Metamorphosism

Recent conversations

This morning, in the car on the way to the train station:
Man: A bunch of great blog post topics occurred to me when I was meditating this morning.
Girl, 16: ...
Man: But now I can't remember any of them.
Girl, 16: ...

Two days ago, in the kitchen:
CD player: [doing, twang, ching, ching, doing]
Girl, 8: What. Is that. Buddha Bar? Pff.
Girl, 16: What. You'd prefer Rammstein I suppose.
Girl, 8: RAMMSTEIN! RAMMSTEIN!
Man: Heh.

This morning, in the kitchen:
CD player: ROSENROT, O ROSENROT, TIEFE WASSER SIND NICHT STILL.
Girl, 8: School. Yuck.
Man: But if you study well, you could open your own Rammstein school.
Girl, 8: Yeah!
Man: Where everything is taught through Rammstein.
Girl, 8: In math, I would teach, "Ramm + Stein = Rammstein."
Man: Right.
Girl, 8: And so on.
Man: Like that.

This isn't maybe funny, but I was thinking "Occult Blood" would be a good name for either a darkish band, or a horror movie. Or maybe an album by a darkish band with a better name.

Also, that "Rammsmeier" would be a good name for a brass band that did Rammstein covers.

I got like 9 hours of sleep last night, not counting dozing back to sleep after cats woke me up a few times, or when Gamma woke me by kicking off the covers. I went to bed at about eight thirty PM and got up after 5 AM. I'm unstoppable.

Now, off to take a shower, go grocery shopping, cook, clean a little and pick Alpha up at the train station.

Party small talk tip: ask a scientist a question

Much of my commute takes me through a woods near the river, so that I spend about 90 minutes a day watching the sky through treetops. Summer evenings, the sun shines low through the trees and flashes strobe-like into your eyes and makes me wonder whether it would be possible, knowing the average speed at which cars will travel along a certain segment of the road, and the angle of the sun being calculable etc, to plant the right type of trees at the right spacing in order to trigger, once the trees grow to a certain size, seizures in epileptic drivers at a certain time of day in a certain season, like they built Newgrange so the passage and chamber would be illuminated by the sunrise on the winter solstice.
But this time of year the days are short and the sky is dark in both directions, or just getting color, and I never get tired of looking.
My youngest daughter, Gamma, was sleeping in the big bed last night because mom's away on a business trip. I was over in Gamma's room reading, and heard Gamma over in the big bed talking. In her sleep, I assumed. A minute later she came over and looked in at me and rummaged around and said something in tongues. She was in a trance I guess. She went to the bathroom and I gave up reading and went to bed. She said various things in no language I understand. We had a nonsensical conversation. She finally fell asleep.

I am trying to be more social. I think, maybe I am not so shy, I am just out of practice and lazy. Also, I get so tired after 8 pm that most of whatever conversation I make consists of non sequiturs at least on my side. I cope with this by getting people to tell stories. They get to tell a story, I don't have to say anything and look like a good listener.

I went to a party on the weekend. For example. One of many recent activities on my social calendar. The hostess finally grabbed me by the arm, pulled me out of the corner where I had thought I was blending in well and ordered me to go talk to someone. Luckily there was a nuculer scientist at the party so I was able to stand there and listen while he explained to me why depleted uranium makes such good projectiles (it is hard, denser than tungsten, and burns when it passes through a target meaning that 1) the projectile self-sharpens, since the outer layer burns, 2) the resulting gasses lubricate its passage through the target and 3) it is burning, meaning it says, as it passes through a target, "anything else combustible here? any oil? any fuel?"

He was entertaining. I felt at ease. I had fun. When I got tired, all I had to do was ask, "so, uranium, what's that look like, exactly?" and the 15 minutes of conversation was assured (uranium is a grey metal. A fuel rod is grey metal, 3 meters long, clad in stainless steel. Before it's used in a power plant, it's not that radioactive).

Also, a woman gave me the eyeball so unabashedly that I actually noticed. I was standing there, learning that uranium is indeed yellow at times (I had always associated uranium with the color yellow for some reason), namely when it is in liquid form, because then it is usually liquified by mixing it with nitric acid, which changes it to uranium nitrate or something, which is yellow, when all of a sudden, hey, what's this? An eyeball? Who gave me the eyeball?

It happened again later. Then I switched to orange juice and left as quickly as I could, because I had a long drive home, and I have noticed that if I don't leave parties early then I stay late, and am usually the last to leave, and they were planning on singing karaoke later.

Yesterday we cleaned house. The kids straightened up their rooms and I vaccuumed everything, and put out fresh towels everywhere. Then when Alpha called home to say hi, I proudly told her we had cleaned house, and she said, gee, I cleaned everything before I left. Which would explain why it was so hard to tell I had done anything.

And I baked a pizza and Beta made some Indian lentil dish, to which I tried to make some roti, but they weren't cooked all the way through, despite being rather black on the outside, which leads me to believe that maybe my pan was too hot. But the kids were nice about it.

Bifurcated sleep

Researchers took volunteers, put them to bed in a dark room at six pm and kept track of their sleep patterns. Initially they slept straight through for 11 hours. After catching up on sleep, they moved into a bifurcated pattern of three to five hours sleep, then waking up and dozing or relaxing for a couple hours, then falling back to sleep for another 4 hours. The conclusion was that this was the normal human sleep pattern. How cavemen slept before Jay Leno.
So let's all start sleeping like this and check back in a month or so and talk about how it changed our lives. We'll go to bed at six pm, sleep until ten or eleven, wake up, talk about our dreams, or have a shag or just lay there musing on something, then go back to sleep until five, and start our day.
I read something else about how the night used to have a different function in pre-industrial society. It mentioned people sleeping like this, hitting the hay at darkfall, then waking up for hanky panky, or to go play cards, or have a midnight snack, then going back to sleep.
It strikes me that my childhood sleep pattern of staring at the ceiling for a couple hours, fearing monsters or the future or whatever, may have been completely normal and natural.

Eulogy

Thank you to everyone who mailed or commented with advice, it was universally good and well-meant and I shall be taking most of it, even the contradictory bits, he said without irony.
Life is an advice machine, isn't it. If you include "lesson" under the general heading of "advice." Maybe it's the buy a red car, see how many red cars are suddenly in the streets thing.
Or in my case, the drive unpredictable beaters and see how many cars break down on the road when the weather gets good and cold, as it is today thing. I was murmuring prayers of thanks, general delivery, on my way to work today that I have a dependable new car at the moment. That made me wonder who, exactly, I ought to be thanking. God? Life in general? My wife and me for living within our means so that we can afford a little Mazda? My children for not developing any expensive habits or problems, except for the harp thing and the going to a school where they take trips throughout the continent all the apparent time thing, which you can't really get upset about thing?
At any rate, I was glad the car worked because it's chilly out.

Earlier this morning I sat down at my kitchen table to eat some uncooked oatmeal because

1. I can't be arsed to cook oatmeal in the mornings and
   
2. I like it better that way

and there was this magazine there with an article about relaxing and taking a different approach to time and stress, which was right up the alley of various things we are dealing with at our house at the moment thing, so I read it as I had my reading glasses with me, and but it was longer than I had time for so actually all I read was the sidebar thing and it had a list of, you guessed it, advice in the form of things to try and I cheered myself up with them.

How I remember the list of advice given in the article:

• Think about the person you want to see in the mirror when you shave in the morning.

That would be Scarlett Johansson in a plush bathrobe going on about what a fun guy I am, except there is something unreal about her, not exactly fake although her lips sometimes make me wonder, but something unreal, especially if I were seeing her in the mirror in the morning, I'd question my sanity more than usual and have to turn around and check, am I just seeing her in the mirror or is she really there in my bathroom and she'd be all, "what? What, Mig?" and if she was just in the mirror I could just run some cold water over my face and swear off the absinthe but if she was there in the bathroom I'd be all, sshhh, don't wake anybody and everything sort of unravels from there; moreover, I'd actually rather see my wife in the mirror in the morning going on about what a fun guy I am.

• Think more about the compass point giving direction in life, and less about the clock running your life.

Okay.

• Imagine your eulogy.

Eesh.
Okay. But I can't get past imagining what my neighbors would say, because I imagine them saying, "He was a nice guy, and quiet, I don't know if I ever had a conversation with him longer than two sentences. Who would have ever suspected he would have an arsenal of automatic weapons, yet alone use them so violently?" And that gets me chuckling and see, the article has me feeling better already and I'll have to finish the list some other time thing.

There is so much

that I cannot tell you, because it is a secret or because I do not know it myself, or both, or because it is private thing.
We visited friends out of town this weekend, Gamma and I, and when we got home she just cried and cried because she was so tired from a fun trip and so relieved to be back home and relax. I told her I knew just how she felt, because I do.
Things have been exploding a bit here lately and the worst part is, it's partly good and partly bad and difficult for me to put into proper perspective.
Meditation and journal writing didn't enable me to get a handle on it; things just got worse, which may have been because of the meditation, or the journal writing, or the getting up an hour early to engage in those activities, or things may have been even worse without doing those things; maybe they ameliorated the situation; or maybe the situation just felt worse, and it was a good thing that it moved in the direction it did.
Gamma advised me to get more sleep, and pointed out that I could meditate at night, as she does, staring into a corner of the ceiling for fifteen minutes before closing her eyes to dream.
I have decided to try something new: I will try taking people's advice, prioritized by their proximity to my core. That is, my own advice first, then that of my wife, then family and friends.
They all tell me to get enough sleep, so that is my new priority. Journal writing I shall try to squeeze in at lunch, once the weather gets warmer I will sit on a park bench and scribble perhaps. Or it will be squeezed in some other time. Evening meditation, because I do need that, or at least am unwilling to drop it just yet, having tried and prematurely dropped so much in my lifetime.
I will sleep at least eight hours nightly for the next fortnight and observe my situation at the end of that period.
I will write about things closer to me and less made-up shit, as my wife has advised me.
I will eat healthy things in moderate quantities, and clean my room, as my mother advised me a long time ago.
I will endeavor to exercise three times weekly, as advised by my body. I will keep my hair good and short, as advised by my hair-cutting person. I will practice cello daily, for as long as possible, as advised by my teacher.
I will unlock the door and let them out, then unlock it and let them back in, and feed them and let them back out and then back in, and give them some of that chicken, and not get so bent out of shape over just a hairball, as advised by my cats.

How are you otherwise?

I can never sleep when I drink that at night, my wife said.
I was mixing myself a fizzy aspirin drink.
I've never noticed any problem, I said.
How many nights ago was that? Three? I lay there like a little doll suspended in the snaky blue sparks of a Jacob's ladder for hours. Who knew aspirin had that effect?
Or maybe it was pure coincidence. When I drink it in the morning, I'm not more energetic or nervous during the day.
Except, today I am. I'm totally crazy inside.
It can't be the moon. It's down to half.
Man, that's scary, how fast the phases of the moon go. Just yesterday, or the day before, it was full and I was surprised that nothing crazy had happened.
I'm electric today, and out of sorts. Last night I went to my dermatologist who reported happily that I have no new skin cancers. Beta was a bit put out that she will not be removing any stitches anytime soon, but she's happy that nothing noticeable is growing on my shoulders.
Except hair, of course.
Then my doctor asked, And how are you otherwise?
Boy, wrong question. It totally threw me. How do you mean, I asked, stalling for time.
Shit, I wondered, how am I?
How am I? Shit. I? How am?
Am? I? How?
It depends, I suppose, I said. What you mean. In which way. Which facet of my life and stuff.
I complained about my job a bit, but on the other hand, had to admit that my second, part-time job is fun.
I didn't even mention the meditation and introspection and what all that's stirring up.
Nor any of the other stuff. Jesus, I was crushed under a blinding cascade of on the one hand on the other hand.
She was probably sorry she had asked. Simple question, and look at him, I set off a chain reaction in his brain of some sort.
How are you otherwise?

So, yes

Walked through the winterized park near my office at lunch.
Walking for one's health sounds like such an old man thing to do.
Tots bundled in quilted strollers and young mothers yapping in heavy coats. Exotic bushes wrapped in burlap.
One foot ahead of the other.
All my life, my feet have turned out. All my childhood this was an issue. I wore braces as an infant, like something out of Lemony Snicket, chrome and leather. Turns out, many if not most babies go through this and it usually goes away naturally.
Walking, just walking carefully, thinking of nothing but this, I notice my feet are nearly straight. They are perfectly normal.
I also wore shoe inserts as a kid, due to flat feet. Of course, my arches are perfectly normal as well.
Parents.
It is quite cold, so cold that I wish I had a hat, one that wouldn't give me hat hair, but not so cold that I can't bear not wearing one.
So, yes, there is this. A stroll.

This morning I discovered something else: it is apparently very irritating to certain people? When they are sitting there drinking their tea at breakfast and a chipper and wide awake person who has already been up for 90 minutes? bounces in and tells them? all about the great meditation they had this morning?

It's more complicated than that, but I won't bore you. It's just, I learned, in the mornings, like before 9 AM, don't speak unless spoken to.

On the interpretation of dreams

Dad, I had a dream you were smoking. Do you smoke?
No, honey. I told you I quit. I haven't smoked all year.
You also had a different form.
Oh yeah?
You were a raccoon.
See? How could I smoke if I washed my cigarettes first?

Also, the back seat of my Mazda looks as if a fairy got carsick back there. Glitter all over.

Paparazzi

A minute ago it was snowing hard, big flakey flakes of wet snow thundering down like paparazzi at an Oscars party wardrobe malfunction, if paparazzi moved vertically. Now they're smaller, and less numerous.

The snow, I mean the snow.

Recently, I've done a couple things right. I won't say what, other people are involved. So there's that.

Had a couple problems with technology, nothing serious. Put my cellphone in my pocket in such a way that I sent 18 text messages to someone on my list, who did not recognize my phone number and gave me a nasty call until we figured out what must be happening. Then I sent an email to a wrong address, thanks to the gmail auto-complete function, which worked out okay because it turned out to be someone I hadn't heard from in a long time and we had a nice exchange. I've heard stories of people with worse luck, who accidentally call a friend behind whose back they happen to be talking with another friend, for example. A model I knew told me about a painter who took a call from his wife once, while painting my model acquaintance, spoke to his wife, then put the phone back into his pocket, assuming he had turned it off, and went back to trying to seduce the model while his wife listened in on their conversation, for around two hours.

Had a cello lesson last night. It went okay. Some romantic sonata by Romberg. It's easier than the Vivaldi thing I had been trying before that. Less work with the left hand, lets me concentrate on my bowing, which needs concentration, man, in my case.

So I guess practicing? It helps? Also I was thinking about Ruth's comment on an earlier post, about Gamma being a good cello teacher with her "alles is lebendig" and I was thinking about that, and how, if my cello is alive in any way, then it wants to be played, and well, and not dropped or to have metronomes fall on it or to be stood in a corner.

So there's that.

Meditating this morning, I tried this thing, this metta thing, where you start out seeing yourself in a loving way, as a good friend would see you, and then thinking about a friend in that way, then a stranger, then an enemy. This is going to take several days to get through, I think. This morning, I sat down, the cat jumped on my lap as he has begun doing every morning, I got as far as thinking about myself as a friend would, but found myself unable, in fact, to imagine why anyone would like me and stood at the rim of that abyss for a while, looking down, with the wind blowing up through my hair, currently short, my hair, a neutral wind, not warm, not chilly, sort of looking down and not seeing anything and thinking, oh for pete's sake, people like me, they must have a reason.

So I pet the cat for a while and made lunches and stuff.

Saw some neat collage stuff on flickr, people jazzing up their moleskine journals. Coincidentally, I have begun glueing stuff into mine. So far, only postits with half-checked-off todo lists, but it's a start.

Making coffee this morning, it occurred to me that it's been 20 years, actually only 19, since I worked in the same office as another American.

Checking my stats, I noticed a stranger had linked one of my Painsuit stories, an old story, and it was quite good, reading through it. That was encouraging.

I am very busy at work. At lunch I will go outside, into the snowy streets, at least I hope they'll still be snowy, and walk around for half an hour or so.

Weekend

We went crosscountry skiing with friends, locally. Afterwards we took long naps. We failed to finish a game of Trivial Pursuit, as usual, due to arguing. We cleaned house. I learned that, when cleaning a kitchen, it is necessary to take it apart first. And that cabinet handles are cleaned with different cleanser than the cabinets themselves.
When I was a boy, a friend got a job cleaning cars. "Not cleaning them," he said. "Detailing them." He detailed cars, which I gathered meant he cleaned them super well. So I detailed the kitchen, which I understand is something my wife or the cleaning lady have done on a weekly basis.
CSI came over afterwards, with their black lights and sprays and they said, when they finished, "This kitchen is clean, man."

Hydrangea

Dick Cheney removes his human mask and squats naked inside a pentagram made from the blood of drowned orphans amidst flickering shadows and flames and smoke from brimstone and burning tires. An aide brings him the bad news: tobacco consumption down, booze down, sugar down, trans-fat down, Krispy-Kreme stock down 15%, whatever.

Dick Cheney just chuckles, a deep chortle with lots of reverb. "Buy," is all he says. "Buy. They'll bounce back up in a week or so when people forget about their resolutions." And he shakes his "head" over folly and human weakness.

It's important, see, that it be clear I have made no resolutions for the New Year. I couldn't be arsed, basically. Suddenly, the New Year was upon me, just like that, and there I stood, no resolutions ready.
The things I have ended up doing differently, stopping doing, doing more of, doing for the first time, they have nothing to do with no steenkin' resolutions.
They are, instead, a response to the pain and turmoil inside me. Nothing special, just the usual stuff you run into, I suppose, on this lap of the bumper car ride.

The weather has been freezing cold for weeks now. Everything is frozen solid. White. When it is foggy, the fog freezes.

There is a hydrangea out in front of my house. If I could paint flowers, I would paint it every day for a year and at the end of the year would know something I currently don't. I would paint it in all weathers and lights and stages of growth from jello-green sprout in the spring (to arbitrarily choose a starting point) to its current brown, whithered and majestic state.

But I can't paint flowers so I think about hydrangeas on my frozen drive into work. You have never seen one die, have you. They live forever, hydrangeas. The ones of my childhood are still alive, still thickening against the walls of my childhood house (except for the one my dad actually parked the pickup on), or they would be, if the house hadn't been burned down, then razed for a mall parking lot.

Hydrangeas are my favorite flower; unfortunately my wife doesn't like them so we get into fistfights over flowers a lot. We drive out into the hills with a bottle of whiskey and she puts a roll of quarters into her fist and slugs me in the head when I'm not looking. When I wake up on my back with the taste of iron in my mouth she's standing over me drinking my whiskey and saying something about no hydrangeas this year.

In fact, we have three of them out in front of the house.

So one of the things I've started doing is meditating in the mornings. I get up at like 4.30 am, 4.45, for that peaceful hour at the start of the day, right, when everyone is sleeping. Feed cats, eat breakfast, boil tea water, make coffee, pack lunches, write in journal. Now add meditating to that. The hour is getting pretty fucking full. It's turning into an hour of stress; I'm beginning to stress myself in my quest for inner peace. I'm sitting there meditating, counting my breaths or something, checking my watch every 5 minutes.

I've also begun making lists. Five to ten items on a postit each morning, which I carry around with me throughout the day, crossing shit off. Or not. I've got a success rate around 70%, which I consider good. A few easy things, a few hard things, a few easy or hard things that have been niggling and bugging me and I've been putting them off for months or years. Works, so far.

One of the things on the list, recently, was go have a cup of coffee by myself. Because you can't just sit in a coffeehouse and do nothing, and I wasn't in the mood to read magazines, I bought a book first. Some book, any book. Some book on Buddhist meditation, cheap skinny little book. I had my coffee and read the book. Mindfulness. Attentiveness. Beginner's mind. Blah blah blah. BzzBzzBzz. Paying attention to the moment. BzzBzzBzz. What was that? You know how you'll be reading, and it occurs to you you sort of slept through the last two pages? I must have read the first three pages of the Mindfulness chapter five times.

How is this ever going to work, I wondered.

So there's the meditation. And the journal writing. And I'm re-reading The Artist's Way. I had, originally, thought I hadn't made a lot of progress when I read it the first time, but here I am trying not to write, but rather trying to edit these manuscripts I have, re-writing is harder than writing, and with ten or a dozen paintings hanging around. So I suppose it did set something in motion.

And I'm trying to give my wife more time to herself and more space, same with Beta, and Gamma I suppose. Step by step, whatever. No resolutions, just this step. And every morning, on my way out to the car, a glance at the hydrangea, frozen in the snow.

Whiskey River had a quote a while back, some one remarking how Westerners want to witness their own enlightenment. I suppose I want not only to witness mine, I also want to blog about it. Although, who knows. Maybe enlightenment will strike, and then I'll just

Readership survey

Situation: you are crossing a large, cold and deep body of water on a stormy day in a ferry that is overloaded with orphans. It tips and begins to sink rapidly. What do you save, an orphan or your notebook computer?

Alles ist lebendig

"Alles ist lebendig," she says to me.
Everything is alive.
We are talking.
We are walking in the snow, perhaps.
Perhaps I am holding her little hand in my big hand, carefully, to avoid pulling her mitten right off, as sometimes happens.
Everything is alive. People are alive. Animals are alive.
This is too obvious for her to even comment on.
Rocks and air are alive. Water is alive.
She agrees.
All this snow. Alive.
Yep.
Is a water crystal alive or is the snowball alive?
Both.
The coffee cup is alive, and when dashed to the floor in anger and exasperation, the shards are all alive.
Every one of them, living shards.
Alles ist lebendig.

Ski trip

The week after Christmas was devoted to skiing. We went to the same ski area as usual, but stayed in a different pension, more centrally located. Beta timed us the first night when we walked to the Kirchenwirt, the inn across the street from the church, where we usually eat. It took us 15 seconds to get there.
Not only that: although we took the ski bus to the lifts, we were able to ski right up to our pension on our way back. I have dreamed of doing that ever since reading about Hemingway doing that on his stays in Tyrol or somewhere. So basically, I had a Hemingway ski trip this winter, if Hemingway had spent his time skiing behind an 8-year old girl. And had drunk less. Quite a bit less, in fact, because he was afraid of falling down too much if he got drunk while skiing.
The weather was perfect. Lots of good, powdery snow. Nice and cold. Trees all thickly flocked in the white. Didn't even fall down the first day. Not until we were on our way home, anyhow. By then I was tired. I didn't feel tired, but I could tell I was because I began to crash a lot.
Even though we spent some time in the lodge, eating and stuff.
The second day it was foggy so we went swimming at a water-slide place. Aquapulco, it was called, but Gamma called it Apocapulco. That's my girl.
If you're new here, Gamma is the 8-year old.
Happy New Year, by the way.
Evenings we spent fighting over the remote control device and jockeying for position on the couch.
When Beta had the remote, we watched MTV, at least part of the time. I was a bit worried when Rammstein came on, because it was visually impressive and included a monk-type fellow stabbing someone to death, and several shirtless flagellants (as opposed to flagellates which are something biological) scourging themselves vigorously and in time with the music.
"Papa," Gamma said once the video had finished, "can you get me a copy of this?"
The third day of skiing was the coldest, so we went into the lodge earlier in the day, to make sure we got a table because it's no fun to lurk around in the lodge looking for a corner to rest in.
We had a good family ski trip. We fought and bickered quite a bit, because we have been doing that this holiday season, but the external conditions couldn't have been better, is what I'm saying. The landscape was quite marvelous. My wife led us around the slopes with calm expertise, and the snow was good with very little ice. I got in a few nice chats with Beta on the ski lifts. We had a good time. But it's nice to be back.