The Rome Diary

I just started blogging for a travel agency based here in Rome. This is the only one I've written so far, but I'm hoping to start pumping out one per week. Check it out when ya got the time.

Dear Senator Casey,

I registered to vote in District One of Philadelphia County just in time to vote for you in the 2006 Senate Election. I’m very proud that in my first PA election I voted for someone who shares my views on health care reform, and simultaneously helped kick a twisted rat-fucker like Rick Santorum out of Congress. Since I helped put you in office, I’d like you to return the favor by endorsing the version of the health care bill that passed the House last Saturday. Furthermore I’d like you to go out on a limb and voice support for the public option that has so many of the bill’s opponents up in arms.

Two years ago I traveled to San Antonio, TX with a friend of mine to visit her family. During the trip I had the pleasure of meeting an uncle of hers, who for the sake of propriety I’ll refer to in this letter as Uncle Jack. When Uncle Jack and I sat down to lunch together, he asked me if I was a Democrat. I told him that I was, and he good-naturedly replied that he was going to “convert” me. I warned him that he had his work cut out for him, and we proceeded to have it out. When we’d worked our way around to national health care, he stated that he was opposed to it on the grounds that it was “socialism”. Unfortunately in his mind, the word carries a connotation that throws up a permanent no-pass. After that, there was nothing more that could be said on the subject. Throughout the conversation he expressed his views with calm and precision and listened to my opposing views with the type of patience and courtesy Texans are known for. Whatever our differences in politics, he impressed me as a high-caliber guy with his heart in the right place.

A few months ago I received a frantic call from my friend telling me that Uncle Jack had suffered a serious injury on the job. He’d had an accident with construction equipment and cut two fingers off his good hand. This minor slip has screwed Uncle Jack in many ways, and from a number of directions. He makes a living with his hands, and his livelihood is now handicapped. This places his (and his wife’s) future in serious jeopardy. As an independent contractor he has no employer-based coverage, and his wife was a stay-at-home mother. If fitted with the proper prosthetics, he could easily continue to work. Unfortunately, without insurance, the price on that would be unbelievably high. There are only two ways they could possibly afford the procedure: mortgaging their house, or cashing in their retirement fund.

It’s a shame that Uncle Jack swallows the Republicans’ scare-tactics on national health care, because he’s a prime example of the kind of person who would benefit from a public option. Not only that, but he DESERVES it. He’s a small business owner who operates under our social code of hard work, independence, and personal responsibility. He didn’t lack health insurance because he was lazy. He lacked it because he was pursuing the American Dream of living life on his own terms. Of course he could have taken out a private policy, but in addition to being the head of a single-income household, he was saving every penny he could for his son’s and daughter’s college tuition. And it’s a sad state of affairs when any American has to choose between his health and his children’s education.

In conclusion, this bill just narrowly escaped defeat in the House, and now it faces an even greater challenge in the Senate. This is the closest to a victory on national health care that the Democrats have gotten since the Roosevelt administration. I’m sure you’re as disappointed as me that the Phillies made it all the way to the Series only to be defeated by the Yankees 4-2. I don’t think I could go through it twice in the same year.


Sincerely,


Jonathan Balog

* I'd like to point out that I wrote this last Thursday when we were paying homage to the vets who put their lives on the line so I can shoot my mouth off. Also, I changed the line about Santorum when I actually sent it.

I've never done that 50 Book Challenge Thing, but I've been ripping through 'em this year.  Chalk it up to not having internet access and spending a lot of time on the bus.  Anyway, so far this year:

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon - Watchmen*
Nick Hornby - High Fidelity
Jack Kerouac - On the Road: The Original Scroll
Ernest Hemmingway - A Farewell to Arms
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Hunter S. Thompson - The Proud Highway
Hunter S. Thompson - The Rum Diary
Ernest Hemmingway - The Sun Also Rises
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451**
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World Revisisted
Leonard Cohen - Book of Longing
Leonard Cohen - Let Us Compare Mythologies
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
Timothy Crouse - The Boys on the Bus
Joseph Campbell - The Power of Myth
Humphrey Carpenter - J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography
Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
William S. Burroughs - The Soft Machine
William S. Burroughs - Nova Express
William S. Burroughs - The Ticket that Exploded***
Stephen Hawking - The Universe in a Nutshell****

* Second time
** First time
*** Probably not the smartest thing to carry around an airport
**** Fuck I feel stupid.  Why didn't I pay attention in high school science?

Hey guys, thanks for your concerns and worries.  I'm alive and well, and so is Rome.

Last night I went to bed early because I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before.  The couple I live with was screaming at each other as usual.  At some point in the night I was lucid enough to notice that my building was shaking like a cardboard box.  I was really out of it, so it didn't occur to me that that isn't normal.  I just figured the couple was throwing furniture or something.

I've been around town today, and haven't noticed any serious damage.  They felt it the worst in L'Aquila, which is about 95 km from Rome.  Last I checked there were over 90 dead.  Keep them in your thoughts.

All the Love,

Jon

(?)

( circumsized for length )

I just finished The Rum Diary, and I ended up liking it a lot more than I thought I would.

H.S.T.'s initial dream was to be a novelist, and he spent most of his 20's writing and rewriting The Rum Diary.  Journalism was something he fell into because it was a way to pay the bills with writing while he worked on becoming the next F. Scott Fitzgerald.  After he went on to reinvent the medium, he put fiction on the back-burner.  Knowing how long it took him to get this book on the shelves, I figured it was to his career what Junky was to William Burroughs's: a generic misfire before he found his true voice.  But now that I've read it, I'm honestly surprised that he didn't find a publisher a hell of a lot sooner.

I don't think it's The Great Puerto Rican Novel that he was shooting for, mostly because the only other characters he tends to interact with are the other American ex-pats.  This might be because it was written under the influence of Hemmingway's ex-pat novels.  Still it's disappointing, because one of the things I admire the most about Thompson was his knack for inserting himself into an environment and wrapping his head around the collective psyche.  Aside from this, it's a solid short novel with a fun plot, fluid dialogue, and tight narrative.  It's clear how hard he was trying to channel Fitzgerald, and he succeeded more often than not.  This is never more evident than it is in the final paragraph.

It's not a beach novel, but read it on the beach anyway.

On Wednesday I was hanging out in Trastevere with my future room mates.  They'd brought along a friend of theirs from Texas who was visiting until the following afternoon.  He and I got along pretty well, and he asked me if I was going out with them that night.  I told him I wasn't really up for it, as I hadn't been making much money lately, and needed to give my liver a break anyway.  He insisted that I come out anyway, and promised to pick up my tab whenever necessary.  And really, how can you say no to a stranger like that?

The five of us killed a few pitchers of Strongbow and New Castle at Scholars, then headed for a dive bar we like in Campo di Fiori.  We started off doing something called a Tequilla Boom Boom, which involves holding a coaster over a glass containing tonic water and a shot glass of tequila down on a bar top.  After a few of those, someone (possibly me) insisted that Texas try a shot of absinthe before he left Italy.  The bar girl pulled out the same 85% brand from Spain that I brought back for my brother for Christmas, and did the whole routine, flaming sugar cubes and all.

At one point, Texas stumbled outside, and I followed him.  When we were out in the street he turned to me and said, "OK, I want you to hit me as hard as you can."

I wasn't expecting that one.  "...what?"

"Right here," he said, tapping his left shoulder.  "I'm gonna puke.  If someone punches me real hard in the arm it diverts my attention from my stomach.  Works every time."

I'd never hit anyone before in my life, unless you count middle school.  "As hard as I can?"

"Yeah.  Don't worry, dude.  Do it all the time."

What the hell, I thought, and slugged him.  Unfortunately it's been a long time since those Kempo courses, and I forgot that you're not supposed to tuck your thumb under your fingers.  I'm lucky I didn't break it.

I'm sorry to say that this experience hasn't inspired me to lead a revolution against consumer culture.  Can't win 'em all I guess.

Laura Greenback, who now works for Bmore Live, asked me to write an article about my night job.  It's in this month's print issue and it just went online yesterday.  Check it out.

Last night I dreamed I was at a party at a stadium in either Philadelphia or New York.  Halfway through the dream, a plane crashed into the stadium (which was then flooded for some reason), killing everyone aboard, including Ian McKellen.  I remember being stricken with fear, thinking, "Who's going to protect us from the Black Riders now???"

Everyone knows that Yogi Berra said, "When you arrive at a fork in the road, take it."  Not everyone knows that those are actually directions to his house.  His long driveway splits somewhere in the middle, but both paths eventually lead to his estate.  Therefore, when you come to a fork in the road, take it.  Most of his one-liners weren't intended to be hors d'oeuvres of zen--they just came out that way.

A few days ago I was trying fight my way through the crowd at Scholars, and I ended up getting stuck in front of someone's table.  A guy at the table looked up and said, "Hey man, who are you?"

"I'm just a guy trying to get by, man."  Literally, I was just trying to get out.

His smile dissolved.  "That's deep, bro."

Looks like I'll be in Milan for a Sisters gig next week.  I'd feel bad taking off work when I'm so strapped for cash, but I've been working hard lately, and I'm due for a trip out of Rome.  Coincidentally, one of my friends is going to Milan on the same day so he can catch a flight to England.  The plan is to catch a midnight train with him on Sunday, check into a hostel, sleep for a few hours, spend the day exploring the city, make it to the show by 9, and catch a RyanAir flight home the next day.  Unfortunately, I won't have the time or money to do all the tours and sight-seeing I'd like to do, but I'm thinking of this as a crash course for when I can come back and stay for a few days.

There's a t-shirt they sell at their gigs that has the Merciful Release log surrounded by the words UTTERLY BASTARD GROOVY.  That t-shirt is my goal for Monday.

Sometimes, my intuition is dead-on-balls accurate.

Two weeks ago, the couple I live with told me that we had to be out of the flat by March 25.  I immediately started room-hunting on craigslist, and found a vacant room in a flat near Piazza Bologna.  Rather than risk finding myself homeless at the end of the month, I took the room on the spot.  Ironically, that very same day, my current room mates told me that we could actually stay here 'til mid-April.  Go figure.

Yesterday I was supposed to drop off part of my deposit, and all day I had a knot in my stomach.  As nice as the people seemed, and as cool as the room was, I really didn't want to live in Bologna.  It would have entailed an hour-long commute to either of my jobs, and getting home after midnight would have been a huge pain in the ass.  Also, as long as we're counting negatives, the neighborhood just doesn't do it for me.  The deciding factor was that the deposit was out of my budget.

I hated myself for screwing someone like this so close to the end of the month, but life has taught me that it's foolish to sacrifice your own happiness to avoid rocking the boat.  I'd decided to stick around my current place 'til April and hold out for a room that I really like.  Not half an hour after I canceled, I got a call from David and Caitlin, two of my best friends in the city.  They wanted to know if I'd be down for finding a place with them in Trastevere (where I live now.)  At that point, my head practically exploded.

Because I rolled with my gut instinct, I'll be living with friends in one of my favorite parts of the city, as opposed to living with strangers in no-man's-land.  I haven't been this happy in weeks.

I woke up this morning to find that one of the cats had shoved his way into my room, and had one of his paws on my nose.  Maybe that was his way of saying, "Glad you'll be around another month, dude."

The Swans are one of those infamous alt-rock acts that I never bothered to catch up with.  When I read that Kyp Malone from TV On The Radio cited them as an influence, I decided to check 'em out on YouTube.

I dig music that's innovative and challenging, not necessarily something that tastes good on the first bite.  That isn't to say that I dislike everything that's popular, or that I automatically favor something just because it's not popular.  It's just that I'm more interested in artists who push boundaries rather than the ones who merely release a 2.0 version of what's already on the market.  To quote the great Peter Murphy, I get bored in the flat field.  Ya feel me?

I'm usually the last person to ever say this, but after finally hearing the Swans...people actually LIKE this???

Now show me your boobies!

Some of the early letters in The Proud Highway reflect Thompson's interest in Ayn Rand's Objectivism.  I only made it 200 pages into Atlas Shrugged, and I've never touched The Fountainhead.

There's a scene in the movie Pink Flamingos where a secretary says, "I'm sorry, but throughout the course of my life I have learned that there are only two kinds of people: people like me and assholes, and it's quite clear which category you belong to."  That's pretty much how things roll in the Ayn Rand Universe.  Her novels are 800+ page manifestos of her philosophy, and her characters are either people like Ayn Rand, or idiots.  In this case, idiots are leftists, environmentalists, hippies, socialists, religious people, foreign aid advocates, anyone who questions the beauty of capitalism, etc., etc.  I once saw an interview with Rand on Donahue where she said that she only liked romantic art because it reflects life long-range rather than life at the moment.  That's all well and good, but it's hard to care about cardboard characters, particularly when the author reveals her agenda twenty pages into the story.

I really should get around to reading those books sometime.  I've never been of the opinion that something has to be good just because it's popular, but still, in order for something to be popular, a lot of people have to like it.  Besides, it's a lot easier to fundamentally disagree with a philosophy once you've studied it in depth.  If I make it to Philly this July, I might pick up the novels in a used book store (because as a rule, every used book shop has to have at least eight copies of both.)  If they're anywhere near as bad as I'm expecting them to be, I'll borrow one of my brother's magnums, put a bullet in each, and post photos of them on Facebook.

I've been spending a lot of time hanging out with my fellow teacher friend Lisa.  Lisa and I met randomly on a bus in October and played text-tag 'til we finally met up two weeks ago.  She teaches full-time at an international school, and she has what may be the sweetest hook-up in Rome.  The school not only takes care of her housing, but pays her 2,000 Euro in cash and 80 in food coupons per month, and takes care of her health insurance.  She's had me over for dinner a few times, and let me tell you her place is SICK.  It's a beautiful fully-furnished one-room flat on the top floor with a terrace overlooking a park in Monteverde.  I'd be happy in something half it's size.  Lucky bitch.

I think I'm going to send my CV to all of the international schools this spring and try to land a position for the fall.  I'm technically not ed-certified, but I've had plenty of experience.  Right now I'm supporting myself with private lessons, I've taught in public schools in the States and Italy, and I co-taught a course for adults in college.  Even if I could only get an assistant's job, the housing would be worth it's weight in gold.

I put a limited warranty on my European days because I can't afford to be naive about the future.  I'm having the time of my life but this lifestyle doesn't have much longevity.  Living paycheck to paycheck is OK when you're a healthy twentysomething, but to quote the great Peter Fonda, I'm hip about time.  However, having a gig like that would put a different spin on things.  With that kind of income I could not only live comfortably but regularly put money into both my IRA and my Ever-Imminent Rainy Day Fund.  Plus, that kind of job would simultaneously curb my drinking and give me plenty of money for weed.

I miss you guys back home more than you can imagine.  Also, I'm terrified by the prospect of jumping back into that wretched economy.  With my kind of credentials there aren't a hell of a lot of options for me right now.  So what would I do?  Go back to waiting tables and carrying suitcases in Philly?  Fuck that.

As usual, it all boils down to yet another option, and I still have a few months to chew on while I sort it all out.

I just heard from one of my room mates that we have to be out of the flat by March 25. The couple was planning on moving sometime this summer, but their landlord's lawyer just called to say they want us out early. This is a considerable dick in my ass because Tamanya's coming to visit, and she's flying in on, you guessed it, March 25.

But aside from that, this is probably a blessing in disguise. I love this place because my bed is huge, I have 24/7 wireless, my room mates mind their own business, and it's a ten-minute walk from the last pub. Unfortunately the rent is way too high for my current income. I'm sick of always being broke and eating the cheapest food I can find at the discount supermercato. I've been doing all right so far, but that's only because nothing has gone seriously wrong. I don't know how much longer I can hold my breath over that.

A few of the kids I work with on the pub crawl have offered to let me live in their flat. They're cool kids for being only 18-20, and I'm not so high and mighty that I can't live with people younger than me. I am, however, WAY too high and mighty to share a room, which I would have to do if I moved in with them. And so, it's time to hit craigslist.

In all honesty, I'd live alone if I could, but that's probably not gonna happen. A friend of mine rents a room from a college professor who only spends one week out of the month in Rome. I need a hook-up like that.

After I find a place with a rate significantly lower than what I'm paying now, I'm gonna celebrate by buying some weed and doing bong hits for Michael Phelps.

Lately I've been reading a book of letters by Hunter S. Thompson called The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman.  It's the kind of lite literary snack that I can carry around in my bag and read on the bus, metro, or tram.

It would have done me a world of good to have read this when I was down and out in Philadelphia, but right now it's helping me put my Philly days in perspective.  The letters I'm reading right now are from after he left Eglin Air Force Base and spent time in NYC and Puerto Rico.  Reading them makes me feel like I'm reliving 2005 to 2008.  I'd moved to Philly in more less the same condition as he was when he went to New York: with no job, few friends, a bare-bones resume, and very little money.  Even when his life-boat was running out of air, he still managed to stay afloat through resourcefulness, and I did the same thing.  When he was living on a few dollars a week and working bottom-rung jobs, he managed to know people who knew people who could get him passes to concerts, plays, operas, and parties.  When I was living at the mercy of a temp agency and plummeting into debt, I regularly pushed my way onto guest lists by writing about the band or volunteering my time on the set.  And of course, drinking for free is never really that hard, if you know where to look.

To a point I could say the same thing about my life at the moment.  I'm nowhere near as desperate as I was a few years ago, mostly because I consider just being here a huge accomplishment.  Still, I'm far from Easy St.  I'm living paycheck to paycheck and I rarely have anything left over at the end of the week.  I tend to eat more or less the same thing every day, and there are days when I would kill for a steak.  But as always, I'm finding ways to party for free, meeting the grooviest people, and having the time of my life.  Security is highly overrated.

Another cool thing about this book is the way he emulates the style and attitude of whoever he's reading that week, whether it's F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ayn Rand, Jack Kerouac, or Jean-Paul Sartre.  It's interesting to see how he absorbed his influences and ultimately incorporated all of them into the style he became known for.  The psychologist Erik Erikson said that this is how teenagers develop an identity.

All of this strikes a major chord in me, because for the first time in my life I'm starting to believe in my abilities as a writer.  I've been paid my share of compliments, but I've just recently begun to buy them.  Maybe I've had more of a jump-start than I thought.