I laugh at least three times a day, even when I’m completely alone in my cell. It’s all because of the music. That’s what got me started arguing. Every cell has a wired radio speaker. And from morning till night they blast these awful radio stations where it’s always Gazmanov (Oleg Gazmanov, a Russian pop singer). So I started demanding that they at least put on Europa Plus for a couple of hours a day. Whenever I demand something, the prison staff—naturally—do the exact opposite. For example, I asked them to increase the amount of time I’m allowed to have a pen and paper (it used to be 1.5 hours a day), and they cut it to 35 minutes. The same thing happened with the music. After my request, they shut off the music stations for the entire SHIZO/PKT (punishment/isolation cell block) and left only the news station—Radio Russia. Twenty-four hours of lies and ads for medicine. But that’s not all! What does a Federal Penitentiary Service employee do if he wants to make your life miserable with music? That’s right—he puts on classical. Because in his mind, that counts as torture and punishment. So now, during breakfast, lunch, and dinner, they play classical music in the cells. I’m no connoisseur, but it’s fine, I can listen to it. Except one of the pieces they play is as gloomy as it gets and sounds like a funeral march. And then there’s the food server, who passes meals into the cell through the hatch in the door—he puts a piece of bread on top of the mug so the bread doesn’t touch anything. But it looks just like the way, at a memorial meal, they place a piece of bread on top of a shot of vodka. And they also often serve something resembling rice porridge, which looks like kutya, a traditional Russian memorial dish. So there I am, sitting at the table in my cell in my black prison uniform, eating memorial kutya, with a mug covered by bread beside me, and funeral music playing. At that moment I imagine all of this being livestreamed on Twitter or Instagram and you seeing it all. I can’t hold it in and start laughing. The happiest man at the funeral wake 😉