The winds are breaking me

What do I expect from the new government?

Nothing.

At least until the ministers start to look like their predecessors.

And then again in the litia.

* * *

Everyone knows someone who died as a result of the coronavirus.

We get used to death as to life...

* * *

And without suspecting that funerals, at the turn of the second and third decades of the 21st century, would be our cruel everyday life, the professor of Latin and French at the Bar High School, Momčilo Vuković, twenty years ago, asked his students about the etymology of the word bury. The majority said that to bury comes from the word to preserve, to store bones and the like. One girl said that she had the opposite opinion, but that she was embarrassed to express it. The professor encouraged, because he always appreciated those with his own attitude and she said that to bury, in fact, means to take away from food.

One of the most educated Barans of his time, professor Vuković, later told Dr. Ljubo Živković, imagined himself, even though he knew that the student was wrong.

And the good doctor says that the girl was only looking to the future.

* * *

Jay is gone. His songs and smile remained. He had a voice that swirled emotions and songs ideal for sadness and self-pity. He was a Roma. And that means that it was not easy for him in this inhumane and hypocritical world, full of prejudice, malice and envy. Among people ready to sneer and belittle the other and the different at any time.

Our family considers it a kind of connective tissue through the song "Vetrovi me lome, ja teram po svome...", which we often sang in unison, especially in the summer, on the way back from Velika or Kraljičina beach. Thanks primarily to that, but also to some other songs, we observed the kilometer-long columns and progress at a snail's pace, as if they did not touch us, wondering afterwards: "Is it already Bar?"

* * *

Tanja is back from Boston. I don't know how long this respect for the invisible, boring, monotonous tasks that he does every day in the house, especially in the kitchen, will keep me.

And it won't be long. A person easily gets used to good things and quickly forgets everything...

* * *

Perhaps the most common phrase is: "The good old days". There is a lot in it: regret and resignation and reproach and dissatisfaction with reality. And above all, it refers to the fact that once everything was better.

I catch myself using it more and more often. Like recently when I explained that the new generations are "undone". They can do something for another if it is in their way and if they can do it without any effort. They would not lift a finger if it means that their comfort will be violated.

Was it like that before? It seems to me that it was not, or at least it was not dominant.

* * *

I understood the catchphrase "get used to one pain, get used to a hundred pains" on a banal example. I used to sleep all night "drunk" for eight hours. Now I can't go past five or six because I get up "for my own sake". As a habit, I uncover myself and get up quickly, as I used to do, and then return to the cold bed, instead of spreading the quilt until I return and preserve the warmth of the bed. And every night the same thing is repeated.

I believe that my students understood me, the younger ones are amazed: what is this guy talking about...

* * *

I can't get rid of another bad habit. In the evening, after midnight, instead of sleeping, I play chess on chess.com. Then my dream breaks and I can't sleep. But that's not the worst either. I would forgive myself for everything if I didn't lose more often than I win. Because, in those wee hours, good chess players are playing for whom chess is not only fun but also a pain and not easy to play with. During the day, I also run into a "pacer", rarely in the evening.

* * *

We decorated the Christmas tree. Earlier than ever. I guess out of a great desire for this year 2020 to pass as soon as possible. And she won't, she'll keep pushing like this until midnight on December 31. She won't skip a single second, as if she knows how uncomfortable we are in her company and how much we can't wait to see her back...