Theo-oligarchic happenings in Slovenia



THE NATIONAL POET OF SLOVENIA IN A LANGUAGE PEOPLE UNDERSTAND presents...

Chicken! Chicken! Something quite
Fetid floating in the night
Kaj imate? Beak or eye?
You've been framed. Fearful diet. Whee!

Here's your vino. Here's the bill.
The smell's down here. We live uphill.
Here's cultured us, there's scruffy them:
We eat our steak, they - MRM.

Beyond the town, not chintz or Aga,
Not Blake or Keats, but smack and lager.
Our trendy idea: more tobacco!
Four a.m., it's off to Rocco.

Our jealousy keeps love apart
Our aim's to stop before you start;
Ladies, you must not have fun -
Keep your panties on and run.

While folks throw up like Britney Spears,
They water us with chicken tears;
The cultured classes thought it meet
For us to inhale chicken feet.

What the Moody's? What the Fitch?
Standards here are poor, not rich.
One billion and a half deposit
Gone to the Catholic Church, who "lost it".

Chicken, chicken, in the night,
This decadent veneer's just right.
Stink night? It's just a case of luck:
What's that odour? What the ?$!??

Literary notes on the poem
with Virgin Mary

This poem is one of a few unasked-for contributions to the annual Days of Poetry and Wine in my adopted home of Ptuj, Slovenia. It first appeared in non-interactive form in the Slovenia Times here.

Because I've bought a place in "his" town with its novel ideas about how to introduce newcomers to their secret language, I got whacked around the head by this guy at the opening night of the poetry festival, after trying out a few phrases. I write this with a throbbing head and fuzzy eye.

Slovenia's oldest town is very nice except for the moribund economic situation, the not-infrequent smell of chicken wastes being rendered - and men and women don't like each other very much.

Also, if you speak English, Ptuj has arranged things so that every time you go out some drunk guy starts shouting at you for not having had the good fortune to have been born speaking Slovenian.

How are these behaviours connected? We are now learning about the subtle chemistry of love and trust, about oxytocin, histocompatibility, and we have known for a while of Catholic iniquities and the stink, corruption and redundancy of Slovenia's theo-oligarchic economic system.

It's time for us to catch up with these hard facts, and take a fresh look at our situation with a news roundup about the linguistically remote Slovenians at home, from the himself-linguistically-isolated English outsider on the inside.

Though I was on Slovenian territory, I wrote "The Chycken" in English.

Right away you can see "piščanec" is a rubbish trochee. Slovene grammar would have messed up all the rhymes and metre, and I wouldn't have been able to make any jokes.

Also, by using English Slovenia can get something out of it for free.

Economy

Slovenia has neither shed the command economy nor managed to get the Pope's hand out of its trousers.

Students, cigarettes, alcohol, foreigners' houses and clerical sex abuse are among the items which can be bought more cheaply in Slovenia, while food, medicine, driving, and life-wrecking bureaucrats are all more expensive.

Ptuj is trying to pass itself off as something it is not, with comedic contrasts.

In the decade since www.ptuj.co.uk appeared chicken factory odour levels and frequencies have improved, though not markedly.

Now clearing their own air was all the Slovenians' own idea. To make your own tourist town less smelly with your own smell is hardly a compromise.

It takes bitter jealousy and sweet sweet wine to make this the "fault" of a single foreign individual's inability at Slovenian. Then you can hit him.

Language: The National Poet's Story

Just as a sea-bed dwelling creature cannot describe the sea or sky, there are some things about Slovenia that its public relations efforts are never going to mention.

Years in, being hopeless at the official language of a country you live in is a less-than-ideal situation. But is this the whole story?

Clue 1: Not speaking Slovenian surprises few of those I meet.

Clue 2: It's a stick even polite, reserved people can beat you with. But especially drunk people. And poor people. And people who think themselves deserving of more than they have. And people who wish your cow would die.

And most of all, people who are all of these things.

Clue 3: English speakers married to or divorced from Slovenians seem to know roughly the same or less of Slovene than this underestimated lonesome boy.

Yes, that's right, it's easier to get through a whole marriage and raise children without being hassled over this language - than a night out in Ptuj.

These couples - interracial insults to the Slovene gene puddle - mostly paired up well away from Slovenia. But why?

Of greater importance to the Slovenian male than getting it on with a girl is stopping other males from doing that.

For to many a drunk jock, the Slovenian bitch - yes, they really do call them that with a straight face - is closely related to a football or basketball.

The game is to tackle, block, or otherwise prevent all your opponents from scoring with this object - and to ultimately force your way through the opposing defences and get a point.

The difference between bitchball and other sports is that in this game, no-one will be cheering when you score. No-one at all.

In line with peoples' easy distraction by image and external appearances over sincerity and actual ability, Slovenia's bitchball is less a physical game: but you can score a put-down, seize a backstabbing opportunity, or strangle any incipient intimacy at birth by taking part in the marathon gossip.

In the resulting drinking race, competitors' best shots consist of not much of a variety of Catholic fearmongering, faux-moralistic, nationalist, or linguistic arguments. Note that the Catholics are very keen to insert sporty thinking very early into every child's education, as a rational excuse for sexual segregation, and to drive out lust.

That's as far as they've got. Like sportily-inclined audiences everywhere, their world view is all full.

The lady balls don't get much of a say in this sports-based love model except to delude themselves that this frantic competition over their possession must mean they are highly desired.

So ownership, trophy wives, and victory over your rivals are the key points of the Slovenian love model.

Unsurprising, then, that disappointment awaits. Lurking at the end of the bitchball tournament, and shortly into the love story itself, is the awful revelation that ball-grabbing skills honed in battle have no application in marriage, and that the player risks ending up as pointless as a solitary footballer.

Finding himself in his dressing room, with no JISM* nearby and the ball supposedly totally under his control, he is baffled, directionless. *Jealous Interrupting Slovenian Males

Lacking the clearly defined aims of the battle to which he has long become accustomed, he soon returns to the safety and familiarity of the playing field - the bars and paid-for sexual transactions of his youth.

Besides a total fertility rate of 1.31, what is the final score in this homoerotic lovefest? It is that Slovenians bet large on away fixtures.

Here's the routine. Using some educational pretext, firstly sprint well out of the reach of the claustrophobic alcoholic "morality", prejudice and your village envy-thon, with all its Catholic quicksand, beady-eyed whispered warnings and inevitable condemnations.

To get your rocks off without their opinions, you will need to go to another country!

Here, hook up (in English) with a non-Slovenian person. At this point you may forget the linguistic misfortune of your birth. Travel broadens the mind, and none more than the Slovenian one.

Optionally if not optimally, you may return with your captive alien to Slovenia, and defiantly present your fait accompli relationship to your grandmothers and the drunk boys.

Over vampi and šmarnica your new partner, who has vowed to follow you to the ends of the earth, may start to wish you hadn't taken them quite so literally.

The Slovenians' exploration of other European tourist facilities, with its necessary but temporary escape from their novelty-phobic villagers, often has the unfortunate side-effect of trapping a newcomer inside Slovenia's ingrown lingosphere and the reactionary reality from which - as their return implies - it is inseparable. Strictly, reactionary is the wrong word - you have to have progressed, to want to go back.

A typical Slovenian interracial love story.

This page was composed in 2012 by the way.

So much for the theory and rules of bitchball. How did I perform in practice? My girl had hightailed it back to England almost as soon as we'd arrived. I was forced to improvise, and search for a local replacement. But I was doing it all wrong.

I was a foreign guy looking for a woman in Slovenia. Most turned out to be Slovenian. Etiquette (meaning their fear) required I go and meet them in a different country, where the confines of their jibber-jabber would be undeniable. But I was messing with the routine: everything was the wrong way around.

Am I really into chicks who would rather stab pins in their eyes than suffer the curses of their fellow peasants? Whaddya think? Slovenian ladies are, after all, only doing as they're told, in the name of modesty.

Dressing up in a gold tasselled bikini to sprawl around on a car doesn't really count. In home mode, they are as sensitive about the hegemony of the foreign penis as they are dulled to the requirements of the local ones.

As my search for the love began, the barflies' jaws began their inevitable descent.

Protecting the womenfolk from anything that isn't drunk and watching football was their first priority. Soon I was the only man interested in sex in the village.

My odd priorities - how could this be more important than drinking, and football? - were exposed! Clearly the best defence of the low bar set by the local menfolk was to publicise that sex was actually my motivation for coming to Slovenia. But that wasn't the plan at all, or I'd have left the other one behind.

My next problem in Slovenia was dancing. It's just about ok for the trendier chaps to shuffle around a bit in a drunken stupor, lamely punching the air to the antiseptic throb of a Europharmaceutically assisted drum machine.

The older girls may go gogo on their own. And me. Try to ignore the yokel stares from over by the bar, as watchful eyes surveil for clues on foreign mating behaviour. If things are going too well their owners may cut in - not to dance, but to distract with The Questions, to quieten your flailing arms with the compulsory drink, or both.

My superior on this terpsichorean frontier - who has passed exams in dance and everything - even had his unconventional gyrations reported to the bouncers!

Samozavestni - the literal translation of "self-conscious" in Slovenian - means a good thing. In some ancestors' benighted century "self-conscious" became "self-aware"...then became "self-limiting". One thing of which Slovenia cannot be accused is attention-seeking.

To deal with this dancing threat - that self-conscious football drunks might not be a girl's only option - my Slovenian-language reputation was redesigned by the Catholic elders and I became the only gay woman-chaser in the village.

Slovenians are a creative and imaginative lot whose escape route from the Balkan nightmare via a kind of blithe mimicry of western counterculture does not prevent them believing most of what their grandparents always believed.

But dancing in the farming hinterlands? This embarrassing protrusion of unauthorised and difficult to limit foreign movement was nervously placed in an unconvincing "British eccentricity" category. Slovenia has categories handy for every nationality.

Of course it is easy for a sexually hung-up boondocks Catholic to classify a solitary bopping deadhead as an attention-seeker, when his own standard dancing model is either pole-dancing, or somewhere to the right of Iran.

One night offered a glimpse into this country's joyless, accountant's animus. As I set one highly disinfected Catholic dancefloor alight, a Karadždic-coiffured man's unflinching stare was explained to me thus: "He's wondering why you're doing this for nothing," a sympathiser whispered.

There is dancing now, in the town where music itself was once prohibited. These adventurers must ignore the majority's Yugo-albatross burden upon their necks. They avoid eye contact, perhaps worried they'll be reported to the authorities, antipsychotics prescribed, and lead weights sewn into to their clothing.

On age matches, Ptuj proved no less creative in its commentary on the alien's love situation. Again there is really no model, as by my age most Slovenians have succumbed to brewer's droop.

For Slovenians, adulthood is long delayed by a school paperchase, as they are deceived into attempting to improve their job prospects by impressing the people whose jobs they would be taking.

In reality, though, the key to most success is in its first syllable.

This means any pre-menopausal women count as under-age schoolgirls.

Word went out about the only gay heterosexual pedophile in the village.

With Ptuj's investigation of British sexuality - and its oddly skewed sample - now thoroughly under way, determined interrogation by the menfolk revealed my worrying reluctance to go along with their casual, ignorant disparagement of the many inferior races.

Immediately, I became the only gay heterosexual pedophile nigger-lover in the village.

I began to suspect religion might have a role to play in all of this.

As their probing revealed the shocking news of my comfortable, difficult to control atheism, shocked villagers rushed to alert one another about the gay, heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving Devil-worshipper in their village.

But then it became clear that I hadn't, in fact, spent my entire life living in one place.

Word went out about the gay, heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving Devil-worshipping gypsy in the village.

When the alcohol-tobacco-cocaine-sport lobby found themselves (I thank Professor Nutt among others) on a different side in the war on drugs I became the only gay, heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving, Devil-worshipping gypsy heroin junkie in the village.

Eventually the locals worked out that the name Julian contained also contained a useful clue, and I became the only jewish gay, heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving, Devil-worshipping gypsy heroin junkie in the village.

BUT! A troubling fact persisted following my welcome into Slovenia's arms. Even with the well-known jewish gay, heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving, Devil-worshipping, gypsy junkie successfully sexually and economically quarantined, concerned defenders of the culture of drinking/smells/men and women not liking each other very much had not become rich enough themselves to barf, cough, and snort to sport all day long.

They were still living with their folks. And I wasn't. Perhaps lawyers would be needed. Something wasn't fair.

It was proved there was no positive (for them) motivation for my somewhat unassimilated presence at all. I was just an unwelcome reminder that they've been born in a square country with a rather unpopular language.

Slovenia could deal with this existential reality only one way: by not actually dealing with it.

Consequently I became the only gay, heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving, Devil-worshipping, gypsy junkie foreign spy in the village.

I'm not even a proper Englishman, they complained, referencing my lack of interest in watching men running around in shorts. They, of all people, should have realised I am too busy with my womanising gay jewish pedo Satanic nigger-loving junkie gypsy secret agent work.

Staggering out of the chauvinistic alcoholic Catholic mists and nationalist myths, to defend the honour of the Slovenian vadge, a real-life foreign weakness wobbled into focus!

Here was someone - who thanks to his excessive novelty and interestingness amongst the townsfolk - had somehow been deprived of the type of company usually responsible for 99% of all conversation - who couldn't speak Slovenian.

Talking to itself was an achievement of which Slovenia could be justly proud: speaking Slovene will remain an uphill struggle for foreigners, who thanks to Slovenian ithyphallophobia are left to their own devices to produce the best explanations of its grammar.

Like a shoal of herrings, the town reacted as one. They weren't allowed to dance, or get laid, or indeed have any kind of non-alcoholic fun, under threat, it seems, of social banishment. They couldn't find any privacy away from their own microscopically detailed investigation of themselves - nor dare to be more or less than the average of themselves.

But ah - the language - we've got you there. Half lurching, half pouncing like drunken cats on my linguistic handicap brought Slovenia brotherhood and strength, some hope of a unified resistance to its invasion by the foreign enemy and his non-phonetic but flexible, uninflected, tongue.

Taunting "the English" for his linguistic, erm, limitation became the European Capital of Chicken's fourth favourite pastime after drinking, smoking and football...and the first new one since the demise of Mithraism.

And so back to my whacking. Clue 4: No-one seems to care about my language abilities more than tonight's zealous lingo-evangelist assailant.

He keeps on and on being a real bummer about it and looks increasingly dangerous. If anything happens to me, it'll be them.

But who knows, not too much should change. Perhaps international poetry gatherings and interracial punch-ups can find a space to work together.

How do we know these local traditions are not mainly racist, or mainly linguistic?

Well, firstly because Slovenian politics operates on exactly the same mudslinging, kindergarten level. Secondly the locals who can't afford to go to another country to pull have to go through the same shit in their own search for lurve, in a performance which, like the politicians', basically involves everyone trying to mess things up for everyone else. Imagine a kind of desperate, last-woman-standing, Alomo kind of a situation.

I haven't visited all the ideologically-damaged backwaters, so I can't compare. But someone gave someone the child until he was seven, and that someone gave Slovenia the man (and woman). When not embezzling, Slovenians are good boys and girls, dreaming of acceptance by any organisation the Church of Creepy Crap has disguised itself as - and in need of guidance.

Alcohol, they say in Ptuj, is even in the air. If mood and empathy can result simply from airborne molecules - or their absence - a blank sheet would be a good starting point for an examination of a "Slovenian psyche/mentality".

Grumpirical evidence

Like many other so-called national identities, I believe Slovenian-ness to be much less genetically predisposed, and much more a response to environmental stimuli, not least language sounds acquired as early as the 16th week of pregnancy, than is popularly supposed.

However such an empirically-based point of view is unlikely to be promoted by politicians or considered by the commentator during bar-room screenings of the UEFA cup, or by the ECB, or by nations preparing for war.

And the determined Slovenian anglophobe cares not for awkward obstetric facts, as to why I have no chance with their rrrrrr noise.

Language is not really his agenda. Were I to excel at Slovenian I would be stealing "his" language and open, I'm sure, to many other criticisms.

As the child of bigots myself I'm fully aware of how they always try to rationalise their phobias. Clue 5.

Back to the poetry and whine. My house is too big, he's sure. Why don't I just sell the house for less than I paid - for EUR 20000 maybe - and get out of Slovenia, he suggests. We're still on the language issue, remember. Clue 6.

He starts muttering how "his" Slovenian system can - abracadabra! - deliver "his" too-big house "back" to him from foreign hands.

Whereupon he probably expects to sit in it watching those better foreign TV programmes dubbed into his village argot, while bundles of foreign money flow pilotlessly inwards.

Not much to ask. This, then, is Tito's legacy?

Rehypothecation Slovenian-style: sold, but we still own it

Clue 7: Virtually no-one in Ptuj expects to pay the one person who is really best at English for any kind of work. But every man-jack-and-jill of them expects to use him to get their English right for free, whenever they feel like it.

Clue 8: But they'd expect me to pay EUR 30 for a painfully thin 45 minute Slovenian class! The teacher would act like it was pointless and useless.

Indeed. It would be like demolishing a motorway toll gate, a profitable obstacle. With a toothpick.

Were this hypothetical language institution's extraordinary activities discovered, it could easily experience a commercially disastrous small-town Amish-style shunning from our patriotic friend and his ilk.

Anyway, this poem is not stolen from a Slovenian one.

Blake fans will recognise "The Tyger" whose trochaic tetrameter catalectic verses (about a blast furnace/foundry) are described in Wackopedia as the most anthologized poem in English.

My "Chycken" addresses the schism betwixt God and industrial revulsion.

My head really hurts, all over. There were, of course, long term consequences of being hit around the head for not speaking Slovenian.

[2017 edit: Within a week I had had a stroke. And just as my fellow attendee at the poetry festival forgave himself before the coke wore off, Slovenia is proud that it has no health insurance for unemployable foreigners.]

Like Spiderman with his radioactive shit, a strange transformation occurred.

In that very instant The National Poet Of Slovenia In A Language People Understand was born.

Notes on The Chycken...

"Kaj imate"

...is Slovene for "whatcha got?"

MRM

Mechanically recovered meat (white slime)

More tobacco

Slovenia smokes on

. . . And on

Rocco

Rocco's is the quietest, least problematic late-night establishment in town. After some poetry and wine why not nip round the corner for a lapdance? Or vice versa...

The Great Deletion... and fragmentation of the complete works of NPOSIALPU

Much of NPOSIALPU's commentary - covering the increasingly cataclysmic period of Slovenian events from mid-2012 on - originally appeared in The Slovenia Times and related to then current political and business events referred to in the ST's articles.

For a couple of years the Slovenians' fragile egos only occasionally got the better of them. So during the reigns of Janša II and Alenka The Legs, there were just a few skirmishes to keep poems on the board.

Like all PR operations, the selling of Slovenia is a struggle to make the "good" highly visible, and make the "bad" disappear. In Slovenia itself this is simply a matter of everyone forgetting. But an historical record cannot go on like that.

But lo, in the First Quarter Moon of the Reign of Miro I, during the Ninth Year of the Ptuj Smell Wars, A Great Deletion of NPOSIALPU-tagged comments occurred at The ST. For verily did their armies smite those verses, resulting in the disappearance of 200-300 poetic gems.

At the same time all reader input was blocked.

To save you heading off to where the poems used to be, only to be disappointed, the RED CROSS has been brought in to SAVE SLOVENIA'S NATIONAL POETRY HERITAGE.

Each RED CROSS highlights the wider issue of PR-control of political commentary in cyberspace, including the use of sockpuppets and shills, and the problem of the dead hand of government de-voicing unwelcome truth-seekers with anything from account disablement to 100% gagging as in this case.

It is a media site owner's decision what to publish. They tend to like business and war, is the problem, while equality and the environment are treated as a bit of a joke, as you'll see.

The ST's comments area was a laissez-faire exception to encroachment on free speech, and I'm guessing I speak for four or five of us when I say we're sorry to see it go.

2017 - I gave up on the graphics for this. They were all deleted. In anticipation of the discovery that Facebook was going to break the world, the material that survived was moved to Google+.

2020 - As if by some curse, Google+ was discontinued and Slovenia's national poetry and other commentaries in a language people understand were moved to www.television.si/nposialpu

Consequently everything that appears below this point is for historical and decorative purposes only, although some links to original news items still work.

Stinks

Cardinal sins 1: Uran's willy