Origin — Malu cu Cioate and the Taste of Scandal
"First child is the standard. Second is God-help-us."
— "Despre cât de prost am putut fi.."
I. The Accident
He was not planned. Not expected. Not, in the arithmetic of rural Romanian survival, necessary. The first child fills the quota — proof the machinery works, a name to carry forward, a body to help in the field. The second child is a miscalculation. A mouth that opens before the harvest is in.
Lișneanu Dumitru-Cristian arrived in Malu cu Cioate1Malu cu Cioate — his name for Trușești, a village in Botoșani county, northern Romania. Not a real toponym — his way of saying "the middle of nowhere." A place that was beautiful before communism fell and democracy dissolved everything that was built. Even the small river near his house dried after he left. as that miscalculation. An unwanted second child in a village where want itself was rationed. Not unwanted in the way suburban therapists mean it — no one sat him down years later to explain attachment theory. Unwanted in the way a late frost is unwanted: it simply arrives, and you deal with it, and you do not discuss whether the frost has feelings about the matter.
His earliest memories are not images. They are textures. The taste of thin breast milk — lapte subțire2Lapte subțire — literally "thin milk"; breast milk depleted of nutrients due to the mother's malnutrition. — which is what the body produces when the body has nothing to produce from. Malnutrition translated into fluid, passed from mother to son as a first inheritance. The swaddling wrapped too tight around his torso, because așa se face3Așa se face — "that's how it's done" — the phrase that governs Romanian village life, equal parts tradition and resignation. — because that is how it is done, because that is how it was always done, because questioning how things are done requires energy that could be spent surviving. The cloth was a tourniquet disguised as tenderness.
He wrote about this decades later in "Despre cât de prost am putut fi.." — about how stupid he could have been — and the title itself is the tell. Not how stupid I was, but how stupid I could have been. The conditional tense. Even the grammar refuses to let the wound close fully, holding open the possibility that stupidity was not fate but proximity. He was born into the conditions for it. Whether he became it is another question, one the blog exists to answer, post by post, 195 times and counting.
II. The Craftsman and the Keeper
His father was meșterul4Meșterul — "the master craftsman"; a title of respect in rural communities for a man who works with his hands. — the village master craftsman. The man who built things with his hands while the country built nothing at all. In "Mă plâng și eu de mine," Cristian lays it out: a father who could make anything from wood, from metal, from whatever the village had, which was never enough. Not a poet. Not a philosopher. A man whose intelligence expressed itself through joints and hinges, through things that fit together because he made them fit.
His mother held everything together. That sentence deserves no elaboration because elaboration would diminish it. She held everything together. In a village where the infrastructure was absence — absent money, absent opportunity, absent future — she was the architecture. The walls. The load-bearing structure that nobody notices until it cracks.
The father's words haunted the son long after. In "Sfântu' Ion," the memory surfaces: Ion e nume de slugă5Ion e nume de slugă — "Ion is a servant's name" — referencing the most common Romanian male name and its association with the peasant class. — Ion is a servant's name. Are we not all servants? The fear embedded in the observation is not about nomenclature. It is about the terror of being nobody in a nation of nobodies, of inheriting anonymity the way other children inherit land or debt or eye color. The village craftsman knew his coordinates. He was good with his hands, invisible to history, and honest enough to say so.
Between these two — the maker and the keeper — a boy learned that love is structural, not decorative. You do not say it. You pour it into the foundation and hope the building stands.
III. December 1989, on a Tube TV
He was three or four years old when Romania executed its dictator on live television. Malu cu Cioate received the Revolution the way it received everything: late, on a screen, from a distance. A tube TV in a village house. Ceaușescu's face. Gunshots. Adults making sounds that were not words.
He could not have understood it. A child that age processes history as weather — something large and loud happens outside, and the adults change. Their voices change. The air in the room becomes different. The Revolution, for him, was not ideology or liberation or the fall of communism. It was a shift in household atmospheric pressure.
But the body remembers what the mind cannot parse. As he wrote in "Mă plâng și eu de mine," the fury came later — decades later — when he understood that the Romania his parents survived was being sold piece by piece, that the revolution was a change in management, not in architecture. The tube TV showed freedom arriving. What it did not show was freedom's invoice.
IV. The Dogs That Never Lied
The wounded animals are the key. Not a footnote. Not a charming anecdote about a sensitive boy. The key.
In "Despre brute și animale," he lays it bare: he rescued traumatized dogs, cats, whatever the village ecosystem damaged and discarded. He gave them warmth. He whispered to them. He built shelters from workshop scraps — his father's offcuts repurposed into architecture for the broken. He learned tenderness from animals because animals operated on a protocol he could trust: pain in, care out, loyalty returned. No conditions. No așa se face. No swaddling philosophy.
The dogs never lied to him. That sentence is the entire chapter compressed into six words. In a childhood where love was structural but unexpressed, where survival consumed the bandwidth that might otherwise carry affection, the animals were the only relationship with a legible emotional interface. You feed them. They stay. You touch them gently. They stop shaking. The feedback loop was immediate, honest, and — crucially — reciprocal.
He has more tenderness for wounded animals than for most humans. This is not misanthropy. This is empirical data. The animals provided a consistent return on emotional investment. The humans, as subsequent chapters will demonstrate, did not.
V. The Taste of Escape
He cannot go back. He wrote this in "Înapoi" — back — and the insight is geological: the place he remembers exists only in memory. The village is still there, presumably. The house may stand. But Malu cu Cioate as he experienced it — the specific texture of that poverty, that warmth, that milk, that swaddling — is a coordinate in time, not in space. You cannot drive to 1989.
What he carries from the origin is not nostalgia. Nostalgia requires distance and sweetness. What he carries is a sensory archive: the taste of milk, the taste of scandal, the taste of escape. Three flavors that defined the first years and never fully left the palate.
The escape was not dramatic. No midnight bus to Bucharest, no cinematic break with the past. The escape was education — slow, stubborn, and entirely self-propelled. It carried him from the village to the university, from the university to the sysadmin desk, from the sysadmin desk to the Kubernetes cluster running in a 44-square-meter apartment where, decades later, he would build 127 pods as if constructing the village his father never got to finish.
But that is the next chapter.