Quote of the Week

From the RSO (Regional Security Officer) to his charges here at Embassy Vilnius, urging them not to be gawkers, or worse yet participants, but rather immediately to clear out of any place where they smell real trouble brewing:

"Guys, please, nobody wants to clean up after you.  Fighting is paperwork-intensive."

Just What I Saw in Klaipeda, and No More

Once again I find myself having to account for a very long spell between posts, this one almost two months.  One might think that the flurry of activity which has intervened between the last post and this would have merited some discussion, some reportage at least.  Moving to Vilnius, for instance (which we have done, successfully, I can report at least that).  But I know from experience that there's a danger in over-attending to the emotional and experiential minutiae of one's days.  Put more directly, it's counterproductive, and just dumb to keep talking and talking about everything.  Forming impressions is fine, even good, even crucial for writers, analysts, reporter-types, but trying to wring too much out of them, too much personal meaning, is misguided as hell.  I learned that the hard way, and I'm not going to muck up doing the same thing again.

That said, I understand that there are some few out there, friends, family, associates, who might enjoy hearing some personal news or insights from out here on the edge of Europe, and I don't imagine it would be grossly out of balance to try to provide such.  To snap a picture now and then of old, pretty Vilnius, or to offer a comment on some facet of life here.  Nor, for that matter, does all the content have to be about place.  One still reads books, listens to music, watches films, and those were the things which seemed worthy of mention before--why wouldn't they remain thusly worthy, independent of location?

So in the tone and spirit of this new straightforwardness, I'll post a picture here below.  It's a funny bronze statue in Kleipeda, which is a tough kind of port city on the Baltic Sea coast.  Nina and I went there a couple weeks back, she for work, I tagging along behind for grins.  It was sunny and windy and chilly, it was a bit of an ugly town in beautiful weather.  German tour groups in the hotel, and in the town square, where Hitler apparently once made a speech.  Cranes and barges in the port.  Stalinist apartment blocks, strip joints across from school yards.  Green water.

And this character, weary-seeming, hauling himself up out of that canal for what must feel to him like the millionth time.  That was Kleipeda.  Or at least what I saw there.