Andrei Jebeleanu

The Pistol That Missed Lenin — And Hit Something Deeper

July 9th, 2025

Did I ever tell you how I stumbled upon a famous artifact? The kind of thing that shouldn’t exist anymore. I wasn’t looking for it. But, that’s how these things always go. This one was tucked away. A tall wooden stand, ascetic and severe, cradled a walnut case with a lacquered sheen. Cold light fell on it from above — directional, almost surgical. Brass-rimmed. UV-filtered. Velvet-lined. Inside: a Mauser C96. German-made, over-engineered, baroque in its absurdity. And then I saw the plaque.

“Pistol used by Fanny Kaplan in the attempted assassination of V.I. Lenin, August 30, 1918.”

That name.
Fanny Kaplan.

Do you remember her?
An anarchist. Half-blind. Nearly deaf. She spent over a decade in the Tsar’s most pitiless prisons — Kara, Akatuy, the empire’s forgotten oubliettes. Tortured into silence, then erased from memory. Until she reappeared in 1918 with a gun in her hand.

History calls her an assassin.
But long before she pulled the trigger, the regime had already transformed her into ammunition.

And beneath the plaque — the explanation:

“The pistol used by Fanny Kaplan in her assassination attempt on Lenin was never officially logged in the CEKA’s inventory. Those who examined the weapon in the immediate aftermath of the attack were surprised to find it wasn’t the standard-issue Nagant M1895, but a German-made Mauser C96 — a large, fixed-magazine handgun, difficult to conceal yet lethally precise, and unusually sophisticated for someone with Kaplan’s profile.

This anomalous choice was promptly classified as an ‘operational irregularity.’ The weapon was quietly taken into custody by Arkadi Kogan, a CEKA officer from Dzerzhinsky’s inner circle, who labeled it ‘a symbolic object with destabilizing potential.’

In 1922, the pistol was transferred to the custody of Section IX — a division within the NKVD responsible for ‘Objects of Political and Esoteric Significance’ — led by Iakov Blumenstein, a man infamous for his obsession with revolutionary relics and his private archive of occult manuscripts.

Following Blumenstein’s death during Stalin’s 1937 purges, the weapon was moved to the “black archive” of Department K-14 — a shadowy unit tasked with handling what could neither be explained nor destroyed.

The last known reference to the pistol appears in a 1956 internal report, signed by General Petrușin, who noted tersely that the weapon had been ‘re-evaluated in light of the new ideological climate’ and subsequently transferred to the private collection of Dr. Lev Vasilievich Berzov — a military psychiatrist and unofficial advisor to the Ministry of Defense, rumored to possess an entire wing filled with artifacts of… symbolic value.”

I stood there, staring at the weapon behind glass, knowing — as one sometimes does without proof — that some things don’t just survive history. This wasn’t just a pistol. It was a relic that refused to settle quietly into any sanctioned version of the past. And as I looked at it, I couldn’t help but wonder:

Did Kaplan really miss?

Because, apparently, some bullets thread through the fabric of history itself, and travel farther than anyone intended.
Why Do You Always Need Space to Explain Time?

July 9th, 2025
(On the Geometry of the Invisible and the Strange Case of Temporal Volume)

It’s a strange thing, isn’t it?

Whenever we try to explain time, we reach instinctively for metaphors of space. A line. A path. A loop. A tunnel. A spiral. A sphere. A goddamn labyrinth. As if the only way to understand how we move through time is to imagine ourselves somewhere.

Why?

Because time, in its raw form, unfolds. And unfolding requires dimension. Requires volume. Requires space.

Time as a Line (1D) — The Industrial Myth of Forward

If time were truly linear, it would be a string stretched tight between past and future.
A → B → C.
Cause → Effect.
Morning → Noon → Night.
Birth → Decision → Death.

This is the time of clocks. Inevitable. Irreversible. Boring. It’s the illusion we need to catch a train, or pay our taxes on time, or pretend we’re not terrified of what we left behind. Linear time is a prosthetic — built so we don’t drown in contingency. But let’s not kid ourselves: real life doesn’t happen in a straight line. It coils. It loops. It repeats. It forgets.

Time as a Page (2D) — The Garden of Bifurcations

Now imagine a page. On the horizontal: your basic timeline. On the vertical: every choice you didn’t make. Every version of you that might’ve been. Each moment a crossroads. Each fork a ghost. This is the time of Borges, of sliding doors and doppelgängers and déjà vus. It’s the time of alternative timelines and multiversal regrets. Here, you don’t just move forward — you branch. You fracture. You multiply.

It’s better than the line. But still… too flat.

Time as a Body (3D) — The Architecture of Echo

Now close your eyes. Picture not a line. Not a sheet. But a chamber. Time, in three dimensions, is not something you move through. It’s something that moves through you. In this model:
- The X-axis is chronology — your string of memories, labeled by date.
- The Y-axis is possibility — each divergent choice, each shattered mirror.
- The Z-axis is resonance — depth, intensity, recursion, meaning.
You don’t just remember the past. You re-enter it. You don’t just await the future. You negotiate with it. The present isn’t a moment. It’s a node. A tension point. A breathing membrane. Time doesn’t flow — it vibrates. And like all vibrations, it has amplitude, frequency, and tone.

So How Does It Feel, This Tridimensional Time?

It feels like returning to a memory only to realize it’s been watching you.

It feels like déjà vu laced with grief.

It feels like living a moment twice — once in real life, once in thought — and not knowing which was more real.

It feels like your future depends on which direction you feel toward, not which direction you walk.

Examples? Fiction’s Been Trying to Tell Us for Years.
- Interstellar, where love has gravitational mass.
- Arrival, where language collapses time into comprehension.
- Slaughterhouse-Five, where Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck and simply… drifts.
- Proust, who chews a madeleine and is launched across time not by plot, but by texture.
- Saint Augustine, who realized that the past and future are fictions held inside the present — a distension of the soul.
What Does This Mean?

That memory isn’t recollection. It’s navigation.
That history isn’t fixed. It’s interpreted.
That death isn’t a wall. It’s a door, with poor signage.
That the self isn’t an arrow in time. It’s an echo chamber for what time sounds like when it tries to mean something.

So no — time doesn’t flow. It breathes. It bends. It breaks. It builds itself around us like a cathedral made of heartbeat and dust. And maybe we’re not travelers in time at all. Maybe we’re just the rooms it keeps passing through.

But then again — do we need time to explain space?
What do you think?

(I think that’s the question that turns the universe inside out. Because if space helps us measure time, maybe time helps us mean space. Maybe we need time to explain space the way we need memory to explain place. A room is just a room — until something happens in it. Then it becomes a scene, a story, a scar. And that’s what time does to space: it etches it. It gives it texture, direction, consequence. It makes it matter. So perhaps the real answer is this: Time and space don’t explain each other — they haunt each other. Like two mirrors facing inward. Or two lovers, endlessly circling the same silence.)
Chronos: A User’s Guide to Time

July 8th, 2025
There are days when time bites.

Not in the poetic, nostalgic way that makes poets sigh about lost youth and roses that no longer smell like anything. I mean it bites — literally, mathematically, epidermically. Like sandpaper seconds dragging across your cheekbone. Like a calendar that’s been weaponized.

But I’m convinced — perhaps naïvely, perhaps heretically — that somewhere, hidden in the backend of time, there is a user interface.
A secret menu.
A page called something like Preferences.

And if, by some improbable glitch in the metaphysics of things, you manage to sneak inside, you’ll find a sub-menu — tucked away like a dev’s Easter egg — labeled:

“Time Texture: Select Material.”

There, you’re no longer a victim of chronology. You become a designer. You choose your seconds.
You soften your minutes.
You resist entropy not with heroism, but with design.

Why suffer through Bureaucratic Granite – Standard Edition, when you could select:
- Petal Flow – Siam Ritual Mode
- Rain of Orchids – Where Every Moment Dissolves Before It Hurts
- Silken Lotus Drift – Morning as Perfume and Clemency
Time becomes… breathable. Kind.
You can finally inhabit it without armor.

But scroll lower. Keep scrolling.
At the very bottom of this invisible menu — under Advanced Settings, naturally — you might glimpse a final option:

“Sign Out of Time Forever.”

A kind of spiritual logout.
Let’s call it what it is: Atemporalitate.

Now, here’s the trick: for most of us, that button is grey. Unclickable. Permanently locked by the developers of reality.
Try to tap it, and the interface politely slaps you with:

Error 403: Access Denied.

You’re not that kind of user.
You haven’t paid enough. You haven’t lost enough.

But — and this is where it gets metaphysically awkward — I have met people for whom the button was blue.
Active. Accessible. Glowing like a secret exit sign from the prison of causality.

Two of them were in the elevator with me that morning.

And no, I’m not going to tell you what floor we pressed.

But before you start searching for that hidden interface, a word of caution.

Some people spend their entire lives looking for the “blue button.”
They call it transcendence. Enlightenment. Retirement in the Azores.
Others press it without knowing — in a poem, a kiss, a quiet refusal.
And a few…
A few are pressed by it.

Time doesn’t like being redesigned.
It has teeth. And ego.
So if you do find the menu — if you really find it — make sure you’re ready.

Because once you sign out, you don’t just leave the timeline.
You leave the plot.

And some of us still have a few scenes left to shoot.
The Violence of Misnaming the Things You Hold Dear

July 7th, 2025

A brief warning before we begin.
Do not misname the things you love.

Not your sons. Not your daughters.
Not the dog curled at your feet, nor the car that’s carried you farther than your own convictions.

A name is not a tag. Nor a label. Not just a sound you repeat until something answers. It is a force. A calling. A mirror turned toward being.

Because to name something wrongly is not merely to confuse it — it is to miscreate. To summon something false in place of what might have been true.

Let me explain.

To name things truthfully is a primal virtue — almost Adamic in its weight.

Let us remember: Adam was not merely the first man.
He was the first to speak into creation, not merely of it.
“The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of the heavens, and to every beast of the field” (Genesis 2:20, ESV).

In that moment, Adam became more than witness.
He became the first philologist,
the first taxonomist,
and — in a sense both practical and metaphysical —
the first archivist of reality.

The creatures were, until then, merely there. After him, they were called. Summoned. Individuated. Named.

Which means Adam was also, quietly, the first baptizer. I confess, I cannot think of a greater honor: To speak a word and, in doing so, summon a thing into meaning. God, with a word, called the world into being. “Let there be…” — and there was. Adam, with another kind of word, called that same world into intimacy. Into identity. He did not create — he designated. He discerned. And perhaps, he revealed.

I won’t weigh this down with a lecture on ousia (οὐσία) and hypostasis (ὑπόστασις) — substance and subsistence — though the temptation is real. Let me simply say this: something becomes what it is only when it is rightly named. Until then, it lingers in a kind of limbo — not quite void, but not quite presence either. Like a dream you can’t retell. Like a face you’ve almost forgotten.

And if God is the Word (John 1:1), and creation is uttered, not assembled, then the Name becomes not just a label, but a metaphysical event. An identity revealed. A being called forth.

In this sense — and in this sense only — Adam called the world into being for a second time.

Tell me: is that not magnificent?

Still, a question haunts me:
Was Adam’s act symbolic? Or — strengthened by divine presence and armed, perhaps, with a pre-critical Kantian intuition — did he touch the Ding an sich itself, the thing-in-itself, and name it from within? Did he speak not just a name, but the name — the one that resonates with essence, not appearance?

It’s a fair question. Especially considering all the things that came after:
Synthetic rubber.
YouTube.
Bosons.
Polonium.
Entropic systems.
Quasars.
Polyethylene.

And yet this post isn’t about them.

It’s about something else:
The strange and luminous collaboration between God and Man.

Because when God lends His speech to humanity, He does not merely offer vocabulary.
He offers co-creation. Co-responsibility.
He lets the human mouth echo the divine Fiat.

We are allowed — terrifyingly — to name.

And that brings me here, to what I’ve really come to say.

Because if naming is a sacred act, then misnaming is a form of betrayal.
If to name rightly is to give being, then to name wrongly is to deform being.
A thing misnamed is a thing miscalled, misclassified, misshaped — a thing left in exile.

And I believe many things remain unnamed still.
Or worse — they were named too quickly. Too carelessly. Too selfishly.
And so they never quite made it into the world we share with God.
They exist — yes. But they remain unbaptized.

The unbaptized world is vast. And loud.
It is the world of humans without reverence. Of language without light.

That is why I believe humanity still bears a flicker of that Adamic vocation:
The power to name — and through naming, to reveal.

When we name rightly — people, things, places — we take our place beside the Creator.
We invite what is unnamed to step into the light.
To be.

I would like to be their advocate — these misnamed, unnamed, disfigured things.
I would like to give them their true names.
I would like to call them, once more, into being.

Philosophy — God help me — has made me a believer.
Because it has taught me this: a name is not an accessory. It is a vocation.
To misname is to mislead.
To rename is sometimes the only path back to essence.
To call something, or someone, by its true name — is to set it free.

Which brings me — finally — to what I meant to ask all along:

“The Suicide Service.” Do you really think that’s the right name?

Because if naming can call something into being, it can just as easily call it away.

There is a more insidious power hidden in language — the power not to create, but to unmake. To assign a name so false, so hollow, so sterile, that the thing itself disappears behind it. Not in the literal sense — the body may remain — but ontologically, existentially, spiritually: it ceases to matter. It becomes background noise.

We are trained, from birth, to fear what is unnamed.
But far more dangerous are the things that have been named wrong.
And we live among them.

Take a word like “collateral damage.”
What is it, really, but a ceremony of erasure?
A syntactic sleight of hand, in which civilian lives — women, children, whole apartment blocks — are linguistically evaporated. Not murdered. Not bombed. Not dismembered. Just… damaged. Collateral to something more important. As if human beings were packaging.

Or “enhanced interrogation.”
What a polite little veil. As if pain, when carefully administered and bureaucratically logged, loses its moral weight. As if it matters how you scream, or how long. Torture, but with a lanyard and a clearance badge.

Or — yes — “Suicide Service.”
A phrase so grotesquely efficient it almost slips past the ear. But stop and look: what is it saying? That death is a service. That despair is institutionalized. That there is an office — a room with a desk and a drawer full of names — where someone decides who should cease to be.

It doesn’t even hide.

And yet, it works — precisely because it names. It puts a label on the unthinkable. It gives it a logo. A workflow. A silence.

Naming, in the wrong hands, is not just distortion.
It is annihilation by absorption.

It allows horror to pass for order.
It allows injustice to wear a tie.
It allows violence to punch out at 5PM, then drive home to its family.

Naming-as-erasure is the logic of the age.
And the more euphemistic the name, the more violent the silence it generates.

Which is why I believe — still, despite it all — in naming rightly.
Even now.
Especially now.

To name something truly is to make it impossible to look away.
To call the thing what it is — and thus refuse the comfort of euphemism.

Because as long as they get to name, we do not get to see.
And if we do not see — we will not act.

So let me say it one more time, without hesitation and without veil:

The Suicide Service is not a name.
It is a crime, dressed as a noun.
A man with a cigar handed the future of a hundred million souls to a man with a mustache. True story.

June 18th, 2025
Excerpt from The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans—A Novel.

Romania — that fabled “mouth of heaven” ¹ God left behind on Earth, inconveniently nestled just a breath away from the gates of hell, where the smoke still curls from its scorched front porch.

After the Second World War, the fate of this country — like that of all future-former communist nations — was sealed in perhaps the most unceremonious and unhygienic way imaginable: on the corner of a napkin.

The date: October 9, 1944.

The place: the Kremlin.

It was late, but Stalin and Churchill were still at the table. The fate of the Balkans had been debated before — in corridors, in cables, in cautious language — but this was the night the conversation edged toward something final.

Seated across from one another — separated only by a table, a translator, a napkin, and a pencil — Churchill sensed that, at last, “the moment was apt for business.” So he leaned in and said, with British understatement and imperial casualness:
“Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans.”

Stalin perked up. Churchill continued, now drafting the arithmetic of empires:
“So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90% dominance in Romania, for us to have 90% of the say in Greece, and go 50–50 about Yugoslavia?”

One can almost hear the graphite scratching percentages onto the napkin — while, outside, the future of millions was reduced to fractions.

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
The very man who, during the war, proclaimed that “socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy — its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
The same statesman who believed that “the price of greatness is responsibility.”
Yes, that same Churchill — cigar in hand, wit sharpened by war — once reached for a scrap of paper and scribbled the future of Eastern Europe with disarming simplicity:
- Romania: USSR – 90%, Others – 10%
- Greece: Great Britain – 90%, Russia – 10%
- Yugoslavia: 50% – 50%
- Hungary: 50% – 50%
- Bulgaria: Russia – 75%, Others – 25%
Thus, in a moment of after-dinner diplomacy, a continent’s fate was penciled into percentages — history reduced to arithmetic, and the lives of millions, casually balanced on a napkin.

Churchill continues the story: “I pushed this across to Stalin, who had by then heard the translation. There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil, made a large tick on it, and passed it back to us.”

As you can imagine, those percentages were never honored. Stalin was, after all, Stalin. And the USSR was less a government than a gang of disagreeable men with an inflated sense of entitlement. From that premise, everything else follows: they took whatever they could reach — 100% of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania, Yugoslavia, Poland. And just to round things out, 100% of something called East Germany.

All these countries would soon disappear behind what Churchill famously called “the Iron Curtain.” With it came the gift that kept on taking: what he once described as the essence of socialism — “an equal sharing of misery.” And so it went. For the next forty-five years.

Then came 1953. Churchill received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The official motivation? “For his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”

Forgive me, but I feel compelled to say that again — with the healthy dose of doubt it deserves: “Defending exalted human values”?

Let me rephrase it in Romanian, because indignation is a native speaker: „Apărarea înălțătoarelor valori umane”?

It must have been the same year they gave Hirohito the Peace Prize, and the Chemistry Prize went to the Nutty Professor.
Because unless you add that kind of footnote, it’s hard to explain how Stalin ends up remembered as one of history’s bloodiest tyrants — while Churchill walks away with €1.16 million and a shiny Nobel medal for turning a quarter of Europe into a 45-year nightmare. Along with everyone trapped in it.

And since we’re on the subject of diplomatic euphemisms: the infamous napkin? It’s gone down in history as “the naughty document.” And that night between Churchill and Stalin? Officially remembered as “the Percentages Agreement.”

If language really does shape reality — and if Churchill really did win a Nobel Prize for Literature — then allow me a few editorial suggestions:

That meeting? Let’s call it “How to Ruin a Continent in Under Ten Minutes.”
And the napkin? “First Draft of a Very Long Misery.”

Still not convinced?

Try a simple thought experiment. Change the names.
Imagine it wasn’t Churchill and Stalin sitting at that table in 1944.
Imagine it was Hitler and Franco.
Same setup. Same translator. Same dirty napkin and half-dead pencil.
They meet in Berlin, on a cold October night, and decide — with the weariness of bureaucrats — to split the eastern third of a continent called Europe.
Hitler leans forward and says:
„Der Zeitpunkt war günstig für ein Unternehmen.”
(The moment was ripe for an enterprise.)

History, you’ll notice, has always had impeccable manners when describing its worst atrocities — especially when those atrocities came with cigars and cocktails.

A few years later, let’s say Hitler happens to write well. He recounts the meeting — same napkin, same tone — in German. Some generous critics call it brillante Redekunst.

And now imagine what happens next.

Two options remain:

Either we accept that Churchill was a politician clinging to a crumbling empire, and chose short-term prestige over long-term humanity — at the cost of a hundred million lives…

Or we give Hitler the Nobel Prize for Literature.
For, quote, “brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.” There’s a question that won’t let me sleep: Why did Churchill believe Greece deserved a better fate than Romania?

Maybe it was the Bosporus. Or the Dardanelles. Or the Suez Canal.
Or maybe it was the Bougainvillea.

Which raises another question:
Had Churchill known that those radiant vines were actually native to Brazil, would he have reconsidered and spared a thought for Romania’s alpine edelweiss instead?

To be fair, against Greece’s iconic white-and-blue palette, Bougainvillea really does put on a show.

And so it was that, while in Athens power was ceremoniously handed to General Nikolaos Plastiras — to lead a government from which communism had been neatly exorcised — in Bucharest, the handover came with darker terms, and no such ritual of cleansing.

Some say history moves in circles. Others, that it follows a line.
But for countries like Romania, history felt more like a spiral — tightening, descending, each loop darker than the last. All because, one night in Moscow, a man with a cigar handed the future of a hundred million souls to a man with a mustache.

Churchill once said, “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
What he failed to grasp was that Stalin didn’t give a damn about minds. Or Churchill.
Which is how we ended up — for the next 45 years and with over a million broken lives — being mind-fucked by our brothers from the East.
1. There’s a folk poem called „Miorița” — absolutely brilliant — that calls Romania “gura de rai” (the “mouth of heaven”). The original line is pure music: “Pe-un picior de plai, pe-o gură de rai…”
  Which roughly translates to:
  “On a foothill’s edge, at the heaven’s mouth”
  A divine opening, a poetic blessing. ↩︎
Did I tell you I met my true love? Her name is Dia and she is my subconscious.

June 17th, 2025

Excerpt from The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans—A Novel.

“You don’t want to leave.”

Of all those present, I was the only one heading toward the door. Which could only mean one thing: the remark was for me. I paused. Debated whether it was worth playing along. Curiosity — ever the saboteur — won. At the top of the staircase stood a figure uncannily similar to Bill Kaulitz in his Schrei-Scream phase. Which is precisely why I couldn’t, for the life of me, tell whether that piercing gaze belonged to a man or a woman.

So I said:

“Before you tell me why I don’t want to leave, let me make a confession. Ever since I first heard Schrei, I’ve known what you are. You’re not a person. You’re a syntactic error, Kaulitz. An amphiboly. I know — it sounds complex. But it’s actually simple. You even said it yourself: “Lasst sie wissen, wer ihr wirklich seid.”. Just… inside out. You follow?”

No reaction from the creature.

“Apparently not!”

I took a step up the stairs:

“What I mean is — most men amplify their masculinity. Most women, their femininity. But you? You’ve perfected ambiguity. You are so radically both that you’ve done something no one else has managed: You’re beautiful — as a man. You’re beautiful — as a woman. You’re too handsome and too gorgeous at the same fucking time. Which makes you a nightmare…”

I kept climbing:

“A linguistic nightmare. Because not knowing what you are forces me to say things like “Thou person!” Or, when I want to be polite: HeShe. Which is basically like being a unicorn that pisses supergravity. You unsettle the entire planet just by existing. You tracking? By your sheer presence, you blur boundaries that were set in place eons ago — when humanity, by divine decree, was split into two genders. Ever since then, everything we know — law, literature, liturgy — has followed suit. But because of you, Second-Wave Feminism will evaporate, gender stereotypes will crack like old statues, and phrases like “biology is destiny” or “you’re not born a woman, you become one” will sound like relics of a tired museum. Simone de Beauvoir will roll in her grave — that arch-priestess of abortion rights and armpit hair. Pronouns, chromosomes, aesthetic binaries — soon they’ll only survive in blonde jokes. Which makes you an X. An X… See? It’s already happening. I meant to say X-Men. But you’re not X-Men. You’re XMenYWomen. Or maybe an XYPerson. Some people bend fire. Others walk through walls. You bend grammar rules. You melt categories. You confuse the code. And in a flexional language —where gender is sewn into every suffix and article — you force me to live grammatically homeless.”

By the time I reached HeShe, I stopped. Beneath the theatrical weight of that makeup, one thing became unshakably clear.

I said, almost reverently:

“I’ve always wondered if the Phi Human exists. The 1.618 Being. And here you are. You are the one who translates the divine madness of the golden ratio into flesh. The length of your arms, the geometry of your shoulders, the slope of your cheekbones, the arc of your brow, the line — no, the equation — of your mouth and nose: A logarithmic spiral, incarnate. The golden section rendered in lymph and bone, the fever dream of mathematicians, architects, alchemists — and cosmetic surgeons. You are proof that the irrationality of a number can become a thing of unbearable beauty. A beauty that…”

And here, I paused. I was becoming Bruno Mars, if Bruno Mars had been a medieval mathematician with a lute.

“…that can ruin everything with a smudge of grunge eyeliner. We all love Nirvana. But on vinyl, not on your face. And the tattoos… It’s like catching someone mid-act while tiling the Great Pyramid of Giza.”

Those eyes —almond-shaped, depthless, black like myth — watched me without blinking. Studying me, as I studied them. And then, the man in me cracked:

“By all the gods… I want you to be a woman so badly.”

It was I who said it. And everything about her outfit dared me to believe I was right: A sleeveless, sheer black top revealing a tight bustier underneath. A pleated black skirt. Victorian mesh cuffs at the wrists, and a high, braided collar of black tulle — five or six centimeters tall, its ribbons vanishing beneath the waistband. Oversized boots, from which emerged black socks that ended just where the skirt began. Tattoos on every piece of skin left exposed — legs, arms, fingers…
On the Geometry of Time — Or Why a Line Will Never Be Enough

June 16th, 2025

Why do we keep saying time is linear? Or, when we want to sound mystical, that it’s circular?

Is that really all the geometry of consciousness allows?
Or is that just the shape we give to something we’ve never had the courage to actually see?

A line is obedient.
A circle is closed.
And somehow, between these two, we’re meant to place all the accidents, spirals, silences, traumas, recoveries, and half-remembered futures that make up a human life?

No. Just… no.

Time — real time — isn’t a clean stroke or a perfect loop. It coils. It repeats. It misfires. It returns not to the same place, but to the same feeling under a different light. It warps when you fall in love and collapses when you lose. It skips entire months when you’re bored and lingers for hours in the space between two seconds of pain.

So why wouldn’t it be a helix?
Not just a spiral, but a climbing spiral. A structure with rhythm and direction.
The kind of geometry that remembers.
Repetition with a twist. Memory with altitude.
Life doesn’t circle back — it rises. The same lesson, but harder. Or sweeter. Or quieter.

Or why wouldn’t it be a double helix?
Something that moves in pairs. One spiral for what you’ve lived, the other for what you’re still becoming.
Tied together like DNA, carrying the memory of wounds you’ve never suffered and the promise of futures that haven’t been earned.
Maybe that’s what time really is: a duet between memory and imagination, spiraling through your bloodstream.

Then again, what if time is stranger than that?
What if it’s a Möbius strip — a single surface, twisted so perfectly that inside becomes outside, then back again.
A surface with only one side and one edge.
Time, then, would be the collapse between cause and effect. Between “what happened to you” and “what you did with what happened.”
A continuous paradox where each moment carries the seed of its own inversion. You come back to the same point. But you’ve become someone else.

Or maybe — stay with me — maybe time is a torus.
A looping shape, like a doughnut.
But imagine the hole thickening or thinning depending on the intensity of a memory. Imagine that every loop back is charged with a different voltage.
In that shape, return is not stagnation — it’s reconfiguration.
The same moment, seen through a different version of you.
A reunion between past and present that alters both.

Still too simple?
Fine.

What if time is a Calabi–Yau manifold — a tangled, multidimensional cathedral from the depths of string theory?
The kind of shape that vibrates in six or seven directions at once, unseen, but shaping everything.
In this time, you’re not just living a life — you’re selecting from thousands of hidden geometries, from alternate selves that almost existed.
You’re not moving through time. You’re collapsing probabilities into presence.
Time as revelation. Time as emergence.

And if that’s still too polite a vision…
Then maybe time is just a strange attractor.
A wild, beautiful mess of trajectories from chaos theory — swirling around invisible centers that pull you whether you like it or not.
A dead parent. A lover you betrayed. A song you heard once and never forgot.
Not linear. Not even logical.
But never random.
You’re not following a path — you’re orbiting meaning.

Maybe it’s all of the above —
plus a few strange things we haven’t yet understood.
Like why some memories feel older than your body.
Why grief bends time backwards.
Why déjà vu feels like a message you almost received.
Why your dreams sometimes know things before you do.

Or maybe time is so personal, so stitched into the singularity of you,
that it carves its own geometry in secret.
A shape no diagram can hold.
Something that loops and stretches, collapses and combusts,
according to the logic of your becoming.

A timeline that doesn’t tell your story —
but is your story.

So no — time isn’t a line.
And no, it’s not a circle.
It’s something more unstable. A hybrid of memory, possibility, and recursion.
A geometry of becoming.

The only thing worse than misunderstanding time
is thinking you’ve understood it too soon.

Choose your metaphor carefully.
Because the shape you give time
is the shape your life will take.
Dear Ceaușescu, It’s a Boy: A Memo from the Dead, For the Not-Yet-Born

June 15th, 2025

Excerpt from The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans—A Novel.

July 28, 1978. The day Ion Mihai Pacepa — lieutenant general in the Securitate and close advisor to Ceaușescu — defected to the West.

It was, by all accounts, a geopolitical earthquake. The regime collapsed into panic. Death sentences were issued in absentia. Loyalists were interrogated, demoted, or disappeared. The Party press went into overdrive, fabricating outrage to mask the internal chaos.

While Romania was unraveling, I was being born.

And here’s the twist I still struggle to process:
Pacepa’s defection wasn’t the story. It was the cover story.

According to a voice recorded in 1975 on a magnetic tape, the entire spectacle — the betrayal, the panic, the Cold War theatrics — had a second purpose. Not just to humiliate Ceaușescu. But to protect the arrival of someone else entirely.

Me.

My birth, I was told, posed a risk that couldn’t be managed through normal channels. So they created a diversion large enough to eclipse it — a defection so loud it drowned out everything else. A political earthquake designed to hide a biological fact.

It sounds paranoid. It probably is. But it also fits perfectly into the logic of a state where paranoia wasn’t just a symptom — it was policy.

Which brings me to the strangest part.

This entire story — the real story — was delivered to me as a voice message.
Recorded three years before I was born.
Meant for me.
Intended to be heard decades later.

How that’s possible is a longer discussion. But for now, I’ll leave you with this:

What do you do when your first breath is buried under a mountain of classified documents? When your life begins in the shadow of a defection that reshaped a country? And when someone, somewhere, believed you were worth that kind of distraction?

I don’t have an answer.
Do you?
Four Reasons You Shouldn’t Invite Me to Dinner – How I Ended Up in the Dean’s Wife’s Mouth

June 14th, 2025

Excerpt from The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans—A Novel.

“What’s your opinion of the Faculty of Journalism?”
The man asking was none other than the Dean himself—Nicolas Coma, head of the Faculty of Journalism and Communication Studies.

“Not a great one,” I replied.

I knew Coma well. Symposiums, networking events, book launches, political roundtables, embassy cocktails. Not to mention my own seventeen years in print media.

He felt the need to clarify:
“Why?”

“How many outstanding journalists has this faculty actually produced?” I asked.

“In print or broadcast?”

“In either. Or both. You may even count Ava Glint, though it’s still unclear whether her work qualifies as journalism, performance art, or a very elaborate prank.”

We were seated at table number seven: myself, one empty chair, the Dean, his wife, and two other couples whose names I hadn’t bothered to learn.
Up to that point, I had made my disinterest in being there painfully obvious.
The drinks were terrible, and since I couldn’t drink my way out, I settled into sullenness like a familiar coat. I’d grunted through every attempted conversation—including his. But the question gave me permission to be unkind, so I thawed just enough to answer. He responded, with practiced mildness:
“Not that many.”

I studied him more closely then, wondering whether this man was worth the effort of a real exchange. Nicolas Coma was gentle, unremarkable—a man incapable of stirring passion in any living being, including himself. If I were generous, I might’ve described him as Master Oogway, the founder of the Valley of Peace. But the truth? He was more like a cocktail of Jeffrey Tambor, low-dose tranquilizers, and corporate ambient music. The soft creases on his face, the slackness of his jawline, the damp melancholy in his eyes—all told the story of a man condemned to always come second.

Officially, he was an only child. Unofficially, he was the second-born—the first died at birth. In school, he always sat in the second row, second desk. From first grade through twelfth, he was placed in Class B. At university, Group Two. He served as deputy of the student detachment. Understudy in every school play. Later, someone’s forgettable substitute teacher. A second-tier professor. Second husband to an extraordinarily average woman. Driver of second-hand cars. And at the height of his career—Dean.
Which, let’s be honest, is just Latin for “the one who answers to the Rector.”

A man like that doesn’t dream of a throne.
He pulls up a small chair, politely, and sits as close to it as he’s allowed.

The Dean had a perfectly oval skull, framed by a receding tonsure that, with each passing year, crept steadily toward the line of his ears.
In what I can only assume was an act of facial defiance, he had cultivated a soul patch — a choice that might’ve worked for Colin Farrell.
But in his case, it looked less like rebellion and more like the tragic aftermath of a failed attempt at oral sex.

He said, amused:
“I assume you have an explanation.”
“I do. Three, actually. Though I’m not entirely sure you’re worth the effort.”

In his place, for an answer like that, I would’ve stood up and smashed the chair I’d just risen from straight across my mouth.
“Indulge me”, he smiled.

I took a moment, then began:
— First of all, you’re running the only journalism school in the world whose acronym is physically unpronounceable. FJC… SJC… F… whatever.
Every time I try to say it out loud, my gums start bleeding. You’re a mortal threat to human speech and a direct insult to that delicate, overworked organ known as the tongue.

He tried to help, diplomatic:
— It’s all in the lips. Eff-Jay-See! Just tighten the corners, elongate the vowels — Efff! Jaaay! Then push the Cee! with a clean column of air from the trachea. Try it.
He puckered his lips with operatic determination and urged me to do the same. And though I admired the effort, I wasn’t about to join in.

— No need. I’ve already found a solution. Just rename the school “Edward Bernays.”
— The father of modern propaganda?
— And the spiritual founder of the very institution you now lead. Which brings me to my second point: Your most famous graduate is still that chain-smoking, soft-censored poet who went on to co-host a culinary podcast no one asked for. And he studied here back when journalism was officially classified as a sub-branch of political science — under the “Public Communication and Ideological Services” department.

— I see. And your third point?
— That the Agriculture School — Soil & Irrigation Division — probably produces more real journalists than your faculty does.

The Dean pulled his chair a few inches closer and asked, with a mix of defensiveness and genuine curiosity:
— Why?
— Why what?
— Why do you think that? What’s the problem with the faculty?

And for a moment, I honestly wondered how I had ended up giving a midnight lecture on institutional decay to the Dean of the Journalism School. Of course, I knew exactly how.
Two reasons.

First — the Dean wanted a second opinion. I’m sure I wasn’t the first to tell him this, just the most impolite.
Second — my parents and their lifelong inability to decline polite invitations from people they barely knew.
And since my father had come down with a flare-up of sciatica, I’d been sent to attend in his place — representing, apparently, the Jebeleanu family legacy.

Which only made things worse. Especially considering that the party I bailed on had better everything — including women who didn’t wear their ethics like a corset.

I looked at the Dean again.
Studied his face.
Then, after a pause just a few seconds longer than social norms permit, I said — in a tone calibrated somewhere between suppressed rage and polite contempt:

“Because your curriculum is still the same as it was in the 1960s: media history, ethics, and the First Amendment on repeat. What you produce at graduation are not journalists, but spin doctors, comms officers, media analysts for lobbying firms, political consultants who cite Noam Chomsky, and future members of the Federal Communications Commission.

Dean Coma gave an awkward smile. He shook his oval head once or twice, and the few defiant hairs dangling beneath his lower lip trembled like they, too, regretted the evening.

Staring somewhere past me, he muttered:
“I only started talking to you because you looked bored. I was hoping we could have a conversation that went absolutely nowhere — and use that as an excuse to leave early.”

“Then you picked the wrong question.”

“Or maybe you picked the wrong answer. Because now I feel oddly compelled to defend my honor.”

That’s when it came — a laugh thick as tar, brewed in the basement of some personal hell. Dry, low, and unmistakably feminine:
“Honor? What honor?”

I turned, startled, to see who had said it. Of course. Professor Dr. Chris Coma — head of the Communication Department, wife of the Dean.

“And if you do defend it”, she added, “I hope you use live ammunition.”

She took a slow glance around the table, shrugged like she was throwing off an invisible shawl, and added:
“What? Am I not allowed to dream a little? We’re at a wedding, after all — the sacred temple where illusions wear tuxedos, drink overpriced wine, dance till dawn, and then wake up next to reality for the next thirty years.”

If he was a good man, she was good by absolutely no recognizable standard.
Once, she failed an entire class just for daring to exist while she was two hours late to an exam. Dean Coma, either hard of hearing or chronically conflict-averse, acted as if his wife hadn’t said a word. He leaned in a bit more, undeterred.

“You studied Computer Science, didn’t you?

Surprised he still wanted to talk, I tilted my head toward his wife, hoping to ask — without actually asking — whether he’d felt that same tidal wave of malice. But he pressed on.

“So what made you switch to journalism?”

“My future classmates. I’d heard they were gorgeous and emotionally unstable. And the ones in TV? Thanks to their diction training, they had oral technique so refined they could get a “Mi-Mo-Ma! Mi-Mo-Ma!” out of a paraplegic.”

“You’re joking.”

“Never about sex. That was my way of saying: intentionally or not, you’ve just shoved me headfirst into your wife’s mouth — and I’d rather not go in there even metaphorically.”

“I was only trying to understand where you think I went wrong.”

The truth was, I’d tried to steer the conversation toward the least respectable regions of anatomy, because somehow, that felt more dignified than explaining where his career had derailed.

And yet, to my astonishment, neither my filth nor his wife’s venom seemed to deter him in the slightest. His passion, remarkably, remained intact.

“I’ve heard all your courses begin with a warning: “Do not confuse journalistic genres.” Do you honestly believe a generation raised on memes, disinformation campaigns, and content that vanishes after eight hours can be inspired by ultimatums and rulebooks? Telling students “a news article is different from a commentary” doesn’t prove your discipline—it proves your irrelevance. It announces, in clinical tones, that you haven’t had a meaningful conversation with the zeitgeist in over two decades.”

Was I doing myself any favors by wasting saliva on this kind of exchange?
Probably not. But cruelty has its own metabolism. So I imagined replacing every academic phrase in my monologue with the filthiest insult I could summon. And I secretly hoped Dean Coma could hear the words behind the words.

“Hyper-correctness is exhausting. And entirely unsuited for a generation whose only constant is fluidity—stylistic, professional, sexual. If you ask me, it would be far more useful to tell these aspiring journalists just one thing: Restlessness is fertile.”

And while my spoken language grew more academic—layered with references to intertextuality and the politics of discourse—my inner monologue boiled over. Saucepans of invective clanged in my skull. “Baro, no matter what I say or what worn-out tricks you pull, you’re still producing mic’d-up airheads and dudes who think investigative journalism means doomscrolling Facebook in their underwear. Look at what you’ve done to the press: you’ve filled it with functional illiterates and recycled TikTok jokes. Your words have no blood. They’re broth. And not even a dying man would sip from that.” But I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I pressed on—calm, articulate, surgical.

“You should be encouraging confusion. Let them mix forms, blur lines, get disoriented—at least for a while. The world is shifting, and the writing that reflects it has to shift too. While you were busy clinging to your textbook definitions, entire new forms of journalism emerged: Comic journalism. Data journalism. YouTube-native formats. Amateur-driven reporting. Gonzo. Convergent. Algorithm-assisted longform. Interactive storytelling. ChatGPT. Sora. Journalism made by and for digital hybrids.”

And as my mind unraveled in a storm of Romani, Romanian, and internal profanity, I desperately wished Coma could understand what I already knew:
We were standing at the edge of a dead institution.

“Even if the smartest people on Earth — Einstein, Tesla, take your pick — had studied journalism at Eduard Bernays, they’d still graduate incapable of stringing together two sentences that feel alive. Meanwhile, the world has moved on. We now have VR journalism. Meme-driven narratives. TikTok-based reporting. Collaborative work between hackers, docu-influencers, and — yes — cats. There’s even something called slow journalism, designed for those who want to change the world to the sound of ambient jazz. And that’s the real issue: The kind of journalism still taught at Eduard Bernays has nothing — absolutely nothing — to do with how people live, speak, or search for truth today.”

“And you think you could do it better?”

It was the Dean’s wife again. I turned toward her and looked at her with a kind of elegant hatred—the kind you might reserve for someone who’s wrong about everything, yet still dares to be loud.

The rage she was barely containing had turned her into a live induction coil:
her short, straight hair stood up at unnatural angles, and her eyes glinted with a metallic fury that suggested both electricity and punishment. For a brief moment, I flirted with the idea of responding. But I knew better. Experience had taught me: a woman that angry is no longer a woman—she’s a deity. The goddess of male impotence. And her curses are capable of turning your intimate anatomy into a radioactive wasteland. So I chose politeness instead. I turned my back to her—gracefully, I thought—and addressed the Dean:

“It seems it’s already too late. I’ve ended up inside your esteemed wife’s mouth. And I think we can both agree: it’s entirely your fault.”

Dean Coma, once again, behaved as though he were either impervious to his wife’s outbursts, or permanently blind to my disgustingly obvious sexual innuendo. He smiled, serene as ever, and said:

“I actually like Chris’s idea. What do you think? Would you be interested in teaching?”

I felt the need to clarify:

“Professor Coma’s suggestion was ironic. A mixture of frustration, condescension, and a faint urge to emasculate me.”

“Mine isn’t”, he said.

“There’s a word—obscure, but painfully precise—for moments like this: pusillanimity. It sounds made-up, I know. Like a spell from a Latin grammar book. But it’s real. And it describes something very specific: that uniquely masculine paralysis triggered by a woman mid-meltdown. In those moments, any man with even the faintest survival instinct knows: the smartest response is to slightly soil his underwear. Not out of fear—but as a tactical maneuver. Because nothing defuses divine feminine wrath quite like the scent of moral surrender.”

That revolting cocktail of fear and shame is, paradoxically, the only thing that might calm her down.

“I’m sure Chris was joking”, he added, weakly.

We both turned to look at Chris Coma. For several seconds, neither of us said a word. Eventually, the Dean had to concede—with a subtle, defeated nod—that I was right. Chris Coma, meanwhile, was becoming visibly deformed by hatred. She tried to speak, but what came out was a guttural animal whine. Then she leaned in and hissed at me, in falsetto:

“Jokes! The refuge of weak minds!”

“In my case, I replied, jokes are the intellectual equivalent of “play dead.” Do they work?”

She turned to her husband, voice trembling:

“Darling, what you’re doing now is cruel. You don’t praise a cripple’s deformity. You don’t let… let this pusi—pusila—pusillan… ugh—this spineless thing walk into our faculty and teach. Can’t you see it yet? The man’s vanity is metastasized. If we let him in, he’ll destroy us.”

Unexpectedly, her fury had driven out my own.

I turned to her and said, calmly:

“Teaching journalism better than you isn’t difficult. And I’ll tell you why—starting with the arrogance you just accused me of. Arrogance, etymologically, is the sister of madness. And the defining condition of madness is honesty. So yes—I’ll gladly play the fool. I’ll be the one to bring you all the bad news. Do you know how many of my newsroom colleagues studied journalism? Not a single one. And of the thousands of working journalists I’ve met, barely five percent hold a degree in the field. I won’t ask you to guess which group performs better. Because the debate about the relevance of journalism schools is, at this point, irrelevant. The values that matter in this profession can’t be taught within your walls. Because they aren’t “values” in the academic sense. They’re instincts. Dispositions. Fault lines. The journalism I practice rests on four principles: rebellion, irreverence, the articulation of meaning, and a vocation for the absurd.”

I paused and looked at the Dean—silently asking permission to go on.
After all, he was the one who’d have to sleep tonight with his testicles in a jar. He smiled back, unbothered. As if survival instinct had never been part of his emotional vocabulary. Maybe that was his superpower.

I smiled too, and continued:

“I need rebellion. Because peaceful people can’t do journalism. You don’t hand an investigation to someone who’s made peace with the world. Journalism, before anything else, is a state of mind. And you won’t find it in people who dream of opening wellness retreats in Vermont or believe beekeeping is a spiritual path. We’re called to bear witness to the most spectacular failures of the human species. Which means I need someone capable of falling in love with collapse. Someone who understands the grandeur of disappointment. In short: someone with a very particular kind of psychological pathology. Because our internal wiring is… different. Animated by the absurdity of the present, we possess a kind of lost innocence. Not irretrievably lost—just misplaced. A longing for the absolute—faded, but not dead. A wounded idealism—not yet fatal. And our rebellion feeds on those utopian embers. Now let me make a leap—illicit both logically and theologically—and say this: Rebellion is to the journalist what hesychia is to the monk. If the monk knows that union with the Absolute can only emerge from stillness, then the journalist knows that truth only reveals itself in neurosis. The monk, disillusioned with the world, climbs inward toward silence. The journalist, enchanted by that same world, descends—gleefully—into its noise. And oh, how much noise there is. So many reasons to rejoice in humanity’s dysfunction: gluttony, planetary-scale lust, politics, greed, hatred dressed as virtue, and the most absurd of all: pride. And because the madness of the present moment is, in its own way, spiritually fertile—always demanding reflection—journalistic thinking has finally matured enough to speak of anisyhia: The craft of unrest. The art of revolt. The emerging humanism of unease. Fortunately, anisyhia can be taught. And here’s where it starts: When the inner conditions are right—when your spiritual pathology aligns with the demands of the craft—you begin to understand something few ever articulate: Most people live with a poorly phrased sense of disappointment. They meet crisis with a tired “meh,” panic with a hollow “oh nooo,” and disguise confusion with a politeness so automatic it renders them abstract, verbose, and slightly unreal.”

I listened to my own voice as if watching a B-movie—detached, mildly appalled—and yet, I pressed on:

“Second: Irreverence. Often mistaken for rudeness. But true irreverence is something else entirely. It’s the science of justified doubt. The precise incision of critical thought. And a particular kind of topographical literacy—knowing where truth hides and how to unearth it. Irreverence teaches you the distance between the right question and the honest answer. It shows how to be informed, provocative, and composed—simultaneously. It’s how you trace the ever-shifting boundaries between boldness and decorum. I won’t pretend irreverence “serves the good.” That kind of idealism is too fragile to survive a newsroom. But I will say this: Our investigations are a form of justice. And in many cases, more persistent than any judicial system. We are the hardest-working court of public record—relentless, unsalaried, and tragically underdressed. So yes, irreverence is fertile. Socially necessary. It sanitizes politics, clarifies relationships, and holds institutions accountable to the people they’re meant to serve.”

I glanced at my audience. Professor Coma looked flushed, struggling to keep pace. The Dean, meanwhile, radiated a strange serenity—as if nothing could disrupt his interior fog.

“Third: Point of view. They say understanding is subjective, intelligence objective. But I believe only a mediocre intelligence is truly objective. In any serious ontology of journalism, the human being is the point of view. That’s why the best journalists are unapologetically subjective. They write from deep personal investment. They think from where they stand. And the paradox of subjectivity is this: The more authentic it is, the more universally it resonates. That’s how opinion becomes literature. That’s how truth survives in a sentence that begins, unapologetically, with “I believe.” I’ll go further: Personality—that infinite column of self—is both axis mundi and lens. It becomes the gravitational center of meaning. Everything I know arranges itself around it, until I myself become the system of reference. Humanity became the dominant species the moment it developed its first true subjective relationship with itself. And we reaffirm that primacy every time we describe the world—not from nowhere—but from exactly where we are. That’s how anatomical singularity becomes authentic voice. And for me, that’s journalism’s true currency: Writers who validate themselves through a point of view. Especially those who live off what they write.”

I paused.

“And finally… the vocation of the absurd. We live in an unbelievable country. And absurdity is our most renewable resource. We glorify incompetence. We treasure the half-finished. We specialize in bureaucratic dead ends and ceremonial nonsense. Sometimes I think this country is trying to eat itself. And I’ve come to suspect that some nations—ours included—were never meant to be modern. Our true form may be rural. Not out of regression, but reconciliation. A return to villages where life is slower, truer, wrapped in an unhurried spirituality.”

I took a breath.

“Which brings me back to me. And the way I do journalism. The first question I ask anyone who says they want to become a journalist isn’t about education. That would be like asking why they were born on a Tuesday. It’s a useless question. I want to know how they relate to mornings. Whether they’re scared of converting kilometers to miles. Whether they’ve ever used the verb to gorgonize or the noun pogonotrophy.”

After a pause, I raised both hands in mock surrender:

“You were hoping for a boring conversation that might send us all home early. I hope I’ve lived up to your expectations—and delivered exactly the level of disappointment you were hoping for.
The Night A Dead Philosopher Interviewed me in Prague. Part TWO

June 12th, 2025

Excerpt from The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans—A Novel.

Scene: A dimly lit café in Prague. Midnight. I – The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans – am seated across from a philosopher who died sometime between two revolutions. The ash in his glass doesn’t move. The clock above the bar hasn’t ticked in years. Smoke lingers. He looks at me with the kind of gaze only the dead can sustain—steady and unsentimental.

And then he asks: “Why, oh why, did you become a journalist?”

I told him: Because you’ve been dead a long time now, I can go with the long answer. Right? Good. Then here it is—the continuation of that long, long version.

„Allow me a brief rhetorical pause before posing what may very well be the most non-rhetorical question you’ve ever tripped over. A question so convoluted, so serenely treacherous, it risks dislocating the entire scaffolding of language built to contain it.

This is the apophatic sublime of inquiry—the kind of paradox that doesn’t merely trouble logic, but seduces it into self-cancellation.

And here it comes. The question-of-all-questions. The cursed jewel at the heart of epistemology:

Is there anything more deceptive than a lie?
Or, more poetically:
Can untruth be more untrue than itself?

Strangely—the answer is yes.
It happens the moment untruth learns to tell a story.

A simple lie is just that: crude, limited, operational.
But once wrapped in narrative, it evolves—becoming liquid, persuasive, dangerously alive.

Neil Gaiman once said that stories are lies that help us see the truth.
Stephen King followed suit, suggesting fiction is truth buried within a lie.
Both are right. And yet, neither goes far enough.

But the deeper truth is this: fiction is not merely a lie dressed up in insight—it is a lie transformed into an instrument of seduction. Fictions are lies turbocharged by imagination, engineered to bypass our critical faculties and reveal, with unsettling clarity, that we were not born with the “baloney detection kit” Carl Sagan warned we’d need. And in the absence of such discernment, the human brain requires shockingly little to transfigure fiction into something else. Into anything else. Into collective hysteria. Into political manifestos and disinformation campaigns. Into animated films and bureaucratic rituals like the Ministry of Propaganda. Into mass suicide pacts. Into Scientology. Into amusement parks. Into space programs. Into entire nations—like North Korea.

All born from stories. All meticulously constructed by untruths pretending to be profound. But perhaps that’s the true miracle of fiction: not that we believe it, but that we need to.

I return to the idea that education is the slaughterhouse of identity—and I invite you to follow that thought to its most radical conclusion.

Here’s how we do that:

If, like the possessed man of Gadara, the “I” is a legion of “many others,” then culture deserves our rejection. Education ought to be exorcised—ripped from ourselves and from others. And civilization? Cast out of our lives altogether.

Suddenly, this no longer sounds like a distant abstraction, does it?
It’s not just another over-intellectualized theory of culture.
It’s become a political program.

A manifesto in three points.
Short enough to fit on a cardboard sign.
Catchy enough to ignite a street movement.

And history has shown us how quickly that can happen.
Stories become doctrines.
Words become weapons.
People become missionaries of ignorance.

All it takes is the right amount of hate—or just the right amount of love.
Turn the idea into a crisis of conscience, for yourself and for others.
Push it to the edge of social delirium.
And suddenly, a passing thought becomes a reality.

There’s a little Trotsky in each of us—an inner agitator, fueled by the violence of language, ready to preach Anti-Cultureto anyone who will listen.

If you’re quiet, you can hear him.

He’s the voice that says:

“Culture is the true assassin of authenticity.
The daimon of genius is the demon of identity.
Untruth entered the world disguised as a story—just like all of humanity’s great delusions:
‘Once upon a time, in a land forgotten by time,
on one of the darkest nights
the earth had ever known,
a child was born…’”

And the power of that story to distort truth has only grown—right alongside our gift for fiction.

“That night, as the fire flickered low
and the wind whispered in an unknown tongue,
someone—or something—knocked at the door…”

Storytellers are master illusionists—experts in seduction.
Stories are incantations.
Libraries are vast collections of flattering hallucinations.

Run from those who possess the gift of narrative.
Beware the novels said to “change your life.”

We blame politics for trying to manipulate our choices—
but the truth is, the person who teaches a child to read shapes their fate more profoundly than Donald Trump ever could.

And within that one well-told story, you can convince people to burn libraries and museums.
To attack anyone with a trace of intellect.

Because that is the power of fiction, when it’s told just right.

In a commercial campaign, it can convince you to drink Coca-Cola—even if you’ve always preferred Pepsi.
In an ideology, it can make you vote Democrat—even if your family has been staunchly Republican for generations.
In a slogan, it can draw you into the streets—shoulder to shoulder with millions.
In a film, it can move you to tears for people who never existed.
In a political speech, it can make you love the very person who despises you.
In a short story, it can make you feel guilty for acts you never committed.
In a song, it can tempt you toward forbidden things you swore you’d never try.
In a religious doctrine, it can lead you to salvation—or to bloodshed.

Perhaps one of the lesser-known examples of this kind of instantaneous metanoia appears in Network, the film written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet.
It’s the moment when Howard Beale is transformed—from an unhinged critic of capitalism into a high priest of corporate transcendence—through nothing more than a story, delivered in these words:

“Our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.”

How was such a conversion possible?

I can answer with a single word—one I’ve had to invent:

narrative-induced cognitive decline.

Why?

Because—and this might be the shortest unified theory of narrative I can offer—stories make us stupid.
And when I say stupid, I mean the kind of stupid we’ll never want to speak of again. The unspeakable kind.

But how exactly does this “narrative-induced cognitive decline” happen?

Let’s return to seriousness. To science.

Stories do not address the neocortex.
They bypass it entirely—and go straight for the glands of credulity.

That’s why, the moment we sense that someone is about to tell us a story, our IQ begins to drop—yes, even when we ourselves are the ones telling it.

And so, even as our lives flirt with disaster, even as our days unravel, even as we drift steadily toward breakdown—we continue to believe that our destiny carries the architecture of myth:
a hero’s journey, a cosmic battle between good and evil, or a long, noble struggle toward becoming our true selves.

And the story always begins the same way:

“One day…”

One day, I will rise.
One day, the role destiny has reserved for me will become clear, and I’ll finally become the protagonist of my own life.
One day, the chaos will recede, swallowed by its own noise, and confusion will cohere into meaning.
One day, the world will realize I was made of the same stuff as legends…

Let me tell you something: only a total lack of discernment could be this poetic. This persuasive. This cynical.

And with each day we repeat the story, we become more like the story—and less like ourselves.
Less real.
Less us.

Time as a Line (1D) — The Industrial Myth of Forward

Time as a Page (2D) — The Garden of Bifurcations

Time as a Body (3D) — The Architecture of Echo

So How Does It Feel, This Tridimensional Time?

Examples? Fiction’s Been Trying to Tell Us for Years.

What Does This Mean?