strike

and then things got worse...

for the last 24 hours i kept hearing about a massive national strike set to bring brussels to a standstill, disrupting airports, public transport etc…i’ve learned from experience that my commute from antwerpen by train is usually fine but that didn’t stop me from pleading misery and getting permission to work from home…that means not working at all of course so i thank the unions of belgium for this windfall of free time, almost like an extra day off…

it seems beyond abtract for a dagastani transplated through the drainage ditch of london to be worrying about a belgian pension thirty or fourty years from now…i mean its a joke in dagestan…you might get 150 € a month if you are lucky and that gets you maybe some stale bread, a few potatoes, some cabbage, maybe some meat if you are lucky…sure, the cost of living is less than here but tfu and i’m lucky, my family got out and only my father was dumb enough to go back and mama had to go back so i was the only one who stayed out and i’m not going to be going on strike because the age to retire might go up a year or two thirty years from now…who even knows if there will be a world in thirty years let alone a pension, where do these people think they are?

anyway, i’m not writing to you to whinge about politics, i’m glad they are striking because i’m at home instead of in that horrific office and its over-eager youth and indifferent bureaucrats and because i’m home i don’t have to work which means i can read…yes read, kolya, you don’t have to get drunk and high every day, right, get drunk on words for a change…

i’ve got two book i bought somehow in london last week…i know, it’s amazing through all that partying with coop and his entourage that i managed to do anything at all but i scored two books to bring back with me: mircea cărtărescu’s “solenoid” and krasznahorkai’s “herscht”…

now some of you i know will be thinking what kind of crap is that but really, listen, for me, this shit is fascinating because it feels like i’m in the country of my own mind when i read them…both have that same sort of need to map what cannot be escaped…can you imagine? maybe that’s what i do here on this substack…mapping this world inside my head that doesn’t go anywhere but doesn’t stop moving…maybe leaving a breadcrumb trail in case i ever need to get back…but back to what though, you know? london? dagestan? i don’t know what is home, only inside me and inside me is a chaotic gulash of contradictions…it’s certaintly not here in belgium which makes the idea of worrying about my belgian pension even more absurd…

and you see? it’s thinking like that which makes me think kolya, why don’t you go out and have a few bollekes, take the weight off, stop thinking…but i can’t really stop thinking…because thinking is living to me. yet it is also what causes all the chaos or maybe i cause the chaos as rebellion from what thinking does to me…

and you know in dagestan, the widows, the solitary women, they’ve invented what they call arranged pensions…it’s half-marriage, half-merger…two poor people pretending to be one stable person...they get joint accounts maybe cook for one another, maybe not…well usually the woman will stink up the miserable flat with boiled cabbage and that will drift into the rugs and furniture and clothes until the old man, chain smoking to a faster, more humane death, offsets those horrible odors with something slightly less miserable and dramatic…their souls are in ruins…let’s go on strike…do you see how it does my head in? all of it?

but that’s why i keep stuttering towards some sort of intellectual understanding of my own suffering compared to that of the others, failing all the while to understand the insignificance of any conclusion i might stumble my way to…all the while imagining the absurdity of belgians going on strike because the retirement age might be raised to 67 for some future generation…

marieke understands this to some degree, maybe that’s why we get on a bit…barely making a living as an exotic dancer, she sees all the ugliness of humanity and it wounds her a little deeper each time until eventually she said, she won’t feel anything and she’ll be happier for that. i get that totally, i just can’t get there is all, not yet…i still think there is some way out…it’s certainly not working in some eu economic think tank so already i know that my present will not be my future but i have no real future unless what, i get eu citizenship…

you see, that’s the other thing, having russian passport is useless, people spit on that now, rightly so, but the british passport is almost as useless since brexit so if i leave this job i can’t just move to berlin for example and work legally…i mean maybe there could be some sort of work visa based on economics i could get but that too is only temporary so i find myself having to imagine that my best way out is to become belgian and by virtue of a belgian passport be able to work anywhere in the eu and then you know, maybe find some breathing room…

marieke said i could join her on stage for exotic dancing and scratch out an illegal living that way but i’m pretty sure and hope she was joking…c’mon kolya, she teased, some of the men in berlin would find you irresistable…but you know she was only trying to get me to smile and i supposed the idea of wrapping myself in boas and dancing on tables in some clumsy way might be amusing but hey, its no career path i thought. then well luckily i caught myself before saying it outloud to marieke and then i feel bad because i think i’m secretly judging her like it’s ok for now if you want to do that but what do you want to do when you grow up, marieke, no, i can’t say that or even think it for that matter…

skinny eddy saves me…he just sent me a text. “hey kolya, what are you doing ? kom, we gaan staken!” which is his way of saying get your head out of the toilet and let’s go drink. (“let’s go on strike!” he giggles, the drunk in his voice sounding like a vinyl played one speed too slow.)

it reminds me of that old russian joke how do you tell russian history in just five words?

“And then things got worse.”