Alpaca Sports
I Was Running

It's almost half-past two, I'm in a foreign country, but the time zone doesn't change here. What changes is the keyboard, so don't hold it against me for missing punctuation and accents.

All I've managed to do here is whirl around museums, cinemas, theaters, concerts, and women from everywhere. Now I'm in the big bed of a woman from here. If you're interested, she's sleeping because in three hours she has to get up and leave for a business trip. I'm naked, wearing nothing, and I've earned her house keys with little effort, so for some time now I've abandoned the shared latrine with the guys I left with to live in this truly phantasmagoric situation: do what you want but when you're free come back here and if you want to do something with me let me know at lunchtime. 

I think about it and it makes me laugh, there's no hypocrisy in all this. There are even stars outside because we live up high, on a high floor but not at the top floors, at the edges of the city. Incredibly, actually, here the city ends, and a rather dense oak wood begins, which Sunday afternoon we visited on a long walk hand in hand, with our cheeks catching the last rays of the setting sun. If only I had my scooter here, we would have made the album cover! I'm going to leave this place for now because I have to go and tell Italy to its face that I'm leaving it too. Anyway, it's warmer than I expected. I know that down there, the usual killer storm is happening while here the weather continues to kill itself. I spent a summer here, and it's still warm inside. I've gotten used to calling it a warm sensation, in pesto-flavored English. A psychotropic and intoxicating summer. I've fallen for it in my 18 years, and I have to say I'm sorry I grew up. I've regained a taste for these situations of sentimental and emotional and sexual precariousness: one day you belong to one, another day you belong to someone else, and sometimes you're just yours and that's it. And it's not just about women.

Well, in the meantime, it's started to rain, and in all these months, it's only the second time it pours down with a certain insistence. The coming of this worrying autumn, the darkening night shadows reflecting spires like Mephistophelian candles dripping over themselves, the dwindling stupid tourists, and the scurrying of natives at a certain hour towards their dwellings with slender white windows and fragile glass, sensitive like their barely concealed essence, stirs something inside me. I know this heat will turn into cold, but I'd like to take a bath in the frost, to find out what it's like, to enter a closed, decadent, and smoky place on a Saturday night, full of adhesive females and clingy women who tell you their men don't make them laugh and that it would be perfect if at home you had something to smoke, drink, and the right record. I told this one that I didn't have the record but I had recently discovered something suitable for us on various YouTube and Bandcamp. Suitable for us, she says? We had just met, just a lifetime ago. Going home, the hardest part is managing to disentangle yourself from the cocktail of alcoholic liquids, sweat, smoke from the combustion of different substances that make the entrance to the right street swampy and lysergic. On the way home, the hardest part is thinking about how many times you've already taken that street with how many different stories. 

Obviously she doesn't like the house, so I, in that context, must seem even more precious. We drink and smoke, make love, and then talk with music in the background. We discover we are similar and immediately clarify that we're beautiful but it won't last. I promptly receive a proposal to change the apartment but not the music. After more than two months, tonight we're still enjoying the same band with their new little work. Alpaca Sports, from Sweden, a guy named Andreas, his friend, and many others from his circle. With their four little songs, they seem to have drawn the line and sums between how you should feel down on the darkest day of the Nordic winter and how you should feel up like June 21st in Gothenburg, when the hormones do their hormone thing.

It results in a state of unconscious awakeness, or of dazed inertia, sweet and manageable, precisely indie pop. With all the Albion and non-Albion hints of the case. With the four strums, simple and straightforward, yet placed where human relationships are borderline, where there's a risk of trespassing, starting to only catch yourself and then somehow find yourself beneath. But it's all under control, it's all borderline, not beyond. The guys have produced two seven-inches, so very little stuff that, however, I invite you to listen to, just to tell me that I haven't understood a damn thing and to give you the chance to wake me up by telling me that more than crap, I'm under the influence of a woman. But she's the one under the influence of me.

Together, instead, we interact with the salty sugars peddled by Alpaca Sports, so close to two other names that I rolled with all summer: Seapony and Wild Nothing. And they come out carefree molecules, chains of something whose name I don't remember - I sucked at chemistry too, honestly -, that push me to think of a rosy future, you'd say, but in this case, I'd dare pastel orange, an eternal carefree sunset, being chased by melancholy.

And I know she'll follow me, that she'll make herself as she sees fit, but eventually, I'll be the one remaking her, in another part of the world again. That's why I have never been a tourist here, and that's why today I contacted Andreas through whom, on my return to the country of clod rhetoric, I'll find these fourteen total inches to keep me company. 

Someone explain to her, who sleeps and makes me think of how stupid the lyrics of Vasco Rossi's songs about sleeping women are. Seems they're written by Mimmo - Verdone - from a film well-known to you all, which certainly won't be like the one of my life.

Next summer I'm going Alpaca hunting, for sport.