Metamorphosism

How would you like your kuufuu?

The big picture will emerge, eventually.

Impressive

When I think about it, I think the most impressive thing I've ever seen was the paint factory burning down when I was a boy. We stood in the field and watched 55 gallon drums rocket into the sky, and big orange balls of fire roll up out of black smoke, and listened to the sirens. The second-most impressive thing I've ever seen was a grown hippopotamus taking a shit at the zoo.

Anything man-made comes further down the list, unless the fire was arson.

I have no idea what my kids would say. Or my wife. I wonder. I'll have to ask them. The sunrise was pretty good this morning, too. I got up early and ran down to the Danube. It was foggy and a barge was going past, headed upstream.

What about you?

maps

Waiting for the Cankle sisters to finish gabbing and get out of my way at the store today so I could finally pay for my lunch and get back to my desk, it occurred to me how life has sometimes found it necessary to get my attention in rather dramatic ways, in order that I realize the full extent of my good fortune such as, forgive me, with my children, whom I used as flashlights when they were small, as the sun has shone out of their asses since the day they were born.

I suspect I would have taken them for granted but they were both born quite prematurely so I am grateful not only for their intelligence and humor and talents, but for other things as well such as, they can walk. They can speak. They can dress themselves.

They can see.

Or our luck with teachers. Since they began going to school, all their teachers have been very good. Once each they had poor teachers for a short time, with the result that we appreciate the rest.

Beta had a teacher in 4th grade whom she corrected, in class, in the subjects of math and English. Not sure about the other subjects.

Gamma, in first grade, had a real knucklehead, known generally as The Mummy. She has another teacher now, in second grade, who impressed me greatly. She took her class - Gamma's - and the Mummy took hers in a single bus to the zoo recently.

They split up once they got there, not sharing a common philosophy of zoo visits. The Mummy did what I would have done - marched the kids through the zoo in double rows, buddy system etc. Actually, I wouldn't just have had them hold hands, I would have employed super glue.

Gamma's teacher, you know what she did? She gave her class maps. Each kid got a map, man. Here are your maps, so you can't get lost, she said. We'll all meet back here in two hours.

And they all did.

How to make Kirschkuchen

M.I.G. Boston operative Brian shows you how to make Kirschkuchen, just in time for those ripe cherries.

Autopsy

With a large scalpel, the diener makes a Y-shaped incision in the trunk, the arms of the "Y" extending from the front of the shoulders to the xiphoid process of the sternum. From there the incision continues to the pubic bone.

Organs are most commonly removed from the trunk with the Rokitansky method which will be familiar to deer-hunters among you.

And so on.

Executive summary: last night's cello recital went well.

The lady I played my duet with and I agreed that the cello is the world's most difficult instrument. In fact, I believe there is another string instrument, native to the Indian sub-continent, which is more difficult to play, requiring the musician to stick it halfway up the asshole of a sleeping Bengal tiger and pluck con brio but it is not very popular and most musicians eventually switch to the sarod or the dilruba.

Everything went wrong at the pre-recital rehearsal, which I took as a good sign as it left nothing to go wrong at the recital; in fact, this was nearly true.

I was a bit nervous as the room began to fill. I stood in the back and watched everyone come in and sit down. I tried various relaxation techniques. I stood there, arms hanging down relaxed, breathing deeply and calmly as goldfish fluttered where my heart usually was. I imagined my arms growing heavy. I visualized tension flowing out of them, but the rivulets of perspiration flowing down them kept distracting me.

A baby in the front row got the hiccups and the mother carried it to the back of the room. I flirted with it for a while. This distracted me for a while, which was good. It is nice to know that I can still make babies smile, although I was unable to get it to stick out its tongue. A couple more minutes, I'm sure I could have.

Long story short, remember reading Mark 5:2-15?

The demons begged Jesus, "Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them."

Remember that one? It turns out you can project your stage fright into babies, and they absorb it. At least this one could. Plus, it cures hiccups.

Win-win situation.

My turn eventually came. I walked to the front of the room and took my cello from the line of like 17 cellos or something, which looks really cool (the line of cellos, not me taking the cello) and also lets you distract yourself when you're waiting by imagining them falling over, domino-style. I sat down and played my solo piece, a prayer by Beethoven, accompanied by piano. I had no major screwups and amid generous applause put back my cello and returned to where I had been standing. After a few more performances, none of them perfect although several were better than me (kids who have been taking lessons longer than I have), it was time for the final piece of the evening, a schmalzy duet. We both played that one quite well. Then it was over and my cello partner said, gee that was fun we should do that more often and I said, yes we really should. Gamma gave me a hug and my wife congratulated me. We went to the Italian restaurant but it turns out to be closed Tuesdays so we were going to go to the Japanese restaurant but Opa had been there for lunch with Gamma so we went to a Chinese restaurant instead. Where I had a large beer.

Alpha said a friend of ours, a doctor who I am sure during the course of his medical training has dissected his share of corpses, and also an amateur musician (that is, the doctor is an amateur musician, I doubt he has dissected amateur musicians, but anything's possible) who was there watching his daughter play cello (she was one of the good ones, the best, I think, although she was not playing the hardest piece) said that I was "trying too hard to play the right notes". Which, you know, wtf, that's the point right? Play the right notes is one of the basics of music, I always thought. But I suppose he had a point, I may have been concentrating too much on intonation and not enough on bowing, or breathing, or sitting on the edge of the seat and proper posture etc.

It was good to hear some honest, knowledgeable criticism, because all the encouragement being given to me by friends and acquaintances (we knew everyone in the room; if I didn't know them then Alpha had gone to school with them or Gamma knew them or her best friend K. who she dragged along for the ride knew them; they sat there like two little old ladies during the recital, studying the program and commenting on the kids and their choice of music and which ensemble they played in at the music school etc.) and even strangers, such as this one hot blonde mom was, although well-meant, after a certain point somehow belittling or demeaning, or depressing, because it's an uncomfortable thing, learning a musical instrument as an adult, at least learning it among children like that. You find yourself in a childlike role. It's nothing I can't bear, but to be honest I'd rather learn among people my age, or at least have people tell me, look, I appreciate you are having fun and fulfilling a dream and overcoming fear and that's all fine, but you sounded like crap tonight and this is why...

But that's not a choice I have and a minor detail. Overall, I had fun, and am getting better.

Positive affirmations

• Tomorrow my cello recital will be over and I shall still be alive
• If this flopping goldfish feeling in my chest is not a heart irregularity that kills me
• I know the music, the recital will go fine.
• Playing before other people can be a source of pleasure.
• Even if I make a mistake or two, no one will notice as long as I manage not to grimace and shake my head.
• Probably my hands won't sweat, and even if they do, that just makes it that much easier to slide my fingers up and down the strings.
• I will remember to breathe.
• I will remember to acknowledge the audience after performing this time, and not flee the stage blindly.
• My new cello will sound so fucking hot, especially following a bunch of cute little kids sawing half-sized Chinese instruments in two.
• I will remember to breathe. I will relax. I will not tremble noticeably. And even if I do, I can sell that as vibrato.

War stories

So the cello duet is beginning to sound a bit like music. The prospect of performing at the recital no longer feels 100% like a looming execution. Now it feels like standing on a diving board blindfolded, not knowing if the pool is empty, full of water, or full of water snakes. I'm saying, it could go either way. We rehearsed the piece several times, five or ten times, and it sounded different each time. A couple of times it sounded fine. One nice thing is, when I really crank my cello, it sounds great. It's not a bad instrument I have. My old rental cellos were like asking a girl to dance and she stands up and has a cast on her foot. This one is like being at a party and everyone is funnier and more charming and you're wondering why they invited you, and will you ever be that funny.

I stopped home after work to pick up the cello before heading to the rehearsal, and Gamma and her friend were like two girl-sized spinning tops made of highly-compressed sugar, spice and 99.6% pure evil. I don't know what Opa gave them to eat. They hid his slippers outside and when he went outside to look for them they locked his ass out of the house and hid the key.

Stuff like that. After he had been nice enough to help them invent cherry juice, squeeze cherries thru a sieve, add a little lime juice, mineral water and sugar. He made me taste it. They washed their hands and used clean implements this time, he assured me. It's safe.

I got back late, checked on Gamma in bed, and mixed Opa and myself gin tonics. It would be a shame to let the expensive limes go bad, is my feeling. It turns out he likes gin tonics. Yeah, I'll have one of those, he said, when I offered it to him.

We talked about mushroom hunting in Carinthia where he is from. We both like looking for chantrelles on rainy days. July ought to be mushroom season there, he thought. And thinking about that got him telling stories about his childhood, when he went without shoes until it snowed, so as to make them last longer, and ate polenta three times a day, with milk if they had it, and meat once a month at most.

He talked about an Allied four-engine aircraft tried to crash land in the mountains near where he lived, but just crashed, and exploded, having been unable to drop leftover bombs first, and how the motors continued on up the hillside several hundred meters and body parts hung from trees. They ran up and looked at the crash site, he and his friends, and scavenged anything they thought looked good while ammunition still exploded around them. One boy carried ammunition belts around his neck. My father-in-law grabbed a life vest.

They threw a dye marker in the creek and the water turned red and a few minutes later the police came, looking for survivors and the boys played dumb.

After the war, they were in the British zone. Once a British soldier drove into the village on a big motorcycle looking for something. When he parked it and walked off they pushed it into the creek and watched from the woods when he came back and looked for it and finally found it and tried to retrieve it, a little puny guy they said, he had a tough time with it.

Some Hungarians passed through town once he said. They had fought with the Germans and wanted, after the war, to avoid being taken prisoner by the Soviets. They had everything, he said. Field kitchen, hospital, 50 or so head of longhorn cattle. Many horses. They stayed in the village for maybe six months. Playing cops and robbers in the hills, he showed me the scar on his wrist, he fell down a steep slope and slashed his wrist open on a rock. It squirted, he held it shut and ran to the Hungarians, who sewed it up for him. After the cattle grazed everything to the ground, they began slaughtering them. They couldn't eat all the beef themselves, everyone in the village got some, he said.

They moved on, and eventually surrendered to the British, who told them they were taking them to a camp but instead handed them over to the Soviets. There is a high bridge, he told me. Now it's a freeway, you hardly notice when you drive over, back then it was more impressive to cross. The British drove them across the bridge, the Soviets waiting on the other side. Many of the Hungarians chose to jump off the bridge. Maybe 200 meters down to the water, he said.

I never eat rabbit, he said. He raised rabbits, but never ate any. Other people ate them. He had a hutch outside. They grazed in a field during the day and went into the hutch at night. He kept one in the kitchen. It used to shit under the credenza and his mother would scold it. And she got the maddest when it would piss on the floor.

Once they found dozens of barrels in a tunnel where creek water flowed through the closed-down iron smelting thing by the iron ore mine, water that had been used to cool the ovens. They had no idea what was in the barrels, which had been stashed there by retreating German soldiers. Twenty minutes later the entire village was in the tunnel with buckets, carrying petroleum home, for lamps, and oil, and fuel.

Once he was standing on a bridge over a creek and a kid shot him in the forehead with a slingshot. We used pieces of slag for our slingshots. I fell into the water, he said. They pulled me out. They also hunted trout with slingshots. They dammed up the creek and waited until trout gathered in the pool. Trout move up and down in still water, he said. You just wait until they are close to the surface and shoot them. I got a couple that way. We built campfires and roasted them. Unfortunately we had no salt.

Once a kid shot a rock with a machinegun he found and fragments ricocheted and injured the kid's eyes.

My father-in-law has a shrapnel scar in his leg from hunting fish with grenades they found once, but he didn't get around to telling me that particular story last night.

He talked about all these things, war from a kid's perspective, for maybe an hour. All the ice cubes in our drinks melted. Then we went to bed.

What is this thing you Earthlings call "calm"?

Do you ever wake up in the morning feeling like a pale nematode injected with radioactive dye and squeezed flat between two microscope slides?

On my planet, that's feeling good. It's like, ah, kick back between these slick slides baby and feel the warmth of that radioactive barium, no worries, nothing.

A friend loan me success tapes. CDs. Success coach yak at me on commute into work. I think, give it a chance. Give it a chance. What the hell, give it a chance. Breathing, affirmations, power dude. I sit down at work feeling a new state of power and hope, and open bottle of mineral water and spray myself good. The secret to doing that, is when it happens, you get it down low, below the keyboard, otherwise the tech guy comes in and says, show me this keyboard that's not working and he opens it up and sees the liquid and laughs at you and how it smells like nacho chips and pringles.

So, I'll listen to the full series, but eh. Plus I miss getting to work and having no memory of driving through the woods or seeing any deer.

But wtf. Give it a chance. It's an experiment.

On my planet barium dye is like an electric blanket.

Bilocation, II

So how do you feel?

Waiting for traffic to move on I found myself thinking of a jellybean composed of pure tension and slapstick with the mass of a planet lodged in my stomach, between my navel chakra and my solar plexus chakra.

So, it sounds like you...

Closer to my navel.

Like a made-up movie called "The End of the World" produced by Jerry Bruckheimer starring Louis De Funes at his most apocaplectic.

What, your wife away on business again?

Japan. Until Sunday. She picked a busy week to go away, but not that much busier than any other week. How does she do it? She can bilocate I think. Unlike me. So while she effortlessly does three things at the same time in three different places, I find myself rushing around.

So you're frustrated you can't whine, only suffer.

I find myself, you know, to get papers at the consulate I don't simply drive to the consulate and get papers, like she would in a similar situation. Or call them and have them send the papers. I find myself turning right at the no-right-turn sign, in front of a streetcar, to find myself not only facing the wrong way down a one-way street, but facing a police car to boot. So I make a quick left, thinking, on the one hand, if they send me a ticket, as Austrian police like to do, my wife will get it, this being her car I'm driving as my father-in-law is trying to get the exhaust fixed on the Dobló; but on the other hand, if they send me a ticket, my wife will get it.

That means...

And then I go to the consulate and find just how sensitively they have calibrated their metal detector. Like, try to get in in with a Prince Albert and they know about it. And so the guy has me standing there at the front of the line emptying my pockets of like everything and it strikes me that somehow I ended up with lots in my pockets, like this ID card and that ID card and that ID card is on a chain which is wrapped around not only this ID card but also this pen and that fresh-breath-spray thing. And glasses and wallet and so on.

No cell phone, though, as my cell phone is broken.

But the metal detector still beeped. It's your belt buckle, he said. He frisked me and let me in. After which everything went smoothly. I went to the end of the line and rapidly got the idea to make sure it was the right line. The hot young woman on crutches in front of me said she was just waiting for a visa. I looked, and the windows for the papers and forms I needed had no line. So I got my stuff quickly and drove back to the office without breaking hardly any more traffic laws.

Then...

Then, work, and leave early to get kid from swimming lessons, and brush and dry long wet hair and rush to get something to eat before a concert and then rush home and throw her into bed. Then, brief daze and a glass of gin with my father-in-law who is living with us again, in sort of a If Life Gives You Fathers-in-Law Make Them Into Drinking Buddies thing. Then bed. Then get up too tired to run. Do stuff. Go to work.

Et cetera

Et cetera.

Notes to a young man contemplating fatherhood

If you are not a father you can't know what it is like. It can't be imagined. What you're imagining when you think you're imagining fatherhood is not fatherhood, it's just you sitting there, or driving along in your car, or taking a shower or shaving, imagining fatherhood.

Fatherhood is way different. It's nothing you can imagine. Whatever you can imagine, that's not it. It's always a surprise, and it's a different surprise for every one of us so what one man says about fatherhood, that's not what it would or will be like for you, either.

For you, it will be different.

For you, it will be as follows:

Take Father's Day, for example. It will find you exhausted from going to the opera the previous night with a bus load of parents and children, Magic Flute, at the Volksoper. So tired that you wake thinking, they ought to do a "Berenstain Bears and Too Much Opera" book. Where father bear, ahem, nods off during the first act and the kid bears are totally into it and mother bear too, and in the intermission father bear takes a quick leak in the men's room and then spends the rest of the time waiting in the line for the ladies room, keeping mother bear and children bear company, because the lines for restrooms during intermissions are so much longer for women, so long in fact that the women are not done with the toilet by the time the show starts again and they have to find their way back to the seat in the dark with the usher criticizing them for being late instead of helping them, welcome to Vienna. And in the book, the opera would be very, very cool. The bears would all have great seats, way high up but with a great view of the orchestra pit, including the cellos, and the singers would all be grand, especially the Queen of the Night, thank god, since she has the most important piece to sing, and several other singers would be quite hot and easy on the eyes as well as ears, so father bear stays awake during the second half.

So tired, in fact, that you never really have the feeling that you wake up entirely for the rest of the day.

Father's day catches you painting the living room, more of the cool paint job you are working on, pink undercoat, brown sponged over it. It will look better and better. Your wife will think, eh, maybe too much of a good thing, but when you put the furniture back in place and the houseplants it starts to look better, everything in perspective so you figure once the curtains are back on their rods, the curtains your wife washed, the huge yellow floral print curtains, then the room will look good and your wife will be reassured.

Father's day will come and your wife will go to the bakery to bring you baked goodies in the morning.

She will also try to iron the curtains but will find it difficult so you will give it a try and discover a talent for patiently ironing gigantic curtains. Hours later you will hang them from the rods and the room will indeed look not only good, it will remind you of nothing more than a hotel room you can't afford, which when you think about it etc etc.

Father's day will find you eating an ice cream cone at the gelateria with your youngest daughter and walking around town, which except for the bakery and the gelateria is pretty much closed down for Sunday.

It will come, that day, and find you thinking, I ought to run but I'm too fucking tired. And it will find you helping your daughter to braid brightly-colored plastic cords, which she then hangs from her hair, because she likes the tight way you braid them. And it will also find you opening a card drawn by her, with several pages of drawings of dolphins (aha, you will think, remembering a week before when she had asked you what your favorite animal was) and "happy father's day" in English and the rest in German, the list of things she loves that you do for her, including telling made up stories and making tiger pudding. And she will explain she wanted to make everything in English but didn't know how to spell it and neither did her teacher.

Father's Day will find your wife's cellphone ringing while she's away running and your youngest daughter will answer it and it will be your other daughter calling from France, just for the hell of it not because of Father's Day, which she forgot. When you tell her what day it is, she will apologize and wish you a happy one. Her voice will seem higher and different and you will realize she's not a little girl anymore and hasn't, in fact, been one in a long time.

And you will think, eh. You will think the same thing all fathers think, except for maybe a couple at that end of the bell curve and a couple at the other end.

Father's Day will find you playing cards with your youngest daughter, rummy, because rummy is a good introductory card game and you hope to have her playing p0ker by the time you visit relatives in the States next month.

Father's Day will find you kissing her goodnight and missing the other one. And it will find you pretty much happy with the way things have turned out.

Kr3sse1gel

Kresse = cress
Igel = hedgehog
Kr3sse1gel (you understand I want to avoid perverts searching for the word arriving at my site) = dinky popup image

Thanks it looks fantastic, I said, when it was all over.

It was a hard haircut this time. She kept talking to me. Talking, talking. While the other stylist was talking and talking to a lady getting her hair colored, and the helper was talking to another woman getting her hair colored. Each of them holding something in her hand going buzz. And probably a radio going. In a foreign language, albeit one in which I am conversant.

I.e. I said, what? a lot. And Pardon me? And sometimes even, yeah, not really knowing what I was yeahing.

I really have trouble following a conversation when there is background noise, is what I'm saying.

So say something in Japanese, she said.

Hrm, I said. Eh, like what? I hate it when people ask you things like that. I can never think of anything. I ought to have a standard phrase at the ready, leaned against the door of my mind like an umbrella on a rainy day to whip out when people say that. In German, I suppose, I shall use the phrase, "Hau di iba di Heisa, du Zniachtl," which Babelfish won't help you with. Japanese, hrm.

Say, I like the haircut, she said.

Eh, I said. Right at that point I was at the stage in the haircut where they have you looking like Beaker from the Muppets before fixing you?

She finally got me to say "how are you."

So anyway, I was happy with the haircut. I paid, left and went to meet my wife and daughter at a music school concert. Actually a concert, too fancy to be a recital. My wife just looked at me and got this charming look on her face she gets when she doesn't like my haircut. Sort of, you dork, you've gotten a short haircut again although you know I prefer it longer, but in a sweet way.

The first thing Gamma said was, Dad, you look like a Kr3sse1gel!

Bees, birds

What part makes the pollen? Gamma asked me.
I pointed to the flower. There, I said. That's called the stamen. It's like the flower's penis. The bee flies in looking for nectar and picks up pollen from the stamen and flies to the next flower and some pollen gets on the second flower's pistil, which is like that flower's vagina and ovaries and so on, I said.
Okay, Gamma said.
Honey, aren't you supposed to use flowers and birds and bees as a metaphor for human reproduction and not the other way around? Alpha said.

CDCDCD

How long have you been taking cello lessons she said.
Going on five years I said.
That's cool she said.
We gave my father cello lessons for his retirement present and he still loves them she said.
That's nice I said.

Neat how she got father and retirement into the same sentence like that.

Haircut appointments often trigger a crisis for me. Thoughts of makeovers.

In fact it's simple: grey = short, end of story.
In fact it's simple: forget about the hair and lose fifteen pounds.
In fact it's simple: who gives a shit, look at Tom Waits or Billy Bob Thornton. Look at Harrison Ford, on the other hand: all the money in the world and he reminds me of someone's great-aunt.
On the other hand, look at Kevin Spacey. Or my dad. He could play Billy Bob's dad in a movie.

Double positive

I heard an anecdote about a university lecturer remarking that a double negative can result in a positive statement, but a double positive can never result in a negative statement, to which someone in the back of the room replied, "Yeah, yeah."

We will be immortal by the year 2050, according to a scientist quoted in an article I read at breakfast this morning. Or our children will. By then, PlayStations will be roughly as smart as people, and we will be able to upload our minds, and live forever, except for virii, spam attacks and denial-of-service hijinks; I suppose the BSOD will take on new significance, too.

Eternal life in a PlayStation, cool.

How, exactly? And what do you mean by eternal? And what happens to me? And what do I mean by me?

It's 2050 and we have Mig-in-a-box now, writing, you know, the usual stuff. I saw a deer, no I saw a dozen deer. In the fog. It was so cool. Or, cello is hard. Or, hold your mouth real close to the microphone and say, "Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy." Say, "Alessandro Marcello, Antonio Vivaldi, Accademia Bizantina, Tiziano Bagnati." So for everyone else, I'm immortal. But how do I see that? Ask the box, and it says, "yeah, sure, I'm immortal pal, WTF, ROTFL, heh." So who's rotting in the ground, then? And how does he see all of this?

Practically twins

I listen to her radio show on my way into work. She has a classical music show on that radio station I recently started listening to because it spends an hour on the news in the morning and in the evening, not just 5 minutes like the other station I used to listen to, and the music they play is so eclectic, as eclectic as you can be playing serious, classical-type music all the time, plus a show in the evenings, coinciding with my evening commute home, where they play other things, jazz or serious songwritey stuff or odd music from around the world.

Every day I get home thinking, "if I could only remember the name of that guy they just profiled on the show I'd dash right out and buy his CDs if they carried his CDs at the local CD store which I doubt." In Vienna, I suspect, if you have a classical music show on a classical music station, chances are that you are one of the ten or hundred most-informed people in the city (and therefore in the world) classical music-wise. At least as far as radio announcers go.

Also, a couple of the female DJs at this station, including her, sit real close to the microphone and you can hear them breathe and smack their lips and stuff when they talk, which adds greatly to one's morning (and evening) classical music experience.

This morning I was listening to her show again. I assume she broadcasts live. So we were speaking at the same time. She was saying, piano, affetuoso, to whomever she says it, into the microphone so close to her face, "that was Lu1gi B0ccherini, La Mus1ca N0tturna delle str4de di M4drid..." as I was saying, to the car stopping for no reason in front of me, fortissimo, agitato, "Fuck, will you fucking go you fucking fuck, fuck!"

That led me to consider the other things we have in common besides speaking at the same time. We both began learning cello as adults; we even have the same teacher. Stranger still, we're playing the same song at the same recital two weeks from now, at the same time!

In a way, it reminds me of the fairy tale about the princess and the swineherd, the one where the swineherd is stuck at the bottom of a well with his cello, hip-deep in slimy mud, and the princess lowers herself halfway down the well sort of propped on the bucket and he climbs halfway up and they play a duet there before she climbs back out and he slides back down into the mud.

On the other hand, it doesn't. I met her last night and had all this in my mind but when we played the piece, we were just playing the piece. She knows everything about it, I know nothing and during the playing none of that matters, or not much. We each have our advantages and disadvantages - she has her broad and deep knowledge, but also gets frustrated knowing how it is supposed to sound, I have my beginner's mind, but also my ignorance.

I suppose we will survive the recital if we practice like hell between now and then. We both have relatively nice instruments. The woman accompanying us on piano was astounded at how nice they sounded.

It was the first time either of us had played with another cellist. It turns out to be really hard. The hard part for me, besides rhythm and playing right in general, is intonation. In particular, it's easy to hear when someone's intonation is wrong, when they're not playing exactly the right note, but it's really hard for me to know if it's me or the other person, and if it's me, whether I'm too high or too low.

Unfortunately it's bad form to stop during a song and get your bearings and then start up again, so I just sort of notice where the notes are that I'm relatively certain of, and use those to get back on track when I suspect it might be me who's falling apart.

I'm also playing a prayer, I might have mentioned it, by Beethoven, just me and the piano, that is a bit of a problem right now because it has all these long notes, like a whole note plus a half note or even four whole notes in a row that are theoretically to be played with a single bow, except my bow is, right now, about one whole note long, max, and so I keep running out of bow. But I'm getting that figured out too. Talking to myself while playing, things like, Play faster, asshole! or, Easy on the bow! Or, Calm down, it's only a recital.

Run 2

Half-hour one way, half-hour back again. Early in the morning, about five o'clock. Ran out of the village and along the bike path between the fields and the creek, fog still rising from both in the sunrise. Made it past the strip mall but not quite to the McDonald's sign, which is my half-hour goal that I haven't made yet. Felt wet from the fog. Turned around and ran back home again. The sun was up by then, burning off the fog so things looked less mysterious on the way back. A white duck watched me by the bridge.

Oh, and...

Gamma was practicing an Irish song on the piano recently and I played the bass part on the cello with her and afterwards she's all like, "man, that sounds a lot better with cello." And I'm all like, "what doesn't?"

It was, for me, as nice as if an Italian poet had given me a book of his poems.

Recital

Speaking of allergic rashes, I have a cello recital coming up later this month. My cello meister has assigned me two pieces, one a Beethoven prayer that is to be played together with a piano (I play one part on the cello, that is, while someone else plays another part on the piano). It sounds alright when both instruments are playing; that is, it sounded alright when I was playing my part on the cello and my teacher was playing the other part on the school cello, slow and meditative and pretty. My problem is practicing it at home, because my part consists of a lot of long notes, long long notes where you run out of bow if you're not careful, and doesn't have a lot of rhythm or structure on its own, not that I can bring out. So I sort of lose the narrative thread, so to speak, when practicing it at home. My teacher warned me this would happen. He gives me tips on how to work around this problem, but I usually forget what they are by the time I practice and just mush around until the next lesson.

The other piece is one part, the easy part I suppose, of a cello duet. I learned it for another recital I ended up not being able to participate in, to my great relief, several months ago. I tried it again in class last Monday and it went very well, which made my teacher happy cause, you know, I didn't forget it in all that time! So I didn't have the heart to mention that I had been secretly practicing it now and then because I hate the idea of paying money to learn music and then forgetting it again before I learn the next piece. There are a couple tricky spots in the piece, tricky for me, pieces where I lose track. Luckily the other person, the person playing the other half of the duet is another adult student, a nice lady with her own classical music show on my favorite station. I listen to her in the mornings on my way to work sometimes. She has a pleasant voice and is a classical music Eloi to my Morlock. She has, I suppose, a problem attaining the state of Beginner's Mind when playing, which would be the one problem I don't have.

My in-laws moved back home last night. As I practiced, my mother-in-law mentioned she would miss the cello practice. I was shocked, as she has not an ironic bone in her body, and it didn't sound like sarcasm.