You put on a bishop's robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.
-- Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

So I live in a castle... It is a very old castle, with walls one and a half meter wide. Very cool in summer. I'm staying in a c-shaped apartment with fireplace, chandeliers and a series of rooms that indiscreetly lead from one to the other. There are two bathrooms and two bedrooms, countless pieces of very old furniture I'll never use. Portraits of someone's ancestors. Candelabrums. Remains of a mummified country mouse in the courtyard.
Half-hill and facing the river, the valley and the SP something that is so little used, the castle would be in the sweetest position, at least during the summer (it's on the shadow side of the valley). Too bad it is also facing a huge warehouse right below, where they seem to be building or storing aluminum frames. Because I am at ground level and because of the young ash trees and the apple tree just below my windows, I see little of the warehouse. The mating cicadas cover most of the noise too. Who cares anyway. Nights are filled by cricket limbs and very quiet, except for a mysterious bird that makes a very monotonous whistle around 1 A.M. that seems almost electronic. Out of the window above the hills a million stars shine.

There is no television nor telephone nor internet. What I do is stealing the connection from the residence hotel I stayed in, back to the village, parking outside of it and behind a corner. I still have the password for their WI-FI shit. But it's not like I can do this that often or for that long, so I apologize to those who wrote me emails and got no answer. Be patient because I am trying to come out of a situation here, etc.

Libi and I live apart now, she's in Milan and me here, in general quite far from any interesting form of civilization.
Folks don't seem to be very nice around here. Wary, cantankerous with each other, coward, greedy and flat, they don't make that much impression. Twenty-something years old girls who describe their ideal man beginning from the money he's supposed to have or make. So filled with negative ideas. Proud of their sunglasses, coming out of their brand new cars in superclean sweatsuits. The intrusive rude looks of the locals you pass by, typical of the solitary mammals on the edge of their territory-- For so long I complained about living in the city, dreaming of the countryside, and I suppose I am being punished now, for my lack of sense of reality.

True, here I can go swimming in the Nure river right across the road. Or to be more exact, I can lay down in the waters or else wet my calves, since the Nure is quite dry this time of the year. I can walk around my apartment without going in circles like a fly around a chandelier, or make a fire in the fireplace to roast me something, which I have no intention to do, but still. Yet all this could work better, was I here with someone who wanted to stand by me. But hey. I complain too much.

Thing is, I am not working now. I hurt my back at work, been at the hospital three or four times, still don't know what hit me. Been through quite awful paralyzing pains that are slowly fading away but still lurk around. Because this is Italy, and because I hurt myself while working in "black" -- which is to say, illegally -- I am obviously not being paid a single bit while I am so to speak invalid. It still takes me few minutes to stand up from horizontal position, and I walk around funny and aching. I can't lift weights and stuff. How can I be a gardener now? Am I a gardener now at all?

As the story goes, if I don't get well soon I'll be regularly fired, which nobody could consider a evil or unreasonable thing to do on my boss' part, because, c'mon, that's how it goes right?
Blah... I think he quite enjoyed himself while preaching on the fact that this is a manly job I am possibly unprepared to do, that I should lift weight like this and that, use my energy like this and that, feeling himself probably younger and stronger and manlier as he went on with his bullshit. Me nodding respectfully.
On the other hand, I can't blame him. I have my problems. I wish I was feeling younger and stronger too, instead than broken and not wanted and filled by ominous self-pity like I do feel now.

Funny how everything that seems friendly dissolves so rapidly, so quietly.

I am staying in the castle anyhow. I pay €350 a month for it in case you were wondering, nobody wants to live around here. Without a piece of paper or anything, of course: all "in parola", "in word". Perhaps exactly because of this I preferred it to a brand new satellite-wi-fi-ready apartment in the village, with parking spot and a supermarket at walking distance. It came for the same price, and that had a real contract too, but maybe I need this singularity. Besides no contract is more freedom. No village is more freedom. No "walking distances" is more freedom. I only have one neighbor here, a inaudible family in the apartment above. I know I'll have to stay here even when fired, because, let's face it, I have nowhere else to go for the moment, end of the post.

"What is the matter?" Molinari shouted at him. "Has using that time-travel drug scrambled your wits, you don't know you've got only one tiny life and that lies ahead of you, not sideways or back? Are you waiting for last year to come by again or something?"
Reaching out, Eric took the paper. "That's exactly right. I've been waiting for a long time for last year. But I guess it's just not coming again."

-- Philip K. Dick, the novel I finished to read today; in picture above, at gardening school in the morning fog. days of exams.

Could this, Mr. Tagomi wondered, be the answer? Mystery of body organism, its own knowledge. Time to quit. Or time partially to quit. A purpose, which I must acquiesce to. What had the oracle last said? To his query in the office as those two lay dying or dead. Sixty-one. Inner Truth. Pigsand fishes are least intelligent of all; hard to convince. It is I. The book means me. I will never fully understand; that is the nature of such creatures. Or is this Inner Truth now, this that is happening to me?

-- Philip Dick, The Man in the High castle

Early night over the city, wet and rained over, folks from the apartment below yelling in front of the TV for the Milan soccer team to score. Sometimes softly warbles through the floor the chant Milan Milan, and someone else, further away beyond the projects blows a canned horn. But everyone who feels like cheering cheers apart and the community exists only across the TV sets. The land all around is cooling and drying, quieting up. The world of the spectators watches the spectacles.
I went to see Jawa today, tried to talk. Things never go like you imagined them if you have imagined them too much or too hard, because your mind can warp reality and compromise it. I mean, we talked, even laughed over it, because the baby has her own same blood type so "this doesn't help us, does it?". But it seemed so far-fetched to her I just dropped it right away in our laughs. It would have been better to drop it anyway. I left soon, she smiled from the threshold and the little kid was crying his short sob in the commotion of the door opened and closed and the distractions going away. I went for shops looking for a new bag not too big, not too small, but in the bourgeois city all the luggage is sinister and well mannered and is a bunch of boxes on wheels. I looked at the travel books and they all seemed useless. I wanted to buy the I Ching since when I read The Man in the High Castle, I had a couple of questions in mind, but I couldn't find the Adelphi copy I wanted. I met with Libi at home in the afternoon and we went to bed and after a while I managed to let my thoughts crawl away and let the sex work. We lay in bed for a while afterwards, the light from the gray sky gone dimmer and the room cold and under a blanket we stayed against the darkening orange wall. Whenever I looked down at her Libi smiled at me and then she said, you should never forget I'm the one who likes what you do to her. She came closer and against my chest and mentioned all the things she liked and we pictured them and I kept feeling inadequate but I didn't tell her. Then Libi left for the sewing school and the door remained open and I could hear the buzz of the city, the fainted honking and the throb of motorbikes and the tires accelerating on the wet surfaces of the street. Nothing else. Birds were silent or unintelligible below the afternoon onslaught of the city noise.
But that was before the night came, and then late at night, when Libi was sleeping alone in the other room with her head resting on a slim pillow near the orange wall, and the soccer match had been over for a long while, and I was writing at the green table and posting on the blog this post and all around had a duration and it felt familiar and distant at the same time. But that wasn't too original a feeling, and it stayed on the surface and I don't know what to do with it.