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.

It rains hard on Milan, and those without umbrellas or hats are skimming in a hurry walls and doors to the streets, under thin edges of scarcely decorated buildings, series of windows and eaves.
Sometimes two milaneses face each other along the narrow dry path right against a line of condos with shallow windowsills. A girl with an already soaking wet wool hat, and a suit without a coat moving from one office to the other and, in my city, the girl lets the suit pass without a second thought, because nobody can stand against business.

I go across town under my favorite hat, in the rumble of vehicles engines and tire crackling on the concrete and exhausts chugging at the semaphores. Alarm sirens go off all around, and the journey is a trek around puddles dark as the night and deep as the Lugano Lake. When it rains this city goes crazy and desperate, but I look past it and try to remember that I love rain. I only wish I was living in a land where business is not more important than girls' good mood, and windowsills are much larger. To begin with.

I feel his eyes on me as I am climbing the slope at the beginning of Naviglio Pavese. I wonder how is it possible that I "feel it" when someone is looking at me. I am both alert for the traffic rushing around and absent-minded in my daydream but I feel and look back. The city was washed by the rain today, and in the white light, the fresh wind is gathering waters in the puddles near the sidewalks, where trees and wires reflect. People hasten by with grocery bags, dragging children, complaining on the telephone, driving in the mess with the tongue sticking out of the left corner of their mouth. Girls are smoking white cigarettes in the shadows of the fancy cockpits, honking & lined behind the trams. His face is in focus in the noise of the city as I move towards him.

We smile at each other, and O.K., I manage to greet him warmly. We haven't seen each other in four years or so, but he's so at ease in dealing with all sort of people he deals fine with me. Pretty soon I am updated about the enormous range of things he did and places where he lived in the past four years. He says he just had his second baby and now he's back to his work. He says he paints too. "Huge paintings. Two-three thousand euros a picture" he says. Makes me think at that character in "Hannah and her sisters".
He asks me what I do, and I say "unemployed", where I live, and I say, "at this girl's".
"Don't you work at the university anymore? I heard you had a career there."
"No."
"But why?" he is surprised. We both are repeaters from Art School and once troubled hard to fit-in boys. Being the one with a career at the University was what made me a real loser, so he's disappointed. Or this is what my paranoia figures.
"I don't know. Long story. I was tired," I say.
"You still write?" he asks.
I hate him for asking this. I had this thing that I wanted to write a long ago, when we were at school and briefly after that. He shouldn't be so aware I am still stuck with my unfulfilled delusion.
"Sure" I say reluctantly. Somehow I know he never ceased to look at me as at an alien.

Then it's time we part, as the energy of the encounter dissipates.
"Let's keep in touch" he says.
"We'll never see each other again" I smile.
"Don't say that!"

As I move away, it's O.K. that I still have a long way to walk home. I m slowing down in the crowd of Viale Bligny to let the impressions of the city do their job on me. I try to meet girls' eyes as they approach me and pass by. But they all seem so angry and impatient today.

It was heavy raining upon Milan, bucketing down from the orange jellyfish dark sky to the gloomy streets, dressing up trees and dog turds, pharmacies and potholes, the whole city shebang. The rain made this hypnotizing rushing sound coming in from everywhere, and all the remaining music of the city's early night was removed by it, swamped into it.
Computer display kept showing to us its bad internet news as we stood there, in silence, in front of the window. The weather was closing in against the panes, all dotted with drops dribbling down, and I was thinking about how to finish what I had started, when first I decided to change my life, more than a year ago. The one job I had to do and that i left unfinished.

Libi said, "I can't believe it. Whoever win this, they will gonna fight about it forever".
Well, the country was obviously bounded for chaos or eternal falling into rotten boredom, I knew that. But sure thing was weird now to read statements of these political ballots experts saying how "we are facing the worst elections in the world". Even worse than the Florida rigged game apparently, although in a smaller and more insignificant league.
And when one part proclaimed to have won, and the other contested, it all seemed a bad deja vu.
Sure thing Italy was going to remain Berlusconi's, just like he bought it from us. After all, it doesn't really matter whether you actually manage a run-down store or not, as long as you can be there blackmailing who will be managing it. The best way to get out of the lead is when the things in front line get really crappy.
I said, "We will never get rid of Berlusconi". Then I said, "we deserve it probably".
All you have are these bitter little jokes to say in the end.

But it was not about that. What was Italy after all? It was just this old boot in the sea, admired and envied by many in the world without any real clue about it, or about the mental insanity of its hypnotized citizens.
Maybe it was all about the fact that the country was not going to do any good to me, because I never did any good to it. It never even crossed my mind you could do something good for this country.

Outside it was still raining. We worried for the wisteria young blooms, if hard rain was going to be too hard for them.
Part of the houses we could spot from across the courtyard looked all blacked out, windows invisible and lifeless behind the rain. In my paranoia I thought, see, lights off, the starting signal of a putsch.
In fact a little later in the house lights went off and on for a while, dimming the bulbs in slowed down hiccups. But then it all remained on.
Libi went to bed, and I stayed awake, as always.
I wasn't frustrated, because I had never been very concerned in changing Italy's destiny or any country's. It was just what the rain was saying. How that's the country of cheating and strafottenza and all, careless, indifferent, slow, and how rain was washing it all out to leave it like it was before, just like anything else.
All right, may be it was a little frustrating after all.

p.s. The title of this post at first was "Well, I too always cheat at videogames, so I can understand". But then I decided it was pointless to suggest someone cheated on the elections. Hey, even if that was, that's modern democracy. Videogames ship out with cheats bundled into them, as opposite of what I assumed few years ago, when first I played one.
So, be it.

Looks like many in the dentist waiting room have been waiting for their turn too long. It' a bit discouraging, also the fact that nobody greets you as you enter the small room. Everyone is pissed, and bored, and grows impatient at seeing yet another fellow putting himself in line. I hang my jacket above the pile stuffed on the clotheshorse, regretting I haven't brought anything to read, as usual.

The most bored of all seems to be a seven years old little girl who is lounging on the small couch. I sit in front of her. She's abandoned against her grandmother's chest, legs sprawled, feet bouncing, complaining.
"But in that place where there were those two fighting with the umbrella you said we had to hurry", she's reproaching her grandma.
"You have to be in time"
"We could have bought the little turtle by this time"
"Or the bird" says grandma.
The little girl idles for few seconds thinking at the possibility of the bird. "Only if we don't keep it in the cage", she says then. "Let's go get them both now!"
"You kidding? We have been waiting for almost an hour now. We're not going now. Besides you ought to wait."
"I am bored!"

Time passes. Droning drills can be heard whirling in the background, but nobody comes out of surgery. In the room, we keep waiting. Everybody is reading in silence, except the little girl and her grandma. And me, recording them inconspicuously. The little girl knows I am there, and every now and then peeps sideways to see if I am still looking at her, suppressing a smile.
Hidden speakers shed "The Sound of Silence" above our heads. The little girl puffs and moves about. Her grandma patiently tries to calm her, talking to her with the mellower tones of her hoarse lowed voice, indecipherable from the other side of the room.

"I would never make someone wait like this. I am reliable" says the little girl at a certain moment. Grandma smiles, I smile. The girl is glad of the attention, and loudly starts acting even more indignant. "How can they do this to me", she says, arms folded.
"You also sometimes do not find the time to do things", grandma remarks. "Your room is always untidy, your things scattered everywhere".
"Oh!" she says, stricken for a second. "But I get by into that!"

The looks of this sweet little girl, with grandma at her service, remind me a little of Mussolini. Her round eyes, the partially squared shape of her head, the mug which sticks so much out when she sulks. So it happens that I am imaging Mussolini now, sitting in this dentist's waiting room with his grandmother, sulking and complaining for the wait and bored and looking out of the window with daydreaming eyes.
This vision strikes me. I wonder where, why, how do we end up so different, us whiny pleasant sweet little kids we have been? We were so inoffensive, and yet some of us ended up a dictator. But it's not only that. We all ended up into offices, in the armies, into cars stuck in traffic, into grown up dresses and into hotels and into dentist waiting rooms, so far from the places we seemed to be ready for as kids. And we are no more allowed to be whiny so much, neither we are so much inoffensive anymore. Everything we do we pretend it is going to happen only once.
Or at least it seems so to me, adult me, uneasy with life, sitting in this waiting room today.
Well, these are not very original thoughts, I know. Still they hit me as singular, and strange.
I am surprised, because in this dentist waiting room I always have the most strange and detached thoughts (See this post).

"I don't like Milano", the little girl is saying now. "It's ugly".
"What! Don't you like it here?" asks grandma. "You have your friends, and your things here"
"I like it if someone listens to me"
"But the city has nothing to do with this!"
"Yes it does!"

I don't want to unsettle the little girl, or maybe I don't want to be laughed at by her for some obscure but peremptory reason. Still I stand up. I have to stretch my legs a little. The good girl seems not to mind me. We are all waiting for incredibly long spans of time. I stroll around the small entrance, rereading for the nth time the hanged diplomas. I think of the zodiacal signs of the doctors. I wonder if they coincide with the picture of them I have in mind. Gemini. Leo. My dentist is a Gemini.

"What a bore!" Boredom is actually torturing her, like a bodily enemy. All the available issues of Topolino she could read are scattered off their pile and discarded around the couch. "I don't want to grow old here!" she says. "Otherwise wrinkles will start to come to my face. I will end up as a granny!"
"Granny? Granny is nice," says her grandmother.
"Sure! So I grow old and die, so I don't have to be here waiting anymore."
At this words, sarcastic and coarse as they are, her grandma covers her own face with a hand for a second, saying nothing. The little girl doesn't notice, occupied as she is to cross her eyes at my benefit.
I look away. Outside it has started to rain. After a thunder, we all look in between the curtains for a few moments, the greenish sky against the shaded walls across the street, the rain violently coming down. The little girl complains for it. They aren't going to buy the turtle now. Colors are changing rapidly outside, and the thunderstorm seems very beautiful.
I break into the surgery room where my doctor is alone, only occupied with trying to open his locked window.

"I had you waiting because I can't be locked inside like this" he says.
"I see."
"But no way. I'll have to call the repairman tomorrow."
At our backs, the little girl and her grandmother are entering too, into the other doctor's surgery.
"I was not bored to wait because of the little girl" I say.
"That one?" says my dentist. "She's crazy."

When I get out of the building everything around is a little darker, but macadam pieces are shining with the film of water pouring down. Cars screech their brakes and honk their horns. I go home, on foot, under my green sun hat trying to imagine what the grandma was feeling behind her hand, before. I remember my father crying in the other room, on Christmas, because his son wasn't close to him. I remember I thought it was death approaching to make him cry. I was sure of it because I think of death everyday, too, trying to picture and to draw that feeling of imminence that seems just so unbearable and inconceivable. Yet I know the little girl was right, it actually will come to be, one day, the end of the wait.