There are a lot of reasons to love this picture, redux

But one of them is that you can really see the kid visualizing the truck going over a landscape of strangely human, undulating hillsides. It's the sort of powerful imaginative visualization I remember from the long hours I endured being unsuccessfully catholicated as a child, which I spent pretending my hands were brontosauruses fighting a death match. That's why Italians talk with their hands, you know. It's because of all the time we spent pretending our hands were brontosauruses fighting a death match in church, while the priest blah blah blahs about crap we obviously pay the closest possible attention to, considering our 'perilously' low birth rate and the sort of revolting, hypocritical adulterous pigs we elect into highest office. And, of course, our ongoing Christlike attachment to the merciful and forgiving spirit of Fascism.

God, I love Picture Is Unrelated so much.

Speaking of Catholics, more Chaser:

Damn good cup of coffee

I used to think of Belgium as Italy's retarded little brother, but after having spent a couple of weeks in Calabria and Sicily I've been reminded of the fact that's not an apt comparison - that it's more a case of Italy being Belgium's attractive but sociopathic ex-con cousin. I'll explain. The F-word and I are rather fussbudgets when it comes to small comforts like coffee. We're so cheap that when it comes to the little luxuries we make them as good as we possibly can - just hold them down and fuck their brains out.  In Belgium that's been a bit hard. It's struck us whilst in Germany and in Italy that the coffee there is better than it is here, even within the same brand. Lavazza here is not nearly as good as Lavazza in either of those countries. I'm usually perfectly happy with Lavazza, but it tastes like steeped sand here, so we've been having the spring the double on Illy, which is painful when you're as fucking cheap as us, but there's no choice. 

I don't know why this is. Belgium could be a low-priority export market because it's so small relative to the German market, and hence could be getting the shitty end of the lollipop in terms of qualities.  Also, I've heard that this places maintains import customs, even within the EU, that involve impounding semi-perishables for a long time. I don't give that 100% credence because it's illegal, from what I understand of European law, but it would certainly explain why you have to pay 7 euros a pop to get espresso that doesn't taste stale, and also Belgium had a four year lag in terms of accepting EU passports as proof of the right of residency, which I believe was also illegal, but, well - I'm trying to be through complaining about this place as an abstract concept. 

That's not stopping me from complaining about the coffee here, but big fucking deal, it's not much of a problem, it just means that when we go to Germany, which we do with relative frequency, we stock up on coffee at the same time as we stock up on delicious, delectable German beer. What I'm getting it is that I've found the right coffee to stock up on, if they sell it in Germany, and if they don't sell it in Germany, I'll set up some sort of mailing scheme with my family in Calabria, as the processing plant for it is in Reggio, the nearest big city to their village.

It's called Mauro, and it's the coffee for me. Rich, fatty, hints of chocolate - not a slap in the face in the morning, more of a nice rousing cuddle - but strong. And one thing about Belgium - there's a shitload of farmers here, who sell unpasteurized cow and goat milk at the daily market down the road from us. All this week, I've been drinking the Mauro with goat milk, because I'm quite fond of goat milk, but today switched to the cow milk, and it was just perfect. Just so lovely. So complimentary. Almost like music, the coffee and the milk worked together so beautifully. 

So. Mauro is the coffee for me. But I understand why some people might like Illy better. Illy has a cleaner taste, and I think it's a little fattier, or at least it gets more of that creamy crema up top. And even if Illy refuses to participate in Fair Trade, it at least pretends to espouse some sort of social agenda in its bean sourcing, which Mauro doesn't even mention. But you know, I spent a lot of time in Reggio and the region around it this Christmas, and I can say without hesitation that supporting any business that provides employment there which doesn't involve processing garbage or killing people is supporting a very necessary social agenda. 

Which leads me to my final point. Which is fuck, Italy makes me sad. The article I wrote this week about the poor man who fell into the machine was about an Italian. Strangely enough, his name was Mauro too. I write about industrial accidents all the time, but this one is affecting me more because the liability has been written off - the parent company artificially outsourced the department Mauro was working in a couple of years back. From local accounts this was probably done because the machinery was antiquated and dangerous, and they needed to get themselves away from liability questions associated with it. And you know what, apparently the safety inspector had approved the machine for operation that same morning. And his co-workers didn't know what had happened to him. He was just gone. All minced up, in little peices in a truck. The machinery was so loud nobody would have been able to hear him screaming. Fuck, it's just such a nightmare, and the public relations woman I was talking to from the company whose premises it was on could say to me quite honestly, 'it's really not our problem.'  

Okay, things like that, much worse things, happen every day all over the world, but you know what? I'd have liked better from Italy. Call me a chauvinist - I absolutely am. But Italy is meant to be a developed country. And a man shouldn't be able to fall into a woodchipper and die in a developed country without it being someone's fucking problem. I think that should be one of the criteria for a country to be called developed. Oh fuck, now I'm crying. Perfect. Jolly good. Off to work. At least I've had a really good coffee to start the day. 

Reflections on a European voyage

Travelling in this over-ripened cheese of a continent at Christmastime is fucking penitential. We had this intensely beautiful and amusing holiday in Sicily and Calabria - more Milos Foreman than Sergio Corbucci it may have all been, and I did have the exquisite pleasure of losing my keys on the first day, but by Sunday, when we were due to fly back to Germany, I was feeling excellent. Well rested, well fed, well fucked, well et cetera. Some of the more family-friendly aspects of the fortnight will no doubt get exposed here in the coming days.

And then, Stefanito got mixed up about when I needed to be at the aeroport - two hours away on dreadful mountain roads - and decided for a marathon session in the bathroom. The entire household took turns begging him to hurry but if there is an Irresistible Force in this world, it's an Italian man occupying a fucking toilet. Anyways, eventually he popped out, responded to the situation, and fucking gunned us across some of the worst winter roads in Aspromonte. That little Fiat was going so fast I thought it would disintegrate. Intensely beautiful region we were burning through, but an absolute shithole - our (Reggio) side of the mountain is okay, or at least as okay as Aspromonte gets, but the Santa Eufemia side is where they took the northern kidnap victims back in the day and no doubt where all sorts of bad shit is got up to now, up to and including some cockless guinea motherfucker taking a bead on us with a handgun as we whizzed by.

We got to the aeroport twenty minutes late, but it turned out that was only bad for my nerves, because Italy being Italy the check-in was crawling at a retarded snail's pace. In fact, we checked in ten minutes before the fucking plane took off, and security was a breeze - all the women setting off the metal detectors with their belt buckles, et cetera, all the security men gaily , or rather heterosexually, waving them through. Not such a breeze, however, that the F-word didn't have confiscated from his hand luggage my bottle of Burt's Bees skin creme Elvis and the Vermeer Lady had mailed me from Vancouver for Christmas (not available in Belgium) which for some inexplicable reason he a) had, and b) had in his fucking hand luggage. I was pissed. I still am.

Luckily for him, Europe was about to overshadow his inexplicability by losing my checked baggage. Not much more to say about that. If it doesn't arrive I'll be fucking pissed. Aside from all the stuff typically in luggage that one doesn't want to lose, there was some olive oil soap in it my family makes from their farm, and little things for the neice, and a couple of packets of Caffe Mauro, roasted in Reggio and, once more, not available in motherfucking Belgium. Not to mention another bottle of Burt's Bees moisturizer that my mum bought me last time I was in Canada. Fuck. Uberfuck. The F-word's luggage got through, but the jar of expensive and exquisite thyme honey we'd bought in Syracusa had got broken despite careful bubble wrapping. Fucking hurrah. Three cheers for European luggage handlers, the fucking trogladyte cunts.

So speaking of Canada, northern Europe is in the grip of a rather refreshing Canadian-esque cold snap, with reasonable quantities of snow on the ground and temperatures bottoming out around -7 C. Pleasant to me, utterly chaos-producing to these incompetents. Let's face a fundamental fucking fact here: Germany and Belgium are northern countries. The last couple of years have been warm, but the winters here traditionally involve cold, snow, and, you know, fucking winter. And then in the last three days, five fucking inches of the shit falls from the sky and has the temerity to remain on the ground, and suddenly it's fucking Armageddon here. Getting from Dusseldorf to Brussels last night had me in tears. Tears of fury rather than despair, yes, but tears nonetheless.

And then, to cap the whole motherfucker off, when we ground into town around 22h in no mood to cook, I bought us some falafel from my favourite kebab shop, and they've changed the fucking recipe or supplier or something, and now it tastes like deep-fried sand. Fuck. Titfuck. Fistfuck. Truckfuck. Et cetera. And as if all that wasn't enough, now I have to go to work, because I haven't been fired yet. Call this a fucking recession? Porca troia. And fuck.

'Gomorra', fuck, it's even a great title

This week will be busier than I'd like, starting with today, but it's for a good cause because, as mentioned, we're running off to London tomorrow. Yaaaaaay! Nonetheless, today I have to tell you about not one but TWO new favourite things:

New Favourite Mobster Movie: Gomorra, by a fucking landslide. Shows those people as the lousy parasitic cunts who'd fuck their own mothers they are. I've been feeling quite strongly about this lately - probably started a couple of years back, post-season four, when I realized the Sopranos had turned into well-shot lifestyle commercials and didn't have anything to do anymore with the psychology of men who are worthless enough to decide that sort of life is for them. Or maybe it even started 12 years ago when I went to Calabria for the first time as an adult and realized what these sorts of organizations do to their own country. And it's been getting stronger with the last year because of some things with my family and some things with work, because those people are all wrapped up in the economic organization of Italy, which we cover for the magazine - without shame, with impunity.

Suffice to say the tidy, surgical precision of the way bad guys only killed bad guys except when there was some sort of dreadful mistake in The Godfather and similar such was starting to feel like the biggest whitewash since the medieval gentry managed to convince themselves they were chivalrous because they serenaded aristocratic women in between raping the peasants. Gomorra isn't like that. At all. It's excellent - textually, and also aesthetically - very good to look at in a gritty way and very nice music from Massive Attack.

New favourite Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel: Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Holy shit. It makes the Metamorphosis look like an ode to social cohesion. Wow. It was so good that I can't find ways to describe how good it was, but that's never stopped me from trying before, so, well, it was a ripping good read, and an utterly convincing literary universe despite being so short. And it should be mandatory reading in all civics classes.It had the unusual merit of being so convincing, as mentioned, but at the same time contriving to feel very much like an allegory of something - but of what? And the action of wondering, 'what is this an allegory of?', sort of forces you to realize it's an allegory of everything - of how we shy away from some of our more confusing duties. Ah, I really can't describe how good it was. Just fucking read it. 128 pages, you've got nothing to lose.

The Red Dragon doesn't like big dirty whores and nasty cunts

It's that Belgium time of the year that makes me want to die, and will one day be something I look back on in such a way that will make whatever sun-soaked paradise I move to in a year or two seem that much more paradisaical. Dark. Frigid. Rainy. Infectious. Like an extremely untalented dirty whore. I have my first cold of the season - made it to October this year. Fuckin' great. At least it's now, before next week's driving lessons and TRIP TO FUCKIN' CANADA! Wheeeee!

Speaking of big dirty whores, check out this story about Italy's Equal Opportunities Minister. Sometimes there are just no words. It did get me thinking about what constitutes being a big dirty whore, though. Ask me a year ago and I would have said letting people fuck you for money. Okay. But what about Craiglist handjob artists who only let you come on their tits to help them pay their university tuition? Still whores, obviously. There's an orgasm some sad sack of a man has to pay money for in there somewhere. But what about people like Mara Carfagna, who sell men's mags photographs of their tits and to help 'readers' prep for dates with non-whores through a quick 18h30 rub-a-tug? How's that qualitatively different from being a Craigslist handjob artist, besides knowing you're not going to get pinkeye from any splashback? Well, it makes it one degree less scandalous when you get your ministership by sucking off your goddamn penis of a prime minister. Fuck, what a big dirty whore.

Oh, and here are some more words. You know what I hate the most about hypocritical, filthy Italian bitches like Carfagna, besides the unhygienic way they shit on other women? That they make the male gender look like a bunch of fucking useless morons when they get involved in a nice mutual exploitation sting with nasty cunts like Berlusconi. And nasty cunts aside, I love the male gender. They have sexual organs that compliment my own, and they can open jars really well, to name just two uniquely wonderful things about them. But now there'll be a generation of Italian girls who'll look at the self-described antifeminist their penis of a prime minister has chosen as an Equal Opportunities Minister, and that'll either make them think that men are too moronic to bother with, or that men are too moronic to have any relationship with except as credit card holders. And that will continue the Circle of Life that has become gender relationships in post-modern Italy - massive mutual disrespect. And then everybody will have equal opportunities to be miserable and unfulfilled in their emotional and sexual lives. Brav-fucking-a, Carfagna.

Planning a vacation south of Gomorra

I just booked our vacation. Two weeks in Italy, one in Calabria with the family and one in Sicily. That will be very nice as I've never spent that much time in Sicily - just long laborious daytrips down from Aspromonte on those monumentally shitty roads the damnable parasitic mafia has siphoned all the money off from, and then across the legendary straits of Messina on one of the damnable parasites' damnable ferries.

Goddamn them, if God will pardon the imperative which I'm using for metaphorical purposes, in the understanding that God will damn only those who He in His wisdom judges it right to damn . How many people have died on those third world roads in Aspromonte? How many people have died in Aspromonte because emergency services couldn't get there fast enough? Lousy money-grubbing rapists, burglars, murderers, and motherfuckers. No wonder some southern Italians still miss that fascist maniac murderer Mussolini: he's the only leader that country's had with enough balls to line them up against the wall and give them the killing they deserve. And that's the most fucking pathetic thing in the fucking world. God, Italy's fucked up.

Anyways, that's where we're going at Christmas and New Years because one of my cousins is getting married, and I need to brush up on my Italian badly, and it will be nice to see the rest of my family there, and we both very much want to spend a good chunk of time exploring Sicily. We'll be staying in Syracuse, where I've never been before, but which sounds fucking legendary. And yes. We'll be going kayaking. Rock. I had to book this early because at Christmastime about a kajillion southern Italian economic migrants head home for the holidays - frankly I'm not pleased to have left it this long - the tickets cost almost 400 euros each and we were lucky to find that.

Not much else to say at the moment because work is so insanely busy and stressful. Yesterday, after finishing a fucking Homeric effort of a market report, my brain was so fried that I had to think about it for three minutes or so before I remembered my home phone number. Dear oh dear.

Tuesday morning mounting moral disappointment extravaganza

Hey, all my fellow guinea descendants who are tired of mobster-and-pasta stereotyping - tired of letting ol' Tony Soprano speak for us, especially now that the show's been (belatedly) cancelled - how about a new stereotype? I think we can call it INHUMAN FUCKING CUNTS.

What the fuck is the matter with us, anyways? Any Italian you meet will be able to explain some of the modern unpleasantnesses of our culture by telling you about the years of oppression in the countries they immigrate to and the centuries of oppression in Italy itself, but you know what, assholes? So could the Irish, Spanish, and everybody from Asia, and you don't hear about THEM fucking sunbathing next to children's corpses. Or voting for that grinning cunt-eyed motherfucker Berlusconi. Fuck me.

And while we're on the subject of vicious retardation, how the fuck is this shit legal, let alone vastly profitable? My last job in advertising brought home to me that the moral corruption of the entertainment industry is greater than any hysterical Biblesucker who doesn't like seeing gays kiss could imagine. And my present job is bringing home to me that the way we've been dealing with capital, at least over the last 100 years, is how a clever pan trog chimp would deal with a machine gun. Adam Smith's Invisible Hand does indeed exist; the Market is using it to wank its Invisible Penis, spilling its Invisible Jissom into your coffee, and using its other Invisible Hand to wipe Invisible Tears of laughter from its Invisible Eyes over what a fucking sucker you are.

Sometimes I feel like if there is a Satan, he'd be feeling really redundant these days. Silly to feel that way, of course. People have always found a way to be congratulated for doing bad things, and people have always sought to do bad things not out of naughtiness, but because they seemed the thing to do. People ain't no good. Sigh.

Lying there with all the light in your hair

Artificial drama makes me impatient, but I try to keep that impatience tamped down because I'm often a little drama factory myself. At least, I am in my head - I try to not let it slip out my teeth or typing fingers. Also, I understand it's people's way to deal - in the same way that they'd rather look like a bastard than a patsy, even when the risk of being a patsy is small, they'll prefer to see themselves as some sort of wronged romantic heroine when the truth is that there was a big emotion that had nowhere to go.



Another thing that makes me impatient is a lack of imagination, and yet I have no imagination when it comes to other people's emotional existence. It can take me years to arrive at some sort of useful juncture when I'm trying to understand the people I love, or who I loved, and sometimes my subconscious needs to help, like it did last night in a 'Bluebeard' dream.

I was in the courtyard of La Pedrera, which had been moved to Paris, and he was there as well, bright-blue-eyed, happy, and rather scrawny as he had been when we first met, before I’d cooked and biked the heroin-chic modeling years out of him. He was acting in his sweet way, with the sweetness that made me want to stay with him long after it was evident I had to go.

‘It’s damp here,’ he observed.

‘Yes,’ I said, pointing to a half-basement apartment behind us. ‘We used to live there and I don’t think it was good for our lungs.’

And then his new girl was there. She looked slightly like me, but much better – that sort of stupendous, mid-size dark blonde you get in a stretch here from Denmark down to northern Italy, through Holland, Alsace, Luxembourg. I liked her instantly, and their rapport was adorable. They started frolicking around the courtyard, and as he scooped up a handful of rainwater to splash her she grabbed my arms and hid behind me. ‘Don’t let him get me!’ she cried, and they both fell about laughing.

Wondering if I’d be pressed into a ménage à trois I’d have to politely refuse, I consented to go to their apartment to pick up some stuff I’d left there. As soon as we entered they both went down for a nap. I gathered up some of the more important and portable things and made to leave.

On my way out, he woke and rolled over to face me, naked as a jaybird. ‘Don’t be a stranger,’ he said, and I told him I’d arrange to come back and pick up the other things later. I kissed him on the forehead and tucked him in next to her, where he fell back asleep almost immediately, a happy little smile on his face.

When I woke up I knew that boy can’t be my bogeyman anymore. I remember too much that I shouldn't forget. His sweetness was just as much a part of him as the batshit craziness. And although that brand of batshit craziness is unacceptable to me, I've been coming to realize for years it’s not really deviant in Central Europe, where their genocides are in living memory and those damnable Italian fuckwits are gearing up for another with their gypsy-hating and sheer fucking pig ignorance. All that fury, all that anger, those words and that way of acting - no wonder it confused him so much when I was revolted by it. It's normal here.

And after having gone through what he went through with me - being rejected because I couldn't accept that fury - how could I expect anything except that he'd get more conscious of it, and go into his next relationship with a greater desire to show more of his sweetness and less of his batshit craziness? Why would I choose to believe he could be some sort of lurking monster when - with his wealth, extreme good looks, generally sweet character and a level of fucking insanity which is merely typical by continental standards - some perfectly reasonable European woman would snap him up and perfectly reasonably love the shit out of him, and that woman - and the man himself - would probably benefit from what he learned through our relationship?

In short, how could I focus so hard on the 2% chance he's the revenge-obsessed monster he acted like when he realized I wasn't just play-acting breaking up with him, and the 98% chance he's happy with someone much better suited to him now? Sure, the 2% chance exists. But the other 98% chance is much, much bigger and rather more pleasant to dwell on . . . so much so, and so obviously, that I wonder if - no, I know I've been choosing to believe that getting over Mistress La Spliffe is impossible. Throwing a mean-spirited sop to my ego whilst throwing prime rib to my pride, my paranoid fear. Harming my mental health, my pleasant memories of the good times we'd shared, and some of the lessons I should've learnt through our relationship.

Because, of course, as my analyst was always at such pains to point out: everybody in the dream is you. As was that girl, his new girl, who was as pretty and happy as I felt myself to be when we first got together all those years ago; a girl who didn't utterly fuck things up, but who did what she felt was right at the time, and who had some joy with that man that made some unpleasantness worth it for a long time. And in the dream, he was me too; the 'big bogeyman' part of me, who is almost statistically certain to have hurt Mistress La Spliffe more than the man himself ever even wanted too. Happy now, playful, reasonable, and put to bed.

Third time fucky

To my father's people:

Congratulations! You're now the joke of the universe, and you've really done something for my relationship with the French by making me resolve to never mock them again without adding "but at least they're not ass-clenchingly moronic enough to vote Silvio Berlusconi into office three fucking times." Thank you for illustrating so beautifully that this goddamn sexist, racist, kleptocratic knucklefucker is the governor you deserve, so I can stop feeling sorry for you. Thank you for giving me a warm fuzzy feeling about my family and all the other people of Italian descent who live outside of Italy, by convincing me that the useful ones have all left.

So have you simply accepted that sponging off your parents until they die of some cancer triggered by the foul miasma of toxins with which your industrial and waste disposal practices have flooded the country is an adequate response to your long-term economic shambles? Have you decided that the enslavement of the south to politically connected organized crime is an august tradition that must not be interfered with? Have you decided that the enslavement of your political system to the industrial class (not such a seperate issue from the last) is the best way to approach the challenges of the new millenium? Or have you just stopped caring?

Well, this year, not caring was the same as participating. Motherfuck, even the Economist was recomending that Roman communist over the fucking thieving filthy monkey you've chosen for the third time. You can't blame the CIA anymore. This was your fault. I cannot wait until he finishes running your institutions into the ground and you get kicked out of the Eurozone because of your incredibly huge national debt, so that I can go on holiday in your country and take advantage of your laughably weak currency (remember that?) to buy up your physical patrimony and ship it to a country that works. That is my hope for Italy now.

Oh, and if you, who benefit from a functioning multi-party system, ever lay into Americans for voting George Bush into office whilst they were stuck with their shitty two party system in my hearing again, I will vomit on you. Do you understand? I will tilt my head back, aim carefully, and vomit all over your overpriced, ill-fitting brand name clothes that make your legs look like sausages and your heads look like pins.

Holy titfuck, three times,

Mistress La Spliffe