FREE WORLD BLUES
Introduction To Russian Stand-Up Comedy Lessons
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Hello, and welcome to Free World Blues. In this recording, I’ll be discussing some stand-up comedy lessons I began taking last week. On 2025-10-07, I visited an orientation course – largely, a sales pitch – for Cтендап Школи Цименмана, a stand-up comedy school in Moscow, Russia, on Тверской – this is downtown, near the Охотный Ряд metro station. The pitch worked, and my lessons began on 2025-10-13, and will run several times a week, at four hours per lesson, until the end of the month. The course is around 47,000 to 48,000 rubles in cost (with some various minor discounts for signing up early or signing up in groups), which is something like 600 dollars as of the date of this recording.
During the orientation, and also during the first few lessons (the latter being after the students had paid), our instructors were very interested in knowing why we chose their stand-up comedy school, and made a massive, just massive, effort, to differentiate their school from others, to explain why it was the best stand-up comedy school in Moscow, to explain why we were getting our money’s worth and then some, and so-on. I obviously don’t know much about stand-up comedy in Russia, or how this school compares to any other, or whether it is relatively high-priced or low-priced or otherwise, or whether the connections to the comedy industry that the instructors claim to have are worth anything, but the ferocity with which the teachers lauded the reputation of their school implies to me that there must be serious competition between stand-up comedy training programs in Moscow. This is something you’ll encounter often in Russia – when you patronize a business, and especially if you do it regularly, the owners of the business will start talking to you, explain why their business is particularly wonderful and better than all its competitors, and perhaps ask you for an investment. This isn’t something I’ve encountered in America very often. If you go to a restaurant in America, the restaurant owner is not going to come up to you and start lecturing you on why his restaurant is the best – I mean, you already made reservations and showed up at the restaurant, which implies that you’re going to order food and pay for it, so the owner has already “won”, so why would he do this?
But, Russians do not think this way. Something else you’ll encounter here is business owners asking you to invest in their businesses, which is, of course, code for “Hello, you’re already our customer, and I have a great idea. Giving us small amounts of money for specific goods and services – that’s fine, of course. But, do you know what would be even better? Giving us a huge pile of money in exchange for nothing concrete – just a vague, poorly-defined, poorly-documented, and poorly-enforceable hope of earning back even more money at some unknown time in the nebulous, uncertain future”. I’ve encountered this at restaurants, at gyms, and most of all when renting office or residential real estate – the companies and small-time landlords that rent these buildings and these lands are very interested in you investing in their activities. You’ll hear something like:
“Ah, are you pleased with the apartment you’re renting? That’s wonderful! I’m pleased to be renting to you. You’re a great tenant. What’s that? I’m a great landlord? Why, thank you, sir, thank you for returning the compliment. You know, I really am a great landlord – I’ve been very successful. But, I could be even more successful – actually, it’s not just I who could become even more successful. We could become successful together!. There is an apartment I’ve been looking at – I’ve negotiated the seller down to 50 million rubles (that’s about 700 thousand dollars). That’s a great price – it’s an amazing price – really, it’s a steal. Too good to pass up. It’s wonderful that I’ve been able to negotiate this with the seller – I’m a great negotiator. But, the trouble is, I don’t have 50 million rubles. How about you give me 50 million rubles in cash and I’ll buy the apartment and split the rental income with you? No? That’s really a shame – you’re missing out by not working with a great negotiator like me. With my negotiation skills and your investment, we could make the Forbes List. But, sadly, that will not be. Perhaps you don’t have the money. You know, in Russia, we have a stereotype, that Americans are rich, but I see that it isn’t so. Oh well, what a pity…I guess it’s true, you can never trust stereotypes…what a pity, what a pity…”
These sort of investment pitches are often accompanied by a certain, particular Russian behavior. As far as I know, this behavior has no name – no name in English, and no name in Russian for me to translate to English. Therefore, I’ve come up with my own terminology: “Negotiation by Exposure”. In this case, “exposure” isn’t about how long a shutter is open in photography, nor is it about a photographer’s clients wanting to pay for a wedding shoot with “exposure” rather than money (as if a landlord would accept “exposure” as currency for rent payment), nor is it about the sort of “exposure” that could be indecent and land you in the back of a police cruiser, hopefully wrapped in a blanket to prevent anyone else from seeing your cock-and-balls. Rather, it’s about exposure to the elements, and specifically, the cold – as in, “death by exposure”. I do have a story about indecent exposure, though.
In 2011, when I was working in San Francisco, I was walking towards Golden Gate park to meet someone; specifically, I was walking East along Fell Street, as I typically did to reach the main body of the park past the Panhandle. Now, Fell Street is an area where I’ve encountered Sodomite men on a number of occasions – there are lots of Sodomites in San Francisco, of course (probably it’s among the most degenerate cities on Earth, though I know someone will say it’s markedly less so since I moved away), and while the Golden Gate Park area isn’t as full of Sodomites as, for example, the Castro, there are still plenty of homosexuals there – more than the Marina or the Financial District, to be sure. On a previous occasion, I had picked up my girlfriend at her place near San Francisco State University, where she lived in half of a converted garage rented out by a Russian landlord – one of my first encounters with Russians, by the way – he gave her a bottle of Бпльтика 7 for her birthday, and she didn’t drink much – I didn’t either – and we drank it together and both got a decent buzz. That was nearly a year later, however. On the day in question, we luckily found parking on Fell Street, but, after we had walked a few hundred meters into Golden Gate Park, I realized that I had forgotten my cell phone in my car. Not wanting to be without it, but not wanting to make her walk all the way back to the car and then all the way to the park again, I suggested that she sit on a park bench and wait for me while I ran back to my car, got my phone, and then returned – she agreed, as the walk East was uphill, and it was a hot July day under full sun, and we were both quite sweaty. I could also run faster without her in toe, as she was in heels – I know that’s absurd for walking in a park, but she was – her choice, not mine – in fact I had argued for flats, but she claimed she had worn heels so often that flats were less comfortable – and, what do I know, perhaps that is true. I always insisted that it was just a matter of new shoes needing to be broken in, and I told her – “yes, your heels are broken in, so they’re comfortable, maybe more comfortable than a new pair of flat shoes, but, once you wear the flats a bit, you’ll break them in, and they’ll be comfortable”, but she would always insist that wearing heels had permanently altered the structure of the bones and ligaments in her feet, such that she was only comfortable wearing heels – and, I mean, what do I know? I don’t wear heels, and I’m not a podiatrist, so, really, I never did consider myself an expert on these things, so I didn’t bring it up too often.
In any case, I was anxious to retrieve my phone as soon as possible, lest someone see it and shatter my car window to snatch it. Crime wasn’t nearly as rampant in San Francisco in 2011 as it is in 2025, but was still significant enough that this was a concern to me at the time. Parking on Fell Street is extremely competitive, especially as it was a Sunday, and I knew that, as soon as someone driving East saw me with keys in hand approaching my car, they would stop, blocking traffic behind them, expecting me to get in my car and leave, excited at the possibility of occupying the parking spot I was about to vacate. This made me very self-conscious and anxious – I didn’t want to be a parking-spot tease. Therefore, I avoided even looking at my car until I was ready to unlock the door (even looking at a parked car could signal to drivers that a parking spot is about to be vacated, and cause a traffic jam). At the last second, I took my keys out of my pocket, and was instantly spotted by a middle-aged American man in an aging Chevrolet pick-up truck, windows rolled down in the July heat. He stopped right behind my car, put on his hazard lights, and immediately the scenario which I had feared unfolded: I had become a parking-spot tease, and the sound of my key turning in the lock was drowned out by the honking horns of irate drivers trapped behind this man. Fortunately, his windows were down, and so I shouted over the sound of the horns:
“I’m sorry – I just forgot my phone, I’m getting it out of my car now, but I’m not moving my car, I’m terribly sorry.”
He replied: “Oh, no need to be sorry – I just wanted to tell you that you are VERY handsome”.
“Ah, you too, sir”, I responded, instinctively.
He then drove off, without another word between us, and the traffic jam abated just as quickly as it had formed.
Most of my interactions with Sodomites in San Francisco have been similarly respectful and harmless – a compliment here or there, nothing more. However, in December of 2011, when I was traversing Fell Street on foot, I had a rather less-respectful interaction. This time, it was in the evening, and I was alone. As I walked East, I was on the North side of the street (that is, the side opposite the panhandle of Golden Gate Park), because I had plans to turn North for a purpose which I won’t discuss further at this time – consider that discussion to be, shall we say, embargoed – it’s been 14 years, maybe in another 14, we’ll discuss it.
In any case, as I was walking past the rowhouses to my right, an American man, probably in his mid-fifties, approached me. He staggered down the wooden stairs leading down from the stoop of one of the houses – I imagined that he probably lived there, since Boomers were the last generation to get a shot at affordable San Francisco housing, especially in such a desirable area. He was in a heavy off-white, I would say cream-white, cotton bathrobe, and had a bottle of Frexinet (FREI-zhe-nyet) sparkling wine in his right hand – those matte black bottles. I’m a fan, personally – my parental units drank the stuff on New Years’ Eve growing up, and I tried it myself when I came of age – and before I came of age, to be honest – and I think it’s perfectly fine as a champagne substitute. Speaking of substitutes, this man – he wore fake tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses (I would estimate that more than 99.9% of “tortoiseshell” items I see are fake, at least in the United States) and a pair of slippers. Despite being visibly drunk, staggering, and of course not appropriately dressed for the winter evening, he looked to be in generally good health – he didn’t have the sunburns of a homeless bum, the track marks of a junky, or the bruises of a drunk who fell down in the gutter. He looked clean and hygienic, with good hair and skin and teeth. He approached me a bit unsteadily, with a look of concentration and determination. He didn’t appear to be leering at me – there was no hint of sexual desire in his expression, and no hint of an attempt to be aggressive or menacing. He simply looked, in a sense, busy. As he descended the last step and the creaking of the wooden stairs were replaced by a quieter sound of his slippers on the sandy concrete, he tried to open his bathrobe and expose himself to me. He got the left side of the bathrobe open, but the trouble was, the right side and left side overlapped a bit, and with the bottle of sparkling wine in his right hand, he didn’t have his right hand free to pull open that side of his bathrobe. He tucked the bottle under his right armpit, to free his hand, but the need to keep his shoulder clenched meant that he didn’t have the full mobility of his right arm. He was a bit like a Tyrannosaurus Rex in those memes, you know – rather limited, so this didn’t work for him either. He wasn’t able to get the right side of his bathrobe open. He looked for a spot, set the champagne bottle down near the curb of the sidewalk where there was a flat space on the cratered concrete, and with full use of his hands, he opened his robe and exposed himself to me, not making much eye contact. He wasn’t erect, and seemed a bit sad and pitiful. He then retrieved his bottle of Frexinet and walked back up the steps – I kept walking and didn’t stop to see if he actually opened the door of that rowhouse on Fell Street, but I did hear a jingle of keys as I walked away.
It’s impossible to know, of course, if this man was a Sodomite, or if perhaps he was an equal-opportunity offender – perhaps he would have just as readily exposed himself to a woman as a man. Perhaps he actually preferred exposing himself to women, but, as none were walking down Fell Street at that time the idea struck him, he accepted me as a less-desirable victim-of-convenience. Perhaps I was far from his first choice. Perhaps I was his last choice – I will never know.
That evening in San Francisco in December of 2011 was cold and dreary by California standards, but it was nothing in comparison to when I first moved to Russia.
[PASSPORT COLLAGE / GALLERY / SLIDESHOW]
I arrived in Moscow on Christmas Day – American Christmas Day, that is, December 25th – of the year 2014. Russians do not celebrate Christmas on this day. That is because Russians have a curious habit of using both the Gregorian calendar and Julian calendar. This isn’t a recording on the history of European timekeeping (a vast topic), or timekeeping generally (an even vaster topic), but, in short: The Gregorian calendar, if you haven’t heard of it, is the calendar that you almost certainly use – it’s been the standard in Europe, and ultimately the world, since October of 1528, when it was introduced by Pope Gregory the 13th – hence the name, “Gregorian”. This now “normal” calendar replaced the Julian calendar, which was itself introduced by Julius Caesar in the year 46 BC. The Julian calendar was supplanted because it overestimates the length of the Solar Year (that is, the “year” defined by the Earth’s orbit around the Sun), and hence gradually drifts out-of-sync with the seasons. This is extremely undesirable, especially for purposes where the seasons really matter – determining when to plant crops, navigating the oceans under shifting wind conditions and changing tide patterns, planning construction projects and military campaigns for favorable weather, etc. Russians, however, still use both calendars, and this is a source of frequent confusion. For example, during the 1908 Summer Olympics, the Russian team arrived 13 days late and missed the Games due to a failure to convert between the Julian and Gregorian calendars (oops). In many ways, this is reminiscent of the incident on September 15th, 1999 when the American-made Mars Climate Orbiter was lost due to failure to properly convert impulse values between Metric units (namely, newton-seconds) and American or Imperial units (namely, pound-force-seconds). This conversion failure sent the spacecraft – which cost 350 million dollars to build, 170 million dollars to launch, and 80 million dollars to pilot – crashing into Mars at hypersonic speeds (oops). If you travel to Russia, you’ll encounter a large number of logistical problems which are caused by the simultaneous use of two or more contradictory systems. The Julian/Gregorian calendar situation is one example; many others stem from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fact that Russia “inherited” certain designations from the USSR while also receiving new designations as an independent country. For example, Russia has two international dialing codes: +7, inherited from the Soviet Union, and +8, which was assigned in 1990 to the then-newly-independent country of Russia, and both are still used. Russia also has three country-code TLDs, or Top-Level Domains: Dot-S-U, in Latin script, for the Soviet Union; Dot-R-U, also in Latin script, for Russia; and Dot-Р-Ф, in Cyrillic script, for Россиская Федерация, or Russian Federation, all three of which are, ALSO, still used. For complicated reasons that I may discuss in a future recording, the enforcement of website registration rules – and, especially, the requirement for registrants to identify themselves – is weaker for dot-S-U domains than other Russian top-level domains. As a result, many sketchy websites – related to gambling, cryptocurrency and other high-risk investments, strip clubs, edgy political ideologies, and the like – will actually use dot-S-U domains, meaning that, despite being thoroughly modern websites in nearly all cases, they are formally registered in the Soviet Union, a country that hasn’t existed for more than 35 years. Russians also have two different writing systems: a cursive system, typically used when handwriting, and a “print” system, typically used in computing – except, italicized text on computers resembles the cursive system. For example, look at these three letters. Two of them are identical, and one is different. One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn’t belong.
[SLIDE]
т М Т
Did you get that? Did you identify which symbol doesn’t belong? That’s right – it’s the symbol in the middle that’s the odd one out. The left symbol is a script-form and print-italic-form “Tuh”, the right symbol is a print-non-Italic-form “Tuh”, but the symbol in the middle is a print-non-Italic form “Muh”, which is a different letter. So, bizarrely, this is the situation we have:
[SLIDE]
[SAME LETTER – DIFFERENT LETTER]
[SHOW SLIDE]
You will need to learn to read and write in both script systems or else you’ll be functionally illiterate, so this is just something that “comes with the territory”, as Hank the Cow-Dog would say. Strictly speaking, these two writing systems are not supposed to be mixed (that is, one should not print-form letters with cursive-form or script-form letters when writing a single word), but Russians do this anyway. Usually it’s private companies that do this. Here is ZAСПОРТ, with [TEXT TXT TEXT].
I have to say, when I’m using Google Street View, I get very nervous if I’m navigating down a street on the wrong side of the road in virtual reality. Fortunately, Новый Арбат is a two-way street, so I can stay on the right as I’m zooming forward, but if I wind up on a one-way street and end up “traveling” the wrong way, this makes me very anxious.
[SLIDE]
There’s also the fact that Russians are increasingly starting to mix Latin characters with Cyrillic as well. You mainly see this on private signage, like this:
and this:
Russia is always a journey and never a destination, and getting blindsided by bizarre logistical problems and then working through them is just part of existing here. Russia is Souls-like, in the sense that an extremely high degree of difficulty, which often lacks any sensible justification and borders on absurdity, is nevertheless an integral part of the experience.
I was naturally a bit confused that Russians were not in the midst of Christmastide celebrations when I landed on December 25th. Of course, December 25th of the Julian calendar actually corresponds to January 7th of the Gregorian Calendar, since by 1901 the calendars had drifted out-of-sync by 13 days, meaning that, after the October Revolution of 1918, the victorious Communist Party declared that the day after Wednesday, January 31st, 1918 would not be Thursday, February 1st, but instead Thursday, February 14th, meaning that, in Russian history, in the year 1918, the First to Thirteenth of February simply do not exist, and Valentine’s Day fell immediately after the end of January. As a result, there is a common Russian joke about a historian who has dedicated his life to studying this time interval, during which, by definition, nothing happened, because, by government decree, these days simply went “missing” that year. But, of course, I did not know this at the time, so hearing that Christmas was nearly two weeks away was rather jarring.
December 2014 was bitterly cold in Moscow, and I made my way to my company-assigned flat in Би́бирево, which was, at the time, the very end of the Grey Line, Серой Ветки – specifically, the North terminus. There is now a station further North, Алту́фьево – the Metro has been expanded since 2014. I arrived at Станции Би́бирево and navigated to the flat on foot through the snow with only a messenger bag and a carry-on suitcase in tow; I had decided to move countries without any checked baggage. I was in an exhausted haze after the long Metro ride, and the longer train ride from ШерEметова before that, and the longer flight – from San Francisco through Paris / Charles DeGaulle to Moscow – before that. I hadn’t slept in 31 hours. I don’t sleep well on aircraft. I don’t sleep well in general – that’s worth noting – but I especially don’t sleep well on aircraft. At least it was early afternoon, so there was still some light. The flat was run-down and freezing, but I was greeted by a friendly Frenchman, a semi-professional English and French teacher. He had taken time out of his schedule to greet me and give me keys to the apartment. His Russian was nearly perfect, and so was his cooking – he made an art to poverty. What I remember more than anything else is that I took the glass carafe from his coffee maker to boil water for drinking over the gas stove before I went to sleep, but I placed it too squarely on the burner, and the gas flame melted the plastic handle, which detached from the stainless steel band on the bottom. He smelled the hot plastic and came into the kitchen from his room. I promised to buy him a new coffee maker since getting a compatible carafe seemed impossible, and went to sleep. That was Thursday, December 25th, 2014. On Friday, December 26th, I bought him a replacement – a bit of an upgrade from what he had, for three-thousand-odd rubles, perhaps fifty dollars. He was overwhelmed with joy at receiving this new coffee maker – that, I remember. It wasn’t the wild, childlike delight of a young boy getting a Christmas present – it was a deeper, more respectful, somber, and somehow spiritual joy, like a wounded soldier receiving morphine and smiling at the medic, knowing that, as he lays dying in the snow, he will at least die without pain. The flat was frigid, bare concrete walls, terrible threadbare linens – the exact sort of image of Eastern Europe that my generation got from STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, the exact sort of image by parents’ generation got from anti-Communist propaganda during the Cold War. It was at least reasonably clean – I doubt any cockroaches could have survived the icy drafts. On Saturday, December 27th, he went out to see his girlfriend – he didn’t spend many nights in the flat, understandably, and as I was still recuperating from my trip, I didn’t have any plans for the weekend, so I stayed home while he went out into the freezing winter morning. Later that Saturday, feeling somewhat better and partially recovered from jetlag, and feeling a bit peckish, I decided to go shopping for food. I had hardly eaten in three days – jetlag always suppresses my appetite. At that moment, I discovered that I couldn’t open the door. It turned out that the Frenchman had locked it in such a way that it was impossible to open from the inside with my key. I called him, but he and his girlfriend were already on a train to Ярославль for a weekend trip, and there was no way for him to return early. I was on the eighth floor, so exiting through a window wasn’t an option – at least, not an attractive one, but as the snowdrifts below were nearly two stories tall, I was comforted in thinking that, if there was a fire, a six-story fall into a snowdrift was potentially survivable. I called my company, expecting them to send someone out to unlock the door, but was told that the supervisor, the landlord, hadn’t been heard from in more than three months – there seemed to be confusion as to who even owned the flat, with some complex laws of inheritance splitting ownership between estranged, bickering family members. My French flatmate told me over the phone that I was free to eat his food, and that I could compensate him later, though there was not much to eat – a kilogram bag of rice with half the contents remaining, a shaker of salt, and spices in neat packets. Perhaps, he hoped, I would eat the half-empty bag of rice and repay him with a full bag – surely, given the coffee-maker incident, he would have been delighted by that: five hundred grams of rice for free. Still, the fear of fire made me uneasy. I discovered a set of IKEA-branded hex wrenches that the Frenchman had presumably been using to assemble his meager furniture, and to my luck, they fit the bolts on the door hinges.
In Russia, one must always beware of doors. Russians are fans of extremely heavy doors, and with the inertia that a swinging door can carry – boosted, perhaps, by a gust of wind – a door could do serious, even fatal, injury. Russians do not like the hollow wooden doors than Americans use to divide interior spaces – neither do they accept the hardwood oak doors seen on the outsides of American homes. Rather, Russian doors are constructed as hollow steel boxes with holes in the top, about eight centimeters thick, with the steel at least a few millimeters thick. Such a door on its own weighs perhaps 100 kilograms – heavy, to be certain, but not unmanageable, with the weight of such a door being on the scale of a man’s weight. 100 kilograms is heavy for a man, but it’s at least within an order of magnitude of human weight. However, the Russian door, in this form, is incomplete. After hanging a door on steel hinges, bolted into the doorframe which is itself anchored into a concrete wall, Russians will open the door outwards, and since the ceiling is higher than the doorframe, this exposes the holes at the top of the door. They then pour a slurry of concrete inside, filling the steel box until it weighs the better part of a metric ton. The concrete sets, and the Russian door has taken its final form. The heat of the setting concrete is substantial, and newly-installed doors are perceptibly warm for the better part of a week. I had noticed the incredible weight of Russian doors even by my third day in the country, and I knew that, once I loosened the bolts of the hinges, I could push the door over from the top, tipping it away from me like a falling domino (the doorframe would prevent it from falling inwards onto me), but I would be completely unable to control its fall. Even if I had the strength – which I did not – and even if the handle held – which it might not – the door outweighed me by at least a factor of ten. Grabbing onto the handle as the door tipped over would only ensure that I tipped along with it, and went crashing to the ground with it. Trying to control the fall of the door would be like tying a rope around a one-ton boulder and playing a game of tug-of-war: no matter how hard I might pull, I would only succeed in pulling myself closer to the bounder, not the other way around.
This presented a clear danger: though I had never seen anyone else in the hallway, and although my French flatmate was away in Ярослвале, anyone unlucky enough to be passing by as the door fell would be killed by the force. I informed the Frenchman of my plans, and my company, and heard no objections. As I prepared to remove the last bolt with the IKEA hex wrench – which had by that time become mangled and galled – I shouted through the door in my best Russian: “Осторожно – ДВЕРь ПАДАЕТ!” – ‘Danger – the Door is Falling!’. I have not screamed louder in my life – not before nor since. After screaming for a full thirty seconds, I removed the final bolt, pushed at the top of the door, and scrambled backwards into the apartment, hiding in the kitchen lest I be hit by flying concrete or other debris from the impact.
The door fell with a tremendous sound, but the apartment hardly shook – Russian apartments are so sturdily built that the impact was easily absorbed. I stepped out to survey the damage. The door had shattered a light fixture on the ceiling of the hallway as it fell, and I cleaned up what glass that I could, but most of the shards and pieces of torn wire and mangled steel were under the door, and there was no way I could move it without a hydraulic jack or something similar. I went out and bought some garlic bread, which tasted lovely.
Neither the Frenchman, nor my company, nor anyone else, felt any need to re-hang the door on its hinges or to replace the light fixture in the corridor. Nor was there any sense that I should pay for the damage (or that anyone else should pay for it – arguably, my actions were reasonable in the name of fire safety, and blame might be shared by the Frenchman who locked me in, the company that had no interest in contacting the landlord, the landlord who had no interested in letting me out, whoever installed the door and the locks in such a way that someone could be locked inside, etc.). Nor did anyone show any resentment towards me. They had absolutely no interest in what I had done. To everyone involved, destroying the door to the apartment was not even worth mentioning, and everyone reacted as if I was boldly confessing to having replaced a flickering fluorescent lightbulb with a warm incandescent bulb in my room: yes, there was some cost associated with it (doors cost money to install, and incandescent lightbulbs use more electricity than fluorescent ones, which means a higher power bill, all else equal), but the scale of the harm was seen as completely inconsequential. Nobody – not even the Frenchman – cared at all that the door was lying on the floor, utterly immovable, and that the apartment now no longer had any front door. There was nothing worth stealing inside. There were two additional locks between the apartment and the street – one between the corridor and the elevators, and the other at the entrance to the building complex. The building was so drafty and poorly-heated that the absence of the door wouldn’t make our flat meaningfully colder – even with the door in place, we had been wearing parkas inside. The entire building seemed abandoned, and even the Frenchman didn’t visit very often. Eventually, he even took his coffee maker to his girlfriend’s house.
I had enough money to rent a decent place in central Moscow, on Новом Арбате in fact, and started corresponding with a prospective landlord. It was in early January of 2015 that I encountered what I call “Negotiation by Exposure”. Again, I’m not talking about the indecent sort of exposure, but rather, when a Russian intentionally exposes you to cold temperatures for a prolonged period of time as a bargaining tactic, hoping that the elements will wear down your resolve. While one could experience this “negotiation tactic” with respect to any sort of agreement, financial or otherwise, the fact is that real estate transactions are the largest monetary transactions most people will ever be party to in their lives, and hence it’s in relation to real estate that you’re most likely to encounter this.
I met my landlord around 21 O’Clock, after work, at the apartment on Новом Арбате, where he gave me a tour of the place. He explained that he needed to be at the Тверская metro station in a few hours, and suggested that we start walking in that direction – we would discuss the deal along the way, and then could sign the paperwork and exchange documents at the McDonald’s near the edge of Пушкинской Плошади. This was, after all, 2015 – McDonald’s was still operating in Russia, and wouldn’t be replaced by Вкусно и Точка for another seven years.
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When we finally reached the McDonald’s, I recognized it from old photographs: it was the first McDonald’s to have opened in Russia, serving its initial customers on January 31st, 1990. Growing up in the aftermath of the Cold War, I remembered those pictures, Russians waiting by the tens of thousands in a line stretching kilometers through the heavy snow, all to dine beneath those Golden Arches.
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Story of Katya and the duct-tape fear (FreeWorldBlues)
Things Leftists Are Right About:
-Violence (sexual and otherwise) against women by men is a major problem and far more must be done to address it. Katya, Junipur, the girl who was ejaculated on in the club, “does the sun make it hard”, etc. I’ve often been uncomfortable during dates in the US, but never in danger, and in both cases where I have used force upon women, it was to protect them from themselves; both cases were drug-related, and it was just a matter of forcibly removing a substance from someone (“you can have this back tomorrow but I’m not going to allow you to overdose and die in my apartment, sorry”), with no combat or striking. Russia is…different.
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I’ve had conversations along these lines multiple times, and I always decline these offers – I tend to think that private investment is very risky. Even investing in public companies — where finances are supposedly well-audited and where there’s hopefully good liquidity – can be risky, and there have been many, many cases in which data reported by public companies turned out to be false. That said, investing privately brings with it a whole new level of risk, given the opacity of privately-held operations, and moreover, I think, it’s a terrible idea to invest in a company that operates in a sphere you don’t understand well, and I am obviously not an expert on the Russian restaurant or gymnasium or leasing industries, so I always decline these…opportunities. Interest rates in Russia are currently extremely high by American standards – the central bank overnight interest rate is 17.5 percent annualized, and even for a secured loan, like a mortgage, you’ll pay a higher rate, probably 22 to 24 percent or so, which means that an unsecured loan for a restaurant is going to have an astronomically high interest rate, North of 30 percent. Given how tight credit is, it’s understandable that businesses are hitting their customers up to see if anyone would like to loan them money, and most, I think, are intending to use the money honestly and responsibly, but still, I’m not going to involve myself in these sorts of things. It’s also worth noting that the restaurant business, in particular, has incredibly high bankruptcy rates in Russia, as in the United States.
When I was living in San Francisco, I had a friend, we’ll call her N.T.C.G., or we can call her “small Natasha”, because there were two Natashas, две Наташи, in our group, a rather thin one and a rather rotund one, and we took to calling them “small Natasha” and “large Natasha”, though of course “large Natasha” wasn’t too fond of this, and she always invented other nicknames for herself, but nothing ever stuck – it was always “small Natasha” and “large Natasha”. That is very much my experience – no nickname that a man creates for himself will ever stick -a nickname must always be bestowed by others. In any case, N.T.C.G., or “small Natasha”, had previously worked in loan underwriting before she was fired, and I suspect that her departure from the industry had something to do with her drinking. She was drinking VERY heavily by the time I met her – I remember, we were organizing a party at a club in San Francisco for New Years’ Eve of 2008/2009, and she told me that there was a Groupon deal – if we both paid 250 dollars up-front, then we would each get a 500-dollar bar tab credit. I told her – N.T.C.G., I’m sorry, but I’m a lightweight. If I drank enough in one night to run up a five-hundred-dollar bar tab, I’d be fuckin’ dead. I mean, this was an expensive club, but not THAT expensive.
I remember when we first met – it was at the Infusion Lounge, 555 Second St, San Francisco. I was there with a fellow we’ll call N.H.A.N., who had rented out part of the bar to promote “miracle berries”. These are fruits of the plant Synsepalum Dulcificum, which is native to West Africa and is one of around 8,000 species in the order Ericales. These berries are edible by humans- though they don’t taste like much and the hard, inedible seeds make up a very large proportion of the overall fruit. The seeds are about the size of olive pits, though black and smooth as opposed to grey-green and furrowed, and the whole fruit is only the size of a small grape, so it’s mostly skin and pit, with very little flesh. Notably, Synsepalum Dulcificum berries contain the glycoprotein “Miraculin”, which is a gustatory hallucinogen. The usual description is that “miraculin makes sour foods taste sweet”, and this is in a sense true – if you eat a Synsepalum Dulcificum berry and then taste a lemon, or even pure citric acid, or even acetic acid, as in white vinegar – you’ll perceive sweetness instead of, or at least in addition to, sourness. A better description, in my opinion, is that “miraculin at physiological pH is tasteless, but in contact with acids it becomes sweet”. The exact mechanism of action is unclear, but there is evidence that, when eaten, miraculin forms a pair of non-covalent but strong and persistent bonds – bonds which last a few hours – to a heterodimer of the TAS1R2 and TAS1R3 taste receptors. Specifically, it binds to the histidine residue at position 30 in TAS1R2 and another histidine residue at position 60 in TAS1R3, both of these receptors being encoded by Chromosome 1 in humans. At physiological pH, this binding doesn’t activate the TAS1R2 / TAS1R3 complex, so no sweetness is perceived. In fact, by occupying these receptors and binding to them much more strongly than “normal” sugars, miraculin actually acts as a competitive ANtagonist, preventing sugars from being perceived as sweet by blocking their binding sites. However, if sour foods are eaten and pH on the tongue falls into the range of 6.3 to 4.8, miraculin will change its conformation and begin activating the TAS1R2/TAS1R3 complex, which causes the perception of sweetness. Essentially, it is a hallucinogen which specifically affects the sense of taste, and which is also a pH indicator, producing hallucinations of sweetness only within a certain pH range. Usually we think of pH indicators as visual, as substances that change color – phenolphthalein, for instance – but really, they can affect any sense. For example, nicotine is an olfactory pH indicator. Usually, nicotine is handled in an aqueous solution. In part, this is because, in pure form, it’s a syrupy, sticky liquid that is hard to pipette and pour. In part, this is because it’s incredibly toxic, as in, the LD50 is less than 100 milligrams in humans, which makes it somewhat more toxic than potassium cyanide, and nicotine is also absorbed through the skin much more easily than hydrophilic cyanide salts, which makes handling it in pure form prohibitively dangerous in many contexts. When nicotine is in aqueous solution, it undergoes an acid-base reaction with water to form the nicotinium ion, so in effect, nicotine solutions are really solutions of nicotinium hydroxide. Nicotinium hydroxide is non-volatile and hence odorless, but if you basify a nicotine solution, by adding a compound which is a stronger base than nicotine (and nicotine is a pretty weak base, so most common bases will work), you’ll convert the nicotinium hydroxide into nicotine freebase, which has an incredibly potent and absolutely appalling odor. It’s somewhat similar to pyridine – it has that fishy, plasticky smell, along with the smell of pyrROLidine, a bit of a sharp, almost sour, ammonia-like smell, which makes sense, given that nicotine contains both pyridine and pyrROLidine rings. It has an additional aspect to its odor, though…something like Piperine and Chavicine, from black pepper, but different in an unpleasant way. In a sense, nicotine smells like a “counterfeit” version of pepper in the same sense that aspartame tastes like a “counterfeit” version of sucrose. I believe that there exists an olfactory “uncanny valley”, where substances that smell a bit like something recognizable – but don’t quite match– are perceived as especially unpleasant. Nicotine is certainly in this valley. The smell of nicotine is not the smell of tobacco smoke, by the way. The smell of tobacco smoke is quite unpleasant (although the plants themselves smell just fine), but neither the smell of the smoldering, dried leaves nor the smell of the living plant is the smell of nicotine – at least, not significantly so. Nicotine is very potent as a drug, as in, a one-milligram dose would produce very noticeable effects in someone who isn’t tolerant, so unless you’re handling fairly concentrated solutions of it, and unless those solutions have been basified to force it into the freebase form, you’re not going to be smelling actual nicotine. If you do get a chance to smell a basified nicotine solution, and you can do it safely, it’s worth doing – this is an odor that you’ll never forget.
In any case, it’s suspected that Miraculin’s TAS1R2/TAS1R3 receptor activation at acidic pH has something to do with the sugar residues present in the glycoprotein, particularly the Arabinose and Xylose residues, though Miraculin also contains residues of four other sugars (namely Fucose, Galactose, Glucosamine, and Mannose), and it’s possible for purely-proteinaceous compounds which contain no saccharides to activate TAS1R2/TAS1R3 and induce a sense of sweetness, so, as with volatile anesthetics, we still don’t fully understand the mechanism of this effect. We also don’t understand why Synsepalum Dulcificum produces this compound. It could be in order to make the fruits more attractive to animals which will eat them and spread the seeds (and indeed miraculin has similar effects on other mammals as it does on humans, though avians seem immune). Miraculin is suspected to act as a protease inhibitor – it bears strong structural resemblance to the KTI proteins, or Kunitz Trypsin Inhibitor family of proteins, which are expressed in legumes, family Fabaceae, including the soybean species Glycine Soja and Glycine Max, which humans are known to eat. Hence, there is some potential concern about eating Synsepalum Dulcificum fruits, although the evidence is that, while miraculin acts as a “countermeasure” to human digestion by binding to and blocking the activity of trypsin, it is not able to bind to the active site of CHYMOstypsin, which serves as a sort of “counter-countermeasure” and hydrolyses the miraculin, allowing trypsin to resume its normal function. Legally speaking, miraculin and the Synsepalum Dulcificum fruit cannot be sold as food in the United States, but can be sold as “dietary supplements”, which was the loophole Mr. N.T.C.G. was using in order to sell this stuff. He did experience a number of issues with importing it, mainly because the fruits are very perishable and had to be frozen in dry ice, and on a number of occasions Customs delayed his shipments to inspect them, and the dry ice all sublimed away and the berries ended up rotting. It’s understandable that this happened – Imagine you’re working at U.S. Customs, you see a shipment of strange berries packed in dry ice, air freight from Ghana to San Francisco – not exactly a common route, so you’re wondering what this stuff is. Could it be some sort of unapproved food product, could it be some kind of drug, and the berries are of course seeds, they’re the reproductive parts of the plant, so usually Customs would end up calling the California Department of Agriculture to take a look at this stuff and figure out what it was and if it risked becoming an invasive species or something, but the Department of Agriculture also had no idea what this stuff was, so there were lots of delays and shipment issues. California is very strict when it comes to importing “exotic” biological materials. As a result, he lost a lot of these shipments, and we commiserated over that at the bar on more than a few occasions. In terms of safety, I tend to take an evidential approach to these things – the berries have been eaten in West Africa for tens of thousands of years, and so I tend to think that it’s fine for adults to consume these in small amounts on occasion, and indeed I did so, and suffered no ill effects.
I didn’t particularly enjoy the gustatory effects. The sweetness was decently close to a “natural” sweetness, much better than aspartame or saccharin or sucralose, all of which taste absolutely awful. Cyclamate, which is occasionally encountered in Russia (though illegal for food use in the United States), also tastes quite bad. I’ve tried Steviol, which is not too good either. Sugar alcohols, especially xylitol, are the most tolerable, although they aren’t great. I’d place miraculin somewhere between sugar alcohols and Steviol in terms of taste.
Overall, though, I have no idea why anyone would consume any artificial sweeteners. There are some people who say these things taste good, but, to quote Seth Tzeentach, “They’re fuckin’ wrong”. I don’t really like sugar in my coffee or tea anyway, but if I had to add sugar to my coffee or tea, I would just add…actual sugar.
When I first met N.T.C.G., we asked each other the typical questions – “what do you do for work?”, “oh, and what do YOU do for work”, et cetera. She told me that she wrote a column for the Walnut Creek Reporter called “Sex in the Suburbs”, which I thought was a joke, and I didn’t press the question. After all, these sorts of questions about what someone does for work are often really about income and wealth, and those are sensitive topics, especially given that San Francisco is so expensive that most are struggling just to make ends meet, so I thought to myself: “Okay, she’s joking around, she’s tired of hearing this question so she came up with a snappy response to change the topic, best to let sleeping dogs lie, we’ll just talk about something else.” It was only months later when I visited her in Walnut Creek that I saw a copy of that column all marked up with red ink by some editor in a draft of the Walnut Creek Reporter on her kitchen counter – this was back when editors still marked articles up with red pens. I wasn’t too interested in her romantic goings-on in Walnut Creek (in fact, I wasn’t really interested in ANY goings-on in Walnut Creek), but we did have some conversations about her loan-underwriting career, and she really impressed upon me how high the failure rate was for bars and restaurants. Even now, when a Russian in the hospitality sector asks me to invest in his business, those drunken conversations from 17 years ago- about broke restauranters defaulting on their loans- are still fresh in my mind. In any case, this comedy school hasn’t hit me up about making an investment yet, but it’s coming. I know it’s coming.Those drunken conversations about broke restaurateurs defaulting on their loans are still fresh in my mind when Russians in the hospitality business ask me to invest, even 17 years later.
-Dream of the ГУЛАГ (though it wasn’t really a nightmare – the camp wasn’t that bad in my dream)
-Хлёпать – Шлёпать (Filthy Frank – words that sound similar – Filthy Frank: the intent was not to educate people about phonology. [Vietnam War reference]. Rather, George miller (the maker of the content) and people who spread “welcome to the lice fields, motherfucker” memes typically have the goal of being gratuitously racist to Asian people, and if that’s your goal, well, it’s a fait accomplis. George Miller, this guy right here – not an expert on phonology of East Asian languages in the Sinic language family – shocking, I know. Vietnamese
-“The lie is wearing off; reality is upon us” – KANYE (actually “the LIGHT is upon us”)
A lie is always living on borrowed time.
Telling people stereotypes about themselves – mention of Russian honesty. The girl who mentioned Mein Kampf. Of course, I’ve read it and I’m not a Nazi – I’ve read the Communist Manifesto and I’m not a Marxist; I’ve read the Little Red Book and I’m not a Maoist; I’ve read the Torah, Koran, Bible, and Rig Veda, but I’m not Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or Hindu. That said [text]… .I’m often accused of being autistic, and perhaps there’s some truth in that: if you hear something consistently from a diverse group of people, that’s an indicator that it might be true. If your wife, your boss, your direct reports, your father, your son, your mother, your daughter, your physician, and random Internet strangers all tell you that you have a drinking problem, then chances are good you have a drinking problem. However, regardless of whether or not (and to what degree) I’m afflicted by the ‘Tism, I still have enough social wherewithal to know that mentioning having read Mein Kampf isn’t the best idea on a first date.