rahvin
keeper of the flame
ok, here's the long version. if you're easily bored or already know all of that because you're stalkers, psychics, or lina, feel free to forget it even exists. if you have questions, hyena will reply because i get confused with details. 
---
i was feeling a bit like in an ellis novel, throughout the whole trip south with the enormous american girl sitting in my car, busy sticking tons of make-up on her face while she repeated that she was too tired to go to that party. she also complained of a headache, oblivious to the size of mine after six hours of rants including the unabridged history of her one-night-stands. if there is something i certainly don't need to hear when speeding on a highway, that's the description of the mood one needs to create to get a rotating hippo to bed.
we stop for gas somewhere around grosseto, still two hours from rome, and it's the dead of night, and it's cold, and i have to spend ten minutes out of the car to get the stupid pump to work. when i get back inside, amy says: "i closed my eyes and i had the feeling the car was still moving. it took me a while to realise it was impossible because you were still out". i point out that there are many cars that manage to actually move in some direction without me being inside to help.
three thousand phone calls follow. mr. r, who is hyena's beloved and who i'm somehow tempted to nickname micicici tries to talk amy out of having me dispatch her at her place instead of the party. i've been driving in rome once before, and somehow i don't really feel up to the task of finding my way through deserted streets at three in the morning without a map. i keep a straight face and avoid telling amy to please try and notice that i've been carrying her around for the previous eight hours, so maybe she should be sensitive enough not to send me to the lions.
mr. r is a bit more effective in this, promising amy someone will take her home from the party soon. he's there too, and hyena. aside from the sad fate of this poor dwarf, they're debating a social dinner which will take place the following nite at hyena's. of course we assume that evil incarnate, his girlfriend, is coming as well, but he just says "no" and fills the world with hope.
i am told all of the above when i set foot at the party, around two, exhausted and badly in need of a drink that i somehow take myself without even noticing i'm gulping down glass after glass of some very expensive dessert wine. i didn't even have dinner, let alone a dessert.
after such momentous revelations, i sit in silence while people i have never met debate my love life from the days of yore (yes, allright, i don't have any other kind anyway. it's understood
). the reason for my name being on everybody's lips is some old writings hyena did when she was 16 and accidentally found on some disk just the other day: they lament - amongst other things including, for some reason, lenin - my being with an obnoxiously idiotic girlfriend and a compulsive liar. she was indeed obnoxiously idiotic and a compulsive liar, but that doesn't mean that i want to be reminded about it ten years later and at night in a roman flat where 30-something employees of the bank of italy sit on the couch looking at me with a peculiar kind of interest.
yet i'm also being called very deep and interesting by hyena in said writings so i get my fifteen seconds of fame and briefly consider introducing myself by saying "hello, i'm the guy mentioned in these writings, and i assure you it didn't get any better since back then".
a little while later, the party ends. mr. r went home before i got there, tired and bubu. we hope for the life of us that he is approaching that fateful reckoning day when he will decide evil incarnate has to bite the dust. a reasonable amount of excitement carries me and hyena home.
the following day - saturday - is dedicated to prepare a decent setting for the night's events. a whopping grandtotal of nine people will arrive, including amy and mr. r, but not - add cruel grin here - evil incarnate. our clever plot includes a good friend of hyena and mr. r to arrive a bit earlier than the others, officially for drinks but in fact so that we can probe and investigate (in my case) or just plain take pleasure from mr. r's company (that's hyena). unfortunately, sphere-like americans keep intruding when amy tells us that she will arrive along with mr. r too, for appetizers.
in the meanwhile hyena's car's license plate disappears. no, really. she tells me it's probably the wind, but i figure she's in a state of pseudo-romantic shock and is therefore uncapable to relate to anything but poetic stuff. i think it's been stolen. we search around the car for a few minutes, looking silly peeking under other vehicles, then decide we have to do what we do best: have business with police stations. in yet another fragment of our long-lasting tradition of behaving stupidly around figures of public authority, we reach the local station under a sudden hail and report what happened, creating a very relaxed climate of general amusement. by the time we get back home, it's time to (a) prepare dinner; (b) hide all references to this forum from hyena's computer.
and then they arrive, mr. r and amy. he's brought a bottle of wine, which is open and finished by the three of us (amy doesn't drink, and is therefore totally untrustworthy imo) in about twenty minutes before anybody else might arrive and partake of it.
the discussion is a bit forced, although mr. r and me (?) try to be quite the entertainers. i can't get a single piece of information about the situation with evil incarnate, and at some point during the night just leave mr. r to hyena's cares, which somehow consist in resting her head on his shoulder and being ignored. i'm quite miffed by this behaviour, because mr. r is usually very extrovert with his female friends (read: he stops one step short of penetration) and i don't understand how he can keep calling hyena such a brilliant character and then turn his back when things might get more affectionate. so i stare into my glass until it's empty (hah) and then realise it's probably just me who feels this way in the whole world.
there's three more remarkable events that i have to list:
- we are informed by amy that "there is trouble in the house of love". evil incarnate is angry and resentful, as it seems mr. r told her he needs some time alone, and everybody knows that in the mystical language of wub, "i need some time alone" means "i don't want you (anymore), fuckface"
- i get three (!) replies in a row to my text messages from someone who seldom replies once
- i get involved in a discussion about my favourite philosopher and at the same time manage to win an argument with a philosophy graduate over whether getting accustomed to rejection can be called a "theoretical system" or not (it can't, btw)
sunday was the least eventful day. in the morning amy calls and tells us she tried to talk to evil incarnate (they share the same apartment) and got told to "go away". this resulted in her starting to cry, and evil incarnate starting to cry, and us feeling sort of ok after all. turmoil in the house of love was still in the air, though, and in the afternoon the two roommates gather around a table (it must have been a big table indeed) to discuss their issues. their issues, apparently, consist in evil incarnate accusing amy of having been out with mr. r the night before. but... they were at our party! and it's not as if evil incarnate hadn't been invited.
needless to say, everybody understands this accusation is quite preposterous, and everybody also understands a new explosion of weeping is about to begin. hyena and i would like to get to their apartment and be really nosy, but we don't want to risk mr. r finding out about it later and getting upset over the fact that we don't really want to let his (former?) girlfriend alone in her time of grief.
said grief is however not as long-lasting as decency would have required. evil incarnate storms out of the apartment leaving a wailing amy to a lonely night of dvd's and long-distance calls to be cuddled by a guy she fancies, and goes to mr. r's place, where only him, god, and an american cook know what will happen. we get no report on the whole situation, except that at 00:40am monday, evil incarnate was still nowhere near her own apartment, and possibly everywhere near her boyfriend's.
and as the whole nation holds its breath, i leave in the morning under the rain, the capital a shade of its former self behind me.
---
interested to read more? buy the book.
disappointed? please remember that nobody ever gets what they want.
---
i was feeling a bit like in an ellis novel, throughout the whole trip south with the enormous american girl sitting in my car, busy sticking tons of make-up on her face while she repeated that she was too tired to go to that party. she also complained of a headache, oblivious to the size of mine after six hours of rants including the unabridged history of her one-night-stands. if there is something i certainly don't need to hear when speeding on a highway, that's the description of the mood one needs to create to get a rotating hippo to bed.
we stop for gas somewhere around grosseto, still two hours from rome, and it's the dead of night, and it's cold, and i have to spend ten minutes out of the car to get the stupid pump to work. when i get back inside, amy says: "i closed my eyes and i had the feeling the car was still moving. it took me a while to realise it was impossible because you were still out". i point out that there are many cars that manage to actually move in some direction without me being inside to help.
three thousand phone calls follow. mr. r, who is hyena's beloved and who i'm somehow tempted to nickname micicici tries to talk amy out of having me dispatch her at her place instead of the party. i've been driving in rome once before, and somehow i don't really feel up to the task of finding my way through deserted streets at three in the morning without a map. i keep a straight face and avoid telling amy to please try and notice that i've been carrying her around for the previous eight hours, so maybe she should be sensitive enough not to send me to the lions.
mr. r is a bit more effective in this, promising amy someone will take her home from the party soon. he's there too, and hyena. aside from the sad fate of this poor dwarf, they're debating a social dinner which will take place the following nite at hyena's. of course we assume that evil incarnate, his girlfriend, is coming as well, but he just says "no" and fills the world with hope.
i am told all of the above when i set foot at the party, around two, exhausted and badly in need of a drink that i somehow take myself without even noticing i'm gulping down glass after glass of some very expensive dessert wine. i didn't even have dinner, let alone a dessert.
after such momentous revelations, i sit in silence while people i have never met debate my love life from the days of yore (yes, allright, i don't have any other kind anyway. it's understood
). the reason for my name being on everybody's lips is some old writings hyena did when she was 16 and accidentally found on some disk just the other day: they lament - amongst other things including, for some reason, lenin - my being with an obnoxiously idiotic girlfriend and a compulsive liar. she was indeed obnoxiously idiotic and a compulsive liar, but that doesn't mean that i want to be reminded about it ten years later and at night in a roman flat where 30-something employees of the bank of italy sit on the couch looking at me with a peculiar kind of interest. yet i'm also being called very deep and interesting by hyena in said writings so i get my fifteen seconds of fame and briefly consider introducing myself by saying "hello, i'm the guy mentioned in these writings, and i assure you it didn't get any better since back then".
a little while later, the party ends. mr. r went home before i got there, tired and bubu. we hope for the life of us that he is approaching that fateful reckoning day when he will decide evil incarnate has to bite the dust. a reasonable amount of excitement carries me and hyena home.
the following day - saturday - is dedicated to prepare a decent setting for the night's events. a whopping grandtotal of nine people will arrive, including amy and mr. r, but not - add cruel grin here - evil incarnate. our clever plot includes a good friend of hyena and mr. r to arrive a bit earlier than the others, officially for drinks but in fact so that we can probe and investigate (in my case) or just plain take pleasure from mr. r's company (that's hyena). unfortunately, sphere-like americans keep intruding when amy tells us that she will arrive along with mr. r too, for appetizers.
in the meanwhile hyena's car's license plate disappears. no, really. she tells me it's probably the wind, but i figure she's in a state of pseudo-romantic shock and is therefore uncapable to relate to anything but poetic stuff. i think it's been stolen. we search around the car for a few minutes, looking silly peeking under other vehicles, then decide we have to do what we do best: have business with police stations. in yet another fragment of our long-lasting tradition of behaving stupidly around figures of public authority, we reach the local station under a sudden hail and report what happened, creating a very relaxed climate of general amusement. by the time we get back home, it's time to (a) prepare dinner; (b) hide all references to this forum from hyena's computer.
and then they arrive, mr. r and amy. he's brought a bottle of wine, which is open and finished by the three of us (amy doesn't drink, and is therefore totally untrustworthy imo) in about twenty minutes before anybody else might arrive and partake of it.
the discussion is a bit forced, although mr. r and me (?) try to be quite the entertainers. i can't get a single piece of information about the situation with evil incarnate, and at some point during the night just leave mr. r to hyena's cares, which somehow consist in resting her head on his shoulder and being ignored. i'm quite miffed by this behaviour, because mr. r is usually very extrovert with his female friends (read: he stops one step short of penetration) and i don't understand how he can keep calling hyena such a brilliant character and then turn his back when things might get more affectionate. so i stare into my glass until it's empty (hah) and then realise it's probably just me who feels this way in the whole world.
there's three more remarkable events that i have to list:
- we are informed by amy that "there is trouble in the house of love". evil incarnate is angry and resentful, as it seems mr. r told her he needs some time alone, and everybody knows that in the mystical language of wub, "i need some time alone" means "i don't want you (anymore), fuckface"
- i get three (!) replies in a row to my text messages from someone who seldom replies once
- i get involved in a discussion about my favourite philosopher and at the same time manage to win an argument with a philosophy graduate over whether getting accustomed to rejection can be called a "theoretical system" or not (it can't, btw
)sunday was the least eventful day. in the morning amy calls and tells us she tried to talk to evil incarnate (they share the same apartment) and got told to "go away". this resulted in her starting to cry, and evil incarnate starting to cry, and us feeling sort of ok after all. turmoil in the house of love was still in the air, though, and in the afternoon the two roommates gather around a table (it must have been a big table indeed) to discuss their issues. their issues, apparently, consist in evil incarnate accusing amy of having been out with mr. r the night before. but... they were at our party! and it's not as if evil incarnate hadn't been invited.
needless to say, everybody understands this accusation is quite preposterous, and everybody also understands a new explosion of weeping is about to begin. hyena and i would like to get to their apartment and be really nosy, but we don't want to risk mr. r finding out about it later and getting upset over the fact that we don't really want to let his (former?) girlfriend alone in her time of grief.
said grief is however not as long-lasting as decency would have required. evil incarnate storms out of the apartment leaving a wailing amy to a lonely night of dvd's and long-distance calls to be cuddled by a guy she fancies, and goes to mr. r's place, where only him, god, and an american cook know what will happen. we get no report on the whole situation, except that at 00:40am monday, evil incarnate was still nowhere near her own apartment, and possibly everywhere near her boyfriend's.
and as the whole nation holds its breath, i leave in the morning under the rain, the capital a shade of its former self behind me.
---
interested to read more? buy the book.
disappointed? please remember that nobody ever gets what they want.
.
thank god it dawned on you too later on. 
:Spin: 
