Killing Batteries

The first thing you learn as a writer – or in my case I just figured it out about a year ago – is that you really need to have your ’space’. The space where you go to write. It should be comfortable, virtually devoid of distractions, with all necessary tools and equipment ergonomically placed and in top working order, with at least one clichéd sexy assistant attending to your every need, like the Portuguese girl in “Love Actually” or, for the ladies, Alfred from “Batman”.

I have had non-stop, whimpering, maddening, hair-yanking, sobbing space issues since the day I sold my house in 2003. Allow me to briefly illustrate a few of the ’spaces’ I’ve had to endure in the past four years:

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Have you ever noticed how there’s just too damn many saints, popes, royalty and leaders for any person with a reasonable social life to keep track of? I’m even fuzzy about the ones that are still alive, much less the untold hundreds of dead ones that people with a good inner-city education should have at least heard of. Did you know that Attila the Hun was from Hungary? Why did I think Mongolia?

Italy has no shortage of important people that I should at least have passing knowledge about and that’s creating a lot of extra work for me while I expand coverage for the LP book. It seems to me that someone should arrange of all the important people in history and present them all in one neat, chronological list. I realize that this might be more popularly known as ‘a history book’, but that’s not what I’m getting at. Just the really important people, done in a clear timeline, with cross references to other important people they interacted with. The current method of deluging us with information about every idiot that ever wore a crown, fed to us over the course of 18 years of schooling, is not sticking. And no, I will not be the one to compile that list. That’s a Bill Bryson job if I ever heard one. I know my strengths… If it isn’t about traveling or writing or complaining about something or cheap, yummy wine and coffee, I don’t want anything to do with it.

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I love breakfast in Italy for three key reasons:

1. Wicked

2. Good

3. Coffee

It’s one of the simple, given pleasures of being here. You can walk into the crustiest, backwater, hilltown train station café, order an 80 cent café macchiato (’stained coffee’, an espresso shot, with a dribble of milk) and it’ll be better than anything you can get for less than US$5 in America. I think about this coffee all day. At night, sometimes I’m too giddy to sleep, because I can’t wait to have that first coffee in the morning. Also the walls are pretty thin, so you can hear it when anyone in the building decides to do a procreation training session. And since this is Italy, that’s pretty often and, needless to say, boisterous.

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I’ve been inspired by last week’s list to make another list. Normally, I’m not a list guy. I just don’t do it. I can barely get it together to make a grocery list (e.g. yesterday I forgot mayo and contact lens solution), much less an authoritative, trustworthy list for public consumption. It wasn’t immediately apparent to me why this was, so I decided to give it some thought and make a list of why I don’t usually make lists:

1. Too much organization and work

That was it. Is it technically a ‘list’ if there’s just one item or do I have to downgrade it down to an ‘excuse’?

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I’m aware that I spend a lot of time complaining about my job and life in this blog. This is partly because my lifestyle, however desirable it may seem to the casual observer, is wrought with frequent obstacles, setbacks and surprises, with the ever-present threat of financial ruin looming overhead. This kind of environment would test the patience of Buddha Himself on occasion, so I make no apologies.Also, I’m crotchety. And don’t ask me why, but when I’m annoyed, I’m twice as funny as when I’m blissed out. It’s sick and masochistic, I know, but we all have our strengths and mine is to make personal distress and injustice hilarious.

That said, there are undeniable perks to this life, like my current living arrangements. For the duration of my LP Tuscany write-up I’ve secured a short-term apartment literally inches from the shores of Lake Trasimeno in northwest Umbria. The apartment itself is about as character-starved as a tube-sock, but it has everything I need and, well, there’s the view:

So, I know it’s not gonna make coffee spew from your nostrils, but this is what I get to look at (and walk around and swim in) for the next six to eight weeks and I just couldn’t help but share.

Though there’s the troubling matter of sitting just out of direct sunlight, on a freakishly uncomfortable plastic chair, working at a table that’s three inches higher than the ergonomic ideal for eight to 10 hours a day, seven days a week, while I update about a hundred pages of old information and greatly expand the book’s coverage on things like Sienese art, patron saints, popes and cathedral floor mosaics, subjects that could bore a free-range chicken to death.So stay tuned, laugh-riot complaining should resume presently.

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As promised, my “Best/Worst of Tuscany” and “What Happened?” lists.

Best/Worst of Tuscany

• Best drive: People, it’s all good, assuming you’re in the passenger seat. If not, count on pulling over a lot for photo sessions. No need to signal, just stomp on the brakes. The 12 Italians tailgating you will understand.
• Worst drive: Trying to get anywhere but Rome when leaving Siena (honorable mention, any drive within the Livorno city limits)
• Best view from a hotel room: Hands down, the Albergo Guastini in Pitigliano

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