Padrone's Last Post

Padrone has had a lot of things happening where he lives, and so his last blog post is late. He regrets the delay, but life takes precedence - always.

I do hate that this is his last post, and it is my own personal hope that he will choose to type more, now and then.

And here it is:

Take a Walk on the Wild Side

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you

T. S. Eliot – The Waste Land

I am a lawyer, so I understand the necessity of laws and rules and how those laws and rules enables us to live in a society that's daily becoming more global and complex, and I understand that we can probably have a good idea of the real value of a country just looking at the web of rights and duties steering its citizens in their pursuit of happiness.

Yet, as much as I deeply admire the insight of Thomas Jefferson and of those guys in the French revolution who came out with the idea of freedom, equal rights and fraternity, something deep inside me tells me that the reason I am alive today cannot be found in rights, rules or the protection of society. The real reason why I'm alive today is that so far I managed not to make anyone angry or annoyed enough to kill me.

Any social group inevitably builds the concept of an ideal citizen, the politically correct guy, and even if different countries can have (and do have) different ideals they are identical in just one thing: no one can totally conform to them. At the personal level there is always a tension, a struggle, between what the group wants you to become and what you want to be and who you feel you are, and willing or not there are times when the group looses and our ego flares.

How do we manage that? Beyond the obvious fascination that we feel for villains and criminals and people that at least for some time can live outside the law, making their own rules or with no rules at all, how do we cope with the inevitable unpolitical and incorrect side of our personality?

For me the question is far from a theoretic one, both on social and personal level, because quite early in my life I discovered that I had some peculiar dreams about my romantic and sexual life. During the seventies here in Europe women were still struggling to reach a real social and sexual equality, burning bras in public marches and demonstration, and while I felt that their struggle for social parity was totally legitimate and understandable I had those daydreams, you know, with a girl kneeling at my feet, eager and ready to fulfill my every need and desire.

It was a disturbing contradiction, especially for a teenager. While you are trying to define your social image, fighting to find a place in a community of your choice, you also are struggling to understand yourself as an individual and you suddenly realize that you have a wild side, that you have needs and urges that the community of your choice surely wouldn't approve.

At some point I decided not to deny those feelings and urges. I perfectly understood that I needed to keep them hidden but I also understood that there is a difference between social and private life, if I had a wild side it was probably better not to try to hide it to myself and to learn as much as I could about it. I decided, as the song says, to take a walk to the wild side and see where the way would lead.

I never regretted that decision, for good or for bad I didn't want to lie to myself and I wanted to find out who I was and what I wanted, both on a social and personal level. If social and personal needs don't always match and that has made my life … complicated, well, that's an unfortunate matter but I guess I share that problem with the rest of all mankind.