Metamorphosism

The book I mentioned, the problem with Zen, and my kid, in no particular order

The book I mentioned an entry or two earlier, I didn't mention the title because the whole joke was that is how I respond to most of the books I read, while I'm reading them. Once I finish them I might be disappointed, or not, but during the reading part, I'm rarely so critical.

This book, though, because you asked, was called, is called, something with archetypes. No, wait, something with Heroes. It's about archetypes. Hang on, let me google it at amazon.

Awakening the Hero Within, it's called.

Sorry if that link doesn't work, I can't be arsed to see if I copied it right.

I shop for books by walking down the aisle with a basket and buying whichever books jump in as I walk past. You know how some books find you? Reading this book, this is all new to me, this stuff. Maybe you are well-versed in archetypes and that sort of thing. I have been a Parcival fan for a long time, and the author mentions Parcival a lot. Same with the Grail legend. So I dig it on that level, it gets through to me in that way. Any psychology book, many of them discuss the same thing in different ways. What's important is that a book gets through to you in your present situation. This one is getting through to me at the moment.

Speaking of psychology, my daughter had a job taking tickets at a local exhibition last weekend. We have both had that job when we were younger, too, good summer job, and Alpha and I both mentioned to her how lots of people would try to buffalo their way inside without tickets in one way or another. Beta is really hard-assed, though, and let only the cute boys in, and only the most charming of those.

Otherwise, she was officer Beta. She said a weekend on that job and you didn't need to study psychology, you had already learned everything you would need in life.

So this book. The author says a few interesting things. She talks about the development of ego, self and soul as a journey, what she calls the hero's journey. Joseph Campbell gets mentioned. This and that. One of the interesting things she says is that the ego is the container for the other stuff learned and experienced along the journey, and that it must be developed before you can develop self and soul. And not, annihilate the ego and stuff. Not at first, any way.

Indeed, you have some of these spiritual disciplines, the ones that talk about doing away with the ego in one way or another; we sometimes forget that a lot of them are not in a big hurry to do that, though. You have to go through a long process before you reach that point.

This isn't a book report. If that sounds like a book for you, take a look at it in the library or something. I'm only half done with it, but I'm still liking it.

At one point she mentions the Zen idea of doing one thing at a time. When you sweep, just sweep. Sweeping I can manage. Same with shoveling snow or digging a hole in the ground. When I do those things, I'm right there doing it and that's all I'm doing.

Same with eating. When I eat, people always say I make it look so good. I'm not concentrating on eating, exactly. I'm just eating, period, all of me. Not just chewing with my mouth while I think about one thing and take a call on my cellphone and watch something else out the window.

But this whole idea falls apart when I think about taking a crap and reading the newspaper, because those two things so go together. I can't possibly take a crap without reading the newspaper. Or: getting a talking-to from your wife and thinking about something else. How can you not do that? Or driving: if I was driving when I was driving, I'd remember more of the commute to work, I think. I don't know what I'm doing when I'm driving, but it's obviously not driving. I get to work and am all, how did I get here? You know that feeling?

On the other hand, there's my daughter, taking tickets. Yesterday was the last day of the exhibition and some guy was trying to get inside without letting her tear his tickets. No idea what his plan was for the tickets, giving them to someone else so they could get inside too or something. He was yelling at my daughter, she said, insulting things, disparaging her ability to comprehend the situation, that sort of thing. When you're 16, or a woman, people sometimes think they can buffalo you. But thing is about Beta, when she's tearing tickets, she's tearing tickets. So she tore off his ticket stubs and that was it.

It's the ego development, I think. That's one of the core things that I like about this book. Being grounded in a strong sense of self as a point of departure for everything else. Alpha and I were talking about Gamma and what a negotiator she is and how she often gets what she wants because she knows exactly what it is that she wants. And how a person who knows what they want is unstoppable to the extent of their ability and possibilities. And how that was always one of our parenting goals, to give our children strong egos and strong senses of self and strong knowledge of what they want and how it seems that we have been successful in that, only of course, who knows if it was due to anything we did that they turned out like that or if that's just the way they turned out, independently of us?

Breakthrough

Having for a good part of my life alternated between periods of low self-esteem and irritating grandiosity, I only recently realized that it's possible to have both simultaneously.

In other news, whoever is responsible for that sort of thing announced recently that slug density hereabouts had reached a high of 75 m² (according to what a doctor friend told us when we picked Gamma up from a birthday party yesterday). Alpha and I took a walk along a creek down to the Danube yesterday and I can only say they were right.

That could be a real racket, couldn't it. Slug counter.

You have to read this book I'm reading

Me: You guys have to read this book I'm reading, it's really interesting.
Alpha: Pfff. Hah. Snicker.
Beta: Bwahahaha. Snicker.
Me: I say that about every book I read, don't I.
Me: But anyway. Seriously, this one is really good.
Alpha: Yeah...
Beta: ... yeah. Snort.

A maggot

Your hand is palm-down on the table. My hand. My hand is palm-down on the table. On my forearm, near the elbow, a maggot is sticking out of my skin. I grasp it gently with my other hand and pull it out.

It doesn't resist. It doesn't hang on, that is. If I release the pressure, it starts sliding back in, though.

Pulling a maggot out of my arm is a good feeling. The idea that there is a maggot in your arm might be disturbing, but here I am pulling one out of my arm, which is a good thing. Completely positive.

The more I pull out, the bigger the maggot turns out to be. It's not so much that it is growing, really; more like it was a lot bigger all along than I thought it was.

It's a maggot as big as a ferret. Sort of pale blonde-white. Like two kilos of sentient fat. A guy from work who turns out to know a lot about maggots helps me pull it out. The more we pull out, the better I feel about it.

Nothing like getting rid of a big maggot.

Messages

This is fun.

Happy birthday, Mr. Bradbury

Rain is my favorite weather, so I'm enjoying this summer so far. Of course, I have enough empathy to feel sorry for sun-lovers, in much the same way that I feel a little sorry for cannibals who are upset that it is illegal to eat people.

Whenever it rains as much as it has been lately, I am reminded of Rod Steiger on the surface of Venus in the film The Illustrated Man, based on the book by Ray Bradbury.

Besides being one of my favorite actors, Rod Steiger is also the best-connected actor in Hollywood (in the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon sense) even better-connected than Kevin Bacon, for example, because has acted in so many different kinds of movies, according to someone who researched that.

And Bradbury was my favorite author when I was a kid devouring the sort of fiction he writes.

Anyway. Rain.

We had people over for dinner yesterday. Including a friend of Beta's, whom we did not expect. As Gamma said to her two friends staying over, whom we also did not expect, "the French people are coming, and their friends, and their friends' kids." I think there were 14 of us. I stood outside in the rain and barbecued chicken satay, with the grill under the eaves of the house so the rain wouldn't put out the coals. It made the side of the house a little hot but nothing caught on fire and the food was good.

Afterwards everyone played whatever musical instruments they played. Beta played the harp. A French girl played the piano. I put on a single-malt whiskey tasting thing for some of the guests, then I played my tin whistles.

Afterwards Beta broke boards with her fist. (Yesterday afternoon, preparing for our guests, we discovered that it's fun to break boards with your fist. ) I don't recommend doing this without proper supervision. I can just see someone punching an oak board against the grain and breaking their wrist. Impressed her little sister and her friends.

MT export

I've got a problem with my MT. Any of you have any idea about this? I keep trying to export all my entries from this blog, to have them all offline in a single file, but the file transfer (export) keeps petering out after about 700 entries (I have over 2000 at the moment), around 3 or 4 MB I guess. I've tried one solution I found in the MT forum but have been unable to get it to work.

Rigger

I used to be the neighborhood rigger. You wanted someone tied up, you came to me. I was the go-to guy for all your bondage needs.

I was seven at the time. Six, seven. My career lasted several years starting in kindergarten or first grade.

How many tender pale wrists did I tie together with jumpropes in kinniegarden? Not all that many. Sherry I remember, and Tracy and a couple more in school I guess; and a few more in the neighborhood, mostly visiting cousins of friends and stuff like that.

Usually I tied them to the apple trees at recess, or to the climbing bars. A couple times kids tied Sherry and me together to the apple tree, but they weren't very good at tieing knots and I got loose fast and knocked their heads together. It was part of the game. I was a hero of great power at that point in my life.

I was a one-trick pony when it came to knots. I was not really a knot expert, I just tied a single knot - granny knot, I guess, over and over. That was my secret: patience and persistance. No one got loose because I tied so many knots. Also, I got repeat customers because I didn't tie you up so tight that the circulation was cut off or anything.

Times tables, I'm thinking, are what put an end to my career as a rigger. Around the third grade I started concentrating on memorizing the times tables, and then suddenly a few years had gone by and it was awkward to say to a girl, Let's go tie you up. Plus, I did not go into Boy Scouts and after a certain age no one is impressed by granny knots anymore, no matter how many you tie.

I might buy a knot book and try to figure out a few new ones now, but I find the diagrams really hard to figure out on my own. It's hard enough to learn a new way to tie my necktie.

Sometimes when things get boring at the office I find myself thinking about Sherry and Tracy, wondering who's tieing them up now.

How to say yo mama in Austrian

I got my hair cut yesterday. I could write an entire post about getting my hair cut, couldn't I, but that's not what this is about. I could also write an entire entry about how I am deaf at the hair place -- the whirring implements, the stereo going, the people talking, the nasty acoustics in the room, which is in an old building with arched ceilings and meter-thick walls -- and how my inability to hear conversation in that room, combined with the unfamiliar accents of both the stylist (from the Austrian province of Burgenland) and the apprentice (from Macedonia originally, speaks great German, but with a slightly unfamiliar accent) leads to my seeming stupid due to numerous nonsequiturs etc. But that is not what I meant to write about, nor about how although my wife said nice things about the haircut when I got home, and I liked it, Gamma made gagging sounds and said "you look like Ken! Only with grey hair. The Barbie Ken." She has a gift for cutting to the quick of the heart of any situation. Beta said, when she saw me later, "you get your hair cut?"

What I wanted to talk about was, after parking my car and on my way to the little machine to buy a little slip of paper that said how long I was allowed to park on the street, I saw K. riding towards me on his bicycle.

K. I love. He is this guy in what, his sixties, very trim grey hair, trim artistic-looking goatee, always nattily dressed. He is a musician (violin? or cello? Not sure.) and a music-lover, a music maven, full of anecdotes about various composers and musicians of his acquaintance and always a story about some concert he just saw. He has commissioned compositions before, paid composers to write stuff for him, that sort of thing.

"Hi, K.," I said.
"Hello there," he said, stopping his bike. We shook hands. He asked me how I was. I wasn't sure (after a day in the office I am often not sure), so I just asked him how he was instead of giving him an answer.
"Oh, just got back from Salzburg," he said. "Saw [some opera, maybe Don Giovanni] there, and a couple other things."
This is where, in the past, he has always gone into detailed description and analysis of the performance. But this time, I said:
"Oh, that's really nice. My wife just saw Mitridate there. We had a cellist friend in the orchestra."
That was the first time anything I'd said had impressed K. He always wears this mask of congenial, cultured gentlemanliness, but that was briefly replaced by pure enthusiasm.
"I've heard that was really good!" he said. "That was a real event!"
He couldn't think of anything more to say after that, because he is used to topping whatever you say, and he had nothing to beat that.
He rode off and I went and put the little slip of paper on my dashboard and went and got my hair cut.
First, though, I wandered around a little, because I still had 15 minutes to kill before my appointment. The bookstore/CD shop smelled too musty so I left there after 5 minutes. I walked around outside in the semi-sunshine like a cop killing time before the end of his shift, idly twirling my-wife-just-saw-Mitridate like a billy club, back and forth, waiting for someone else to ask me how I was.

Music II

Went to a concert at an art museum last night, with Alpha and the friend we go to interesting concerts with. It was the second concert in a row for us where a guy played a conch shell. He also played a tuba and a cimbasso, which I don't know about you but I don't see one every day.

When we got there, there was a guy loitering in front of the museum. He was a barefoot white guy with dreadlocks and old jeans etc, and I jokingly said to Alpha, "there's the tuba player," because we had been wondering what to wear to the concert - casual, suit, something in between? We went with jeans, finally, because it was not only tuba, it was also electronic music (it was a tuba/electronic duo experiment) and after all in an art museum and not a concert hall.

We took our seats and the musicians walked in and I had been right about the tuba player. He played something, the electronics guy analyzed the rhythm and added a percussion track and doodled around and this went on for an hour or so.

Blat-blat-blat. Twinky-twinky-doing-doing. Click-click-click. Cool stereo effect with ping-pong-ball sounds clicking from speaker to speaker. Hoo-hoo-hoo (beer bottle). Ornk-ornk-ornk (conch shell).

A few people walked out at various points in the concert. A guy sitting in front of me grooved to the music and frowned a superior frown everytime someone left. Philistine luzer squares.

Coincidentally, in the room were works by an Austrian artist who specialized in painting scribbles over photographs. I once thought, dude, I could do that, and to prove it took a photograph and scribbled over it; turned out I could in fact not do it, at least not the way he did. So, my conclusion, he was a genuine artist; so I am careful not to let myself think things like, you know, "my kid could do that."

So what I did instead was think, why is it always the nice guys who get assassinated? Like Gandhi, or that Catholic priest recently who had been working on behalf of ecumenical reconciliation? Why not an artistic fraud? I scanned the crowd for signs of a knife but no dice. I suppose it's too hard to know with certainty, deep down, on the spur of the moment, if maybe you just aren't getting it.

After the concert, the two musicians hugged each other and grinned as if to say, wasn't that a great success. The guy with the dreads said CDs were for sale.

Oh, and there was a man with a big video camera taping the show, and a hottish blonde woman in a white outfit and white high-heeled track shoes with him with sort of a TV reporter look to her. They had a little tv monitor with them that they could watch what they filmed on.

The show was organized, I suppose, and introduced by the son of the man who owns the museum, or at least the art in the museum. He may be a respected expert on electronic music. At any rate, he has a sweet gig, putting on electronic music concerts in his dad's art museum.

His dad came to the show at the end, sat in the front row, impeccable in a grey suit.

9

It is raining. It is cold. I built a fire in the fireplace last night and enjoyed mid-August coziness. Somewhere in the country it is probably nine degrees centigrade. Last time I went skiing, February last year, it was nine degrees and the snow was melting and mushy. Now it's August and the same temperature. Nine Degrees Centigrade must be thinking, "You guys are never satisfied! Give a guy a break!"

Sigur Ros

I was listening to Sigur Ros on the way to work on Monday (Dear Anne, one of the Sigur Ros CDs you gave me is Sigur Ros, the other one turns out to actually be Chumbawamba, which is fine since "Mouth Full of Shit" turns out to be one of Gamma's favorite songs, so thanks!) and thinking about how melancholy it was, and then about how one could describe its melancholy exactly, if one wanted to be as precise as possible.

I mean, when I listen to Snow Patrol it reminds me first of D, who introduced me to Snow Patrol in the first place, but then makes me think of, okay, snow but also the sort of sad feeling being a teenager or young adult or human in general gives you sometimes, that confusion and depression and vulnerability and so on. On the other hand, listening to this Sigur Ros CD, it reminds me of doing something fun with someone beautiful who is grieving, like spending the day at the water slide park with a beautiful girl whose identical twin just died; it reminds me of the time I broke up with a girlfriend on her birthday while we were backpacking and had to hike ten miles back to the car while she sang, softly, Happy Birthday to Me.

I wasn't exactly thinking too many moves ahead that day, was I. Exit strategy, boy; what is your exit strategy? The American military must feel like that in Iraq, only worse. Context is very important, or as realtors like to say, the three most important factors when breaking up are location, location and location.

Beta and I were watching Kill Bill 2 the other evening. She put her arm around me. It was a nice surprise, after not having her around for six months. We talked a little, small things like, "hey buddy," or "man, Carradine is so great in this" or "who's he?" or "he used to play this Shaolin monk in the TV show Kung Fu when I was your age," or "whatever" or holding our breath while The Bride tried to dig her way out of the grave or "ew, she's squishing her eye between her toes" or "yow, look at that black mamba bite him in the face! Kewl!"

Or, at the part where she's putting her little daughter to bed, "oh man" or "what?" or "I used to do that, I did that so many times when you were little, remove my arm gently and tuck you in after you'd finally fallen asleep and try to sneak away without waking you" or "you want more guacamole?"

On meeting bloggers

Our grey cat has caught a mouse. Everyone but me is out on the front porch yelling. From where I sit in the kitchen, finishing dinner, I can see they have left the front door wide open. Here we go again, I think.

Blogging has a social function, Petr said a couple months ago in Brno. I was there with my family meeting Anne and her supporting cast.

I have met several bloggers now. Maybe I'm becoming a more social person. It's never a disappointment, at any rate, not for me at least. There's always the potential for that, obviously, but if someone seems like a real asshole from their blog, or boring, you generally end up not reading their blog and it never occurs to you to meet them, so you tend to meet only the people who hold your interest, which is more than one can say about daily life, but there is always the possibility you could be disappointed, or disappoint them, assuming they have expectations.

All I'm saying is, that hasn't happened to me yet, although if it had I couldn't talk about it, could I. If I did that, then no one would want to meet me, would they, if I gave people bad reviews. You always have that slight pressure to say something nice about the people you meet.

He's in the house! Get out of the house with that mouse, they are yelling. The mouse is still alive! He's dropping it! Pick that mouse back up! The cat lets the mouse run around in the entryway for a while before recatching it.

I met four bloggers this summer for the first time. I found it interesting that all of them mentioned something about how they do not write about the experience when they meet other bloggers. I concluded I must be so boring and they were too nice to embarrass me and too honest to lie or something. I decided I wouldn't either, avoiding that whole good review/bad review quandary.

And besides, there is the privacy thing. What they want people to know about them they already write on their own blog, you know?

What can I add to what they already talk about, you know? I could write about the general experience. I could say, when I met Horst I got lost first, looking for parking, and then gave up and parked several blocks away. Or I could remark on how the table at the restaurant - we were eating outside on the sidewalk, it was a nice day - was the type that is round and a little too small and a little too low or too high for me to comfortably eat at. I could say how he is remarkably observant, with a scientist's eye, a naturalist's eye, for daily life, especially restaurants. But if you read his site, you already know that.

People don't want you to review them. I don't know. Meeting bloggers is interesting for me because it's a new thing for me, meeting people at all. I used to be a recluse. Then, a few years ago, I flew to London to meet D and P and J and B. It got me out of the house, it was fun, it didn't kill me. At that time, I had no idea whether such people were actually real or what. Ambling back and forth at the underground station in London, I wondered back then whether someone was perched upon a nearby building with a sniper rifle, watching me.

The cat carries the mouse into the living room and it gets loose again, trapped behind an open door. The cat starts to go after it and everyone yells at it to finally catch the mouse again, which the cat misunderstands and gets a little freaked out and sort of just watches the mouse, thinking maybe that they are telling it not to harm the mouse.

I figure, though, my blog, I write about every damned thing that happens to me and meeting someone is a subset of that, so when they decide to meet me, they can expect I might mention it somewhere. It's not like I give them two stars or three thumbs up. Plus, I met very cool people.

Early in July, we happened to be in the South of France so we dropped by Ruth's and Julian's place. If you read their sites, you know all about them; I have nothing to add, really. Their house was a little hard to find. Beta spilled my wine all over me and Julian loaned me a shirt. Artichokes are thistles, bloom purple and make cool bouquets. It is hard for me to follow conversations in a room full of talking people. I run out of gas at about 9 PM, especially where alcohol is involved.

Let's see. What might you not know? Not only is Ruth a professional cellist of reknown, she is also incredibly beautiful. She doesn't seem to post pictures of herself on her site, so maybe you only guessed this from the quality of her writing. And Julian is a painter. They manage to combine many of my dreams into a single package - living in an old house in the South of France (which I didn't realize until visiting that area this summer was my dream), being a brilliant cellist, being a painter. The only thing missing from the formula, really, would have been a professional writer, I thought. Then I was introduced to Gary, a friend of Julian's who happened to be visiting. He is a novelist and screenwriter.

We bought one of Julian's pictures. Beta wanted to buy another one for her friend's birthday, but Julian gave it to her for free. I have never seen her so impressed.

I finally start yelling when the fucking mouse moves to the other open door, the one leading to the kitchen, and the genius cat circles around into the kitchen instead of pursuing the mouse behind the door, giving the mouse an opening to head out into the living room at large. First it hides under the dining table, then that being too exposed moves under first one sofa, then the other one.

Ruth happened to be in Austria later, while I was in the States, performing at the Salzburger Festspiele (that is, she was in Salzburg in Austria performing at the Festspiele there, I wasn't performing at the Salzburger Festspiele in the United States, of course, since there are none in the US, and besides what would I perform?), and generously got Alpha and a friend into the dress rehearsal of Mitridate, which they loved and which got great reviews.

After that, Alpha was pretty much sold on the idea of meeting bloggers.

Then came Portland and the Driftwood Room, which is where I suggested to Ronnie Cordova that we meet. I didn't know it was called the Driftwood Room at the time, I just told him to be in the bar at the Mallory at 8 PM, which he was, much to my surprise. I was late, having gone out to dinner with the girls and an uncle who insisted on getting the girls everything that they wanted and one said ice cream so he ran us across town to one shop which was closed so he then took us to a Dairy Queen while I looked at my watch hoping, secretly, that Ronnie would bail because that way I could just go to bed early and not have to be social.

We finally got back to the hotel, I got the girls to their room and wondering what he would look like and how I would recognize him if he was still there wandered into the very dark bar.

I spotted him right away, because he was the only person in the bar, chatting away happily if somewhat sardonically with the two bartenders who, okay, are also persons so three persons in the bar, four counting me. He would be a dead ringer for Ricardo Montalban, if Ricardo was a lot younger, and shorter, with rounder features, a puckish glint to his eyes and about three days' growth of hair on his head.

"I almost bailed on you," he said.

"I was hoping you would," I said.

The fucking goddamned mouse was heading for the library. I ran walked rapidly, as one would in a hotel fire evacuation, into the kitchen and looked for a good dish to plop over it. Something transparent, or at least translucent, and as cheap as possible, in case anyone had health objections to using kitchenware that had come into contact with a filthy little mouse although, you know, you can just wash it in the dishwasher afterwards and anyway, what could you catch from a little mouse? I followed the little fucker into the library, fully conscious of my advantage: I knew the layout by heart, whereas this mouse was, to my knowledge, seeing the place for the first time.

Using his superior powers of interrogation, Ronnie found out that the bar had previously been called the Redwood Room, which made sense as it had sort of redwoody panelling but for some reason had been renamed the Driftwood Room and now had pieces of driftwood all over the place, which I hadn't noticed right away upon entering the bar, having been paying more attention to trying to figure out which guest was Ronnie, which turned out to be easy, as I already mentioned a few paragraphs above this one.

We had a few drinks. I drank gin & tonics. My brane shut down eventually and I found myself saying things like, "uh huh, uh huh, uh huh" and, two-thirds of the way through a story, or at the end of a story, "what the hell was my point?" or "what, exactly, motivated me to start telling this particular anecdote?"

To which Ronnie would respond with a shrug, usually, or a fantasy about watching children be dragged out to sea by a riptide.

Normally, one just meets people in one's immediate vicinity. Work, school, neighborhood. That's what I have always enjoyed about blogging, besides the cheap ego gratification I get from it: a window into the lives of people I wouldn't normally meet. And here I am now, actually meeting some of them.

I get the dish, a round, cylindrical clear plastic container that had held candy, these cheap gelatine-based red-and-white hearts or eyeballs or something and was now empty, over the mouse on the second try. I told Gamma to bring me a newspaper and slid that underneath and carried the little guy outside. Gamma carried the cat. We reunited them on the terrace and they went out into a flowerbed and did whatever it is that cats and mice usually do.

Whatever. I figured blogging was for the ego gratification, and maybe writing practice, but Petr turns out to be right, the social component is important as well.

My father's dreams

"I went to highschool with him. We both had Jaguars. His wasn't quite as nice. It was grey."
"And you haven't seen him since then, and you recognize him?"
"Doubt he recognizes me. We've changed."
The other man is what. Seventy three or four. Humpbacked. Thick glasses. As skinny as my dad. Snoozing in his recliner at the dialysis clinic. The airconditioning is on high, so it's freezing inside the room. I have a splitting headache.
My father pats my leg. He recognized the guy right away. "It's his second time here."
When the guy wakes up the Ukranian nurse goes over and asks him if he remembers my father. He waves but seems a little disoriented.
I go out to my rental car and drink some water and try to eat an energy bar that is basically melted inside its mylar wrapper. The bottled water inside the car is the temperature of fresh tea. The Russian guy with no legs is wheeled out of the clinic in his wheelchair by his wife and son. There are lots of Russian immigrants around town now.
Most people doze for a while during their dialysis treatment. It's exhausting and boring and takes hours so what else should they do.
They are dreaming about what, exactly? My father remarks several times during my visit that his fellow patients occasionally get tired of the treatment, move into a hospice and are dead within a week. The Japanese lady who lived next door to us when I was growing up did that a couple months ago.
My father dozes in his recliner. As does the man in the next chair. They all doze.
"I'm surrounded by Republicans," my father tells me.
The noise level is rather high in the room, and it includes voices from televisions and several conversations, so it is very hard for my father to understand what I say, and for me to understand what he says. As I do every time, I had come here hoping to have a big father-son talk, but give up.
I never get to ask my father whatever I would ask him, no idea really what that would be. Why did you never amount to much, in material terms? Why did you never do anything, really? What stopped you? Does it bother you that I never amounted to anything either? What kind of hopes did you have for me?
I have his memory for faces. When I lived in Tokyo, I used to remember faces of other commuters I had seen once before through a train window.
My daughter's friend is traveling with us and I feel sorry for her at the beginning because all the relatives we meet at the start are in their mid-seventies or older and the only one in good shape is my mother. There is the forgetful uncle and his crippled wife, and so on.
They are all slipping away. On my way into the office today Laurie Anderson sang something about Oh death, that creep that crooked jerk.
During my trip, I finally realized: I am the father now. It had to get really obvious for me to figure that out. I had to be 46 years old to see that. My brother, my sister, me, we're the parents. This is it. Here we go.
"You'll sell an article or a story one of these days," my father says to me, out of the blue. We hadn't been talking about writing. We had just been sitting there, not saying anything.
A guy I was paying $100 an hour told me once, "we think our parents will be hurt if we surpass them but they won't, that's what they want for us." I suppose he was right.
Take this, take my melancholy, my sense of humor, my laugh, my memory for faces, my sentimentality. Take my short legs and my intelligence, my perceptiveness and my love for trees and words and do more with them than I did, and don't look back.
It's what I would tell my kids too.

Good seats

There is an opera in Vienna, maybe you have heard of it. There are several, in fact. Opera is the city's spectacle of choice. Music is loved here, as is theater, and opera combines everything into a single spectacle.

I saw an opera in the United States once, and I remember it as being a little crappy in comparison to a Viennese opera. That was more than twenty-five years ago. Ever since then, I believed Americans lacked the knack for such a public spectacle. Moon landing, okay. Atom bomb even. But regular public cultural spectacle?

I had never been to a pro baseball game.

I never thought I'd have anything nice to say about baseball. As a kid, it did not appear on my radar. My father had to wait until they had my little sister to have someone to play catch and talk sports with. They would watch TV and talk pitching and batting averages and to me arcane statistics.

When foreigners, assuming all Americans must understand baseball, would ask me to explain the game to them, I would often just make various shit up, in the hope that I was pretty close.

Infield fly rule? What?

So I was in the United States for the last two weeks of July. The coolest thing I did was attend a Seattle Mariners' game.

My sister has season tickets in the very first row by the left field foul line just up from third base. I understand they are good seats. They seemed that way to me. I attended with my two daughters, and my oldest daughter's friend, and my cousin's boy who is their age.

It was bat night and all the kids got bats, so things got off to a cool start. It was an evening game. The stadium was enormous and new and clean and very neat. The architecture was very impressive and theatrical. The lighting was beautiful. The grass was a perfect shade of vivid green and the red dirt of the infield reminded me of the earth we had seen in the South of France a week or so previously.

My sister had warned me that balls were often hit into the seats we occupied. One had gone through the hair of a friend's young daughter once, striking the seat behind her head and freaking everyone out. So I vowed to pay close attention. I did pretty well, too, although towards the end it often happened that I would be thinking about something, and there would be a CRACK and the crowd would roar and I'd be all, oh shit, where's the ball, where's the ball? But we never got hit by a ball, so it was okay in that respect.

The kids enjoyed it. The two older girls disappeared at one point and came back with foot-long hotdogs. I went upstairs with Gamma and got the same for her and me and my cousin's kid, as well as an eight-dollar microbrew and some garlic fries (highly recommended) and some pop for the kids.

The Mariners were playing some other team. It looked like they had a D on their caps. The other team won, but not thanks to Ichiro, who was the star of the whole spectacle.

That guy is cool, let me tell you. The way he gets set up before hitting. The way he holds his bat out in front of him, vertically, and plucks at his shoulder with the other hand. The consistent way he hits, and the way he hustles.

And the other elements, the peanut vendors and the big television screens and the scoreboard and the people in the crowd goofing for the cameras and the way the sky went from blue to purple to black, and the lost seagull flying in big circles inside the stadium. Other people talking statistics and complaining about the pitching. The single guy a few seats away rooting for the other team.

My kids kept asking me to explain everything to them. Sometimes I tried, sometimes I told them to ask their cousin, who didn't know much more than I did, which made me like him even more than I already did.

So baseball is American opera. I was able to forget about all the money involved, and all the steroids and my dislike of crowds and just enjoy being there. Enjoy the spectacle and the pleasure of being part of a crowd that was, for the moment, doing no harm. I never thought I'd say that.

No offense

Portland is a nice city, don't get me wrong. Nicer than Vancouver, Washington, for example. Portland has an impressive meth problem, judging from the headlines I saw in the Oregonian during my visit, and I've long thought any description of the town ought, for the sake of completeness, include one or more of these adjectives: small, disappointment, second-rate, self-absorbed and shabby; and its freeway bridges have been the source of serial nightmares for me since early childhood, but it is a nice city.

And anyway, meth schmeth. Who doesn't have a meth problem nowadays?

We stayed at the Mallory Hotel while we were there. "This place is way too nice for us," Gamma said when we entered the place the first time. Gamma got chocolate all over the bed. Sorry, Mallory! Reentering the hotel at night after a Chinese dinner with an uncle, Beta said, "hey, where's the guy who opened the door for us this afternoon?"

When we finally left, Beta or her friend had forgotten something, some books from Powell's I think (buying books at Powell's the previous day, I had panicked at the cash register, unable to find my credit card, and thinking I had lost it at Niketown (where I found all but one of the salespeople unhelpful ("Sorry, we don't have the MP3 player your daughter's friend wants and we don't have those shoes in your size, now will you step aside so I can help this other person who looks like they'll be spending more than you?") and irritating ("can I take that to the register for you?")), and began to melt down before ultimately finding it at the bottom of my Nike shopping bag. I should have bought a Sigmund Freud action figure to celebrate, I think now) , so I sent them back alone and waited for them in the parking garage. They came back eventually and told me they had met the Dalai Lama at the hotel. When I retold the story to relatives, I told them the girls had returned to their room and when they opened the door the Dalai Lama handed them their books. Actually it was just the cleaning lady and they just saw the Dalai Lama loitering out front, trying to score some meth maybe.

Before we left Portland, we had to drive around in circles because we got caught behind some traffic cones marking off the course for some sort of footrace held in the town that day; they were just in the process of setting up the course, closing off streets and so on, so we somehow managed to get trapped on the course itself; we had some streets to ourselves for a while. It would've been funnier if people had already been running, but you can't have everything.

It's also possible I overlooked something, because at Starbucks where we had breakfast the guy asked me how I was and I said a wreck and he said what would you like and I said what has the most caffeine and he said how about a cafe americanus gigantus or whatever, with an extra shot or two of methspresso and I said okay and regretted it. My nerves are still jangling.

OMSI was fun. It's fun to go places with my daughter's friend. She tends to nearly knock things over. Display mirror at Niketown. Pyramid of thermos bottles at OMSI shop.

So the trip is over now. I'm still curled up in a corner of my mind, behind the sofa, gnawing at the gristle of my trip. Beta and her friend stayed an extra week, they get home tomorrow.

Leaving Portland last week, Gamma and I finally made it through security (the Lufthansa lady, who was unfriendly, and also incompetent (putting Gamma's name on both our tickets, which I didn't notice cause, who expects that? which caused big problems for us in Frankfurt; and who also sat us in separate rows... luckily a nice cabin attendant fell in love with Gamma and helped us out) flagged me for a security check, nice of her, so we got searched good, etc.; and we wandered to our gate at Portland's rather small and disappointing airport. The low ceiling gave the room a shabby feel and the skylights divided it into distinct dark areas of shade and relative coolness, and hot areas of blinding glare. The dark areas were already populated by waiting passengers arranged so that there were no empty seats adjacent to other empty seats left; sitting in those parts would have required me to sit next to another person, which I wasn't in the mood to do. The blinding glare area, on the other hand, had plenty of empty seats so I sat us there, assuming in the five hours until loading (I like to get there early) I wouldn't begin to sweat all too much.

So I sat there, arm over the seat behind Gamma, trying to talk her into something - explaining why I didn't want to shop for more shiny crap ("We just got you a ball point pen with glitter and pink feathers attached, and the bead set, and the twelve dollar journal and felt pens so you could color, and another book, and those chocolates and the cookie") when I felt a stabbing weight on my arm and looked to see a sharp little chin resting on it, attached to a chatty five year-old girl who wanted to know all about us.

And then her brother, three years old and suffering from hyperactive saliva, showed up on the other side of me.

"What are you drawing?" she asked Gamma. "Why doesn't she have any hands?"

"Oooh goooh waaaah," said her brother.

"That's my brother. Is he your grandfather?" she asked Gamma.

"Dude," I said.

Gamma set the record straight. "I thought he looked too young to be your grandfather," the girl said. It was a very close call. Things didn't look good for her for a few seconds there.

Their mother apologized for them pestering me. I said no problem, without wasting effort on sounding sincere. What I thought was, if I saw them being sucked out to sea by a riptide, I might try to save them, but only because you're hot, lady, and I feel a certain amount of solidarity with other parents travelling alone with children.

Luckily, they did not bother us on the plane. They were sitting totally somewhere else and we never saw them again.

Disease

Nothing is as interesting as a good epidemic.

I bought Gamma a duck call in Seattle. Duck calls are the latest thing. Every eight year old has to have a duck call.

On the drive down to Portland, I braced myself for three hours of solid quacking, and was almost disappointed when she fell asleep near Tacoma, silent after only 45 minutes. I woke her up for a milkshake in Kalama, but she had a soft ice cream cone instead (a twist) and quacked a little.

Here I am back in Austria, and my mind is full of Washington State place names.

I saw some ducks at Lake Union in Seattle. I saw some at my parents' pond later on. I think I saw one on the Columbia River in Portland, or maybe the Willamette. There are more on the creek near my house here in Austria.

The Mallard has one of the most extensive breeding ranges of any duck in North America, extending across the northern one-third of the USA, and up to the Bering Sea. Mallards are very common throughout North America, much of Europe, Asia and Africa. As migratory waterfowl, they winter south of Canada, throughout the United States south to Central America.

An Indonesian official said recently that they would not, after all, cull for bird flu because it was too expensive. On the radio yesterday, they said bird flu had spread to Kazachstan. Siberia too.

If you want to get my attention, use the word epidemic. Nothing interests me like a good epidemic.

[QUACK] means yes, Gamma said. [QUACK QUAAAAACK] means no.

I bought some books at Powell's in Portland. Last night I started reading The Tipping Point. I just started, so I can't say whether or not I like it, but his application of the epidemic metaphor to other phenomena, like human behavior, is interesting. Like the spread of syphillis in Baltimore, which, okay, is a genuine epidemic, or how Hush Puppies footwear went from being Out to In.

Now that everything is an epidemic, I can be interested by life in general. Vectors of infection for podcasting. Do I have a full-blown case of Shakira or am I just a carrier? Will the DaVinci Code burn itself out, like a bad flare-up of ebola, and then slumber for decades in colonies of moles or prarie dogs? I am resistant to musical talent, susceptible to women with glasses.

A bunch of ducks died somewhere in Russia. A young man was admitted to hospital with flu-like symptoms.

Bird flu cannot be transmitted between humans so far. But the flu likes to mutate.

Dead horse: Wake me up when you're finished belaboring this metaphor.

Maybe peace will mutate one day, and spread by sneezes, handshakes and doorknobs. Maybe a vaccine will be found for hatred and fear. Maybe mosquito bites will make us svelte and graceful.

Recently, somewhere in the South of France, perhaps

Paco: That's him.
Stipo: You sure?
Paco: Sure I'm sure.
Stipo: Absolutely sure?
Paco: Pretty sure. White hair, look at that white hair. Needs a haircut bad. Who's he think he is, Jim Jarmusch?
Stipo: He's not smoking. He's supposed to be a chain-smoker.
Paco: Pff.
Stipo: He hasn't smoked once the whole time.
Paco: Pff.
Stipo: And he doesn't look like a... he look like a finance minister to you? Even one on vacation? Finance ministers don't drive Doblós and sleep in tents.
Paco: Still, I'd rather err on the side of prudence, you know?
Stipo: He look seventy to you? I mean, tired's one thing, but he's no seventy. Pooped, okay. Sapped by the mistral, okay. Culturally shocked, okay. But come on.
Paco: I say we do him anyway.
Stipo: Call it.
Paco: Heads.
Stipo: It's tails.
Paco: I still say we do him anyway.

My condolences to those mourning Wim Duisenberg. Still, when a finance minister is found floating in his pool, is "heart attack" the first thing you think? Is "natural death" the first thing that goes through your mind? Totally possible, even likely, given his age. And it's not like he was in a bathtub, fully dressed or suspended from Blackfriar's Bridge. But still.

The South of France was nice, BTW. Highly recommend it.

EP

In the country, a girl and her father traveling share the room across from us.

Unos, dos, tres, catorze

School hasn't started yet, it's nowhere even close. Beta's not even back from the States yet, so my mind does nothing but wander on my drive into work.

A week ago in Washington State, driving my dad home from dialysis, we passed a field. He said the oats were ripening fast. Looking close, I suppose I could claim that I recognized the crop as oats and not, say, wheat. This morning, today, I passed fields, some already mowed and baled into hay, others ripe but uncut and could only identify them as grass-like stuff.

Something in the grass family.

U2 was loud on my car stereo. I turned it down.

I thought something about my brother. I remembered a kite I bought at the beach and left at my sister's house because it was too big for either of my suitcases.

Other things went through my head, lots of things, all the way to the office. How I am looking for work, for example. How I am curious about podcasting, for example. How the crack in my windshield now goes two-thirds of the way across, from bottom to top on the passenger side. Lots of things.