1. ‘talking about the shittiness of Slovakia is the least interesting part of your shtick’, writes a friend. And I agree. But it’s a big part of my lived reality. For now.

2. A client told me I would talk to nobody and make no connections at a pro-Palestine protest. This is quintessential Slovak negativity. I DID talk to the organizer and volunteers and got contacted later to meet up with one of the organizers, a Slovak guy who, like me, stayed with a host family in Palestine for a while. This is the all encompassing negativity that reigns here. You share a plan with a Slovak and he or she will always point to some danger or downside or why it won’t work or why it’s nice, but useless. Useless to most Slovaks and Czechs being: ‘I don’t see how this gets you more money.’

3. I also met up with someone who contacted me because he had read something articles on my website. He asked me repeatedly NOT to write about him, so I won’t. I will just say: he asked me lots of questions about how I see Slovaks. He agreed with my observations. Which was a relief, because sometimes I think am too harsh, but he said exactly the same things. No culture, all money and status changing. I wanna honor my promise not to write about him, so I’ll say no more.

4. The best moments of the day involved taking excellent care of Bruno. I cover him with a blanket as he watches Youtube kids together with his buddy, an oversized cuddly animal called Marshall. We went out on bikes, I got him icecream. Then we went to a playground. He navigated cause I wasn’t even sure where it was. We played hide and seek and some basketball. We were on some swings together. When he got thirsty we went to a local shop and he got two kinds of Vinea, a local beverage, to try. I could give more examples, but let me summarize it like this: I shower Bruno in a tenderness most children never get to experience. And here we can leap to where the horror starts for me: Apart from Bruno nobody wants my tenderness or care. Paying clients appreciate my utility and compassion, but who I really am is amputated. Israelified (inside joke some of you will get).

One of the paradoxes of my life is that one the one hand macho clients open up to me and cry whole sessions with me and thank me profusely afterwards for helping them so much. And then on the other hand nobody wants to hang out with me.

Leading to this almost hilariously tragic conclusion: people pay me to listen to them, but they don’t want me for free.

5. Then there is always the most brutal horror. The endless stream of children torn to bits and pieces by Israel in a way that makes me conclude: causing pain is now Israel’s ultimate goal, ultimate passion, ultimate desire: pain, pain, pain.

6. Something I look forward to every week is a new episode of a horror and mystery series called From. Though there are some harrowing scenes in this series, nothing even remotely compares to what Israel does to real people every day. This series From attracts me for obvious reasons: people are stuck in an endless loop and dreary location they can’t seem to ever escape from, but stay remarkably decent and caring towards each other, while monsters stalk them. I mean, you get why to me this series feels like… home.

7. Over the years I did complain endlessly about how frozen and anti-social and stupidly materialistic Slovak are, how reserved, how scared, how insecure, all true. But I understand Slovaks also function like a mirror of what is going on inside you. When am ready to connect I tend to break through this Slovak frozenness. It takes energy, it takes courage, it takes optimism, but it’s possible. You just have to accept the first step, the first spark will always have to come from you. And you will also have to accept that even if you do connect with a Slovak that Slovak will not introduce you to his friends. Making a breakthrough feel very fragile and temporary. One’s social life here cannot bloom easily.
Having said that, I did have a quite long conversation with a lady at a bakery on Saturday. I talked to an older neighbour at the register in a shop. As of of the few Slovaks friends I have says: ‘In Slovakia you are playing the game of life on extreme hard mode.’

The upside, oh man, oh man, imagine me in Portugal, Spain, Mexico, Lebanon, some parts of Italy. I survived Slovak frozenness. I feel like I can find 50 soulmates in the first week spent in a place where people are warm and see others as an invitation for inspiration, not as a walking death threat.

8. My decades long wrestling with the question: What is the point in writing? Nobody reads long form posts by an unknown dude anyway. Especially not where I can share it like Twitter which is calibrated to feed outrage dopamine. But reality has an answer: am daily in contact via whatsapp with someone who discovered me on Twitter and he’s one of the few people who talks to me about something that’s actually interesting to me. And as mentioned above: I did get to meet an interesting person who only found me cause I write.

The results of me putting effort into so much writing are just underwhelming.

9. I had very long kokology marathons with ChatGpt. Chatgpt EXCELS at testing users via kokology, as long as you are willing to stare yourself in the face and be stripped of all your illusions. So that’s what I did – again – this weekend and this Monday morning. There were many painful conclusions, but all of it can be changed. It will require a lot of systematic work, but my situation isn’t hopeless. To keep things short: my main problem is a crushing form of loneliness, even though my work involves having conversations with people from the morning till the evening. My other main problem is that my boundless energy, tenderness, passion doesn’t get poured into anything that can scale. Or that when I do pour it into something with potential I don’t do the 5 percent that gets what I do into a purchasable product. Result: I have four or five finished manuscripts that I do nothing with, even though many people have told me they are worth reading. These two things, the crushing lack of any meaningful intimacy and the frustration of not selling what I create often gets me into suicidal thoughts spirals. Especially when combined with how the world is supporting a life streamed genocide and nobody I know seems to give a damn.

10. There are always old hurts popping up, rearing their heads, biting me, soaking up energy that could go into more creativity, more building, more practical stuff. Friends who ghosted me even though I helped them a lot. Opportunities that looked promising, but in the end went nowhere. I work with people all the time, so my advice to myself is: get so busy building the future that the past doesn’t have a chance to hurt you anymore.

So this is like throwing a message in a bottle into the sea.

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