26Sep / 2024

Bella Ciao

God: Where are we now?
Noah: Erm, eleven. 9:11.
God: Ok.
God: So anyway, Yes, I am confirming my covenant with you. Never again will floodwaters kill all living creatures; never again will a flood destroy the earth.
Noah (writing): Ok, yep, good, got it. No More Floods.
God: Weeeelll not exackly.
Noah: You said, and I quote, “never again will floodwaters etc etc.”
God: Yes however.
Noah: Kill all living creatures.
God: Yes ok not all of them.
Noah (loses cuniform stylus in mud): Dang. Look, I’ll just put “no more floods” for now and add the details later.
God: You’re gonna forget.
Noah: I won’t forget! Man!
God: Yeah ok whatever.

The Damage Commission was at our house this morning.
They looked around.
My wife, who has been cleaning for over a week (with help from friends and relatives including me) apologized for the mess. Who apologizes for the mess after a flood has flooded your house?
Oh, we’ve seen worse, say the Damage Commission.
The Damage Commission decides how much damage money we get or something, at least is responsible for the first stage of the process, before it vanishes into bureaucracy. I wanted to wait on the cleaning until after their visit so the cellar would look worse but Alpha said they would know, don’t worry, which was correct.

They needed our children to sign a form so I hunted them down on the way to work. There has been much hunting down of people to sign forms lately.

I hunted Gamma down at the hospital where she is doing an internship, something to do with psychology and psychotherapy blah blah blah and out she walks to meet me, wearing a white lab coat and carrying a clip board and a book.

Oh, you have a pen to sign with, I said.
I have two, she said, flaunting the second pen.

That’s how together she is nowadays.

Then I drove to the other train station, my regular train station still being under water, and failed to find a legal parking spot because everyone who normally uses my regular train station is now also using the other train station so I went home and had Alpha drive me to the other train station. When I got to town I went to the ministry to meet Beta.

I hesitate to say which ministry because with Beta you never fucking know how secret something is. Anyway she came out and we went to Starbucks – I think I am allowed to divulge that – where I had a pumpkin spice latte and she had another beverage, I will not say which one. I also had a ham and cheese croissant. She signed the document and now I’m carrying it around until I go home at night. I walked her back to the ministry and she walked me back to the UBahn. I’ll go in here, she said, it’s a secret entrance; you may enter the UBahn station over there.

See you in November when I get back from [REDACTED], she said.

Then I took a couple subways and a bus to the office. On one subway a fellow got on, he was wearing an accordion securely strapped to his body. He said something and began to play. He played short versions of a couple songs I recognized but could not name. Others seemed to be ignoring him. When my stop came I gave him two 2-Euro coins and exited (he, ever the professional had been blocking the exit with his body so one was forced to interact with him one way or the other).

He thanked me and broke into a nice rendition of “Bella Ciao”, my favorite involuntary subway accordion song.

Standing on the platform watching the train leave, I had the same feeling as I had as a boy after loading a jukebox with a bunch of coins and punching in the numbers for many terrible songs before leaving a place.

Enjoy, suckers, I did not say as I watched the tunnel suck up the train. I caught a glimpse of a woman on the train giving the accordionist more coins, and felt good.

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17Sep / 2024

Marked safe

Woman: Was that a joke.
Man: Yes.
Woman: Try harder.

(We all react to catastrophes in our own way.)

So we’ve had a bit of flooding.
Short version: a Flood of the Century that was, where we live, considerably worse than the previous Flood of the Century 22 years ago.

Man (trying harder): We had everything packed and ready to go: documents, spare underwear, cats. My climbing gear bag. A siren went off and your mother said it was time to go so we did. Shortly before the official evacuation notice.
Woman: Ok.
Man: I suppose you could call it premature evacuation.
Woman: That was another joke right.

The cats are extremely well-behaved here at Beta’s place.
So are we.
When we woke up this morning the sky was blue (still is) but it’s still too early to go back to the house and check on damage and clean up and discard etc.
Some villages in the area are still in the process of being evacuated.
The cats are sleeping.
My wife is checking the news on her phone.
My daughter is working.
Now I will stand up from the comfortable chair to put my breakfast bowl into the dishwasher, and my wife will steal it.
Later we will get dressed and go for a walk.
There is a climbing gym in the neighborhood but I don’t know if i am up to it.
I woke up at 2 and thought about all those who have to flee on short notice, all around the world.
I hope they are doing ok.
But not all of them are.
I fed the cats at 4:30.
I woke up at 6:30 so I did fall asleep at some point.

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09Sep / 2024

Equilibrium

So anyway. There I was in the woods. Looking around. Weather was beginning to cool, but still hot, not like today which is cool and rainy, perfect, perfect weather.
It was hot but the woods were shady.
I was wearing socks this time in case something ran up the inside of my pantsleg again (nothing did) and a straw hat and a pink Bikini Kill T-shirt and blue jeans. And shoes. I had clippers in my pocket, hidden by the shirt in case I encountered the owner of the forest or a hunter or whatever (I didn’t).
I told myself it was legal to clip the cattails; I wasn’t taking many and the ones that were protected are a different, smaller kind. These are ok to take.
I don’t know if they really are. According to something I found online it is legal in Austria to take things (nuts, berries, mushrooms) from the woods for your own use, but not, like, commercially, and not firewood etc. So I took 5 hazel switches (for possible basketry) (I didn’t take more because I didn’t want to look greedy should I encounter an owner or other authority) (I didn’t) and looked around for thick stands of cattails.
I found some near the edge of a pond. It was a steep slope maybe 2 meters down to the water’s edge.
I don’t know what happened. I was carefully going down the slope when I just tipped.
I was clutching at the grass and plants, but it was no good.

Voice in my head: “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” (all lower case, calm, more dismay than terror, more wanting to get this falling stuff over with so the climbing back up can commence). I did not catch myself elegantly. There was 0% elegance going on here.
Did I make a sound? I don’t recall.
At least I didn’t fall into mud or brackish water.
I bet Mary Oliver fell into the cattails sometimes too.
“There it was, the soft animal of my body, lying there on its back in the reeds, hoping nothing slithered up its leg.”
I resolved to start doing more squats and knee mobility stuff.

I got my cattails, a medium-sized bundle, and wandered back to my Ford Tourneo Courier 1.0 Ecoboost (which a recent passenger determined dings a lot, safety warnings that are, in sum, distracting).

I went home and set out my catch in the shed to dry under the wasp nests (3 at last count). That reminds me, I forgot to put my bicycle back into the shed and now it is raining. My motivation to put my bike back was mitigated by the 3 wasp nests.

I made some twine. I watched the closing ceremony of the Paralympics with my wife. At some point I went to bed, because I woke up in bed this morning, happy to see the rain and the cooler weather.

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02Sep / 2024

Migbars, and old man whining about health

My recipe for “Migbars” (energy bars to snack on while climbing etc. that are healthier and cheaper than commercial ones) is nearly all sorted out. The climbers I know who have so far test-eaten them all gave positive feedback.

I remain happy with my Ford Tourneo Courier 1.0 Ecoboost although the cruise control is distracting. It is my first car with a cruise control, I like the cruise control, but it switches to “standby” if I step on the brakes or gas while using it, and I have not yet figured out how to just switch it back on, and instead must turn it off and back on instead.

I woke up today without vertigo for the first time in more than 2 weeks. I am hesitant to discuss my health, as I don’t want to be an old person cliche talking about my health all the time, but I always find trouble-shooting a PITA and it’s even more so when it is your health you are dealing with and man don’t ever do internet searches for health/illness stuff. There are so many potential causes of vertigo! Most dire! This led to me bouncing from one doctor to another, with the result that my body has passed inspection and I am street-legal for another year. It has been determined by MRI that my brain is “not clinically relevant” which sounds insulting but is good news; my ears are fine, except for the growing deafness and tinnitus, and so on.

I have been forced to monitor my blood pressure, which so far is right where it should be.

I still don’t know what the cause of my dizziness was – anyway I woke up this morning feeling fine for the first time in 2 weeks. I think it might have been a combination of the hot weather, stress, fear and panic. I was somewhat miserable and unable to go climbing, which is my main anti-misery tool lately. Anyway. Feeling better now, I think. Hope it sticks. Maybe I can go climbing again soon (as soon as I manage to convince Alpha that I my equilibrium has returned), and have a Migbar.

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25Aug / 2024

Interspecies contract

It is sometimes good for your mental health when you are able to give the wheel to your stone age side that is otherwise so often repressed in today’s society (does not apply to fascists) and so I found it liberating yesterday to go into the woods and look for some natural fibers with which to make a basket; I have no idea how to make a basket so we are talking early Neanderthal in my case (archeologists have found traces of cordage-making in 90,000 year old Neanderthal settlements but based on how easily the practice of twining fibers came to me I would guess it is earlier than that) anyway I clipped a few cattails and stripped off their leaves, which I find good for making cordage as the leaves are quite long and there are smaller bits on one side of the leaves you can strip off that are good for making thinner, almost thread-like twine that is quite strong but I do not know yet what to do with that either; in fact that is the reason I am trying to make a basket because when a friend asked me, But what are you going to do with the twine? I answered, Make a basket and so there I was with my cat-tails, wandering deeper into the woods to find some branches I could use for a frame and it felt like the opening scene of a detective show where a passerby innocently stumbles upon the first body, which I call the “Leichenfund”-scene as in, I am on the sofa, TV is on, my wife is outside talking to the kale in the raised bed and I shout to her, Honey hurry, your Krimi is on, you’re going to miss the Leichenfund! and I stepped into a tuft of grass and something cold, moving fast, wriggled up my leg, between leg and trouser-leg and I instinctively did the dance (definitely an instinct imprinted in my lizard brain, requiring zero thought) that one does in such a situation, the dance we have been doing since the days of Neanderthal fiber-gathering, probably longer, and in response the cold wriggling creature threw it into reverse and wriggled off through the grass and I thought, Lizard? Snake? and mused upon the interspecies contract whereby one wriggles, one dances, the wriggler exits stage left, no harm done and how that would benefit both species in such a way that we have both evolved to this point that we can safely go our separate ways, happy with our rapidly beating hearts and a story to tell when we get home.
I found no body, but I did cut a few branches that are crookeder and less uniform than I had hoped for for a basket but perhaps that will lend the finished product an interesting air, assuming I can produce a piece of twine to tie them together that doesn’t break when I tug on it.
Then a bee stung me in the left shoulder blade when was watering the flower bed in front of the house. My first thought was a wasp, which will sting you for fun, and not a bee, which you have to give a reason and I had given bees no reason to sting me, I am mellow with bees, I was merely watering their flowers, and I said a bad word and squirted myself in the back with the hose to get rid of the wasp, which will sting you multiple times if they are in a mood to, but when I got back into the house and removed my wet shirt I could see the stinger and its attached poison sack still in my shoulder blade and realized a bee had somehow crawled up my shirt and stung me when I leaned against the wall of the house (as an American, I am always leaning against something, this is typical for Americans, a fact I read on my phone from an article citing a CIA manual for its spies under “how not to look American while abroad” that said Americans were always leaning against something; I was leaning against the interior of a subway when I read that, but everyone leans against the interior of the subway, don’t they?) and finding itself between house and shoulder blade it felt compelled to sting, sadly, because I meant it no harm and honeybees, unlike wasps, can only sting once, and this beautiful animal died, and when I pulled out the stinger I of course accidentally squeezed the remaining venom into myself making it worse, and wished for an interspecies contract with honeybees, which of course maybe we have already and which I had violated, such as, Don’t squish us and we won’t sting you. Maybe.
Anyway. I don’t know what’s going on with the animals in my clothes lately.
Just what happens when you leave the house I guess.
Now please excuse me, I must water the yard.

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20Aug / 2024

2nd review of Ford Tourneo Courier 1.0 Ecoboost

Getting better at the cruise control which includes keep-you-in-your-lane assistant which is practically a self-driving car but keeps you on your toes because when the road markings get complicated or confusing, such as at construction sites or road 1 merges with road 2 etc the assistant just throws its hands up in the air and says, Jesus take the wheel then you have to drive again. But i really like how it changes speeds for you when you enter a different speed zone, the car has probably already paid for itself with all the speeding tickets I haven’t gotten.

Ok, casual readers have all clicked away, let me tell you, hardcore readers, about my prostatic adventure: So anyway my urologist talked me into getting a prostate biopsy, by promising propofol and fentanyl. My wife drove me to the appointment which was out of town because I would not be able to drive myself home we were told.

When we got to the clinic the door was locked and a woman in scrubs with serious Domme vibes let us in. It’s hard to describe – body language and aura. If you know you know. I asked what was in the little cup and should I drink it she said, tranquilizer I already told you yes drink it (you naughty worm). I was scared and hard of hearing but I was like, whatever and didn’t try to explain my handicap and drank it and did not get bratty.

It was a shot glass of something strong so when I was shown to the next room I was already pretty high which was good because they were like, you can leave your shirt on everything else goes and I was like, awesome I get to keep my shirt on and scrub Domme explained in slow short sentences how exactly I was to position myself in the chair/table which was a gynecological chair except in this case an andrological chair I guess and in my tranquil state it was not as simple as it might otherwise have been but i eventually got my legs up into the stirrups and my butt acceptably close to the edge of the mattress and my arms in the arm holders and the other doctor I didn’t know said something in a friendly tone, maybe jokingly to put me at ease but I couldn’t understand much (especially the actual meaning and intention of what he was saying) because I had put everything into the tray, including my hearing aids, while my own urologist who was also there explained the procedure and set the needle in my arm and here comes the oxygen mask and here comes the anesthetic lube and explains why it was necessary to strap my legs and arms into their respective restrainers are you cool with that?

And I’m like making some cooperative noises through the oxygen mask and thinking, ok now TBH I get how some fellas make this a habit.

Anyway that’s all I remember and at some point my wife drove me home and here I am now four days later, meds worn off pretty much, waiting for the diagnosis which I am scheduled to discuss with my doctor in two weeks. I suppose if he has bad news he’ll call me before that, so no news is good news right?

Also I have begun making energy bars, which I call Mig Bars, which (from the second batch on) are actually pretty good and effective – eat one and you are not hungry for a long time, in a good way.

I also find the average mileage display on the dashboard of the Ford Tourneo really motivates me to take it easy on the gas as I try to get that average fuel consumption down as low as possible. Unfortunately, when I started the rig this morning on my morning drive to the train station, that figure had vanished from the display so someone must have changed something fucking around with the controls no idea what but now I will have to learn more about it but so far, over all, I really like the vehicle, I have decided to just enjoy the now and not ruin the experience for myself by worrying about the huge number of doodads and features that will eventually break and make life a frustrating, expensive purgatory. I can burn that bridge when I come to it.

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08Aug / 2024

First review of Ford Tourneo Courier 1.0 Ecoboost

We picked it up today and drove it home past what we later found out was a tornado and out to lunch and then I went shopping with it, more rain, and then we drove it back to the dealer to return the 2nd key from the Kia we traded in and pick up the back support pillow I forgot in the driver’s seat of the Kia.
So not a lot of driving so far, maybe an hour total. I will submit further reviews here with additional impressions as they arise.
For the moment I am enjoying the bells and whistles and electronic doodads and functions. I finally figured out the cruise control, for example, and am gradually getting used to the stay-in-your-lane function and the don’t-tailgate function, not to mention the you-are-exceeding-the-speed-limit alarm.
It also folds the outside mirrors in when you lock it, which is useful if you are someone with a tendency to check if you forgot to lock the door, because now you can see – if the mirrors are folded in you locked it.
When you turn the vehicle on, the radio comes on. When you turn the vehicle off, the radio stays on. Then when you open the door to get out, the radio turns off. I have had cars in the past that did similar things, but this is the first one that seems to do it by design and not because you haven’t found the loose wire yet.
Size-wise it resembles a Doblo, even looks more compact, but has a very roomy feel and there was plenty of room for all the nuts and dried fruit I bought at the supermarket today to make my own energy bars because energy bars are expensive!
Unfortunately dried fruit and nuts are also expensive, oh well.
Lastly, there is no CD player in the Ford, which I gather is normal now, so I guess I will have to bite the bullet and get going on a Spotify account or something.

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