When you're in Moscow, you see dogs. And I don't mean dogz, like, your boyz, or dogs like your parents gave away to a farm out west when you were 10, no, these canines are hardcore. I'm talking third generation street dogs - they're not begging you for scraps or just waiting for someone to look deep enough into their big brown eyes to realize that adoption is the only prudent course. No, they are veritable Moscovites themselves, claiming a citizenship and a right to existence on par with our own. Long past the hammer's fall they roam the city in tightly knit self-sufficient packs, following still the path swathed by the sickle's sweep and issuing a constant critique of Orwell's zoologic prejudice in their efficient and effective embrace of the Soviet ideal.  

They will not shy from a hand that feeds them, nor will they bite it off, but they've progressed beyond domestication;  they've rather adapted and evolved to survive in an urban setting - they're dependent on us, but only in the way a wolf is dependent on the grass the sheep eats. Thousands of years from now when mankind's time has come to a close, Moscow is where their greatest archaeologists will situate their most fruitful digs. 

But, they're still dogs. Adorable, cute, cuddly dogs. With a rough edge, maybe, and all of them could use a bath, but that hardly curtails my "awwww" reaction, and in fact their very independence makes it even cuter when they do people stuff. This is a segue to a personal experience. The other day as Val and I headed to school, we noticed a mutt waiting at the top of an escalator. He wanted to go down, clearly, but each time he braved a foot the machine's strange motion caused him to recoil in confusion. The flirtation continued as Val and I stepped onto the escalator adjacent. Not wanting to miss what might be my only chance to ever see, at least short of youtube, a dog heading down an escalator of his own volition, I leaned as far over the railing as I could that the spectacle might not cease. At this point the humor depends explicitly on a certain familiarity with the environment, and so I present to you exhibit A, a photo of said escalator:

(I found this photo here)

Now your first reaction is probably going to be something along the lines of, "damn that's a long escalator." But the careful observer of details with a keen eye for plot device will have appended a normally more mundane fact to this descriptive exclamation, letting their thoughts run on tracks more similar to "damn that's a long escalator whose central banisters are punctuated by large cylindrical light fixtures of a particular solid construction at about every six meters." 

For, you see, directly over that center banister is exactly where my head found itself floating as my eyes, working in conjunction with my neck and the greater part of my upper body, thrust it in an emphatic expression of their passion for the bizzarre. 

I think you know where this is going. To you, my reader, I must apologize. You probably think me trite, washed up, and old hack rehashing old materials. "Your characters are one dimensional!" you scream as your literary tendencies gain the better of your inbred American susceptibility to physical humor. And I sympathize with all my heart - I wish all my stories weren't about how clumsy I am, I wish that this ended with an acrobatic trick, or perhaps an impressive skateboarding move pizazzed further by torch juggling. But the truth demands its say:

"Clunk." A flicker and then a noticable dimming. A red flush is dealt on my face and a bruise cuts the umbilical. A few seconds later the light comes back online, its proletariat workmanship handling the impact better than my pride. But all throughout, something is missing. No laughter, no smiles, except for Val's chuckle. At 5pm the metros are packed, at least 20 people must've seen me do this, at least out of the corners of their eyes. But the Russian stoic has grown more sophisticated in humor. What in America would be a funniest home video in Russia is just an american, doing those things  americans do while they look on, secretly wondering how on earth, of all the peoples in the world, they lost in the 1980 winter olympics ice hockey medal round to us.

Babooshkaed.

Itemization is King, and the bullet wears the crown.

• Instead of "push" and "pull" the doors here say, well, some gibberish in Cyrillic, but it turns out that what it means is "to yourself" or "from yourself." Though innocuous, I think it is an important difference. These doors make no assumption about your intent; they do not demand action, only inform you of their function. "I open towards you, but, you know, only if you want me to." Nothing is required, you sign no metaphysical agreement, and there is no breach of contract when you look at the door, read the sign, and then choose not to go in. It's the difference between a popup ad and a hyperlink; there is no act of volition, no conflict of wills required to refuse it. It makes for a less harrowing existence, at least, for those who don't have something better to be harrowed by.
  
• Amidst my philosophical meditations on the metro as a metaphor for all human interaction (see: last post), I frequently find myself on the wrong train. There are only three stops between here and the IUM, and they are, in fact, the same stops each day, so every few weeks or so I develop a wholly natural sense of confidence in the route and stop looking at the signs or listening to the announcements. Inevitably it crumbles; the engines of history and character chug inexorably on, mulching my independence to fertilize a fresh plot of self doubt - I step off a train into an entirely foreign place, pause, and wonder "Where am I?" But the real question is not where but who, and I am me, not a man who can tell you how to get from here to there, but rather a man who flies free of the strictures of only one left and one right. I lose my way in a return to self.
• Speaking of the metro, in the afternoon there's a train which has had half of its seats removed and replaced with art. Two days ago I caught it and was transported.
  
• Today at the laundromat I was, suddenly and without warning, babooshkaed. Laundry is not my area of expertise, and I try to avoid it - only in a whisper will I even admit the necessity of clean garments. Although I have been doing my own laundry for the last 12 years, it has been in a purely utilitarian and grudging fashion: I know which hole takes the clothes and which hole takes the soap. Like a young man before Internet porn, I can visualize the basic mechanics of the operation but the intricacies, the small details that turn it from a struggle to an art, are to me as magic to a muggle. I do not know what temperature anything should be washed at; if you asked me what effect the temperature had, I would say something stupid, or mumble, or change the subject, maybe throw in some science words - perhaps all at once - "It warms the clothing and then changes the ph content of my color stratum which, say, did you see the Padres game?" I would try to brush it aside and if you didn't let me you would find proving my ignorance only a Pyrrhic victory as you fell forever into its dark chasmic depths. I buy color-safe bleach not because I know the difference, but because the word "safe" comforts me. Laundry is a ritual I approach carefully, the same way each time, my chants and symbols warding off any malevolent gods. But here in Russia, they do not practice the same laundry handed down to the western world in a direct line from the ancient Roman lava-toga, no, as in all things they are positively Byzantine. Idols line the wall, Easter is a week later, and there is a machine that comes between the washer and dryer (warding off the evil spirits that occupy the scarce trodden realm between wet and dry). A Russian grandmother, seeing my ignorance of the Orthodox ways, spoke to me in tongues and with a wild gesture proceeded to do my laundry for me. Спасибо, бабушка, спасибо.
• There is no strategy to Russian Scrabble because you are only allowed to use the nominative singular. If you know both what that means and why that matters there's a good chance you don't have a tan. Also, nothing is bullet worthy without italicization.
  

Because Continuity Is Overrated

I'm bored, but in Soviet Russia you entertain internet, so instead of suckling at the milky teat of user filtered content, I've decided to dust of the old blog and offer up my own nipple for a change.

• The overflow stock of the book store has now completely barricaded in the ping pong table, rendering it inaccessible. In a few weeks, it will only be whispered of in dark grottos; in a month, it will be as the caveman ensconced in ice in the bowels of the Yukon - or Boba Fett in the Sarlacc Pit - forgotten to the world, but ever-suffering. This bullet would be perfectly completed by a photo of the ping pong table, but as I don't have my camera on hand I can only approximate:

• The metro is no tea party. First, there is no tea. Second, the Russian people, finding insufficient opportunity for solitude in their spiteful, never sleeping winters or at the bottom of a bottle of vodka, embrace the chance provided by the daily commute to finally get in some quality frowning silently time. The other day (well, like three weeks ago), someone made a phone call, and their cellphone proceeded to blare out at full volume an obnoxious generic club-music ringback tone for the next 30 seconds. Like statues we stood, sweaty and crammed in next to eachother, without a single jig cracking in any limb, nor the merest change of expression. I hope, at least, that nobody missed the irony.

• On Monday my Russian teacher delivered a spirited defense of the tuba solo. A quick youtube search has revealed that it was, in fact, I who was in the wrong.