Saturday morning coffee with Solzhenitsyn

I like to wake up to a cup of coffee just like most of Seattle. I could hear that four non blonde song faintly through my newly opened window.

"And so I wake in the morning and I step outside
And I take A deep breath and I get real high
And I scream from the top of my lungs,
What's goin' on"

Nice grey and drizzly day, so when I spied my notes from Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn from the first volume of "The Gulag Archipelago" I took them with me to the front porch were I like set and pray, or meditate over java.

In a discription of his Stalin era prisons' morning toilet ritual he recalls receiving two very small sheets of toilet paper, "The size of two railway tickets".

That is enough to fill any meditation right there! From the relative safety of my hovel, I at least have double-ply, fluffy, non-buzzcut variety toilet paper. And plenty of it. Oh the misery.

But the actual contemplation I wanted to share comes after that scene.

"At the Lubyanka this was not particularly interresting. The paper was blank and white. But there were enticing prisons where they gave you the pages of books--and what reading that was! You could try to guess whence it came, read it over on both sides, digest the contents, evaluate the style--and when words had been cut in half that was particularly essential! You could trade with your comrades."

Solzhenitsyn has a great sence of humor, and when I read the book I kept hearing the voices of three Ukranian guys I worked with on the fishing vessel Zenith echo in my mind. Their habit of laughing at adversity, making light of miserable tasks.

As I read the book I remember debating internally about the outcome of society in general. < click me for must see cartoon probably not related to the point > I cant help thinking of Orwells vision of the future when I read this book. But Huxley's fears certainly seem to have been realized.

Whats so frustrating is that in every instance of history repeating itself, you and I, the common people are far more numerous than the controllers in every case.

Take a look at some modern control methods in China... Darn, I was going to share this video at this point showing how the electronically and physically locked down entire neighborhoods in Bejieng. I'm unfortunately out of time for blogging. I will update this latter if I find it.