Кто ты по жизни?

This article was published originally in 2011, in Romanian, as Voi ce-ati facut in viata asta, ba ? I opted for the Russian version over the English chiefly because the English doesn't exist -- not because it simply doesn't exist, but because its correspondingly shaped hole in ESL minds doesn't exist, having been carefully filled in by the politruks as a most dangerous avenue through which the night might go out.

The title bears, as you probably fail to intuit, a vast cultural horizon. It's not exactly identical to the very powerful, and very Russian Кто ты по жизни?ⁱ, but it is somewhat similar. And somewhat different.

Before proceeding to the discussion, allow me to take a boring, lengthy and sinuous introductory walk all over the place, neoplastically consuming in this manner the greater part of the article and leaving behind as the only somewhat recognizable element of the normal parts of discourse a mere conclusion, hurriedly tacked on at the end. (As you can observe, through continuous improvement, my introductions now have, in turn, their own introductions).

Ago some time, not all that much of it, I suffered a cultural shock from which I've not apparently fully recovered just yet. I was sitting, and in my arms I held a highschooler kitten, pink and palpititious, while on a screen there flowed an interview as part of a disputation with someone else. You probably know the interview in question, especially if you've the age required for this article to mean anything to you : it's the one in which a nobody with the tiresomely insistent voice of a country deacon, much too delighted at his own vocal abilities, pesters Emil Cioran, not before having repeated as an intro those nonsensical soundbytes about "the interbellum little Paris" that lost into imaginary Saharas a whole generation of pretentious zarghitiⁱⁱ, if not two.

And as we sat and discussed, to which proceedings the young lady in my arms participated by listening, as it's right and proper for children, suddenly I feel a question making its way, burbling, through her bodyⁱⁱⁱ towards the bucal opening. And yes indeedy, if she's permitted she'd wish to ask what is that thing ? Which ? That! That thing, my dearly esteemed brothers in Earthly toil momentarily bereft of the pinkish burden is in point of fact a phone, sitting peacibly on the shelf by the philosopher's elbow, and thereby reducing, if we can be bothered to notice, the whole tableau towards the ludicrous, at least in this perspective. What is the point of keeping the phone on the shelf, after all, if there's no Divinity to call you up on it ?

A telephone. An old, disc-driven telephone. The only kind of telephone there was for what, twenty ? thirty ? a hundred, a thousand years of your existence ? The sixteen year old girl knows all sorts of things, partly learned from meus, partly given her as inheritance by nature. Among the things she knows there isn't the old, disc-powered phone. Too early for her, back when she was opening her eyes into this world the cellphone had long become the metric. When did you last spin one of those discs, by the way ?

Which matter brings us somewhat closer to our point. You know how they have those yearly bits of tedious UGC, "those who turn 18 today never drove an unsubmersible car, can't use paper on paper^iv and never knew a time before the automatic digital translation from any language to any language (no, not like in Hitchhikers', but somehow otherwise)". You do know, yes ?

Okay. I have a bomb to drop on you : those who turned eighteen back in 2011 didn't live in a time when they didn't suck the cock.

You don't know what I'm talking about ? Oh, of course you don't. Because you're fundamentally inclined to lying, to yourself first of all, like all people. But let me remind you : thirty or so years ago you had sex with the wife or with the hand, my dears. Man is not generally amenable to admitting the degree of troglodytism he slowly, very slowly emerged from, and especially^v Romanians won't have any of it. But this is no problem, here I am to help!

So, thirty or so years ago the Romanian ate in the happiest of cases, when he was lucky enough to catch 'em, the claws of chickens, matter now fed to the dogs. He ate from the doggy dish, and he was happy to have found a place. Of course we like to pretend, sitting around on a chair with a beer nearby that in fact we always thusly sat, the bar's always and forever owners and imported Belgian beer back in '88 for the ironic hipsters of the period. Nothing could be falser than this. The ironic hipsters of `88, the yous of today, went for agricultural practice^vi and "asked for the friendship"^vii of some dorkette who counted herself most felicitous if she had a pair of underwear that weren't inherited from her grandmother. Ah, the grandmother knickers, do you recall ? What silken undergarments they had in those days, what satin sheets, o brother...

Thirty or so years ago you had sex with Manuela, because your poor wife... but let's quote, lest you imagine I lie so as to not have to confront how you lie to yourself. So :

The film of a banal winter day in the life of a wife in the communist 80s went roughly thus : wake up at six am^viii, queue for milk^ix, prepare children for school, leave for work^x riding precariously on the stairwell of the bus^xi, freezing to death on the way, queue between 16 and 18, return home, feed family, clean up, warm beds with hot water bottles, put children to sleep, wash out of a pot heated prison-style, spread so the man can have sex (for "the peace of the home"), wash genitals in cold water, and at midnight wake up to cook because that's when the gas had usable pressure. Nudity was excluded by temperature. Only in theory did young wives rebel against the ditties of their mule^xii. Practically, they lived the same reality : sex as a pain the ass wrapped in a ribbon of abundant risks. This perception communicated, producing intimate dysfunction and in due time a reciprocal disgust of each other.

You know what I was asked, not by the same young miss, but another, just as sweet a burden but a coupla years older ? Well, confronted with a description tailored to the needs of her education as to how and what it went "during communism", her first question was "And so they only did anal ?" Do you understand me ? And the second question, upon my explaining that it's not likely there were one hundred men alive in all of Romania that had pushed the mud uphill in the woman in the 80s, "And no oral either ? Why not ?!"

Rather shocked, you understand me, dears ? Not comprehending, as nobody can comprehend, among the girls that are today at that age when they're fit for shooting and selling in plastic wrapper, why didn't your wife suck you off in 1985. Why didn't you fuck her in the ass, darlings ? Can you make answer ?^xiii

The problems of money, of chicken claws, of granny knickers and the rest of the economical, financial and lifestyle humiliations you endured with the rest of the misfortunates caught behind the iron curtain ; but the problems of cocksucking and to a large degree of the rest of the modern sexual practices you endured with the rest of men in the whole world, indiscriminately. Review for your own aedification A thousand and one nights^xiv to admire dysfunctional sex between two hunks of pine board. That was the rule, before we came into this world, that's "how sex went".

In 198x not even the devil himself sucked it, and much less your wife. Today, when "In my class most all the girls tried anal" and she's 11th grade -- she's just started it (the grade, I mean) -- it's easy to pretend like it's common, and normal, and universal and always was the case. It's easy, when you see "cocksucking" on all available walls^xv, to imagine cocksucking is part of your life, and even if you've not had your own item sucked in a year or a decade nevertheless, at least by apartenence, you're part of a group, of a population, of a nation that fucks faces. Frequently. Daily. Your football team's winning every day.

But it wasn't common, and it wasn't normal. In 198x, where x can easily be 8, 9, and in 199y, where y can again be 4, 5, 6, there was no inkling of a clue of "sucking the cock as a mandatory pre-amble to sex", there was no "anal as the normal and common way to cap a romp started in the cunt", there weren't all sorts of things. Just watch Seinfeld to get an idea, let me fish out a screencap to refresh your memory :

Season 3, so 1993, episode 13, so summertime. "Subway". Do you recall it ? No ? Maybe it's time to review it. Maybe it's time to review the marks left by the sexual praxis of the period, so I needn't remind you in writing of what the distances between men and women were back then, and between people and pleasure. Spare me the private amusement at your own personal history. Let's laugh together, it's healthier. We'll still be laughing at your history, of course.

This is what we've done, us, that are thirty-something today. We changed the face of the world, we brought human to human (eventually, but unlimitedly to, man and woman) closer. Much closer. Two sigmas closer. We did what the 1960s fucktards pretended to be doing and never managed. And when I say "us" I include myself, even though it's mostly the girl's merit. The merit of the girls that are today thirty something, twenty somerthing, that sucked more cock than all the women in their entire line starting with Eve, together. The girls that are being imitated by and in whose footsteps march the kiddos coming to the dick today, sixteen, eighteeen, almost twenty.

In this order the girls an' the boys that are today thirty something changed the world, my darlings. We changed the world, my darlings.

What have you done in this life ?

1. Can you believe I govorited parusski before they invented Bitcoin ?

   To be frank, the assumption of the flies that everyone's a fly just like them and consequently has no fucking idea what morning is, being born ten minutes after noon on the current day is becoming tiresome.

   Yes, I'm aware you think I'm rich because Bitcoin, as that's what you like to pretend for yourself, having perceived an avenue where your transparent, adolescentine aferations seem credible (at least to you, whether your ver is Richard Name or not). Guess what ? I was rich before that, too, which is precisely why I'm actually Bitcoin rich even though you're more like Bitcoin squash.

   And yes I'm aware you think I heard about computers "sometime in school", just like you. Except I didn't, I was four. And I was four in the 80s, which is very different. And yes I'm aware you think I just discovered irc, except I was there. In 1994. Before you even heard of yahoo messenger.

   And yes hurr durr BDSM, except by the time Ten Shades of Retard came out I had a slavegirl that had been my slavegirl FOR SEVEN YEARS at that point. And I still have her, which is very much unlike how you don't even have the fucking book anymore. No, I know you think you do. Where is it ? Look well. See ?

   She's still my chattel, such as your own car isn't (bank owns it, amirite ?), such as your house isn't (lol). She's ballgagged naked right now, doing the floors on her hands and knees because I ordered her head not raise above a meter's height. Yes, just like in that film with the uppity British chick visiting an Eastern tyrant ; except I'm apparently tougher stuff than what Hollywood makes its "Eastern tyrants" out of. She's punished, and she's happier to be punished by me, with her thighs belted red and her jaws aching from the gag, and the terror that maybe it's catfood next, and maybe she pukes it, and maybe she has to lick the puke off the floor and swallow it all, like she had to before, than to be your dearly beloved and respected equal partner whom you love and respect and towards which you direct your tepid sense of humour and general goodguyness. Hurr durr.

   So yes, the safe assumption is that whatever you see me do, or use, or be familiar with -- I was there at the making of. Because that's just the sort of asshole I am. [↩]

2. Romanian word, denoting a young (usually male) exemplar at that unhinged age where their bones and muscles overgrew their mind, and consequently the danger of unintentional mechanical self-harm is alarmingly visible. [↩]
3. Yes, this is why you hold young women at that dubious age when they're shedding their childhood nude in your arms : so you can feel the thing they'll be struggle inside the egg they are. It's pleasant. [↩]
4. As opposed to using virtual paper as provided by an app. [↩]
5. This especially is because the article was geared towards that audience, and the examples chosen to suit. The point works as well if we say especially you, my dear reader, whoever you might be. [↩]
6. Neo-marxist (feminist, gender-equalitarian, politically correct, ecological etc) practice of Socialist Romania of forcing all schoolkids to spend months over the summer doing migrant farm labourer work. Oh, you think that's fascist rather than socialist ? Lulz.

   Coming soon to a kibbutz near your highschool. Bitch. [↩]

7. Magic formula of the time, there was no "dtf", it was "I would like to ask for your friendship". Yeah, that's right, verbatim, like characters of some bad 1800s novel. [↩]
8. I regularly wake up at 6 am. Here. In Costa Rica the Sun comes out around five, and the weather is balmy so I wake up naturally, walk barebutt to the balcony and drink divine cafe con leche, nom maranon, camarron and so on. The Sun barely rises at all in the Bucharest Winter, and in no case before eight or so.

   Location matters ; and in the locale discussed waking up at 6am was nothing short of horrible. [↩]

9. Yes, they went out of the "house" in the hruscheba, queued in front of the shop downstairs. [↩]
10. Hey, Ro commies made women equal to men. Just like yours did. Same results, too. [↩]
11. Too many "employees" of no practical value (GDP/capita ~100 at the time) and buses with a certain export value meant that it's a better deal to export the buses and kill the people. Which the socialists DID, because all pretense aside, everyone's always capitalist -- some just suck at it more than others. [↩]
12. Romanian plural of the term for the undesirables in society : old women. [↩]
13. This may sound disconcerting to you, seeing how in 1985 you had Reagan not Bimbolama. Nevertheless : in 1990, the first year after the fall of the regime, there could not be found in the entire country a single copper who knew what pot smelled like. Not. One.

    Now you understand me ? Dodo birds can in fact be constructed, it's simply talking the lies you tell kids about Xmas and turning it to 11. [↩]

14. The Pasolini item. [↩]
15. This is a Romanian trope, there's ten trillion scribblings of "Muie" everywhere. [↩]