Content 18+ Lou was sitting at the table in the cafe eating his sandwich and staring absently at the milling about of other people. It was random of course, but it also seemed strangely choreographed, as if they had all secretly made plans to move this way and that, occupying tables, chattering and eating, paying and leaving. And he wondered why he saw them … Read the rest
Content 16+ It would be hard to exaggerate how much my life has changed since 2017. I used to live in Moscow and in my role as ESL (English as Second Language) tutor I would beat the streets in all directions — with long intervals aboard metro trains, buses, trams — often scouring broad and faceless oblong buildings or plunging into the shadows between … Read the rest
Content 18+
by Eric Le Roy
We move among them much of our lives, especially people of the cities. At first, when young, we dive in, intrigued and enraptured by as yet unknown entities in which -- like vines of limitless fecundity -- we hope to entwine ourselves. (Some will be poisonous.) Surely, we imagine, as we head out of the station and enter the boundless flesh fabric of New … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ (obscene language)
There are a number of things in the ‘developed’ nations that everybody hates but evidently are powerless to do anything about. They are: banks, insurance companies, and customer service.
‘Service’. What service?? We are plagued with euphemisms in our culture. You pay a fee to attend some buffet lunch function and they call it a ‘donation’. … Read the rest
Content 18+
Back in Moscow -- and also now in Bulgaria, as I continue to work with Russians via Skype and Zoom -- it has been my business to have close connections with Russian professionals. Because of that, I know a lot of 50-something guys who were living the good life until they lost their jobs. A lot of them were in the banking industry, some dealt in software, others … Read the rest
Content 18+
Once upon a time, I was a little boy who lived with his grandparents in Charleston, West Virginia. It was long ago. I used to imagine, fearfully, that the dinosaurs were still around, and at night they would come slithering over to our house at the end of the hilly street. They would reach my upstairs bedroom window with their long necks and poke their rough lizard tongues … Read the rest
Content 18+
My wife Liuba is from Omsk, and many hard, frozen, poverty-stricken years there did nothing to damage her health.But all it took was four winters amid the belching smokestacks and poisoned atmosphere of Moscow for her to contract a chronic bronchial infection. During her last two years in the megapolis, often amid endless bleak rains that more and more prevail there because of climate change, our apartment was … Read the rest
