Mid. So, the walk, right? Pure oldies stroll. Legs felt like Jell-O in a heatwave—a total structural flop against the sheer intention of sublimation. Fighting the bookish somatotype, the chill, sedentary habitus. A quick, messy run attempt, and then back to the regular pace. You get it.

The Great Ethiopian Run vibe hit, though. George Leonard: running is the purest sport, unchecked intensity, flirting with the literal end. That same emulous drive, the querist unsatisfied, is the mind’s demand for intellectual steel.

Then, the idea for next week, a non-negotiable page. The Acting President of AAU news dropped—tears, a genuine emotional reflex, not just cant, a promise for structural work. Walking on that pushed road covered with greens, thronged by people walking on purpose.

Struggling for the right words, the tension demanded a linguistic swerve. Neither Romances nor Slavic, but the Germanic entanglements—structural severity. German: pure architecture of paranoia. Every new declension, a terrifying move toward self-diagnosis. It gives you the Übermensch, which only makes the real self feel like a structural flop. But Goethe’s return from writing was supreme. A crucial Gretchenfrage. The bardolatry of Shakespeare. Sturm und Drang—storm and stress. That ultimate flex: architecture is frozen music (Schelling gets the credit, though).

The Russian temptation: depth of soul, pure Dostoevsky, endless, subterranean guilt. A friend’s warning: not the grammar, but the psychic invasion—fear the language reveals something awful, something you cannot un-know. The mind’s ultimate hypochondria. Nietzsche’s flex: amor fati, the joyful acceptance of one’s fate.

Then, the Chinese twist. The ultimate structural riddle. Idiographic, a complete rejection of the phonetic, Western mind. It demands the utter stillness of the Beckettian void just to decode. The final, non-negotiable “L” of my college career, acknowledging that Western structural thinking is a flop when confronted with something truly other.

This whole self-analysis mélange, this pursuit of an Alibi Ake, coincided with needing to doodle for the Ethiopian Reporter. Peak cringe—the purest, most uncut distillation of hypochondria, labeling a non-pathological state. Ultimate cognitive consonance built on ultimate dissonance.

I muttered about the lumpen intellectual class. The AAU charter, its raison d’être, must be taken to the nth degree now. Meera Kaushik, the Psychology lecture hall—Lobsang Rampa morphing into the Briggs-Myers nonsense—the vulgarization of Jungian archetypes. This MBTI, this flattening of behavior, annihilates individuality. It’s the engine of modern hypochondria, giving an Alibi Ake for every structural flop. The haughty CEO claiming Maslow’s top echelon while killing institutional memory. That labeling is the most graphic thing imaginable—the annihilation of the soul in favor of the synthetic profile.

This structural absurdity peaked in the court case—a bureaucratic rataplan. First Instance Court, Supreme Court, then back to the First Instance Court. A circular, self-eating judicial process—the definition of Zugzwang, where trying to find a resolution returns you to the start, but weaker. The ultimate structural flop.

Mid. My day job was Ayn Rand’s nightmare—a piece of furniture in a fake public entity, run by a theft-wired homo sapiens, a man of osseous theft. Next gig: a poly cat who looked perpetually intoxicated, a vibe that followed me to my latest employer and which I still see on filiopietistic politicians who bring havoc. That vulgar, predatory gaze on newly employed teens was savage.

Then came the Daily Monitor article, a stemwinder of impending chaos: China’s beef consumption jumping from four to forty kilos per capita. The US, the sardanapalian winner, at seven hundred. But the rhadamanthine footnote: twenty kilos of agricultural product for one of beef, compared to four for chicken.

China wasn’t just eating; it was a sulfurous message about global resources. Korea and Algeria, struggling with farmable land scarcity—a ceteris paribus condition mirroring China’s challenge. The ultimate slap: the Egyptian embassy had ten hydrologists. Me, in the water sector, and I’d never heard the word! My friend’s stories of sand-filled sacks against the Awash were just popcorn chatter, neither grand allocution nor water policy, just frantic effort.

The obsession, the need to sublime the frustration of those employers, finally paid off. A fieldwork gig at an international company. I was leaving the gelatinous swamp, running towards something. That’s the tea.

Mid. How long ago was this? The Eskimos have a word for this jumbled sense of time, this googol chiffer abracadabra. Decades, maybe. Time is a repetend.

I’d just made the jump, riding high on the sublimation of neurotic energy. Working with expatriates, BBC and WorldSpace satellite days. I was emulous, keen to talk International Issues, the big, messy, global logomachy. But the vibe? Savage. They were non possumus—not interested, zero engagement. All ears for local FMs, news from their own specific geography.

I flipped to Ethiopian radio. A truly Beckettian joke. The news wasn’t from Addis Ababa, but from the house right next to my family’s. The place that sold simple, honest dairy now dealt in Abesha Areke, 100 percent alky. The news: a duel. Neither swords nor osseous logic, but bottles. Two long-time customers—a perfect projection of my own shaky mental state—feuding over who could finish a bottle. The promoter footed the bill. They finished, shook hands, went home to sleep forever and a day. Both dead. Police rounded everyone up.

Not a good start to my new international life. The world was talking beef and hydrology, and my home news was about two guys who sublimated their entire frustrating existence into a final, fatal toast. Lesson learned: the most important, truly emulous competition is often right where you started. That’s the tea.

Mid. The new entity was a dizzying dose of cognitive dissonance. The local tragedy of the fatal Abesha Areke duel, then thrust into the international void where the true logomachy was just trying to understand the accent. A global census in one coffee break. The Englishman: Geordie accent, bare, osseous linguistic structure of an “I’m goin’ home.” Others throwing down Scouse and Yorkshire—a veritable logomachy of regional English. A personal non possumus almost issued on my own comprehension.

The Scottish presence. A witty, waggish, jock fountainhead—a naturalized Swede, Glaswegian. Married purely for a rhadamanthine (inflexible) life insurance policy requirement. Grim. He had a sulfurous disposition, an ill-starred aberration to women, a toxic vibe that was a projection of the chaos he saw. A walking metaphor for hit-or-miss R&D, a Band-Aid solution against the cryptic alphabet soup of diseases that required their own abracadabra to pronounce. His language, when the usual four-letter word failed, relied on substitute epithets.

The Aussies. Alveolar flapping of their four-letter word was practically a second language. One, the funniest person I know, a master of comedic sublimation. The other: high-school genius, Tasmanian blood, a true lumpen intellectual in spirit. Diabetes, fresh needle pricks, a total ogre until whatever he took finally sedated him. Residing in Thailand for tax reasons, an economic non possumus to the Australian tax authority.

The ultimate takeaway: the sheer, inescapable global emulous chaos. Everyone running a hustle, neither linguistic nor financial nor tragically personal, but all of the above. All engaged in their own frantic, high-stakes Cognitive Athletics. The world was a mess, and the only common language was the explicit or implicit breaking of a rule. That’s the tea.

Mid. Let’s talk about the charter again. Not the paper kind, but the raw, brutal contract of self-improvement. The international clamor was a circus, but among the local staff was a young, fire-breathing medical doctor. Savage.

Two things fascinated me: his academic books—a palpable, almost violent personal charter of excellence. Second, his repeated, expensive trips to Cairo. This coincided with my own temporary sophomania—delusion of intellectual superiority—fueled by Tsegaye and Najib Mahfouz’s Nobel. Mahfouz’s refusal to fly made Cairo an exigible topic.

But the doctor? He was non possumus on my cultural chatter. His realpolitik was simple: saving his monthly income for those Cairo trips to take the US medical exams. His goal was an American charter—his via dolorosa, and Cairo was a necessary checkpoint.

The grim reality broke through: he told me stories of young men trekking the entire length of the River Abay (Blue Nile) to Cairo, only to be repeatedly deported. A modern ordeal. The river, our supposed national pride, became a trap. These trekkers, driven by the same emulous desperation to escape local stasis, were met with deportation. They embodied the ultimate failure of sublimation: energy channeled into a massive, suicidal effort, projected back, empty-handed.

The doctor fought through books; they fought through exhaustion. The Egyptian embassy might have its hydrologists counting drops for power politics, but for these men, the river was a trail of broken hope. The irony: one Ethiopian flying repeatedly to a new system, others walking to be rejected by the old system’s gatekeepers. The charter remained a cruel ignis fatuus—a delusional, flickering light just out of reach. That’s the tea.

Mid. The constant push-pull, the international clamor versus the stark, Beckettian local tragedy, forced one question: Was all this movement—the Abay trekkers, the Doctor flying to Cairo—hope, nor desperate flight from stasis, but both? Savage.

The Doctor, the one with the personal charter of academic excellence, was the ultimate enigma. Non possumus on geopolitics, he was all in on mental health. Was this the projection of his own internal chaos—the immense pressure of those American medical exams? His fixation on mental illness—maybe a form of folie à deux with the overwhelming US medical system he was trying to break into. The high stakes fed his sophomania. The chilling factoid: maybe a third of hospital beds in the States occupied by mental health patients. His via dolorosa wasn’t just Cairo, but the knowledge that his prize might be a different kind of confinement.

This contrast between effort and outcome defined the era. The brilliant surgical student. First water talent, a future aide-mémoire for the nation. Assigned to a remote area of tribal feud. Grim. His surgical brilliance, the exigible expertise, lost—a casualty of administrative machtpolitik, a system so morally polluted it failed to retain its most valuable somatotype. A failure of the national charter, a colossal jactitation waiting to happen. The system had issued a non possumus on his existence.

The Scandinavians—extremes from Greenland to Latin America. A south Swedish pack devoured by the Northerners, who were closer to Denmark, complaining of their rustic unsophistication. The extreme north group, led by someone who waited six years for a younger brother, never stopped talking since. A land where sunlight is deficient, with a culture of internal alky lighting. Utter disgust to all paper and systems, from an extremely non-religious country. A management system good for subcontracts yet blind to bigger pictures.

A herculean so imaginative a walking testimonial for the word workaholic, Monday to Monday. Danish. A non-speaking type, always sitting on the same chair, but craved to be listened to. Almost spent his whole life in Greenland, a huge influence.

An Italian has been to 36 countries, communicating in his baby Italian. Amazing soul, hyper attitude to work. Vowed not to get involved again after being mistreated. His neighbors in Italy: Paolo Rossi, a football lion, and a no-big-name cyclist riding 30,000 kilometers a year, earning 1/30,000 percent of the footballer’s income.

At one time, a Viking group conquered the English-dominated area, and things shifted: food from meat to fish (not mother’s meatballs). Management polarized, “they” and “us.” No room for diverse views, papers, systems, and English.

During a function, one of them started talking about raw meat, saying too much ends up as a boulder in a crusher, a nonstop sickness. I was pissed off because its source was our boss, and it spread among “themselves.” “Us and them.” I told him to stop the nonsense. I countered with the “diamonds of gastronomy” in black truffles and the “pearls of the kitchen” in white truffles, selling for over USD 2,000 a pound, a parallel to how people crave raw meat. After all, it wasn’t a luxury everyone could afford, just like Surströmming of the northern Swedish cuisine, a packed fermented fish that could fell a nearby person with its smell.

Then Boers from South Africa took over, with their rolls in the tongues and “ehs” in blends of Dutch and Aussie English. Unmixing packs, many with hangovers from apartheid, the quintessence of hard work. Then some mixed and black, with humors I cannot imagine anywhere. A fraternity of paragons who changed my attitude about people forever. The hangover from the long overdue “one settler one bullet” years of struggle, the lost generation, was still lingering.

Once at a function, one of them raised the issue of “My country’s backwardness.” I started to explain, going back to the 16th century, traveling to Japan, as we share akin inwardness at the same time, as to our contacts to the outside world. He squawked with an extended guffaw. I made a discourse about the 16th century, adding that no matter what, we looked backward in the other’s eyes, we are able to guard our identity with all its virtues and essences. It was more than enough.

I continued with the meaning of “Boor” and “Boer.” I continued with the Hottentots, a gibberish equivalent of the Khoikhoi, a name meant “men among men,” the hard luck they had being in contact with the Dutch settlers of the Cape of Good Hope, sooner or later losing most of their land. The Bushmen rubbish imposed from other values on another civilization. This explains Ethiopia’s “backwardness”, without the need to mention internal conflicts.

Later on, a blustering insolent, a leadership genius, notorious for his iffy twists, stinger tongue and torrents of lies, an American, came  turning the human landscape one and the same – his fifth wheel. Fubared, four letter worded up beyond all recognition, all collective diverse memory, and thoughts about self and others, the same kind of language yet so difficult to talk to one another. A circular organizational higgledy-piggledy structure, torments in a sharp sword suspended by a single thin thread on everyone.

Uneasy days. No one waits their turn to make a point, preferring their stellar, different way, trashing everything so no one speaks next time in their presence, garnished with 24-carat insults. They never see anything positive from anyone; no idea is new. Meetings turn into gleaning his ruffian negative digs, seeking only vices, repeating what he said and trashed, ending up in a dramaticule of claques among the sycophants, jesters, and hecklers, a wolfish, hectoring pack among the rank and file. If someone dares to speak their mind or behaves in a certain way, a new culture prevails to decipher that someone as though it were from the supreme leader’s uniquely shaped head, a despotic attrition. Things get off-color, ending up in a nonstop show of a heebie-jeebies, slavery-era management.

Nothing is anything other than its culture—a family, a community, a company, or, for that matter, a country. As the air is filled with a star-studded bedroom war of gals, doxies, and tootsies, detailed battle plans, whose “all’s well that ends well” in garbologists’ breaking news, along with hopes, whose star is rising for somebody and whose for nobody, at the same time corrupting thousands of minds, confusing offices as daylight imposters, breastaurants, turning the company compound into a daily tabloid. A catechization nightmare of work, reward, love, support, success, failure, manhood, and womanhood. A dominating doxy hue from dusky to ivory, setting the scenery—a muggy encompass of a dyno fuddy-duddy garnished with dotards and flower people.

Close to year 2000, the bank of England, brought to the market a portion of its gold reserve. It was immediately followed by an unprecedented price fall. The gesture brought its gold reserve value by half, as it was reported. The same holds true to a doxie to the market as to womanhood, as it is to men.

This student’s fate, his intellectual desuetude, hit me harder than the Abay trekkers. Not scarcity; waste.

Once, tired of the absence of national emulous obsession, I suggested we adopt “the Japan way.” Their first university curriculum, I claimed, was built around mechanical engineering—building things. Ours? Governance—the endless theory of rule, the logomachy of control. A philosophical turning point, my own little academic anagnorisis.

Our academic priorities were flawed, potentially ahistorical—based on a filiopietistic reverence for theory over application. The new charter must tilt away from the torpid pretense of governing the abstract and towards teaching students how to engineer themselves through the rigor of doing. This is the only way the AAU charter becomes a genuine engine for Cognitive Athletics, a Lacedaemonian discipline, not just another source of Sardanapalian sloth or a stage for tragic aberration. The charter is the permission slip; self-discovery is the mission.

The critique demands rigor. We cannot accept the sardanapalian luxury of wasted resources. The institution cannot wallow in wasteful sloth, squandering national intellectual revenue. We must avoid becoming a system defined by psittacism—mindless repetition of curriculum—resulting in external polish but no intrinsic value. Our students, our most valuable osseous (bony, foundational) structure, are becoming aliterate—able to read but choosing not to. The true fear: the Ministry of Education could be included in this systemic flop. Richard Williams’s notable absence from Wimbledon. Our Minister of Education assuming the role of father-trainer, building Cognitive Athleticism. Running, the metaphor: sweat, blisters, sublimation, forging the desire to train until every fiber of one’s mind is turned to steel.

What AAU needs to keep is that core donnish curiosity. What it must avoid is becoming a kludgeocracy—a clumsy, ugly structure—or sinking into filiopietistic reverence for tradition that resists all change. The struggle is also internal. My own mind engaged in a logomachy, sorting genuine commitment from sulfurous language. The sulfurous can be profane language or a leader’s fiery, emotional personality, but it always implies a volatility that must be managed.

The whole national vibe, the ambition for structural rigor, is hinged on a simple idea: AAU must become a crucible of sublimation, not a projection screen for failure. Think of institutions like Colombia, Oxford, or Sorbonne: they define the cutting edge because they force energy into rigorous, productive output. That’s sublimation. The alternative—casting our internal inadequacies onto the system, like that bureaucratic rataplan court case—is the failure of projection. AAU needs to be about being, not being not.

The core mission, much like the Danish workaholic’s discipline, must be to reject the sardanapalian sloth of wasted intellectual resources. We’re sitting on a massive issue of hydrology, a resource too crucial to be treated with kludgeocracy management or merely whispered about in a non possumus fashion. We need students who can engineer themselves through doing, who are first water talent in addressing complex issues like hydrology, capable of intellectual traction in the global arena. The current situation, where a brilliant surgeon is wasted on administrative machtpolitik, or where young men risk their lives trekking the Abay, is the ultimate structural flop—a colossal failure to sublime national energy.

AAU’s charter is the permission slip to transition from a filiopietistic repetition of theory (psittacism) to a Lacedaemonian discipline of applied excellence, a true engine for Cognitive Athletics. It must forge the mind until it is turned to steel, ensuring that the national intellectual revenue—the hydrology of talent—is not squandered in desuetude. The aim is to produce minds that offer solutions, not more logomachy about the problem.

Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye