BROWSE Columns
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Me and my Shoelaces
They’ve not been tied since purchase, c. March of this year. Milan was under attack by its atmosphere when the postman delivered the package (containing my baby pink suede boots) to Donna Ludovica, the mustard building’s doorlady. She gave them to my housemate, Gemma, who left them on my bed. So many steps for a journey that hadn’t yet begun. When I put them on, they felt humid.
Today, as I wrap them round my feet, they look back all zen-like, evidently well versed in all forms of walking and many corners of the universe. One day they hope to take me to the Ursa Major but for now my measly senior stipend can’t get us far past Newark. There was a time before academia shipped us over the Atlantic – a time worth remembering! – when we were headquartered in Milan and made the rounds of Europe on 5€ 5am FlixBuses, shady regional trains, and feet! God did feet get us much further than we could have ever imagined. All we needed were couches, sympathy, and tea. Life was simple.
Somehow, I had climbed my way up a not entirely irrelevant fashion magazine thus earning the right to wear my tatters (or dress like shite as one comrade pointed out), but the city remained hostile. They never felt whole. I could sense their yearning to walk the world, to find and actualize the something more that each of us believes is floating out there somewhere. Sympathy overcame me.
Anyways, I’m ready to get moving. I slip on the boots but don’t tie my shoelaces. I’m not naked. I’m wearing an adidas tracksuit and football club shirt. As the door opens a wild zephyr blasts me to last March…
The Furthest my Shoes took me (Tuscan Bums)
One funky matinée I decided I wanted to live deliberately and be happy at least six days a week, and one day a week be sad and wretched – Six days a week to quit my bed and seek Milan’s little pleasures: a glimpse of Helios through the looking glass here, a silly date with a Sicilian girl in cowboy boots there, some old Manchurian playing fisarmonica for lunch money, etc. – I want my one wretched day to be purposeful in just the same way, so when French Frankie proposed we give homelessness a shot I couldn’t refuse.
He was a slim inauspicious cat who tied his shoelaces fresh each morning and carried rucksacks wherever he went, in his spare time he meditated in Yaqui-huasca circles smoking bamboo pipes and read about every dead explorer to ever die. He went naked to weddings and wore sweatpants to church.
We were joined by our old friend Bonaventure, who had only recently adopted the monicker after losing his afro in a factory accident – he was also a dedicated ascetic who loved this and that and never missed a chance to externalize himself, we called him the happiest man in the world.
Not before long we were trudging up to Fiesole, underequipped but carrying plenty of wine for dinner and shuteye – the frost was unexpected and our fire dim, we huddled in a circle and sang songs of prayer and love, we trembled in awe and cried with joy, we were disheveled and ecstatic, we loved being and grabbed mud. In our next life the sun came up and touched my baby pink suede boots, its warmth radiating up my body. Zungguzungguguzungguzeng!
The next night I slept in a tram. Alone, perfectly content.
Me and my Tracksuit
It is not uncommon for the European male to be part of clubs (associations of youth, semi-professional, and professional teams in various sports, typically association football and basketball, sometimes water polo, illicit horserace betting, and drug trafficking, depending on which anthropological definition you adhere to). These clubs form the basis of his collective identity. The club shirt is his uniform, proudly parading the coat of arms and ceremonially worn on all shitty days when one needs to get on with it. It invokes pride and elegance; remaining the only collared shirt that young men wear throughout their teens.
Together with the club shirt, the adidas tracksuit forms the uniform of the Western European lower and middle-class suburbanite. Being equal parts stylish, half-court pick-up game and piss off, it’s been a harbinger of social cohesion and confidence. It is among the few garments that still means something.
Before exiting I sneak in a cheeky look to the mirror… the clothes make sense.
The importance of footwear cannot be understated – Leon, the Siberian bum my friends and I consulted on all matters philosophical, liked to joke that if he could see further, it was because he stood on the shoulders of his boots; an enlightened ditch-dweller, but even he didn’t leave the ditch naked – shoes are important, but shirt and trousers make a person whole. Some more whole than others.
Time melts away and I – the urban gentleman, in tracksuit and club shirt – am ready to exit the house and caress the pavements. There is just one issue: the elastic band designed to keep my trousers at a socially acceptable level has vanished into the washing machine ether and mama is nowhere in sight, meaning no quick fix, meaning saggy pants. Elastic-less and destitute, I embark on the life-changing epopee.
The Slowest Walk
Everyone in Ikaria knows that he who walks fast will perish, whereas he who walks slow will live forever. The intuition is simple enough: time is made up of a series of instants, each of which is composed of atomic details. Thus, the slower one walks the more details they see, and in doing so can extend their life indefinitely. When they’ve had enough of the whole immortality thing (which village wisdom claims to be no more than a decade beyond regular folk life expectancy) all they need to do is pick up the pace a little, and they’ll wither away into history.
Au contraire, those who walk fast transition from instant to instant without allowing themselves enough space-time to grasp the details, so on their death bed they’re still thinking about the odd consistency of an English breakfast in Margate or the silly text they sent that Armenian who never became their wife (despite the allure of fantasizing) – there’s a backlog of information and justifiably so. Anyways, they might as well be telling us I sir, take no interest in the present or the future, but live in the past. To each their own, I guess.
As I drag one foot behind the other and pull up my trousers every two-and-a-half steps I reminisce about my friend Tony, the slowest walker to have graced my life thus far, who would wake up and sit in bed practicing wu wei (do nothing) then get on with it but not lose his wu wei! He could birth something from nothing, pressurize thin air into diamond, unearth beauty in prison. His thirty minute walk between room and campus gate, no more than four hundred meters, was the good life typified. Sometimes I wondered whether he might be Aristotle reincarnate but the thought of marble statues and Galateas being reborn Nigerian was too much for my brain to handle.
Henry’s Interlude
At this point Henry Moses – a ginger fella from up north walks up to my desk and entertains me, he wants to try my Waterman, he lays these words on my manuscript
(it would be sacrilege to erase them)
And I’m so different from Henry Moses
Prophet on 12 Av. De la Marseillaise
The past punctually catches up with the present, Strasbourg’s somewhere in the limen. It’s the town on the Franco-German frontier which raised me. I’ve returned to say hello to the lads and ladies of the Taverne Française, my adolescent pub of choice. The countertop remembers me well. So does the men’s restroom.
Neither early nor late, but rather intemporally, Auguste lugs open the steel-framed door and proceeds to the bar. He does so in his characteristic shuffle, dragging one foot behind the other, conscious that time is not his enemy.
He slumps on the countertop and fiddles with the barstool until it reaches a satisfactory height. Thomas – who used to serve Picon-bière to the surrealists in the 20s and before them vin chaud to the people of Robespierre – well, being experienced as he is, Thomas knows to bring Auguste one of the same but heavy on the Picon. Everyone who frequents the tavern also knows that Auguste somehow found God at a very young age, the lore being that he was grazing at the Orangerie when a stone fruit or other found him dead center on the cranium; he woke up three days later unsullied of earthly concern, omniscient, and apparently free. Since then, he’s drowned in hopeless lethargy, unsure where to begin distilling his newfound information.
A dozen years living with the burden of truth does no good to a man, even if he is a saint… he clasps the nectar ever closer and hops off the stool, shuffles to the oak roundtable perched solitary in the backdrop and sinks in the throne. Retrieving a little parchment and fountain pen from his chest pocket, he lays out a title: Manifeste de la Vérité, his exposition of all truths begins.
Not before long it’s time for another Picon-bière. Auguste shuffles back to the bar and slumps on the countertop, Thomas brings him another, like clockwork he clasps it and shuffles back to the roundtable. Meditatively twisting pen between fingers – a contrarian habit developed to spite French teachers – he continues: il n’y a pas de manière évidente de commencer une explication de la vérité, de toute la vérité, de tout.
By the time he’s mulled this sentence over and is satisfied with its holism, his pint’s over, and so it begins again. Shuffle, slump, beg, drink, shuffle, sink, fiddle, write? By the time the third Picon-bière gushes to his liver Auguste can no longer think coherently, he wants to celebrate the revolution with the youngins of Place de la République; he crumbles his first page and abandons her in the dustbin – condemning her to decay in the mausoleum of unfinished truth expositions and life manifestos.
Neither early nor late, he lugs open the steel door and begs me for another Gauloise cigarette, my last one, the lucky one, I grant him my wish.
He takes it out of the packet and lights it with a snap of his fingers, then runs down to République where the students are breaking chains, burning desks, reclaiming Christ, and celebrating the dawn of the 6th Republic. But no one notices Auguste, who’s laid down in the grass to catch a glimpse of heaven. The drunk fool is trampled by the horde and relegated to amnesia, decomposing over the next million years, feeding earthworms, sustaining the ecosystem that will sprout new trees bearing the fruit that will nourish the next wave of revolutionaries.
His wish was for salvation. Vive la 7ème République.
Revolución Caliente, Dialogues between Giamma and Myself
(Myself)
Summer means Spanish and Spanish means summer, we should all be studying with a beer in each hand, a joint in each toe, and water coolers overflowing with Lemon Fanta, it will be the Revolución Caliente.
(Giamma)
This is a familiar truth right here; I believe unspoken dreams of the revolución caliente are saving millions of corporate lives on a daily basis.
(Myself)
Yes, we do not espouse the Revolución for hedonistic ends, but for the sake of low and stable inflation (2% ECB target) and stable economic growth (3% per annum), Quechua foldable chairs, silly talk, and saving the economy one marijuana cigarette at a time.
(Giamma)
Remember? Some of us used to live and die, sitting on a sunbathed bench with drowsy eyes and dim shades to conceal the post-huevos-rotos-trauma at 2.30pm, no hurries or worries whatsoever, at least not while digesting… the big shift was subtly imposed with longer life expectancy and that so-called responsibility that burns out your endorphin receptors, but let’s take a sec to be honest and level with the fact that while these corporate lives rush through their copy-paste lunch, they switch off their corporate brain and deftly dream about that cortado con hielo lifestyle, that Revolución Caliente. We’re going to save lives!
(Myself)
The issue is corporate buyback. As lazy hedonism pushes them in our direction their overlords will provide each marginal dollar necessary to buy them back. Materialistic hedonism isn’t easily assuaged. We’ll have to knock four times then knock twice more; aha! we’ll walk all over their desire!
The Revolución Caliente Manifesto
There’s a ghost haunting Europe, the ghost of generous unemployment benefits, plentiful pensions, paternity leave, government-negotiated drug prices, higher education for under one thousand euro, legal marijuana, psychedelics for the depressed, and a clear separation between work and leisure. The Revolución Caliente is coming. We just need more beer coolers and arabica gum rolling paper.
It's all based on a simple truth: Americans live to work, and Europeans work to live, but given the decrepit state of our (formerly great?) institutions and stagnating economies, we’ve decided to enjoy ourselves before it all goes bust – some fear this time we won’t escape the valley of darkness – and we get relegated to the role of life-size Disneyland for the emergent Chinese middle-class.
From now on we will work for fun and live to live. The next hegira will involve thirty million young adults in pink suede boots marching down to Puglia singing Manu Chao songs; you know, me gusta marijuana, me gustas tu, that kind of stuff. They will have, and they will love, one another, and perhaps the ageing population will look on frightened, but sooner or later they too will disintegrate into party powder as new empires of fun rise from their ashes.
Don’t forget! The revolution will be televised, so take your illegal satellite boxes out and wipe off the dust, turn on, tune in, drop out. Once all the stuff – let’s be real, capital accumulation has gone way too far – well, once it’s all gone, the answers from within will be evident. The real us will resurface.
Me and my Teacup
I’m awake at 7am even if that’s not what my body wants!
I brew the tea into existence even if that’s not what the tea wants!
Dazed, I drop the teacup on the linoleum tiles. It’s dead, shattered, soulless. Even though that’s not what it wanted!
I wear my shoes and walk but never ask for their opinion! They’re objects after all, objects made to be abused, objects we can’t live without.
I take another teacup from the rack and pour steaming water over black chai leaves. After letting it seep for four to five minutes, I add a dash of almond milk. It looks like molten caramel; I feel like an Aristocrat! I do not, however, raise my pinky to drink as I’m preoccupied removing workman callouses off my hands and writing quips. I drank too much as a kid so my brain’s too fried to write books. Quips, I hope, will one day elevate me to niche celebrity status of the ‘who’s the guy who said that one thing? Damn that was a nice one-liner’ status. No one should recognize me as I cross international borders and sleep under bridges… When I awoke, the teacup was still there!
The chai burns open pores and clears away decades of Marlboro soot and stale Meteor Blonde. The breaths leave me breathless, how wonderful to have fresh air and leaf jazz – the wind always was my favorite composer.
When E and I were unencumbered children, we’d pick a direction and walk as far as we could; I don’t know which, but one of those walks must’ve never ended.
I’m walking slower than ever but I’ve outrun the north-east alluminum shuttle. Relativity’s at stake, New Jersey reappears over the horizon.
Me and the Tiger, in Combat
The last place I walked was Nassau Road, in Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a quaint little town, off the map for anyone below the median income (nothing for them to do there frankly). The campus teems with brilliant little demons too smart for their own good; mini future congressmen and Nobel laureates, war declarers and resolvers, army nuts and animal lovers, fascists and communists and all sorts of other extremists and ghosts drowning in library books, not having seen the light of day since they jumped off the dinky some musty August afternoon.
I cross Nassau and melt into the campus I’ve come to love, looking for a patch of grass to graze in. It’s mid-October but the sun is still with us. If only everyone here forgot they were students for an instant and became bodhisattvas – uncorked a cheap Chateau de Seguin Bordeaux and listened to Chet Baker through (just) one planetary whirl – but no, it’s not allowed, they’ll say – you’re Princeton students for God’s sake figure it out! Alas, even drinking has been institutionalized; too smart for their own good, I tell you.
So, I lay in the grass alone and bask in the sun (humans are flowers at heart), I uncork my Bordeaux and pour some in my teacup; left there to sift through my thoughts – thoughts that constitute me – and stroll leisurely in my pink suede boots.
Stefanos Spyridon likes subjectivity, little things, stories, and people. He writes subjective little stories about people. Mostly out of Greece. Sometimes from Italy and France.
