kaksteist kuud

"And he puts his cocaine in the microwave. I mean, who does that?" Los Angeles, Los Angeles. It's such a ridiculously stupid city. People would rather spend hours in traffic than get behind some kind of comfortable and effective public transportation scheme. And I am one of these people. I am one of these people sitting at a table in an Ethiopian restaurant hearing about the exploits of an entertainer with a $500-a-day cocaine habit. "There were lines going everywhere. I mean here, there, on everything."

I like stories like this because it makes me feel as if I am rather normal, like I've made out okay in the stinky stanky tarpits of life. I've never even done lines. I credit Melle Mel's "White Lines (Don't Do It)," but also just the idea of doing an expensive, addictive, and often life-threatening drug doesn't make sense to me. It's like heroin. Let's count the casualties. And this is something you will pay to do?

Hell yes. South of the border a drug war is ongoing. In fact, it's now referred to as The Drug War, so as not to be confused with the War on Drugs. As it was explained to me at the Ethiopian restaurant, the armies of the drug lords are stronger and more effective than those at the disposal of the central government. The enemies are carved into pieces. When they recently found a human head in a plastic bag near the HOLLYWOOD sign, it was thought at first to be related to Mexico's drug war, though it's more likely some local out to get national attention (and they all are). Should demand for Mexico's wares diminish in the Estados Unidos, the revenue base of the drug lords would similarly decline. But until then, more heads and hands and feet, more entertainers with $500-a-day cocaine habits, more traffic.

The Ethiopians eat with their hands. Their beer isn't half bad either. Better than Saku, not as good as A. Le Coq, easier on the gut than those jars of brown stuff the Setos sell from the back of their cars during the Setokuningriigi Päevad. One downside to knowledge of the Estonian tongue is the inability to speak about Estonia without using Estonian words or expressions. Like Setokuningriigi Päevad. It translates as "Seto Kingdom Days." But that just sounds clumsy and awkward. How else could you say it? "Days of the Seto Kingdom"? Just as bad. How about Viljandi Paadimees, the "Viljandi Boatman." That also sounds odd to my ears. And it doesn't matter how you translate it, because Seto Kingdom Days and Viljandi Boatman don't mean anything to anyone outside of Estonia because nearly all people on Earth are unaware of the existence of the Seto people, let alone their kingdom, and they have never heard of Viljandi, and therefore are completely ignorant of its mystical Boatman!

They do know about Kaksteist Kuud. This means "twelve months" in Estonian, but is interpreted by English-speaking ears as "cocks taste good." Everyone knows about Kaksteist Kuud. Go to some small Polynesian island and raise the blue black and white flag of the Estonian republic and you'll see the little naked children throng the shores shouting out, "Kaksteist kuud! Kaksteist kuud!" They've all seen the YouTube clip where the smarmy backpackers get pretty Estonian girls to say it over and over again.

Listen, even at the lowest points of my sad and alcoholic pre-marital life I did not stoop to the levels of these YouTube clip-uploading cafoni. Cafone is a southern Italian dialect word. It means a disreputable or ill-mannered person. I was once called this by an older person when as a teenager I ordered three hamburgers at lunch. But now I am calling you all out. It's time to let it go. Just as MTV retired "Ice Ice Baby," it's time to retire Kaksteist kuud.

But you know they won't let it go. No one will. Our friend recently was injured in Viljandi. She was walking down the street when someone dropped a couch on her head from a second-floor window. Just a minor concussion. But still! Our friend was hit in the head by a couch. I don't know why some part of me still believes life could be some other more rational or sane way. Couches falling from the sky. Microwaved cocaine. Kaksteist kuud. When the plane landed in New York it was snowing. Our driver was an old man, half my height. We listened to Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra all the way home. "Papa loves mambo, Mama loves mambo ..."

People keep inviting me to all kinds of events. One journalist wants to interview me about jealousy in relationships. Someone wants me to give a presentation at an assembly of Estonian teachers on the local education system. Sometimes I would just like to scrap it all and start playing João Gilberto tunes in some club somewhere. Or even Dean Martin. I could sing like Dean Martin. At this point, why not? In a way, it makes perfect sense.

mart bryson

I've got a year's worth of reading sitting on my shelf: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, Down and Out in London and Paris by George Orwell, The Island by Aldous Huxley. Then there's At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson, inspired by his own home, a former Church of England rectory. And those are just a few of the titles before me.

I haven't managed to read any of these books. Not only do I lack the time, but I also can't decide where to start. Fortunately, my subconscious has been providing me with some suggestions. It happened the other night that I dreamed that I lived in a house right beside Bill Bryson's rectory. I went to knock at the door, and after exchanging some kind words with his English offspring, Bryson appeared at the door and began speaking to me ... in Estonian.

Not only did he speak to me in Estonian, but he had the air of a mad professor about him, like Dr. Emmett Brown in Back to the Future, that hyperactive hum to his speech, but instead of spouting random facts about 19th century English life, he was spouting random facts about the Battle of Narva and Forest Brothers while I tried to engage him in some kind of normal, "Hi, I'm your new neighbor." As he spoke, he kept looking up, his eyes fluttering behind his glasses in manic excitement, as if God was speaking through him. And then I realized that it wasn't Bill Bryson before me. It was "powerful" Estonian Defense Minister Mart Laar!

Or some combination of the two, call him Mart Bryson or Bill Laar. I had never seen the link between the two of them until they were meshed in my dream, but now when I look at them, side by side, it seems so obvious how much these two men share. Perhaps they descend from the same brainy, burly, random fact spouting Viking, who after pollinating Estonia, had some ribald adventures in East Anglia, chattering on about some fascinating overlooked facts about Valhalla to his tired fellow Vikings along the way.

Laar's actually on my mind because of the leadership struggle in his party, Isamaa ja Res Publica Liit, officially called the Union of Pro Patria and Res Publica. Watching the other contenders declared and undeclared speak to Estonian journalists on ETV recently was like having oneself dipped in liquid nitrogen. I cannot even mimic the stiff body movements and drone-like speech of the other heirs apparent to the machine at the top of which Laar still sits. Compared to them, Laar's fondness for looking up while he talks and occasionally moving his hands, if only to refresh his e-mail,  make him look like some kind of fiesta-loving, ultra charismatic Latino Estonian.

So my dreams are infused by books on my shelf and ETV, with a touch of some classic films starring Michael J. Fox. Fine. But then as we stood in Mart Bryson's doorway, we watched a stealth helicopter land in an adjacent property and a firefight ensue. It was SEAL Team 6, come to rub out Al-Qaeda instigator Osama bin Laden!

"You knew that Osama bin Laden was your neighbor all along and you didn't tell anyone?" I asked Mart Bryson as we watched the neighboring compound go up in smoke. "Well, I'm glad they took him out," he said, polishing his glasses. "That jerk doesn't take good care of his lawn." Then he shook his head and continued to chatter on about Hirmus Ants and the Battle of Tannenberg Line. When I awoke, it occurred to me that I have spent far too much of my time reading online news.

the tourist

Sharm el-Sheikh. Never had much of a desire to go there, fearing shark and/or suicide attacks, plus hordes of euro trash and just plain old regular trash, left by the sides of sandy highways.

My excursions to Gran Canaria, while intriguing, produced various bouts of nausea and disgust when faced with bratwurst stands staffed by Spaniards, or self-sufficient enclaves of Norwegian-speaking pensioners.

Sadly, the Red Sea resorts and the Canary Islands are the only close opportunities for summer in the depths of winter for northern Europeans. Greece and Cyprus only start to warm up in April or so. There are charter flights leaving for Thailand or the Cape Verde Islands, but those are longer and more expensive plane rides. And the belt of land between the Canaries and the Sinai peninsula is besieged by domestic conflicts.

Here I look within myself and find an unabashed colonizer. Wouldn't it be splendid to winter in Algeria? Libya? How about Tunisia? Wouldn't it be great to covertly support Western-friendly, petroleum-exporting regimes that welcomed flocks of pasty northerners with bad haircuts and dyslexic fashion sense to bask in the sunlight of their endless summers? Wouldn't that be in our collective Western interest?

I gave into Sharm because the Estonian weather was leading the wife and I toward unhealthy thoughts. "I feel as if I am trapped in a bag," she said on one very dark and rainy December day. "And I would like to take a knife and cut my way out into the sunshine." And so after much contemplation we said yes to a tacky quick getaway to a resort on the Sinai peninsula. This probably raised some eyebrows among globe-trotting friends who prefer to take their kids to "real" places like Rwanda or Tibet for the educational experiences and bragging rights. As I have discovered though, children don't care so much about that stuff. Given a choice between an eye-opening intercultural experience and a pool with a water slide, they'll take the water slide, thanks.

That being said, Sharm is Egypt, the same way that Disney World is the United States or Cancun is Mexico. There is no escaping Egypt, the Egyptian national character, its honeyed foods, its overwhelming desire for tips. The first Egyptian I met was already holding my baggage when I went to pick it up, asking for money. I gave him three bucks. Which meant I didn't have any other small change for the three other guys who asked me for tips between the airport door and the door to our hotel room.

Nothing in Egypt has a real price, it seems. After years of orderly Estonian shopping, I arrived in a land where everyone is trying to take you for a ride, sometimes literally. I just happened to be standing outside my hotel when a fellow with a camel came by and picked up my two daughters and rode off with them down the block. It cost me 250 Egyptian pounds to get them back. The "official price" was 300, but he gave me a discount because I "look Egyptian." It was all in good fun, but there was a sense of extortion in the air.

Egypt was the third Muslim country I have visited after Turkey and Malaysia. I've gotten use to the headscarves, they remind me of nun's habits, except more colorful. So the women are basically nuns who can have sex. Terrific. But the Saudi ladies in full get-up baffle me. It's not that I have no idea what they look like, it's that I wonder how do they eat or drink without revealing their faces. Supposedly they come to Egypt to experience a more tolerant and open culture. Saudi Arabia has this ominous image, even in Egypt. It's right over there, and yet nobody can go over there. I'm not sure what happens to you if you accidentally get lost while snorkeling and wash up on a Saudi beach. I don't want to know, actually.

There are plenty of other nationalities in Sharm. The English were the friendliest and the most "normal," in that they would speak to you and tell you about their lives and talk about The Beatles. The Scots are affable yet indecipherable. Fortunately, having read Kidnapped and watched Trainspotting, I was able to get by. The Russians are also friendly, to each other, and seem to ignore people who do not speak Russian. Hence, the estrangement some Estonians feel toward their monolingual neighbors is not confined to this small land.

Russians also have the most fantastic sense of fashion, particularly the women. I was unaware that such apparel could even be acquired at a regular store, and was not to be solely found in sex shops. It also seemed that some Russian women enjoy complaining. I watched one scene by the pool where the woman complained and complained to her husband, who pretended to be asleep. This seemed to bother neither of them. She went on complaining, he continued to snooze. In the end, they both got up and went and had lunch, holding hands.

The number of Russian tourists in Egypt creates a challenge for other nationalities. On one hand, Russians are great fun. I watched a Russian man grasp his mate's voluptuous bikini-suspended breasts as they dove into the water together, laughing all the way, completely unashamed of their playful display of affection. On the other hand, the separation between "us and them," Russian speakers and non-Russian speakers, is annoying. Just because we may not speak the same language, doesn't mean that you have to avoid eye contact and/or sign language.

Estonians are the opposite. They are happy to speak any language to prove their resourcefulness and utter brilliance. Estonians also feel naked unless they have either a beer or some kind of telecommunications device in their hand. Our GoAdventure diving instructor took a break from scuba diving to post an update on a social networking site. The Estonian word for a wet suit is "kalipso," which confused the hell out of me. The wife's asking me for a "kalipso," and I'm looking around for Harry Belafonte to serenade us with "Jump in the Line."

Scandinavians are a mixed bunch. Danes are outgoing, friendly. Norwegians aren't. Something about the way they carry themselves makes me wonder if they secretly believe that they are the best that mankind can do. These are not only my thoughts. A Swede described Norway as a "nation of oligarchs," nouveau riche given to flaunting their oil wealth. A Dutchman opined, "they have all of our problems with one-tenth the amount of people and ten times more land."

I only heard one other American voice in Sharm, identified by the overuse of the word, "like." "And then I was like riding this camel in the desert, dude. It was, like, totally awesome!" I'm not sure how the Egyptians feel about Americans. When I went through passport control, the guy shook his head and laughed to himself, almost out of pity. "Ah, an American, an American ..." When I told a Bedouin lady that I was an American, she wrinkled her nose and frowned, as if she was about to vomit all over me. She still took my money though. We spoke Italian to each other.

I indulged myself as a tourist. An Egyptian friend even procured for me a hookah, which after a few false starts, I got the hang of, and one could see me sitting in a chair, blowing circles of smoke into the air, living it up, watching belly dancers. These are all just hazy memories now, photos from a family vacation. I stocked up on souvenirs too though.  So if you see a guy zooming around Estonia wearing a checkered scarf on his head a la Arafat and blasting Egyptian Top 40 from his car speakers, don't be alarmed. It's just me.

sunday morning

Velvet Underground front man Lou Reed and Velvet Revolutionary Vaclav Havel discuss bondage, sexual and political.

Pulled into a Statoil in Pärnu on a rainy December night to get a coffee, left with the three disc Rolling Stones Singles Collection, just so I could zoom among the dark pines and listen to Mick Jagger croon, "I am the little red rooster, too lazy to crow for day ..."

I had to buy it. Just had to. What other Statoil customer would? What demand exists in Estonia for vintage Stones? I felt it was my duty as a lifelong Stones fan to snatch up their product.

I was thinking about rock 'n' roll music the whole ride home, wondering what impact it had had at all in Estonia. Many of the songs of the Singing Revolution were nominally rock songs, though it's hard to trace the musical lineage from "Johnny B. Goode" to "Eestlane olen ja eestlaseks jään."

I have no idea what music my father-in-law Andres enjoys. His brother Tiit, who actually is a musician, is one of these frustrating people who likes all kinds of music. No luck there. I know my late mother-in-law Aime supposedly had a fondness for French pop. But nothing seems to light the old folks' fire like "Satisfaction" does when my father John hears Keith play that fuzzy introductory riff for the 1,965th time.

When I got home I saw that Vaclav Havel had died. He wasn't Estonian, but he was a so-called Eastern European, a dissident who helped topple the local Communist regime and later became president. A Mandela story in other words, but not exactly. Havel was also an avid rock music fan, and the group that tickled his fancy wasn't the Stones but one that originated closer to my home, the Velvet Underground, consisting of Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, all of Long Island, and John Cale of Carmarthenshire,Wales, with vocals by Nico of Cologne, West Germany.

From what I understand, the records of this New York based experimental rock ensemble, which gained notoriety in the US but sold dismally, were smuggled into then Czechoslovakia and embraced by the underground dissident movement. Reed has claimed that the name "Velvet Revolution" evolved out of the Czech dissidents' affinity for the Velvet Underground's music. It's possible. Reed and Havel were acquaintances, if not friends. He came to visit Havel in Prague in 1990, and played at the White House dinner in Havel's honor in 1998. To give one a sense of the profound change that had taken place in global culture, try imagining the frontman for a group that sang about heroin addiction, transvestites, and sadomasochism playing at a state dinner during the Johnson or Nixon administrations ...

I can see why Europeans liked the Velvet Underground. Nico's deep, accented vocals immediately gave the group's first album a Teutonic tinge, and John Cale's palette was different from any working class New Yorkers', a viola player trained in classical music at the University of London. Even if you listen to those records now with Nico moaning over Reed's choppy, anxious guitar and Cale sawing away on his electric viola, you can see how they fit in among Prague's gothic architecture, far more than the Grateful Dead's sunny West Coast psychedelia or the Stones' attempt to revive the Delta blues with a Kentish accent.

I guess what I am trying to say is that music is important. It doesn't get enough credit. When we write the history of the 20th century, we of course should remember to put the dissidents-cum-presidents front and center. But don't forget about the poets and their guitars who spoke to them through stereo speakers in their bedrooms late at night. Maybe there is more to those spur-of-the-moment Statoil purchases.

milch lait latte

If there is one conversation topic that never ceases to irritate me in Estonia, it is language. Estonians are obsessed with language, with their own language, with other languages. They can spend whole nights sitting by the fire trading interesting dialect words that they learned from their grandmother one summer in Võrumaa. Which makes President Toomas Hendrik Ilves' recent interview with Der Bund, a Swiss newspaper, even more frustrating. You'd think that in an interview for a foreign publication they wouldn't pester Härra President with questions about languages, given the extent to which he is tormented at home. No such luck.

The excerpt making the rounds is the following, the Swiss paper asked Ilves why Russian wasn't an official second language of the Republic of Estonia, and Ilves deflected it with a short history lesson and a laugh. "Don't ask me ridiculous questions." I've heard this stuff before, a million times. Sometimes Estonian leaders deflect to Germany when these questions are tossed in their direction, "There are X many Turks in Germany" ... To which the German mind silently processes, "Yes, but they're Muslims ..." and then moves onto the next question. This time Ilves trotted out the Occupation rhetoric, but there was a gem in the rough.

Toome näiteks: me okupeerime teie maa ja pärast 50 aastat ütleme, et te peate eesti keele ametlikuks keeleks tegema.

"How about we occupy your country and after 50 years tell you that you have to make Estonian your official language."

Now that was splendid. One can imagine the Swiss journalist's mind silently processing, "Yes, but you are a small insignificant country that couldn't occupy another if it tried, well, maybe Latvia ..." but then conveniently moves on to the next question. It also got perhaps a few people to think about things a different way.

As president of Estonia, Ilves has to walk a tightrope when it comes to the "Russian question." On one hand, he's got the right wingers, not to mention segments of the exile community, who fervently resent the presence of Soviet-era migrants and their descendants on the holy soil of the fatherland. On the other hand, a plurality of those Soviet-era migrants and their descendants are Estonian citizens today, and their membership in the Estonian body politic does not need to be qualified, especially by their own president. So, basically, no matter what Ilves says, he's bound to piss off somebody.

Still, I think of these questions as opportunities missed. Why isn't Russian your second official language? Simple: because it does not need to be. First of all, Russians are an official minority -- go consult your Law on Cultural Autonomy for National Minorities (1925, 1993). "National minority cultural autonomy may be established by persons belonging to German, Russian, Swedish and Jewish minorities and persons belonging to national minorities with a membership of more than 3,000." This names Russians as an official minority. It does not qualify them by what year they arrived to Estonia. Russian is the language of instruction of 20 percent of Estonia's public schools. And what are the first foreign languages most pupils, regardless of background, learn in school? Russian and English.

Honestly, I don't know who is Russian and who is Estonian anymore. A good number of my daughter's classmates have Russian surnames, and yet their parents seem as Estonian as one can be. Our publishing house has published books written by Andrei Hvostov, Vahur Afanasjev, Maria Kupinskaja: they're all Estonians too.

The arguments about protecting the Estonian language during the Singing Revolution were coached in terms of ethnic national survival. But in the 22 years since Estonia reverted to having one national language, Estonian has become the default language among those with Estonian and German and Swedish and Russian and Ukrainian and Italian backgrounds. The inhabitants of Estonia have in a way become Homo esticus. This is not a new process. Estonia has a way of luring people in and assimilating them. And if you stand on a hill in Harjuimaa on a breezy day, and put your ear to the wind, you can hear that giant sucking sound ...

zoinks

A screen capture from Scooby Doo or just another old house in Viljandi?

On a warm summer's day, Viljandi looks like a pretty-as-a-picture northern European town, on a wet December day, it looks like a dump, some sort of Dickensian slum of crooked dwellings spewing smog, one-legged tramps hobbling down a busted road, one third puddles, one third cobblestones, one third dirt, little bratty pickpockets without parents rustling by to congregate at the local sweet shop. I should dislike it, pining for a cheeseburger in paradise, but instead my interest is piqued, because this is prime real estate for a novel.

Not only does Viljandi have the scenery down, but the characters, the characters. My pal Sten (name changed), a Vietnam vet with an expanding roster of offspring who lightens his load by doing flips on a trampoline. The school master Leivo (name changed again), who is like some kind of cross between Santa Claus and DIY painting guru Bob Ross. The local handyman Benno (another name changed) who is friendly on most days but especially friendly on the days that he drinks, and who I once saw collapse in a parking lot.

Then there are the poets and musicians: Kristiina (name not changed) writer of earthy poetry and her husband Silver (name not changed) whose talents include playing the bicycle tire. The motorcycle enthusiast (wait for it) who bought a sticker so that his yellow "Jeep" reads "Peep." Ruslan (name unchanged) the Ukrainian trombonist and Sofia (name unchanged) the Swedish folkie, plus the Armenian restaurateur and the Roma lady who told me she liked my books and then asked me for money (both names unknown), with all of whom I speak only Estonian, as if it was the only language in existence. It all adds up to something, an extravaganza, on ice, sometimes literally, but the only problem is that I just can't find a story line.

A madcap comedy? A murder mystery? A tale of passion and betrayal? Dangerous Estonian liaisons? An epic struggle between good and evil? Some modern-day rewrite of a Biblical parable? After our two cats disappeared, right in the neighborhood of a Chinese restaurant, I began to suspect that some kind of serial cat killer could pick up in Viljandi right where he left off in Kafka on the Shore. That one had no legs. The excitement over the discovery of a corpse in the lake after last winter's thaw (and there's always one or two) didn't lead me anywhere either. There's a haunted house around the corner too, but, who cares?

Fortunately, I've got plenty of other stories to write. But, for now, I am living in a book without a plot.

the shadow knows

This is the time of year that produces the most bitching and bellyaching, the last days of November, the curtain call for autumn. People complain about the darkness, complain about the black, but I have to ask, isn't the black also sometimes beautiful?

There is something majestic about the whole scene, something inky and purple about the texture of the night that sets in, the kind of night one doesn't meet at any other time of year. It is so dark that anything that is light takes on new significance, the light from the inside of a passing car, the glow of a neon sign.

The days, if sunny, are colored with orange haze and long lovely shadows. Many of the days are sunless. These days are more like monotonous shrouds of cottony white and gray that stretch around barns and church steeples. The darkness is thus a reprieve: an opportunity to forget, a chance to dream. When 4 pm feels like 9 pm, then the very notion of time itself becomes irrelevant. Some might see this as an obstacle, but others might see it as liberating, an empowering opportunity.

Each day no matter the length I wrestle with assumptions. People have assumptions about me as I do about them. One is that, being from New York, that I am suffocating or drowning living in a small wooden town like Viljandi, and would still suffer in an even larger "metropolis" like Tallinn, home to just 400,000 souls, about the same number as Cleveland, Ohio, or Omaha, Nebraska. My truth is that big cities can be even lonelier places than small towns, as I have experienced first hand. Just because one is surrounded by people does not mean that they know who you are or care about your well being. And often the streets are just as deserted. I've rambled through the empty black streets of Washington, DC, and New York City and Boston in the wee hours, like wading through graveyards, the only signs of life being the homeless bums snoring away on the park benches, the pigeons pecking away at the garbage.

Another assumption is that just because I have written a book about Estonia (two actually), that I am some kind of expert or knowledgeable person when it comes to this place. Not only that, but I am a figure who might be able to give a person advice (!). In which case, I almost automatically point the hapless soul searchers in the direction of fellow bloggers Flasher T or Mingus, gentlemen who exude enough confidence to fool others into believing that they actually possess some form of insight or wisdom. I understand the need to look for support. Life is tricky. I can't even count all the letters I've sent to Vello Vikerkaar asking his advice on whatever it is that pesters me. But we are all just humans! Equally flawed, equally ridiculous.

Supposedly, the above attitude makes me a nihilist, which sounds quite scary. I imagine nihilists to be cloaked in shadows, weepy and black, like Sirius Snape sporting a "No More Mr. Nice Guy" coffee mug in one hand, a scythe in the other, and a puss that conveys a nasty attitude. I have no idea how this nihilism snuck up on me and overtook me. It was plain highway robbery, or rather a back alley mugging. But I think it comes in handy in times like these, the autumn of autumn. Long days or long nights, sun-drenched insomnia or gloom-induced narcolepsy. It's all just weather, right? Equally flawed, equally ridiculous.

unzipped

"Did you know that Tallinn means 'Danish city?'"
Estonian PM Ansip and Danish PM Thorning-Schmidt talk Europe.

Estonians are never happy. In the days when they had a new prime minister every few years, if not months, they yearned for a steady hand, their very own Anders Fogh Rasmussen or Matti Vanhanen who would come along and tell everyone what to do.

But now Rasmussen is gone, as is his successor Lars Løkke Rasmussen,and his counterpart is one Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Vanhanen handed his crown over to Mari Kiviniemi, who then lost an election to Jyrki Katainen. And the people back home are starting to whisper about "stagnation" and a "crisis of democracy" as Estonian politics seems to be headed nowhere fast. They even use the dreaded 'B' word to describe their top leaders -- Brezhnev.

Andrus Ansip is the Six Million Dollar Man of Estonian politics. Small scandals and broken promises don't faze him. Instead, he leaps over them, keeping his eagle eye trained on the future, zooming around the world on his cross country skis.

Even if his anglophone detractors refer to him in private as "Unzip," Ansip's an eternal optimist. No matter what happens in Estonia, it is typically good for the country and only possible thanks to his wise and thrifty policies. Sure the removal of the Bronze Soldier was a messy affair, but at least it didn't provoke a war with Russia. Sure Estonian unemployment is high, but at least it's not as high as in Latvia. Sure, goods are often ridiculously overpriced, but at least you are paying for them in euros. See what I mean? With Ansip, there is always a silver lining.

In April 2012, Ansip will conclude his seventh year at the helm of the ship of state. People wonder will there be an eighth year of Ansip, and a ninth year after that. With Tallinn Mayor Edgar Savisaar sidelined by Center Party squabbles, and Defense Minister Mart Laar sizing up other opportunities, the only real challenge to Reform Party rule will come from the Social Democrats. But it's going to be a long time before voters have any chance to change things in Tallinn -- about three and a half years. Until then, Estonia looks forward to more of the same.

the chosen people

How do I make myself clear without slipping into 19th century racial theory? Somebody in the Estonian woodpile had very high cheekbones.

I know the people of this land like to fancy themselves as northern Germanics, a sort of cross between Hans Brinker, Heidi and the von Trapp Family Singers, but when I look at my daughters, all three of them, I'm seeing Genghis Khan.

Not that they have mustaches. Or swords. But those impossibly high cheekbones! So high. We're talking K2, Mount Everest! Several people have commented already that the newest addition to our flock resembles a small Chinese girl. Väike hiinlane they call her. Which she doesn't at all, but for the eyes. The eyes, the eyes, it's all in the eyes. And if the Estonians are somewhere genetically between the Latvians and the Finns (like it should be), then where does the Mongolian aspect kick in?

Those are looks, but how about temperament? I've been back a week or so, and I've run into people in public who I have sworn to myself are distraught. Women who look like they are about to burst out into tears. Men who look like they've been constipated for ages. Children who look like they've been freed from the frozen carbonite on Jabba the Hutt's wall. But the thing is ... there's nothing actually wrong with them. They just happen to look miserable all the time. It doesn't mean that they are miserable.

That's a minority though. Most people have a sort of stern, business-like quality to them, and then there are even the few jolly old fellows with the mustaches who wear blue overalls every day of the week and cry out, "Tere!" at every opportunity. But, for the most part, smiling is not part of the average Estonian's repertoire of facial expressions. And so I have made it a point now of smiling in the direction of every miserable or stoic person I meet.

I'm like a miracle worker, I tell myself, a healer. I'm like a leather-jacket wearing Christ, the Joel Osteen of Estonia, except instead of turning water to wine, or making every day a Friday, I am making Estonian bank tellers smile. Incredible. All you have to do is make sure to be as pleasant as possible and show joy at every turn. "Ah, I have to sign my name here? How lovely." Maybe they are laughing at me, not with me, but at least they don't look like they're sitting on a spike anymore. Sooner or later they will all come around with a little sunshine. The country will fall to me, one by one, each miserable, mopey-faced Finno-Ugric is going to be a little happier if I have to slip something in their kama.

That's not everybody, of course, not at all. But most male conversations are as abrupt and monotone as possible. I walk around wondering, what happened to these guys? They seem so ... hopelessly lost. People famously complain about the stoic, quiet Estonians, and when they do, they are talking about the men,  and they are telling the truth. And does anybody have a real job here? Most of the guys I know are employed doing odd jobs. A little construction here, a little IT work there, plenty of time for home improvement here, some forestry there ... don't you have an office to go to, or some product to produce? You're putting me to shame by hammering stuff all the time. I can't keep up!

Basically, what I am getting at, is that I have decided not to integrate. You don't want to talk, that's too bad, because I want to talk. You want to spend your free time building another house in a land full of empty buildings, go ahead, but don't expect me to follow suit. You don't want to smile? Well, that's too bad too, because I am an American and I feel like having a nice day. It's my birthright. The descendants of prewar Estonian citizens get their passports and the Israelis get their Holy Land. I get my white t-shirt with an obscenely yellow happy face on it.

when greed became ungood

Sometime in the past few years people went from admiring to loathing the ultrarich. It may have coincided with the economic crash, boom, bang of 2008, or may have preceeded it, or may have just dawned on the many right now. But most people no longer admire and seek the emulate the excesses of the wealthy: they ridicule them.

The "Greed" era is over. It has been for some years. Some are waiting for it to return, and they keep waiting, believing that by trimming some taxes here or regulation there, it will be 1984, the "Year of the Yuppie," all over again. That was the at the dawn of the boom, but this is the bust, and it will continue to be one until society arrives at a new social contract.

I am writing mostly about the US, my country, here, but this has implications for small, northern European economic "speedboats," as Marju Lauristin referred to countries like Estonia and Iceland, Latvia and Ireland, as opposed to the heavy industrial freighters of Germany and Sweden. Growth in Estonia has returned thanks to austerity measures that the public was willing to swallow because its choices were the smartly dressed neoliberals or a cranky, washed up demagogue who stands for nothing or everything or anything. But most agree it will never return to boom levels, and if it does, it is unlikely to be fed by the same crass speculation in real estate.

It is interesting that I am actually old enough to remember life before the Era of Greed. When I was a very small person, the rich were almost universally Old Money, reared in educated in luxury, private and exclusive. If you want a TV reference, go take a good look at Mr. and Mrs. Howell from Gilligan's Island. They wore ascot hats and hung out at yacht clubs and smoked pipes. They were the upper class and always had been and always would be. Until the nouveau riche built a McMansion next to their family estate on Martha's Vineyard and buzzed the ancestral compound in their helicopters.

For a long time, people worshipped the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But after the crash and, especially, once it became clear that taxpayers would be footing the bill for the irresponsibility of the private sector, that adulation reversed. Hence you have protests on four continents against "corporate greed," which only the most marginal of leftist students rose against years ago, at a time when they were universally cast aside as misguided and irrelevant. Now Occupy Wall Street and its imitators are frontpage news, with plenty of institutional backing, unions, media. What do they stand for? What does it all mean? Would I seem like a cynical f*** if I told you that it doesn't really matter what they want or what it means? What matters is the following:

The General Social Survey, administered by the National Opinion Research Council, has asked Americans about their confidence in banks and financial institutions since 1973. Between March of 2006 and March of 2010, the percent of Americans with a great deal of confidence in banks and financial institutions plummeted 19 percentage points, from 30 percent to an all-time low of 11 percent. According to a similar trend from Harris Interactive, the percent of Americans with a great deal of confidence in the people running Wall Street had already reached an all-time low of just 4 percent by February of 2009.

Most Americans have lost confidence in their banks and financial institutions. The protests against "Wall Street" are just a manifestation of that loss of confidence. Sure, plenty of of those in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan are Che Guevera-adoring leftists with barbarian-grade understanding of market economies. But others are middle class kids who accrued a lifetime's worth of debt with the widely held but utterly naive belief that there would be a pot of gold waiting for them at the end of the tunnel. There is a vast swath of highly educated, formerly upper middle class youth now entering the lower class. Not a recipe for national success.

Of course, there is an Estonian angle in this -- there always is. The head of Adbusters, the Canadian media group that instigated Occupy Wall Street is Kalle Lasn. He was born in Tallinn in 1942. I wonder if an Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana is in his future. he is certainly influential and one cannot accuse him of lacking self promotion skills and motivation. As I have remarked before, these Estonians, or at least a very capable subset of them, are doers.

Will things ever again be business as usual? They will, but it will take a long time, and at the end the idea of what "business as usual" will have taken on new meanings, lost old ones, and will have wider backing in multiple strata of society. Only then will we have a new social contract. By that time, people will look back on days like these as the Era of Negotiation.

planet putin

The further the Soviet Union recedes into the mists of antiquity, the more outlandish its perceived successes become.

For hundreds of years the Russian Empire spent fortunes in blood and treasure to maintain some semblance of control over its vast real estate holdings, putting down Polish rebellions here and Chechen uprisings there. The USSR was just about as lucky, spending local and foreign lives like an Atlantic City casino addict.

Its high was a stretch of 30 years between the death of Stalin and the rise of Gorbachev, half of which is now known as the period of stagnation. This just so happened to be the period of time into which its current ruler Vladimir Putin was born and raised. Putin was born in 1952, which means his worldview is restricted to some kind of glossy, wood-paneled 1970s time capsule. People pore over biographies trying to understand why Putin is the way he is. But there is one simple answer: he's just an old fart.

Hence, the "Eurasian Union," the returning president's "new" idea to rebuild some kind of superpower on the sun-bleached bones of the Soviet corpse. Or as Putin put it in an Izvestiya article, "a great inheritance" of "infrastructure, specialized production facilities, and a common linguistic, scientific and cultural space."

This new union would comprise the Russian Federation at its core, of course, as well as Belarus and Kazakhstan, with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan poised to join at a later date. Interesting that more bitter pills to swallow, such as Ukraine, where there are scary nationalists, and Uzbekistan, where there are scary Muslims, were left off the immediate agenda.

Still, according to the once and again president, all of the former CIS countries have "spiritual threads that unite their peoples." Trying to create an entity as glorious as the USSR would be a "naive" attempt to "restore or copy what is already past," he said. The Eurasian alliance instead will be based on "universal principles of integration, as an integral part of greater Europe, united by common values of freedom, democracy and market laws."

Which sounds like complete bullshit to me, but ... who's asking?

The Baltics have been left off the Eurasian Union map for now. Most writers have called the idea of their reorientation from the European Union to the other EU "unimaginable." And, at face value, one could argue that Russia's suggestion could work. Didn't the German-dominated EU make similar overtures to cooperation, democracy, freedom, market laws, peace and understanding when it "enlarged" into Central Europe, the Baltic Rim countries and, especially, the Western Balkans? If Russia was actually a free country with a functioning democracy and obeyed market laws, the Eurasian Union might make some sense. But because it isn't, it only scares people, almost as much as a shot of the old Soviet fart in Siberia with his shirt off.

I'll only remind you that when the Estonian puppet government "applied" for membership in the USSR in 1940, it was done explicitly to protect Estonian independence from the dangers of a Nazi-led, federated Europe. The Estonians would have more freedom within the USSR than outside it, argued its Soviet-picked leaders. According to this line of thinking, a vote to join the USSR was a vote for Estonian independence. Terrific.

I don't know how seriously to take the Eurasian Union. Those who adore the Russian ruler and believe him to embody all good things will likely be warm to this new and brilliant idea -- I mean, what good does a wholly autonomous Tajikistan do anybody, huh? Those who see him as the reincarnation of Stalin, albeit with a mustache-devoid upper lip, will cite it as another example of Putin's power lust and innate evil. Some people just think that the man is trying to seduce Russian voters with big ideas ahead of his reinstatement in March. They're probably right.

el yunque hellhound

Dear readers. I am writing to you from my friend's bungalow in Sonoma County. California is a joy. Grassy hills loom like green and blue ghosts. Strangers wave to you or ask you directions in relaxed, friendly, undemanding tones. In the afternoon I consumed zebra tomatoes and Chubby Hubby. For dinner we had tamales and taquitos. Tomorrow, my friend promised to restock his medicinal marijuana supply at the Peace in Medicine shop. "They sell it in stores here?" I asked. "Yes," he replied, "welcome to civilization" …

Almost everyone is speaking English here. I say this as someone who accidentally said, "ei" instead of "no" when the server at a café asked me if I wanted any organic "mesclun," which I unfortunately by that time heard as "mescaline," but actually is a green salad of French origin lacking hallucinogenic properties. In addition to mesclun, one can purchase crystals at the crystal shop downtown, or stock up on patchouli oil at the equivalent of a hippie five-and-ten nearby. Walking the sun-kissed streets, we ponder the significance of recent events, such as the moment that Maria Shriver began to wonder about the identity of the father of the family maid's son.

"Maybe he was lifting heavy furniture," my friend suggests. "Or maybe the kid started speaking with an Austrian accent …"

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is also a topic of discussion. As it was revealed earlier this week, Putin will reassume his position as president once Dmitri Medvedev's term ends next year. No one in the West openly believes in the charade of Russian "democracy" anymore, but now it's clear that that country's leadership doesn't really care either. I wonder who the "opponents" are that Putin will "defeat."

Estonians are once again chattering what the return of Putin will mean for their country. During the Medvedev years, the Estonian president had several meetings with his Russian counterpart, one that ended with him walking out of a conference and another that saw him praised for managing to sit through a Victory Day parade. There were even slight murmurs of hope among the more optimistic that the Medvedev thaw could continue, following the painful era of the border treaty debacle, in which the Russians used a magic diplomatic eraser to remove their signature from said agreement, and the Bronze Soldier affair, which saw the redeployment of noxious Stalinist and Third Reich propaganda, consumed with enthusiasm by local idiots.

Few in the US are interested in this. They would like to hear more rambling Rick Perry sound bites, blather on about baseball, or watch VH1's top hip hop jams of all time. In the meantime I am still trying to figure out what to do with my deposit in an eco hotel in the El Yunque rain forest in Puerto Rico. We were supposed to go last year, but were unable to do so. It was unfortunate because it is a goddamn beautiful place. When I inquired about swimming pools, I was informed that we could bathe in slow-moving natural waterfalls nearby.

The hotel promised to hold the deposit for a year, ending in Jan. 2012, and we initially planned to return, but now, with three kids and plenty of responsibilities, it is looking more and more impossible. How I wish someone would finally invent a method to "beam" me to different geographies for a limited fee a la Star Trek. Sadly, technology still lags the imaginations of 1960s Hollywood screenwriters. The deposit at the oasis in the jungle, called the Casa Cubuy Ecolodge, is $480. We are trying to hand it off to an interested party as soon as possible for as little as $300. You can contact me directly for this one time offer.

exile on tallinn street

I am a foreigner here. I am many other things, but this is my chief designation in the eyes of society. This is perhaps the situation of anyone who is a foreigner anywhere. Now I regret all the times I inquired as to the source of a person's accent in the US. "And where are you from? The former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia?"

Foreigner. This is not necessarily a burden. It lifts you above the others, singles you out from the pack. Anyone can be a writer, but not everyone can be a foreign writer. Anyone can play guitar, but not everyone can be a foreigner playing guitar. Some of Estonia's most successful musicians are foreigners: see Dave Benton or Ruslan Trochynskyi from Svjata Vatra. Anyone who's seen Ruslan yield his scythe and croon about sexy time in Ukrainian remembers him for his foreignness. But who are the guys backing him up? Ah, just a bunch of Estonians. So, there you have it. Foreigners are special. When you walk down the street, my fellow foreigners, hold your heads up high!

And yet, just as being a foreigner sets you apart from the lumpenproletariat, the "flotsam" of Esto society,it also makes you invisible. Conversations typically revolve around language acquisition or reactions to the local cuisine. Few people really talk to you about anything important, because few people really know how to talk to you. Whole conversations cascade around you of which you can play little role, maybe because you don't understand everything being said, but mostly because you have so little to contribute. I recently watched two acquaintances have a deep conversation about forestry. Forestry! What the &%¤£ do I know about forestry? Even if we were speaking the same language, we'd be speaking different tongues. Do you catch my drift?

This was an issue in my second book. Most of the main characters, the deep characters, the ones who carried around with them meaning, were foreigners. The Estonians were like cardboard cutouts of people, two dimensional, but not only for my lack of ability to translate them into text, but because so few of them had shared any shred of their souls with me. This was perhaps less because of the national character of the Estonian people, than because of the simple fact that I was an outsider, a foreigner, and somehow disconnected from the reality around me. Being a foreigner gives one the unique ability to walk down the street in one land, and still simultaneously, metaphysically, be in another.

Not like it would be any better there. I feel the same claustrophobia around most of my countrymen. Just as Estonia is too quiet, America is too loud. When I arrive home to New York, I snake through the sweaty bowels of John F. Kennedy International Airport, only to cross through the gates of US customs, where I am always made to feel as if I have done something wrong, though at last check, I have committed no crime. I get nervous standing there, wondering if my name has somehow wound up on some kind of list. "No Teen Idols!" "But I'm not Timberlake, I'm not Bieber!" "Guards, take him away!" "I swear, hey, what are you doing? Get your hands off of me! I'm innocent! I can't even dance, watch me, I'll prove it to you." "Mmm. Resisting arrest? That's another 10 years." "No, no, there must be some mistake!" "Tell it to your lawyer, kid."

America. The over-saturation of stimuli, the clamor of the crowds, the thousands of TV sets suspended from the ceilings blaring the day's misfortunes, pundits yelling over one another, people climbing over each another, the aroma of fried chicken and pizza, old newspapers, Andean flute players, Penn Station, New York City! One never feels so alive as when he's cruising the 6, drunk as a skunk, standing next to some punk Wall Street broker with a flattop who is singing along to The Supremes on his iPod. "You can't hurry love. No, it just has to wait ..."

And when you finally emerge from the swampy mess, battered and chafed, and you land back in Estonia, you exhale. I feel this every single time I make the journey between the two countries. The heat of America, the coolness of Estonia. The more I think about it, the more it reminds me of the Estonian sauna, running between the oven-like conditions of the saun to the ice waters of the lake, only to find peace somewhere in between for a few fleeting moments.

Just as the Americans annoy me with their 24-hour cable news networks, the Estonians annoy me because they don't know how to live, they don't know how to enjoy themselves. Each day I watch construction workers slave late into the evening, 10, 11 o'clock at night, cigarettes dangling from their lips, blue circles beneath the eyes. There is this incredible urgency to everything they do, because summer only lasts so long, and soon it will be too cold to work anymore. I am sure that it all makes sense, but at the same time I feel that they are committing suicide, that never-ending work and drink and smoke are the Estonian version of harakiri.

I cannot change anything though. I cannot advocate a mezzogiorno for my neighbors. I cannot organize one for myself. Could you imagine in Estonia stopping work at around 1 pm to rush home and eat a prolonged, savory meal until about 5 in the evening, lounging around, munching on olives and fennel and telling pointless jokes and stories? No. Here it would be condemned as rape, a brutal, graphic violation of the Protestant work ethic. It just doesn't happen. Even when Estonians do relax, it involves the consumption of hard liquor, stuff that hits the bottom of your gut like a fiery asteroid. There must be moving, doing, consuming ... The more I think about it, I don't fit into America or Estonia or anywhere. I have become a perpetual foreigner. I will be a foreigner everywhere I go.

¡Ilves! ¡tarand! ¡Ilves!

"I don't think that guy is going to be reelected," a university professor confided in me one autumn day in the last years of the '00s. "He's just too arrogant. Estonians want their president to be a man of the people."

It's true that when people criticize Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, they immediately seize upon the 'a' word: arrogant. But what they forget is that arrogance is one of the defining traits of the Estonian people. No matter which one of them you get in Kadriorg, he (or she) is likely to be arrogant. And so I didn't take my professor's prediction too seriously. If anything, most Estonians relish their leaders' arrogance. They like a leader who acts like he knows what he's doing.

And then there was the matter of Ilves' trademark bow tie, which some took as comedy and others as treachery. I recall a blog post criticizing Ilves for wearing a blue and yellow tie during a meeting with Swedish counterparts. Heresy! Treason! Vanity! There it is, the 'v' word. And it's also very Estonian. Just as they are an arrogant people, the Estonians are utterly vain. They buy tabloids in vast quantities just to read up on the personal lives of people who are famous only because they have been featured in said tabloids. They change their Facebook profile photos every fortnight. The vain president, the vain first lady, the vain businessman, the vain athlete, the vain model, the vain author, the vain chocolatier. Read all about it! What do all these Estonians have in common? The 'v' word.

So, like all other Estonians, Ilves is perceived as arrogant and vain. But he is also a smarty pants. When they say "US educated," they don't mean that he sold crack outside of PS 21 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. This gentleman was valedictorian of his high school class, got a bachelor's at Columbia, and then his master's at the University of Pennsylvania. And his son went to Stanford! Jeesus, the Ilveses are smart people. They are of brainy stock. While being a nerd might get you humiliated in junior high school, it tends to work to your advantage when consulting with other world leaders. Drop in a forgotten quote from a Greek philosopher here, construct meaning out of a random historical fact that no one remembers there. Watch the jaws drop. Suddenly, you're the person humiliating the others. And it feels great.

Lyndon Johnson used body language to get his way. The long, tall Texan would lean in, enveloping the individual he wished to persuade with his presence, his face a millimeter away from his target, suffocating his victim with "supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint and the hint of threat," his eyebrows moving up and down, until the errant senator or congressman caved in and agreed to vote Johnson's way. They called it the "Johnson Treatment." The "Ilves Treatment" is to be made to feel as if you never attended a day of school in your life.

Indrek Tarand, Ilves' opponent in the presidential election embodied many of these characteristics. Tarand is known as the man who ran an advertisement in Eesti Ekspress upon his university graduation in 1991, "Indrek Tarand lõpetab ülikooli, kõik pakkumised oodatud"/ "Indrek Tarand is finishing university, awaits all offers." Even the arrogant and vain Estonians were bowled over by that move. And that's really all you need to know about Indrek Tarand. His successful campaign for European Parliament was taken right out of The Candidate, with Tarand cast as Robert Redford's Bill McKay, a gum chewing, bluntly honest novice who isn't afraid to lose and yet somehow manages to beat the establishment. Ilves' has his bow tie, Tarand has his cool shades. Therein lies the difference.

I was on the same flight with Tarand, a plane ride to Copenhagen in June. When I saw him, I stared at him a bit, as if he were an old friend. Then I recalled that I only knew him from the tabloids. When he caught me looking at him, Tarand winked at me. I wondered if he recognized me from the tabloids. We sat across from each other but didn't say a word. But all the time up in the air over the blue Baltic Sea I felt that we had something in common. We had both sold our souls to Estonia. I wonder sometimes if President Ilves feels that way too when he's jetting around the world.

In the end Ilves defeated Tarand, receiving 73 votes to his 25 in parliament. It was the first time since 1991 that an Estonian president had been selected in the first round, a sign of "political maturity," Ilves said approvingly. It was probably best that both men kept their day jobs, Ilves in Kadriorg, Tarand in Brussels. These Estonians know how to promote themselves and how to promote their country. They stand out, they look good, they find wise or witty things to say. And, most importantly, they act like they know what they are doing.

iceland square

Sometimes when I look at photos of rural Afghanistan, down into the verdant valleys where the farmers are growing poppies and the zealots are shouldering rifles, I wonder how that place could exist on the same planet as the suburbs of New York, where some kid in a Yankee hat is stuffing his face with pepperoni pizza and playing games on his Wii, or even some remote jungle village in the Amazon, where an uncontacted tribe is looking up for the first time at a helicopter and smiling photojournalists.

It's August 2011 in all of these places, except it's a very different August 2011. August is the eighth month of our calendar. Two thousand and eleven is how many years have more or less passed since the birth of Christ. But the concepts of time and place here are relative. What is more important is our societies' relationships to time and place, and where we place ourselves on the belt of time.

This is what crosses my mind when I look at the old photographs of Lenin's statue coming down in what is now Iceland Square in Tallinn in August 1991, surrounded by mustachioed Estonians dressed like they stepped out of some 1970s fashion vortex. That door to another dimension has a name: it's called the "Fall of the Soviet Union." We know the looks, the sounds, the characters, the drama. Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Mitterand, Kohl. It's been replayed so many times in our minds and on our TV screens that we have to remind ourselves where we were on those days 20 years ago. And most of us weren't on Iceland Square.

To me it all seemed rather normal. The late 1980s. The early 1990s. The Intifada. Palestinian kids throwing rocks. German reunification. Teens wielding hammers. Tiannanman Square. Men standing in front of tanks. Armenian earthquakes. Gulf wars. Shuttle explosions. Nuclear meltdowns. Ozone holes. Ruined oil tankers. This was the evening news at the dawn of the era of the 24-hour cable news network. We watched it every night. Suffice to say that in my August 1991, a universe of skater kids, stonewashed jeans, fluorescent t-shirts, I wasn't really surprised by the Fall of the Soviet Union. It was just one of those things that happened.

I can't even conceptualize how short-sighted I was. But when your school has to order new maps every few years to keep up with the emergence of countries that haven't existed since 1940, or 1914, or, in many cases, never at all, you develop a thick skin to geopolitical change. The very idea that the Soviet Union could return though seemed out of the question. All the kings horses and all the kings men, couldn't put Comrade Dumpty together again. Ding, dong, the socialist witch was dead. The whole idea of the Soviet Union by that point was like some stale, moss-covered cracker you found wedged in the backseat of your car. It had passed its expiration date sometime in the late 1980s, if not before. Taking down a statue of Lenin seemed like the most natural thing to do. It was old metal junk. And what do you do with old junk? That's right, you throw it away.

Twenty years later and I am sitting in the former Soviet Union, except I rarely think of it as such. Sometimes in an antique store, a classic Soviet clock or radio will be pointed out to me as a curiosity. I recently enjoyed an exhibition in Tallinn about life in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. Old bookshelves, ancient cars, silly clothes, squeezable meals in metal tubes. So that's how it was back then, before the fabric of Soviet time was torn open, and people crawled out of the vortex, blinded by the neon lights of the West. That's how it was. And now Estonia is part of the West. The "former Soviet republic" era is long over.

Tomorrow is Islandi päev -- Iceland Day. It was proclaimed to coincide with the Republic of Iceland's recognition of Estonian independence two decades ago. President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson will be on hand to celebrate one of the few occasions where his country played a significant geopolitical role in recent decades. But he will also be discussing Iceland's EU accession negotiations with his Estonian counterpart. Talk about a wrinkle in time. Could people have even imagined this future 20 years ago? And can we even conjure up what life could be like in 20 years time? That's what I would like to know.

deathman

Nothing like a good shooting to make one nervous. Sometimes it feels like you aren't safe anywere. Norwegian islands, Finnish shopping malls, the Estonian Ministry of Defense. And this was supposed to be the quiet, boring part of the world.

Read all about it. Karen Drambjan has his own English-language Wikipedia entry, one he probably didn't even write himself. Fifty seven years old. Divorced. Failed politician. In a dire financial situation. And a writer of manifestos, like all those who fancy themselves as important from the vantage point of history.

According to news report, Drambjan, an Armenian by birth who acquired Estonian citizenship in 1993, called Estonia a "morally bankrupt, neo-fascist country." He was also convinced that the current government was about to initiate a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the local non-Estonian population, which by some definitions would include him.

But why listen to Drambjan, when taxi driver Travis Bickle does such a better job? "All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets." Keep going, keep going, "I think someone should just take this city and just... just flush it down the fuckin' toilet." Go on, go on, "The idea had been growing in my brain for some time: true force. All the king's men cannot put it back together again." Perfect.

Drambjan entered the Estonian Ministry of Defense in Tallinn on August 11, armed with a pistol and explosives, believing that he would be the spark that would set off the inevitable Estonian civil war, where the "slavish" Slavic community would rise up and throw off its chains. To do this, he took, for some time, two people captive. He was later killed in shootout with Estonian K-Komando, who are just not the kind of people you want to mess with. And that was it, really. No civil war. Just some ink in the newspapers and one middle-aged body in a bag. From one man's belief in the profundity of his violence, many were made uncomfortable for a few hours, then baffled by his political statements, then went shopping and forgot about it altogether.

Was Drambjan like Norway's Anders Behring Breivik? He was in that he let his radical beliefs get the best of his sanity, and that he thought that an individual act of public violence would set off a period of bloodletting that would end in a desired political solution. Breivik attempted to accomplish this by murdering teenage members of a left-leaning political party. Drambjan did it by setting off smoke bombs and explosions in the entrance of a government ministry and taking a two people hostage.

But neither were successful. In the end, people were puzzled by how the actors' political gripe translated into the actors' violent actions. Immigration sure is a hot issue in Europe, but how does that justify the murder of teenagers? Estonian minorities probably do feel alienated from the political process -- there isn't one minister in the current government from a minority group (and there is only one woman, period) -- but how does taking a security guard hostage change anything?

One flaw of mankind is our inability to simply stop trying to understand things. We continue to search for that "Aha" moment where everything clicks and where Behring Breivik or Drambjan sort of, kind of make sense, but it eludes us. We are forced instead to conclude that both of them, despite those powerful manifestos, were actually just crazy, which seems terribly simplistic, but was probably true.

It does not surprise me though that Drambjan was involved in the effort to keep Estonia's Bronze Soldier on Tõnismägi or that he was a member of the United Left party. What fascinated me about that controversy was that the most compelling argument for keeping it in place -- respect for the dead -- was overwhelmed by neo-Stalinist rhetoric about fascism and liberation, the kind of rhetoric that is fanned by Russian state-controlled media and probably swallowed whole by individuals like the late Drambjan.

Anti-Estonian rhetoric is based on recycled Stalinist propaganda. Go read what Pravda wrote about Estonia in the 1920s and the 1930s. It's virtually unchanged. And this was Stalinist media, overseen by one of the greatest mass murderers in history. The entire political system that he designed was built on murder -- the murder of the tsar and his family, of the Whites, the counterrevolutionary social democrats, the kulaks, and the original Bolsheviks -- Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev; the list goes on and on and on. His propaganda was designed to justify that murder. Conflict with the immoral fascist West, and counterrevolutionaries, was not only inevitable, it was necessary. Violence was justified against these others, who were out to sabotage a brilliant future and therefore were undeserving of life.

It is an extremely paranoid worldview, shaped by extremely paranoid men, men deep in Taxi Driver territory, fellows who fancied themselves as important players in the history of mankind. Guys sort of like Behring Breivik and Drambjan.

multilingualismo

Down, down, down into the belly of the whale, through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole, out the keyhole, out into the sunlight of a Pärnu street scene where a young woman is playing an accordion, another is selling ceramic mugs, and a third is drinking beer before noon, calling out to her friends in Finnish, that archaic northern tongue that sounds so ridiculous to Estonian ears.

I don't know why it surprises me to see signage in Finnish in Estonia. They are Estonia's second largest foreign investor, one of its greatest sources of tourists, and, let's not forget, its fourth largest minority, weighing in at just under 1 percent of the total population. But to actually see their language in windows and on menus and basically everywhere, that's a different story, especially when the Estonia I read about is supposedly so bent on eradicating Russian and every other foreign language from public eye.

It's just not true. Horseshit, is what it is. In reality, the Estonian public space is a free-for-all of languages. Just the other day I walked into Rademar in Viljandi and was astonished to see a sign in Swedish, with the Estonian printed in smaller lettering below. How was this possible? Okay, I have two Swedish friends in Viljandi, make that three, but do they really deserve their own signs at Rademar? It doesn't add up. I have deduced after many cappuccinos that the sign was acquired from Sweden, and the Estonian text was added later. That's the only plausible explanation, right?

Russian goes without saying. Every train station I enter in Estonia, every water park, every menu I pick up has some of those eye-tickling Cyrillic letters below the Estonian language. English is often there too. But there are others. Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, and German. Italian, French, and Spanish. Danish and Norwegian. You can even find Icelandic on the plaque on Iceland Square. In fact, I'm trying to think of languages I haven't seen in Estonia on signs or menus or products. I'm sure there are a few. Irish is one, sure. Haven't seen any Thai recently. Or maybe they are out there lurking somewhere. Maybe there is a shop window somewhere in Otepää that displays the store's contents in the Estonian, Irish, and Thai languages. You never know.

And so it happened that I went to a handicrafts seller in the basement of the De la Gardie shopping center near the Viru Gate in Tallinn looking for some ceramic plates with bees painted on them. A birthday gift for my dear wife. The seller was an upper middle-aged woman, creases at the eye, gray hair pulled back into a pony tail. I conversed with her in Estonian, and everything was done in the national language, effortlessly, politely. Then when she went to get a cardboard box from a neighboring merchant, the neighboring merchant made a remark about her accent.

"These Estonians are always making fun of my accent," the seller said to me in Estonian, returning with the box.

"What accent?" I asked.

"You don't know? I'm not Estonian, I'm Finnish."

"You are?" I squinted at the woman, at her high cheekbones, pouting lips, studying her. Yes, aha, mmhmm, definitely Finnish, like Kekkonen, now I see it, now I see it. "Well, if it makes you feel any better, I'm American," I said.

"You are?" she stepped back. "Well, then, why the hell aren't we speaking English?" she asked in English.

"I don't know," I said in English.

Her English was pretty good, but she said that she spoke Italian even better. "It's my home language," she said.

"So you are a Finn living in Estonia who speaks Italian at home."

"My husband is Italian. Was Italian. He's dead," she said. "But I speak to my children in Italian. We used to live in Rome before we moved here."

"Come va?" I asked her.

The woman's eyes narrowed again. "Bene, bene. You speak Italian too?"

"Just a little," I said. After she finished packing the ceramic dishes with the bees on them, she handed it to me. "Kiitos," I thanked her in Finnish.

"And Finnish!" she was surprised. "You speak Finnish too! Amazing!"

"I only know two words," I told her. "Kiitos and perkele."

"But those are very important words," she said, nodding. "Maybe the most important words."

On the way out of the center I got into an elevator with two Brazilians wearing identical Ronaldinho t-shirts, mumbling away in Portuguese about feijoada or João Goulart or whomever or whatever. They were still beside me when we stepped back into the sunlight of Tallinn street scene in July, girls playing accordions, processions of German tourists floating by, Finns sipping beers and calling out to each other from cowboy bars. What a crazy country.

tormented

Another media-inflamed controversy, in the town where I live. According to news reports "several dozen" attended a ceremony in the German cemetery in Viljandi to commemorate the July 8, 1941 "liberation" of Estonia from Soviet rule by Nazi German forces.

It was condemned.

Ala Jacobsen, chairwoman of the Estonian Jewish community, said, "The usual attempt to portray people who collaborated with the Nazi occupational regime as 'warriors against Bolshevism,' and furthermore on the day when the mass murder of the citizens of Viljandi and Estonia who belonged to the 'wrong' ethnicity began [...] appears completely idiotic."

The news of the small gathering of several dozen in Viljandi also reached the Holy Land. From his offices in Jerusalem, Wiesenthal Center's Israel director Efraim Zuroff was moved to speak, "No one is disputing that the Estonian population suffered under the Soviet Union. But to celebrate the Nazi invasion, in which 99.3 percent of Estonia's Jews ended up being murdered, is unacceptable."

A small gathering of several dozen draws a reaction from two individuals, and then ensnares the rest of us. Bolshevism. Nazism. What a joy it is to be a denizen of the post-war world. We talk and argue and talk, and never really get anywhere. My particular favorite is the tenuous link between these several dozen and the rest of the Estonian population. From this several dozen, a whole larger mass of individuals can be smeared.

Per one comment on ERR, "I think one should say straightforward what Estonian people are doing here: They are trivializing the holocaust crimes and other human rights violations committed under the Nazi-regime."

Shame on you, Estonians. Shame on me. I live here and did nothing to stop the ceremony. I didn't even know it took place. It seems that none of my friends or acquaintances did either. It hasn't been mentioned in any conversation. It would have just slipped by if it wasn't for all the media coverage.

But now it's on my mind and it's a good thing too because I had nearly forgotten about it. Oh, Holocaust, it's been too long. How I have missed you. In sixth grade, it was The Diary of Anne Frank. In eight grade, it was Night by Elie Wiesel, and the mandatory viewing of Schindler's List. In tenth grade, we were summoned to the auditorium to view old film reels of emaciated bodies being bulldozed into mass graves. We were each given a yellow sticker. On it, the Star of David, the number 6,000,000, and the slogan, "Never forget." I took it home and placed it somberly above my desk.

Holocaust. We used to have such an intimate relationship, and yet I have become desensitized to you, detached from you over the years. We've grown apart. All the other death, all the other suffering. The massacre at Mai Lai. The carnage of Chechnya. It's all just a blur, really, a long, red river of nightmares. Forgive me Holocaust for forgetting about you. It's nothing personal. You understand me, don't you?

A warm night in the Old Town. A conversation with a middle-aged German and a middle-aged Estonian. I'm the third corner of the triangle, the clumsy not-so-young youth. Summer in Tallinn. Three glasses of Chardonnay and torment.

"My father's generation was tormented," said the German. "That generation was taught to give orders and follow out orders, give orders and follow out orders. They were all tormented, so tormented."

"All the Germans, they carry around with them this huge guilt," said the Estonian. "But we Estonians, we are proud of it." The Estonian tapped her shoulder. She was being ironic.

"Why do some people still admire Hitler?" I asked the German. "Not only did he murder millions of people and destroy his country, but he lost. He was a loser. Why do people admire a loser?"

The German seemed perplexed. "I hate that man with every bone in my body," he said.

I wondered if I hated Hitler. Really hated him. It all seemed so distant. Far, far away. Nearly all my relatives who were adults at that time are dead. This German was born a decade after the war. He only knew his parents' inner torment second hand. His guilt is acquired.

"I've become desensitized to it," I confessed to the German. "I've heard about it so many times."

"Ever been to Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen?" He countered with a raised eyebrow. The German leaned in especially close to me, so I could hear him utter the ugly names, smell the torment on his breath.

"No," I answered.

"You should go," he nodded, knowingly. "Everyone should go."

Should we? To be honest, it's not high on my list. "Hey, honey, let's take the kids to Auschwitz this summer! They'll love it." I'm sure that would go over well. Why would I purposefully go to a place of such profound suffering? To feel more guilty? To feel more tormented?

Once we drove from Paldiski to Tallinn and stopped at the Klooga camp memorial. It was a peaceful place, and I allowed myself a modicum of quiet reflection at the suffering of others. My children were there, and I had no idea how to even explain the significance of the Holocaust to them. They're too young anyway. Why torment them with history?

I can begin to see how the post-war generation is haunted by it though. For my generation of Americans, it is Vietnam that was the tormenting conflict. It still feels close to me after all these years, breathing down my neck. Vietnam. I am always thinking about it in some corner of my mind. We are all scarred by it. It is a deep scar, a blot on our souls. The German has his Auschwitz and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. I have my Mai Lai and Agent Orange and Punji Sticks. A nightmare, a recurring nightmare. The ghosts of Southeast Asia never rest.

I admit that I really fell in love with Anne Frank when I read her diary. Ah, those Jewish girls, with their dark eyes and their unleavened cakes. And I felt as if I knew that girl. I felt as if I lived in the Annex, that I knew Peter and Margot and Lies Goosens. It seemed so incomprehensible to me at the time how such a young person could die. It didn't make any sense. None of it does. All of the death, all of the suffering, all of the torment and blurry nightmares, and in the end, the only thing that can still reach me, that can breach my insensitivity, that I can remember, is the voice of someone who was once very much alive.

in the belly of the whale

Today I saw something that disturbed me. It was a drunk. I don't know why it bothered me to see him. There are so many drunks in this country. It's a sizable demographic. They could have their own flag.

I think why this drunk was different from the others was because he was in such close proximity to me. I stood right behind him in line at the automatic bottle deposit, the Taaraautomaat, at the Maxima supermarket in Viljandi.

He had long, skinny, sinewy legs, the color of urine. Dirty clothes from who knows where. A baseball cap and shaggy brown and gray greasy hair suspended just above the shoulders. I watched as he fished through his bag of empties and found one half-full beer. Then he tipped the brown glass bottle back and like some kind of neanderthal man guzzled it down, grunting in between gulps.

The Taaraautomaat works this way: you place the bottle into the opening, and it is spun around until its barcode is read and is taken into the machine. The Taaraautomaat keeps note of your deposit and in the end you are issued a receipt that you can take to the nearest cashier. Drunks live off this system of collecting empty bottles, depositing them at the Taaraautomaat and obtaining enough money to buy more beer. I am unique in this regard. Most of my empty bottles are for Värska mineral water or Kali. Occasionally, there will be a beer bottle in the mix, but not often.

When the drunk finished his last beer and popped it into the machine, he pushed the green kviitung button and was rewarded with a receipt to take to the cashier. He had a satisfied look on his face, a bit of a grin, as if to say, "Ah, that last beer hit the spot." Then he sauntered into the supermarket, in search of his next fix.

I can't figure out why that drunk distressed me so. I've lived in New York City, Washington, DC; I've been harassed by drunks from Vancouver to Bangkok. So why did this one drunk ruin my mood so much? Perhaps a bit of my childlike humanity resurfaced this morning for whatever reason. The part of a person that still feels things. But then, after I saw the drunk, whatever innocence I had in my heart was gone. It wasn't yet noon.

Sometimes I feel as if I am being swallowed by the ocean itself. An immense wave is taking me down with it. Down into the depths of the deep. Down into the aquatic mysteries, among the seaweed and nautiluses. Deep into the belly of the whale.

something salty

Estonia, Estonia. You never cease to surprise me. Just when I thought I had turned over every rock, leafed through every page, looked up every tree, a new piece of information assembled itself before my very eyes.

This new find has nothing to do with deportations or bailouts. It has to do with food. From hanging out at the local ökopood ("eco store") in Viljandi, I have learned that there are exactly two kinds of foods in Estonia: magustoit ("sweet food") and midagi soolast ("something salty").

Forgive me if I seem naive, but I never really thought of food this way. Sure I understood that junk food basically fell into two categories: salty and sweet. On one side you have your potato chips and on the other side you have your chocolate chip cookies. But to take that principle and apply it to all foods? That's what is new to me.

Under this new Estonian principle, if a food has salt in it, it is described as midagi soolast. This is the most important information the Estonian eater needs to know. Whether it is pizza or Indian curry or pork chops and sauerkraut, it's all just food from the saltier side of the spectrum. And so the seller doesn't ask, "Do you want Indian curry or rhubarb pie?" or even, "Do you want lunch or a snack?" She asks, "Do you want something salty or something sweet?" It's all just midagi soolast or magustoit.

More baffling to me is if all Estonians actually think this way. Rather than desiring a particular kind of meal, be it Indian curry or pork chops and sauerkraut, the hungry Estonian's brain only registers desire in terms of salt and sugar. The Estonian doesn't think, "I could really go for some Armenian food." The Estonian thinks, "I could really use something salty. Maybe followed by something sweet."

I guess I think similarly, but in my mind, salty food is just regular food. Breakfast, lunch, dinner -- 90 percent of the time, all the food items are salty. There is no need to define it as salty as far more important information can be shared about it. And, to me, "sweet food" is simply dessert. In fact, the very crude Estonian-English dictionary in my brain translates magustoit as "dessert." The terms are equivalent.

Even more peculiar here is the Estonian habit of mixing salt and sugar in the same food. This is most likely to occur with some kind of porridge or pudding. You add equal amounts of salt and sugar to the mix, producing an odd yet stimulating taste. These recipes call for dishes that are "not too salty, not too sweet."

I'm really not sure into what category these mixed dishes fall. Are they midagi soolast or magustoit? Is it possible that they could actually be both?

human cattle

Someone asked me about the legacy of the June 1941 deportations from Estonia. About 10,000 people were loaded into cattle cars in the span of two days and removed to Siberia. More than half of them were women. A quarter were children.

I would say that the deportations not only destroyed lives in the sense that many of those who were deported died from disease, hunger and horrendous working conditions, not to mention execution. They destroyed the families of those who remained behind. And even if the person who survived the deportation managed to return to Estonia, he (or she) was often a shadow of the person he once was.

For Estonia's younger generations, the deportations are less tangible. But for the post-war generation, the memory of the broken families and broken people created by the actions of the Soviet state linger. I wonder sometimes how it is possible that Estonians, who can really be considered historical activists, like Mart Laar or Imbi Paju, are driven so passionately to tell the story of this period of history.

Then I remember that they were raised by those very people whose lives were destroyed by Soviet actions. And what a contrast it must have been to be a small Soviet child in the golden 1960s surrounded by adults who were not keen to talk about themselves or their childhoods or what had happened to their various relatives. Even for them it must have been hard to fathom a situation where they were woken up in the night and placed into a cattle car bound for Siberia.

I don't know what to tell my own children about the deportations. I had a hard time explaining to my eldest, now seven, that Estonia was at one time not free. She did not understand the concept of an Estonia that was not independent. How do I explain to her how people were rounded up and loaded into cattle cars? How do I even try to explain to her what the motive behind such actions was? As time grows between the present day and the collapse of the Soviet state, its ideology becomes even more far-fetched and preposterous. Its crimes are inexplicable.

notes from the north

As I have discussed previously, living in northern Europe does funny things to you. While one might feel as if he is living on an oil rig in the Arctic during the long winters in Estonia, the same person finds himself at the center of a very perverse sleep-deprivation experiment every time June rolls around.

This is because, as everyone knows, the sun rises earlier and earlier (and sets later and later) until the longest day arrives towards the end of June, and the sun sets at 10.38 pm only to rise at 4.02 am, making for 18 hours of light.

These extremely long days cause all kinds of bizarre behavior among the locals. It becomes completely appropriate for a neighbor to mow his lawn at 6 am on any given Sunday in June, as the sun has already been up a good two hours. It is also completely appropriate for the same neighbor to cut down dead tree branches with a chainsaw at 10 pm, as he has got a good half hour until the sun really sets. In summary, Estonians take advantage of the long days to work even more.

The term "sunset" is relative here. The sun does disappear from the sky, and so a state of "night" does exist somewhere between 11 pm and 4 am. At the same time, light is still lurking on the horizon, and so total night does not really ever arrive. What you get instead is an extended dusk that returns at dawn. The light at around 10 pm is also not like the afternoon sun. Instead a hazy dusk falls upon the land, akin to the grayish light that occurs right before a thunderstorm, lending a certain eerie quality to this time of day.

Going to sleep, especially when you have children, becomes more absurd as the June days wear on. It's hard to convince a child that it's "nighttime" when light is visible through the blinds. In this circumstance, the time one goes to sleep, and the length of the period of rest, become completely arbitrary. Feel free to nap during the day and work all night. Indeed, the other day in Setomaa, I started a painting job at 5 pm, knowing I would have plenty of time before "night" rolled around. I worked until nightfall, that is, about 11 pm, and went to sleep in a curtain-less room, only to be awakened by ecstatic birds at 4 am. I was back on the job, paintbrush in hand at 4.30 am. A new day had begun and I had gotten probably less than five hours of sleep the night before.

This is just one manifestation of the freakish quality of Estonian life. Another came yesterday, when a friend delivered bottles of organic astelpaju mahl to our house. We weren't home at the time, so it was left at a neighbor's apartment. I went to go pick it up later, unaware of the size of the order (my wife had placed it), and was surprised when he pulled a dozen bottles of the yellow stuff from his refrigerator, placed it back in the cooler it came in, and handed it to me.

I make it a point to always speak to my children in English, no matter how complicated the situation. And so I found myself sitting across from my youngest daughter who asked for a cup of astelpaju mahl, which in English translates as sea-buckthorn juice. This drink is popular in northern Europe but I have never encountered it anywhere else, so I had to look it up just to find the proper English translation.

"More astelpaju mahla, please," my little daughter begged of me.

"Don't you mean 'more sea-buckthorn juice,' honey?" I was forced to ask her.

"Yeah," she responded. "That."

It was 10.30 pm.