Jörg Haider

So he died. Now he must be in Nazi heaven...kissing his Furher's saggy bottom.

I remember him well: I was taking a stroll in the centre of this small, very clean and very sleepy town, on the Danube's shores. The town's name was Grein am Donnau or Grein am Strudengau, or maybe both.

Then there was a big commotion, people in the little markt all of a sudden, some musical instruments, drums, flags, a little impromptu crowd right in the town center.
Haider then was sort of good looking.
I stopped, curious like any stranger.
He was handing red and white carnation to women, Frisbees to kids and wooden spoons to those that did not want flowers or Frisbees. All objects were marked with the FPÖ initials and logo.
I knew he was a politician by the way he kept on shaking hands and kissing babies, the way he dressed - but I found out only few years later what sort of politician he really was.
At the time, I just accepted the carnation he offered me gallantly. He even asked me what part of Nesblandia I was from.
I even told him. I thought at the time, in my ignorance, that he was a nice guy - but at that time I thought the same about Kurt Waldheim.
Nobody was talking yet about his Nazi past in Europe and I could not even have imagined that they could put at the top of UN somebody that was not up to the job. Somebody that was not clean enough, not proper.
I was young and silly - an idealist at heart...

So there they are: Hitler, Waldheim and Haider.
Three sons of the same country.
Austrians must be very, very proud.
But wait - there's more: I forgot to add Arnold Schvartzenegger.
I'm sure that if I dig a bit deeper I can find a couple more. Like that guy from Amstetten that kept his daughter as a sex-slave for about a quarter of a century and fathered her 7 children.

Strange achievement for a country that has just about 8 million inhabitants now, in the 21 Century and had even less than that just few decades ago...
I guess that inbreeding must be unhealthy, after all, no matter how traditional (see Hitler's affair with his own Niece).

I remember yet very vividly how many Austrians used to literally spit in the street after every passing by Nesblandian. I remember because I was one of them, and if I spoke my own idiom with somebody and they heard we weren't speaking German, they spat at us. Literally, I'm not kidding. It happened to me many times in 2 years, maybe 20 times in different parts of the country.


Yeah, I did not forget, how sad is that.

Congo Journey

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3096/2524119750_079aed4e57.jpg?v=0

I am reading this fabulous travel-adventure book – Congo Journey by Redmond O’Hanlon.
Somewhere on page 188 in my Penguin Books edition (I Love Penguin Books – They Are The Best!) it says:

‘It’s a bit like the psychological bargains Christians or Muslims strike with themselves: you agree to abandon for life your ability to think straight; you accept a job-lot of fairy tales, all kinds of absurdities; and in return for the effort it costs to push your intellect back into bed every time you get up in the morning, you’re released from the big one, the fear of death. You can really start to tell yourself that you’ll see your dead mother and father again, that your dead children are not dead, that your dead friends are still sitting drinking round the fire, and maybe, even your favorite dog is waiting for you, fast asleep…’

Yup, it summarizes it quite comprehensively. Very well put, Redso! That’s exactly how it is, no doubt about that. I couldn’t have said it better myself – he he he! A palliative. For a toothache.

Andrew Brown from The Guardian has written here few years ago a fascinating account of Redmond, the Man.

The politically correct, highly publicised 'help'at hand bullshit

I had a message recently:

Thankyou for your recent email to the Jonathan Wren automatic resume registration email address.

If your mail was intended for an individual staff member or an application
for a specific position, it will have been passed on to the relevant person
for their attention. If you were updating your resume or availability, this
has been actioned.

Please contact us via this address should your availability, contact or
resume details change. We will contact you to advise of any progress in
obtaining work for you.

Guess what? I was registered with this agency about 4 years ago when I was very desperate for being unemployed. As Nesblandians tend to be, regardless of their qualifications or experience.

The agency never found me a job, never bothered to contact me not even once and if it wasn't for this e-mail about a week ago, I would have forgotten completely they even existed.

I answered them though, because

they deserved

an answer:

Dear Agency,

Thank you for waking up and remembering me after all this time,(4 years roughly) although it wasn't I the person who contacted you.
Perhaps it was somebody else with another foreign-funny-sounding-name-similar-to-mine, or about as desperate as I used to be when I tried to get your "help"; another person that you are going to ignore deliberately for 3-4 years, I presume.

As for me, do not bother anymore, I found myself a job long ago, without your "precious-highly-specialized" help. Please update your data base, will you? Shouldn't be that much trouble to try to clean it up twice every decade, don't you think?

Keep up the good work, you fabulous people, you!

And then I had a satisfaction that I did not keep quiet and just ignored their idiotic, out of date e-mail.

The Bastards!

What revenue does this bring and to whom?

There are things that puzzle me sometimes, things that beat logic. Simple things like for example concessions for students.
In Nesblandia by the way, when students have concessions they have them equally – all of them in the same way. For transport or for other things, the concessions encompass all students, Nesblandians or not.
Where I live now though, things are stranger than fiction.
We travelled through France this year – a part of Nesblandia that is very much visited by millions of people every year. It wasn’t only France on our itinerary, but other countries of the EU as well.
Here and there we had to catch a train, a bus, we went to museums, places of interest, botanical gardens etc.
My daughter was a student from outside Nesblandia (recte France) and in spite of that, she benefited of those concessions, no questions asked apart from her Student ID card. She presented it and everything was fine. Even if she did not present it, was OK. They asked for her passport as a proof that she was under 25 and it was fine – she got her concession ticket everywhere. We were quite pleased.

Here, at home, we went to another city. The city was in another state but still in the same federation, in the same country where everybody abides by exactly the same laws, eats the same food, speaks the same language and sings the same National Anthem. We have only one Constitution too.

We asked for a concession ticket for a tram, too lazy or too tired to walk from the hotel to a museum not far away. We bought two - one for my mother who has a pensioner concession card and the other one for my daughter who is a student of course. They both got their concession tickets, and we jumped in the first tram.
On the road, a controller boarded and started checking the tickets. We presented ours. My mother had to present her senior citizen card. She was fine. Then my daughter had to present her student ID and she did. She was not fine. She was to be fined instead.
We were in trouble.
The man told us that if she was not a student in that state, she had to buy a full fare ticket, like any adult. We were a bit scared; we had no idea we were in the wrong. At the outlet where we bought the tickets, nobody told us about that slight difference and we did not ask, since we were at home, in our own country, not abroad. We behaved like in our own city when we have to use public transport.
The person who sold us the tickets did not know that we were from another state – it did not show on our language or clothes or anything, so they assumed we were locals.

Now, there was a fine in place for such things, and the controller told us. We were quite shocked and upset – first because we were not aware, and second because there was no difference apparently in between a foreigner from outside the country and us. In spite of being taxpayers with some advantages in our own country, we were treated the same way like strangers. That wasn’t fair for some Nesblandian tourists either. I mean, when we travelled through their countries, they gave us a concession for my daughter and my mother, and our own country did not make any concessions to those Nesblandian daughters at all, not to mention their own daughters.
That was a shame.
The strange thing was that my mother had no problems – her concession, as a senior citizen was as valid in that state as it was in our residential state.
I could not grasp that kind of logic.
The senior citizens are in their own right to have a public transport or even a museum/cultural event concession in every state of the federation, but the young people under 25 are not entitled to that at all. Even if they present a card that proves they are secondary or tertiary students, and therefore many times, without an income or with a very tiny one.
No wonder the young generation learns and travels less here than they do in Nesblandia. No wonder they learn less in those circumstances and no wonder so many parents leave their children at home when they go somewhere for a brief holiday – it costs them too much to take the offspring with them and broaden their horizon.

In long term – who gains what from such a stupid policy?

Anyway, as a triviality, the controller was a Nesblandian himself, ( lucky us!) and therefore he was not only sympathetic and understanding, but he also whispered in our ear that he thought the policy was unfair and stupid. So he did not fine us in the end. He realized that we were not cheating the system, we simply did not know.
Besides, like us, he understood the system was wrong and unfair to the young generation and I believe it pleased him to be able to challenge it a bit in that way.

Braunau

Horror was born in this pretty little town: its name was Adolf Hitler.

An Ordinate Delirium

They say that if you want to accomplish yourself, you must plant a tree, have a child, and write a book.
I don’t remember who said that, some classic for sure. I don’t remember where and when I heard this first, I’ve read it in a book or somebody told me when I was a child, but I never forgot it, nevertheless, although I must have heard it for the first time when I was about 8 or 9 years old. I do remember the age because I recall that the idea of having to have a child terrified me. At the age of 9 the last thing I wanted was to have children. I wasn’t into it not even at 19, let alone at 9 years of age.

Trees I planted, if I add them up, there are enough to make a small forest.
Children I had as well, the second one more to help the first, so they won’t be too lonely in the world.
The book though I did not write, but I started it a little bit every time I wrote a longer letter to someone. My letters always look like a small chapter of something bigger, without an introduction or an end.
Perhaps "the bigger thing" it’s called Life.
To put life into words it’s a pretty simple thing when you have mastered the words. If you are lost for words or they are out of your control, it’s much harder.

The critics talk too much about literary styles not to make one feel uneasy and incompetent when it comes to words – although what else should writing be but a chit-chat with the other, like when one has a cuppa with a friend.
My favorite authors are those that write with ease, with the same spontaneity they use probably when they talk.
Writing has been for me a small passion, as long as I could feel free to express myself without having to take into account the obligation of being extremely pretentious and literary in style.
To put my life or the fiction inspired by it ‘on paper’ so to speak, and be at ease at the same time,I must renounce first to calculating my words; give up on counting my repetitions and abbreviations; forget about poetical license, stylistic embroideries and even the extraction from the subconscious of the exact day or minute when facts happened.
Without having to bother too much about that, the thought comes into words easier, words turn into sentences and phrases more spontaneously and that way the phrase illustrates more easily ideas, memories, personal philosophies, reflections. Even some metaphors can come into existence with more simplicity. Free from the labor and pain of a birth.
I guess in all the above I am describing a storyteller rather than a writer.
To be a storyteller is fine by me. It’s unpretentious and honest. No claims to anything.

The truth is that I do not write for the purpose of giving literary lessons. Not even to myself. Grammar is something the academics should be concerned with and taking care of, I’m just a foreigner and English is not even my second language, but the third.
I have no literary aims; I’m just a chronicler of my own existence, and often my only reader.
I write the way I talk.
There were times when I felt that I had something to say. In public that is. Perhaps because the events I had witnessed and lived are too easily forgotten and what’s left after a while it’s submissive to oblivion. To fight this, I write a letter or a long e-mail to a friend.
It’s a form of self-therapy that helps to preserve mental health and sorts out the good from the bad.
The written word helps with the keeping of thoughts in the right order; it weighs the facts of life and balances them much better than the spoken word, even if you use the same spontaneous style.
Perhaps the script is only an ordinate delirium; a delirium that we all endure although not all of us feel compelled to put it in print.

After the first youth, one might feel the necessity to share some personal experience with the next generation. At least I feel that way, and from my previous trips through memorialistic literature, I have noticed that many had practiced ‘the sport’ ages before me, with an ability and talent far more apt than any attempts of making myself understood by a reader or two.
Bad luck I should say – I am definitely not an inventor of styles.

Having children means amongst other things that you spend your life as a parent trying to protect them against unpleasant outcomes. How else, but sharing with them some of your own ‘baggage’ until you see them rolling their eyes. Apparently, us, the parents, believe that this should be called upbringing; forgetting about the times when our own parents had served us the same cold dish to which we rolled our eyes just the same. Even if in those times we did that only after they had left the room.
That of course was called ‘lecturing’.
It doesn’t seem to me that today the habit has a different name. It does not bother me too much. I still remember quite clearly my teenage years like they were yesterday. This is the reason why we all know that no matter what, everyone learns only from own mistakes, regardless of how much we try to pass on any lessons learned.

Reality is that our own memories play us with an impertinent trepidation: time flies, things change more or less, people forget, only history repeats itself.

When I was 9, the last things I was longing to have in the future, were children. What I wanted then was to become a writer of science–fiction. I was passionate for Imaginary Worlds.
When I was 11, I had a great Maternal Language teacher, one of those extremely understanding ones, which knew how to deal with the shyness and sensibilities of children. A dedicated man.
Very young, fair, skinny, pale, with a suffering expression on his face like he was in pain most of the time, this teacher lived for his profession – as seldom happens. He taught us that as long as we won’t use cliché, recipes and formulae in our writing, whatever we’ll write, should become a small original literary creation.
I took his advice for granted at the time, and even years later, with the blessed naivety of the age.
That age has passed long ago, but some of that naivety still lingers.

Our language teacher used to initiate during his classes ‘The Liar’s Competition’ when we were encouraged to lie about a given happening of some sort as much as we could. It was a good game; it stimulated imagination and humor. We had great fun playing it. That way we could compare how much we could twist our own capabilities of presenting a story in different ways or from different standpoints. The winner always got a lolly or even a chocolate.
This wonderful teacher’s name was S T (pronounced more like Soreen Teatell). He died young, not before becoming one of the most promising writers that part of Nesblandia had. I still have his first book with dedication. ‘To impish Dee’ it says. In some Nesblandian cities, some streets carry his name.

If at the age of 11 I wished to write sci-fi, at 21 I was more into reading than writing, longing badly for books we could not accede to in Communist Nesblandia of those times.
A ferocious censorship of all printed material that entered the country was in place there, even for magazines or tabloids. There were thousands of titles and authors from all over the World that were forbidden. Typewriters were all registered with the Secret Police. Every typewriter in the country, the private ones or those used in institutions had to have a typed sample recorded and filed with the police. This was put in place for anyone who eventually dared to type anything against the communists. Based on that sample, the eventual culprit who typed a personal or general dissent or insubordination, could be easily identified and punished. The same way it is happening in China right now.

We had to learn French and English very well if we wanted to read good books that were illegally introduced in the country at great risk for those who could manage that.
It wasn’t quite like so few years before – in the Seventies we had a lot of translations from the great Universal Literature – although those great names were mostly old classics, from before the Russian Revolution when the Communism was enthroned in Europe. Very few neutral contemporaries – mainly of socialist orientation. ‘Socialist’ in the view of the Communists that is. But even those were censored all the times. In the Eighties though, things went from bad to worse.

One day, a friend I could trust lended me a book called ‘1984’. George Orwell’s book. The year was just right – it was 1984.
Since the end of 1983 this book was on peoples’ whispers; almost like some kind of Nostradamus prediction. I wanted to read it very much, but it wasn’t easy to find someone who could ask someone else to ask God-knows-who to lend it to a friend of a friend of a friend. Everybody was afraid to lend such thing to strangers; even to admit they had such forbidden books. One never knew who the other person could be really – there were plenty of informants everywhere. You could end up in jail for distributing ‘subversive material’. There was no difference according to the law between a paedophile distributing child pornography or a regular person lending blacklisted literature to a friend. Ironically, they were more tolerant eventually towards the paedophile. A regular person could end up in jail even for reading a ‘naughty’ magazine like Playboy.
There made no difference to the Communist Watchdog – they could declare subversive whatever they decided to be subversive – even poetry or travel accounts.
Sometimes some people were only suspected of having ‘subversive interests’ and that simple suspicion led– for example – to their typewriter being confiscated. Just in case their subversive interests turned into printed material talking about freedom or democracy.
While reading Orwell’s book I had a revelation of Uselessness, Unhappiness and Time Irreversibly Lost - revelation more acute than ever before. I felt like a Don Quixote fighting the windmills.
The language Soreen has taught us years before was long dead by then.
The spoken/written language in the Eighties was a wooden, heavy, inflexible one – a stiff language of cliche, pre-approved formulas, communist political correctness, false pride and phoney, sycophantic love for dictatorship.
It included compulsorily in every phrase, book or piece of artwork words like comrades, heroes, heroic peasants, working class, heroic proletarians, Leninism, righteous ideology, glory, victory, bright future, duty towards the party, the Motherland, absolute equality, love for the most dearly beloved sons of the Nation on one side, and imperialism, rotten, globalize, enemy, traitor, spy, exploitation, undermining, danger, sabotage, slavery, pit-hell, capitalism, on the other.
No one was allowed to get around these words. Those who tried were punished by those who were ‘more equal than others’.

In the Eighties, escaping from Communist Nesblandia to the Free World was a complicated matter for most and quite easy goes lucky for a very few. It was a daily occurrence though, and later the myth entered the Nesblandian folklore under the general name of ‘exodus’.
To want to run away leaving absolutely everything behind, one had to be very depressed, very disgusted, very scared or simply very hungry.
My immediate family and I were not hungry, but we were all the other things enlisted above.

An old schoolmate of mine discretely had given us hopes that he knew a way in which we could defect to the West without being caught. But his way was expensive because there was a group of ‘helpers’ involved.
Nothing new under the sun.
In the ‘perfectly egalitarian society’ in which we lived, NOTHING that we were entitled to was free as the Communist Scripture pretentiously called Constitution claimed.

Tales from Nesblandia

*When I was a kid – a very little one with pleated hair, short school uniform dress, curious eyes and always seeking my mother's attention, I lived in a small town in Nesblandia.
Nesblandia is my trademark even today.
I have a copyright on it – it’s my Word, my World, I invented it.
NESB is a label for people that come from a Non English Speaking Background (country). I am a NESB; I was born in Nesblandia.
Nesblandia is the biggest country on Earth.
About 85% of the Planet’s population live in Nesblandia. I am one of those.

Nesblandia, or more exactly the part of Nesblandia I was living in then, was, at the time of my childhood a patriarchal, peaceful, isolated from the rest of the World place. This was how my childish eyes perceived it until I reached almost adulthood.
The town where I lived and went to school was small, clean, stuck in the past, peaceful, quiet. It had about 15- 20.000 people, I think.

My school was a big and impressive building for the town’s standards. It had a façade built of grey granite; it had heavy doors made of solid, polished teak with big doorhandles of casted iron. I could hardly pull them open – they seemed to be childproof. On the top of the three massive doors of the entry hall, on the outside as well as on the inside, there were 3 owls, made of brass, perched on a laced affair of wrought iron. They were the symbols of knowledge – a bunch of scary old things, looking down onto us, kids, with metallic, cold, shiny eyes.

School was tough then, there. A lot was expected from little children. We had to work hard, study seriously and if not, we supported the bad consequences.
My Mom was a bit of a snob. Although not extremely educated herself, almost a high school dropout, she wanted me to be the first in class all the time.
When I did not so well in school, she would lecture me, punish me and even slap me.
Those were the times. Nobody knew any better then I suppose. It was common practice for parents to scare the wits out of you with punishment in order to rise you right.
I was an only child, my genitors had no time to have more – fate and politics separated them. My father was away, a political prisoner, arrested not many years after I was born. I could hardly remember him.

I lived in a small world inside which I created another one, my refuge. That of books.
The town had a Public Library – a lot of people then were avid readers. There was not much TV to watch, just one channel; no computers – just the movie theatres to go to in a small town like that.

At school, they forced us very early, starting with the second grade, to do two things: to have a library card and a savings account at the local Credit Union. I had both.
While saving pennies did not mean much to me at the time, as I had not desire to buy anything, reading books meant something. New worlds opened in front of my eyes like movies, whenever I immersed myself into reading.

At first, I was very much into fairy tales – I used to devour the stories of Grimm Brothers, legends and fairy tales of an international plethora of cultures, all sorts of things like that.
Every Saturday I went to the library by myself and borrowed new books. During the week, after school, I would come home and instead of doing my homework, I was reading my stories like it was no tomorrow. In a hurry, and hardly breathing at first, then my breathing rhythm changing at the pace of the plot.

Some of these books were thick and heavy, big collections of illustrated stories for kids to be read by the parents at bedtime. I could hardly carry them home at that age, especially in winter when the sidewalk became a skating arena in some places.

I loved it when my Mom had time to read me a bit in the evening – which was rather seldom, because she worked until 7 or 8 p.m. Once home, she was too tired and too busy cooking dinner and ironing my school uniform to have the patience after that to read me anything. When she did, she fell asleep with the book in her hand after about 10-15 minutes. Without disturbing her, I used to pull the book out of her hands and continue to read it myself, late into the night.
Sometimes, she would wake up and looking at the clock she would become mad at herself for falling asleep. But mainly at me, for failing to do so.
In the morning then, she had to work hard and be very vocal in order to wake me up for school.

By the third grade, I was a little star at our local library.
They asked me to bring in a photo, to be displayed on a panel in the lobby because I was they said, one of their best clients, reading more books than most adults in town.
I felt flattered and important. I was the best at something. My mom will be proud.
I for one, I was very proud.
I skipped all the way home singing and smiling at the passers by that afternoon to tell Mom. She was proud too, but not that happy – the photographs were not at all that cheap and she earned very little money.

In that part of Nesblandia, things worked like this: if a woman was married to a political prisoner, as punishment for her husband’s crimes she had to appear in front of a Judging Panel where she was demoted to the lowest level of work possible within the institution where she worked. That, after she dealt first with the local Secret Police, of course. If they did not find her too guilty within one year of interviews and even short arrests at times for 2-3 days, she was only demoted.
Sometimes, if found not 100% guilty of sharing her husband’s views, the woman was only fired and sent by the officials to work in a dirty and poorly paid place.
If the family had children over 14 years of age, the children were submitted to the same treatment. First, they were interviewed by the Secret Police, then they were expelled from school/university and finnaly they were sent to work somewhere in the mines, fields or in a best scenario, in a factory. They were never allowed to study again, because they were the children of a “traitor”.

My mom at the time I started school was just released from almost a year of detention in a women’s jail.
While she was there, I was in the care of my maternal Grandma, somewhere in the countryside. Mom was sentenced because she was married to a ‘traitor”.
She was allowed to work afterwards in a factory that produced spare parts for electrical equipment.
Before that, she was a clerk. Now she was not allowed to do that any more. This made her feel very bitter, ashamed and humiliated.
It made me feel bad, too. I was the daughter of a criminal. It was very embarrassing.
I tried to keep that from my school friends and their parents. When someone asked me where my father was, I told them he was working away from home, on a large construction site.
Later, I realised that most people thought that I had no father, being a natural child, maybe out of wedlock. They must have felt sorry for me and pretended to believe me.
Some of them though as I understood later, after listening to my explanation did not allow their children to play with me any more.

In a predicament like this, being the best at something, seemed to mean a great deal. Therefore I was overwhelmed with joy to have my photo taken and displayed in a library foyer.

By the age of 9, I had read all the fairy tales I could find at our small, provincial library.
At the suggestion of the librarian I started reading now the books of Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Two Years' Vacation, Captain Grant's Children, Around the World in Eighty Days etc), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Karl May’s Winnetou, The Apache Knight and Winnetou, The Treasure of Nugget Mountain, Washington Irving’s The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, Johann Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and many others.
That was the age when I discovered also sci-fi as a genre and immersed myself into it with a vengeance. It was “all grown up literature” in my view and such a far cry from the fairy tales I used to read as a little girl.

The sci-fi books that I dwelled in, were mainly by Russian authors. The libraries all over the country were censored well against anything too threatening to the system/ideology/Marxism. There were Valentin Kataev’s writings, Yefremov's Andromeda, Alexander Belyaev’s The Amphibian, Professor Dowell’s Head, Aleksey Tolstoy’s Engineer Garin and his death ray and many others that I cannot remember, as they were tied together in a couple of collective works volumes.
Fact is that the balance was uneven, there were more of the Western titles on my library records than there were Soviet authors. That was a worry apparently as they were dearly bellowed by the Communist Regime and recommended by the school curriculum above all others. The old western classics I believe were not considered dangerous because they were mainly 19th Century authors and even the Communists in power were brought up with those books around, when they were children.

One day, my mom received a phone call from the library and she was summoned there urgently. They gave her my photo back and lectured her on the pitfalls of children not being properly parented.
They brought up my list of library borrowings showing her black on white what they meant, and how unbalanced my choices were.
They also recommended her to cancel my library card before it was too late.
Which she did, on the spot.

She was to frightened not to.

What should I write now?

Everybody has a blog these days – or so I hear.
Why not me, D?
I must have driven my friends crazy for years with my long e-mails – when am I going to stop writing so much?
It must be therapy – nothing else. Getting out of my system all this and that.
But would I be able to write something of interest for the people out there, for the strangers? God knows!
English is my third language; it used to be anyway.
I’ll do mistakes, I’ll misspell words every now and then – who’s gonna put up with it?
Not that the Internet is some grammar school of some sort, but still…
I am very new to this.
I’m thinking, what should I start with?
So much had happened in my life I can write a book or two – but then again – who doesn’t?
Even Madonna or Fran Drescher did it. Well, they reckon. Personally I have doubts, but that would be another matter for debate.

15 minutes ago when I decided to start this blog, (finally, after a good period of time while I was forcing myself to get to it, let’s say, 4 or 5 years or maybe more) I had a thought: what if I ask a reader or two, (if any would stumble across this text) what to write about until I warm up.
What should I write about, for a start?
I cannot really make a choice, digging through old memories and new crises.

I’ve met some famous/strange/unnerving/unique people in my life. I travelled through 16 different countries. I was suspended from school, fired from a job for political reasons, followed by secret police.
I had a machine gun pointed at my chest once in a foreign country.
I was in danger of being raped by guards at a border, almost killed in an international conflict I had nothing to do with.
I was arrested defecting from a communist country.
I won a couple of unexpected small prizes.
I fell of somebody’s motorcycle and lived.
I lived in a small desert town for almost 6 years.
I was born in a very green country with hundreds of rivers, lakes and springs.
I published when the least expected a couple of thoughts in a couple of magazines.
I met a prince, an eastern European Mafia guy, and a Middle Eastern very suspect guy with only 3 fingers that almost became my brother in law (god forbid!).
I illustrated 3 books.
I moved from a continent to another, making 30 new friends and losing another 100 old ones in the process.
I was robbed, stolen from, humiliated, unemployed, praised, criticised, admired, hated, disinherited and much more.
I made efforts, I was also lazy and depressed, happy, in love, divorced, raised 2 kids by myself, weighted good and bad, judged people, hated my mother, loved her for being my mother.
I took some good photographs and some bad ones.
I painted some good paintings and some bad ones too; I sculpted in sandstone, I draw some excellent, even magnificent drawings of landscape. With great passion.
I knitted jumpers. I collected stamps and awkwardly shaped glass objects and bottles.
I reconditioned some furniture and learned French and some German and some Italian and whatever else I had time to pick up in my travels.
I was bored to tears by people or circumstances and captivated/interested by some other things to the verge of obsession.
I read a loooooot of books.
I loved cats and dogs and birds and flowers all my life and had many of them around the house.
I’ve lost and I’ve gained and lost again.
One of my old acquaintances and one of my cousins became Ministers with real ministerial portfolios somewhere far away from where I live.
Another cousin became an American senator.
I watched many American sitcoms on TV and lots of documentaries.
I wrote poetry and essays and fiction and memoirs and lots and lots of e-mails, then I burned them to some CDs and never looked at them again.
I was tricked, cheated, lied to.
I was helped a lot by many generous people.
People in power that were put there to do exactly the opposite made me false
promises ( personally ).
I was discriminated against.
I was a victim of poverty and fashion.
I was a good mother and a very bad one at times.
I was always poor. I worked very hard most of my life.
I’ve learned to cook Chinese food and loved it.
I was born in a very rich family that was previously disinherited by abuse and force.
I was at war with my father, for as long as he lived, mainly because he was a Nazi at heart and during the SWW.
I saw a lot of cruelty towards animals and children.
I studied many years.
I cried many times.

What should I write about?