Massimo Volume
Cattive Abitudini

A cold early December morning in the lowlands. Fog and cultivated fields are what nature offers to those who, at the first light of dawn, mournfully, cross the Valtrebbia to reach the city. Sometimes, the wind, cold, sharp as a katana, coming from the east, sweeps away the mist, and you can see the Alps in the background, which, like in a painting never painted by Dalì, suddenly rise from what appears to be an endless plain of nothing. On mornings like this, the Alps reflect in the ice on the road, and the cornfields are dusted with a light coating of snow. The asphalt is a sheet of ice, straight, slicing and cutting the patches of land that repeat all the same, divided by green and white trees and others, dry and cold, modestly naked.

My methane-powered Punto struggles, it seems like a small igloo, white and frozen as it is. A record plays silently. It's all happening in my head. Sometimes I find myself thinking of myself as a solipsist, I feel a bit guilty. I am alone. Naked in the snow, it's curious how nature has given only a few trees the ability to be evergreen, no matter how many leaves they lose, because new ones always sprout. They are all around me, mocking me. I've stopped hoping to be like them, I am proud and full of hatred and prejudice. And I scream, and shake the little buds peeking out from the snow, but no matter how much my throat burns, my diaphragm cannot overcome the pressure of my skull. Everything is stuck, and echoes, resonates between those narrow walls.

Alienated. Aliens, mine is the X-Files generation, raised with American TV series and the massification of one's self. I distinguish myself from the crowd, but not by choice, I am a victim of my own person, which, despite all my efforts, does not allow me to be a complete idiot. Verga would have written a book about me, between the Malavoglia and Gesualdo, but he could not yet suspect the drama of the petty bourgeois, who grows up with the obligation of mediocrity.

Clementi has stopped talking only about himself, the impression I've gotten is that he has stopped being frightened by the nonexistence of his own future, by the inability to find an illusion that would allow him to grow mentally stable, now he lives in his future, swims in his image of a disillusioned forty-year-old, as the world expects nothing else from him, there is no longer anything strange in the obsession with the passing of time, and he screams placidly for those who still have fear alive in their eyes, sings, without singing, of those who look ahead and see nothing but the void holding up the Alps.

This is a gift to all the generations who never had a future, including his own.

I will put it under the tree, even if it wasn't what I asked Santa for, but I appreciate the thought, with a special dedication: From Mimì, with love, to all those who have decided never to come back home, to never find a serious job.

An album that isn't new, it is old, it is an instruction manual left to posterity, on how to get through your 30s, when at 16 you listened to "Lungo i Bordi" and felt it was yours. How lucky we are, we young people, always with the beaten path, the meal ready...

And so we come forward
similar in everything to those of yesterday
clinging to an image
condemned to describe us
tell me, isn't it so?