Day 6 Year 2
I can now confirm it was a Kh-101 that almost blew me to smithereens in October.
So, I updated the post, accordingly.
You know how literary hacks and opinion leaders have been bouncing around ideas about open society lately: they drone on about the anthropology of the Cossacks of Ukraine, about the structured intimacy of clarifying one’s own image and choosing a life path while burning tires on the square after picking up gardening tools at the supermarket.
Well of course it’s galling. It’s irritating that any twerp anywhere can quantify/qualify the desire for freedom when it’s so freaking hard just to make up your mind when presented with a display of trowels.
Not that that’s been an issue lately, but still.
Even more galling, duh, is when it works. Amidst the above-mentioned paraphernalia frenzy I’ve found myself falling head over heels for articles about corruption and the crashingly unsexy Andrii Borovyk, who champions Ukraine’s form-follows-function fuzz, all designed quite smartly, built to last and affordable.
Ukraine’s aisles of anti-corruption bricolage teem with generations of yellow and blue gadgets that all interlock and look really neat and just make sense to some upstart peckerwood flak at The Washington Post1. I sometimes pause while my brain froths away over some junk (no matter the context) and I think, you know, this would be much easier with a snappy new open-bolt, blowback-operated submachine gun.
Zelensky takes on Ukraine’s top internal enemy. (The Washington Post, February 27, 2023)