I am having something of an identity crisis.

Yesterday I woke up knowing that I would face the mountainous terrain of Serbian bureaucracy in order to finish the establishment of my branding agency. It is mountainous, full of crags, hairpin turns, and impasses due to rock slides, and while

Having slept quite well, I woke up one fine morning refreshed and in an excellent mood. People who know me will note that this is exceptional behavior and perhaps even cause for alarm.

 

My routine had all the usual morning hiccups associated with my as yet decaffeinated state: I dropped the spoon while making my coffee; I found a dark thread on my white bathrobe, which it seemed I had inadvertently put on inside out; the butter knife slipped from my hand mid-toast; reaching for it, I hit the bread and overturned it; I took a new piece of bread (and new knife) and re-booted. Thus reconfigured, I proceeded to my breakfast.

Time is a funny thing.

We usually think we don't have enough of it, as if it would suddenly run out. And sometimes time seems to stand still. We set ourselves appointments in time, deadlines in time, and sometimes allow ourselves a timeout.

The whole world has agreed to this arbitrary standard, as a means of segmenting our finite human sojourn on this planet. We have divided it up into a certain amount of months, weeks, days, and hours and we agree to allow it to reign supreme over all our activities. Time is a cruel master - it never bends to our needs and we are forever chasing after it.

In the shuffle, I probably signed a paper that allows the bank to change the date of my birthday if they want. I also signed to forfeit any presents I might get.

Today (and yesterday, and tomorrow since it is not quite finished) I opened a new bank account. In order to do so, I affixed my scrawling and somewhat easy-to-copy signature to at least fifty documents - none of which I read.

LONDON, KEW. His Majesty King George III, loser of America to a unilateral declaration of independence, and raging loon brought on by porphyria (or so they speculate), was both a great proponent of its botanical gardens and detainee within the royal palace at Kew in the early 1800s.

Thusly do I follow in rather oddly assorted footsteps by my Tube-imposed sequestration here in Kew during the thirty-six hour long 24 hour strike of the London Underground. I do not complain; there are worse places to be sequestered (and let us not reopen the file on Slavonski Brod...).

In many ways, we are at the height of our cleverness at 4 a.m. So many brilliant ideas occur to us at four in the morning but as a rule they are gone by the time the alarm goes off a few hours later.

Not so today.

While my body and mind are still responding to Chinese time cues, making me think four a.m. is a darn good time to get up and start the day, I happen to be awake and aware of the pre-down cleverness which most of us sleep through.

Too late.

I got a message on Viber 27 seconds ago. When do I respond? Immediately? What is the etiquette? Is there any etiquette?

People who have an active and useful memory of the 20th Century (like me for example) used to send letters to each other, a process by which weeks and months could pass in between missives. When we got email and could send a letter instantly without relying on the post office, we started to think about "response times". One company I worked for mandated a maximum 48-hour response time for emails. This was soon sliced in two and 24 hours became the etiquette. After that, you were being lazy. Or rude. Or both.

 

HERCEG NOVI, MONTENEGRO – There are as many Perfect Holiday Scenarios as there are people who might conceive of them. For me, observing the Alien Landings on the beaches of Montenegro is always one of the most anthropologically satisfying ways to pass the time.

You are out. You are away from the office and the daily hub-bub of whatever bub you happen to hub for a living. A few hours ago, you were disgorged from a bus or a plane onto this foreign shore. The sunlight blinds your troglodytic eyes, causing you to throw up one tote-bag-toting arm in futile self-defense. Your arms and legs gleaming white-grey the from hours of exposure to fluorescent light, sensitive translucent skin calling out to some long dormant genetic code linking you to a nocturnal amphibious haddock yearning to be free.  

But that was Saturday.

It's a mystery. Wrapped inside a pickle. On a ham sandwich.

On sale in Aisle 7.

The mystery is that I no longer know where I am when I go to the supermarket in Belgrade. Today, for example, I started out list-in-handed on a journey to IDEA in New Belgrade. I had received in the post a special Happy Birthday coupon for a 10% discount (on almost everything except what I wanted to buy I found in the fine print).