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

– Jago Noja

— young girls university students of the Veneto-Friuli province, chatting of nonsensical affairs about friends and relatives with the moral inflections and commonplaces of their mothers, dressed casually and modestly, small simple earrings, and bearing the most intense and erotically charged look in their eyes;

— African women and men, walking in couples, arm under arm, hand in hand, smiling, joking, talking. This may seem normal, but it is actually a very rare sight in Italy;

— a couple of girls, one African-Italian girl and a blond Italian. I walk toward them along the sidewalk. The blond girl is gently opening the blouse of the black girl, showing up her white shirt. The black girl, lost in her thoughts, is looking away. As I come closer to them, the black girl raises her eyes and looks at me, with a serious expression. The blond girl, now putting her hands down, says: “there, now you look very nice”;

— The girl behind the counter in the bar near the station, no more than 20 years old, wears a fetish-like black leather top, extremely alluring and showing. The bar is just a simple Italian bar, but she doesn’t look out of place. It doesn’t take much to understand that she is courting the polish waiter, approximately her age, who keeps forgetting what I ordered. They would make a beautiful couple, actually.

Life is neither ugly or beautiful. But it is original!
— Italo Svevo

The waters in the port are dark and indistinguishable. It’s late into the night and there’s nobody around. The wind brushes roughly the piers. I sit at a table of a closed bar, above my head a tend is smacked noisly by the wind. On one side of the pier, lines and lines of classic prestigious yachts rest untouched, rolling back and forth hypnotically. On the other side only the old beautiful fishing boat “Lucy” is marooned.
The remaining of what I can see all around consists of parked luxury cars, spare trees, traffic. Behind the mute oppressive imperial architectures crowds of students hang out of the cozy bars, glasses of wine in their hands, smoking, chatting, kissing.
I walk among them, I don’t know anybody. I feel guilty for those who wanted to be with me and I left behind. I’ll buy them a fucking present, that’s what I’ll do.
Actually, I always forget to buy presents. Must be the stingy blood of my father in my veins.

Later I sit in Hortis square where is the statue of Italo Svevo. At the base of the statue is a quote from his masterpiece “Zeno’s Coscience” that I kept as the motto of an old website of mine years ago. Most likely a coincidence.

Although I am about to fall asleep, I roam around the city for a while in the windy night, climbing the steep part of it, looking for the places Svevo talks about in the book. But I think a city these days, any city, it’s nothing but a big fucking garage for cars, so much so that Svevo himself would have had a hard time recognizing it. I don’t recognize it.

I know I am not interested in architectures, museums, churches, shops, and all the other touristic things. The only things I am interested in are the faces of the people, their looks, and the rate of variation, and eccentricity, and tolerance I can find in them and in their attitudes. The presence of imagination and warmth in human behaviors and attitudes is what I look for, mmeddling with the crowd and walking about.
I like a city only if it is various enough in human types, and yet not too much indifferent and cold and annoyed. Most of the large cities are various but indifferent and annoyed, as Trieste looks even in the morning after. For this reason I prefer an anonymous city like Udine, where I am stranded later in the morning. The gloom streets and architectures are ablaze with staggering women and men of all kinds, and this entice me out of my worries for a while.

Worry, worry, what for? I find myself in Udine with a ticket for Wien in my hands. Most of the people would be thankful for that. I didn’t know where else to go from Trieste, although I could have left for Zagreb or Belgrad. I bought this ticket following an impulse. But suddenly the idea of Wien scares me and repels me. Not speaking German, not being rich and easygoing enough, I find it hard to imagine myself there.
The coincidence from Venice to Wien is late, and I keep thinking I should tear the ticket into pieces and walk away. I should find me a bizarre women in Udine, a provincial, catholic, sexually mad and unfaithful woman, possibly immigrated there from I don’t know where, like all the women in Udine today seem to be, and just run away with her.

Then the train arrives and once again I am sitting in a compartment seat getting my ticket punched. I am chatting with a girl sitting in front of me, and the time has changed its pace once again. The journey continues.

I fall asleep stretched on the row of brown seats after Verona. My sleep is half worried and it reproaches me.
My friend V., painter and madman, whom I wanted to visit in Venice, is in fact in Moscow to see his mother and get a haircut. This is a bit of a letdown. Suddenly, hearing his voice on the phone, I felt a pang of nostalgia for our conversations and his twisted Russian sense of humor.
I wish this train was going straight to Moscow, I think, that shitty city. The direction is right after all. I dream about it awaken for a second by the bell of the snack vendor rushing down the second class corridor.

I wake up again as the train slows down in the station of Mestre, ten minutes from the Lagoon. I stand up in the dark compartment, it’s past 10 pm, I pick up my stuff, not entirely awake I climb down the train. The sidewalk is wet of rain and the iron smell of the rain evaporating in the warm evening fills my nostrils.
On the other side of the sidewalk is a pendolino waiting, filled with light and empty of passengers. The train conductor is lurking at me from there, whistle in the hand, foot onto the ladder.
He whistles. His short bristled black mustaches bend in a circle around the silver whistle.
I ask him if the train goes to Trieste.
“Sure,” he says, removing the whistle from his mouth.
“Can I take the train without a ticket” I ask him.
“If you pay for it!” he exclaims.
“I mean do I pay a fee?” I know this is the rule if you want to get aboard a superfast pendolino train without reservation.
“Oh! Not at this hour,” he says, now with a reassuring smile, meaning he will make an exception.
This is so typical Italy, I think climbing the ladder. You can’t understand it if you’re not Italian.

Later I am finally waking up. I’m on a different train, there’s a bar without a barman, empty seats in the lounge, in every coach, and a random destination. To be continued.

Just let me do a pretty obvious consideration here, and to pose a quick question, after yet another attack against Italian military forces in Iraq in a few weeks, and another Italian soldier dead.

The new left-wing government promised a retirement of the troops from Iraq since before the elections. Even though former Prime Minister Berlusconi himself promised it, swearing he didn’t want to go to Iraq in the first place, it is clear that it will be this new government to actually do it. Thus, as the mainstream interpretation goes, comes the terrorist attacks against Italian troops, to “accelerate” the process.

Now for the obvious consideration, from what I see: ‘accelerate the process’? this is nonsense. It is obvious to me that the attacks are not possibly meant to “accelerate” the retirement of our troops, but to slow it down, and make it awkward. In fact, it is much harder now for the new government of this very middle-class country to hurry a getaway from Iraq while our troops are under attack. Although our military forces have a tradition of chickening out, this is going to inevitably look like too much of a chickening out.
Now, they promised to retire from Iraq, and they have to do it: but then, with the attacks, they are going to pay a price in popularity if they do it. Whatever the government decides in this situation, to stay a little more or to go away sooner, comes out bad.

So, the quick question: who calls for this attacks? What forces want to undermine the newly formed left-wing European governments just when they’re about to unthread themselves from the bloody coalition of the willing? Are those the same forces that, after having realized how Zapatero was about to win in Spain and to retire the Spanish troops right after, tried to make it hard to him at the last moment with the attacks in Madrid? is this all a psy-op to transform decent retirements into humiliating retirements? And, finally: who stands to gain from this?

Not a so quick question, after all. But I think it’s worthed a thought or two.

— in picture: Italian soldiers on a road in Iraq. Some say all Italian professional soldiers are fascists, but I don’t believe it. Yet I would like to know what’s with all those roman salutes they exchange when they’re far from the cameras.

When I read a book, I am surprised by the number of words that I find into it and I dream to make use of them. I take note. When I work, it’s impossible. I am limited to my own vocabulary. I can’t get out of it, and it is so short that working turns into a riddle — Jean Cocteau

As always when I’m about to leave without a destination, I am taken by all sorts of paranoid thoughts about my inadequacy, my psychological or physical weakness, my ignorance of the world. I don’t speak German, I barely stammer some French, I can’t read Cyrillic. My experience of locations, places, hotels, habits, cultures is minimal. I am not fit as I used to be wish I was, although I get thinner by the day because apparently I don’t eat enough. I got pathetically attached to my absurd habits lately. My body is not very adapt to movement as it used to be only one year ago, when traveling was more frequent. Now, after one year of blogging and after having declared the independence from the city that surrounds me — my body doesn’t know the basics of rambling around anymore.

However. Sometimes tomorrow I will head for Milan Central Station with the lighter luggage possible and my sneakers, and I’ll get on one train among many without any particular reason nor conviction. I think the train should be going south, down the falling peninsula, but instead I think it shall be going north.
Doesn’t matter. What really worries me is that I will be without my Zanichelli and Oxford CDs. What will I do when the remains of my self-taught English vocabulary fail to describe what I want them to? I hate that feeling of impotence… Even though someone says it is the best exercise possible if you want to tell a story, you know, that stingy economy of words and all.

After the sunny day come the clouds over the city, the air is strangely cool again. I enter the lobby lost in my thoughts, wondering how it happened that I have a troubled personality, and if it’s true that I use my subconscious to struggle with something to feel alive, and, yeah, get out of the mess. Then I check the mailbox for the bills and stuff and instead I find this leaflet from Dianetics-Italy into it. Wow, I must say. I never received one. It’s almost like they read my thoughts. Sort of a mission impossible, actually. Ha-ha.

The unconscious, subconscious or reactive mind, diminish and enslave the Man. It is the source of your problems, psychosomatic illnesses, fights and insecurities. Learn how to take control of your reactive mind! Know yourself better. Read Dianetics…, etc. 10 euros… etc.

I must thank them because this leaflet really helped me to make my thoughts a little clearer today. The unconscious diminishing and enslaving “the Man”?! Aside of the fact that “the Man”, really, is hilarious. These reactionary wannabe priests really have no clue, don’t they.
I’d rather be dead than “taking control” of my subconscious. In Tom Cruise’s case, well, he probably thinks it all comes to taking control of his own homosexuality keeping it in the closet when he goes around faking enthusiasm for his fictitious screen love over someone else’s couch. But to me, boy. What my life would be if I hadn’t my daily hours devoted to the quarrels of my mind? The unforeseeable raining of feelings and thoughts from the heavens or hells of the mind? I’m blessed when it rains in there, really. When it doesn’t I feel lost.

I know many hate to give room to too much thinking and contemplating. Maybe their mind resounds with rich emotions, thoughts or sensations more than everybody else’s, and yet they state they “hate to think”. My sister is one of them. She always has to have something to do otherwise her thoughts drive her mad (I’ll tell about her one day). Nina, who does almost nothing but to study and work, also said to me the same thing.
“I’m tired to think, I feel oppressed by my thoughts. I’d rather do.”
“Aren’t you curious of what goes on into it when you don’t look?”
“Nothing new goes on into it. Really.”

I am not ashamed to say that I consider my time precious because when I don’t have time left to think about nothing I really get desperate or sick. To be in control of the unconscious would be like controlling rain to me. Good for agriculture, indeed. But I’m no agriculturist, folks. I get the clouds as they come. And that was the post for today.

— in picture: Dianetic’s leaflet. The biggest font size is the one that indicates the amount due.

(Following this post) This is so horribly plebiscitary…. I hate all these left-wing european intellectuals, their awards and theaters and universities… They’re so much the greatest cowards in the world, who love to look heroic only if the majority of their minority is with them. And the politicians? There are no words to describe their idea of the world.

After being selected as this year’s winner of the coveted Heinrich Heine Prize of the City of Düsseldorf, Austrian author Peter Handke has now been told he will not receive the award after all. After heated public criticism, the Düsseldorf City Council has announced it will revoke the prize. Read more

They shouldn’t be entitled to give away awards, really. Only to receive them. “For having chosen the path of least resistance once again, this year the award goes to…”

m: tell me.
me: I wanted to ask you if you– if you are browsing my blog, you know. These days.
m: …

Pause. I am standing up against the counter in the kitchen. Libi is on the bed reading and her mother’s cat runs around madly. Apart of that, it is all calm and quiet and unreal. Silence seems always to make room for anything big coming. But it’s just an impression.

me: Sincerely.
m: …How do you know that?
me: It’s kind of easy actually, the access counter records IP numbers and resolve the addresses automatically. It’s not like I was checking for you or anybody else but– it didn’t take much to understand it was you when I read the name of the place where you work and all those accesses you made.
m: Oh.
me: so tell me please, who does know about this other than you? Because I looked at your accesses and it looked like you first arrived by knowing the address of the blog already. Someone must have told you.
m: No… I got to the blog following a link from another blog.
me: because I got the impression you knew already, that someone told you it was my blog and all.
m: No, I followed a link. For real.
me: your first access was made by typing the address.

What a lousy conversation. I would like to ask when or how he understood it was my blog then, but it looks like I am a parent or a policeman. This sucks. Outside the window the courtyard is in the dark, except for the balcony lamps, neon blue, yellow bulbs, and the violet flickering of televisions. Suddenly I think how it is good to tell about this scenery, just like it looks like, knowing that nobody actually knows how it looks for real, picturing it its own way. Well, a part of those who actually know of what scenery I am talking about, given the many times they have been here, for dinner, singing along as I played guitar, selecting songs from winamp, etc.

me: well, listen, this is a major disaster for me. I am thinking of closing down the blog. Move it to another address, start over.
m: But, why?
me: this blog isn’t meant to be read by you or anybody I know in real life. You’ve read it all, so you must know– you should know of what I’m talking about.
m: Yeah, actually, I imagined you wouldn’t be happy to know I was reading it. That’s why I haven’t told you.
me: you should have told me instead. I realized it by myself only by sheer chance. What if I didn’t?
m: Yeah.
me: Anyway, I can’t forbid you to read it or anything, you know, it’s your right to. But I wish you wouldn’t. This is a big problem for me.
m: But why?

I repeat the usual story of me being inhibited and incapacitated to write sincerely when I think that someone I know reads me. But as I listen to my words, I know they’re not right even if they are convincing, which they probably are not. I used them too many times and now they sound exhausted, frayed, worn out. Maybe it’s just that it is all too complicated and absurd to be shared, and I wish I had another reason, you know, uncrushable. But what other reasons one could possibly have?

me: I work for the secret service. I forgot my code name but it has numbers in it.

In a little while we say goodbye. Most useless evil phone call ever. I put the cell phone down and there, I don’t know anything I didn’t know already. Later m texts me he enjoys reading the blog, and that I should trust him. This is very nice, putting me in a even more nasty position. The point is, it’s me the one who doesn’t enjoy it, you know? Now it seem all feasible, even flattering. But what will happen later, when I will have to talk about this or that?
This or that will turn into phony shit, this will happen.

I told part of the story of me and Leni on women’s day (one of the many ‘first parts’ of this blog that never got to have a ‘second part’ or a ‘final part’). I wrote a sort of a poem about her sometimes before that, too. So, my readers must know something about her.
Two days ago she texted me a message. She does it now and then, and usually I don’t answer, but it happens always in the most weird moments. Once she wrote me right as I was finishing to move my boxes from the self-storage to Libi’s place and I read her message a little later, laying on the ground perspiring and puffing, baffled. Even then, I didn’t answered. I have this mute way to respond to the things that had me suffering. I would like to be easy about it, and I end up motionless.

I wish I knew how are you doing, where you are. After two years in Holland it seems the moment to move on. I would like to hear from you again, without preconceptions.

Well, she really used that word, preconceptions. After a couple of days I still haven’t found anything proper to answer.
After all, I had decided not to care about Leni anymore. It had taken me a while to, after the split-up in Rotterdam and at that time it was clear she wasn’t in love with me anymore. Too many lies had been told, too many mistakes done, and then too much space had grown between us. I was in Rome she in Rotterdam — she had someone else — I was back in Milan and then she made a move back, not very convincing, and I knew she didn’t liked me that much anymore, so I find it easier not to care about her.
I take some pleasure in leaving my fate in the unknown, because I fear the moment when someone, anyone, gets a too ascertained idea of me, of where I am.
And also she had a life, a career: I was quite adrift.

I don’t know what to answer you. If not that one day maybe we’ll meet again and it will be nice and all. But not yet. Too much stuff happened.

Finally I decided I could just answer what I had in mind. Out in the city, when the weather shambles the colors and the top of trees, and all the energy battles with the city, and you walk in the city during the preparation for the storm as if it doesn’t concern you, because the city takes in all the energy and protects you, there you can easily make the mistake to overestimate the condition of your soul, dreaming it to be stronger than it is because so calmly it faces the storm to come.
Now I think it was a shallow answer from my side, and probably, I realized once back home, silence would have been the best choice again.

OK. I’ll know how to wait. I’m glad you answered me anyway.

It happens so, when you can’t stand the idea of someone else’s pain, even the small pain given by the silence after so much silence, or the even smaller pain of a hint of formality in the wrong words. Then it’s too late, and another mistake adds to the old mistakes. Leni shouldn’t wait. I could never go back. We shouldn’t be so cold and formal. All the things that we should have were never told. And the words fail you, when you fail to see inside yourself in time. You must be fast before the weather tricks you. This was another post that didn’t make much sense.

So it happened. I have been expecting this for a while. Someone I know reads this blog and this thing just freaks me out. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do, thanks to sitemeter and whois and whatever.
Half of me wants to shut the blog down right now, seriously. Change the title and domain name, and start from scratch somewhere else in blogland. The other half of me is just in pain… knowing it would be a shame to close the blog now, but also that everything will be just harder now here at italyisfalling.com.

I hate to be read by friends who may think they “know” me better this way, and obviously I don’t want to be read by them because this deranges my sincerity or honesty in writing, whatever it is, whenever I reach it. They don’t even know how much hard this effort for sincerity is, but it is. Who does really try?
I know this isn’t anybody’s fault but mine, since I have been so weak to casually drop in a conversation with friends, one day, that I was “blogging”, in “English”. Such an idiot I was. Ashamed of not doing anything proper with my life, trying to look good. It only took time.
Oh, I hate to be looked at. The only idea of being read by someone I know freezes me. How am I supposed now to talk about… you know, my life? My sorrows? My lies?

I don’t trust anybody, folks. So I wonder what I am going to do. I better not wonder how many people knows this. Shit.
I know I am not that much into people’s mind, but I also know that I bolster morbid curiosities sometimes, only because I stay mostly by myself, maybe I don’t call, and there seems to be something secret about me, but there isn’t folks, it’s just my life, a life unfit to be looked at from this point of view.

I really don’t know what I’m gonna do. I know the contradiction it’s all mine (what am I doing blogging if I don’t want to be read?)
I accept suggestions for the new blog’s name, just in case. But only privately. Shit, it looked so much like a beautiful windy day today.