Gregory and the Demons

Welcome to Russia (1) Let me try to describe life here as if I don’t live here myself. After all, “it is good where we are not”, and we often do not notice good things in our environment, paying attention only to bad things. Well, let’s get started... I live in a megalopolis, but there are no crowds of people walking along the streets, and in general, it’s quite spacious. People may not smile when they meet, but they also don’t bother strangers with their hypocrisy. Our cities are rather horizontal, smeared on hills and rivers like pate on a lush bun. There are a lot of trees and water: each city usually stands near a forest on a large river, or even two. Life is pretty cheap here: you won’t believe it, but I personally pay only $3 a month for gas, and this gas is UNLIMITED! Hell, I could kill myself with that gas without spending a penny of my funeral budget! But I won’t do that, don’t worry. (to be continued...)

Fabric of the Universe The Fabric of the Universe is thinning. It wasn’t silk before, but now it looks like a rag at all. However, the simpler the better. Beauty is the lot of deception. But I am afraid that the world will crack at the seams in this century. Where are the people who will put me in a shroud when I fall asleep? Where are the threads by which I will tie others to me so that they repeat my movements? Where are those knitting needles that will sew the Matter of Everything without pricking a single finger? There are none. I’m freezing, because there are no clothes suitable for me. I’m shrinking, because there is no world suitable for me. And it makes me feel sadness and don’t give a shit at the same time, that time, which the real Fabric of the Universe is.

Our enemies will die eventually Perhaps the time bomb that is embedded in all of us, and which guarantees that we will all grow old and die, is not so much a balancing mechanism as a reconciling one. God (or whoever created man) it seems to be telling us: “Relax, do not harm anyone, do not accumulate evil and offence, do not fight and do not kill each other, because I’ll kill you all myself when the time comes...” And the most impatient of us, like children, yell back at him: “No, we want it now!” And how to refuse a child? How to explain that the fire is hot and the snow is tasteless? No way you can. Seeing a pit, one should only allow another to step into it in order to learn something. Even neural networks learn from mistakes, and our task is simply to live longer and see the death of our enemies or even the death of our delusions itself.

Grains of gone If a day goes by and nothing has gotten worse, I start to get suspicious. In those moments, I feel like something is broken. It’s like an hourglass that has stopped running. If I open Telegram and see that no one has left my channel today, it immediately seems to me that the program had crushed (sometimes my desktop client freezes). Everything should flow away, it’s the natural order of things. So unsubscribe regularly, do not scare me like that! In general, of course, it is sad, but there is nothing can be done about it. “Someone’s born for sweet delight, someone’s born for endless night.” And that’s how I meet my degradation every day, like an old friend who will pat me on the head and all the pain will flow away.

Creating a Colossus It’s been a long time since I wrote patriotic posts. In general, we live in a pretty sick world, since I have to keep a balance between the truth and the style. However, I hope my readers will understand my feelings wherever they live. After all, if you hate your land, you will be considered scum in any culture. So now it seems to me that our enemies are creating a Colossus out of us. Russia should have been calmed and lulled, deceived and robbed quietly, but instead they openly challenged us, inflaming our excitement and sports anger, forcing us to solve our long-standing problems, making our eternal reflection finally useful. And when we defeat 50 countries opposing us, when we completely subdue our hidden forces, do you think will we be kind, will we be fair? Truly I tell you, the Colossus should be calmed and lulled, deceived and robbed quietly...

The procession One boy, who didn’t remember his name or where he was from, just walking and came across a funeral procession. Interested, he trailed in its tail. Since he was wearing the same black clothes as everyone else, no one paid attention to him. Several hours passed, the procession went on and on, and not a single cemetery was encountered on their way. Then suddenly they stopped, the coffin was lowered to the ground, it opened, and a man came out, stood next to the porters, and one of the others, on the contrary, lay down in his place. The procession moved forward again, it went on for a long time, as if endlessly, and this ritual was repeated many times – replacing the one who lies with the one who follows. Finally it’s the boy’s turn. The procession stopped, a place in the coffin was vacated and everyone looked at him silently, but expectantly. The boy obediently lay down inside, where it was surprisingly warm. And only then and only there, in the darkness of silence, did he remember that he had died the day before yesterday, and that his name was...

Garbage collector Why a person needs memory if it causes more pain than benefit? I wish I could forget most of my life. If it were possible, I would leave only useful skills, such as the syntax of programming languages, my favorite musical notes (or even better – tabs) and beautiful words from books. I would betray other people’s dreams once again, would escape from all that is escapable, leaving only my personal goal in my head, My Dream (although I often can’t even formulate it). But man is very poorly designed, and we are forced to drag out all this crap, our memory, together with ourselves until the grave. Every time we experience a pleasant and useful emotion, along with it some old trauma creeps into our mind, ugly, but inseparable. Even if there is not a single link left to this depressive worm of memory, the Garbage collector will never come for it, will never clear us of everything superfluous and destructive. And so we live – joyfully-painfully.

2 year anniversary I almost forgot that today is something like my channel’s birthday! Two years ago, I got into this fucking loop and still can’t get out. Won’t say it wasn’t fun, but there are enough worries too. I hope that I helped at least one person (because art is medicine), but if I didn’t, then fine. Life is meaningless, demons are omnipresent, we will all die alone. On this cheerful note, I open a bottle of wine, blowing out the candles, make my eternal misanthropic Wish, and say goodbye to you until next week. Take care of yourself, those who have stayed here so far...

Think like a schizo I doubt that many of us would want to become schizophrenics. Yes, it sounds fun: you see patterns that no one else sees, you hear sounds that no one makes, you can’t distinguish reality from illusion, you know the Truth, which is actually a lie. But it’s hardly really fun. Schizophrenia is, so to speak, a hardware malfunction of the brain – just some person was unlucky to get a defective product that’s impossible to take out of the head and change for a brand new one. Probably, only Artists can wish to become schizophrenics, because it seems to them that they will immediately be able to create masterpieces, original and sick in a good way. But if a operable mechanism does not work, then what makes you think that a broken one will do? If you don’t care about the live voices of real people, why do you need to hear phantoms? I do not know: I am too normal and too boring to know the answers to such questions.

Non dimiseritis Yes, we are doing evil today. War is definitely not a good thing, one can’t argue with that. But the truth is our evil is much kinder than the evil that our enemies do. And no matter if their evil may not have been directed at us straight, we still accepted the challenge. It’s even more noble. There is no world without evil, it was not a year ago, it will not be a year later. Someone will mutter vaguely that it is necessary to forgive offends, that the principle of “an eye for an eye” will make the world blind, that nuclear deterrence will inevitably lead to a radioactive catastrophe, etc. Well, I don’t need to believe all the lie that I hear! When I felt bad, no one cared about me, and now I just return the debt of indifference to this world. I crumpled up the Moral, put it in the pocket of my non-american jeans, and I’ll get it back only when the Age of Plenty returns...

Gentle dagger I want to thank you, my subscribers, that you do not leave all at once, but do it smoothly, a couple of people a week. Could it be that you are all bots, and it’s just written in your program? (I used to create such fake Telegram users, so I know what I’m talking about...) Perhaps you will massively unsubscribe after these words of mine, or maybe I am too overreact to the disappointment of others in me. So please, if you’re going to leave me, at least be gentle. The Ides of March have already come and even passed, I’m no longer afraid of betrayal, but the imaginary scars on my back still hurt. Come abruptly, leave smoothly – there is no reason to cause unnecessary pain to us, overly delicate hypochondriacals.

Baby, one, two, three! If you give birth to one child, then he will be doomed to live in a dying world. If there are two children, then they will be living in a world that is stagnating, frozen in time, like a fly in resin. And if you give birth to three or more, these young people already have some hope to see the world developing, where they may become an important driving part. So, baby, one, two, three! Sing with me, agree with me. If you are not ready to conquer the world of the future and give birth to at least three children, then do not give birth to anyone at all, die and be forgotten, give way to other, more fuckable dreamers.

Hightech Human If a person could control emotions, it would probably be a machine, not a man. And no matter how much we are advised to analyze our feelings, think before acting, and generally develop the so-called “emotional intelligence”, nothing will help. Man is a storm, man is a swamp, but man is not a robot. I can perfectly understand the origins of my emotions and even see the consequences, but I can’t order myself to feel a certain way, few people can. Although more often I suffer not even from this, but because, on the contrary, I experience too few emotions, that I am not an empathic person enough. But even here there is a mitigating factor – the feeling of frustration due to lack of feelings is quite weak in itself, and it’s easier for me to experience such days.

Believer and Unbeliever Perhaps we are doomed to invent gods. It sounds cool, of course, but in fact, it’s sad. That is who we are – creatures, whose development of mind is much lower than the complexity of this same mind. And when we face with something that we cannot explain, we call it with a capital letter, a Big Thing, the Inexplicable. It is this complexity that is the main and only argument of Believers. They ask: “Who then created all this unimaginably sophisticated system? Did life appeared by itself, huh?” And even the most intelligent Unbelievers cannot answer this question. In general, the faith is similar to a person who doesn’t have a father. A Believer believes that his father is an artist, a doctor, an officer or even an astronaut, that he is somewhere far away, but they will definitely meet someday. And the Unbeliever knows that his father was an alcoholic and died a long time ago.

Lie, lie, lie Lie in the resume, lie on the interview, lie at work, because the employer is your natural enemy. He wants to rot you on the galleys or in the mines, and you want to squeeze every last coin out of him. Only sometimes, when your dreams intersect, when an interesting project appears on the horizon, at that moment you unite with him for a while in a strong handshake, from which even the veins swell on the biceps, and say to each other, almost in unison: “Let’s do it, dude!” But remember that you will still remain enemies in the end, because you can’t buy socialism.

Angel in the pawnshop One day an angel who was in dire need of money took off his wings and pawned them in a pawnshop. Time passed, the angel worked hard and finally saved up for a deposit. But when he came to the pawnshop, it turned out that the wings had gone up in price, so he didn’t have enough money, and had to leave with nothing. And so it went on many times: the angel worked and saved, came to buy wings, but they always cost exactly one ruble more than he had. (Yes, the angel was Russian. How else?) The pawnshop owner (I think his name was Slobodan), looking at the angel’s upset face, replied that wings would always cost more than money, because wings were designed by God, and money – by the Devil. Hearing of a devil, the angel could not stand it, grabbed the first thing that came to hand – some ancient pagan figurine – and hit the pawnshop owner on the head with it... So now the wings were lying right in front of him, complimentary as goodness itself, but the angel just said: “I don’t need this shit” and went outside.

I want my programs to run faster than the dreams of programming dies Lately I’ve started to get some joy from programming. When you manage to speed up a fragment of code by 10 or 100 times, it’s really a pleasant feeling. I even Go to another language, from interpreted to compiled (more precisely, returned, because I started, like many of us, with C++) But the mood changes faster than the context switch occurs... And in general, of course, everything is meaningless. Whatever we do, whatever we dream about... A-a-argh! I don’t even want to finish this sentence... return;

Moat In times of peace, around the castle in which we live, there can be anything: a beautiful garden, golden fields of wheat, a lively and noisy settlement... But in times of war, around the castle in which we die, should be only a moat. And woe to those trees of the garden, those ears of wheat and the people of the settlement who will be in its place. To be honest, I don’t care about the fate of Ukraine at all. This country could have been a garden, a field and a settlement, but chose to become a moat. For at least 30 years they have been going to this conflict, they dreamed about it, because only that how they saw the meaning of their lives. Well, we’re just fulfilling the dream of our former brothers, nothing more.

My demonic weight When I stepped on the scales this summer and saw the number 66.6 (kg), I smiled viciously. Black humor is my favorite, as if it broke out of the ghetto and now laughs just so as not to cry. Yet for me, this image does not come from a modern DC Joker, but rather from Victor Hugo’s Gwynplaine – if anyone doesn’t know, this is a character who was kidnapped as a boy by wandering freak dealers, which cut his mouth from ear to ear to show him in their demonic circus. And this circus still travels around our world: the format has changed, but not the essence, that “essence”, which is gradually eroding from the people, making them even more lightweight, even more meaningless. So when I weigh myself again and see the number 66.55321, I will smile viciously again, remembering another character. But that’s a completely different story...

I don’t want to look pretty I prefer to look dangerous, even if I’m not. Hence the short hair, partially black clothes, lack of glasses and rare conversations only with a low voice. It is by these signs that I can immediately tell whether it is worth mess with a person. After all, we are really just animals who have built abstract constructs of morality, law, religion on top of their jungles. But these constructs are full of holes, like a sieve, and the vines of our deeper nature keep climbing out of them. The jungle let Mowgli go, but it won’t let anyone else go again. We came out of the bestial and we’ll return there, so that one day we can get into the Bestiary of Future People who will not repeat our mistakes.