You think you can leave the matter to your lips
and they don't work right

-- Emanuel Carnevali

This morning it seemed so important to write down the dream, but at night its importance dissolved and plays now remote like some music fading out (in my head is Leo Reisman). So many hours later it is almost as not interesting as someone else's dream. So it happens with dreams, rapidly marvel is substituted by vague unfamiliarity and the effort to rebuild hazy details ruins it all.
Once again I toy with the idea of writing more about my so called roots or about some old classmate or relative I don't see anymore -- because I can't stare directly at my life right now, and honest I tried to put down few posts about it but my interest on the matter so soon dries out, and what I thought was fun to write about suddenly does not even faze me anymore. With memories of the past sometimes it is like with the dream I made this morning as seen from tonight, all smudged out like a faint stain.
I visualize a two lines image of my father, where if my father gets in touch too much with the world, you know, socializing or looking out for the others, they shot him with a tranquillizer an take him to the zoo. Like one of those bears they find roaming around in Bavaria.
I think I took too much from him but my heart is much bigger, and luckily less neat.
I don't really care when Nina tells me that she still loves that man (no, not my father, I changed subject don't you see). Yet driving in the night to vague destinations, possibly Vigevano, I feel disturbed and intrigued by hearing once again the story. Unchanged after so many years. Disturbed, I don't know why. Maybe because someone else's unfulfilled loves remind me my own, and everybodies'.
ANd I care when Libi tells me she loves me so, but we can't help each other just as well. I will think these things better later in the night, not usefully.
Not during the days, which are beautiful, warm and dry, good in the shades. The Nights, windows open on the courtyards, voices from the televisions and the dinners and the dinners in front of the televisions. The stunning full moon not right above my head. I called about the job at the University in Sardegna but it was too late already two weeks ago. Later talking on the phone with Bruma I convened, I had hoped to be helped to find a direction but it's on by myself now. I also asked in vain, I mean with the wrong code words, what was the grown-up choice to make, but nobody seems to get that I seriously don't know.
I dreamed it was me, a young Allen Ginsberg and Giampiero Epidermico. Giampiero Epidermico is not his real name. He was a junior high classmate of mine who since then has become a Very Young Internationally Renowned Contemporary Art Critic. A cousin of mine, the one who can see in the dark, is a Contemporary Art Critic too, senior editor of a Important Magazine abroad, and at one moment of their lives, years ago, the two of them were running errands together in a famous Art Magazine in Italy. And they hated each other very much. Which surprised me when I found out. But then I saw Epidermico and I realized. He was constantly in a good mood and that was about it.
I was living in Venice back then and they came for the Biennale on different trains and visited differed pavilions but for me and my Russian friend the Biennale was good only for a good laugh and a good depression, the present only existed as a distortion of the much greater and very humid past we were living into.
I was stupidly radical about it back then. I'm not saying I was understanding. Once I said to my cousin that I thought Contemporary Art should not be called Art, you know, not to confuse it with the real thing which although it is dying, destroyed by restorations and abysmal ignorance, it is still somewhat alive, and we can at least pretend we know why it was supposed to be so great. Not that in fifteen exams of Arts I took at the university I ever met anyone capable of telling me why and how a Bellini is so great compared to a minor. No, it was all crappy theory there, all methodology (but then I learned, outside of school, and now I could tell the difference why and where.) But my cousin looked at me as if I was completely out of the world. He was probably right to look at me like that. It's not Art I said is satire! we should call it Visual Satire or something I said. He kept looking at me like that. What he said? He said Art is what it is happening now.
In my dream Allen Ginsberg and Giampiero Epidermico they went on putting green toothpaste in their pants to melt their dicks onto their balls sort of JT style and I was by myself in the dream until Allen Ginsberg came to me and told me I was cool because or even if I wasn't putting the toothpaste on my balls. The post ends here.

So I fantasize that I receive the emails I am waiting for, open them, give a look at them, very fast, jumping from one line to the other (certain words appearing as in bold, or as slightly larger than the other words). Then I put the emails away -- without actually reading them from start to end, instead going to bed, finally sleeping knowing that waking up the next day won't be a disappointment or a torment. I think we have these dreams (with the classic open eyes) because we dream to do good to ourselves-- And I remember all the times I did that, even as a kid: with letters my mother wrote, or my father, my brother. Letters girlfriends wrote, that went in the drawer without being read until later. But inexactly now it feels like I never waited for those.

-- In picture, above: magic episodes of traveling, from the museum of anthropology, Ciudad de Mexico.

I dreamed I was a member of Rasputin's family.
I woke up in the dream a member of Rasputin family and thought, my last name is now almost the same as the president's.
I dreamed I was a member of Rasputin's family. I belonged to his house. I knew all the faces there, of the servants and the followers and the other family members. I knew the neighbors and the purveyors and the doctors.
I dreamed I was walking through Rasputin's house like I was in my house, but it wasn't my house, it was nobody's house.
It was a clear day of spring, the snow outside was melting under the white sky and the polished wooden floors where shiny and fragrant of wax. All the carpets where rolled aside against the wainscoting. I entered this big room where Grigori Rasputin sat alone, surrounded by few pieces of dark furniture, a table, a chair, a stove, the room was large and had barren walls. A teapot was enveloped in a red and white rag and steaming on the stove. He was reading. There was sweet smell of tobacco and a scent of urine and rotten wood.
I said, may I have some of your tea, father?
Grigori looked at me and said, you're not a member of this family. Get out of this house. He made this short speech keeping one of his fingers straight between the pages of the book to keep the place. He barely glanced at me.
His eyes where proverbial clear, almost gray as the sky outside. I said, fine, I was only dreaming it.
I walked the long corridor to the front door --nobody seemed to be in the house. I got out under the porch and to the garden where my father was standing, rake in his hands. He looked at me, sad and tired, and said, so you chose Rasputin against me and turned his back at me and went past the fence and away.
There was also a girl in the garden, hanging long robes and pants to many long lines of wires.
I ran to her and touched her shoulder. She turned to me and said no, you can't make love to me unless you are a member of this family. Then she picked up the basket of clothes and disappeared behind the white curtain of Grigori Rasputin's hanged long robes and pants --and I woke up. That girl looked just like my sister, by the way.

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

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

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

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.

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.

In the dream I am just arrived at home, outside the shutters is the silver blue light of the moon and dim street noises, into the room, lights on, is my brother in the bunk bed, whom I don't want to meet. He sleeps or maybe lays awake, dreaming or thinking at me getting back. Also the bed below is occupied, by somebody else beneath covers, could be my friend T. with whom I had a fight few years ago and now is friend with my brother. He snores slightly.
I am sicked by these presences, and want to run away, but I don't want them to know I was here, so I have to remove any trace of my presence from the room. I grab my jeans jacket which is rolled into a ball as a mop, the bag, my notebooks. I swim across the room, I turn off the lights.
But I can't turn off the last light, which makes everything visible including me trying to turn it off. I am scared, I am agitated. There's this big switch in red and black with oddly shaped abstract white signs over it which does nothing when operated, and finally sinks useless into its slot. Now I am desperate and about to wake up.
My brother then moves in his bed, draws out his head. Glances at me hopelessly, his notorious phlegm used as a reproach. I try to stammer out an excuse.

I wake up and obviously think at my brother, who just got back after three years in South America, and called me, day before, on the phone twice and I didn't anwsered, his mother sent me a message ("F. is here, call me back"), but I switched the phone off. The phone is still off next to me on the mattress.
I roll on the bed and think of meeting him, weighting the dead cell phone in my hands. Will he try to hug me, will we smile? Will we be all viril stiff positions and cold irony? Will we still battle for my father's love? Will I be a coward because I won't switch on my cell phone?
Before me a bad day is waiting. What a strange switch that was, I think of the dream. Why I had to turn off the lights so much? And why I couldn't, and why in every dream I do I feel the eye of my father supervising the scene?
Then it hits me, my brother not only has the politcal commitment on his side, he is also electrician. He has his own important proletarian job.

I get out of bed nervously. I would like to argue with the dream because the symbolism was so lousy, and I made such a bad impression in it.
Too bad you can't argue with your own dreams.ù