Invers come ona pidria
-- Milanese saying

(...) Well, damage oneself, all right. But deliberately that's the knack, thus in a perverted way, so that half of ourself remains asleep during the whole process and can later complain about it. You can do it for too much self-involvement, or too much confidence, or hatred for yourself. Self-damaging behavior is for example when we are loved, and we do everything we can to convince the lover that we do not deserve to be loved. Or it is when we deliberately damage our public face, that still gets credit, because we intimately doubts its integrity or merit, or because we hate that public face for being more popular than the unconfessed face we have. And it is a lot more than that.

Nina to Corpodibacco 05:25 pm
Come with me to Ferrara at the end of August. There's a terrific conference about Baroque Music and Science. I have to go anyway because I present a poster. I understand why you are not answering me. I understand everything. But I am sorry not to hear from you.

Corpodibacco to Nina 5:09 am
Nina, I don't give a shit about conferences and posters, go figure.
Anyway, it is not that I'm not calling for resentment or incomprehension. It's just that I'm left without bridges to connect myself to the others. I'm not getting anywhere... let's leave it at that. Libi soon will go to Paris with a girlfriend, but I don't know what I am going to do.

Nina to Corpodibacco 9:32 am
I haven't asked you to come to Ferrara to look at my poster. I don't give a shit about it either, don't you worry. I was asking you to come to be with me, but considering that you keep looking for the abysses and basically you adore this inertia of yours, stay in the deep shit where you are.

The sense of comparing someone to a upside down funnel is that a funnel cannot stand in any other way but upside down. Someone who is like that is someone integrally wrong, wrong by nature, and not seriously meant for this world, like a funnel is not meant to be piled up with the rest of the dishes and pans. Sometimes this happens because of fear, haste, or because of confusion, or because of the transiting planets. Some other time one is just born like that, invers como una pidira, upside down like a funnel. If you put two or three funnels together the results can be funny but certainly unusable. Or painfully ludicrous.

There are many who suffer for the fate of the animals, but most of the people either do not care, or they think it's something not important compared to the fate of humans (of course, there's also the small minority who hates animals or think they are there only to be hunted and annihilated, but they're just too incomprehensible for me so I'll leave them out of the picture).
Now, among those who do not care that much about animals are those who think that the fate of humans in term of justice, freedom, fights against all sorts of exploitations and so on is the most important thing in the world, in front of which the point of view of animals disappears. They're particularly disappointing to me, because while they pretend to be very caring about the destiny of those who suffers, they just fail completely to see the suffering inflicted to all the animals. What are they sensitive for?

They just don't get the point, if you listen to me. Humans are everywhere, the world is filled with them. It is obviously a successful species. It doesn't need that much help to get to be even more successful. But it has left only the crumbs for the animals. Those animals that are not bred in captivity by humans to be eaten or used for food in different ways, are forced into degrading and shrinking environments without much hope to make it after this century as a species.
I can't help it. When first I read the story of the bear from Trentino few days ago I just hated this world because it is so less and less meant for animals, and I am too sorry for them. I know life is generally meaningless as Nature conceived it, and cruel to everything that is alive, but I feel sorry for the animals because they keep trying to be successful but it's sort of too late for them.

The bear I am talking about is a two years old male bear of a monitored kind, Slovenian origin, who trespassed the Italian border from the Adamello National Park, in the region of Trentino in Italy, to Baviera in Germany, few days ago. Out of his relatively human-less environment, probably looking for a female bear on heat, the bear found himself in a much more developed area, with lots of farms and villages. So he killed chickens, pigs and other animals to support himself. In the region of Baviera it is not allowed to hunt bears, particularly of this protected species. Nonetheless, the authorities decided to allow the hunting of the bear, and the regional minister for the environment, Werner Schnappauf (Csu), said the bear was getting 'too dangerous' and had to be killed.

Today it's on the news, the bear has probably been killed by some poacher encouraged by the authorities, who's probably stuffing his fucking trophy right now.

It's a fact that the bear killed eleven sheep, and plundered many hives. In spite of that, a bear it's not really dangerous in this situation if for one thing: it is economically dangerous. It is not a Grizzly bear we are talking about, but a young brown bear scared by humans who doesn't know fowls are there for humans only. Farmers are pissed off because they lose their living properties, and politicians are scared to lose farmers' support. But let's consider the recent unfortunate extermination of thousands of chickens and other birds because of the avian influenza scare: the region of Baviera compensates financially the losses caused by the bear just like it does with those caused by the avian influenza, so where is the fucking problem? They should have taken their time and captured the bear with soporific bullets or something like that, sending it back to Trentino. Although I admit the whole scheme must be too complicated and expansive for the lazy mind of a politician, when it's so easy to simply suggest to all animal killers at large to just feel free to go on and take the problem away, having some fun.

Poor bastard bear who didn't know shit, of our borders and our crazy attitudes, and our staggering fast way to communicate each other something silly he did, walking into Baviera.

*** update: apparently, the bear has not really been killed. It has been spotted alive again. This post does not make much sense then.

It's four thirty in the morning, I definitively am coming out of my drowsiness, hearing the blackbirds singing out in the dark, strangely realizing only now the meaning of the locution "in the dead of night" in that Beatles song.
I've been stepping in and out of my dreams for a while tonight.
S. is softly snoring at my right. I know that just as I will make a move to get out of bed she will come half out of her sleep, and her hands will reach for me. So I remain still.
Her mother's cat is curled up between our legs. The blackbirds are singing about in the area they consider theirs. They have quadrichromatic vision, seeing everything they need to see among the roofs, and courtyards, and the patches of green where they will be looking for food. They know nothing of my stomach though, all knotted up. I don't remember what culture or religion considered the stomach as the seat of all emotions, but I think they were right. All my emotions are there, they actually never move out from my stomach where evidently they feel quite secure.
All these thoughts I have been having tonight, how inconsistent my life turned out to be, how vain my wishes, my brother whom I secretly envy, my father whom I feel guilty with and yet whom I can't stand, his wife, whom I can't love, all the friends who vanished, from whom I vanished, and my place among their thoughts... I wonder is it a big, considerable sunny spot? Or just the occasional appearing of a name and a memory? All these faces and voices and foreigner thoughts fill my mind, but the stomach is the one who feels it. All warmed up and stiff and closed up and all.
I get out of bed, and Libi reaches for me with a soft moan. I touch her for a second. It's everything O.K. Later I can hear her sleeping, as I silently move around to fix me a tea. The blackbirds go on. There's at least two of them around in the courtyard. Their singing is a marvel, the optimism of certain parts of it, when their song goes up ad halts there, with few notes, no moral ending of sorts.

"Vegetation, it seems, releases methane - not just when it rots, but under normal conditions. And it's no small amount either - between 10 and 30 per cent of all the methane pumped into the atmosphere... methane... is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Time to rethink the Kyoto rules, then." (New Scientist)

"It is tempting to conclude from this new study that in some way we have been conned into thinking that trees were great for the planet when it turns out they might be helping to cause global warming. In fact, of course, trees are neither good nor bad. They are just there, and if they are producing methane now they always have been in natural conditions. " (BBC)

"...in a warming world, forests should be reduced, rather than extended." (Corriere.it *winner)

Nothing yesterday has been more exciting than this:

If you think it's easy fleshing, with this 3 meters long attached rambling passionflower you already saved by certain death a couple of times, you are deadly wrong.

When the re-potting operation ended, I was shaking, breathing heavily, not for the cold. Quite surprised, that I made it, and that I was shaking.
Hope she makes a fucking good winter now.

--post-winter update: the fucker died miserably.