I was most obsessed with the notion of time when I was serving the army; actually every soldier I knew was. From the first day one was drafted, he would start counting down the days to the discharge. One always knew how many days where left to be served. This was called The Number; we were constantly saying to each other things like - Hit me with your Number!

We all had calendars of some sort in which we would very meticulously cross out each served day. After I had served some time, crossing out day by day felt quite discouraging, since there were still a lot of days to be crossed out. It felt much better not to do it for some time, and instead leave the days to accumulate and than cross out fifteen or twenty days all together.

Some of us had so-called dzombometers (dzomba + meter); dzomba – in Serbo-Croatian (then the official language in the army) means bump on the road, but in the slang of the Yugoslav People Army (JNA) it also stood for a senior soldier who had already served one half of the military term (actually, the worse part), which somehow gave him the right to bully the new soldiers. Actually dzombometer was an image made of 365 (one year, was the period of the military service at that time) typewritten letters O. One O represented one day, and for each day that passed one would fill up one O with a pen. The usual images were a nude girl, the number 365, a tank, in the Navy usually a mermaid or an anchor, the JNA abbreviation or as in my case, a lizard. Opposite to dzomba, a young soldier, for some reason unknown to me, was called a lizard.

The image represented here is an enlarged replica of my original dzombometer; I served 96 days in the army before I was discharged due to health reasons.