OBLIGATION TO JOY

(Or What Happens on Christmas)

Let me rant about this lovely holiday for a moment. Or about how overrated and blown out of proportion it is. We all know the streets light up in beginning of November (if the city leaders have some sense) or in October (if they don’t). There’s the shopping frenzy, the movies, true values are forgotten, yadda, yadda, yadda. Okay. This doesn’t bother me in and of itself. What bothers me is the fact that all this is supposed to make us happy.

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”

   ~Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

EVERY GHOST TOWN HAS A LIFE

(Or I Love My Stupid City, and I Never Even Knew)

Maribor, Slovenia.

It doesn’t seem like anything special. Truth to be told, it probably isn’t, just a town with its history and its present, with its strengths and weaknesses, bad roads, and so many cobblestones, and narrow allies that smell like piss.

The thing is...

Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one.

~-Johann Wolfgang Van Goethe