How I convinced some jailbirds I'm more demented than they could ever hope to be.

This is a translation of an older Romanian article, Cum am convins niste puscariasi ca-s mai dement ca ei. In reading it you're asked to kindly allow for the fact that marginal, small, homogenous cultures are not readily understood standing on the avatars of the larger, central, homogenizedⁱ mess, precisely because they still contain interesting nuggets and other rigid impaction that have long been grounded into dust elsewhere.

So sometime in the 90s, doesn't matter exactly when, I was abroad, doesn't matter exactly where, because some guys, doesn't matter exactly who, just got out of coop, doesn't matter exactly how. I believe you're completely edified on the basis of this introduction, isn't it ?

Mkay, and being people generally happy for them, seeing how liberation seemed originally improbable, as well as them being happy for themselves, for idem reasons, obviously there was a party. For which party X was going to provide the place and Y transport them (because you realise... and if you don't, all the better), Z supply the consumables and there was I left behind, lame duckⁱⁱ, to bring the chicks.

The chicks, right ? Not the whores, not the whores, not the whores, not the whores.ⁱⁱⁱ But the chicks. You'll remember the detail ? For it's important.

So therefore I didn't call my girlfriends to call their girlfriends to come fuck. I didn't call my partners in pornography to bring some girls straight from the studio and perhaps also cams, because parties yield great material. I didn't start conversations with cab drivers and receptionists in downtown hotels, didn't buy the small ads paper^iv to look for massage parlours nor did I go slumming to pick them up right in the street. But what did I do ?

Oh... what I did...

I called an agency of kids party stuff. Cinderellas for birthdays, Snow-whites, Woody-Woodpeckers, Chips & Dales, Toames^v & Gerris, stuff like that. A very likable cucoana answered, with the voice of a matron and the slightly ironic benevolence of a woman that lived among tweens her entire life. She didn't seem all that astonished I want one of each, which is to say one Snowwhite, one Woody Woodpecker, one Chip 'n one Dale. Given that Snow-white was also Cinderella, so I couldn't have both, and similarly the chipmunks and the cartoon cat and mouse and so on. So, four girls total, seven roles in the book, you're following along yes ?

I insisted she must send only females, she set me at ease that she only hires girls anyway, for "boys are unreliable". Unfortunately the joke that "well, pour acid on them then" doesn't work in that language.^vi

And so at ten hours postmeridian, seven girls, one tallish and dark haired (Snow white), two freckled, gingery sisters (the rodents) and another very joyous blondy all together rang a door somewhere. Doesn't matter where.

Damn, the faces fell off these dudes.^vii So, the doorbell rings, I say, "aaaa, the girls are here". Hooting and hollering. I open the door, they come in. I close the door. Momentary suspension. I lock the door, with all the chains. Everyone, quietly, looking through large eyes. Four girls more or less of college age, dressed in plushie suits. A dozen men, some recently escaped, some soon to go in. Some shaved, some not so much. And me, trying not to bend laughing.

It was perhaps the funniest^viii party of all time. I was reminded of it by the assistant-hiphoper Cosmin Maricari, through an extemporaneous remark otherwise very comme il faut, just like himself.

The incontestable advantage of old age.

1. The difference between homogenous and homogenized is the deep reason why, while most crystals have an apparent color other than white, nevertheless most crystal streaks white. Water is homogenous, and thus transparent ; milk is homogenized and thus opaque. Diamond is homogenous and thus valuable ; coal is homogenized and thus dusty. On it goes.

   Homogenous social constructs, such as nations, have structure built on similar parts ; homogenized social constructs, such as empires, have no particular structure, a weakness which is compensated through abundant verbalized nonsense (aka, ideology, "corporate values", what have you), all built on the basis of dissimilar parts ground down. [↩]

2. In the original, sontic-sontic is an onomatopeic of "walking with a limp leg" based on repeating the Romanian transduction of Hungarian sontika, which means lame. Romanian does a lot of this, cf "lopitaule mascat" etc. [↩]
3. Not my fault your language's boring. [↩]
4. 90s. Before GPS, cellphones, before your mom was posting selfies on "her internet" ie Facebook... [↩]
5. Romanian feminine, grows tits right on proper nouns! [↩]
6. It works in Romanian : to rely on is "to put basis on", "a pune baza" which "baza" is directly how you say base in a chemical context. So... if you can't put any base, why not try some acid... [↩]
7. Romanian idiomatic denoting supreme, earth shattering surprise. "His face fell off". [↩]
8. Romanian "haios" is directly derived from chaos, scandal, ruckus. But the happy, laughing type. [↩]