Well, Chris Guillebeau is way more fabulous than I will ever be, and ten years younger. This kid kicks my ass to Saturn, and probably yours too. Clicking around his hipster-riffic Web site I’m less That could be me! than Why even bother? or maybe Why not just kill myself now? There are other people out there living my dream better than I ever could. Who am I to think I have anything new or necessary to say or contribute?

**

It’s getting harder and harder to drag myself into work each day. My cubicled purgatory is still full of wonderful souls who smile and embrace me, and I love them, but without my beautiful boys the color and the pizazz as well as all motivation is gone. I’m living within an almost still life — as monochrome and sexless as the world of the angels in Wim Wenders’ imagination, longing like Damiel to cross over and take a big bite of the apple.

Thus the summer flies by. I thought I’d be elsewhere by now.

“You should come to California with me!” says my friend Drew, the amateur astrologer I previously called stocky and adorable, who comes around for his daily hug. He’s considering a move to the Los Angeles area to attend graduate school. Unfortunately he’s not driving there. If he were, I’d actually consider it, just to get on the road again (and the hell out of Dodge). I am fond of Drew, and he’s cute in his freckled redheaded way, even if his beliefs are a little out there for me. I’d consider biding my time with him the way I bided (bid?) my time with Seamus — although Drew has said himself that the Leo-Capricorn combination isn’t ideal. (His ex-wife was a Capricorn.) It’s not like I have a throng of irresistible fans lining up to take me out. Anymore.

**

A new reader points me to an online Zen expert. He’s a fine guidance counselor, Krishnamurti-like in his advice — “you have to decide for yourself what is best” — and gently compassionate in his outlook. He reminds me of the Buddhist therapist I saw for a number of years. I’ve always preferred Zen to most other philosophies and belief systems, even though it could be interpreted as directly contradicting what my own life coach and other live-your-dream types currently advocate. The “intention” and “manifestation” people, after all, tell you to desire, and to desire hard — the more the better! Which, I have consistently found in my own experience, only leads to more suffering when I invariably don’t obtain or achieve whatever it is I wanted.

Hence the appeal of Zen. Especially now. Of course, mine is probably the immature, sour-grapes version…kind of like when the Violent Femmes sing You know that I want your lovin/but Mr. Logic, Mr. Logic says it ain’t never gonna happen/so then my defenses say I, I didn’t want it anyway…yeah, I want to transcend desire and attachment and become one with Pure Being. But you know sometimes I’m a liar.

**

Samira emails me from India. I ask her how Ken is, and she replies “Great. Still HOT. Still sweet. My honey.” She, for one, isn’t helping to prove that so-called romantic love with another human is unfulfilling. But I don’t really want her to.

**

In my last installment of the Italy diaries, I wind up celebrating fleeting joys and fruitless desires, unapologetic about what I wanted and how I conducted myself. It’s kind of a pleasure to revisit, to tell you the truth. So here it is, the last of the series.

Part 6.3: MILANO (MILAN)

The next morning I boarded the 11:14 train to Milano at Santa Maria Novella station. It arrived at Stazione Centrale around two, and I wandered back and forth along Via Vitruvio until I located Hotel Bernino on Via Napo Torriani.

My room was smaller and darker than the one in Florence, but it was also half the price. After I dropped off my things, I set off down Via Pisani (a street of unattractive modern buildings that could have been in any city) toward central Milan in search of food. I was specifically looking for Asmara, an Eritrean restaurant recommended by Let’s Go that was supposed to be open for lunch until four.

After walking about twelve blocks I found the place, in what seemed to be a largely African immigrant neighborhood, but it was closed. Groaning and hungry, I walked over to the shopping thoroughfare Corso de Buenos Aires. Most restaurants were closed, observant of afternoon siesta time, and the snack bar on the corner was completely cleaned out. Across the street was a McDonalds, but I was not going to go in there. I continued down the Corso feeling almost lightheaded, fretting that I might soon pass out from low blood sugar (this is not an exaggeration, it’s happened before), when suddenly I had the calming thought (or heard the voice, depending on how you interpret it) — Have faith, you’re almost there.

Who knows what that was about? What I do know is that right around the corner, on Via Spallonzani, I found a piazza with a little snack bar full of Italians. I bought a piece of foccacia pizza, which they had in abundance, and a bottle of aqua naturale. The foccacia was melt-in-your-mouth delicious, but the story doesn’t end there. After I had finished I noticed that both the chalkboard outside and the painted words on the door said CANNOLI SICILIANI.

That’s the part that amazes me. I was complaining not long ago that you can’t get decent cannoli in my town the way you can in the Italian North End of Boston, and I had intended to find some authentic cannoli in Italy. But I had been in Italy almost five weeks, it was my last day, and I had located no cannoli. Antonio had insisted that Sicily made the best. Allora, this was kismet. I ordered one with a cappuccino, and when it came it was like a dream on a plate. The crispiest, flakiest shell, dusted with powdered sugar, was stuffed with the freshest, sweetest, gooiest filling (mascarpone, not ricotta!) and garnished with candied orange. Mamma mia. Mamma mia. It kicked the North End’s ass. I made all sorts of noises while savoring every bite, and licked my fingers afterward.

The local sitting in front of me talking to his buddy in Italian was wearing a shirt that said HEMINGWAY’S BAR across the back of it. When he got up I noticed that the front said “Mexico,” so it wasn’t just some Milano locale. What is it with these meaningful coincidences? Skeptics say it’s a matter of what we filter; others believe in synchronicity. I’m not about to say, although I do have a mystic’s tendency to err on the side of the mysterious. And this day in Milano was already turning out to be marvelously mysterious.

I followed Corso Buenos Aires until it turned into Corso Venezia, intending to visit Milano’s Duomo. This Duomo is the third largest church in the world, begun by Visconti in the 14th century and finished in the 1800s under Napoleon. I passed by the Giardini Pubblici, a park housing the natural history museum, as the Corso grew prettier and prettier.

Alessandro didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He discouraged me from going to Milano on my days off at Centro, saying that it was too industrial, and that there was nothing to recommend it if you weren’t a fashionista. He made it sound like a mixture of Los Angeles and Detroit. I should never have listened to a young man who can’t even see into a mirror properly.

Milano is a beautiful city full of gorgeous architecture like that of Roma, laid out in ways that remind me, again, of my hometown Boston. You could say Milano is to Firenze as Washington, DC is to Annapolis, Maryland. One is an imposing urban metropolis showcasing innumerable periods of design; the other is a pretty historic town full of cobblestones and charm. Of course, Annapolis is much smaller than Firenze, but It’s the feel of the place I’m talking about.

In an area overrun by expensive clothiers and tourist-trap restaurants, I found the Duomo. It was overwhelming. There’s something frightening about a structure that large with more apparent spines than a porcupine. From the ground, what you see are rows and circles of stalagmites growing from countless spires to reach sharply toward heaven. If anyone were to be cast out like Lucifer, he’d be in danger of getting gruesomely impaled on these things. The style is ostensibly somewhere between Gothic and Baroque, having gone through five centuries of architectural tinkering. Mercifully, this Duomo has a lift that takes curious tourists to the roof, where they can clamber up and down built-in stairs and take in birds’-eye views of Milano.

Before doing that, I walked around the cathedral, and saw the Piazza del Duomo out front, which looks like the Italy you see in movies, gray flagstone and pigeons underfoot, with the arched doorways of Renaissance-era buildings on either side and a monument of the ubiquitous King Vittorio Emmanuele II in the center.

I took the lift up with a petite and sunny middle-aged woman named Margret who was visiting from Germany with a tour group. We walked together on the roof for a short time, and she pointed out the rooftop garden restaurant where they had stopped for lunch.

From here I could see that the “stalagmites,” which had looked like sharp points from the ground, were in reality tipped with detailed statues of saints and other religious symbols. Truly an amazing, painstaking accomplishment. No wonder it had taken so long. Beyond them, the stately roofs of Milano stretched for kilometers in every direction; here and there rose the round green duomo of a lesser church.

Why hadn’t I come here sooner? Why hadn’t I taken advantage of the opportunity to wander this extraordinary rooftop before, when I could have come here on a day off with my wonderful new English friend?

But it might have been too much for me. A sublime and centuries-old work of art like this cathedral would have brought home to me the small, transitory identities of (AlienBaby) and James — whatever one believes about the soul — and made me want him even more, with that bittersweet carpe-diem sort of longing. I leaned against one of the turrets and felt the familiar ache in my chest. This is why some people, after falling once, won’t let it happen again: loss is a bastard.

Yet we have to say goodbye to everyone, at some point. How is it a solution not to love anyone?

I walked back to the side of the roof across from Margret’s restaurant. Somewhere in that building, music was blaring. What the world needs now/is love/sweet love/it’s the only thing/that there’s just too little of…

I bent to rest my forearms on the stone railing and listened, smiling to myself. I could not have made this up. Even better was the next thing on the playlist, “I’m Not In Love,” that ironically penned protest against the obvious. I’d like to see you/but then again/it doesn’t mean you mean that much to me…

Big boys don’t cry.

…

I now had a massive blister on my left pinky-toe and was limping slightly as I walked toward Viale Premuda and the Osteria il Giardino del Segreti, a highly recommended restaurant. I stopped in at one of the many Farmacias, marked with a green neon cross, to buy plastic adhesive bandages, and sat down at a trolley stop to apply one.

Viale Premuda is another Boston-esque street, reminiscent of Commonwealth Avenue where it snakes its way through Brookline, with quaint little trolleys running up and down the center of it and slightly run-down shops and restaurants on either side. It’s unfortunate to see graffiti on some of the beautiful 17th- and 18th-century buildings, but local taggers are probably blasé about their city’s history.

The Osteria wasn’t open yet — the man inside told me quarter-past seven — so I looked around unsuccessfully for an Internet point for twenty minutes. When I came back, they told me ten more minutes, so I decided to start back uptown. I was far from the hotel, and I wanted to be a lot closer when it got dark. (I found an Internet point within fifteen minutes once I headed toward the Corso, and checked my email.)  I decided to swing by Asmara one more time, just for the heck of it, and found it open.

Seated by the smiling Eritrean hostess at a white-tableclothed table beneath photographs of beautiful African women, I ordered a piccolo beer and the vegetariano special.

Madonna. It was better than even the best very similar Ethiopian food I’d had in the States. Scooping up scrumptious greens, potatoes, and lentils using the spongy bread, I was reminded of a certain non-date I had had at an Ethiopian restaurant with a certain non-boyfriend of mine back in the early spring. It was nice to think about a man other than you-know-who for a change. The memory is a wonderful one, a Novara all its own.

And I considered how this person, who defies any sort of categorization in my life, has been a blessing, and possibly one of the best things that has ever happened to me. How could I fail to remember that? He won’t even mind my saying so, that’s how radically different and how terminally cool he is. I actually believe that we will always be friends. I feel I can tell him anything without fear of judgment (hence his presence on this list). And when you don’t need to seek after or worry about someone’s acceptance or esteem — when you know that it’s already there for you — the need for reassurances, promises, or contracts seems to largely dissipate. At least for me, at least in this case. And that’s no small thing. In reality, it’s a pretty big, rare thing.

He has given me exactly what I needed from him.

Bless him for that.

EPILOGUE

As my plane prepared for takeoff the next morning, I thought about all the places I hadn’t been. Venice. Pisa. Naples. Sicily. The Amalfi coast. Cinque Terre. Part of my original idea had been to see the Mediterranean, and I hadn’t gotten anywhere near it. But there was no more time, and even if there were, I had no more energy or stamina. My health was starting to wane.

Then I remembered how, not long ago, I was talking with my good friend Ruth, and was able to sum up my most personal dream for her in a few words: to be somewhere beautiful, with someone beautiful.

I had lived my dream. I had lived it for only two weeks, but some people never even see theirs for a day. High on a mountain overlooking Lago d’Orta, amid the jasmine and the honeysuckle and the peacocks, I flushed with happy excitement to see a witty blue-eyed Englishman coming up the gravel path. What could have been lovelier or more magical? It was worth a hundred steam burns in the dishroom and peeling endless piles of carrots, just to see him smile, to gain the prize of making him laugh. Call him a first class asshole, call me a fool for falling for a first class asshole, but I’d do it all again in a millisecond. James may not have believed he was very attractive or very lovable (and isn’t that the root of all evil?) but to me he was bellissimo, bellissimo, beautiful in every way.

And who knows, really…there are many beautiful places in the world. There are beautiful places right here. There are beautiful, lovable, ineffably dear people everywhere, and the more intimate you become with loss — the more you befriend it –the less afraid you are to love them.

Of course, there’s loss, and then there’s loss. In Philadelphia where I changed planes there were televisions tuned to CNN, and I mistakenly thought that their BBC clip commemorating the anniversary of last year’s London bombings was current. Did that ever make my heart hammer. Such catastrophic dispatches from that part of the world will never be the same. It’s one thing to feel empathy and sorrow for strangers attacked in a distant city, and quite another to care passionately for even one person there who may come into harm’s way. “It’s enough for me that you are somewhere here,” says Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha at one point in Dostoevsky’s novel, and that’s how I feel, even though I don’t expect to ever see him again. To steal a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay, “More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.” I can live without James, but I do want him to live.

Günter was fond of saying, you never know. And you don’t. You never know what tomorrow will bring, or if there will be one. Lightning strikes, cars collide, the body fails. A close friend of mine from college took her own life. I regret so much about that relationship, and about my silence within it…that was part of what shaped me into the apparent madwoman I am today, who won’t shut up about how great you are, and how much she loves you. Most “normal” people don’t behave this way in the English-speaking world. Raffe was like that, but James didn’t take her effusions seriously, and besides, she was Italian. Still, I won’t apologize for refusing to be cautious, for saying the things I said, or for trusting my own heart. Because you never know.

My flight companion on the way back from Philly turned out to be a delightful sixtysomething Englishman from Surrey. How perfect is that? He lives in Paris now, and we discussed some of the better French films and actors, much the way another Englishman and I discussed the better English-language films and actors, during one of the many good times at Centro.

It was a fitting bookend to my Italian aventura, my sojourn in Oz, my dream.

I won’t lie to you: I’ve become depressed again. And if killing myself could land me in Goran Dukic’s quirky limbo for lost souls, I’d be climbing into the tub with the hair dryer. Because even in that grey place that’s almost like planet Earth, “just a little bit worse,” friendships and road trips and great music and small miracles — even romantic love — are possible. (Besides which, you don’t have the usual paralyzing worries about getting yourself killed or starving in the street, because you’re already dead.) I wanted to get in the totally beat-to-shit station wagon with gypsy rocker Eugene (Shea Whigham, looking like Peter Krause’s mutton-chopped little brother) and take off for Tom Waits’ magical refugee camp in the desert where even the “crooked trees” among us are celebrated.

Of course, Waits’ character Kneller sums up my whole problem in one line. “Here’s the deal,” he tells the protagonist Zia (Patrick Fugit). “As long as you want it so bad, it’s not going to happen. The only way it’s going to work is if it doesn’t matter.”

I might be the best witness to that, having been brooding lately over a lifetime catalog of things I wanted so badly my ribs hurt, and to which I never even got close — attributing this outcome to ill fortune or my own baffling incompetence. But consider this: when all I wanted in the world was Sonny, I got the cash infusion that allowed me to go to Italy. When all I wanted in the world was to go back to Europe, Rick crept up like a wild creature to eat out of my hand. When all I wanted in the world was Rick, then Eli seemed to notice me. Whatever I was not intensely focused upon came easily, and what I desired most did not.

Of course now even scintillating Eli is gone (whose attentions I would have welcomed in lieu of my vanishing stoner’s), my pool of pretty young admirers has inexplicably dried up, and I have even less of a clue or a hope about how I’ll get to the other side of the lake. I’m in my own grey purgatory of solitary routines and ugly cubicles, consigned to a repetitive task that invites the hostility of strangers, living in a transient’s furniture-challenged crash pad, and sleepwalking through rapidly passing, oppressive summer days in which nothing new or interesting happens.

I seem to have jumped, as so often has been the case, from one of those delightful beginnings (where everything is new, and you can wind up playing pool in a hippie bar with an intriguing acquaintance at the drop of a hat) to a truncated end (where suddenly everything’s played out and exhausted), with no discernible middle. You’ve just gotten to first base on your first turn at bat, and now the game’s over. Rained out. So you sit in the window at home, gazing out at the drizzle, disappointed and bored.

Somebody please send Eugene over with the car! I want to hit the road and go see the Wizard. Although I think I know what he’s going to say. Still, I’d like to make the journey, because the journey itself is half the point. Besides which, Eugene — for all his skeezy antics — is damn cute. And he’s always horny. Seriously, I’d eat that little pirogi for breakfast.

But speaking of journeys…onward with the diaries…we’re almost done. This week I have a tale of Florence to tell.

Part 6.2: FIRENZE (FLORENCE)

The next morning I took a city train (as opposed to the faster Eurostar) and got to Florence at shortly after three in the afternoon. Without too much trouble I located the Ostello Archi Rossi on Via Faenza, off of the main drag Via Nationale. Faenza is like hostel central in Florence, with a number of small hotels along it as well.

The Ostello is clearly a youth hostel.  But I’m no longer a youth, and the staff was hostile.

They had gotten my e-mail, at least, and handed me the Visa slip to sign. Perhaps that had given them a prejudice against me already, I have no idea.

At first, I liked the funky feel of the place – noisy and vibrant in that collegiate way, with graffiti-covered walls that would have made my little anarcho-radical pals feel right at home (although the actual clientele looks much more American State University). When I got to my 6-bunk room I was glad to find it clean, and that I had a locker. They had assigned me an upper bunk, and I wondered briefly how I was going to climb up or down without stepping on the head of the person in the twin bed at the foot of the bunk. There were clean sheets, but no towel. Did they rent them out? I hoped so. I went down the hall to the “toilette” and noticed that there was a single shower off to one side of the toilet. Poking around a bit, I didn’t find a shower room, although I found one other similar “toilette” on that floor. I started to feel a little anxious, wondering how two such bathrooms were supposed to accommodate a throng of people who would be needing to both bathe and relieve themselves. I’d ask the staff when I went down to see about renting a towel. I decided, since the room was empty, that I could at least recharge my laptop.

Except that none of the outlets in the room worked.

I sat down on the lower bunk, feeling defeated, and gulped water from a litre bottle I had bought downstairs from the ostello refrigerator. I felt considerably dehydrated.

That’s when the migraine hit.

I had not had a migraine since March. Not since I had quit the job I had come to hate. At the time, I had attributed my debilitating condition to stress, sinus congestion, and general unhappiness with my station in life. So in a way, this was a perfect time for a migraine. My sinuses had been screwed up since my Pettenasco cold, I was beaten down by heat, fatigue, and loss, and completely stressed out by my surroundings.

I wanted to talk to the staff, to relieve some of my anxiety, but I was in too much pain. I took two Naproxen tablets and climbed up into the bunk, where I grew groggy as the medication hit. My head throbbed softly and I lay there in a near-trance, hearing very clearly the voices on the patio outside. Somewhere down there, I heard a man speak in a broad, working-class English accent; his voice had a familiar, midrange tenor timbre. My heart started to race. I knew the reaction was irrational and physiological — he was gone, gone for good — but knowing this just increased the pain, adding a heavy ache in my chest to accompany the sharp ache in my head. I listened to the man’s voice, and tried to relax into the pain, “becoming the pain,” as the Buddhists would say, eventually losing consciousness for the better part of an hour.

Later, when I managed to wander down to the desk in my medicated haze, I asked about towels, showers, and the outlets. Yes, towels were rentals. They seemed affronted by my fairly neutral shower question, and addressed me with a tone of condescension. “This is how it is in hostels in Italy!” I begged to differ, telling them about the Rome YWCA. They had never heard of it. You want your own shower, the impatient gray-haired woman said, thoroughly misunderstanding me, with a you-spoiled-high-maintenance-American-princess tone of voice, you get a single. They were none too happy about my asking to recharge my laptop behind the desk, either, although they hadn’t known about the outlets in that room, so I actually did them a favor.

Exploring the hostel for myself, I found that there were six bathrooms total (one shower and one toilet in each), two per floor, for 140 people. (Does that sound reasonable to you?) I determined to get up at six the next morning to beat the rush.

It was six-thirty PM and I was feeling weak, having eaten only a foccacia on the train. I found ZaZa’s after a short walk, and Osteria Pepo next door, but the latter opened at seven, and I just couldn’t wait. I sat outside on ZaZa’s pretty terrace facing the piazza, but the experience was lost on my achy, druggy self. I remember eating seafood pasta (it seemed a good time to indulge, for once) and yet another subpar salad.

While I was waiting for my food, a black man driving a silver sedan got himself stuck between parked cars (they really were too close together) in the piazza intersection. Everyone behind him started honking angrily, and the onlookers on the piazza started laughing at him. Feeling surrounded by hostility myself, I squirmed for the man, who doubtless already had to suffer innumerable difficulties due to having dark skin in this white country, and now was the glaring focus of so much public ire and ridicule. I thought, things could definitely be much worse for me. (He finally managed to back up, and maneuver between the parked cars.)

The waitress brought my pasta. It was full of shrimp. The waiter at the wine bar next door called to the hostess: “Gina!”

Bleary-eyed, fighting back tears, I thought to myself: Florence blows, man.

What was it, exactly? It was that feeling of being vulnerable and unmoored, in an (at best) indifferent and (at worst) hostile world. Alienation: that sense of being alone, misunderstood, and cared for by no one. In other words, how many Western men, like a certain Anglo I know, experience life on a daily basis. What was it I told him that night in the kitchen? “I can’t explain it,” I said. “I just have so much love for people.” My sense of connection, so it would seem, originated within me. Where had it gone?

Well, first things first. I was feeling like a sick, abandoned child. Some grownup part of me was going to have to advocate for the helpless part. WWED? What Would (my grandmother) Ella Do? I asked myself. I was in Italy thanks to her, and she certainly wouldn’t want me to be feeling so ill and miserable. What would she tell me?

You go and spend some more of that money, dearie, came the answer. It’s ALL RIGHT. Pay whatever you have to. This ain’t worth the savings.

I returned to the Ostello and asked the unsmiling clerk about paying extra for a private room. I even tried to explain that I wasn’t feeling well. He looked at me as if I were telling him some bullshit tale of woe, and said that there weren’t any. Eager to be rid of me, he said I could tell him tomorrow morning if I found somewhere else to stay my second night.

I went up to the (still empty) dorm to burst briefly into hot tears of weariness, pain, and humiliation, and then, with renewed resolve (Archi Rossi can kiss my spoiled American princess ass!!!), went outside and wandered up and down the street, inquiring with hotels and hostels. I found a tiny third-floor hostel for women called Hotel Paula that looked lovely, painted in coral tones, but unfortunately it was full. Around the corner from the Ostello, the small air-conditioned Hotel Vasari had a double available for 100 Euro. The quiet front desk clerk was deferential and kind-eyed; his manner made me want to hug him. I reserved the room with my credit card and immediately felt a hundred kilos lighter.

There now, said Ella. Isn’t that better.

When I got back to Archi Rossi, I met Werner and Sita, young Toronto-ites, in the room, which (yet another surprise) was unisex. I told them my whole Ostello story, and they were not only sympathetic, but also grateful to get the information about the towels, the outlets, and the sucky bathroom situation. At least my troubles benefited someone. They were more than happy to let me have the ladder hanging from Werner’s upper bunk, as he could climb up without it. How good it was to see and to talk to these friendly young Canadians after dealing with the unfriendly staff! They went out, and I went to bed early in a still-empty room.

In the morning I felt much better, like a human being again. I showered (with lightning speed) at seven, packed and locked up my luggage, and took advantage of the hostel’s included breakfast and Internet (booking my Milan hotel) before heading out to the Duomo.

Brunelleschi’s famous dome, that is, topping the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Del Fiore. The Cathedral is huge, and an amazing sight to see, looking, with its green marble stripes, like it was made out of very dusty peppermint candy. It’s almost too flashy, outside, to be a Catholic church; it should by all rights be a mosque. The top of the dome is the highest point in the city of Florence, and you can reach it by climbing at least as many stairs as are inside the Statue of Liberty. I paid the six Euro for this particular torture, seeing as it was early in the morning and there was no line.

Speaking of torture, there are frescoes inside the dome that depict the torments of hell, in true Christian doomsday fashion. These paintings are almost kinky…they belong to that genre of religious art that seems downright salacious in its voyeuristic violence. Christian porn, more or less. Grinning devil-men with horns and tails skewer naked humans with pitchforks; one unfortunate man seems to be getting a flaming torch in the ass. Such visceral physicality the artist envisioned for an essentially spiritual punishment! The grotesque, graphic images of the destruction of the flesh made me wince. Is it any wonder so many people hate religion?

From the top of the dome — if you make it — you can see all of Florence, and the mountains beyond.  It was quite a panorama to behold, but unfortunately I had to descend soon after my triumphant arrival in order to make check-out time at Archi Rossi.

I got back before eleven to retrieve my belongings, and spent an hour and a half in the cafe across the street from the hostel, sipping a cappuccino and writing. I wheeled my suitcase around the corner to the hotel at half-past noon, but my room still wasn’t ready. The paternal white-haired man at the front desk showed me where to stow my luggage in the meantime. Bless the Hotel Vasari. God bless them, every one.

Now it was time for lunch. I headed for Trattoria Mario, on the same piazza as ZaZa, a lunch joint Let’s Go cited as having a rabid following among Florentines.

It was crowded and raucous, an Italian greasy spoon, and I was told to sit at a table with three strangers. Allora (so)! I did. They were all Italiani, two men and one woman. The studious-looking, bespectacled man and the pretty brunette woman were together; the good-looking green-eyed man with the shiny, wavy black hair who smiled broadly at me was obviously a regular. He knew the waitstaff, and kept talking to the men at the next table. I told the cute shorn-headed waiter (he looked like Andre Agassi) “Non mangio la carne,” and he brought me a bread and vegetable soup.

It was only room temperature — appropriate, I suppose, on such a blistering day — but it was the best thing I’d had in days. Hearty and deliciously seasoned, it possessed the perfect balance of flavors — not too salty, sweetened by the bread. I ordered an insalata verde, too, and I got a plate of crispy dark greens with radiccio in a simple but tasty olive oil dressing. Bravo, Trattoria Mario!  Write that one down, folks.

The green-eyed hunk kept glancing at me while he and the others talked, and I finally said to him, “Non capisco niente. Non parlo l’Italiano molto bene.” (I understand nothing. I don’t speak Italian very well.) He laughed uproariously (had I actually fooled him with my ordering?), and asked where I was from. I told him, and he explained things to the others. Everyone introduced themselves, but I can’t for the life of me remember their names. Still, I loved the whole noisy, elbow-rubbing, familial feel of it all. What I told James is true. It’s the gente, man. Il popolo. You can be connected regardless of lingua.

From the trattoria I went straight to Accademia, the museum housing Michelangelo’s David. The slowly creeping line stretched around the block, and for once I joined an endless queue of sweaty tourists. If I was going to get into only one museum in Florence, it was going to be Accademia. What other sight in Italy was more up my alley than the great master’s timeless monument to male beauty??!

Behind me, I heard Spanish being spoken. Thrilled to hear a language other than English that I understood, I turned around. “De donde van Ustedes?” (Where are you from?) The three twentysomethings were from Mexico: Ana, Michaela, y Jose. Ana was a raven-haired beauty with a pierced nose; Michaela was cute, lively, and petite, with glasses like mine; and Jose was a stocky jokester with an interesting birthmark on his right temple. He gave me sips of their McDonalds Coke, and the four of us braved the unforgiving, humid heat together for an hour and a half.  Jose knew English, and Ana asked me a lot of questions in simple Spanish. I also chatted intermittently with the affable middle-aged Australian man in front of me. Time flies, or speeds up, anyway, when you’re in good company.

Finally we were in. Upon entering the museo, I was greeted by the spiral of the three figures in The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Giambologna: an older, defeated protector on the bottom, overcome by a younger, stronger man in the middle who is carrying away the gaping woman at the top. It’s necessary to walk all the way around for full effect. In the next room are Michaelangelo’s slave sculptures, appropriately still imprisoned in their stone, and his similarly imprisoned Saint Matthew.

The plaque by this last sculpture called attention to the strain of the figure in opposite directions, denoting the opposition between the temporal and the eternal, between the flesh and the spirit, the ongoing dualistic war within a man. Well, I thought. There you grand old Western patriarchs go again! Who decided we needed a war? What’s so compelling or unavoidable about splitting yourself in two?

Then there was the domed, high-ceilinged room at the end, where David towered in all his naked glory. It was necessary to walk all the way around him also, just to behold his three-dimensional perfection. Such attentive care was given to depicting the musculature of his chest and belly, his thighs, his back, the veins in his hands, the curve of his buttocks. Has anyone ever accused Michaelangelo of being queer? It seems to me (but you know how I am!) that one would have to love the male body to create such an appreciative tribute.

Beneath a discreet, sleeping member, his balls are plump, perfect globes. It’s amazing to me that after all these centuries David has managed to hang onto the entirety of his manhood. So many other statues, including the men grappling beneath the Sabine woman, have been emasculated by the ravages of time. A stone hurled during a riot in 1873 broke David’s wrist in two places, but otherwise he’s managed to survive, magnificently intact, with all delicate extremities precisely as they were created.

After staring at David for a while, I looked around the rest of the museum — it was mostly church triptychs and commissioned paintings dating back to the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. There were many madonnas with child, as well as assorted crucifixes, apostles and saints. Daddis and Gaddis and Peruginos. That these things have survived is impressive, but I’m not a huge fan of Christian art.

From there I went south, to the Bargello, a less touristy museum that houses sculptures by Donatello, but it was closed for the day. So I headed for the river and the Uffizi, home of Botticelli’s Venus, as well as works by Fra Angelico, Da Vinci, and Caravaggio. Alas, there was a daunting line, so I wandered the little plaza between the two branches of the building, which was a combination of buskerfest and art bazaar. Living “statues” posed for photographs with tourists, and artists lined the thoroughfare selling their original art. I bought a small original for the wonderful woman who covered nearly all of my work shifts from an inobtrusive artist who resembled Stephen Rea. (He struck me as having a better eye than some of his fellows, whose attempts at realism or impressionism tended to be between generic and cheesy.) I was sorry when the police chased off a group of youngsters who looked like our anarchist kids at home — they had illegally put down a blanket to hawk their stone and bead necklaces, and I had wanted to scope out their wares.

I had a quick look around the courtyard of the medieval Palazzo Vecchio next door, with its 15th century frescoes, and checked out the cluster of statues outside, including a smaller copy of the David and an attempt at Neptune by the student Ammannato which Michelangelo had historically slammed. (The Florentines apparently call it “Il Biancone” in derision, or “The Big White One.”) Across from the Palazzo, facing onto the Piazza Della Signoria (a wide-open and truly lovely piazza), is the stone stage Loggia dei Lanzi where some actual treasures are on open display, such as Cellini’s Perseus holding the head of Medusa. No tickets, no waiting.

From there I walked back through the plaza to the Arno river, to check out the Ponte Vecchio, the oldest bridge in Florence, which was built in 1345. These days it’s a tourist mecca of boutiques and jewelry shops, but it still maintains much of its ancient charm, and the view from the east side of the bridge is a postcard.

But now it was gelato time. I headed back toward the Bargello to find Vivoli, which Let’s Go says is a long-standing contender for the best gelato in Italy. With a little bit of wandering I found it — it’s so easy to get turned around in those skinny cobblestone streets — and discovered a creme caramel flavor that beat out even the chocolate mousse.

On the way back to the hotel I stopped in at Florence’s smaller Santa Maria Maggiore church. Like so many buildings in the city, it had undergone many incarnations.There were still faded paintings on the original pillars that dated back to the 14th or 15th century, and then there were the Renaissance and post-Renaissance religious paintings on the walls, and then there were the modern touches at the altars. At the altar along the left wall, candles were burning for the dead, and I gave my 30 cents to light a candle for Ella. I thought of how she had made all of this possible for me, the good, the bad, the ugly — and the beautiful. Thank you, Ella, I thought, for my Italian aventura. I was quickly choked up with emotion and with gratitude and with missing her, the plucky little farm woman from Pennsylvania.

Arriving back at the Hotel Vasari, I discovered my double room to be minimalist, but bright and clean, with a gleaming toilet, bidet, and shower all my own. There was even a hair dryer. I nearly fell on my knees and wept with gratitude, but instead I stripped off every stitch of my sweat-soaked clothing and proceeded to unpack every single item from my suitcase and backpack. I plugged in my laptop, and threw out all the random bits of paper and receipts I had accumulated, along with used-up toiletries and my grungy box of soap. I re-folded all of my clean clothes. Then I took a long sandblast of a shower, after which I dried my hair and applied makeup, two things I hadn’t done in a very long time. When I walked out into the evening I felt regenerated, and more attractive than I’d felt since leaving the States. Three young Italian men passing by on Faenza seemed to concur.

I went straight to Osteria Pepo. Stepping inside, I found a warmly lamp-lit, classy interior with wine bottles lining the back bar, and was greeted — much like at Arancia Blu — with a gratis glass of sparkling wine. They had me at hello.

The crostini I ordered were superb — one topped with Tuscan white beans, another with a zucchini pate, another with a classic fresh tomato sauce. The liver one I didn’t eat, for obvious reasons. And it was here, at last, that I got the good gnocci, swimming in tomatoes and fresh melted mozzarella. (I finished with a cappuccino and tiramisu, which was good, but not oh-sweet-Lord-in-heaven good, which tiramisu really should be.)

I went back to my room to write for a while, and heard the shouts and cheers begin when Italy defeated Germany in the latest football match. Long after I’d gone to bed, the honking and the yelling and the screeching tires continued.

Then, as necessity dawns, dread. Pulse-quickening fear. Ripples of anxiety burning through my gut like a sulphurous acid. What will I do today? What will I do tomorrow? How will I live? And what, exactly, do I have to live for?

I want to go back to sleep, but the adrenaline won’t let me relax. My racing thoughts are running a familiar track. Going over and over the abysmal loop about the little girl whose dreams never seemed to come true, who grew old alone, destitute, scarcely having lived life, as the world’s ecosystem and economy disintegrated around her.

At that point the only course of action seems clear. And it ain’t sending out résumés.

**

49:49:2. These numbers popped into my head the other day. My coach friend has pressed me to talk about my “dreams,” has encouraged me to run wild with my imagination, and I’ve had trouble explaining why this prodding feels so cruel to me. I might elaborate now that my life often seems to me to have consisted of 49 percent daydreams, 49 percent suffering, and 2 percent actual living.

You see, from the time I was a very young child, I have always been able to vividly imagine the way I would like things to be. And I typically suffered (from feelings ranging in intensity from mere disappointment to heartbreak and total despair) when what actually happened around me — nearly all of the time — was radically different from what I envisioned. (Woody Allen dealt with this conflict between imagination and reality brilliantly in The Purple Rose of Cairo.) Those rare times when there was a match, or more accurately a near-match, between what I wanted and what really occurred, make up the other 2 percent. Some might call me lucky for ever hitting that 2 percent. Some might say, “Welcome to the real world, sweetheart!” Then there are those who would fault me, like the Christians with their mustard seeds, for not having faith enough.

I wonder, in response: how can a young child who believes in Santa Claus and the resurrection not have faith enough?

So I can’t help but react viscerally when asked about my dreams. Especially at times like these, when everyone wants to know what I intend to do with my life. If I could even tell you, friends, would it matter? At 41, is the question even still relevant?

All this historic angst resurfaces when the routines and relationships and duties that have defined me and paid my way for a time are completely stripped away, and I’m left with the pressing immediate question of survival — but also the perennial (and still unresolved) question of life purpose. While the clock keeps ticking.

**

“Unknown” called again on my cell yesterday. “Unknown” has been calling me a lot lately.

If I pick up, I know I’ll most likely hear Officer Frank Lipinsky from the Fraternal Order of Police or Sargeant George Dodd from Disabled Veterans of America or Something Somebody Something from the Society for Blind Homeless Mormon Puppies making a persistent guilt appeal to me for money I don’t have.

If I don’t pick up, I can pretend it’s Sonny (to borrow an old alias of his), calling to see how I’m doing, if I’m okay, if I want to meet somewhere. He’s blocked his number because he’s not completely sure he’ll be ready to talk to me if I pick up. He didn’t respond electronically, after all, when I replied to his brief expression of concern with a heartfelt plea to stay connected.

So I don’t pick up. As usual, there’s no message.

You see how my imagination works?

**

I honestly don’t know what I mean to this man, now, if I mean much of anything to him anymore. I only know what he’s meant to me, and if you’ve been reading me attentively for a while, I don’t have to tell you. He did liberate himself, at last, from the clutches of one of those Fascinating Women who look supermodel-pretty from a short distance, but when you get close to them you see the perpetual discontent drawing down the corners of their mouths (rendering them oddly plain), and hear the chronic disapproval dripping from their voices. I extended her the benefit of the doubt way past its expiration date because I honestly believed she was contributing to Sonny’s happiness.

When it’s quiet at night I think I can hear the dull thwack of him rebounding off of half a dozen headboards around the city. I know the opportunities are there, attractive and ruby-ripe for the picking, and he’s definitely got the appetite (as well as some of the attributes) of a young Warren Beatty. Now that he doesn’t have to behave, he’ll probably be making up for lost time. (I once likened his pleasure-loving nature to that of a five-year-old boy left alone with a tub of ice cream.)

It’s all right, folks; I don’t own him. I know I’ve never had any claim to him in the slightest. None of us ever really do, even if we decide to play by the rules and stand up in front of a person of the cloth or the law and repeat after him or her. We made that stuff up to create a safe boundary, to protect our vulnerability, to not have to relive the irrecoverable losses of our helpless childhoods. The fact is that people are born free, and if what they really need to do isn’t what we would have them do…well, if we love them enough to want them to follow their bliss, we’ve got to let them go. (Once in a while, as happened for the fortunate Joseph Campbell and his wife, two people decide that being together is folllowing their bliss.) From almost the very beginning, three years ago, I knew I’d found a soul brother I would have to wish the best, even if he wound up breaking my heart into a million bleeding pieces.

You may not want me to feel the way I do about Sonny, either, but that’s what I’ve elected to do with my freedom.

**

A friend and I go to see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Brad Pitt, comely as he is, has never been my favorite actor, but the film is deeply affecting because it’s essentially about change, and, ultimately, loss.

The title character, a man aging in reverse, weathers everything that happens to him with a sort of melancholy equanimity. Raised in a home for the elderly, he becomes used to seeing his companions vanish and new ones take their place. When Benjamin, in his wizened early twenties, finally comes to know the father who abandoned him at birth, he brings the fatally ill man out to the lake where he was happiest. One of the film’s most memorable quotes occurs as son and dying father watch the sun rise over the lake: “You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went, you can swear and curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.”

I don’t know about you, but at twice his age I’m still having trouble with that.

Benjamin knows, too, when to exit stage right, when his lifelong love Daisy is obviously not open to being with him — first at a smoky, boozy dancers’ after-show party in New York City where she is surrounded by male admirers (he walks away), and later after a crippling injury in Paris robs her of her livelihood and her pride (she sends him away).

Eventually they will “meet in the middle,” when he has grown substantially younger physically and she has grown substantially older emotionally. Of course Benjamin has no way of knowing if their time will ever come; that’s one thing that makes his surrender to the inexorable conditions of the present all the more admirable.

I can let my time at the studio go, the way Benjamin let his father go: mad as a mad dog at the way things went, swearing and cursing the fates, yet knowing when the end is the end.

But Sonny…I can’t go there. Not now. I can only hope for Benjamin’s equanimity, the gracious exit stage right after seeing the crowded room and the competition (and, perhaps, the injury). The time isn’t right; we aren’t welcome.

Maybe someday.

**

Like Benjamin, my life’s trajectory has been shaped more by haphazard coincidences and personal connections than by some grand overarching plan. His early years were played out on small stages: a house, a tugboat, a hotel — while mine were equally circumscribed by classrooms, kitchens, bookstores, and coffeeshops. I was 38 when I left the country for the first time and traveled to Italy. (That was my “2 percent“ year, the year of exceptions, the year I met Sonny. I could write an entire post on that spring, broad and sunny with possibility like the early years of life.) I honestly can’t imagine what it’s like to be someone who knows exactly what she wants to become from childhood and spends her life pursuing that path. My ideas kept changing: today, a nurse; tomorrow, an artist; the day after, a veterinarian; or, on second thought, maybe an actress; a mother; a pilot; a poet.

The only constants along the way, truthfully, were a burning desire for approval, and an even fiercer desire to be loved by those who elicited my own affections.

Which is funny, really, given the way things have turned out. As if everything that has happened since was meant to teach me that in order to maintain my integrity I might have to relinquish those very fundamental desires. Just as an example, I can introduce you to a few people at my former job who definitely don’t approve of me (!), but I didn’t submit to their bullying in order to be liked — did I?!

As for the second part…well, I’ve discovered along the way that it’s true what the otherwise astringent Christian mystic Anthony DeMello postulated: that the human spirit needs to love more than it needs to be loved. (He identified our two basic existential needs as to love and to be free.) For sure, not getting what you were after from the people you think you love will inevitably teach you the meaning of “unconditional.”

**

A fairly random, heart-driven existence, with no great accomplishments to cite: this has been my résumé, much like that of the curious Mr. Button. I only wish that I were aging in reverse right now. My chronic pain has been intensifying recently, perhaps as a response to all the new stresses. A friend of a friend who does Network Spinal Analysis has just told me that I’ve stored multiple traumas, both physical and emotional, in my spine, and that the blockages are cutting off my healthy nervous system functioning. (This is also, apparently, the reason why I’ve spent so much time in the overstimulated state of fight-or-flight.) It could be treated, if I had several hundred dollars to spend, but right now I’m more likely to be treating every dollar like a plank in my life raft, and seeing what I can cut out of my grocery bill.

The uncertainty and anxiety of poverty and unemployment in dismal economic times, the specter of encroaching physical breakdown and even disability, the prospect of being forced to give up my home and return to the bleak Northeast to live stifled within my relatives’ claustrophobic closet of millennial Puritanism… all of these things have driven me, in recent days, to the handrail of George Bailey’s bridge, staring at the water, wild-eyed. (Where’s that paunchy, bulb-nosed angel when you need him?)

**

Which is where we began. TAKAHO, my best friend from college always says: Tie A Knot And Hang On. I know my body can’t withstand another bruising stint in food service. The prospect of cubicles and fluorescents and sales calls gives me waves of existential nausea. I don’t even know whether I should put the yoga studio on my résumé, or how to talk about what happened there. The mere thought of paging or clicking through classifieds and job boards, attempting to find a round hole I can try to force my square peg into, is enough to make me break into a sweat.

The world of cold, hard survival is no place for choosy daydreamers.

And yet…the little girl still daydreams. Of kindred spirits and of giving help, of creating, of contributing, of having enough.

What she needs right now, frankly, is a miracle.

**

Sonny once wrote to me, “ask and you shall receive” — the irony of which was utterly lost on him. It’s a thing I have only found true, myself, that lucky 2 percent of the time. It’s hard to hear that particular Bible verse quoted, at any rate, when part of you is convinced Jesus fast-forwarded through all your fervent, begging childhood messages, including that one about Grandma’s cancer. Nevertheless, like those raving Secret people, I try to visualize the checks coming in (from where?) and to imagine fortuitous meetings and life-altering chance encounters. We can’t all be Forrest Gump, but poet David Whyte has mapped his life that way in the past, and he’s not exactly a member of the rah-rah manifestation crowd. The angel intervened when George Bailey was at the end of his rope and out of ideas (except for a very permanent solution to a temporary problem). If ever I needed a freakish coincidence, the time is now.

So I’ll refrain from drinking bleach for the moment, and let myself surrender and fall. As if there really are forces working in my favor. Even if the forces amount to nothing more than my belief that forces are working in my favor. I just don’t know. Maybe, sometimes, you simply have to trust that the net will appear.

As Benjamin’s adoptive mother Queenie was fond of saying, you never know what’s comin’ for you.

At the risk of sounding crazy (when has that ever stopped me?) I’ll divulge that I was seized by dark, self-destructive thoughts and urges all during that week myself, and that they were at their depressive worst on Friday. My more psychically inclined friends are convinced there’s a direct connection; I don’t know about that, but I marvel at the synchronicity.

Friday evening, in fact, I found myself contemplating the feasibility of emptying a pint of whisky and going down to the railyards by the river to wait for one of those freight trains that come clacking and wailing through the city late at night, so I could throw myself under it in the dark (properly anaesthetized), and no one would be the wiser until daybreak. Maybe even write ‘DNR’ in permanent magic marker across my chest, just for good measure. (What, after all, could be worse than a botched attempt, and the pity and disfigurement and permanent disability that might attend it?)

While I was entertaining this morbid little scenario in my head, an hour behind me in California David was tying the noose.

At the time, of course, I had no idea. Now before you go calling the paramedics, let me say that I hadn’t felt quite that self-destructive for a while. Besides, I suspect (if the wildly popular PostSecret blog is any gauge) that such thoughts are far more prevalent (even “normal”) than most people will admit. If my confession shocks you, I’m probably just breaking a cultural taboo. At any rate, by Saturday night I had shifted out of that frame of mind, and that’s when I read the news. A sharp shiver passed through my entire body, and sudden sadness landed in my chest with a leaden thud. Writing a few initial words about him on my blog, I shed tears for this relative stranger.

**

David Foster Wallace. In the rare taped interview, he appeared as a 90s grunge-nerd, like the unassuming bassist in the garage band, with his ubiquitous bandanna and his long hair, pale, bespectacled, soft-spoken, betraying the occasional tic and stammer, clearly ill at ease with the camera’s eye. He reminded me of so many of my classmates at St. John’s College, the “Great Books school,” which by virtue of its curriculum attracted brilliant, serious, abstracted, entirely non-materialistic young men whose greatest passion in life was thinking. I could definitely see myself staying up with David in the basement coffee shop of McDowell Hall until one in the morning discussing Hume. (I would probably have been mentally jogging and panting to keep up with the long strides of his churning mind.) He would have been a friend for sure. Not a lover, I think, but a good friend. If I talk about him, then, with too great a familiarity, forgive me — he just felt so familiar.

Well versed in the ways of postmodern academia and its infatuation with irony and avant-garde arcana and snark, David (who could way out-footnote Nabokov) demonstrated an unfashionable commitment to sincerity and authenticity and (what he called in his 1996 conversation with Salon) “that feeling in the stomach, which is why we read.” He wanted to create work that challenged his readers intellectually while making them feel “like someone was talking to (them) rather than striking a number of poses.” Newsweek wrote a fine elegy shedding light upon the “terrible master” that was David’s teeming brain; I won’t reiterate everything here, but suffice it to say that while he emphatically believed that solipsism — the generally empirically sound conclusion that one’s own perceiving consciousness is, in fact, the center of the universe — is a sucky orientation to call home, he also acknowledged the terrible loneliness of being a singular, bounded, perceiving consciousness. Writing and reading were a way of reaching out.

We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

This has always been my take, bounded as I feel within the walls of my own infernally solitary unit of human consciousness. How jealous I am of those fluid, blissful, mystic types who claim to experience the seamless oneness of all things! My circumscribed brain more often than not feels like a prison — a prison where I am intermittently but masterfully tortured.

I’ll wager it was similar for David, who urged the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College to avoid “getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head” — the advice of many a Zen master and spiritual teacher — and went on to say

…learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

What was happening in my own brain those few dark days last week was a constant monologue of repetitive and despairing thoughts masquerading as the only truth. A longtime sufferer of depression myself, I’m skeptical of all the strictly biochemical explanations for it, including those that go swirling around in the wake of suicides. Comparative religion scholar Huston Smith, among others, has observed that just because we can describe something scientifically doesn’t mean we have isolated its cause (or made full sense of it). The explanation that has always made the most sense to me is that we assist and perpetuate certain chemical cocktails within our brains when we travel well-worn synaptic paths that trigger stressful emotions. Drugs can interrupt this process and fuzz out the distress, but they don’t really address its origins.

Imagine having a brain capable of grasping every reason on earth to despair — on 24-hour overdrive. I have no doubt, too, given my comparatively modest intellect and my nevertheless oversized ego, that David’s own intense self-consciousness must have only magnified his suffering. (See The Albatross of Personal Importance for more on ego-driven suffering.) Talking to Charlie Rose, he frequently flinched and grimaced when he finished making a point, as if his incisive formulations were embarrassingly inadequate. Shame and grandiosity are the flip-side extremes within perfectionistic, hierarchical minds that tend to turn the merciless spotlight on themselves…

Grappling with isolation, despair, dread, personal inadequacy — how is it possible not to be “totally hosed?”

**

According to David, by exercising some choice over “how and what you think.” Fine advice, so it would seem, though much easier said than done. He was suggesting, as psychologists and spiritual teachers have, that we use our minds more consciously, and choose what we pay attention to.

But I’m starting to entertain the possibility, again, that this is not enough. That this is just another ploy to sustain an unsustainable status quo. (It wasn’t sustainable for him, after all.) I’m starting to wonder if I’ve let the clarity of an initial ‘aha’ more than a year ago become muddied by the assurances of those who insist I can have my cake and ego too — whether it’s the manifest-your-desires crowd or others who argue that my constructed self (or selves, as the case may be) really isn’t essentially a “parasite” that could eventually kill me. Based on how I felt that Friday, I’m pretty sure it could, and I’m not talking about just one overly zealous critical aspect of it.

You see, I felt like I’d hit a vein of gold when I first read “The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind.” In a few sentences, Eckhart Tolle managed to negate the mountains of self-help literature, psychology, philosophy, positive-thinking new-agey type books, and religious dogma I’d plowed my way through over the years to no avail. “The study of madness is not enough to create sanity.”

All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being. As long as I am my mind, I am those cravings, those needs, wants, attachments, and aversions, and apart from them there is no “I” except as a mere possibility, an unfulfilled potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted. In that state, even my desire to become enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future.

I don’t know if a craving for some sort of recognition motivated David, although I do know that he told Charlie Rose that when he got it, he found that it changed nothing, and that people still didn’t recognize what he thought was important, anyway. This is interesting to those of us still laboring away under the impression that “success” will make some kind of major difference in our lives. What constitutes this effing “success,” anyway? William S. Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch as an attempt to get Allen Ginsberg to come back to him. He wound up with multiple accolades and acolytes, but no Allen. For old Bill, that may have meant failure.

I know all about that kind of failure. (My motto could be “Those who can, live; those who can’t, write.”) But what I’m trying to say is that all of this anxiety-ridden achievement (or lack thereof) is measured with a yardstick provided by the tireless but tiresome ego. I need, I crave, I hate…am I this or that enough? Am I better or worse than you? Will I ever get what I want/deserve? Who wins and who loses?

**

By chance I recently picked up a strange pink-lettered book on Kabbalah (it was free, at a festival) the thesis of which is that the root of all evil is “the desire to receive for the self alone.” This desire is known as the “Opponent” (can you say ego?), who keeps us locked up in a prison of suffering. In order to escape this prison (and “become like God”) we must practice “transformative sharing.” The greater the discomfort this sharing creates, the better it’s working to destroy the desire to receive for the self alone.

I have to say, Rabbi Berg’s clown suit story kind of got to me. He tells the story of a famous Kabbalist who goes out walking with a companion and smells the scent of the Garden of Eden wafting from a house. They go inside to investigate, and find that this wonderful scent is coming from a clown suit in the back of the owner’s closet. When they ask him about it, he blushes and recounts the following story.

The man had been trying to help a friend in financial straits, and had attempted to take up a collection among their neighbors. Failing to collect more than a pittance, he went to a local tavern where he encountered a table full of wealthy, drunken men. One of them offered to give him all the money his friend needed — on the condition that he don a clown suit and parade around the town with the lot of them in the wee hours, singing and shouting and waking up the townspeople. He reluctantly agreed to be part of this Fellini-esque scene. Of course, the angry townspeople hollered obscenities out of their windows and even emptied their chamber pots on him, and he was thoroughly disgraced in front of every last person he knew — but he obtained the money for his friend. He ran home in shame and threw the suit in the back of his closet.

When the man had finished his story, the Kabbalist looked at him with bright eyes. “That explains why this extraordinary fragrance was coming from your closet,’ he said. “Your sharing action shattered your ego so completely that a tremendous amount of Light was revealed. Indeed, so powerful is the protection that even after your death it will continue. Tell your family to bury you in the suit when you die, for it will give you immediate admission into the Garden of Eden.”

**

One of the things that makes me feel like disappearing is a feeling of perpetual humiliation. Sometimes I start to view my entire past as nothing more than a series of indignities both great and small, a sort of decades-long hazing, while my present appears to be only a ripe opportunity for more of the same. Underlying this nearly intolerable feeling is the thwarted egoic craving to be respected, sought after, esteemed and desired, and to get what I want for a change, regardless of whether it costs anyone else. Gimmeeeeeee! Despairing of this, I actually start to question whether life is worth living.

The assumption that gives rise to such a question is that life is about getting what’s coming to you (“receiving for the self alone”). Certainly this is quintessentially American. (Just look at the wonders it’s worked on Wall Street!) What hit me so hard reading the Kabbalah story was the idea that relinquishing this assumption can be a painful and humiliating, but perhaps ultimately worthwhile, process. What if everything I’ve regarded as a failure, slight, or slap in the face has been a necessary step toward not “coming into my own,” but getting out of myself? What if sharing what (credit, responsibilities, attention, people) I don’t want to share is exactly what I need to do?

When we live in ego nature, sharing is an unnatural act. Sharing violates the ego’s fundamental survival need: I want it for myself. This is a deep, dark pit, an unscratchable itch, a bottomless longing destined never to be filled.

David once (a bit too presciently, perhaps) noted that suicides often shoot themselves in the head — the location of that “terrible master.” I would add — maybe what they really intended to kill, however unconsiously, was their ego.

I, for one, am sick to death of mine. Tired of the same old thoughts, obsessions, anxieties, criticisms, and unsatisfied wants.

Hand me those big red Bozo shoes, Rabbi.