Metamorphosism

That humming sound you hear is the cosmos

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the%20path%20to%20enlightenment

I take a pitcher just in case.

Lounge

Alpha: And I'll give you guys my frequent-flyer card so you can go into the lounge at the airport when you go to America.
Gamma: Yay! Do they have cool music in the lounge?
Alpha: Erm...
Gamma: And disco lights?
Alpha: Not really.
Gamma: Drinks? Cool sofas?
Alpha: Well, beverages. Sofas, yes.
Gamma: Pff. No music? No lights? What kind of lounge is that?

Banksy

"withus oragainstus"

[Via Peace Dividend]

4x24

Long weekend. Four days melt together in my mind. Random images:

• Up at 3.30 on Easter morning when Gamma's alarm clock unexpectedly rings. Alpha catches it before it wakes Gamma. We stay up, hide eggs, baskets in back yard. Go back to sleep.
  
• Gamma wakes us up at 7.20 Easter morning with report of finding baskets, eggs, presents.
  
• Leaning against sink, drinking coffee, wondering where the night went, listen to conversation between Gamma and her mother. "I feel sorry for people without children on Easter," Alpha says. "Yes, like Aunt X," Gamma says. "I wonder what she's doing? Sailing or playing golf?" "I'd guess playing golf," Alpha says.
  
• Drive Gamma and her friend to what I will call Gemstone World, a theme park devoted to a certain gem. Multi-media exhibit. Gift shoppe. Tour, including a look at the vein of the gemstone underground. Alpha asks guide, so, the jewelry in the shop is all made from gems dug here? No, he says, they would fall apart. Which explains the theme park: how else to earn money from worthless gems? I pay €10 for the right to go out back and dig for gems with two little girls, as Alpha watches (wrong shoes, wasn't expecting to dig for gems in the mud) and gives advice and washes stones dug up by little girls and myself. Two seven-year-old girls assume since I'm a grown man I'll know where to dig for gemstones, with the result that wherever I migrate to, I'm soon dodging their flying shovels and hammers. I wonder briefly why little girls and digging in mud are a recurring theme in my life and not, say, awards ceremonies and starlets. I find nothing. Gamma finds nothing. Her friend finds a ton of quartz and other crystals, making Gamma envious. Friend splits everything with Gamma. I guess they seed the dirt now and then with a few gemstones. Turns out, as we leave, Gamma terribly disappointed, that you get a free gemstone if you fail to find any. Gamma's friend lets Gamma have the biggest one.
  
• Little girls in the apple tree. Gamma discovered that it's big enought to climb now, and spends half of her outdoor time among the branches.
  
• First daffodils blooming in yard. Fresh barkdust spread in flowerbed out front.
  
• Turtle makes massive poo on kitchen floor while we are out for several hours, walks in it. Before cleaning it up, I explain to Gamma about Jackson Pollack.

Feral Living Archive

Just for the record, in case any historians are interested, finally got the old Feral Living Archives moved to this server. The archives date back to when I started it in 1868, making it the oldest blog in the world, to my knowledge.

Images didn't survive the move, however, and I can't be bothered to fix them.

Bedtime

Mig: [closes book gently] ...and so that's how geysers work. Okay kiddo, lights out.
Gamma: [reopens book and points at picture] What if you were standing there?
Mig: You wouldn't want to. It's boiling mudpots. You know, bloopbloopbloop.
Gamma: [Laughs] I like how you say that. It sounds just like boiling mud. Do it again.
Mig: Bloopbloopbloop.
Gamma: Hehe. What if you were standing here, then?
Mig: Boiling mineral-laden water would rain down on you and you'd be cooked.
Gamma: Uh-huh. So where does God come from, anyway?
Mig: ["God was always there," goes through his head] Ehm...
Gamma: Grandma says God was already always there, but that doesn't make any sense to me. God had to come from somewhere.
Mig: Dude, look at the time. I have to go clean the kitchen.

I felt bad about running away from an interesting discussion. But seriously. We would have been talking for hours. I'm still trying to figure out the answer to that question.

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a server

If you can't read this, it's because my host is being hit pretty hard by spammers right now.

Influence

As you know, I live deep inside a mountain and influence events from a distance. I had been postponing our harp trip to France due to storms, blizzards, avalanche warnings, flood warnings and more storms until I realized that I was causing these problems by not going. I figured next on the list is volcanoes, seismic activity and swarms of winged vermin so we went and now flowers are blooming everywhere.

But this is not enough for me. I will stop at nothing until world domination is achieved and I can play Scrabble with their teeth. They know who they are. And my agents are everywhere.

Stipo and Paco

There is this story I am trying to write and there are these two characters, killers, who want to be in it. They have nothing to do with the story, but they are killers and they are desperate, so desperate that they have taken to harassing me in real life. They blocked my way in the aisle on the train Alpha and I took through Austria on our recent trip to France, you may have heard about it.

On my way back to our compartment (I am thinking the sleeping compartments on this train were designed by a small Swiss architect with a deep feeling of aggression towards everyone over five feet tall; as I have said, it was the size of an economy class toilet on a 767, with bunkbeds; we were served breakfast, which we ate scrunched over sitting on the bottom bunk, teeny breakfast trays on teeny fold-out tables as we said to each other, Isn't this nice? Isn't this the nicest trip ever?) from a visit to the restroom (large and clean and, this time, unflooded) I espied two men standing in the aisle discussing something with the steward, who was below them, on the stairs leading down to our compartment, where he had been examining our tickets or bringing us candy bars and kiwi fruit or something.

Stipo and Paco I recognized immediately, which blurred the boundaries between reality and imagination to a rather dangerous degree, seeing as how these two resembled nothing more strongly than hitmen. Paco, the tall one, the brains of the bunch, the one with hair, longish and brown, the color of his longish brown coat, was talking to the steward. Paco had the air of someone not that smart to begin with who pretended to be even dopier for the edge it gave him; an air of larceny as pungent as a truffle. He was explaining to the steward that they were looking for empty seats, and the steward was explaining to them that in this sleeping car everything was reserved, and I was thinking, these guys are casing the car.

Stipo, on the other hand, and this is why I say "dangerously blurred the boundaries between imagination and reality," was a couple inches shorter than I am, making him five eight or five nine. His head was shaved, and somehow the surreal feeling of the encounter led me to continue onward until I could count the very follicles in his pink scalp (306 per square centimeter, just short of average for males). I got a closeup view of his golden earring and the nails on the fingers on the very tough-looking hands holding the black travel bag over the shoulder of his long, black coat were thick and yellowish-white, and although it was eleven at night he wore dark glasses. He looked prison-gym strong and his aura, in contrast to Paco's larceny, was pure violence. Paco finally accepted the steward's explanation and Stipo grunted and I realized I was way too close and got out of the way and let them past.

So this is what sleeping-car thieves look like, I thought, and descended the stairs to our compartment. I ate a candybar with Alpha, and we peeled kiwis. I locked the door before we went to bed, and wedged a suitcase in front of it, which wasn't unusual, because in the compartment, pretty much everything was wedged in one way or another.

Probably the two guys were social studies teachers on holiday.

Julian Merrow-Smith

Two of what I assume are several differences between Ruth Philips and myself: she is a cellist and lives in a farmhouse in France.

And her hub paints. Every day.

Luck

If there is anything nicer than seeing your kid with a big grin on her face, then I would have to say it's seeing your kid with a big grin on her face as she leans out the window of a 200-year-old French farmhouse.

Add that to my wishlist: 200-year-old French farmhouse.

Of all the lousy little gin joints in all the lousy little towns around the world where she could have ended up when she decided to be an exchange student for half a year, after all the horror stories we heard from friends (stuck with paranoid religious fundamentalists in Canada, arrested and jailed in South America...) Beta ends up with a charming family in the above-mentioned house in the hills just north of the South of France, with a room of her own with a view of mountains and forest out her window. Down the road is the Isere valley, where she goes rowing twice a week.

Since arriving, Beta had sent us quiet, little email messages, nothing gushy. We had no idea it was that nice. Unlike her father, Beta tends towards understatement.

When Alpha and I drove there this weekend to deliver her harp, we were dreading the long trip. We needn't have worried. We hadn't even arrived yet and had vowed to have more adventures like this. Check the oil, gas and tire pressure, fill the windshield fluid container up so you can wash off the bugs and just drive off into the blue.

I would say Beta is a lucky person, but to some extent we make our own luck. It was her idea to enroll in the exchange program. It was she who insisted on France. Etc.

It was good to see her happy and in such a positive setting. It was good to see her enjoying herself and integrated and not homesick.

And the house. You know the old French farmhouses in the design and architecture and lifestyle books? They really exist. The village has a single movie theater: it's in their cellar. With real movie seats and Dolby sound. They gave us a tour.

We walked around the village with her host parents and their big, friendly, stupid menace of a dog. He had welcomed me by licking my arm and trying to chew off my watch. Host dad threw a plastic bucket lid ("le Frisbee") for him. They showed us a field that had been turned into lots and sold and que terrible now houses were being built there. I asked them what the price of land was. They told me.

"Wow! We could sell our house in Austria and build a huge house here for that price," I said. "We should move here, Alpha. I could teach English at the school."

"And I could teach Japanese," she said.

"Oui," the host mother said. "But the winter is very long and very cold here."

"Hm," we said. "Still, look at that wonderful view."

"And in April? It is raining all the time."

It was fun winding her up.

As we walked, enjoying the sunset, the dog loped ahead and disappeared through the gate of a nice, old home with a high wall around it. We heard a small child scream and a few seconds later the dog reemerged with a red ball in its mouth.

It was a warm day. We met various friends and relatives in the neighborhood. We met the grandparents. We loved it. They were all very nice and spoke English and German to us after we proved we could not speak French. We said, we heard the French were snotty, but you're all so nice. Paris is not France, they said.

They ate a lot of food but they were all slim. I don't know how they do that. Lots of walks with the dog, maybe. There's a book out in Austria right now, "Why are Frenchwomen so slim?" would be an approximate translation of the title. The theory is that they take time to eat, they enjoy eating, the portions aren't huge and no between-meal snacks. Nothing we saw while we were there would contradict that. But we were there only an afternoon. We slept in a spare room that night and left the next morning at 4.

We drove about 1,500 km, there and back. We would have driven a lot more, but we took the train through Austria. On the way there we took the night train. You can drive your car onto the train, see. Like a ferry. And we booked a room on the train, to sleep, so we'd arrive fresh the next morning. The room was small (roughly the dimensions of an airliner toilet, only with bunk beds) but clean and what do you want, it's a train? Coming back we took a day train and just dozed in regular seats. We had a compartment all to ourselves. We arrived back in Vienna exhausted, but not as wiped out as if we had driven the entire way. We were first off the train because the Dobló had been first on. Unfortunately, being first on means your windshield catches all the bugs, and it looked as if the train had passed through a swarm of cockroaches a hundred miles wide.

So I'm tired today, but happy. I've lost my fear of France, and my fear of traveling around. Alpha and I are looking forward to more quick weekend outings like this.

On the minus side, one string on the harp has already broken. I'm praying it was just a coincidence, and that the trip was not bad for the harp (totally possible)...

I hear they call it travail

Now that the snows have stopped, we leave in a few hours to deliver a harp to France.

Amidst flood and avalanche warnings.

Drawing

Child: I'm bored. What should I draw.
Father: Draw a parasite.
Child: Yuck.
Father: Seriously. There are so many kinds. Draw what you think a parasite looks like.
Child: Okay. [Makes single dot on paper with tip of pen.] Now what should I draw?

When I was a kid and asked my father that question, he suggested one of three things: flies, a bucket of water, or a bath.

I don't know how many buckets of water I drew as a kid.

The Way of the Fool

On the Suburban Path to Enlightenment, when you meet Buddha in the road, you don't stop, you don't even slow down. Either he jumps out of the way or he is history.

There are many ways. You can study texts or meditate on koans. I find driving and simultaneously holding a conversation on cellphone to be a good way to achieve beginner's mind, which is something I try for as I am following the Way of the Fool.

It is a way that stresses openness and spontaneity - something particularly difficult for me to achieve - and has the added bonus of getting you off the hook if you don't really know anything about Buddhism. Someone calls you on a point of procedure or something, you get all beginner's mind on them.

One thing I have realized on this path is that we do not change. Womb to grave, we are who we are. We just are. You are, you know? You know what I mean? We are constantly changing, our cells reproducing and dying, but in the midst of all this change and chaos, we are who we are. We simply are.

You cannot ask someone else to change for you. And you cannot change yourself. You are a holographic section of the world, the entire world is in you and vice versa and all you can do is accept the world as it is. All you can do is accept others, accept yourself. Look. You just are. You cannot change yourself.

But you can change what you do. You can change your practices.

Kafka said, and I paraphrase another paraphrase of a translation, You don't have to go outside in search of life, you don't even have to leave your room. You can just sit quietly and it will come to you and roll at your feet.

There is acceptance and freedom and decisions and you are entirely in control every second of every day even if it doesn't seem like that when you sit down to pay the bills.

The Way of the Fool is a way without fear. This is another paradoxical bit for me, being built on a foundation of fear as I am.

I was at a school function last night and afterwards was talking to a teacher. I told her a story. I had been asked to make a speech at a concert but had begged off, saying I had no time. Then it so happened that someone caught me in the vicinity at the time of the concert, which was slightly embarassing. I decided - even before being caught - that there had been no need for me to make an excuse. I simply don't do public speaking. I don't have to change myself. That is simply a fact about me. I don't do it. You want me to make a speech, sorry.

Even on a path to enlightenment, we don't have to evolve to fit someone's idea of the ideal person.

And she said, You know, you're right, you don't talk, do you? In fact, I've never heard you speak before this.

And I stood there and talked to her for a while. We talked about Gamma and her personality. I talked of Gamma's social skills, and how from day one she got all the attention she needed. Her method was to enter a situation, observe shyly for a few minutes, then, having figured out what the situation demanded, take control.

And I went on to tell her the story, for example, of Alpha's 40th birthday party, when Gamma was almost 3. "Garden party in the back yard. All attention was directed towards the guest of honor of course, until Gamma stripped naked and took a shit in the grass." I mimed picking up a huge, firm turd with my bare hands and carrying it over to the compost heap.

The teacher nodded. We stood there for a couple seconds, then I sort of wandered over to the buffet and she went and talked to someone else.

It's okay, I thought, it's the Way of the Fool.

This happens every year

I thought it was the cat knocking on the door but when I checked it was a fucking L3prech4un trying to steal my hubcaps and I grabbed him before he could run away although he twisted and turned mightily and squabbled and tried to distract my attention, draw it away but I maintained eye contact and assured him that I would be insisting on my wish, that he grant my wish and that my first wish would be for an endless number of wishes so he couldn't fuck me up by some hair-splitting L1ttle P30ple trick like, you know, you wish for a nice Yakima apple with organic peanut butter and you get it, but you didn't say you wanted it without f3cal matter mixed in, you know?

I'm savvy to that.

"The fecking Dobló don't even have hubcaps, man," the small man said to me.

"Tough titties. My first wish is..."

"Feh. I'm going down in the history of the faeries as the poor sod who got caught by Mig Living and granted wishes for the rest of his days. I want this. No, not exactly that. A little different. And move the sofa over there. Hell." He took out a cigarette and asked me for a light.

"Here you go," I said and lit it.

"God, that's good. Bet you wish you could have one," he said.

"Do I ever."

He chuckled as he gave me one.

"Shit," I said.

Then I went back inside and Alpha pinched me because I wasn't wearing green.

"Have you been smoking?" she asked.

Bedtime

Funny, isn't it, how all kids are the same in some respects? Like how they all, without exception, negotiate with you at bedtime? Take last night:

Gamma: Two books?
Mig: Three books. Final offer.
Gamma: But not the parasite book! Or I won't be able to sleep!
Mig: Don't worry, honey. I'll read it first. Then the volcano book and then Witches by Roald Dahl. That way they'll superimpose themselves on the parasites and you'll have nice dreams.
Gamma: [skeptically] Well...
Mig: Just one chapter of each. Parasites first. Listen, this is what can happen if you eat food contaminated with parasite eggs. Look at this chart. That's the life cycle. You eat the eggs on dirty food or if you don't wash your hands. Then they hatch in your gut, and burrow through, and migrate through your liver to your lungs. Then you cough them back out, reingest them and they lay eggs in your stomach, which you pass when you poo.
Gamma: Yuck.
Mig: Okay. Volcanoes.
Gamma: Let me go wash my hands first.

Banana writing

"What's 'nice tits' mean?" Gamma asks.
"Ehm," her mother says, going outside in her bathrobe to move her car so I can leave for work.
"It means... honey, are you reading your mother's banana? You're not supposed to read other people's bananas."
"It says, Nice tits. What are tits?"
Oh the hell with it. "These are tits," I say. I point at my chest.
"Hehe," Gamma says.

This morning, Gamma's banana says "nice eyes." They're not supposed to read their bananas until lunch, but they always get curious and read them before they even leave for school/work.

No words were substituted in the making of this post.

Plan

Upon waking from a troubling dream about cellos, Gregor Samsa sniffed and realized he had a bad case of psychetosis. Bad breath of the soul. Still, he thought, better than the bug problem back in the old days. He wrote in his journal a while and cheered himself up by making a plan to improve his life. The plan looked like this:

1. Eat less, and better. Pack a lunch for work every day including fruit and water. Benefits: feel better, lose weight, leading to even more feeling better.
   
2. Work on writing every day for at least two hours: one in the morning and one at lunch. But regularly.
   
3. Pay attention to kids.
   
4. Pay attention to wife.

He also decided to consider ways to earn extra money. And ways to actually submit writing for publication.

Then his wife came into the kitchen and they ate toast and with a what, he forgets, with a well-timed shrug perhaps, he made her choke on her tea, nearly spraying it out her nose. He entirely forgets the context, simply that the timing of some simple thing had been so good that she did the drink thing. He paid close attention, because he had decided to. And because his older daughter owes him a Euro if he makes his wife spit her drink, and two if it comes out her nose. But no luck that morning.

Still, it cheered him up. His plan was already working.

On buying a truss

You ever get tired of your self? Tired of your fears, your hopes, especially your sense of humor and the look of your face in the mirror in the morning and the sound of your voice?

What's it like?

In case any of you are getting tired of hearing about my truss quest and my information-gathering process (formerly known as "dithering"), I have decided to give you a break and in this post substitute the word "truss" for "truss". If you're not tired of hearing the word "truss" yet, you can still mentally re-substitute "truss" for the other word, "truss", wherever it appears.

I went to a truss dealer this morning before work. My truss teacher recommended the place, and even met me there. I had with me another truss he had borrowed previously for me to try out. It was slightly more expensive than I was looking for, and I wasn't crazy about the way it looked. The sound was good, but it was just too precious. Since sound is the most important thing for me in a truss, and looks are way down low on my list of priorities, I figured the money would be better invested in a different truss where I would be paying for the sound quality alone, and let someone else who placed higher value on appearance buy this truss, because it was pretty, if not in a way that I especially valued.

Anyway. He was a few minutes late and so I was there in the truss shop by myself, trying out three other trusses the trussmaker unpacked for me. One was roughly the same as the one I had returned, quite pretty. Nice tone, though. Another was €500 more expensive, not nearly as pretty, in fact a bit weathered-looking, but had a good sound. The third was a truss, cheaper than the others, but a centimeter or so longer and wider in the body, with the result that it wouldn't fit into a normal truss case. So in the end, the money I would save on this one would go towards a more expensive special case, with the result that the final sum I paid would roughly equal the other one.

So I had two trusses here. Before I go any further, I must point out to those who have never shopped for a truss that if you are a bit shy or self-conscious and not too expert at playing them, or to be honest rather inept without notes, it can be a very uncomfortable experience, sitting down and trying out a truss in front of a group of strangers.

Luckily my teacher showed up and put an end to my suffering, taking the truss from me and playing away. The oversized one sounded louder close up, the other one had a nice smooth, even tone that he suspected would carry further, which would be good in an orchestral situation in a large hall, but otherwise, for my needs, the first one was actually better. And to be honest, the slightly freakish aspect of it being a centimeter longer than normal appealed to me.

Did you know that some of the trusses made by Stradivarius were up to four centimeters longer than normal (in the body)? That trusses were not even standardized until his time? And worst of all, that most of his outsized trusses were cut back by their owners later on to fit the standard size?

The trussmaker told that story to us, and he and my teacher grimaced. It is a painful thought. What a sacrilege! Imagine.

Like changing the smile on the Mona Lisa, the trussmaker said.

I borrowed the one truss, the oversized one, and will play it at home in the upcoming week, trying it out. I have it here with me in the office right now. Everyone is asking me what it is. Meanwhile I'm desperately looking for a way to hear and if possible see one of the carbon fiber trusses I find so intriguing. Cause if they really sound better than wooden trusses costing twice as much, they must sound damn good.

I never knew buying a truss would be such an emotionally exhausting process.

Jones

I'm torn. Wood or carbon fiber?

Wood is more romantic. The wood has history. Centuries of growing and aging before it's even made into an instrument. And the unique sound every instrument has. And the development of that sound as the instrument ages. And it retains its value, with proper care.

OTOH, sit on a wooden cello and it's history. And I have heard the carbon fiber instruments, by that maker I linked there, sound as good as much more expensive wooden ones. And when I mailed them, on a Sunday, they mailed right back with an answer to my questions.

OTOH, I woke up at four this morning, from a nightmare: the doorbell had rung, I opened it, and there a cello was, they had fedexed it to me the same day! And it had no strings, so the only way I could try to tell whether or not it sounded any good was to rap on it with my knuckles. And it sounded dull and flat, but I didn't know if that was because of the instrument or because I was rapping on it wrong.

My heart was beating a wicked tattoo.

I told my wife about it at breakfast. "At least you're having cello nightmares now," she said, "and not dreaming about murdering people anymore."

Don't get off the boat

Not without snacks.

I wish I were a scintillating conversationalist. I was standing in front of a canvas in my cellar yesterday thinking, "That's not what it was supposed to look like." I have conversations like that too, with the difference that you can paint over an oil painting. All I can do to salvage a conversation is blog about it.

Like this:

My wife and I were in a restaurant yesterday. Two women came in, one carrying a cello in a hard case.

"Look, a cello," I said.
"I know that," my wife said.

We had the schnitzel special. My wife and my daughter substituted potatoes with parsley for the potato salad. Judging from my digestion afterwards, a good choice.

We had been at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. Afterwards, my wife and daughter were hungry. Lunchtime. I couldn't make up my mind if I was or not. My wife, hungry, sheds her human mask and reveals a ball of Taser-packing copperheads underneath and she passed the gene to Gamma.

I found the cafe in the museum overpriced, and my wife found the service too slow, and so the fun started. We left in search of lunch; my priority: reasonably priced, reasonable quality. Their priority: food, now.

Never forget: always bring snacks.

The restaurant in the butterfly house was full. Doh, lunchtime. The cafe in the Albertina museum theoretically has good food, but it's up at the top of the museum and we figured we'd get there, discover it was full and have to wander on so we skipped it.

Gamma had her heart set on spaghetti. She was sort of chanting it. Alpha led the way, saying things like, "Come on!" and "What, you're not wearing gloves? Are you crazy?" and, "if you'd gotten a Ph.D. we'd be eating juicy steaks Right Now." I was holding Gamma's hand and trying to distract her. I saw a poster for a documentary about a group of accordionists from various cultures. I'd love to see that movie. Alpha wasn't interested in backtracking to come see the poster, though, and Gamma and I had to jog a bit to catch up.

Three granola bars, you know? Or animal crackers, or three bananas. The world would have been a different place.

We ended up at the restaurant waiting for our schnitzels. We warned Gamma not to drink up all her Fanta at once because it had to last her through her entree.

Two women came in, one carrying a cello in a hard case.
"Look, a cello," I said.

Car names

I entertained myself on my way into work this morning, which was good because I was parked on the freeway for a whole hour while they cleaned up an accident. Parked.

I entertained myself as I sometimes do by devising new names for automobiles.

Fiat Maligna was one of my favorites.
Toyota names are fun: Toyota Cretina.
Body parts: Dodge Rectum. Volvo Uterus (a family van). Ford Sphincter (modernistic, concept sports-compact). Chevy Idiot. Ford Moron (or, if it's a 4WD Ford Morono, with New Mexican desert background in the advertisement).

A thousand times noh

Chekhov's pistol, you know? I was listening to the radio station I mentioned, Oe1, one late-night drive home, and they had this hour-long (at least) report on Japanese Noh theater. The report was nearly as slow-paced as noh theater itself, but I forced myself to listen, and eventually was engrossed.

One Austrian reporter remarked about all the people he'd seen sleeping in the audience. A Japanese university professor noh expert was asked about it and he said -- you know how they play a bit of the original response, and then its volume is turned down but it continues under the translation? The professor said, among other things, "Noh de, yoku nemasu nee." Which they translated as something along the lines of "it's common for people to sleep at noh performances" but which means, to me at least, "noh is great for sleeping."

They discussed the inherent boringness of noh -- how it has been slowing down and growing more stylized since it was invented centuries ago, to the point where a performance that would have taken 45 minutes then takes 90 minutes now. And the zen nature of noh was mentioned. And how the slow, boring, stylized minimalism forces viewers to actively (emotionally) participate and empathize rather than be entertained. And this, which is my whole point: now it is not about external events or impressions, or anything else surface and temporary, but rather about the internal emotional world in each of us, the constellation that never ages, that persists from childhood to old age.

I like that idea. Because I'm still that lonesome 3-year old kid playing checkers with my uncle, unaware that he's lonesome.

Got a flaming heart can't get my fill

The missionaries kicked in my door and held their guns in my face and said, while I sniffed gun oil and cordite, DOESN'T IT GET U DOWN THAT U HAVE EXISTENTIAL CRISES AMONG DOPES WITH BETTER CAREERS THAN U OR THAT U REACH OVER ON UR DRIVE INTO WORK WITH UR PHANTOM ARM AND PAT HER PHANTOM LEG AND WONDER DO U FEEL THAT WHEREVER U ARE AND THINK BOY I MISS U KID, FULL OF WIST?
And I say, right before they knock in my teeth and I spit them like cherry chiclets onto the tile floor of our entryway, well you know, it's not all bad. There is the way the lane behind me fades into the grey of the falling snow until it vanishes and there are the ninety or ninety-five greys of the sky and there is the little whirring sound the coffee machine at the UN briefly makes when it's finished with my coffee order and it's time to take out the cup, like the propellor of a toy motorboat spinning when you lift it out of the water, or imagining on my way home late at night from work and stopping by the music school to try out a new cello how Gamma will look asleep in my bed by the light of the lava lamp (knowing her mom is not home and she'll use the situation to sleep in the big bed) and I get home and she's really sleeping there and she really looks exactly the way I imagined and the stopping by the music school late at night: having my own key, wandering the halls of an old thick-walled convent in the pitch dark thinking about centuries of ghosts as I feel my way to the cello room and turn on the light and boy does the C string sound good on this new cello (although it looks a little dopey and I won't buy it I don't think)! So, I tell the missionaries, there are various phenomena limiting how down it can get me, now take your corny booklets and go bug someone else.

Trackback

I get a modest amount of traffic and am rarely linked by other blogs so trackbacks were pointless for me; if someone linked me and it drove any traffic my way I saw it in my stats anyway. I fail to see the benefit of trackbacks, for me at least. Not to sound ungrateful to a charming person who is at least partly responsible for the blogging software I use for free, but part of me thinks maybe Mena is a control freak and trackbacks sort of grew from that, the need for absolute control over the blog; you know, like, Who's Linking Me? But the only ones I got were trackback spam, and I got hundreds so I went and stripped anything trackback related from all my blogs and guess what, I still get them from automatic programs spamming me. I have a couple MT links to check out, I'm sure there's a solution for it, I am just too busy this week at work to spend any time doing it just yet, but I'll fix it eventually. But my question is, do any of you see a point in trackbacks?

Wavelength

We dropped the kid off at her friend's house, apartment actually, Alpha and I walked her over on a bright cold weekend day. They let her in, we said goodbye there in the hallway, the mom in the doorway and the kid's friend and Alpha didn't see him because their Golden Retriever was out saying hi, licking me and jumping on me and she's not a dog person and so all she saw was dog but I, being a dog person, was all Yeah, boy, howyalikedat Yeah, attaboy and relaxed and I saw him, peeking out from behind his mom, the kid's friend's little brother, pure psycho evil and only five years old. Eyes as dark as the deepest pockets of Johnny Cash's blackest coat. The little kid stuck a 60 watt lightbulb in his mouth and it lit up. Not really, but I imagined him doing it; you wouldn't be surprised if he had. Gamma came home later with a bruise on her cheek and a wiggly tooth where he had hit her in the face with a big chunk of icy ice when they were playing outside and for some reason her friend got grounded for it. And I thought, we got off cheap and I thought, this isn't the last we're hearing about that guy, some day his neighbors will be saying on TV, He was such a quiet person.
And then they'll stick the microphone in my face and I'll say, That little fucker's given me the heebie jeebies ever since he was a little bitty boy.

How to fall asleep

The way I see it, a guy my age you has two choices when things bog down: 4uto-er0tic 4sphyxiati0n or self-hypnosis.

That's just one choice, isn't it? Two alternatives. Mom, if you're reading this, I'm starting out with self-hypnosis.

It can't hurt. Worst-case scenario: it doesn't work. Nothing happens. Big deal. So I found some directions on the Internet.

Those are famous last words, aren't they? "I found out on the Internet how to do this." Second only to , "Hey, y'all, watch this."

This is, briefly, how it is done:

1. Count down from 100, relaxing as you go
   
2. Then count down from 5, telling yourself at each step, I'm getting more relaxed, I'll make some nice suggestions, etc.
   
3. Make suggestions
   
4. Count yourself back up to 5, waking up a little at each step.

Or, in my case, you count down from 100 and around 50 you hear loud snoring and wake up.
It turns out to be a fine way to fall asleep at night. I drop right off. It's changed my life.
As far as the hypnosis goes, I have to try it sitting up. Not sure if it's worked yet. I'm totally in the middle of a crisis sort of week(s) and even having panic attacks (standing in front of the elevator at the UN a couple days ago, amidst a gaggle of diplomats, I wanted nothing more than to scream "WAAHHHHHHHH" as a breadloaf-sized lump of misery and panic exploded from my solar plexus; then I looked around me and wondered how many other people there felt the same way), so I suppose it's shaken something up. I'm taking a positive view of it. In Chinese, the word for "crisis" is written with the characters for "can" and "worms", right?
And I sleep better.
And the chances of being found dangling from a doorknob in my wife's clothes are infinitesimal.

Painting a day

Duane Keiser is an artist who does a painting a day and posts it to his blog here. He also has another website here. I came across Mr. Keiser via Negative Velocity, which seems not to have been updated in a while. NV got it from Boingboing.

If I had the money, I would buy paintings from Mr. Keiser immediately. They are wonderful, wonderful details, wonderful colors, wonderful light. Good eye for beauty in all things. That peanut butter and jelly sandwich is making me hungry, and it's not even nine in the morning.

On my drive in this morning, I thought, that's how I'd like to write. Then I thought, it is how I try to write. That is it. That's it. Lime slices, you know? Gum wrapper. Peanut. Pigment. And the grander stuff at the other site. Fine stuff, Mr. Keiser. You're inspiring.

From now on, all my blog posts are for sale, starting at $100 a piece for the smaller ones.

On spatial metaphors

Imagine walking into a forest. Have you read Kafka on the Shore yet? (That is, Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. Not "Kafka on the Shore Yet?" by etc etc. ) No? Good, because I'm lifting this from him, partly. Say you walk into a forest until you get lost, and then continue on, deeper and deeper, until you're hopelessly lost. Then you take off your pack, and leave it on the ground with your axe and canteen and keep walking until you completely lose your orientation, any sense of direction. You can't be any more lost than this. You are so lost, place, distance and direction have no meaning anymore. You even lose yourself. At this point, well, not "point" seeing as how place has no meaning, but at this point in our story, at this point in time, although it's also a timeless place forest: now, although strictly speaking there is no "now" here, I mean "here", fear dissolves. For instance. Say. Fear of being lost. Because you are lost. And you're not getting more lost.
Whom do you meet here?

String theory

Mom: What's up with the string tied to everything? It's a mess.
Gamma: Erm...
Dad: Did I ever tell you about how when I was bored when I was little my mom gave me yarn and I would stand in the corner for hours making spiderwebs between the curtain rod, two doorknobs and the handles on the dresser? Or how if the weather was good she'd send my brother and me outside where I'd hang bits of yarn from the fence for birds to make their nests from, and my little brother would follow me, picking the yarn back off the fence, and when we got to the end of the fence I'd think birds had already taken all the yarn, then we'd go back to the start of the fence and hang the same yarn back up again?
Gamma: Hehe.
Mom: Thanks for the backup, pal.

90% of my mother's parenting consisted of ploys to get rid of us, and 10% of trips to OMSI. And yet I have fond memories of so much of it - drawing pictures in the kitchen on rainy days, wandering around the countryside, sitting in my uncle's garden discussing life with his beagle.

Soundtrack for a nervous breakdown

I was listening to Bananarama's Greatest Hits in my car yesterday because the mix of Jorane, Snow Patrol, Iarla Ó Lionáird and Apocalyptica running on my work PC, in combination with this cold weather and other factors had been getting me down, but all that led to was the realization that Bananarama doesn't really have enough hits to fill a CD and they had to resort to, you know, "hits". Oh, and I also realized I don't really have any perky music, except for some of the mixes Jessica kindly sent me, but Gamma steals most of those; she's all, "Love Parasite! Yeah!"

I did have the good sense not to put Tom Waits' "Alice" in the player. Cause, you know:

Arithmetic arithmetock/ Turn the hands back on the clock/ How does the ocean rock the boat?/ How did the razor find my throat?/ The only strings that hold me here/ Are tangled up around the pier

Oh, and Blue Notes classics are in my work mix, too.

So, whatever. Having a musical crisis. Tired of Led Zeppelin et al. So you know what? I discovered Ö1, or Oe1, for those of you without umlauts, which is the local classical music station.

It's really quite cool. Interesting mix of music, and the DJs are all into the details, you know, how this particular musician interprets this particular piece; how French piano playing influenced Bach and so on. Christ, it's a breath of fresh air when everything seems so nasty, brutal and short, you know?

On a related note, wondering whether to buy a wooden cello or an odd but interesting-looking carbon fiber cello. I'll end up going with wood, simply because the carbon fiber celli are 1) slightly out of my price range -- doably slightly, but still a bit steep, and 2) that in combination with the extra hassle of getting one over from the States means I'll buy an instrument locally. So, if wood, my next decision is new or old? With an older instrument, the sound is developed, but I like the idea of giving my money to someone who actually produces instruments rather than deals in them, so I'll hopefully buy a new instrument from a craftsman, you know? And watch listen to the tone improve with time. It's a bit of a slow process, finding an instrument, at least for me, because I lack the confidence to just go try a few out by myself and have to drag my teacher or someone else with me, on the assumption that he would be able to judge what's a good deal and what sounds like crap, because after two or three celli I'd lose the ability to hear any differences, I think.

Spareribs

Spent the afternoon with my favorite colleague from work. His wife just had a baby.
Me: She had it in the car, you say?
Him: Yeah. Right where you're sitting.
Me: Heh.
Him: Is it dry yet?

We visited his wife at the hospital and saw the baby. They also had pictures, of the car parked at an angle in the entrance of the hospital, passenger door open, midwife pointing at the passenger seat where the big event had taken place. Another picture of the seat itself, a bloody towel and a pair of women's shoes on the floor.

Later we had lunch, spareribs. I ate so many I couldn't eat any dinner. I was so full of meat, I woke up at midnight and couldn't fall back to sleep until three AM. Our lunch conversation went like this:

Him: She pulled her pants down at the light. I looked over and saw the top of the baby's head sticking out. Which sauce do you prefer, the piquant sauce or the garlic sauce?
Me: The piquant sauce. The garlic sauce is a little, I dunno, noncommittal.
Him: And of course, blood and everything all over.
Me: Check please.
Milan Kundera: There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
Bouncer: [Frog-marches Kundera through restaurant, forcibly ejects him] And stay out.

In other news, coldest day of the entire winter so far today. And Brian made me cry at work. And Novala nearly did too. It's just the mood I'm in today.