MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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It is a craft maybe older than the oldest - I suppose that the simple Neanderthal man wouldn't have come to the point that he would pay for love (Prostitution) with the odds-and-ends in his bag if he had not heard the story told by some frustrated lover who wasn't able to grab a Neanderthal woman and abduct her in his cave; but brilliance in fibbing about ones sexual life creates the best stories.
I was always thinking that it is much more funny to create your own world than to write about this one in which we are living. Maybe this world was created by God, but it is decidedly led by nuts.
In fact, I have been running away from non-fiction writing for all of my life.
I never know how to begin a non-fiction article. It is easy with the fiction; you have a beginning, middle and end.
Where is the beginning of the world I am living in?
Somebody could say that everything began with the Big Bang, but I don't have the cosmos on my mind.
On my mind is only the part of the Europe I am living in. I live in the former Czechoslovakia. The part of the world where it is brilliant when the wheel is round - everything else is a gift from the Lord.
I am a man who came from the former Yugoslavia. My poor motherland already forgot what the wheel was for a while.
Of course, Mr. Milosevic is one very discerning ruler and he will not allow the people of Yugoslavia to forget what the wheel is looking like. Right now (according to BBC World Service, confirmed by E-mails I have received tonight from Yugoslavia) he is refreshing people's knowledge about wheels with the enormous number wheels on the police vehicles on the streets of Belgrade, Novi Sad, Nis...
These are the same towns which took the most of beatings of the NATO Flying Circus a few months ago.
NATO bombarded those towns because they belong to a country led by Mr. Milosevic. Thus, Mr. Milosevic now sending his police forces to those towns because they are led by his opponents and their citizens are demonstrating looking for his demise seems an ironic justice...
( Now let's face it: Such bullshit as this couldn't pass in a fiction text. No Sir, it would be rejected even in an amateurish newsletter in the middle of nowhere.)
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On the other side, members of Communist Party favored by the former regime think that the start of the mess is closely connected with the end of 'eighties and the fall of the wall in Berlin.
For lot of Hungarians living in Slovakia the question of Communism is irrelevant and their anger aims to the year 1918 and extinction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the Empire fell it made the Hungarians a new minority.
Gypsies would say that the mess started in 'fifties, when they were settled by force in villages abandoned by Carpathian Germans and forced to work in factories which were unprofitable from the beginning.
A friend of mine says the mess in his live began with the doctors who found that he had a damaged pancreas and so banned him from drink.
Of course, there are worse places to live in than Central Europe.
Boston, USA, for example.
A friend of a friend of mine, who immigrated there from Southern Europe, can't stand the fact that he has to pay US$1.65 for paprika there and that the paprika is flavorless and tastes like a plastic bag... And there is always somebody to pester with immigrants; I know it from my personal experience: I am forced to endure the ugly immigrant's face with his ceaseless grumblings every morning in the mirror.
Theoretically, immigrants are going somewhere where it is better than where they had lived before, otherwise they wouldn't be immigrants, but fools.
In practice, they really live better than they would live in their previous location, but this practical fact has no connection with their feeling of happiness.
A friend of mine, who is Chinese and an ample man, the owner of a few big stores here in Kosice, left his country some ten years ago. He was born in an infertile agricultural part of China, he was not able to travel there, he had to be careful about what he talkied about, and he had no opportunity to have his own business under the Communist regime. All of that is the truth, but I have the impression that when he talks of it he doesn't talk only to me, but to himself, too.
I do not know why, but I expect him to start to speak about mosquitoes which are bigger and much more aggressive in China than mosquitoes in Slovakia. He doesn't. It is pity, because I am fond of telling him about virulent gad-flies near the Danube in Vojvodina.
The Slovakian border with the Ukraine is place a where human smuggling is a booming business. People from Asia, often more than 60 packed like sardines in a small truck, try to reach Slovakia --- not because they want to stay here, but to reach the Czech Republic.
After that only the Austrian or German border divides them from the Western Dream.
Slovak police often catch such cargo, but the public here doesn't pay too much attention. You can't see more than five or ten lines in the local newspaper or a 30 second piece on the very end of the television news, just before they kick in a story from some zoo with a new panda or some buzz from the celebrity world. Friends of mine are telling me that it was different before, some fifteen or twenty years ago, when the passport was not common thing but almost an unreachable treasure.
I am curious to know what is going to be the situation with people who survived the wars in the former Yugoslavia. After the 'nineties have ended, nobody will be able to look at a TV screen full of uniforms from any place in the world indifferently as they used to when Vietnam, Israel, Afghanistan or Lebanon were attractive names reminding us of lessons in geography.
What is news commentary going to be like in fifteen, twenty years? Should CNN be treated with same feelings as MTV or Eurosport?
I know that I will write about it again. I know that I will be able to finish this story of life in Eastern Europe with a happy-end. After all, I am a fiction writer. 
I am a fiction writer, a story-teller.
I suppose that everybody around here has his own theory about when the mess in this part of the world started.
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*Table Background courtesy of Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Dissidents toward the former regime believe that the mess started in 1917 with the Great October Revolution when communism was established as a force and left consequences which could not be repaired in the next few decades.
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