Life Remains
English
Italian
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Issue 1
a Test Tube baby
57 views • Aug 12, 2024
an unspeakable scandal was maybe the cause of my birth
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Issue 2
Father
21 views • Aug 12, 2024
My father side of the family, a mystery mostly shrouded in conservative silence
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Issue 4
post WWII - hope and reality
17 views • Aug 12, 2024
in the space of a few years, youth and hope leave room to conformism and consumerism, with the expected emptiness as a result
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Issue 5
Almost Africa
11 views • Aug 12, 2024
Sometimes events can be recognized as pivotal for our life even before we can do anything about them
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Issue 6
1963
13 views • Aug 12, 2024
among other things, the birth of hypertext, lava lamp, the mouse, cassette tapes, and smiley!! :) an obsessively repeated rhyme notwithstanding, life felt great
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Issue 7
Sister surprise
12 views • Aug 18, 2024
some secrets get revealed, and we take a couple of trips to see dad
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Issue 8
Prague, 1968
13 views • Aug 24, 2024
A fruitless exhibition, angry whispers, a lifelong question, soviet tanks in the streets
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Issue 9
life, if profitable
14 views • Aug 31, 2024
moon landing, Buzz Aldrin smashing figure, my dreams, lost people's reality
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Issue 10
Extensions
13 views • Sep 07, 2024
where I share many terrors with my childhood best - and only - friend
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Issue 11
Too Much
18 views • Sep 15, 2024
Just anxiety... and feeling like I don't know what is going on
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Issue 13
Loss of Innocence
8 views • Oct 05, 2024
Our confidence in judging others, you may have noticed, decreases as we ourselves fail to navigate the moral quandaries of life.
Mine was cracked early on by an event that has haunted me since.
The first of many moral failings...
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Issue 14
Religious brushings
9 views • Oct 05, 2024
I do have to say, this ain't going to end the way one would think reading this episode...
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Issue 15
Whose fault was it anyway?
9 views • Oct 13, 2024
A glimpse into the craziness that can come out of siblings' relationships, and yet another stupid thing I may have done
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Issue 16
Satori
6 views • Oct 19, 2024
Sometimes understanding becomes almost like a solid thing that hits you, but it's rarely a sticky thing
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Issue 17
Return to Rome
8 views • Oct 26, 2024
I wasn't really aware, at 8 years old, of what anything that had just happened meant for anyone involved.
So when my mother, once I returned from 'exile', tearfully confessed to me the reason why she had sent me off and out of the way, I distinctly remember feeling out of tune emotionally with the drama that was obviously playing around me.
As she hugged me crying, if anything I had a little envy for my sister, who was off seeing new things and had simply - in my mind - decided to take a trip, no drama involved.
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Issue 18
Two digits old!!
NSFW
8 views • Nov 02, 2024
As I turned two digits, things begin to change, and like everyone going to the first year of middle school knows, it's not immediately clear which way they're heading....
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Issue 19
Middle School
10 views • Nov 09, 2024
It all started out fairly normal, I made a great best friend, someone who knew how to do things... , and learned to get over the 'pretty drawing' idea thanks to a maniacal art teacher.
Overall, I seemed to be headed for a normal three years...
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Issue 20
Diana
7 views • Nov 23, 2024
At times, if we're lucky, we get glimpses of the reality beyond our childish description of it, and those experiences become the stones upon which we walk to cross the river of life
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Issue 21
Hints of Awakening
8 views • Nov 23, 2024
I feel that this is the year that my life went from that of a passive, overwhelmed lonely child to a an exponentially accelerating path.
It was possibly due to my mother's success, the people that began to hang around the house, and of course the first trip to visit places and cultures that back then were still the stuff of legend, mystery, and endless slide shows upon returning...
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Issue 22
One Step Beyond
6 views • Nov 30, 2024
My return from the Far East fills me with a childish sense of having figured out a lot more stuff than I actually did.
So now it's time to prove otherwise...
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Issue 23
Spiritual Thirst
6 views • Dec 07, 2024
At 11 years old I felt a strong yearning to overcome the prohibitive speed at which everyone talked and acted, to find enough space to unravel outwardly and maybe find safe, warm connections
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Issue 24
the "Lead" Years
11 views • Dec 14, 2024
My approach to adulthood put my inner and outer worlds apparently at odds. My inner world was the search for a way to relate to existence, which I believed was somehow connected to inner peace, while my outer was a society rocked by armed struggled, state terrorism, pushed right and left by geopolitical psychopaths who believed, then and now, that the end justifies the means. As if reality was a series of disconnected boxes, non sequential, not spatially, temporally or context related in any way, where the boxes called "the means" would be separate and never affect the moral context of "the end" boxes...
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Issue 25
Crucible Moment
7 views • Dec 22, 2024
As I almost literally started coming out of my shell, life began to pick up pace, my mind was facing the path t0 enlightenment and to carpentry at the same time. And then I became a boy!
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Issue 26
Here we go again
3 views • Dec 29, 2024
Again to the far east, and again ready to dive head first into a religious experience.
I think time has come to stop and question the well cared of, neat and packaged past I have been carrying along with me all my life, a life 'movie' in which I've been mostly hero or victim, but hardly ever perpetrator, or even deluded.
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Issue 27
Little Daco gets a visit...
2 views • Jan 05, 2025
Episode 27: Little Daco gets a visitor...
My Alters pay a visit to the 11 years old me, prior to my taking the 5 vows, the first step towards becoming a Tibetan monk. At this point in my biography I felt the need to open the door to an alternative way of adding reflections, commentaries, sideline which so far have been confined to a whole lot of text per episode. Hence the Alters, a family of misfits if there ever was one.
Also a homage to Little Nemo for those who fail to catch it.
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Issue 28
Let's do this
3 views • Jan 12, 2025
In what I can see today probably being one of the first very visible sign of OCD, I jump in and take the five
vows, which were then expressed in very draconian terms.
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Issue 29
Vacillations
4 views • Jan 20, 2025
Having taken the five Buddhist vows, I find myself trying to follow them and interpret them, all the while on the cusp of that precocious age in which temptations are everywhere...
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Issue 30
A phone call
4 views • Jan 27, 2025
As I fail to sync up with everything around me, and feel as remote as ever from the world, seeing its delusions through the lens of the buddhist view, we get a phone call about a surprise visit from a teacher...
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Issue 31
1975: Boarding the helicopter
15 views • Feb 03, 2025
Sometimes you know an event will have an everlasting effect on you, on what you do, on what and how you think, virtually every single day for the rest of your life.
But I didn't know, and honestly, nor will most people who read this be able to imagine in which ways my life changed. Most will extrapolate their own thinking into a linear "religious", "abuse", "fantasy", "Dzogchen", "enlightenment" storyline, whatever positive or negative idea they already have in mind. But of course my life went very differently.
You'll just have to keep reading... subscribe/follow/share if you haven't already.
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Issue 32
The end of childhood
4 views • Feb 10, 2025
At some point, childhood ends and adolescence begins. Not only I turned 13 in 1976, I finished middle school, entered high school, and in the summer I had an experience that remained with me every single day of the rest of my life, which I'll talk more about in future episodes
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Issue 33
Crashing Helicopters
6 views • Feb 17, 2025
One panel about Dozgchen because it's view will trickle in the entire comic. And before I get into details, the overall beginning and end of that first retreat
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Issue 34
No Matter What...
5 views • Feb 24, 2025
Sooner or later it had to happen. I was just thirteen, but i don't remember it being any different than any other time it happened in my life
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Issue 35
Refuge from Madness
4 views • Mar 02, 2025
I let go of my vows. I hold her hand, then and forever in my heart.
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Issue 36
3, 2, 1 ...
3 views • Mar 17, 2025
This is one of those moments, one of those "this is it" instants after which nothing is ever the same.
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Issue 37
Shame on you
NSFW
5 views • Mar 24, 2025
Shame and guilt when experiencing pleasures that reduce submission to a controlling authority are a classic in abusive relationships with such authority.
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Issue 38
Unworth
3 views • Mar 30, 2025
From the very first time, my lack of self-esteem and sense of abandonment and solitude manifests as attachment anxiety.
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Issue 39
Mountaning
5 views • Apr 07, 2025
the Dzogchen retreat of Chogyal Namkhai Norbu is taking a break, I head to the nearby mountain.
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Issue 40
I know what to do
6 views • Apr 13, 2025
The guidelines are simple. But I read them the way I wanted to better serve my desire
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Issue 41
Ode to the addict
5 views • Apr 20, 2025
There's a goal to addiction, and it's not running away from something, but it's moving towards something more primeval than the concepts we're told should make up the fickle castle of beliefs that veils our humanity.
Unfortunately, there's no substance or compulsion that can permanently deliver us from the everyday delusion we suffer from.
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Issue 42
Welcome to High School
NSFW
7 views • Apr 28, 2025
The person who entered those buildings was very, very different from the person who exited the catholic middle school buildings just a few months before.
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Issue 43
Lead Years High
7 views • May 05, 2025
Going to high school in the year 76-77, during Italy's Lead Years, was certainly very different from today. It was the desperate end of a decade in which young people tried to wrestle control of society and the direction of progress from the greedy overlords of today. After those years, the US elected an actor as president, and the biggest scam ever perpetrated on working and middle classes was deployed like a well rehearsed theatre play, engineered by an array of right wing think tank that had been hastily assembled to counter the strong drive towards a more equitable society.
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Issue 44
Not Fitting In
0 views • May 12, 2025
It's normal that people don't care enough about you to figure you out before labelling you. It's more of an obesssive compulsive thing, that of HAVING to label and classify things and people. And the quick way is "if you're not with us then you're with them".
Not conforming, in school I was a communist, a fascist, a nihilist, basically I was "other".
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Issue 45
Bali in the 70's
1 views • May 18, 2025
Until I had kids I never asked myself if the autonomy my mother granted me was reckless. It certainly help me, danger averted after danger averted, to become wise as to how to move about in the world very early on. But luck had a lot to do with (spoiler!) me being still alive.
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Issue 47
Bali Market[ing], 1976
NSFW
0 views • Jun 01, 2025
Last week Black, my ADHD alter ego but also the one who cannot avoid helping in my work, lest my whole existence fall apart in one instant, had to cover the role of the waitress, whose features I can't recall. She brought food to myself and my sister's boyfriend when, in 1976 Bali, we sat stoned and amazed at a tiny makeshift restaurant perched on the side of a volcano. I was 13 and he was probably around 20.
Because the waitress did something amazing, Black has to cover her role this week as well, for continuity. In addition, Smart, my ambitious and narcissistic alter ego, has an idea for how to get more views in a world where mind has lost the battle.
