I've had a puppy-rescuing experience a month or so ago. I ran across a 900 gram bundle of fur which the vet told me couldn't be more than a month old... she was a complete mongrel left all alone in a park, with some horrid bird pecking at her. Tiny fluffy filthy dog, all quiet, in complete shock, color of 'I wanted some brown highlights but it all went horribly wrong'. So what to do - I took her to a vet, then home, spent a day or two loving her and agonizing over her future (it's hard to find a home for a mongrel, people who want dogs tend to already have dogs, and most people want a breed......) I'm not really a dog person, and neither is Husband - but I tells ya, we were on the verge. I couldn't bear to just toss her out again, and serbia has no asylums or shelters for abandoned animals... so handing her over to an institution would mean she would be put to sleep. I just wasn't ready to let something so fluffy die.

anywho the story ends happily (as all good stories do :) - friends talked to other friends and a friend of a friend took her, and loved her at first sight. she's currently in a town an hour or so away from Belgrade, in a nice house with a yard, and I hear her best friend is a cat. Open minded little dog.

well the dog story worked out ok, except that I found it sensitised me greatly to the plight of abandoned animals (strays bring tears to my eyes sometimes, and they never used to), and gave me a deep-seated and undeniable need for something furry, fuzzy and fluffy scurrying around the house. So Husband and I looked around and came up with two gray kittens (which breed, you ask? Thoroughbred Belgrade Dumpster Cat). You can imagine how entertaining life has just become :)

in other news, I took the MENSA test the other day. Felt horribly embarrassed standing there with thirty or so people all reckoning they've got genius potential... I even made Husband participate ('C'mon, it'll be fuuuun....!!) though he fought me long and hard. Anyhow it's a month-long wait till the results come in..... Honestly, if someone asked me why I did it I couldn't say. This nice man was talking about it in the morning TV programme.....

they say you can do the test three times in total, and must wait a full year between sittings. But honestly, I think I'll stick with the one time, whatever the result. I've got nothing to hang a complaint on - I had enough time (though the man was right - it was the fastest 20 minutes of my life), I was rested and happy and relaxed, and if the score comes back low it can only mean I'm objectively daft :) At any rate I'm not really aiming for the MENSA entrance level. (that's an IQ of 148) I'm reckoning somewhere around 130.............................

Heh heh it will be fun when the results arrive though, seeing as Husband and I both took the test. Whoever comes out on top, I can see trouble brewing.... Our one salvation would be a tie! Incidentally, among the people taking the test with us were three girls sharing the same last name - sisters, presumably. Wonder how the results affect their lives.......... Wonder why they decided to all go together. Funny thing intelligence. None of us feel we're lacking in it, yet it's a frightening thing to let someone give you  a scientific estimate of you IQ.... Makes one feel curiously vulnerable. Most of us would rather just secretly suspect we're a lot smarter than anyone would guess.............

I'm thinking too many things simultaneously, and none of them gel with any of the others. So I'll hold on to the whole tangled ball of yarn until some sort of pattern emerges. Until then I'll share some poetry.

Maybe a word on poetry before that - I realise that for most people, the invocation of this term requires mention of sunsets, flowers and tragic romance as obligatory items. Which always makes me recall what Daniil Kharms once wrote (wonderful Russian writer, anyone who looks him up is sure to be amused. Especially his 'Incidences') anyhow where was I.... yes, he wrote 'One should write poetry so that if you threw a poem at a window, the pane would shatter'.

Oh one could pontificate all day. Here goes.

Running lightly over spongy ground,
Past the pasture of flat stones,
The three elms,
The sheep strewn on a field,
Over a rickety bridge
Toward the quick-water, wrinkling and rippling.

Hunting along the river,
Down among the rubbish, the bug-riddled foliage,
By the muddy pond-edge, by the bog-holes,
By the shrunken lake, hunting, in the heat of summer.

The shape of a rat?
It’s bigger than that.
It’s less than a leg
And more than a nose,
Just under the water
It usually goes.

Is it soft like a mouse?
Can it wrinkle its nose?
Could it come in the house
On the tips of its toes?

Take the skin of a cat
And the back of an eel,
Then roll them in grease,–
That’s the way it would feel.

It’s sleek as an otter
With wide webby toes
Just under the water
It usually goes.

(Theodore Roethke. I remember something else written by him, about the sadness of pencils..... ah anyhow. This is actually part of a larger poem, called The Lost Son)

I'll share another - and this, quite irrationally, moves me beyond all expectation. Maybe simply because it is very dear to someone who is very dear to me, and very far. But also it seems somehow to say something about life that I cannot quite sum up but rings stealthily true:

Louis MacNeice - Bagpipe Music

It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.

The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife 'Take it away; I'm through with overproduction'.

It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.

Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.

It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.

It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

it has come!!! it has struck me, yesterday at half past five. it came flying in through the window with the radiant dying rays of afternoon sun.

this was my second. my first epiphany happened during the bombing in 2000 - I think it was 2000 at least, march maybe. a tomahawk missile had struck the building of one of the ministries - a building of gigantic stone pillars and marble halls and ornate double doors you can barely push open, like banks used to be built - to inspire confidence and give an air of unflappable quiet strength, and never let any warmth in through all that stone. always cool and quiet on the inside, with echoing halls and wide staircases. anyhow the tomahawk came down right through the roof, leaving the building looking entirely intact from the street, but giving it a whole new level of ventilation from above. two days later I'm walking down the street and the soft spring sunshine is streaming into this building through the crater in its ceiling, flowing and spilling out the huge double doors and into the street, bathing the inside of the building - and all the rubble and scattered papers - in what can only be described as a physical emanation of heavenly grace.

that was epiphany no. 1.

it said never try to guess what can or cannot be beautiful, or positive, or good. Because you haven't got enough imagination to cover all the possibilities.

yesterday was the day of the second epiphany, and this one was internal rather than physically manifested. I've been bitching for days, for months now, to myself and to others, complaining of this and that in my life. My boss hates me, my job sucks, there's no inspiration or creativity, he treats my work like rubbish, i've got seven times more school than him - not to mention pure common sense - i have to keep cleaning up his messes, think for him AND make him coffee, simultaneously. he's an aggressive, insensitive, sexist racist pompous prick. this goes on and on you know. I could keep going all day.

anyhow then it hit me. all these things, though without doubt quite true - and utterly annoying - are thoroughly, completely, painfully beside the point. Unbelievably!!! what the fuck difference does it make what I think of my boss, his qualifications or his social skills? what is my job? to do whatever he needs done. am I doing it? not even with a tenth of my capacity. it's an easy job and I'm a bright girl so the tenth is still enough to keep things running - but it's a lot less than what I could be accomplishing. and why? because subconsciously I'd made a decision that he's not worth the effort. And this decision was completely WRONG. it's not about him. it's not about what he deserves, what he appreciates, or how much he's worth. this is my job. I should do it as best I can. and cut the bitching. or walk. he hasn't got me chained to the friggin' desk. I can always tell him to take this high-paying, mindless position and shove it. and he can write his own reports, letters and guest lists. as long as I choose not to do this - i.e. not to tell him to go fuck himself - I am duty-bound to actually work there. Not spend every minute feeling sorry for myself and figuring out how to cut corners.

some of the inspiration for this came from that most mediocre of motion pictures, 'The Devil Wears Prada'. similar scenario - frumpy, intellectual-type girl works for ice-cold, freakishly over-demanding high class fashion magazine editor, thinks she's better than the job, looks down on the entire fashion industry, and keeps feeling sorry for herself because people are not being nice to her. and a friendly gay designer type tells her - what do you want?? a pat on the back, a vote of sympathy? poor girl, look how badly you're being treated, no one understands you?? you've got a job a million girls would kill for. you don't want it - move over. otherwise just shut your mouth and actually do it!

so that was part of it, definitely. another part was something I kept trying to say to myself and stick by for a long time, but had recently quite forgotten - YOU'VE NO CONTROL OVER WHAT OTHER PEOPLE DO. ALL YOU CONTROL ARE YOUR OWN ACTIONS. Deal with this. People often get in trouble - work themselves into feeling miserable - through shifting responsibility for their own happiness onto the backs of supposedly uncaring Others. my life sucks because my boss doesn't appreciate me, my colleagues get away with doing nothing but gossip all day, my professor keeps not being available when I want to meet and talk about my thesis. I hate them all - friends and acquaintances, lovers and pets, the public, the government, the planet and the galaxy. And me such a little morsel of perfection. blameless and without a blemish, floating within this tainted, cracked, corrupted existence. It's not that I'm doing a job I've long since outgrown but I'm too chicken to quit and surrender the unreasonably high salary, it's not that I'm not willing to sacrifice comfort for psychological fulfillment, it's not that I'm envious of people who get away with dumping their obligations on others even though I'd never want to trade places with them - no sirree, ain't nothing wrong with me. it's all Them!!!!!! hahahhahahahaha......................................................

come on girl, you're older than that, you're smarter than that.

so you work for a prick. not the first, not the last. if it don't kill you it'll make you stronger. at least the money's good. and you can still always tell him to take a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut. if and when you choose. until then................

like it.

this was epiphany no. 2.

let's see how long it holds.................

life turns too quickly. too quickly.

up to a few years ago, my Aunt From America (aka Mrs. Robinson, of the cult film and ubiquitous Simon and Garfunkel tune) seemed destined to live out her days in glorious singledom - with a grown baby girl from a long-since-finished, somewhat misguided and never legitimised relationship with an army spec-ops aviator - a handsome and thoroughly irresponsible drunk, my aunt - in her youth European karate champion, ammateur parachutist and general intrepid adventurer, an excellent shot from the tender age of 5, avid world traveler, always dressed in parrot hues and with perpetually running mascara, slight, dark-haired and with a slightly hooked nose, finally found true love at the delicate age of 48 and promptly married the delightfully kind and easygoing Mr. Les Robinson, whom she met through work. The story runs just like a fairytale should - he gets fired by a hypocritical moron of a new boss, she flies into the moron boss's office like a (hell-hath-no.....) fury and sticks her indignant resignation down his scrawny throat, the couple - avec baby girl, just turned sixteen - moves to Tucson Arizona where - as they assure us in richly illustrated e-mails - between ostriches, biplanes, oysters, cacti, bikers and spicy Indian food recipes, one can hardly catch one's breath.

Or was that just the desert heat?

The whole family was bathed in a wave of optimism. It is collectively concluded that if the aunt can happily marry at 48, there's still hope for everyone under the sun. The most lovable family Robinson wings it all the way from Tucson to visit relatives still rooted in the Balkans - amongst other things, to bring some extra pizzazz to my wedding (they had supplied the flying monkey, which I'm sure is to become a new institution of Serbian wedding ceremonies). Mr. Robinson is the nicest addition to our family in a long while (the Light of My Life - also added to the family at that particular ceremony - notwithstanding), a remarkably quiet man, slightly hunched in vain attempts to mitigate his soaring height of 6'5", with peaceful liquid-blue eyes and an uncanny ability to set you at ease, whether you converse with him or merely occupy an adjacent space. Worked as a professor of history, lived in Alaska for a number of years (running - and first setting up, actually - a radio-station network), moved to Arizona as the doctors said it would benefit his wife's health, lost his wife in spite of this, came out to Serbia to help the general democratic-reform-and-liberation-of-media effort. ('Oh, a spy then?' any self-respecting Serbian taxi driver would say. I usually reply with a cheerful 'mhm' :)

Now when I think back on it, he did seem unwell. His breathing laboured, just sitting seemed to wear him out. Walking was a challenge. 'Asthma', he kept saying. Humid weather. Fair enough, it was a sweltering Belgrade summer. Still..............

A few weeks later they went back to Arizona.

And how fairytales die. My grandmother calls me two days ago all panicky, to say they've taken Les to the hospital - colon cancer, they're operating now. Yesterday another call - the operation is over, but the cancer has metastasized. Late stages, then. And so many questions. Did he not know? He lost his first wife to cancer. Did he choose to ignore it? Did he come to Serbia with his new family, fully knowing he was gravely ill, just because they were so looking forward to it?

anyhow. just googling some cancer facts. metastasis is a common phenomenon in advanced cancers they say. When cancer has metastasized, it may be treated by chemotherapy, radiation therapy, biological therapy, hormone therapy, surgery, or a combination of these, says Wikipedia. The article closes with the following line.

'Unfortunately, the treatment options currently available are rarely able to cure the patient.'

Fairytale.

Dead.

Heavens.

Crystal turquoise waters are one thing, but that flaking paint...... ha ha ha that's a fairly incoherent start, isn't it... let me start more logically, from the end. Sitting in a taxi two nights ago, staring out the window as the vehicle rolled through the impossible streets of Habana (I love the original spelling for some reason - never feels right to spell it with a 'v'... though I do sometimes) I catch a glimpse of an open window, with an ancient and very elaborate brass ceiling fan rotating slowly, moving the sultry air around the dimly lit room. We'd passed this window before, walking through the city, and I'd taken a photo of the fan, which was standing still at the time. Now driving by the place once again the following thought strikes me - hey, why'd they leave the lights and the fan on? we're leaving!

Takes me a fragment of a second to put it together - yes, we are leaving. they're staying. Whoever they may be. This is something that often happens to me on trips - when too many things happen, and the brain has to deal with too much fresh input, the ancient boundaries between self and non-self tend to break down at times. Especially as I'm leaving. It's as if my mind cannot fully grasp the idea of a place continuing to exist when I'm not around to see it - the old 'if the tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it - was there a sound?' thing - I half expect the whole place to pack up and flicker out as I depart. Silly things humans.... :)

La Habana is an incredible city. Nothing can prepare you for it. Driving into the city for the first time we roll by the three fortresses that used to defend it from the pirates, with cannons still in place. Then two streets away there's the old palace (beautiful, intricate stone building with an old green tank parked proudly on a pedestal in front of it), and the lush central park, but just two streets away the buildings seem to disintegrate in front of you - most of the city is in an advanced state of decay. It's like slipping into an alternate dimension - like one of those horror films (yes, I'm thinking Silent Hill) where you're walking down a regular dusty street in a hot town and suddenly there's a shift of atmosphere and the paint starts to come off the walls in front of your eyes, window frames twist and crack, pieces of fences bend and start to jut out at awkward angles. Filth spreads like fire, sprouting from the very substance of the streets and houses.

Enough horror film analogies. But the city is decrepit beyond belief. It's not entirely strange that in a country where the climate is never harsh one might not be as quick to fix a broken window - but the scale of..... disintegration of Habana is hard to fully fathom. Everything is broken, splintered and chipped, all paint is peeling. As if 50 years ago the revolution outlawed hammers and paint brushes. The contrast is brought out by the fact that these crumbling buildings are beautiful - the colonial architecture is resplendent with arches and terraces - the terrace being the very key of Habana life, as you find most of them populated by languorous chocolate-skinned figures, often in pairs chatting, sometimes solitary and just staring off into the distance. Leaning over balcony fences, squatting in crumbling doorways, dangling their feet from rooftops or a myriad of other, less likely places. ('don't these people have jobs??' my husband kept saying. the place made him a little uneasy...)

I kept trying to catch it all in photographs, but sadly we only had a single day in Habana, and the most beautiful buildings, the most polished and tricked out old cars, the most chocolate-smooth examples of local wildlife were only glimpsed in passing, from taxis or busses, each extracting from me a little anguished cry. Ah! look at that one! can we come back to this street? no, we'll never have time... look for a street-name, where are we anyway? Another one! look, the shiny purple Cadillac! Behind the lime green Chevvy. Oh they so hot. One building we passed (twice!! the ignominy!! and not once could I take a shot!) had a particularly elaborate facade, it seemed as if the entire building was made out of large stone flowers. It looked so run-down, like it might come down at any minute, pulling with it the two old ladies sitting on one of the balconies. And all the strings of colorful laundry stretched out at most improbable angles. And the flowerpots, and all the brickabrack that can be glimpsed in the shade of the open doorways.

The cars of course are a story unto itself. Not all are ancient - some brand spankin' new Audis, the odd Toyota Yaris, a bunch of new Skodas - Felicia, Octavia. A lot of old but unremarkable vehicles too. But the 50's Chryslers, Chevvies, Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles - all in impeccable shape, polished to the max, bright paint shining - many with fins and hood ornaments, some in beautiful two-tone. Also some plain oddities - I've seen my share of old Skodas, Fiats and Ladas living out here in the Balkans, but before coming to Habana I've never in my life seen a tricked out Lada - paintwork perfect, not a knock anywhere on her, jacked-on hydraulics gleaming under the chassis. Or a Fiat 126p with decals - tiny but shiny little yellow car looking to my eyes somehow both ridiculous and irresistible with its flame paintwork.

Ah la Habana.............................. the atmosphere is perfect in a way, decay and old glory, languor and fierce sunshine. You can imagine some wild parties going on there after nightfall. Hot salsa rhythms and icy cool mojitos and pina coladas. I would have loved to have someone show me around the city - the real Habana, to take me into the buildings and cafes and all the places tourists can't - or don't know how to - go. On the other hand you keep feeling it's a city that needs help - though it's utterly disinterested in seeking it. (In spite of large numbers of people living in evident squalor, I didn't see a single beggar, for instance). But I've read someplace (and looking at the place I think it must be true) that every year a number of buildings just caves in. Sometimes you see a beautiful flaky facade only to realise that through the windows you see broken planks, bits of mortar and blue sky. On all floors. Strange city.

Tomorrow maybe a story about Varadero, and my fish friends.

 

new photo album indicating some sort of reason for my recent absence.....

my life has been hijacked from me somehow, and I need to go find it and rescue it. until then I'm a bit lost I'm afraid.........

i'm sure i'll get it back soon.