Videodrome (1983) by David Cronenberg. The story seems to be geared towards mass audience that finds itself feeding its mind with subliminal messaging off the Television programing. The broadcaster, the one who chooses the programming, is completely unconscious of the impact that television has on his mind and the public mind.
He is merely a puppet of a greater force that is reeling its power behind the scenes, awaiting an opportune moment to infiltrate the mass public and convert them to a new way of thinking. All the while, the master plan is brewing, to create a new life form, one which merges the television world and physical dimension with the humans' now sickened mind and body.
Science fiction stories have often been precursers to how our civilization advances, not simple entertainment of a wild mind. If the human brain can fathom, often it is possible. In fact, someone, in a science lab, locked away in some facility's basement, is most likely working on it right now, and the only reason you don't know about it is because someone always knows hat the public is not ready for it, is not ready to accept its future because it is too ugly of its ill intent-- often, not always, but often.
Someone always seeks gain, and any product of any imagination is simply a new way to cash in, you see, and the longer they can keep up the farce, the longer they can cash in. So, no matter how literally or metaphorically you want to accept this story, Videodrome, you can take away one very real fact from it, one you cannot get away from.
Television has created a public that is easier to control, that is it. Television has slowly been infiltrating our minds over decades to make puppets out of us, ones that think less and have less expectations from everything in this world. And now that we have come around to this idea we begin to look to the internet as a new better thing. Is it not parallel in concept?
Videodrome may be outdated, maybe we already know, but, how long will it take before we realize that the internet has been vastly used as an extenuation of these concepts presented in the film. Film and Television often thrived and developed in countries during political and social unrest, as a tool to subvert and adjust public opinion under the guise of "education" for the masses.
The internet is now used for free information exchange, in a time of GLOBAL political, economic and social unrest. Very interesting.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Delirium
I meant to post this on March 8th, the International Women's Day, widely celebrated in Russia, and all over the world, hence it is "international." Unfortunately I do not possess promptitude and only come around to posting it almost a month later. But...here it is...For Women, not "feminists":
I am in a delirium, stuck in my own dream reality, drunk on my own power. I have no understanding of reality in the physical sense, how much do I care about my body, how much do I need to take care of it for others to still enjoy it, how much do I care to have other people enjoy it? How much work do I need to do on myself for others to keep loving me? Do I want people to keep loving me? Why do I need that?
I am in a delirium, stuck in my own dream reality, drunk on my own power. I have no understanding of reality in the physical sense, how much do I care about my body, how much do I need to take care of it for others to still enjoy it, how much do I care to have other people enjoy it? How much work do I need to do on myself for others to keep loving me? Do I want people to keep loving me? Why do I need that?
Everyone needs love, most are satisfied with the dedication of only one other being, I want many, I want many to love me and to swim in my pearlessense. Do I want this for myself? I don’t think so, I think I want it for others, I want for others to have what I have and enjoy it, and whatever I have, believe me I enjoy tremendously, it is nice to transcend reality and live in a dream a constant dream unhindered by physicality.
How do I know others want it? Why wouldn’t they? In fear of generalizing and stepping away from purity and truth I have to be limited to my own experience, and for some reason, in my experience it is always the same story, those who come in contact with me fall into my story they fall into my universe. How do they do it? Why do they do it? Is it just life? Is that all it is? I don’t think it’s just life, I think that what can explain this phenomenon is something that I gather from many different sources.
The conclusion I come to is that some of us on earth are gods, or come to the purest form of godliness, and someone took that away from us before and right now, I’m living in an age when I can recognize that in myself I can say I’m a goddess even though I have nothing, I am an ephemeral being, I flutter away I skew your thoughts you can’t have me, I give you only bits and pieces here and there, appreciate that which I have given you, I don’t have to give you everything, you are lucky to have a crumb, a morsel maybe even a slice, but you can’t have the whole thing, it’s mine.
So again how much do I need to do? To maintain my godliness I have to not do anything, if I work, if I concern myself with physical possession I will have no time to use my brain, I will have no time to transcend reality I will have no time to think, so I have to maintain myself at a level where I do the least with the most result, the result I seek is more knowledge, that’s all, it’s that simple. I just want a lot of knowledge.
What gives me godliness is that knowledge and my ability to process it and keep it and put it out into the collective consciousness for others to finally understand, I am a translator, I translate for you between the different worlds, I translate for you in a way where that which is obscure, oblique and dangerous becomes disarmed in its nudity through my words, I can explain in words that which you will never understand without my words, I have a real job, a job in the more real universe, a job in the cycle of life
Not a pretend job that gives me something to do to fill my time with nothing so that I can spend pretend money on pretend services, my job is living life that’s what I do and apparently the universe somehow benefits from me being alive, I know because I am still alive, even though I don’t work in the same way that one would define work in societal standards.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Wake Up
This is amazing, I watch people, they are literally empty talking heads. They have nothing going on in their minds, they are lost and hang on to anything and everything that is given to them by the media and by their surroundings. Am I insane? Did I get stuck in a vortex of small minds? I’m trying to climb out, trying to get out, I don’t want to be surrounded by slaves.
Wake up, I plead them, I tell them, but they don’t hear, their mind is clouded by money and petty concerns. You can survive without your money. You go to work five days a week, you get off, and all I hear you do is bitch about your job, fuck this fuck that and this and the other, then on Friday you get off work and get your paycheck, but by the time you get your paycheck you are so miserable that you seek some kind of reward for the torture you feel you drag yourself through every day and so what do you do next?
You spend your money, your hard earned money on what? You spend it on bullshit, bullshit you already have, the same bullshit that your home is already filled with, it’s a disease, it’s an addiction, money is your disease. How wonderful they set it up for you, you work like a slave, you work a brain dead job, a job that does not stimulate your mind a job that drives you out of the confines of your sanity because you must shut off your consciousness in order to justify to yourself the reason why you drag your face in the mud, like a slave, because you are a slave, but the system wants you to forget that, so you willingly forget, just like they want you to, and you continue working.
If you didn’t forget you’d quit, you wouldn’t be able to stand the insanity of the idea that you should waste your life away doing what you hate. But the funny thing is that this is exactly why everything works for the consumerist system. It is in the benefit of this system for you not to have contentment, if you are content you don’t need to spend your money, if you are content you don’t need 70 pairs of shoes, or 20 million vinyl records, all that stuff comes from the emptiness in your own mind, and your mind is empty because you make it that way.
You have the ability to dive deep into the crevices of your imagination, but instead, you are afraid because if you do, you will see the horrific lie you are living, the giant game of charades that you have subjected yourself to, and facing this truth is disorienting, it’s life shattering, you would have to start life all over again, and you don’t want to. The elite, the ones with all the control in the palm of their hands, what do you think they do with their time? They read, they think and they expand their minds, they learn about the depths of souls and the layers of existence, they learn how to control their universe, and they have the time to do this.
They have the time and they have the right, because they’re settled, they’re taken care of and they don’t need to occupy their brains with the petty concerns of the general public. But the way they’ve got it set up is that the general consciousness has the consensus that you have no right to do the same thing they’re doing, you don’t have the right to develop your mind and your intelligence, and I don’t mean your intelligence as a student in a university, I mean your intelligence as a higher being, as a being that is a key part of the human race and the process of its evolution.
The reality of the matter is that we all have a much more important job in this sphere of existence, that job is not to make money, not to make money, not to make money, that is not a job, that is a false conception of an evil mind, a mind that seeks control over the masses, and it’s working, it’s working, it’s working. Stop its progression, you are drowning in a fake world, a world that has been constructed out of greed, a greed for knowledge and the intent to keep it to oneself.
You get a taste of that knowledge, a taste of the power it will bring, and you can realize why one would desire to keep it to themselves, but it is a lonely path, and we can all share in that knowledge, we can all use it, the knowledge is plentiful, and power is plentiful, there is no need for only one person to hold the pulsating power in their small greedy palm, we all have power, we all have the knowledge, but we are made to forget it, to disbelieve it, to put it aside and concern ourselves with worthless worldliness of the physical possession, we use it to measure our worth in the world, in the universe.
You are worth more than you are lead to believe, and not just in your immediate surroundings, you are slowing down the progression of the human race over all by letting yourself be stupefied, because you are that important, you matter to us all, not just to your family, not just to your friends, you matter to the entire existence of the entire human race, and that is what the elite don’t want you to know, because if we all figure that out, the elite will no longer be elite, we will all be the elite, we will all be on their level, and we will all be able to fly beyond the confines of our small minds.
Wake up, I plead them, I tell them, but they don’t hear, their mind is clouded by money and petty concerns. You can survive without your money. You go to work five days a week, you get off, and all I hear you do is bitch about your job, fuck this fuck that and this and the other, then on Friday you get off work and get your paycheck, but by the time you get your paycheck you are so miserable that you seek some kind of reward for the torture you feel you drag yourself through every day and so what do you do next?
You spend your money, your hard earned money on what? You spend it on bullshit, bullshit you already have, the same bullshit that your home is already filled with, it’s a disease, it’s an addiction, money is your disease. How wonderful they set it up for you, you work like a slave, you work a brain dead job, a job that does not stimulate your mind a job that drives you out of the confines of your sanity because you must shut off your consciousness in order to justify to yourself the reason why you drag your face in the mud, like a slave, because you are a slave, but the system wants you to forget that, so you willingly forget, just like they want you to, and you continue working.
If you didn’t forget you’d quit, you wouldn’t be able to stand the insanity of the idea that you should waste your life away doing what you hate. But the funny thing is that this is exactly why everything works for the consumerist system. It is in the benefit of this system for you not to have contentment, if you are content you don’t need to spend your money, if you are content you don’t need 70 pairs of shoes, or 20 million vinyl records, all that stuff comes from the emptiness in your own mind, and your mind is empty because you make it that way.
You have the ability to dive deep into the crevices of your imagination, but instead, you are afraid because if you do, you will see the horrific lie you are living, the giant game of charades that you have subjected yourself to, and facing this truth is disorienting, it’s life shattering, you would have to start life all over again, and you don’t want to. The elite, the ones with all the control in the palm of their hands, what do you think they do with their time? They read, they think and they expand their minds, they learn about the depths of souls and the layers of existence, they learn how to control their universe, and they have the time to do this.
They have the time and they have the right, because they’re settled, they’re taken care of and they don’t need to occupy their brains with the petty concerns of the general public. But the way they’ve got it set up is that the general consciousness has the consensus that you have no right to do the same thing they’re doing, you don’t have the right to develop your mind and your intelligence, and I don’t mean your intelligence as a student in a university, I mean your intelligence as a higher being, as a being that is a key part of the human race and the process of its evolution.
The reality of the matter is that we all have a much more important job in this sphere of existence, that job is not to make money, not to make money, not to make money, that is not a job, that is a false conception of an evil mind, a mind that seeks control over the masses, and it’s working, it’s working, it’s working. Stop its progression, you are drowning in a fake world, a world that has been constructed out of greed, a greed for knowledge and the intent to keep it to oneself.
You get a taste of that knowledge, a taste of the power it will bring, and you can realize why one would desire to keep it to themselves, but it is a lonely path, and we can all share in that knowledge, we can all use it, the knowledge is plentiful, and power is plentiful, there is no need for only one person to hold the pulsating power in their small greedy palm, we all have power, we all have the knowledge, but we are made to forget it, to disbelieve it, to put it aside and concern ourselves with worthless worldliness of the physical possession, we use it to measure our worth in the world, in the universe.
You are worth more than you are lead to believe, and not just in your immediate surroundings, you are slowing down the progression of the human race over all by letting yourself be stupefied, because you are that important, you matter to us all, not just to your family, not just to your friends, you matter to the entire existence of the entire human race, and that is what the elite don’t want you to know, because if we all figure that out, the elite will no longer be elite, we will all be the elite, we will all be on their level, and we will all be able to fly beyond the confines of our small minds.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Let me intervine
This is not a story of self pity, this is the story of truth. Yes, it’s always greener on the other side, and we know that it is human nature. This concept is easy to maintain if you don’t actually get to experience what it’s like on the other side, but once you do step outside of your bounds, outside artificial borders, you come closer to the truth. The truth is not that it is greener on the other side, the truth is that there are flaws everywhere. For a government it is beneficial to create the collective understanding that things are not so bad here, the greener on the other side mentality creates a psychological cycle that starts with a discontent public, that contributes its discontent to the supposed human nature phenomenon of “greener on the other side” which then keeps their expected standards of living at the will of the government rather than realizing that they can change it themselves. Basically the concept spurs a passive race of humans.
Discussing ones history, ones personal history, remembering ones stories and passing them on to others, analyzing what went wrong and weaving the pattern of your own mentality and then distinguishing which part of that mentality is your own and which part was conditioned in you by your surroundings and then taking matters in your own hands by resisting those conditioned elements and shedding them one layer at a time will create an true individual, in the sense that you will be taking a path in life that will lead you to your true essence your real desires. These are all things that the government would not want to public to do. It is undesirable to a controlling entity for the controlled to be capable of free thought.
This is not an attack on any specific government, and it is not an attack on governments in general. This is the call for a balance of knowledge, a free flow of information from all sources and the development of a public that wants to hear rather than stay in the shadows, obscured by commodity, physical possession. Everyone is capable of understanding, not everyone is willing to carry the burden, knowledge is a heavy load. The more you know, the more you are put into the position of choosing to care or not to care, to react or stay on the sidelines. The more we stay on the sidelines the easier the government’s job is. This is not a conspiracy theory, it’s just facts. Once a system has been implemented it is easier to maintain the system, it is fossilized in the sense that the same old system traverses centuries rather than kept alive and sensitive to the times as well as growing and sprouting constant change accordingly with the times.
This is the government’s personal agenda, and it is carried down in the chain of command from the top all the way down through all the governing bodies down to the public at large and to individuals. In its stale state, the government must come up with ways to create the illusion of change, the illusion of progress, an example would be presidential elections. You choose between really just two parties, the Republican and the Democratic, the two candidates are only two different people, one of them is no better than the other, it’s only a matter of choosing whose bullshit do you want to deal with. So the illusion is that you are choosing the better of the two, but the reality is that neither one of them is good enough, most likely, but you have no way of choosing someone better.
to be continued...
Discussing ones history, ones personal history, remembering ones stories and passing them on to others, analyzing what went wrong and weaving the pattern of your own mentality and then distinguishing which part of that mentality is your own and which part was conditioned in you by your surroundings and then taking matters in your own hands by resisting those conditioned elements and shedding them one layer at a time will create an true individual, in the sense that you will be taking a path in life that will lead you to your true essence your real desires. These are all things that the government would not want to public to do. It is undesirable to a controlling entity for the controlled to be capable of free thought.
This is not an attack on any specific government, and it is not an attack on governments in general. This is the call for a balance of knowledge, a free flow of information from all sources and the development of a public that wants to hear rather than stay in the shadows, obscured by commodity, physical possession. Everyone is capable of understanding, not everyone is willing to carry the burden, knowledge is a heavy load. The more you know, the more you are put into the position of choosing to care or not to care, to react or stay on the sidelines. The more we stay on the sidelines the easier the government’s job is. This is not a conspiracy theory, it’s just facts. Once a system has been implemented it is easier to maintain the system, it is fossilized in the sense that the same old system traverses centuries rather than kept alive and sensitive to the times as well as growing and sprouting constant change accordingly with the times.
This is the government’s personal agenda, and it is carried down in the chain of command from the top all the way down through all the governing bodies down to the public at large and to individuals. In its stale state, the government must come up with ways to create the illusion of change, the illusion of progress, an example would be presidential elections. You choose between really just two parties, the Republican and the Democratic, the two candidates are only two different people, one of them is no better than the other, it’s only a matter of choosing whose bullshit do you want to deal with. So the illusion is that you are choosing the better of the two, but the reality is that neither one of them is good enough, most likely, but you have no way of choosing someone better.
to be continued...
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Escape
How did I come to be here? How did I become "homeless"? Well, this is a long story, or maybe the story itself is not so long, but I'm gonna make it long, after all what's my measly 24 years stand in comparison to the infinite, inorganic construct that we call time. The 24 years themselves mean nothing but my journey itself started a long time ago, perhaps, or no, not perhaps, but definitely before I was born. It happened (I'm going to try to go consecutively backwards to the best of my ability here)...it happened before globalization, before capitalism, before the fall of communism, before my mother and father were born, before WWII, before my grandparents were born, before their parents were born, before the rise of Soviet communism, and so we go back and back and back, all our stories tie into the history of an infinity of significant and insignificant events, personal, societal, governmental, natural...So let me maybe begin somewhere during the time of my existence.
Born in 1986, on the cusp of the Soviet collapse, and what a time to experience firsthand! I would have no such bragging rights had I not the fortune of one day at the age of three finding myself in a kitchen of a restaurant that my grandmother (my father's mother) worked in, in a Georgian Village up in the Caucasus mountains (the name now escapes me). My grandmother left me at the mercy of a drunken cook while she went to take care of something. I remember clearly how I sat across from him, him in his Chef's coat, me in my tights, skirt and shirt and flannel shoes. He was the adult and I was the bored little kid, just sitting around waiting. I remember even me realizing that he was drunk, but in my childish head the realization did not connect to the repercussions except for I did wonder why my grandma would leave me with a drunk man. But I didn't go too deeply into these wonderings, and my boredom overwhelmed me, I spoke the words "mister, mister pick me up!" and he picked me up with his arms stretched out in front of him and me just dangling off his hands by my armpits.
Now in this kitchen there were giant barrels of boiling water for some reason or other and this man thought it would be a great idea to put me into one of them. So with me still dangling off his outstretched arms he slowly walked over to one of these barrels and started dipping me into the water first the tip of my toes, then half of my feet then both my feet up to the ankles and then the shoe on my right foot slips off and I scream...AAAAAAAAA... My foot was boiling, the drunken chef twitched, quickly retrieved me and put me down on the ground. My foot is now fine, but that event shocked me into remembering my life, I now presume, from the age of three. And so I am fortunate to have been completely aware of my surroundings and on top of that remembering them clearly to this day.
So I remember, one may argue through childish eyes, but what can be more pure and true than the understanding of simple facts through the eyes of a child? I remember a plentiful, colorful world, vibrant fun, uncaring and then comes 1991 and BAM! the colors are sapped out of the buildings, the streets, the peoples' faces, the trees, the grass, the whole city, the villages surrounding the city. It all turns gray, ugly, lifeless mush, the snow is dirty, piss stained, clouds of stale cigarettes linger in the alleys off the main streets. People have homes but they have no food, old wrinkly women in their tweed coats line the contours of the streets, the underground metro system--the BEAUTIFUL, MARBLE underground metro system. The walls are of marble with grandiose statues, relief sculptures, mosaics--HAIL COMMUNISM--they all say--THE BETTER BRIGHTER FUTURE IS AHEAD--they point at it, they look toward it with strong chests thrusting forward in a welcoming gesture, shoulders back, faces uplifted to the sun shine above ground. But in 1991 it arrived with all its beauty, all its riches down in the gutters, people lying drunk on the ground in the streets, barely alive, dead enough not to remember, but alive enough to uphold the human instinct to survive.
What is the use of a home if your home has no food for you? What is the use of your home if it was originally constructed for a 50 year life span? And 50 years have passed and the giant boxes that hold the network of smaller boxes, all separated by cardboard thin walls are now the monoliths of a dead age of false hopes, covered in the shroud of hard work, locked away in the coffins that are meant to rot in 50 years, the central heating system shot, the pipes bursting, everyone just trying to put a patch onto their small insignificant leak when the real structure itself crumbles around them. People were homeless even though they had a "home". They were forced to stand in the streets selling the last of their belongings so they could get a bite to eat, it didn't matter that they had a home, they had to become beggars.
I say beggars because the things they sold, no one needed. During the WWII blockade all the antiques and things of value were already exchanged on the black market for some extra food. The wives and daughters of the generals took advantage of this time to embellish their collections because while everyone else was starving, the elite few had a surplus of food, food that was more valuable than gold, in fact it was more valuable than human life. A handful of grain was exchanged for things of extreme value in a less extreme "economy" to put it into simple words. And now those same old women, not so much the men because most of them were dead by now, were yet again forced into the streets only now the only motivation for someone to buy what they offered was sheer pity, of which there was little during this time. And it wasn't just old women, it was everyone, everyone that didn't want to buy into the mafia that now controlled everything.
The "mafia" was not some entity that was hard to penetrate like the infamous Mob in the states. Everyone was a candidate, it was anarchy, there was no government, and the government was the people and the people were weak after a century of lies and you had to cash in your morals and buy into the sex trade, the drug trade, the human trafficking trade, the human torture trade, the everything that is false and ugly trade and in exchange you'd get a nice fur coat, a car, an apartment of some old woman whose family has abandoned her so now it’s easy to turn her into the streets, or maybe a leather jacket to keep you warm, and if you're not willing to trade in your morals then you line the contours of the streets with your worthless possessions at the mercy of those who traded in their humanity a long time ago, we called them the new Russians.
So my mother escaped this country, she didn't want to trade in her morality, so we left, but the funny thing is that even though to this day she would never admit it, my mother was a mail order bride and I was her baggage. She left St. Petersburg in 1995, after exchanging letters for a year with many different men all over the world and finally one said all the right words in his letters and she flew over the ocean still looking for her better brighter future, still stuck in the mentality formed by the Soviet propaganda that someone else will take care of you for "free". Apparently she hadn't learned her lesson the first time, she missed out on the element that had brought down a nation and repeated the cycle in her own personal life. She thought she'd come to the US and this stranger would take care of her because she was beautiful, intelligent, young, a doctor, and she could cook, clean, take care of him, give him love. What she didn't know is that in America doctors make a ton of money, couldn't suspect it during her letter exchange with this highly intelligent, well read and cultured individual who lived on the other side of the world as far from our shit hole as one could possibly imagine, in the always sunny California where everyone has a big house all to themselves in Beverly Hills and a car of their own and no care in the world, or so we though in Russia, where my mother, who graduated at the top of her class from the best medical school in St. Petersburg now made enough money to buy a pound of apples a month. She had no clue that this man could have any motive to bring her to the US other than her virtues.
She flew over the ocean to the US in 1995 to seal her good fortune and left me with my grandmother for a year. That year was to be the only year in my life when I got to be a child completely and consecutively month after month for a whole year. My grandmother and I had a great time together, we went to the village together every week, she was building a house on her land and every weekend we packed boxes, piled them into a taxi at 6am, when it was too cold to be awake, too cold to be alive on these winter mornings. The taxi took us to the train station, we unloaded our baggage, lugged everything to the train, rode that train to a layover where we would unload our stuff, and wait for this other train that traveled the rural lands, and while the train from St. Petersburg was always almost empty, this other train was always full to the brim with the people travelling from other surrounding villages.
See here, in the US. when you board the Amtrak or the Greyhound there are people who take care of your luggage you just go to some general luggage area, and some dude picks it up for you and hauls it onto the bus or train, not so the case in Russia, at least not during that time. My grandma, under the pretence that she was too old, and rightfully so at the age of 64, had me carry all the heavy boxes, sometimes we even transported furniture. So at the age of nine I somehow dragged these heavy objects onto the taxi, off the taxi, onto the train, off the train, and onto another train, and off the train again, and back onto a taxi that would deliver us to our home and off that taxi and into our home.
On the second train, we were packed like sardines, my grandma, me, our boxes and all the working class of our country, the proletariat, travelling from the provincial town station back to whatever village they come from, or on to whatever village that had work for them, all of us packed like sardines in the working class coach. Here there were more people per bench than a bench could hold, and each compartment had bunks above the benches, and all these bunks were filled either with more than holding capacity of human weight or with just one burly man curled up snoring away after a long day of physical labor.
Sometimes we didn't have a spot to sit and had to stand for the three hour ride with the other significant number of people who couldn't find a spot to rest their tired feet. Every weekend I did this with my grandmother and it was great. My pants had a hole in the crotch and every week my grandma would patch it up and every week the persistent crotch hole would rip again and again. I was always embarrassed of it, but generally it wasn't a big deal and I thought my life was great.
But then a year later my mother came back for me. I think at the time I may have actually not wanted her back, in fact I know I didn't want her to come back, her return meant the return of many things that need not be mentioned now other than the fact that she represented distress to me. But she came back, and she was already married. My grandma and I were surprised, you see, we also were in denial that my mother was a mail order bride, even though it's not a term used in Russia we did comprehend the concept, but somehow wanted to believe that what my mother was doing was something better than those other women, something smarter so even though it's only obvious that this man who brings her to the US on his own money will want something in return, for example enslaving an unsuspecting foreign woman, we did not actually think she would marry him.
But she did and she came to get me away from the oh so tortuous life I was living at the mercy of my horrible, slave driving grandmother, how dare she make me drag heavy boxes around? My mother was livid with anger, she hated her mother, hated her city, hated her country but really she just hated the collapse of the Soviet Union, we fell prey to the cycle of all imperial structures. It wasn't our countries fault, it wasn't the land's fault, nor the people's fault nor the governments fault, really it was all because of one guy, Lenin, we could just point the finger at him for this cycle, or maybe take it even farther, we could blame it on Marx and Ingles, after all they spawned the ideology. But the point I am trying to make is that she made a huge mistake for hating her country, a huge mistake.
We left our city where the colors were sapped out of the buildings, the streets, the peoples' faces, the trees, the grass, the whole city, the villages surrounding the city. We left the gray, ugly lifeless mush, the dirty piss stained snow, the clouds of stale cigarette smoke lingering in the alleys off the main streets. And our plane landed in LA. I met the man who was to be my step father. He took us to his car, a gray Corsica Chevrolet, the interior was shabby with the lining hanging off the top and touching my head, the body paint and the window tinting were peeling off and as he started the engine it rattled and oh, I forgot to mention, one of the door handles didn't work.
You see when I walked off that plane and stepped onto the pavement of the International Airport in LA I had an idea, a check list of the "American Dream" package sold to Russia on our TV screens and in our movie theaters compliments of globalization. I was immediately consulting this checklist. In the always sunny California, which on that day happened to be overcast, everyone has a nice car--NEGATIVE--next item on the list...everyone has a big house all to themselves. As we drove out of the airport I started suspecting that this was also a lie and that really, this guy probably has just half a house.
A funny thought you may think, but it has happened before. My mother had a friend who also was testing her cards in the mail order bride business. This girl didn't speak English and was corresponding with a man in Wales and my mom would help her with the letters because she was fluent in English. One day they came up with the outrageous idea of sending me and my mom to Wales so we could meet this man and decide if he's good enough for my mom's friend. This was logical because my mother spoke English, and apparently the plan worked, this man's true character was exposed one day, when he suggested to my mother that he would come into the bathroom with her and show her how to properly apply a tampon up her vagina. The next day we moved out of his place and he was written off the possible husband list. But the thing is, in his letters to that girl he had described himself as a home owner, but it turned out that he was a half a house owner, with a small patch of land in front of it and the vast majority of this half a house was occupied by a large, bulky staircase that led to the bedroom on the second floor.
So as I got into my step father's shabby car I began to suspect that he also had only half a house. But hey, here I was in California! I scoped out the scene, I didn't see any piss stained snow, probably because there wasn't any snow, and there was no stale cigarette smoke lingering in the alleys, probably because I was in a car. But this place also didn't have the beautiful architecture that I walked through daily in my city, it didn't have a river flowing through it, with cool bridges and canals, it didn't have trees, in fact, it wasn't really a city, it was just a high way with a river of cars instead of water, and it moved really slow so I could really appreciate the subtleties of the brick wall that was my view for the next four hours that we spent in his shitty car. Occasionally the brick wall would reveal a landscape of boxes that were supposed to be houses, all bunched up together back to back. What a shit hole I thought to myself, why did we leave?
We arrived in Tustin, Orange County, in some sterile looking street, Hill Street I think it was. All the houses on this street were white, and there were perfect square patches of green grass that was all uniform in height, it was like a weird robot world. And of course my suspicions were right, not only was this guy NOT a home owner, but he wasn't even a half a house owner, in fact he didn't own anything but his shitty car, and he brought me into an apartment on the second floor that was completely void of any personality, the walls were white. White walls are pretty unheard of in Russia, my whole ten years there never brought me into a house hold of white walls. You know, white walls and their implementation as a housing standard is a bit of a strange thing. They used to drive me crazy, they still do to this day, the vastness of the emptiness that they represent, part of that perfect-square-patch-of-uniform-green-grass-robot world.
So here we were, here my mother brought us. In Russia we had a house in the village, a large chunk of land that we could grow things on and an apartment in the city, and not just any city, St. Petersburg. We also had a family and our culture. And we arrived in Tustin, Orange County, California, to an apartment with white walls and a car that's falling apart. In my mind then it seemed like a regression, I felt like we lost something, and I was right, I lost everything the day that I arrived in this new country and so did my mom.
Born in 1986, on the cusp of the Soviet collapse, and what a time to experience firsthand! I would have no such bragging rights had I not the fortune of one day at the age of three finding myself in a kitchen of a restaurant that my grandmother (my father's mother) worked in, in a Georgian Village up in the Caucasus mountains (the name now escapes me). My grandmother left me at the mercy of a drunken cook while she went to take care of something. I remember clearly how I sat across from him, him in his Chef's coat, me in my tights, skirt and shirt and flannel shoes. He was the adult and I was the bored little kid, just sitting around waiting. I remember even me realizing that he was drunk, but in my childish head the realization did not connect to the repercussions except for I did wonder why my grandma would leave me with a drunk man. But I didn't go too deeply into these wonderings, and my boredom overwhelmed me, I spoke the words "mister, mister pick me up!" and he picked me up with his arms stretched out in front of him and me just dangling off his hands by my armpits.
Now in this kitchen there were giant barrels of boiling water for some reason or other and this man thought it would be a great idea to put me into one of them. So with me still dangling off his outstretched arms he slowly walked over to one of these barrels and started dipping me into the water first the tip of my toes, then half of my feet then both my feet up to the ankles and then the shoe on my right foot slips off and I scream...AAAAAAAAA... My foot was boiling, the drunken chef twitched, quickly retrieved me and put me down on the ground. My foot is now fine, but that event shocked me into remembering my life, I now presume, from the age of three. And so I am fortunate to have been completely aware of my surroundings and on top of that remembering them clearly to this day.
So I remember, one may argue through childish eyes, but what can be more pure and true than the understanding of simple facts through the eyes of a child? I remember a plentiful, colorful world, vibrant fun, uncaring and then comes 1991 and BAM! the colors are sapped out of the buildings, the streets, the peoples' faces, the trees, the grass, the whole city, the villages surrounding the city. It all turns gray, ugly, lifeless mush, the snow is dirty, piss stained, clouds of stale cigarettes linger in the alleys off the main streets. People have homes but they have no food, old wrinkly women in their tweed coats line the contours of the streets, the underground metro system--the BEAUTIFUL, MARBLE underground metro system. The walls are of marble with grandiose statues, relief sculptures, mosaics--HAIL COMMUNISM--they all say--THE BETTER BRIGHTER FUTURE IS AHEAD--they point at it, they look toward it with strong chests thrusting forward in a welcoming gesture, shoulders back, faces uplifted to the sun shine above ground. But in 1991 it arrived with all its beauty, all its riches down in the gutters, people lying drunk on the ground in the streets, barely alive, dead enough not to remember, but alive enough to uphold the human instinct to survive.
What is the use of a home if your home has no food for you? What is the use of your home if it was originally constructed for a 50 year life span? And 50 years have passed and the giant boxes that hold the network of smaller boxes, all separated by cardboard thin walls are now the monoliths of a dead age of false hopes, covered in the shroud of hard work, locked away in the coffins that are meant to rot in 50 years, the central heating system shot, the pipes bursting, everyone just trying to put a patch onto their small insignificant leak when the real structure itself crumbles around them. People were homeless even though they had a "home". They were forced to stand in the streets selling the last of their belongings so they could get a bite to eat, it didn't matter that they had a home, they had to become beggars.
I say beggars because the things they sold, no one needed. During the WWII blockade all the antiques and things of value were already exchanged on the black market for some extra food. The wives and daughters of the generals took advantage of this time to embellish their collections because while everyone else was starving, the elite few had a surplus of food, food that was more valuable than gold, in fact it was more valuable than human life. A handful of grain was exchanged for things of extreme value in a less extreme "economy" to put it into simple words. And now those same old women, not so much the men because most of them were dead by now, were yet again forced into the streets only now the only motivation for someone to buy what they offered was sheer pity, of which there was little during this time. And it wasn't just old women, it was everyone, everyone that didn't want to buy into the mafia that now controlled everything.
The "mafia" was not some entity that was hard to penetrate like the infamous Mob in the states. Everyone was a candidate, it was anarchy, there was no government, and the government was the people and the people were weak after a century of lies and you had to cash in your morals and buy into the sex trade, the drug trade, the human trafficking trade, the human torture trade, the everything that is false and ugly trade and in exchange you'd get a nice fur coat, a car, an apartment of some old woman whose family has abandoned her so now it’s easy to turn her into the streets, or maybe a leather jacket to keep you warm, and if you're not willing to trade in your morals then you line the contours of the streets with your worthless possessions at the mercy of those who traded in their humanity a long time ago, we called them the new Russians.
So my mother escaped this country, she didn't want to trade in her morality, so we left, but the funny thing is that even though to this day she would never admit it, my mother was a mail order bride and I was her baggage. She left St. Petersburg in 1995, after exchanging letters for a year with many different men all over the world and finally one said all the right words in his letters and she flew over the ocean still looking for her better brighter future, still stuck in the mentality formed by the Soviet propaganda that someone else will take care of you for "free". Apparently she hadn't learned her lesson the first time, she missed out on the element that had brought down a nation and repeated the cycle in her own personal life. She thought she'd come to the US and this stranger would take care of her because she was beautiful, intelligent, young, a doctor, and she could cook, clean, take care of him, give him love. What she didn't know is that in America doctors make a ton of money, couldn't suspect it during her letter exchange with this highly intelligent, well read and cultured individual who lived on the other side of the world as far from our shit hole as one could possibly imagine, in the always sunny California where everyone has a big house all to themselves in Beverly Hills and a car of their own and no care in the world, or so we though in Russia, where my mother, who graduated at the top of her class from the best medical school in St. Petersburg now made enough money to buy a pound of apples a month. She had no clue that this man could have any motive to bring her to the US other than her virtues.
She flew over the ocean to the US in 1995 to seal her good fortune and left me with my grandmother for a year. That year was to be the only year in my life when I got to be a child completely and consecutively month after month for a whole year. My grandmother and I had a great time together, we went to the village together every week, she was building a house on her land and every weekend we packed boxes, piled them into a taxi at 6am, when it was too cold to be awake, too cold to be alive on these winter mornings. The taxi took us to the train station, we unloaded our baggage, lugged everything to the train, rode that train to a layover where we would unload our stuff, and wait for this other train that traveled the rural lands, and while the train from St. Petersburg was always almost empty, this other train was always full to the brim with the people travelling from other surrounding villages.
See here, in the US. when you board the Amtrak or the Greyhound there are people who take care of your luggage you just go to some general luggage area, and some dude picks it up for you and hauls it onto the bus or train, not so the case in Russia, at least not during that time. My grandma, under the pretence that she was too old, and rightfully so at the age of 64, had me carry all the heavy boxes, sometimes we even transported furniture. So at the age of nine I somehow dragged these heavy objects onto the taxi, off the taxi, onto the train, off the train, and onto another train, and off the train again, and back onto a taxi that would deliver us to our home and off that taxi and into our home.
On the second train, we were packed like sardines, my grandma, me, our boxes and all the working class of our country, the proletariat, travelling from the provincial town station back to whatever village they come from, or on to whatever village that had work for them, all of us packed like sardines in the working class coach. Here there were more people per bench than a bench could hold, and each compartment had bunks above the benches, and all these bunks were filled either with more than holding capacity of human weight or with just one burly man curled up snoring away after a long day of physical labor.
Sometimes we didn't have a spot to sit and had to stand for the three hour ride with the other significant number of people who couldn't find a spot to rest their tired feet. Every weekend I did this with my grandmother and it was great. My pants had a hole in the crotch and every week my grandma would patch it up and every week the persistent crotch hole would rip again and again. I was always embarrassed of it, but generally it wasn't a big deal and I thought my life was great.
But then a year later my mother came back for me. I think at the time I may have actually not wanted her back, in fact I know I didn't want her to come back, her return meant the return of many things that need not be mentioned now other than the fact that she represented distress to me. But she came back, and she was already married. My grandma and I were surprised, you see, we also were in denial that my mother was a mail order bride, even though it's not a term used in Russia we did comprehend the concept, but somehow wanted to believe that what my mother was doing was something better than those other women, something smarter so even though it's only obvious that this man who brings her to the US on his own money will want something in return, for example enslaving an unsuspecting foreign woman, we did not actually think she would marry him.
But she did and she came to get me away from the oh so tortuous life I was living at the mercy of my horrible, slave driving grandmother, how dare she make me drag heavy boxes around? My mother was livid with anger, she hated her mother, hated her city, hated her country but really she just hated the collapse of the Soviet Union, we fell prey to the cycle of all imperial structures. It wasn't our countries fault, it wasn't the land's fault, nor the people's fault nor the governments fault, really it was all because of one guy, Lenin, we could just point the finger at him for this cycle, or maybe take it even farther, we could blame it on Marx and Ingles, after all they spawned the ideology. But the point I am trying to make is that she made a huge mistake for hating her country, a huge mistake.
We left our city where the colors were sapped out of the buildings, the streets, the peoples' faces, the trees, the grass, the whole city, the villages surrounding the city. We left the gray, ugly lifeless mush, the dirty piss stained snow, the clouds of stale cigarette smoke lingering in the alleys off the main streets. And our plane landed in LA. I met the man who was to be my step father. He took us to his car, a gray Corsica Chevrolet, the interior was shabby with the lining hanging off the top and touching my head, the body paint and the window tinting were peeling off and as he started the engine it rattled and oh, I forgot to mention, one of the door handles didn't work.
You see when I walked off that plane and stepped onto the pavement of the International Airport in LA I had an idea, a check list of the "American Dream" package sold to Russia on our TV screens and in our movie theaters compliments of globalization. I was immediately consulting this checklist. In the always sunny California, which on that day happened to be overcast, everyone has a nice car--NEGATIVE--next item on the list...everyone has a big house all to themselves. As we drove out of the airport I started suspecting that this was also a lie and that really, this guy probably has just half a house.
A funny thought you may think, but it has happened before. My mother had a friend who also was testing her cards in the mail order bride business. This girl didn't speak English and was corresponding with a man in Wales and my mom would help her with the letters because she was fluent in English. One day they came up with the outrageous idea of sending me and my mom to Wales so we could meet this man and decide if he's good enough for my mom's friend. This was logical because my mother spoke English, and apparently the plan worked, this man's true character was exposed one day, when he suggested to my mother that he would come into the bathroom with her and show her how to properly apply a tampon up her vagina. The next day we moved out of his place and he was written off the possible husband list. But the thing is, in his letters to that girl he had described himself as a home owner, but it turned out that he was a half a house owner, with a small patch of land in front of it and the vast majority of this half a house was occupied by a large, bulky staircase that led to the bedroom on the second floor.
So as I got into my step father's shabby car I began to suspect that he also had only half a house. But hey, here I was in California! I scoped out the scene, I didn't see any piss stained snow, probably because there wasn't any snow, and there was no stale cigarette smoke lingering in the alleys, probably because I was in a car. But this place also didn't have the beautiful architecture that I walked through daily in my city, it didn't have a river flowing through it, with cool bridges and canals, it didn't have trees, in fact, it wasn't really a city, it was just a high way with a river of cars instead of water, and it moved really slow so I could really appreciate the subtleties of the brick wall that was my view for the next four hours that we spent in his shitty car. Occasionally the brick wall would reveal a landscape of boxes that were supposed to be houses, all bunched up together back to back. What a shit hole I thought to myself, why did we leave?
We arrived in Tustin, Orange County, in some sterile looking street, Hill Street I think it was. All the houses on this street were white, and there were perfect square patches of green grass that was all uniform in height, it was like a weird robot world. And of course my suspicions were right, not only was this guy NOT a home owner, but he wasn't even a half a house owner, in fact he didn't own anything but his shitty car, and he brought me into an apartment on the second floor that was completely void of any personality, the walls were white. White walls are pretty unheard of in Russia, my whole ten years there never brought me into a house hold of white walls. You know, white walls and their implementation as a housing standard is a bit of a strange thing. They used to drive me crazy, they still do to this day, the vastness of the emptiness that they represent, part of that perfect-square-patch-of-uniform-green-grass-robot world.
So here we were, here my mother brought us. In Russia we had a house in the village, a large chunk of land that we could grow things on and an apartment in the city, and not just any city, St. Petersburg. We also had a family and our culture. And we arrived in Tustin, Orange County, California, to an apartment with white walls and a car that's falling apart. In my mind then it seemed like a regression, I felt like we lost something, and I was right, I lost everything the day that I arrived in this new country and so did my mom.
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