Metamorphosism

The captain of the Titanic wipes his lips on the sleeve of his uniform and places the flask of whiskey back into his breast pocket. He looks out into the darkness and sighs an enigmatic sigh.

He stares out into the darkness, listens to the creaking and rumbling of his ship and tries to figure out what he might have meant by the sigh. He decides it means, this whiskey is not so bad.

The little bell rings that indicates that someone wants to talk to him through the speaking tube. He removes the speaking tube - a flexible black tube with brass fittings - from its brass holder on the polished mahogany wall of the bridge.

Ahoy, says the captain of the Titanic.

Ahoy, answers the captain of the Andrea Doria. Because this is not your average speaking tube (AKA voicepipe). This speaking tube does not simply run down into the engine room or galley or something. It connects the Titanic and the Andrea Doria across time and distance.

It is a wormhole, of sorts. A living ship’s captain can’t pass through it physically, just voices. Still, better than nothing.

How goes it, says the captain of the Titanic.

The captain of the Andrea Doria relates a dream. A good dream. The captain of the Titanic stares out into the darkness and sees only his reflection on the window. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine the dream, but sees only more darkness.

I haven’t remembered a dream in ages, he says.

They talk about books for a while.

Somewhere, a bell rings. Gotta go, says the captain of the Titanic.

Seen any icebergs lately, says the captain of the Andrea Doria.

I’ll keep my eyes peeled, says the captain of the Titanic. Careful out there in the fog yourself, he says.

Aye-aye, says the captain of the Andrea Doria.

I read somewhere this morning that wireless devices result in too little downtime for our brains.

Somewhere. I say somewhere. On the crapper on my laptop is where.

The human brain, according to my research, (brain taken here to mean the whole shebang, heart, soul etc) does need downtime. Staring into space time.

Best is actual staring into space, except for the falling asleep on the picnic table while falling stars light up the sky above you part. Second best is walking. Driving isn’t bad but you might be someone who prefers to concentrate while driving.

Meditating is good, but that’s already getting a little too organized for me.

As if I knew.

Some people are better at embracing downtime than others. The others call those who are good at it “lazy” and yell at them for not helping with the housework, according to a recent study I performed last night.

Downtime.

There is a German word, Muße, or Musse if your monitor can’t handle the double-S character that looks like a B, that is translated as leisure but has, for me, a far more delicious nuance of just goofing off, walking around, staring into space from a hammock, aimlessly doing nothing, whereas leisure is scheduled and organized and ambitious unless you are talking about a person of leisure or something.

Who would have thought there was such a word in the German language?

And yet, there it is.

Muße.

In the course of his research, the pseudoptician arrives at a series of conclusions:

• It is easier to spot green prunes in a prune tree at night than it is in the day. In the daytime, they look nearly as green as the leaves. At night, the leaves look dark grey and the prunes look almost white.
• He really fucking hates it when an adult burps in his face. When a guy did it at work, twice, he nearly punched him in the throat out.
• If you google an old acquaintance you liked and they write back and ask gee what a surprise what motivated you to write, you will never hear from them again if you give them an honest answer, at least if you do it on the downward slope of a serious depression.
• Paris is very large.
• People, people, people.

1. Your uncle dies and you make a quick trip to the United States for his funeral.
2. While there, your sister gives you sourdough starter your cousin gave her to give you.
3. The starter is basically an empty plastic bottle with a little scum stuck to the walls.
4. Which you refrigerate, and worry you were too late in refrigerating it and it will already be dead, or it will die on the trip home because you can’t refrigerate it nor take it in your hand luggage and in your checked luggage the extremes of temperature will do it in or something, or you will forget it.
5. Everyone laughs at you because you’re so jetlagged.
6. And you are more susceptible to jetlag than most people. All someone has to say is “airplane” and you get tired and disoriented.
7. OTOH you are happy you let the lady at the car rental place talk you into the upgrade. In fact, you practically talked her into talking you into it. The midsize SUV is so much more fun to drive around in a state of extreme fatigue than the ultracompact thing you reserved.
8. By now your shoulders and upper back are burning from tension and your lower back is painfully close to throwing in the towel from sitting in airplanes and cars and sleeping on unfamiliar beds, and your tailbone hurts from all the sitting.
9. So on the flight home, the long leg from Washington, D.C. (where, upon your arrival, a woman in uniform pulled you out of a long line and gave you to a man in uniform with the words, “Got one for you,” and he swabbed your hand and stuck the swab into a machine where nothing happened and you are secretly happy because normally it’s your brother who gets searched and interrogated and it’s nice to fit into a profile too, or even share one with him, and the man asks you, “How long have you been out of the country?” and you say, “26 years, just back for a few days for a funeral,” and he says, “my condolences” and lets you go because the swab didn’t set off alarms or anything, and, WTF a swab?) to Vienna, with your sore tailbone and 10 hours of stupid movies ahead of you, on tiny screens that are burning out and only show the colors brown, white and black, which is okay due to the jelly-like nature of your brain, although it ameliorates nothing, you find yourself moved to a (marginally) better seat so a family can sit together, and you find yourself sitting beside a pretty, young, dark-haired, pale woman, early 20s if that, and her baby, which was apparently drawn by Edward Gorey and cries a lot, like the sixty other babies on the plane.
10. The woman is apologetic and you smile and try to reassure her, saying that your kid cried all the way between Tokyo and Vienna once, in first class, but the woman’s English is not so good, or maybe your pain and confusion makes you creepy, or you smile too much at her baby (at least you didn’t offer it a peanut, which briefly crossed your mind, Here baby, like a peanut? Would that shut you up, huh? How bout one of these pretzels, as they don’t actually serve peanuts on board aircraft anymore, due I guess to the allergy thing and people giving them to crying babies too much) or she is just polite or wants to sit with relatives, and she moves during the flight, trading places with her 15 year old girl cousin.
11. The 15 year old girl cousin has a friendly, tough-guy persona and informs you that all the crying babies are Albanian, going home to Pristina for summer vacation, from Dallas where her father remains because he couldn’t come along because he has to run the restaurant and she’s going to Pristina for 5 weeks because her grandmother’s paralyzed and maybe her father will go next year and she’ll run the restaurant while he’s gone.
12. The Albanians are all from Dallas, which is for her not such a great place to live because there are only two things to do namely 1) go to school and 2) go straight to the restaurant to work after school.
13. Meanwhile, your sourdough starter is cooling its heels in your suitcase somewhere in the plane’s cargo section.
14. The woman beside you talks and talks and you say you’re sorry about her grandmother and you think, although you don’t understand the thought, entirely:
15. Take care of this girl, America, because she is your soul.
16. Mainly because she is working and not consuming or otherwise out of control. Because she thinks of herself but also of others and glows with intelligence.
17. Remember, America, back when you worked?
18. Remember those days? When Walt Whitman wrote his poems going on and on about the working man and grass and so on?
19. Before you went out of control?
20. This girl still embodies that. It’s not dead. She carries it with her. You just have to feed it.
21. So watch out for her.
22. At home, pop the sourdough starter into the fridge and google instructions.
23. Kingarthurflour.com is good.
24. Follow the directions inexactly. Here is a fact about bread making: if it were such an exact science, wheat-based societies would have died out thousands of years ago.
25. Result: two flat loaves no one in the family wants to eat because the crust would stop a .22 and the bread is extra, extra tangy.
26. Sour dough bread baking is a slow process which you can’t hurry. There is something exhilarating about this. Those bacteria there can’t be rushed. It takes the time that it takes.
27. We need more of this sort of thing.
28. Follow instructions more exactly next time (and reduce refrigeration time because that turns out- refrigeration - to be connected to tang, and maybe your family will be more likely to eat the bread if it’s not so tangy) and get less-tangy, higher loaves. A little higher, anyway. People you communicate with during this process tell you they have never gotten high sourdough loaves without adding a little extra yeast, which you consider cheating.
29. Letting them rise longer must be the key, you think.
30. You resolve to follow instructions to the letter next time, to try to get nice, high loaves. And also to use just white flour, not whole-wheat.
31. Apparently bread making is an art not a science, but at the same time pretty forgiving and not rocket-science type art see #24.
32. Unfortunately, on your third try (you let the starter rest during the week and bake on weekends) you get off to a late start and in order to bake before you go to bed on Sunday you have to rush things along a little.
33. So the loaves are still flat.
34. This coming weekend you’re going to Paris for a week so you’ll skip it and try again when you get back. You plan to start on Thursday evening, not Saturday morning, so the loaves will have time to rise and rise and rise. Maybe that will help.

Alpha just left for Carinthia with her father, to pick up her mother who was getting massages because she got a fresh knee, is my understanding. Beta is in Vienna preparing for a visit to Indonesia. Gamma just sent us an SMS from London, BIN LEBEND ANGEKOMMEN (”I arrived alive”).

There have been ads for a show on television recently, something something SOLITARY CONFINEMENT something, with images of people freaking out because they can’t take 9 days alone. What could be easier? I thought.

Except. Ignoring people who are here is easier to take, it turns out, than dealing with their absence.

Despite the list of activities my wife gave me before she left.

And the list I have myself. Water garden. Tie up tomatoes. Filter pool. Yell at cats and chase them around. Chat with tortoise. Play cello, which has brand new Larsen strings and sounds amazng now.

And other stuff. Walks and stuff. Sleep. Icecream straight out of the container.

If you want to get something done, ask a busy person. It might be all it takes to raise their tension levels above a critical threshold level, triggering a heart attack and stopping them from making you look so bad all the time. Or at least, the distraction provided by the commotion will buy you time to find another solution.

At least, that’s the way it looks to me this week, during which I have been cast against type as the busy person and besides a bunch of work also had a recital, an invitation to perform that composition for soprano and theremin we did (”The Cashier’s Ascension”) at a concert next fall, wrote an obituary, organized a trip (with a lot of help), wrote a text for a friend’s book, applied to participate in what sounds like a fascinating international group project, and some other stuff I’m forgetting, like assemble that goddamned garden pavillion…

It’s actually quite good, because it’s got me unblocked.

My uncle Phil died on Saturday. He was 86. I don’t want to write a long, emotional thing here, but I don’t know.

My brother sent me this picture. I was kind of numb until I saw this, then I cried so hard the cat got worried.

Listen, I was trying to remember my first memory of Phil, and it turns out to be my first memory at all. I was maybe two. He was carrying me on his back, down the path between his filbert orchard and his garden. A row of blackberries was on the left, the filbert trees on the right. Do you know the smell of filbert trees?

Beyond the row of berries was his large vegetable garden. The path led from his barn and chicken house between his junk pile and his wood pile, past his garage and tool shed, to his house. On the right are the fields where he had cows and my dad would later have horses sometimes.

Phil is carrying me, and I say, “Phil, you’re a pill.”

The rhyme interested me. And kidding with Phil.

There are a lot of things here. They are central to me, and they all come from my uncle. Everything I am, or very very much of it, is thanks to uncle Phil.

And this one image, this one memory says so much about him.

He was always carrying someone in one way or another. He lived to help other people. He was never rich and never had money, but he always had a twenty for you when you were broke, there was always cash in his birthday cards, or a check. He never had money but he made the world an abundant place and then he shared that abundance with everyone.

He helped my folks a lot. He helped all the relatives, he helped old people, he baby sat nieces and nephews. When I was in college I worked with him recycling metals and paper, and washing windows, and he shared the proceeds with me way more generously than he ought to have.

He financed my first trip to Europe by selling government bonds. I worked after school jobs and summer jobs to pay him back. He financed my second trip to Europe. I paid him back for that, too. Never once did he mention it or ask me to repay him.

And he was this way with everyone.

Always a twenty. Always a box of tomatoes from his garden. Always some eggs from the chicken house.

He took us camping, and his pack was always the heaviest, despite the rocks he hid in your pack as a practical joke.

Dinners were fun times. If you looked away, he stole your food.

I won’t go on and on here,  although I could.

He took pictures. It was like having Diane Arbus in the family. He took many thousands of pictures since the 1940s. Always the camera. Always posing us. Or taking candid shots. We were often, Oh, Phil, not another picture. But, now we have dozens and dozens of albums, dating back to the 1940s. It’s a precious thing.

Little did we know.

And funny thing, he liked word play, especially spoonerisms, and I like words too. I have a garden. I like practical jokes. And it’s not only me. My brother has a garden and chickens. If you go to his house, he will give you vegetables. He takes care of old people. And my sister is that way too. And my cousins. Phil was central to all of us. We all want to go to Hawaii again. He got us started with that. We all like to travel. If you look away, we will all steal your food.

So, Phil. Abundant and funny, practical jokes and generous. I am not monkey man strong, though. Things have their limits. He was not a big guy, average size about, but he would come home from the mountains with a truckload of waste wood he had salvaged from some logging operation, to burn, and dude - there were logs in there that filled the bed of his truck. How did you get those in there, we would ask him. I just put them in, he would say.

And he had an arm. He liked ball sports. He was athletic. I’m none of these things. I remember him one time, he was up on a ladder picking pears. I was bugging him about something. Then I ran away. I got clear across the field. I thought I was home free. How far away was I? It felt like miles. I was running and laughing when a rotten pear hit me right in the lower back so hard that half the pear went up my shirt, clear to my shoulder blades, and the other half filled the crack of my ass. It was the most perfect rotten pear shot known to science.

I started crying, I was so shocked. It shouldn’t have been possible! No one can throw a rotten pear that far!

I don’t know how old I was. Forty? Or nine, maybe? Something like that.

So, Phil. I could go on and on. We were driving down the street once, and a guy on the sidewalk spazzed out and fell down. Phil stopped the car, ran over and helped him. Would you have? At the time, I would have just ignored it. But he got the guy into the shade, found out what was wrong with him, got help.

I think the guy was drunk. I think it turned out he was drunk, but I also think I’m making that up, or made it up then. He may have had a seizure, it was a hot day. I don’t know. It was just a weird, scary guy, and Phil didn’t even think, he ran over and helped him.

I could go on and on.

On and on.

The musicologist is having more fun learning the Gabrielli ricercar (#1) than he has had learning any music, ever, except maybe the bass line to Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’ back in college.

Most things were more fun back in college, come to think of it, the musicologist thinks. With the Gabrielli piece, you have the music, which he likes, and the fact that it is one of the first compositions for solo cello, and the history of the instrument at the time - the invention of metal-wound strings and the effect of this change on the construction of the instrument and playing styles. Back in college, all you needed was a bottle of Blue Nun, a joint and a record player. And you only really needed one of those if it was good enough.

The musicologist wishes he knew more about music, but he doesn’t.

Here, this is interesting, synchronically speaking: the musicologist has been thinking about the Shadow. Maybe because he talks about Jung with a friend sometimes. Maybe because of something he read.

Then another friend tells his wife about a seminar she went on where you something something Shadow something a lot of money something over three weekends eight weeks apart, and it was her best experience with psychotherapy ever and she should know.

So he looks up the person who wrote the book and, ehn, Inner Child is there, and the musicologist immediately has a problem because, Inner Child? But the author gets good reviews on Amazon and the friend liked the therapist, so maybe he’ll give it a try. Although, that’s a lot of money.

The musicologist is waiting for some of her books to arrive from Amazon. They were shipped yesterday, he got an email.

While he waits, he talks to the friend who took the seminar. Not his wife’s friend who took the seminar, the friend he talks to Jung about sometimes, she took the same seminar somewhere else, or something. She wasn’t too crazy about it, because, Inner Child? But she liked a meditation they did, to find a Place.

At night, the musicologist tries the meditation. Even if it doesn’t work, it might help him sleep, not that he needs help lately.

Except he can’t remember the meditation exactly. Something with steps and counting backwards. Steps up or down? He can’t remember, and he’s not going to get up and check. He decides on steps down. Count backwards, steps downward, into the dark. Then something with a door, and you open the door, or go through it, or both. Then something.

The musicologist decides on ‘downward’ because he has been looking for his Shadow, and so even if he doesn’t find this Place, maybe he’ll encounter the Shadow, is the thing. The thought behind this. The idea.

He goes down and down. Then his wife says something to him. They talk for a while. Then a cat climbs up on his hip, the highest point in the bed, and goes all Lion King. Then he - the musicologist - gets comfortable and starts counting down again.

Next thing he knows, it’s 4.45 in the morning and the cat wants something so it’s meowing and knocking stuff around on the musicologist’s night stand. Not the lava lamp or the book, the little stuff in the basket, and the musicologist remembers a nightmare about a scary guy, somewhat younger than him, who was very angry and wanted to do him harm.

The musicologist says, Thanks, because he’s always thankful for nightmares, usually.

#1.

Salesclerk: You give these away as gifts, don’t you? I saw you in here last week buying some.

Man: Er. Actually I seem to collect them. I just love Moleskines. I can’t write fast enough to fill them up and they accumulate.

Salesclerk: Okay.

#2.

Girl: What’s that?

Man: [Sees group of 2-3 cars parked off the road, beside a large van. The rear doors of the van are open, revealing several tanks, one of which is open and emitting fog. Several men in their forties populate the scene.] Looks like a bovine sperm transaction to me.

Girl: Uh.

Man: They keep it in those tanks in liquid nitrogen. That’s what’s making the fog. What else would middle-aged guys be standing around doing this early in the morning, but buying bovine sperm?

Girl: Okay.

Man: Can you imagine? It’s someone’s job to extract bull semen?

Girl: [Leans back, looks at man, settles in] Okay.

Man: I wonder what it’s called. Bovine sperm extraction technician? And how is it done, exactly? Do they like have to wear a cow mask? Or… ew.

Girl: Heh.

Man: Hey, I have an idea for the mystery you have to write for your English test. They’re at Smith Mansion, right? Dinner party. Dessert is tapioca pudding? All their rich friends, right? Only the cook was a bovine sperm thief. Prize-winning bull, worth millions. And the police raid his kitchen, but all they find is tapioca pudding because he switched it. And the Smiths’ rich friends destroyed the evidence.

Girl: Okay.

Man: And somebody kills someone for some rea… ew. Now I have to think of something nice. Unicorns. Rainbows. Unicorns, unicorns, unicorns.

Girl: Lamas.

Girl: I forgot the word ’suddenly’ yesterday.

Man: When I forget a word, I just use a different word with the same meaning. Or with a different meaning.

Man: I’m trying to think of a story for kids about a summer vacation.

Girl: They come to a town, but it’s abandoned. Everyone has locked themselves in their houses because a serial killer is on the loose. And they get attacked by the killer.

Man: Er. That might be too exciting for this market.

Man: AND THE KILLER IS KILLING EVERYONE BECAUSE HE’S UPSET OVER SOME BAD TAPIOCA PUDDING!!!

Man: You can use that on your English test today. You have my permission.

Girl: Unicorns.

Man: Lamas.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but I have been somewhat happy lately. The German word for happiness is the same as that for luck: Glück. That feels right.

Not sure why. Maybe I’m sleeping better.

Maybe it’s the phase of the moon. Austrians are strongly affected by lunar phases. The moon is currently full, and the road to work was full of crazy asshats this morning. Either the full moon turns about 25% of Austrians into really bad drivers, or it makes me cranky, impatient and hypercritical.

I think it’s sleep, though. I have a phobia of going senile. After observing the process in two relatives, I have the feeling that there are aspects of the onset of senility that one notices about oneself and either accepts or denies, and there are (and this is maybe worse) aspects that one does not perceive. And I have noticed myself forgetting words and names. I tell myself that I have done this all my life and it is just the fact that I am 50 that I connect it with senile dementia, but one still worries. And I did get all flustered at the music store recently and buy a stack of sheet music that I had eliminated, and neglected to buy the notes I wanted, and had to go back the next day and exchange, but that can happen to anyone, right?

And now that I am sleeping, I feel less confused. So there’s that. And there is also the thought that maybe part of my problem is that I’m surrounded by so many sharp people. There are all you smart people reading this. There are all my smart friends. Many of you belong to both groups, of course. There are the women in my family who have been kicking ass lately. Gamma, who turns 13 in a few days, was at the doctor recently for a checkup with her sister and her mother, where the following conversation ensued:

Doctor: Und was hast du für Beschwerden, Gamma? (What complaints (symptoms) do you have, Gamma?)

Gamma: Ich kriege viel zu wenig Taschengeld! (My allowance is way too low!)

Anyhow. Maybe I need to watch Fox News for awhile until I start feeling smarter.