Welcome to this site! It was developed through the good will of Stoyan Tonev (HTML, scripting, and site art) and of yours truly, Georgi Ushev, Sainthood, Modesty (short stories and articles).

Possibly you have noted that this is the only site material I have written in English; all my other writings are in Bulgarian - my own style of Bulgarian perhaps, but Bulgarian nonetheless. Probably you would ask why, now that your interest in this site, thence presumably in my writings, has brought you this far. A logical question. A human question. Especially considering that I have lived away from Bulgaria for the last 28 years, 24 of them in the US.

Human questions, even the most logical ones, are difficult to answer. Actually, they can be answered, but the logic of the responder seldom fits the logic of the questioner because each looks at the world from the perspective of unique and unrepeatable life experiences. An attempt to answer a human question opens a web of more questions, often unpleasant - in their response.

Therefore, to save you the unpleasantness of an elaborate response, let me say only that my writings here were created not for employment but for personal pleasure; they are my own personal space. Also let me add that in my formative 11 years in the US, that is, the years before I became a normal human being with a wife and a family, the Anglo-American culture and its adherents with whom fate met me overwhelmingly failed to coalesce into an endearing image. In a very natural consequence, my wife is a Bulgarian, the language that I associate with human acceptance and love and children and happiness is Bulgarian - and in my personal space I speak and write Bulgarian only.

Soul reminiscences like the above almost invariably invite the old All-American Question: how can I reconcile my Bulgarian-only personal space with my US citizenship? The question assumes that the culture of Bulgarian Americans has no place in the American cultural fabric. Incidentally, the All-American Question is typically posed by… Bulgarian immigrants or newly-minted Bulgarian Americans, still eager to show off their freshly-refocused patriotic zeal - and still unaware that the question is old and meaningless. No longer do the Anglo-Americans waste time with it; they are busy recasting me from the stereotyped image of a cultural subhuman into a statistical image of their own, in their sudden discovery that our common European roots tie us quite close to each other - and to the ideals behind the US citizenship. Of course, such new discoveries of "closeness" are relative, but when the measurement is the minority proportion of the Anglo-Americans in California, with the same predicted for other states along the southern border, and eventually to the whole US, the "closeness" relativism assumes an absolutistic hue. The only problem is, bitter memories cannot be just wished away.

But what I just wrote does not fit with the nature of my stories, you might note. Why, they always center on the human soul, even to the point of excluding descriptions of physical appearance! What "failure to coalesce into an endearing image", what "bitter memories" could possibly transpire through the obviously Anglo-American voices in stories such as "Water Wad", "A Piece of Journal Bearing", "From the Rear", and many others! How could I write such stories unless someone opened his soul to me - and how could one do that over the forbidding cultural chasm that I imply here! Well, I could! Because there is a huge difference between opening one's soul to a peer who can judge and maybe ask back piercing searching questions, and dumping pain onto an outsider whose judgment is not a psychological factor - and is therefore a safe, for the lack of a better word, outlet for held back pressurized anguish that self-suppression has not released to be shared with, er, regular people. To say it bluntly, as often as not I was the safe outlet, the outsider whose judgment is not a psychological factor. For example, "Now that I Look" and "The Shadow" came to me in teary-eyed monologues just before and after retirement, respectively, from colleagues who had told me "hello" no more that 10 times, between both of them, over 10 years of working together! Were those attempts at reconciliation, or at asking for forgiveness?! A similar origin had "Humanity". And the demographic shift I already mentioned induced a few other soul openings, in the central California village of Escalon. Again, it was not personal closeness but the town's new Mexican character, with old neighbors feeling aliens in their own native home, that lighted them with joy at seeing a familiar face with… such close roots… "Moral Little Circles" came right out of a one-hour monologue in front of the grocery store.

Perhaps the humanity in some of the Anglo-American images is to certain degree a reflection of my own. How many readers could guess that the character in "Now that I Look" in 1988 had voiced "concerns" to some authorities about my speaking - God forbid! - Bulgarian in my private life, with the result that I was called in by the then-Rockwell Industrial Security to clarify precisely what language I speak with my parents - and perhaps to feel "un-American" for not speaking… English… The formal record of the meeting stated that I was required to bring proofs of all my employment from college onward. (The gentleman in "First the Patches" knew about such verbal versus written orders…) And the character in "Moral Little Circles" lived on the other side of the fence from our back yard. He had a dog - and we had a dog. The dogs would tear holes in the wooden fence and would cross over. When his dog did, we pushed it back through the hole; when our dog did, he called the Animal Control - to teach us lessons in American civic virtue… The fines from the Control were $20, in 1979; minimum (i.e. my) wage was $2.73/hour. Now, was it my humanity that filtered out these stains from the neighbor's image in the story? I hope it was. Or maybe it was forgiveness. The ultimate irony in stories such as these is that their characters do not fit the mainstream American perceptions of how the world should view the "real" Americans. Therefore the characters' images were practically wiped out by the very same culture under whose conditioning they had behaved as discriminating assholes, to say it politely. And it is through the Bulgarian culture, a culture they considered inferior, that fragments of their images now live on.

However, most of the characters in my stories are outstanding people just the way they are, or were, for those who have already passed away. For example, my employment at McDonnell-Douglas happened on the signature of the gentleman from "Subversive". My next job at Rockwell was possible through the intercession of the gentleman from "The Drill Bit", who through various personal contacts at various agencies ensured that US laws and rights applied, in 1987, even to Bulgarian Americans, thence to me, at least in theory. May he engrave Archangel Mihail's coffee mugs and arrange the "express penicillin lane" for angels returning from shore leave on Earth! Humanity transcends ethnic, religious, and national boundaries - and I hope my stories show it.

Thank you for visiting the site! If you already know Bulgarian, through birth or through respect for my culture - you are welcome in my personal space! Otherwise - thank you anyway, and hasta la vista!

The bitter ugliness of some of my memories, in a distant mathematical linear logic space, or rather their smoldering pain, still hover, roused by writing this comment. Yet life cannot exist without beauty! So here is an image of beauty - to leave you and me with a brighter mood when we exit:

God bless!

Georgi Ushev, 28 JUN 2002