The furniture for the new offices was scheduled to arrive around 14:00. So it turned out that I was the only one going home that way (as in "everybody else found a reason to be somewhere else"), and that I had to meet a guy about software for school class scheduling. So I arranged to meet him there at the same time, and reluctantly volunteered him to help me carry all those wheely chairs and desks downstairs. The heat was awful, but at least we could sit comfortably in the cool shade inside, when we were done. I would have gladly accepted a drink, but there was none.
The next day (i.e. fifth), discussing on sezam with my prime minister (of the quasi Government of Civilization...):
It would be enlightening to hear which cases were those, but, regardless, I fear the insufficiency of our understanding that the real success still comes
Well, say, founding a firm in the middle of the yogurt revolution, rubbing the wrong way on the local monopolist with good connections in the komitet (fall/winter 88/89). First two years we'd hear every three months a gossip that we'll go bust within two weeks. It thinned out now, I'm already worried.
enomouredness on sensation and good fairy. In practice, unfortunately,
Those are fantasies and that has no deeper root. Look at all the possible fairy tales with wishes being fulfilled. Every wish made true carries with it a hidden fuckup. It's clear to everybody that toil is inevitable - but toiling doesn't make a nice verbal (oral?) literature, there's no legend. Which explains the lack of stories about little negroes who carried it all on their backs, but rather about egg thieves who made it overnight by raining misery on this or that guy. Here and there someone honest dawns up rich; we discussed the exceptions which strengthen the rules last winter.
One thing that is not in the mentality, is that a man who just applies the elbow grease and lines up his pockets slowly, will not get into a tavern to dick around [i.e. brag], because it's not easy money (as in „so come, so go“), he most probably will not go into a tavern, because some fuckwind there will ask him for a loan.
I think I laid here enough ideas from popular thinking, which emerged by themselves from somewhere while I was writing this (it's scorching here, so this much is actually welcome). I mean to say that about _work_ and how is it understood in our midst recently we can easily acquire a huge amount of wrong impressions. One thing is that the system is set up in such a way that work doesn't pay, and another is that there is a sufficient number of people who know why and how to do it. The third is - then why don't they? That is a matter of motivation, organization, political and economical system...
Continued on eighth...
I didn't say that Amers are stupid. What I listed could be understood as stupidity in the sense that they enforce extermination of those of their own brain cells which serve any other purpose but making money. So, they make money, and have everything that goes with money - but are short on the rest. Which is why the Japaneses pee them over, because they make money even better, but also have culture and tradition, ergo breadth and the accompanying brain cells.
Someone wrote these days that the Amers, and the whole west along with them, will be in relative pit in a few decades, when the influx of brains from the east stops, and their weak elementary, and well high education too, comes to the surface. They are hollow and uneducated (talking of averages again), and produce nobels in those branches where research costs _fat amounts_. On the other hand, it should be seen how many foreigners are members of the research teams whose bosses pick Nobel prizes. And Russians have peed over Amers in education, by several lengths. Amers actually confessed that, and endeavoured to reform their education, but that didn't return the investment fast enough and was mostly canceled out by the next reform.
Regardless of me being entrenched contrary to Amers in this discussion, and feeling a duty to hold the trench even when I'm not quite right (as I otherwise am :), I still think this is one of the key questions. One of the things which should be somewhere in the tenets of (theoretical) socialism, and which basically stoked the masses into revolution, is every man's right to personal happiness. And somewhere in the foundations of the american dream it says „pursuit of happiness“, neither more nor less.
The point where I'm becoming distant from the Amers is where they begin to impose their model of fulfilling that pursuit of happiness, where, just like the enforcers of happiness to the humanity here, they impose their ways „how to do so-and-so to achieve that-and-that“. Even many of those „things to achieve“ are their invention, and nobody sane before that ever thought of desiring them. With so much money for background, they probably succeeded in imposing some of their habits upon the world, replacing or evicting in some countries some much better or more intelligent habits. While I stick to the policy of hundred flowers blossoming (whatever grows on you should grow), I hold their flooding of the world with a new idiocy every few months for a very resilient weed, which keeps blossoming and blossoming and suffocating many nicer flowers.
Nice of them to have developed hundred good jokes about stupid bleached blondes, but it was them who invented them, just like they did the general structure of a gas station, [movie] theatre, pulp magazines... some movie genres were completely suppressed, because of abysmal sales there, etc, etc. For example, in cartoons, which could have been an art above arts, with the possibilities they provide, nothing goes except purely american genres: relentless fights a la Tom and Jerry, and feature fairy tales. And, ah, yes, there's one more cartoon genre: a comic which moves twenty minutes a week.
Amers never had a renaissance. They'd probably never understand what's wrong in a fach-idiot. They'd probably consider the expression as a compliment.
Now what are those values of ours: what one notices first, is that communication between strangers exists on one side, and between neighbors, at some even higher level. In Švabija* I realized that they keep dogs so to have an excuse to talk with their neighbors, or else they'd come across as weird (!?). Over here one needs no dog, can talk with (almost) anybody, without much of a pretext.
As one said when he returned from Švabija, „they do have the dough, but we live“.
Next week it was Grgi and me who held the fort, because everybody else was on vacation. We had four (or five by then) yugos to pick from. The trouble was that gasoline was hard to find.
Sale had the idea to save on gasoline - five cars, even though only yugos, did consume - by having twenty phone lines (hoping to get at least six, that would help a lot), from Vanji's old connection, some Arsenić, an engineer and probably the boss of telephony in the municipality. The memorable answer was „Twenty lines? Are you nuts or your feet stink? If you asked me whether it was raining in Zrenjanin now, I wouldn't dare look through the window, I'd have to call Belgrade to ask whether it was raining in Zrenjanin... and you think I can give you twenty lines“. So two lines it was, don't even remember if we ever got a third. Even so, remoting to customers helped a lot. The cost of phones was regularly equal to that of the gasoline.
As per my entry on sezam on 16th, "we failed when we tried to get a brewery as a customer, because we asked for money for software and hardware. The competition won by accepting payment of five tons of beer. Now that will be an app... specially if they got an advance.
On 23rd:
In a largish company here the bigwigs are sitting and discussing their balance sheet. After some half an hour, someone asks whether this is all in new or old dinars. Then it took them another half an hour to establish that.
On 28th:
"Can someone explain what's going on with cigarettes? The tobacco tax is the sweetest dish for any state, and in this state, which has finally invented financial police (again), nobody even thinks of raiding the tobacco mafia. When the Russians, Romanians and the Poles were reigning over the flea markets here, the cops would chase them away at least once in ten days. These now sell on the sidewalks, green markets, anywhere, and not the smuggled macedonian cigarettes anymore, it's those from Niš, which they buy in the kiosk as soon as they arrive.
I went nuts first when I saw that private kiosks sell only two or three packs (what kind of private merchants are they when they have such a "everything rationed" socrealistic attitude), but then I understood that they are trying to protect their regular customers.
W. Post says that black market mafias are mostly composed of "meritory criminals - war veterans" which is why they're Sloba's pets (or else they'd turn against him :>). Anyone with a better explanation?
p.s. I managed on my own. After fifteen years of emitting positive vibrations to the north end of town, I succeeded, offline, to convince the local tobacco industry to start selling rolling tobacco. Not bad. Anyone with a good connection? The only (AFAIK) factory of cigarette paper we had remains in Rijeka ;(."
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* Švaba [Schwabe] is a person from south Germany, mostly around München. We use the word to denote a German in generally, just like the Amers would use Fritz.
28-VIII-2011 - 16-V-2026