I’ve been devoting un-precious moments of my wee-hour insomnia thinking about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. 

[Swoosh]

He’s lying on his back in a crib or cradle kicking his little legs and waving his little arms.

[Swoosh]

He’s in middle school, pasty and sawed-off^[1], targeted by bullies who stink of B.O and Turkish cigarettes.^[2]

[Swoosh]

Now, he’s sitting at the end of a table, a fifth of an American football field^[3] from his nearest underling.

In a recent NYT op-ed piece. Madeleine Albright, who spent three hours with Putin when she was Clinton’s secretary of state, described him as “reptilian.”

So obviously something went terribly wrong with him somehow, somewhere. 

He claims to have revered his parents, so they must have loved him – or maybe not.

A bad seed?

I bet it’s complicated.

Then end product is overcompensation. Why all the overcompensation?

Overcompensation, micro and macro. 

            Micro: Judo black belts, bare-chested horsemanship. 

            Macro: Resurrecting the former Soviet Union.

In the irrational pre-dawn of my depressive sleeplessness, it seems we’re regressing, devolving, that even in the US democracy is disappearing.^[4]

Meanwhile, In Ukraine, babies lie on their backs, kick their little legs, wave their little arms.

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^[1] A hip 1950’s synonym for “short.”

^[2] I spent twenty-eighty days in June of ’89 in the Soviet Union. Anonymous high rises galore, the stench of Turkish cigarettes, shuffling pedestrians everywhere looking down at the sidewalk. 

Putin’s citizens are more prosperous, less woebegone. He’s popular, especially among the countryfolk, c.f. Trump

^[3] Approx. twenty yards, two first downs, i.e., 18.288 meters, give or take a centimeter or two.

^[4] Folk wisdom insists “that just before daylight is the darkest hour.”