Extra definitions

Bulgakov's professor Preobrazhensky was interested: where did Marx say that the second entrance of the Kalabukhovsky house on Prechistenka should be boarded up?

Fragments of this quote surfaced in my unfortunate head on a quiet January night in Thailand. Quiet, however, the night was not for long - until the compatriots in the bungalow opposite reached the calculated level of the celebration of Orthodox Christmas.

Where does Christ say that in honor of his birthday, one should pour cognac up to the ears, and then shoot pyrotechnics into the sky until half past four in the morning?

At brunch, the male Orthodox fireworkers, two in number, sat gloomy, with bo-bo heads; sat topless, with their bellies on their knees; one of those who sat, in addition to his physique, pleased those around him with a tattooed cross on his bicep.

My wife suggested that the tattoo was done for informational purposes. Got up in the morning, and who you do not remember. He went to the mirror, peered: aha, Orthodox! One less question to the universe.

In the midst of breakfast, a combat-looking Thai woman entered the restaurant terrace - in a miniskirt, stilettos and all in sequins, entered and went straight to the Orthodox, for the calculation. It was ten o'clock in the morning, and the Orthodox removed the cover, apparently, for the night, and her working hours had long ended.

"Ten minets," the kid muttered to her, meaning in this case, hopefully, the number of minutes.

If these people (having previously tied them tightly so as not to be killed) are told that they have the same relation to Orthodoxy as a hare has to geometry, these people, I believe, will be sincerely offended. But self-identification sometimes has little to do with reality. The Aztecs, for example, believed they were in charge of the rising of the sun. This consideration is very interesting to anthropologists, but astronomers don't care.

... The emptiness that formed in the minds after the final bummer with communism was quickly filled with a new obligatory subject. And just as almost no one has read Marx, so almost no one has touched the Gospel either—and now you don't even need abstracts, just hang up a cross. (An old dream: to crowd in the corner of some nomenklatura resident with a candle and rapidly examine ... How many evangelists were there? Names, passwords, appearances?

We live in a world of self-styled definitions. Here comes a man who calls himself a liberal on the grounds that he has learned how to use a pin code. Here comes another, thinking that he is a statesman, because a portrait of Putin hangs in his office and now he “roofs” not like an ordinary bandit, but on behalf of the Russian Federation ... Here comes - already without any metaphor, but literally, in front of me - a hefty kid with a hangover (the karmic brother of those with fireworks) is walking through the Thai airport and is loudly rude to the local girl leading us to the landing. Kindly so, for fun, in the back, in Russian ... All the same, she does not understand!

And to my request to stop rudeness, he joyfully explains:

So let's go home!

Ah, well, that changes things. He is not just like that, but in the joy of a quick meeting with the Motherland! For patriotic reasons...

You know, I still propose to return to the evaluation scale of Professor Preobrazhensky.

Peeing past the toilet and stealing galoshes are not Marxists, even if they do all this under his portrait; a drunk tattooed is just a drunk tattooed, even if he is tattooed with an Orthodox cross, and a rude woman is an ordinary boor - regardless of whether he flies to his homeland or (and it would be better) away from it.