It’s a Holy Father’s Christmas

Would you really want this guy slipping down your chimney at night?
Would you really trust your baby on his lap?

Das Opium des Volkes

“Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen, das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüt einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volkes”.
Karl Marx

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
Karl Marx

Psy-cho-path (Si’Ko-Path’)

Symptoms:

• Considerable superficial charm and average or above average intelligence
• Unreliability, disregard for obligations no sense of responsibility, in matters of little and great import
• Untruthfulness and insincerity
• Poor judgment and failure to learn from experience
• Pathological egocentricity. Total self-centeredness incapacity for real love
  and attachment
• General poverty ot deep and lasting emotions
• Lack of any true insight, inability to see oneself as others do
• A complete lack of conscience

Hervey M. Cleckley’s psychopathy checklist

Psychopaths rule our world

“vi veri veniversum vivus vici”
by the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe
Signs of the Times

29% of the world? Exhausted already...

Mind you... If nothing unpleasantly unexpected happens to me from now on, I have already downloaded 56% of my living time in this earth, given that healthy life expectancy at birth for males in Greece is 69.1 years (WHO stats, 2002).
The fact is depressing as such, since the realization of having something less than 30 years left is somehow shocking (just thinking that my mortgage runs through half of my remaining time, I get really pissed).
So, what have I done during my 56% of consumed time? Well… I lived in four countries and visited 62 more… This is the 29% of the official UN country list! Not that bad, considering that most people on this planet check in and out without ever leaving the borders of their home country.
Being ungrateful and greedy enough, I’d say that should I wished to see the rest of my planet before I die, I’d have to visit another 162 countries and territories in the next 30 years; this is more than 5 of them annually.
Gimme a break! I’m exhausted already man…

Liars by birth

We pretend to be heroes because we lack of saints, because we are insolent. We pretend to be assassins because we are dying to kill the fellow. We pretend to be all these because we are liars by birth.

JPS

Tagus...

The city’s fishermen never quit it seems. Patiently, they wait for their prey at the pier. They exchange jokes and secrets of their craft, and sometimes they quarrel over politics. The constant noise over their heads doesn’t seem to bother them. They’ve got used to it, and so did the fish, or at least those that ignore the danger and swim under the bridge at the mouth of Tagus to the Atlantic Ocean. I don’t even know for how long I was sitting there. Enough time to smoke five or six cigarettes, the last Greek ones from the packs I bought at Athens airport’s duty free store.

How on earth did I come here at the end of Europe? “Here where the land ends and the ocean begins” as the Portuguese poet had said. What the hell… Life is an adventurous game. I guess I couldn’t have imagined myself over here a year ago. But, then again, a year ago I hadn’t met Luis...

Now, as I hold the keys of my new apartment in Linda-a-Velha, which I found through a real estate paper ad for a monthly rental much higher than any average Portuguese would have ever agreed to pay for two rooms on the second floor of a 1970 building by the side of the busy avenue, I wonder what is more urgent: buying a TV set or a kitchen table…

Humidity kills me. My shirt swims in sweat and 35º C don’t make it any easier. It is 10 pm already and the fishermen don’t seem tired. I should get going in a while. I should buy my first local smokes and walk back home. Without television set and kitchen table. They told me that they’ll ring me tomorrow early in the morning for the interview. I’d better go to sleep at once, while Tagus is still floating outside my bedroom window.

The kiss

Alicia had a request: "I have never seen guys kiss before. Could you kiss each other? If it’s okay with you two, of course, is it?"

There was silence but Miguel did stand up and sit on my lap facing me. Boy, that felt good... Since he was also drunk he fell into the kiss quickly, and we kissed for so long that I felt like years were passing by. It was so full of energy, so intense, I just fell out of the world. And at the time when we kissed, Guillermo came back home and saw us kissing.

"Well, looks like we have gotten that far so to see at least." Guillermo just had to mention that with a 'by the way' voice.

I didn't hear him quite good cause I was more focused on the kiss, but from the background I did faintly hear noises. The kiss wasn't still broken, we kissed on, and I was like sliding away with him from there into the air. I felt like I was floating. Once we broke the kiss he sat down next to me, with him putting his head on my shoulder, and stayed like that for as long as we had time.

Soon, I lit a cigarette... for a while of smoking Miguel took the cigarette and made a few inhales too, yet then came the bad part, I always forget that if I drink too much and then have a smoke too, at a bad time, then I throw up... The worst part is that I did it on Miguel’s jeans.

Capaz de cualquier cosa

Pienso que acabo de perder la fe en este momento y, al no tener fe, ya no creo en Dios ni en el infierno.

Y si no creo en el infierno, ya no tengo miedo.

Y sin miedo, soy capaz de cualquier cosa.

Everyone’s Anna…

I started telling her about Anna; she works for a major advertising company, speaks three languages, has traveled a lot for her 25 years; she’s pretty and smart, from a good family and loves me a lot; she misses me terribly and we call each other two or three times each a day; she hates it that I’m here and she’s there and she plans to visit me in Portugal for a few weeks of holidays.

Luis, have you met Anna? his mother asked with enthusiasm as soon as I finished the story.

Luis was saddened. It was the first time in his life he was listening about this “Anna” and he was speechless with my comfortable ability to create a human being out of nothing. Just in three minutes, I had given her flesh and bones, I had transferred her from Athens to Lisbon, I sat her at the Cardoso family’s living room, where she happily joined us all for coffee, I dressed her smartly and gave her a fancy hairdo and a shining smile; I was tenderly holding her hand and looking deep into her eyes.

Anna was here, among us, more lively and real than anyone else. And Mrs Cardoso adored her. She wanted to hold her in her arms, kiss her, tell her how beautiful she was and invite her out for tea in Rua Augusta. In Anna’s face she could see the bride that one day Luis would bring home, when he was certain that this was the woman who would give his old parents grandchildren. Anna of my imagination suddenly became Luis’ and everyone else’s Anna. Of course he had met her...

Yes, mother, I’ve met her. She’s a terrific girl, he said.

Mrs Cardoso smiled and so did Mr Cardoso and me. Even Anna smiled. It was a lovely Sunday afternoon at the flat of the parents of my best friend in Portugal…