History may put this entry off by a couple of days back and forth. This is the day before the independence of Slovenia, announced a few days ago, becomes official. Or not - the republic is still legally a part of the federation, and the federal constitution has no provision for secession, unless maybe with the consensus of other members. Sitting in the evening by the keyboard of one of the Acrotech's machines, probably a 16mHz 286 with a Hercules bw video card and a simple crt, I hear radio Novi (Vita Simurdić or Jovan V Nikolić at the helm) play, in the last minutes of the day, Tomaž Domicelj and his "Vlak na jug" (train to south), where the chorus goes
"zdravo, Jugoslavija, kako si / zakaj se delaš da me ne poznaš"
[hello, Yugoslavia, how are you / why do you pretend that you don't know me]
Which is the old Arlo Guthrie's song, just replacing California... with a completely different text. And I knew Tomaž's text from before, it's a gastarbajter's song. But now the meaning is turned upside down. And Tomaž himself will reissue the song on another album, with „zdaj se delam da te ne poznam“ (now I pretend I don't know you).
Shit. I loved this country.
That evening I was putting together some of the texts for that specialization paper in ventura (under bundled GEM, the Windows version wasn't ready yet).