Pictures of the world we live in#2

 

Panorama from Castelmazzano, Basilicata, Italy July 2016

The blank page.

Medium.

An online platform for people who wants to write and publish what they write to an audience.

It is great. I read stuff there I couldn't have read anywhere else. It is (sometimes) entertaining. It is (sometimes) educational. Often it is reflections and some kind of self realisation pieces. And very often it is writing about writing and how to be a better writer or even just to become one that writes.

Writing starts with a blank page.

From there it is a matter of persistence and bravery. It is like the matador, alone in the bullfighting arena against the bull.

The blank paper against you. 

A blank page.

You (me)?

The idea is not to give up, just start somewhere, then it could go by it self.

At least that's what I read two days ago in yet another of those many stories about how to write.

So that is exactly what I'll do.

Just write.

Fill the blank page with?

In the past month, more or less, I've been using writing prompts to get started. It is a wee app I've installed here on my iPad - yeah, I have got used to use my iPad for writing. I like the hammering on the touch screen a lot more that using a laptop keyboard -or any keyboard in fact- and I really like the writing app I am using -  so, every day, when I normally sit down to write, I open that app and it gives me a prompt, somewhere or something to start writing about.

That has helped, in some ways. 

Now though, it has started to bore me a bit with its often superficial prompts.

So once again I look into the writing tips and advice I've read about to seek guidance. Hmm. I have been thinking back to my school days when we were asked to write pieces, papers and small essays.

Man, how I hated writing back then.

I remember how we also got subjects to write about from the teacher. "What did you do on holiday?" Or what about this: "do you prefer dogs or cats, and why?"

I was so lazy. I just wanted to go outside to play and run around, and many times that's what I did and so, the papers never got made until the very last moment -which sometimes was early in the morning on the day they were due- and, of corse, therefore they were utterly rubbish. Or piss, like they would say it in Scotland.

Getting those subjects I thought back then, was a limitation of my individual creativity and a restraint on my imagination so therefore I convinced myself that I would prefer it when we were given no specific subject - or a prompt- to write about. Just write what came into our mind.

Blank page.

Only then I shamefully realised that if there was no given subject or prompt, I absolutely didn't have any idea what to write about.

Blank page.

One of the ideas or suggestions I've read about lately is that you try to imagine who you are writing to or for.

Ok, now I'm writing to this blog of mine that I have started. The problem is that no one knows anything about it and I don't tell anyone as I am afraid people would laugh and think; " what a load of utter rubbish"!

So that is who I'm writing to, no one. 

Why bother then?

Blank page.

Like a pilot at training flying a simulator, or rather simulating he is flying.

This is like me now. I could write in a little greasy notebook here in my kitchen and hide it away in a drawer so no one could ever see it. Or I could write and simulate that someone actually might see it published on a blog that no one knows anything about. 

To get practice. I could say. And because I like it. Because I feel I have to do it. Because I feel good doing it.

A page with four words.

A prompt.

Sometimes there is a need for an ignition, something unexpected to start a chain of associations.

To put on that blank page, as a start.

Prompts.

Before the words are coming out as a natural stream of sense.

Picture of the world we live in.

Mount Vesuvius across the bay of Neaples. 

Dump bed, hydraulic and the fresh air of the North Atlantic.

Once in a while I wake up in the middle of the night and a certain experience starts haunting my mind and I start shivering with anxiety and fear.

Anxiety and fear. 

Not connected to that moment but something that has happened many year previously. I didn't really feel that fear at the time it happened but I can certainly after, years after when I wake up and feel that incredible fear. 

Back in the early 80ties. I was a truck driver on the Faroe Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. Some small windiest wind ridden islands, right in between Scotland and Iceland. Sometimes they kill whales there, just for the sake of it. I didn't do that, I was a truck driver.

For a week. Then I got bored and became a taxi driver. For one night. I think that was the night where I ate the eye of a sheep. But that is yet another story.

It was as a truck driver I got scared. Well, not back then. I was too young and dumb or maybe just too naive to be as scared as I should have bee. The rest of my life was still in front of me -and still is- so what could possible go wrong, apart from nearly everything.

Short time before that I'd just finished my military service and felt so free that I could fly to the clouds and beyond and above, like Jonathan Livingston seagull. 

They needed more roads on those windiest islands. They gotten themselves some more cars because they caught more fish and built bigger houses and even bigger boats. Then needed to catch more fish to pay for it all. And now this road. 

We were quite at the beginning. Two men was drilling holes in the rocks and cliffs and filling it with dynamite. In the night they would blow it. Next morning the digger would go there and start to dig in the pulverised rocks and lift them onto the loader of my gigantic truck.

Once my truck had been filled with tons and tons of rocks and rubble, I would push the shift forward, into first gear, release the clutch, give some gas and the monster would slowly start moving. It was a heavy dealt. And loud.

Basically I was building my own road to drive on and for every load I delivered at the other end I had to drive further and further.

There, at the other end a colleague in bulldozer was moving back and forth to flatten the rocks and rubble to a plain surface. Later gravel and sand would be added, then some layers of Tarmac and a new road would be finished. At the end of that new road, a wee remotely village, which only had been reachable by boat or hiking over the hills.

Now the cars would come, and the tourists. Like the German car that suddenly came out along the road we were building. As they came to a halt at the front of my huge truck, they got out with a map and asked why they couldn't continue.

"Well, because the road isn't finished yet" I replied.

"But it is here on the map" they argued and shovelled a big map out of the passenger window and up under my nose.

"Look, here it is, you can see the road there as a red line".

And they were right. There on the map was a clear red line marked along the coast line whee we were just building that road.

"When is that map printed?" I asked.

"This year!" They replied.

"I see." I said.

And then, I, as a "migrant" worker, had to explain to some German tourists why that road was on a freshly printed map as a finished solid road when it clearly still was under construction.

Do I need to explain it here too? I guess I do.

Okay. Back then, the Faroe Islands was still like a culture of fishermen. Like people of nature. They were used to a hard life with very few resources. Apart from fish. And maybe that was how and why  their philosophy was this way.

If you catch a lot of fish, you have a pile of them. Then you can start eating. When you have eaten the last fish you can't eat anymore, unless you go fishing again to catch some more.

When they build roads they behave a bit the same way. Roads are build and paid for, using some of the money they collect from taxes. Each year the know more of less how much they take in. Then they budget. So much for this and so much for the other.

At the beginning of the year they pile of money was all there, but opposite as with the road we were building that became longer and longer by the day, the pile of money got less. Until one day there was nothing more. Then they stopped and waited until the next year and a new pile of tax money.

That was why they knew that the road would eventually be there at some time, so they printed the map with the projected road. Although it wasn't there, yet.

Clearly the German tourists weren't largely impressed by that explanation, but I couldn't blame them. After all they were German and used to different kind of budgeting and efficiency.

This isn't what sometimes keeps me awake though, not the slightest.

My huge truck was kind of the dump truck type with a solid metal Vessel. To unload the rubble and rocks, I had to back up to the edge of the track we've created, reverse as far I could to the very edge, and then kip it all down using the powerful hydraulic pump to lift the vessel.

I loved this part of it, the part where I had to reverse this massive & heavy ten wheeler and manoeuvre it as close to the edge as possible. Sometimes I had to get out to go have a look how far yet to go before the whole machinery would crack the hundreds of meters down into the North Atlantic Ocean. 

At that time I didn't give that much thought. I couldn't imagine that I would misjudge the distance in the rear mirror when I put that machine in reverse. I didn't imagine that my foot could slip from the cloth or the break. Never it came to my mind that those breaks could even fail.

This is, however scary and somewhat risky it actually was, not what sometimes let me shiver when I get to think about it. That something else entirely.

One day when I'd stopped at the sheer drop ready to kip my load of rocks and rubble down into abyss. 

I started the hydraulic pump. The hoist started pushing upwards and the bed slowly rose and soon the first rocks started dropping. As the dump bed came higher and higher the whole load got moving and with a cracking noise rolled out with more and more force. That's when it happened. Suddenly there was an unfamiliar noise, another crack I didn't recognise and the dump bed stopped moving but began shaking.

What was that. I looked out and up under the dump bed, I saw that the hydraulic hoist had become loose and was now just holding up the heavy dump bed as it was stuck at one of the metal bars at the bottom. 

The whole load was gone and I shut down the hydraulic so the hoist and bed came down, but I couldn't take another trip. I had to get back to the garage to get this fixed. 

To call it a carnage is a little big bit of an overstatement. Basically the truck was owned by one man who lived in a house just opposite the entry to the building site. If he owned more of the heavy material on the construction site, I cannot tell. 

As I came there I found him in his office, or rather where he had his calculator and a telephone. 

I explained the problem and he got up and out, found himself a really dirty and oily boiler suit. The we went out to the patient which I'd parked in the driveway.

Now it was standing there like it was looking at us coming towards it, boiling and steaming and smelling of oil and diesel and hot hydraulic oil.

He jumped up into the drivers seat and hit the ignition. The truck started and a big cloud of black smoke shot out of the exhaust pipes and up in the air. As he tit the gas pedal a deep roar thundered through the Atlantic air.

Then he hit the hydraulic lever and the dump bed started moving. The hoist was still stuck in the corner of two crossing metal-beams under the chassis of the bed and so it managed to lift it up.

As it came as high as it could he stopped it and let it stay there. Jumped down and found a wooden pole.

He took it and carried it up onto the chassis of the truck. Then he placed it between the bed and the chassis to support the bed in its upright position.

I thought to my self: will that really hold the weight of that heavy dump bed. 

Or at least now I tell my self that was what I was thinking. But maybe I wasn't. Because I found my self standing there next to him working with a power tool and trying to cut out the broken metal joint that should connect the hydraulic hoist and the dump bed.

It did take some time to fix it, and all that while we were both standing there working on the truck chassis. Only with a wooden pole to hold up that metal dump bed above us.

There has been hundreds of accidents worldwide in similar situations. Fatal accidents as well. That thing would have squashed us both to minced meat had it come down. 

And exactly that is what sometimes keeps me awake when I start thinking what could have gone so terrible wrong.

But because you can read this it obviously didn't.

Business as usual.

They have their kids in the best private schools.

On a night out they go to the best restaurants in clothes from the best and most prestigious designers.

"Good day sir & Madame. The same private table with the view as last time? Certainly sir, may I take your coat Madame? Will you start with Dom Perignon 2004 again, like yesterday sir?"

Cars from the worlds top manufacturers are parked in car parks by servants, and at the closest port, a private yacht is anchored and a full staff is waiting to disembark to a private cruise into the glowing sunset.

They are among the society's high earners, and role models to many who wants to be successful in finances. But then we get to know out their busyness, we get disgusted by them and want our police and justice system to investigate into their business to find evidence to prove they are earning incredible profits on other people's misery. They deal with depravation, devastation and death.

They are drug dealers.

Their kids are admitted into the most prestigious private boarding schools.

When they take their families out, they only frequent Michelin Star restaurants, wearing the highest quality garments from the worlds top designers.

"Good day sir & Madame. Had pleasant day today sir?

Madame, would you like a glass of champagne before settling in? Dom Perignon 2004 again, like yesterday?"

Cars from the worlds top manufacturers are parked along side each other by servants and on weekends they fly to Saint Tropez to enjoy the sun set at the mediterranean sea with the jet set.

When we see them we envy their wealth, the big houses and boats. We Love to look at pictures of the high society in the coloured magazines, their cars, dresses and wish to make as much money as them to be able to mingling with them in high society. They are greeted by police directors and met with handshakes and huge smiles by presidents and politicians all over the world. Some of them are probably politicians themselves. Somewhere. When we get to know their busyness, it makes no different. They too deal with devastation and death, but that is just a business.

They are arms dealers.

The sad road diner.

In the 70ties and early 80ties it might have been a heaving busy stop and road diner on what could then have been the main road south towards Brindisi and Bari, before the new parallel autostrada was built to suit the new times and big fast cars to cruise faster from Northern Europe and down to the sun in southern Italy and Greece.

Now it was just a sad road diner at a marginalised road.

A road used mainly by the locals and perhaps sometimes people like us. Holiday drivers, who used the peripheral roads to get to obscure destinations. No stress and no pressure to be anywhere at a certain time. You see more that way, on the secondary roads, I think. And you can easily stop when you see anything interesting. Not to mention all the money you save on autostrada tolls. Instead you can spend that on spaghetti, pizzas and refreshments of any kind.

That was exactly what we intended to do now. We'd been on the road for some time and needed a little rest and spend some of the saved coins to buy a nice cup of hot coffee.

We'd seen a sign for gas and fork, spoon and cup on the side of the road. 500 meters. The indicated to the right, a look in the rear mirrors, a light adjustment of the stirring wheel to the right, reduce speed. A filling station straight ahead. Orientation, localise parking spot, stirring wheel, break, stop.

No car was at the marginalised filling station. Looked quite abandoned actually. Next to that marginalised filling station, this peripheral little “sad” cafe.

One car was parked outside. It was a small wooden shed. Not to bad to look at, a bit similar to a road workers lunch-shed in Denmark.

On the inside, the door and windows were reinforced by a metal grid. We walked to the door and pushed it open.

3 pairs of eyes stalked us from the moment the door opened and for about 3 or 4 seconds. One man was sitting pushing coins into a slot machine, he froze into a halt while staring at us. He was the first to withdraw the gloom and return his attention to the machine.

Across from the entrance, behind the desk stood the owner or manager. He was probably my own age. A tall man with semi long hair starting to grow very thin at the front and top. He was wearing jeans and a yellowish faded polo shirt that was a bit out of shape and, like myself, his tommy was sticking out a bit. He probably had been one of the more hansom and popular guys around, in his younger days.

“Buon giorno”. It was me in my retarded Italian, trying to gain enough self-confidence to also order a coffee. Tai tai had vanished to visit the toilet.

There was some sort of greeting back and also another sentence which I didn't comprehend. I just acted like I did and walked up to the desk and ordered “dua caffee latte, prego”.

Not really sure if he rolled his eyes or not, but he started to work the Italian coffee magic they do at those huge steaming metal machines they have installed behind counters in every bar and cafe.

Side track.

In Italy, the coffee is absolutely great everywhere. It isn't like in Northern Europe or the US, where you get good coffee at “real café's”, but at road stops and diners you get the worst evaporated solid tar from an old coffeemaker.

Back on track. 

At the back of the cafe, behind another desk, a tall woman. In the glass enclosure at that desk some different sandwiches, hotdogs and burgers. After convincingly ordering coffee, I leisurely strode to the back to take a look at the food on offer. I wasn't really hungry, however, being on holiday, you never know what might tempt you?

The woman's face changed slightly, from disengaged to hopeful and her eyes caught a tiny light and over her lips a tense shivering, a hopeful smile arose as I came to take a look at her food?

She was tall and slender, shoulder long dark hair and wearing jeans and a nice feminine top. It was obvious that she tried to maintain and express some sort of class, even life wasn't as good as it once could have been, in the late 80ties at a then busy and well frequented road diner. 

I decided not to be hungry. The displayed food didn't tempt me at all and as I walked back to the coffee desk I could sense a huge disappointment in the woman's face.

Our coffees was finished and put on the desk for us. She walked up towards the coffee desk and had a short word exchange with her husband. Of corse I didn't understand what it was about. He said some short sentence back at her, threw the tea towel over the coffee machine and walked off in direction of the corner, where a television was playing some old black and white Italian heimat movie.

Now she took position at the coffee machine and secretly stalking us having our coffee.

She was also about my age, however, she had managed to keep better in shape than me, and the man, who must be her husband. She was quite attractive and had definitely been a stunner in her younger days. He had probably won her heart by promising her the world and moon by the prospects of a life running a busy and prosperous road side cafe, back then when that road was the road that led to everyones dreams.

I can't tell if we were the first completely strangers in that road diner for a long, long time. Not only strangers, but foreign strangers as well. It was like that thought of being a foreign stranger entering a road cafe in a foreign country was playing on her mind.

The other customer was still pulling the handle of the slot machine, we were drinking our coffee and talking silently about the next stage of our trip. The probably husband was watching TV in the corner, but she was still standing there in her own thoughts, secretly observing us like she was trying to imagine where we'd come from and where we were heading, and like she in a way wanted to try to be us. Two strangers in a diner in a foreign country, who eventually would just walk out of there, out of that sad road diner and head somewhere else. Or was her thoughts maybe even worse, maybe she thought to her self that we had somewhere else to go, somewhere that was not frozen in time, with her stuck in it.

As we finished our coffee's and left the diner, I could feel her eyes following us until we closed the door.

It was a sad feeling that followed me all the way to the car.

One second.

"A sunbeam strikes a dark haired woman in a ultra tight white dress just as she strips herself naked next to one of the pillars supporting the bridge as you drive through it."

You can get an app for your smart phone called "One Second a Day". That app will allow you to capture one second video snippet and assemble these snippets into a longer video. 

What if you want to do a "one second a day" as a writing exercise or short story?

It will take a lot longer, and it wouldn't be realtime playing it back or reading it as with the video option.

In the video option one month will at the most be 31 seconds. How long would it take explaining one second in words?

Anyway and back and forth with words. I'm going to try to explain some of my one second revelations, thoughts or wonderings that has occurred during this summer trip to Italy.

The first one second blink that is etched into my memory -and will be for a very long time- was cinematic surreal. It was one of those moments you maybe dream in one of your most secret fantasies or that you could come up with if you are a real good writer. For sure, this one thing isn't what you think will ever happen to you, but suddenly it is playing out in front of your very own eyes like it was in slow-motion.

This first one second happened on our trip from the mountains in the Abruzzi region of Italy, to the town of Vieste at the Adriatic Sea in the Puglia region.

However, the second I remember goes like this:

"A sunbeam strikes a dark haired woman in a ultra tight white dress just as she strips herself naked by the side of one of the pillars supporting the bridge as we pass under it."

Fortunately, no accident happened. There could have, I guess, if I'd decided to glance some more and take my eyes of the road for longer than that second. My tai tai (wife) didn't see it, however she saw all that followed, which in it self would have been some other worthy seconds as well.

To explain the real circumstances, I need to rewind the tape a couple of minutes.

We were on this road going south along the east coast of Italy.

Nothing much had been happening, the road was quiet and only one truck in front of us and our car. Further ahead, a bridge crossing over the road and I am looking for an opportunity to overtake the truck. The road ahead is free so I got out r to start driving past that truck. Ahead the bridge in the shimmering sun. A silhouette of a truck parked at the right side under it and two silhouettes of humans crossing the road to the other side, under that bridge. Distorted and blurred by the immense heat from the road like a superior mirage in the dessert.

In my mind I saw a man and a woman. Then the male stopped to turn back to the truck on the side. The female figure continued across and started raising her arms above her head.

Our car was now so close that I could see the figure clearly. And I could see her pulling her dress up above her head. First I didn't believe my eyes. Thought I were daydreaming. I blinked a couple of times and opened my eyes again, still she was dragging the dress further and further above her head and I could now see her underpants and naked lower back. Soon her thick dark hair got free from the tight dress above her head and as her arms came down with the white dress in one hand, her hair fell back down on her suntanned back which was beaming in the sun beam. 

I got my eyes back on the road. Couldn't really believe what I've just seen. Wasn't sure I'd actually seen it, however I wasn't particularly tired and couldn't have had some sort of hallucination. Shortly after on the left side of the road, I saw a big sun umbrella with two ladies sitting looking out, and then I knew what it was all about. I asked Catriona if she'd seen anything, she hadn't and as I described what I'd seen she didn't believe it. Then suddenly, on the right side of the road, in a parking spot, stood this woman and made very clear copulating gestures towards the oncoming traffic and us.

Silence for a bit in our car, then laughter. 

As we turned off the road and toward our new destination, one last lady was offering "happy endings" at the road side.