A clip of Albanian amateur porn in my email. That’s what it said: Albanian amateur porn. I have no idea how one tells the difference between it and any other Indo-European porn. How the world has changed, I thought. During the Cold War it was at its very coldest in Albania. They didn’t shoot porn there. They shot Albanians, mostly, or anyone unlucky enough to stumble across the border. Albanians also built bunkers and pillboxes by the hundreds of thousands, till they littered the countryside like mushrooms, completely useless. Now they house chickens and sheep and their kid’s heavy metal band. No one did ever invade Albania, though. Maybe the useless things actually were a deterrent somehow, scattered helter skelter across field and beach, city and mountainside. Apparently when America or Italy or Yugoslavia or the USSR or whoever invaded, all Albanians and their sheep were to take to the bunkers and defend the Revolution to the death. It never happened. Instead, Albania’s own Stalin (or was it Mao), Enver Hoxha, finally died and was forgotten. I thought of him as I deleted the video unwatched. I can’t imagine Albanian amateur porn is any less clumsy or badly filmed than any other. People of all nations are busily humping away in front of their iPhones anymore, millions of them, thunder thighed and shaven all over, to the intense embarrassment of all their children not yet even born. Though maybe they were born nine months later. Oh no, look, it’s Mom and Dad. The things those of us old enough never had to worry about, let alone imagine.

Before they made amateur porn, Albanians built 700,000 bunkers like these.