One difference between Mig and Marcel Proust:

Proust writes:

… I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin…

Mig writes:

Driving to work this morning, I smelled something funny so I smelled my anorak but that wasn’t it. I don’t know what it was.

Recipe for petites madeleines.

Setting: Family house during holiday season.
Characters: Man, cat.

Man: You fucker.
Cat: …
Man: You fucking little bastard.
Cat: …
Man: You know what this means, don’t you.
Cat: …
Man: It’s your way of saying, I want to be an outdoor cat tonight.
Cat: …
Man: “I want to get my ass kicked by the neighbor cat tonight,” is what you’re saying.
Cat: …
Man: I just cleaned the litter box for you, you know. You have no excuse. What’s your problem?
Cat: …
Man: [unlocks door, throws cat out, closes door before cat can dash back inside.] Take that. I hope he kicks your ass.
Cat: [mutters under breath] Just wait, human. You have to sleep sometime.
Man: [Carries bath mat into laundry room.] Feh.

His wife returns tomorrow from her business trip. He will pick her up at the airport. He will tell her he doused himself with diesel fuel. He imagines her saying, “next time call the Crisis Hotline first when things get that bad.”

The anorak seemed relatively dry this morning, and relatively fluffy in a limp and lumpy way. He wore it iceskating. “What smells like a dog. It’s you! You smell like a dog! Your coat does!” the oldest daughter said.

“Oh, is that the coat you got diesel on yesterday?” The Friend asked.

Younger daughter, enter stage right. “What smells like a cat? You smell like a cat! You smell like M! Hahahahaha!” M being the naughty red cat that jumps up onto kitchen counters to lick cutting boards, and pisses on everything.

They skated for a while. Round and round. Nice day for it. Sunny. Cold. Then they had lunch. Then they, what? Cleaned house a bit due to tuberculosis scare. Then harp gig at church somewhere: drop harpist and instrument off, drive home, do a little housecleaning, return half hour later (it’s a 23 minute drive each way). They were great again, he thought, wiping a tear from his eye. “When are they finally finished,” asked the little one.

Priest invited them to stick around. Go to the pub across the street, he’d pay. But they, alas, had to rush to the next engagement, Xmas gulash party at the rowing club.

By now the anorak had been dried to a fluffy crisp in the drier and he wore it because it no longer smelled like dog or cat.

You know what a Rhodesian Ridgeback is? One of his favorite dogs, for sure. Beautiful, elegant animals. There were two of them there, all over his anorak from the second he arrived. Sniff sniff.

Sniff sniff.

Teen girls grab 3-CD sampler box of 80’s rock and quiz him, giving him names of songs and he has to give the artist. He gets nearly all the US/UK bands right, except for one he never listened to in the 80’s. He misses all the Euroshite bands.

Not a single punk or new wave number on the three album set, either.

The gulash was good too. Then they left. Bye, they said. Merry Christmas, some people said. Sniff sniff, said the Rhodesian Ridgebacks.

He woke with an earache and a sore throat. The radio said cold, and storm winds and snow in the mountains. He didn’t know about the snow but the radio was right about everything else.

He fed the cats. He got the big girl up and then he got the little one up and fed them and loaded them into the car and drove the big one to the train station. He drove the little one home and she said what shall we do and he said what about eat a proper breakfast and she wasn’t interested. She wanted to play a game. She had money burning a hole in her pocket and she wanted to go to the local store and spend it so they dressed warmly and went to the local store.

“I sure like this brand-new goose down anorak,” he said. “It sure is warm.”

He got a newspaper and a lottery ticket and she got some sort of yogurt product with crackly chocolate bits and probably pink glitter. Everything she gets has pink glitter. Then the low-fuel light came on in the car and he drove them to the gas station to fill the tank. He filled the tank with diesel and was topping it off, getting a drop more in and another drop and when he pulled the nozzle out of the tank it was dripping fuel and a gust of wind blew diesel fuel onto his brand-new goose down jacket. Just a few drops on the sleeve.

He said, fuck.

He went into the station to pay.

The lady rang up his purchase. “Get some on you, did you?”

“A bit.”

“Better soak that fast, or you’ll never get it out,” she said.

He said he would. On his way out, he noticed he’d gotten more on himself than he’d originally thought. It was all over the front of his anorak. It was all over his Doc Martens.

Fuck, he thought. He could really go for a cigarette right now, he thought.

Then he thought, maybe not such a good idea.

He drove them home and hand-washed his anorak in warm water with a gentle soap, as per instructions. It was the first time in his life he’d ever paid attention to those instructions.

It still smelled like diesel so he moved the jacket upstairs into the bathtub and washed it again but it still smelled like diesel. At that point he noticed he had diesel on his jeans and on his sweater. He got undressed and found diesel on his t-shirt as well. His socks and underpants were okay, though.

He washed his clothes. He washed his anorak again just for the sheer fun of it. His mother-in-law and father-in-law came over to pick up the little one and asked why he was washing clothes. He told them the truth, taking care to frame the story in such a way that he looked as intelligent as possible.

He blamed it on the wind.

After they left with the little one he didn’t have much time to go shopping so he just went back to the local shop and bought a few things, forgetting things like toothpaste and floss, and hair gel and after shave. Then he had to hurry to the local school to pick up a friend of the big one — yes, that friend — and rush her to Vienna to meet the big one who had bought three tickets to the Albrecht D

Some CD in the player this morning, some heavy-duty band; me wondering just how loud will this thing go. Stereos used to go up to 10. This goes way past. 10 on this is barely audible. 10 is not good enough for us anymore. 15 is the default “mute”. The women in my life start making noises when I turn it past around 26, noises like, loud enough. Or, not that CD again. Nevertheless, 32 is minimum listening level. Just how high will it go, I wonder, now that the car is empty but for me? It goes way past 50 I’m sure. Maybe there is no end to the scale. An infinitely loud car stereo brought to you by Blaupunkt. The woofers start flapping and saying Uncle around 44, depending on how much bass the band is using. There is, surely, a sonic level beyond which one would need some sort of auxilliary amplification. A level beyond which so much energy would be drained from the car’s system that it would decelerate until it was ultimately just crawling along the freeway going THUNK-THUNK-THUNK with a long line of cars behind it. Maybe that’s what that senior citizen was doing this morning. Testing his stereo.

It’s the same with people. I dated a perfect woman for a while. She was a 10. A genius, for one thing, and a body like a Playboy Bunny for another thing. So, except for my wife, she was the closest thing to a 10 ever to whisper my name, until one began subtracting the hidden deficits, like her husband was getting out of prison soon, she smoked menthols and wore false eyelashes that resembled gothic centipedes. Also she thought a meal wasn’t a real meal unless it included Brussels sprouts, no offense Belgium. But she was what she was.

Now that is insufficient. Now one must inject various substances into the face to puff this up and paralyze that. Thread golden wires in here and so on until everyone eventually converges.

I thought I’d heard everything until I met Brandy. I was driving a diplomat somewhere and waiting outside a hotel she was just leaving. She asked me for a ride and I shook my head. “Sorry, I’m already waiting to pick up a guy,” I said.

She looked at her watch. “That’s okay. It’s too late now anyway.” She lit up a cigarette and leaned against my Mercedes and blew smoke straight up. She held her pack of menthols in my direction and I politely declined.

“They go in through the mouth now,” she said. “The advantage is it doesn’t leave any scars.”

I looked at her like, what?

“Of course you have a sore throat for a while. Worse than a tonsilectomy.”

“Who goes in through the mouth?” I said.

“You have to go to Brazil for it. It’s not approved anywhere else yet. But it works. Just look at me. I know you were looking. Does it work or does it work?” And right there in front of this posh hotel, just around the corner from one of Vienna’s busiest streets, she unbuttoned her ankle-length fur coat. She was stark naked underneath. Her hairless body reminded me of one of those smooth white grubs various natives roast, but it was perfect, like she said. Pointing out her features, she reminded me of a luxury car salesman. “Of course as long as they’re going in, I thought, I’ll have them do the rib reduction and not only the breast replacement.” She had a tiny waist. “I had them take out my appendix while they were at it, and correct my navel. Look, no scars anywhere. None in the armpits, none around the nipples, none underneath, see for yourself.”

“Do a lot of people do that?” I asked.

She was digging in her purse, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth and she just nodded. She removed her hand from her purse and waved something small and silver at me. “Come here and look for yourself.” She handed me what turned out to be a dental mirror and opened her mouth wide. I held the mirror inside her mouth and peered down her throat. Sure enough, there was a fine white scar.

“Endoscopic cosmetic surgery. If you could buy stock in it you could retire tomorrow, it’s the coming thing.”

“You run around with this in your purse all the time?” I returned her mirror.

“I’m a dental hygienist,” she said. “Look.” Her purse was full of sharp metal probes and scrapers, and fluoride foams in assorted flavors, tubes of flavored anaesthetic gels; she had various toothbrushes and rubber-tipped picks, latex gloves and plastic bibs.

I was about to ask her for her card, but then my diplomat came out and I had to go.

Lacking a nano-tape-recorder into which one could dictate blog entries during the commute to work — the most fruitful time for the imagination to fuse with the dream-consciousness and compose creative and fanciful, yet deep, stories (and which, on further consideration, is just as well, since 99% of said dictation would amount to brief bursts such as, “oh, ride right up on my bumper, you think that’s going to make me go any faster, you fucker,” and “slow lane, slow lane you moron that’s where you drive when you want to go slow that’s why they call it the slow lane, fuck!” and “shit where’d I put the other goddamn ACDCCD?”) — I am doomed, instead, to just forget them. Amazing the brilliance without which the world can still survive. Or, maybe, mildly interesting how the world zooms past insignificant people sitting on the side of the road trying to remember something they thought was funny, splashing them with muddy water.

So anyway, my mother-in-law. She and the father-in-law are watching the girls while Alpha frolics in Tokyo this week. The grandparents are indispensable. My life would grind to a halt, and fast, without them.

But still, but still.

I love them, they’re great. They just need to learn to relax a little. Do a little yoga, a few breathing exercises. Shake out all that bad chi. Ask me first if they want to cancel orthodontist appointments. Stop fucking telling me how to raise my kids.

No, seriously, they rock. I don’t have any problems with them. They’re sweet and mean well. They’re just not getting any younger. It’s only a week. We’ll survive.

They celebrate name-days here in Austria. The saint’s day of the saint who shares your name is your name-day. Sometimes you get a card, usually just a “happy name-day”. Rarely a gift, except maybe little kids. Or maybe it’s just me.

My MIL lit a candle for the nameday of a deceased relative. A large Christmasy candle. Then forgot about it. She lit it in the morning in her house, and remembered it in the evening at our house.

The kids and I were all like, “relax, Oma.”
“Go lie down. Take a load off. Opa is checking on it.”
“It’s only five miles away, you’d see smoke if there were a big fire.”

She continued, however, to serve us food. She couldn’t relax until she knew whether her house had burned to the ground, or not. Sheesh.

Four more days.

…not only are you an asshole, you’re a multipurpose asshole.

Melissa is talking about all of us. I dunno. I was going to leave a comment on her site. I probably still should. It’s not nice to talk about people behind their backs. She’s talking about the asshole nature of being human, which sounds like a title that would make Milan Kundera go, “Hey… that’s pretty g… nah.”

I pretty much agree with her, if I am understanding her right. If what she says about asshole nature is what I think about when I think about our inescapable culpability in everything.

I was at a big conference this week, of a large, very large international organization dedicated to development aid. Where a very eloquent American gentleman spoke in a very critical tone of changing priorities, of how a billion people live on less than $2 a day, of how the the United States, for example, but other developed countries are not necessarily doing better in this regard, spends so and so much on “defense” and so and so much on development aid and the “war on poverty” and how the two figures are shamefully out of proportion.

I spend $15 a month for hosting for my blog empire. What some people spend to live for a week, or two weeks. So I’m culpable too, as are you.

And asshole nature, yes, I’m ashamed of things I have done, of other things I continue to do. Less so, the older I get, partly because I grow more shameless, partly because I grow less shameful, I hope.

All you can do is move towards the light.