Евгений Мешков - Simple Truths of Life

Another nuisance was that some time ago my father sold his mother’s apartment for very cheap, about a quarter of its market value. As I understand it, his acquaintances deceived him when he was drunk. Before selling the apartment, father rented it out, but then there was a small fire in it, and someone talked him into selling a Moscow two-room apartment of 52 square meters for just a million rubles. Simply put, someone had bought their apartment at a huge discount. Father then bought a new car and a TV for the money received. Then he began to drink the rest of the money away.

It so happened that in the summer, my father decided to buy me a motor scooter, since my motorcycle was constantly breaking down, and almost all my friends were riding on these new (for our village) vehicles. He arrived with cash already withdrawn. Having traveled to the nearest cities, we were able to find only one store where only one Chinese scooter was sold. I tried it by having driven it on a local road. Everything seemed quite normal, including the power of a 50-liter moped. I then had a choice: to take that one scooter or risk that my father would drink the already withdrawn money away, which, alas, could happen, given his previous decisions. We bought that scooter. After some time, it became clear that the Chinese scooter had a chain instead of a variator and a drive belt, which is why it tangibly lost in power to its brothers from Japan. This led to the fact that very soon I could not have anyone ride on my scooter except for myself.

Unfortunately, the problems did not end there. It soon became clear that some strangers began to live in father’s apartment. Father himself was almost always drunk. It became clear to my adult relatives that those people wanted to get their hands on my father’s apartment. Then my cousin helped us make the deed of gift for that apartment to me so that my father could not become homeless. A few months later, dad told how those people were shocked to find out that the apartment no longer belonged to him and disappeared very quickly from his life, possibly in search of other people with alcohol addiction… There were also some people who tried to redirect my father to think that his son, that is me, will kick him out from the apartment. Unfortunately, my father actually asked us one day if we wanted to do something like that – certainly not! He then sighed with relief and in fact lived in his apartment until the end of his life, even despite all the difficulties that we had to overcome…

In the village, I fell in love with one girl who was new in our company and was older than me. I then often thought about telling her about my feelings, but each time, when I was outside with her, I could not force myself to do this during our conversations. The fear of speech overpowered every time. It is interesting that I spoke normally when we talked about other topics, but as soon as I thought about telling the truth, I was immediately constrained by my insecurities. Many years of life had taught me that when I start talking in this state of consciousness, speech stutters are guaranteed. And I did not want her to know.

Because of this inability to confess my feelings to a girl, I for the first time seriously thought about suicide. “Seriously” means that I really decided that when I would be in Moscow, I would commit suicide by jumping from a tall building. It was not just a thought or fantasy; it was a firm decision. Something interesting happened after that. A few months ago, I watched a television show about palmistry, and how lines, or dots, crossing the life line, can mean a person’s death. Then in the village, sitting by the window of the Small House, I accidentally noticed that a spot appeared on the life line of my right palm, located not far from half the length of that line. At that moment, I clearly realized that I would really commit suicide and die if I would not change the course of my thoughts. I chose life, and the spot on my life line quickly disappeared.

Then I continued to fantasize very often, too often… If earlier it was a conscious action, a choice that I made during loneliness, then it was happening more and more as if by itself. I constantly dreamed of something, or someone, even while doing some work, for example, while repairing a motorcycle, or when I was repairing the roof of our house and terrace. Fictional stories covered up all the “bad” of my real life so perfectly that I simply could not live without them, because I no longer felt discomfort and fear. Needless to say, I fantasized about the girl I fell in love with and often accompanied those fantasies with masturbation… (I should add a clarification here so that everyone has a clear picture of what I mean when I talk about my negative habit of daydreaming in this particular book. During such fantasies, I began to “voice” the speech of imaginary characters in my head, “hearing” a muffled “voice” that I myself generate in my mind).

Once we had dinner in the kitchen of the Big House. We were eating there because my father had come for a visit. I think he drank alcohol then, and I made a speech about the harm from such alcohol consumption, and that psychology plays an important role in this addiction. It was a very clever speech for a teenager of my age, and my father jokingly mentioned this, noting that I did not take after him. I never studied psychology. I just as if “always”, or from birth, knew that truth, which I then told my father.

This was not the only time I had knowledge of something that I had never read or heard about in my life. Once in Moscow, while still at school, I watched a television program about the secrets of death, and at the end of that program, the announcer said along a black screen, that after death we simply cease to exist. I immediately knew that this simply could not be true. If this were true, then it would mean that we are simple robots, and robots cannot identify themselves – they cannot say “I am” because they really think so, and not because in the past they were programmed by someone to say that. In the following years, when I was dealing with programming, I found even more confirmation of the correctness of that knowledge, but it is still difficult for me to express that truth with words so that everyone understands what I mean. And considering the fact that many modern serious scientists really believe that robots can gain consciousness, means that not all readers will understand me.

There was also a case in the village when I instructed an older friend against drinking with another, more “adult” company, as it was clear that he was going to make a mistake in his desires to be with people of his age at the expense of his health and moral convictions – he had previously made a promise that would never drink. In the end, my fears were confirmed when he often drank and once, one might say, allowed one guy from another company to trample the mint that he planted earlier near his house – then we often went in the woods to transplant trees from there to the lawns in front of our houses – we were interested in it in our childhood.

Returning to the passage of my life on which we stopped, the time had come for the last eleventh grade.

After a couple of months, I, and several of my friends and acquaintances, started to have the Internet access.

One of the first things I started looking up was “how to cure stuttering”. On one of the forums I read the comment of an adult woman who, if my memory serves me, worked as a teacher and continued to stutter. She wrote that the best thing to do in this situation is to simply come to terms with stuttering. I got defensive then about the idea of putting up with stuttering. I could not put up with such a stammering speech, and I clearly remember that I wanted to be either completely normal and healthy, or no one at all. Then I closed the page and did not search for anything more regarding stuttering, thinking that if the best thing people on the Internet could write about stuttering was to put up with it, it meant that I would not find the answer to my question, otherwise all people would already known about the solution to the stuttering problem, right…?