I skulked into the medical clinic last week with a folded up plastic paketa in hand. I had it folded over several times to hide the contents.
     "Uh, ana-LEEZ?" I said, just as the nurse had instructed me.
     "Chto?" the pretty blond receptionist asked. She wore a see-through blouse, the kind made famous here for drawing your eyes straight to their Warsaw Pact bras. The receptionist stared at the paketa.
     "Chto tam?!"
     Suddenly the whole waiting room turns its attention to me. The music stops. A Japanese couple, two young mothers, an American yuppie, a doctor passing through the hallway: they all stop and listen.
     "Ana-LEEZ," I repeated more softly, pointing to the paketa.
     "Chto-o?"
     She reached for the paketa. I pulled back. Don't want her tearing it open, see-through stool sample cylinder the size of a cocaine bullet, spoon and all, crashes on the floor, turd chunk flies across the room, sticking to the wall clock...
      "Chto tam?"
      "Ana-LEEZ," I said.
     Now they're all confused. They gather around to try to figure out what I've got there. I shake the bag.
      Suddenly the girl's face lightens up. "Oh, A-NA-leez. A-NA-leez."
     "Da, a-NA-leez," I agreed.
      My mispronunciation made her think I was leaving my anus in a paketa, instead of my anus's droppings. Now I made sense! Ha-ha! Everything was fine! The crowd backed away.
     "Zdes," she said. She reached her hand up to take the paketa.
      I panicked. She'll never let me marry her if she sees this: a tiny chunk of brown clay stuck to the spoon, a lonely li'l bugger, so vulnerable, so cute...so crawling with parasites.
     Fuck it. Gotta get healthy. Always my slogan: Gotta Get Healthy! I handed her the paketa, then otsnaggelpussoval, exit stage left.
     "Hey, Ames, that's nothing new! You've been handing your stool samples to us readers every other week for years now! That bitch got off light!"
     Right you are, sir. And why stop a good thing? Since you're such a smart guy, I'll double the load this issue. Here are two more stool samples for y'all to chew on. For the price of one. Hell, I'm givin' 'em away! I'm nuts! Mad Mark's Hanukkah Giveaway! You can't stop me!...
      STOOL SAMPLE #1: After weeks of insomnia and mornings feeling like my blood had turned to sand, I finally caved in to the pharmaceutical industry. I've been off Imovane for three months now. It's a dangerously kind drug, Imovane, the perfect sleeping pill that also offers a few minutes of pre-fainting bliss if you time things right. That was the last eXile obsession after the hard drugs ran out: buy a box of Imovanes from the local apte-ka, pop two, then try to stay awake for as long as possible, doing laps in your bedroom while blasting Bonnie Prince Billie. It's the closest thing to a 10-minute smack rush, and legal. But you can get hooked on Imovane. After a couple of months doing Imovane laps in your bedroom, you find that you can't sleep without them.
      So I quit. In Kosovo they only sell Valiums, which always leave me depressed and panicky. I was as clean as President Bush there. After three Imovane-less months and weeks of horrible sleep, I ran to the 36.6 this past Monday night. They did-n't have Imovanes, but the sweet eager pharmacist pushed Moscow's newest pill: Idavan.
     Like Imovane, Idavan is made in France. For about six bucks, you get 20 of the white, oval- shaped pills. Idavan is chemically similar to Imovane, and exactly the same as that impossible-to-score American elixir, Ambien. I used to pinch Ambiens from my mother's medicine cabinet before moving to Russia. We needed them to deal with my dying stepfather's late-night cries. It was the only way you could sleep.
      The wonderful thing about Idavan is that it produces a cheerful kaleidoscopic effect. The key is trying to stay awake long after it kicks in. After popping my first, I noticed that my computer screen images were moving in colorful counter- clockwise circles, the javascript graphics bouncing out in three dimensions. I tried staying awake as long as possible to enjoy it--ten minutes of bliss, then... I woke up the next morning feeling chipper and ready to offer up stool samples for all.
      STOOL SAMPLE #2: Has anybody noticed how potentially fucked Russia is in 2001? Everybody (including government officials) agrees that the only reasons Russia turned around this year are because of ludicrously high oil prices caused primarily by the energy-guzzling U.S. economy, and the boon to local production inspired by 1998's ruble devaluation. Now the U.S. economy is heading for recession, oil prices are collapsing, and the ruble has appreciated in real terms against the dollar over the past year by some 30-40%, pushing it well into "overvalued" territory. Even Russia's biggest cheerleaders have been wailing about Russia's need to "finally reform before oil prices sink, or else the economic recovery is doomed." Welp, on Tuesday, Reuters ran this cheery story: "Oil's 3-Day Slump Ends 2-Year Bull Run": "Oil prices extended a heavy losing streak on Tuesday, prompting dealers to herald the end of the two-year- old bull run that has slowed world economic growth. [...] 'The great bull market is over,' said U.S. oil analyst Bill O'Grady of A.G. Edwards." World growth has indeed slowed, to put it mildly. Asian stock markets have crashed just as hard as they did in 97/98, while the NASDAQ fall has wiped out $2.5 trillion in American wealth just in the past few months. Oil prices have suddenly suffered from acute penile erection disorder, falling 18 percent in the last week alone, leading Reuters to offer this cheerful morsel yesterday: "'It does look as if the bull run [in oil] is totally over,' said broker Christopher Bellew of Prudential Bache."
      Ooops. Welp, guess it's already too late--yet again--for Russia to make those "hurry before it's too late" reforms that the pundits have been calling for since, well, going back to the days when Paula Abdul ruled the airwaves.
      Not that it matters. Even when the economy imploded in 1998, it wasn't the end of the world (except of course for Buck Wiley). The nice thing is that this time, there's barely a bubble to burst. The Russian stock market has about as much daily turnover as a 7-11 in Bakersfield. There are no functioning banks to collapse, few debt instruments to default on, and a completely comatose real estate market (I hope none of you saps actually booked a 10-year lease on Class A office space based on the myth of booming prices pimped by Andrew McCheesey and Eric The Hulque). The once-famously massive Western colonial presence in Moscow is now so small you could probably fit them all onto Night Flight's dance floor. In fact, they often do. On top of that, there's almost no opposition media to make a big stink if the tiny bubble does pop. Not only the Russian press, but the English-press as well. The Moscow Times is all but shutting down, The Russia Journal is by its own admission a Kremlin mouthpiece, and the eXile... hell, we're so burnt from years of abuse that even our own reflections stopped paying attention to us.
      Now, in fact, is the perfect time for the narrowly-booming Russian economy to collapse. No one would give a shit. No one would even notice
     . My prediction: exactly one year from now, just as the Russian economy is starting to grow again, the new EBRD chief will publish an op-ed piece in The Russia Journal (the only English-language paper allowed to print under Journal patron Mikhail Lesin's new licensing laws) calling for Russia to make necessary structural reforms "now, before it's too late." And you know what? Maybe, just maybe Russia will do it. Yeah. And maybe I'm a Chinese butt pilot.