A Traveling Apology

A Traveling Apology:


“I have not failed. I've just found 10000 ways that won't work.”- Thomas Edison

We have hijacked a train unknowingly. We stay calm and no one kills us. I have washed my hair. We are only babies. We have reached Orte and passed on the first class biscotti. What more can be asked? I am not asking.


May 30th, 2010


“Oh my land/ it ain’t beneath me/ cause I got my head in the sand/ Oh my land”
–Dr. Dog

Buddha said it is better to live one moment in the way beyond the way. It is always better to live one moment. Jacobi said Ancona is the only city in the world where the sun rises from the hills and sets into the ocean. This happens in June and only in June. In Ancona we see the ocean, the hills, the sun, the sunset, the sunrise...but we do not see this! It is May 30th.


“Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes”- Lewis Carroll

A peacock has said its ok. She will remember this now the rest of her life. She will learn to make a right angle. He was speaking to me through a buffer of six. It’s the eye contact that gives him away, always away. It took six people between us to say anything more about it. He was right, always right. I tried to say anything back without saying anything but it can be so very difficult to talk back to a peacock.


“If you get one hundred percent of mud on you, you turn into a mud monster.” –Gus Varallo

I was once a mud monster too, kid; stuck in the mud in my own backyard, kicking the dirt for feeding me dirt. Everyone loses a shoe or two eventually. If you never lose a shoe, you get stuck in your shoes. You become a shoe monster, which is much worse. A shoe monster cannot wash the shoes off its feet, not even with a power hose!


“Maybe she go/ Maybe she don’t go/ Many time she afraid to go/ many, she do go”
–Odetta

You can tell a bird from a bat because a bat’s wings are in constant motion. A bird flaps its wings three or four times before coasting, and then coasts, and then flaps its wings again. If you throw a rock in the air with enough momentum, a bat will detect the motion and chase it. The bird will not.


On Sheepishness


A sheep cannot shave itself. If it could do you think that it would? Do you think it would learn how to knit itself a sweater?


“Dreadfully sorry/ Apple scrumping/ born in a war/ birthday punching”- The Who

If you are clever no one will ask you the wrong question at the wrong time or when you do not have an answer either, or else if they do by the time you answer they will already have forgotten the question. This is only if you are clever, though.


“I got ninety-nine problems but a bitch ain’t one—hit me” –Jay-Z

I dream we are all on vacation. We wander off and we get a little lost. We end up in what they call a “bar-bar”, the most authentic bar on the trip, so they say. I get a coffee and the waitress says Americans like peanut butter in their coffee and would I like that? I say yes and yes it is delicious. I tip the waitress ninety cents.


“Keep on with the living/ you’ll soon enough be dead”—Dr. Dog

We are entering Roma and we are going to be fine. We are reading the signs and unclenching our thigh muscles.


“You can call me crazy/ you can call me anything you like...even rivers ask for rain”
–Dr. Dog

How strange they are: the shapes of trees separating through a window. The anxious motion of the train feeling anxious and about to vomit. A thing held in will often pass.











Piazza del Gesu: Naples, Italy


“Did she wake you up to tell you that/ it was only a change of plans”—Neil Young

We decide we will go to Napoli. We will ride the train to Napoli. We will get off the first train in Roma. We will get on a train we think goes to Napoli in Roma. We will decide it does not go to Napoli and we will get off. Someone opens the window. We will decide it does go to Napoli and we will get back on. We will end up in Napoli, down a row of skyscrapers. An old man walks us a mile to the metro. He counts the stops out on his fingers, saying every stop before and then: Mergellina, Mergellina. He flies down the staircase. We try to show him our tongues where they’ve gone numb. We try to thank him.


“And the promise of finding a cat you can count on is more than just reading the comics.”—F.D. Reeve

The awnings were all coming down around us. The street pajamas, which had not sold were being pulled & roped into cardboard boxes. The fish were being washed and boxed. Their heads were being all cut off. We ended up in a room of bunk beds. We bumped eachother’s heads. We washed our feet off in the ocean.



Il Grotto Azure (Capri)


A man lays back flat against me through a tunnel & we end up in a cave.

The bluest water in the world is half-green.



Pompeii


“Nor can I go on, without a reflection on those accidental meetings, which, though they happen every day, seldom excite our surprize but upon some extraordinary occasion...How many seeming accidents must unite before we can be cloathed or fed.”
—The Vicar of Wakefield

We are going to Pompeii to see the people who died there; to go into their houses. I do not say I have met these people once before; that I have stood in their kitchens on a grass carpet and seen a purple flower growing there, as a lizard skitters quickly to the wall.




Napoli: Piazza del Gesu (& beyond)


“No, I don’t need no doctor/ to tear me all apart”—Dr. Dog

L’Oriental University is where they learn the languages, says the travel agent we meet outside a bar called Blue Moon. He wants to move to America, maybe he can live with me? To go there forever, that is my dream. He watches MTV. There is no money. It is my home. But the money here is no good. The most important moment in history of Napoli is this church. This is a church and a monastery. Across the street is a Tabacchi machine. I feed the machine five euro and it spits out a carton of Lucky Strikes.



Ostello Mergellina


“The radio was blasting/ someone’s knocking at the door/ I’m lookin’ at my girlfriend/ She’s passed out on the floor/ I’ve seen so many things I ain’t ever seen before”- Odetta

Old folks (I am guessing) from a home sit in a row. Their backs and the backs of their chairs watching Italian soap operas, sit in the lobby of our “Ostello Mergellina”. The espresso machine drops a cup down but misses the cup with the spoon. A pigeon is heard murmuring through a halfway opened window. The two girls spend an hour pushing buttons for a Coca-Cola.



Il Grotto Azure


“but its calm under the waves/ in the blue of my oblivion”—Fiona Apple

Inside the cave a man rows the boat in a memorized pattern; lazy, slow. He is singing an operetta. His voice booms and echoes around us. Il Grotto Azure is half-green.




The train to Pompei


The train to Pompei is staying put. It sits around and does not leave. At every station they play the same song. It is in English and it has one verse. The verse goes: “I just want to be ok/ be ok/ be ok/ I just want to be ok/ be ok/ be ok.”

--So what was the big crisis?



Mergellina


“And what you thought was a hurricane/ was just the rustling of the wind”—Dr. Dog

In Mergellina we find the Ostello hidden inside a hill and through a tunnel. Inside it is orange. I think of Max and everything is orange. The window does not open. The door never really locks. We live in a room of bunk beds. We collect our bed sheets at the front desk. It is a relief that everything is orange.



Spoleto


“I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!”—Pablo Picasso

Before we leave Spoleto, we are walking down the hill. A bird’s nest is lying in the road. I want to show it to my father and tell him how I found it here. I want him to see the lightning bugs that come out at night all along the path to get here. I hide the bird’s nest in the bushes off the road.


“I’ve been around a long time/ It’s more than I can say/ I’ve searched for the truth/ I’m looking today” -Odetta

I forget to buy apples for the horses. If the horses were cows they would eat stale bread. They would love it. We could stand at the fence for hours. If you just stand still enough, they will always come up to you.


“The engine of curiosity is a lack of knowledge” –Brett Lott

I’ve seen them scared off so many times. They can’t take the rapid movements. You should stop moving. You should become quiet and listen.



Dear Bob,


“You skinned my cat and donned it!”—ferry tanka

I have brought your sweater somewhere it’s never been to before. I have worn it there. I have thought of you.

Dear Bob,


Have you been very alone there, Bob? Would you tell me honestly if you were? I can’t see into your room from here.


Sincerely,


What do you think of when you think of me, Bob? I won’t ask you. There is this one question I have tired of answering here, though. No one believes me. Some of them are answering for me and they are answering wrong but I won’t say it. You know me, Bob. I guess I didn’t want them to know, Bob. Every time they ask the question they think they do not know me yet. They are so very innocent then and I can’t lie to them so it kills me. They ask and I answer. They say why kind of, why really? I pinch my arms.

“And you found another way to tell the truth”—The Morning Benders

I want to be a fox again and also for you to be here. I want to go home and I want the house to be swallowed in a black hole and be gone forever. I want to wipe things clean. I want to forget things. But there are things I would like to remember!



On the train to Feligno


“My voice is climbing walls/ its smoking and I want love”- Jeff Tweedy

I want to feel my own bones and organs with my own un-washed hands. I want the high pitched bell on this train to stop singing. I want to know what your plan is, William. I want to know if you have one. I want to be the cat I see in Mergellina, walking towards us as if out of the sea across the rocks & like a sea-cat.



In the bathroom on the train to Feligno:
I am a cigarette smoker


“Out of my brain on the 5:15” –The Who

Cigarette smokers are restless & cigarettes rest together in packs of twenty on shelves in convenience stores. The stores can be easily found; there is at least one on almost every street that anyone has ever been on. Cigarette smokers spend their money on cigarettes, maybe for this, but maybe for the nicotine, and maybe just to appear a bit more like a dragon.