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

– Jago Noja

Since I am coming out a major PC disaster, occurred while trying to solve a smaller problem, I guess I had my “don’t mess with windows” lesson today. Well, the lesson lasted two days (so much it took to come out of it without losing all the important stuff, porn galleries and all) so I guess it was a very important lesson.
I knew everything about it though, and it wasn’t so very interesting. The most interesting thing about it was my face when the dark boot screen froze saying something like “I can’t find HAL, reinstall windows”. He couldn’t find HAL, couldn’t it. A Space Odissey all over again. Later my face got even more interesting, because no matter what I did the damn thing wouldn’t start, so I started to act very nervous, and to snort and fume and grumble and swear.
It all happened because I wanted to run a… oh, forget it, that’s too boring.

On the brink of falling asleep, even if only for a few seconds sat in a segment of sun against the ugly squared pillar in Diaz square, passersby’s voices undergo a sort of sublimation in my head, becoming a deeper, neater, very focused thing against a more uniform background. Could be they skidded on a plane slightly aside reality, in axis with my inside, or they just got purified, for few secs before entering the realm of sleep, of the thoughts forever evaluating and judging, the watching that always downsizes and displaces.
It’s like they turn, seconds after I close my eyes, more alien and more beautiful at the same time: like from the world of the sleeper, next to its clumsy nightmares, the world of real things would appear. A world of resonant, passing things without anything of the fuzzy confusion alert senses give us either in dreams or reality.

Voices of conversations slide beneath the plastic chair I sit on sprawled, sounding so definitive and objective, like this woman saying “I’ve been running all day and cell phone was off”, it’s like her voice is perfectly floating it in the void, for the first time in the world. Then she goes, and her voice fades out, and a man approaches the bubble of my perception, the deep tone of his phrase fading in, so clear, “I knew he was gonna accept that”.

Alert. I’m awake. I wasn’t sleeping. I open my eyes and run them swiftly to the XVII century books set on their side edges over the stall. They’re all there, thank God. I know I should stand up now to look busy and conscious to the folks on the other side of the stall, and I should also stand up to avoid falling asleep like an ass again. I try to recount how many hours I have been staying awake now, I come to the quite impressive result of thirty hours, so I recount again, I decide it’s twentyfivehours and I have to last at least four more. I wish I was allowed to sleep here for a while. The sun is warm and pleasurable and keeps my eyes half-closed.

I stand up. I move in the shaded area near the stall, where the air is cold and wind-flapped, the books are all opened at wrong pages. I move around arranging leafs, I look busy. Then I move back behind the stall and start the restless dance of the chilly seller, who pushes his feet against the ground one by one, sways his hips, bobs his head, looks into vacancy. I don’t have the prescribed woolcap and the half-gloves, but I enrich the dance by singing in my head, and few words of the song I’m singing slip out and get heard. Someone looks at me. I grab a book and get back to the seat in our moving segment of sun. Fuck you customers who never buy no shit.

(in picture, above: gettin’ back home, later, riding the lousy brand new green tram)

There’s a kind of elongated violet indigo clouds that is typical of the sky at dawn in the half-beautiful days, at least here over the roofs of Milan. I must have looked at them dozens of times, isolated as they are against the fading-to-yellow blu sky. They all look alike, from day to day and season to season, strechted and small, pointed at the ends and frayed and very very distant but low in the sky. And I am pretty sure they announce bigger clouds to come.
How long they last? They last from the moment you notice them, in the quiet house where everything still has to happen, and your thoughts don’t fight with sensations but just toy with them, to the moment you have forgotten everything about them, in the house where the world pushes in, and your idea of the sky is just the repository of everything that heats, burns, turns into ashes and smoke. Suddendly, the strongest wind rattles the window panes and announces rain. The clouds are gigantic already.

Saturday I was at home, sleeping. I slept all morning through part the afternoon. I tried to make it as peacefully as I could.
Just as I was working on it, dreaming I guess, grinding my teeth probably as I often do, on the other side of the city, near where I lived with Leni few years ago, actions of guerrilla were going on.
Remarkably for me, It’s not the first time I am sleeping while somewhere outside in the city a battle goes on. I might say it happens every time: Me snoring, them fighting. Maybe I dream those battles, who knows.

When finally I woke up, I learned the news, thought of my brother. This also always happens when there’s a battle. Because he would have been out there battling, wearing an helmet and throwing stones and looking for fascists or policemen to beat, it’s impossible for me not to picture him, earning his grades this way. He would have been there, but he doesn’t live in Italy anymore, which is better for me so that my thoughts toward this kind of fighting in the streets can be more detached. Otherwise there would be sheer intolerance without any further rational thought. I don’t get along with my brother very much.

What happened is that there was an electoral masquerade going on, the neo-fascist nearly-governative party “Fiamma tricolore” (Three-colored flame) marching the streets with the usual show of celtic crosses, roman salutes, skinheads, moronic chants.
Not having better things to do, organizations of the extreme left, social centers, neo-communists and anarchists organized a march against them. (In the pictures below, from Repubblica.it and corriere.it: the mentioned fascists, with hair uncertainties and roman salutes, all coming from families of immigrants or half-immigrants, marching behind a banner saying: “no more immigrants”)

Not with the same intensity (everything is less intense in Milan), things went as in Genova during the G8 few years ago. Groups of demonstrators from the left-wing march, forced by the police to continuous stops, started their acts of “political” vandalism.
At the end of the morning (me always sleeping), Corriere.it recounted: Four car burned down, more damaged, a local shop used for electoral propaganda by AN (right-wing government party originated by the same party as “Three-colored Flame”) burned down, a paper-bomb detonated near a Mac Do already rampaged by some of the protesters, scaring away customers with kids and all, a motorbike, garbage cans, a news stand, all burned down, windows and flower pots destroyed in the numbers, etc. (In the following pictures, from Corriere.it and Repubblica.it, scenes from the battle)

You must understand that, although not clearly visible by this selection of pictures, the battle went on between some groups of demonstrators and the police. Fascist marchers and communist marchers never actually met.
Too bad. Maybe that way we would have gotten rid of both, once and for all. Eliminating each other.

Instead, every now and then we are forced to watch this shameful idiocy going on. On one side, unharmed fascists with their roman salutes and racist chants going around the streets like it is a normal day; on the other, the childish nonsensical vandalism of this so-called rebels who give their best hand to right-wing governments, proving once again that the alternative to the moderate right-wing non-idea is disorder, anarchy, and disrespect of the peaceful indifference of middle-class lifestyle.
Well, the middle-class is the third character in this story not coming out very well. According to many news sources, the police had to save some of the protesters from the hands of passersby who wanted to lynch them. Or, more cowardly, who wanted the police to lynch them before their eyes. “Destroy them!” the enraged mob of peaceful citizens allegedly screamed. Of course only when the battle was finished.
The peaceful middle-class fathers wanting to lynch their sons, both parts high on confusion and hatred and boredom, and ignorance. What a nice, beautiful picture. Who wanted to take it, just a month before the elections, I wonder.

There’s the stupid Book Fair this morning, and I have to be loading boxes at seven thirty. But I’d so get back to sleep just to give this dream another plot, if possible.

Via Dagospia.com (time-limited free content), from the magazine “Grazia”, Asia Argento is finally interviewed about the JT Leroy case. Too bad it’s not a very satisfactory conversation. The most remarkable thought? Laura Albert is “pure genius”. Here’s an excerpt for you (our translation):

“Asia Argento knew everything, she helped with the hoax just to have her movie done”. Is it true?
It’s true I wanted to make the movie at all costs. I called JT all the time and he answered every time with different accents. Once with a West Virginian accent, another with a San Francisco’s, another time he was British. Sometimes he used a man’s voice, some other woman’s. (…)

Is it possible that never, not even once, JT spoke to you with his authentic voice?
Ten days ago he answered to the phone with her real voice, of a forty years old woman from Brooklyn: Laura Albert. (…)

Weren’t you angry?
“Not at all. I even invited Laura to New York, for the premiere of the movie. She is pure genius. She understood that nobody could ever have published a novel by failed former rock-singer Laura Albert. But everybody would have been generous with an ex-junkie HIV positive writing his own biography. If literary world wanted to believe JT Leroy was real, it’s not Laura Albert’s fault, but literary world’s. She just wanted to have her novel published.”

Now, this is the most incredible load of nonsense bullshit…. First of all, among that “everybody” who believed in the ex-junkie HIV-positive supposedly it’s also Asia herself. So what’s with the literary world? What about showbiz kids then?

And, I can give to Laura Albert you have to be smart and crazy and creative enough to plan something this big, with all the acting and the posing, to the point Laura configures herself as an interesting case. If her position was like ‘I did it to prove how much women are discriminated in the literary world’, or ‘I wanted to prove the superficiality of book publishers’, it might have some sort of dignity. If she came out with something like this soon after the first book I could understand it. But don’t forget she lied to so many people, like, completely innocent: fellow authors that struggle with the same superficiality of book publishers as she supposedly did, and thousands of readers now heartbroken. You don’t need a genius to break so many people’s heart.

She claimed to be someone else for years. You don’t do this just to have “a novel published”.
It was a greedy scheme for success and money that had no artistic goal but to make Laura and her affiliates rich and indirectly famous. That ain’t the same as wanting so-bad to have your novel published. “She just wanted to have her novel published” seems a reason good for the worst Italian mafia mentality, one that Asia probably has in her blood in large quantities, to the point she doesn’t even notice the difference with actual honest behavior anymore.

How come the fake JT never gave himself away with you? Not even once? How’s that possible?
“To tell the truth, he used to say: ‘call me Savannah’. I obeyed, but I didn’t think it was Savannah for real. I thought he wanted to be called with a girl’s name simply because he felt himself more like a woman than a man.

At a certain point, newspapers wrote that you and JT had a relationship…
I was very flattered by the fact that a man turning into a woman was in love with me. To me it came as a sign of maximum seductive power (…)

JT Leroy wasn’t a man at all. How come you never noticed he was a woman, if you two were together?
We just kissed. (…)

Asia, how could you mistake a girl, Savannah Knoop, for a boy: JT Leroy?
For what I knew, JT Leroy wasn’t properly a boy. He said he was a man taking hormones to become a woman. I noticed that under cloches he had his breasts all bound up, but I just assumed he had an intervention of plastic surgery. And he had all those hairs on his legs and face… I really thought he was a twenty years old in transition between sexes (…) never saw a woman that hairy.

OK, my lie indicator just exploded. The bullshit one melted.
“Call me Savannah”. That’s the best safeguard just in case someone one day pops out saying “she knew it all the time, I heard her calling her ‘Savannah'”.
They went around letting people believe she was pregnant of his child, for chrissake!
They just kissed. Sure. Well, this is true probably only because everything was entirely made up just to promote the movie.
And about that, it’s interesting to read how Susie Bright finds Asia’s movie a entirely ‘heterosexual’ movie. After all, writer and director were both heterosexual women. Not bad for ‘the new icon of gay literature’.

But the JT Leroy case is more important than Laura Albert’s story or Asia Argento’s story. I think it proves once again that the fixation with the figure of the ‘writer’, to the detriment of form and content of books, just went too far. It is since the advent of Romanticism in Europe that writers take more and more space to books. I think we should try, as readers or authors, to make our best to get a little out of this in a positive, harmless way.

The first time I saw Leni I was speaking to the classroom she was a part of at the U. It was a laboratory workshop for the students preparing their final exams that year. I had been fetched to speak in front of them by the group of workshop’s teachers and professors, who wanted a report from the previous year experience. I had been just a “production assistant” and an occasional teaching jolly then, but I was the only individual to be avaliable that day with a sufficently complete idea of the workshop in general.
I was not scared for the part, but I was really clueless. I had hated that experience, for me it had been just all about struggling with professors to keep the class together.
As Leni later told me, it was obvious from the students’ seats I had no idea of where I was going, and still I managed to come out good because I just went on speaking for an hour and a half, without slides to show or any other help, and without any questions by the students. A real hero.
Well, no questions, with just one notable exception.

Toward the end of the class, I saw Leni face sorting out from behind students faces, raising her hand. She asked two different, very elaborated things, and my gratitude for her was just immense. Now this may seem the most normal thing to you, but it’s very hard, at least in my experience, to grab students’ interest, there’s a whole lot of tricks you should learn. Everybody who’s been a teacher knows that in a silent class it takes real guts and personality to be the first to ask a clever question.
That’s the kind of person Leni was, for sure, and being the evidently attractive girl she also was hadn’t any apparent part in the way she asked questions or expressed her personality. And that was something almost disconcerting and very rare in the world I was leaving into.

I spoke with Leni later in the alley outside the classroom, it was a beautiful day of winter and a white intense light poured in from the windows. Clusters of students hanged around the snack vending machines, puffing smoke outside the windows ajar from neat bright cigarettes. Because Leni was friend with one of the students I knew from the past laboratory, I came to talk to her and it was a pleasant conversation, even though with me still in the part of the advising teacher, she in the part of the nervous about-to-be-graduated student. Still nobody could miss the sparkle of almost mad intelligence in her beautiful eyes, or the triple-pierced ear, the gracious slight swiss accent in her perfect italian.

That night I met their group in a pub full of smoke and wood tables and empty glasses of beer in a quiet eastern neighbour of Milan, she at the center with her male friends. She glanced at me and gestured me to come to seat. Her oval face was as luminous as in the alley.

You were never tired to talk with her because her ways of being curious of stuff seemed to be just inexhaustible.
I was a promising assistant, and she a promising student, and there was all those signs of fun and passion when we were together. It had to be, evidently for the plans of a strange God, that we had to be together for more than 2 years, eventually living together and trying to make it out of Italy together, finally separating with one or two of the tragic saddening disturbing or overwhelming ways people separate.
When I dropped off that so-promising job, and fell into a major crisis whose origins where as mysterious and irreparable as that strange God had wanted them to be, Leni on the other side was shifting her personality into a less-complex and more hard to handle one, a career professional woman fighting her way head down in that same world I was just coming out from.
So we found ourselves, in the same room in that distant inhospitable country, me looking at her from my daydreaming world made of vague desires and silly hopes and fading borders, and her, hairs now cut shorter, suit to go to work or meetings, new pair of glasses over the same triple-piereced ear.

It’s hard for me imagine her now, still in that cold town, on the other side of this whole big valley of disappointments and misunderstandings among us. I picture her running to work, with just few hours spared everyday for love or peace or rest, career life, gym, while I still remember very well the girl that went around with a small notepad to write poems or make sketches, who played the clarinetto and loved Kruder & Dorfmeister. The girl I went with through the Broletto’s columns in Milan at two in the morning, high on narghilé, looking for the spot where the sound effect was to be triggered, sorrounded by the pointed christmas trees of 2001, both trying to be left behind by the group of males to exchange our first kiss.
Shit, I know that for a woman full of talents the career world is a challenge more alluring than for a man, because it is a sexist world out there, and the slice they offer to a girl isn’t always very interesting.
So as probably was the slice I could offer her.

It’s hard for me possibly because I’m not in love with her anymore, and I haven’t answered any of her past messages, and “I don’t think about her that often”.
So, in my mind, she’s left alone there — where she wanted to be alone (although she had someone else), tired and with much less irony left to use.
We met in Milan one last time, for a meeting she had, and she kind of offered me to get back together. She was now feeling alone in the inhospitable country, and with this other guy (a colleague of hers) everything had gone wrong. That day in a bar I told her I was too sensitive for her, although it wasn’t at all a matter of quantity.

Her beautiful eyes where sparkling as always, even if not with the same crazyness of the past, and the oval face I loved was always tender and lovely to caress. This post was dedicated to her.

Tomorrow will be March 8th, the international day of women. Here’s what Giuseppe Morello writes today for Affari italiani (our translation):

On March 8th 1908 women workers of a New York garment manufacturing firm, after days on strike for the dreadful working conditions, were secluded into the factory where a fire killed more than a hundred of them. March 8th 2006 my friend Gisa will pass her morning to the cosmetologist. She will have lunch at the sushi with her boyfriend, who won’t forget to bring her a smelly mimosa bouquet. She will spend afternoon shopping. She will have dinner at the Indian with a group of girlfriends, with whom she will end the night by watching a so-amusing show “for women only” where men by the iron-cast biceps sway around wearing a speedo so tight it looks like filled with the fat of the land. (…)

Part of women, in Italy and all over the world, still live in a condition of minority (Asia and Africa particularly), while another part (the one we see on TV) just accepted with enthusiasm to be identified with their mammary glands and few other anatomical detail.

I may point out that many details of the factory story Morello tells do not match with wikipedia version of the story, since dates are wrong, and the strike and the fire seems not to be connected in the first place (check yourself with the above link), but that’s not the point. I may consider how my friend Gisa instead, won’t do any of those things he mentions, ’cause she has a whole lot of other problems and mimosa makes her sick. But all in all, I think Morello is right, set aside his observations on masculinity of male strippers.
8th march is a stupid celebration, just like Halloween and mom’s day.

I am at home, standing in front of the bedroom window. My mother’s voice comes hasty from the phone, I just answered and we’re already into the story of her occasional paresthesia to the left hand and arm again, the difficulty to swallow and stuff, and I am once again worried not only by what she is saying, for how much adornment of irony she might be rapidly seasoning it with, but by the fact that she already told me this story, about the cortisone and the physician who doesn’t understand or thinks she’s an aggressive hypochondriac, and her depression undergoing it all, and even thought she’s always been quite absent-minded, I know it’s not the first time after the operation she just seems to have no recollection at all of entire pieces of our telephone conversations.

Now she’s talking in a rush and it feels like she’s worried of being interrupted. She has her mother’s story in mind, as I do. This doesn’t help neither of us to be rational. But I already said that somewhere else.

I sit on the bed and close my eyes against the sun blazing. I let it heat the skin of my face and I watch this moment developing, when I figure that something bad is already happening, and maybe I am already into it, and then I become suddenly stiff and calm, as all the tension invisibly swirls in and out my stomach, and I wonder if this preparation to events is in fact desire for events to come, any event: to make life more substantial.
Outside the window, at the bottom of the horizon around the big ball of fire the usual blocks of flats piled up to harbor human beings dissolve upward in the mighty light. The city continuosly plays in the background its instruments, mostly engines, and few calls of the living, birds included, bounce between the walls. I think about masturbating for a sec, I don’t know why.

“I know you’re having this new job now”, she’s saying, “and that it’s probably too soon to get a vacation or something.”

It’s not that kind of job, I probably should say, but I don’t say anything. It would be pointless now to explain her how not only there’s no such thing as a vacation to “take” at the bookstore anyway, but also that days off work because of flu or shit like that are not even paid, and then you have to recuperate the lost hours anyway.
So I think, yeah, the boss wouldn’t be very understanding if I ask her for ‘a vacation’.

“… I am going to do more exams this week, but most likely I will have to be operated again”, she says. “I’m asking you first. I’d need your help for a week or so with the dogs and the horse just like you did the other time. I’ll pay you of course. ”
“Mom”, I say. Or better, I call her by her first name, since I never called my parents ‘mom’ and ‘dad’, given the fact that they just didn’t allowed us to, ’cause it was ‘bourgeois’. “Mom, what kind of operation? Why?”
“The same operation.”
“Oh, no, shit. Not that.”
“Yes honey. The first physician is not listening to me, he thinks I am a crazy old witch, he says the post-intervention situation is fine but I went to this other one who is supposed to be a big name of neurology in Bari and he just told me that the situation instead is possibly bad, and that all the stuff I am experiencing right now it’s because of this fluid that is still in my skull, osmosing blood from the meninx and all. I’ve got to do something. I might as well end half-paralyzed and then I’d be way much more idiot or crazy”
“What, wait, why the second doctor should be more reliable than the first”
“Because that one is just not considering how I feel now. This one instead seems to be actually interested in my condition.”
“The other is defensive because he made the intervention, that’s all. Still it’s one to one…”
“No it’s not, because it’s not only the exams, it’s how I feel. What should I do? You tell me.”
“Let’s hear someone else, send me all the papers and I’ll find a neurologist here in Milan…”
I say this because in terms of public services like hospitals and stuff, I’m unreasonably intolerant toward the southern italian medical world. I can’t help it. No offense, but inflation of hypochondriacs really can ruin it for everybody. I’m one of them, so I should know it.

“Listen, if you can’t come here I perfectly understand…”
“I think I can make it if necessary” I hear my voice saying. “Don’t worry”.

When later I hang up I wonder why I said that. Being away for an entire week after only a month working at the bookstore. That can’t be easy.
Since I have problems thinking I’m a good or generous or caring fellow, I just wonder if I said that because subconsciously I might already hoping to be fired from the bookstore. I picture it, under the heat of the sun behind my eyelids, and I see I wouldn’t mind very much being fired. After all my father was right when he said I had no tangible idea of how ‘the rest of regular people’ was making it in the world.

It is raining steady outside. The pouring water makes a faint noise against the bricks of the terrace, the plastics vases and the rigid jasmine leaves. Light is strangely dimmer all around, also because of the wet surfaces of the buildings and the roofs darken everything, and the grayish yellow walls of the condos drawn upon by the rain with wide wet brush-like stains, dragon-shaped, or shaped like clouds piled up to the horizon.
My thoughts do not enthuse me, miserable plans of cheating, hypocrite worries for relatives I never call, absurd fears of precocious illnesses, strategies to work even less or caring less, the doubtful meaning of this blogging, like a ‘I put myself at the window here and report back’ kind of thing, only because I can do it, just like cheating.
They don’t enthuse me, but these are my thoughts, and I cannot find a way to pilot them to a better destination, so I just look out of the window, sunday raining, let them roll. I am lucky enough, I think, I have this window to look out from, this good things, like a yogurt or a computer or the music or such, and a person I can have sex with right now, sunday morning, just if I feel like having it, high-handed. And as I start wondering why is that, that I need to brutalize the women I love, or they wish to be brutalized by me, a whole chain of images, fantasies and scenes come to me. Finally are the thoughts that don’t need to be hijacked or pushed forward.

Outside the light’s changing again, someone down in the road is bitterly impelling her old dog to move faster, the lid of clouds seems more thick and consistent and the dark crows and pigeons stand out against it as they fly from one roof to the other.

It takes half an hour to go on foot from the bookstore to my place. First you have to follow the canal up to the basin and then you just walk all the way down the avenue up to Porta Romana.
Little more than a mile. It would make a pleasurable journey because of the bodegas and the trams, the sporadic yet impressive trees, the old courtyards you can spot behind large openings on the condo facades, the clusters of showing Bocconi students out of the bars, the bunch of northern Africans smiling and talking idling across the sidewalks, the Filipinos or the transvestites or the girls or the elderly singles and couples rushing in all directions.
Those are city’s lives surrounding you, appearing and disappearing rolling under the shades, sometimes old and beautiful, of the milanese houses. You should be able to enjoy that. I personally love city’s confusion, the crowd, all the faces and attires and the voices and stuff. Make me feel I’m pushing into something I am different from and part of.

But, you’re in Italy. Cars are there all the time. And particularly with these beautiful days of upcoming spring they are this unbearable and inexplicable and yet relentless presence.
Particularly in the evening, they obsess you without any hiatus. At the glowing lights of semaphores and signboards you hear them honking to passersby if they cross too slowly the street, you see them cutting trams routes pushing bicycles against the endless line of parked cars, you see them passing each other with impulsive accelerations, pressing the music of their stereos against your ears, blowing in carbon monoxides straight up to your nose.
Motorbikes obsess you too: their accelerations are so noisy they suck up all the idiocy around in a second and scatter it all over the place. They are typically ridden over the sidewalks at short stages, and as they swirl pass you so you have no choice but to walk in the invisible stinky cloud of their exhaust trying not to breathe.
(Honest, I hate motorbikes, even more than I hate cars. First of all I don’t have those kind of macho issues. And plus, if I ever hear again someone say how beautiful it is to ride a motorbike because this way you’re “really into the environment” (what environment?!) I may vomit on the spot.)

It’s this the metal and mechanical anarchy that constantly says: I am your enemy. Everything is my enemy. I may be useful, but I am still your enemy.

Still I know there’s people behind the appearance of this metalmechanical anarchy, and I cannot hate them because they don’t know any better. If I’m tired of fighting my way through the rumble and the poisoning, all I can do is to stop by and wait for a tram. The trams are frequent, most of them are still of the very old orange kind and incredibly beautiful and pleasurable to ride so you can cope with that. You just need your tickets.

As you go to stamp your ticked this time, though, the weirdest thing happens: there’s a new type of ticket stamping machine aboard, and it’s trying to suck in your ticket with all its book of tickets attached. It’s not the regular stamping machine, you realize: it’s the one for the new electronic tickets we all will have to use in the next future.
One more electronic badge so they will always know when or where we come and go. A gentle old man gives me a brief explanation of what’s up with that. I had no idea this was actually going on, to the point of replacing any paper ticket around with something electronic.

So these are the choices you have in the end, as a respectable citizen of this wealthy city: have a walk into mechanical deadly anarchy, or take a ride into fascist oppressive technology, so now don’t say you don’t have options.