The Last Sun

Mocking like the drop that just eroded the rock falls from a freshly repaired faucet, here I am all intent on snatching another handful of minutes of sunshine and sea from the impending bad season. Swimsuit, backpack, quality music in Chinese wireless headphones, strolling through semi-deserted streets as if summer would never end. Or as if this, in the middle of another improbable autumn, was enough to postpone its euthanasia, catapulting me directly into next advanced spring.

I know very well that the days will inevitably get shorter and colder, of course. Beach towel and bottle of fresh water will soon be replaced by blanket and hot cup. Totally agree.

That is not the point. It is that I try to become impermeable, in turn, to the grayness and negativity that the season and life itself are currently throwing in my face, day after day. React, one has to react: which, for me, must no longer mean simply avoiding resignation or even just resisting.

Once again, I choose cats as my teachers. Thanks to them, I have convinced myself that when I have acquired the superpower of feline indifference, I will find something beautiful even where it does not exist. I will identify in hell what is not hell, to save it, take care of it and raise it (with many apologies to the great Italo Calvino for yet another inappropriate quotation). In the same time, I will uninterest to everything else, including worries about a past that can no longer be changed and anxieties about a future that cannot be predicted.

But first, I must learn to stop adapting to circumstances in order to adapt circumstances to myself. Just like cats do. Is the top of the wall too high to reach? I contemplate it for a while and then discard it. I get off the roof of the car and go to perch on the closest tree, which is even more congenial to me. Or I stay here, enjoying the warmth of this improvised steel pethouse. Any place is good for keeping an eye on the world and napping when the eye gets tired. It works, at least in theory.

In practice, today that (still) non lavoro, resto nudo e manifesto / contro i calci di rigore sulla traversa [I do not work, I remain naked and manifest against penalty kicks rifled against the crossbar] I repeat to myself humming the old Bandabardò’s workhorse. I would gladly send all adversity to hell, cars, trees, chance, gods and anyone else who opposes the pursuit of my happiness, without paying too much attention to who or what, at the moment, hinders me, or what I lack; but I do not, even that is all wasted energy.

I wait for the rain to dance in it, with the same attitude and in the same way I am enjoying the last sun.