Metamorphosism

Varroa jacobsoni

It is May so my car is covered with pollen. Driving around, I think this is what it would feel like to be a varroa jacobsoni, a relatively benign honeybee parasite, if varroa jacobsoni drove the bee and found it irritating to have to drive bees in the first place, because bees got cracks in their windshields all the time, no sooner did you replace the windshield, it got a new crack, maybe bees shouldn't tailgate trucks, or even cars, and the price of whatever ran the bees was going up to the point that, sheesh. And on the varroa jacobsoni's way to work, alongside the freeway offramp, there was a line of stuffed toys and dolls, two or three stuffed animals and a doll or two, and seeing that made the varroa jacobsoni sad every morning. And the mite remembered this one afternoon when it was seventeen, it went to the library with a friend to listen to a lecture on Transcendental Meditation, and got there early so they read Rolling Stones in the library, and saw an article about clothes designed by Eldridge Cleaver including pants with a built-in codpiece, which Mr. Cleaver modeled in the article, and laughed about it and later, during the lecture remembered it and giggled through the lecture, and eventually took up TM until the organization started getting into the levitation and the "His Holiness" business, whereupon the varroa jacobsoni got busy with other things; and the mite wonders why it remembers this and not, for example, what it had for breakfast that day, which upon reflection it figures was probably toast or cereal, since pancakes were the only other thing it usually ate back then for breakfast, and they were probably too much trouble except on special occasions.

Musical nightmare

I dreamed I was participating in the first rehearsal of my composition. The other musicians were all there, the conductor was there. We discussed the music, my intentions with it and how everyone was to play. Then we sat down and played it for the first time. I noticed that the cello part had no notes, except for three at the very beginning, and instructions to play with a lot of tremolo. For the next seven minutes, I tried to make up notes as we went along.

Then I realized it was not a nightmare, it was really happening. I'd left the cello part to the last, figuring I'd get around to it eventually. Then I forgot, as the endorphins released by being finished with everything else flooded my system. Our next rehearsal is this coming Tuesday. I have until then to figure something out. Also I am beginning to feel that the tremolo doesn't work.

Nine miles down - voice track

Chris was kind enough to host the mp3 for me since I was unable to figure out how to get it onto my own server. You can download it as a zip file here (about 10 MB). Warning: lots of reverb. 10 minutes long, too.

P.S. Chris has put up a hack of the project here, which is pretty cool. The music is from him, not me.

Blah, blah music yadda yadda

Survived the orchestra camp and the first concert. Food was better this year. The concert went okay. Looking forward to the rest of them - we have three more this month.

Beta also enjoyed the orchestra. The people are nice. Both of us would like to do it again next year, but it's a time question. We'll see.

I spent my free time messing around with Finale, a music composition program. That's great fun, too.

My composition "Nine Miles Down" is scheduled to be performed on the 14th of this month, so we'll be rehearsing that. I am curious whether it can be performed at all. I suppose so. First rehearsal is, I think, tonight, or maybe tomorrow, or Tuesday of next week. I'll be in the music school tonight for my cello lesson, so if it's tonight I can act as if I knew it was all along.

I've got the voice track more or less finished. The voice track I was talking about, the one that is to be played during the performance of Nine Miles Down, the one for which so many of you kindly donated your voices. It's a little heavy on the reverb in places, maybe I'll change that if time permits, which I doubt. Mixing sounds is terribly time-consuming, at least if you don't know what you're doing. Also I spent a lot of time watching my iBook's beachball spin.

I was going to post an MP3 of the voice track right here, but I'm having firewall problems apparently. If you are interested in listening to it, mail me at metamorphosist at gmail and I'll send you a copy (if your email thing can handle 10MB files).

Traveling music

Beta and I went to Galway about ten years ago (it was in October) to see a man about a harp, beginning what we did not know at the time would be a series of travels in the name of music. At the time, bad tin whistle was the limit of my own musical experiences, and I had no plans to change that.

The first trip went well. We bought an Irish harp, we made friends in Dublin, Beta, although only eight at the time managed the following day to guide her massively hungover father through a transfer at Zurich airport where I thought I'd lost my ticket and we got home safe, harp, bodhran, and all.

In the ten years since then we have been to workshops around Austria and to a couple orchestra camps. It was often a thing just the two of us did, and I enjoyed it. Encouraged by her great joy with the harp, I took up cello, with less success but just as much joy. Somehow I even ended up composing music.

This evening we will leave for what I think will be our last orchestra camp (our trajectories are taking us elsewhere, I guess). We will play a concert on Sunday, and then three more in the coming weeks. She will sound beautiful on the harp, I will sit as far back in the cello section as I am able and play some of the songs (more than last year), pantomime others.

Sometimes you only realize later that something you do is for the last time - carrying your kid around on your shoulders, visiting a certain place, giving a big guy the finger in traffic. This weekend, though, I will be aware of it every second, and paying attention.

Little-known facts about the skate

• Skates are cartilaginous fish. They belong to the Rajidae family, controlling half the casinos in Las Vegas.
  
• Skates are bottom-dwelling, all the way down to the abyssal zone.
  
• So black is the skate's favorite color.
  
• The common skate, Dipturus batis, is the largest found in British waters, but it is less common than the thornback ray, Raja clavata, which is the most common skate in British waters.
  
• Ironically.
  
• Skates grow slowly and mature late. It is not uncommon to find adult skates blogging all day at work.
  
• Skates are prone to self-conscious sentimentality. For example, when an adult skate drops his young off at school, he not only sits there in his car watching her across the street and all the way into the school, his heart breaking over the irretrievable moment, he also watches himself watching her and thinks, I ought to write something about this some time.
  
• The skate's biggest fear is someday tourists will discover the abyssal zone.
  
• The skate has been good about doing the dishes lately.
  
• Skates lay eggs in a case known as a "mermaid's purse".
  

Reading Jordan Harper at the United Nations

There I sat, on the overstuffed, too-low, stained, green chair ("Donated to the United Nations by the Government of Hungary") in the lounge on the fourth floor, squinting to read my laptop in the glare coming in through the window on my lunch break from covering a meeting of a certain crime commission, where things such as human trafficking, money-laundering, narcotics and arms trafficking and their connection to terrorism (kaching!) were being discussed with soporific effect, when she walked in.

Well, not exactly she.
It.
A metafilter projects link. Metafilter is good to read when you're using a dim iBook and the sun is bright, because good contrast, the blue and yellow.

The link was to a website of short neo-noir hardcore hardboiled fiction by Jordan Harper. Here, I will link his site: Jordan Harper crime fiction

After taking notes at the conference that morning, it was like looking at crime through the other end of the telescope, if turning around a telescope made it work like a microscope.

I really like his writing. My sister sent my wife a collection of America's Best Crime Fiction for a certain year, 2007 maybe, that I am reading on the toilet lately, and Harper's writing is as good as anything in that. I read through all the stories on his site and couldn't get them out of my head, a couple in particular.

I even sent him a gushing fan email.

His writing, in fact, reminded somewhat of my writing on this site, if instead of sentimental marine creatures talking about their dreams you had neoNazis cutting people in half with shotguns, and stuff (I don't want to spoil anything for you).

Actually, upon further reflection, his writing does not strongly resemble mine, but it did remind me heavily of my young man-hood, and the sorts of people and situations I would have chewed my arm off to avoid. And the scary men I sensed at the edge of my peripheral perception. The demons of my youth, or something.

Rasputina has a song, "State Fair", that reminds me vividly of situations of my youth. In a totally different way, Harper also brings to life dialects and characters I have not seen elsewhere. Maybe I just lead a sheltered life, who knows. You should go look at his stuff, though, and let me know what you think.

Going to school

"You have a choice," I said. "Sigur Ros or Nine Inch Nails."
"Nine Inch Nails," Gamma said.

It rained hard yesterday. My wife called me at work and said the road near our village was closed due to a mudslide. That's some hard rain, because it's perfectly flat where we live.

There is one underpass where the road goes under some train tracks, sometimes that fills up. And new train tracks are raised, so maybe some mud washed down the embankment.

I made it home okay. I couldn't make my mind up between Nine Inch Nails and Sigur Ros, so I kept switching between the two. NIN went well with the lightning and dark clouds. SR went well with the rained-on fields and the green coming out in the woods.

Could be anywhere

There are a bunch of old trees outside my office window. It was warm this morning so the window is open. It just got windy. The sound the wind makes I have heard before. Waiting for a train one humid afternoon in the middle of nowhere in Japan. On the Oregon coast as a boy, hiding from people in tall grass. Taking a leak at a rest stop in Eastern Washington one hot summer day, trying to remember why I was there.

People are talking somewhere, and cars are driving around and the elevator is going places.

Opossum, the other white meat

My favorite Alan Watts story is about a teacher whose student asks him, so if everything is an illusion, then that elephant is an illusion too? And the teacher says, yes, that's right. So to prove his faith in his teacher, the student lies down and tells the elephant guy to have it step on him, which it does, and he is crushed. Maybe I ought to have told him he's an a illusion, too, the teacher mutters.

Still, picking out a tie this morning, I had to think about money and slavery. Are we slaves? Is money imaginary? If money is imaginary, does that mean we are slaves? What is a slave, what is the definition? I'm thinking sort of, in the sense of drudgery, or submitting to a dominating influence, or bondage of some sort.

If money is imaginary, does that mean we are slaves?

Is money the gold leaf on an iron glove? Does everything come down to money, or to the power structures beneath? Maybe money is the smiley face on the prison guard's taser.

Maybe we should be grateful to people like Jérôme Kerviel for burning Société Générale and demonstrating the imaginariness of money.

It's a perspective thing, partly. You steal $20 from me, it ruins my day. You burn $billions at some French bank, everyone is all, whatever.

Kerviel should get a medal. Money is imaginary. We're slaves. I get it now.

On the other hand, there is, in a way, a largish man here in the kitchen with me with a two-foot length of half-inch rebar in his hand who tells me in a convincing voice that he would use it to shatter both my kneecaps if I don't pay him ten thousand dollars in the next few hours.

In this scenario, money is suddenly very real. So we have a graph:



This would illustrate the possible fact that the reality of money is a function of the consequences of denying its reality. In other words, money is imaginary as long as one suffers no consequences for believing this, and increases in reality as the negative consequences of denying this reality increase.

This would suggest that money has less power over those who develop the ability to live without it, or to "need" less of it.

When we put a price on something, we lend reality to this tool of control. This greatly simplifies life in most cases, because, you know, imagine bartering for a car. Or for everything.

Still, not everything must be a market transaction. "Shopping" for a mate, for example. Metaphors like that make me cringe.

Speaking of slavery, and what I mean by it: my kid tells me that slaves in "ancient Greece" owned slaves of their own. So if you are paying some guy to mow your grass, it doesn't mean you're not a slave.

I wonder, though, how long it takes to get tired of opossum, and whether that's the only choice.

Everything you can think of is true

Drivers are so uptight lately.
Honking and gesturing.
I've been noticing this since Monday, when I started taking muscle relaxants for my back again.*
They've been harshing my mellow at work, too. My supervisor has been all, like, do this, do that. She's been like, I've discovered if I sit here next to you and give you input, you do more work.
On the plus side, great Olympic torch run, guys.
Honestly, on so many levels.
Also: had a nice walk along the creek yesterday morning.
Sunrise reflected on glass-calm water.
Two black bunnies crossed my path.
Then, at lunch, found this video over here. It is the coolest thing I've seen lately, except maybe Gamma's tie-dye shirt, the sunrise and the heron (which will appear later in this post): a scientist giving a great scientific lecture that is rigorously scientific and at the same time so deeply emotional that it had her, her studio audience and me in tears.
Then: on my way home last night, moving slow in traffic on the bridge, got to watch a grey heron fly (real slow, against the wind) across the lanes, right in front of my car, almost at eye level.

I read somewhere, What would you do if you knew you would succeed?

What. What would it be? My first thought: buy a lotto ticket.

I was thinking a few weeks ago, standing outside under a perfect blue sky, about how very happy I am. I was telling this to Beta. The surprisingly big response to my request for voices for the composition had really thrilled me, and I was having a lot of social contacts with a lot of nice people, and I was thinking about a nice guy who has had a dream come true, not only being a talented painter but also making a living at it, and other friends who have achieved things.
And I realized, well, my dream was to live in Europe and make a living as a writer and I've achieved the first part. And Beta pointed out that I might have a better chance at achieving the second part if I actually submitted stuff.
Everything you can think of is true. Dick Cheney shits hornet eggs. I publish something finally.
I've actually got a couple manuscripts here I want to send to agents and publishers. I have a subscription to writersmarket.com and have been looking thru their listings.
The problem is narrowing that down a bit. How does one go about that, I wonder. One can't send a submission to every single one all at the same time.
And so on.

*I stopped on Tuesday again, cause you don't want this to turn into a habit or something.

Morning haiku

Yeah, fuck you too, jerk
Where'd you learn to drive, asshole?
The crescent moon smiles

Otherwise, whatever. There was something I'd been meaning to say but then Heath Ledger, who lives in my lower back now, told me to take another muscle relaxant so I forgot.

It was something clever.

Yesterday I was sitting on the living room floor, meditating after doing a little yoga for the back, very carefully. I realized I was wearing a tie-dye t-shirt. All I need is a gray ponytail now, I thought.

Gamma was supposed to make a purse at school, in her sewing class, but failed utterly and was downcast. Her next project was to make a t-shirt, so we spent the weekend tie-dying t-shirts.

Her assignment was to design a shirt and make it. I suggested making the shirt first, then making a design that looked like the shirt, because harder to go wrong that way.

Her shirt turned out really cool. She wanted diagonal stripes, and she GOT DIAGONAL STRIPES! It was the first time either of us had ever tie-dyed, and it totally turned out.

Mine didn't turn out so well. The spiral was a spiral, and the other pattern was right too, but I was too impatient with the dye and didn't squirt on enough, so there's too much white IMO. But it's good to know how the patterns work.

Maybe we'll start a t-shirt company. We could make sand candles too. Or macrame.

Val.Hal.Uh.I.Yam.Co.Ho.Ming

That's like about the only Led Zeppelin lyric I can actually understand.
I was lecturing to Gamma about The Immigrant Song on the way to school yesterday, and watched in the mirror as she rolled her eyes. She gave me a sweet smile when she caught me looking at her, and the look she got when I said I'd love to be in a Led Zeppelin cover band is hard to describe. A lot like the look you get when your father said the same thing, I guess.

Last night at bedtime, she was listening to Dvorak.

"My birthday is in exactly one week," she said a while ago.

So I've been thinking about her birth. I barely made it. I dropped Alpha off at the hospital, went home to get her stuff and a bottle of champagne to celebrate, and a bottle of MacCallan's in case it took a long time, decided not to shave and got back to the delivery room just in time to see Gamma shoot out like a cork and go boing at the end of the umbilical cord.

The doctor looked at the whisky and said, boy, you Irish know how to have babies. Instead of explaining my family history, I just poured champagne.

When she goes to America this summer, Gamma will be eleven and will attend a marine biology class with her cousin. I attended the same class at the same age and liked it. Maybe that's why I am such a fish expert now.

This morning, for reasons unknown, I had an earworm, Nena singing 99 Luftballons. As we got ready to leave the house, Gamma started singing it.

Composition update

Using my key, I entered the music school early this morning and made my way up to the teachers' lounge, where the cleaning ladies were goofing off, standing around smoking and talking about sports* and deposited the completed notes to my composition in the cubby-hole of my composition workshop advisor, only one month late.

Next step, I guess, is recruit musicians and start rehearsals. A performance is scheduled for 14 May. I hadn't exactly forgotten about it, it had just seemed so far off when I began.

Now I can get going on all those voice recordings people sent me. If you are still working on a recording for me, it is still not to late to mail it in.

_________
*not really. they are industrious workers and nice people.

Beginning, middle, etc etc

About playing the cello: something I read a while ago gave me the idea that a note is not, as I had previously thought, a dot on a page with a lot of other dots, but rather that one can break it down further upon closer examination, into a beginning, a middle, and an end. Since then, when playing, I think about that occasionally.
It doesn't actually help, or it hasn't so far, but it does make me think about my bowing, and I find it somehow encouraging to take this micro-view of each note and have the feeling that it will end up helping.
Most of the time, though, when I play, I'm still all, For god's sake, look at all these notes! And I'm always like that in orchestra rehearsals.
I mentioned this micro-view of notes to my cello teacher and I had the feeling he wasn't deeply impressed by it. He seems to tend more in the other direction, seeing a piece as phrases and arcs of music instead of individual notes, which also totally makes sense to me.
I wonder whether I'm just screwing myself up with this note anatomy thing.