I lived in Sevastopol, Ukraine for a period of about 6 months. The thing that you have to understand about Sevastopol is that it’s the weirdest damn place on earth. Ukraine itself is backwards, but Sevastopol is straight up Soviet still. It’s like no one bothered to tell them that the Cold War was over. There are a lot of Old World things that I saw in Sev-town that I expect that I will never see again. They went out of their way to preserve the old Russian way of life, and it was vastly apparent that I was considered I spy during my time there.
It was the constant reminder that the people of that great city thought I was a spy that kept me from murdering the man that I was “stationed” there with. His name was Brilliant, which was incongruent at best. The boy was obsessed with building a mechwarrior and lived in this weird planet where he was awesome and the rest of us agreed. He wanted to be an inventor, and his great project, his billion-dollar baby, was going to be a see-through toaster. That’s the level of insanity he had achieved. That two steps away from murdering you in your sleep.
A lot of my life was shaped in Sevastopol. It was there that I learned that there truly was a God. Not that I had tremendous doubts on the subject, being raised a dutiful child of a faithful Mormon family. I was serving in Sevastopol on a mission for the church I had belonged to my entire life. Still I had a difficult time resigning myself to believing without a doubt that there was a Supreme Deity who was responsible for all of life and creation. After all, I was living in a city that hadn’t yet learned that the Soviet Republic no longer stood with a man whose life ambition was to construct a giant robot with money he earned making a see-through toaster.
We lived in an apartment on Gluhovo street, which by itself was an unbelievable place. Sort of like Martin Scorsese meets The Bourne Supremacy meets Disney. We had a next-door neighbor who we lovingly gave the moniker “Weird Man,” due to the fact that he would watch us from between the blinds in his kitchen window every day when we left. There were only a few times that we saw him outside of his apartment and every time we desperately tried to get him to communicate with us. He would just run through us like he was playing Red Rover. There was a lady of an indeterminate age that was constantly trying to get us to buy “fresh” milk. A group of (actual) children that would sit around and smoke cigarettes. We called them the Gluhovo stompers. People that looked like they were going to work as Serfs on a farm in the country. The best part? We lived 3 blocks from the beach. I could see the Black Sea from the street. And people dressed like farmers. It was past bizarre.
I’m getting off topic (though that’s sort of the point of this blog). We were walking down Menshikova (which was the main street that Gluhovo was connected to) after some awesome proselytizing when we heard this unworldly siren blaring up the road. I couldn’t place it- every siren in Europe is traumatic to listen to. But this one seemed too inconsistent, too shrill. I looked down the road and saw a car approaching. As it drew closer, I squinted and saw a white monkey, screaming its little monkey head off jumping up and down in the driver’s seat. Instead of trying to steer, however, our ancient ancestor insisted simply on pounding the dashboard with angry monkey fists. It took a triple take before I realized that it was an English car- the steering wheel was on the opposite side. I started laughing, but was immediately cut off as I was pushed off the sidewalk by no less than two dozen goats, who proceeded to walk up the sidewalk in a metropolitan area as though they built the place. After a few seconds of shocked silence, I laughed again.
I realized then and there that there had to be a God, because goats and palm trees and monkeys who hate car rides just don’t happen in some freak cosmic accident. God is some Mel Brooks style genius and Sevastopol is his greatest stage- the weirdest damn place on earth.