Was up at 5 am. Did ten pull-ups outside. There’s nobody out except for some lady with a big labrador. I don’t want the dog to come and sniff my feet when am hanging on a bar, so I wait till they are gone. I go for a walk. I just go from pull up bar to pull up bar. There is another one at 400 metres and another one at 1500 metres and so on. There are many pull up bars in Bratislava. It’s because in this town full of lifeless, frozen people you constantly have to pull yourself up out of misery and loneliness. One lady all in green is running around a park. Once I trust my body again I will start running again too. It used to drive out the demons better than almost anything else except for extreme sex with extreme women – those for whom ‘normal’ life tastes equally stale and fake cheerfulness stinks worse than 100 rotten corpses after the IDF throws ‘gifts’ on a school.

Back to local reality where no IDF bomb will kill you, but if you stay too long your insides will be ripped apart too. Just much more slowly. By Slovaks who are so tense, so scared, so insecure, so eternally flexing and putting up masks that you forget life once existed. Some environments are incompatible with a person and I’ve been in one like that for 10 years now. Why? I didn’t know it, but a good chunk of my identity is wired to endure hardship, not to look for real salvation. 15 years ago I got told that I am someone who isn’t aware of his own needs. Back then that sounded very foreign to me. Almost impossible, laughable. Slovakia has taught me at least that. Only a man who is dangerously cut off from his own needs, desires, comfort, belonging, cut off from home, chooses a place like this and stays here. It’s like a rose would pack her bags and try to create a rose garden somewhere in the north of Siberia.

I don’t want to make this episode all about Slow vakia.

Back to how I survive here.

Pull-ups. Walk.

I come back.

Bruno is up.

He gives me a gift for my name’s day. Today is my name’s day. I think this week is also memorial day in the US. I find it fitting that my name’s day falls in the same week. I feel far more affinity with soldiers who died fighting for mostly lost causes than for Slovaks with a corporate job. I find it impossible to respect people who sit through dull meetings so they get to lick their icecreams, buy their hollow box apartments and go on their repetitive, stereotypical trips to Croatia and whatever destination happens to be in vogue.

Bruno gives me a can of sardines and a can of tuna.

I’ve been on a high protein diet for quite a while now.

To maintain SOME semblance of pride in this spiritual graveyard I do what other Slovaks only talk about. I actually fucking stick to that protein diet. I can tell you exactly how much protein I ate today and how many calories.

I suppose that I hate talk about optimization of personal routines more for the fakery and the delusional drive than for the optimization itself.

I help Bruno prepare for preschool.

I eat two protein puddings. That’s as close to indulgences I get most days and I like it that way.

While Bruno is in school or kindergarten – I tend to call it school – I go on my hometrainer. With the window open. Directly in the sun. With black coffee. And episode 5 of the Vietnam War by Ken Burns playing in the background on repeat.

After am wet with sweat I take a shower. Warm. Then cold.

Note that when am miserable I somehow harden into self-discipline. I’ve already said it: I grew up trained to endure, not trained to find happiness. For the first time in my life I realize I can actually KEEP the self-discipline, but it does have to start serving finding happiness. I risk merely enduring for the rest of my life. My epitaph can then read. ‘His son made him smile at times, but other than that he was a miserable sod with little fat on his body. He died miserably and alone anyway.’

I go to Lidl. It’s still early. It’s old ladies time at Lidl. I choose not to rush.

I buy 41 euro worth of protein stuff. Some chips for Bruno.

The cashier is maybe exactly what I look for in a woman.

She has beautiful eyebrows, trimmed, but naturally very thick. Her hands are even more beautiful. By her gestures I can tell that this is a young woman who works.

At the end of the day she will be tired from REAL WORK.

What she does has a direct positive impact on people’s lives.

She looks bright, I’ve seen her many times before.

Now listen up:

In Bratislava ANY idiot whatsoever can get a corporate job. ANY idiot. You don’t even need a university degree. It’s one of the weirdest things about this place. Maybe when a place is full of idiots HR lowers its standards dramatically.

But what does that mean?

Unproductive, fairly meaningless corporate jobs get you more status in Bratislava. More money too.

She could get one of those jobs, but chooses to work at Lidl, which is very low status work here, especially for people in their late twenties or early thirties.

That means she cares more about liking her job and doing real work than status.

She is a bit warmer too. She wishes me a ‘krasny den’, a beautiful day. There is a warmth hierarchy here. Pekny den or dovidenia are more common. Very common is that the cashier doesn’t even so much as grunt anything when you thank him or her.

As you can see, fantasy and overthinking take over in a low stimulus environment. This is NOT southern Italy or Brazil.

The only warm exchange I’ve had in Bratislava this year was when I walked two Italian tourists to the tram stop from their hotel. They even shook my hand and told me their names.

After Lidl I have to teach classes.

To respect the privacy of my students I will refrain from giving details, for once.

Then I kinda dress up, because Bruno has some kids performance and I attend only to be there for him.

I don’t talk to anyone there.

It’s not a language thing.

I have simply burned out trying to establish any sort of meaningful connection outside of teaching or coaching or psychotherapy sessions.

Hey, don’t take from my morose, unhappy tone that I can’t help people. Am actually quite brilliant in one on one sessions when the point is to create at least some depth. I just really don’t have the energy anymore to listen to other parents and their plans for the weekend. I know their plans for the weekend. Living in Slovakia is like the movie Groundhog day. I can point out strangers to you on the street and I can tell you with more than 90 percent certainty – if the stranger is Slovak – what he will eat on Christmas Eve and where he will spend at least one week on vacation this summer. No, really, really, really, really, really. REALLY. Slovaks can do many things, but they cannot surprise you.

The performance is one of the better ones I’ve seen at Bruno’s school so far. Bruno not being full on Slovak DOES surprise me. He dances well. He does NOT have that from me.

With all my understimulation, trappedness, bore-out, depair, both personally and when it comes to world events, I have still managed to create so much aliveness in Bruno’s universe that he is able to enjoy these innocent moments. At around his age I was already incapable of enjoying any of that shit. At his age I wanted to see Rutger Hauer fuck a blonde in a bath tub in a besieged castle. (The movie is called Flesh and Blood and it’s almost like a metaphor for the world of 2026, so it aged extremely well).

I am profoundly grateful that Bruno is not like me. He only looks like me and has my hair and may have a bit of my memory capacity and some need for intensity. If it stays like that and doesn’t escalate into total alienation with the modern world like I am afflicted with there is much hope that he will have a far, far happier life.

I leave the ‘party’ with its sterile conversations, forced smiles, adults making a fuss over things that I sincerely hope do not truly care about and only fake care about to be polite, but I fear it’s real. These people ARE somehow mysteriously fulfilled by talking about which chalet in the mountains they will rent next time to trudge around in nature and eat gulash somewhere. You look at these people and you just know Slovakia is an independent country only because no greater power fucking wanted to be saddled with it.

That’s a lot of contempt for my side, I know.

But give me a slice of your empathy.

I have been starved of resonance and human warmth for ten years now.

At home Bruno and I exceptionally eat cheesecake. No worries, am not contradicting myself, my calorie total for the day is less than half of what even modest eaters stuff their faces with on a regular week day.

Bruno watches some funny Minions video on YouTube.

I rather like those minions myself, though without Bruno I wouldn’t gravitate towards them.

Yesterday I bought him two figurines. Minions. Good price. They are called Stuart and Kevin.

My excuse was that I could give something on the eve of my name’s day.

My enormous drive for tenderness, affection, wonder, awe, devotion, which is strangled, systematically in my life, goes all into being there for Bruno. And into sessions with clients. And into this writing.

It may not be so apparent, but I don’t write to express hatred.

My writing is a cry for a more alive, more tender, more passionate world.

That’s why parents at a kids performance are torture to me.

Fully activated, fully alive, vibrant, innerly rich people do NOT behave like they do. I have been observing these people for more three years now. I’ve overheard plenty of their conversations. There was even a time I tried to connect with them, but their small world elicited cynicism in me and dissapointment.

Hint:

Do not bring up dead Palestinian kids to Slovaks.

They don’t care and it just makes them a little uncomfortable.

They can’t paint their balcony with the blood of Palestinian kids. So what’s the use?

And they are fairly sure the bones of dead Palestinian kids are not used to build the car of their dreams.

When Bruno goes to bed I will have more sessions.

I do attract the type of Slovaks who do want to talk about deeper things. When they stay with me for longer periods, some have been with me for over 8 years, they increasingly take a liking to talking about issues bigger than where they have the best best burger in town.

So am in this odd little universe.

I have never felt more lonely in my entire life.

But I talk to people and actually get paid to listen to them most days of the week. I have a son who is brimming with life.

Bratislava itself is beautiful to me. I love the sky and the sun here.

And at the same time my life feels as empty as can be.

Even my best clients do not see me. Even some of those who’ve been showing up weekly for almost a decade only see me as calm language freak with a quiet, boring life. They don’t see the storms inside me, they have no idea what I actually think about when am alone or what I really want to talk about.

And so I listen to what dress they will wear for lunch.

Which beer they will drink on Friday.

How they will find someone to renovate their living room.

What they had for breakfast.

And I entertain myself by spotting patterns in what I hear. I run my job as a social laboratory. There is the stuff I get paid for, and in the background I use my job as a way to map society.

To name one undeniable pattern:

people today have unusally high expectations when it comes to novelty surrounding for, and at the same time SHOCKINGLY low interest in connecting with other people, other than as potential gym buddies or route to a promotion or some relief from boredom at work.

They want to talk about what they miss: nurturing stimulation.

They have plenty of stimulation, but none of it nourishes them.

I think this is why food becomes such a thing for them.

It’s also why they always expect more from the food.

They need something they don’t have the words for, it’s not in food, but they hope it’s in food. So food, even the best food, always has to be criticized.

As if they are saying: ‘Food, you looked so promising, but you failed, you didn’t make me happy. Do better next time!!’

That’s how I survive in a desert.  

It’s like I do puzzles alone in a room, 16 hours a day.

Observing, looking, putting things together, trying to see the system that creates these people.

The danger is of course that even if I do put the puzzle together, I could have spent that energy building a life structure that DOES give me resonance.

But then I would almost certainly have to spend half my time outside of Slovakia and I do hate not seeing Bruno every day.

But to have a father slowly wilting, rotting away seven days a week, dredging up positivity for his son from deeper and deeper layers of my life’s reserves is worse than having a father three or four days a week who is IGNITED again, by beauty, by participation, by resonance, by elegance, by color, by flavor, by sensuality and genuine intellectual – not snobbish – exploration.

For now am still on my uninhabited island, where right now the inhabitants on surrounding islands are stabbing my soul with pest infected daggers every day with their priorities which insult the reach of human consciousness. Add to that that these fuckers don’t give a shit about anyone being bombed as long as they can have dumplings in sheep cheese and a fancy car.

Enough for today, have a ‘krasny den’.

Written for Bruno, for a woman I haven’t met yet and for the few survivors of the spiritual holocaust, like you, yes, you.

PS

I have been told to ask the cashier out on a date, but am too afraid she will want to see my car first and there is no car.