tl;dr I was in Italy. I liked it. Pictures are here

Tarnishing my sparkle in Tuscany§

During the 12+ hours of travel time with two toddlers and bickering heterosexuals, I began to formulate a concept I called "My Sparkle."

The kids were irritating. The parents were irritating. The airport was irritating. Flying economy for 8 hours was irritating. Based on the time I spent in the back seat listening to different straight couples have identical arguments, I've determined that marriage is a game two people play where they try to get the other person to read their mind and get really, really mad when it doesn't work.

Nonetheless, I was in Italy. I couldn't let small irritations bother me. I dubbed this rare joie de vivre my "sparkle", and I charged myself with protecting it from being "tarnished". This was a tall order.

It felt like everyone around me was totally ungrateful to be in the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life. They could not resist picking stupid arguments and getting pissed off over small things. It was an assault from all fronts on my sparkle.

I found small solace in-- of all places-- Hobbes' Leviathan. He's some 17th century English asshole, and I'd happily suicide bait him on Twitter today. But I couldn't help nodding along with this passage:

Timely Resolution, or determination of what a man is to do, is Honourable; as being the contempt of small difficulties, and dangers. And Irresolution, Dishonourable; as a signe of too much valuing of little impediments, and little advantages: For when a man has weighed things as long as the time permits, and resolves not, the difference of weight is but little; and therefore if he resolve not, he overvalues little things, which is Pusillanimity. (pp. 44)

Pusillanimity. That was the juice my travel companions were slurping. To guard my sparkle from their pusillanimity I had to be the opposite: decisively lackadaisical. I went with every flow, expressed no complaints, smiled through every tantrum, chose the easiest option and objected to no facially bad decisions. It was through this passive fluidity I thought I could preserve my sparkle.

On day two, everyone was too drunk on the boat to complain. Day three began with tears. The last car ride of day four had been suffered in tense silence. On the fifth day, at around two in the morning (Central European Time) I laid awake having uncharitable thoughts, anxiety, and frustration. I was considering the possibility that my sparkle had been tarnished.

It was that day that the parties were splitting. My sister's family and I were leaving for Rome, and I no longer had to stew in that environment.

Wagers and Coercion in Rome§

Throughout my nieces' lives I've collaborated with their parents on methods for convincing them to eat their meals. We've made promises, struck up competitions, offered bribes, and even resorted to blackmail.

A new method presented itself at dinner in a pasta place in Rome: the wager. Conversation with my eldest niece at a dinner revealed she has a concept of something called "nature". "Nature" consists only of stuff like trees and dogs. I told her that, in fact, everything is nature. She fervently disputed the proposition with several examples, which the adults at the table in turn rebuked: the tiles on the wall (stones), the light from the bulbs (electricity, from renewable and non-renewable energy sources), the glass in cups and lenses (superheated minerals),

Her conviction inspired me to turn the conversation into a wager: if I could trace a thing of her choosing back to its natural origin with sufficient fidelity, she had to take a bite of her unfinished bolognese. After some deliberation she shook on the terms with a haughtiness that suggested she had an ace up her sleeve. I was admittedly impressed when she said: plastic. "A long long time ago..."was I began. After

The only thing I couldn't convince either of my neices of was the origin of humans. When asked where they thought their mom came from, my nieces answered: her mom. When asked where they thought their mom's mom came from, they answered: her mom's mom's mom. When I asked where they thought the mother of all mothers came from, they answered: her mom.

I never figured out if my niece's worldview had room for the fundamentals of Darwinism, because at this point we adults were busy herding them to our Vatican tour while imagining kidnappers around every corner.

Getting a boner in Vatican City§

'Herding' is an appropriate term to use, because the mass of humanity at the Vatican is very much a flock. The staff aggressively shepherd tourist through long hallways in the Vatican Museum and the nave of the Basilican San Pietro. I can brag that I've been to the Sistine Chapel, I guess-- you can't really see shit. There's no time to loiter, except in one of the contingent of Vatican Museum Gift Shops.

I felt desire for the first time in years in one of those gift shops.

I was doing some such loitering, waiting for my sister's children to obtain their obligatory souvenirs and thinking about tax-deductible pedophile priests when I saw a beautiful man. As an international tourist destination, this is a commonplace experience in Rome. Tourists are aggressively groomed, shaved, waxed, moisturized and tailored. The stores of the Via Condotti were crawling with such beautiful people.

That's an objective beauty, which does not account for taste. Objectively, the man I saw was not beautiful. But subjectively, to me, he was.

He was a tall, portly bearded man with short, curly hair. He looked like he would be nice to lay on. But what sealed the deal were his shoes. They looked sturdy and comfortable, something like hiking boots-- which would serve you very well plodding around the discombobulated cobble streets of Rome. The sensibility lit my loins. I salivated. I fantasized about the forethought to pack the boots and plan an outfit around them.

The most life-ruining sex I've ever had was in a guy's shitbox sedan. I wouldn't have fucked him if not for that car. It was old, beat to hell and messy. It was practical. New-car smell puts me in fight-or-flight.

Those shoes, that car, are lived-in, unselfconscious, pratical, utilitarian. I unilaterally interpreted them as mating displays.

The gift-shop guy passed me in an instant, but it felt I had stood in the path of a crashing wave, and even now I feel gently tugged back out to sea.

My family came back with their souvenirs. My niece had chosen a rosary necklace, and between the cross dangling from her neck and her overall blond innocence, she looked like a Neo-Nazi's wet dream.

Cancer§

My step-mother's heart stopped beating in 2022. She and my father fought for years to get her on the transplant list. Doctors got her on a medication which raised her T-cell count, then made her get chemotherapy to get it back down, which depressed her immune system. Who knows if the cancer wouldn't have taken hold if they hadn't done that.

The cancer is also likely hereditary: when she was a teen it took her mother, and during the ordeal she was the sole caretaker. If it wasn't heart failure now, it could've been lung cancer or liver failure later. The only thing keeping her alive at the moment in the Left Ventricle Assistive Device (LVAD), which is an extracorporeal pump with tubes surgically grafted to the heart's valves, and which pumps blood in the heart's stead. She can't submerge herself in water, be far away from a hospital, or go anywhere without a back-up pump. Clothing tailored to accommodate the LVAD unit are typically for people many times her size, so she has one or two dresses DIY'd for the purpose.

Italy is it for her. There's nothing after this. She and my father sold their business, and the rental house in Tuscany is what they used the money on. All their children dropped thousands of dollars to make the trip. It was supposed to be nice. Sometimes it was.

I'm not the person my father will need me to be when his wife dies. He used to affectionately compare my personality to a serial killer's. The people who know me the most have called me 'cold' and 'alienating' and 'difficult to talk to'. There's nothing I can really do about that.

I Don't Wanna Die In America§

Sometimes I think about getting out.

They have shit on lock in Italy. You can get a cocktail and espresso at any petrol station. The cars are tiny. I didn't see a single cybertruck for a week. In large parts of Tuscany there's not a single billboard, and the ones they do have aren't even a quarter of the size they are in America. Everything closes in the afternoon and reopens for dinner. There are other ways of doing things.

It doesn't even have to be Italy. I've been to London twice and enjoyed it. I'd like to see Berlin. Maybe I'd move there. Of course, anywhere you go is going to have its problems. Italy's the birthplace of fascism. Europe is getting overrun with Nazis. The UK's the UK.

It's hard not to hate America when all you see of it is the coast-to-coast asphalt, the franchise corridors and toxic sacrificial zones. But I haven't even seen the Appalachian trail despite living very close to it. I haven't seen the vastness of the sky over a Southwestern desert. I haven't seen the sun's last rays leave the continent as it sets below the Pacific. I haven't seen boiling water freeze mid-air when tossed from a pot in a Chicago blizzard.

Am I gonna get out? Do I want to get out? Does anyone really get out?