Leonardo Boiko’s Diary

I got a few superstitions. I don’t listen to “Riders on the Storm” unless it’s actually raining; I don’t listen to “Summer is Almost Gone” except when the summer is ending. I don’t eat fatty food before university exams. I think the Beats should be read aloud, or not at all. And I don’t read the Beats in translation.

Therefore, I saw the Naked Lunch movie but didn’t read the book, because so far I couldn’t find any Burroughs in English. Until last week, that is, during the Virada Cultural event (in which you was supposed to watch while various artsy persons did stuff the whole night). I found a Burroughs plastic-wrapped (blasphemy!) deep down the Parada Paulista underground. “Excuse me, I have a problem”, I said. The clerk put on her worried face. “This book, you see, it wants to go home with me, but I have no more than four 10-real bills in my wallet”. She agreed — they always do. And the event was not the depressing night of tedium it would be otherwise: I spent the night wandering in the dark corners of the República region, without a penny, reciting The Soft Machine for myself, and happy.

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Someone asked for news? I failed to join the scholarship program at USP’s Physics department; I’m still locked outside academia, in the enterprise purgatory. I didn’t join that company which accepted a six-hour workday either (turns out they wanted a Java guy, and you kitties know well what I think about Java). And I’m still without a computer, so that I can’t develop the blogs like I want to.

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We finally got some cold. It’s still not real cold, but it’s refreshing nonetheless; I can use my trenchcoat now. These days I’m physically in love with my old green Belorussian trenchcoat. Ever since I forgot my sleeping bag somewhere I’ve been using the trenchcoat as a blanket, and before the cold came I even dreamed about wearing it. Could the whole symbiont business have influenced me? Now that I think about it, I’ve always been attached to blankets… Hm…

Hot days here are worse than those of Manaus, even though Manaus is hotter; because here the air is polluted, heavy, feeling like a glasshouse — actually, it does work like a glasshouse. The cold climate will bring with it thermal inversion, but it improves my mood anyway. Small fucking favors.

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Speaking about Naked Lunch: I didn’t think I’d miss Ladybug, my portable red Hermes typewriter, that much. I was waiting to find a real home before bringing it back, but so far I had no luck…