My son's apartment has become a sick-bay, the four of us laid low with another flu-like virus: I managed to get through an hour-long call in Italian with a local lawyer, propped up with paracetamol and black tea.
A reflective moment in an ancient church, lighting candles for half a dozen friends, guardian angels, who whisper words of wisdom (which I heed):
@liznangel3.bsky.social, @catingrams.bsky.social, @yanina.bsky.social, @hystericalblkns.bsky.social, @kimcarsons4.bsky.social, @masakepic.bsky.social
Nothing in Italy moves in a straight line.
Tomorrow, we meet with a lawyer regarding the proposed lease contract for the apartment we want. There's a grey area in it that relates to our immigration status (isn't there always?) so we need advice.
Good news: we can stay another 10 days with our son.
#auspol if you actually want political change you have to behave in an unpredictable way.
Mine, too. A refurbed iPhone 11.
"The new calculations reveal that following a relative sea level rise of 1 metre, it is estimated that 37% more coastal areas will fall below sea level, affecting up to 132 million individuals."
"Globally, the research found ocean levels are an average of 30cm higher than previously believed, but in some areas of the global south, including south-east Asia and the Indo-Pacific, they may be 100-150cm higher than previously thought."
[sigh]
"...We estimate that a million satellites could mean that a teragram (one billion kgs) of alumina accumulates in the upper atmosphere – enough, alongside launch emissions, to significantly alter atmospheric chemistry and heating in dramatic ways we do not yet understand."
Despite Google's long-standing assurances and a current disinformation campaign, the #Android mobile operating system will be locked-down in 180 days.
If you care about the freedom to control your devices and care about the privacy of you data, visit keepandroidopen.org/
In a conversation between June Jordan and Angela Y. Davis, published in 1990, Jordan said she was concerned about how much despair there is cuz people often take it out on themselves.
She said she wanted a return to rage, where it’s taken out on the system.
Samuel Beckett—whom I like to think of as God’s most ferocious joker—in an interview with John Gruen, in Vogue, in 1969: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” (Rather serendipitously found, and new to me: maybe it’s a line everybody knows. . .)
morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/blm-announ... there's info on who to complain to to try to stop this at the end of the article, lets share this message and try our best to stop it.
My wife, our daughter, and I were supposed to leave our son's apartment the day after tomorrow, just before his flatmates returned from South-East Asia and Turkey. Now we've heard they won't be back for another week, so we can stay a little longer
Which is a relief, because my wife has the flu.
Some days...a series of tortuous conversations with a lawyer, a police officer, a clutch of civil servants and 'our real estate guy' trying to patch a major pothole on the (back)road to getting our lease sorted out.
F.......[screaming]........ck.
Oh, no. A very lucky find (my wife's) not far from Piazza degli Eroi.
"It is a spectacular part of the world. Way too beautiful for man’s inhumanity to man. In winter, the wind combs the ridges clean before snow is laid down like a vast cold white duvet. In summer, dust rises in amber veils. Silence, though, is always brief..."
"For years the border has simmered—tense, theatrical, contained within the oddly fetching grammar of skirmish and denial. That grammar now seems broken."
– Peter Bach, @lyst.bsky.social, on a history of suspicion and conflict along the disputed Afghanistan/Pakistan border.
Up early this morning to get across town and submit our application for the small apartment my wife and I viewed on Saturday. Approval is still an each-way bet but we are allowing ourselves a frisson of excitement.
Late night reading: Jazz Revolutionary: The Life and Music of Eric Dolphy by Jonathon Grasse.
If you and yours make it to here, come stay.
the Orwellian ‘Board of Peace’ has launched its first war
Good news (finally): we have found a small apartment. We meet with the agent again on Monday to negotiate the lease,
We stopped at a couple of churches along the way back to Ostiense to light candles (yeah, two faithless souls resorting to prayer and cheap offerings to end their wandering).
Breathe, I say. To myself, to my double, to the other. Breathe.
(notes)
conch / sankh
Kaliyuga / ‘The Age of Iron’
a black cloud
flowers
.
beginning & end, before
& after, are only
dreams, one dream
and then the sea …
Another day of medical appointments and impromptu performance art — our wayward youngest trying to describe a urine sample jar to a non-English-speaking pharmacist in Ostiense:
"You know, a piss cup...the lab across the street says I need one."
"Nobody remembers how the hooligan-muse of the ‘50s Beat Generation, Neal Cassady ended up as the Prankster’s wheelman... The novelist Robert Stone described Cassady as 'the world’s greatest driver, who could roll a joint while backing a 1937 Packard onto the lip of the Grand Canyon.'”
The heavily modified, psychedically painted school bus, named Further, with its perpex observation dome above the driver's seat and a roodtop sun deck.
Ken Kesey inside the bus: looking more like a college frat boy than a hippie dopehead, the author Ken Kesey (famed for the 1962 novel, 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest') as a young man.
On the road across America with Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters, 1964:
"It’s all a myth now, anyway. Tell it however you want."
– Ken Babbs, one of the original Merry Pranksters
ccohanlon.tumblr.com/post/6832138...
Below: The Pranksters aboard the modified school bus, Furthur, and Ken Kesey
A writer went investigating a homicide case. Instead, he found an SF relic.
Doug Kari discovered a journal that belonged to a Merry Prankster who went by the name Cool Breeze
Rescued last summer, with us since September — her stability and support is one of the reasons (the other was my heart attack) why we moved ashore. We're so bloody grateful to our son, who has sheltered us all in his Rome flat for a couple of months.
