dear each, cher chacun, caro ognuno,
it turns out internet access is relatively easy to find, but wireless rather not. So I get many dark Internet rooms with smokers, gamers and chatters that are not at all inspiring, and that is why emailing you and such are not ready at (my) hand (and your eyes). It also turns out many romanians have internet at home, and the so called cafes are not that, but mostly places where street kids intersect with the virtual world.

Some of you got my email pointing you here and maybe feel you stepped into a chat whose start you've missed, it's all a bit st(r)eam-of-conciousness; questionable style but the in-discipline of my brain and the feel of the place makes this so natural; sorry, read what you can.

This trip is fun I think, well, I feel I'm travelling. Buk'resh--might as well say it right, with the same verbal shorthand as T'rano--is of course a city looking for modernity. Or rather looking for western modernity. Though this place's rationality is as shallow as any hot blooded consumer's, I am proud to feel the rather modulated modernity of "I think, that I'm a deleusian war machine--therefore I am". This little country who saw many hordes unfurl over its lands(!), feels now it can be the horde, albeit of migrant or zigzaggingly-mobile whitish-collar biznessmen. Of course a whole category of people, most ppl?, will never be "1st class hordemen" because they look like it's 1979 and they carry along with their dusty briefcase a bagful of fish carcasses for soup. Ahh yes soups! yum! Or they sound like gipsies who look like rappers (and the language they use smells of fish carcasses too but I guess it's normal for urban fashion). So the beemers and mercs and SUVs, all pretending they don't have fish carcasses in their briefcases, are speeding through the dust and makes it all more like Rio, except ppl hope it's gonna be Europe. But Europe has already several economic lanes, and the fast one in Romania is already full.

It's silly, it's funny, it's infuriating, it's scary: can't a people who routinely ate tragedy spread on bread while children sing and laugh about hard drinking (yes, really!) and wild dog-packs sleep their beautifully relaxed freedom in parks in the sun, can't these people look for better toys than pin-stripe suits, tanned and shiny smiles, fancy cars, cheap gold, impants, lean yoghurt, etc.? I mean really, half-wild dogs are tail-wagging-buddhas, because it's illegal to hurt them (they've been tagged and neutered though): how lucky to see routinely dogs spread out in the most relaxed poses, or walking very leisurely around... it's a whole other experience from the pampered nervous pets you get in toronto... ok so they can bark and bite now and then; yup don't go in _their_ parks at night, you're stepping on their tails and dreams and they can kill. But the idea of half wild creatures in the city could be so innovative! (yes of course we in toronto have the westnile flu and other wild bacteria). the romantic in me imagines the architectural/urbanistic possibilities.
At the moment I can't help but be pissed that another city from the margins wants to become just like others: the global village wants no idiots so we dress them in armani suits. But no news here.

ok so with that furball out of my throat how am I doing here? well enough. I spend a significant time with the pains of my mom's generation: memory and geriatry compete for their consciousness. In eastern europe, but I think elsewhere too, the muse of memory is a beefy steroid-era athlete, she shoves aside the muse of old-age most of the time when competing for mind-space; of course old people want that. The muse of old age is persistent of course, and will win, hopefully without them knowing.