Once again I find myself staying in a residence hotel, this time in a small village that we can call Oil Bridge, some ten kilometers south of a city on the river Po we can call Pleasance. I have no evidence that the city is living up to its name, or that the village has anything to do with Oil. Just a long bridge on the shallow river Nure. Truth is I am close to some of the most beautiful hills in Italy. First impression, the little I've seen of the people around here I don't like very much, I wonder what are those mugs, if arrogance or wariness, and the use of the italian word "salve" to greet people, like in Milan, more than in Milan widespread. "Salve" is a good indicator of contempt for the next one. It's like saying I don't want to greet you, you're not welcome, when are you leaving? It cannot be said looking at someone right in the eyes, but only eluding the contact. It is the most unpleasant and the most hypocrite casual greeting conceivable in Italy. I hate it and so should anyone who has a bit of heart. However, it seems to be used a lot around here. I noticed my "good day!" is getting more stentorian.
Of course I don't know the tenth part of it. I've been working. I am a gardener. I was given a baseball hat too small for my big head, I eat in the trattorias in my muddy overalls and I'm coming home for the weekend.

I drive under the gloom sky to Milan and to the rainstorm, some old times blues singer is moaning, I feel tired. Later the lively raindrops against the smudged windshield, while the fuzzy yellow opening to the west goes dark. I enter the city. Numerous parts of my body are sore, my face and arms are cooked and bi-cooked, I got blisters on my fingers, four days of garden building, 9+ hours a day under the sun or rain proved to be quite hard. I felt stupid when I still had to dig into wet soil, unload compost, connect irrigation pipes or some other stuff at the end of the workday, and I just couldn't do it, I had to go someplace instead against a wall or a tree and sit and breathe and let my heartbeat slow-- But it was graceful to work again, and be back to the real treasure of this work, which I venture is to change scenery so often during the week, but always being among plants and outside and into a garden. Besides, from Oil Bridge you get everywhere in half an hour. Back in Milan, I'm stuck in traffic again, I have to park the car somewhere possibly illegal and far from the condo, while the rain pours down. I left my hat in Oil Bridge, and will get wet, so I pretend I got accustomed to it already.

-- in picture, above: coming back to Milan.

When I go to Milan, to fulfill that town's dream of a cultural centre, you should come. An interesting city. It's huge - and full of very ugly, common, repulsive people.
-- Ingmar Bergman, from The Passion of Anna

that night I slept at Carlo's, after more talking and boasting and drinking and walking around Venice, meeting people in bars, following girls down the calli, ending up us alone and stoned and bitter sitting on the steps of a deconsecrated church turned into a art gallery or a gym and talking about foolish things now forever sunk into a oblivion thicker than the waters of the canals of Venice. And I had that dream sleeping on a pallet on floor, a portion of a dream I still remember, where girls leaned on a table looking at fashion pictures in a magazine, whispering things in the ancient-looking room by a high ceiling but not large (just like a room of a old palace of Venice) and outside of a window, invisible to me in the corner of the dream was the world of the future that I was anxiously about to see but couldn't and couldn't and couldn't until I woke up.
I was in Carlo's garret. Looking up at the backside of the roof, wood and terracotta, atrocious white light entering from a squared hole through a opaque glass pane. Pigeons walking and talking above and not so far, the early boat acoustic signals said it was a foggy day. My disappointed snort for the bad weather. The rattling of the garbage trolleys going up and down the bridges.
I had slept too little, and felt absurdly awake in the sleeping house, bad taste in dry mouth and dizziness-- eyes hurting.
I got out without saying goodbye walking softly amid the snores, the streets were so cold, I could hear the noise made by my steps against the hard pavement stones. The streets were dark to the openings of the skewed squares, wide in comparison and filled with more white light under the low unfriendly sky, quiet, dirty of a nightly high tide now dissolved in a grainy film of stickiness made of guano and salted sea.
I was looking for a bar, at that time I still had the veneration for the italian bars and their stinking coffees and croissants with no imagination, that what Parise so beautifully wrote about, and I think I found one just down the Ponte de Maravegie. It's the bar with the colorful glass panes, not the osteria nor the pastry shop (that lane down the bridge being the typical italian three-bars-in-a-row) and so little room inside against the counter. A radio was certainly playing, but not loudly. The croissants were warm and good, the coffee probably good. Nice the people. I didn't know any better. It felt reinvigorating and so I extended my walk to the aimless route of the fondamenta along Canale della Giudecca (aka fondamenta degli incurabili) once again fantasizing of being Corto Maltese (before my brother robbed me of that fantasy too) or Brodskij (before my russian friend explained it all to me). Enjoying the procrastination of the coming back home, where more rest and the long awaited solitude were.
The humid sadness of the city in the thin fog, its casual beauty appearing and disappearing and morphing, the large unsteady waters of the canal and their uniform color fading out in nothingness, the few, walking the fondamenta like me with their hands well protected in the big pockets of their dark dark dark cappotti, and my eyes still hurting-- the day had begun but without a move, wanting to be admired in its pointlessness, it was quite beautiful to be there and alive.
It was near the end-- one of the last months in Venice, before coming back to Milan. And I thought I had had enough of Venice back then. I didn't know anything.

-- in picture above: waters, venice, etc.

So it's nineleven again. Fifth recurrence of the stupid day terrorism made the rampant globalists ever more arrogant. The day the Global Technological Police State was given its well crafted perfect excuse to take over. Or if you prefer, the day of the greatest defeat ever inflicted to the Islamic world since the foundation of the state of Israel (it's a fact, not a opinion).
Nobody on earth is supposed to ignore this day. I wish so much I could ignore it. Truth is, I can't. Makes my blood boil instead. The lie running naked in the streets and being called truth makes my blood boil, on and again --even if I have been knowing it was a lie for the whole six years (since day one, actually).
The morons repeating it and drumming it carrying around banners made with fake videos and inconsistent evidence and disposed clues and unproved facts make my blood boil. I don't feel as much impotent as I feel discouraged in front of them.

Outside, it is really the end of summer. After a sunny day the evening streets of Milan are definitely busy--like any day of the year (schools opened this week). Maybe it's only because the days are getting so shorter and the pretty windows of the many shops glow brighter along the sidewalks -- the crowd moving in front of them casting more significant clouds of shade and light -- or maybe it's the cooler wind that now and then can be felt. If it wasn't for the propaganda, let alone nineleven from the point of view of Milan man-made end-of-the-world globalwarming wouldn't cross my mind. If anything because nothing like propaganda happens "globally" (in the same way all over the globe).

So it occurs to me this funny thing, that "everything is connected" like every cretin likes to say, only because propaganda connects everything. Otherwise the hell things are all connected, they are not. Our major weakness as individuals is exactly in failing to protect ourselves from forced connections between our lives and others'. To a certain extent, connecting dots and grasping common destinies is emancipation and is knowledge. Beyond that extent anyway it is a curse that instead of uplifting us individuals puts a burden on our back. The burden of remote things whose truthfulness can't be measured and whose reality can't be touched.

I think that the ambition to connect everything comes from a need for rationalization and control of reality that is actually impossible without descending into the pathological. It is a tool used by the gate-keepers to make everyone feel smaller than them.
Meanwhile walking down the streets without feeling that burden, of the remotest connections converging on yourself as terrible persuasion tools, is getting harder and harder by the day. Especially on stupid days like this one.

there was this beautiful sky. I was staying in bed, I had cried, not hardly or for long or anything. Just a result of scattered thoughts of people far, the inability to summon them up, the clumsiness or weight of the world that couldn't be moved or pulled, the bitter promises of the future. I couldn't see very well, because of the wet paste in the eyes. I unhooked the mosquito net, it rolled on itself with a slam! after which the radio was playing quietly. I cleaned my eyes with my fingers curled. a unsteady coolish breeze came to my face with diverted noises from the avenue behind the condos. all words were mixed up in my head, all thoughts still as if queuing up on a bench against the wall to be called forth. it was all so familiar and this familiarity what I could stand less, less than any other form of pain or boredom. the things a ghost of once intense things I hardly could connect to now. the hatred for the city was one thing with hatred for myself, the weak--

no, not exactly that. i took the pictures of the sky automatically thinking 'this will go for the blog'. I knew it hardly mattered because I still lacked the courage to take out for a walk the things I wanted to say. the sunsetting sky was seriously beautiful. if only I had the ability to see into things like I used to. i closed the left nostril with a finger pushing air out. the right one still half-closed since then, not creaking anymore. I think it will stay this way, I thought satisfied-- so since nearly about the time my last intense emotions were, some is still trapped-- and the most shitty thing is to be uncertain of the accuracy of your own memories and the details that are fading out and, you know, this unwillingness to explain.

How incredible the other day, talking to the girls at the bakery shop, as the radio reported of a philippine woman living in Italy, just outside our city, who slaughtered her entire family later trying to kill herself. The girls were joking about it like people do with events that are so remote and inconceivable that one cannot identify with it.
"She killed her husband with a knife!" said one.
"And her sons!" said the other. They were using the usual half phony sympathy tone of the milanese trades, hypocrite imitation of badly evoked old times.
It was so funny to them, because a woman had done it, and women are supposed to be defenseless or powerless compared to men. It was also funny because she was not italian, and thus such kind of disgrace had nothing to do with us, and could be treated more easily, like the thought of a inundation in India or a earthquake in Guatemala.
I couldn't joke with them as a customer is expected to do. All I could come up with was a sort of depressed smile I was sorry for.
But c'mon. It's years that a week doesn't go by in my country without news of some husband killing his wife. Some father murdering his daughter or son. Some lover, some brother, killing a sister, a ex pregnant girlfriend, etc. Every week. Certain weeks many times. But the girls were bantering as if news of this sort were unheard of around here. "It took a chinese woman to do it!" It was yet another big illusion sold cheap to us by Immigration. Helping us to picture our country as if it was a completely different, innocent little thing. Well, at least for a minute or two of fake conversation.
"Aren't italian men usually killing italian women?" I asked in the end, as the girl handed me a paper bag with in it the bread I had just payed for. "With guns, no?" I pursued. But the girls fell silent and incredulous. Could it be I was the only one who was noticing all the killing of women in the italian newspapers? I had had that same feeling before. It seemed like if these were events that no one wanted to really consider. Consumed rapidly, even if they kept turning up again and again, they didn't mean anything compared to other events, much more abstract and conceptual, distant and showy, that were discussed forever.
But I had disrupted the pleasant atmosphere. Especially when I ended: "If there's a gun in a house, you can be almost sure it will end up being used by a man to kill a woman! Isn't it funny?"
"I'll never give my husband a gun then", the girl proposed after a short while (I was already halfway the glass door), bursting in a fake laugh which strangely moved me.
I remember that all I could think of in that moment was "What I can't believe is that someone married you." I am always amazed when I am informed that people are married. I don't expect them to be. But I didn't said that. I only gave the usual curt salute of the non customary customer and left, to the apparent relief of the street where actually nobody was laughing.

You're in total dark, and summoned by the voice you move forward, in line with few others. You keep one hand against the wall and with the other you waggle or drag the white cane nervously. You aim for the voice and try to follow it. Sometimes you're cornered, or stumble, or you run into someone else's limbs and must apologize. For the rest you fumble around. The space all around you at moment seems limitless although it is probably very narrow. You may have the impression of a very high or a very low ceiling above your head, but no doubt both the feelings are inaccurate because you have no way to tell. All you can see is total darkness, and some whitish blurry spots in your eyes that for a long while don't seem to want to fade. All the steps you take are incredibly short tentative steps and yet you have the impression of having walked a large distance. You passed a garden, where the canned birds chirped and few odorous plants guided you through; had your slice of traffic experience and went across a dangling bridge, a passage on a boat, explored a room with bas-relief pictures hanging on the walls and chests with mysterious objects inside. Finally in a bar you realized it ain't so hard to mix coffee and milk in total darkness, or to rip the sugar sachet, until you lost the plastic spoon, after which you were kind of lost yourself. You also realized that it ain't so obvious to tell between one coin or the other, let alone drop them right in the hand of the girl at the counter and take your change back.
After one hour and fifteen minutes you get out of the dark to the bright hall and suddenly you wonder, what all this light is here for? What's the use? You sort of was accustomed to the dark there. You were alert and your body and your senses were working at full throttle. It was amazing and challenging. Now you can't help but feeling that there's another bunch of experiences your other senses are craving to work equally hard for. Watching a movie. Playing a card game. Playing a instrument. Playing some sport. Writing. Climbing. Swimming. Hugging someone. Telling the facial features by touch. Groping your guiding voice who as soon as we're all out to the light appears to be a strikingly beautiful visually impaired 25 year old foreign girl, who works part time at the Istituto dei ciechi (Institution for blind persons) in Milan, for the permanent exhibition Dialogo nel buio (Dialogue in the dark).
Which, in case you haven't experienced it yet, is a must see.

Every time I drag myself down to the navigli beyond the bridge of Via Cassala to see Jawa, I bring with me questions for her, and bits of a discourse I would like to make. Then regularly there's the baby, and her worries and her enthusiasm for the baby, and I give up and put away all my anxiety to speak more seriously or passionately with her. I reckon that everything is different when you face a mother.
Then coming back there's the rumble of traffic and the heavy air to breathe and everything is more confused and lonesome-- I wonder whether this is a sign that I'm finally growing up, and that I am beginning to develop some form of mature resistance to my constant craving for real connections (if so the thought disappoints me).
I walk, the dusk descend on the city and the people and me. I go over the two hours spent in her kitchen. I reenact the three windows on the roofs of Milan and the balconies and the far mall sign that seem to be resting under a coat of clouds. Occasional pigeons and the intense silky violet of cyclamen sticking out beyond the window panes. Lifegate radio playing and preaching.
I am stretched on the pavement with her, we speak of the winter that didn't come this year. Of the gorses blossoming in January. I watch her long legs in the corduroy jeans as we crawl on the pavement around the baby. We accidentally touch each other but there is no hesitation. I watch her hands and realize I never saw how long they were. She turns, is her ass always so beautiful and inviting? Quite-- I wish she didn't kiss me on the mouth when she welcomes me or when she says goodbye. She closes her eyes too.
I listen to her telling about her residual fears after the little boy's accident. I listen to her plans to stay home without a salary for six months more. She says that she would love to give a little sister to the boy, and that they're trying but so far no luck. This could be the moment to ask her-- does he knows that there's a remote possibility that the little boy is mine? Of course not, right? But I don't know about the menage you two guys have. Sometimes I wonder --
Although maybe the little boy doesn't look like me? Or maybe he does?
I look at him. I never saw such a charming smile in a one year old little thing like this. Is his mouth similar to mine? Do I smile like this?
I would like to ask her, aside of the baby, you know-- How much does he knows really?
I would like to ask-- Do you have the same memories I do of those days, kind of wrong and right at the same time? Do you know that I made a mistake, I told him I used to live in Via Savona at that time? So close to your house. A mistake. Nobody knew. I wish the baby wasn't here for a while and I could ask you to undress like you used to do, shyly looking away or down and then suddenly looking straight at me--
Listen Jawa, I'm going-- I says. They escort me to the door. There's the light kiss on the mouth and the eyes briefly closed. The charming smile of the little boy as the door closes and then a corridor-- steel pipes running along the roof of it.

Now all the trams of Milan have canned voices reciting the stops. The city glides away, all the cars are rolling. We sit and we stand in the tram and nobody speaks. The canned voice goes on calling the stops, sort of evil aristocratic tone. A girl touches my hand as we reach for the same support. No hesitation. I look at her and she looks away. The canned voice calls Alzaia Naviglio Grande and at these words I feel like a strange emotion in my stomach, for all the things not told, the things not done, the lives not lived. It is like a punch or an embrace and for a brief moment I am suddenly surprised of being here, now, and everything seems right and enviable, even the city I always hated.
I climb down the tram in a state of marvel, and there's a large sign that says "absolute zero" --and when I turn southward this incredible sunset is tearing the sky apart. The air is warm and dense. The winter didn't really come this year.