Imagine There's No Heaven

I’m wanting to jump past this part of my book. It’s not very political? It’s irrelevant, supposedly political and yet decidedly apolitical? My Own Identity Politics? Within this highly charged—downright electric—landscape in which nations were literally emerging, a writer-like person was hiding out too: and yet, I’d persist haplessly in a foreign terrain. I was a lost cause, a writer already undercover, pretending in politics. It’s my summer in the Soviet Union. Yes, that Soviet Union. My part of the Soviet Union was as you might imagine it to be: colorless high rises and patches of weeds stretching throughout haunting projects, a grayish pallor over a city crisscrossed with tram wires overhead and situated on top of a metro system that reeked of infinity and unhappiness and industry and dank urbanity, trousers with holes on sad men, ripped stockings not worthy of being called nylons on women with unfashionable purses, Orwellian grocery stores with nothing on the shelves, cr