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.