Today on sezam, in the Civilization conference, I opened the Deponija (landfill, dump) subject. Thus:
I think the time came for us to scratch between the ears a bit. It seems that the three (to seven) years of life in the non-country finally (and I hope not also irrevocably) did our nerves in.
even I started losing nerve, even started planning some revenges. Todays I got pissed off over a banal matter - I rode the bike two and a half kilometers on snow to come to dairy's diskont [discount shop]; that's the only place where one can buy milk on a saturday morning. Found 40 people neatly, quite sheep like, waiting at the door. What's the wait for, I asked. They're on a break, one said.
This is where I really lost it, and at least for a week I don't want to hear about the dairy - I have 7 apps running there, have even fullfilled their musical wishes [i.e. songs for the asking], and they can't even provide me with a chance to, once a week at least, just walk into a shop and buy milk for the children. The maams inside have a break and don't give a corner about 40 people waiting outside, freezing on the snow.
Looking also on these stupid disputes on sezam. One are bothered with juski, others with cyrillic, third with american script; we fight much more than before, I notice malice even in myself and censor it at times, at other times not really.
Seems to me that the onset of human material fatigue runs deep already.
How does it seem to you?*
It happened to us before as well. The difference is that we don't have the where and the how to recharge batteries anymore. I'm under an impression that the last sane people on this planet will be the anglers and the grannies doing embroidery.
For nervous people, the likes of computer users (SILENCE! Better confess!) there can hardly be a cure given the conditions in which we exist. When was the rear (ALRIGHT, LAST) time you were at the sea? When did you last buy some pretty, expensive and useless thing to a person you love? When was the last time you sincerely laughed? When was the last time you consumed alcohol, and were also merry and without remorse after?
Batteries, man, batteries....
bCetina:
F'gossake it seems horrible to me. I think this folk's system of thinking is shifted aside. It would be interesting to perform some sociological studies on the subject. Here['s] an example:
When that snow was, there's a nice slope in my area and of course the kids (and parents too) bring sleds. There's a street now, but there's also a sidewalk with a banister. And it's normal that I'm the only cretin who forces his kid to return by sidewalk. Nobody else comes to the same idea, they slam into each other, slip, curse but nope nobody budges. Must be me who's crazy, not all of them.
It's probably a consequence of understanding the „societal ownership“, iow the „it's not mine and I don't care“ philosophy. And the civil consciousness is at minus infinity, not on 0.
Examples are endless. The other day Invest bank in sarajevska street posted a paper saying they are closed due to „shift switch handover“. Rubbish, they were closed for half an hour (actually sitting with a coffee) and when they opened then out of 5-6 of them only one was working and that of course while making private phone calls and... just nail polishing was missing. The people are annoyyed but what can [they do]? There are no mechanisms through which you can do anything, and as long as it is so, tough shit.
Me:
Don't know whether it was because of the snow, or the special year or the new street with mostly younger folks, well I never saw so many snowmen as forelast week. And no kidding - meter and a half or taller, in front of every second or third house.
A week ago, coming from work, saw a big snowman by our house, with a hat (made of snow). Only a big beard was missing, by everything else it was as I was posing. Across, at the neighbor's [that'll be Faik], with a shield cap. He and my wife and all the kids were competing in whose will be larger. Both fell by evening, but I like the spirit. Chances exist.
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As for the preservation of nerves, looking at myself any me firm; the living is still rather easy, but there's no non-stop banter like half a year ago. Even then there was always some trouble afoot, every day was worse than the preceding [one], and it all seems to move for the better (I even bought oranges for the children, second time!), and the mood is worse.
Maybe it is about the broken expectations. Everyone is somehow waiting „for all this to pass“, and when some small thing changes for a better (not small, at that - instead of the pressure to drain the whole salary by five in the afternoon, now I have to weigh every coin), they're still disappointed that still nothing is as it once was.
Ummm... how to paraphrase that... maybe like this „may you have lived in the times when good old times are invoked“.
For the grub we had a novelty. The sausage that DBA got for compensation (from a customer who didn't have the money, so give what you can) helped us bridge the winter, and now it was the time to start managing, we were running out. And we managed. Sojaprotein (soy processing) from one of those Bečejs* was making some soy patties, which may be fried and eaten... except they utterly lacked taste. But we knew that in advance, so she fried them with meat. And that's where she got it going - two small steaks would give the oil their taste, and then ten sojka (as we called them, unrelated to sojka bird) would acqure that taste and we had lunch.
Not that it was bad, it tasted well, filled the belly, but we knew from square one that we were eating a fake, that this was make believe meat, didn't even get the color right. We didn't feel too well, except for the fact that we invented a trick, and hoping this won't last.
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* One of the the guys I know a bit better, Zake, Paki or maybe Gremlin, I think an oldwave group member, fuckit if I know now, pulled the whole archive of sezam and posted it. The server is somewhere on New Zealand and so is the guy anyway. Back then sezam (both old and new) accepted ten codepages while keeping the texts in its private codepage. When converting all this into utf-8, there was a little token snafu, in spice amounts - the „čak“ would come out as „žak“, a fuckitesse. I didn't emulate this error in english, but kept it in serbian version of this text.
** there are two places with that name, one on our and the other on the bačka side of Tisa. In hungarian, they're called Magyar Becse and Török Becse, i.e. the hungarian and the turkish one; after the war all the places with Hungarian in the name were renamed to Novi (new), so they are Novi Bečej and Bečej now, the latter being, I think, on our side [wrong, the old one is hungarian and the new one, turkish is on our side, which I eventually figured out in march of 2025]. Their hungarian names never changed, so the multilingual signs announcing places' names here are almost an ethnographic museum of sorts.
14-XII-2024 - 11-VII-2025