So many imposing, memorable things have been made, throughout the centuries, for women. Wars, castles, cities, poems, novels, church reforms, pop hits. What have women done (for men, in return)?

Everything that was left to do; they wrote in their hearts every single man’s personal unwritten biography, they recorded and indexed forever in their detail-oriented minds every single picture of men waking up, going to bed, despairing in their self-absorption, shuddering in their orgasms; they’ve arranged millions of family houses, and they’ve invented quadrillions of lullabys, they’ve hated their children without nobody ever knowing it, and they’ve killed all their rivals without a single blood-drop to be wasted, they’ve led men to death and they’ve led men to fame, they’ve led men to marriage and they’ve led men to bankruptcy, they’ve kissed strangers mutely and they’ve cheated without making a sound, they’ve played the victims and they’ve played the witches, they’ve seduced their little boys and they’ve envied their little girls, they fed everybody without bothering to cook, they took care of everybody without bothering to care, they loved power best from the “power of love”, and they loved love best from the “God is love”.

Woman is the world’s most sophisticated thing. And wherever there’s anything to be entangled, you will find her there, entangling. Brewing, spellbounding, making fine little useful pieces of everything out of a huge, rigid, terrifying nothing.

PS: New drawing above called “The Prison”. You know, just to keep my hand is shape, avoiding to get atrophied from typing my nebulous study…

PS2: And a fine little useful piece of music coming from Tori Amos. Among my all time favorites: “Sweet the sting”, live performance (however, the album version is also highly recommended).

Music is the only heavy habit I have and doesn’t make me cringe with embarrassment. For all the rest, I could easily be pilloried. Everyone’d be welcomed then to watch me getting blasted, for I have never believed in merciful treatment and soft-spoken words coming out of many.

Stand up for your habits, friends. There’s no such thing as self-conquest anyway.

People become very suspicious if you actually take time and reflect upon a problem they’ve mentioned. They simply don’t expect you to. They expect you to nod your head and move on. “Don’t touch a thing, don’t stir up debates, leave the world as it is. Who are you to reflect upon my problems? My problems. You must be moonstruck, delirious or pathologically curious if you insist in reflecting upon my problems. My problems.”

Whenever you happen to touch someone’s universe – mistakenly or intentionally – you are reminded that all universes are private and non-interpretable by outsiders. Or insiders. No one is astronomer enough for that.

A personal problem must be addressed through impersonal comments; any other kind of comments (thoughtful comments, responsible comments, controversial comments) are held as insolent attempts to perforate the non-elastic membrane of cliché-statements that keeps a decent personal universe together.

An intuitive mind is a serious menace to the passing-time-attitude which is the most popular way of being among friends. A reflective opinion is an unexpected hit below the belt. And an insult. And, therefore, a perfect opportunity to mock and embarrass the hermeneutist. “Who are you to interpret me? Woody Allen?”

Yes, people are lazy, dishonest and cowards. And they don’t want you to tell them a single meaningful thing. They love their errors and their miseries and they just want to digest them in solitude. And you owe them that.

PS: Best in my iPod today was David Bowie’s “Days” from Reality (2003). Check the YouTube link. This is such a warm, but firm piece of… Reality…

Sometimes, some things just don’t work. The more you try, the less they work. The longer they resist you, the more you are likely to experience first discontentment, then annoyance, then pain, and, well, in the end, you are bound to agonize just like a victim of some terrible natural cataclysm.

All those things that don’t seem to surrender your earnest attempts, your (supposedly) creative efforts and your constant muscle-flexing labor, suddenly become obscurely magic, intense, powerful, feared. Their unavailability certifies their indispensability. You find yourself in a highly (and bizarrely) “spiritual” relationship with them, you improvise rituals to approach them, you make up words of power, you capture them in standardized discourses. You know everything about them while you can’t do a single thing about them. It’s a terrible, passionated and self-perpetuating relationship with your own limits that can literally turn you into the most sinister character of your own life.

Those people whose wellbeing depends on things they cannot do, those people, my friends, are left without a resting place…

PS: This is one of the very few songs that, some/long time ago, have literally changed my life. Some weeks my heart beats exclusively for Velvet Underground. All through those weeks, down for me is up.

How does it feel to have too much work to do? It feels sad, humiliating, destabilizing. You are no longer in control of your life, you just assist at different phenomena happening within you; whatever you write, turns into a lamentable reflection, whatever you say is pittifully inessential, empty, unrealistic. You don’t have the time nor the resources to take a healthy distance from what you’ve become: an inefficient zombie , “someone” who can no longer discern between an excessive statement and a sound judgment, “someone” who can no longer anticipate a textual disaster or a fashion miss/hit, all in all, “someone” who inappropriately approaches every possible life field.

Yesterday I’ve met a dear friend at the airport. And that was a taste of luxury. The luxury of being free from an inhumanly tight schedule, of getting back in my senses, feel the hot summer air, get stuck in the traffic, follow signs, timetables, have a hug and a laugh. From yesterday’s self-consciousness I had to “regress” to today’s amorphous (supposedly “productive”) state of mind once again. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”. And that’s precisely what I’ve done. I’m hopelessly busy.

PS: And here is a track that never ever leaves my iPod. One of my all-time Tom Petty favorites (although sung by Campbell…) And now that you’re here , take yet another heartbreaking classic. Don’t matter how many times I’ve heard it through the years, I still can’t resist those guitars.

Friday. The 4th of July. Summer. Vacation. Fireworks. Bikini. Could it be better??? The kingship of Surfin’ USA is proclaimed. We don’t like Americans, but we love their ways; their surf and their Miami, their elections and the General Motors’ corpse, their Bob Dylan and their Elvis, their sophisticated eating behaviors and their ethical standpoints, their cheap iPhones and their affordable dollar, their faith in monogamy and their cognitive psychology, their real estate crisis and their full churches, their Sex and their City, their XXL ethos and their Starbucks, their self-legitimating ways and their Britney Spears, their eBay prices and their Larry Jerry David Seinfeld, their Sunday schools and their Brooklyn, their eternal quest for nuclear weapons and, above all, their Marc Jacobs.

There is a little USA inside in each of us. If you believe in your heart that it is so, you will be saved and set free. Yes, today, you are free! Today, you can let go of whatever it holds you down: provincial inferiority complexes, unhealed wounds from the European Football Championship, huge social security taxes, public transport, yellow teeth, muddy outsoles, boring cinema, death. And now becomes your choice to listen to this warning, or to ignore it. But how many times did you ignore the American voice inside you? How often did you, even after you heard that voice, put it on hold? How many times have you turned off the tv in the middle of a Chuck Norris movie? How many times have you canceled on a Big Mac or on Benny Hinn? And how many times, yea how many thousands of times, since you first knew it’s there inside, have you rebelled in your heart and lived life your weird and depraved old continental way? Yes, there’s a knock on the door of your heart. Yes, you must open. Will you, right now, accept there’s the voice of America inside you, and answer the door of your life, allow that voice fill you, and take over? Will you? I want to pray that you do. God bless, yea, God bless your little own America.

PS: California, let us all come home!!!!