I start forgetting things. Sometimes I remember that I'm forgetting but sometimes I don't so I keep a list. I note the consequences because I think that may provide an incentive for me to remember in the future.
Forgot: to wear sash.
Consequence: beaten on soles of feet and pay docked for three days as couldn't work.
Forgot: to salute the Valide Sultan when she returned to the palace after an excursion to the Sweet Waters of Asia.
Yambol, in southeastern Bulgaria, has been a hub for various folk traditions for many centuries. Nowadays, alongside Pernik in western Bulgaria, it is thought of as one of Bulgaria's capitals of Kukeri, or mummers. An annual folk festival takes place in downtown Yambol, usually at the end of February or beginning of March, with mummers not only from the surrounding villages but also from all parts of Bulgaria that retain the tradition arriving by busloads to participate in a three-day folk extravaganza of loud music and even louder clanking of mummers' bells.
I was there early, so I went up to the second floor restroom. I seized the moment of seclusion, and scraped my own cave painting on the wall. It depicted a group of hunters who had surrounded a rhinoceros. The hunters were wearing suits and ties; it was we, the employees, and the rhino was the Agency. Satisfied with this epistle, I went downstairs.
KARIYA'S PHONE STOPS WORKING SOMEWHERE IN THE air above Hokkaido. He isn't sure what happened; at the beginning of the flight, he switched it – dutifully – to airplane mode when the captain reminded the passengers to do so, but as soon as he lands in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, his phone has stopped working entirely. He presses the power button, the home button, every combination of buttons he can think of, but in the end, even after being plugged into a charger for several hours, his phone is decidedly and irreversibly dead.
Writers often find their true material through the subconscious mind. The obsession that has guided me to my truest writing always emerged more intuitively than consciously. A writer develops, over time, this ability to tap into a reservoir of knowledge, imagination, memory, and feeling that exists both at the individual level and the collective. You go into a dark, place full of buried treasure, where anything is possible, and begin your quest for your true story. You are fuelled, all along, by the particular energy of your subject.
It may seem like nothing to you but you have to understand there was this life I was heading for like for a heavy-ass truck on the highway – fast, loose – and it was like all of a sudden I was getting a preview of it.
"Todor, you'll be sorry one day," my mother would say.
"Failure depends on you," my father would repeat.
"Mr. Emanuilov, you've failed the test," my high school math teacher would say haughtily.
"Tosho, you are totally the great evil," Kosey, one of my few friends, would say – the one who would go with me to drink drugstore vodka in homemade cherry compote with the metalheads.
He is the blind oracle at Unchained Melody Massage Parlor.
He specializes in foot rubs. He can stimulate all kinds of glands with pulls and pricks of the tendon and phalanges.
He can, for example, make a person grow taller by pushing on the well of the big toe, which is the pituitary gland reflex point. Everyone knows this.
He can also tell people's fortunes.
He made his first prophecy on April 26, 1521.
The exhibition was organised with the support of the American Embassy in Sofia. Ambassador Eric Rubin opened the event, together with Amelia Gesheva, the deputy minister of culture. The guests included Bulgarian and American expats, representatives of the diplomatic community, artists and photographers, entrepreneurs, journalists, members of the NGO sector and others.
Frontiers: Photography from the American Southwest will travel around Bulgaria. Its next stop is in Varna, with opening at Varna City Art Gallery on 5 April.
"There are many such places," he continues. "Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary… For myself I'll take Moab, Utah. I don't mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it – the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky – all that which lies beyond the end of the roads."