Need help?

The funny thing about having so many intelligent and gifted and lovely friends (and let me also add the priceless contribution of my wicked stepmother) is that you always know whom to refer to in case of problems. You tell somebody about an important issue you’re having at present, and in a minute you’re given practical and cunning and stunning advice: you really should read… check that restaurant out… you can find the recipe in… you’re just like myself, I found helpful… my mechanic is in… come and visit my church…

Since last year, and for the first time, I’ve started accepting these pieces of advice – which is not what you would actually imagine: I’ve stopped refusing them in the first place and harshly conforming to them afterwards, whatever the cost. Opinions, not heartless rules, to be used if needed, never unbiased.

Self-help books, for example, have popped up in my daily routine for the first time. And, like Jerome K. Jerome before me, “I sat for awhile, frozen with horror”*. Apparently, I’ve been a sick, co-dependent, workaholic, loving-too-much kind of woman, with a monstrous inner critic, narcissistic tendencies, a longing for perfection and an unresolved Electra complex my whole life, switching between the most bitter forms of bulimia and a chronic lack of appetite every two years. All my work colleagues have always abused me, my bosses have bullied me every day, my intelligence hasn’t developed in the right direction and I have always chosen the wrong path for self-assertion. I have been too docile. No, well, I should have been more passive and strive to emerge less. I’ve never known the fundamental truth of human life: that our wealth is only within ourselves and that everything outside is impermanent, and also that success in life is a clue to inner attainments. Well, but it says in…

I really wonder now how I’ve managed to survive. A miracle, if you ask me! A lucky thing all this came along.

*I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

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Creative activity over the past two weeks

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Idle, short, random, and fast, part II

Those who are cross-eyed are constantly calling Venus into question.

Women with small breasts usually have a neat array of champagne cups.

A bakery is a perfect place for ice-skating. Or – maybe better – flour-skating.

We’re in a new Ice Age. Where the fuck is Autumn gone?

Murphy laws should be studied in all Physics departments.

You watch the traffic and you know it’s a Friday.

At times it’s really hard to explain the notion of homonymy to Carabinieri. Other times it’s impossible.

The Lasagna is ready. See you!

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Colourfully yours

They say it runs in the family.

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Status symbol /Facebook invective/

h 7.30pm – is cooking
h 9.30pm – is eating
h 11.30pm – is taking a leak
h 00.15am – is getting laid
h 0.17am – Good night, world!
h 8.00am – Good morning, world!
h 9.00am – is having breakfast
h 11.00am – is working – what a pain in the ass!
h 12.00am – is going out to buy a sandwich
h 1.30pm – is eating the sandwich

Barbarella: Bon Appétit!

Dick: damn, me not yet!

Goofy: Hey, you’re really cute!

h 5.00pm – Ready to run, hooray! LOL!
h 8.00pm – is leaving tomorrow, byeeeee xxxxx

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The names of the stars: Joanna Newsom

Music and poetry have uttered their first cry into this world together, have shared the same crib, sucked from the same bosom and lived in a marriage of true minds for centuries. At least, that’s what we’re told. One grows up and starts thinking that these are truisms implanted into us from a generation of nostalgic losers. That music has always been accompanied by stock lyrics designed to catch the listener’s ear – the more generic the better. That amid the lines of the lyrics of Neapolitan popular music and the best of pop/rock songs you find just the same commonplace, misogynistic junk about loneliness and being left behind. And yet, for Christ’s sake, at times you get such a punch to the gut when the miracle happens.

For me it was Emily by Joanna Newsom. Time stopped. Who the hell is this Mother Goose voice, blurting out about personal kingdoms and river stones and the order of stars and the surface of the water and meteors and door keys? I found myself in an epiphany, wishing to shake off all the kilograms of skin I carry and stand with all my nerves exposed to the air, in the middle of all my past and my present and my future, part of a large net made up of all those who are related to me, and to whom I’m related. Suddenly all the closeness and the distance were straight before me. And so was absence. And gratitude. A bittersweet dream. It must be the fucking strings – I swallow the bait every time.

Really remarkable.

Let us go! Though we know it’s a hopeless endeavor
The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined and hold us close forever
Though there is nothing would help me come to grips with a sky that is gaping and yawning
There is a song I woke with on my lips as you sailed your great ship towards the morning

by hey, stupido gatto!

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Delicatessen

I must have felt a bit tired

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Stories I haven’t written

I’ve never written a word about that kind of crushing sensitivity that seizes you at times, and you can’t say whether you’re happy or sad, but you positively flatter yourself that you’re the only one in the history of the whole, immense universe to have faced the same intensity.

Now that I think of it, I also didn’t write that fake candid satire planned to reflect my childhood impressions upon my first visit to the western world: The taste of a cheeseburger; people screaming on MTV; the size of peppers; anti-theft car systems.

There was also that nice story about what happens to you when somebody in your family kicks the bucket and leaves you something. For instance, you have to provide fresh death certificates every six months till the whole deal is over (“Yes, officer, she’s still dead today”).

And not even a word about the story of my mother. The part where my grandparents get divorced in the 50s and each of them tugs my mother’s arms, just out of the court-house. My grandmother eventually prevailed, after she had hit my grandfather with her purse (he was a very small guy).

I have once imagined turning into a reasoning machine that had to work hard to be entitled to receive love. I ended up paying cash. Of course, in the end I was supposed to die (or be cathartically dismantled), for the sake of the morale.

I also know a pretty series of edifying stories on addiction. My family is really useful for that. They would have been great in a technique based on the sublimation of excess – a bit in the Palahniuk or Welsh style, only that I’ve never written them.

On a more self indulgent level, it would have been lovely to represent myself as a lame neurotic with twitches, like over sweating, stammering or tripping over everything. But I didn’t write anything about it because it would have been too autobiographic.

And then I thought about my obsessive impossibility of writing something not in the first person singular. I imagined this painter who could only paint self portraits. The whole thing looked like a concentric circle. I guess I’ve been too much into Escher.

For something like a year, I kept seeing dead cats everywhere. I guess it’s just a matter of statistics: at the time, I used to work in the city centre. But anyway, I developed this sort of strange relationship with cats, made of pity and impossibility. I went on writing each chapter with a dead cat at the beginning and a near-death caused by the nearness of cats at the end. That was as far as I got to writing a novel. But then I suddenly stopped writing, so that project was aborted.

Earlier this year my mind was busy with the idea of the eternal recurrence of things. I thought of writing something more extensive about not learning from experience, but then I found out that I had actually read it in Kundera and that it was not my own idea.

I still think that an eulogy on recklessness is absolutely necessary. For the future of humanity. But I haven’t written it yet.

I’ve never written about the very current issue of telecommuting, so exalted by Italian standup comedians nowadays, and about all its absurdities.

And how about that story my grandfather told me last year, when he had gone hiking in the woods and met a bear? After a few seconds in which both my grandfather and the bear kept staring at each other, frozen with horror, the two of them started running in opposite directions and didn’t stop for hours.

I had started collecting material about strange professions of the 21st century. For example, a person I met once claimed he worked here. But I didn’t write anything.

A few other things I’ll probably never write about: human hands, their warmth, the pleasure they can give; the illusion of forming a single being with somebody else; and consequently what it takes to become whole again; the eternal hesitation related to the ending of things; the jail of jealousy.

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