Claudio Baglioni
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THE REVIEW

February 24th, election day, today the fate of our country could change… could… we would love it so much. We have desired it for 40 years. Outside it snows like it's Christmas Eve.

Like a sloth in hibernation, I greedily squirm amidst the Sunday drowsiness of the blankets, waiting for my patient mother to come and drag me out of bed to tell me that lunch is ready; a side of fries, and (on a weekly rotation) some delicious creature that once had the power to walk the earth with its own paws. All luscious as always and then the “puccino,” dried with decades of experience thanks to a majestic polenta.

I glance at Facebook, link a couple of anti-depression phrases thrown in there, the other eye on DeBaser, shove a handful of comments out of laziness as usual, change, grab the umbrella, and go to vote. The town hall is 50 meters from home. I don't even bother taking the car out of the garage. I return and wait for a friend with whom I'm supposed to meet intimately around 5:00 PM. Meanwhile, what do I do?

Today I feel like lightness, moments of melancholy, and memories. I want to exhume a musty tape that I bought almost twenty years ago at a market stall for about ten thousand lire.

Today is not a day for metaphorical phrases to interpret, psychedelic sounds, drum solos in thirty-four thirty-fifths, and screaming hard-rock highs.

Today I feel like a feather floating, swimming suspended in the air, and trying to grasp that "hook in the middle of the sky", today "I want to go away from you who drop by drop have squeezed my heart", traveling far in thought, while I grab old photos again, I am a victim of flashbacks of distant friends and loves still too close and still too present and soaked in the soul, incapable like scars or moles of slipping from the skin, and here you are my love in this pose we took in Tuscany, "you resting on your knees and your eyes forever in my eyes", "now that I have you somewhere in my body to hurt me".

Today the Roman minstrel accompanies me, with his ode to the old, "always underfoot, closed in the kitchen if someone comes, the old ones that no one wants, the old ones to be thrown away", to the girls of the east "little queens among statues of heroes and workers, slight thorns of anxiety in round and white chests" and to those nights "of an unfortunate love and bitter nights waiting for you".

Today is like this and nothing changes. It's a day for light pop and vein-slitting songs. Finally, it's 5:00 PM, I turn off the stereo. I extract the cassette and put it back on the shelf. Outside it still sleets, it's zero degrees, I cover myself well. The last phrases of the track that closes the record echo in my ears: "good luck that is never enough, to you who are leaving"

Today I had no expectations, today I needed little.