Fucked Up

It is a bad period for me. No money, no job, almost no friends.

The worst of all?

93% of my life has been like this, of which these last 11 years are just a minor part, and  ´- to be honest - I often felt much worse.

In all my life, I only got three good years - more like, two and a half.  From 1999 to 2001.

The years during which I left my stupid mason job, and went back to college.

For two years and a half, I was happy and thought that my future could, actually, improve.  That there would have been some gratification, after the delays.

I believed that, when I would have had my piece of paper, I could have looked for a good job - one decently paid and not completely idiotic, maybe with a shadow of a perspective of career, I didn't need more - and maybe even moved out of home, in the long term.

Then, entering the last year of college, I made a stupid mistake: I went in "Erasmus" to Paris.

Which could have been good, had I done it the right way -  though it was only a six month period, which was not so good in reality.

I made the single most stupid mistake someone can make, going in Erasmus.

I studied my ass off, the whole time.

It is the last thing one should do, going as an exchange student in a foreign country whose language he knows only a little better than marginally. Really, I am not kidding.

By the time one manages to overcome the language gap, chances are the academics degree are fucked up anyway, and to redress it is just too much effort. Better to forget it and just enjoy the ride - let Erasmus be an Orgasmus, as they say. 

I was out of home, living on my own for the first time in my life (my stint in the Italian national service didn't really count -  I was 30 km from home, and had a day home every three, motly spent working at fixing our hose), having to handle a language that I didn't really know well in a country whose inhabitants - in my experience - aren't very democratic toward foreigners who do not speak the local lingo.

To compound things, the campus was in Noisy Le Grand-Mont d'Est (that you may know, as Terry Gilliam shot some of Brazil scenes there) and on the other side of the street from the students' dormitories was a nice block of passably angry Sub-Saharan immigrants and their descendants, that us students were friendly encouraged to avoid - apparently, the locals didn't like what they saw as rich spoiled brats, and tended to show their dislike by flashing knives every now and then.

I, also, arrived there on September 7, 2001. Four days later... well, you may know what happened.

To echo the great American fuck-up, some local idiot found in his heart the need to bomb -  with a tiny little bomb, that did almost no damage but a symbolic one - one of the external walls of the campus main building.

It darkened my mood,  having to show my ID to a blackwateresque guy every time that I entered the place.

All of which drove my basic antisocial tendencies up to eleven, and I spent the whole six months mostly alone - but for a poor Czech doctorate student, that had to share the flat with a very depressed Italian - studying the IT stuff, studying French and reading French books bought on the banks of the Seine.

As I said, unfortunately the exchange there was only six month long - unfortunately because it ended right when I was starting to get  maybe, a bit better - if I can believe something that my brother told me years after.

So I went back to Italy probably too early, having passed the stupid courses that I had to pass, but also having lost any hope of being able to function outside of my co-dependence with my mother (i.e. any hope whatsoever).  

Another way my "Erasmus" proved to be a fuck-up was that I lost the occasion to choose the kind of "internship" that could have proven better for me.

Being, as I am, a lover of hardware tinkering, I should have gone for something in industrial electronics... but those places were already "gone" by the time I came back, so I finished doing simple programming in an office of the very same university where I was studying.

And by the time I got my piece of paper, my mother - with whom I was, and still am living with... she is almost deaf, almost blind and near impossible to withstand without the oversized streak of masochism that I unfortunately possess, so offloading her was and is more than a bit difficult - was in full panic mode, and more or less forced me to stay working there.

To be honest, it was not bad.

The pay was on the lowish side of things, but I liked my colleagues - and my chief was smart enough to never give me an actual order (something that my father, little authoritarian dickhead that he was, never really understood... I may not rebel overtly, because I have been shown time and again that it has no purpose or effect, but give me an order and you may as well die before truly comply... "passive-aggressive" is all I am).

The man, wisely, just went on with "there is something to do that is a bit on the odd side - would you mind looking into it?" - and off I went with all my might. 

It was an underpaid job (less than 20 k a year - for an IT engineering graduate, living in one of the most expensive areas of Italy) and I tried way too hard to fill my unreasonable ideal of the necessary proficiency on the job  (years later, I discovered that they had to replace me with three consulting guys, each one paid a good 40% more than me - it is, in equal parts, a source of pride and anger).

Many days I felt like my head was cracking open in the middle, and I also knew that chances of career there were nil.

And that job was, by far, the brightest spot of my life back then.


Because it kept me out of home, and away from my mother - who spent all the twelve+ hours I wasn't there dreaming up terrors to crash on my head when I was back.

Do you remember the SARS epidemics of 2003, in Hong Kong? No, right?

I do remember the stupid, stupid, stupid thing.

For more than six months, my mother was scared to death that I could get it, having to go to work in the "big city" of Milan.

And when that scare was over, she went for the successive one, and also kept opening my bank statements and checking the meager state of my finances.

So, when she had not an epidemics to use in her scare tactics, she went for the perspective of my impending fall into poorness the day she died, then to the rumors about soon to be instated new taxes, and then back to some new epidemics.

All of this interspersed with descriptions of how some guy in our town had finally divorced from that bitch of his wife, and had found himself forced to go back living with his parents - while the bitch enjoyed the house that he had bought.

Or some other nice story of the same kind.

If I did an hour or two of overtime, she went all crazy with "worrying" and this shit doubled.

In reality, I realized - then as well as now - perfectly well what she was really worried about.

She feared me finding some "whore" - she doesn't think that women can be anything else, really, which while being accurate for a number of them does not cease to be insulting for the others -  and eloping away, leaving her to contend with my brother and his wife.

Which isn't going to happen, because women scare me more than a bit - the little I understand, my mother is on the pathological side, but many of them come from a similar mold. Deep down, in the secret of their hearts, they consider the men in their life little more than resources to exploit to make themselves more comfortable.I hope that they die of endometriosis gangrene.

In summer 2006, things came to a head.

My brother was moving to Spain with his family and his wife, who was a bit concerned about me - seeing that I seemed depressed on an almost suicidal level - convinced him to invite me to join in, and move away from that shitty place.

I wasn't really inclined to go, because I didn't have any project about the future and I didn't understand what I could do in one of the poorest regions of Spain.

To be honest, more than ten years later, I still do not have any idea.

In those same days I had finally asked my mother to stop trying to drive me insane with her inane "worries" and psychotic delusions - because she was succeeding.

I will never forget, or forgive, her answer.

I would have settle on a "I will try".

- And fail because... come on, we are talking about my mom; She never did anything, in her life, that required any serious effort of discipline that had not an almost immediate payoff; we are talking of someone that flunked middle school because of ornamental pattern design! That's something that requires only to understand how to lay a repetitive grid with a T ruler. 

I didn't even get that.

Her answer was

"But, it is my nature."

I think that she never understood how deluding, and how unfair that felt to me - no matter how many times I told her so. But then again, she does not listen to anybody.

Let's be clear.

A  tiny part of MY NATURE would like to kidnap 15 years old girls, and play on them with a screwdriver, or a soldering iron for electric circuits, till the time comes to get rid of their bodies (which kind of stopped me, because I do not believe in the perfect crime, and getting rid of corpses is where most week-end assassins fuck things up).

Needless to say, even today the first thing that I do in the morning is to piss on that part of my nature, and then go about trying to be a decent - although quite seriously flawed - human being.

Less dramatically and more truthfully, it is also not in my nature to accept orders from any external authority whatsoever, or to put effort in stuff that I do not care about (yes, my boss was SLY).

Again, every time I woke up in the morning, I used to piss on that part of my soul too, with a lot less convincing, and go to work.

So , saying that I was deluded by her answer is a tender euphemism.

It killed me inside, and not just a bit.

Because almost any way out of the hole I felt I was in required that, at least, my personal Osama Bin Laden stopped trying to terrorize me for no reason at any imperceptible "mistake" I made, while I scoped for ways out that were meaningful to me.

Instead, she just said "Up Youre Arse, Son".

In nice words, because she likes to use nice words and thinks that it is being polite, but the substance was that. 

Things could have stabilized themselves anyway, over time.

Maybe - or my sister-in-law would have had to come back for my funeral in a year or so.

But one final straw was to be drawn.

That month, after a four years long freeze, the office where I was working was finally allowed to convert some of us temps into "eternal" workers (it is virtually impossible to get fired from an Italian "state" workplace, once you are assumed as "full-time employee" -  not for anything less than killing a co-worker, and even then - maybe).

So, we had a concourse with some tests (very much tailored around the needs of the office, i.e. almost exactly what the various temps were already doing in it - but that's the way in governmental offices and the similar) in which I went OK ( something like 3rd out of 12), till the final test.

Which was a dialog with a psychologist.

A very pretty woman, tall, blonde, young, incredibly nice ass - and that's about all her qualities, as far as I am concerned. Not very perspicacious.

She asked me "What do you think about loyalty to the enterprise?"

The subtle stupidity of the question, in a day and age when even the Japanese - of my generation - had no reason to cherish that shit, pushed me over the edge.

So, I must also be happy, to be an underpaid slave? Really? Loyalty to the enterprise?

From the depths of my soul, a monumental

FUCK OFF!!!

arose.

Less inelegantly, I answered: "It doesn't matter, because I am moving away, out of this damned country!" 

And so, I ended up where I am now.

Fucked Up, but still alive.

For now