Podgorica on the water

Nobody lives that well. Believe me I'm not bragging by heart. Every morning I drink two coffees and go down to the river. I have arranged steps on the river that lead to several beaches and hidden corners. I listen to Morača roaring on the 1.000 square meter property, the property I own in the center of the capital. Now he asks naively, where did you, journalist, get the money to buy a plot on the river in the center of Podgorica? But wait, who said I bought anything?

No one lives as well as I do because I don't have to pay, which in the west costs a lot of money. In Podgorica, on the contrary - I walk down a few hundred meters from the Millennium bridge, down the stone stairs that the socialist uncle built when the city's people were healthy. But as time has changed customs, the coast has remained deserted and I go down alone to enjoy myself away from the dullness of the city. I can get pretty lost in thought over a single noise, the sound of running water transports me to a level of concentration suitable for reading. But when I really want to separate myself from the world, I jump over the gap between the rocks and sit by the riverbed. These are all games in the sun and pleasures that I am slowly discovering.

At first, I thought quasi-ideologically - not to say to the left, I was thinking of how to alert the public, how to get the citizens of Podgorica to recover mentally and go down to the river, to use even the meadow with the wall and the small jetty/jumping place. But then I realized that I should be silent, a patrician came to me, I don't know where. I come from a family of workers and peasants, I am not a lord or a landowner, but suddenly I began to see a piece of the coast as my property. This property-ideological turn happened in the first month of living alone on the water. Suddenly, my laments became my celebrations. I don't need anyone down there now. I'm not interested in the level of culture of the given collectivity - if the people of Podgorica don't go down to the rivers, that's strange, but the perverse majority, no matter how much they oppressed me at every step, left me alone. Thank you very much. A person still needs to jump over a few obstacles on the way to classic Zen in the city center.

If you pass the plastic bags, excrement and garbage, bliss awaits down on the shore - I know what I'm talking about because I've seen the river, lazed from the Vardar to the Hudson and all the city's rivers were poisonous snakes slithering through greasy concrete. Grandmothers, hipsters, students, guys with mustaches sunbathe on the shore around the waterholes of Western Europe, all in a crowd, sharing a piece of the pestilential nature that stinks. How I pity them, how much better my position is. I no longer have any doubts that the most beautiful piece of the river is mine, a full two minutes from the apartment, a hidden place where you can poop or read Lacan, a place where you can poop Lacanian and no one catches you in those deeply subversive actions.

True, it happens that a guy with pate or a grandfather with his grandson comes by. I let them know they are in my territory. They don't stick around. Because that's obstacle number three - after bags and black shit - you have to get over the feeling of going crazy. If you go down to Morača alone while honest people are sipping express coffee somewhere in the upper world, if you go down the stairs that are used only in case of emergency - you should be aware that you are acting like a man who: a) drinks drugs; b) masturbates; c) he went crazy with the book, who knows what he's doing.

The demon of hydrophobia, or the fear of water, is known as the crowning symptom of the acute phase of rabies, while in sociological terms, the fear of rivers can be a candidate for the endemic mark of alienation. Cattle know where to go to the water, bees know too, I can imagine every bird on Morača - but in order to see people I have to dig up the archival footage from 1962, when TV Beograd cameraman Jovan Knežević pointed the lens into the water and captured the surreal - relaxed Citizens of Tito.

A few people who came down to watch my activities on the river, saw that I was laying a piece of wood right on the bank, even though I have such a cocky attitude. How kindly I call them god help, I repel them with so much energy, because the time has passed when I thought of the common good and lamented that the people live without the joy of nature; oh no, now I'm a landowner who realized overnight that he got a plot of land for d to read, own and waste time next to a ruined house (maybe it was a mill?) with a beach, a place to throw a stick, a meadow and a broken fountain , with all the furniture I need. The problem is that the vegetation is waking up, April is the month of the first leaves, sedge already invades the path and bramble takes part of the path that crosses into a small bridge over gravel. What to do?

I feel like calling the DPS youth to clean up the field, to do some humanitarian action. But those are remnants of the old way of thinking. I will clean myself as much as I can and as much as I need. The fewer people, the happier I am on the river and the closer I am to the infernal plan of privatization. I flatter myself, I like the thought, nowadays, that a piece of land is really only mine.

Old Proudhon said - ownership is theft. That Sloterdijk says he's the thief who first thought to fence. Ah, what a lovely definition of transition - so lovely that I will celebrate it with an ice-cold beer, on my own river, like a true village philosopher in full swing.