Young Men, Time, and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia

Introduction

INTRODUCTION I n the American film Groundhog Day (Ramis 1993), Bill Murray portrays a TV weatherman who, during an assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Pennsylvania, finds himself in a time loop, repeating the same day over and over again. At first he indulges in acts of hedonism and then becomes more and more desperate to end the loop by attempting suicide. Still, he wakes up to the same day every day. After a long period, he begins to reexamine his life, eventually breaking the loop by changing as a person. When I returned to Batumi in the spring of 2009 after a three-month stay in Denmark, I discovered that Emil’s two formerly absent brother-men had returned at the same time: Magu came home from Moscow, and Roma was released from prison. On a general level, however, most things seemed to be the same. Winter had only slowly begun to loosen its grip but, as Emil put it, life was “still boring.” As mentioned in Chapter 1, that life in Batumi was boring for most of the year was a common sentiment among both my informants and the holiday workers from Tbilisi who spent a few months each summer in the city. In late September, as the season faded and autumn storms began to tear up the beach, the workers longed for Tbilisi and held small parties in the nowclosed cafés and bars, celebrating their upcoming return to life in the capital . They were going back to jobs or studies, and they talked about eagerly waiting for life to start again. Local university students also found solace in their studies, but for the young men I had come to know, such as Giorgi, Armen, Emil, Tengu, Muni, Gosha, Roman, and Avto, there was little to celebrate. With little earnings, they had to wait for almost ten months before summer started again. As noted in Chapter 1, winter was described as a “dead” period when “everything disappears,” when there is nothing to 80 • SECTIOn II do besides, perhaps, drinking or taking drugs, and when every new day is strikingly—and sometimes unnervingly—similar to the last one. I had long periods in which my mood was somber, when it felt like a struggle to get out of bed knowing that rain would again be pouring down and putting a stop to the water supply in my apartment, and that I would again have to force myself to write field notes that would feel like a repetition of the notes I had written the day before. It felt as if we were all endlessly repeating Groundhog Day. Emil had warned me against the “sorrow ” that one could be struck by in autumn and winter just by sitting alone and doing nothing, falling into complete passivity and apathy. Chapter 2 describes how Emil commented on the huge number of casinos and poker clubs that we passed on one of our walks, noting that they were places of “fairy tales” where men of his mother’s generation went with one or two lari in the hope of an implausible win. He often mentioned that many men lived their lives in a constant search for immediate pleasure , most commonly in drinking or drug use. This was especially evident during winter, when there was little else to do. Younger men were not exempt from this—far from it. They also drank and did drugs, living with the experience of “empty lives,” as Emil put it, because of the dire situation. However, Emil and his friends took an outspoken reflective stance: they acknowledged that they drank and did drugs but knew this to be a dangerous , and fruitless, temporary solution to their problems. Thus, it was necessary for them to constantly clarify that their drinking and drug use was a means to move on, not a way of living merely for the present. But how did the young men face this long period of “boredom”? How did they convey a sense of futurity and progression in the face of inertia ? How did they attempt to break seeming time loops in which nothing happened? These questions gain further specificity when seen in light of the data presented in Section I, for how did the haunting presence of the past affect such endeavors? How could the fragments of the past be engaged in productive ways that could move them forward rather than make them numb? The title of this section, “Daily into the...