With Davor and Pedja, two friends who also got jobs with the magazine, I rented a three-bedroom apartment in the old neighborhood Kovači. I had a full-time job and lived on my own—a major, adult accomplishment in a sadly socialist society where people grew old living with their parents, perpetually underemployed. My previous and limited working experience had been in radio, where, apart from very short and baffling fiction, I wrote opinionated pieces on film, literature, and general stupidity. Hence I became the culture editor of Naši dani, and I somehow managed to negotiate thirteen pages for culture (whatever that was) out of the magazine’s forty-eight. Convinced that the previous generation of journalists was tainted by the idiocy of comfortable communism, I refused to publish in my pages any writing by anyone older than twenty-seven, which required frequently fighting off the rest of the editorial team, still forgiving to some press veterans. I also wrote short, acerbic pieces for the satiric two-page spread and a column called “Sarajevo Republika,”
