Read Online Our Man in Iraq by Robert Perisic - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Robert Perisic
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and a joke, as if I was wafting in a higher universe safe from so-called social values. Stuff from the world of careers didn’t interest her anyway. She only saw love. Our love and love in the wider world. Ecology. Genuineness. She loved me just the way I was. It was only recently that she’d begun to follow the Career column of the horoscope.
And now, through nervous conversations, we’d begun to arrive at it, at the context—like in Alien , when the crew, after initial arrogance, begins to grasp the magnitude of the problems lurking in the cave in that distant galaxy.
Now, after Boris, it was crystal clear that my voluntary mediation in human resources was extremely stupid. Sanja compared it to her experience of volunteering in the alternative drama group Zero. Her circles from the Academy had gathered there, full of enthusiasm, only to break up in rancor in the winter, with everyone feeling they’d been used by a bunch of thankless idiots.
The fact that there was no cash caused feelings to get all muddled. Who knows why, but doing away with monetary accounts inevitably leads us onto the path of emotional reckoning. Wherever there’s no dough you open an emotional account: you seek some form of acknowledgment. But how are you going to measure that? In the end everyone feels the others owe them something. That was the end of Zero. Everyone quarreled with everyone else, the expletives were as foul as foul could be, and Sanja felt used; she decided that in the future she’d only act when she was paid.
To tell the truth, it bugged her a bit that she’d departed from her youthful ideals so quickly.
I felt like that myself when I dropped out of Drama. I was working for various newspapers and, parallel to that, listening to the bullshit of pocket-monied students at uni. The longer I worked, the more avant-gardist they became. We read the deconstructionists and tried to apply them to the field of drama. We had conversations verging on the schizophrenic.
I was angry at my parents for canceling my pocket money and making fun of my efforts at deconstruction. I was angry at the Zagreb alternative bimbos who sooner or later would become part of the local glamour scene. I was angry at the proles and the elite, at work and art—having ended up somewhere in between. I was someone who hadn’t managed to penetrate the haze between all those cultural classes, all those people who were so damn convinced of their ownauthenticity. I was angry at myself because I couldn’t express myself.
When Sanja left volunteering on the fringe I told her it was the right thing to do. She agreed. There was no other option, and if there was, it had to stay a secret, like masturbation in the bathroom at work, or me voluntarily sticking my nose into human resources.
Here I channeled my anarchic instincts and enriched the staff profile with unexpected guests like Boris, whom no tie-wearing staffer would ever have chosen. That was a holdover of my subversive tendencies from the days when I used to sing along with Johnny Štulić—fellow rebel and Yugoslavia’s answer to Joe Strummer:
The street is lined on either side
With office buildings tall
Bureaucrats creep and teem
Help, oh help
It makes my flesh crawl .
Like bacteria that become resistant to antibiotics, my rebellion mutated during the search for enjoyment under capitalism. Find yourself a little hole in the system, have your fantasies, and live on them, cultivate them like people grow a little bit of pot in a secret place.
The whole business with Boris was prime evidence that my idea of subversion was only doing harm to myself. But I didn’t want to talk about it with Sanja in these terms. I didn’t see any way of saying all that to her without it having major consequences. I thought it’d have a disastrous effect on her image of me—and of us. She believed we were special.
Being very young and an actress, Sanja could still enjoy everything. Her
And now, through nervous conversations, we’d begun to arrive at it, at the context—like in Alien , when the crew, after initial arrogance, begins to grasp the magnitude of the problems lurking in the cave in that distant galaxy.
Now, after Boris, it was crystal clear that my voluntary mediation in human resources was extremely stupid. Sanja compared it to her experience of volunteering in the alternative drama group Zero. Her circles from the Academy had gathered there, full of enthusiasm, only to break up in rancor in the winter, with everyone feeling they’d been used by a bunch of thankless idiots.
The fact that there was no cash caused feelings to get all muddled. Who knows why, but doing away with monetary accounts inevitably leads us onto the path of emotional reckoning. Wherever there’s no dough you open an emotional account: you seek some form of acknowledgment. But how are you going to measure that? In the end everyone feels the others owe them something. That was the end of Zero. Everyone quarreled with everyone else, the expletives were as foul as foul could be, and Sanja felt used; she decided that in the future she’d only act when she was paid.
To tell the truth, it bugged her a bit that she’d departed from her youthful ideals so quickly.
I felt like that myself when I dropped out of Drama. I was working for various newspapers and, parallel to that, listening to the bullshit of pocket-monied students at uni. The longer I worked, the more avant-gardist they became. We read the deconstructionists and tried to apply them to the field of drama. We had conversations verging on the schizophrenic.
I was angry at my parents for canceling my pocket money and making fun of my efforts at deconstruction. I was angry at the Zagreb alternative bimbos who sooner or later would become part of the local glamour scene. I was angry at the proles and the elite, at work and art—having ended up somewhere in between. I was someone who hadn’t managed to penetrate the haze between all those cultural classes, all those people who were so damn convinced of their ownauthenticity. I was angry at myself because I couldn’t express myself.
When Sanja left volunteering on the fringe I told her it was the right thing to do. She agreed. There was no other option, and if there was, it had to stay a secret, like masturbation in the bathroom at work, or me voluntarily sticking my nose into human resources.
Here I channeled my anarchic instincts and enriched the staff profile with unexpected guests like Boris, whom no tie-wearing staffer would ever have chosen. That was a holdover of my subversive tendencies from the days when I used to sing along with Johnny Štulić—fellow rebel and Yugoslavia’s answer to Joe Strummer:
The street is lined on either side
With office buildings tall
Bureaucrats creep and teem
Help, oh help
It makes my flesh crawl .
Like bacteria that become resistant to antibiotics, my rebellion mutated during the search for enjoyment under capitalism. Find yourself a little hole in the system, have your fantasies, and live on them, cultivate them like people grow a little bit of pot in a secret place.
The whole business with Boris was prime evidence that my idea of subversion was only doing harm to myself. But I didn’t want to talk about it with Sanja in these terms. I didn’t see any way of saying all that to her without it having major consequences. I thought it’d have a disastrous effect on her image of me—and of us. She believed we were special.
Being very young and an actress, Sanja could still enjoy everything. Her
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