but desperation can crystallize

“BUT DESPERATION CAN CRYSTALLIZE. It’s like amber or obsidian, like those obsidian arrowheads from the Yucatan. It hardens and somehow becomes more bearable, natural.”

“And Eisenhower hated Fitzgerald. And the hatred was mutual. Cold cold bright days again. Work week, work, work. But, yes, I’ll do it. For the money.”

“And waving to [name omitted] at night. It’s like clutching to debris from the sinking Titanic. You just cling to it and cling to it. It provides you with a feeling of safety. Sort of.”

“I just sort of glued myself to her after that. She was tired though and left wearing a little black Bolt helmet. She went home to sleep. Mine ja maga uinakut, I told her. Go and take a nap. And I hugged her and it was nice.”

“Then I willed myself out into the countryside. I was thinking of her, all silver and blue, a girl who swims through life like a tropical fish. At least it is an honest feeling, a true feeling. At least I know that honesty and truth still exist, just as she exists. And if I could tell her anything, I would say, I would choose you and only you, and even if you are really so short, for me you are just right, paras.”

“And in that dream I was waiting for a train to Philadelphia beside [name omitted] who kept telling me that I was annoying her. Then I was in a wooden ruin, which turned into a sinking ship. I was talking about 21 Jump Street with Johnny Depp and Richard Grieco and Peter Deluise. Then I took the subway into the office in New York, arriving at noon. My editor scolded me for being late. [Name omitted] was there, but was preparing to leave work, but she asked me to collect her things. There was a kind of gauze or white sheet, and I folded everything up for her.”

“I ran to the theatre, diving for cover. Horrors of Mariupol, murder. I looked out into the distance and could see the billowing red Oppenheimer clouds. Orange with abundant death. I ran to the theatre, taking shelter. Some buildings had been hit. There were glass windows, and blue leaking water. There were anti-aircraft gunners but it was no use. People, blues, ballooning, drifting. Groceries blown all over the streets. Run to the theatre, get in the theatre!”

“[Name omitted] was then elected president of Finland, succeeding Sauli Niinistö. She went to Tallinn to accompany an art exhibition or installation, but was protected by her bodyguards. I wanted to see her, but was nervous. We would meet at Kumu. I agreed we could talk about her new flower book. Along the way, several people stopped me to ask for directions around Tallinn. But Tallinn had changed. It was like Stockholm. It was set out on islands, with bridges everywhere …”

Excerpts from my journal, written April 2023 – February 2024

the airport and kermit’s birthday

WE WERE SOMEWHERE in the Far East. At least it felt that way because I knew that the flight home was going to be a long one. Getting to the airport was an ordeal. You had to go down to the port and take a ship across the harbor. It was easier to land planes on that side, between the mountains. These were large ferries that made the voyage every 20 minutes. Much of the transport time involved checking and loading passengers. We were late though because on our way to the port, our little dinghy got stuck in the swamps. It was me, two of my daughters, and Kermit Haas, the world famous Estonian cubist painter. When we got to the port, my eldest made it aboard the ship and proceeded to the plane, but the youngest and I stayed behind, in part because I got to talking to Gunna and one of her girlfriends there. They were dressed as if they were about to go out to some nightclub. We agreed to meet again.

If there would ever be an again.

But we missed the next ferry to the airport, and decided not to proceed on our journey. Instead, Kermit drove us around the harbor to his house, where there had been planned for him a surprise birthday party. Somehow this part of the area looked quite like the opposite shore of Viljandi Lake, and there was even snow on the ground. Some farmers were out tending to rusty old machines in their snowy farmers’ fields. The house was full of people. I was surprised to see Linnéa was there. She was a friend of Kermit’s as I understood it. She was dressed in a white blouse and her blonde hair hung about her shoulders. She was filming the entire event with her phone, broadcasting it live via multiple Instagram accounts. As usual, she ignored me. I kept looking in her direction, hoping she might make eye contact, but there was just blackness in those eyes. It was not only that she was ignoring me. It was as if I didn’t exist.

Toward the end of the party, an African fellow who worked at Wolt showed up. He was dressed in his delivery clothes. He went over to Linnéa and put his arm around her, and I realized they were together. The Wolt delivery man and Linnéa left the party together, but at the last moment, she looked in my direction. This time I could see it in her eyes that she recognized me, albeit faintly. The two of them left. The rest of the guests were hoisting Kermit Haas in the air.

There were balloons floating up everywhere.

rory and maimu

RORY AND MAIMU were two local poets. One day, they came to town when it was all iced over. There had been about six weeks of continuous snowfall, with temperatures plunging to about 20 below, and when the thaw came at the cusp of February, it flooded the streets. When it dipped below zero again, the streets froze over, meaning that the entire town was covered in ice. Ever-long blocks of white and purple. You had to skate from house to house. You couldn’t even walk. And this is how Rory and Maimu and I wound up skating over to the Park Hotel.

Rory was wearing his sweater, tied loosely around his neck, and Maimu had her braid pulled up on one side. They were talented skaters. They were talented poets. Their books had been dipping into the Top 10 and out of it all winter long. They went zooming down Koidu Street, pass the little Coop market and the Green House Café, then turned up Tartu Street. I skated behind them, but when I got to the intersection, a truck was passing and I just couldn’t stop. The truck barely missed me, and I skated on. At Oru Street, it was the same, and I watched as a woman in a red car drove headfirst into a snow pile just to avoid me. I waved and apologized.

There was an old Victorian mansion in the park, one that I had never seen before. It was where the statue of Köler the painter is, or was. It was all painted gray, and the the paint on the façade was peeling off. When I got there, a girl took me by the hand. She said that Rory and Maimu had gone inside for some tea. They were going to write some poetry together. The girl said they were planning to renovate the house and yard, once the EU money came through.

no love in my kitchen

CELESTE CAME INTO the kitchen with her child. She was wearing a long black coat, and her child sat in the corner playing with some toys. I was sleeping there in my cot. It was only big enough for one person, and my feet dangled off the end. She walked by me and looked down, and then she stopped and sat next to me. “But why are you waiting for me?” she asked. “It has been so many years. This has been uncomfortable. It’s tormenting me. It’s tormenting you.”

Can’t you just let go of me and of this thing?

I sat up. “No,” I said. “For me, you will always be Woman Number One. You will always be first place in my heart. You occupy the first spot. I have tried in so many ways to get you out of there, but you are stuck there, for good it seems. So there’s no sense in trying to dislodge you from my heart, because it just won’t work. Believe me, Celeste, I’ve tried. This is just how it is.”

Celeste looked troubled for a moment, but then she curled up beside me and she hugged me. “See,” I said. “It’s really not so bad. It’s just love. How could love ever be bad?” Just then, an old woman came out of the kitchen. She had long white hair and was dressed in her food preparation clothes, a white shirt and pants. The old woman said, “You two better knock it off. There’s no love in my kitchen!” I turned over and said to the old woman, “You better stop, lady. I like old, saucy women. If you don’t go back in that kitchen, you’ll be the next one in my cot.”

the end of the approach

FIRST ABOVE GERMANY. Fluffy foamy carpets, white, and between them rolling hills or knolls, nubs, crests, with little motherboard looking settlements below, and lines of wind turbines churning. The mind ping-pongs, skirting memories, realities. The clouds turn to a frosty desert, layered upon other deserts. You think of her dreamy eyes that can give you a thousand blisses. You think of other people and then you think of yourself, a change in focus.

Below is nothing, not a road, not a corner, not a coast, or a line of white trees. The sea seems endless. The clouds absorb the orange and pink from that slowly-slipping January sunset. There is an almost fascinating rainbow glow. Then rolls of milk white that crest like sugary whipped cream. The clouds suddenly look gray and somehow cold. They are lower here, lying in a sort of cloud valley beyond. Big gray hunks of gray coldness drifting, almost like that shattered ice in the Gulf of Finland. No signs of civilization, no planes, no tiny houses, no little glowing lights below. It feels as if we are getting closer to the North Pole. Maybe we passed it?

Then, for a while, nothing, just purple. White clouds spin beyond. They look like French crullers. They are arranged, moving in gentle circles, like gears. Bigger clouds drift in, chunky and heavy, like fists. The longest descent ever. The clouds are so low here that they drift around the tops of houses. The color is almost navy blue fading into gray, an almost depthless bleak fog. The houses are faint and gold, like fire embers. By the time we finally dip below the cloud cover, I can read the signs on the buildings. I can see the icy lunar surface of the lake.

This is the end of the approach.

women’s dormitory

I WAS STANDING outside a large house. It was almost like a university dormitory and I have no idea how I got there. It was so dark out that I couldn’t really make out the structure of the building either, but it seemed to be vast, rectangular, and have many windows. I had a small satchel full of coconuts with me and a machete. Don’t ask me how these came into my possession. My back was to the building, and I cut one of the coconuts open, and lifted it to drink its sweet water. Supposedly, this stuff is the healing elixir lifesource itself. Drink enough and you will be replenished. Instead, a kind of algal green slime poured forth. I let it run into the snow and could see the snow turn green. Fermented, I thought. Simply undrinkable.

From a basement level window, I could see steam puffing out, and when I peeked inside, I immediately saw a nude young woman. I stepped back, still holding my machete and coconuts, not wanting to get caught peeking, but then glanced through the window once more, and saw there were actually two women in there. One of them was straddling the other, and she was moaning. “Yes, yes, just like that,” she said. Maybe this was an all-woman’s dorm? I tried not to listen, but could not help but keep one ear focused. Why did these things keep happening to me? It’s not like I went around searching for showering lesbians. They found me all the same.

I pulled another coconut from my satchel and hacked off its top with my blade. To my surprise, it was actually two coconuts that had grown together, a kind of double-barrelled coconut, with two channels. The water was warm, sticky, sweet, refreshing, everything that coconut water was supposed to be and more. After draining both channels, I felt fully restored, and put the coconut in my bag for later consumption. The showering co-eds were still moaning downstairs, but I walked around the building, showed my pass, and went inside.

Down one hallway, I noticed stairs that led up to a computer lab. The room was dark, but all of the computer monitors were on. Esmeralda was sitting there, squinting at the screen. She was smiling. Esmeralda looked happy. Her brown hair was tied up in a bun, and she was wearing that dress she used to wear when she worked at the café. I thought she looked beautiful, with that special slope of her eyes. She really was such a beautiful girl. I didn’t want to disturb her. Esmeralda looked so happy sitting alone. Maybe someone else had sent her a love letter.

the conjurer

SOME KIND OF GURU or shaman came to these shores and so we set about arranging an event to host him. This conjurer from Jaipur was booked for an evening at Helsinki’s Royal Sibelius Hall. Petra, my wife, played an important role in organizing the conjurer’s airfare, found him a place to stay, made sure his dressing room was outfitted with Ravi Shankar records and mounds of rice and chana masala. My job was simple enough, to make sure the concessions operated smoothly, but of course I botched this too, like everything I touch, and the price list wasn’t posted properly and a fist fight broke out over the sweet gulab jamun.

Petra was annoyed. “I give you one little thing to organize and you mess that up too! No wonder I’m divorced you!” I apologized and slinked away, but started to question things. Why was I always apologizing to people who had hurt me and humiliated me? Was there a limit? It was shameful to experience. But there was a time before them all, before all of this. I had been a person then too. Psychological terror. It had scarred me, but I was still there, beneath it all.

Outside people gathered after the conjurer’s talk. A tango group had been commissioned and began to play the square in front of the Royal Sibelius. El Scorcho, the Chilean guitarist, was there, with some friends. They began to dance the tango. Petra also began to move to the music. She was standing right next to me. Did she want to reconcile? Did she even want to dance? Of course not. A few minutes later, her date arrived. He was tall and pale and all dressed in black, with a cowboy hat to top it off. She said he was from the countryside. His name was Tex. Petra and Tex disappeared into the crowd and began to tango, tango away.

Then the wind picked up. It was a strong gust. I tried to hold onto the iron fence outside the hall, but it was no use. I began to drift away toward the head of the Esplanaadi. It was here where I had met Petra, years ago when we were younger. That was where it all began, by that fountain right there. And this is how it ended. Soon I was over the Swedish Theatre. I tried to move in some direction, maybe I could float over to the Eira neighborhood? It was no use. I was at the wind’s mercy. I was tired of people anyway. I was tired of the evil of the human heart. It seemed every heart around me was poisoned. They went to fists over Indian sweets.

not a single soul

THE WEATHER WAS WARM but overcast, so I decided to take a bike ride through the Old Town. I got as far as the Town Hall Square, but didn’t see anyone, not a single soul. The Christmas market had been dismantled, and there were shipping pallets stacked up on the street corners. A few pigeons pecked about, but there were no people there. Not one person. All of the shops and restaurants were shut, as were the beer halls, puppet theatres, and amber dealers. Everything was closed, locked up tight. Even the Depeche Mode bar. I was mystified.

I rode my bike up toward the train station after that. This was the street called Nunne, but it looked different. Some hipster cafes were open, and chairs and tables were scattered across the street, but there was nobody seated in them. All of the empty chairs made it hard to pass by. But that wasn’t the only thing that was off. At the end of Nunne Street, I saw that there was now a canal separating the Old Town from the Baltic Station. There had always been a pond there at the foot of Toompea, called the Snelli Tiik, but this had flooded over and expanded.

The canal was quite wide and deep.

“A few elevated wooden platforms had been erected across the canal, but these were almost flooded over, with all of the runoff from the melting snow. The wood was also coming apart from the regular wear and tear. I was reminded of an article I once read written by Jaak Juske, about how there used to be a canal in the middle of Tallinn, but that they had filled it in sometime in the middle of the 1930s. I walked my bike across one of the bridges alone. Halfway across, I noticed that one of my tires was flat and I decided to pump it right there — I had a bike pump in my bag — but a pedestrian behind me, a blonde woman with a bunch of shopping bags, was annoyed with me. “Do you mind?” she said in Estonian. “You’re in the way. Tule eest!”

“Tule eest, yourself lady,” I y and continued pumping away. “Wait, you’re the only person I have seen all day. Where is everyone else?” I said. “There’s a big sale on at Viru Keskus,” she replied. “Major discounts in all the outlet stores, plus you can get a good deal at the new restaurants!”

The closer she got to me, the lower the canal platform sank. Finally, with the weight of all those shopping bags, the canal bridge collapsed into the green waters. The blonde shopper swirled in the rapids. I could see her outstretched arm and the bags from Zara and Sportland.

Then she was gone.

I swam briskly to the other side, pulling my bicycle across with me. The pump went floating by and I grabbed that too. Then I got up on the other bank of the canal, finished pumping my tires, and cycled away. I needed to make that last train to Viljandi. It would be leaving soon.

twenty-three

TWENTY-THREE was a productive year. I wrote two or three books, if you count the material generated for this site as future book material. There were diverse stories, some of them articles, others observations, others dream fiction. The top five most-read stories of the whole year were:

“Memoirs of an Invisible Man,” published 19 August 2023. This piece was published in the magazine Edasi under a different title. This article reveals some of my American influences, in which the Estonian countryside takes on a Great Depression-era, Dust Bowl flavor. People seem to like these articles about cultural differences, for whatever reason, and I have been too happy to write them, in fact, I seem to specialize in them. This one seemed to really hit the mark.

“Principios de Declaración by Tomás del Real,” published 12 July 2023. Nothing like some web traffic generated off the back of a popular folk singer. This was my attempt to do a quick, magazine-style review of del Real’s newest album. I don’t feel I did the record full justice, but I got it up and posted in time for the maestro’s 30th birthday. People seem eager to read about Tomás. Another story I wrote about South American musicians in Viljandi, that featured interviews with Tomás, as well as Pepi Prieto and Lee Taul from Araukaaria, was among the top 10 most-read stories.

“My Love, She Speaks Like Silence,” published 28 December 2022. This story raised quite a few eyebrows. Who was she? I actually managed to write several stories this year about an unnamed muse, who remained anonymous to everyone, including herself most likely (hopefully). The title of this one derives from a Bob Dylan lyric from the song “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.” I am not capable of writing like this on demand. I have to feel it, and I cannot make myself feel things. I have to feel them naturally. And as long as nobody gets hurt in the process, then, well, why not? I only know that some people wish I could write this way about them.

“Za Tallina, Za Rodinu,” published 26 September 2023. This reflection on Estonians and Russians in Tallinn was actually requested by Edasi, and I wrote it in Estonian, and later translated it into my native language. Most of it was written during coffee breaks during the Tallinn Digital Summit. All of the photos are mine. It’s been a black-and-white kind of year.

“Art Nouveau,” published 1 August 2023. After the Viljandi Folk Music Festival, I was exhausted and went to Tartu for a few days. I stayed in a friend’s apartment. It happened to be during a film festival, and so I could hear the 1995 movie Heat playing loudly through the windows. I took an herbal sleeping aid, and then the events recounted in this story more or less transpired. I was terrified when I woke up. The next morning I went over to Kohvipaus and typed up this story, which is probably among the weirdest I have ever produced.

What I like about dream fiction is that I am not responsible for the content. I am merely the messenger. And I plan to write many more stories in ’24.

fry cook

THE CAR DROPPED ME OFF just outside the city limits and screeched off into the polar night. It was near some home improvement stores and car dealers’ lots. The terrain was familiar, that long highway that stretched out past Karula and those dark forests all the way to Tallinn, but the area had been developed in my time away. It seemed that Swedish brands had moved in. There was a Spotify office, a Volvo dealer, and even a Marabou chocolate distributor now. A new shopping center had been built beside the other new one. I went in. In its central atrium, there stood a Christmas tree festooned with gold and tinsel, and little plastic mechanical elves and reindeer danced robotically to Andy Williams’ hit “Happy Holiday/The Holiday Season.”

I rode the escalator up to the second floor. Most of the shops were already closed, but there was a burger and fries fast food restaurant that was still open. A few local women tended to the fries, which sat in small cardboard containers glowing beneath a warm orange light. The burgers, fresh off the griddle, were dressed quickly in silver packaging and lined up to cool on a rack, like tiny astronauts. I placed an order for fries and waited for my number to be called. But when I looked back, all the lights had been turned off, and there were no burgers left.

Then a young woman came out holding my fries and she told me they had shut for the night. Her light hair was cut in bangs, or a fringe as they say, and she had two braids. She was an Estonian, for sure. She had light blue eyes. She said, “Soon I am going to go and live in a commune on the North Coast. There will be good people there, spiritual people. Would you be willing and come to live with me in the woods?” She handed me the fries and I thought it over. Why did I keep running into women like this? A commune on the North Coast? An ashram in India? I didn’t know what to make of it, but decided to tell her yes. When an Estonian fry cook with golden braids asks you to go live with her in a commune on the North Coast, you say yes.