“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

In Nicaragua there’s a island in the middle of a big lake, and there are two volcanoes on the island, the island is actually made by the two volcanoes dabbing each other. One of the volcanes is sleeping and the other, named Concepcion, is awake. The tip of the two volcanoes is almost always hidden by a dense blanket of clouds, and both are covered by a thick rain forest populated by mysterious and dangerous animals and insects. All around the coasts are the villages, and long long beaches made of brown and black sand. The water of the lake is of a light brown color and you can’t see the other side of it. The spanish who first came here called it Dulce Mar. The Nicaraguan cowboys ride along the beaches, taking the cattle down to the lake to drink, and to move it from one part to the other of the island. Sick and thin dogs by the ghostly appearance follow them, without hopes. People is very good looking and shy and prideful and authentic and all the other too much used trite words, they rarely smile, they jump in the waters of the lake with all their clothes on, they love bicycles, they always wave back if you wave first, the girls have black eyes shiny like pearls and white teeth, all the pupils at school wear blue and white uniforms, and the men are almost always serious and focused on something, but not always. Sometimes, walking across the villages far from the coasts, you can hear music being played in the small houses by two or three instruments, and people singing and dancing in the inside of the houses in the dark. Almost all the houses have pavements of dirt and pallets on the floor and kitchens made of piled stones or pieces of wood on the outside. Sometimes there’s a hammock, often a radio. All the radios play the same station.
The food is either bad or very bad and makes you worry, like the water or the insects, especially if you don’t have any vaccination like I do. There is always rice and beans to eat and chicken and few other things but soon you get accustomed to it. Not so much fruits, and some mediocre fish from the lake. But food doesn’t matter anyway.
There are acacia trees by the red flowers and the long blisters of seeds, looks like africa, and sick banana trees growing on fields covered with trash, and blue birds by the long wide tails and the loud strange songs. A strong wind is always, incessantly, blowing hard across the island coming from the east. They say that the wind ceases only when there are hurricanes sweeping the gulf far away, but I wouldn’t know. The wind never ceases.
This island is one of the most beautiful places I ever visited in my life. I wish I could stay here forever, lounging on the hammock, walking across the villages, getting to know the people and building my own house and stop waiting for something or searching for something. I don’t know in how many years this place will be turned into a miserable fake resort for north american tourists (sorry, but it’s true, Costarica is the perfect example), probably not so many. Everything is for sale in central america.
And it’s always that strange mixed feeling, to be finding and losing things at the same time, following the tourist everywhere he or she goes.

Miami says to me the same things places like Las Vegas or Saint Tropez say. Solitude, unhappiness, dominance of the appearance, weakness, boredom, excessive loud music everywhere, hard drinks, everything under a blanket of lies and money that keeps it all together. There’s nothing into it and nothing I can do here.
There’s many many very sexy women around on sunday night, and their unapproachability or even their easy reachability it’s not something I am able to use. I long for the sex but everything that surrounds the sex keeps me away.
Walking down the streets at night I am solicited by prostitutes posing as tourists or students, and all their professional questions and attitudes make me depressed and withdrawn into myself. Soliciting is illegal, which means, like with all the illegal things, that just a little more lies and precautions are needed to access certain pleasures.
Ishtar, or whatever invented name she is using, approaches me in front of some big hotel on Ocean drive and we walk together the some twelve blocks down to the Mango club. I haven’t invited or asked her anything, I only smiled at her the way I got accustomed to do here. But she wants to ask all her uninterested questions and tell her story and I let her. She’s cute, but it is not a real conversation.
From Lithuania, studies in New York, all of a sudden has to pay the term to the school and hasn’t the money, she is also a professional masseuse, 21, etc. I try to tell her that I am not the right target for her, that she is wasting her time. I feel more and more naive and stupid talking to her like that. I tell her that I never paid for sex and I am not going to start now. She pretends it is different if I just give her money for the school. I kind of laugh at this. Say no again. I try not to sound judgmental or anything, it’s just the way it is. She doesn’t seem to want to listen. Finally we part in front of the club, she goes in. She’ll probably find one of the many lonesome men in there, those standing there watching at the half-naked bar girls dancing on the counter of the bar, their phallic bottles of beer in hand.
As I walk away, I think of the things I would have wanted to tell her. Those occur to me always when it’s too late.
“Ishtar”, I would have said, “did it ever happened to you to feel so lonesome and apart from everyone else and impossible to reach and trapped in your solitude, exactly when someone, maybe many, were desperately trying to have you, or have something from you?”
Ishtar would jump into the window opened by the word ‘solitude’ and say something like, “I can take care of your solitude, you know”, but I wouldn’t mind the interruption. “What you’re doing to me right now, Ishtar, it’s exactly that. You are making me feel lonesome and unreachable and trapped in my solitude. You are showing me how wrong it is for me to be here, or how wrong I seem to be for this world. I know that this enhanced feeling of solitude in some weird way is supposed to work in your favor… but I am not like that. I want the real thing, even for one night I need to know that someone is there actually desiring me or finding me attractive or interesting.”
“I am just offering you some fun, if you don’t want that…” she would say at that point, giving her hopes away. “I am sure the sex would be ‘fun’ as you say”, I would answer. “But I dread the moment when the money is given, the sex is done, and nothing at all is left, not even a bit of regret. I am scared of that moment and of its consequences on my mood.” Because I don’t want to use the world ‘spirit’ or similar imprecise tools.

I walk away wondering what Ishtar would have said then. If at my words she would have wandered outside of all the prepared speeches full of details and the well known answers and the well known careful questions. I don’t know. It’s pretty frustrating and idiot to invent conversations like that anyway. I slowly go back to the hostel, walking under the palms and the neon lights, carefully trying not to smile at the pretty girls again, but there will be more prostitutes to dodge before I am safe in bed, horny and in a bad, bad mood.

“That guy is a dick!” yells Roger in the car. “You was a great man Max cuz you didn’t flip out or anything. Way to go man.”
“I was ready to kick his ass, porcodio” says Max driving. I can see him smiling from the back of his head.
“I was laughing, laughing all the time, trying not to laugh at his face” says Sheila to me, barely audible in the exchanging loud cussing of Roger and Max. They are talking about the Restaurant manager, who had the nerve to get into the kitchen and grill some meat himself like if the chefs weren’t able to cope.
“He’s a fucking piece of shit”, says Roger to me, “this place is fucking garbage, man. Fucking garbage!”
I don’t say anything, I can’t think of anything funny to say.
“I never liked him from day one” says Max with his thick italian accent.
“Me neither, man, me neither.” Roger growls leaning back on the seat. His face is still sweating. There’s a acid smell of food in the car emanating from the bodies.
As if to himself, the eyes sparkling, Roger starts telling the story of when he and a mexican got to each other’s face in the kitchen. “I was spitting all over his face man” he says. “Get the fuck out of my kitchen! I told him!”

I look outside. Fruitville boulevard, Sarasota, going by in the dark. The distant red of the stop lights doesn’t slow down Max, our faces appearing and disappearing in the occasional glare of the car lights coming in the other direction.
A tan Chevy approaches our car on the left lane. There are two old ladies inside, and one of them, the passenger, is cleaning the inside of the windshield with a rotating methodical movement, the way she probably does with her windows at home.
Between the two ladies there’s a dangling chain hanging from the rear view mirror, with a plastic stone at its end. In a trance I look at the piece of plastic dangling by, sparkling blue, while the lady goes on with the circular movement of her hand.
The two car cover some road next to each other, and the stone keeps dangling, the lady cleaning the windshield, I watching. There’s something abstract and absurd about the scene and I suddenly feel uplifted by it, as if I didn’t belong there anymore. Eventually Max slows down and the two ladies glide away along the lane. We’re almost home. It’s my last night here.

I am happy that I sent back to Milan a second box of clothes and stuff, that my luggage is even lighter now. That I choose a destination, entirely by chance only because a ticket was available for some two hundred dollars. That I am leaving soon. Sarasota has been a blank in this trip, as I waited there for a call from my brother in Venezuela that never came, waiting to find the courage to do things I couldn’t do, listening to Sheila and Max fighting, envious of everyone’s experiences only because they seemed to belong to a world where things kept happening, surrounded by people who were rarely moving or intense, and where many words got lost forever in the untidy box of the memories picked on the go.

I sit on top of my lug against the ochre wall of the greyhound station of Sarasota. There’s smell of flowers floating in the hot humid air, a familiar climate that reminds me of somalia. There’s probably also a scent of the gulf in it, which I understand must be somewhere not too far from here, going in some direction.
I just finished trying again to get through to Max, got no answer, left a message. I hope he will hear the message and come soon. I’m through with riding anything to anywhere right now.
I think back at the last 35 crazy hours spent aboard of greyhound buses, into inhospitable greyhound stations, probably not unlikely a survivor thinks of his raft. Almost everything that could happen happened, and I am tired, stinking, worn out. I think back at it and wonder, did I really did that? Was I really there?
What I mean, was I really so friggin’ stupid to come all the way down here from New York on a bus?
It doesn’t matter now. All is fine. I relax. Hot weather works instantly. The sun either burns or spares, from behind and between the immense tropical clouds quickly moving and morphing up in the sky, making and unmaking the shadows of the trees against the gray ground of the greyhound lot, while the cars run down the road unceasingly (it’s washington road).
Birds and a squirrel yell from the long branches of trees I never saw, with red, yellow flowers, I wish i knew the names, but I’m just another city boy.
It doesn’t matter. Everything’s gonna be fine. Max will finally arrive and take me away. The world around will unfold and provide its meanings, and if it won’t, it doesn’t matter anyway. Hot weather works good.

In the basement of the famous music club, breathing hot air under the low ceiling as I walk amidst the little crowd gathering, I feel ill, disturbed by my weakness, dizzy of pharmacy drugs and nasal congestion. The self-sabotage keeps moving forward like the only thing moving forward inside me.
I wonder if the bacteria of my cold, or the viruses of my flu are spreading themselves around the room as I move around.
There are many young italians here, guys probably living in the city. I look at them, listen to the italian chit-chat all around me. I don’t feel any bond, any special sympathy for them. I wish there was no italian language at all down here tonight. I don’t want to pay attention to it. I look at them, all happy and relaxed, so casually conscious of their appearance. I’m not one of them. Neither I am one of the locals of course. No doubt about that.

Me and Loris* hug awkwardly in a corner near the bar. He’s nervous and excited for the show about to begin. We talk about the tour, the positive reviews that made him happy. We drink something, I have a beer because I don’t know what to order, I tell him I admire his courage to be a small fish in the biggest sea here, when he’s such a cult in Italy now. He says, I am tired, I can’t wait to be back in Italy.
When the show starts, the music is definitely too loud for me, the voice almost unintelligible, also because of the chewed sort of italian-british accent Loris pulls out when he sings. The choreography they use during the songs, partially coordinated and partially improvised on the very limited same-level stage is pretty amazing, and even hating the loud volume as I do the sound is evidently great.
Loris has a couple of winning numbers, like when he plays the guitar stroking the strings against the tripod of the mic. An american girl near where I am standing, shouts to a friend: “I don’t understand a word! [unintelligible] He’s awesome!”
I am leaning on a column at the back of the room where the loud music drums less violently against my sensitive ears. They will be buzzing for hours at the end of the night.
I wonder if all these silly precautions and fears are a definitive sign of my being irremediably old. But the truth is, I always was like this. I always had sensitive ears, always felt alone and about to fall when I was sick, always had a sense of not belonging to the place where everyone else felt at ease.

Someone is dancing in front, I see the bobbing heads and arms backlit against the sweating faces of the band, in full light and with eyes mostly closed. There are many wild cheers at the end of the songs. I applaud, listening to the distinct smack of my hands and feel alone and displaced. I would love to be able to talk to the asian girl sitting next to me, or to some of the guys there that seem so nice and cool. But the music is too loud anyway, and I wouldn’t know what to say. I actually had more fun at the gay bar the night before, at the reunion with the anthology guys. And not only because in the meantime my cold developed into something nasty and feverish. Here everything seems to be dragging me in a place where I can’t be, where I am no good. Here I don’t learn nor I see because I am only worried to defend myself, somehow.

Hours before, in the afternoon — a long conversation with Libi. Finally with a prepaid telephone card that didn’t let us down. She was having a late dinner with friends, and I was bowing inside a telephone booth on 14th street. She said, it seems like three years you’ve been away. They will feel like twenty before you come back. Don’t be such a Penelope, I said. Although I actually wish I was a Ulysses.
I told her I was thinking of going to Loris’s show anyway, even if the cold was getting worse. I told her that I needed to make things happen.
We talked, putting a lot of warmness in our voices. Things seemed patched up between us now, although I kept feeling a sort of pressure from her regarding the direction I had to take, the things I was considering to do. My not saying, I love you I miss you, I’ll be back soon.
We discussed the practical things, the package of winter clothes I wanted to send back home, the destinations, the accomodations. Nothing useful coming out of it, except the illusion of working out the loneliness.
I told her how naively admired I was, of the guys of the anthology, how I was amazed by the humanity and beauty and diversity of their characters, of their souls. How the city was contradictory in that regard, so that at moments you felt surrounded by so many authentic interesting people and stories, and at moments solitude and deceit where everywhere, with every step, into every shop and with every trading act, muttered words of courtesy, cash exchanging hands, friday night competitions to get cabs, racism and hypocrisy of all the parts. I was wondering how amazing it should have been to fall in love with someone in a city where you can feel so lonesome and left out, and cheated. And because of that, how probably rare and misunderstood falling in love must have been. Not differently from other cities, of course, the cities we knew already. But so obvious in the feeling of the place, when you’re a stranger into it.

At the end of the concert, moments of blessed silence. Me and Loris exchange a slap and then I climb up the stairs and get out of the club, while the band hurriedly packs up the instruments. There’s a long line of people on the sidewalk outside and after few minutes breathing fresh air, checking for new messages, I realize there is no way I can get back in the club now. The line extends itself down the stairs and it is impossible to cut in front.
I wait outside for half an hour. An hour. I start feeling very cold and tired. What a crappy night. No dinner or hanging out with the band, for me. I am going back. I go back. So nothing happened in the end. Slowly walking through Soho and the village back to the hostel I stupidly keep calling home as I talk by myself.
I know I won’t be leaving for any place the next day. I lack the courage to embark on a bus and leave the city. Humiliated by my weakness, I feel too sick and about to fall.

_{* As you know, not a real name. Never real names.}

As though the sky now partook of an alien system, it became too high for the high towers of civilization in the foreground of the picture, and against the compact, menacing background the human landscape degenerated into a junkyard. The deep blue with which a time grown plethoric weighed on the world was the essential — the scattered leaflets down below, in which only fear of life or death could beguile him (or anyone else!) to find the slightest meaning, were a secondary, minor factor.

— Peter Handke, as quoted in this article (thanks to Greg for pointing it out)

— in movie, above: just the nothingness recorded by my little camera from inside a coffee place.

I sit into another coffee place of that silly chain, just next to Korean town, on 32nd. I stretch my right leg under the table close to the window. The knee still bothers me, and at moments it seems like it is never going to stop hurting. But I decided not to let it ruin my trip, so I stick to the plan. I just leave it there, eat a sandwich, take the drugs. My leg smells of hospital, it’s the bengay cream. My pants look a little like hospital pants, all pastel blue as they are. Girls check me out because I look like a doctor on a break. I try to accustom to the part, looking heroic and bored and undisclosedly fit. It’s not hard, that’s a little how I feel, together with lost and displaced and good for nothing of course.
People are using laptops on the few tables around me. Everyone went to typing school and writes real fast. So fast and aggressively it distracts me from my thoughts. Not that my thoughts are so relevant at this moment of the day. A table of Korean youngsters produces collective burst of laughs at given intervals, and two incredibly attractive young Indian girls talk animately and with a lot of mannerisms at a table behind them.

I just ended the worse conversation on the phone with Libi. I called her from a public phone on the street, it was chaotic. She was sleeping, I woke her up, had her telling me about her day. As soon as I started talking about how I felt she used her long pauses and was all defensive and then I told her about my dreams, the bare bones of projects I would love to have, it was as if everything emanating from me was there to threaten her. She said “I knew this was going to happen” and I had no idea what “this” was, and then the voice said “thirty seconds” ridiculously soon, damn polish prepaid cards.

A middle age guy from the next table gives me his videocamera to film him and his ten year old son eating pizza together. They actually took pizza from Sbarro and brought it here. I don’t know why he wants me to film that. The proposal is so unexpected and the man so nice I can’t think of anything, any rudeness, to avoid the thing. So I film them, the dad acts like he’s making a toast with his son with the pizzas, and I even wave into the camera to convince the little kid to wave back. He does, with a beautiful smile, and asks me what’s my name. I tell him. Must repeat it a couple of times ’cause it is unusual. His dad is convinced that I must be Russian. I am italian, I tell him, and he says, really, me too. Born here, though, he says. i fail to manifest pleasure and surprise. He gives me his card. Frank Positano, there’s written on it. Photographer, New York. He looks expectant but I don’t know what to say. “You’re a photographer”, I say. “Interesting.”
I give him back the camera. Our moment is over. I put my own little camera on the table and start filming the outside, just out of nothingness, I hope he doesn’t notice.
People walking by. Neons flickering. Girl with stilettos getting off the cab. Korean people converging to 32nd. Cars and bikes passing by. Music suggesting arbitrary feelings unasked for. I just sit there in a daze and let it flow in and out until it’s time to go.

I sit on the bunk bed in the small bare room. The sliding window is half open, so are the blinds, and a faint cold breeze searches the room.
Through the not blooming branches of a tree that almost reaches for my windowsill, comes in from the outside the rumble of the city, endless engine noises covering sparse traces of voices and creatures. Occasionally cars run 20th street, but mostly it’s the constant pushing uptown of the traffic on 8th avenue to give the rhythm.
There’s an indistinct smell in the room, a mix of clothes scattered around and in the bag, shoes, the old faint red carpet, and the car exhaust rising up from the street, gasoline, tires, dust, maybe some remote coffee place spreading aroma along the sidewalks.
I try not to move my leg and wonder what the best position is supposed to be. My feelings, mostly shame for this failure of my body. An old injury, the right meniscus that got broken so many years ago, waking up again, so badly, without an obvious reason. Sure it must have been the weather, I argue, ’cause changing weather always caused my right knee to hurt a little, to swollen when I used it too much. And I always limped a little, unnoticeable. But it never happened to hurt so distinctly, for so many days without ever getting better — at moments so stiff and painful and unavoidable. What a shame.

I am worried by the thought that it might be self-sabotage, too. That’s probably what the feeling of shame relates to. On some level, am I maybe causing this to be so bad so that the whole trip is screwed? I wonder. Out of fear? Out of guilt? Because Libi everyday reminds me how lonely she’s feeling, how unreasonably far I am going? Because my father ignores my emails, ignores to acknowledge my being away? My keep trying to be in my own way?
Because I still fail to get hold of concrete reasons for my choices, and to mark significant steps forward?

Could be, I mean. After all there must be an explanation, I say to myself. I might need a traumatologist, or I might need a psychologist, or both. Together analyzing me. Plus an acupuncturist maybe.

I felt so bad this morning that I had to cancel a get together with Robert, one of the fellow Userlands contributors, because of this fucking sabotage (if he ever received my message, which, at this point, not having received any answer from him, I worryingly start to doubt). And it’s not like I make new friends everyday. But it was crazy to think I could go around walking, when just half a mile around the block it’s painful to do.

I sit on the bed, writing and drawing, the room enlightened by a uniform white light pouring in through the blinds. I look at the knee and it looks fucking normal. I touch it and it feels normal. A fucking normal knee that hurts every time I move it.
I have these absurd fantasies of being frown upon, wondered about, by the latino girls cleaning the rooms, and the guys at the reception, or by the guests I meet more than once a day while limping up and down the stairs.

Weird limping guy by the half-mad half-desperate expression on his face, roaming around the hostel. Call black-uniform anti-terrorism homeland security squads and have him shackled away, over.

I get out to grab a cup of coffee and something to eat. It feels pretty lonely to stay in line at the Deli, random individuals as we are, each of us getting the preferred food the way we want, each going its own way to eat it by ourselves. I’d rather have the wrong, the least special food and have it shared at a table with these people. Everything feels wrong. I limp back at the hostel. Soon I fall into a worked up, raging sleep.

I dream with clarity of my father’s face, so regular and severe. He doesn’t look at me, he looks so much younger, taken by his life, going away. In the dream I clearly know he’s wishing he had a different son, the one he wanted, someone who was expected to come out different from everything else, brand new, of the brand new world, and certainly not so similar to his mother, or what’s worse, to his grandfather. Not so fragile or introverted or a day dreamer.
He wishes for it, but it’s not like he cares much.
He keeps looking away, seems like having better things to do, and in the dream I want to ask, what about me, can’t I have better things to do now?

The Wanderer. Success through smallness.
    Perseverance brings good fortune to the wanderer.

Changing yin at the bottom means:
If the wanderer busies himself with trivial things,
He draws down misfortune upon himself.

Changing yang at the top means:
The bird’s nest burns up.
The wanderer laughs at first,
Then must needs lament and weep.
Through carelessness he loses his cow.
Misfortune.

— I Ching, Hexagram 56

Internet says that the Greyhound to Sarasota costs 135 dollars. I kind of hoped it was cheaper but I guess it’s okay. I just printed the timetable even though I still can’t buy the ticket until I know that I can actually walk with this knee. I don’t know what’s going to happen if things don’t get better, unless it’s my intention to let NYC devour me alive for my money.

I am actually tired of the way money is sucked from people here in the city. It’s not for the money, I’m game going for broke, I haven’t been doing much else in the last years, but the ways, and the reckless lack of sense of proportion, that hurts my nerves.

In the meantime I’m on for the craiglists rideshares too (Ok, I lied in the ad, it’s not that I love to drive. Unless I’m on secondary roads and I can go as slow as I want.)

I am trying a funny cream for the knee that is called “bengay”, it is meant for joint inflammations and similar things and I’m trying to believe in it. Although, they should probably write on the boxes that, after you rubbed whatever with bengay and you still have some on your hand, you better not touch, you know, there. I tend to have this reflex when I’m alone in bed thinking and doing nothing, looking up at the ceiling or whatever, touching myself. Bengay sort of roasts your genitals alive if you do. I mean, it could also be pleasurable for some, but I think it’s one of the classic side effects you should be warned about.

Greyhound says that there are eighteen destinations between here and Sarasota, and three transfers to make. To read the list of the city names gives me a momentary feeling of upcoming adventure, and fuzzy unreasonable expectations. But they’re probably going to be all big cities taken over by cars and business, where all the good things, if any, will be hidden to someone like me. Be in the city like from behind a window. Get off the bus to pee and have coffee and get on it again, like the cliche wants.

It doesn’t matter. The ways of the trip don’t matter. So many things don’t matter since when I left. Had I to write down a list of the things that don’t matter, or matter in a very different way now, it probably would come a list as long as the list of cities touched by the greyhound bus between here and sarasota, florida in a little more than a one day ride.

— in picture, above: a different sort of bus running through the village

What once had become a challenge to extremes had become a laughable weakling dripping in saccharine date rape and schlocky bruises to the torso and forearm like teenage suicide reminders.
Stripping down to the most unbearable truth-the awkward silence, the too loud laughter, off kilter smile or gruesome expression that passes by in the blink of an eye, real submission, dressing to be seen, not dressing to pretend to want to be seen.

— Young and Stupid finally posted. You can read more here

Yes, there’ve been many, many times that people who have been molested or who suffered a lot of emotional, physical, or psychological abuse when they were young have either written to me or talked to me about my work and said they felt connected to what I’ve written in relationship to those kinds of experiences. Honestly, those have been the most important and meaningful responses I’ve ever gotten to my writing both because I feel like those people have a deep understanding of what my work is trying to do, and because, especially at a certain point years ago when I was constantly being accused of glamourizing and romanticizing that kind of violence for shock value, their seeming understanding and appreciation of what I’m trying to do really helped me believe and stay on course, by which I mean continuing to write about those kinds of acts with what I hope is their full intensity and complexity, attraction and horror and damage intact.

— Dennis Cooper wrote today, in the p.s. section of the day

And Porcelain Skull posted, too. New great pictures.
I am staying put tonight because I barely can walk with my knee, whatever is happening to it. I put more dollars in the dollar-sucking machine attached to the PC and read and write. Blogs are always there to help.

a place is a place,
roads lead to its hammered doors,
thru curtains of smell and decaying,
legends of lies, stouts
in the land where rolls of dollars open every door,
or you might be closed in, closed out
brave ads imitating life from every dried wall
failing to consolidate the myth,
because this is not what we wanted,
it’s what we’re dealing with.