Very first impressions, some of which will last a long time.

My plane from Prague landed in Zvartnots ariport at about 5 in the morning. As it was flying low, I noticed how dark the city was.

There are two terminals. The old, round, futuristic one (as described at the time it was built). Architecturally unique in a Montreal-Olympic-stadium sort of way. Like its namesake and its Montreal formsake it is falling apart.

Then there is the new terminal. A shining glass rectangular box. Practical, efficient, well lit, well organized, and with all the modern trappings you would expect from a growing economy.

They take us into the new terminal. The old one is destined (doomed) to become an administrative building only.

All signs are in Armenian and English. I always disliked the "new" Eastern Armenian orthography brought in by the Soviet era, now it is staring me in the face from everywhere. My teachers of Armenian would have had a heart attack.

They are all dead now. So it doesn't really matter.

I fill in my visa application form. Nothing official looking. Just a typed out piece of ordinary paper. Suggesting that the country has other priorities.

And it should.

My turn comes at the window. The officer looks at my paper, looks at my passport, then looks at me.

Nobody ever suspects that I am Armenian. I don't look it. I have no large hooked nose, no short and stocky stature, not a lot of hair on my face (neither on my head). I am not dark complexioned. I do not fulfill the stereotype.

Adolph Hitler lived with his mental myth of the image of the pure Arian nation as the origin of the Indo-European people and being one of tall, white, blond and blue-eyed folks. He still has many followers in the world, even in Armenia. Most of whom do not look anything like his stereotype.

Armenians and Persians (modern Iranians) are historically, genetically and in the case of the Armenians, even linguistically, the closest to the original Indo-Europeans. The Armenian body type is the exact opposite of the one in Hitler's mind. His mind was not in the right place, that's for sure. As for his heart, well, he didn't have a heart. At least he didn't act as if he did. Not even Eva Braun would say so.

The anthropological name for a white person, sort of fitting the white, relatively tall and fair haired type, is Caucasian. I find it funny.

I find it funny because you cannot get more Caucasian than Armenians. So much for scientists knowing what they are doing. Or knowing what they are naming.

The visa officer looks at me again and is trying to mentally classify me. My passport is Canadian, he is not sure that I speak the language.

"Paron Vigen?", he says (Mr. Viken?).

"Ayo khntrem", I respond (Yes, please).

A broad smile lights up his face. He is happy he connected, or that he guessed right. Or both.

"Eem anounn el a Vigen", he says (My name is also Viken).

"Ed lav nshan a vor hayrenikoum aratchin badahadz mardet ko announn ouni", I say (It is a good sign that the first person you meet in your country has your name).

His smile grows. "Edi lav assatsik", is his reply (you said it right).

I pay my $30 US visa fee. He sticks in the visa and stamps it. And then waves me away.

I then move to the immigration control officer. She is young and attractive. Something about women in uniform. She looks bored.

She verifies that the visa I have is good. Considering that I just got it from the window prior to hers, I wondered what the point was. But rules are rules. She stamps my passport and I am now officially in. I pick up my bags. They are there, not lost, not damaged, on time and just taking their lazy ride on the conveyor belt. Hope for the best my maternal grandmother always said.

She had to say it, she was a genocide survivor. She was of course right. I miss her.

ML is there to greet me, it is almost six in the morning but it is dark. She smiles. When ML smiles she smiles with her whole face. You can never forget it.

ML is one half of a totally madcap couple and their family. They lived in all the great inspiring cities of the world, from Barcelona to New York, and now they have ended up in Yerevan. They must have figured out that here it is equally inspiring, if not more.

I should trust them. They are my friends.

ML is another one of the eight bipeds I have referred to. Her husband P is still another. He is a thinking man's thinker. I am really lucky to know them both.

The reason I am lucky is because without them , the other six of us would not have come together here, in this strange and also very familiar place. Without them, the eight bipeds could have met anywhere, like we did in New York last September. I look at them as the custodians of something wonderful that is happening in Yerevan. Something magical.

But more on that later.

I get into the van with ML and she drives me. The road is winding. Very sparse lighting.

Suddenly, there is a very long stretch on both sides with game halls, casinos, flashing lights, advertisings. It comes at you out of nowhere.

"All of these used to be in Yerevan", says ML, "they passed a law to move them out, so they all moved to this stretch, between the airport and the American Embassy, right at the boundary of the city".

It is the first thing a visitor sees. So much for city planning.

Alexander Tamanian, the totally brilliant city architect of Yerevan, died in 1936. He was 58 years old. I think he just couldn't stand Stalinism any longer. He would have killed himself today.

I check in at the Marriott. Right at one of the masterpieces of Tamanian, the Republic Square.

The hotel used to be called Hotel Armenia. It was on all the old Soviet postcards, along with the Statue of Lenin at the middle of the square.

That statue is now also a memory. It was torn down in the first days of independence. The head is kept somewhere by the goevernment. I don't care to know where. Memento Mori.

In Moscow there is a mausoleum where they have kept Lenin's mummified body, lying in state to this day. Now that's one incredible Memento Mori.

According to science fiction based on the theme of genetics, we can all be brought back from one single cell. I certainly hope that they don't experiment with Lenin that way. It is time to move on.

The time to move on was here a long time ago. It always creeps up on you, yet we tend to ignore it.

I am here now.

There, I did it. Something I thought I'd never do. I became a visitor to my own homeland.

Kind of like being a visitor to your own house, and forcing yourself to feel like a guest.

What is that all about?

Kind of like behaving as if you were never there, as if you have never ever had anything to do with it.

Is it just me or is it just me?

Kind of like deliberately denying who you are and forgetting every memory, in every cell of your being.

Kind of like embracing Alzheimer's.

All Armenians have embraced Alzheimer's. Every single one wants to forget some part of his/her Armenianness. Whether they like it or not. Whether they admit it or not.

I think genocide does that to a people.

I think dictatorship does that to a people.

Self induced Alzhemer's as a survival tool. Psychiatrists have a word for it, "selective and deliberate amnesia" they call it. "Buried memories as a reaction to trauma" they call it.

They think that by hypnotizing patients they can bring everything out. Beats me why you'd want to do that.

Alzheimer's though is different. It permanently erases parts of your brain.

Self induced Alzheimer's would permanently remove part of your mind. Here's another word for it. Autolobotomy.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which comes from eating too much meat of the "mad cow" variety has the same effect. It makes holes in your brain.

Nature's comeback to tell us that hey, maybe we should take it easy with all that carnivorousness. Maybe it has no other way of communicating with us to say that it does not like what we are doing to it.

Of course, when you are eating the meat, you do not know that it is infected with those strange little things called prions that cause the "mad cow" syndrome.

But what if you did? What if eating too much meat was your way of commiting slow suicide? Like smoking.

Here's another idea for a story.

A nation is so tormented that to live with its reality it practices self-induced Alzheimer's. The only way it can do this is by eating lots of meat, slaughtering lambs, sheep, cows. All in pursuit of the elusive infected flesh. In the end, in their quest for memory erasure they end up consuming all the meat that is available. Their only remaining option is cannibalism. They consume each other until they disappear. With them disappear all the memories that they wanted to get rid of. A nation of self-consuming zombies.

Armenians in Armenia eat too much khorovadz (grilled meat) for my taste. No one knows why.

Here is a real story. And I am not kidding. Google it if you do not believe me.

There is a tribe in New Guinea called the South Fore. There are only a few thousand of them left. At one point, the South Fore were going poof because of a disease called kuru, or laughing disease. Anybody wth kuru would laugh incontrollably and eventually die. Almost a quarter of their population was wiped out.

The culprit was our old friend, a prion. The form of transmission, cannibalism. The South Fore used to eat each other. Now it is illegal.

No more kuru. It went poof.

In reference to their well-known disunitedness, Armenians say "menk irar goudenk" (we eat each other).

We must be trying very hard to forget something calamitous.

I know we are trying hard, but I do not want us to go poof. I think our music, our literature, our architecture, our stone carvings, our illuminated manuscripts, all the things in my mythical illusory and now very real landscape are screaming for us not to go poof.

There is a man under my window on Republic Square. He is playing a duduk (Armenian traditional wind instrument), it is almost midnight. His duduk is pleading for us not to go poof.

We can never listen to too much duduk.