Prologue

GUIDES TO OUR LIVES
Flies on a Hook

There is pressure, it’s hard to breathe, hard to walk, and we need the courage to say what. We’re still pretending we don’t know what’s coming. The year cannot really begin. It seems it also has its doubts about everything ending and closing in it. We’re not thinking of traveling to islands, each of us is turning into an island.
”Gloomy days”, says good old Dušan Radović. ”Now it’s good to have a friend, simple, joyful, merry, beneficial. To teach us the important and unimportant in life. To slap us on the shoulder, and cure us with that slap.”
With less and less wondering and sorrow we watch great artists and experts ending their lives and careers like flies on a hook. Like a pack of Kleenex used for one cold. Like a fig leaf and tassel for a single political campaign. They turn into little men, into perishables. ”If you haven’t learnt what to say, you could’ve at least learnt to keep quiet.”
We did everything to help foreigners find their way around Belgrade. Now it’s time to help Belgradians. In a city where you gamble as if in Las Vegas, have fun as if in Bangkok, snow is wasted as in Bogota and Medelin, politics run as in Titograd, sex changed as in the ballad about Frankenstein, Belgradians don’t feel at home anymore. When they start off ”to the city”, many bring an English dictionary with them. If they get confused, they ask foreigners for help. Only holes in the streets and open garbage cans remind them that they are in Belgrade.
So it is. We defend ourselves with buttons: Cancel. Close. Delete. We defend ourselves with work and hope, prayer and silence. For you it’s easy, you have National Review. You just turn your eyes a bit to the right and choose where to find shelter.