Miami says to me the same things places like Las Vegas or Saint Tropez say. Solitude, unhappiness, dominance of the appearance, weakness, boredom, excessive loud music everywhere, hard drinks, everything under a blanket of lies and money that keeps it all together. There's nothing into it and nothing I can do here.
There's many many very sexy women around on sunday night, and their unapproachability or even their easy reachability it's not something I am able to use. I long for the sex but everything that surrounds the sex keeps me away.
Walking down the streets at night I am solicited by prostitutes posing as tourists or students, and all their professional questions and attitudes make me depressed and withdrawn into myself. Soliciting is illegal, which means, like with all the illegal things, that just a little more lies and precautions are needed to access certain pleasures.
Ishtar, or whatever invented name she is using, approaches me in front of some big hotel on Ocean drive and we walk together the some twelve blocks down to the Mango club. I haven't invited or asked her anything, I only smiled at her the way I got accustomed to do here. But she wants to ask all her uninterested questions and tell her story and I let her. She's cute, but it is not a real conversation.
From Lithuania, studies in New York, all of a sudden has to pay the term to the school and hasn't the money, she is also a professional masseuse, 21, etc. I try to tell her that I am not the right target for her, that she is wasting her time. I feel more and more naive and stupid talking to her like that. I tell her that I never paid for sex and I am not going to start now. She pretends it is different if I just give her money for the school. I kind of laugh at this. Say no again. I try not to sound judgmental or anything, it's just the way it is. She doesn't seem to want to listen. Finally we part in front of the club, she goes in. She'll probably find one of the many lonesome men in there, those standing there watching at the half-naked bar girls dancing on the counter of the bar, their phallic bottles of beer in hand.
As I walk away, I think of the things I would have wanted to tell her. Those occur to me always when it's too late.
"Ishtar", I would have said, "did it ever happened to you to feel so lonesome and apart from everyone else and impossible to reach and trapped in your solitude, exactly when someone, maybe many, were desperately trying to have you, or have something from you?"
Ishtar would jump into the window opened by the word 'solitude' and say something like, "I can take care of your solitude, you know", but I wouldn't mind the interruption. "What you're doing to me right now, Ishtar, it's exactly that. You are making me feel lonesome and unreachable and trapped in my solitude. You are showing me how wrong it is for me to be here, or how wrong I seem to be for this world. I know that this enhanced feeling of solitude in some weird way is supposed to work in your favor... but I am not like that. I want the real thing, even for one night I need to know that someone is there actually desiring me or finding me attractive or interesting."
"I am just offering you some fun, if you don't want that..." she would say at that point, giving her hopes away. "I am sure the sex would be 'fun' as you say", I would answer. "But I dread the moment when the money is given, the sex is done, and nothing at all is left, not even a bit of regret. I am scared of that moment and of its consequences on my mood." Because I don't want to use the world 'spirit' or similar imprecise tools.

I walk away wondering what Ishtar would have said then. If at my words she would have wandered outside of all the prepared speeches full of details and the well known answers and the well known careful questions. I don't know. It's pretty frustrating and idiot to invent conversations like that anyway. I slowly go back to the hostel, walking under the palms and the neon lights, carefully trying not to smile at the pretty girls again, but there will be more prostitutes to dodge before I am safe in bed, horny and in a bad, bad mood.

I'm worried for Britney. I can't help to feel a sort of protective instinct for this wandering soul.
Oh, I know it's not hip not to despise Britney, not to laugh at her or at the other one called like a hotel. Well these girls are laughable, that's true. Although nobody laughs that much at men, the always forgiven.
Now, maybe the case with these pictures isn't even that bad. She shaves her own head because no one wants to do it. This might as well be a big fuck you to all the expectations of those who don't understand. It certainly took courage and impudence and some idea, precise of vague, that shaving one's own head ought to have a meaning. Perhaps a positive one.
Still the implacable force by which Britney's life is being judged and weighted and frowned upon and inquired is hard to witness. It is not voyeuristic anymore. It is another step forward into the uninterrupted ritual scapegoating that makes the energetic spirit of the world.
One feels so much he wants to save the victim: this probably is a feature, the feature of scapegoating.
The ritual weapon is the well tested continuous exposure of all the weaknesses, all the mistakes. The big-brotherly life that only concentrates on your faults and shames. Inviting you to make a better show of them.

People say, why caring for a person like this? She's loaded with cash, she has no fucking real problem.
Thing is, I look at the pictures and that's not what I see. In the pictures the shadow of her smile appears under eyes that cried, the calm attitude of one who doesn't expect to be helped or stopped anymore, pictures that she has no power or intention to escape, taken by people like you and me who find it natural to help the scapegoating.
You know, I read stories of the showbiz like everyone else, because tragedies and weaklings are all over the place there. And we need tragedy.
Britney, I don't know squat about this girl. But in general, I don't really care for money, that someone "has a lot of money": How not seeing that money is a burden? Look at her. Don't you see the burden? She's calling for help from under it (and fine, there's nothing I could do about it: but I'm not so lifeless or dumb not to hear her calling.)
I see a person, yet another one, by the piercing eyes and a lively character and the many trivial hopes and the evident solitude, crushed, or so it seems, by the world of show business and the wolfs of the headline news.
And it's not that you don't know that worse species of suffering are always going on, every day in every city of the world, breaking the backs of millions of strangers of which we don't know anything about.
But like few others Britney's story is everywhere, instead. One can't ignore it, not after seeing pictures like this one. On every newswire, in every tube. And I cannot avoid to read it or to see it.

25, lived five lives already, single mother, two kids that the fascist CPS will soon take away from her, large house, three cars, two pools, rage and displacement, misunderstandings, selfishness and generosity, never left alone a single moment by the blind eyes of the crushing machine, the blind eyes of the millions who innocently eat her alive watching. It is known the witnesses are always innocent.
It's not just for her, this laughable girl, this strong and not yet lost person. But is also for her.
To say it with Peter Handke, this is one of the cases where the witness of a humiliation, if still is a human being, feels exposed, and humiliated too.

I came to Libi's studio to attach to the ceiling a couple of venetian blinds, hang a couple of scaffolding and to screw to an old table the two button-makers Libi uses when she makes cloth buttons. We already put off this thing two or three times since it is not easy to have me doing things. So Libi opens the door, I get into the house and put down the bag with the drill and there's this communication door to her grandma apartment because Libi can't afford to have her own atelier or something, and through the passage I see her grandma sitting stuffed into a small armchair with two or three pillows and a loud TV set in the background. Next to her is her Ukrainian maid, slavonic oblique eyes and large cheekbones, a skin all scribbled by lines of wrinkles. I never met either of the two ladies, so I cross the room to give them the hand. The room is an old used room of an old used apartment that used to be lived in by many people. They say some of them died in the camps during the war and others survived and later died of life. There are the old photos, the faces so dark and smiling and a collection of bad and good pictures hanging from the walls, a large opaquish mirror where I can watch my figure approaching.

We don't chat or anything, I just say "nice to meet you", stand, look around. Smell of artichokes or peas. I shake with grandma first, shriveled in her chair, and her hand is moist, kind of completely damp with a warm sticky liquid, possibly saliva. Her eyes scrutinize me rapidly and shyly, not very present in the moment. Her mind must be thinner than it used to, evaporating in the late age like the words coming from the TV and leaving no trace. I then forget to shake with the Ukrainian lady because of the saliva on the palm of my hand, kind of shocked for a second there, and I step back where there's Libi still in the door and then come back to shake the Ukrainian lady too.
"I'm sorry" I say, I smile of myself and try to make it a little warmer. I still don't give a shit about either of the two ladies or the situation but I'm here. I know how Libi sort of weeps for her family when she's alone, because she's a only child, she says she's going to be the last one to know of her family, of how it was, what all the names and things and places meant, and how even new lives brought into it would be outside of it because it's too late. I guess she's right. She tried few times to get me interested with her family story to no avail-- now I'm sorry she doesn't try anymore, but better that way-- I'm the guy who drives her mad declaring his indifference or enmity for family bonds, she found the wrong guy at that-- but it's the same for me, Libi, the connection is broken and lost --we all waited too long. But I don't care. Why? because the mythology died a long ago I guess--

Libi behind me smiles in the opaquish mirror and says something to he maid. Tries her grandfather sunglasses on and smiles. She has that slightly disturbing householder inflection I never heard on her, insensitive and strangely moving --sign of the distance-- as she gets closer to the mirror to watch at herself from behind the enveloping glasses.
"I'm keeping the glasses" she announces. Almost in synchrony her grandmother declares that she has to go to the bathroom and the two ladies get up, move to the corridor to the bathroom disappearing in the friendly water pipes noises.

I didn't said hello to Libi very warmly before. I am grumpy and bored and disappointed by everything. Why is it so? All so unhappy and tighten up, ridiculous. It is like wanting to see faces without the courage to look for fear to be looked at. I think of a word to describe this feeling but I don't have any-- I think at what is Libi thinking of me when I feel her glancing at my sphinxy face. That I am crazy, that I am a tone deaf music, that my distrust is cruel-- that I am lost to her love or help--
Why is it that I can't-- admit that I am better now than I used to be?

I should have told her how she looked beautiful in those sunglasses and instead I looked away-- there's always something more important in the thoughts and I can't be there. I never learned to be there-- I only managed to, by accident-- I still don't believe to or seriously take all the wounds we're carrying but it must be fear-- lack of desire--

How was the phrase in that movie, "that's what makes me clumsy, the absence of desire."
Peter Handke, of course--

The atelier in her grandfather studio. All around is the endearing Libi's classical mess, piles of clothes and the armless legless dummy I bought her in that little store of used stuff on the navigli.
I start drilling holes making the awful noises go around in the house-- and I picture the noises entering every room of the old used apartment, door after door, carpet and walls and chairs and quavering cups, and it's like if in the noises we all hide how much alone we are.

There's something else, therefore, at the origins of pain, which isn't at all the brutal game of an instrument indifferent to life and for each the same. In truth, this instrument is tighten in a well different way for any of us. And we will never know what in reality is physical pain if we ignore what makes the individual, in a system morphologically identical for all.

(RENÉ LERICHE, La Chirurgie de la Douleur - 1938. Quoted today by Guido Ceronetti on lastampa.it)

At first Libi wasn't ready for it-- she had never tried, she had tried once, it was unbearable pain-- This is why now, when I ass-fuck her, I direct her with orders like keep quiet stay still hold it now shut.
Once trying to-- I said something like that, in a brusque way, and her body suddenly relaxed and welcomed me. She became silent-- swallowed-- I smiled and thought: women. My mother would kill me for that smile-- but that's how it went.
I couldn't see her face and I wondered what was going on with the pain-- I pulled her shoulder, her hair but nothing happened. She was resting her cheek against the pillow-- her eyes undetectable in a haze of hair and lashes-- 't was like she was buried in a book-- I am a selfish lover and went on.

Does this instinctive masochism have something to do with not feeling guilty and letting go-- because-- for a second, the body is convinced that there is no way out, no escape from it?
Orders and rough manners, that's for her-- how the pain is suddenly bearable, tidying the room for the arrival of pleasure.
Sometimes I wish I could feel the same when I have sex-- not having a way out. The recurring forwarding of moments of exit from the moment --taking decisions-- can estrange you-- It is more about being an individual than being a male.

So mistreat her, call her names. I know it is like a comment --to the solitude of the bodies that are having sex-- tangled together but isolated-- like nearby teeth in a mysterious mouth.
The mouth is chewing our feelings putting them together-- but the manducating tooth above doesn't know the first thing of the wave of pain or pleasure passing through --the tooth below.

--In picture, above: when she reads, by italyisfalling.com, 2006