http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riOB29p1DqY&feature=related
1. Venedikt Erofeev writes eighty pages to cheer his friends up, and 10 pages to make them forget all cheerfulness.
What a wonderful balance. What a gift!
2. "Sad eyes" at the party at 5:04
3. Throat buzzer as ultimate comedic prop (though it stings me to type this)
4. Here: I am nice. I will type out a bit of Moskva-Petushki, known also as Moscow to the End of the Line.
The narrator is in a restaurant. He has been denied service. He just wants a little sherry. It is early in the morning.
"Why are they all so crude? Eh? And so blatantly crude at the very moment when one oughtn't be crude, when a person has all his nerves dangling out, when he is chicken-hearted and placid? Why is it always like that? Oh, if only the whole world, if everyone were like I am now, placid and timorous and never sure about anything, not sure of himself nor of the seriousness of his position under the heavens--oh, how good it could be. No enthusiasts, no feats of valor, nothing obsessive! Just universal chicken-heartedness. I'd agree to live on the earth for an eternity if they'd show me first a corner where there's not always room for valor. "Universal chicken-heartedness." Indeed this is the panacea, this is the predicate to sublime perfection. And as for nature's activist inclinations...
"Who's getting sherry here?"
Looming above me were two women and a man, all three in white. I looked up at them and, oh, how much ugliness and vagary there must have been in my eyes then. I knew that just by looking at them, because my ugliness and vagary were reflected in their eyes. I felt myself sinking somehow and losing a hold on my soul.
"Yes, well, I'm...almost not joking. Well, so, there isn't any sherry, I'll wait, I'll just..."
"Whadaya mean 'just'? What do you think you're going to 'wait' for?
Things get worse from here.
