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Aug. 23rd, 2022|10:06 pm |
Found myself in Daugavpils as the sun was coming up and my wife had just fallen asleep in the hospital.
Locals were riding the flood water cascading down the incline of the streets (it is a dream). People who know their way about the place, evidently. I ended up in some kind of bar, and then some women who had the honour of sitting on the morning stanga asked me questions. I thought about one of them (the vapros), and they asked me why I was depressed.
I once knew an Austrian Scandinavian, who was from the USA. He had been sent to Kraslava as part of the Peace Corps to teach English and instil a love of America and pick up litter etcetera.
The Head of Kraslava Mafia respected him in a public sauna (he withstood treatment) after his neighbour and minor organised criminal had threatened to kill him for flooding his apartment.
On his first day, a couple of high-school girls turned up to show him around in their bikinis.
It was the late 90’s.
He is married to a Russian chick now - or he was. They proofread LV foreign policy.
"Look at this girl" said this Irish guy (about 25 to be fair in 2000 and something), standing against a castle wall somewhere in Estonia. He knew her. Look at her, he exhorted again, enlarging the image on his phone in Bar Leningrad on a bitchy summer afternoon. My Scottish friend agreed she was all things Russky and beyond, and agreed to join him in Tallinn as he was between loves, and he was down with the yazik (having studied there). I didn’t go with them despite being in a marital hellscape at the short period of time. I was pagan and I had a headache.
Now married and Brussels based, he took a look around last week to check no Russian chicks were listening in on the warm Riga terrace, and then told me how fucking awful Mordor really was.
To illustrate he was “with this Yank on a train to the Moscow suburbs at night after work (at some institute), when these 5 orcs clocked us and came down to sit next to us. Being clever, Scottish and in camouflage, in black leather jacket and black hat, we talked about the Fitba as a tactic - which worked, and we got out at the next stop. And they got out behind us. And if I hadn’t ducked around the busses, and the bus stops, and gone round back of the station
twice
We would have been fucked. But then we realised we were lost. We had gotten out at the wrong stop.”
Two hobbits in Mordor.
“We went through a forest, and came upon some village. We asked for help, and a guy told his dog to be quiet. He told us the last train would leave in 15 minutes, and then he took us there in his van.
See?”
It had taken him over 20 minutes to tell it, while I was wondering whether to point out the obvious, but he insisted I was ignorant of Russia, like he once had been. There would be no point. He speaks the language, so he can listen to podcasts that mock the Western far right for thinking Dugin has any influence in the Kremlin. I can hear his account of their incredulity in the blast of car bomb. |
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