I AM ONLY ME

"immortality sucks because you forget who you are" we always forget who we are. do you remember who you were at four years of age? who you were at fourteen? "who i am" is a shadow cast on the wall.

When I was 16 we would hang out outside and inside the library. We ranged from a group of 20 to a group of 3-4 people on any given day, because us 16 year olds also hung out with whatever other kid was around the area. (Mostly younger siblings and then their friends.) We never did anything wrong, never mind illegal. We were never loud in the library and were always polite to the staff. We sometimes got a little loud outside on the street when there was some contest thing going on, but not very often. We mostly hung out and talked about stuff going on in our lives.

Then one day someone called the cops on us.

And the cops showed up all ready angry, then started yelling at us for doing nothing. They couldn’t even come up with a real reason to be there yelling at us, other than to demand to know if we were a ‘gang’. When one of my friends started crying, I turned to tell her that it would be ok. The cop grabbed me, screamed at me to not look away when he was talking to me, then demand I get in the cop car and go down to the station. It took almost an hour for my mother to find out where I was because I didn’t have a cellphone at the time and the cops had just fucking kidnapped me. For comforting a friend while they screamed at us. And you know what happened?

We never hung out like that again. None of us. We all got banned from the library for a year. Again, all of this for literally no reason. They told us we were ‘misbehaving’ for simply hanging around outside being kids. And then we had no where to go. Some of those kids were forced back into their abusive homes. I literally never saw half of them again. Ever. And I lived in that town for several years after that.

on top of that... it's a seismic area. you really don't want to make engineering experiments there.

governments have tried to figure out a way to build that bridge at least from the 60s, afaik, but engineers have just come to the conclusion that nope.

also: people in sicily and calabria have reason to believe that if a project like that gets given the green light, it will end up fattening the pockets of corrupted politicians and mafia groups.

pretty straightforward right? yeah... NOPE!

the italian right has been waving the proposal of building that bridge for decades. every once in a while, when you think you're free, BAM the right-wing politician genius of the moment comes up with the law proposal to build the bridge. it used to be berlusconi, now berlusconi is dead, recently it's been salvini. they propose to build the bridge, the left says "what the fuck", and the right goes see!! the left doesn't want progress and development for the country!! they want the country to languish and die!!

(in the meanwhile taxpayers' euros go into paying commissions that need to figure out how to build the bridge, ignoring that there's been a billion commissions over almost a century that have all come to the conclusion that nope.)

(also remember what i said about corrupted politicians and mafia groups? well try to guess the reason it's the right-wing parties that keep insisting on building this fucking bridge.)