there was this check from the car's insurance company abandoned in the drawer and I knew I had to wait before to cash it-- with its three damn zeros. Now, wow, it entirely disappeared inside the subscription to what will be my task for the next six months -- going to school. And it didn't even covered the whole crap.
Awake all night... and my mind is fluctuating and dizzy -- my face as if pushing forward around the nose and distracting me-- ideas are made up in an approximate rational state -- occasional terror due to the shape of things to come-- but it is a cool sunny morning out, and one day soon I'll cut my hair again-- and nothing is all right, reasons, methods, conditions, covered portions of the truth in my life-- but che cazzo ci posso fare.

I fall asleep stretched on the row of brown seats after Verona. My sleep is half worried and it reproaches me.
My friend V., painter and madman, whom I wanted to visit in Venice, is in fact in Moscow to see his mother and get a haircut. This is a bit of a letdown. Suddenly, hearing his voice on the phone, I felt a pang of nostalgia for our conversations and his twisted Russian sense of humor.
I wish this train was going straight to Moscow, I think, that shitty city. The direction is right after all. I dream about it awaken for a second by the bell of the snack vendor rushing down the second class corridor.

I wake up again as the train slows down in the station of Mestre, ten minutes from the Lagoon. I stand up in the dark compartment, it's past 10 pm, I pick up my stuff, not entirely awake I climb down the train. The sidewalk is wet of rain and the iron smell of the rain evaporating in the warm evening fills my nostrils.
On the other side of the sidewalk is a pendolino waiting, filled with light and empty of passengers. The train conductor is lurking at me from there, whistle in the hand, foot onto the ladder.
He whistles. His short bristled black mustaches bend in a circle around the silver whistle.
I ask him if the train goes to Trieste.
"Sure," he says, removing the whistle from his mouth.
"Can I take the train without a ticket" I ask him.
"If you pay for it!" he exclaims.
"I mean do I pay a fee?" I know this is the rule if you want to get aboard a superfast pendolino train without reservation.
"Oh! Not at this hour," he says, now with a reassuring smile, meaning he will make an exception.
This is so typical Italy, I think climbing the ladder. You can't understand it if you're not Italian.

Later I am finally waking up. I'm on a different train, there's a bar without a barman, empty seats in the lounge, in every coach, and a random destination. To be continued.

On the brink of falling asleep, even if only for a few seconds sat in a segment of sun against the ugly squared pillar in Diaz square, passersby's voices undergo a sort of sublimation in my head, becoming a deeper, neater, very focused thing against a more uniform background. Could be they skidded on a plane slightly aside reality, in axis with my inside, or they just got purified, for few secs before entering the realm of sleep, of the thoughts forever evaluating and judging, the watching that always downsizes and displaces.
It's like they turn, seconds after I close my eyes, more alien and more beautiful at the same time: like from the world of the sleeper, next to its clumsy nightmares, the world of real things would appear. A world of resonant, passing things without anything of the fuzzy confusion alert senses give us either in dreams or reality.

Voices of conversations slide beneath the plastic chair I sit on sprawled, sounding so definitive and objective, like this woman saying "I've been running all day and cell phone was off", it's like her voice is perfectly floating it in the void, for the first time in the world. Then she goes, and her voice fades out, and a man approaches the bubble of my perception, the deep tone of his phrase fading in, so clear, "I knew he was gonna accept that".

Alert. I'm awake. I wasn't sleeping. I open my eyes and run them swiftly to the XVII century books set on their side edges over the stall. They're all there, thank God. I know I should stand up now to look busy and conscious to the folks on the other side of the stall, and I should also stand up to avoid falling asleep like an ass again. I try to recount how many hours I have been staying awake now, I come to the quite impressive result of thirty hours, so I recount again, I decide it's twentyfivehours and I have to last at least four more. I wish I was allowed to sleep here for a while. The sun is warm and pleasurable and keeps my eyes half-closed.

I stand up. I move in the shaded area near the stall, where the air is cold and wind-flapped, the books are all opened at wrong pages. I move around arranging leafs, I look busy. Then I move back behind the stall and start the restless dance of the chilly seller, who pushes his feet against the ground one by one, sways his hips, bobs his head, looks into vacancy. I don't have the prescribed woolcap and the half-gloves, but I enrich the dance by singing in my head, and few words of the song I'm singing slip out and get heard. Someone looks at me. I grab a book and get back to the seat in our moving segment of sun. Fuck you customers who never buy no shit.

(in picture, above: gettin' back home, later, riding the lousy brand new green tram)