"What is the matter?" Molinari shouted at him. "Has using that time-travel drug scrambled your wits, you don't know you've got only one tiny life and that lies ahead of you, not sideways or back? Are you waiting for last year to come by again or something?"
Reaching out, Eric took the paper. "That's exactly right. I've been waiting for a long time for last year. But I guess it's just not coming again."

-- Philip K. Dick, the novel I finished to read today; in picture above, at gardening school in the morning fog. days of exams.

So I fantasize that I receive the emails I am waiting for, open them, give a look at them, very fast, jumping from one line to the other (certain words appearing as in bold, or as slightly larger than the other words). Then I put the emails away -- without actually reading them from start to end, instead going to bed, finally sleeping knowing that waking up the next day won't be a disappointment or a torment. I think we have these dreams (with the classic open eyes) because we dream to do good to ourselves-- And I remember all the times I did that, even as a kid: with letters my mother wrote, or my father, my brother. Letters girlfriends wrote, that went in the drawer without being read until later. But inexactly now it feels like I never waited for those.

-- In picture, above: magic episodes of traveling, from the museum of anthropology, Ciudad de Mexico.

I sit on top of my lug against the ochre wall of the greyhound station of Sarasota. There's smell of flowers floating in the hot humid air, a familiar climate that reminds me of somalia. There's probably also a scent of the gulf in it, which I understand must be somewhere not too far from here, going in some direction.
I just finished trying again to get through to Max, got no answer, left a message. I hope he will hear the message and come soon. I'm through with riding anything to anywhere right now.
I think back at the last 35 crazy hours spent aboard of greyhound buses, into inhospitable greyhound stations, probably not unlikely a survivor thinks of his raft. Almost everything that could happen happened, and I am tired, stinking, worn out. I think back at it and wonder, did I really did that? Was I really there?
What I mean, was I really so friggin' stupid to come all the way down here from New York on a bus?
It doesn't matter now. All is fine. I relax. Hot weather works instantly. The sun either burns or spares, from behind and between the immense tropical clouds quickly moving and morphing up in the sky, making and unmaking the shadows of the trees against the gray ground of the greyhound lot, while the cars run down the road unceasingly (it's washington road).
Birds and a squirrel yell from the long branches of trees I never saw, with red, yellow flowers, I wish i knew the names, but I'm just another city boy.
It doesn't matter. Everything's gonna be fine. Max will finally arrive and take me away. The world around will unfold and provide its meanings, and if it won't, it doesn't matter anyway. Hot weather works good.

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.

Luckily at the dentist's surgery today there's a Louis Armstrong cd spinning, and the volume is low. We are spared the ordinary anguish of loud radio music drilling into our ears in preparation of more useful drills. The guy loves blues, he told me, but mostly it's the assistant to pick the cds or the radio stations, a nice, short sassy girl with terrible musical taste. Libi once told me her second job is to take part to TV reality shows as an "active" member of the public, so I always picture her with a microphone in her hand and the greenish respirator down over her chin.
In my usual drowsiness I sit, my back at the window, among the bystanders. Some browse "Oggi", some browse "Gente", some flicks "Famiglia Cristiana". I strive to remain awake dragging in vain my hand over my face, the scene disappears behind it and nobody knows it. I trawl in my pockets looking for some distractions I can't find. When there's to wait, I always forget to bring something to read or, I don't know, an ice cream.
From the mentioned magazines, glossy figures and block capitals, acts of pedophilia, orgies, rapes, overdoses, scams and grand thefts, Padre Pio all over the place and photo-op kisses, all the stuff nobody among us had the courage or the venture to do in this life is equally suggested, or outlined, as the tragic enviable privilege of a superior society where our-rules-don't-count, good-for-them and what-a-shame.
From behind my back comes the muffled noise of the streets, tires cracking rapidly over the uneven macadam, repeating their rolling with a kind of lulling rhythm, so the inevitable happens and I fall asleep.

I reopen my eyes from beneath my hand. The scene is unchanged but once again all is like from a distance, and the sat-downs profiles, with their dark clothes, calm breathings, frighten me for a moment. Why are they so silent? What are we all doing here together? How can they resist staying among strangers, at the mercy of this close walls, so meek and calm?
"Survived to the flight of Death we leave for the honeymoon trip" recites one of the glossy titles. I fall asleep again, and into an erotic dream, sex in the parking lot, receiving a blowjob by a boy, indecipherable faces. Must be all that visiting Cooper's blog, I argue in the dream. I wake up once again behind my hand, half hard-on possibly not to touch right now, just to let it go away.
When the assistant calls me in, it's a relief the habitual little chat about nothing-or-soccer, even though we support different teams.

You go out in the early morning, empty-stomached, to get to the laboratory and have your blood tested. The laboratory it's closed for vacation; you walk about a mile to a second laboratory which is in fact open. You pay for the tests, you wait few minutes because almost nobody is in line for it, you let them rive your veins and head off quickly for a bar where to have your coffee and some foolish pastry. All bars seems to be already closed for the holidays.
No wait, there's the horrible bar there where you never dared to step into which is open. Good.
You sit there, at the dorky tacky table of the morose room you at the moment cherish, and while waiting for the coffee you try to pick out of the window on the street scenery, but the position is lame and you can just see the entrance of a closed garage.
Wait, a newspaper. You unfold a newspaper left there.
You get depressed by reading that yesterday in Italy we had 157 wildfires in the same day. The wildfires burned everywhere in the peninsula; as usual most of the wildfires (61% it's the average) were malicious; the firemen fought the flames with scarce equipments and forces; the rest of the pages are full of our politicians, almost off on vacation, that had their last pre-holiday pre-electoral fights about sheer skeletal power issues that are, as my father used to say, like a battle of big submarine creatures, of which you just see the emerging bubbles and cannot --do not want imagine what is really happening underneath.
Coffee arrives with stupid pastry. You fold the newspaper. After all, you cannot possibly care less, because as you consider in presence of the pastry, they do not concern you.
Newspapers makes you sick about it all, don't they. But still, you want something to read while enjoying your coffee which is disgusting, and just to affect composure, you discover in your bag the folded paper they gave you after the test. Presences moves behind the counter and in front of it .You sink yourself in the stupid technical lines while Milano fades.