"ma un uomo camion vive ancora in me.." (Paolo Conte)

I'm defoliating the young ficus carica that we are explanting because the rocky soil has to be minced again. Above is the unequal sky, gray and azure and always changing --a cold wind comes from downfield -- I lent my windbreaker to Susy but I don't feel cold-- working and running up and down and all. I first met Susy this early morning, we shook hands-- exchanged our reciprocal biographies in three phrases-- later I tried not to look too hard at her sweet smile or to listen too intently to her warm accent. She took tools from my hands once or twice and gently said "I do this now". It is a week of apprenticeship and I came down south. It probably wasn't a good idea. Everyone is very nice to me and knows more than me about everything. But it's not that, maybe just that it was a long road to get here and my first impression was that they don't really need me here-- I grumbled against the school for sending me out to a apprenticeship after just three weeks of school. And letting me pick the one I wanted, too.
Susy tags the vases, I shorten the taproot proboscides that make funny angles or just don't let the plant go and we stick the little creatures into the vases. It's my first really ungrateful doing with plants-- when I go up to the road and line the vases along the stonewall where the rows end "so they don't get stolen" says Very Friendly Bruce (the boss of the 10 hectares foundation) and that's where I cut all the leaves down mercilessly. Some of the varieties have dark buds, pointed and with a hump-- now unprotected-- others are of a bright green almost white-- the leaves fall to the ground and make a bed of silvery green that should be raked away and composted or burned but will remain here-- some of the nano fruits are oblong, they fall too-- It's a conservative foundation and there are more than 170 varieties of ficus carica in the two or three parcels where we are working. I look at the little plants coming up from the rocky soil, shaking slightly and elastic in the gusts of wind and wonder what's the why or sense or the beginning. When I bow and get my nose into the small plant to cut the succulent branches that are hard to get I can smell the sweet obvious smell of the fig-- I wonder if that moment is to be considered part of the notorious idyll of this outdoor life-- because maybe the fact that it doesn't feel idyllic depends on me not being ready for it-- and I wonder whether it should be used as a lever to turn inside out all the painful or squalid thoughts rushing through my mind instead. To be into the light, to stand up to light wrote Max Frisch: not flattering to light itself, only a desirable task like submitting oneself to Time as if it was Eternity-- I want to learn how to do that and many other things but my mind knows other things better: I often get distracted. I think about her again, and again I see her and hear her in my head-- Martina-- so that I wish I could close my eyes and make it go away-- with the obnoxious moaning of why and why and why-- And this morning I felt sorry for myself a lot, foolishly, there in the densely parceled land-- myself extraneous, alien, guilty, ignorant, "getting old", incapable of clearness and peace-- indifferent to the parcels besides, trying with smiles and loud phrases and stupid brown-nosing and aping knowledge to melt with the thing all around me-- the people and a job to do, a role in the job to do-- being useful-- being accepted by the others and all the crap--
But then in the end I felt unreasonably glad that I was doing this job, later glad that the job had ended and I was tired and the sky was definitely now different and that we are were all in a good mood, that the sun kept showing up between one cloud and the other-- and we all got to the storehouse dragging the soles of our shoes to get the bigger pieces of soil out--
Everybody was smiling and raising hands when we said goodbyes and I drove back home and the radio was playing and I made the turns when the road made turns and had no further thoughts or feelings or compassion left.

The days drag by.

I'm choked by food,
by the shit I expel, the words I say.
The daylight that shouts at me
every morning to get up.

The sleep which is only
dreams that chase me.

-- Ingmar Bergman, from The Passion of Anna

The following scene is more calm. There is no trace of slapping oneself in the face and cursing out loud in the empty apartment. Kicking chairs, shaking random obstacles, people, relatives, bloggers, the heat. Counting on the absence of witnesses. On the pages everything I know is written about each vegetable form living out on the terrace. Soil, chemistry, prune and multiply. Something I am mediocre at like most of everything. Flor suggested me a new source and now I can look for more details on the internet for each of them and feeling I know more --the phrases that are useful appear to me as if highlighted on the page. But I don't really know more I am only informed.

Life is minor now. It doesn't matter the rage for the apparent phoniness of everything and the hypocrisy and the malfunction. I think I never had so little respect for myself as I am having now. Although there's no bottom end to that.
From behind comes classical music, probably Bach. The first feeling when trying to focus on the effect of the music on myself is that the music sounds so modern. The superficial consideration leaves me unhappy.

Flor found me on the internet, with little investigation recognized me out here and found the blog and asked me out. The global village. What sense can have a thing like this, we have been briefly together so many years ago and so much has happened since then and now she comes. We were very young and almost totally ignorant of love but this doesn't make that experience more relevant to me. All the contrary. I seem to remember that the sex was especially good. Or that we had fun because we both tended to be outsiders (although I was a professional outsider). But beside such vague feelings it is something dear I can barely relate to now. Life changed me anyway even if I still am an outsider. Folks don't seem to know I want Time to pass and changes to be even when I state that I don't want to get older (because of the failures). Walking around in the bookshop she said, you still matter to me, you always mattered. I didn't know what to say. I felt moved and detached and embarrassed. She seemed uncomfortable and we let the topic fade away. Myself, I stopped thinking about you when masturbating years ago, I thought, which doesn't necessarily mean anything. Our conversation flew easily. We always could talk of everything, and apparently we still do. At moments it even appears interesting. I am out of the world anyway.
Out of the bookshop the city was wet, the dark asphalt glimmering in the late afternoon light and the sopping walls drawing mysterious bodies of smudged films of water, the trees of the park a obscure still mass encircling the left side of Piazza Cavour, trapped behind the tall green fence, nobody around. The last days of quietness of the busy middle class city, skies moving from gray to darker gray, the light coming from the isolated open bar where the men stand against the counter and don't talk nor move.

It was days ago and now it is the past and it doesn't exist anymore. It is still raining above the city, and the sun light is white, the corners are damp and clothes are withdrawn from the balconies--

I understood something recently, that as much as my life can come to be a failure, as much as I keep dropping out, and as all the material means to be and fight for keep passing me by or making me fail or go mad or flee, still nothing really would interest me -- enriching my present moment -- simulacrum of reality -- as much as love life. And I am not strictly talking about my own love life, and the satisfaction of my own desires and longings -- with time my own desires and longings, my suffering and struggling and groping for love seem to become less relevant or less interesting than the general human constant reaching for love and the general wasting or losing love all around.
And as I read a honest book, or hear a true story I notice how my interest doubles or triples as soon as the element of emotion and desire, sex and good willing and wrongdoing for love appears. As soon as "I met a person" is said, "I keep thinking of him" is said. "I miss the bitch" is said. As soon as "I dreamed of you again" is said to oneself. Everything about it matters to me, provided the manifestation of love is stronger than -- I don't know, the other important things suddenly ceasing to be important. It must be that I am not capable of feeling fine in any other realm. Everything matters when it is genuine, the trivial things that keep repeating renovating and consuming themselves through the centuries through the bodies through the rooms and the drawers, and the more unpredictable, scandalous ones-- Morbid affection, violence, betrayal, servitude, mysterious bonds, inverted poles, manias and eclecticisms-- all coming down to my witnessing and participating, my own mixed feeling of stupor and acknowledgment: so this is love too.

And yet I am so incapable to love, in a proper reasonable way. I get so easily impatient as well as inert, bored, inept, false, lazy-- because my crave is for the variety, possibly-- is this why I could so little relate to the barely disclosed ambitions of Flor to go to bed with me for old time sake-- like she wanted to come up (Libi being away) and I said just park here and didn't invited her in-- she had her own reasons that had nothing to do with me, and my heart isn't prepared to bend yet. Every morning, every afternoon, every night I have someone in my mind who is far and away-- my heart isn't capable to bend yet--

Across the sleeping city we had passed near the house where I lived back then, with my father's wife and my step-brother. Every time I walk by that place in the bourgeois hell of via Plinio, something that I systematically avoid to do, a mess of bad memories and the bare square weight of past life attacks me, and I can't avoid to lash out my distaste and my disgust for those past days. The huge wooden door, always closed, and the precious shops, the brand new cars parked under the tall old plane milanese trees -- the dog turds and cockroaches in the deli and the still loners waiting at the stop of the 60-- when everything was wrong and all days were wrong and it was wrong my not being able to break out of there. My ridiculous communist so called parents so eager to settle themselves in the bourgeois neighborhoods -- and the fights, my father's yells, the humiliations and the disgust and the unbearable dishonesty of myself and who I was -- And then Flor next to me said, every time I pass in front of this place I have all these nice memories of when we were together, and I came here to visit you in your room-- it was so nice to be with you there, do you know? It was the sex but all the rest too-- With all your rudeness you were pretty welcoming, you know?

It took me so long to come up with a post and I don't know how to end it.

I first met Rulla in Venice, on a day of exams. We were both waiting to give one of the many at the department of fine arts. She used to wear certain kinky tigerish glasses back then and always a black short skirt, obviously her long curly straw-yellow venetian hair were all about her. She was fun and carefree and lighthearted. I was already this grave boy but more sociable back then. I think we fell for each other, life was about to give us a great passion... we ended up moving together in a little apartment in St. Polo where we lived for almost three years, although the real passion was alive for the first six months at most, before we even moved in together.
Later the passion developed into something different, equally intense but totally self-destructing and perverse and crazy. There were fights, objects thrown, threats, cheating, promises, cries, fake suicide, slaps in the face, reconciliations, kinky stuff and more cries and resentments and self-destructing choices. We were always broke and always behind with the exams and always sad and unsatisfied and stupefied by all the unhappiness. It dates to those times the insane habit I grew to bury myself into the computer to overcome my sadness and the feeling of being out of place.

I finally got the job at the university of Milan and left Venice, because of Rulla-- and I knew the city wasn't going to be a place for me anymore.
As often happens with the wrong habits me and Rulla never really completely moved on... we sort of kept in touch in the following years. Mostly it was her calling me, and since I was --like her, but in a different way-- badly wounded by our story and weary and selfish, sometimes I ignored her calls, worried to get more of her cries and reprimands and desperation.
But we never really let go the thing. The sexual attraction never really faded, and instead placed itself into a particularly scary and sometimes attractive place inside our minds. For a while we also had moments of getting together to fuck every now and then-- as sometimes happens.

Then strangely all the mistakes and the things never told faded into the past and left nothing but the pipes and wires of some sort of edifice we once had had and that was now nowhere to be found, like a razed construction site, footprints of the old structure squashed and deformed in the dirt by the following plans, as we loved and re-loved other bodies, and our bodies were loved, declaring different things with similar words and tones, making new errors and choices above the old ones.

Recently me and Rulla started to hear from each other more frequently. Now one can call the other, normal day, and we just talk about our lives. I learned to listen to her without being scared or self righteous as I used to and I finally saw, how strong and brave and generous she had been during her difficult years. How in different ways we both managed to overcome the worst aspects of our characters, and all the craziness that we experienced when we were together and afterwards. I came to feel that it really had been one of those unique things in life to witness, this twisted path we had jointly followed and separately.

Today Rulla called and said she was pregnant of her boyfriend, with whom she has been living for a year or so. Because of some surgery she had to undergo in the past the news were two times shocking, and the minute she said "I'm pregnant" I wanted so badly to hug her and make her feel how happy I was for her, how great it was and it was going to be, so much that I felt my eyes on the verge of tears. I mean, I think it was sheer happiness for her --I still can feel it right now as I write, if I only think about it-- although I can't rule out other kinds of feelings I might have felt (maybe I stupidly wanted her to hug me too).
The more evident of these feelings could be that our paths are really separating now. Our two lives are going to be growing so differently and on not contagious levels now. This is "right", and inevitable and this rightfulness is what makes it sad on a certain level, I guess.
Also, many of the women I have been with and loved are becoming mothers, so much that I am becoming an expert on the matter. But I am a man, and I can't be a mother no matter what I do. This is no little thing. It is one of the many way life actually has to tell you that your gender not always works for you. At most I could become I lousy father, and the only time I got close to that, with Libi, it was hell at first and then unbearable pain and later on only a memory hard to swallow.

Libi... she came home that I was still talking with Rulla on the phone. She found me in the bathroom sitting on the edge of the tub rambling about names and silly fears. Later me and Libi got to the mall and I told her about Rulla and after a while Libi said she had nausea all day. I thought it was ridiculous. I hoped life wasn't going to be that ridiculous. Or maybe I didn't hoped, I just wondered if.

It is kind of lazy to just grab someone else's quote and re-use it like that, but I found this one so poetic and unusual that we can make an exception. Today, on Ceronetti's "Altrove" (his collection of almost daily quotes selected by him for the newspaper La Stampa), Anna Maria Ortese (note: I mean this quote to be "unusual" compared to what is usually quoted by Ceronetti himself and others on the italian media. It is quite straightforward in itself):

Sometimes I find myself looking into the pages of this or that history of a nation, or of all the nations, or just forgotten chronicles, and I watch emerging and passing by like lights faces of joyless women, yet more resistant than the others, faces of women braver than men, in the act of saying goodbye to someone or looking towards a aurora impossible for them. Women who left orders, flags, testaments, without whom each one of us wouldn't be a thing. Us, without these women, wouldn't even be. They are the woman, that is, humanity. Here is what I mean for being a woman: to be a part -- surfaced today -- of such obscure groups, of their bravery, to recall forever their ensigns of fire and light.

But the trouble is that conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on and on being 'decadent', since decadence means falling and one can only be said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon. Sooner or later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude towards life and society. It would be putting too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the Communist party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines.

-- George Orwell, T.S. Eliot, 1942

The other day I gave a look at the insides of my mind and called. "Why nobody down there can write poetry anymore?"
I yelled. No answer.
But I know why, I shouldn't even ask. Poetry needs fresh feelings and i'm not good at those lately. Even the bleakest poetry needs the outgoing attitude of    wanting to sing the world,    not my very philosophical attitude of: renouncing-to-say-anything    because-nothing-really-matters and all that.
Not a line of good poetry has ever been written with such an attitude. That's why time and poetry so often go in different directions, because every year our of adolescence there's a higher chance to turn into a turd which sticks to the sidewalk even if you kick at it.
(...)   I believe that poetry is essentially based on what is felt the first time something is done, or looked at in a certain way, whatever that is. The ability to withhold and recall that fresh feeling entirely lies in some sort of faith one must have in the world-- that the images of it contain it all --and most of the times I'm too worried and into paranoia to achieve that.
It's a waste, I say, and    I'm even the only one to say it (about me), which could also be a good sign (or not, whatever).

So TIME magazine came out with its moronic "you" cover. Everyone's running around saying how phenomenal and democratic it is. To me it's just incomprehensible. It's like a joke. Well, it's TIME magazine. The digest of all the propaganda, right? Ginsberg teaches.

First of all, what's with youTube? Because this cover is obviously an homage to youTube, right? The word "you" with that graphics, the player tool, even the font.
Are they taking youTube as a symbol of net democracy? A service already bought by CIA-Google and which is buried under an avalanche of lawsuits and which will probably soon die of natural death inside Google-Video's womb? And isn't it funny they decided to promote this brand as soon as Google bought it? I bet youTube could use some clamor before, when they were forced to sell because of all the lawsuits incoming.

The blurb says: "You control the information age".
"The age of information is the end of the age of knowledge." said someone else.
This supposedly free "information age" seems to me more like a playground where all the tools are bought and owned by the same two or three players, which are using them to control all the activity going on.

Meanwhile U.S. politicians such as McCain or Al Gore are actively working to dismantle Internet freedoms with the excuse of pedophiles and terrorists.
And TIME magazine, as usual, averting its eyes. Cooking propaganda.

I am a blogger and this cover is dedicated to me too, right? Well let me tell you, I'd rather have faced another pukesome Bono-Gates cover than having this chilling slap on the back.

"Information age", my ass.

"How do you move in a world of fog, that’s always changing things. Makes me wish that I could be a dog"
-- Tom Waits, "I don't wanna grow up"

Vanni says that thinking too much about the fact that you are getting old, makes you even older. I haven't seen him in five years and he still has that power to make most of my arguments powerless.
He is right, of course. Why do I think so much about it?
"The lost occasions" I defend. They proportionally or even exponentially can increase your anguish to grow up and get old.
"Not to think about it is the answer" he says. "They do not exist."
Yeah I always thought that. It's like the others-- or life itself --keep putting them before your eyes without a good reason. But it's hard or pointless to explain that I also need to speculate on the sheer fact of growing old and wasting the time of life away. Or think out the mystery. Because there is no actual way not to waste time, since this is the only compromise possible in being alive unless you want to embrace the rules of nature in their entirety, which would be a nightmare, although not a waste of time --if you're lucky.
"Why would that be?" Vanni asks.
Because the reasons of genes and selections, which I would never doubt since they are a scientific fact, are also one of the most depressing things on earth. They cause immense suffering and injustice and any decent life of a free person should be imagined with at least one foot and one hand outside those boundaries.
"It can be fine inside the boundaries" Vanni says.

I never really could find a pal whom with share my speculations. The maddening efforts to describe the trap aren't really worth it to most of us. But on the other hand I always masturbated alone.