Let's say that there is a group that goes to blow around the surrounding bar settlements, drives at night through the deserted villages of the border, and listens to Bjork, Massive Attack, let's say that one of them brings a hookah from the boat, and fills it with Albanian grass, so some blissful evening ten of them heading to Opatija Ratačka, where they will get high looking at the sea, on the pedestal, on the circular edge of the sanctuary, left to the smell of pine and the waves.
Let's say that a group of riotous hashishers under the influence of THC connects with the birthstone, the spirits of the warrior clergy, the sea, and, intoxicated with iodine plus the moon, starts roaring, celebrating life, as only the lungs of high school graduates can do.
Let's say they are excited, because Ratac follows terrible stories about voyeurs and nocturnal sects that leave objects under the crypt of facility A. The excitement takes its toll and the young men, for example, think that a dangerous sect might be right there somewhere behind the first pines, that ganja must have been sprayed, so paranoid thoughts follow one after the other, until in a flash of genius one of the high priests of this provincial cult of boredom cries out - we are that sect! We fight under the pines in the dead of night, we are actually running away from ourselves!
This young man on the war walls looks like a prophet and his comrades take his words seriously, while their eyes dive towards the harbor and silos, the dark shadow of Volujica behind which is the world, Otrant and the point, which they finally burst out laughing.
Let's say that this story about growing up and understanding one's role in society has a lesson, although it is not necessary. Perhaps it is only important to say that sometimes the "drug addicts" from the circles have their function, that sometimes the rejected, dreamers, night guards and declassified lovers of the city, even though they are a handful of misery, preserve the connection with the space, even in the transgression and spasm that seems nonsensical. Sometimes completely lost, but always pure in search of meaning in a small cruel town like Bar, people appear who live differently and pay the price of their insight. And so it has always been. So it was in my pen. That's how people lived, as they say, in an alternative way. That's how bands, graffiti, neuroses and heroes were born. This is how a certain ideal of the city was preserved.
These days I see that the ideal has been preserved, that there are cadets, and that they are not windbreakers in the woods but healthy, intact and happy, beautiful forms of life, girls and boys, new citizens who are willing to act, for whom the action suits perfectly. As if they were not born here, high school students, economic school students, managed to present a political action without a single mistake, to defend trees and concrete amphitheatres from the government's cunning plan to level everything and clean up the kindergarten in front of the school.
The victory of students, activists, although not yet final, is stronger than any "Albanian", their circles are out of this world, real in space, and I can only envy the classics who waited to run into something so powerful. To revive the gloomy identity of the Bar bazaar and illuminate the feeling of belonging to the city. That was not attainable for my generation, it was avoided. But after this episode, a lot of things change, they don't send excavators to cypress trees twice, to paraphrase Johnny, when girls still wear it on their T-shirts while hugging trees.
I'm far from idealizing young people, but that's exactly why episodes like this are important, they give birth to hope that an almost ancient moment of democracy is possible, which is what the architect probably had in mind when he drew the circles around the school. That democracy does not pay membership fees, does not ask for parties and commissars, on the contrary, it exposes parasites, so it should be expected that it will be suppressed from all sides.
As a former student of the same high school, but also of the neighboring elementary school of the concrete courtyard, I can only be inspired by the struggle of the bar team - of course, I have long since begun to be skeptical and that I need such infusions of idealism, so that maybe I myself would dare to hug a tree .
Bonus video:
