CornFed Invades Moscow by CornFed (superbooks4u .TXT) 📕

came except the front desk saying some cops had called last night to check on my story and that the maids have been banging on my door since 10 AM trying to clean it. This day started the recurring sleep pattern for the rest of Moscow. Stay out all night, sleep all day, ignore the maids, barter with locals, and meet the most interesting people.

To be quite honest, the last 5 days of Moscow were a bit of a blur. Each night was a new adventure and I would usually make a friend or two at Doug and Marty’s Boar House, they’d give me some ideas on a cool spot to visit, and I’d venture out alone, and then soak up the environment and the people.

I remember one place I went to called Papa John’s. The entrance line to this place was reminiscent of what you’d see at a club in a big city. Bouncers checking id’s, making judgement calls on who should enter, patting you down for weapons, taking your money, and shoving you into a line of humans-turned-cows trodding down the trail to either the bathroom or the bar.

The loud 70’s disco music was all I needed to locate the dance floor here; as the best entertainment ever is watching drunken people dance the night away. Conversation with people was minimal at best as this was a local urban hangout with a minimal foreign population. And then I saw my new foreign pals.

Standing there, looking exactly like the man in the movie The 40 Year Old Virgin, was an American with an enterouge of other men who looked like the man in the movie The 40 Year Old Virgin. They weren’t laughing or pointing, they were looking. I just had to figure out what the hell they were doing in Moscow.

“My fellow Americans!”

I yelled as I shook their hands

“Comrade!”

they yelled back as they shook my hand and wondered what God’s name is this redneck farm kid doing in Moscow.

“What in God’s name is a redneck farm kid doing in Moscow?”

they asked

“Watching foreigners.”

I replied

It seems our band of shy men from America were in Moscow to look for a bride. That’s right, they didn’t go through the regular dating services. They just got stood up one night, got drunk, and ended up booking a 2 week venture to Moscow the next day. They were on day 4 and had met “some very interesting potential brides.”

“So, how do you meet a bride? Do you just lay it out there and see if she accepts your proposal?”

“Well, I tried that the first night and she wanted to know how much I’d pay her. We learned quick-like if we wanted a bride, we’d have to start weeding out the groom-haters.”

And, on this night, I watched them weed through about 10 groom-haters before finally the leader of the 40-Year-Old-Virgin bunch seemed to have found someone as sincere as a Hallmark card. I watched them dance, hold hands, give pecks on the cheek……all that silly falling-in-love-on-the-first-night-wanting-marriage-wanting-to-leave-Russia-now foreplay that would normally happen.

I don’t know what happened to them, if they got married, and lived happily ever after but I do know I ran into another bunch of bride-hunting guys later that week at the Hungry Duck, having apparently forgotten what they came to Russia for in the first place. They were too drunk to talk and looked too letdown to even bother invading their aura.

Love.

It must be a painful experience anywhere in the world.

The remaining highlights of my days in Moscow are too many to list. I cannot even begin to describe the variety of people I met on those solo nights out on the town. But I do remember getting the strange feeling that some things are uniquely universal. No matter your environment, no matter your “poverty level”, it’s all a perception, a mirage, that life in and of itself is a good thing. Some people in Moscow wanted to get out and move to America only to find some of the same things that the people in America were trying to get away from.
I’ve often heard it said that you must find your diamond in your own backyard before you can enjoy another zip code. That you must “ease” into change, not force it. It was the same plight of my friend from Chicago. I spoke to him years later and he eventually moved back to America. Apparently, his backyard needed to be Moscow before he could enjoy the life in his homeland of Chicago.

As I got off the plane in Atlanta Georgia, I was what you could call a new man. Not an Old Spice man with an imaginary yacht, but a more universally-accepting-of-others man. Everything I was taught in the confines of Camp South Georgia and it’s associated religions of choice, could not be transposed onto the realities of having been raised in another time, in another place. The Universe is indeed vast and it seems we are indeed all actors in a play and to attempt to put that sort of reality into a box only dilutes the beauty of it all. On the surface, looking at it with linear eyes, the life of the Muscovites is a gloomy life indeed, filled with bland food, cheap vodka, and low pay. But beneath that layer, there are souls walking down those streets, drinking that vodka, eating that bland food. And they are just as important as the suit-wearing souls in America. They are just as important to Life as I am.

Several years after my trip to Moscow, I happened upon a conversation with a bartender in NYC. I remembered the bombing that occurred in the train station across from my hotel and felt somewhat “inspired” to bring it up. The look on her face and what she told me next sums it up nicely:

“I was supposed to be on one of those trains, in that station, on that day, in that hour, when it was bombed. I was travelling across Russia and it just so happened that an ex-boyfriend was on the train with me. I had not seen him in years. When we arrived in Moscow, we decided to have breakfast. Breakfast turned into drinks. Drinks turned into love. Love turned into the next day. I was so distraught at having missed that train. It seemed my life was always getting derailed, so to speak. I had wanted to come to America and live in NYC for so long but it never happened. And then we got news that the train had blown up. If it were not for him, the breakfast, the drinks, the lovemaking, I would have been on that train and I would not be here today, in NYC, living a better life. I’m glad you brought up the explosion. It reminded me of why I should be thankful.”

It’s sort of funny how the things that move us and move life will use anything and everything to help us along, to get us where we are supposed to be. And Moscow, as fun as it was, is still a deeply spiritual place….just in a different way, using different tools to further the Ultimate Purpose of it all.

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Publication Date: 11-25-2009

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