by the way doesn’t mean what’s good, what works, for all people, but what’s appropriate for the greatest number of people.

“I recall one time Ms. Hindenberg on Skins’s island, the Warpy primitive, griping that kitchen counters were designed by men who wanted them too high for women to use easily.

“The defrocked warped primitive of course always blames men for her problems.

“What Ms. Hindenberg forgot was that, in addition to being hideously ugly, she’s shorter than most other women.

“And the height of kitchen counters was decided upon to serve the greatest number of people, not all the people.

“If I, a deaf person, can ‘adapt’ to the way things are in the majority world, the hearing world, without being a bitch about it, then surely Ms. Hindenberg can adapt to things that are meant to be easy and convenient for that majority world, everybody who’s taller than she is, instead of whining about it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Anyway, the socialists had apparently never bothered trying to figure out what was easiest, and most convenient, for the workers and peasants to use.

“No matter where one was, steps were always uneven in height, even in the newest of places.

“In the stairwells, the first step might be three inches up, the second step seven inches up, the third step five inches up, the fourth step nine inches up, and so on.

“It was especially a hazard when the stairwells weren’t lit, which they weren’t most of the time.

“And there wasn’t even any pattern, any cycle, to these differing heights of steps.  It was wholly random, from the first floor all the way up to the thirteenth floor.

“I don’t believe I ever saw, anywhere, two steps in a row the same height.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“One time, I spoke with a socialist engineer, who knew English, wondering about why so much mud all over.

“’It’s as if nobody here’s familiar with the concept of ‘drainage,’ I said.

“At the same time, I brought up the matter of ancient babushkas bent permanently into upside-down “L”s because they were compelled to use short-handled brooms to whisk the streets, whereas long-handled brooms would’ve been better.

“And the matter of privies, usually just a shed housing a hole in the ground, over which two planks were spaced apart, forcing one to squat and let go.

“I’m sure that a ledge on which one could sit had been invented as long ago as the Stone Age, and that having a ledge on which to sit made it not only easier to use, but more sanitary.

“He ignored those, and getting back to my original comment, replied, ‘drainage is a decadent western capitalist bourgeoise concept useless to socialist man, which is why we don’t bother with it.’”

- - - - - - - - - -

“As I got to know those guys of Vietnamese derivation stranded in that abominable place, unable to go back home, they became more comfortable showing me their information, including their college transcripts.

“These were graduates of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, remember; the premier college of engineering.  Four- and five-year graduates, just like those from colleges of engineering here.

“And with about the same number of ‘credit hours.’

“By that time, I was reasonably able to read Russian and Ukrainian, and ‘translating’ these transcripts was barely any problem at all, especially considering they used the same format as used in western academic transcripts.

“These guys had taken a lot of courses in engineering.

“But about a third of their courses, required for their degrees, were in socialist indoctrination, nothing to do with engineering or real life at all.”

to be continued