-- Boy I so wish they let us work tomorrow.
-- Yeah, me too. I don’t think they will though.
-- Why not? I mean. C’mon.
-- They finally realized they needed our proposal yesterday. Now they have it. Who knows how long it can take before they fuck know what to do with it.
-- Man. Don’t they know we’ve been here doing nothing for almost fifteen days?
-- Maybe they think they’re doing us a favour. Keeping us here for free doing nothing.
-- Doing nothing is fun when you’re at home with your girl. Not fucking here. Aren’t they worried for the money?
-- I know.

(They chew on. Rice and lamb. Kish of nondescript vegetables. All is silent except the elevator music. Jamel has stopped horsing around. Disappeared from behind the buffet.)

-- Thing is it’s the government money, you know? Fuck, it’s not their money. It’s the little girl’s money, her grandpa’s money, the tall waiter’s money, that other ugly guy’s money, that fat woman’s money. It’s people’s. It’s not theirs. Let them flow, they don’t care.
-- I think I’m having a beer.
-- Ha-ha.
-- Boy, is that woman fat.
-- Like a ball. Cause she can’t have sex with me, that’s why.

(Noise of forks and knives. The plates are almost empty. They try not looking at them.)

-- I wish we were starting to work tomorrow.
-- Yeah. Me too.
-- We could have been in the desert.
-- Yeah! Or back home.
-- Yeah! Uh, it’s the other tape now.

(They bob their head. Laugh. Suddenly they stand up. The guy at the counter tries the “Inter!” thumb up but goes unnoticed. They leave the restaurant floor without a word).

Every so often in the scorching night fireworks go off. It’s the third night this is happening. Faraway parties in the outskirts of the vast capital, where the big farms and the gardens of the elite are. Birthdays of daughters born in May. Celebrations of business deals.
We’ve been in one of those gardens; we’ve seen lions and tigers in cages below the violet shadows of majestic jacarandas efflorescence; next to one hectare of peach trees growing in the sand there was a old villa tinted magenta. But maybe that’s another story.

There’s not really much to see on the little white TV in my hotel room, I mostly have animal planet on, tonight I’m watching the wounded dogs, rescued dogs, uncared for dogs with their irresistible caring mugs, generous, good-willing, needy. I do it until I can’t stand it anymore, tired of the burning eyes. There’s a Tom Cruise movie on the only other channel I can understand and it’s OK. I actually like him on film. The fireworks go on but I can’t see them from the window. Nights got really hot these last days, they say it’s nothing compared to what the next months will be, when the Sahara will actually turn its blow this way.

The occasional cockroach runs out from behind the mirror. The carpet is annoyingly warm beneath my feet as I rush for the kill and fail.

Days pass in the hotel as the nothing happens. Stuck in the Arabian labyrinth, or should we call it To Nowhere road, we are forgotten again, still without a contract, still not working. Fed and forgotten. I value the pointless energy of my resistance to it as I try to exercise in my room in the morning. Day after day we have identical lunches and dinners in the hotel restaurant, always rice and meat with something. Waiting for calls. All the personnel knows us by now, names and room numbers. We have manly exchanges about italian football teams. See if I care. With the young workers from Tunisia or Morocco it’s a little better, you can talk about women and booze. Personal biographies are left out pretty soon. Who should want to talk about its immigration disgrace in this pond called Mediterranean? Everyone comes from somewhere else and that’s all there is to it.
Just as well, I got tired to repeat that I am a gardener while I am not being one.

Sometimes we come down dressed with the tunics we bought at the suq just for kicks. We laugh at the elevator music that goes on and on and on while we eat, but does not actually plays inside the elevators where it belongs. My fellow gardener fights with the computer trying to get messenger to work. I have lengthy telephone conversations with Libi about how long I am supposed to stay put before fucking off and coming back home, but I don’t really want to come back. I want this to work.
Libi does not condone anymore.

Sometimes I wake up exasperated, sweaty, victim of the erotic dreams of the morning and feeling unjustified hatred for the place and the people. For our differences. For their disregard of women. For the different prices for foreigners. For spending their time always among men, for their ludicrous non alcoholic Becks, or for the hard to get prostitute option they leave the weak and the lonely with.
Then I am out in the traffic and the market and the language and I know nothing of this landscape. I feel envy and tenderness for the innocence and shyness of young people here. Curiosity. A glimpse of the world we have consumed, maybe. Where is love hiding for them? Hisham says it takes too much time, I’d say to scoop it out the pan of tradition. Nobody has that kind of time.

Some other times I wake up and it’s the good old hatred for myself, my late incompleteness, my foggy mind, my wasted years, my green eyes looking at me from the mirror trying to understand fuck knows what. I will never know where I am going. Never.

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

-- Max Frisch

The Hotel LaCroix in Palenque, Chiapas, is a run-down one storey building whose once beautiful garden is now scattered with trash, and whose once welcoming cozy lobby is now covered by layers of dust, debris fallen from the failing roof. Not that I ever saw it before this day, but just looking through the gates and the garden fence is enough to understand that part of the story. The outside and inside walls of the structure are still marked by martian-red painted-over quotations from books, and in the inside, mysterious colorful paintings of figures from the mayan tradition. The plants in the garden grown wildly, the grass green only in patches. All the rest is lost.

I go around the barrio looking for people who can help me to understand. It is difficult to get enough attention from them today, Sunday, during the futbal match, and many just mumble words keeping their eyes fixed on the TV screens.

As I learn it, the dueño of the hotel LaCroix (el señor LaCroix, possibly) died few years ago (some say four, some say ten) and right after his departure his sons fought over the property, as so often happens. The property is now split between them, and thus unusable, unsellable, abandoned.

The town of Palenque, once a village in the middle of the rain forest, is a horrible place, no doubts about it: grown rapidly in the last forty years out of a handful of cabañas and turned into a collection of modern or semi-modern, cheaply built hotels, restaurants and shops for gringos and for those who live out of tourism, makes the same impression of certain italian cities, especially in the south, whose growth consists of self-built unfinished cement houses that cannot last more than two generations without turning into dust. They have no spirit, no solidity, no character... People inhabit them, occupy them, and crowd them with big cars and loud music and colorful commercial banners without understanding that it is the city itself, its careless presence, the cause of their unhappiness.

The so called colonial cities of Chiapas I visited after Guatemala, before arriving here, in this ugly hot, damp, dusty place, were of rare beauty: San Cristobal de Las Casas, of course, despite all the silly t-shirts and puppets of the subcomandante, where the "alternatives" go to the pub "revolucion" apparently convinced that being in Chiapas itself is some dangerous revolutionary act; even more beautiful, Comitan (where, all right, they stole my cell phone on the road to the Lagos of Montebello): an almost gringos-free town of rich and poor, of sexy women and steep narrow roads going up and downhill, ran by the inevitable wolksvagen beetles.
These cities, rich islands in the middle of the poverty and inequality of the rich state of Chiapas, are proof that if anything, the spanish colonialists, incapable of recognizing the beauty of the pre-hispanic architectures and culture they only wanted to destroy, obviously had an idea of beauty themselves: an idea which was powerful and which was meant to resist across the centuries and resist almost forever-- although nothing does, just like it didn't the idea of beauty and religion they were seeking to destroy.

In Palenque there is nothing of the beauty and character and promise left over by the loathed colonial times: it is instead a perfect example of the confusion and wasteland of modern times, times were humans are no more capable of designing, inventing, or imitating a beautiful town: they cannot vindicate their past in any way, but still they call themselves in way of development, mainly because they can impose their loud cheap pop music to anyone's ears, thanks to their new stereos (and mind you, half of it is cheap pop italian music sung in spanish by hypocrite italian pop stars).

At the core of the town of Palenque, the only decent thing would have been the Hotel La Croix, and probably only for me, here, today: only because I am the only one to know that the Hotel La Croix was so beautifully described by Max Frisch in his masterpiece Homo Faber, and because it was a unpredictable, unique place.

But the hotel is closed. For one night I sleep into another one, a horrible box of cement down the road. In the following morning I go to the ruins, sit on the top of one of the overwhelming temple-pyramids and sleep surrounded by the monkey-bird-chicharras sounds of the awaken forest all around, and later, by the voices of the vendors and the tourists and the guides explaining it all. I long to be back to San Cristobal in the evening, the small old colorful houses and the relative calm of its zocalo. And from there, possibly to get to the beaches somewhere on the pacific coast, for a couple of my last weeks here on this so big continent called America.

What once had become a challenge to extremes had become a laughable weakling dripping in saccharine date rape and schlocky bruises to the torso and forearm like teenage suicide reminders.
Stripping down to the most unbearable truth-the awkward silence, the too loud laughter, off kilter smile or gruesome expression that passes by in the blink of an eye, real submission, dressing to be seen, not dressing to pretend to want to be seen.

-- Young and Stupid finally posted. You can read more here

Yes, there've been many, many times that people who have been molested or who suffered a lot of emotional, physical, or psychological abuse when they were young have either written to me or talked to me about my work and said they felt connected to what I've written in relationship to those kinds of experiences. Honestly, those have been the most important and meaningful responses I've ever gotten to my writing both because I feel like those people have a deep understanding of what my work is trying to do, and because, especially at a certain point years ago when I was constantly being accused of glamourizing and romanticizing that kind of violence for shock value, their seeming understanding and appreciation of what I'm trying to do really helped me believe and stay on course, by which I mean continuing to write about those kinds of acts with what I hope is their full intensity and complexity, attraction and horror and damage intact.

-- Dennis Cooper wrote today, in the p.s. section of the day

And Porcelain Skull posted, too. New great pictures.
I am staying put tonight because I barely can walk with my knee, whatever is happening to it. I put more dollars in the dollar-sucking machine attached to the PC and read and write. Blogs are always there to help.

I wake up before 7 A.M. because of the party of young dutch students that took over the hostel yesterday. Overgrown by cattle hormones, absurdly tall and loud even when they barely move around on the old wooden floor, dutch guys and girls seem to be in every room of the hostel and in every bathroom and under every shower and into every room at this floor and at every floor of this part of the hostel. The hostel extends itself over several street numbers so I don't know if they took over there too. Anyway the turn-over for the bathrooms and showers has started slowly, and noisily, and as I lay in bed in my room I try to identify the moment when the bathroom on my floor will finally be accessible. I curse the dutch people of the world and try to sleep or at least masturbate but without success, 'cause they have now decided to hang just outside my door waiting for their turn, horsing around, calling down from the top of the stairwell, talking and laughing.

It's not before 9 that I can eventually use the bathroom and take a shower. By then the dutch world is gathering its people across the street, and is being noisy down there in the sun. From the window of my room they now look less noisy and less tall and are instead quite good looking, with their blond and red heads glowing under the bright sun light scouring 20th street out of the frozen snow.

I love this Hostel. I have my own double bed room, all run-down and sloppy, luckily no television. There are common bathrooms all right, but it's not a problem for me. Well, as long as the dutch leave something for me.
There is no curfew, it is all very clean, and it's in Chelsea, Manhattan. It is ridiculously pricey, but only compared to similar places outside New York or in Europe. It is actually cheap for the standards here.

From the Hostel I walk down towards the village, have breakfast somewhere (I wish there were alternatives to the fucking starbucks of my boots) and then I probably head towards a cyber cafe' in Bleecker street that seem to be run by a very nice middle-aged chinese lady who doesn't speak english except for two essential words, and who sweeps and mops the floor under your feet while you're there writing.

Afterwards it's the city, it's my being useless into its belly, it's bars I never dared to enter (thanks, Dita) and my feelings come and go, and at moments all the beauty of it, all its lively magic, all the moving accumulation of sorrows in the shaded maze of the subways hits me with a smell and a push, like the banal solitudes, the young couples kissing on the trains at night, the displays of fish and algae in Chinatown, the fabric stores I enter imagining what Libi would think or say of the colors and the materials, where the old jewish store manager tells me, "if you think you can pick the fabrics for your friend you must think you're very good."
And he's right, I mean. I could never pick the right fabrics.

in picture, above: you know what. It has nothing to do with the hostel though.

¹ you can't be away from home without having your falling country still falling in the background. Either this tragic truth comes with you wherever you go or its consequences expect you when you come back.

² whoever you talk to will try to discourage you. Whether they are slow-food-organic farmers, hotel-agriturismo-pensione managers, restaurant-bar tenders or plants nursery technicians they'll tell you how escaping to the countryside won't save you from getting strangled by bureaucracy and the stupidity of the apparatus. All the contrary. And everybody will sing the same song, which goes:
we fight everyday against one hundred seventy thousand laws and rules
we succumb to china because our sclerotic state is a sinking ship of fools

me: "It's amazing how, with the corrupted apparatus of the communist system on its shoulders, the Chinese manages to engage in new industrial or commercial activities better than we do. I guess their average bureaucrat is easier to bribe"
the hotel manager: "On the contrary, I bet they are less corrupted. I believe it's all in the seven thousand people a year they send to death. We should learn from them."
me: "..."
the hotel manager: "don't get me wrong, I believe in democracy. But we just shouldn't misuse it."
me: "right. We really must be going now. Nice hotel and everything."

³ sex in foreign beds can be better, if it keeps the imagination going. Especially when you are charged with the unsound Italian prices (cf. "unsound methods", Heart of darkness). This fuels the customer/whore fantasy when you're still climbing the stairs to your room.

The hotel was in an old stony street in the center of Ferrara. It was single starred and that was what I was looking for. Moving from hotel to motel to B&B to hotel during solitary trips in the last years, I ended up elaborating my personal theory, and that is that the higher the ranking of the hotel and the prices of the rooms, the worse is what you get in the end. Weird theory, of which I am not that sure of, and still, it can be verified. Probably this comes to me because I don't care for: TV, personal bathroom, breakfast, room service. And because I never stayed in the same hotel more than two or three nights.

After driving for hours in the Padana praire, strolled the streets of Ferrara for a couple of hours, visited the beloved interiors of the Schifanoia palace, I was very much tired and it was about to rain again and I had slept just a couple of those hours in the car.
The door of the Centro Storico Hotel was closed but lights were on inside. Before ringing the bell I heard from the ground floor window snippets of a conversation between a mother and a kid daughter. They were both laughing at a kid's classmate expenses in a sympathetic way, but it felt completely unrelated with the Hotel business. And what if I was the classmate happening to have a walk outside here I thought. I have of these thoughts.

As I rang, the voice of the mother said, who's ringing now? quite annoyed and so, I tried to look less tired and more smiling. My stomach was aching 'cause I get very emotional when I have to get in touch with my fellow humans in these situations. I am not at ease in the adult world, even though I am a sort of adult person, so my stomach started to cringe and squeeze the void into there, slightly emotional only for this simple task of having to obtain, or risking to have a hard time obtaining, what I needed from some unknown person, and - you know - I can hate how they act behind a reception desk.
She was a nice little young blond mother, looking at me surprised, and after the deal was done and the keys in my hand, she was still looking at me surprised, and smiling me only in bits. Dry brusque blonde.
- Can I pay in advance? So that I.. - You have to. - Oh. Fine, then.

The room was a piece of small rectangular cell worth twenty of my bucks, single bedded, window facing the roofs over the town, mixture of new fake furniture and old residual objects, a table to write, a little lamp, old ceramic sink. I slept in it all afternoon long, voices faded in and out my coscience and finally woke me up around dinner time, too loud voices of Hotel residents, and listening to their phony friendly conversation I realized there where only long-term guests in the hotel. Possibly people from Ferrara and vicinity left without a house. Tourism was probably not going that well then.

What if I was living here too, I thought. They would probably make me a better deal. It could be affordable. I would probably ran into fights with everybody about the noise or the music. I can't stand loud music. I would have affairs with guest ladies acting as Blanche, and quarrels about soccer with the old men. I would be despised behind my back and considered a bum. Could be fun. At the end the dry blonde would fall in love with me and cry as Circe at my departure outside the enchanted ring, towards home.