The other day I stumbled upon a Honda GB350S and didn't notice how I was already deep in motorcycle-license research. Classic midlife crisis. Everybody's going through it with their own background. What is mine? I'm too young to be properly Soviet, too shaped by the collapse to be straightforwardly post-Soviet and too old to be defined only by Putin's Russia.

— I'm a Brit, and how do you do?
— I'm a late-Soviet collapse child and I'm fine. Normalno, as we say.

So what actually makes me who I am? Black tea, buckwheat, salo — real, but not exclusive. Pan-Eastern-Slavic at best. Doesn't prove much. Then there's the directness that reads as cold, the dark joke as genuine warmth — why am I recognizing both?

"Without effort you won't pull even a fish from a pond." Others might read it optimistically — work hard, get rewarded. To me, it says: you work hard because that's what existing in a hard world requires. The reward is not guaranteed. The effort is still correct.

Then there's the broken ancestry. Wars, terror, deportations — the Soviet state dissolved family memory. No generational wealth, but also no coherent story about where you came from. You don't miss what you never had, except often you do.

There was also chess. It didn't say much about you. It was not a nerd thing, not a personality trait — just a thing people did, like your neighbor playing it on a bench. Literature occupied a slot it might not have occupied elsewhere — not entertainment, not prestige signaling, but almost the only available space for anything true. A certain patience with difficult things. Tarkovsky was not arthouse, he was just a filmmaker. But maybe it was just the 20th century.

Not sure this adds up to a clean identity. It feels like a specific texture, a set of defaults.

There's a story about Velimir Khlebnikov, a Russian poet, — someone sat with him in silence for a half an hour, then got up to leave. Khlebnikov looked up: "Why are you leaving? We were having such a good conversation." I think about that a lot. Maybe that's also something.