I popoli settentrionali meno caldi nelle illusioni,
sono anche meno freddi nel disinganno.
-- Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degli Italiani

I had that known feeling again this morning, same as yesterday. I woke up and wondered where I was, in which bed I was. I might be wrong but I swear it doesn't look like home I thought. I mean, it's no big deal because if it's not home, it will certainly be something else, equally habitable.
And why am I here again? What have I done? Where is the window? (It's on the opposite side!) On which side of the bed am I? Have I not too much room? Am I not kicking someone out of bed? Where is the loved one? (Not here.) What house is this? What world is outside? (what if it is a world I don't know?)

After which the swinging of the black walnut leaves against the smooth perfect sky of the morning; something in the line of the hills, or the sheer factuality of the hills; possibly the smell of the wall near my face (of all the visible objects, the odd abat-jour, the wooden dark seat, the chandelier, the vaulted ceiling, so full of clues, none seemingly but placeless, not belonging to anywhere): I couldn't say with what feeling I learned where I was. Relief acceptance disappointment wonder. That is right, I thought, I am in the castle. Outside is the province. Fields villages dry rivers gardens petrol stations old folks. All the lines at the horizon are crooked and the long road to Plaisance is the swoosh of that engine running by in the early morning and felt between the thoughts.

Later during the day, I am half naked under the sun and entrenched in the umpteenth boring Toro irrigation plant, I am digging or screwing pipes one to the other, mounting sprinklers etc. I am alone at the endless building site in the remote val d'arda, high up on a hill where a villa is being made. I have no time to enjoy the scenery, the unusual birdsongs, the silence and wisdom of this particular dale. Only I notice how suddenly the sun is not present as it was, the clouds of the second half of August have arrived. Now and then I squint and look up at the dramatic canvas in the making. By the end of the day, the sky is broken into many districts, layers of skies of different intensity, drawings of nothingness and vapors of rare beauty. Some strokes are dark grey, others white against the blue and boringly, all I am able to think, pervaded as I am by a feeling of smallness and wonder is the classic: wow, it is so beautiful it seems fake. And then to laugh at the eternal joke, that if it was fake (a sky of Canaletto as this could be), it is so beautiful it could be real.
What a disappointment, a disillusion: to be in the world and yet not having a grasp on it, only a handful of small tricks and jokes to deal with it day by day. I think I have written these pages already a million times, sign that my feelings are not moving but in circles.

Driving back home, alone in the noisy truck, the sky above the road is of yet another sort, because it is so late. Getting dark, closing up and low, the end of a day's tale. And melancholic I keep on driving, thinking that skies were all there it was worth remembering today and it is all so difficult to keep together.

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.

There's a kind of elongated violet indigo clouds that is typical of the sky at dawn in the half-beautiful days, at least here over the roofs of Milan. I must have looked at them dozens of times, isolated as they are against the fading-to-yellow blu sky. They all look alike, from day to day and season to season, strechted and small, pointed at the ends and frayed and very very distant but low in the sky. And I am pretty sure they announce bigger clouds to come.
How long they last? They last from the moment you notice them, in the quiet house where everything still has to happen, and your thoughts don't fight with sensations but just toy with them, to the moment you have forgotten everything about them, in the house where the world pushes in, and your idea of the sky is just the repository of everything that heats, burns, turns into ashes and smoke. Suddendly, the strongest wind rattles the window panes and announces rain. The clouds are gigantic already.

It is raining steady outside. The pouring water makes a faint noise against the bricks of the terrace, the plastics vases and the rigid jasmine leaves. Light is strangely dimmer all around, also because of the wet surfaces of the buildings and the roofs darken everything, and the grayish yellow walls of the condos drawn upon by the rain with wide wet brush-like stains, dragon-shaped, or shaped like clouds piled up to the horizon.
My thoughts do not enthuse me, miserable plans of cheating, hypocrite worries for relatives I never call, absurd fears of precocious illnesses, strategies to work even less or caring less, the doubtful meaning of this blogging, like a 'I put myself at the window here and report back' kind of thing, only because I can do it, just like cheating.
They don't enthuse me, but these are my thoughts, and I cannot find a way to pilot them to a better destination, so I just look out of the window, sunday raining, let them roll. I am lucky enough, I think, I have this window to look out from, this good things, like a yogurt or a computer or the music or such, and a person I can have sex with right now, sunday morning, just if I feel like having it, high-handed. And as I start wondering why is that, that I need to brutalize the women I love, or they wish to be brutalized by me, a whole chain of images, fantasies and scenes come to me. Finally are the thoughts that don't need to be hijacked or pushed forward.

Outside the light's changing again, someone down in the road is bitterly impelling her old dog to move faster, the lid of clouds seems more thick and consistent and the dark crows and pigeons stand out against it as they fly from one roof to the other.

Music: Louis Armstrong, Because of you. Outside the sky is white in the background and clad in grey blue skeins, the city seems to hide and seek behind the squared pierced walls, quiet before the offer of the night, before every light goes on. My homely frustration grows as the world gets nearer my reach, and I wonder, is there any way out or in. I like the chimneys over that roof, I also think, which are in a cluster and all different and undoubtely a sign of the Life going on at the other end of the pipes.
Libi is patiently waiting for me to agree to watch that movie with her for her dissertation and I just can't come out with anymore excuses. In my pockets, my longing for when I lived in Venice is just getting out of hand, I think.

So they are back with the perfect scare again: the idiot asteroid who wants to crush itself against our lousy planet. They even named it after the Egyptian Spirit of Evil and Destruction so to be sure everyone gets the message. Well, at least everyone that knows Egyptian gods, or all the TV fans of Stargate.

Nasa has estimated that an impact from Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere.(From the Guardian, read more)

They say we still have to develop a defense system against idiot asteroids, and that "it could take decades to design, test and build the required technology to deflect the idiot asteroid". And also that this idiot asteroid or another, "it is just a matter of time before..."

Bullshit. They just want my money to play their stupid videogames.

I have the perfect, cheap solution. Listen to this.

Let's just all look the other way and forget about it. Human race always did that and everything went fine. A study demonstrates that it is eye contact to make them asteroids nervous. That's the mistake dynos did. Everybody knows that.

Hope that the guys at NASA listen to me for once.