Giglio
(from last april (oh and if you got linked to the amazing SACI dance Video Lorenzo linked you can find it bellow....or here www.vimeo.com/4857161 )

we knew nothing about Giglio accept that we referred to it as Gigolo island and that brought the group of us a great deal of humor ....by this time my friend Tonya was in Florence visiting and she came along on one of the man outings....but we couldn't refer to it as this any longer... like we did out loud but in our mental associations with the bonding experience.. (so maybe the gigolo joke was getting old fast….and we all knew it) not.. this time Nanda left early and staked out the island and found us a beach to sleep on and wear all the lazily flying spears may be seen best in the moonlight (see Capri adventure ( to be posted soon) )......he was successful in surviving his first night alone on the island…….and upon our arrival he was already waiting at the port like some long neglected statue that just got renovated and was waiting for us, to be picked up and erected in the town square with a huge ceremony and red ribbons, balloons, tortilla chips and large overly stuffed marsupials similar to those won at a carnival game....instead he gave us all hugs as if he were lost at sea for the last several months....its amazing how one night alone on a desolate island can do for the soul.... for me...at this point... i was incredibly seasick from the boat ride....but after walking a bit………. I managed to shake the lulling back and forth movements of the un-tamed ocean. Nanda led us to our beach...through thickly covered hillsides of blooming lavender, rosemary, and the yellow flowered bushy plants that smelled absolutely amazing. until we found out later if viewed from up-close....like up-close as in touching them as in they grab onto you with their vicious spiny thorns as in never never never…..absolutly never willing to let go....ever.

but we got to the beach and it was getting dark and we collected wood for our fire and scouted out an inhabited million dollar villa with a welcoming terrace with an amazing view for the evening slumber.....I....In my need to always engulf myself within a body of water as long as its accessible.....made my way with no announcement to jump in the ocean. later at around midnight........... around the warm crackling fire.....after our satiating fried zucchini dipped in pesto meal ....I convinced the whole of us.....Joey, Tonya, Mr. Verney, Sam and Nanda to take a late night swim in the nude.....surprisingly everyone was in! we even danced around the fire like lunatics in our underwear (I might have some video footage I can wrastle up.....actually we were considering to put it in the American Boy dance video but it never made the final cut.....for time pressing issues (little help Verney?)) the next morning I had to jump in the sea again…though I could only convince Verney into jumping in with me... I realized then and there me and Jon Verney were on a mission....we were going to get the entire group of us lost.....near the sea...surrounded by walls and walls of thorns.....I would like to take more credit for this insanity but Jon was pretty intent on supporting my navigational skills so I in return supported his......it was fun at first...then we thought we were going to die out there.....just give up and lay down and forget about all the seagulls cackling/laughing at us and absolve back into the earths elemental makeup...

.. it wasn’t as intentional as you would have thought....it was just getting off the vague trail markings when it split into many trails thinking yeah....the light house we are looking for will definitely be near the water....so the coast will be the big......absolute......definitive land marking.......this way of thinking is what got us in trouble......and I base way too much on intuition...especially when we should be using logic after a certain time when traveling in the bush....Nanda was right....he knew we should have stuck to the power lines......it would have been the most logical direction and would have saved us hours of …….well im getting to that...

Soon enough, by each obstacle we confronted...Jon and I got this look of insanity in our eyes as if saying "you wanted adventure? here’s your adventure!..." following with a procession of man grunts and death defying leaps over purely composed thorn bridges.......mind you.... this is after we were walking calmly though the most green, beautiful, momentous of gentle rolling grassy landscapes and Joey has to open his big mouth and yell out "we must get the ring to Mordor" in his best lord of the rings accent that he could muster.......I haven’t mentioned Joey much as of yet....but he’s the kind of guy you get to know and say to yourself...........Man this guy is probably the most amazing person that ill ever meet.....to keep things short Joey is awesome...no way around it.....

so back to the jungle of thorns...the more we gritted our teeth for adventure the more we got lost...the more Verney yelled out positive innuendos for male bonding adventure time.... the more I did....the more Tonya did...and for a little while atleast….. the more everyone did. we thought that it will be ok to get lost because we probably wont get lost.......and then we got lost.......it sort of corresponded with trying to meet back up with the main trail...and we saw in the rolling distance an object that looked like it should be some kind of shelter...but later upon being lost and closer inspection it turned out to be an ancient stone that some idiot (who probably got lost himself.....though maybe a bit more life threatening) some eight hundred years ago carved to look like a hut....just to piss people off who were about to get lost.......I was the one who vowed to make it to this absurd land mark....it was absolutely impossible to make it there....no one else followed...I told them not to....Verney tried to go another way but got stuck.....I gritted my teeth and pretended not feel the thorns collecting around me......at several different moments I continued to reassess the impossibility of the situation.......and then mindlessly kept engulfing myself in the thick of it.....to find...... after my 20 minutes of insanity to be close enough to our "shelter" to see that there was no trail connecting to our newly found non-shelter.....all I could see were seagulls on the rocks looking at me as if I were and idiot....I really hated those seagulls......and how they could just jump up into the sky and lift their stupid hollow bodies into mid-flight and go wherever they felt .....like to another rock probably........at least I had a little more ambition going for me...like pizza! oh by the way we were all starving and out of water.....bad combination for being lost......at this point I abandoned the group...it was against my better judgment but it had to happen....I couldn’t go back the way I came.....mentally to go back a route that was impossible to begin with only to be just as lost as when you started....it's a little draining...they were only about fifty yards from me though...it wasn’t like I was going to France or something....just to the now-realized consensus of all consensuses.... the power lines........ I yelled that they should take the creek and I will go straight up and we will meet inevitably. they nodded as if not agreeing with anything that I had just said...and we set off......I felt a bit uneasy...anxious...even more lost now that I was alone....and I felt I walked most of us into the fiery inferno of the jaws of nature and I myself opened up a huge umbrella and just started floating peacefully into the sky.....well at least I figured that they begrudgingly felt this way of me....so I decided to find them somehow at some place.....when I reached a large rock cropping I surveyed till I spotted them........we yelled in each others general directions then I keep going only to find that 20 minutes later they were just where I was moments before…..and I was on a new collection of rocks...the most surreal point was when Jon kept going and Sam followed shortly after but Tonya, Nanda and Joey stayed put on those collection of momentarily safe islands in the thickets....and when Jon and Sam separated one-another I just stood there thinking that this is not how things get done (but hey….i was the first to split the group up I suppose)......soon Jon was to a new collection of boulders and Sam was going deeper into the "shit" yelling angrily to himself and the thorns perhaps.....I was on my boulder and started yelling to three of them at the first set of boulders to make sure everything was ok and then to Jon and to Sam....this continued oddly for some time………..

.at this point we created this strange triangle of islands on the boulders with unheard words floating into space and serene apprehensive, complicated, absurd glances to one another with a good 80 feet separating each little collection of curious, fragmented, baffled human consciousness. this is when I think Verney snapped.....he was as close as me to the power lines...maybe 50 yards still out of the two hundred when we initially made our decision to find civilization........he looked up to the mountain and yelled to me something like "brad Im going for it man!" not like some kind of jovial tea sipping philosophical light bulb blinking lazily overhead, as if suggesting: lets go for a swim in the lake! its right there! it will be fun! sort of going for it......no no no ......more like this is fucking insane! I don’t know what to do! going for it looks like to be my very last option! I don’t want to die here! that would be stupid! (later I found out from Verney.....(oh and to relieve the suspense we’re all still alive to my knowledge...sorry to ruin the climax) that he was thinking about what he had learned about saint peter and his journey through hundreds of miles of shear, dense, isolated forest......kind of a crazy epic mindset if you ask me.(Jon maybe you could write something more vividly for this part and ill copy it in at a later date?) another thing was Verney's demeanor....he facial features turned menacing......or more psychotically into a sophisticated-muppet-like-creature-whojsutlosthislastounceofcomposuregiventhathejustrealizedhe’llbeamuppethiswholeentirelifewithsomestrangershandcallingtheshots,constructinghiseverymotive,thiseverynuanceofselfdeterminedfreedomdrainingjustbeforehisveryeyes and wobbled his way forward..... into the "shit".....it was amazingly comic given the situation with our lonely triangle of boulders.....and Verney's appearance wasn't merely intimidating but just as well inspiring......half in a fit of passion...half out of mindless exhaustion I yelled out to the rest of the group as if they hadn’t heard him...as if the whole world was listening at that exact given moment and they.....just the four others had forgotten to pay attention................ when the whole episode of our dilemma...the whole ferociousness of our given stance in this new reality of being alive......when I repeated again what Verney had just told me "Verney's fucking going for it!"…..while intentionally adding my own choice of translation….. the rest just looked at me in the same way as we all had looked over the past hour or so.....perpetually confused....

the next thing I know Verney went for it...then I lost sight of his immaculate grimace into the face of "it".....and after a brief struggle he fell over....I could see only his face struggling and the tops of the thorn bushes embracing his struggle. then all I could see were the tops of the thorn bushes moving...and then they stopped and everything was quiet....... later Jon told me he laid there and tried to accept his fate....later he told me he felt like St. Peter and just accepted the notion to fuse back into the grumbling earth from which he came…..as if a small children’s water toy washed upon some abandoned, uninhabited beach.....then he said the seagulls began flying over head and laughing at him.....he couldn’t take this......the seagulls disrespect for a fellow dying animal..... so he got up and dredged on.....still with the glint of insanity raging from behind his eyes......I stayed where I was. waiting for the rest.... and after which seemed like days Verney got to the electrical lines.......he said nothing at first because there was no trail and he felt defeated...not defeated just for his own sense of well being but the pressures that defeat brings as if a whole group were defeated upon your own shoulders..... but then he found the trail and screamed out I found the trail! and then he saw the lighthouse and screamed...I found the lighthouse! I interpreted again for him "Verney found the trail! and he sees rainbows!" whatever that meant.....but the important part was the whole thing dealing with the trail.....I then looked at the three sitting on the boulders still having not moved thinking "who cares"......"well never make it.....that’s like a three days walk from here"......"and were still stuck on these boulders"....and I could hear Sam grunted majestically though the “shit” and I decided to ease this feeling of guilt burrowing its way into my stomach........ I was going back for the others and making loud obnoxious guttural sounds along the way....

I mean now we had something to fight for...hadn’t we? a trail in the distance....I even fell over backpack first into a thick patch of prickers because Tonya couldn’t get through.....I told her to us me as a bridge...it worked and was sort of humorous until I couldn’t get back up...the three of them had to help me to my feet. after another 30 minutes of crazy, beautiful, yellow-flowered thorn battles...(that weren’t too beautiful any longer).....we too found the trail. but no Verney.....and then the lighthouse...but no Verney...only his pillow that he was carrying this whole time.....like a child in some long lost dream world.....maybe The Chronicles of Narnia...or The Never Ending Story...except this main character brought his pillow from home.....can you imagine the psychological implications that were going through my head at a moment like this? I mean....we made it and our fearless conqueror who led the remainder of the way.....the one who went for "it"......had now totally dissolved into the mountains and what was left of him was his tattered blood stained pillow......as if he was the first to wake up from some episodic nightmare to find himself safely into the confines of his own home....in his soft warm quilted bed. with his soft warm freshly washed pillow. and the remainder of us were to endure the newly fallen rain that began to damper our newly found glory.

turns out Verney ran to the light house for moral support and water.....we also meandered in that direction with our newly discovered relic of a once great man......and then there he was...water in hand......dampened hair from the rain.....I swear it was as if really this whole time....... we were trying to find Verney...like he was kidnapped by pirates and locked in some makeshift prison on this remote thorn ridden island and had just escaped by the shear ingenuity as if a man could muster such ingenuity purely based upon his name. Jon Verney........ which would compel such a haphazard group to go risking their own necks for an individual this valuable and/or crazy to be captured by pirates......... we then went back to the light house to ask for more information on which way to go.....to say the least the military personnel weren’t exactly thrilled to see our chaotic facial expressions...they just thought we were dumb tourists who got stuck in the rain....I suppose we were.

we then found the road and walked in the fog for several miles...up the mountain. back to civilization...though we didn’t know when that would be and thought we would probably miss our boat…… and we didn’t care..... because we couldn’t stop thinking about pizza. and then the fog began clearing and Nanda stopped Joey and I and began comparing himself to this bird just before us slowly moving through the sky (maybe it was a metaphor for a journey which we felt relived to have just begun or has been put nearly behind us).....the void of fog then began shifting apart and the bird languished just in front of where the fog initially began to clear....it was a little more complicated then that...the metaphor of the bird and all of this……but maybe Nanda could explain it a little more clearly(?).. but to say the least Joey, I and Nanda had a moment....and watched the bird vanish back into the fog now that it had opened a hole in the void and the fog just kept clearing and clearing until it was magically from sight....... this is when we realized that everything reflected by sunlight makes everything beautiful and the rest of the hike from that point on wasn’t as boring...or rainy or difficult...actually when we saw the gem of the city from around one of those never ending mountain bends....we all lit up and three of us started running (tonya,joey and I) singing a song from the top gun soundtrack.....not the really fast one but I think the one about losing that love and feeling...whoa oh that love and feeling....you lost that love and feeling……. now its gone………. Gone…………….. gone......woah oh oh oh..........................but I don’t quite remember I’ll have to ask Joey....Joey will know.

to make a long story shorter.....right when we got to the city we found a pizza joint and the six of us order 12 pizzas.....really ten and a calzone but whenever we have talked about the episode since we agreed that 12 pizzas sound more amazing then 10 and a calzone....by golly we should have gotten the 12 for purely aesthetic purposes. after that we missed our boat and Tonya and I tried to pass as a couple of newly weds to manage a cheap hotel room that we could all split....but the old couple caught onto or shenanigans when we tried to walk right past them in the middle of the night......not five minutes after booking the room.....and given how baffled they were and how mistrusting mine and Tonya’s conniving deeds had become we still worked out a deal that they couldn’t refuse.....I mean we paid more money....but not as much as we should have.....and now we had all of our own beds. and drank wine safely apart from the labyrinth of thorns we exhaustedly pushed, for the moment, furthest from recollection as possible.