I'm carrying three ducks, four porcupines, a silver-coated salad spinner, and a foldable rolling wooden bar fully on my back in my backpack for my mother because neither of us are the least bit interested in checking our luggage. The seven hand-crafted Chilean-made stone wild animals weigh a combined 63 kg and consume easily 3 cubic meters of physical space suspended between my butt and just above the top of my head. The salad spinner, a vintage Philippe Starck-designed collector's item likely stolen from the post-modern kitchen collection (second level) at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, is especially bothersome not so much because of its weight -- which is unprecedented in itself -- but because the art nouveau design is such that the object's "feet", if you will, protrude from the containing cardboard box and dig painfully into my intertransversarii muscle which -- normally -- facilitates movement between the individual vertebrae but that right now simply encourages pain. The folding bar is a whole other story that just truly isn't worth describing in any detail right now save for a rather comical misunderstanding on my mother's part between folding bicycles and folding table bars of which one stores alcohol, the latter, I mean.
The aforementioned items (which leave me no room for any personal items such as, say, a toothbrush, my chewing tobacco, my Stephenie Meyer-signed vampire calligraphy set, or a change of underwear) are gifts for my older sister and by implication her husband, my brother-in-law. We are visiting them in Foggia, which is a medium-sized city in Italy's south-east wasteland where my brother-in-law has been selling his skills, as they say, in the burgeoning technology sector at Z_____ Corporation. He's recently been let go however (the brother-in-law) following a bizarre illegal pancake-whisky incident that does not surprise me in the least of leasts.
We arrive at the train station in Foggia with only partial -- yet permanent -- damage to my infra-spinatus and levator scapulae, and -- worst of all, which I will only learn the extent of in the years to come -- will leave me horribly kyphotic and hence ineligible for a walk-on role in a certain, well, I don't want to get into that right now... We are greeted by my sister and sister's husband. I try to extrude a North American familial greeting embrace to show my joy at her (but definitely not his) site but am overpowered by the overweight and hugely awkward backpack. It's good to see my sister nonetheless, and I put on my show for her somewhat creepy husband. "Hi Pemulis!", I bemoan in a way that appears to come out as a beaming how-do-you-do.
Following a 37-hour transatlantic flight and a 3-hour train ride from Rome I am emotionally -- but involuntarily, mind you -- incapable of not full on requiring some non-negligible time away from my mother for at least a few hours. Though he makes me feel highly uneasy -- disgusting, really -- I agree to accompany Pemulis and my sister to the local English Pub to meet some of their friends. The bar is dirty by even my standards. I refuse beer out of both principle and hygiene-related apprehension of a presentimental nature. I meet Armenians, Pakistanis, Lithuanians, Americans. But strangely few Italian people. I scoff to myself (silently, inwardly) that you need social skills to meet the locals; this international ragtag group of miscreants are made for each other and have clearly sought each other's company out of a pure gut-bred need where each denied to him/herself initially that they would sink this low but ultimately was forced to come around. Each one is stranger than the next complete with horrid disfigurements that make Pemulis look right at home. Whereas typically you surround someone with grotesqueness and they start to look better -- you say hey! at least Suzy isn't THAT bad -- somehow this amalgam of fright builds malformation upon miscreation and you actually begin to see things that probably should have but didn't until now give you a severe case of the howling fantods. These are not the type of people you would ever want to leave alone with your sister (woops!). I plead to my sister with my eyes to for god's sake get us out of here. She thankfully obliges and as I see my mother peacefully sleeping on an IKEA fold-out mattress I am flooded with guilt; I hug her tightly until the morning sun arrives. She brings me a coffee and says Good Morning! I role my eyes and put in my iPhone earbuds. Don't these things go any louder, I wonder?
This morning I have gained some perspective. Life is about trade-offs, balances, experiences, and of course all vampire-related media/paraphernalia: books, films, video-games, comic books, interactive augmented-reality roll playing adventures, branded toys and articles such as lunchboxes, thermoses, and backpacks (that hold enormous amounts of articles, by the way), posters, playing cards, stationary, etc. And so when creepy brother-in-law offers to take me for a bike ride in the mountains, while my first reaction is on the flight side of Walter Bradford Cannon's fight-or-flight, I weigh the experience of biking through dramatic scenery hundreds and sometimes thousands of metres above sea-level with his inane comments and strange compulsion to want to discuss "young person" stuff with me (does he not realize he's something north of ten years older than me and our generation [yes, it is most certainly an entirely different generation] has no idea what a DiscMan is and furthermore could you please stop accepting my friends' friend requests on Facebook because they're MY friends, not YOUR friends, and that just adds to your creepiness you big weirdo; oh and don't even get me started on the atonal, keyless, out of- really anything related to music in any way, shape, or form - incessant singing that never, really just never ever, ends) and I decide "what the hey" and go for it. Good decision in the end because this place is a bike-rider's paradise.
We watch a Mordecai Richler book-inspired film spread over two non-successive nights. I feign boredom and pretend to be fully and completely absorbed in my new vampire ebook on my Amazon (TM) Kindle (TM) but am in fact heavily engrossed -- captivated, even -- in/by the film. My brother-in-law takes great pain to point out the inaccuracies with respect to the book (which I'm convinced he does simply to prove that he's read the book and I find ungodly annoying, much like most everything that dimwit does) on which it's based such as the fact that they replaced Toronto with New York and Paris with Rome; but no one really cares about that sort of change in my opinion.
We visit the Corno Grande in the Appennino Meridionale mountain range to hike. BiL makes 70-year-old corny joke again and I turn the music up even more in my iPod. To prove how tough he is (note: not at all) BiL swims in a glacier-fed lake that we get to in the mountains. Unfortunately for him (but making my day for me) he is horribly (further) disfigured when an itinerant cold-water octopus mistakes his face for a mate and we spend the rest of the afternoon in an Italian emergency ward. I move on to The Apprenticeship of Bella Swan Volume XIV on my Kindle (TM) and turn my iPod volume up beyond its theoretical factory-set maximum. Unfortunately for me (but probably making his day) the damage is less than originally predicted by Italian doctors and he -- extremely unfortunately -- will not live out the remainder of his days with an octopus tentacle dangling from his chin (as was also originally prognosticated by Dr. Frederico Belluci, Emma.Dolce.).
Hours that seem to morph into days that somehow melt beneath me into the worn scratched wooden floor pass through us as we futilely attempt to plan a trip for us four (the octopus incident has incited a panic-fueled desire to flea this part of the country). We can't decide whether we should rent a car or go to the Adriatic on the east coast or the Mediterranean on the west. When we finally do make a decision it's been so long that the possibility has already vanished either due to no longer extent car-renting possibility or accommodation. The tension in the room is so thick that it really does feel like I'm moving my limbs while underwater and I might even pull out the one could cut it like butter cliché but I think I'll save that for another time. My headache returns. It's a hard, focused pain. Like one of those extra-strong blue laser pointers burning through a highly focused point on a slab of thin bone resting gingerly at the apex of my skull that sends bone splinters flying in all directions only to be rebounded against other primary pain receptors that seem to have been placed just-so by Satan himself and in turn causing additional surrounding damage. The headache causes a not-at-all pleasant claustrophobic feeling that makes me feel as if I'm drowning in a fiery, yet still watery, abyss. This, combined with the aforementioned air thickness due to human-induced psychotropical room-tension begins to play serious tricks on my brain about the reality of this whole situation: am I really relatively safe (minus Pemulis's relative proximity) in a first-floor apartment? Or am I truly drowning and this is what happens in the final moments of life as your brain struggles to comprehend its demise? I struggle to find my white earbuds and listen to Pink, or even Hedley, to try to push the cranial pain out but I feel almost drunk: my brain-muscle signals are confused and I stumblingly reach for my iPhone just as I receive a text; I imagine it must be what Bella feels when she is finally climaxingly bit in her oh-so-svelt neck by Edward the dreamy Vampire (TM) to join the world of the immortal (oh to be Bella...). The Twilight-themed text-tone on my phone is soothing, and when I see that the message is from the Serendipity Hall organizers who want to know in which time slot I'll be planning my volunteer hours this fall, I suddenly feel relief. The air begins to thin, my breathing returns to normal, and the pain in my head subsides. Someone suggests we just take the train to Rome (where we're flying out of anyways) and we all say sure! Great idea!
Rome is Rome. There are Americans and we hope to do the uje: Castel Sant'Angelo, the Coliseum, the Vatican. Pemulis thinks he's pretty cool from having lived here in something like the 90's but I question whether this city even existed that long ago. He acts like he knows where everything is; what a poser. BiL is getting on my nerves and if he responds to one of my suggestions to visit ZZZ with "I've already done ZZZ" I swear I'll murder him right here right now and not in an unproud fashion. Mother asks for pictures to be taken by me but won't actually take them herself. I solder the motherboard of my iPhone back together following some technical transmogrifications and realize that I've succeeded in again allowing it to pump out even more watts [ed: amps?] and turn my music up that little extra bit which, thankfully, is exactly what was required at this particular moment in the universes's existence.
Genius over here (I better just be real full-on explicit here and point out freely and clearly in all soberness and complete honesty that I use that in the most sarcastic form possible) has got us lost on the way to some book shop he wants me to visit. I'm sure it's some kind of attempt to impress me with his supposed quasi-intellectual put-on disgusting -- and frankly kind of insulting -- display of world knowledge when it comes to "Rome Kitsch" and really, let me ask, who would come all the way to Italy to visit an English-language bookstore in the first place? But I digress. The point is that we're now lost though not nearly as lost as the seven hundred Americans that have asked me for directions to the closest ice cream stand in the last thirty six minutes seem to be. I pull out a map and decide to take charge. But this city is not laid out following North American standards, no siree-Bob. Just trying to find the route that we've taken so far from our admittedly hip rented apartment is like staring at a bowl of tagliatelle and mentally unfurling each sticky, twisted, glistening strand. Pemmy (as me and my brother call him behind his back. In fact -- quick digression -- due to the hilarious similarity between our secret nickname for him and the name of Inspector Gadget's niece Penny we tend to download his Facebook pictures and draw a blonde wig on to his bald head and laugh and giggle like school girls; oh wait, another digression: how does one lose all his hair by the age of 30? What a shitty lottery ticket my sister ended up drawing with that one. But I can look at this self-interestedly. Now I'm not getting married until I'm at least 50; that way, if he hasn't lost his hair by then, he'll probably be keeping it) eventually takes over and we find the restaurant which ends up being not bad. But that just makes things even worse because he then gets that god-awful self-congratulatory smug dumb-looking smile that tries to say "look how smart I am" but ends up really just conveying "look how much of a creepy bald asshole I am!".
And the worst of all are his idiot "look at me!" wannabe avant-gard meta-fiction blog posts, if you can even call them that, the blog posts, I mean. Have you ever read such redundant self-congratulatory, self-aggrandizing, clichéd trite bullshit in your entire life? Newsflash to Pemulis: you're about as original as an Instagramed plane wing that's gone through low-fi and been tilted 20 degrees to the horizontal, and definitely less clever. And you're no DFW! In fact, you're not even a Perez Hilton [ed: burn!]. God, you know these attention-seeking hypocritical aspirational intellectuals with Ph.D.'s from fourth-level schools in a useless subject so they can force others to address them as "Doctor" who measure themselves by the books on their shelves -- and who only read said books so they can put them on said shelves so other social-climbing vapid airheads who contribute nothing to society like themselves can see how anti-stupid they are when they only choose said books because someone told them that those are the books they have to read to impress same and then they look down on actual literature that in fact is full-on enjoyable which in itself is proof that Stephenie Meyer is a true genius because these arrogant fucks have to spend all their time breaking her down because her production [in a literary sense] is just eons, metaphorically speaking, above anything ever written by some effeminate French socialite named following a wine-drenched ass-kissing aristocratic get-together where his dumbshit parents thought the way to say Cheers used by their German equally effeminate socialite ass-kissing aristocratic guests when they clinked their crystal diamond-infused champagne flutes together would result in a good name [ed: but Proust is his last name] -- are just the worst, in my personal opinion. But then, despite how bad they are, I guess he's not as bad as the fictional doctor House lovers in my former undergraduate program who walk around with black Nike's ordered directly from the Fox syndicated-program's online product guide in jeans too small to fit their fat asses and who gained said fat asses from staying up all night eating Creatine bars to stay awake through their umpeenth Doctor House marathon. To just kind of clear up that final point above there, those people are truly the worst.
