I’ve got sensational news for you, friends. The psycho spoke. It’s a great story. So, a few months ago, they announced on Russian Radio: a centaur robot has been invented in Russia. The news sounded so wild that I was delighted, and when later a delegation of cops came to my punishment cell (SHIZO, a Russian solitary confinement cell) to take me out to work, I told them the radio had reported the invention of a centaur robot. So let that thing do the work. Well, naturally, this turned into a ten-minute argument. The cops kept whining that I wasn’t complying with their demands and that they’d bring all sorts of punishments down on me for it, while I kept going on about the centaur robot and how they wouldn’t lie on the radio. The centaur robot topic irritated the cops like crazy, so for a couple of days I steered every conversation back to it, and at the disciplinary hearing I also informed the bosses that prisoner labor was no longer needed by anyone, since centaur robots would soon be introduced everywhere in the national economy. But then I got bored and forgot all about it. A few months passed. In SHIZO/PKT (Russian prison punishment/isolation units), they completely cut off all radio—nothing but readings from the Constitution, the internal prison regulations, classical music, and Putin’s speeches in the evenings. The other day I was out walking in the exercise yard. Everything as usual: four steps forward, four steps back. I’m memorizing a poem, and the psycho is screaming like mad in the next yard over. There are lots of exercise yards, but they always bring him out to the one next to mine so I won’t get bored. And then suddenly the psycho stops howling and says in a human voice: — Neighbor, neighbor! — What? I say. He says: — Listen, they turned off the radio, so now there’s no music, no news. And remember how you refused to work because the radio said something about a centaur robot? DO YOU THINK MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE OF THAT? Someday I’ll make a ranking of the very best moments in prison. And this one will definitely make the top five 😉