Metamorphosism

In other news, University of Vienna vanishes into space-time discontinuity the size of a pea

I was, this morning in the shower, thinking about trackbacks and how my theory is they were a product of the obsessive-compulsive micro-managing personality of Mena, who once, years ago, mailed me when I linked her blog, asking me to change the text in the link to the correct name of her blog, I suppose for the search engine mojo or whatever, and how otherwise it would probably have taken a long time for anyone else to come up with the idea of trackbacks. And I was wondering, as I often had, what the hell the appeal of trackbacks ever was, since you could always see who was linking you from your traffic stats unless the link wasn't sending any traffic your way and if it wasn't who cares? And I guess, a trackback would be so other people could see who was linking you, and who cares if they do? Some people, I suppose. So for them, trackbacks might have been a good thing. I was never too crazy about them, because all mine did was show, on practiclly every post, how no one was linking that post. And I was also thinking how trackbacks are now dead, basically, due to trackback spammers, thanks a lot guys. And I was thinking how it would be ironic, or not ironic, but, well, funny, if Horst's post on this topic, which I had just read, shortly before thinking all this stuff, got lots of trackbacks.

Nooo...

Beta's not tired of blogging...

Best

Girl: Who are your favorite female singers?
Man: Pff. Umm.
Girl: ?
Man: Uh. Annie Lennox is good. Cindi Lauper has a good voice. Uh.
Girl: ???????!???!!
Man: Oh, and of course Shakira.
Girl: Only third?
Man: Shakira, Shakira, Shakira.
Girl: Third place?
Man: So, so many singers. You know? Hard to... you can't really rank... so, so many. Things to take into... to consider. You know?
Girl: Dad, dad, dad. Shakira is number one, Jennifer Lopez is number two.
Man: Naturally.

Fashion

I was following this Orthodox Jewish guy around in my car, two guys actually, two young guys, then more, they were walking down the sidewalk and standing on the corner and I was looking for a place to park because I was on my way to a therapy session and my therapist is in a section of town where there happen to be a lot of your orthodox types and I always find good restaurants or a nice looking kosher shop looking for a place to park.

Cause kosher shops, you know, they can't park just anywhere.

And I was looking at these guys, thinking, that's a great look they have going. Dark suit, dark shoes, white shirt, you can't go wrong. And I had to think about my grandfather. Not my Chicago-Irish paternal grandfather, the one who drank, the one who married the hot, young divorced Montana-Swedish singer with a kid already, the one who always said, You're a gentleman and a scholar, the one who died before I was born, but my mother's father, who also died before my birth, the one who spoke Yiddish, the one who suffered for years from diabetes and finally killed himself with a loaf of fresh bread when they left him home alone.

Yiddish, in Washington State. I listen to a radio station in Vienna, Oe1, which is so totally intelligent and interesting I'm kicking myself for not listening to it earlier. They have the most wonderful, smart programs and stories and music there and yesterday they had a special about Klezmer music and the scene in New York and they said around the turn of the century, the one 105 years ago I mean, there were a several million Yiddish speakers in New York, if I understood them right. 1-2 million, something like that. Or in the United States? or around the 1930s and not the turn of the century? I wasn't listening too closely, I was driving, man.

Klezmer music is good music. It really rocks. They played a lot from the 1920s and 1930s, and to be honest the vocals, at least what they played... I can listen to the instrumental stuff longer. But any music gets on your nerves after a time, and what do I know anyway.

My mother still spoke some Yiddish with us, because her father had with them. Or she spoke it with me at least. I never spoke it to anyone, I know that. I feel like the ass end of American culture. I remember what it was like before it became homogenized and industrialized. As far as I know, my family is not Jewish, although there is this one great-great-grandmother who came from Alsace we're not sure about. That would be his grandmother.

I used to work at a mortgage bank, back when I lived in the U.S., and there are these rules and conditions printed on the back of property deeds and they include, still today, things like, "the property may not be sold or rented to Jews" and so on. It's illegal and carries no legal weight and no one pays attention to them; they're just this historical appendix hanging there. It would be impractical to remove that stuff from millions of deeds, they just pass laws making that bit void. But what I'm saying is, I don't know what I'm saying. He spoke Yiddish is all I'm saying.

When I was little I was attracted to flashier attire than I now wear. In a shop in Vancouver, when I was about ten or eleven, its name, back then, was "The Gay Blade", I remember insisting that my mother buy me a paisley shirt. She said I had what her father would call "fingerspitsengefoo". I said what's that and she said it means you're a flashy dresser. When I learned German, I found out that would correspond to the word "Fingerspitzengefühl" or, if you don't have umlauts, "Fingerspitzengefuehl" which I suppose one could translate as taste or sensitivity.

Nobody speaks Yiddish in my family anymore. We watch baseball on TV and bitch about Bush, same as everyone else.

On the way to school

I try to speak English to Gamma so she'll learn it. Sometimes she speaks it back to me, sometimes our conversations sound like this:

Gamma: (riding on my shoulders) Wieso sagt man "Glatze"? Woher kommt das Wort, eigentlich?
Me: (Sigh.) Um... I wonder...
Gamma: Ich meine... naja, von "glatt"! Natürlich. Eine Glatze ist glatt!
Me: That makes sense.
Gamma: Weil, weisst du, Papa, bei dir sieht man ein bisschen durch da.
Me: Lalalalalala.

Hammer

I've got a pattern going on here don't I. I can see it.

Right now this works as a joke, doesn't it? Just asking. In two weeks it's vapid nonsense. But for a single fortnight... a two-week window of significance.

"It was probably just some little, tiny job too, wasn't it?" he said to me when I explained how my finger got blue.

"I was hammering in a single... a single thing to keep the tortoise in, because she keeps trying to escape." A single stake-like contraption to fill a hole in the fence. Got my finger on the first swing. When I hurt myself, I'm very efficient.

It's not really that bad. It only hurts when I play a B-flat on the A string. Unfortunately, this new song I'm learning has a few of them. It goes from B-flat to D above that, so I've got my hand stretched out and press down with the right corner of the tip of my index finger, seen from above, which is the part that got smashed.

It had to be the B-flat, too, the note that, every time I play it, I have to think, why do they have to call it a B in German? In German, a B-flat is called B and B is called H. There's a historical reason for it but I prefer to complain about it.

Radio

When I was a kid, my dad had this transistor radio that got AM, FM and several short-wave bands and I used to lie in bed at night and reel through the stations and press the little button that lit up the dial.

Just kidding. I mean, not kidding, he did have a radio like that, and it played an important role in my young life. I mean, kidding that I'm going to do another appliance post this... ok, either you get the joke or... if I explain it it's not funny.

Maybe it's...

Enough cellos and enough appliances for a while, is all I'm saying.

I didn't write anything because I... for several reasons. Mainly I was in too good a mood until yesterday, when I was too cranky. And we had a three-day weekend here, and I don't do weekends.

And I was busy doing stuff. Fixing the flowerbeds in the yard. Flattening my left index finger with a sledgehammer. Well, not a sledge hammer, just this blunt, about eight-pound hammer I use to hammer in stakes and stuff.

I used to work... I worked in a cannery summers when I was in college, for a while. Squirting big machines with a high-pressure hose, mostly, washing off the algae that grew so fast in that hot, moist, deafening climate. Every now and then I let a dead mouse ride past on the conveyor belt because then the ladies found it as they picked sub-standard green beans out of the other beans and we all got a ten minute break as the heavy-duty cleaning crew came in and disinfected everything.

I was... so long ago and I remember my job title: nubbin-grader operator. There were these big rotating bins with perforated sides; sliced-up beans fell into them and were sorted by size.

There was this one guy there, a boxer, little guy with solid, big arms, told lots of stories about beating people up in bars and driving grain threshers east of the mountains, and harvesting corn and coming out covered with red mites.

One day the boss praised me as I left, for doing whatever constitutes a good job as a nubbin-grader operator, not falling off the catwalk and not getting your hand torn off by the hypnotically-rotating drum I suppose, and I was so pleased by his praise that I stepped into an open drainage trench in the concrete floor and nearly broke my leg.

Since then, I've noticed that I take praise poorly. It makes me unwary, and I stab myself in the hand with a chisel or hit my finger with a big hammer so hard the tip ruptures and blood squirts. It was actually kind of cool. Blood dripped onto my other hand and I wiped it onto the injured finger on my way into the house to get a bandaid, and I noticed it made the finger look even scarier, so I wiped it around a little more to make it look even worse before showing it to Alpha, nonchalantly. "Eh, hit myself with the hammer again." Drip, drip. She disappointed me by remaining cool.

I don't know. Other people's opinions shouldn't matter so much. Someone says something nice, I send them a mail playing dumb and asking them to elaborate, just to drag it out. They say something nasty, I ban their ISP and delete their comment, or whatever the real-life version of that is. Or not. And besides, I'm far too nice, no one ever says anything nasty to me.

I used to listen to various preachers on that radio as my family slept. The dial glowed blue and they talked about redemption or sin or whatever. Later I found a station that played Alan Watts. The summer I was 17 they played the Ramones and the Sex Pistols and I thought, Wow.

For those of you tired of Eicca's torso

I thought so.

Which Apocalyptica guy are you?
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[Via This guy]

TV

A TV that just turns right off is no fun. When I was a kid, you turned a TV off, the picture shrank to a rectangle, then a bright point that lingered for a while. Maybe it made a crackling, static noise too, or was that just our TV? And maybe the screen was covered with static electricity, so more crackle if you touched it.

If it rained alot and you couldn't go play outside and you'd already drawn every monster and dragster you could think of and got bored, you could amuse yourself for a time turning the TV on, then off again, and then back on just before that point of light disappeared for good. How long could you make that point of light last before it went black?

Now, you turn the TV off, it just turns off.

The human soul, I think, is like the old TV sets. Before you die it shrinks to a small, glowing point of light that grows weaker then vanishes. This process may take minutes or hours in some people, decades in others.

Another thing I'm thinking: if I sometimes act as if I consider myself the center of the universe, it's because I am. Anyone that pisses off is overlooking the fact that they are also the center of the universe; that the universe has as many centers as it has points of consciousness.

That's our job, being the center of the universe. God stands there at the side of a gravel road on a balmy summer evening, watching all these glowing dots hovering in the bushes like fireflies. Maybe he puts several into a jar with holes in the lid and uses it for a flashlight, shaking the jar now and then to make the dots glow harder. Maybe he squishes one and draws a glowing heart on his arm, just for the hell of it. But mostly, I think, he just watches.

Bad apple

A person will take the bad apple if it's the last one in the fruit basket and they really want fruit for lunch. I know, I did this morning. I felt a little sorry for it, too. I have this thing for underdogs.

Gamma got the remains of some olive bread, sliced, with broiled turkey breast inside, and a banana with something written on it (note to parents: don't get started with the banana notes, it seems nice at first and kids (etc.) like it, but eventually you run out of clever things to write and have a banana crisis every morning, standing there with a writing implement in one hand (in my case, a fork, I bruise the notes into the banana skin with the tine) and the banana in the other, a look of concentration on your face) and three cherry tomatoes. Alpha got similar turkey between two slices of a triangular loaf of whole wheat sort of bread, a banana with something else written on it and tomatoes. I took two pears and the apple. The pears are longish, yellowish-brownish. The apple is gravensteiny-looking, and is bad on one side where something got poked into it a few days ago and it's been going soft since then. On the other side is a bare spot where I peeled off the sticker (Great Idea! Let's put apple-shaped logos on all our apples, so when customers think of our product, they think of apples!).

The rest of the bunch was unspoiled.

Link

After reading this about a supposed link between pessimism, depression and dementia, I realized I had been just about to write the exact same thing myself, using the same words in exactly that order, but he beat me to it.

Coats of paint

I painted half the office at home then ran out of paint.
I painted white over white. You feel like going blind, try doing that, checking if you missed a spot or not.
I masked everything off, painted half the office, then ran out of paint.

White over white. Semi-gloss Polar White over cheap mix-it-yourself from powder white. The half of the office I got painted looks nice with the semi-gloss finish.
I painted from worst to best, starting around the skylight where brown stains traced down the wall from a thundershower or two that caught us with our windows open. Then I painted the corners, then the dirtiest bits, then the biggest wall.
Then part of the ceiling and parts of two more walls, then I ran out of paint.
I ran out of paint because we hadn't painted that room since before we moved in. The paint on that wall, the matte-finish paint, had been drying for twelve years or so. It really sucked up this fresh paint.
Usually I buy too much paint. For once I try to calculate exactly how much I'll need, to avoid waste, and this happens. There I stood, brush in one hand, roller in the other, hours of daylight left, staring at a clean, fresh white wall.
Once I painted the library -- I call it the library, we call it the library, I dunno; it's our posh room, the room with the books and the fancy tilework on the floor and the musical instruments and my single malts and all the other booze. Sometimes we call it the music room -- I once painted that room two different colors in a single day, a total of three or four coats of paint.
Maybe you remember.
Remember how the first green just looked different there, in that north light filtered through birch leaves, than it had in the hardware store?
Simply the wrong shade, you said.
Hurry and get whatever other shade you want, I said, remember that? As long as I have everything masked off, let's go for it.
Green over green over white.
When we moved in, every room was white. I painted every room white, and we said we'd live in them a little and decide what color we wanted to paint them.
Now the kitchen is off-white. Some ivory shade, perfect for that room.
The entry way has gone from white to yellow to sort of a salmon, and we have bolder plans for it, not to mention what I'm going to do to the furniture once I get my workshop cleared out. I want to paint the furniture -- now worn natural wood -- with oil paints. My dad did that to my bedroom furniture when I was a kid, what he called antiqueing. I thought it very cool at the time; when I see that dresser now on visits, I find it sad and chintzy. What I do to the entryway furniture will be totally different, my daughters won't find it sad when they grow up.
The living room, we have bold plans for that too. Now yellow over yellow over yellow over yellow over white, so many different shades of yellow. We're going to go orangish-reddish-brownish with that, or something. I've got a natural sponge all ready to go, I'm going to give that room a coat of something and then sponge another shade over it but it's going to look good, it's not going to look like someone bought an interior decoration how-to book.
I think we'll leave the playroom as-is for a while; that's green paint over green wallpaper we brought back from Japan with us and had a Bosnian refugee hang for us during the war. He was living with the friend of a friend and needed employment. He did a terrible job but we felt sorry for him and he told incredible stories. We gave up on turning that into a Japanese room for now, our tatami mats are mouldering in the attic and Gamma uses the room as her studio; every shade of paint is spattered on the walls, my fault, we get a little wild sometimes when we paint in there.
The stairwell is light yellow and I like it like that, nice and bright.
On the rainy days I paint, on the sunny days I fuck off or work in the flowerbeds if I must.

gmail

Anyone else getting sick of those numbers on the gmail login page, counting counting counting, ticking away the nanoseconds of your life, ticking ticking ticking, incessantly?

Pushing the cello envelope

1. Went with TH, if you want a real review ask him.
2. He's a really nice guy, BTW.
3. The opening act got the most applause at the end of their last song.
4. They weren't kidding when they told me, "wear earplugs".
5. In fact, it was the loudest concert I've been to since seeing The Who in Portland, Oregon in 1976 or 1977 or so. Even louder, I think.
6. Seriously, loudest cellos you're ever going to hear, pal. And the bass drum felt like a fricking heart massage. Fine place to have a heart attack, you wouldn't know until the music stopped. A big acoustic pacemaker.
7. Perttu can play his cello behind his head.
8. And I now understand how he could break a bow.
9. I kept thinking, "no wonder they sound so fucking hot, they use double bass rosin."
10. And also, "needs more Led Zeppelin."

Cello advisory: avoid Schiphol airport

"The carbon fiber cello. Yes, well," says Perttu Kivilaakso. "I no longer play that one."
Paavo Lötjönen chuckles. "It was..." he makes a V with his hands, "crushed by a large truck. It looked like this."

"It was in pieces," says Perttu.
"Where was that?" Paavo asks.
"Schiphol Airport," says Perttu.
"We have bad luck at Schiphol," says Paavo.

I like cellos, I like carbon, and I like fibers, so my curiosity about carbon fiber cellos is preordained and I have been on a quest to get my hands on one and draw a bow across its strings and see what it feels like and how it sounds.

Being a fan, I already have Apocalyptica tickets. Then I notice on a website that Perttu plays a carbon fiber cello, so I ask his management whether I could meet him while he is in Vienna and interview his cello. I am honest, I tell them it is for a blog. I call it a website, but I give them the URL. I don't get my hopes up. To my surprise, they readily agree.

My next surprise comes when I arrive backstage on the afternoon before the concert and everyone is nice to me. It turns out Eicca Toppinen, the founder of the band, is a big fan of metamorphosism! "We of course all understand it, being intellectuals," he says, shaking my hand.

Actually, I just made that up. He is busy brushing his hair when I arrive. The guy is a walking Wella ad. Talk about hair. They ought to get a shampoo company to sponsor them. Both he and Perttu do the hair thing in concert, the headbanging hair whip thing?

Eicca is busy brushing his hair and the fourth man, the quiet one with dark glasses, the John Entwistle only with cello one, the one whose name isn't on the website, the one I have no pictures of, is practicing classical licks on a cello from the 1700s because, as they tell me later, he has an orchestral audition coming up.

That leaves Perttu Kivilaakso, who happens to be the one I wanted to see in the first place, and Paavo Lötjönen (pronounced "Paavo Lötjönen"). They march into an interview room with three or four of their cellos and a bunch of other shit and we get to work. If you ever happen to be someone who knows very little about rock music and equally little about cellos but have to interview someone about those subjects? I highly recommend these two. They practically interview themselves, in a nice way.

Perttu is a tall, slender young man with some fancy dye work in his hair, black fingernails on his left hand and a can of Red Bull connected to a vein in his arm by IV drip. When he pronounces the word "knife" he doesn't let the letter "K" go to waste.

Paavo is a bit shorter, stockier, athletic, with short black hair and a little thing growing on his chin. Maybe he's more hyper than Perttu, maybe he just got more sleep.

In great detail and in perfect English they tell me more about cellos and their use in heavy metal music than I could have hoped for. I am now an expert. They show me their cellos, they tell me which rosins they use, they explain their pickups and their earplugs and why they use new Chinese cellos.

Basically, new Chinese cellos are cheap. When a baggage truck runs over one at Schiphol Airport, they merely laugh derisively and say, "Schiphol is as hard on cellos as we are." They also use piezo pickups on the bridge of the cello, so the actual sound of the cello played acoustically is not that important, since they don't use microphones. "We use a wireless system so we can move around on stage without tripping over cords," Paavo explains. "We're sitting down at the beginning of the set, but then we start moving around quite a bit."

They display the cellos. "Look," Paavo says, opening the first hard case. "Eicca's is the oldest, it's a few years old." All the varnish is worn off the back, and every corner that can be broken off is. More varnish is worn off the front, where they use sandpaper to remove rosin. Paavo proudly shows me the sandpaper. "We are hard on cellos," he says. They are hard on everything. He showed me the carbon fiber spike on the otherwise wooden cello. "These are good. They are very light, and very strong, but Eicca broke one."

Many of the bows they use are also carbon fiber. "I broke one on stage once," Perttu says. "The luthiers back in Finland said that was impossible, but it wasn't."

They break a lot of strings too. Half the cello strings sold in Finland every year are sold to Apocalyptica. Paavo grins. "The luthiers love us. We give them a lot of business."

They unpack their bows. Perttu takes out a carbon fiber bow that is just shredded. "This is what they look like at the end of the set," he says. They use double bass rosin on their bows for rock songs, and cello rosin on different bows, sometimes wood, for the ballads they play. I get some double bass rosin on my hand somehow. That stuff is like glue. "It is good for the attack," Paavo says. He demonstrates, playing something on the cello. "Wow," I think. "That sounds just like Apocalyptica." Then, you know, duh. He hands me the cello and the bow. I play a little. I sound like shit, but the cello just roars with that sticky rosin. You can practically pluck the strings with it, the attack is just amazing. Sounds a bit rough on the "A" string, but the lower strings just growl.

Paavo opens another case. "We also have a blue cello." They had a sponsor on their German tour, who asked them to paint a cello blue and play a few numbers on it. "I asked all the luthiers I could find, but none of them would paint a cello blue," he says. "Then I asked all the guitar makers I knew, but they all refused. Finally one gave me a number to call." It turned out to be the number of an automotive paint shop. Paavo masked the cello and they sprayed it with car paint. He grinned as he told me the story. "It's a Chinese cello, too. This used to be yours, didn't it?"

Perttu nods. "Yes, the neck was broken off and when we had it repaired it was better than before."

"Where was it broken?" asks Paavo.

"Schiphol," Perttu says. "We've lost three there."

Paavo plays some more and talks about technique. "We play a lot of fifths," he said, demonstrating. "so it looks like we have bad technique, but for fifths you have to play like this." He holds his fingers flat across the strings and plays two at a time.

Their bowing technique is different, too, with a stiffer wrist. "if you have a relaxed wrist, your arm gets very tired by the end of a set."

Perttu shows me the bridge on one of the cellos. It has a slightly different shape than an average cello bridge. "The A string must be closer to the fingerboard, and the other strings a bit higher, because of how we play."

Paavo takes out some yellow foam things and explains how they work. They are ear plugs and earphones at the same time, allowing them to hear themselves and cutting out noise at the same time. "It is the only way to play in tune," he explains. "And I have no problem with tinnitus." The sound engineer can adjust the volume and "location" of all the musicians. "In the earphones, Eicca is on my right, Perttu is on my left, the drums are behind me and all the other stuff we have on tape is about here." He waves his hands above and behind his head.

They tell me they no longer take their cellos into the cabin when they fly. After spending about $100,000 buying tickets for their instruments, they decided it would be cheaper to put them in baggage and replace the ones that break. "It's a big savings," Paavo says.

"As long as we avoid Schiphol," Perttu says.

Finally my time runs out. As they pack everything up, Paavo and Perttu say they like to play classical music when they're not on tour. They're all classically trained. Perttu, the son of a cellist, plays in the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Paavo, whose parents are both musicians, plays somewhere else. Listen, between you and me, by this time I was getting tired and frankly wasn't paying close attention anymore. Overall, though, you have to admit I did pretty good with the quotes for not recording anything and not taking any notes.

When you're playing a cello, Perttu tells me, the most important thing, more important than the sound of the cello, he says, is the sound in your head you're trying to produce. He says he tries to replicate the human voice. He's a big opera fan.

I take a few pictures of them. The woman in charge of publicity comes in to drag them to their next interview and I ask her to take a picture. Eicca walks by outside and I ask him to come in for a group picture, which he does. His hair looks great.

He asks me if I'm coming to the concert tonight. I tell him I am. "Wear earplugs," he says.

Perttu, me, Paavo, Eicca.

More on the concert in a while.

Many thanks to various people. Thanks to Novala, thanks to Joe, thanks to Anne and Francis, and special thanks to Aikku for making me an MP3 demonstrating the correct pronunciation of the band members' names.

All photos copyright me, 2005.

Contest

Guess who I just met on my lunch break?
(Those of you I have recently pestered in this connection ineligible).
Answer tomorrow, with pictures.

Draw four

We're living a more authentic life, and that includes decorating our house more boldly. Right now, we want to repaint the upstairs office. It's white and we're painting it Polar White.

It was last painted before we moved in, more than 10 years ago. Although it's a small room, it's a big job because documents and things have been accumulating all that time. Every shelf, every drawer, every cupboard is jammed full of notebooks I started, then abandoned after three or four pages; of drawings by Beta and Gamma, of their letters to Santa; of manuscripts and records and garbage. And every page must be looked at before it is saved or thrown out.

It is a terrible job, but it's coming at just the right time. I'm finding books and manuscripts I've been looking for, I'm crying over pictures of the kids and various crap they brought home from daycare.

I found a book my wife made for me before we were married, with pictures of us and various sayings written in the margins. It's nice to look at, but when I look at old pictures of myself, besides noticing how much weight I've gained, I have to think: if I would have known then how I would turn out, I would probably have killed myself.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'm not giving my young self enough credit. Maybe I would have been able to see that, although this is not exactly the way I had hoped things would turn out, I would not trade it for what I had hoped for then, either.

If I had committed suicide at the age of, say, 24, which is roughly the age I was when I was depressed and unemployed, sleeping on a friend's sofa in a cold, condemned house, I would have missed all these things. An old weekly planner has a list of stuff to bring to Alpha, pregnant with Gamma, in the hospital, a few weeks before another entry about a flight to Ireland to pick up Beta's first harp. Drawing these treasure maps for kids' birthday parties.

Day before yesterday, Saturday, I walked downstairs to hear Gamma and her friend playing UNO with each other, and talking trash like I don't know what. "Green! Shit, I don't have any green. Here, take this: DRAW FOUR!" "BAHAHAHAHA, take this, I have a draw four too! DRAW EIGHT! BWAHAHAHA." And so on. Merciless. Seven-year-old girls' capacity for evil is widely underestimated.

All the big and little things. Helping a couple girls with a flat change their tire in front of my house last night. Bringing a lost truck driver home from the gas station this morning to ask Alpha directions because I wasn't sure and he was looking a little desperate, a nice old guy with a double load of rebar; and Alpha was just out of the shower, naked, and didn't want to come downstairs, so it was pretty funny. The cat, loving our new chair, tossing and turning on it because it can't decide on a position because they're all so comfortable.

On one shelf, in a stack of papers, I found a letter I'd written to Beta when she was less than a month old, even though we didn't know if she would ever be able to read, because she'd been born seriously premature and there was a chance of brain damage. I didn't know anything when I wrote it. Will she live? Will she be healthy? Will she be happy? Those were my hopes back then. That she would turn out the way she has, that possibility was beyond my capacity to dream.

I would have to thank myself for not committing suicide. Maybe I sensed this after all, that even though I would disappoint, so far, all my hopes for myself and become a boring, stupid and sentimental old guy, none of that would matter; that there is so much more to this life and that I would grow and become able to see it sometimes. What a gift that is.

Luis & Clark?

The search for the perfect cello goes on. Wood or carbon fiber? Have tickets to the Apocalyptica concert in Vienna this coming Monday, so I'll finally hear the Luis & Clarke played by Perttu Kivilaakso, but only (greatly) amplified, and not solo, which makes it nearly impossible to judge its tonal qualities. The search goes on.

Insight

Insight comes to us at the oddest times.

Or maybe it's not odd, maybe we are more receptive when our mind is blank, when we are showering, or driving, or someone is talking to us. Like this morning, on the freeway, with perfect clarity it occurred to me that I was so hungry because I had forgotten to eat breakfast.

If I could only forget to eat Gamma's chocolate Easter bunnies, I'd be slim, as slim as... quick, who's a slim male celebrity, all I can think of is Mr. Rogers.

Finally, from Ymir's eyebrow they shaped Midgard

Person one: And the secretary said her boss and the big boss were both freaking out and cranky.
Person two: Uh huh.
Person one: So I wasn't the only one. Maybe there was something in the air making menopausal men crazy.
Person two: Uh huh. So anyway, what's-her-face said to me...
Person one: Can you talk to her without thinking of her eyebrows? I mean, you and I, together we have average eyebrows, but because we have average eyebrows to begin with. She and her husband do too, though -- I mean, she has that freaky cyborgian no-eyebrow look going, and man, his look like they just crawled onto his face at night to build coccoons. Or that they'll start burning soon and God will talk out of them
Person two: I never notice people's eyebrows.
Person one: And that other couple we met. I can't remember her eyebrows, so I assume they were within a normal range. But her husband's!
Person two: Bushy?
Person one: Like two squirrel tails. Like antennae. Like...
Person two: You sure talk a lot for it being not even six in the morning yet.
Person one: Don't they see it? Why don't guys my age trim their eyebrows? Seriously. Just a little clipping now and then. Nothing drastic.
Person two: [Sets teacup on table thoughtfully] You. Pluck. Your. Eyebrows?
Person one: Huh? Pluck? Me? No. No way. No, no.
Person two: Uh huh.
Person one: A little trim now and then...

Actually, life is pretty good, except for the zombies

I mean, the table I designed all those years ago by making a little one out of wood scraps and giving that to the carpenter is still working, we still eat breakfast on it every morning. And we still love each other most days. And you like that we have five different kinds of daffodils blooming in the flower bed in front of the house, and that makes me happy because I planted them last autumn in the hope that you would see them and smile this spring, and here you are, smiling. And the little one's across the street in her pyjamas and house slippers, stealing dandelions from the neighbor for the tortoise, who's out in the flowerbed. Jesus I hope she doesn't get hit by a distracted commuter on her way back across the street. We could use a new welcome mat, all the nubbins are starting to break off. And the front steps, largely concrete with slate over them, are still settling and now there's a half-inch gap between them and the house I'll eventually have to figure out how to fill with something sometime. And the cars need to be washed, and my tank's empty. But the weather is warm and the forsythia is blooming and the new flowerbed in back of the house is looking good. And Gamma made it back across the street and I got two braids into her hair without too much screaming.

The bright side

You know what? Fuck the bright side. Why always look just on one side of things? Look on the bright side, the glass is half full. Look on the bright side, cats can't talk -- think what a pain in the ass that would be, cats bossing you around. Look on the bright side, pal, until it's too late. Look on the bright side until, shit, zombies grabbing me! How'd those zombies get in the house? So I think it's not a bad idea to look on the dark side now and then, in case of zombies.

Some good would come of this

If only I could change perspective in time.

If only the door on the medicine cabinet would swing open a few degrees in time, revealing the madman before he buried the red fireaxe between the starlet's scapulae.

If only it occurred to you in time that no, you don't have to take this shit from this person at this time.

Shaving this morning, I paused and wondered if lonely people, when they are adults, have invisible friends or if they, like I just had in the shower [those of you who have seen American Beauty are going Ew right now, aren't you?] have whole invisible pubs they go to, where they sit down and strike up conversations, or allow conversations to be struck up, that they never would or at least never end up doing in real life.

Do you do this? Sit down for a drink in your imaginary bar and someone sits down at your table, This seat taken?, and from the way the regulars are ignoring this person, you know that they must be a bit odd if not dangerous, and very possibly dangerous. At my bar, the person is often Howard Hughes. But before I can ask him about Gwen Stefani or what it's like to wander around Death Valley he's explaining my life to me.

Saying things like, You must dig up the .38 from where you buried it in greasy rags beneath the bridge and complete your mission.

No, he says things like, What did you expect? Have an insight into your life and They give you a prize, whoever They are? Things suddenly get easier? That's magical thinking, pal.

And a bunch of other stuff.

Why it is okay to confine missionaries to ones cellar

• They're the first to forgive you, so it's okay.
• They know it's a dangerous job when they take it.
• They don't usually laugh when you tell them their sexual position is one of your favorites.
• They can still perform simple household tasks, even after the lobotomy; such as scramble eggs? Although you do usually have to remind them to stop when they're finished, and you would want to do the actual cooking yourself, due to the hot burner and all.

We apparently had missionaries at the door recently, but I was in my shop at the time and Alpha answered the door and sent them on their merry way as she is wont to do. I tend to chat with them for a while. With telephone salespeople it's the other way around. I say things like, "Whoa, the baby's let the alligator out of the tank again, gotta dash," while Alpha sometimes gets snagged.

I went out at lunch to buy paints for Gamma for the weekend, one-liter bottles of poster paints. This requires driving cross town to the big art supply store I just love so, so much, so so much, which in turn involves getting inconsolably lost in lunchtime Vienna traffic, which is not as bad as say lunchtime Mexico City traffic or lunchtime Jakarta traffic, but is bad enough for me. Also I forgot to eat lunch so I'm hungry now.

But I have the paints.

And I saw a guy washing a big bronze statue of the Pope. Scrubbing it good.