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An interesting episode from Italian history. Every time I feel mawkish or meek overcome by the million needles that are shot at my brain by those who wish to do me harm or spiritual violence (lady at Whole Foods who tells me I cannot grab & eat food from the hot bar with my fingers, girl at gym who refuses to make eye contact with me, Mother), I have to remind myself that this can be my life one day if I play my cards right. From the article:
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âOn Sept. 12, 1919, flanked by a few black-clad former army buddies, known as âarditi,â dâAnnunzio marched on the city â over the exasperated objections of the Italian government. âEcce homo,â he announced from the governorâs mansion, echoing the words of Pontius Pilate in the Gospel of John when he recognizes that Jesus is the Messiah. DâAnnunzio was saying it about himself.
DâAnnunzioâs strange, chaotic 15-month rule over the city began. He mandated daily poetry readings, regular concerts and constant fireworks. Soldiers were commanded to celebrate not with the vulgar âhip, hip, hurrah,â but âEia eia alalĂ !â â his Italianized interpretation of the Greek battle cry of Achilles in The Iliad. A constitution established an anarcho-syndicalist, corporatist state, in which one of the corporations was designed to represent the superior Ăbermensch. (DâAnnunzio was heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche.)
The city became a haven for all kinds of misfits and miscreants: occultists, vegetarians, futurists, practitioners of free love. Venereal disease outstripped any other malady by a factor of 10. Drug use skyrocketed. Ethnic Croatians were quietly, or not so quietly, expelled. Political opponents were routinely humiliated: The âarditiâ pioneered the punitive use of castor oil, a noxious laxative, which they forced their enemies to drink. And dâAnnunzio, the âdivine leader,â presided over it all.â
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If you had the ability to seize tyrannical control over your city, what would you do? Iâd demolish the highways & replace them with waterways. Iâd inaugurate the newly made 405 canal with a maiden voyage on a pleasure barge with purple sails flying the Jolly Roger. Iâd use similar engineering technology used during the creation of the Panama Canal to flood the San Fernando  Valley in its entirety.
Did you know that 40 million years ago, the San Fernando Valley was part of a complex of inland oceans? You can feel this still. When the night is coming on in purple & pink, when the air is heavy & dry, when the palm trees are swaying in the warm & silent breezeâ you can see the ghosts of Archelons swimming among the fronds.Â
For posterity, I will cultivate an orange orchard at my villa on one of the islands of the San Gabriel Archipelago. When the time for harvest comes, I wonât lift a finger to pluck them. Iâll wait for them to overripe & fall to the earth. Only then will I peel them open & eat them
Apr 28, 2024
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I say this because I appear to have lost, no, mislaid your favor, since you have gone a long time without writing me, and I was doubtful whence the cause could arise. And of all those that came to my mind I took little account except for one, when I feared you had stopped writing to me because someone had written to you that I was not a good warden of your letters; and I knew that, apart from Filippo and Pagolo, no one else had seen them on account of me. I regained your favor by your last letter of the 23rd of last month, where I was very pleased to see how orderedly and quietly you exercise this public ofÂfice; and I urge you to continue so, for whoever lets go of his own convenience for the convenience of others, only loses his own and gets no thanks from them. And because ForÂtune wants to do everything, she wants us to allow her to do it, to remain quiet and not give trouble, and to await the time at which she allows men something to do; and then it will be right for you to give more effort, to watch things more, and for me to leave my villa and say: âHere I am.â
Therefore, wishing to return equal favors, I cannot tell you in this letter of mine anything other than what my life is like, and if you judge that it should be bartered for yours, I will be content to exchange it.
I stay in my villa, and since these last chance events occurred, I have not spent, to add them all up, twenty days in Florence. Until now I have been catching thrushes with my own hands. I would get up before day, prepare traps, and go out with a bundle of cages on my back, so that I looked like Geta when he returned from the harbor with Amphitryonâs books; I caught at least two, at most six thrushes. And so passed all September; then this pastime, though annoying and strange, gave out, to my displeasure. And what my life is like, I will tell you. I get up in the morning with the sun and go to a wood of mine that I am having cut down, where I stay for two hours to look over the work of the past day, and to pass time with the woodÂcutters, who always have some disaster on their hands either among themselves or with their neighbors. And regarding this wood I would have a thousand beautiful things to tell you of what happened to me with Frosino da Panzano and others who want wood from it. And Frosino in particular sent for a number of loads without telling me anything, and on payment wanted to hold back ten lire from me, which he said he should have had from me four years ago when he beat me at cricca at Antonio GuicciarÂdiniâs. I began to raise the devil and was on the point of acÂcusing the driver who had gone for it of theft; but Giovanni Machiavelli came between us and brought us to agree. Batista Guicciardini, Filippo Ginori, Tommaso del Bene, and some other citizens, when that north wind was blowing ordered a load each from me. I promised to all, and sent one to Tommaso which in Florence turned into a half-load because to stack it up there were himself, his wife, his servant, and his children, so that they looked like Gabbura with his boys when he bludgeons an ox on Thursday So when I saw whose profit it was, I told the others I had no more wood; and all have made a big point of it, especially Batista, who counts this among the other disasters of Prato.
When I leave the wood, I go to a spring, and from there to an aviary of mine. I have a book under my arm, Dante or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid, and such. I read of their amorous passions and their loves; I remember my own and enjoy myself for a while in this thinking. Then I move on along the road to the inn; I speak with those passing by; I ask them news of their places; I learn various things; and I note the various tastes and different fancies of men. In the meantime conies the hour to dine, when I eat with my company what food this poor villa and tiny patrimony allow Having eaten, I return to the inn; there is the host, ordinarily a butcher, a miller, two bakers. With them I become a rascal for the whole day, playing at cricca and tric-trac, from which arise a thousand quarrels and countless abuses with insulting words, and most times we are fighting over a penny and yet we can be heard shouting from San Casciano. Thus involved with these vermin I scrape the mold off my brain and I satisfy the malignity of this fate of mine, as I am content to be trampled on this path so as to see if she will be ashamed of it.
When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the anÂcient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.
And because Dante says that to have understood withÂout retaining does not make knowledge, I have noted what capital I have made from their conversation and have composed a little work De Principatibus [On Principalities], where I delve as deeply as I can into reflections on this subject, debating what a principality is, of what kinds they are, how they are acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost. And if you have ever been pleased by any of my whimsies, this one should not displease you; and to a prince, and especially to a new prince, it should be welcome. So I am addressing it to his Magnificence, Giuliano. Filippo Casavecchia has seen it; he can give you an account in part both of the thing in itself and of the discussions I had with him, although I am all the time fattening and polishing it.
You wish, magnificent ambassador, that I leave this life and come to enjoy your life with you. I will do it in any case, but what tempts me now is certain dealings of mine which I will have done in six weeks. What makes me be doubtful is that the Soderini are there, whom I would be forced, if I came, to visit and speak with. I should fear that at my return I would not expect to get off at my house, but I would get off at the Bargello, for although this state has very great foundations and great security, yet it is new, and because of this suspicious; nor does it lack wiseacres who, to appear like Pagolo Bertii, would let others run up a bill and leave me to think of paying. I beg you to relieve me of this fear, and then I will come in the time stated to meet you anyway.
I have discussed with Filippo this little work of mine, whether to give it to him or not; and if it is good to give it, whether it would be good for me to take it or send it to you. Not giving it would make me fear that at the least it would not be read by Giuliano and that this Ardinghelli would take for himself the honor of this latest effort of mine. The neÂcessity that chases me makes me give it, because I am becoming worn out, and I cannot remain as I am for a long time without becoming despised because of poverty, besides the desire I have that these Medici lords begin to make use of me even if they should begin by making me roll a stone. For if I should not then win them over to me, I should complain of myself; and through this thing, if it were read, one would see that I have neither slept through nor played away the fifteen years I have been at the study of the art of the state. And anyone should be glad to have the service of one who is full of experience at the expense of another. And one should not doubt my faith, because having always observed faith, I ought not now be learning to break it. Whoever has been faithful and good for forty-three years, as I have, ought not to be able to change his nature, and of my faith and goodness my poverty is witness.
I should like, then, for you to write me again on how this matter appears to you, and I commend myself to you.
Be prosperous.
Nov 8, 2023
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Bring forth to mind, if you will, the ill-fortuned Orpheus; Odysseus, ill-fortuned but cruel- and cleverest-enough to make it forward; now lovely Inanna; loving Dante; Fritti and Ida and so many other brothers and sisters; so many poems, songs; yes, meet me tonight in Atlantic City; Iâm in love with a dying man, yes, yes; now the post-midnight train to Coney Island, smiling in the summer, tears in November; a minivan to Cape May one grey day; prison-taxi down to Long Beach with the sun coming up; one thousand leaps into the East River and the Danube and the Seine and then⊠this is just what comes to mind. Oil pipelines. Black licorice. Oh, coincidentally, have you yet read the fiction-piece One Hundred by brilliant blonde Zans Brady Krohn? (printed, of course, in Heavy Traffic 1 â where else?) Yes, that too comes to mind, naturally, yes, I think so⊠Terrific story. Atlantic City story. So, katabasis story. In more ways than one, really ⊠And following: certain buildings, certain seasons of mood. Iâm running dry. Greenlight on the edge of the dock. Absinthe and stolen vodka. âCuriousity killed the cat, satisfaction brought it back.â Thatâs half anabasis. Iâm just spitballing. Trying to remember.
May 10, 2023
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Iâm a classic dilettante. I do it all for my own diletto, my own light enjoyment of things. If I had lived in the 19th century I would have spent most of my time in opium dens. As soon as something fails to please me, itâs dead to me. Otherwise, my life is scored by an airy, bright, spacious, sonorous vibrato pitchâ as if a CD box set of Vivaldiâs collected works had fallen on my head while I was out on a morning stroll. I fall in love with every girl I lay eyes on. I will lie on the couch for hours at a time, perfectly still simply because my foot is perfectly wedged between the couch cushion and a throw pillow. I only rise when a homemade latte seems marginally more appealing to me than continuing to stare out the window, at the ceiling, whatever. This post, I sign it with a pen dipped in honey.
May 6, 2024
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sometimes you just need to read some real shit straight from the realest person you know .
Feb 24, 2025
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This is a confession post, not a recommendation, not even much of an anti-recommendation. Tbh it reads like a humilation ritual. Honestly just keep scrolling; it's not worth reading. I'm just posting it because I think I had a point when I first started writing this, one which I lost pretty wuickly. But I spent a good couple of minutes typing this all out, so I'll post it anyway. Thank God I'm anon. If you do read it, please forgive me.
My friend Tyler brought a joint to the super bowl party last night. He handed it to me & told me about how it had weed diamonds in it while I smoked, he told me that it was some good shit and that I wouldn't have to smoke so much of it since I've got such a low tolerance & all, but I could also smoke as much as I liked, seeing as he had a bunch more & that it was the super bowl & we had a bunch of wings on the way anyway, so might as well smoke some more weed so you know what? yeah, i smoked some more weed since what's the harm anyway it's just weed after all.
I've been a mess all day. I've been slow & stupid & disgustingly horny since I woke up this morning; but really honestly since I smoked the weed. If you're one of those types that "actually becomes more functional when you're smoking weed" & that I should "just let people enjoy things" I don't know what to say to you. I'm going to be weird for 4 weeks now and it's all my fault. This happens every time.
Even when it doesn't turn me into a non-verbal paranoiac nutcase, even when it's enjoyable to me in that moment-- I become something lower than a beast. I stand over the platter of chicken wings & gorge until I am sick and then I gorge even more. My stomach becomes distended & my face and fingers are covered in thai curry buffalo chicken fat goo. I waddle around & fart & I find this very funny. I confuse the sound of my own voice with that of my younger sisters & this is incredibly disqueting to me. Do I really sound like that? I become a big confused overgrown fat baby.
I'm going to be be weird for four weeks now. Slow. I was supposed to meet up with my friends to watch Luka's debut for the Lakers. I'm stitting at my desk typing this up; procrastinating going to the gym (which I can NOT neglect [especially after my evening of spiritual obesity]) & the game starts in 5 minutes. Stupid. Typing out this confession right now is painfully difficult. Every word that I type has the appearance of a whitehead that can't be popped to me. This textbox full of blemishes so infuriatingly, stubbornly, immutably DISGUSTING. I feel sick just reading back what I'm writing here. Once again, if you've made it this far, forgive me. This is a confession, not a recommendation. Disgustingly horny. This one I won't elaborate on. Forgive me.
It's not because I smoked weed. The smoking of the weed was just the first movement in a sequence that had already begun before I'd even accepted the joint from Tyler. My own spiritual weakness is the mantle upon which all of these failings hang. I'm not this way because I smoked weed, I'm this way because I'm the type of guy that smokes weed even though I know what it will do to me. There are 999,999,999 other weeds in my life that I am all too willing to permit myself. I haven't eaten anything but bread & butter all day. The lakers game is starting soon. Off to the gym I go.
Feb 11, 2025
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Mar 4, 2025