another lucky b*stard living in tuscany

You know what I told my son tonight that I had forgotten to tell him?  That life is good.

He was feeling bummed.  The Boy has OCD and way too much IQ.  And of course like every father I see myself in him.  The good parts of me, the bad parts of me, and the bad parts of my wife.  (Although I think she may have a slightly different version of that.)

The kid is scary smart.  And manipulative. Strong and determined.  I’m playing George McClellan to his Robert E. Lee.  He’s kicking my ass all over Virginia.  

We snark together, we laugh together, we enjoy each other’s company, and we fight like gladiators.  Like every father I want him to profit from my experience and not be the total f—ing idiot I was.  And like every father I have no power to make that happen.  

Katherine and I have been together 29 years.  We still fight — always have, always will– but we also have a marriage made of steel.  We will always be together.  And we were together for 18 years before the Boy was born.  So he missed the early stuff.  It’s like he missed the first 18 chapters and started reading in the last half of the book.  He only showed up for the part where K and I talk in shorthand, conversations based on assumptions whose predicates he never saw.  

For all my incessant whining, I have a great life.  I am in love with my wife who, (this makes me doubt her, frankly,)  feels the same about me.  I have two very cool kids.  I work at a job I hate to admit I kind of love.  If I dropped dead tomorrow I’d have no complaints.

So I tried to convey some of that to The Boy.  God knows I’ve done a good job of teaching him how to be dissatisfied.  I don’t know that I’d ever manage to tell him how happy I am. You know, when I’m not bitching.  

Life is kind of good.  Don’t quote me on that.

This has been bothering me for a few days.  I’m not going to mention names, because no one thought they were on the record.  

Anyway, I was at SCBWI, the final night.  Katherine didn’t want to attend the wrap party because she preferred to stay in the hotel room and knock back shots of tequila until she passed out on the bathroom floor and the kids called family services.  

What.  I can’t exaggerate a little?

So I go the wrap party as her ambassador.  No one there, except my former editor, Michael Stearns, has any idea who I am.  I think the general opinion — to the extent that anyone bothered to have an opinion — was that I was Katherine’s Kevin Federline.  Of course I take a certain strange pleasure from this.  It’s liberating. I could have started rapping if I’d wanted to.

Anyway, I’m on the party bus with a big deal kidlit editor.  And by way of making conversation I say to him/her, “Isn’t it hard to be at these things, to see all these people who so want to succeed.  People who, in some cases, may be a bit desperate.”  And he/she says that while he/she has some sympathy when he/she — okay it — has to turn down someone it knows, it has no empathy for the people it doesn’t know.

I tried to give it some cover.  I said something like, “Well, you’d have to take that attitude in your line of work or you might have a hard time doing your job.”

But it would have none of that.  It simply did not think about the fact that it held something close to the power of life or death in people’s lives.  And even when confronted with that thought, it directly denied any sense of empathy.  In fact, it supplied the word “empathy,” and then knocked it down.

I understand protecting yourself.  Doctors can’t get too involved with patients, lawyers can’t become emotional about clients and so on.  But this went beyond that.  This was a denial of the very possibility of empathy with people who spend a year writing away at a manuscript.  Who get up at 4:00 am before they take their kids to school and head to the job they hate.  Who count their pennies and clip coupons to save enough money to attend one of these events.  Who had to endure a spouse’s ridicule, and a boss’ threats to carve out the time to come to SCBWI and show their labor of love to someone who can with a single decision drastically alter the course of that writer’s life.

No empathy?  None?

Something’s wrong there.  There’s an empathy number line that extends from Oprah to Dick Cheney.  I’m about half a Dick myself.  But this person may have achieved total dickhood.

This is my first small taste of book-touring.  I did a bookseller’s lunch in Pasadena and a bookseller’s dinner just now in New York.  Let me just say this:  if I hear the sound of my own voice again I will stab myself in the throat with the minibar corkscrew.

Oh.  My.  God.  Shut up, Michael.  Shut up.  ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp!

Seriously:  shut up.

You don’t realize just how amazingly boring you are until you have to hold forth for a three and a half hour dinner.  And here’s the bitch:  the Boy was with me so I couldn’t even pass the time flirting.  And my press handler was with me so I couldn’t get hammered and collapse face down the table.  And really, once you take away leering at anyone with cleavage and passing out in a puddle of my own puke, I pretty much got nothing. 

Writers are boring.  I used to know the head of plastic surgery at UNC.  He spent his days gluing the faces back on burn victims.  You know what I spend my days doing?  Typing.  I’m a typist.  I make things up and poke the keyboard with my fingers, pausing only to reload my coffee, relight by cigar and obsessively check my Amazon.com sales number.

Hey, guys, whadja do today?  

Well, the doctor took a kid who fell into a puddle of acid, performed miracles of cutting edge medical science during the course of a week-long operation that involved cloning new flesh from the insides of his nostrils.  Because of that doctor we will never suffer the depredations of another Harvey Two-Face.

And the kid’s book writer?  He wrote two pages.  Then he ran around like a crazy person spraying insecticide at wasps.  And made some coffee. 

Writing is kind of fun.  Listening to people talk about writing is so boring that I do not know how these people tonight resisted the urge to frog-walk me into the restaurant kitchen and dunk me in the deep-fryer.

Whew.  I just had to get that out of my system.  To everyone I bored or offended . . .yes, I said that word.  And that word, too.  And I told that story. . . my apologies.  My excuse is that I’m really just kind of a dork. And although I have a great life, it really isn’t very interesting.  

Willies.  Got ‘em bad.  Must drown feelings of inadequacy in booze.

The instant we went wheels-up heading to the States we began to refer to the house in Italy as “home.”  Until that moment the kids called the still-unsold North Carolina house home.  And I basically just refused to use the “h” word.  But now Pelago, Italy is home.  Now, for now.

Bill Bryson wrote something I wish I had in front of me because I’m going to have to paraphrase and obliterate all his skill and humor in the process.  But the basic idea was that one of the great joys of travel is being the outsider, being ignorant, unreliable, unprepared, confused and essentially childlike.  

It’s my core nature to bitch about wherever I am.  In Italy I complain about the roads, the hours, the banks, the food (oh, yes, we’ll have more on that some day,) the motorinos — for whom I have developed an enduring hatred — the fashions, the slowness of service, and the prices.  But back here now in LA I recognize how easily I can fit into this most accepting, most openiminded of cultures.  What fun is that?

too easy to be ab Abageleno, p-

I’m not correcting the above line because that is where a combination of jet lag, Ambien and bourbon nailed me to the sheets.  And it’s kind of funny.  No idea what the hell I was just about to write.  In any case, next morning, all woken up . . .

I was born here, raised here through first grade before being hauled off to France for three years.  I’ve lived here on a couple of occasions since then as well.  So LA is a nice counterpoint for me to the expat experience.  Because I’m an Angeleno I have never quite accepted any weather that was not 78 degrees and sunny.  Because I’m an Angeleno I believe everything should be open 24 hours.  Because I’m an Angeleno I know it’s the 405.  

I keep thinking I’ll end up here some day.  And I may.  But for all my whining about lovely Pelago/Pontassieve/San Francesco, I’m kind of missing it.  Which is not what I expected.  I haven’t been bitten by a mosquito, sweated, or fought the desire to murder a motorcyclist in days.  Yesterday, you know what happened?  I walked to the adjacent mall, stepped into a crosswalk and a car a block away slowed down for me.  I mean really:  where’s the challenge?  

So I guess for the next few days I’ll bitch about the States and then, upon my return to Italy, resume bitching about Italy.  

The important thing is the continuity I offer.

Let’s say you’re Bongo, a member of that until-recently-undiscovered Amazon tribe.  You fly to Italy, you fly to the States.  (Can I have your miles, Bongo?)  You’re not going to come away feeling there’s that much difference.  Both Italians and Americans wear roughly the same clothing, drive around in cars, eat pizza,  talk on cell phones, feed dogs rather than eat them, have governments of sorts and live under a system of laws.  (Or, in Italy, not so much under the system as near-by.)

The differences between Americans and Italians would barely be visible to a true outsider.  But there are differences.  

Americans and Italians both love freedom. Both see themselves as great individualists.  Both are big on family, roots, regional identifications.  Both have high opinions of themselves as peoples and low opinions of their respective governments.  (And what was once a wide gap between the usefulness of the Italian government and our own is narrowing rapidly, with most of that movement, unfortunately, coming from our side.)

The core difference is not the Italian’s long history, or the American’s patriotism.  It’s not their cynicism or our religiosity.  The core difference that I see is this:  Americans believe in efficiency, the Italians believe in lunch.

I realize these aren’t neatly paired.  Efficiency is not necessarily the opposite of lunch.  Although it can be at times.  It’s more that we’re two crazy, messed-up kids who want very different things out of life.  We Americans want to get the job done.  Whatever the job happens to be.  Even if it’s a stupid job.  A job no one should be doing.  Nevertheless, we want to get it done.  Right now.

Here’s point A, and there is point B, and the shortest distance between them is a straight line and it never for a moment occurs to an American that there could ever be a reason not to draw the straight line.  

This is not to say that we actually are efficient.  Efficiency is our faith.  It’s our goal.  It’s not something we necessarily achieve.  See: air travel.  See: Congress.  See: health care.  But we are at least hoping for efficiency.  We’d like to see a world where every line was perfectly straight, every decision was based on sturdy predicates, every action was carried out with zero waste.  In a perfect America, everything would be available to everyone, everywhere, all the time, at low, low prices and with no delays.

I’m sure Italians would like some of that, too, but not if it meant working through lunch.

Italians don’t start their day asking themselves how they can achieve their goal.  Oh, sure, they have goals.  And they’d like to achieve those goals.  But for an Italian the day begins with certain unquestioned assumptions:  there will be lunch, and it will begin at 12:30.  Lunch will take a minimum of one hour and will be followed by at least two hours of doing nothing.  There will be dinner, and it will begin at 8:00 and last at least two hours.  There will be coffees and drinks at various times throughout the day.  

These are not suggestions.  These are rules.  These are defining.  You may not deviate.

This sounds frivolous, but a people that begins with a culturally-dictated schedule, a people that blocks out vast portions of the day, is not a people devoted to the ruthless pursuit of efficiency.

There is not an American alive who has not worked straight through lunch.  I’m not sure there’s an Italian alive who has.  

Americans will work until they fall over dead from exhaustion and lack of nourishment in order to put a Burger King precisely where you’d want to find a Burger King.  If you move to a new house they’ll build a whole new Burger King there.  But wait!  What if you don’t want a Whopper?  No problem!  Another bunch of Americans is laboring like ants to build you a Taco Bell.  And a Starbucks.  And a Hyundai dealership.  And if you don’t want a Hyundai, how about a Chrysler dealership?  Toyota?  And with all that car-buying and fast-food-drive-throughing you’re going to need a gas station on this corner.  And that corner.  Okay, on all corners.  And a vast supermarket open from . . . no, wait, open 24 hours!  And so is the coffee shop.  And the bowling alley.  In fact, let’s just cram every possible variety of restaurant, donut shop, car dealership, lube shop, mini golf, tire shop,  and muffler shop all in together and keep them all running 24 hours a day leaving only enough space for . . . a gigantic Wal-Mart.  Yay!  And a mall!  Yay!  

Yes.  I’m in Los Angeles.  How did you guess?

In Los Angeles you can have anything, anytime, everywhere.  Coffee at 4 am?  Absolutely.  You know what the odds are of you finding a cup of coffee at 4:00 am in Italy?  Non-existent.  Outside of major tourist towns you can’t even buy lunch at 11:00 am.  No, not 11:30, either.  And not 11:45.  Or 11:50.  Or 11:55.  11:57?  No.  Noon?  Bingo.  And how about a late lunch at 2:00 pm?  Um, no.  You had your chance.  Now you wait until 8:00 pm.  

In Los Angeles you know what I can have at 8:00 o’clock pm?  Breakfast.  I can have breakfast, lunch or dinner.  I can have burgers, Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Indian, Sushi, French, tapas, Afghanistani, Ethiopian, Indonesian, Argentinian, Basque, Russian, and yes, Italian.  And all the regions of Italy.  Why?  Because we believe — it’s right there in the constitution — that we have a sacred right to have whatever the hell we want, whenever the hell we want it, right now.  No limits.  Because why?  Because limits are inefficient.  Because competition is efficient.  And arbitrarily forcing everyone to eat at the same time and in the same way is really going to slow the planning, building and opening of that Burger King we’re putting up in your back yard.

The results of all that efficient competition, all that single-minded devotion to efficiently making and efficiently creating and efficiently accomplishing in the quickest, most effective way possible, is one of the ugliest places on earth:  Los Angeles.  There is more jaw-dropping man-made ugly in this one city than in all of Italy.  (And Italy has some serious ugly.  See;  Sesto Fiorentino.)  And there is not 1% of the prettiness you find in Italy. 

But here’s the thing:  LA is alive.  It’s ugly, but it is alive and doing its wacky best to create the future.  LA builds.  LA creates.  LA invents.  Italy?  Well, Tuscany, where I live, can’t even be bothered to preserve its own past.  It’s not about the future, in Tuscany, but neither is it really about the past.  Visit Florence, and look it at with an unprejudiced eye.  See the dirt, the lack of upkeep, the indifference to their own treasures.  Tuscany is amazingly beautiful.  But it’s not about the future or the past, it’s just bout lunch.

I’m back in the US for the next ten days.  Katherine has to attend the meeting of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in LA where she will accept their award for Book of the Year.  HOME OF THE BRAVE. Damn right it was book of the year.  

She’s also conducting two workshops and giving a speech, so needless to say the entire household has been drafted to help.  Well, mostly the Boy, who handles the assembly of the two Keynotes as well as doing some Photoshopping and some Dreamweavering and various other techie things.

For my part I have contributed by smoking cigars and yelling at the kids.  I know you’re thinking “child labor” but it’s really no different than having the kids do chores back on the farm.  

“Have you milked them cows yet?”

“Have you finished coding your mother’s website yet?”

In any case, we flew from Florence to Frankfurt on Luftwaffe Lufthansa, then on United to Dulles.  United apologized for the fact that Lufthansa — which handles their ground operations out of Frankfurt — was on strike so, “we don’t have our usual level of service on food.”  What?  No lukewarm goo?  No brown salad?  No leaden wad of brown stuff for desert?   Well, it turned out they had all of that.  But breakfast, that was a different story entirely.  Time to wake up and have . . . tada! . . . two packs of pretzels.  What’s better than stale pretzels and coffee in the morning?  If by “morning” you mean 6:00 pm local, midnight Italy time.

In any case. we’re staying over a day in Washington so we can sleep off the jetlag and do some shopping. Tyson’s Corners, bay-bee.  

My US shopping list?  Over-the-counter drugs.  You want Ibuprofen in Italy?  You stand in line at a Farmacia, and buy a 12-pack for 5 Euros.  So we’re coming back with a pair of 250-count bottles which will cost a whole hell of a lot less and involve exactly zero time standing in line behind hard-bitten old Italian ladies who need help with their corns.

1) OTC drugs.  

2) Decent bourbon.  (All they have in Italy is Jack Daniels.)  

3) Clothing, especially for the kids.  Clothing prices in Italy are criminal.  They have no Wal-Mart or Target driving prices down.  It’s the same slave-labor stuff we get from China, but three times more expensive.  And that’s before currency conversion.  No wonder Italians dress like refugees from the 80’s.

4) Books.

5) iPhone.  A third of what they cost in Italy.  It’s actually cheaper to eat the hideous roaming charges.

Off to shop.  More later.

I own quite a few copyrights.  I make 100% of my income from selling books, all of which are of course copyrighted.  So I love copyright laws.  I have never done an illegal music or movie download.  Never.  Never would.  And I would never let my kids do it.  I want artists to get every penny they (we) deserve.

However . . .

It is all but impossible for me to access free American TV shows while in Europe.  I’m NOT talking about shows I’d be charged for in the States.  Only shows that are streamed free in the States.  If it’s available on iTunes I pay for the download.  

All that having been said, here’s how you can access streaming American TV shows that are embargoed to European IP’s.  

1) Go to Anchor Free.  Download the free program there.

2) Install Anchor Free’s Hotspot Shield.  Open it, and wait until it connects to a US-based IP.  

3) Go to Hulu.com.

4) Select the program you want to watch, and start it.

5) This seems a bit counterintuitive, but it works (at least for us.)  Once you’ve begun playing the show, click on your Anchor Free icon (on Macs you can show it on the top line of your display, up next to the clock.) and disconnect.

Anchor Free allows you to access Hulu.com, but it slows the stream down to the point where the show becomes unwatchable.  You only need Anchor Free to start the show.  Turn it off once the show’s begun and the show will play much more easily.  Not flawlessly, but fairly reliably.

If you switch to another show you have to repeat the process all over again.

On a related topic, some of you may have noticed that certain downloadable software (no names, we don’t want to irritate them,) costs two to three times more in Europe.  Once again, the US company will not allow you to buy at US rates using a European IP.  Anchor Free did not work for spoofing these guys.  So we Googled companies providing VPN’s — Virtual Private Networks.  You have to pay for these, but the download speed and capacity are greater.

We have successfully saved hundreds of dollars using VPN’s to pay US prices for downloads.  This causes me some moral qualms, but not too many.  I’m paying the software developer the price he considers fair for an American customer.  

All the above, by the way, courtesy of my 11 year-old.  If you don’t have an 11 year-old tech genius, you really should consider getting one.

Hey, I’m in Newsweek.  

I guess I said those things.  Kind of.

We visited Lucca today.  Just try visiting Lucca without humming Luka by Suzanne Vega.  I went around all day sweating, fighting with the kids and inventing new lyrics to that annoying song.  

Traveling with kids — mine anyway, your mileage may vary — isn’t so much about enjoying art or architecture.  Or food.  Or culture.  Or the simple pleasure of being in a new place.  Or walking where Puccini hummed.  (Probably Luka.) In fact, traveling with kids isn’t really about enjoying anything, really. It’s about bitching and begging.

The Boy:  It’s so hot. I’m hot.  I’m so hot.  

The Girl: I’m tired of walking.

The Boy:  I want air conditioning.

The Girl: Yeah.  I hate Italy.

The Boy: It’s hot.  Italy is hot.  

The Girl:  Yeah and everything is so far away.

And this goes on, in an endless loop, only minimally interrupted by increasingly weak parental attempts to cram some history and culture down the little savages’ throats.  

You start off with, “You know, you can almost imagine wealthy ladies festooned in peacock feathers being carried through these narrow streets on palanquins by sturdy manservants and reading the latest verses penned by master Dante Alighieri or perhaps contemplating the art of. . .

But soon enough you’re reduced to, “That’s right, they emptied their chamberpots out of the window.  Poop dropped on people’s heads.  Horse poop in the streets, people poop dropping out of thr sky.  Yes, Lucca is chiefly known as the city of poop.”

There’s a brief, insincere pity-laugh, and then it’s right back to, “Why did it have to be so hot?’ And, “Why can’t we take a taxi?”

Until, without warning, Bitchery turns to Beggary.

The Boy:  Can I buy that?

The Girl:  How come he gets something?

The Boy: I really want it!

The Girl:  Me too!

The Boy: How much does she get to spend?

The Girl: That’s all I get?

The Boy:  She got more than me.  I want more.  More!

The Girl:  Mooooooore!

The Boy:  Moooooooore than her!

The Girl:  Mooooooooore than him!

The Boy:  Listen!  Listen to my carefully-constructed argument in which I will spare no effort, hold nothing in reserve, shy away from no underhanded tactic in my monomaniacal desire to obtain something that I didn’t know existed 30 seconds ago and will forget 30 seconds from now.

The Girl: (Knowing a smart play.) If he gets it, I get it, too.

After a couple hours of this, in 95 degree heat, you start sympathizing just a little with Luka’s parents.  Maybe Luka kept bitching and begging, bitching and begging until Luka’s parents snapped.

My blog buddy Randy suggests that my failure to post since, oh, a long time ago, may be evidence of some misfortune.  This is silly.  Randy’s been reading me long enough to know that an alternate title for this blog could be Another Lazy B*stard Living In Tuscany.

But in this case I wasn’t even being lazy, just busy.  I’ve been doing the writing I actually get paid for.  In this case I was finishing the second draft of GONE 2.  

Coming straight of that, I had to rush off to Rome.

That sounds so cool, doesn’t it?  ”As soon as I was done with my book, I had to rush off to Rome.”  Conjures images of a diplomatic mission.  Something important.  Maybe I had to give Berlusconi some advice.  (Possible advice:  Silvio, you’re richer than God, so why do you want this gig?  Are you under the sad misapprehension that being President of Italy is a prestige job?  Dude, right now you’re outranked by the president of Colombia.)

So, I rushed off to Rome.  To the Roma Est mall, actually.  Because I had to be there by today, July 11, at 8:00 am.

Some will already have begun to suspect the reason.  July 11.  8:00 am.  Roma Est.  Home of the only full-scale Apple Store in continental Europe.  Yep, we rushed off to Rome for an iPhone.  Not for me, but for the Boy.  He wanted to be with his fellow fanboys, living the fanboy life, waiting in the geekline.  The Boy is our official tech guy, and he gets paid for his geekery, so it’s his iPhone.  Or would be if we’d gotten one.  

Only one full-fledged Apple store in all of continental Europe, (so much nicer than incontinental Europe) and they don’t actually sell the iPhone.  The iPhone is only available at Vodafone and TIM stores.  And they’re running a waiting list.  Which we didn’t get ourselves on because of course we assumed the store would be selling the phone like every other Apple store in the universe.

It’s some comfort that Apple seems to have screwed up the launch everywhere and not just here in Italy.  But you know what would have been helpful?  Some little note, some little parenthetical.  An asterisk that explained that while Apple Stores in the US, Canda, UK, Australia and Japan would have the phone, the store here in Italy, no.  That would have been nice.