Metamorphosism

On learning music

A guy I know is a professional musician. He has about a dozen kids or something. He plays the whatever in the something theater in Vienna. On the radio this morning, when I turned it back on after running out of songs to sing on my morning commute, they said something about how they were now playing something there that they play every year at this time.
I figure for him, and those in his orchestra, it must be like blocks of Legos by now. For the next few weeks we will play this again, they say, and reach into their music bags and take out preassembled blocks of Legos already all fit together. They might rearrange a couple plastic bricklets, but everything is basically already in place.
Yesterday I practiced the cello after slacking off for a couple days. I practiced the LeClerc piece I like so much and even it was hard. I did a couple scales and my hand cramped right away. The stuff for the orchestra was horrible.
Overall, it wasn't like Legos. It was like stacking ball bearings.
It was like, here, stack this pound of ball bearings into a single column, in the dark, and then you can have some Legos.
On the plus side, I got a red GEWA hard case for my cello for Christmas and it looks very, very cool. I am most pleased with it. The luthier gave me a good deal. First he gave me a discount because I was a regular customer. Then he gave me a good price for my old cello bag. I kept going, geeze, I really want this but it's just... expensive. I wasn't trying to negotiate with him, I was just being honest. He kept talking himself down further and further. Finally he was taking out his catalogs and showing me how, this is what he pays for it, he has almost no profit margin left. Showing me the actual figures.
Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe he likes me as much as I like him, who knows. Maybe he's a good guy, he seems to be.
He even gave me a pencil when I left. It has a clip attached to it by a string so you can hang it from your music stand and annotate your music. He gave me another one for my cello teacher.
I didn't tell him about the ball bearings.

The marvel of the human mind

Our cat, the scientist one that has figured out doors, woke me at 3 because he wanted out so I felt my way downstairs in the dark and unlocked the front door as quietly as I could but the lock still made the loud click it always makes and when the cat got out it realized that out wasn't where it wanted to be, in was where it wanted to be because it was cold, and snowing or raining or snowing and raining and also I am perhaps partly to blame because I gave him a choice. I stood there for a couple seconds with the door open, looking at him on the doormat and actually asked him, "are you sure about this?" and he came back inside. He followed me back upstairs and slept on the bed, at the foot of the mattress while I lay there and stared at the ceiling and at the dresser until about 4 when I reset my alarm clock to 6 from 5 because I was going to need the extra hour of sleep seeing as how I wasn't falling right back to sleep and my morning journal writing could just wait until another morning. At this time the cat knocked something off a night stand, or was about to, which is his way of letting you know he wants out, if the bedroom door happens to be open and he can't wake you by scratching on it. I think I let him out at that point, but my wife may have.
I must have finally fallen asleep around one minute to six because the alarm woke me just as I was getting into a dream about driving on icy streets in the darkest of nights. It was just as well. It was one of those dreams where you go, duh, how about encoding things a little more next time. Where, if you read it in a work of fiction you would mentally chastize the author for not trying harder or for being so obvious.
All that was missing were colored blocks falling from the sky, eternally, clogging everything up.
So I felt my way back downstairs in the darkness and made coffee. Both cats were back inside, so I guess my wife let scientist cat back in soon after one of us let him out. I fed the cats. I ate muesli. I drank a cup of coffee while checking my email. I vaguely remembered another dream, where someone told me something, gave me an idea, suggested something and I thought, Hey, that would be a perfect project for evco in 2007.
I can't remember what it was, though. It may have involved volatile substances and my place of employment so, ehn.
Then I showered, shaved and got dressed. Before getting dressed I also dried my hair and spent a minute applying some sort of hair product to it in an attempt to get it to behave the way it behaves for my hair stylist. Then I gave up on that. I sprayed deodorant from an aerosol can into my left armpit. Then, still using my right hand, I sprayed it into my right armpit. To do this, I had to hold the can upside down.
Held upside down, mostly just propellant comes out. Back in the days of freon propellant, you could freeze flies by doing that. Did you know that? It reminded me of my job in a photo shop when I was in highschool, lining up rows of frozen flies along the counter on slow days, mentally betting on which would thaw out and fly away first.
I wondered if any scientific papers had been written on the relative incidence of armpit conditions in left and right armpits, whether there was a significant difference and whether they had concluded holding the aerosol deodorant can right side up vs upside down were a contributing factor.
Here's the best part: I thought all this in a split second. The human brain is a marvel.
Then I went upstairs and got dressed, as quietly as possible, and put on my shoes and drove to work.
The roads were wet, but not icy. Because they were wet, the windshield was soon opaque with road grime, but I had to ration my windshield cleaning fluid because I wasn't sure how much was left.
So I only cleaned the windshield when it was absolutely necessary. Sometimes I got lucky and a truck would splash my car a little and I could use that water to clean the windshield.
The radio was all blahblahblah so I turned it off and sang the usual songs.
I was the first one at the office so I took the best parking space. Normally I park a few spaces back to make the higher-ups happy or whatever. But today I figured, it's the last working day in the year. Fuck them.

Visitation rights

A day or two ago, I saw my father's ghost in the living room. The irony of that didn't occur to me until just now.

He looked troubled, I would say. The word that first came to me was "tormented," but that is maybe too dramatic, or leaping to a conclusion.
But surely troubled. Out of focus. Lost.

My initial reaction was to pray that he would find his destination. That he would find God, if that was a prospect, and peace. Pray that he would be led to the light by loved ones that had preceded him, and that if there are more than one place one can ago in death he would go to the best place, and sit at the right hand of Jesus beside his beloved brother Jack.

Assuming that is an option.

But what do we know of prayer? What if it is not a good thing? For we know nothing of the effects of prayer on the living or the dead.

What if prayer is like asbestos or cell phones? Will our grandchildren one day shake their heads and murmer, "They actually prayed for the dead"?

What if my father, or his ghost, or however that works, only wanted to talk, and I, out of fear of ghosts masquerading as filial love¹, prayed him away? Maybe he was all, "Son, listen, the six right numbers are..." and then, SSSSUCK! as the force of my prayer for his peace and salvation created a metaphysical vacuum.

Cause later on I had to wonder about that. Why he visited. Was he lost and wandering, or was he looking for parts of himself in others (the parts of others we bear in ourselves) or do we lose pieces of our souls and he was just checking everywhere he'd been, or was he fine and simply visiting loved ones?

I had to wonder what he would have said. Maybe, "Son. When we're dead, we're dead, except for the ghost thing. There is so much of me in you that I can do dice tricks and become visible, if only at the very edge of your peripheral vision. I loved you so much. You know the feeling -- I loved you as much as you loved me. I'm sorry we didn't talk more, but that's how it turned out. You talk more to your kids, maybe that is a good thing.
What I wanted to say: I want you to be happy. I don't want you to give up on happiness, even if the pursuit makes you miserable. You don't deserve unhappiness and fear. You don't deserve to be anyone but who you are. It is so brief! Believe me. It is so brief, there is only time for honesty and love.
I want you to be the you I love, the shining spark at your center. The rest of you is merely fuel.
I never told you what I wanted, because I didn't want to interfere. You thought it proved your unimportance or insignificance, but I just didn't want to interfere. I have never wanted anything for you but for you to be as only you can be. Not good or bad or afraid or careful or successful. Be you. Do what you do. What life tells you through you and through the world, not what others say or what you think they want. Not what good sense says or the ghosts of your forefathers."

Maybe he just wanted to say, "I love you so much."

Maybe he just wanted to say, "where are the goddamned dice?"
----------------------

¹The fear, of course, is masquerading as filial love, and not the ghosts. No one fears ghosts masquerading as filial love.

All the best to you

and peace

Points of orchestral etiquette

For the second year running, I am in a local amateur orchestra. For those of you in a similar situation, I offer the following tips on participation in rehearsals, which can be challenging and complicated interactions.

• Come on time. This means a few minutes early, because you have to find your place, and unpack everything, and tune, and yada yada yada.
  
• By no means come, like, half an hour late when everyone is in the middle of the Mozart piece and the only spare cello seat is in the middle of the orchestra somewhere.
  
• If you do come late, unpack quietly and when you wrangle your way to the empty seat in the middle of the packed rehearsal hall, try not to forget your cello.
  
• If you do forget your cello, and have to get back up and excusemeexcusemeexcusemesorry your way back to the grand piano in the back of the room where you left it, pretend you're going because you got an urgent call on your mobile phone if, luckily, your daughter calls to check where you are because she forgot you had rehearsal.
  
• When you go to your seat for the second time (excusemeexcusemeexcusemesorry), with your cello this time, by no means are you to forget to tighten the little screw that holds in the spike, because it is, like, a two-foot, half-pound piece of sharpened metal that can make a loud noise when it falls out and CLANGs to the floor between a viola player's feet.

The Devil's Advocate and the Shit Weasel

Gamma has been very protective of Red Cat since his recent crime (see previous post). She often sticks up for underdogs like that, although in this case it feels more like devil's advocacy. I'm guessing there is a certain feeling of kinship there, although most of it is, probably, softhearted sweetness.

Last night she asked for a bedtime story. Anything I wanted, she said, as long as it did not involve something nasty happening to a cat. This meant I had to toss my first story idea. To be honest, I did not toss it, I just gave it a happy ending, and told the short version so I could more quickly get on to the main story for the night. The cat story, about an evil cat that ate the birthday cake of a poor one-legged boy I knew in school, so poor that his parents went without lunch for a year in order to afford the first birthday cake of his life, with the result that the cat was thrown out an upper-storey window, landing on telephone wires and dancing from one telephone wire to the other, and was discovered by a circus, where it thereafter performed, financially saving the family, was just the opening act for the story of the shit weasel. Please don't inform CPS.

When I was a boy, I had a phobia of the toilet monster. I figured it lived in the plumbing and hated me for flushing so much shit down its way, and would someday exact an unimaginable, yet terrible, revenge.

One day, after my mother had cleaned our perfectly white house, shampooed the perfectly white carpets and dusted the white furniture and walls and vacuumed the white sofas in preparation for a Tupperware party she would be holding later in the day, she went out for supplies, warning me not to get anything dirty in her absence.

I was taking a crap, reading a book, minding my own business, when I heard something splashing. I jumped off the toilet, terrified, and grabbed a broom (plunger would have been more logical, it seems to me now, but in the true story upon which this is based, the man -- an acquaintance of my father's -- had grabbed a broom), praying I would somehow be able to drive away the toilet monster.

Instead, a shit weasel climbed out of the toilet. I hit at it with the broom, but it wouldn't go back down. Likewise, flushing had no effect. Soaking wet, covered with shit and wearing a little hat of wet toilet paper, it jumped out of the john. I tried to escape to look for a box or other trap, but it was too quick for me and dashed into the house when I opened the door.

I chased it around but it was impossible to catch. It ran into the clean, white living room before I could close the door. Everywhere it stepped, it left little filthy footprints.

Naturally I was frantic. I grabbed some rags and began wiping at the footprints, but they were covered with black car grease from my father's last car repair work and left black greasy spots where I wiped, making things worse. I grabbed a can of upholstery shampoo and sprayed that on things, but it turned out to be blue shaving cream and left blue stains.

About this time I heard my mother drive into the driveway. Lacking a better idea, I locked the door and shouted out to her "Just a minute" and "be right with you."

I got a bucket of white paint out of the cellar and tried touching up the walls and then the furniture and carpet with that, but it only made things worse because it was the wrong shade of white and now wet paint was all over everything.

I opened the window a crack and made a trail of food along the sill and floor to where the shit weasel was hiding under the sofa. Then I got the broom and tried to shoo it in the direction of the window, so it would go outside and not cause any more problems.

(At least, I think this is what I said, because I kept falling asleep during the story and Gamma had to keep waking me up. )

My mother was, of course, standing outside with chips and things and banging on the door.

The shit weasel ran in the wrong direction, knocking over a burning candle and setting the Christmas tree on fire. When it saw the flames, though, it finally did go outside.

Then I ran to the front door, unlocked it and ran outside, locking it behind me again. "I was so scared," I told my mom. "The candles you left burning set the house on fire and you had locked me in and I couldn't find the keys until just now."

My mother called the fire department from a neighbor's house and they were there in a jiffy, and put out the fire before too much structural damage was done, but they made a hell of a mess so I was off the hook.

The end.

Gamma seemed to like it. She laughed, and said we really had to start up the nightly stories again.

About a turkey

Guest post by Anton Pavlovich Chekov
Mig came home from somewhere yesterday. He had driven his daughter to a museum, that was it. He came home, let in the cat, which he carefully loaded and hung on the wall, and started reading.
His cousin loaned him the latest novel by what'shisface the High Fidelity guy when he was in the States for his father's funeral. He started reading it this weekend and found it a good, crisp read. Also, reading a story about people who wanted to jump off a building had a positive effect on his mood.
He had a turkey breast to roast. He had also cooked chili con carne the day before. Actually, there was so much of that left that he wouldn't have needed to roast the turkey except the turkey was set to expire in two days and he figured if he roast it then it would eventually get eaten, whereas if he didn't roast it right away who knows? So he put it in the oven with some carrots and potatoes and read his book some more.
He basted the turkey a few times. He saw kids off to bed. His wife as well. Eventually the turkey was finished roasting and he put it onto the stove to cool before he carried it downstairs to the cold room in the cellar for the night.
The book, it's called "A Long Way Down," that's it. By Nick Hornby.
Everytime Mig reads that name, it strikes him as though it ought to be Hornsby, although he can't explain why.
He was about to the end of a chapter. He was about to get up and see if the turkey had cooled enough, when he heard the noises coming from the kitchen.
Immediately he knew what was happening.
It hadn't happened since one Thanksgiving more than ten years ago.
The noises were like this:

Licklicklicklicklicklicklick.

It was the sound of a cat making the most of a small window of opportunity.
It was followed quickly by other sounds - profane sputtering, hurried footsteps across a polished maple floor, "shoo"ing noises, a door opening and closing quickly, then a minute of profane lamenting, then another minute of quiet thought.
Mig fired up the oven, to a higher temperature this time, to the maximum actually, and after carving off the begnawed end of the roast, slid the whole works back in.
It was boiling away within a couple minutes. He let it roast for a quarter of an hour. This, he thought, most definitely would sterilize everything.
But who would eat it but him?
But what if he didn't tell anyone?
He couldn't do that. Not even to his mother-in-law.
And even if he could, how could he serve it to her and to no one else without someone getting suspicious?
After it had cooled, he put it into the cellar. When the grey cat woke him at two in the morning to be let out, he cut off a bit of the chewed piece he had earlier removed and fed it to him, since the grey cat was innocent. It was very pleased. It ate it so fast it nearly gagged.
He left the rest of the gnawed piece on the counter and, with both cats outside and the ruined turkey in the cellar, went to bed.
In the morning, the red cat was somehow back in the house and the chewed piece was gone.
What a pig.
He told the story to his wife and she said to put a warning sign on the turkey so no one would eat it by accident.
Mig wished he hadn't told her the part about her mother, as she didn't find it very funny.

Little-known facts about the grouper

• The grouper, of the family Serranidae, commonly weighs between 50-100 pounds, although they can reach 750 pounds.
  
• The biggest one ever caught with a rod and reel weighed over 400 pounds. Imagine that.
  
• You wouldn't want to eat one that big, though, because the bigger ones can cause ciguatera poisoning, whatever that is.
  
• Some marine biologists claim that groupers like coastal areas. That is what the groupers want them to think.
  
• The grouper is an angrier fish than the casual observer would guess.
  
• The grouper hates arcade games where variously-colored blocks fall unpredictably and constantly from the sky, piling up until the window clogs and the game is lost, because it reminds them too directly of their life.
  
• In fact, if it had the time, the grouper could spend an entire day sitting on a park bench thinking about a single thing: how much it hates its life.
  
• Despite this, the grouper appears to be a friendly fish, and can be fed by hand.
  
• It requires a great effort of will on the part of the grouper not to eat the hand, which is a delicacy for the grouper.
  
• The grouper is a popular food fish, used for many kinds of cooking.

Orphanage infestation starlet

Man: How was school today, honey?
Girl: Okay.
Man: That's nice. Everything okay?
Newspaper: Two-headed baby massacre disco fire.
Girl: Bzzbzzbzz.
Newspaper: Deadzone meltoff oilslick.
Girl: Bzzbzzbzz.
Man: I'm sorry, honey. Could you repeat that? I'm having trouble listening lately.
Girl: That's okay. I have a Latin test tomorrow, I said.
Man: So you're going to school tomorrow? You feeling better?
Girl: A little bit. If you miss the test you just have to take a harder one later.
Man: Yeah. Totally.
Newspaper: Downturn collusion deficit.
Girl: Bzzbzzbzz.
Newspaper: Bulimia prolapse.
Train of thought: Since when is prolapse part of our normal vocabulary, and what does that say about us?
Girl: Bzzbzzbzz.
Man: I'm sorry. The bus?
Girl: I said, I will have to take the bus to the train station tomorrow, won't I?
Man: I suppose so. I could try to get your sister up early so we could drive you, but we'd have to leave by when, 6.30 AM, right?
Girl: More or less.
Man: You feel okay enough to do that?
Girl: Sure.
Newspaper: Alligator body parts. Celebrity investigation.
Newspaper: Contamination plunge. Suspicious gadget discount.
Newspaper: Bedbug tragedy.
Newspaper: Daycare arrest.
Man: Ham sandwich okay for lunch tomorrow?
Girl: Sure.

Brain evolution

On the radio this morning, something was said about a program to be broadcast later in the day, about alt sein ("being old"), only I understood Alzheim. The irony crushed me to the thickness of a peanut skin.

Cracking walnuts a few days ago, I had to think about the evolution of the brain. My theory is, we are descended from walnuts. It's all there, the two sides, the lobes, the corpus callosum. Maybe not the lobes, I guess, but the folds, the folds.

Either that, or there is some natural mathematical explanation involving surface area and volume and maximization.

I have no time lately to practice cello. This makes lessons and orchestra rehearsals frustrating. Even when I do practice, I cannot get into the proper frame of mind. Last night I was doing okay for a while, but then Beta yelled that Gamma wanted me to come upstairs and dry her hair, and I sighed and went upstairs and she was in the tub crying because the water was too hot and I said why didn't you put some cold water in and we ended up yelling at each other, in part I think because we are all so sick and tired at home, and in part because St. Nicholas brought chocolate yesterday and that's about all we ate all day long.

Gamma and I are both the kiss-and-make-up types, though, so we were getting along again by bedtime.

I got her into bed and practiced a little more but didn't make much progress on any of my orchestra pieces, which require more concentration than I am presently able to give.

There are two other things, however, which are saving me musically. One is a small Le Clerc piece, a cello duet, kindly sent to me by Guanaco. It is at a level of difficulty that enables me to concentrate on enjoying the music, and perhaps bowing, rather than getting all tangled up in intonation. It is fun to play, and another cellist at the music school and I may soon be playing it together, just for the hell of it.

This is significant, as it goes beyond what my original goal was in taking cello lessons. My original goal was, to increase my enjoyment of hearing music. To open the window a bit wider to the room where musicians sit around playing. I did not dream that I would ever be in the room playing with them.

I have achieved all my original goals and must set new ones I guess. My experience in the orchestra has also been a benefit - I can now hear the different parts of the music when an orchestra plays, and my appreciation of it has increased.

For the moment I am coasting while I formulate new goals. Struggling with hard music, and enjoying playing as an added, surprise bonus. Thanks, cello! Thanks, Guanaco!

The other thing is, Gamma and I have enrolled in a composition workshop at our music school. See, she said she'd only do it if I signed up with her. We are the second father-daughter team in the workshop, among other kids there.

We are working on a minimal music piece, I think. One idea, the teacher said, would be to come up with your own scale of several notes and noodle around with that for a while and see what you come up with. I tried it the other day.

Remember the dead fox? In German, it is spelled Fuchs. Subtract the U, which is no note in German notation, and you have the notes F, C, B (called H in German) and E flat (called Es in German). It is possible, without any knowledge of piano, to sit down at one, figure out which keys correspond to those notes, press down on the sustain pedal and noodle around such that it sounds pretty and melancholy. I find it a great comfort.

It is harder to get something nice-sounding by noodling about on the cello, at least for me, at least right now. Maybe that would be a good goal.

Gamma doesn't want to compose a melancholy piece, though. She wants to do something happy about a badger, maybe. Or something else.

The voice at 5.00 AM

My kids do their homework and I realize I don't know a single thing. There is no knowledge, only vague memories such as, things chemical involve electrons. Or, there was a literary style known as expressionism. Everything else is pure guesswork or less, pure making shit up.

Like: until you hit the ground, you can't be sure whether you're flying or falling.

Looking for a necktie this morning, it occurred to me that my father never abandoned me on the bridge at Multnomah Falls. As a young boy I had a phobia that I would be abandoned at a landmark of some sort, a park, or perhaps a bus depot.

My father was a bus driver, I saw the inside of a lot of bus depots; baggage rooms and driver rooms and dispatch offices.

It is, I suppose, a phase we go through, wanting to abandon our children, and I must have picked up on those vibes as a boy.

I was the first one into the office this morning. A phone was ringing somewhere with that mysterious potential native to unanswered ringing phones.

It was early in the morning when my mother called to tell me of my father's death. Her voice was naked and quiet. I cried after I hung up. Then I sat on the edge of my bed and remembered how strong my father's arms had seemed when he held me when I was little. He wore plaid pendleton wool shirts and smelled of wool and work and tobacco and lumber and diesel.

Even now, I still love wool and work and lumber and quiet, decent men, and the smell of tobacco and diesel.

Z was a little old lady I went to grade school with. I thought about her this morning, driving into work. She was blond and small for her age. She had curly hair and thick glasses and elderly parents. Elderly parents! And they gave her a name that started with Z!

Each year she was taken out of class for heart surgery. When we square danced, the teacher made me dance with her because I was the nicest boy. I also was assigned the task of helping her catch up with school work when she returned from hospital.

She died in the fourth grade. Nowadays, such a kid might have a better chance. Back then, maybe, the surgeons stood around after the ether put her out and thought, Jesus, what now. I imagine their tools looked like something out of your father's toolbox, just sterile.

I don't think about Z very often, but when I do it feels as if I'm always thinking about her. Like a theme in some very long composition that when you hear it, you think, this is what ties everything together.