Metamorphosism

Karma

I stepped on a cockroach in my kitchen this morning. I felt bad about it.

I wondered if the Dalai Lama would step on a cockroach. I suppose if anyone was watching he'd take it outside and give it a cracker.

Do proper Buddhists make an exception for vermin? Or did my karma take a small hit? We had friends over for brunch yesterday. They have a couple daughters about Gamma's age. The girls started screaming because a spider was on the table. I carried it outside, so maybe that made up for the cockroach. But I chased the girls around the house with it first, so maybe not.

Then I noticed the cockroach wasn't dead, only crippled. It was mashed up, but its feelers were still twitching. So I hadn't killed it after all.

I felt better. It still had a chance to learn something from this incarnation and maybe reincarnate a step or two up the ladder, as a talk-radio host or something.

I began to tell Alpha about it when she came down to breakfast, but she wasn't awake enough for a philosophical discussion, plus she'd want to know why I had left a crippled cockroach on the kitchen floor, so I got a Kleenex and carried it outside to the trash instead, where it probably died of cognitive dissonance.

I was afraid of this

Welcome to the canon.

Faster than the lawyers

Two physeter macrocephalus walk into a bar.
PM1: Oh god. [Lowers broad forehead to cool surface of bar, which has a soothing effect for about one second until his body heat warms it up.] Oh god, ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod.
PM2: Don't look to me for sympathy.
PM1: Just harpoon me now. God.
PM2: It's the same story every time you eat running sushi. You're an adult. You have to know this by now.
PM1: I just can't resist the colossal squid.
PM2: You must have eaten your body weight's worth of them. The chef was staring.
PM1: If I could move I'd beach myself.
PM2: They say colossal squid make up 70% of our stomach contents, normally.
PM1: [groans]
PM2: In your case it's more like 170%. You had a plate of gyoza too, right?
PM1: I'm warning you, change the subject now.
PM2: They must be packed in there tighter than the spermaceti in your skull.
PM1: [empties stomach contents in explosive manner all over the bar]
PM2: You weren't kidding. Feel better now?
Bartender: [Blinks. Looks at rag in his hand.]
PM1: Somewhat. Quite a bit, actually. How's the family?

PM2: Getting by. Kid in college now. Boy, that went fast. I still remember...
PM1: Save it for your drunken speech at her wedding.
PM2: It's funny. I used to wonder how my dad would feel if I were more successful than he was, when in fact that's all a sane parent could hope for.
PM1: It reminds me of that lawyer joke great white sharks tell.
PM2: [Quizzical look]
PM1: You know. You've heard it. The two sharks are trying to get away from the lawyers, and the one says, Aw, give up, we'll never outswim them; and the other one says, I don't have to be faster than them, I only have to be faster than you.
PM2: [Can't stop chuckling]
PM1: Every generation wants its kids to outswim it. All we can do is buy them time. And pray they'll be faster than the lawyers when we're gone.
Bartender: Get you guys anything?
PM2: Got any pulque?
PM1: BLEARGH!!
Bartender: [Blinks, looks at rag.]

Hyperbolic curve

"You seemed a bit lost at rehearsal," my teacher said at my lesson yesterday, putting it mildly.
"Yes," I said, not adding, "I felt like a dog chasing its ass in circles," which is what I had wanted to say at the rehearsal, and only refrained from doing because a couple of young kids about 12 years old (or younger) were also playing, and I decided to say nothing rather than something like, "I feel like a dog chasing it's bottom," because that is not how I had felt.
"Anything in particular?" my teacher said. "What about this tricky part here?"
"Yeah," I said. "I couldn't make any sense of that, as you noticed," I said. In fact, I might as well have been watching flies dance on a zebra's carcass. But that's not something one normally says in polite conversation. Or, at least, it would have come out more awkward than I like to think that sort of thing does in writing, because first I would have had to translate it into German, (es war wie Fliegen beim Tanzen auf einem Zebrakadaver zu beobachten, or something) and it would just lose its spontaneity, and so on.
I had a lot on my mind when I was at the rehearsal, and basically could not concentrate. And I just couldn't figure out the fingerings on the spot like that, and then I got flustered and gave up.
In my lesson, my teacher was kind enough to discuss some basics of figuring out fingerings, which should help in the long run. One of my problems with cello is impatience. I would probably move faster if I went slower.

A coin

Last week at the local supermarket, I put a coin into the slot of the shopping cart locking mechanism but nothing happened that I could see so I tried to get the coin back out to try it in the slot of another cart's locking mechanism. I couldn't get a good grip on the coin, though, because less than a millimeter was sticking out and I have short fingernails.

I could get it to move a couple microns, but it kept slipping back in. I couldn't even get it to move enough to tell whether it was somehow locked into the slot (having engaged some mechanism) or I just wasn't pulling hard enough. People who had arrived after me were taking carts from other nested lines of carts and going about their business.

Noticing my situation, the man who sells the homeless newspaper in front of the store came over. He took some fingernail clippers out of his pocket and got ahold of the edge of the coin that way. I remembered my mother warning me when I was a kid not to put coins in my mouth; her argument was one never knows where they have been whereas I had been more concerned about the choking danger at the time. Now that I am grown I can put coins in my mouth whenever I want, but if I do I'll always boil them first I guess.

The coin just wouldn't come out, though, it did appear to be locked in the slot. So the man helping me checked to see whether my insertion of the coin had disengaged the cart lock, something I had neglected to do after failing to hear the usual "click" upon insertion, or see the key pop out as usual.

Indeed, the cart was unlocked and my only problem was me. Funny how that works, I thought. Upon leaving the supermarket, I purchased a newspaper from the man and asked him how his arm was doing, because we had discussed it a few weeks earlier, and he had told me then about slipping and falling on it. It is doing better now, although he dreads the approaching winter, which is expected to be cold.

An egg a day

Beta: Someone at the subway station had a sign that said, "an egg a day is okay."
Gamma: Whoa! That's like, 563 eggs a year!
[Pregnant pause]
Everyone else in the room: 365!
Gamma: Heh.

What about the salt lick?

It's been foggy lately. In the mornings. Haven't seen any deer lately, though. Maybe someone told them about hunting season.

Deer 1: WTFBBQ!!1!
Deer 2: Yep.
Deer 1: What about the salt lick?
Deer 2: [Nods slowly.]
Deer 1: Whoa.

A hearse passed me on my way to work yesterday morning, and I was already speeding. Its license plate number indicated it was licensed in a town upriver. Then a whole pod of cars with plates from the same town, about a dozen of them, sped past too. My mind was occupied trying to figure that one out the rest of the way to the office.

I figure they were all late to a funeral, but the hearse too? They're not going to start without you, dude.

Maybe he stole the body and the others were trying to catch him. Leave your theories in the comments.

Cello progress report

I've been somewhat distracted by life lately, and yet not in a manner one could bitch about in any interesting way. Mornings have been foggy and beautiful. Luckily there were no law enforcement officers around because I was driving and taking pictures on my way to work again this morning. On the bad for your concentration while driving scale, photography falls somewhere between telecommunications activity and what I once saw happening in the Dodge Charger in front of me on a road out in some Wyoming wasteland once a long time ago.

With certain exceptions that may even be more conceptual than real, to the extent that real concepts are less real than, say, fog, or hibernating tortoises (I sometimes wonder whether Schrödinger actually had a tortoise, not a cat, because while one rarely seals cats into boxes, tortoises do like to hibernate out of sight, under leaves in a plastic tub in your cellar, for example, with the result that you have this schrödingeresque period of time every spring: is it dead? is it alive but just sleeping? is it trying to get out but I just don't hear it down in the cellar? is it going through a Cask-of-Amontillado panic right now? did it go through one yesterday, but I missed it and now it's dead and there goes my karma? is it fine and I should quit worrying? and he probably started out lecturing about his tortoise, and everyone was all, WTF? until he got the idea to talk about a cat instead) things have been going okayish or better.

Someone asked me how I was again recently, and it threw me again. I just am, don't ask me how. Ask me how cello is going, I can answer that. They put me on the orchestra list again this year. I wasn't even asked, it was assumed, which is nice. And we got some of the sheet music. And I can already play most of it. Which is to say, I cannot play any of it the way it will eventually have to be played, but at the first rehearsal I managed to keep up with the best cellists there (luckily the two really good cellists didn't come to the first rehearsal).

The fiddly bits all look manageable - nothing evil like some of the stuff I was forced to pantomime last year. We're playing some stuff from Carmen. That's fun. And some other stuff. A Strauss polka, I think it's Strauss. And so on.

I was thinking, if mice don't like dissonance, then the music school has no mice. I've gotten over my fear of robust bowing. The fear was making me squeak too much. I am often unsure of my intonation, and try to play more quietly, which is the opposite of what you should do (at least while practicing, I still think in an orchestral performance you should keep quiet if you're not sure). Last night my teacher got me to play a piece loudly and it sounded good. The cello, I mean. See, he said. That's what your cello is supposed to sound like. It seems to be a nice instrument, as student celli go, and one of my goals for the year is to get sounds like that out of it more often.

Last year, I had the feeling I was making no progress, mostly due to Grieg and other stuff I just couldn't crack. But when I sat down with my sheet music this year and started trying it out, and it started working, I had to admit maybe I've begun to learn something after all.

Long-lost early Beatrix Potter manuscript recovered from lining of man's top hat purchased on eBay

It was badly stained. Using x-rays, Evco Institute restorers recovered the following text:

Mr. Bug's Coma Dreams

It was a sunny day; well, not really very sunny, more overcast, but it had been sunny earlier, when Mr. Bug (short for [insert clever acronymic name here]) had made his decision to take a lunchtime stroll, so even though it clouded up he still went outside when his lunchbreak came around.

Mr. Bug avoided the park, even though with autumn approaching it promised to be quite lovely as the leaves on the collection of trees in the arboretum changed their hue to a variety of colors at different rates, because he had attained a certain uncomfortable level of sensitivity to the stares he got from nannies, he, a middle-aged man in a suit, alone, often carrying a camera, among people (we shall call them people although they will of course be various animals in the illustrations) generally composed of nannies and small children.

Walking the other direction, towards various sources of food, Mr. Bug's mind wandered between various trains of thought, as walking always proved conducive to cogitation on Mr. Bug's part, and so he thought of various issues and situations, such as, "what is up with this whole private army shit thing anyway, who needs a private army, isn't that illegal, and why don't they call them mercenaries, which is what they are, not fcuking contractors, a contractor builds your house or something," and other things that had been in the news, or which he had observed personally, until he was in such a state of agitation that he was led to recall a warning he had received from his opthamologist regarding macular degeneration and its possible connection to high blood pressure, which she said he should have his general practicioner check him for as he had previously admitted to her he had not yet been checked despite his age, which was, as we have said, middle, whether he liked it or not.

Becoming aware of his agitation, Mr. Bug recalled a yoga breathing practice he had read about on the internet, involving inhaling through the nostrils for a count of eight, and exhaling through pursed lips for a count of sixteen. He tried this for some time, synchronizing his counting with his footsteps on the paved sidewalk, and gradually had the feeling that he was growing calmer, so he continued; soon, however, he realized that "count" was a very imprecise way to measure time, and that if he counted fast he hyperventilated, and if he counted slowly he grew faint.

And if he counted very slowly... but he never completed that thought, because a sudden state of disequilibrium resulting from an insufficient supply of oxygen to his brain, which sat snugly in his cranium beneath his black bowler hat, rendered him unconscious, and he fell, and in falling struck his head on the stone kerb, receiving such a strong concussion that he fell into a coma.

Mr. Bug perceived none of this, however, and to his perception he continued walking in his business-manner down the street in a search of some sort of nourishment. Looking through the plate-glass window of the running sushi establishment, he was astounded to see not dodgy Asian tidbits but instead Hollywood actresses riding the conveyor belt around the restaurant on little plates. He did not recognize any, except for maybe Charlize Theron, although he wasn't sure. It did not dismay him, though, because he hadn't really been hungry for running sushi in the first place.

Next he passed by Mr. MacGregor's Bakery, where a large hookah-smoking caterpillar and a grinning cat [note to editor: will this fly?] spoke to him as he waited for his bun. But his bun never came, Mr. MacGregor puttered in the back room inexplicably until, on the advice of the hookah-smoking caterpillar, Mr. Bug simply took his bun and left (after placing the proper coins on the counter, which however the grinning cat pocketed).

Mr. Bug was quite distressed to see Mr. MacGregor, who was a colossal squid, extrude from the door of his bakery in an agitated state, in hot pursuit. Mr. MacGregor was the size of an omnibus (but bore a closer resemblance to an incubus, or perhaps a cthulu), if you included all his arms and legs, but although he was fast and graceful under-water, here on land Mr. Bug noticed to his relief that he was slowed considerably by his weight and the fact that his body possessed no hard parts but for his beak, which was contorted in an angry frown. Mr. MacGregor's large eyes were angry as well, and bloodshot to boot, as he flopped and oozed down the street, making a great effort to avoid the electrical cable overhead that powered the trams.

Then, to Mr. Bug's shock, Mr. MacGregor attached himself to a passing omnibus, gripping it tightly with the suckers on the underside of some of his arms, and rapidly closed the gap between them.

In his panic to escape Mr. MacGregor, who was a colossal squid, Mr. Bug overlooked an open manhole and fell down, down, down. He seemed to fall forever. Due to the aerodynamic properties of his carapace, he fell quite quickly too, passing a whole menagerie of other people falling down the same hole, including a little girl with dark rings around her eyes, and a gryphon.

Finally, just before he hit the bottom of the deep, deep hole, he woke up in a hospital bed. "You struck your head and lost consciousness," said the doctor. "I shall notify your next of kin while the hospital clowns cheer you up."

Several hospital clowns Mr. Bug had not previously noticed emerged from the woodwork and began performing comedic pantomime. "That won't be nece..." Mr. Bug began, but stopped short when he noticed that one of the clowns, the one without a red nose, was actually Gwen Stefani.

"I do this in my spare time," she said.

Mr. Bug realized that he must still be unconscious, and this was simply a new level of his dream. He sent away the other clowns, told the doctor he would contact his family himself in due course, and spent his afternoon in a sunbeam, discussing points of Sanskrit grammar with Ms. Stefani.

(to be continued...)

Learning to drive

Beta is learning to drive. She takes lessons at a school in town, and practices with me. We attach warning signs to the windshield and back window of her car with suction cups and off we go.

We drive all over. She does real well, I'm proud of her.

Today she's driving me to music school. I have a cello lesson after work and she has harp. So I have to remember to drive home instead of to music school.

I had forgotten how hard it was to learn to drive. Or, I remembered that it was hard to learn to drive, but I had forgotten precisely how it was hard to learn to drive.

But she does real well.