Riding along on Kafka’s motorbike
Man: So will you be there or will you be somewhere else?
Other person: Yes.
Man: … Yes, you will be there, or yes you will be somewhere else?
Other person: [Insert sound effect signifying thinking]
Man: Yes you will be there or no you will be somewhere else?
Man: Will you be there or not?
Man: Will you be there? Yes or no?
Other person: Yes.
Man: Yes?
Man: Yes, you will be there?
Other person: Yes.
Man: Okay.
Man: You know how sometimes people have, like, secret signs they make across crowded rooms or whatever to say, ‘I love you?’
Girl: [Does something with phone.] Wut?
Man: You know, secret signs, like, for example somebody tugs their earlobe like this and the other persons sees it and it’s like they’re saying, ‘I love you’ in secret sign language.
Girl: [Blink]
Man: We should do something like that.
Girl: [Gives man the finger with both hands]
Man: [Grimaces and balls fists] Oh, man, I was going to suggest that!
Girl: [Does something with phone]
Upgrade tower?
Yes.
Insufficient resources to upgrade. You require gold. Attack kitten?
Yes.
You were slain by kitten. Restart?
Yes.
Welcome, Level One Mage. Choose a direction: North, South, East, West.
West.
The kitten (assuming it is a kitten, assuming that there even is such a thing as a ‘kitten’) has advanced from shredding leather furniture (assuming leather furniture exists) to removing art (what is ‘art’?) from the walls. Not that it was the skeptologist’s favorite painting, but still it is unacceptable behavior.
Assuming there is such a thing as behavior in this universe, if this universe is real (what is real?) and that it matters.
Although it is April, it is snowing. The skeptologist writes his daughter a note instructing her to shovel the sidewalk in his absence and drives his other daughter to the train station. On a snowy day such as this, it is good to take the train rather than drive into town.
The skeptologist’s daughter is not wearing a hat so he stands between her and the wind and examines the snow in her hair while making wind-breaking jokes.
Muskoxen do this, he tells her.
Muskoxen?
Yeah. Up in the mountains in India, Nepal, Mongolia, someplace cold. The herd stands around their young, horns pointed in, asses out to the elements to protect the young and keep them warm. I guess their asses are the least-important part to them, and the young the most. Maybe when a wolf comes or a yeti, they turn around and point their horns outward.
Snow has melted and the skeptologist’s daughter’s head is sparkling with thousands of small water droplets, assuming this is even real, their surface tension holding them into their droplet-shapes, surface tension stronger than the capillary action that would cause the water to flow along the hairs to which they adhere. She has her hair up in a bun against the elements and with her pale skin and long eyelashes briefly has the skeptologist wondering how he ended up with such beautiful daughters.
Assuming beauty is a real thing, and beautiful a real category.
The skeptologist buys a monthly train pass at the station when he arrives, having lost his daughter in the crowd somewhere.
How do you know everyone else in the crowd has a mind such as yours? You do not. Applying an analogy, you can figure since they act roughly as you do, they have roughly similar minds, but in fact they do not. You are the only one with a mind, the rest are zombies.
Except me. I have a mind.
The woman at the rail pass counter is friendly. The skeptologist is in a good mood, if a mood is a real thing.
The skeptologist is excited by the thought that the class of things that must be perceived whole, such as the idea of a “sphere” or “darkness” or “light” can extend to more “complicated” phenomena such as “remembering what you had for dinner” or “droplets of snow on your daughter’s hair” and life bursts into a whirling chaos of poetry, becoming relatively less similar to a game in which he suffers from a chronic shortage of resources.
The skeptologist’s subway comes almost immediately, as does his bus after that. He has to stand but that’s alright.
The skeptologist walks in the snow for a little bit. He is careful not to fall down. He has slipped on ice twice this winter and fallen on his hip. It makes him think about his father’s aunt who went to the doctor for sore knees and left the hospital with a new hip she didn’t know she had broken. This makes him think about Game of Thrones, and how, although people beyond The Wall sometimes fall in the snow, they do so only because they are running away from something, such as a White Walker, or trip on a root, and never just slip on ice. The skeptologist figures it’s probably just as well he doesn’t direct Game of Thrones, and he also figures George RR Martin probably lives somewhere warm and has little ice-walking experience because if he did there’d be more slapstick in his books.
The skeptologist, aware that no one won the main prize in the lotto yesterday, still checks the lotto website to verify that he was not among those who won the second-tier prize. After that he works, in order to eventually upgrade a tower or two.
Posted in Das Gehirn, Familie, Metamorphosism
Tags: big ideas, Careers in Science, skeptology, tower defense, upgrade
Last week was busier than I like. I can tolerate going out about once a week, and I was busy every single day last week, due to a rare alignment of regularly-scheduled events (yoga class, cello rehearsal) and occasional, random cultural events (theater subscription, concert subscription 1, concert subscription 2, interesting concert 3).
On Monday, we (my wife and I) watched a performance of Anna Karenina at the Volkstheater in Vienna. Although I was familiar with the story, I found it very hard to understand the actors. It was a good production, the Volkstheater is generally a safe bet since Michael Schottenberg took over there as manager, we’ve been fans of his for decades. I slept very little, although I get up pretty early in the morning.
Tuesday I had yoga class. I slept very little.
Wednesday we went to the Beriosaal at the Konzerthaus for a live performance by the ensemble Phace of a new musical piece composed by American composer Gene Coleman to the 1926 Japanese silent film A Page of Madness, using both Western and Japanese instruments, if there can be said to be such categories. It was very good and I slept very little.
On Thursday we watched Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at the Grosser Saal of the Konzerthaus, performed by the Collegium Vocale Gent / Herreweghe. They were very good, the orchestra played period instruments (I noticed Baroque celli and a viola da gamba – which had a wonderful solo). It is interesting to observe how the crowd varies from event to event. It can be youngish/middle-aged and snooty but trying to appearcounter-culture, or old and cultured and somehow less snooty, and so on. The Bach crowd struck me as quite elderly and generally well-to-do or at least well-dressed (there was a lot of jewelry on display, though), quite slender in general, and very slow-moving until the concert was over, at which time they were t the coatcheck very quickly.
Friday’s event was the most interesting for me – there is a series in the town of Krems called Imago Dei, concerts in the Minoritenkirche there. We watched a performance by cellist/composer Frances-Marie Uitti, the ensemble Extracello, and Buddhist monks; the event consisted of a Buddhist Puja ceremony (ceremony to honor the creative spirit?) and composition(s) by Uitti. For this performance, Extracello tuned (according to the program) their cellos to unconventional tunings, and played primarily open strings and flageolets (which resonate longer than when you are fingering the strings), and Uitti is famous for playing with two bows in one hand. I expected her to do that to be able to play all 4 strings at once, but she somehow manages to coordinate the two bows in unexpected ways and it was quite fascinating.
For your viewing pleasure, I will include a few Uitti links here:
It was an interesting week, but it was too much for me and I will be digesting this for some time to come. A lot of images and ideas were poured into my head while I was in a trance state this week, as if the creative spirit unscrewed the top of my head and poured in a basket of bees, which now fly through my mouth and make honey in the empty spaces inside.
(PS: as you can see in the videos, Uitti has an ALUMINUM CELLO from the 1920s. With an awesome dent.)
Posted in Das Cello, Das Gehirn, Familie, ferner liefen, Metamorphosism
Tags: cello, concerts, extracello, imago dei, konzerthaus, minoritenkirche, music, uitti
The ktenologist is driving down the highway with his daughter. They are driving instead of taking the train because the ktenologist is going to a play with his wife after work and would probably miss the last train.
The ktenologist’s soul is heavy because he did something wrong the day before while trying to install an Ikea lamp in his other daughter’s apartment and now only her refrigerator and one electrical outlet work.
He had resisted installing the lamp for a long time, until his wife threatened to get an electrician to do it. Then he had driven over with his father-in-law, who has a better understanding of wiring and they had tried to install the lamp. His father-in-law is a wonderful man, but he has Alzheimer’s and was unable to find his glasses at the apartment, so the ktenologist had tried to do the wiring with the abovementioned results.
A day wasted, and now an electrician has to come anyway, and who knows what he’ll have to fix.
“You take what you get in this life,” says the ktenologist to his teenaged daughter.
“You get what you take in this life,” says his daughter.
The ktenologist pats her on the leg and just drives for a while, thinking, this kid is going to be okay.
Posted in Careers in Science, Das Gehirn, Familie, Metamorphosism
Tags: Careers in Science, ktenology
Is this place never crowded, he wonders.
He waits patiently in line, wishing he had done something with his hair, he has a mad scientist vibe going on.
Thing is, it was sort of a surpise, mid-week day off, and he thought he’d be sitting around the house, getting things done so he didn’t waste too much time making himself presentable.
But then he had called the pharmacy to see if his prescriptions were finally ready, after two weeks of waiting, and they finally were. So here he was.
There were four pharmacists manning the counter, and four lines; or rather, this being Austria, a disorganized crowd of people elbowing each other, a situation in which people from Anglo-Saxon and other societies accustomed to queuing politely are at a distinct disadvantage. He finally made it to the counter and explained to one of the pharmacists what he was there for and she went back and got his order.
It was two things, with vague directions on the boxes.
It had been four weeks since he had spoken to his dermatologist, so he asked the pharmacist how each medicine was to be used, exactly because he didn’t want to get them mixed up; also, he couldn’t even remember what the second one – a cream – was for; he only remembered that one was for the basal cell carcinoma on his shoulder. He vaguely remembered the other one might be for rosacea.
“How are these medicines to be used, exactly?” he asked.
“This one is used in the genital area,” she said in a very clear voice. Not loud, but it carried.
“Wut?” said the man.
“Genital warts?” she said.
“Basal cell carcinoma?” said the man.
The pharmacist shrugged. “Ask your dermatologist.”
“I’ll give her a call right away,” said the man, willing himself invisible. “Because, oh forget it.”
He had learned when to stop digging.
Man: You know what I really hate? The way the concept of ‘capture’ has grown central to modern capitalism. Plutocratic capture of the courts. Regulatory capture. Brand capture, like the way Apple ‘forces’ you to buy only Apple products at inflated prices. Design capture, as in the way modern cars and appliances are impossible to fix yourself, down to changing a headlight… Hey, is that a box?
Girl:???
Man: It’s a box! Your cat like that box?
Girl: ADD much?
Captive Audience: Deedeedeedee! Deedee! Dee.Dee!
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