Absurdia.net

Year: 2009

  • Absent homes

    It’s weird to wake up everyday in a place where you don’t feel safe, at ease. In a place where your relations are not only strangers but enemies. Where you touch things that you should be owning and you perceive them as sly unknowns.
    There was a time when home was a word with a meaning, even in my own vocabulary. When the word home aroused all sorts of familiar feelings, accompanied by reassuring images. Not that even in those days the feeling was frequent. But at least I could tell how it was to connect the idea with a factuality.
    What’s home? I mean, really? I don’t see how some place has to be home just because you don’t know any better. Even with all the frustrations and disappointments. How can you constantly be disappointed in a place and still be able to call it home? Apparently it doesn’t take much for people to be contented, otherwise I wouldn’t know how to explain this constant putting up with exasperation. And how would you call home a place where your dignity, if you have some, is denied in every possible way? Getting mad for ten minutes every now and then isn’t enough to replace the dignity you keep on losing. Abulia and apathy aren’t necessarily arms in the hand of the strongest. They’re vicious maladies that gnaw at your brilliance, at your will to be and do.
    A lot of talk I hear from everybody. They all have their neatly folded opinions about everything, even about what they do not know. If they do not have one, they can make some up or steal it from a TV show’s host or a magazine for bored housewives. But I reckon in their depths, where something valuable should be, where authentic home should be, there is nothing but this dull contentment, so they can go on another day.

    And yes, I am truly as simplistic as a kid in my notions. That must be why I do not update often, ha!

  • Untitled

    Around people I feel nauseous, because I see through their sordid intentions, their excuses, their unwillingness. All of us, liars. All of us, deceivers. Looking for the quickest path to shut ourselves in self-absorption. Grinning all the way through the day, rolling the eyes to conceal aversion. Requesting assistance but refusing humane barters. I don’t trust any of this. I’m too much into it to not know how it works. Every step forward you get pushed backward, isn’t it how it is? Some are a little too good at waving their arms, at overindulging, that’s why they seem to progress so, while the rest of us, the inepts, keep on regressing day in day out.

  • Things to do

    Time goes fast. I didn’t realize just for how long I’ve been neglecting everything. I turn around the head and it’s already a week. Then two and three. A month. How can anybody be so distracted. It’s all my doing. For delays are an addiction. One day the cat’s gone lame, the other there are bills to pay, the other mothers are going bonkers over something. Futile matters and my brain can only take so much at one time. I forget to write back, to call back. I lose books I am reading and I have to start new ones. And I’ve been stuck in one of these vicious insomnia-drowsiness-insomnia circles and every schedule’s been pretty much fucked up, as one day I would spend twelve hours sleeping and the next I wouldn’t be sleepy at all. So would end doing all things at the wrong time of the day and now that I’m feeling able to be back to a more regular pace I really have no idea where to start. And there is this thing I’ve been trapped into, and I’m not going into it because it will surely go bad before I know it, that I’ve been forced to work on for the last two three weeks and now that I’m nearly done with it it looks like I gave birth to a monster or worse, to a clownish monster. I said tomorrow I’ll be done with it anyway, and that’s what I’m going to do. This means I still have something to do.

  • A remorseful teacup killer

    With Autumn approaching and air getting chillier little by little, I am able again to come back to my torrential tea habits. Yes, and this means I will be soon in trouble. Because my beautiful Japanese teacup got smashed accidentally in July. It was an unpleasant accident, involving a bear, hard candy and the printer. The teacup was innocent and got mixed in this whole gory affair in spite of itself. That’s because I’m keeping all my things in a very limited space, so I deserved it. I haven’t learned a lesson from it, that’s for sure. And I don’t have decent teacup anymore. I’m browsing ebay to find a replacement; since I want my cup to come directly from Japan it’ll take some time. What will I do in the meantime? I have other cups of course. But I don’t like them. My cup was tiny and had beautiful carvings in it. Those I own are stupid cups painted with ugly flowers or fruit. I don’t remember buying them, I don’t remember anybody in the family ever buying them. Who wants something so characterless? They probably came with something else. I don’t know how some objects come to live with you in these cases. I also have a thermal cup I got as a gift ages ago, when I was in high school. There’s a dismal frog in a field on it. It’s a thermal cup. The frog tells you by turning into a prince when the content is hot. But it’s a big cup, presumably for milk rather than for tea. There’s also that expensive tea set I got for Christmas. It’s vaguely Asian in style, but it’s probably made in Italy. That’s not the point anyway. I have nothing against it. It’s that I don’t want to use a teacup that has other three twin sisters stashed away in a dark box somewhere. I don’t want to depersonalize my very intimate tea-sipping ritual. And the teapot. I don’t need that pretentious teapot. It’s small and it looks terribly fragile despite its sturdiness. I wouldn’t know where to put it. There’s enough kitchenware around this house already. I have my own teapot, something conveniently anonymous that will hold a lot of tea and I can keep in my room without fearing to break it every five minutes. I have other six or seven teapots around the house, stuff somebody bought and never even used. Again, items with gold platings and flowers and things like that. I’m not old and brain-dead enough yet to want to use something like that or even look at it on daily basis. The truth is I wish I didn’t kill my teacup. But I know if I’ll get another I’ll keep it in the same spot I used to keep its dead predecessor. Sad, but I have no other place in the room to keep it. It’s the only free spot there is, apart from the chair.

  • What am I to do with you, Papa?

    I‘m torn in two everytime. I can’t share your passions and views, I can’t share your being a man with all these idiosyncrasies, though I can sense and understand them all, one by one; at the same time I do praise the grace, the precision, the art that forms and shapes the writing. The intelligence, the higher degree of humanity, the respect shown in it. I’m no blind to all of that. I can’t decide which aspect results as winner in this conflict. You make me frown. And you fill me with awe. But a reading soul isn’t a soul as a whole entity, so I can’t just ignore the frowning and the reproach even when entangled in the wonder. The fragility and the impotence that envelops your being, the very human fall toward the wrong side of the natural moral, the tragedy of extreme anthropocentrism but also the longing for all that’s sacred in the natural world, the hunger for Nature’s titanic stature. Which one of this is the real you? I assume it’s both. That’s why I’m so torn. Torn between revulsion and admiration. Because how am I supposed to form an opinion that will be coherent and solid and without cracks if I am to despise one thing and admire the other? If I can’t take you as a whole, I do have to forget about the complexity of your multiple facets. Look from a vantage point at the matter that forms your creation from one side only, ignoring the rest. Betraying your essence. You do that to me every single time I pick up one of these books. And the more I read the more amazed and confused I am, because I can’t stand on firm grounds. I can only go on and on until words are over. But the conflict remains.

  • Yes and no

    I can’t concentrate, but apart from that things seem to be in a rather stagnant state. Some questions occasionally get better, some others the opposite. Things break easily and need replacement. People do the same, in a more tragic manner most of the times. They ask for attention, sometimes imperatively. But it’s nothing worth noting anyway.
    When you meet somebody you know in the street you’re supposed to greet them, but this is a custom that’s falling into disuse more and more. The others of my generation and I just pretend we don’t know each others, we ignore our reciprocal presence. Then we’re supposed to acknowledge ourselves once again in critical times. I’m digressing again.
    I really do not know what I should be writing about. Everybody seem to have so much to say. I just want to retreat in my own space, wherever it is.