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

– Jago Noja

I keep seeing around on Italian blogs disturbing disclaimers that seem to be placed there to prevent lawsuits of sorts. So I guessed I should have mine, and here it is. Now I only have to decide whether to link it from the sidebar, footer, header or what, but I am finally safe from any attack. Or am I?

So in the end I called the father. I must have been in a moment of stupor or unconscious lucidity (if anything like that exists) because, as sometimes happens, the moment I took the phone I forgot entirely all the conjecturing I had gone through for it. The hours passed picturing the consequences of that phone call dissolved, and while I listened to the free line signal I couldn’t recall anything at all of what I had planned to say. I wasn’t even nervous or angry or scared. I just waited for him to pick up the phone. Like I was a normal son and he a normal father.

Then my father answered, and didn’t recognize my voice, probably because he’s becoming a little deaf in the years, and this gave me the inspiration to say something like: “it’s me, your son. I know you haven’t heard much of this voice lately, but still.”
How very thankful I am to my muse for that.
So a brief conversation followed, during which we both stated unconvincingly that we were “doing well”. He didn’t say anything of what he had said to my sister, of his resentments and accusations and the whole thing lasted only few moments– in diplomatic diplomacy. I agreed to go and visit him for Christmas, even if there wasn’t any official reunion, even if one or two days later, even if at any rate I’d rather disappear from the planet.

Then before hanging up I said: “I am sorry if I caused the cancellation of our Christmas reunion.”
I wasn’t sincere in saying that, since I hadn’t caused anything like it at all. But it was important that I had managed to say it anyway. Plus suddenly I realized that in my heart I was sincere in saying I was sorry. I was sorry because in that precise moment nothing indecent, no blackmailing or yelling was going on. If you’re a dreamer and absent-minded like me, it is easy and sweet to forget– at least when one doesn’t feel in danger which is all I usually feel when I’m next to my father.

“It’s not just you,” was the father’s response. “Your brother doesn’t come out of South America, your sister is going on vacation. The toy is broken.”
And so I thought, how many years I had waited for that toy to break? How many years of Christmas reunions I had waited for the burden to fall, those reunions pervaded by self-censorship and hypocrisy and lies and misunderstandings and commonplaces and slivers of cracked love slipping from our hands, shadows of the love that could be there? I had stopped being there for the presents when I was like twelve years old. From then on it had been just a matter of fear and worries, chiefly for my father’s expectations and silent reproaches.

I didn’t say anything, I just sighed. Deep down I knew that the toy could never actually be broken, and even so its shreds were going to be inside me until the day I died, as a nightmare or a menace or the ironic representation of my guilt in form of a sinister Christmas dead tree.
Still it was a relief to the sorry stomach –only to consider the possibility.

Italy presented yesterday its long-awaited plan to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2008-2012 to the European Commission (Yawn. I know. The not so boring part comes in the next paragraph). Together with other countries of the EU Italy is putting itself in line with the new rules to fight pollution and “global warming”. This is applauded everywhere, just like the other law that recently passed at the EU to norm the use of toxic chemicals in industry.
As Europeans we are proud of our battle against pollutions of all sorts.

There’s a but, of course, and it’s pretty gigantic.
Nothing is more hypocrite of these laws, even if they are themselves very rightful. The reason I say this is that while they cause more costs for the European industries, they don’t really imply a sacrifice, because the same industries are outsourcing the polluting productions and refinery of raw materials to countries like China. So Europe can preach to the world the faults of industrialism from its wealthy garden, while its big brands, whether they are French, German, Dutch, British, Italian or Spanish can afford even more polluting lines of production in far away countries without regulations. So in the end the only ones who pay for these laws are those smaller local industries who cannot or do not want to outsource. Not a great result.

My opinion is that sacrifices should be done for reals, not for show. We should really produce less and consume less, changing our lifestyle beyond the naive ‘doing good to ourselves and our garden’. Until then, to see rich and “progressive” German or Italian yuppies enjoying the newly found pleasures of compatible products and cleaner air and rivers, while blindly buying other products “made in China” without considering if they are compatible or not (and I mean not only superfluous products, but also necessary products like a fridge, or toys for the kids), will only be one more reason to be depressed, and disillusioned about the whole European thing, let alone “progress” in itself.

So my father cries on the phone with my sister. Fighting the tears he says that he cannot take the first step in my direction. He –cannot.
I understand him. All he wants is to be searched and proved love. Who wouldn’t.
— call him says the sister. The tears, she says. Good people in my family. Too bad their only way out is always the path of least resistance.
I try to imagine any possible outcome of a conversation with him. They’re all dreadful. I’m calling him! Right now! says the voice. But I haven’t thought any possible outcome before. So I can’t.
Any possible outcome: All must be thought through in advance or without answers ready I will have things to regret.

What do you want to prove? asks the voice. What do I want to prove? Nothing. It is not about proving anything, it is about surviving. What do I fear? Everything: the violent man that he was, his voice, his disrespect for anything I ever wanted to be. What I miss? The witty laughs we had together sometimes. The evenings when he was in a good mood. What do I want to be admired for? I don’t know. I want to disappear.
Is hypocrisy I can’t handle? Yes I can’t handle it. Makes me feel dead and cruel and coward. What is at the roots of it? I don’t know. Possibly me refusing his authority since when I was twelve. Or anything else in his past taunting us, suicide of his father, repressive education, domestic violence, political revenge, Neapolitan madness. I did refuse his authority though. It’s definitely the best thing I did for myself. Only I thought I could find my own way to be respected by him so that we all could be happy each in his own way. An that was a big waste of time.

Everything ends in hysteria in my family. Christmas in a week and I am in the perfect trap. Crawl to him and apologize, cry and humble yourself says the voice. Strange how really everything becomes suffocating in this occasions. Loves, life, family, vices and beatitudes. A dinner. Explanations. Her body against mine in the solidarity hug. Advices. More explanations. I know part of my mind is once again surprised that neither me nor my body are flying away from it all. Unfortunately most of the other anatomical chunks aren’t really listening.

So I sit awake in the silent room built in the middle of the night. Listening to music and feeling like crying out of the stomach what I can’t really cry (did I ingested a small plastic figurine of my father raising his hand?) At moments I am amazed by the fact that this is all so serious and not a joke. I suspect that those are the moments of lucidity. They cause chains of alas. Can’t I really escape? In a laugh? In a plane? Can’t I really fly away? Can I have my wasted time back? Must the calls be made? Must the guilt be such a burden? Must the songs be so wrenching? Etc.

It’s weird, then again it’s not. I’m not a celibacy advocate, in the way some people are, who view it as a type of ‘self love’ or whatever other label they’d like to attach to it, but I can’t deny that I’ve essentially lived a celibate life for the past two years. It’s something I don’t write about, something I don’t complain about because I think to whine about that makes for unoriginal writing and I can’t whine about it because I don’t see it as a problem, for myself, not when I keep my finger on that clitoral trigger and that, by and large, is sufficient because I’m currently more interested in orgasmic release rather than entwining my psyche with the psyche of another in the course of my daily life.

— from: Anastasia’s Sexualité

I regret that those who have the ease to talk about their sex life –not to make “porn” (which is fine) but to open the window on another secluded slice of the mystery– are often labeled or label themselves as “writers of sex”, which is so obviously a limitation, and an error, because the mystery is attainable only if we don’t separate the parts artificially.
Anyway Anastasia, sometimes is definitively adorable. If I can use the Stendhalian adjective.

It rains hard on Milan, and those without umbrellas or hats are skimming in a hurry walls and doors to the streets, under thin edges of scarcely decorated buildings, series of windows and eaves.
Sometimes two milaneses face each other along the narrow dry path right against a line of condos with shallow windowsills. A girl with an already soaking wet wool hat, and a suit without a coat moving from one office to the other and, in my city, the girl lets the suit pass without a second thought, because nobody can stand against business.

I go across town under my favorite hat, in the rumble of vehicles engines and tire crackling on the concrete and exhausts chugging at the semaphores. Alarm sirens go off all around, and the journey is a trek around puddles dark as the night and deep as the Lugano Lake. When it rains this city goes crazy and desperate, but I look past it and try to remember that I love rain. I only wish I was living in a land where business is not more important than girls’ good mood, and windowsills are much larger. To begin with.

So TIME magazine came out with its moronic “you” cover. Everyone’s running around saying how phenomenal and democratic it is. To me it’s just incomprehensible. It’s like a joke. Well, it’s TIME magazine. The digest of all the propaganda, right? Ginsberg teaches.

First of all, what’s with youTube? Because this cover is obviously an homage to youTube, right? The word “you” with that graphics, the player tool, even the font.
Are they taking youTube as a symbol of net democracy? A service already bought by CIA-Google and which is buried under an avalanche of lawsuits and which will probably soon die of natural death inside Google-Video’s womb? And isn’t it funny they decided to promote this brand as soon as Google bought it? I bet youTube could use some clamor before, when they were forced to sell because of all the lawsuits incoming.

The blurb says: “You control the information age”.
“The age of information is the end of the age of knowledge.” said someone else.
This supposedly free “information age” seems to me more like a playground where all the tools are bought and owned by the same two or three players, which are using them to control all the activity going on.

Meanwhile U.S. politicians such as McCain or Al Gore are actively working to dismantle Internet freedoms with the excuse of pedophiles and terrorists.
And TIME magazine, as usual, averting its eyes. Cooking propaganda.

I am a blogger and this cover is dedicated to me too, right? Well let me tell you, I’d rather have faced another pukesome Bono-Gates cover than having this chilling slap on the back.

“Information age”, my ass.

— George Orwell, Notes on the way, April 1940

In this country, as in all catholic countries, nobody is more merciless than the church, the hierarchy of church, and all those who, for one reason or another, consider the church above the people.
But in front of this merciless force are medical scientists, whose category in Italy is made up essentially by affiliates of the catholic church, and who are the representatives of a stubborn force which is two times merciless: one time for the power of religious dogma, and the other for the power of scientific dogma.

There’s a third force which is equally capable of merciless acts and cruel indifference to the destiny of the individual. Such is the force of magistrates and the book of law. Far from being as it should an independent riverbank against the floods of injustice that always waste our falling landscapes, the italian magistrates are capable only to bash the poor, the hopeless, and the left-out (There are exceptions, when magistrates go against someone who was or still is powerful: but this is only when there’s an invisible battle going on among factions, and the magistrates just take one of the sides: It balances nothing).

These days, the most tragic example of all these forces converging to destroy the hopes of the people, is the case of Piergiorgio Welby, an Italian citizen who is literally imploring his physicians to let him die, and who is forced into a suspended state of hellish life for this atrocious coward mix of mistaken sense of scientific duty, imitative brainless religion and cretin soulless application of the law.

Welby wrote to the Italian newspapers: “In any case so long, gentlemen, who are making of endless torture the mean, the obligatory instrument to realize or defend your values!
What are going to be (and how) the dead or the living who will remain when we will all be gone, we don’t know, neither you and I.”

People who felt moved by Welby’s story marched in the streets these days. To ask for mercy and justice for all those who are in the same situation. Actually they didn’t technically march as they held a “vigil”, with candles and all. The prayer vigils are of course religious practices and in fact, many of those who are expressing solidarity to Welby are Christians religious people.

The reasons to “hold a vigil” anyway, go beyond a casual choice dictated by the spirit of those who organized it. The vigil is supposed to be also a moral point which, in an indirect way, is meant to say to the Vatican (the real culprit in this whole story): “your authority and your religion are a fake: ours are real because we feel real mercy and we know what pity is.”

There’s a bit of hypocrisy there, and also a bit of sincerity.

It would be incredibly difficult and artificial to try and extricate from this story where religion begins and where it ends, what’s the bad that it brought into it and what is the good. In the name of what in a society without religion or the idea of religion people would light candles (or doing anything equally “ritual”) to stop merciless acts of governments? I don’t seem to recall anything similar in supposed “materialistic” societies men tried to establish.

This bring me to the final part of this post, which is dedicated to scientist and author Richard Dawkins.

In a recent interview, to promote his new book “The God delusion” set against the idea of god and religion, there’s this exchange:

— In The God Delusion, [you quote] John Lennon’s Imagine and suggest that without religion the world would be a happier and more harmonious place.
— Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot…
— But surely this is a very naive way of looking at things. Even if religion disappeared overnight, there would still be a predilection for violence in the human character.
— Yes, I agree with that.
— [Aren’t you] implying quite the opposite?
— Hmm, let me try to think that through… If the only thing you’ve got against someone is that they support the wrong football team, you might get into a fight about it, but you will stop short of killing them. Now that’s something you might well not do if you’ve been taught from babyhood upwards that your God will approve of such behaviour. You don’t have to produce evidence to support your belief. You simply say, “It’s my faith”, and are blind to any kind of argument. If part of your faith is the righteousness of killing infidels or apostates, then that does seem to me to go further than the ordinary aggression which you pessimistically attribute to humans anyway.

Suddenly I think Richard Dawkins is a stupid man, who doesn’t know the first thing about the world. This is most certainly not true, and still, it looks like he is dreaming of a debate he’s having in a theoretical reality.

For example: to blindly believe that 9/11 and the London bombings (and even the crusades!) are acts dictated by faith is incredibly shallow and dumb. Anyone with a little education, a little criticism and the ability to look behind the lies of the media should know better than that. Such events are obviously caused by greed and the battle for power and not by religious reasons. Religion is simply an instrument in the matter which could easily be replaced by any other instrument after just a bit of testing. Terrorism, moreover, is mostly staged (included the events Dawkins talks about, and others, such as the IRA fight against the British government) and even if you don’t want to believe it –because you’re too “reasonable” to– you cannot ignore that it wouldn’t be possible without the complicity and collaboration of people of the most diverse religions. People not on the field –creating diversions, removing defenses, cooking lies in the media– because of their religious faith.
(Also, to say that a football supporter would stop short before killing is just absurd, news are full of examples that proves exactly the contrary, but whatever.)

Now, there are more profound reasons to argue that it is shallow to identify religion and the idea of God with the “evil” things done in its name. The real story of humanity is one of evil and cruelty since its early beginnings, and –like it or not– very often religion acted as an organizing principle against violence injustice and cruelty, and inside whose boundaries violence and cruelty where limited and not heightened.
It is well known that (one could say unfortunately, but it’s all a matter of points of view) in African countries descended into anarchy and violence (say Somalia) Islam is welcomed because it is an organizing principle under which life is more peaceful, an order is given, streets are kept clean, old-timers are respected etc.

Now I am the first to loath religious states, fanaticism, the forced numbed down mentality that very often religion creates. I never practiced religion and I’m not even baptized. I advocated emancipation from religion many times. I spent hours of my young life outside classrooms –since elementary school– waiting for the “religious hour” to end.
I read “Why I am not a Christian” at sixteen, joyously.

Nonetheless, I recognize religion as an instrument –like many. History is there to prove how it can be used for good or for bad. Isn’t Michelangelo’s art, for example, a product of religion in the sense that religion gave to him an organizing philosophical principle under which he could handle and tell about the struggle between good and evil as he perceived it in his everyday life? One can argue that that sort religion was a simplification and a lie, but this didn’t produce a simplified or untrue art, did it.

And this brings me to my final considerations. The power of the church and of the dogmas in general can make the authority merciless and cruel and stupid. We all know that. The answer is always: education, emancipation, free-thinking process and so forth. I’m all for that.
Yet religion, even if it is nothing but a simplified version of a mistaken philosophy (I don’t know, I am always searching in a way), can make people more resistant to merciless authorities. It does that by providing a simple set of rules, which no maker of ideas and laws can easily change or ridicule.
After all they’re simple enough to give a soul to anyone.

— George Orwell, Notes on the way, April 1940

“How do you move in a world of fog, that’s always changing things. Makes me wish that I could be a dog”
— Tom Waits, “I don’t wanna grow up”

Vanni says that thinking too much about the fact that you are getting old, makes you even older. I haven’t seen him in five years and he still has that power to make most of my arguments powerless.
He is right, of course. Why do I think so much about it?
“The lost occasions” I defend. They proportionally or even exponentially can increase your anguish to grow up and get old.
“Not to think about it is the answer” he says. “They do not exist.”
Yeah I always thought that. It’s like the others— or life itself –keep putting them before your eyes without a good reason. But it’s hard or pointless to explain that I also need to speculate on the sheer fact of growing old and wasting the time of life away. Or think out the mystery. Because there is no actual way not to waste time, since this is the only compromise possible in being alive unless you want to embrace the rules of nature in their entirety, which would be a nightmare, although not a waste of time –if you’re lucky.
“Why would that be?” Vanni asks.
Because the reasons of genes and selections, which I would never doubt since they are a scientific fact, are also one of the most depressing things on earth. They cause immense suffering and injustice and any decent life of a free person should be imagined with at least one foot and one hand outside those boundaries.
“It can be fine inside the boundaries” Vanni says.

I never really could find a pal whom with share my speculations. The maddening efforts to describe the trap aren’t really worth it to most of us. But on the other hand I always masturbated alone.

tourist woman #1(in english): Oohh…this is where Jesus DIED!
tourist woman #2: really? I would have thought they’d put a church up there.

— Rome, Capitolino Hill. Overheard by i know where jesus really died (big thanks for the submission)