„All of this happened, more or less“ - Kurt Vonnegut
I started writing this in may of 2007. It is 2022 now and I'm still not done. There's always more that I may consider interesting.
So... what is this? Well, I tried to concoct some catchy title, like carselfwrite, or „This is how it was“ - but the former is a bad translation, the latter is a title of a similar book written by dad's high school pal. Then nothing, this is simply an autobiography. My internal name for it is Byo in english, and Bijo in serbian (equally misspelled - ’bio‘ means was and bijo is illiterate version of it, j gets inserted between vowels in many cases except between i and o).
Why? Why not... and then there's this new age of relativization, of all things being the same, of discounting personal experience as something between unreliable and irrelevant. It's all the same, no matter where you were, we know better than you how it was to live through all those years and countries.
Yeah, right. You'll tell me. And I won't agree. You're wrong, and I have enough proof for myself to know how (and where) you're wrong.
There's also a bigger why, about which below, in Really,.
The construction of this is linear in the end, but I wasn't writing it that way. Among the first few hundred articles (you'll see the number in the url) there were dozens where I picked the date at random, and wrote whatever I remembered nearest to that date. After that, I went on gathering sources, which were different in each epoch.
I'm hiding very little, except the names. All names of persons and most of the places are invented or shuffled. This all happened, more or less. Though, not all of it happened to those people to whom they are assigned here, nor necessarily in that order or in that time. Likewise, some persons are somewhat shuffled - one gets another's education, or a personal trait - well, whatever I considered sufficient for deniability. Whoever recognizes one's own self here, that self is most probably half borrowed, so, looking at you, it's not you. It's something I remember, and you were there at the time, in my mind. The pieces are mostly in place, chronologically and geographically, except where they aren't.
Recommended order of reading: back and forth, at random, follow the links a bit, then don't, then pick a random direction. Forget about this for a while, then come back. Repeat at will. I hope you enjoy reading it at least by half as much as I did writing it.
Er, yes, the question of why should you read this, what's in it? Well there's a mountain of text, because I was never good at deciding what to delete, what to omit. I'd never know what may be interesting to some reader, and what if I removed exactly that? And since this will never be on paper, the cost of another megabyte of text is close to nothing, except in time, mine and reader's. Time, on the other hand, is continuously manufactured, at the steady rate of 24 hours a day, so I'll keep adding stuff, whenever I remember something.
The brief edition for the impatient:
1955-08-23} born
1962-1970 elementary school
1967 started messing with photography
1970-1974 gimnazija
05-II-1971. founded DC-99
july 1972. crazy vacation, Inge
21-I-1973. met her
02-IX-1974. I won't be directing movies
1974-1978 studying maths
17-III-1979. we married
23-VIII-1979. Go was born
20-XI-1979. graduated
1980-1986 education and renaissance
1981-1982 army
29-V-1983.Nina was born
1983-1993 building the house
1989-1994 made DBA and banged on it
07-V-1992. Lena was born
1993 incredible inflation
1994-1996 work in Hungary
1994 made Avai
1999-2010 life in Virginia
1999-2001 work at Zero
2002 work with Berix
2003 work at Orion
2004-2006 work for UniJewel and visits to NYC
2007-2019 work at Firriver
2010 back from the US
Then it becomes a bit boring, though that part may have most of the text. Boredom is good, we did have more than our share of interesting times. Lived to see grandchildren, bury our parents, bought a garden, started making brandy, and at around 2017 decided we may like it.