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

– Jago Noja

In the dream I was sleeping somewhere, in an unfriendly school maybe, and I must have tried to say something out loud, because then I felt these hands against me, my back and the back of my skull. So typically the dream turned into this story where someone was sneaking behind me to kill me, and I couldn’t move to struggle or run away. Actually, I think that the dream’s imagination made up the entire story of me sleeping and getting killed the moment I felt threatened, nonetheless it made complete sense and was very persuasive in the context.
I tried to scream to call for help and I must have screamed in the real world for a while. But the hands remained there, since it was just Libi trying to soothe me (so much for meddling into someone’s dreams to save him out of trouble, I guess).

I never entirely woke up, I just managed to roll away from Libi hands to calm down. I knew my mouth was dry because some weird new allergy clogged my nose, and I knew I had to wake up to get me some water. But I had to finish my dream first.
There was a memory of when I used to go visit my dad in Trento, few years ago, before he retired to Liguria. I was a student in Venice and sometimes I had to ride the Valsugana “little train” up to Trento to stay at his place a couple of days. The Valsugana “little train” was a blue and white diesel train with two carriages mostly used by students in the weekends. Among them was this beautiful girl I really liked, from Borgo Valsugana. She had long gorgeous legs and long black hair, and I never dared to talk to her. I never knew her name. But this has nothing to do with the story.
I was never happy to visit my dad, it was very stressful (in fact I don’t do it anymore). But it was an occasion to eat real food, meat for example, since I never had any money.
At my father’s I used to sleep in the living room, on a small folding bed shorter than I was. Before falling asleep into it, all my care was devoted to resist at masturbating into it. I stayed awake until late instead, reading. I used to read a lot then, in the before-I-had-a-computer days.

Many of those nights in the short folding bed I could hear my father screaming in his sleep, which was something he probably always did since when I first knew him and we all lived together under the same roof. From those days I think somewhere in my mind rests the conviction that grown-ups scream in their dreams, so that others can pity them and admire their troubled soul.
Now every time I have a loud dream I get in the back of my head some immediate reward, because I finally got to be a troubled adult (not that I ignore how much it sucks to be one). But then I also get some guilty feeling, because during those nights in Trento I never got out of bed to wake my father out of his own bad dreams.

I left him there instead, calling for help. I just stayed still, turned toward the wall that divided the two rooms, until he had finished calling. I probably thought he couldn’t appreciate my helping him out, since he always made so much to hide all his soft spots (but then I knew them all).
Probably I also had thoughts like “now you see what it means to be scared, jerk”. What a jerk I was.

In the dream I wondered if I had to make up for this. Call him, visit him, soothe him out of his bad dreams. But isn’t it exactly this that scared you even more tonight? I argued.
Then I remembered Art Spiegelman’s miraculous words: “I’d rather feel guilty”, and slowly I came back from the sleepers.

repositories of dust and guano and crammed pots
wherein roots bend around until dirt is consumed
the faces of the buildings line them some face to face some very close
sometimes I lean out of the ledges, I bend backward from the streets
they’re hanging on the other side, and I imagine it’s you
  hanging clothes, watering plants, tilting your head
driven by my sight to half a wave

not knowing what to do with your body I used
  before you get it in.

why you? because you never cared for a balcony when you had it,
  and now you live in a city where to smoke grass is
allowed but balconies’re not, ’cause they cost too much
but it makes no difference anyway, you know
the air kept changing today, and balconies still look clogged
  of the air abandoned
by the lives that lived it.

The usual Beppe Grillo, very famous Italian comedian & blogger, in this quite O.K. although scary post wishes for the all the planet’s fossil fuel reserves to finish, so that pollution, deforestation, desertification and all that crap may come to an end.
For as much frustrated as I can be with this crazy non-stop consumerism, and for as much I can loath cars as well ’cause in the long run they make everything miserable, I must say it’d be no use to favor such an outcome. We might as well wish the end of humanity and of any animal on the earth.
In fact, following what I just learned from this beautiful book, which I just finished to read (mind you, it is not a book about environmental issues, but about how life came to be on our planet: it’s six-hundred pages long), if all the fossil fuel of the world was consumed it would be the end of any living species that needs oxygen.

Incidentally, having said that oxygen is produced by green plants and algae, it is an oversimplification to leave it at that. It is true that plants give off oxygen. But when a plant dies, its decay, in chemical reactions equivalent to burning all its carbonaceous materials, would use up an amount of oxygen equal to all the oxygen released by that plant during its lifetime. There would therefore be no net gain in atmospheric oxygen, but for one thing. Not all dead plants decay. Some of them are laid down as coal (or equivalents), where they are removed from circulation. If all the fossil fuels of the world were burned by humanity, much of the oxygen in the atmosphere would be replaced by carbon dioxide, restoring the ancient status quo. This is not likely to happen in the near future. But we should not forget that the only reason we have oxygen to breathe is that most of the carbon of the world is tied up underground.

(From Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale, p. 565)

So, waiting for our fossil reserves to finish it’s like waiting the end of humanity to see what happens next. Only you can’t breathe it to the next scene.

This is supposed to mean we should do something regardless how much fossil fuel reserves we have left, but personally I think there is more or less nothing we can do for the sake of humanity or the planet: I think that we will screw it all (for just a while of course, a glimpse of time before Life continues luxuriantly without us) no matter what we try to do to avoid it. Because O.K., species destroy their enviroments and then go extinct, that’s what they do if they have no predators. Nature is that dumb. Those who just try to get richer and richer regarldess the sake of the environment are stupid and egoist, but they have a lot of arguments on their side: the most important of all being that God gave us this planet.
I often thought that the idea of creatures from Mars coming to destroy us came to people’s minds when most of us realized we were going to be too many, and nothing was really going to change that. I think deep down we were craving for predators, and we still do because we know it would be right to have them, so we just tried to summon them from outer spaces, since on the earth they are nowhere to be found.

Anyway, just for the sake of Beppe Grillo’s argument, on my side I’d favor forbidding cars: I’d make them taboo. Only kings cardinals politicians showbiz kids and mafia bosses could go around with cars. We all could kneel or laugh at their passage, depending on how we feel, and as they would rapidly disappear pushing the crowd aside, we could regard them for what they really are, those who are not unimportant enough to walk.

Isn’t it instructive that on the blog of the guy who killed and raped a ten years old little girl, keeping her corpse in the tub to eat it later, there are hundreds of comments that go back in time calling him a “sick fuck” who will make a “good bitch in prison” retroactively? Isn’t it lovely the way we always wish to be more powerful than Time, although there is no possible way we can be?
I suppose it’s less lovely the way by which we want to prove to Big Brother we are not involved, and that of something that horrible we cannot possibly be convicted publicly. We were always against it, even years before we knew.

–update: all the comments I was referring to have been removed and this post doesn’t make much sense anymore.

We live
In singing-emptied rooms, robbed-like
(Guido Ceronetti)

Libi gets out of the bed and into the bathroom. She’s leaving for Paris in the morning. I have been staying up all night. I am not leaving. Perhaps I’ll be leaving later, tomorrow, in another direction.
I’m preparing her two sandwiches, one hard-boiled egg, three peeled carrots I bundle in a piece of paper. The sandwiches have pieces of green, of red, of white into them. The slices of bread are thin. I’m putting everything in a small bag of paper to show it to her when she comes to the kitchen. I’m preparing her coffee too.
“I smelled you was preparing me the egg.”
“Oh! Sorry I wake you up.”
“No! It was sweet of you to think.”
“Yep.”
“I like the way you wrap the sandwiches up in a piece of paper and then you fold everything up in domopak film.”
“Yep.”

I learned from Leni to wrap up sandwiches that way. Often I stop for a second to recall when I first learned something I just did which is not entirely obvious, whatever that is. Then I am usually surprised by the fact that it’s not so long ago I learned it.

Leni used to prepare these little tasty sandwiches every time we were going somewhere on a trip. The last time she did it was when we were leaving for Rotterdam. We had a rented van filled up with our stuff. I mean her stuff. The sandwiches had cucumber and meat and lettuce and cheese. Austrian bread. We ate them in one of those vast rest areas of the german autobahns. The rest area had a piece of circular road far in the back, behind a line of trees. We sat there on the grassy curb and ate the sandwiches looking at the squared shape of the SHELL gas station floating behind the layers of vapors heated by the sun.
We didn’t have much to say then. The magpies were coming down from the trees behind us appearing and disappearing in the high meadow grass before flying further away in the big lawn.
The sandwiches were good.
“Do you like it?” She asked.
“I like the way you wrap the sandwiches up in paper and domopak film”, I said.
“Thanks” Leni said, smiling. It was very typical of her to say “thanks” even if the thing she was thanking you for was casual or meant ironically. She needed every little compliment she could fish, and it made me sad, sometimes.

Libi and I smile when we’re about to kiss. Kissing is a thing I don’t concede very often. But our kisses are very pleasurable. We look tenderly in each other’s eyes and the kiss is wet and warm.
We are parting outside the door, on the small terrace. I hate it when she makes these endless goodbyes, but I try to endure them without losing my attention. I wonder if I love her, I mean if I am really in love with her. I wonder if the invite Nina texted me to go together to Trieste is still valid, but I don’t believe so.
Then I am alone in the apartment. The sun pours in, the dishes are in the sink for me to wash them.
Is my heart so empty? I ask. But it’s just a voice. I can love.

My analysis, if you really want to hear it, is that things couldn’t have worked out better for Berlusconi right now, and not only for him. This almost perfect tie, while a major disaster for Italy, is the best way for Berlusconi to walk out of office as the strong leader he never was and never will be. Only few weeks ago everybody looked at him as the sorriest loser in the world.
Sure, the crappy electoral law he did just few months before the elections ended up giving a lot of unjustified bonus to the wrong winner, so much that the left-wing seats at the Chamber of Deputies largely outnumber right-wing’s: but the difference in votes is so very small it can be fairly called a draw.
At the Senate, because the bonus to the winner is calculated for any single region and not for the whole nation (thanks to the mentioned crappy electoral law), it is a lot more difficult to give a majority of seats to a winner: in fact, at the Senate Berlsuconi and Prodi, his opponent, will have the same number of seats. As a consequence, it will be a hassle to pass any law, since everyone of them has to be approved by both Chamber and Senate. And what will happen when a given Senator will decide not to vote for a law he doesn’t like? His power will become suddenly enormous. That’s a too powerful temptation, when one single vote can change everything. Governability is screwed.
Now, because of this, and because of the conditions in which the country is in, and the hard work Italy would need to come out of the mud and make it in the Euro zone, it’d be no piece of cake to be Prime Minister. It is actually a lot better for Berlusconi to be in the background and let someone else do the hard work. Because of this, even though the numbers says Berlusconi could have won the elections, I say he’s glad he didn’t. More: he didn’t want to.
Everything is really working great just like it is: with his party “Forza Italia” stronger enough in the Parliament, nobody will dare to touch his televisions and his assets. I can picture him, loudly calling for new elections, trashing the next opening of the new Parliament bragging to be the real winner and insisting that the Chambers are not justly composed. I can picture him blocking any law concerning him or his interests.
He will have a hell of a time in the part. He may even end up as the President.

So much for Berlusconi. And who else will be happy for this result? Well, what about all those forces abroad who need Italy to remain unstable, so that the European Union remains unstable? Those same kind of forces that always wanted Italy to remain unstable in the last fifty years or so? What about Berlusconi’s best friends, mr. George W. and mister Putin, who strangely enough are not Europeans and are not concerned with the destiny of the European Union? They will be happy to know that, while their friend Berlusconi is not in charge when the worst decisions have to be taken (the reforms that the dreadful italian economic situation needs), not because of this Italy will actually have any real chance to prosper in the next future, nor to grow any real influence abroad.

Finally, who else will be smiling from this dark picture? Easy to say, radical left-wing parties will be smiling: because the weaker a moderate left-wing government will be, the stronger their place into it will be. Plus, it’s not easy for them to be friends with an actual left-wing government, ’cause they don’t look good under that light. So the weaker the government, the better.
It is a fact that under Berlusconi’s spell they prosper, and eventually get a lot of votes. Not so under a moderate left-wing coalition. After all, it’s obvious to anyone that they had, as always, a great deal of help from Berlusconi’s televisions, having their faces showed everywhere before the elections. On the other hand, if the moderate left comes out too strong, they get totally neglected by TVs.

So, to sum up, we better wait before deciding who is the actual winner here. The supposed winners, they are all but happy. And some of the supposed losers, don’t listen to what they say now. Give ’em the time to smile and they will be smiling. That’s Italy, you know. In fact, have I mentioned the citizens in this picture? No, I haven’t. Because even though citizens seems to be divided into two different italian countries, one against and one for Berlusconi, they are not a real issue.

The sky out is whiter than white, the city is noisy but the blackbird chirps, and I am very very tired. I am going to hit the pad. Italy just turned over in its steady fall, but no bad dreams. The rate of falling isn’t changed so far.
The so called analysis is finished now, I hope you liked it ’cause that was it. I know I will want too change it later, but, it will be too late. Kisses.

It was heavy raining upon Milan, bucketing down from the orange jellyfish dark sky to the gloomy streets, dressing up trees and dog turds, pharmacies and potholes, the whole city shebang. The rain made this hypnotizing rushing sound coming in from everywhere, and all the remaining music of the city’s early night was removed by it, swamped into it.
Computer display kept showing to us its bad internet news as we stood there, in silence, in front of the window. The weather was closing in against the panes, all dotted with drops dribbling down, and I was thinking about how to finish what I had started, when first I decided to change my life, more than a year ago. The one job I had to do and that i left unfinished.

Libi said, “I can’t believe it. Whoever win this, they will gonna fight about it forever”.
Well, the country was obviously bounded for chaos or eternal falling into rotten boredom, I knew that. But sure thing was weird now to read statements of these political ballots experts saying how “we are facing the worst elections in the world”. Even worse than the Florida rigged game apparently, although in a smaller and more insignificant league.
And when one part proclaimed to have won, and the other contested, it all seemed a bad deja vu.
Sure thing Italy was going to remain Berlusconi’s, just like he bought it from us. After all, it doesn’t really matter whether you actually manage a run-down store or not, as long as you can be there blackmailing who will be managing it. The best way to get out of the lead is when the things in front line get really crappy.
I said, “We will never get rid of Berlusconi”. Then I said, “we deserve it probably”.
All you have are these bitter little jokes to say in the end.

But it was not about that. What was Italy after all? It was just this old boot in the sea, admired and envied by many in the world without any real clue about it, or about the mental insanity of its hypnotized citizens.
Maybe it was all about the fact that the country was not going to do any good to me, because I never did any good to it. It never even crossed my mind you could do something good for this country.

Outside it was still raining. We worried for the wisteria young blooms, if hard rain was going to be too hard for them.
Part of the houses we could spot from across the courtyard looked all blacked out, windows invisible and lifeless behind the rain. In my paranoia I thought, see, lights off, the starting signal of a putsch.
In fact a little later in the house lights went off and on for a while, dimming the bulbs in slowed down hiccups. But then it all remained on.
Libi went to bed, and I stayed awake, as always.
I wasn’t frustrated, because I had never been very concerned in changing Italy’s destiny or any country’s. It was just what the rain was saying. How that’s the country of cheating and strafottenza and all, careless, indifferent, slow, and how rain was washing it all out to leave it like it was before, just like anything else.
All right, may be it was a little frustrating after all.

p.s. The title of this post at first was “Well, I too always cheat at videogames, so I can understand”. But then I decided it was pointless to suggest someone cheated on the elections. Hey, even if that was, that’s modern democracy. Videogames ship out with cheats bundled into them, as opposite of what I assumed few years ago, when first I played one.
So, be it.

Because of those more hours in front of the computer I am kind of mislaying my thin sense of reality. So often I feel like my brain is draining out its ability to grasp and to wonder, leaving only this naked sensitivity that makes me dumb. That’s where I think I’m feeling something that is inside me, doh, but I can’t reach it.
I know my mind is doing so by keeping itself busy moving aside rubbish, and wounds, as they were the same thing.

(if you’re new to the thing, there are more sketches around here. They all look alike though)

O.K., if you, english readers have some further curiosity about Italy, these couple of days before elections, I know my help won’t be very practical. It is too tiring for someone in the middle of it to find the words to describe why such a weak political coalition, unrealiable, a bit mafiosa and not really different from anything we already know as the coalition of Prodi, Berlusconi’s opponent, can be regarded as the finest hope against the unthinkable possibility of Berlusconi winning his second term.
By the way, this possibility is still there, not only because you never know what can cross italian minds, but also in regards of the many hints of possible electoral frauds that are coming in, particularly about the votes of italians abroad.

So, to know the shape this country is in, how much damage Berlusconi has actually done already, how little but important difference his opponents are bound to make, I’ll suggest you to give a read to “Between Guatemala and Mongolia” by the german journalist Friedrich Christian Delius. The article, translated in english by the outstanding website signandsight.com, is very readable and quite accurate. Particularly when it comes to the great misunderstanding between Italy and the world, where the world tends to be blindly in love with a country which instead badly needs strong enemies abroad: enemies firmly intolerant with its continuous taking of deranged paths, so that it in the end those enemies would be the real friends we never had.

So we are four at Gisa place again tonight. I came with Libi, and this guy Paolo has just arrived, who was Libi boyfriend a while ago, more or less at the same time I was Gisa boyfriend. Actually, this Paolo must have been the love of her life back then so it should be interesting to look at him, which I haven’t done yet, except when we shook hands before but I had the baby in my arms then, luckily, and was busy already with the meal thing that I always offer myself to do in order to avoid greetings, so that I can yell them from the kitchen where I am safe.
This isn’t supposed to feel weird or anything, because a lot of time has passed, and also because there’s the little girl among us, almost seven months years old, restlessly babbling and screeching claiming attention from everybody, so we’re not even four, we’re five. The title of this post is wrong.
These were the initials anyway.

We are four and waiting the fifth to fall asleep, the lights are too low, I am at the stoves preparing what Gisa told me to, although I am trying to be a vegetarian, still not a dogmatic one. I know Gisa is glad of this night only because she is really devastated by being a mother, and feels easily left alone, and irrational. She needs company to keep it up with reality every single day, and I know I have been neglecting her instead, I fear only because I am not so exceptional at her eyes as I used to be.
Weeks and months has passed, but things doesn’t seem to change into something less tiring for her and the baby while Loris is almost always away, with his rock star life, and she is constantly jealous, mostly without reason, but, who knows.
To the point, so I go on blending the stuff in the pan, and listening to them talking in the background, and I’m thinking that she is glad of us being here, but not so glad because this is not what she wants after all.

At the edge of the picture there’s the city rolling outside the windows, car lights reflecting into the canal and a dog barking from a balcony against the traffic. Wind bends and shakes the branches of the shrubs out there in the courtyard, very strongly. It’s late and shops lights are going off not one by one, but all together, or in groups, and when it happens the streets are left alone, barren of trees and visible life, just drawn over and over by cars. The intermitting lamps from Gisa Christmas tree appear and disappear on the window pane, glowing their strange patterns three months late.

I know she’d rather mingle into a drugged night, an endless party of sorts, with lots of cocaine or kinky stuff, the backstage situation at a one of Loris’s concerts, some of the other things I don’t do or I wouldn’t do right, so it gives me a little pain to be here just as a faint friendly substitute of something more brave and meaningful which is not here. She just got back from Berlin and she’s even more depressed than when she left.
I see this as Time which is passed and has made us different.

Not that we’re here to do orgies or anything like that, just this boring dinner we’re about to have, where nothing really is going to be told. I feel it so, as I hear Libi and Paolo talking, he talks about his job in a low, resolved slightly bored way, arm folded, making faces at the baby in the walker. At every phrase I think about the time when those two were together for life, and I can’t decide if it feels reasonably possible only because Libi is so malleable by her men’s attitudes, or if it doesn’t feel reasonable at all.
I turn and see Gisa in a daze in her chair. She’s above the conversation and her eyes looks dreamy and desperate and too tired already. No talking could be more distant from her than the one going on right now, and I may call her attention over the stoves, or try to change the subject, or ask her some stuff I might need, but I don’t. I get my eyes back to the pan. I feel like I’m not so different or so interesting tonight. I fade out in the background again.

Later we’re all a little drunk, and finally the baby is asleep, Libi fills her glass again and glances in my direction as if to ask permission to drink another glass. I don’t know why this always happens with the girls I’m with, that they end up asking me permission to drink when we’re out. She fills our glasses too, smiling around as if to excuse her. Her smile is beautiful and tender, shining in back light when she tuns back to me.
Now I can look at him across the table, but I don’t seem to be interested anymore. The conversation falls into pools of silence now and then, and when it’s late enough into one of the pools we can hear a freight train whistling across town. I think it’s the sound of Middleland sleeping. Gisa needs cigarettes, so we all go out. We separate down at the corner, I hug Gisa rubbing her skinny back, thinking how much this girl can get skinnier before she disappears. In my hands I have a transparent sealed box with the remnants of the meal she didn’t even wanted to have around in the house.

I am driving back to the house. Libi is leaning against my shoulder as I drive. The streets are empty, and everything is tainted with the orange cheap light of Middleland’s street lamps.
“You know I wouldn’t exchange you with anybody” Libi says.
“Mh.” I say.
“I want to have sex” she mumbles.
I don’t say anything, she touches me and I just touch her back. I wonder whether our relationship is going higher or lower or sideways (I am still a little drunk), and I decide i don’t want to think about it, because I learned that if you don’t think about it, and you try not to define it, however it goes it’s healthier for everyone.
Then I am struggling to find a parking spot near the place. I drive a couple of times around before settling for an half-illegal one, for that’s how much illegal this city allows us to be.
“It’s just that I really didn’t looked at the guy”, I say before we walk out of the car.
“Yeah, you probably didn’t want to.” she says. She must be really drunk to be so outspoken, yet it feels OK.

“How’s going?” I ask to Libi few minutes after the sex. She nods her head in sign of approval. I was wondering if she finally had an orgasm or not, but I prefer not to ask since she’s so nice not to fake it. The issue is one of the many reasons I envy homosexuals for.
Sometimes during sex, if I’m coming too early I think about football players playing, or about ugly TV faces, to cool me off. If I’m coming late, I think about my ex-girlfriends, usually two of them who were the most masochistic ones. And all these thoughts jumbles in my mind as I have sex, so I rarely have any hints of what is passing in the other’s mind.
“I ‘m feeling like trying the headstands again”, she says, just a moment before falling asleep, snatching me a smile. But it’s nothing about sex. It’s just this thing we tried to do one sunday afternoon, to get to stand on our heads, because I had just read about it an a Saul bellow’s book. And that’s a pretty stupid way to end this post, but it’s the way it ends.