It's raining. At moments very hard and thundering. I look out on the terrace, all the creatures look healthy but they could do without the rain. Fallen flower petals draw light shapes on the terracotta tiles. Spraying sulfur yesterday was really useless I reckon. My new employer does not want me to relocate and start with the new job because it's raining. We call each other everyday and we discuss the weather like old lovers. "There is nothing to do", he says. It's true. No grass to mow, no treatments to do, no planting to do, no nothing. Why should he start to pay me, right? "The Azores anticyclonic thing is not showing up" he reports. I venture, "Because of the gulf stream slowing down?" I read that Europe is facing a little new ice age and all that. Temperatures having not been above average since 1998.
"May, it rains for twenty days in a row. June, same thing", he regrets.
Hail the next sucker who believes in man-made global warming. I am here with nothing obvious to do, luggage half-packed, half unpacked (the mess' on the floor, always in between), relation half-broken. The usual. I can't put this on the plate with the man, right?
I rewrote the about page 'cause I felt I am becoming something new, and yet, frustration, I am not. (Although on a funnier note, Libya called today asking for my bank account details. For the third time they did that, oh morons, but at least they are going to pay, who would have thought. With the people's money, of course: it's horrible to work for the government, any government, if you ask me. End of the post.)

-- In picture, above: petunia never looks wet.

So after the looong time spent without a job, I am again someone who has one. Someone who gets out in the morning, or one day a week in the afternoon, and heads to this antique books store to file move and sell piles of yellowish scorched books for four hours as a part time job. Someone who will probably count the months left to the day he will be free again to go away, around and ramble and bum.

Someone who must learn the glossary of old books sellers, the elaborate ways they have to describe the conditions of books, the superficial ways they have to judge when a book is worth something or not (not by what's written on it). Someone who'll gradually reckon the small tribe of obsessed collectors from whom the store earns its errands, as they crave for certain books and disdain others, with the only criteria of whether an old book is a first edition or not.

So, what. I'll always be someone who will take the longest route from work on foot, even if that means immerse himself in the thick scared noises of the hellish city living all around, stinky, dusty, deadly. To see a car burning as all the trams wait in line, and people run by, and many of them are scared and many smiles, because, who doesn't hate cars deep inside, and because it is an event, finally. To see the flames get very brighter as the front body of the car melt down over the macadam angular pieces of broken stone.

I had the most negative feelings toward this step back into their real world. Their expectations of me being presentable and regular and fit to be seen around or mentioned about as a piece of those macadam stones that are supposed to fit into place.
Oh, don't talk about me, you creep me out, I should have said, careless or nonchalant. I was just supposed to be consuming my left money and then become a real bum as I promised myself years ago.
But then I thought it would be too melodramatic, you know. Like a big complaint against the world, and for much I like to complain, that is something which can really hollow you in the end.
I'll let them think what they want of me. I finished trying to be like they want me to be anyway, even though my father would not be happy to hear this I guess.

Still I have the most negative feelings. I sleep even less, snap awake at four in the morning in the desperate effort to have more time to waste as I always loved to do, just sitting there, reading, thinking, drawing... I took a proposition a month ago, to only think about writing and do creative stuff this year and I already blew it, how good am I?

As Monica Geller said back then, welcome to the real world, it sucks, you're gonna love it. But seriously, I'm not gonna. And with this, I ended with myself for today. How about you? Damn comments are open you know.