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.’