A long story short, each one of was born with a speck of genius ingrained inside. Otherwise we wouldn’t be born. Regardless of how scientifically they explain the process, there’s always a marvel involved when a child emerges from a non-child it was just a year prior. I’m not going divine at you, God forbid, just a mystery of universe repeating itself. What happens next is entirely in our hands, no matter how hard we try to blame anything but ourselves. Once the victim mentality kicks in, good luck and good night.
Back in 1987, cruising in my cab through downtown Belgrade like a vulture, I picked up a guy, about my age, who came from Dusseldorf to visit his relatives. Ever since sixties, those Serbs with a plan, or just being pissed with the regime, would go and ‘arbeit’ in West Germany. Few years after, every summer, they’d be roaring past Zagreb in their clunky Opel Commodores and Ford Granadas, along with the Turks, in a modern day version of Attila the Hun.
Steve was one of the clan, and typically, had no intention of returning to motherland before retiring, years away. ‘You’re not going to believe it, brother, when I tell you. This time I came to visit with one goal in my mind, one goal only: to help my sister and my brother-in-law solve their housing situation. We gathered around kitchen table, and I simply told them to move into my own apartment, empty for two years, and keep it for the next twenty years or so, for free. I don’t need it, and to lease it out while my sister has to rent from god knows who didn’t seem right.’
At that point I started to laugh, just pictured it coming: ‘Oh, brother, don’t tell me that!’
‘Yep, that’s exactly what happened. They were ready for me, pulled the entire bloody list of counter reason why they couldn’t accept my offer.’ I suggested that he go see The Friends of Eddie Coyle, with Mitchum, Boyle, and Jordan. We shook hands, and I never saw him again.
A touch of higher forces that brought us to existence had to leave a trace of outworldly substance in the process, giving us all chance to ask for the world. Most people never ask, some – like me – obviously demand without the right conviction: I can’t think of any other reason, unless I burnt the speck by pushing way too hard. Then again, it might still be in me, hidden in plain view. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve never cleared my mental pipes well enough for a symphony to begin? There was an inexplicable constraint pulling me backwards every time the road was clear for a take off, some undetected weakness watering down my self-belief.
As irony would have it, every time I pushed my rebellion beyond reason, no matter how dire the circumstances appeared to be, an elegant solution would surface out. I was sitting in the military headquarters after the final rejection, waiting for military police to escort me back to the barracks, when that phone call came in – and I walked out free. Years later, I found myself surrounded by four hostile guys in a tiny mechanic shop, shouting to go fuck themselves; and before a first scumbag could make a move, my trucking partner, a Thai guy named Warich Akrawong, walked in to level the battlefield.
It is some sort of primal scream I’m referring to, or the final scene of Vanishing Point, when Kowalski slams his Dodge Challenger full speed into bulldozers blocking the road. Maybe even Zabriskie Point, where Daria imagines a lavish desert house near Phoenix exploding in billows of orange flames, backed up by Pink Floyd’s tempestuous sound.
Just today I lamented to Eileen about death of creativity: the last great director I discovered was veteran Tony Scott, a real actor Leo DiCaprio. I don’t follow literary events for the lack of time, but came across the finalists of a prestigious story collection, and they could’ve been my parents; kudos to them! I guess the primal scream got replaced with Black Friday stampede on Wal-Mart, and I better get used to it: consumption has a different type of heroes, they arise from within their own mediocrity; they look, smell, and talk like mother womb who spit them out. I know I’m antiquated, but I don’t twist facts, since I’m not desperate to prove any point – other than two mentioned above in caps. One of my cult movies was Taxi Driver. Eileen enjoys watching the same Sybil Shepherd in her sitcom, some thirty-five years later. Now you have it. Thank God for art being a three-letter word: it’s still fairly easy to spell.
A friend of my daughter’s, lucky to read while going through a Catholic school, asked me if I really think my namesake Orwell sucks. ‘When it comes to literature, my dear, I stopped thinking long time ago: I either see it, or I don’t. It’s the only 20/20 vision I’ve ever had in my life.’
During my six months in Macedonia, in 1978, my uncle and my best friend Branko Djuric and I used to drink together almost every day; by ourselves, or accompanied with other relatives of the same spirit. I even tinkered with a thought of settling down there permanently. He loved me like a son, and still does – and I haven’t seen him for the past thirty years – yet one day, while bulshitting vis-à-vis over a bottle of mastika, he suddenly got dead incisive: ‘Maestro,’ he said with his unique self-effacing grace, ‘you have to get out of here. It breaks my heart to say it, but you need to go back to Belgrade. This is not the edifying place where your future is, so don’t shortcut yourself while you still have your conspicuous personality – before you become precarious like me. And I won’t have neither enough heart, nor soul to tell you this again. Get out of Dodge.’
Tears in my eyes or not, I left the next morning, Branko’s words still resonating in me to this day.

Life is young Universe’ bribe to Gods of metaphysics for a mess the Big Bang created

About the same time – in metaphysical terms that is – when his father took Jose Buendia to see ice, I went to the event which left me speechless for the rest of my life. It was November 26, 1968, a dry and clear day in Belgrade. The entire year was like a veil being lifted from my eyes, since my parents took my sister and me on a summer European tour. The Latin Quarter impressed upon my teen mind the idea of youthful revolt and destructive follow-up, visible all over the place, while hippies along the Boulevard St Michel projected the peaceful aura of the same dichotomy. Something grand was brewing, from what I could see, enjoying every moment spent in Paris. Heading homebound, we went to touch snow in July (I was this close to ice) while driving over St. Gotthard Pass, crossed the wooden Lucerne bridge before it burnt to ashes, and somewhere along the way I had my very first french fries. I bought a pack of Camel incognito, hid it at various places, and froze when the customs officer asked if had any cigarettes to declare:’We are non-smokers,’ my father proudly proclaimed, even though that wasn’t the question.
I don’t recall details any longer – they expired and sunk in way deep to justify the cost of excavation – all I remember is me and my buddy Nick going to see London-Sydney Rally, that had a stop in Belgrade. Forget ice, this was an epiphany unfolding: all kinds of cars I’d never dreamed existed, painted in multi colors, dressed up with stickers, large numbers on the door, zillion of additional lights, huge front grills. I walked around with mouth agape, as if it were an inter-galactic shipyard, forgetting the time and the place, immersing into distorted reality around me. We waited for the last car to leave, waving at them as they rushed toward Bombay via Istanbul, Tehran, and Kabul.
A fledgling in me was totally ignorant of all the rally legends I’d just met face to face. It didn’t matter then, but I’m thankful today for rubbing shoulders with one Roger Clark, Simo Lampinen, Lucien Bianchi, or Paddy Hopkirk; an equivalent of a stroll through the Rally Hall of Fame of early rally era, as well as rally history in making. That November day life wasn’t somewhere else: it was all over me like an Armani suit. Eventually the caravan drove away, but it was a blast while lasted.
Suddenly my future made full sense, the molding was cut and awaiting; I was four years away and counting. The next summer, as we vacationed on the Adriatic Coast, I stole keys to my father’s three-speed Peugeot 404 and drove circles around the hotel parking lot. Coincidentally, the same model won three prior Safari Rallies in a row. This high adrenaline exhilaration filled the molding once for all, and to this day the song remained the same.
Last Saturday my son Miro, Communication Director at ifixit.com, and his buddies at work started to prepare an old Volvo wagon for the 24 Hours of Le Mons at Sears Point. They stripped the car clean, and a week later, today, installed a Sparco racing seat and god knows what else. The idea is catching up the momentum, with more and more races across the country. Sooner or later it’ll make a dent in the automotive universe, since it costs a fraction of running in SCCA series, well known as the most affordable amateur racing.
This clangorous work in progress rekindled my racing spirit once again, yet more importantly it unveiled the real ethos of our country, the spirit of the frontier and beyond; quite refreshing after all the doom-and-gloomers and nostradamuses laid out their flawed theories, spitting their pitiful intestines into ever evolving human spirit. What they fail to recognise is a simple fact: being pessimistic or optimistic has nothing to do with the mission of universe, which is inherently moving toward more life: its impelling motive is the acceleration of existing substance. Unfortunately, Einstein refused to write ‘The Brief History of Universe for Idiots’. Do they sincerely believe the initial explosion of matter will stall in its tracks in order to accommodate their petty vanities? Well, do you, punks?
Nowadays there is an outrageous disrespect when it comes to life as we know it. With so many goodies taken for granted, life ceases to be a game of exposure and mutates into a game of weakness. Me and my fellow humans used to build and give, now we demand and beg for more. This made for a set of living arrangements worthy of a French farce, a spawning ground for florid food stamps. The word shame is wiped out of every vocabulary as none of quasi politicians has guts to draw a line at the buffet, close the kitchen, and kick the ‘victims’ out. In the meantime, life leaks away down the Cloaca Maxima, roads will wish for the Young Turks to proudly gallop their horses once more – but there will be no Turks anymore.
During 1943 and 1944 Viktor Frankl would frequently walk the streets of the walled town of Theresienstadt – turned into a ghetto under Gestapo – to deliver his ‘Psychotherapeutic Experience in a Concentration Camp’ lecture to an imaginary audience. The vision of him giving the same speech to a university class after the war saved his sanity and made him a survivor, as he realized that life has a meaning no matter how harsh the circumstances are: ‘But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire’.

Hope is a good breakfast, but is a bad supper – Sir Francis Bacon

By the time I stumbled across the Bloch’s leviathan, I had already lived in hope for too long. I simply hoped excessively since my conscious years, getting to a point that I mostly lived in the future. I hated school, imbeciles who taught and idiots who listened, but I knew one day school’d be out forever – even before listening to Alice Cooper’s classic – and I endured those days by gazing through the classroom window, throwing myself into life yet to come.
In my junior year I wanted to race something, so I took our family magnetophon to a pawn shop and cashed it out, to be caught just days later and rightfully beaten up by my father. Then I stole money from my grandfather’s wallet, bought a moped, was soon discovered, and beaten up again. The following summer I got cash for a vacation with my buddies, and bought another scooter. To my utmost surprise, the thrill was gone once the dream came true. A month later I sold it.
Not until my Abarth went roaming through the back roads of Serbia, had I experienced the epiphany of a premonition turned into a full-fledged reality. It was definitely a surreal experience, sewed of finest dreams, as if Gods let me peak in Heaven through a door cracked open. I lived within a different layer of awareness, developed intense perception, could clearly vision my own next move. I’ve never had that experience, but it was like playing chess while on heroin, or peyote.
Well, every time you get close to a deity, you pay in Krugerrands after landing. Does Icarus ring a bell? There’s no discount there, and interest runs high – as high as your climb. After a painful translation, it boils down to this: up to date – and my book isn’t closed yet by any means – that was the only time I stood elevated aloft myself, far beyond my boundaries.
The years after my racing retirement, at 21, found me wandering, a ‘what happened?’ grimace crowning my face. The streets of Belgrade weren’t long enough, the 4am tram wasn’t early enough, my friends had patina hue all over them. I decided to kick my military obligation can even further down the road, up the pile of nuisances that wouldn’t go away. To add an insult to a blood dripping wound, with my hair quite long I looked as ridiculous as Stalone in Rocky III, at best.
Five forgettable years later, Eileen and I met and got married, I turned the Yugoslav Army upside down single-handedly, like Rambo with hair short, and started the only real job I had in Yugoslavia: driving my own taxi cab. The horizon changed its colors once more, this time for a long haul. Starting a family is a heart-fulfilling work-in-progress, and it rearranges parameters around you, as most of us are fortunate enough to know. Hope matures into a present tense, no longer it is a fake rabbit speeding down the wire: you can touch it, hold it.
Ten years after, even a broader horizon exploded in front of my eyes: on July 25th, 1990, some time around midnight, we landed at the LAX: four of us, eight pieces of luggage, $8,000 in traveler’s checks. A week later, after buying a car and renting a house south of Ventura Boulevard in San Fernando Valley, it was four of us and $4,000. No relatives, no friends, no job; just hope of the most exquisite kind: a revelation of the New World.
Two decades past, I hear that rusty chain rattling. It rattles when I go to work, it rattles when arrive home from work. Occasionally it used to be a gilded one – like the live version of Humble Pie’s Walk On Gilded Splinters at Bilzen Festival in late August of 1969 – or a silver one and without its song, with a passing resemblance to outbursts of life I longed for. The sound is driving me nuts, there are no two ways about it. At the other end of that chain, like a flesh-eating steppenwolf born to be wild, growls my car sales tenure.
I tried to saw off the shackle by joining Morgan Stanley in 2000, by playing online No Limit Holdem in 2004, immersing in commercial real estate during 2006: not a dent. It is 2012 now, and I’m starting to question the principle of hope, both Bloch’s and mine. A steak can sizzle forever for all I care, yet nothing beats the first bite.
Fleeing his creditors once again in 1840, Honoré de Balzac rented the top, third floor at 47, Rue Raynouard, in the 16th arrondissement, under the name of Monsieur de Breugnol. There he will finish yet another masterpiece, Les Illusions Perdues. An illusion, in general, is hope applied to a certain goal. When our goal fails to incarnate, we either blame the goal itself, or ourselves – a usual pas de deux – but we never question hope itself. And maybe we shouldn’t: we risk to alienate our best ally, the catalyst of our dreamtigers.
The perpetual internecine sniping in between hope and the present time leaves me no choice: if I shoot a dreamtiger, my foot will hurt in the morning. If, however, I choose to be eaten, I might not come back. In the meantime, my future usually arrives late, with painted face of Dorian Gray and three balloons.
In seldom moments of despair, I remember one of the last chapters from Quo Vadis, where Saint Peter has to leave Rome in a hurry, choosing to take his apprentice along: ‘The sun rose over the hills, and then a wonderful vision burst upon the Apostle. It seemed to him that the golden disc, instead of rising higher in the sky, came gliding down from the heights and moved along the road. Then Peter stopped and said: “Dost thou see the brightness approaching us?”
“I see nothing,” replied Nazarius.’

There’s more to the picture
Than meets the eye
Neil Young – Hey Hey, My My

The book of history had already turned the page on what once was a noble discipline. Can you imagine two guys fistfighting in the middle of the street, or campus: the headlines in the papers, on local and even national TV, on Yahoo, going viral over YouTube and Facebook, with ‘experts’ discussing the seriousness of the event and its political consequences in an election year. Police would probably shoot first then ask questions, claiming an assault with deadly weapon, a fist. Parents would publicly apologize, trying to avoid lawsuits and insurance claims, passerby would write a book or two about the event, and fifteen minutes later all will be forgotten. Most people are brain-dead, so they need electroshocks of this kind in order not to slip into a coma.
Yet, it was an honorable thing to do, once. I was a five-year-old when sent for a loaf of bread, some two hundred yards down the street. The very first time I took upon this adventure, barbarians were there: five of them, playing soccer in front of the gates of Navip, the biggest liquor and wine producer in Yugoslavia. They showered me with names, curses, but I kept on going – intimidated, pissed, but not scared. Then they blocked the way, interrupting my mission; so I stopped. Now what? After massaging me verbally, they left me go. Same thing of my way back: now they reached for my bread. A rush of fear shook my body as I hit the closest boy and broke his nose. He ran away weeping, others followed; I stormed home, pressing bread stained with blood. I felt free and frightened. Few days later I went again. The pressure of the unknown boiled inside: I couldn’t wait to get over with it. They looked at me, I looked at them, no one said a word.
I was plain lucky. Had I blinked, bent, or simply chickened out, my soul would’ve been impregnated for life with anxiety and subtle inferiority complex – with the shadow of self-doubt. I was fortunate my genes didn’t budge: they just drew their first line in the sand of time, circling my freedom and letting integrity fill the space. Every youngster has his or her Vietnam – I survived mine.
Since I had VIP treatment at the entrance, they got me at the exit: I developed a soft spot for the less favored, and kept on fighting their battles after they capitulated. Those were raw times, with bullies blossoming on every corner, in every schoolyard. They were victims of different Gods, of abusive parents frustrated with their own failures, of misplaced genes, or God knows what. I had no natural desire, nor any thoughts of being a white knight – I just had an allergic reaction to the acts of those bastards; I couldn’t help it.
Luckily, bullies don’t flock, so I dealt with them on one-on-one basis, where I had a slight advantage: first, I was on a mission to stop them, second, I hated them, and lastly, I was more experienced in tough fights. Now, that’s all freaking theory: when you stand in front of a scumbag who’s mean, stinks, and twice your weight, then you quickly realize where the hypothesis stops, and you begin to sweat. By that time your challenge reverberates in the air, and you can’t suck it back into your lungs: you’re exposed, skinless in the open. And the clock is ticking.
Ultimately they had enough of me and my righteousness, and called for a guy with notorious reputation and strong track record, one fight short of a legend, nicknamed Hitter. I had never crossed paths with him since he lived in the outskirts of Belgrade, but was well aware of his reputation. The moment I saw him across the street from my highschool, I knew I was in for a challenge: he wasn’t huge, tall, or anything like it; more of a regular looking fella, but stone-calm. It suddenly dawned on me: this wasn’t a bully at all, rather a pro street fighter; if that existed.
Crossing the street, pretty narrow, barely let me calm down the rush of mixed emotions. Hitter put me on the spot right away: ‘I heard you threatened to beat me up.’ That was not what I said to his protegé, a stinky bully, but I did say I’d beat him up, or anybody else, if they touch again a buddy of mine. In the meanwhile, half of the highschool boys came across the street to see the show. ‘Not exactly’, I declared, risking to sound defensive and cowardly, growing more frustrated with his slimy allegation, ‘but I will if you ever touch this guy.’ I pointed at Alex Stankovic, standing next to me. Hitter didn’t see it coming, a tiny shadow crossed his stare. ‘Listen, fucker, do you see what I’ve got here?’ He had a thick metal bar bulging inside the cheap vinyl suitcase of his. For a brief moment, I simply didn’t know where I stood: the signs of my progress seemed to be iffy at best, delusional at worst. Plus, Hitter never raised his voice – a gloomy prospect.
At that point of my fighting career he was not in my league, I don’t think anybody was: a decade packed with daily mental and physical challenges, and a noble reason behind it, made me feel invincible, almost arrogant. ‘I don’t care, Hitter, why would I.’ I could see his cool shaken, as he had enough of me already. ‘What if I pull it out…?’ His voice growled, his eyes riveted on me. I knew I got him, and turned up the heat: ‘You won’t be able to pull it out, Hitter.’
His heart snapped, his eyes moved sideways as he acknowledged defeat: ‘Why are we arguing about these suckers, anyway. They don’t deserve our attention, don’t you agree.’ I agreed wholeheartedly, and we parted ways as new-found friends.
In between these two face-offs stretched a long bildungsroman, an actuality that kept on swinging at me, kept threatening me, rooting for my defeat. As I pushed through the first blood and swallowed the first fear, there was an initial capital to work with, a dividend paying investment. I was exposed as a celebrity of a wrong kind, grew my first skin, shrugged off their stares, but I had never reached the whistling phase: the pressure was there around the clock, the standard was set too high for my taste.
Well, as Churchill said it, the chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.

Every philosophy is like looking for a black cat in a dark room; Marxist philosophy is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, but the cat isn’t there; Soviet philosophy is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, the cat isn’t there, but you keep shouting ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found it!’
Matthew Lynn

Growing up under the socialistic regime back in Yugoslavia, I became somewhat of an expert on hypocritical issues and sublime two-faced strategies. I watched a rally coverage on YouTube the other day, the Serbian championship battle, where the commentator (her) spoke in such an artificial ‘media’ tone to make my stomach twist. Then the new champ stopped by, and he came across even more feigned. If the rally sport is infested, what’s left? The guy risked his life all season long, outdrove the competition, and in his unique moment of glory he appears on the national television and drops his lively personality to mockery.
Are Serbs one fake nation? They are not, but their cogito needs an urgent medical assistance. Those decades under Tito’s rule, otherwise quite acceptable, left a paranoid residue in people’s conscience, all kinds of phobias, and the national insecurity complex. I used to exchange emails with one of my best friends, a succesful TV journalist of Charlie Rose genre and Robert Redford looks, when his correspondence suddenly went missing for weeks – after claiming the exchange to be very helpful in his current state of mind. ‘I didn’t feel like writing’, he said afterwards. Fine with me. Next time it was months, now it’s already been a year. If it weren’t for the death of our mutual friend, even longer. There is no journalist in the world who doesn’t feel like sending an email to a friend for a freaking year. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, something marked the state with a scar.
Another close friend never answers to my emails, but keeps bombarding me with poker bonus invitations via Facebook, every time under slightly different name. He is an established peddler at the Belgrade’s flea market, a free spirit in both meanings of the word. The three of us used to be inseparable for many years, and grew away as wild variations of the same political system: a successful but incomplete and unsatisfied, a happy peddler, and the observant from miles apart. One climbed the ladders, one laughed at the climber, one burnt the ladders. None fought the system. Drei Kameraden, with Velja being Robert, Baum being Gottfried, and myself Otto.
After Tito died the system disintegrated with a bang, yet the mentality kept going full force, bursting at the seams of irrational exuberance. Numerous ‘psychics’ tried their cures and left feeling dizzy and nauseous, as ‘the liberators of the free world’ followed the suit. Political indoctrination goes long way: it paints your dream with doubt, whispers threats in your ear, questions the political purity of your thought. People get hit from both sides, where schizophrenia grabs the weak and intellectually honest, while paranoia chases the strong and stubborn. It took one Isaak Babel to laugh in Stalin’s face by having a long affair with the wife of Nikolai Yezhov, NKVD’s chief. Babel was executed, as well as Yezhov, while Yevgenia Yezhov committed suicide in a mental institution.
Yugoslavia had a watered down oppression, yet many ended up incarcerated. A distant uncle of mine, Whitey, did his time at Goli Otok, refused to talk about it, and carried his curse around like leprosy. Saban Bajramovic, a Gipsy folk legend, ran out of his army duty at age of 19 to be with his girlfriend, got three years at Goli Otok, showed them finger at the trial, and ended up with a five and a half. When I did a similar stunt years later, they just discharged me as a psycho (which was the plan anyway).*
Serbs got their will taken away for so long, first by the Turks for centuries than by Tito for decades, and the nation lost its ability to breathe. After holding their breath for such an extended period of time, Serb faces turned blue as the country went red. We know from Pavlov’s experiment with dogs that confrontation of red box and blue circle eventually ends up with a mixed signal, aka purple ellipse, i.e. neurosis. The grand ulcer of the nation produced an excuse to whine and fuss, but lament in first place.
When I watch Novak Djokovic winning Grand Slams after stating that he was, unfortunately, born at the wrong time, during the Federer and Nadal supremacy, and beating these two like there’s no tomorrow, I see a future for the nation bleeding from a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts. When I stare at one of Lubarda’s paintings, playful Horses, I feel the strength waiting to erupt.
A close friend of mine left Belgrade after his wife committed a suicide, to take care of his daughter and isolate himself from the world. I wrote to him once, and he answered by refusing any further correspondence. ‘I’d like to see you once more in my lifetime’, he said.
When my father died three years ago, I didn’t have money to go and attend his funeral, nor visit him while he was trying to recuperate from the stroke that shortly afterwards ended his fruitful life. It’s hard to imagine a lower blow to one’s self-esteem.
I do miss the streets of Belgrade, that decor of my past motions in space, the birthplace of my kids, but that’s about it. When Jessica and Miro, my daughter-in-law and my son, went to visit Belgrade this June, for the only time since we left in 1990 and the first time for her, I felt weird. As if the past were reaching for me, like a debt suddenly emerging from the depth of genes, a smiling and a sad Janus telling me stories of glory days and bloody defeats. I felt like a rolling stone that gathers no moss, as well as Sisyphus pushing the same stone back, up the hill of absurd.

* My Psychotic Military Adventure

You are what you think, not what you think you are.
Bruce MacLelland – Prosperity Through Thought Force

It’s hard to believe, sometimes I doubt it myself, but it all started with Hegel.
Around the summer of 2007 I stood at the crossroads. Eileen and I had just arrived back home from Houston, TX, actually it’s suburb of Baytown. We viewed an 88-unit multi-family apartment complex, offered at 1.2 million, and as a sideshow, two more in Houston. Owned by a Romanian couple, the place didn’t stand out in either direction: its deferred maintenance was typical for the surrounding area, predominantly low blue collar peppered with Section 8 and welfare recipients: even my perennial optimism needed a Red Bull to get it going. A day long tropical rain contributed to this experience, washing away the remnants of my enthusiasm. This was the last trip Eileen and I made during our commercial real estate adventure.
To sweeten the insult, our house of thirteen years was hanging in the thin air of looming foreclosure, which was obvious even to a glass eye, but not to us. I had no choice but to escape from reality – but where to? Then, along came the Napoleon Hill’s classic, Think and Grow Rich. Napoleon was sponsored by Andrew Carnegie for two decades to study the rise to riches of the wealthiest people of his time, in early 20th Century, and summarized his devotion and insights in some hundred pages. Somewhere at the edge of this mind boggling text laid the premise that certain matter in the Universe can answer to a proper and persistent request for our personal prosperity and unlimited abundance. And it will come to us.
Being sceptic, like most of us, I took it with a large grain of salt. Being desperate, like some of us, I decided to practice his teachings. Then I came across a DVD, The Secret, where experts from various walks of life discussed basically the same idea and praised its effects. It was like a FDA’s approval of a new drug, where stock skyrockets, revenues jump, analysts rush with Strong Buy recommendations. I’m not a firefighter, only a former street fighter, but when I see smoke, I go there to gaze at the fire; or at least check if there’s any.
Eileen and I have been frequent visitors and unending devotees of Malibu, CA, located only minutes away from where we lived, in West Hills. To us two, this beach community has had an inexplicable advantage over others in Southern California: was it for its rolling hills backdrop, for Chumash Indians’ holly grounds, for its estates leisurely spread around – I don’t know. Not even sceptics would question a love at first sight, only the good old cynics. Shortly after the espial of Malibu, while walking the hillside one day, we stumbled upon our dream house: a 4800 sqf mansion overlooking the Pacific from quarter-mile distance, listed as a bargain at 5 mil. It became a focal point of our Malibu visits ever after. To spice our daydream a notch, the realtor posted some fifty or so high definition pics to go along with the listing. Offer an icy cold, sweating glass of pink lemonade to a thirsty Sahara trekker.
Last year, a buyer snatched this foreclosed beauty for a measly 2.3 mil., breaking my weak heart and running roughshod over my self-esteem once again. I was still dreaming, my immutable faith allowed no reassessment in accordance to real life facts, when – while reading from James Altucher’s blog – a revelation occurred. A book published in 1910, by someone I’ve never heard of, Wallace Wattles, named The Science of Getting Rich. It was the black hole of any other, past or future, attempts on the subject, a distilled essence. This disciple of Hegel starts with a premise that there is thinking stuff (the Universe, Nature, in a sense of self-growing capacity), that man can produce thing imagined by pressing his thought upon intelligent formless substance; as long as he backs it up with unwavering faith and keeps on vividly imagining the desired object.
Both Wattles and Hill heavily rely on The Law of Attraction, a metaphysical belief that ‘alike attracts alike’. It all made much sense to me, so I went to work. As mentioned above, I tried this technique after reading Hill’s book, but wasn’t persistent enough, I guess, and ended up in the fool’s paradise. This time my determination took no prisoners. I visualized our dream mansion, the cars we’d own, a Starfire Pearl Lexus LX 570, a black 2012 Mustang Boss, lifestyle there, lifestyle out of there, motions, actions, weather, the smell of a built-in barbecue next to its saltwater pool. I thanked the Universe for providing me with material bits I longed for, as a pretext of this restructured life I’m going to lead.
Days went on. Nights too. Since, like pretty much all of us, I spend most of my time at work – being a salesman at a Nissan dealership – while standing outside waiting for customers, I’d launch myself into life I decided to have: walk the property, take a swim in the pool, throw tennis balls to our German shepherds Drake and Lacey, have coffee with Eileen in the open. A classic case of daydreaming. Yet, according to Wattles, it is faith and purpose in the use of imagination which make the difference between a scientist and a dreamer.
I was living in the Mansion without rent expense, driving my Boss absent its monthly payment, feeling like twenty-seven million bucks and you keep the change. Two months later I questioned my sanity, and it checked out. Than I did a Ben Franklin close, confronting pros and cons, still my faith prevailed. The comparison with Matrix, the movie, came to mind, as well as Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, but I dismissed them both for the lack of conceptual relevance, since the former needed a technical stretch, and the latter relied on peyote.
Right now I’m just an actuary of time divided by two spaces. I intend to keep on going until a resolution presents itself, one way or the other. I might end up being a schizophrenic. But, hey, I’m betting on myself, and Nietzsche: ‘No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself’.

Robin: Maybe if we attack it, it will get confused, and make a mistake!
(pause)
Arthur: Like what?
(longer pause)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail

One meaningful shortcoming will always be my inability to live philosophy. Took me a year-long intensive studying of the subject to apprehend this simple fact. Then I threw those books away. And pretty much all others. Like Buridan’s donkey – who died of hunger not being able to choose in between the two identical bales of hay – my self was divided by quite opposite poles: Spengler’s The Decline of the West, and Doors’ lyrics from The End: ‘The west is the best, The west is the best, Get here, and we’ll do the rest’. How do you live through that divide? People do, by looking straight ahead, in front of them. That’s the arrow approach. I wanted something else, to live, as Kundera would say, jinde, or elsewhere. Attending philosophical studies had nothing to do with attaining acumen, or living the philosophical life. Students around me were regular disciples: they would open a Hegel and sigh with awe, as if Almighty jumped from a holy horse, his cheeks ruddy from the mountain chill. Ridiculous! Who needs a holy horse? What kind of holy are you if you can’t ride an average horse? But then again, how do you define an average horse? You see what I’m saying? Suddenly it doesn’t matter if you are idolatrous, as long as you can quote from Hegel. And Hegel you can only quote from anyway, you don’t grasp his domain, and so don’t I. If you could, you wouldn’t be reading this; if I could, I’d be lecturing jinde. Which, basically, was the idea when I enrolled. The enrollment in itself was fine, I had just enrolled the wrong guy.
I should had gotten drunk and joined Kundera at La Rotonde, 105, Boul. Montparnasse, for a Saumon fume. Wasn’t good enough – I wanted to live philosophy. How do you do that anyway? Well, the general idea was stolen from Plato’s Akademia, a kind of philosophical heaven on Earth, where my girlfriends would be a year behind, or IQ behind, and I’d become their Plato, absent strict platonic connotations. My buddies were already philosophers, as long as a bottle was handy. A sharply naive vision from a slightly cross-eyed individual at not so naive age. Reminds me of a soldier who sends home a photo with the platoon’s mule, signing off with ‘I’m the one on the left’. In my case, I was the one in the middle, a book in one hand and a glass of slivovitz in the other. Blessed times!
As it turned out, my plan wasn’t illogical at all: the legendary Alexandre Kojeve, a lecturer on Hegel, allegedly achieved my dream (give or take) with two underaged fourteen year old girls, his apprentices. Those were the times when girls still had cogital brains and philosophical appetite among other cravings, so Kandinsky’s nephew simply brought Hegel down to earth. In addition, he influenced Michel Foucault and his History of Sexuality. In a different realm, my aspirations eventually came to ignore the sexual consequences: I was after glory and delusion. And I took the task seriously, with a touch of an idiot savant. A short year later, at the verge of meningitis, I wasn’t talking to God, I was listening.
What I meant by living philosophy was to build a philosophical circle around me, and stay there for the rest of my intellectual life span. Soaked in hubris, I’d dismiss any opposing argument with a supercilious smile. To make things worse, I became dangerously good at dialectics: I could argue any subject from both ends with the same penetration and credibility. The beauty of my thesis would find its equal in the charm of her sister, the antithesis: the two goddesses, hand-in-hand, glided down the catwalk where Devil wore many faces, and Janus laughed incessantly.
Until one random week day I took the opposing argument, confronting the loud mouths of the class and the assistant professor. It was about – who else – Ludwig Wittgenstein, the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century, the man whose 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus brought the substance of philosophy to its climax, and its knees. Who, consequently, waved goodbye to classic philosophy in his masterpiece Philosophical Investigations, evolving into language and its games.
My claim was, and still is, that philosophy has to unfold into literature as sine qua non for its survival, slash continuation – otherwise it ends as self-contained Faberge egg. The bobbleheads just couldn’t swallow this somewhat cruel fact, i. e. its repercussions for their future studies. They stormed at me with a barrage of contra punches, arguing that I can’t have philosophy outside philosophy. ‘Why not’, I shot back, ‘that is called transcending, while you guys just reverberate thoughts of the world long gone and forgotten. You are already zombies of your academic careers yet to hypostatize’.
I walked my talk out of the class, closing another door behind me. Passing through the empty halls, for a brief moment I felt corrosion of time crumbling at me, pictured their helpless looks begging mother hen for support, and almost threw up my sympathy on the sparkling marble floor called the Yugoslav academic system.
Obviously, I didn’t give up on philosophy for the sake of literature because of Wittgenstein, since the latter has been my lifelong obsession – I just drew the line for formally studying the former; and pushed my writing attempts even harder. At least I had a gift for throwing away the junk I wrote: Narcissus in me was thoroughly beaten up by a healthy peasant deep inside. Until one day in 1989 – caught without guard due to easy wins that never failed – the agricola shattered his fist on the hard cover of The Metaphysical Stories. Thank God that Narcissus already laid unconscious, covered in his own vomit. It was my time to turn the hourglass upside down, so I did it.
There was a literary evening devoted to this tiny book, held at a prestigious hall (my ego almost got
stuck at the entrance). After a lengthy discourse by David Albahari, as well as Dane Masic, the publisher, audience got to ask questions. Among others, there was a person I didn’t recognize at first, far in the back, who wanted to know if I still insist on death of philosophy, the field she held her PhD diploma.
‘Let me respond with a quote from Wittgenstein’, I said, ‘that philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Literature, my dear, is a battle against the bewitchment of our language by means of lunacy. Less than a decade ago, you and I shared the same classroom: I walked out, you stayed. Today, you are an accomplished academic with deep knowledge of the subject by means of its history, and your own thoughts gave the subject much needed CPR. However, it is still a subject. In the meantime, I have done nothing measurable, I have no wagons to circle, no diploma to show for it. However, I reinvented literature in a microcosmic way, and I cleaned a slice of language from all the gunk accumulated over the eons. At any university around the globe, you could easily head the acclaimed department of philosophy, while, if I’m lucky enough, they might hire me as a janitor. However, in the world of intangibles, my dear, I will always be the master of the game.’

Oh Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All along dem day

Nina Simone – Sinnerman

This past April I received an email from a longtime friend of mine letting me know that Papa had died. It was a shock for both of us, since we knew Papa for years. I guess he was almost sixty, or so, and had some kind of cancer. A majestic portal in our lives was closed shut.
The last time I saw him, Eileen and I were walking through downtown Belgrade, where we all lived. Already divorced from Mira, leaning on his girlfriend as if his life depended on it , Papa looked absent, displaced in another dimension. The girlfriend was a typical bottom feeder, glancing at three of us sideways, not even trying to act friendly. Wherever Papa was, he tried to return by cracking a few empty jokes. It was a sad sight: he always had an exquisite sense of humor, and we used to repeat his ‘pearls’ for days to come. In front of me emerged another man, his instincts were taking a toll larger than him. Standing still in the middle of a busy district, we communicated like strangers with familiar faces. I didn’t act much better either, being freshly married and sensitive to Eileen’s reactions. If someone had to paint the scene, I would had gone with Toulouse-Lautrec much rather than Rembrandt – it was that painful in detail.
I met Papa some time in 1976, as he lived five stories above my friend’s apartment. He was a natural-born painter, a bohemian par excellence. Never met a woman he didn’t like, despite being married to Mira and having two boys, Philip and Mark. Other than that, he was a caring husband and affectionate father. Working as a janitor didn’t bother him a bit: he was people’s person in the truest sense of the word, liberated from socially condescending formulas. On the other end of the spectrum, he showed too much respect to those with high education: couldn’t resist paying the price for his own insufficiency there; which further led to a certain self-denial – his talent just couldn’t offset this poison.
Papa’s paintings were surrealistic, closer to Ernst in ‘Celebes’ than any Dali. My favorite was a head close up of man bursting at the seams of sheer power, a dog collar with metal spikes around his neck. None of us who surrounded him on daily basis figured it out, but it’s clear to me now, after Papa is gone: that was his autoportrait, where the utmost vulnerability met the extreme aptitude and raw instinct. Papa presented us with the painted quintessence of him, yet we acted as a consortium of mentally blind men.
Not once, we’d take a bus and ride out of the city to pick up his paycheck, then roll back to our favorite pub and get hammered, orderly (one scotch, one bourbon, one beer). We’d sit there, mano a mano, and dig deep into life, art, metaphysics, and even deeper, down the bottle. It’s amazing how many epiphanies you can extract from thick glass freshly washed by hard liquor. For the most of our circle, Papa was an entertainer: five-eight, lean and full of muscle, he was bursting with life; his thick blond beard and discolored teeth added to visual part of the package. He either had a wide smile on his face, or his eyes would be piercing through you with friendly attention. As for me, he was both an inspiration and support: natural motivator and mood lifter, Papa would build for you an aura around otherwise average day, person, or event. His electrifying vigor would transform reality in front of your very eyes, making you feel a special participant of a unique happening.
Papa supported me on different levels, the most memorable being the girls he hooked me up with. And he was so subtle along the way, that later I could barely remember whose courtesy it was. In essence, he treated me as a champ long after I quit racing, led me believe I still was, and kept my dream intact. How many people are willing, or able to do that? You tell me.
Eventually, we all morph into the later phase, following dialectics down the road obscure to us at the time. Eileen and I got married, Mira and Papa got divorced, I jumped into my taxicab and took on driving ten hours a day; and before you wiped the glasses, the picture exhausted its appeal. I have no intention of becoming a structuralist here – a person who looks at Vermeer and says: ‘Nice frame’ – but the composition lost its balance. The thrill was gone, and so was our camaraderie. There is an uneasy aftertaste in my mouth every time I part a friend and have to reshape my inner texture, a taste of emotional hangover, a self-query if the new path earned its marks, or just erased a perfectly sound direction. Some doubts always remain doubts, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
In 1990 we moved to the U.S., and memory hell broke loose: time, now multiplied by distance, turned into a voracious white shark, feasting on anterior relationships and images like there was no tomorrow, nor yesterday. The first new world impressions cut deep into the fresh soil of our expectations: life was future weighted, taking no prisoners from the obsolete wars. From the opposing end, I had to face the fact that Serbs, by definition of time, live in the past. Even though they gave up on rain dance years ago, communion via internet is random at best, having the shock value of Colonel Buendia’s, when his father took him to see ice.
Mira died in early April of this year. Taller than Papa, with thick framed glasses contrasting her pale face, she radiated forbearance of a Madonna combined with gleaming of a nun. Emma Bovary comes out short in the comparison of two hearts. Papa attended her funeral on April 15th, not feeling well himself. He died the next day.*

* How can anyone explain to Mark and Philip Cosovic what happened in front of their eyes during that short week. I certainly can’t. Maybe The Poet, in the boiler room named Romeo and Juliet?

When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving slow
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know
Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit

Do you play chess? I know, who does. They don’t even play chess where it was second only to soccer for decades, in former Yugoslavia. My father used to beat me like a stepchild, with his queen watching from a side of the board. He enjoyed his victories a little bit too much, so I returned the favor ten years after. Everybody played, and bragged about it: parks were full of chessboards and chess fanatics, bistros, chess tournaments all over the country – national pastime. Father used to joke how he beat the best Yugoslav grandmaster of his era, Svetozar Gligoric – a true story with a twist, since Gligoric never showed up for the official match of the Student Cup. For my generation, I can say that there is a grandmaster with my last name, not me though, and no relation. We shared the same chess club, Slavia, and Stefan was already a Master Candidate when I started. He ended up being an average grandmaster, while I quit even before reaching the Master title; kind of lousy average out of two Djurics.
Here, we are a poker nation, and that’s fine. What puzzles me is that the real history of chess begins and ends with an American chess genius: Paul Morphy and Bobby Fischer. Morphy beat everyone he played against, and retired in New Orleans at age of 22! On the opposite end, the best chess book I’ve ever read was written by the above mentioned Gligoric – an exquisite journalist, who also was an occasional tutor to young Fischer – about the mythical match in Reykjavik: Fischer vs. Boris Spaski. Spaski was a scholar and a gentleman, thus had no chance against the mad genius from Pasadena.
The history of chess resembles a pub in Soho, London, say The George, at 213 Strand: Morphy comes at noon to open, by three there are already a few drunk Russians and a suspiciously sober looking gentleman reading newspapers. By seven, the number of Russians is out of hand, with five or six of them lying on the floor, including the informant. Then the Serbs come, already spirited, and the real show breaks ground. By three in the morning, when Fischer comes to close, all the glassware is transformed into glass splinters and dust, while Serbs suddenly realize that crystal ashtrays somehow managed to remain intact, and go to work.
After the infiltration of the IBM’s Big Blue (and the spiders from Mars), chess unofficially ceased to exist; that is, if you ask me. Nobody plays chess anymore, even in Yugoslavia (ceased to exist), which proves how dead it became. The world has changed. But, I come to bury chess, not to praise it. The noble media had told you chess was an ambitious game, so they replaced it with series about housewives and Kardashians, while Brother Maynard (see: ‘Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch’) was substituted with Brother Madoff. My heart is in the coffin there with a wooden board and thirty two pieces of wood, and I must pause till it come back to me.
Somewhere close to the end of my brief chess career, I started to pay more attention to white rabbit in chess than chess itself. studying chess theory eight to ten hours each day, then playing another eight at Slavia, eventually got to me: there was no end in sight. Which, in return, helped me realize I was not made of the grandmaster material, i. e. the sterner stuff. So, instead of going wide and trying to conquer the chess world, and spread my thin talent to translucency, I decided to dig deep into mental Fata Morganas of analyzing a complex position on the chess board. When pushed to extreme, these positions transform into a newborn reality, self-contained and detached from chess reality. Like Castaneda’s 1968 master’s thesis, The Teachings of Don Juan, it leaves the common actuality in the dust, searching for the Geist beyond perception.
The first three moves – and keep in mind, one move means your move and your opponent’s move – in any type of position are mentally transparent, meaning you might be wrong in your analysis but you can ‘see’ them quite clearly. The fourth move will give you a headache and the inferiority complex, tempting you to quit self-torturing and move to greener pastures. By the time you reach the fifth, you are dizzy, nauseous, disoriented, pitiful, and on the verge of fainting. That’s where the most of us quit: it just not worth the effort (the voice of our ego whispering to our weak minds). Essentially, we do all the work required – and give up three feet from gold.
The sixth move is where the real fun begins. It’s where the White Knight is talking backwards, like in Four Horsemen of Aphrodite’s Child, where you enter the Court of the Crimson King, where the Red Queen allows Leslie West’s guitar to take her thoughts to Mississippi, where the Rook walks all along the watchtower, and where the Bishop (every saint has his past) tries to sneak through the stairway to heaven unnoticed. Pions, as usual, get served panem et circenses, fresh off the grill. Most importantly, and I underline this, you don’t need to ask Alice anymore: you are Alice yourself.
As for the seventh move, it is an albedo feature. I know it exists, I heard the rumors, but I’ve never been capable of getting there: my tiny brain simply overheated at the entrance, and the bouncers laughed me out of the chess Area 51.

I tried to free myself from him by moving on from the mythologies of the slums to games with time and infinity, but those games are now Borges’ and I will have to conceive of other things.
Jorge Luis Borges – ‘Borges and I’

Speaking for myself, I barely can. It took place half a century ago – a scary fact to say when talking about a human, especially about yourself – and I witnessed it with my own eyes, not yours. Truth to be spoken, while I was quite cross eyed as a kid, my mind wasn’t. The entry was grand. Depending who you ask, it felt like entering the Pink Floyd studio during the recording of Dark Side of the Moon, it was like the first lap of 24 Hours of Le Mans, or just as reading of A Universal History of Infamy. It sure loaded sixteen tons on my shoulders, which I don’t think I was ready for. Neither I saw it coming. As far as I could see, there was no writing on the wall either: the walls were all shelved up from bottom to top, bearing the enormous weight of the antimatter. Being barely five years old, I just guessed tons and tons of it. I don’t think I’ve seen that much weight ever after: my shoulders itch at a miniscule reminiscence. And for a some reason unknown to me, people assume that matter weighs more than antimatter. I am by no means an expert when it comes to astrophysics, but I’ll take the credit for this one.
Years later, driving my race car sideways through the first curve of my first rally, that feeling came back too me, touched my shoulder, and drifted away: time was already way faster and almost material. It became absolutely material just few hundred feet away, when my Abarth overheated and the smell of burning antimatter filled the cockpit. But that’s another story, ‘My First Rally’.
I recently wrote about the editorial analysis (I still deny my temptation to embrace analysis with quotation marks) I received from some literary magazine, and at this juncture I have to quote a tiny bit of it: ‘Why would a library full of books be considered THE wonder of the world…?’ It’s probably me, but I’m missing something here. Name any other wonder of the world, and I’ll laugh at the comparison. Nothing can stand shoulder to shoulder with human thought, unless we have an alien in mind. Even then, good luck to him.
Still, I have hard time remembering antimatter, and I don’t think it matters anymore. Forgetting it is like a spiral which drills deeper and deeper into the solid core of the Blue Planet, bemoaning the blues for the surface light in August. It’s almost November as I write this, spell-checking Gutenberg’s name for double ‘t’, and adding an extra t-shirt when I go out for a cigarette. Sometimes I wish I could smoke inside, and blow more smokes into the screen, just like the blind librarian. Or take a joyride on a psychotic horse through the burning stables. There are so many items I have to kiss goodbye these days: mouth-watering bar brawls, lucid moments of self-awareness, burning rubber while driving sideways around the neighborhood; and Eileen when I go to work.
Going to work is yet another story from a tedious library of Karl Marx. At age five, I wasn’t philosophically inclined: I hoped for a life spent in labyrinth of my own fantasies, fantasies constructed of other minds’ labyrinths – anything that would isolate me from mental ubiquity of the slums surrounding the farm my grandfather had, from those names my peers slammed over my large head and the exclusive Marty Feldman stare. Two eye surgeries and relocating to the big city took care of my exterior troubles, leaving the fancy emptiness inside. I got stuck in between the mythology of slums and the games with infinity, while the time was leaking out unnoticed.
Our memory is arguably the biggest thief of them all, robbing us blind in broad daylight. It serves as a surge protector for its mothership, the body itself. It strikes with efficiency of the Cheka commissars zooming in on a Gulag escapee, with no intention of taking prisoners. It creates darkness at noon within a single second, erasing any traces of the event ever taking place. Those erased segments eventually add up, arousing that itchy sensation of dizziness and confusion, shifting firm memories out of focus and into self-doubt.
For instance, I can’t remember why that day I just walked away from my racing car never to start it again. I even refused to get engaged when it came to selling the damn thing; my father had to deal with it. I was at my peak, only 21 years old, just a tad shy of the full-fledged mastery in terms of driving technique. But the speed was there: I broke almost every single record in my class. And I walked. Obviously, I know, or I think I know why I did what I did, yet I can’t remember the crucial turning catalyst which finally overpowered all the reason shouting at me to reconsider. It might had been some unknown personal trait that kicked in, or that Slavic self-destructive impulse, or I simply had enough of racing my talent into a cul-de-sac: Jovica Palikovic was the best, well-connected, well-funded, and all he ended up with was a part time stunt with Renault’s Balkans division, driving Renault 8 Gordini on few international rallies. They gave him a Renault 12 afterwards, but that car was a fluke. I was the fastest, not connected, not funded, and in all likelihood I couldn’t breathe under such an existential stress. Still, I don’t remember why.
One clue remains certain: George and I haven’t been in the best of terms ever since. There was a mortal leak of antimatter, cutting my future peaks half-mast, an absence of the secret ingredient that made alchemists amaranthine and philosophers tangible. For a brief, flickering moment George had it lined up, and now – as I walk away from him – he is where he always wanted to be: racing his bolide through the labyrinth of what-could’ve-beens.