I dance a tango with my hubris ...

There was once a story that I read. The Yellow Wallpaper. I don’t remember exactly the “action”, but I do remember how it made me feel. Loneliness in an absurd, meaningless world, struggling among words, hopelessly grasping for air.

Everyone should have ”the people” near them, no matter what, or at least this is how the ancient story of humanity goes, this is how the bedside stories tell us, the films, the fairytales or the books that we read. My Bible. Beyond the success that you have, and the small or the big victories, for each of us there should be somewhere a peaceful, meaningful Ithaca. And instead of this, some of us receive in their lives only cold shoulders, duties, responsibilities, pain, indifference, remorse, and so damn much heaviness.  

I envy and I cannot understand people who have this promised story and aren’t able to see what they have next to them, who are unable to get up, to follow their dreams. I want to hit them and make them feel for a second a Yellow Wallpaper. I have always seen Ithaca, with its warmth people from inside, a nucleus, with such energy that someone can overcome all the problems from his/her road. The God, my God, the one that matters God. It doesn’t matter the money (who the fuck has it?), where we live, how far we want to go, how many things we have to do. Nobody’s life is perfect, but Ithaca is the heartbeat of our victories, of what human being means. And at the end, if this turns out to be a Camus story, then where did we go wrong, how bigger were our sins to deserve that, for what we have lived, what was the worth of all these?....

I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing ...

I'd like to build the world a home

And furnish it with love

Grow apple trees and honey bees

And snow white turtle doves

Seen. Heard. Loved. Understood. Appreciated. As probably the best TV series that I have ever seen puts it in its last episode (but not only there) these are the things that people – broken or “normal” – keep on searching in their roads.

It's been a long time since I wanted to write about Mad Men, but there are too many things to be said and felt about this TV series. I think that Life is not a simple story where happiness means a home with a child and a wife in it + a successful career, but maybe it’s simply about what you feel inside yourself: the haunted wounds from within, the wars with yourself, the culture and the time when you are born. I also believe that there are different ways to watch it: from a surface level, where we see only the adventures of some characters, judging their lives, from a historical and cultural point of view – an image of (the) America(n) dream, from a psychological perspective, or from a personal point, from Person to Person.

"My name's Leonard and I don't know if there's anything that complicated about me. And so I should be happier, I guess.[…] But I've never been interesting to anybody. I, m-- I work in an office. People walk right by me. I know they don't see me. And I go home and I watch my wife and my kids. They don't look up when I sit down.
[…] It's like no one cares that I'm gone. They should love me. I mean, maybe they do, but I don't even know what it is. You spend your whole life thinking you're not getting it, people aren't giving it to you. Then you realize they're trying and you don't even know what it is.
[…] I had a dream I was on a shelf in the refrigerator. Someone closes the door and the light goes off, and I know everybody's out there eating.
And then they open the door and you see them smiling. And they're happy to see you, but maybe they don't look right at you, and maybe they don't pick you. And then the door closes again. The light goes off."