Just various and sundry thoughts...

Da Ven sort of vented about the Canadians going hooligan after losing to Boston in some hockey game. He should never want to be a soccer fan in Europe.

I saw a game live.... once. In Berlin. In the stadium Hitler had built for the '33 Olympics. It was so impressive, architecturally. Intimidating and skeery. The home team lost, but there was camaderie, but that was 'back then'. And all I could think was, 'so this is where Jesse Owens humiliated Hitler.'

What later developed wasn't so interesting, and more annoying. Riots. Hooligans, who currently get a huge police presence when they arrive and accompany them to the stadium... which had an interim re-naming to the Arnold Scharzenegger Stadium and after he pissed off the city officials, got re-named to the original Liebenauer Stadium. Long story.

I took a trip to Rome in the late Seventies. It was the one city I disliked on sight. Athens fascinated me, and I fell in love. Rome? I hated it. So I jumped ship after having spent one morning in the Vatican museums, which were way too much to absorb, and fled to Salerno, only because I'd read it was on the sea, and knew that a very bloody WWII battle was fought there. It was a pure vacation place, steep mountains falling to the strip of the city, a long strip of promenade, with the most amazing acts on it... the local version of Punch and Judy, which originated there during the time of Comedia dell'arte, and it was full of vacationing Italians, so I got a brush up on my speaking skills. Took day trips to Pompeii, and Amalfi. Unforgettable, and just what I needed to relax and fill my head with knowledge.

The bus ride to Pompeii was hair-raising. People had chickens in coops on the baggage racks above the seats, and we swerved along mountainsides where everything was so steep, I thought I had made a bad decision, but everyone ELSE was calm, so I went with it. You do that when you're young and fearless.

I was down there for a week, it was inexpensive, and wonderful, and what I needed. Just some solitude. I knew I was falling in love, and wanted to sort it out and be clear in my mind about whether that was what I wanted.

Two days before I was supposed to be back to work, I returned to Rome taking an evening train there and was absolutely freaked when I got to Roma Termini, the station. It was crawling with humanity. What I hadn't known was that the World Cup Soccer Tournament had just ended, and everyone in the wuuurrrrrld was leaving. I was lucky to get on, it was packed.

And landed sitting on my suitcase near the WC door on one car, and it was wall to wall people, yelling, screaming, and I had to keep moving for all the people wanting to void in the toilet one way or another, and had a hysterical English kid drunk out of his gourd who gave me a play by play re-run of all the games in complete 'euphoria'. He brought back all the stress I had managed to lose. People were piled up sleeping in the corridors.

I'm claustrophobic at best, and it was my night in Hell. And I kept thinking, 'I've got to get OUT of here!' but I didn't 'know' any other cities on the route, so I held on to Venice in my head.

It takes twelve hours to travel by train from Rome to Venice. That far.

But I learned some things, although I was more than annoyed at the time.

Once in Venice, I put my suitcase in a locker, took a boat to the Lido, and a bus to the southernmost end, where there was a nude beach. High dunes, sort of magical, and I crashed out and finally slept. There was a train going back to Graz in the evening, you see, and I thought the horror would be over.

But before I got the boat, I'd run into Jimmy Carter for the second time on that trip. Early morning, he was out jogging with his secret service agents... I'd already seen him in Rome, going somewhere... he and Rosalynn waving, and the Romans sort of shrugging as if to say, WTF? It was weird, as in, 'Can't I have a minute here???'

When I got up to go back, there was this letch who followed me on the bus back to Santa Maria Elisabetta, where the ferries back to the city go, and he was fat, toothless, and kept running his tongue over his lips laciviously, and all I wanted to do was laugh, and thought 'Fellini makes documentaries'.

The train home was quiet, I got in at seven, began work a half-hour later, and life became normal again.

What was extraordinary about soccer fanatics then became magnified, but I sort of understand. I've met many since. They scrape everything they have together just to see their HE-roes. They live through them vicariously. They live and breathe the game. Because their lives aren't so exciting. And they are sort of a sad sort of group.

And the more poor they became, the more violent.

It's just a guess.

People can be very sad.