Monkeyrockworld

It’s been long, too long since I last sat down to write something about my travels, let alone, my life. It sounds so retarded and gay sometimes to be almost morally forced to write something down for the lions out there to feed on, especially when the global situation around you has the density of a very thick layer of diarrhea, almost fluid SHIT coloring the walls, the air, the sun everything around you.
There have been few low moments like this in my entire life, and I’m partially glad because its never nice to be diving head first in a brown sea, but at the same time, such moments are able to leave you just stranded. Flabbergasted. Because you understand something bigger might lurk up there, above the clouds, being it Mr. Smiling Buddha or the Unnamed Chtulhu, I’ll never know. But definitely able to change the big plan in ways you’d never expected.
WZL 755 is not the name of a robot out of Star Wars; it was the name of my van, and i still dont know if buying it was the best or the worst thing I ever did in Australia. This boy was so cheap that the little Red Devil on my left shoulder kept on screaming at me, pulling my ear “If you don’t buy it NOW, you miss out, or well, you’re just a bloody retard!!” so I had to do it. I had to, dreaming of those infinite landscapes, deserts, kangaroos running wild in the open, koalas swinging from the trees and Aborigines finally keen in explaining me some of the secrets of their Tjukurpa. It was a perfect picture that left me totally broke in Melbourne, with no work ahead of me and a serie of fixes to do to it, plus registration money and blah blah blah

It was long and frustrating to get everything up and running, but that emotion on the day I finally set foot on the pedal and handled the clutch is hard to explain. It was like a hand from above pushing under my ass to chase my freedom… a small rabbit motherfucker running so far up the horizon line it was totally hard to catch it for two months and more than 12 thousand kilometres. If I had driven that distance straight, I might have been able to stop in Penang, pick up Kit, drive back to Italy across Central Asia and deliver her on the door of my old house in Voghera. It has been a great long trip, definitely, but like every trip, sometimes it has to come to an end.

When I first saw the smoke coming out from under the seat, I knew something major would have taken its toll on me and my random fate. I got to the point to consider life just on the sheer scale of a flat cement line running towards the horizon, ahead of me. A sky full of clouds was my television set at night, and a soft matrass shared with two other guys my early shelter. It was not uncommon to find yourself lingering in a sleep limbo way before 10 pm… kind of weird for me, and for you as well, I guess. I was feeling like that no direction, that sense of losing myself into such a vast and uncaring wilderness was the key to my problems. The fire at night was telling me the things I needed to know after a monotonous rice or pasta meal, forks beating hard on a plate we always wish was fuller. Sweaty and stinky, non showering for days, we were finding into nature an evicted shelter from ourselves and our responsibilities, and the situation was getting almost dangerous. Some nights I wished I wasn’t there, but the funny thing was, I didn’t know where else better could I have been. That nature lurking into my eyesockets with its sounds, darkness, colors, smells, was just as overwhelming as being delivered straight from your mother’s womb against a cold, slimy surface. And that smoke was like realizing something was burning in the oven while you are relaxed, reading a book, or glancing at a magazine. Totally random, it came out of the blue, and grabbed me by the balls. Squeezing. Hard. Ouch.

The wheels were red and the soil was burning hot, while we were crouching in a circle, scooping spoons of brothy chicken noodles from a pan on the ground. A stop to avoid overheating and putting some coolant in the radiator mouth was the first action we did. Dont know if right or wrong now, but when we restarted the engine and drove off, we had to stop again after two minutes driving, smoking from under our asses. It looked bad. Especially because Alice Springs, one of the most remote towns on Planet Earth, was 80 kms away. Luckily we had some tow rope and a couple of French guys pairing with us on another car for the past few days, so we could get pulled at the Proserpine Gorge rest area, saw the sight, and it was one of the most beautiful and unhappy sights of my trip. I had a bad ball of something stuck inbetween my lungs and my Adam’s Apple. And to make a long story short, when the next day we literally pulled into Alice Springs after an 80 km dead engine drive, the pieces of the broken mirror started to fall down upon me and cutting myself as loose as the German medium in the opening scene of Deep Red.

(To Be Continued)

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