For the past five days, the lights in the stairwell have been out of order. Either a fuse blew or something went wonky in the wiring which serves to link all five levels’ lighting up to the same five switches.

I did the eight-landing journey, up and down, twice, in the darkness, thinking all the while, “gee, I should have brought my flashlight” (or “torch”, depending on what you call them in your country). On a few later journeys I used my cigarette lighter, which is somewhat problematic given how hot the thing gets.

It finally occurred to me just now, coming back home, to use the display on my mobile (or “cell”, depending on …) phone as a light source. Two flights up, I met a couple on their way down, also using their phones for illumination.

“Náš moderný svet,” (“Our modern world”) I remarked, with a sigh, thinking how ridiculous it was to be living without lights in the stairwell for five days.

“No veľmi moderný!” (“Very modern!”) replied the man, thinking how decidedly modern it is to light one’s way with a phone.

Slovak MP, former Interior Minister and head of the Christian Democrats of Slovakia party Vladimír Palko has weighed in on this development with a brief opinion piece published in three languages at La Voce della Slovacchia, a primarily Italian-language news outlet on the Slovak scene. The piece is entitled “Gay marches end in tyranny“. Yes, you read that right.

The homosexual lobby wants to achieve a situation where the homosexual lifestyle is respected by the majority society as something normal and natural.

I’m unsure, myself, what the “homosexual lobby” seeks to achieve in Slovakia. But if it includes this, I support it whole-heartedly. Because what we have in the meanwhile is a situation where it’s considered “normal” and “natural” to hate anyone operating outside the religio-culturally prescribed heterosexual model, and act accordingly toward them.

Palko then explains the “tyranny” he wants his readers to fear is coming, that they might grant him and his cronies more power:

I will mention the example of Judge Andrew McClintock from Sheffield, who lost his judges robes because he did not wish to preside over cases where he would by law have to award guardianship of children to a homosexual couple. Another example is the employee of City Hall in London, Lilian Ladele, who will no longer be able to do her job as wedding registrar, because she had a problem with her conscience in “marrying” homosexual couples.

So, what Palko wants those who read his screed to fear is that government workers will be “tyrannized”. Awwwww! It makes me want to go run right out and give the nearest police officer a great big hug.

As long as issues such as sexual orientation and marriage are to fall under the baneful gaze of states, it should be clear to anyone, Palko included, that the only proper function of the government employees handling them is to simply carry out the law impartially. And if they can’t handle that, fine, let them go out and get into an honest line of work instead.

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, by Robert A. Heinlein

Not having much better to do with my time near the end of our stay, and enchanted by the low low prices, I picked up a copy of Robert Heinlein’s novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. I’d read it long before, as a teenager, but forgotten it. I’d bought and then re-sold a few novels at this shop already, sating my sci-fi habit.

The book accompanied us for a while after. Possibly my girlfriend read or re-read it also (she’s also a Heinlein fan). We ended up taking it with us to Florida where we holed up for a week between flights, caught up with my family and reunited with dear kitty Henry. And then the book came with us to Bratislava.

Shortly after arriving in Bratislava we discovered an English-language used book shop called Next Apache (the name is a bit of trans-linguistic play, “Next Apache” being pronounced very similarly to a common Slovak expression, “nech sa páči“, meaning “enjoy!” or “here you go!” or, literally, “may it please”). One of us sold Cat to the store for credit against other book purchases.

I just got back to Bratislava last Wednesday, after nearly three months staying in Granada, Spain. A friend put me in touch with a potential room for rent in a flat in the center of town, and after a bit of dithering and some rather fruitless searching on my own, I decided to take the place. Today I met with my friend and with Tony, an Italian guy who will be one of my new flatmates. While in the place, I had a glance at the books up on the shelf between the living room and kitchen. Hmmm, a few English titles! Tony tells me he’s a great sci-fi fan.

An Italian translation of Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder immediately caught my eye. Awesome far-out speculative stuff. A few shelves down and a bit to the left, and, ooh! Heinlein! A copy of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls! Now, wouldn’t it be funny, if…

And so I open the book and it’s got “NEXT APACHE” stamped twice inside the back cover. But inside the front cover: “Vrisa Bookshop, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala”.

This interview was published, in Slovak, by Markíza Magazine on 2 July 2009.

The English text here is a loose back-translation of the Slovak text of the published article, which is available at mojacasopis.sk.

This is a translation of a translation of my own interview responses, and a bunch of things inevitably get lost in such a process. In a couple of cases, I’ve footnoted things that I feel I ought to clarify, but, with that, the text:

Verbal Aspect Bothers Me!

Text: Ľuba Kukučková – Photo: Oles Cheresko

Mike Gogulski has a Polish surname, was born an American and today is a citizen of no state. He has worked in the USA and in Belgium. Lately, he’s dropped anchor in Slovakia and has been living in Bratislava for five years.

At the old Slovak National Theater in Bratislava. Photo: Oles Cheresko, Markíza

To the east, he’s been as far as Košice, Guatemala to the south and Vancouver, Canada to the northwest. He doesn’t feel like a globetrotter, and he’s very pleased to be in Bratislava!

Mike’s paternal grandparents emigrated to America at the start of the 1900s. His mother’s ancestors came from Germany. Most of today’s Gogulskis live in the area of Poznań, Poland, but Mike doesn’t know them personally. Like many European emigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, his ancestors, too, wanted to break their bonds with their motherland and become Americans. They had difficult lives, too, and there remained no time to preserve the Polish language and culture for their children. But now their great-grandchild has come back to Europe after all. He speaks four languages and, thanks to his spontaneous approach to people, has made many friends in Slovakia. In this way, he might be called a true world citizen. Mike Gogulski, however, has no citizenship. He renounced his American citizenship, and for the moment is only considering becoming a Slovak citizen…

School, LSD and Beer

Michael was born on 8 August 1972 in Phoenix, Arizona. His father got a job as an electro-mechanical engineer in Orlando, Florida, and there Mike lived with his family until he was 25 years old. Afterward, he roamed a number of states following jobs, from Minnesota to Connecticut and from California to Wisconsin. Eight years ago, his father died of cancer. His mother, Joan, lives in Florida. Mike’s younger sister, Karen, who works as a nurse, is raising two adorable boys – Cole and Chase – in Orlando with her husband, Billy. Mike sees his nephews only in photos, though. “In 1990 I started studying information technology at a university in Orlando, but then my interest shifted to LSD and beer,” he openly confesses. He quit his studies after the first semester. But he’s found his footing in life quite successfully. He has a ten-year information systems career behind him as a systems administrator, network engineer and IT infrastructure manager. He moved around a large area of the western parts of the US after work.

In 2004, in the wake of many work as well as personal expectations and failures, Mike left America. His girlfriend at the time wanted to teach English in a European country, someplace in the eastern bloc. She sent out inquiries and got a response from right here in Slovakia. They both moved to Bratislava and, though their paths parted later, Mike became fond of Bratislava. Since 2006 he’s begun devoting himself more to language, rather than to computers as in the past. He has become a translator, proofreader and editor.

Slovaks are Quieter

“Bratislava has its good and less-good sides,” the American native muses. “I never lived right in the city in the past, in the US. I thought that I’d hate the city, but that’s not so. I find living here pleasant. I like that Bratislava is small enough to offer a peaceful life while being big enough to have everything you’d expect from a city.” He has friends, lovers, ex-lovers as well as enemies here… He has been to Žilina, Košice, Prešov, Banská Bystrica and Zvolen. He has heard that Slovakia is a beautiful land and looks forward to discovering it over time. Does he sometimes compare Slovaks to Americans? To Mike, good and bad people are found everywhere. As a matter of principle, however, he judges people as individual beings, not as members of some group based on place of birth or the geographical divisions of the world. Mike believes that Slovaks, in general, are quieter than Americans. He’s had some awkward moments, though, with the hazards of Slovak. He’d been in Slovakia barely three months when he approached a group of girls at work with whom he often went to smoke outside the building. He asked: “Would you like to smoke?” And they took this a bit differently… They stopped laughing after a bit and explained the sexual undertone* of the question.

At one time he defended his trouble with the language by saying, “my Slovak is good enough for taxi drivers and waiters,” but since then he’s improved dramatically. He reads well in Slovak, in his humble appraisal, writes like a respectable schoolboy but has trouble, though, understanding responses in conversation. He works as a translator, and so he hasn’t mastered slang; he says his Slovak is more lawyerly. Really understanding a language demands growing up in the country. “I didn’t want to live in some sort of isolated bubble with other Americans and English-speaking people,” Mike says. “I would have felt cut off from reality. Many Slovaks say that Slovak is one of the most difficult languages in the world, but I don’t think so. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s easy. I took two years of Latin in school, so Slovak declension didn’t surprise me. Still, I’m not good at recalling when and how I should use the various cases. And the hardest thing for me – and perhaps for many westerners who come to Slavic lands – is verbal aspect. I want a magic key that would make it clear for me when to use the perfective aspect, but no such key exists!”

Mike is “Polyamorous”

Besides working with Slovak, Mike also translates official documents from Czech into English. He has simplified his lifestyle, and so he’s also living off smaller earnings. If he travels to the Czech Republic, he gets by in Slovak, and says the local people there observe him with interest. He once spoke Spanish very well, but has forgotten a lot. He believes, however, that if he traveled for a month to Spain or Mexico he would speak fluently by the third week. Though he behaves like a world citizen, he hasn’t traveled that much more of it. “In the US I moved from city to city every two years. I have been as far east as Košice, as far south as Guatemala, and as far north and west as Vancouver, Canada. I have been satisfied living here in Bratislava, and I don’t have any urge to move someplace else soon.” Mike got married in the US at 23, but the marriage lasted for only six years. From the marriage he has a nine-year-old daughter, Kyra, who lives with her mother in Georgia. Nobody from his family has visited him in Bratislava yet, though maybe they will come when his nephews grow up. Is he sad to be alone? “No. These days I am polyamorous (author’s note: in love with more than one person) and I’m not interested in an everlasting relationship of the marriage type.”**

Why did Mike renounce his American citizenship? “In its political, governmental essence, the USA appears to be a criminal organization. I don’t want to be connected with it in any way. I’m not against supporting society, but I am against taxes, which the state criminally demands of me from birth, and I don’t want to support others’ privileges. For me, ridding myself of citizenship was a way to bring my legal and social status into harmony with my beliefs. Perhaps later I will apply for Slovak citizenship, but that will be only for practical reasons, so that I can travel. I don’t want to have any sort of connection with the criminal organization known as the state. And, perhaps, I will not be a citizen of any country until the end of my life.”

* The Slovak verb fajčiť means, literally, “to consume by smoking”, as by smoking a cigarette. In slang it also means “to perform fellatio”.

** My actual words: “These days I am openly polyamorous, and not interested in a state marriage of any kind.”

From the show announcement:

On Todays Show We Have Jeff Nabers & Phoebe Chongchua Authors of 5 Steps To Freedom. How To Cut Your Dependence On Institutions And Escape Financial Slavery. Also On The Show: Mike Gogulski Who Has Renounced His American Citizenship And Is Now Living In Bratislava, Slovakia. Hosts James Cox, Michael Shanklin & Todd Barnett will be discussing The Movement’s articles on current.com, and the weekly news events. Please Call In To The Show On (347) 633-9636

I’ve clipped out my segment and provide it here as a podcast.

Listen below, or download. 26m59s, 12.3MB MP3.

Argue with me all you like about the ethics of this. I’ll probably just ignore it. Fact is, the company that provides public transport is a state-protected monopoly, and riding black is one of the ways I employ to recover the money stolen from me via VAT and other taxes.

Covert photography

When you ride black, you have to keep your eyes open for the ticket inspectors. They’re almost always out there, but there aren’t too many of them. I can usually spot them based on their demeanor and behavior, even if I don’t know how the specific person looks.

When I’m feeling lazy or tired or stressed or when I have a phone call going when I get on the bus or tram, though, I punch a ticket. If I’m not fully on the alert, I’m liable to miss spotting the inspectors.

Here are a couple I met the other day. Both very grumpy looking men. Funny thing, they even forgot to check my ticket, which I did have punched and in hand, since I knew I wasn’t on the alert that time. Good thing, too.

Overt photography

I snapped the dude in the close-up several times. When he finally looked at me, I snapped him again square on. I’m not quite sure what restrained him, but it was rather obvious from his facial expressions, words and body language that he would have liked to break my neck. “What are you doing?” he asked, and I just smiled, waving goodbye as the bus left him and his colleague behind at a stop. I heard him ask his colleague something to the effect of, “Is this asshole allowed to take pictures of me?” and the response came back as a shrug.

Additional fun can be had with public transport ticket inspectors in cities with a “punch pre-purchased ticket on board vehicle” payment system like Bratislava’s. If the inspectors start a check, and you have your trip ticket paid for and punched, just start yelling: “Kontrola! Revízor! Kontrola! Revízor!” and make a panicked dash for an exit. Of course, you’ll immediately draw the attention of the entire vehicle’s occupants, plus both inspectors. In addition to causing a bit of merry, harmless chaos, this may open a window for other načierno comrades to slip away undetected.

I received a wonderful gift. A t-shirt bearing this famous photograph, taken on 21 August 1968 at Šafárikovo námestie, Bratislava, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia:

by Ladislav Bielik, 21 August 1968, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia

On the back of the shirt: приглашение

Pictured in the background, the headquarters of Comenius University in Bratislava.

There was much waiting around the office to do, as the staffers there were quite unfamiliar with the process and regulations for folks like me.

I was required to also submit a certified translation into Slovak of my Certificate of Loss of Nationality of the United States and €33.50 in official duty stamps.

My photograph and fingerprints were taken, and I provided a digitized signature. Looks like my document will have the hated RFID chip with biometric data embedded in it.

In return for all this I received the document below, confirming acceptance and approval of the application. I will return in 2-3 weeks to pick up my passport-that-isn’t-a-passport and to submit another application (and €4.50 in duty stamps), this time for re-issuance of my residence permit sticker. I’ll have to return once more a couple of weeks after that to pick up the sticker.

Potvrdenie o prijatí žiadosti o vydanie cestovného dokladu cudzinca (Dohovor z 28. septembra 1954)

Číslo žiadosti:                  EC-ECBA1-090216-001
Číslo záznamu (Č.p.:):    UHCP-727/RHCP-BA-OCP-Z-2009
Dátum podania:              16.2.2009
Pracovisko podania:      EC2 Bratislava
Adresa pracoviska:        HROBÁKOVÁ 1237/44 BRATISLAVA

Meno:                                             Michael Jude
Priezvisko:                                     Gogulski
Tituly:
Dátum a miesto narodenia:    8.8.1972, Phoenix
Štátna príslušnosť:                  Osoba bez štátnej príslušnosti

Žiadosť o vydanie cestovného dokladu cudzinca (Dohovor z 28. septembra 1954) bola SCHVÁLENÁ

Poučenie:
Žiadateľ bol poučený, že doklad si môže vyzdvihnúť výhradne na tom útvare, na ktorom požiadal o jeho vydanie.

Žiadosť prijal (meno a priezvisko):        Pečiatka a podpis prijímajúceho orgánu:
XXX XXX                                                           [illegible signature, stamp]

Confirmation of acceptance of application for issuance of foreigner’s travel document (Convention of 28 September 1954)

Application number:        EC-ECBA1-090216-001
Record number:                UHCP-727/RHCP-BA-OCP-Z-2009
Submission date:              16.2.2009
Submission workplace:    EC2 Bratislava
Workplace address:           HROBÁKOVÁ 1237/44 BRATISLAVA

Name:                                     Michael Jude
Surname:                               Gogulski
Titles:
Date and place of birth:    8.8.1972, Phoenix
Citizenship:                       Stateless person

The application for issuance of a foreigner’s travel document (Convention of 28 September 1954) was APPROVED

Guidance:
The applicant was advised that the document can be picked up exclusively at that office to which he applied for its issuance.

Application accepted by (name & surname):    Accepting authority’s stamp & signature:
XXX XXX                                                                  [illegible signature, stamp]

The staffer offered me the choice of picking it up in person or having it mailed to me, with signature-on-delivery confirmation. I opted to pick it up in person.

If I don’t make it down there during their opening hours, it’ll have to wait until after the new year.

As far as I know, the issuance of this document means that I became a stateless person on 8 December 2008, that having been the day I swore the Oath of Renunciation and surrendered my US passport.

For more exciting bureaucracy, stay tuned to this channel!

Mainstream media:

I received an email on Wednesday asking if I would make myself available for an interview with a major Slovak weekly magazine, Plus 7 dní. I replied in the affirmative right away. Several hours later, I got a message back saying that the magazine would not be writing on this topic at this time. Someone’s story idea got shot down by an editor.

News sites:

My jaw dropped to see my own story featured as the lead item on the December 16 issue of Strike the Root. Wow. I’m honored.

Blogs:

Royce Christian, at his new .urbandissent blog: Souless? Not such a bad thing… (post on state provision of the identity, partly inspired by my renunciation)

Enlightened Rogue: Quotes of the Week (quotation from press release)

Free of State: “PAY US, OR WE WILL KILL YOU” — RENOUNCE THE STATE (press release)

Greensboring: He gave up his U.S. citizenship (press release link, favorable blog post, mixed discussion)

Bob Kaercher’s The Postmodern Tribune: Randomly Associational Interwebbery (press release link, friendly commentary)

Liberty Pile: Weekly Minute 12/13/2008-12/19/2008 (link to press release)

Martin Rojko: Mike Gogulski bez štátneho občianstva (press release, in Slovak)

John Simpson’s jms1blog: A friend has renounced his US Citizenship (press release link, friendly commentary)

Forums:

Baexpats (Buenos Aires expat forum): Divorce with USA (press release, generally unfriendly discussion)

Anywhere in the world, if a smoking hot, rich, brilliant, funny, creative, intellectually curious, athletic, caring, considerate woman is willing to put up with a guy like me so that she can have permanent legal access to the USA, I’m totally game. Why would someone take such a valuable commodity and flush it down the toilet?

– “Napoleon”, posting in the comments

Oh noes! My chances with shallow, opportunistic women seeking to realize their princess dreams by hooking up with rich foreigners have been totally ruined!

Mises Institute Forum: Bratislava resident renounces American citizenship, becomes stateless person (link posted by DixieFlatline of the No Treason blog, generally friendly discussion)

Slovak-World Yahoo Group: Stateless in Slovakia (press release link, generally unfriendly or irrelevant discussion)

Stormfront: American renounces citizenship and becomes stateless (press release, discussion ranging from positive to utterly bizarre)

Receiving attention from the Intertube’s most notorious white supremacist website is decidedly creepy. Link posted, with reservations, for the sake of completeness.

UPDATED:

Other:

YouTube: Mike gives USA One Finger Salute, by AzraelsJudgment of Azrael’s Free Thoughts (friendly report and commentary)