Whereas Degas painted the dancing girls, I get to paint a hallway yellow this weekend; a hallway and a stairwell and I can’t say I expect to feel any less satisfaction than he probably did. I enjoy painting.

My daughter who is sick woke me up at about three this morning because mosquitos bit her 20 times the previous night and I told her to wake me up next time she heard them and I’d swat them for her. I couldn’t find the mosquito, though, although I heard it once as it flew past my head, laughing a mosquito’s high-pitched laugh. So I swatted a fly sleeping on the ceiling. It may have had ties to *l-Qua*da. It may have sought to acquire uranium in Africa.

You never know about flies.

Then I went back to bed, glad I didn’t have to hunt burglars.

Cause I hunted burglars the night before last. It was the typical scenario – middle of the night, windy. You hear a burglar noise and walk through the house doing kung fu moves as you round corners and pass through doorways, all the while telling yourself, “It’s only the wind” and recalling simultaneously that’s what people tell each other in horror movies just before the monster/guy in the hockey mask/Texan with the chainsaw gets them. You find nothing, then go back to bed.

Except I found the front door unlocked. I probably forgot to lock it, which is out of character for me, a compulsive door-locker (thanks mom).

I went back to bed and had a bad dream about getting stuck in a car outside an inn that was also a church and a cemetary, throwing the car into reverse although visibility was bad and knocking over a stone structure that had some religious and/or historical significance, and got caught by the innkeeper before I could get away.

Then I woke up, made coffee and realized the thing I had knocked over had the same emotional charge, for me, as our old coffee maker, which leaked. My wife replaced it the same day, although I didn’t tell her anything about that.

Talk about mental telepathy.

Sunflowers now, field-wise, by the field, field after field of heavy yellow noggins turned toward the sun or, at sunset, turning back to where it will come back up in the morning; enough to make you want to go on an absinthe binge, box your ear and send it to a hooker, shoot yourself in the heart with a crow gun.

I could use a little of this.

When a child asks you to give her a word so she can come up with other words that rhyme, do you tell her “Orange”? Or just think “Orange” and say “Moon”?

We have a new gardener at work. A tall, young, muscular Filipino guy, model handsome. Near-sighted, too, perhaps, because this morning he told me I was handsome.

“You are handsome today!” he said.

“Gee, thanks,” I said. (See, I wasn’t tongue-tied this time because another guy told me the same thing last week and I was tongue-tied and to avoid the embarrassment in the future should it happen again I prepared a snappy comeback and lo-and-behold it came in handy.)

But he wasn’t finished. “You’re handsome every day!” he said.

“Dress code,” I said. I did what I always do in unusual situations, smiled a shit-eating grin, and went into the office thinking about what had just happened. Is the guy near-sighted? Am I his type? Is he just being nice (probably)? Is this just a cheap way to talk about my good looks on my blog (likely)?

I ought to post a picture my youngest daughter took of me recently. My face looks swollen and half paralyzed. It’s hilarious.

What was my point? I forget.

On an unrelated note, this sex book I was reading a couple weeks ago mentioned that the prostate was the male G-spot. I’m thinking if you want to try that out on your lover, you may want to warn him first. And that reminds me that I’m overdue for a prostate exam. Sorry, you’re not reading this at lunch I hope. My urologist is an Ireland fan and thinks I’m Irish and always tells me about his last trip over, (SNAP! go the rubber gloves) and drinking Kilkenny beer because Guinness (SQUIRT goes the lube) is too dark for him.

Did you know the prostate is the only “heart-shaped” organ in the human body? I always forget to post that on Valentine’s day.

My in-laws live on the side of a mountain so their property slants at about 45 degrees.

They are getting old and decided they need steps in the backyard so my father-in-law and I did a little bonding this weekend. He mixed concrete and carried it, two buckets at a time, up two flights of stairs to where I attempted to piece cobblestones into stairs. He also carried buckets of sand when I needed them.

They turned out okay. Not great, but okay. I don’t know where they got the idea that I could do that kind of work.

I just did them the way I do everything else in my life – just sort of figure it out as I go along. Although they came out level left to right, they slant down a little too much from back to front (that would be dangerous if they get icy in winter), so I’ll have to take a mallet and knock them into position later (they’re mostly set in sand except for the front row on each step).

I also worked out Sunday morning, so I’m sore in a good way.

Among my few character flaws is a certain irresistable, cyclical attraction to self-help books. Every now and then I buy a few, read them, believe them whole-heartedly, fail to implement them and, finally, forget them. Which is just as well because, face it, people never change, do we?

I mean, you can change what you do, but not who you are, deep down. And it’s who I am, deep down, that really truly bugs me, you know.

Oh, before I forget, to the small lady on the hot, crowded subway with her head stuck in some guy’s armpit: whew, I know; I apologize; but I am allergic to every deodorant I’ve found so far, they make my armpits itch horribly so I can’t use them. Sorry!

And this one self-help book — which I’m liking so far since it admits you can’t change another person or a relationship, just yourself, assuming that is that you can change yourself which you of course can’t (see above), but which I won’t name here as it’s a bit academic in parts and also, I haven’t finished it yet so I won’t mention it yet but I promise to later if it works, which I doubt — mentioned sexual fantasies, and what they can, sometimes, tell about you.

And I asked myself, have I ever really had a sexual fantasy? Normally, I wouldn’t ask myself that but traffic was fairly light on the freeway and now that they’ve installed these computerized spy cameras everywhere here that photograph your license plates and calculate your average speed people have been going the speed limit here, which is a real miracle in Austria so it seemed safe to pursue the line of thought.

Have I? Fantasies? Day-dreams?

No. I’ve never had a sexual fantasy, not once in my life. Before I met my wife, I might have seen a woman walking down the sidewalk and thought, “gosh, she’s really fucking hot!” But that’s not a fantasy.

My visual imagination really sucks, maybe that’s part of it. And, in writing, I’m not very good at coming up with a plot, either. Maybe it’s some deficiency hardwired into my brain. So I decided to try to have a sexual fantasy right there, going 130 KpH on the freeway.

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