Andiamo!

[make onward noises]













[make windy lake noises]







No, Like This. [make dove noises]





Alpi
unce, unce. blip.

The anti-tourist silently slipped a sly shot and slithered away.

goodpeopleandplaces

Between the dates of Oct27 and Nov5 2007

I had this dream, where I met [you] we held hands and smiled, and friends helped each other cross the streets. The light bulbs never burnt out, and the linen screen was never full. When we wanted lemonade it was in the refrigerator, and when our parents, aunts and uncles died, we cried, but didn't worry-there was always a shoulder and warm memories. Our bicycles never needed new tires, but were well used, and our leg muscles were strong, we walked one foot directly in front of the other. Every year the trees' colors were more vibrant than they shed previously and every speech we heard motivated us to dance. There was an escarpment we bordered on and over. We had seen it from the valley and leaned over it's edge; sometimes the wind let us float, and when a chill crept up, we shared jackets. No one had cameras and everyones mind suffered from the least clutter, and the photographs that our eyes took never betrayed or lied, they helped us evade trenches of nostalgia and pushed us on, always learning, scraping our knees, smelling like the sand we carried with us between our skin folds and in our hair. We didn't hold on, we bathed securely in hot springs, boiling in loyalty and trust.
The dream wasn't as convoluted as these words make it; it wasn't warm, it was to the sound of the dryer, in the fall, with leaves settled, resting on the window blocks of the row houses and trees that framed the view of the street below.

In sum,

Many people imagine that the sun is necessary to human happiness and that the South Sea islanders must be the gayest, most leisurely and most contented folk on earth.
No notion could be more falsely romantic, for happiness has nothing to do with climate; these Eskimos afforded decisive proof that happiness is a disposition of the spirit. Here was a people living in the most rigorous climate in the world, in the most depressing surroundings imaginable haunted by famine in a grey and sombre landscape sullen with the absence of life; shivering in their tents in the autumn, fighting the recurrent blizzard in the winter, toiling and moiling fifteen hours a day merely in order to get food and stay alive. Huddling and motionless in their igloos through this interminable night, they ought to have been melancholy men, men despondent and suicidal; instead , they were a cheerful people, always laughing, never weary of laughter.
A man is happy , in sum, when he is leading the life that suits him; and neither warmth nor comfort has anything to do with it.