Metamorphosism

wwkd?

Q: Fair enough, but will there be titties?
There may someday be titties, so stay tuned.

School's out *forever*

Surprise Quiz:

1. You've been teaching for 15 years or so, substitute etc and this is your first day of your own class. Is it a good idea to forget ten of your kids out in front of the school when you walk your class over to the church for the school opening day ceremonies?
   
2. Is it a good idea to apologize to the parents afterwards?
   
3. When a little girl who wants to like school and to like her teacher signs up for an extra class before school, and comes on time, is it a good idea to forget her in the cloak room and make her sit there for an hour until the rest of school starts?
   
4. Should you apologize to the parents and the little girl afterwards?
   
5. If you have a rowdy class, is making them skip their gym class and sit still in the classroom for an hour the best way to punish them?
   
6. When one evil little boy tells another little boy to poke a little girl with a pencil, should you listen to the little girl when she reports this?
   
7. When second little boy pokes little girl again with a pencil the next day, this time in the eye, is sending him to the big kids' classroom for an hour the best way to punish him?
   
8. Is it a good idea to make him continue sitting next to the little girl?

My kid's teacher scored zero on this quiz. How'd you do?
Key: uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, no, no, uh-oh, uh-oh

Random

Psst, you, from R*andom H*use, I've seen you in my statistics, you, like, know any editors?

The boing drive

Setting: sunny day in Central Europe. Two old men, one smoking a pipe, one a cigarette, both dressed in tweedy suits, are standing near a bouncy castle, watching children frolic inside.

Sigmund Freud:Boing.
Elias Canetti: Vat?
Sigmund Freud: Ze drive to boing. I totally forgot ze drive to boing.
Elias Canetti: Vat are you talkink about, Sigmund?
Sigmund Freud: Not zat you and your "Crowds and Power" ever mentioned it neizer, and you wit your big Nobel Prize. Feh.
Elias Canetti: Boing?
Sigmund Freud: Look at ze children.
Elias Canetti: [Stares, at first cynically, then slack-jawed with wonder. Cigarette falls from bottom lip.]
Sigmund Freud: Boing.
Elias Canetti: Boing.
Sigmund Freud: Boing is ze center of it all.
Elias Canetti: Boing.

Arrogant

So I bought a book of these game-like personality tests you can sit around with friends taking with each other and discover deep things about your inner self from but mostly have fun and good ice-breaker etc.

And last night before bed the wife, the oldest one and I were taking a few. Turns out I'm stingy (which I knew).

Also arrogant. That came as a surprise. I mean, being not only better-looking but also vastly more intelligent than 97% of the general population, it's ironic that I hadn't figured that one out on my own.

Thanks

Yesterday was thanksgiving day in our village. Definitely not the holiday it is in the United States. Gee, maybe I should post this to Lost in Transit... Anyway. All they do in our village is dress up in suits and dresses based on traditional wear, giving everyone a real rural look, like the way a foreigner who's seen "Sound of Music" might be forgiven for imagining Austrians dress all the time. Then the farmers carry corn and nuts and wheat and stuff, local products (but no livestock) into the church and the priest blesses it all and makes a long speech.

And little kids carry little baskets with fruit and nuts and flowers and that gets blessed too. Including our youngest.

Not being Catholic, my mind wandered during the service, as usual. My wife told me later she could actually see it wandering.

They've painted the interior of the church, I noticed, improved heating (it used to be freezing inside) and lighting (it's now fairly brightly lit, no longer dark) and they seem to have restored the Bearded Madonna painting, which is what I call, only to myself, a large painting that used to be surrounded by lightbulbs (I used to pass the time counting how many were burned out) which I suppose were impressive and holy-looking in the days when lightbulbs were cutting edge technology; now they've been replaced with candles and a big holy golden frame; the Madonna and Child are wearing silver crowns - real silver crowns have been glued onto the painting - and the Child is reaching up to the Madonna's chin so it looks like he's tugging on a long goatee.

Anyway.

And the priest still has his combover, and still pronunces two words funny so that my wife and I elbow each other whenever he says them. And Robot Voice Lady was sitting directly behind us. She thoroughly creeped me out in the parts, whatever they're called, the Q&A parts, the shout-out parts, you know, the Priest says something and the crowd audience congregation answers something or repeats what he says. This woman spoke in a very weird monotone, as if she were trying to approximate a Gregorian-Monk-Chanting-in-Latin style, but it sounded to me as if she were saying [Robot voice] I ABANDON MY PERSONALITY AND THE CORE OF MY BEING TO THIS HERE CULT.

Then we shook hands with everyone, and I got out two Euro to put into the collection basket, only they weren't passed around, instead two fellows stood at the exit and we dropped money in as we went out. Then we waited for the little one.

Who emerged with a two Euro coin in her hand, and we asked her (doh) where she got it and she said "that nice man with the basket."

So we broke even at Church yesterday. Then there was an Agape, a get-together in the churchyard, they had tables set up with food and drink. The little one had a soda, I had a glass of white wine and a slice of bread with lard and those gritty bits that are left over from a roast spread on top (mmm); my wife had a glass of red and bread with some harmless cheese spread, I think. At nine-thirty in the morning.

Then we went to another village and watched people play medieval music on more or less original instruments and sing in middle-high German and we ate sausages and drank wine and beer for lunch. I got a buzz from the beer and it, and the beautiful sunshine, made me euphoric, and I stood around watching the little one in a bouncy castle and thinking deep thoughts.

Fashion solution

Nothing worse than a grown up guy dressing like a teenager, in my opinion. So there has been this quest for the ideal outfit. Black two-piece suit is good. But since I already own more than a dozen of those, I've been looking for something else. Something perfect.

Then it hit me. What looks better on a guy in his forties with greyish-whitish silver hair than a pilot's uniform? Think about it.

I could just see myself dressed in a tailored navy blue airline pilot's uniform.

Of course, one wouldn't want to be caught wearing one around an actual airport, sort of hard to explain nowadays, end up in prison and all that, no sense of humor those guys. But otherwise.

The airline pilot's uniform communicates exactly that which is most attractive about grown up men, doesn't it: experience, adulthood, dashing-ness, a sense of fun and romance, and above all responsibility.

Think about it. That must be the one single thing we have that young men don't: We're responsible. For, well for many things. Environmental devastation and daily extinction of new species. The rise of non-democratic kleptocracies. Western society's ethical collapse. Pop music.

Web

Awaking from possibly disturbing, completely forgotten dreams this morning, Miguel discovered that spiders had spun webs in his hair. Shower, shampoo, blow-dry, tiny bit of gel or what his "stylist" calls "product". Driving to work, he discovered more webs in his hair. "What the heck?" he said. But sure enough, webs. The morning light was shining brightly, still sideways as the sun rises, and as he drove in and out of the shadows cast by roadside trees the spiderwebs flashed and glinted in the sunlight. Either that or, dude, retina problems. But, no, pawing at his hair, he felt them, sort of, I mean, something that fine hard to be sure. But yeah. Spiderwebs.

That or the silkworms have gotten loose again, he thought with horror.

Kewl

Hrm, wonder if this stuff really works.

The Blue Merkin

Since you ask I’ll tell you why I’m so goddamn angry. If you want to know, I’ll damn well tell you.

but with the ball gag in my mouth I couldn’t give him a coherent response. I grunted and hoped it communicated my meaning of, relax, you can have all the money in the register.

There are the things that’ve been corroding at me all my life, like the whole little kid thing, and then there are newer things like that fucking redheaded fucker stalking me. Staring at me on the bus over his book, watching me in the reflection on the bus window like I’m not smart enough to see what he’s doing. Watching me from the street when I’m driving, me stuck in traffic yelling into my mobile phone, begging the fucking video shop to stay open late for me for ten measly minutes so I can return the DVD without paying a penalty and they refuse and there the goddamned redheaded guy is, on the street corner, down on one knee pretending to pull something out of a bag.

me, the hand holding the knife was the center of my attention, but then I noticed in my peripheral vision some movement. Someone else was in the shop. I hadn’t noticed. They must have been on the other side of the lube display, this giant pyramid of bottles and tubes. I didn’t need this. First rule: nobody be a hero. Just give him the money, turn the security tapes over to the police, let them handle it.

Being on the small side is the least of my problems. Kids are no big deal, you expect them to be stupid shits so you’re not surprised, they’re easy to ignore as long as they don’t fucking touch me. Adults are worse. It’s the adults that expect you to be somehow tender or childlike or innocent just because you stopped growing when you were seven and were never on the big side to begin with. All the goddamned Tin Drum jokes, Jesus Christ if I ever hear another one of them.

, but before I could complete the thought she was standing there, six feet tall with shoulders like Arnold Schwarzenegger. She pulled her sweater down to expose her knockers so they were completely hanging out, which distracted him long enough for me to hit his hand with the prostate. I brought it down as hard as I could and it sounded like something broke. His military knife bounced off the counter and stuck in Barbara’s cheek and he started yelling. “Scheiße, the hand is broken, Scheiße,” he said. “You broke it.”

Then she put him in a sleeper hold and he shut up. At first, I couldn’t think of anything to say, not surprising given the situation. I handed her some leather restraints and she strapped his hands behind his back; it was probably the first time anything from the shop had been put to a legitimate use. I finally took out my ball gag and thanked her. She was sublime if you define sublime as overwhelmingly beautiful. Blonde hair, smokey skin, dark and pale at the same time, built like a bodybuilder, but supple and natural-looking, not one of your square-looking, acne-all-over-the-back types, did I say fantastic tits already? and she moved like a dancer. She introduced herself, she had a thick accent but a quiet voice, some Spanish name that sounded like Musca.

“What brings you to the Blue Merkin?” I asked her as I started dialing Seiji’s number.

“The what?”

“That’s what I call this place since the letters on the sign burned out. Blue American is a stupid name for a sex shop.”

“Do they require that you to dress that way?”

I removed the knife from Barbara’s cheek and straightened her white wig. The wound looked pretty bad, but you can fix almost anything with super glue. “Do you have any idea what a Real Doll goes for?” I said. Seiji, you might not know this, Seiji was always doing these irritating, artistic displays. Right now he had me standing at the cash register squeezed in between this creepy rubber woman who looked like Barbara Bush with her white wig, and a see-through plastic man I called George, like those visible people you see in biology class that you can open up and take out all the organs, only bent over because Seiji had gotten burned on an order of lube he couldn’t move now so was trying to sell customers on any sexual practice he could think of that took a lot of lube. George was pretty robust, his organs were all heavy, solid acrylic, and it was his prostate that I’d broken the robber’s hand with. You know how it works, slip a prostate into an extra large leather codpiece: instant blackjack.

When you work at a sex shop in the seedier end of the Kabukicho, for a guy who more likely than not has Yakuza connections, or at least owes them a lot of money, you don’t just go flag down the first policeman who walks by when you get robbed. I called Seiji and while we were waiting for him we looked over the guy on the floor.

“Maybe I should go,” Musca said.

“Sure, if you want.”

“He looks like a god,” she said.

I was going through his pockets. “His name is Udo,” I said, showing her his foreigner card. “He’s German.”

I went back around the counter where I had a small space heater because my ass was getting cold hanging out of the chaps I had to wear like that. “Do you like wearing that?” Musca asked me.

“Dress code,” I said. “Seiji thought a blonde midget in S&M gear would give the store a little what he called brand identity.” She was checking out my package, I could tell. Although I’m very short, my equipment is average-sized, which makes it look big on my frame.

“You remind me of that singer from Led Zeppelin.”

That flattered me. I heard that a lot: like Robert Plant, but ten years younger. Unfortunately, I still look like him – have you seen him lately? Jesus Christ, scary, knowing I’ll look that way in ten years.

I got her telephone number before she ran out into the rain, leaving behind two pairs of nipple clips and some silver thumb-cuffs. I slipped them into my pocket. Everyone needs a lucky charm.

It had been raining without interruption for a week.

Seiji finally showed up. He knocked on the door of the shop – I’d locked it just in case – and I let him in. He came in shaking rain off his umbrella.

“Malcolm, what happened? Hora, you catch robber? Bakayaro, dude!” It might help understand Seiji if you knew that Seiji had spent a lot of time in Hawaii “studying English” once upon a time.

“Seiji, this is Udo. Udo, Seiji.”

“I can’t feel my hands,” Udo said.

“Udo, mellow out, man,” Seiji said. He handed Udo a ten thousand yen bill to keep him quiet. We went behind the counter. Seiji insisted on watching the security video first thing. He pulled out the tape and we watched it.

He had a shit eating grin on his face, which on Seiji was always bad because that was the Seiji has an idea expression.

“Malcolm,” he said. “Overpower movie.”

“What?”

“Like crush video, only overpower. Little guy and naked woman overpower German. Who that babe?”

Seiji explained his brilliant idea – overpowering would be the new bukkake, he said. “Overpowering much bigger than vomit fetish or crush,” he said. “Bigger maybe than roricon.”

You have to hand it to the Japanese, no one can invent fetishes better than those guys.

He gave Udo another bill, and a Xeroxed document in Japanese. “Sign release form please, Udo,” he said.

Seiji found someone else to run the cash register at the Blue Merkin and shopped around for a video camera. The good part was, I didn’t have to wear those fucking clothes anymore. The bad part was we couldn’t find Musca anywhere. We checked all the strip clubs, all the soaplands and callgirl things and enjo-kosai things we could find, all that sort of stuff, but no one recognized her from the grainy screen caps Seiji had printed out from the security cam. He finally gave up on her and had Udo and me interview some other girls while he went about selling the security video as his first product.

Put yourself in their shoes: rainy season, a fifteen-minute walk through trash and piled-up abandoned bicycles from the nearest subway station so you’re wet and sweaty when you arrive at this dingy blue apartment building with sick-building syndrome written all over it, where you have to climb three flights of stairs because the elevator doesn’t come (on your way up you see it’s stuck with doors half open on the second floor) and you finally arrive at the scratched orange door, double-check the number from the note in your pocket, knock cautiously, someone says “come in” and you do, and there on the sofa of the bare casting room sits a German god with his right arm in a cast, and me behind the desk because that way I look less tiny.

Most leave right there, like, injured guy and midget, right. Twenty-five make audition appointments, fifteen find the apartment, a dozen leave right there, without saying another word. I admit there may have been some creepiness.

But a couple showed up and fled not. Like this one. Looked around like there might be a mistake, where are the Japanese casting people? Why are there no other girls waiting their turn? What the hell is this?

“I’m here for the, um, audition?” She re-checked her note. “An, um, over… um…”

Udo it turns out was quite shy back then so I helped her out. “Overpower video, yes. Have you got any film experience?”

“I’ve been an extra in a couple movies… I’m actually an English teacher…”

Who hasn’t been an English teacher in Japan, I think, that and Christ do I hate ellipses. But we’re desperate. “Look, Agathe,” I say, since that’s her name. “I’ll be open with you. This is an art film. Sure, it’s for the fetish trade, basically, but there’s no explicit sex, no nudity on your part. It’s an artistic conceptual film.”

“It only being marketed in Asia?”

“Your relatives in the, what, U.K. judging from your accent? They’ll never see it if that’s what you’re worried about. The clientele is very, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh restricted.” Shit, I think, what a time for my stammer to flare up. Picture it, she’s being interviewed by a midget with a high voice and a stammer and she sticks around, how desperate can she be?

In fact, we even ended up making one with Agathe. I didn’t think a single inch of film would ever really be shot, so I was surprised. She looked like a good kid so I told her to demand her fee up front from Seiji, because, like, try collecting afterwards.

Seiji sketched out a pizza-delivery scenario: Agathe is a stewardess watching television, I come up the stairs with a pizza (it was filmed in the same apartment as where we interviewed the actresses – Seiji’s brother’s apartment while the brother was away in Hawaii studying English; we ate the pizza when we finished). She opens the door for me, Udo forces his way in, pizza goes flying.

Seiji thought at first it was the seminal overpower movie, defining all the necessary elements for the following ones: the toss (Udo threw me onto the sofa), oddness (Barbara and George were standing around in the background), bondage (Udo starts taping up Agathe), surprise (I crack Seiji’s highschool golf trophy over Udo’s head), genuine unconsciousness (Udo crumples to floor) and finally, more bondage, as Agathe and I tape up Udo.

Seiji took Udo to a clinic he knew. Agathe and I hung around the apartment for a while. Agathe said she’d go wash up, she had tape sticking to her. Fine with me – night had fallen outside and the black glass of the sliding door to the tiny balcony reflected, from where I sat, a perfect view of her getting undressed and prancing around the bathroom. Wonder if we could work that into a video, I thought. Refrection movie, dude.

“You look like Robert Plant, you know that?” she said from the bathroom.

“I’m Seiji’s backdoor man,” I said.

“His what?”

“When I work at the Blue Merkin (I’d explained the name to her previously) I don’t go in the front door, I go in this small door in the back alley. He thinks it makes the gaijin cashier more mysterious if I just appear and disappear without anyone seeing me come or go.”

“Seiji all there?”

“Who is? As long as he pays us up front we’re okay. If you can consider someone dealing with him at all in the first place ‘okay’.”

You may have heard about Japanese loan sharks, yakuza, etc. and all that shit. Drinking with Seiji, he’d intimated that he’d had business dealings with such people. They’re same as anywhere else: every now and then they have to kill someone who doesn’t pay so everyone else takes them seriously. Unfortunately for Seiji. Late one January morning, as I made my way through the garbage cans and crows and slush to open up the Blue Merkin and saw footprints going up the alley to the back door but not back out, I stopped and looked around.

One pair of prints, not Seiji’s. No one hiding in the alley, no cars. Malcolm puts two and two together. In the movies, I would have snuck in and had a look around, but in the movies I would have been this kung-fu guy, or had a gun, not a midget with nothing in his pocket but his lucky charms.

See, Seiji’s idea for overpower videos had not panned out. He blamed it on us losing Musca. He’d sit up nights comparing the security footage with what we’d produced, trying to duplicate the effect, but it never worked. He tried another one with Agathe; then he canned her and tried one or two other women. He had to borrow a little money for all this.

Anyway, I saw the footprints and figured, fuck. Nice knowing you, Seiji. I mean, I was Seiji’s midget. Anyone who knew him would know I was connected with him, and I didn’t need that. No thank you.

In all, from the time I saw the footprints to when I walked back out of the alley, casually but at the same time as fast as I could move, maybe thirty seconds elapsed. Back out the alley, up the street and of course there’s Musca in a 7-11 watching the clerk warm a cheese burrito for her in the microwave. Angels are like cops, I think, never there when you need them, always hanging around when it’s too late.

On the other hand, when you’ve been looking for someone as long and with as much desperation as I’d been looking for her, when you finally find them you don’t think, “what an odd coincidence, how suspicious,” no matter the circumstances. They could be crawling out of a snake’s asshole in the Amazon and you’d say something like, “Musca, Jesus, how good you look!”

At least that’s what I said, and not, “how odd to see you here, so close to the Blue Merkin, just when someone’s snuffed Seiji inside.”

The microwave went “DING”, she paid for her burrito and her other stuff, cans of olives and tomato sauce and stuff mostly and I told her about Seiji as we left. “The movies didn’t work out,” I said. “He thought it was because they lacked you. And now he’s dead in the Merkin.”

“Did you see him?” I said I hadn’t. She wanted to go check. “Geeze, just let the police find him,” I said. “Let’s go get alibis somewhere and let them find him. Let’s take a shinkansen to Osaka or something for the weekend.”

She insisted though, and I figured, she can be the kung-fu guy in this movie. I unlocked the front door of the shop, to which I of course had a key, and we went in. Behind the counter, yep, there’s Seiji dead on the floor, in a big pool of blood. Above him, there’s Udo rifling through the goddamn cash register.

“Udo you fucker, I don’t believe it,” I said. “How could you?”

“He owed me money,” he said. “The bastard cheated me.”

“Man, I always told you to get paid up front,” I said.

“Don’t come any closer,” Udo said. He had a new butterfly knife, covered with blood, he waved it at me a little, then went back to filling his bag with cash. I couldn’t believe how much cash the register held. Normally Seiji comes at night and deposits it or whatever.

I threw a blue plastic bottle of lube at him, but missed. “Nothing more dangerous than a midget with lube, is there?”

“Don’t try anything,” he said. He brandished his knife at me again, then returned his attention to his money. I quietly uncapped another bottle and squirted lube all over the floor. Worth a try, I thought.

Udo filled his bag and came out around the counter on his way out of the store but only made it to the puddle of lube, where he slipped and fell on his back, cracking his head on the floor, hard.

“Musca, give me your bags,” I said. It did strike me as odd that she had her knockers out again, but I was concentrating on immobilizing Udo. I found the biggest can of beans and hit him with it until he stopped moving, then got the thumb-cuffs out of my pocket and secured his hands behind his back.

Then I just sat there on his chest, breathing hard, exhausted from the adrenalin.

“Fuck,” I said. Udo was still breathing, so I sort of rode up and down a little on each of his breaths. Despite everything, I was relieved he wasn’t dead.

“Musca, call the cops this time,” I said.

Seiji stood up behind the counter. “Cut,” he said. “That was great, Malcolm,” he said. “That rocked.”

A guy stepped out of the back room, then a second one did, carrying a camera. Both were lighting cigarettes, Mild Sevens.

Seiji immediately started watching the footage in the camera’s little monitor. “This is much better. Secret to good overpower movie is actor must believe is real,” he said. “Bakayaro.”

I got off Udo and walked out of the Merkin. “I thought you were a fucking angel. You knew,” I said to Musca as I passed her. Of course. What a coincidence, Musca at the Merkin at just the right time.

“Malcolm, you’re a big star,” Seiji shouted after me. “You famous, bakayaro.”

, and found out years later, fucking around doing a Google search, that Udo is a TV star in Germany now. Still looks good. And he gives acting workshops. Whatever.

I walked to Agathe’s place, it took me five hours because she lived way the hell out in some suburbs exactly across town and I wasn’t hurrying. We’d had a certain rapport and I’d entertained hopes that we might get together for a while. I got to her place just in time to see her being led out in handcuffs, muscled around by eight policemen. I heard later it was some drug charge, she’d held some pot for a friend who got caught and cut a deal. I visited her in jail a few times.

Not exactly my day.

to open a bar and call it The Blue Merkin, of course, but I never got together enough money, and I didn’t want to borrow the cash after what happened to Seiji, or didn’t, but could have. Agathe turned out to be Polish, she just spoke good English. We hung out after she got out of jail and that’s how I ended up here. She’s opening an English school and I’m helping her out.

Of course it started to rain at this point. I walked for a while, then stood on a bridge crossing a filthy canal and watched the raindrops hit the water. I reached into my pocket and tossed the nipple clips into the dirty water. They hardly made a splash. The rain picked up and it made a hissing sound as it hit the water, and the tires of cars driving past made hissing sounds too on the wet pavement.

Rubble

If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.

Saw that on someone's blog yesterday, attributed to Sappho.

Losing it in translation

Speaking of translation, as you may have gathered from my posting frequency here today I am struggling with a text, not especially bad but stultifying to the extent that my consciousness is sinking like a wallet dropped into a lake, slowly, almost playfully into mud and weeds and darkness and in attempts to wake my braine up I log in here and type something, anything. Said text to be translated is supposed to be a press release, but it violates the two basic principles of press releases, which are as most of you are aware:

1. Don't suggest to the reader that you are an idiot, and
   
2. Make reader want to come to the thing your press release is about

I'm tweaking it a little as I go to up the credibility level but it needs a total rewrite, which it's not going to get because that would have to be approved via so many complicated channels the event in question would be over long before such approval came, or not.

So yeah, anyway. I lost the thread here.

Was that it, my nice wallet simile there?

What else. I bought grapes for lunch. You can get more grapes than you want to eat for lunch for €1.05 at the "super"market near my office.

A stranger greeted me on the street; my Doppelgänger is still around somewhere I guess. He would be the evil one, I suppose, with a goatee.

I am the good one, clean-shaven and forgetful.

I just remembered. Do you sometimes get clear pictures of bloggers you read but have never met nor seen? I.e. imagine what they look like?

I don't. My visual imagination sucks like you wouldn't believe. But walking around at lunch today, it occurred to me that if you were to meet Steve, and if you looked really close, you'd notice he levitates. You know, walk into the tack shop to buy a curry comb and there he is at the counter shooting the shit with the proprietor, floating two or three inches off the floor.

What kind of thinker are you?

I found this test at the Aardvark. I wish I would have taken this as a kid. I remember taking some sort of aptitude test in high school that recommended I become a train engineer.

According to this test here, I am both a linguistic ("tend to think in words, and like to use language to express complex ideas, are sensitive to the sounds and rhythms of words as well as their meanings") and an interpersonal thinker ("Spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to understand themselves (and blogging about it), reflect on their thoughts and moods, and work to improve them (and blog about it), and you understand how your behaviour affects your relationships with others (not so sure about that one)).

The test also suggests potential career choices, some of which I actually do or have done: Journalist (check, liked it), Librarian (no, like librarians, though), Salesperson (check, hated it), Proof-reader (did it, okay job), Translator (did it, liked it), Poet (published poems, earned no money at it, liked it), Lyricist (does fiction count? Or Lügengeschichten?), Psychologist (no, but I wouldn't mind visiting one if you know what I mean), Teacher (check, wasn't so great at it, but the students liked me), Pilot (flew a plane with my little brother once when we were kids, landed on the back of a blue whale out in the Pacific), Child care worker (well, I do have two kids), Explorer (Yes! That's it! I'll become an explorer!), Drama therapist (nah).

Catchy

My boss has classic rock cranked in his office, and I just caught myself sitting here digging it.

Smoke

That's the field. You know the field I talk about all the time, that's it. See the blinds there, those are the ones. Yeah. They put out feed and the deer feed right underneath them. I don't see any deer today, do you? But the fog. Isn't it something? Like that lake you pointed out, like a mirror, and with the fog rising, wow.

This is all yours you know. Take better care than I was able to.

Then, holy shit. I'd thought traffic was moving suspiciously fluidly this morning. What happened? That motherfucker in the white van slammed on his brakes. That's the smell, burning rubber. Look at that smoke, wow. Good brakes on the Dobló, huh?

That's why we don't follow too close. Keep an eye on the cars ahead, all that stuff.

Well here's your subway station. Have fun at school.

Wunderkind

If I had a VCR, the clock would not be blinking "12:00" but only because I have a teenaged child.

When my mobile phone was new, I read the manual and was able to store new telephone numbers for the speed-dialing function, but now I have my kid do that when necessary. Same thing for sending text messages.

However, I still get dressed by myself in the morning, which may be why I'm not sure, today, whether I've got my boxer shorts on right, or backwards. Constructed of some high-tech fiber, the seams are practically invisible and make it hard enough to tell whether they're inside-out or not. Add to this the fact that there is no fly and it's hard to tell which end is the front.

Ah, I hear you say, the tag, Mig. The tag goes in the back. To which I must respond, this pair has two tags, one in front, on the outside, serving a branding/decoration function I suppose, and on in the usual place, on the inside in the back. It would help a lot if one tag included the words, "ass goes here" or something but alas.

Sublime

What do you find sublime? I want to know.

I.e. (from Webster's 1913 dictionary:)

1. \Sub*lime"\, a. [Compar. {Sublimer}; superl.
   {Sublimest}.] [L. sublimis; sub under + (perhaps) a word akin
   to limen lintel, sill, thus meaning, up to the lintel: cf. F.
   sublime. Cf. {Eliminate}.]
   
   1. Lifted up; high in place; exalted aloft; uplifted; lofty.

      Sublime on these a tower of steel is reared.
      --Dryden.

   2. Distinguished by lofty or noble traits; eminent; -- said
      of persons. ``The sublime Julian leader.'' --De Quincey.

   3. Awakening or expressing the emotion of awe, adoration,
      veneration, heroic resolve, etc.; dignified; grand;
      solemn; stately; -- said of an impressive object in
      nature, of an action, of a discourse, of a work of art, of
      a spectacle, etc.; as, sublime scenery; a sublime deed.

      Easy in words thy style, in sense sublime. --Prior.

      Know how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be
      strong. --Longfellow.

   4. Elevated by joy; elate. [Poetic]

      Their hearts were jocund and sublime, Drunk with
      idolatry, drunk with wine. --Milton.

   5. Lofty of mien; haughty; proud. [Poetic] ``Countenance
      sublime and insolent.'' --Spenser.

      His fair, large front and eye sublime declared
      Absolute rule. --Milton.

      Syn: Exalted; lofty; noble; majestic. See {Grand}.

   
   

2. \Sub*lime"\, n.
   That which is sublime; -- with the definite article; as:
   
   1. A grand or lofty style in speaking or writing; a style
      that expresses lofty conceptions.

      The sublime rises from the nobleness of thoughts,
      the magnificence of words, or the harmonious and
      lively turn of the phrase. --Addison.
      

   2. That which is grand in nature or art, as distinguished
      from the merely beautiful.

   
   

3. \Sub*lime"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Sublimed}; p. pr. &
   vb. n. {Subliming}.] [Cf. L. sublimare, F. sublimer to
   subject to sublimation. See {Sublime}, a., and cf.
   {Sublimate}, v. t.]
   
   1. To raise on high. [Archaic]

      A soul sublimed by an idea above the region of
      vanity and conceit. --E. P.
      Whipple.

   2. (Chem.) To subject to the process of sublimation; to heat,
      volatilize, and condense in crystals or powder; to distill
      off, and condense in solid form; hence, also, to purify.

   3. To exalt; to heighten; to improve; to purify.

      The sun . . . Which not alone the southern wit
      sublimes, But ripens spirits in cold, northern
      climes. --Pope.

   4. To dignify; to ennoble.

      An ordinary gift can not sublime a person to a
      supernatural employment. --Jer. Taylor.

   
   

4. \Sub*lime"\, v. i. (Chem.)
   To pass off in vapor, with immediate condensation;
   specifically, to evaporate or volatilize from the solid state
   without apparent melting; -- said of those substances, like
   arsenic, benzoic acid, etc., which do not exhibit a liquid
   form on heating, except under increased pressure.

New Kafka manuscript discovered

I discovered a handwritten manuscript (yellowed individual sheets of note paper bound with those bendy brass things; with coffee stains and what looks like a beer stain in one corner, pilsner) in the back of an old child's toy kitchen (Wiener Werkstätte, about 1918) at a flea market this weekend. Excuse the clumsy translation; author's notes in parentheses, translator's notes in square brackets.

Goreg Samsa (think of better last name later) woke one morning from troubling dreams to discover that he owned thirteen (good number) black suits. It was beyond his comprehension how he had ended up with so many. It was [style is better in original, there is naturally no repetition of the phrase "it was"] not until this time that he noticed someone was banging on his door; that must have been what dragged [snatched? clutched?] him from his dreams in the first place. It was the girl, and the girl was in a foul mood. "How dare you write on your weblog that my friend is hot?" Samsa made a mental note to keep secret all [illegible, looks like "URLs"] in the future. He rolled over and mumbled towards the door, "well, she is hot. Is she hot or isn't she? It's not like I want to date her." "That's perv... that's pedophilic," the girl shouted. "You're 44. You're a pig." "Pedo-what?" he said. At this point the large lump beside him in bed began to stir. Goreg (not crazy about this name either) had thought until now was a lump of bedclothes. [Illegible, looks like "Richard Nixon" but that's impossible] climbed out of bed and stumbled towards the door. "He is not a pederast," he said, shaking his jowly face. "You get out of this, Nixon," Samsa said. "You just go back to hell, I can do without your help." Nixon snorted and went back to hell. The day was starting all wrong, Goreg Samsa thought, except for the Nixon going to hell part. "Is breakfast ready yet?" he asked. "Or at least coffee?"

Freedom to assemble

Been getting hits from searches for that phrase, as well variations like "freedom of assemble" etc. I'm honored.

For anyone who stumbles across this site looking for serious information, here's a short excerpt from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of special privileges for pre-assembled furniture and quasi-furniture products, from Sweden or any other country either within Scandinavia or outside, nor prohibiting the free assembly thereof; or abridging the freedom to include nonsensical diagrams and instructions or schematic drawings inside the packing materials, possibly sealed closed with heavy-duty packing tape so that said instructions or diagrams are torn irretrievably upon unpacking, or requiring that all items required for assembly actually really be included in the little plastic bag of screws inside the box, said bag which may or may not be composed of Kevlar or similar impenetrable material; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances except where prohibited by law or for stock sold at a discount.

unclear family

Haven't been consuming a whole lot of meat or alcohol lately, so when we visited friends this weekend, and ate really, really good Japanese barbecue (he is Japanese, and the best cook I know) and drank Budweiser (from Budweis, he buys his beer across the border in the Czech Republic) and wine (he has some righteous wines), I got really sleepy. So much for conversation.

Which was just as well, because I sometimes have a bad time understanding them, as they mix English, German and Japanese when they speak (not such a problem on its own, we do that too) but the style of communication is one that takes time to adjust to; I don't want to seem ungrateful, it's just that a fundamentally different conversational strategy from ours seems to underpin their communication. Then, when we were all sitting outside enjoying the food, their neighbor the stammering computer programmer visited. I'd spoken to him on the telephone once, a five minute call about computer problems I was having; the call took half an hour to complete. I stammer too, sometimes, when under stress etc., but wow. He turns out to be young and good-looking, so my wife was flirting with him somewhat, which didn't help with the stammer at all.

I was still sleepy driving home the next day, but luckily didn't pile the Dobló into any Dutch tourists pulling their trailers uphill at 70 kph on the freeway. I'm still sleepy now in fact.

F*cking deer, man

The fog this time of year is something else. It covers the fields in sheets four feet off the ground. Driving my daughter to the train in the morning, I can see over the top of the fog, and underneath. Over the top are hills with a big orange sun rising. Underneath are fields and deer.

And then a deer, um, bounded across the road directly in front of the van in front of us, bounded from the stubble of the corn field on the left, or West, to another field on the right, which was East; so abruptly that the van's brake lights didn't even come on.

We watched it run off. Pretty reddish-brown doe.

Have you ever seen a wild deer up close? Well, wild. How wild can you be coexisting with the suburbs like that, coming down from the hills to the fringes of human settlement, nibbling hay and corn hunters lay out at the bases of their blinds in winter. Freerange deer. Have you ever seen one up close? Those guys are in shape, I'm not fooling. Talk about lean. Like that nervous skinny kid you went to school with who was so good at track and wanted to be a drummer. Only with more fog.

Lifestyle traits

1. Regularly forgets birthdays
2. Has a thing about fog, and deer
3. And insects
4. Headlight burns out a lot
5. Very busy lately
6. Might be a Martian
7. Reads A Moveable Beast whenever internet connection not bogged down, as well as all those other guys over on the right
8. Likes the cello, and metal

Lucky

“But Gretchen, I am your father!”

The screen door slammed behind her and she walked into the night and the fog in her mother’s coat. Far enough away to watch the house without being seen, she stood in the woods until she saw her dad come out, look around, then open the hood of the car and start messing with something. Nothing complicated, maybe just fixing a bulb in the light her mom had complained was burned out.

She thought about the sound of a screen door slamming. She walked through the woods to her spot by the road where she could stand and watch the cars drive past on the freeway down the slope, only tonight fog was heavy but for one spot; vehicles emerged from fog for a distance equal to the gap between two of those mercury lights along the freeway before vanishing again. She watched them and thought about the sound of a screen door slamming.

There should be a television game show called "Describe that Picture", she thought. Like “Name that Tune.” Because a thousand words? She could do it in way, way less. “I can paint that picture in two hundred fifty words, Bob,” her opponent would say. “I can do it in seventy-five,” she’d say, to gasps from the studio audience. They'd drag it out over the commercial break, the director or someone making the audience laugh, then the "On Air" sign would light up and she'd win a trip for two to Mazatlan or enough money to enlarge her bedroom.

Her mother smoked Merits and there was a pack in the pocket of the coat and matches so Gretchen lit one up. Her mother was out tonight at dance lessons, because she thought if she could go ballroom dancing with Gretchen’s father, who was an excellent dancer, it would be good for their marriage.

Gretchen prayed to God she’d never be in a relationship.

Wild hops formed a cone fifteen feet tall where they grew up the pole of the streetlight under which a fifteen year old girl stood in her mother’s coat smoking and thinking. Fog congealed around her in tiny droplets, and when she exhaled it came out twice as thick, both smoke and condensing vapor from her lungs, so it carried further and stayed in the air longer, like rays from some TV monster destroying Tokyo.

It should be pointed out that Gretchen wasn’t just any fifteen year old girl, she was also currently embodying the immortal Fortuna, goddess of luck. Leaning to one side, an unbalanced, poorly-loaded delivery truck drove past on the freeway below, emerging into the light and then re-entering the darkness and fog, but in that space of time Gretchen saw the life history of the driver, a twenty year old man named Pete Bedelia who last year had a summer job with a landscaping company, this summer was driving this truck for a drugstore chain. He would never learn how to load a truck right; a pallet of shampoo had tipped over in the back, making the truck lean, as well as a terrible mess inside, which he would discover when he arrived at the warehouse. He would have no summer job at all next year, instead acquiring an eating disorder and starving himself to death before Easter.

Gretchen blew a stream of luck his way as he vanished into the fog. Pete wouldn’t starve to death; he’d enter a therapy program. In two years, he’d find work as a counselor at a camp for kids with similar eating disorders.

The woods were silent but for water dripping here and there from a tree and striking another leaf further below. Forget a picture, Gretchen could map out an entire life in under a hundred words. But the sound of a screen door slamming haunted her. All the things that sound could mean. Anger, escape, release. Love and hate. Melancholy. Words couldn’t begin to describe what that sound did to her every time.

Mom was learning the chachacha. Last week, foxtrot. At home she tried to get her husband to practice with her. Sometimes he did, sometimes she put on the record from the dance school and laid out her things, what Gretchen thought of as the devil’s kidneys, kidney-shaped pieces of paper with numbers on them. Gretchen had thought they’d look like foot prints, but mom said this shape was designed for the sweeping effect, to show the direction your foot took when you stepped off, cause dancing was about moving, not standing in place.

She imagined Satan wincing, taking a break from causing trouble to grab his lower back, nodding when a demon asked him, “that Meyer woman dancing again?”

An old woman in a Chevelle would live to see her grandchildren be born and enter school because Gretchen blew luck on her. She went through nearly half the pack that way. Then it got cold, even in the coat, and she returned home. On the way she washed her mouth out with some Listerine she hid in a hollow apple tree so the smoke wouldn’t stink so bad. Her mother wasn’t home yet, she saw with some relief; this gave her time to clean up a little, because she didn’t want her mother stressed and nothing stressed her mom worse than a dirty house.

She opened the door and went in.

Her father was sitting there watching something on television. “I fixed the headlight,” he said.

The word "shroud" comes to mind

Fog lifting over that field, the word "shroud" comes to mind. Some deer off at the far edge, "frolicking". No other word for it. In the far distance, more deer jumping - the word "bound" comes to mind. Except then my eyes adjust and it's just hillocks of grass coming into focus. Coming into focus, each one looks like a deer, boing.

Anyway. Busy, otherwise. Secret work stuff, unfortunately. "Secret" here being a euphemism for, for, the word "boring" comes to mind.

My daughter had her first troll yesterday. I'm so proud.

World, world, world. You are so nice. You must get tired of people sometimes.

Joke

A horse walks into a bar. "Doctor, I've got a bad case of diplomats," it says."
"Then you must listen Ramones," the doctor says. The doctor can't speak English so good, which is funny in this context.

"Ramones is only known antidote for diplomats, but still only work in special case."

Fog

Fog today. Ten feet inside the fence beside the freeway, young doe grazes a mowed field.

Yesterday we wandered through the woods by the river. I've been wanting to do that for a long time now. Not much to collect yet besides wild hops growing everywhere, made a door wreath out of them and a bunch of berry vines gone red.

Walked past some hand-drawn signs saying things like, "do not pass" and "wander lost here" and "bring water river" there. Nonsensical enough not to take seriously; at the same time, weird enough to make you imagine a crazy man in each hunter's blind, and the woods were full of those.

Cathedral

[Insert crappy picture of cathedral here]

Moth

This morning, after the three of them leave to drop one of them off at the train station to go into town for school, just what I've been waiting for, feigning sleep upstairs, I go down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. On the way, a pretty black and brown moth huddled on the stairs, down in the corner where they turn going downstairs.

Acting invisible.

Wrong color for hiding on the stairs.

I pass the moth, careful not to step on him. I drink my coffee. I step over him again on the way back up. When the other two get back, I mention it to the little one. "Yeah, I saw it this morning. Is it alive or dead?" she looks. "Ah, it's turned around. It's alive."

I go to the cellar to get a screw driver to perform some morning task, taking down curtains or something, to be washed. I let a cat out of the cellar, where it's apparently trapped itself. I take down curtains and drink more coffee.

Going back upstairs to get dressed, I notice the moth is gone. I notice the cat is licking its lips.

Remembering Johnny Cash

Once in a blue moon he and I would play a game of chess. He taught me how to play and every time I play now I imagine him sat forward in the chair with a cigarette pondering his next move against my ill-conceived attacks. He would win because I would never think more than a move or two ahead.

Tschirp

Just now, walking down a tree-lined street of mansions on my way to the store for some honey-roasted peanuts for lunch, I thought I heard my first bird ever really saying "tweet". Listening more closely, I realized it was actually saying, "tveet."

Is that a sheerie in your pants or are you just happy to see me?

"You grogoch," she says to her little sister.

On a rainy, foggy day the little one looks out the window. "Oooh, the Grey Man."

A friend gave us a book about Irish fairies, and suddenly Austria is aswarm with them.

Fat chance

May peace prevail.

Leni Riefenstahl finally dead

Bob Hope, Idi Amin and now Leni Riefenstahl: hopefully, this tragic series (deaths of people you weren't sure were alive or not) has reached an end. We reprint here a
tribute to Idi Leni Riefenstahl.

This Aale in its vehicle of the pneumatic shock absorber or is is simply lucky you you stop to see it?

That's what you get when you babelize the phrase, "are those eels in your hovercraft or are you just happy to see me?"

So, so soft

As I was telling you earlier, about when I was working on the tunnel crew one summer while I was in college, tunnel workers are hard drinkers. A professional tunneler, I don't know when he sleeps. Digging and drinking is what they live for.

There are tunneler bars. This still strikes me as odd, since they are largely an itinerant bunch, moving from job to job, digging a subway tunnel in this town, a freeway tunnel in that town. But somehow they always manage to find a bar where filthy dirty men are tolerated, and they always congregate at the same one, even different crews working on different jobs.

Not that there are ever alot of tunnelers around, of course. Most people never notice them, maybe most people never go into those bars.

So I was in this bar in the Fremont area, this was a long time ago, twenty five years ago or so, in the shadow of this big freeway bridge over a canal. It was a biker bar but there was never any trouble I know of, the tunnelers all sat at a couple tables and a booth over in one corner by the jukebox. I don't remember what music was played. I would imagine heavy metal of some sort, whatever big guys with beards and leather clothes listen to.

I was supposed to meet some friends that night, but Ed had dragged me along with him, don't ask me why. Ed was the head tunneler, he worked at the front of the crew. He was a short guy who shaved his head, although he was pretty much covered with fine black hair everywhere else. He looked like that British actor, Bob Hoskins, but had hands that didn't fit his body. They reminded me of hubcaps, that big, and just as hairy as his thick forearms, and with fingernails like black claws. He never shook my hand and I was glad.

I don't know why he took me along. Maybe he knew no other tunnelers would be there that night and didn't want to drink alone. Normally the professional guys on the crew ignored the local helpers, unless they were calling us punks. You were a tunneler or a punk.

While he was up in front, digging with his pick and his shovel, sometimes dislodging a rock with those bare hands, I and my fellow punks were in back shoveling dirt and stones into a wheelbarrow and carting the debris to the mouth of the tunnel, where it was loaded into trucks.

So Ed was like, "let's get a drink, punk." And I was like, "sure, Ed." Cause, bottom line, Ed was definitely more interesting than any friends I had who'd stayed in town that summer. And then I was like, "shit, a biker bar." Although I didn't say that out loud.

It was quiet, a Tuesday or a Wednesday and not very late yet. We got a couple pitchers right away and sat in the corner. Boxing was on television. I had my back to the set but could sort of keep track of the action by watching the reflections in Ed's eyes.

"Tell me about yourself," he said. I did. It didn't take me very long. I didn't have much of a life story yet, although he seemed to listen to the story about the millionaire sisters.

I asked him how he got into tunneling. He said it was a family thing.

"You should have seen my father." Dirt fell off some part of him onto the table. He paused to brush it onto the floor. "He was the real tunneler in the family."

The more he drank, the harder it was to watch the boxing reflected in his eyes. Either that was because his eyes were, physically, growing less reflective (which I assumed then), or I was drinking too and that was affecting my perception (which I believe now).

"I never knew my dad, just the stories my mother told me. He didn't run off, if that's what you're thinking. He was a hero. He was in Nebraska someplace digging a rescue shaft into a collapsed mine. You can imagine the time pressure they were under. They were digging twenty-four hours a day non-stop. They didn't have fancy machinery back then like we do now. This job we're on here, you know, the picks and shovels and pneumatic drills - that's because we're doing this drainage tunnel under that fancy residential neighborhood. Normally we'd use a big drill. Back in my father's day, though, it was stinky loud diesel generators running the drills, it was men going deaf in there with no ear protection, yelling all the time, breathing the fumes, trying to get to the miners inside."

Ed's pitcher was empty, and he reached over to take mine. I sort of slid it over to him, and his thick arm touched mine. I shivered as his hair brushed across my skin. It was so, so soft. It looked bristly, thick and black, but it was like silk or velour or something.

"It was unstable geology which is why they couldn't go in with any bigger rigs," he went on. "That's also why the other tunnel collapsed in the first place. When they got close, they had to turn off the carbide lights they wore to reduce the danger of explosion. I told you my father was blind, didn't I?"

"No, you didn't mention it. He was blind?"

"Yeah, another accident. He worked by feel mostly. It was pretty cramped in the places he worked, that wasn't a big problem for him. So anyway he worked just as well in the dark as he did in the light. He was up in front of the crew digging when the tunnel fell in. Some of the guys who got out say he saved them by propping up the ceiling long enough for them to get out."

"I'm sorry, Ed."

"Well, they never found him. They cleaned it out, you know, finished the tunnel to get to the miners inside, some actually were saved too, but they never found him. Mom says they told her that mine was his grave."

He got a weird look. "But I think he tunneled out."

"But then..." I started.

"I don't think he abandoned us, though. I think being crushed like that would change you, is all. Digging out through rock with your bare hands, being buried, you know. It would change the way you think about things. He's still tunneling somewhere."

"And you are too." I realized that's what Ed was doing up at the front of the crew all the time, hoping to find his old man. Clawing ancient smooth river stones out of the gravel with those hands, one by one.

He probably still is, stupid fucker.

Lügengeschichten

The German word Lügengeschichte is a compound noun made up of the word Lügen, which is the plural of Lüge, which means "lie", as in "fib", and Geschichte, which means "story". Translating it as "tall tale" would be insufficient, although as close as anything else I can think of, since it does include the joyous aspect of telling and hearing a wild made-up story.

A Lügengeschichte is something that a certain six-year-old girl of my acquaintance tries to wheedle out of me at bedtime, after her regulation storybook (currently James and the Giant Peach) and before serious sleeping. They are fun to hear, and as she has discovered, even more fun to tell especially if the audience does not realize they are hearing a Lügengeschichte.

The joy of telling an unrecognized Lügengeschichte, I have observed, is not the surface joy of praise or sunshine, warming the outer layers of the heart or epidermis. It is a dark, subterranean joy, replenishing the soul like deep ground water rising to soothe parched roots.

At least that's what it looked like when she came home from her first day of school to tell us a long list of things she'd done and experienced, including getting a B. "A B is good," she finished. The best Lügengeschichte, like its flightless cousin a good lie, is rooted in truth. She did go to school that day. Listening, I bought it totally until it occurred to me that she hadn't had time to do all the things she described, and that no grades are awarded on the first day of first grade.

There was no way to tell from her face or demeanor that she was making it up, though. She's so good at this. You have to believe what you are saying to be that good. While she told it, it was seamlessly true.

Rich list

How rich are you?

When performing home lobotomies, sterilize all tools and watch out for those arteries!

"I know how to ride a bike, dad! You just don't think!"

Good advice. Thinking is overrated sometimes.

She rode a mile with us on Sunday against a strong headwind. One of those strong headwinds that manage to be a headwind both coming and going. She was careful to stay on the side of the path away from the creek, wise, given her father's tendency to cycle down the bank and into the water.

And fall is coming. Chucked the hanging baskets, getting dry. Washed the glass front on the woodstove; now waiting, kindling and matches in hand, for the first crisp evening.

A guy was telling me about his trip to Sweden. Now I want to go to Sweden, now that I know it's not so expensive, unless you drink alcohol there, and the long days and summer light is nice, and that they are nice to children. Only my children want to go somewhere hot.

You want to know what Greece means to me, what I think of when I hear "Greece"? Bottles of ouzo I purchase and never finish because I don't like ouzo but always forget, and plastic shopping bags cutting into my hands as I lug flat mineral water, watermelons, white bread, instant soup, retsina, nectarines, jam and yogurt from the shop in town up some hill past tavernas full of lobster-red British tourists to a nice little bungalow.

And skin cancer.

Okay, and beaches and sand castles and kids having lots of fun. And cocktails at sunset with my wife.

And mosquitos and cocky rats that jump this high.

Thank you, Mig

Today's guest blogger is Missy Elliot

Mig asked me not to mention him when I was making my acceptance speech for the MTV "Best Video" award for my video "Work It", and I respect his wishes, but first of all I'd like to make up for that here and say, from the bottom of my heart, Thank you Mig for the idea with the bees!

"Don't say anything smart," Mig said when I asked him what I was supposed to write here, so I decided to talk about the meaning of life, as what is lamer than that? In fact, although I do not like to be pigeon-holed, I would have to say that my belief that asking what the meaning of life is is the wrong question makes me more a nihilist, in some respects, than anything else.

What do you mean by life? I'm always tempted to ask in return. Because life does not exist, you see, only circumstances; and what is the meaning of circumstances? Whatever meaning you give them, is what it boils down to.

Life, schmife.

I eat a plum, and the plum tastes sweet.

Circumnavigation

A lot of things happened, then we had tea in ritzy cups I bought on sale at Harrod's back then. Classy tea, poured out of a real pot, not made in the cup with a teabag. And some sort of cookies, with coconut in the recipe.

Then we went to the parking lot and when our youngest daughter got tired of riding her bike in a straight line from me at one end of the lot to her mother at the other end, she began to ride in circles around the lot.

Not too close to the bushes at the sides, because the bushes dash out and grab you when you are six if you get too close.

There's a slash in the bicycle seat to prove it.

Then she crashed and landed on both hands and ouch. We thought she'd broken her arm.

Her wrist hurt. We went home. Put something cold on the wrist. No swelling, but tender. We took her to the hospital, all four of us. Big sister along for moral support.

X-ray. An X-ray is called a Röntgen in German, after the man who invented X-rays. Imagine the effort, all that tinkering with various rays.

By the time the doctor looked at her wrist it didn't hurt anymore. On his PC screen was an X-ray showing a perfect little arm - "Hello, Mig, long time no see, how's the shoulder?" "Oh, okay."

It was the handsome salt-and-pepper doctor who'd looked at my shoulder when it was killing me. "Good, good." "My elbow sure hurts, though." He touched a certain spot. "Here?" he asked. My eyes opened wide. "Precisely there."

"Tennis elbow," he said.

Another one of my stupid mysterious sports injuries. I'd quit playing tennis, except I don't play. Rowing causes it too, but I've only been rowing twice this season. Other causes: painting, chopping wood, clearing brush, swinging a hammer, hatchet, etc. Whatever it is, stop it until it gets better. I wonder briefly if sexual abstention would help.

Standing on a tall aluminum ladder leaned up against a wild prune tree picking wild prunes in the wind as the ladder slips dangerously each time I lean out to reach for another little misshapen dodgy-tasting fruit and females on the ground complain about having to catch prunes. Our young cultivated prune or is it a plum or are they the same thing tree bore a single fruit this year, I had a small piece of it, very elegant-tasting little thing. Point for cultivation over hunting-gathering.

Certain grains were domesticated millennia ago, strawberries weren't figured out until the middle ages by monks with time on their hands. Dogs were the first animal domesticated. Farmers still haven't gotten the hang of rhinocerii. Imagine a big old rhino behind a plow. Now that's farming.

(This started with tea and a little girl riding a bike in circles for the first time, I can't end it with a self-abuse joke.)

balsam, sort of

First the old flower lady tells me my hair has gone white. Then I realize my boss is younger than I am and telling myself I rejected a stressful life of uncool soul-selling careerism is cold comfort because part of me asks, Then why am I feeling so stressed out and soul-sold then, huh?

Then I get home and find a virus has swept across the land making two out of three females insane. Various events transpire, then one of the two puts the other one of the two to bed and I stand there in the relative calm feeling like a man who has just stuffed a lynx into a mailbox.

Then the third one, the calm one, is nice to me. Eldest daughter. Someday she be doctor, cure something. Live in big house.

I ask her how school was. She's going to a new school where all the other kids are geniuses with attitudes. I can feel that she's sort of exploring the world of attitude, trying various ones on. Her attitude this evening is: Affectionate.

"All the other dads walked their kids clear up to the classroom." She has the classroom on the highest floor of the school, in the furthest corner. I was in a big hurry to get to work and just sort of walked her into the school and dropped her off. We were early, she was the first one.

"Did anyone mention me not coming clear up?"

"No, I was the first one. No one saw. But it doesn't matter. E's dad even gave her a kiss and she didn't punch him for it!"

"Wow."

"And I couldn't believe the other dads. You're by far the coolest and best-looking."

"Really?"

"All the rest were like already bald on top with a gray fringe and a grey moustache."

[I silently give thanks that I shaved the grey goatee I grew on vacation.]

"And wore funny little glasses."

[I pocket my reading glasses.]

"And they all look like, I dunno, bank directors."

"Bank directors are bad..."

"Very bad."

BRB

Somewhere in my building, a tech guy is fighting worms, and virii.

Here's looking at you

Eye want my country back.

School

Hottest summer ever and suddenly, autumn.
Small doe nosing around the stubble of a harvested cornfield as traffic zooms past on the freeway.

I remember doing this with you, I tell my oldest daughter. It seems like last year, not eight years ago. It honestly does - her first day of school. I wear a teeshirt under my office shirt but still feel the chill. Rotten apples lie on the sidewalk. Up ahead her mother walks, further up other parents and at the front, the little kids starting school today, with their teachers. Her little sister and another girl are holding their teacher's hands as they walk.

The little one has been so excited she's slept poorly for the past several nights. She's said she's looking forward to it, but this morning she admitted being scared.

We all walked her to school this morning. New room, stuffy, full of parents and new first-graders. Most know each other from their local nursery school. Our daughter is one of a few outsiders. Like the other kids, she introduced herself to the teacher, shook her hand, gave her the picture of the school she'd been asked to draw, and sat down at one of the two-kid tables that filled the room. No one else sat down next to her.

She sat there waiting patiently, a little girl in glasses wearing her best dress, shoes polished, alone. The teacher seated children as they came into the room, but left our kid alone although she was sitting near the front. Needless to say, she got off on the wrong foot with us.

Then everyone marched out of school to the local church for a school mass. Every school in the country does this on the first day of school. So much for the separation of church and state in Austria. The little kids gathered in front of the church, we went to the back. We were among the last, so we went to the last pew. My wife and daughter got seats, I stood because a lady was saving a seat for someone who never showed up. Then, when everyone was taking Communion I left for work.