Sto giro partiamo con una storia scritta da un locals sulla grande nevicata in Austria del 99. Quando vai in Austria è un po’ difficile che ti raccontino in italiano, ben che ti vada c’è l’inglese. Come qui. Se lo sai poco esercitati qui, se non lo sai ancora… Torna a scuola!
Pigs rule the world.
Pigs dive into the dirt they come from, turn around and squeak in it.
Spraying mucus all over those people who are careless enough to come too close.
Pigs rule the world. They sit in pigs’ offices on a pig leather chair doing dirty business over the sleazy phone. Or they are in the rotten streets doing pig-deals with passers-by.
And when you walk the internet - all of the sudden you’re surrounded by pig-pages, pages that keep opening up, and don’t disappear, not even when you click the X.
Instead, minutes later your screen is filled with pig filth and your computer surrenders to the overload of muddy waters in it’s processors.
But then you’re a pig yourself.
Dirty thoughts about the girl that just walked by, eating spaghetti when you’re too hungry to care about your shirt, watching “8-mm” and finding you’re fascinated, mixing honey with gorgonzola and things like that.
But what defines piggishness?
Can a human being be without piggishness?
We all always feel like pigs, don’t we? And if you answer:
“I am civilized - I know what good is and bad, I know what is clean and healthy - I feel clean and healthy.”
That is when people like me start thinking:
“This guy is even a worse pig than I am.”
Why? Well maybe because the biggest pigs are the ones that don’t even realize it. Because the beer-pig always wears the white vest and believes in his innocence. And maybe because any kind of over-indulgence generally characterizes piggishness.
And the overestimation of one’s own humanity and righteousness is nothing but such an over-indulgence in the filthy rules of western society and the false belief of one’s own capability to be in control of the swine within.
Politeness and formalities are such ridiculously thin walls against the kind of pigs we really are. Better get used to it.
Too much of anything is always dirty. And we humans are definitely too much in ourselves.
Well anyway, the following pieces are about pig snow - about an overdose of too much too white angelic powder. It is the story of the dumps that happened in Europe in winter 1999.
Pig dumps.
But do not fear: This is not a reality TV show. Everything is fiction - or almost anyway.
Pig-fiction.
My very own, pig-faced version of a meteorological happening.
One.
On Sunday night of February 7th, Matteo was out partying.
Matt is a hairdresser, and he doesn’t work on Mondays. And when you party on Sunday night, things generally tend to be bizarre. No cops on the street (they are all tired from arresting people on Saturday), and few people going out.
But those that do, they do it right. They indulge. They pork out. So Matt was porking out.
Red Bull vodka after a dinner with wine, dancing, kissing all the girls in sight (and the next moment forgetting whom he had kissed). He felt great - superior to the rest - superior to himself even.
And that was mainly because of the alcohol, but also because of that white powder.
It hadn’t stopped snowing outside. Oh, he wasn’t tired when he decided to go home. But the last semi good-looking girl had just left the room.
So Matt got in his car: Integrale. Let the engine run warm like a pro. He concentrated on his own tunnel-vision and stepped on it. Feel good. The chill of sliding on powder covered streets running up his spine.
Up to his brain from that center-of-the-world-spot between his shrunken balls and the tightened sphincter.
Up a mountain road. Power sliding. The feeling of control, as gears shifted smoothly up and down, down and up. The car’s perfectly balanced centre of gravity pulling right at it’s middle. No understeer, no oversteer. Just as if he were in his own V-Rally setup, with a very realistic resolution and steering wheel. 80 K right up to that hairpin turn.
Slam the brakes. Drift 180°. Accelerate in second - third - passing 100 K - slowing down into a wide right turn at 70.
Breakout.
And that was where the little Polo stood in the way. Two girls trying to put their chains on their summer-tired front wheels.
And Matt was out of control.
Hitting the 2 meter snowbank on his left, thrown back into the road too dumb-drunk to react like a real rally driver would.
Mini-skirts hitting his windshield (Matt briefly realizes he is killing the two girls he had just talked to at the bar), and the cracking sound of glass and metal and other stuff.
His pig-head snaps back onto the Recaro headrests as his hood gets crunched up towards his feet. Matt passes out. If he hadn’t he would have gone mad on the spot.
Silence.
Two.
Francois doesn’t have a girlfriend.
He has a lover girl. He only sees Florence once in a while, and when he does, they usually end up having great sex.
Not that he doesn’t like talking to her, being with her. He does. He respects the girl - she’s too smart. But they both don’t feel like having a relationship. And she likes to fuck him. And vice-versa.
So when Francois told Florence that he wanted to take her to the mountains for the weekend and she said yes, Francois knew he had to prepare.
Something special. He rented a small but luxurious chalet. Fully equipped with Dolby Surround Sound System, a video recorder, a stacked minibar, a cliche heart-shaped bathtub and a king-size double bed. Remote, right up on the hill (you even had to hike 20 minutes to get there).
When Florence and him arrived, the Champagne had already been chilled, and the fireplace was crackling away.
But for the heck of it they started Friday night with a short walk in the knee-deep powder.
At some point Francois grabbed his girl and threw her down into the soft white stuff. They rolled around a while and didn’t feel the cold at all. Then they moved back an made love with, and on the floor next to, fire.
Saturday they went riding.
But then the lifts closed down because of avalanche danger. Somewhere in the middle of the evening, a local fire-fighter knocked on their door, and wanted them to move down into the community centre.
Francois burst out in rage - no way he was going to sacrifice their weekend - and told him to fuck off. The poor old man didn’t stand a chance.
Shaking his head, he left and wandered off to the next chalet.
Francois went back in and tied Florence up in a long tongue-twisting kiss.
Two hours later, someone was knocking on the door again.
They were just in the bathtub together, and Francois told his lover girl that no way was he going out there to open the door.
The knocking - and then shouting - continued for a while, and then it ceased.
Francois pulled two towels and carried Florence over to the bed.
For the third time that evening he indulged, fully indulged in being the man he had always wanted to be.
At first, the rumbling sounded like a big truck approaching the chalet (trucks where there is no road?), but quickly it became louder and louder.
Florence was at the point where she wouldn’t have heard anything, even if it was an avalanche approaching.
But between her sighs, Francois noticed there was something in the air.
Something wrong.
When the snow masses hit, the walls of the chalet downright exploded and the roof was thrown down on the aching bed.
As his condom slipped off, Francois witnessed a big wooden beam followed by a couple of hundred kilograms of snow crushing his lover girl’s chest.
Francois came, and then luckily got knocked out by a deer-head flying through the room.
When Francois awoke, he was in a hospital bed, and his first thought was how to kill himself.
Three.
Friedl and his friends were all pretty good snowboarders.
On weekends they would usually check the weather reports for the place with the most snow, hop in their VW-Van and cruise.
Lately snow had been everywhere. So Friedl and his friends had been everywhere too. Especially out of bounds.
On Monday morning, they drove into Estendorf, loudspeakers pumping, and cruised up to the very top of the mountain.
One controlled slope to get to the middle station where the lifts and the people were, but apart from that, a whole mountain of free powder to the east, the west, the north and the south.
Axel saw a little peak he wanted to climb - to gain access to the steep south slope of the mountain:
“Come on, it’s perfect - it’s untracked and we’ll come out right next to the gondola.”
Friedl did not feel good about the idea, and told people so. But Axel was already hiking up, and the others were too intrigued by the unridden steeps not to follow.
So Friedl hiked up too.
Again, he voiced his concerns, but the west-wind blew them away.
Friedl thought:
“Since I’m up here, I might as well go first - go fast - and get this dangerous slope over with in style.”
So he dropped in in a straight line, just one or two turns, and felt good when he was getting into flatter terrain, with little trees surfacing the powder.
When he felt safe, Friedl turned back to the mountain to see how his friends were doing.
That was when Axel, in the middle of his run, decided to thoroughly indulge in one of those big sprays we always see in pictures of Craig Kelly.
He gathered speed in the fall-line, and went into a huge and powerful toe side turn. The snow must have sprayed more than eight feet into the cold air.
But then something snapped - and it wasn’t Axel’s board.
Somehow the entire slope seemed to suddenly disappear beneath his feet.
Axel pulled back, putting his board on edge on the scarred surface the avalanche had just left behind and watched the course of destruction.
First it hit Friedl. Looking back as he was, he had seen it coming. Disbelief at first.
Then, right on time, his film started: Memories, wishes, accomplishments of his life. All in Technicolor, and followed by that bright light esoteric always talk about. Then he died.
The avalanche went on. Bigger and bigger, crushing the chairlift that went up to the right of the middle station of the gondola.
And suddenly Axel realized his life would never be the same again.
The End?
Well, dear Freezer reader, you might think now that Friedl, Florence and those two girls putting chains on their Polo should meet as angels up in heaven…
Sorry, man… but in this pig-story those kinds of miracles just don’t happen.
You know the truth of this story? The truth is that all of the victims just disappeared. They are no more. They’re dead and that’s it.
In this pig-story of indulging pig-people in pig-snow, the good guys loose and the bad guys win - they win nightmares.
If you want, the difference between pigs and the sons-of-god is that sons-of-god are apart when they live, and they meet in heaven.
Pigs disappear when they die, and those pigs that survive (call them Axel, Francois, Matteo, if you want) meet in hell while they are still alive.
They pollute telepathic airspace with their nightmares and get weighed down because they receive the pollution of all the other nightmares around them.
I call it the ‘collective nightmare’, and I am not part of it yet. Lucky me.
Still, reading the news and thinking about all the good guys dying and bad guys surviving with their nightmares makes me sick.
Yeah, la vita è bella, and all that snow we got, provided most of us, with a fantastic winter. But don’t forget - it’s a pig’s world too.