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

– Jago Noja

Many of the left–wing bloggers are calling ‘coglione’ themselves right now. ‘Coglione’, which means testicle, balls, stupid idiot, is the adjective our beloved Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi used today to define left-wing voters. Since we are a few days before the elections, and there’s been a lot of talking about him going to finally lose his chair and all, apparently he’s reacting pretty bad to the trend.
Anyway, although this is actually what he meant, Berlusconi didn’t say left-wing voters are ‘coglioni’. This is not what he said. He said “I think too much of italians to believe someone would be so much coglione to vote against his own interests”.
Now, well, you know. I can’t believe it either. Still, that’s what has been happening in this country since this country was born, almost 150 years ago. No doubt it is going to happen again this time. Whoever wins. But what can you do? I know we’re all coglioni.

Looks like many in the dentist waiting room have been waiting for their turn too long. It’ a bit discouraging, also the fact that nobody greets you as you enter the small room. Everyone is pissed, and bored, and grows impatient at seeing yet another fellow putting himself in line. I hang my jacket above the pile stuffed on the clotheshorse, regretting I haven’t brought anything to read, as usual.

The most bored of all seems to be a seven years old little girl who is lounging on the small couch. I sit in front of her. She’s abandoned against her grandmother’s chest, legs sprawled, feet bouncing, complaining.
“But in that place where there were those two fighting with the umbrella you said we had to hurry”, she’s reproaching her grandma.
“You have to be in time”
“We could have bought the little turtle by this time”
“Or the bird” says grandma.
The little girl idles for few seconds thinking at the possibility of the bird. “Only if we don’t keep it in the cage”, she says then. “Let’s go get them both now!”
“You kidding? We have been waiting for almost an hour now. We’re not going now. Besides you ought to wait.”
“I am bored!”

Time passes. Droning drills can be heard whirling in the background, but nobody comes out of surgery. In the room, we keep waiting. Everybody is reading in silence, except the little girl and her grandma. And me, recording them inconspicuously. The little girl knows I am there, and every now and then peeps sideways to see if I am still looking at her, suppressing a smile.
Hidden speakers shed “The Sound of Silence” above our heads. The little girl puffs and moves about. Her grandma patiently tries to calm her, talking to her with the mellower tones of her hoarse lowed voice, indecipherable from the other side of the room.

“I would never make someone wait like this. I am reliable” says the little girl at a certain moment. Grandma smiles, I smile. The girl is glad of the attention, and loudly starts acting even more indignant. “How can they do this to me”, she says, arms folded.
“You also sometimes do not find the time to do things”, grandma remarks. “Your room is always untidy, your things scattered everywhere”.
“Oh!” she says, stricken for a second. “But I get by into that!”

The looks of this sweet little girl, with grandma at her service, remind me a little of Mussolini. Her round eyes, the partially squared shape of her head, the mug which sticks so much out when she sulks. So it happens that I am imaging Mussolini now, sitting in this dentist’s waiting room with his grandmother, sulking and complaining for the wait and bored and looking out of the window with daydreaming eyes.
This vision strikes me. I wonder where, why, how do we end up so different, us whiny pleasant sweet little kids we have been? We were so inoffensive, and yet some of us ended up a dictator. But it’s not only that. We all ended up into offices, in the armies, into cars stuck in traffic, into grown up dresses and into hotels and into dentist waiting rooms, so far from the places we seemed to be ready for as kids. And we are no more allowed to be whiny so much, neither we are so much inoffensive anymore. Everything we do we pretend it is going to happen only once.
Or at least it seems so to me, adult me, uneasy with life, sitting in this waiting room today.
Well, these are not very original thoughts, I know. Still they hit me as singular, and strange.
I am surprised, because in this dentist waiting room I always have the most strange and detached thoughts (See this post).

“I don’t like Milano”, the little girl is saying now. “It’s ugly”.
“What! Don’t you like it here?” asks grandma. “You have your friends, and your things here”
“I like it if someone listens to me”
“But the city has nothing to do with this!”
“Yes it does!”

I don’t want to unsettle the little girl, or maybe I don’t want to be laughed at by her for some obscure but peremptory reason. Still I stand up. I have to stretch my legs a little. The good girl seems not to mind me. We are all waiting for incredibly long spans of time. I stroll around the small entrance, rereading for the nth time the hanged diplomas. I think of the zodiacal signs of the doctors. I wonder if they coincide with the picture of them I have in mind. Gemini. Leo. My dentist is a Gemini.

“What a bore!” Boredom is actually torturing her, like a bodily enemy. All the available issues of Topolino she could read are scattered off their pile and discarded around the couch. “I don’t want to grow old here!” she says. “Otherwise wrinkles will start to come to my face. I will end up as a granny!”
“Granny? Granny is nice,” says her grandmother.
“Sure! So I grow old and die, so I don’t have to be here waiting anymore.”
At this words, sarcastic and coarse as they are, her grandma covers her own face with a hand for a second, saying nothing. The little girl doesn’t notice, occupied as she is to cross her eyes at my benefit.
I look away. Outside it has started to rain. After a thunder, we all look in between the curtains for a few moments, the greenish sky against the shaded walls across the street, the rain violently coming down. The little girl complains for it. They aren’t going to buy the turtle now. Colors are changing rapidly outside, and the thunderstorm seems very beautiful.
I break into the surgery room where my doctor is alone, only occupied with trying to open his locked window.

“I had you waiting because I can’t be locked inside like this” he says.
“I see.”
“But no way. I’ll have to call the repairman tomorrow.”
At our backs, the little girl and her grandmother are entering too, into the other doctor’s surgery.
“I was not bored to wait because of the little girl” I say.
“That one?” says my dentist. “She’s crazy.”

When I get out of the building everything around is a little darker, but macadam pieces are shining with the film of water pouring down. Cars screech their brakes and honk their horns. I go home, on foot, under my green sun hat trying to imagine what the grandma was feeling behind her hand, before. I remember my father crying in the other room, on Christmas, because his son wasn’t close to him. I remember I thought it was death approaching to make him cry. I was sure of it because I think of death everyday, too, trying to picture and to draw that feeling of imminence that seems just so unbearable and inconceivable. Yet I know the little girl was right, it actually will come to be, one day, the end of the wait.

I remember the old days when flash headlines all in red were dedicated only to very alarming news and happenings, like the planes smashing the twin towers in Manhattan and shit like that.
Now, this girl has been arrested, then released, for whatever the reasons, and this fuckers at corriere.it just scared me to death out of nothing.
Mind you, corriere.it is supposed to be the website of the most influential newspaper in Italy.

See, that’s what I’m talking about here.
This country is a mess.

Funny coincidence today on the first page of corriere.it.
Main news, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi declares that Chinese communists used to boil little children at the time of revolution. Which may even be true as far as I’m concerned, although it’s hardly an issue for a Prime Minister of the third millennium.
Just below it, questioned about import-export duties, the Minister of finance indicates: “Beijing is eating us alive.”

Funny. Is this a subtle way to tell us they want at least to be boiled? That China should at least boil Italy before eating it? Or that we should accommodate ourselves to the fact that it is good and right if we let our politicians to boil us?

I imagine one of the countless fights between brother and sister. The boy, brought up by the father to be the next powerful mafia boss, but weak, and coward in spirit. The sister, educated to be an obedient, unpretentious wife and mother, who instead goes away to find a love and a family for herself out of the obvious men’s rules, and the less obvious Mafia’s rules.
I imagine him, trying desperately to be a tough guy like Papà, and ending up again and again to pester his sister, to bend her will to his. He knows for sure women must obey to men. Just as Mamma obeys to Papà. He knows Papà and Mamma toss their heads when they talk about the daughter. Father would be pleased if it was him to teach her a lesson.
But she never listen to him. She, who had a son without being married, with someone not even involved with his father’s mafia clan, even comes back at him, laughing at his sorry face.

Isn’t it the oldest story in the world? When someone very stupid is also convinced to be very strong or powerful or righteous?
So he spent the night in the car near her place. And in the morning he got out, reached her door, called her down with an excuse. She climbed down the stairs, showed up at the front door where he shot her in the head.
Finally relieved of not having anymore to face that obvious example of his own weakness (his incomprehensible disobedient sister) he declares to the police: “I am proud of what I did.”
It’s Italia, 2006.

(or, maybe it’s an entire different movie. They were lovers. She was his toy. But now, stronger with the newborn son and her new family, she was threatening to sell it all out, so that’d teach him to go around playing Mafia boss. This plot would make his murder motivated by slightly smarter reasons, and meaner. And his proudness would come out from entirely different regions.
Well, you pick your favorite movie. One is less likely than the other, but they’re both plausible, in this country, today)

As you may have learned from previous posts here, I can’t be that crushed by the news. Still, the situation pretty much sucks. My profitable collaboration with the bookstore won’t continue. It’s ended, actually. Every intimate place has its small Hitler defending it, so I guess this is where I found myself out there. There was this small Hitler, hard-worker, nice woman, and still very positive that the response Italian workers are expected to give is total abnegation to the cause. My response was quite disappointing instead. I mean, I love books and everything, but I wasn’t that good, that enthusiasts, as I should have been. I had unrequested opinions, too.
It all must be traced back to the fact that I am spoiled, I don’t need to work, I must have plenty of money in the bank, I should try to work in a mine and see what it means, I have no idea what hard work means, etc. All true. Anyway, I can’t stand sermons, so when the sermon started, I had to stop it.

“O.K.”, I said. “It seems like I’m giving you problems by remaining here. I don’t want to leave you on the spot (that’s a lie: I wanted to leave on the spot), so tell me when I’m leaving. Just, please, stop the sermon. I don’t wanna hear it”
“So you stay until the end of the month. But you are going to listen to the sermon, because–”
“No I’m not, I don’t want to hear it, I told you”
“But I want to say it”
“Jesus. Listen,” I said, “it’s like when they catch you on the bus without a ticket. They can lecture you on the advantages of respecting laws and traveling with a valid ticket, OR they can fine you. They can’t do both things.”
“What, how does this touch our case–”
“I’m leaving. That’s how being fined on the bus. So no sermon, thanks. You could lecture me if I was going to stay. But I’m not gonna stay. Simple as that”

We’re having problems exchanging words and glances when we’re at the bookstore together. Good ol’ hypocrisy rules when a customer is in. And I’m officially looking for a job.

It’s four thirty in the morning, I definitively am coming out of my drowsiness, hearing the blackbirds singing out in the dark, strangely realizing only now the meaning of the locution “in the dead of night” in that Beatles song.
I’ve been stepping in and out of my dreams for a while tonight.
Libi is softly snoring at my right. I know that just as I will make a move to get out of bed she will come half out of her sleep, and her hands will reach for me. So I remain still.
Her mother’s cat is curled up between our legs. The blackbirds are singing about in the area they consider theirs. They have quadrichromatic vision, seeing everything they need to see among the roofs, and courtyards, and the patches of green where they will be looking for food. They know nothing of my stomach though, all knotted up. I don’t remember what culture or religion considered the stomach as the seat of all emotions, but I think they were right. All my emotions are there, they actually never move out from my stomach where evidently they feel quite secure.
All these thoughts I have been having tonight, how inconsistent my life turned out to be, how vain my wishes, my brother whom I secretly envy, my father whom I feel guilty with and yet whom I can’t stand, his wife, whom I can’t love, all the friends who vanished, from whom I vanished, and my place among their thoughts… I wonder is it a big, considerable sunny spot? Or just the occasional appearing of a name and a memory? All these faces and voices and foreigner thoughts fill my mind, but the stomach is the one who feels it. All warmed up and stiff and closed up and all.
I get out of bed, and Libi reaches for me with a soft moan. I touch her for a second. It’s everything O.K. Later I can hear her sleeping, as I silently move around to fix me a tea. The blackbirds go on. There’s at least two of them around in the courtyard. Their singing is a marvel, the optimism of certain parts of it, when their song goes up ad halts there, with few notes, no moral ending of sorts.

My boss gave up on me, because I am not a “comrade”.
Everybody is a communist here along the canal. I mean among the storekeepers and the managers, everybody is recognizably from the left or the extreme left. Even if they don’t call themselves “communists”, it’s the same, Berlusconi-wise. As many communists and former-closet communists do, they all secretly admire the shit-eater thief Berlusconi, and they just think and act like a big clan. I can spot them by a mile. For exaggerated this may sound, it’s easy to say in Italy, with little margin of error, when someone who looks or talks in a certain way belongs to a certain political area. Or better, when this someone pretends to belong to a certain political area.
Well, it’s incredible, considered how the traditional retailers here in Milan had always been the most bigot ones, the core of conservatism of our local society.
Now, here around in the navigli neighborhood, if you hang about bodegas and stores you just meet these non-conformist, hipsters, apparently cool and never formal shopkeepers and managers and employees who make a show of their political convictions as often as they can. Their customers, mostly making a show of their being hipsters and cool too, are so enthusiast to find “comrades” everywhere they go in the area, they can’t believe it how lucky they are.

It’s such a general consent of attitudes and looks it makes you sick, in a little while. When two of these fellows meet, the third or the second phrase will undoubtedly be something about Berlusconi, or the good ol’ times corrupted by capitalism, or how the food it’s not the same (because capitalism corrupted food), or something they both heard on Radio Popolare, and so forth.
If you have the misfortune to talk with them about politics, they will take you on the longest route to draw this big circle where everything fits into place logically: anti-capitalism, business, anarchism, individualism, communism, environmentalism, to avoid paying taxes, to make little or no difference among political parties because they’re all criminals, to never pay taxes for the employees, to fire anybody whenever they feel like it because life is a struggle, because capitalism ruined society etc. To work sixteen hours a day and become greedy and crabby and stingy and addicted to work is normal too, it all fits into the big picture of how capitalism ruined everybody’s life and so, shit, they are so obliged to this.

It is left to say about the employees. Are they in the same bunch, too? Well, some. But the ones that worked in the area for a little longer, they inevitably turned into disillusioned individualist, luckily only focused to look into the short supply of good-hearted or exceptional people, regardless any creed or color.

I think I already told somewhere in the blog about when Gisa worked at the pub on the other side of the canal, and got pregnant, and her boss first kept her working after late at night until the sixth month and then, when she barely could resist standing in the smoke-filled room for more than half a hour a time, he fired her, later claiming he didn’t owed her any payoff money. This guy, an expert of wines, calls himself a “communist guevarist”.

Now my boss. She’s addicted as everybody else here to her work, since the unlucky day she found out that the more she worked the more money flew in. And she’s addicted to the infamous Radio Popolare, obviously, and she makes a face every time I say something negative about someone from the extreme left, or the “real left” as she calls it. But I can’t help it. I am from the left, but I also think with my own head.
So she gave up on me. Well, she gave up also because I let her down twice, when she needed me after my shift and I really didn’t feel like it.

She made a scene one day.
“I consider your behavior hallucinating”
“Why, what?”
She looked at me like she wanted to send me at the stake. Then she started mocking my voice, making it the voice of someone very spoiled and lazy:
“No I don’t feel like working, I can’t come”
“Listen, you don’t have to mock my vo–”
“I don’t feel like working, I don’t need it”
“All right. Go on.”
“I can’t stand you. You are so haughty. You obviously don’t have any belief in it”
“Belief in what?”
“The thing, the bookstore. You just don’t have any faith in it, it’s obvious.”
“Wha- You can’t expect me to have faith in your own assets, do you?”
“Oh! You’re so haughty!”

Everybody is a communist here along the canal, but I can’t take it anymore.
I had my share of milanese communism all my childhood and adolescence, I had plenty of it, I could write entire books about this very crafted way they have to turn everything into a moral problem, in order to force you to be just like they want.
I am not like them, and I want to be as much different as I can.
I reckon this bookstore thing is really not going anywhere. I kind of have no faith into it.

Luckily at the dentist’s surgery today there’s a Louis Armstrong cd spinning, and the volume is low. We are spared the ordinary anguish of loud radio music drilling into our ears in preparation of more useful drills. The guy loves blues, he told me, but mostly it’s the assistant to pick the cds or the radio stations, a nice, short sassy girl with terrible musical taste. Libi once told me her second job is to take part to TV reality shows as an “active” member of the public, so I always picture her with a microphone in her hand and the greenish respirator down over her chin.
In my usual drowsiness I sit, my back at the window, among the bystanders. Some browse “Oggi”, some browse “Gente”, some flicks “Famiglia Cristiana”. I strive to remain awake dragging in vain my hand over my face, the scene disappears behind it and nobody knows it. I trawl in my pockets looking for some distractions I can’t find. When there’s to wait, I always forget to bring something to read or, I don’t know, an ice cream.
From the mentioned magazines, glossy figures and block capitals, acts of pedophilia, orgies, rapes, overdoses, scams and grand thefts, Padre Pio all over the place and photo-op kisses, all the stuff nobody among us had the courage or the venture to do in this life is equally suggested, or outlined, as the tragic enviable privilege of a superior society where our-rules-don’t-count, good-for-them and what-a-shame.
From behind my back comes the muffled noise of the streets, tires cracking rapidly over the uneven macadam, repeating their rolling with a kind of lulling rhythm, so the inevitable happens and I fall asleep.

I reopen my eyes from beneath my hand. The scene is unchanged but once again all is like from a distance, and the sat-downs profiles, with their dark clothes, calm breathings, frighten me for a moment. Why are they so silent? What are we all doing here together? How can they resist staying among strangers, at the mercy of this close walls, so meek and calm?
“Survived to the flight of Death we leave for the honeymoon trip” recites one of the glossy titles. I fall asleep again, and into an erotic dream, sex in the parking lot, receiving a blowjob by a boy, indecipherable faces. Must be all that visiting Cooper’s blog, I argue in the dream. I wake up once again behind my hand, half hard-on possibly not to touch right now, just to let it go away.
When the assistant calls me in, it’s a relief the habitual little chat about nothing-or-soccer, even though we support different teams.

Two news items from the super-vague and boring English news section of News Agency ANSA attract my attention today.
Considered that, as somewhere else I argued already, ANSA never reports what really happens in Italy because they don’t want to disappoint anybody (i.e. government and finance forces), I see it as a pretty significant event that today you can find two anti-government news items in the even more censored English section of their Stalinist-like agency.
Elections are so close they must have felt the moment right to take a side, in expectation of serving the next government at their best. The sly foxes.
For much that I want Berlusconi to fall down and even more down, those signs of journalism subjection are always creepy to look at. Anyway, nothing really new here.

First news item, it’s about the racist and moronic Northern League government party, a pretty powerful organization devoted to separate Italy in two parts (north and south), in order to keep the north richer and the south in misery, and make even more miserable the life of all non-Italian non-rich individuals who share the misfortune of living in our falling country. But you already know that.
The news is that their party is about to be suspended by the European Parliament, because of the too many racist and anti-Islamic stances. What the article don’t say, is that the average Northern League elector will be proud of that. What they don’t say but they know very well, is that the moderate right-wing elector will be very much pissed by this.
Well, what do you know. I’ve always been against suspensions, at least since when I was suspended from school when I was twelve (for saying ‘fuck off’ to the teacher, alas), and in this case I am against too. Because it is pretty hypocrite to suspend them now, they always said and did even worse during the years, way before European elections. The point is that Berlusconi was their strong ally, and nobody wanted to disappoint him for so little as some racist shows against immigrants whose train seats had to be ‘disinfected’ after the use (just an example of the happy political fights of this shameful organization).

Second news item, it’s about another trial against Berlusconi. It’s yet another story of corruption of magistrates and politicians, and dirty money’s intelligent routes, nothing new from our beloved PM. Isn’t it something all Prime Ministers and Presidents do? Well, probably not, but still, who wouldn’t do the same in his position?
Once again, the only remarkable thing about this news item is that ANSA is giving it to the international public. They really want everybody to know they never supported Berlusconi. Oh, it would be nice to believe them, unfortunately we are out of gullibility right now. Under elections it goes away like bread, as we say here.
And with this we are finished with boring political journalism stuff for today. I am sorry I have inflicted it to you.