MOSCOW, December 23, 2008 -- The red queen is back!
Where have I been?
It’s a long story.
It all started when my e-mail went out back in September. To make a long story short, I put money on my server. It still didn’t work. I tried to call them. They put me on hold and used up all my mobile phone money. Missy had eaten my house phone connection, so I couldn’t call on my house phone.
Finally, after this go-round for two months, Zhorik took things in hand, because he needed the Internet for his university courses. Within three or four days – and after a $ 75 visit from a computer specialist, my Internet is working again. The downer is that I spent over $ 100 on mobile telephone fees and was without Internet for two months.
But for now. It’s working.
But I also was not up for putting my thoughts on paper. The luster was completely off of my life in Russia.
I had pretty much decided to go to Spain at the end of this teaching year, because Zhorik wasn’t showing me the love and respect I expected from him. Once he called me a mudak, which roughly translated is a prick or an asshole; another time he called me a durak, which is the rough equivalent of a fool. Both times he apologized and said he had been very drunk. Another time he took his hand and put it in a choking position on my neck. I knew he didn’t dare carry out his threat so I simply looked at him with scorn and disdain.
This happened one night after he brought his girlfriend Anya home and fucked her in our bed. He was very drunk and she was moaning and I was furious, because I had to get up at 6 a.m. for the class with Andrei. I finally got up and came to the computer.
He told me to come to bed and I told him I couldn’t sleep with the noise they were making. That’s when he put the choke-hold on me. After I finally crawled back in bed he bumped me twice with his leg and I ran my hands up his hairy legs to his cock, which erected several times in my hand. Obviously, mixed messages.
We have become more chummy and had sex several times since then. But I am of the “in vino, veritas,” school. And I figured he was telling me exactly what he thought of me but didn’t have the balls to do when he was sober.
In late November, I gave Igor $ 800 to go to the hospital in Moldova, then he would return to Moscow and live with me. But things have not turned out well. It turns out that Sergei and Zhorik hate him, and won’t let him in the apartment. Sergei said that “inside” Igor is bad, but he is at heart a bad person and he doesn’t want him “sitting on my neck,” an old Russian expression for being a constant fiscal drag on me, which he has been.
But for now, it’s freezing cold outside, and I can’t guarantee Igor’s health. When I finally see him, I will tell him that I will give him the money to go back to Moldova. That’s all I can do.
In the meantime, I have banished his brother Denis from the apartment. He’s a druggie, and I won’t permit drug users in the apartment.
In any case, you get the picture! I am living in a cauldron and am trying desperately to save money for Spain. Right now I have in the bank about the same as I had two months ago -- $ 3,000, which means I’ve spent all the money in the meantime on rent and on Zhorik and on Igor.
Although Zhorik has started being nicer, says that he loves me, doesn’t want me to move to Spain, and that he is going to start working on Jan. 10 and pay me money for rent, I still don’t see my future in Russia. Sister Ivana put her foot down the other night on that! “Absolutely not,” he said. Ivana is planning to go to Ourense with me; we will start a school together and be roommates, which means my rent will be even less.
Certainly Russia is getting more and more autocratic and Putin is becoming more and more of a dictator. A recent New York Times article reported that Putin was using the economic crisis as an excuse for the Russian state to take over more and more businesses, which seems to be true.
The crisis is hitting Russia hard, and the Kremlin is deathly afraid of what ordinary Russians might do if their back is to the wall. Recently, the rubber stamp Duma, or Congress, rammed through a bill giving the president a six-year term. Everyone assumes that that was for the benefit of Putin, who is expected to become president again after – or before – Medvedev’s present four-year term expires. In the meantime, he is using his Prime Minister slot to exercise his dictatorial bent.
But now that the Russian economy is on the skids, commentators are much less deferential toward Putin. The Moscow Times reported that he is losing his Teflon luster. He still has complete control over Russian television, which 70% of the population still trusts, but radio and newspapers are attacking him and his policies much more openly. What will the response of the Russian State be to all this?
It’s another very strong reason for me to move to Spain: I don’t want to live in a Brezhnevian – or even worse, a Stalinist – Russia, although my students at Potemkin U. seem to be of a mind not to allow such a thing to happen. But at best, there is likely to be civil war and bloodshed, and I don’t want to be here for that.
Furthermore, by the time Zhorik finishes university and we would move to Stavropol for him to “take care” of me, I will be in my early 80s, too old to “cut the mustard,” as the old American song of the ’40s goes. I figure I have about 5 good years left in my life, and I don’t want to spend them being a slave to my Russian friends. I want to get out of Dodge City while I can.
The biggest conundrum of the moment is what to do about Sergei’s marriage to Katya in Stavropol on the 17th of January. I don’t want to go to the wedding. It will cost me several hundred dollars in lost income, and my classes at Touro start on the 19th. It means I would have to get to the airport the next day, Sunday – if I can even get an airline ticket then – and fly back.
I also suspect that Sergei is expecting to hit me up for money, which I don’t have, or don’t want to spend on him. He already owes me almost $ 3,000! And I do want to have money to get to Spain next summer. Ivana figures that with my $ 1,000-month pension, I can pay rent and buy groceries in Ourense. I can’t even pay rent with it here. Moscow has become for me, as the headlines have been proclaiming for the last several years – one of the most expensive cities in the world.
But Sergei has said he will be mortally hurt if I don’t come to his wedding, and that our relationship will be impaired. But is that really so bad? I get back from Spain on the 14th, and he’s planning for us to go down to Stavropol together on the 15th or 16th, get married on the 17th, and for me to get back to Moscow on the 18th? Even if it happened, I would miss my Diplomatic Academy class on the 17th! I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Stay tuned.
The predictions for 2008 have largely come true (Chapt. 275, Spain offers new future – if I have one); that is, Obama as the winner of the 2008 election is facing “one hell of a clusterfuck,” of economic collapse, global warming, and peak oil, as End of Suburbia author James Kunstler warned last year in an end-of-year assessment.
Kunstler predicted 2008 would be the year the backed-up shit of America’s rampant consumerism and financial irresponsibility hit the blades of the peak oil fan.
“….My little walnut brain can't imagine any scenario in which the US economy doesn't end up on a gurney in history's emergency room,” Kunstler observed.
And it seems, he was right. For starters, the “death spiral” of the then-current housing market was “not just the low point in a regular cycle,” but rather “the end of the suburban phase of US history,” a cycle which will never be repeated.
Peak Oil “not only puts the schnitz on America's whole Happy Motoring / suburban nexus, but implies a pervasive trend for contraction in everything from the daily distances we can travel to the very core idea of regular economic growth per se -- at least in the way we have understood it through the age of industrial capital.”
The suburban housing collapse is being echoed on the commercial side as well, Kunstler noted, leaving the mortgage holders of the “’way too many strip malls, power centers, and office parks” around the country with handfuls of worthless paper.
“What happens out there on the housing market scene will certainly redound in banking and finance and whatever still constitutes the US economy generally….Nor does anyone really know how this is affecting the hedge funds, and their staggering leveraged positions in things that are looking more and more like quicksand. I can't imagine that quite a few major banks will not collapse in the first half of 2008.
That hasn’t happened, thanks to a massive U.S. bailout, but the impact of the bail-out now remains a haunting spectre.
“…The death of more than a few hedge funds could easily unwind the entire global finance system
“….The world has never really been in a situation like this before and it is impossible to say what it might lead to. But there is no doubt that the American public has enjoyed an artificially high standard of living in relation to the value of what we actually produce -- fried chicken, hair extensions, and the Flaver Flav Show, so the conclusion is pretty self-evident.”
Kunstler said that 2008 would be the year that the Peak Oil issue “pushes global warming aside as the most immediate threat to the ‘modern’ way-of-life….
“…It remains to be seen,” he said, whether a drop in demand for oil in the “wobbling US economy” as a result of the collapse of the building industry “will keep oil prices from jumping into the uncharted territory beyond $ 100-a-barrel.”
It didn’t, of course, and oil rose to $ 147 before the shit really hit the fan and the drop in oil prices began. They have now slid to around $ 40 a barrel, though they aren’t expected to stay there long, but will rebound as the world realizes that it can’t live without it.
“In any case,” concluded Kunstler a year ago, “whoever ends up in the oval office will preside over one king-hell of a clusterfuck.”
His final comment: “….There is no fucking way that the DOW, the NASDAQ, and the S & P will not end the year 2008 absolutely on their asses. The charade of permanent prosperity based on getting something for nothing is over.
“That sound you hear out there is reality knocking on the door. It has been standing out in the cold for a long time and it is not happy with us.”
Although the year is not over, it has been uncommonly kind to me in that I am still alive, notwithstanding the ominous prediction of the Sochi fortune teller I went to with ex-lover Misha in the spring of 1999 (Chapt. 16, Black Sea Cassandra Adds to Trinity).
She told me I had 9 years left to live, which would have put my demise sometime during the last 12 months.
But she was wrong about so many other things, I’m not surprised. In any case, I’m still here to remind you that we are teetering on the edge of the big abyss, and there’s no telling at this point what may happen in the coming months: More resource wars? (Bush’s deadly tilting at Iraq was the first.) The Olduvai gorge in which population dies off by the hundreds of thousands? Revolution in much of the world?
I don’t know. Maybe all, maybe none. In any case, I think Ourense, Spain, not Moscow, Russia, is the place for me to be for it.
See also related pages:
Chapt. #275 - Spain offers new future – if I have one
