You’re talking to someone at length. After a while, it dawns on you that they’re still talking, but you haven’t been listening for who knows how long, minutes, because you’re thinking about what they taste like. Either because you know, or because you’d like to know; because you can imagine, or you really, really don’t want to know.

Try it today at lunch.

Standing in a well-stocked bookstore, you are suddenly overwhelmed by all the titles: all that effort to sum up 300 pages in a short phrase, a single word. All that exertion to appear sensitive or smart or better or catchy. Titles swarm you like diseased bats erupting from the window of an abandoned roller rink when you kicked in the window at dusk. No amount of showering will get you clean, this will take a penicillin sandwich.

Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

Who said that? I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything lately, I’m too sleepy. I was sleepy all last week, SOLS¹ or something. All I could do was stumble through my days, wishing for energy and alertness.

Then, Friday night at 10.30 PM, I got my wish. I’d avoided caffeine all day in the hopes of beating the fatigue with a good night’s rest, and taken a hot bath. But as soon as my weary carcass hit the sheets, I was wide awake.

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“Would you like some more of the sinfully-rich chocolate chip cookies I just baked?”

“No! Give me broccolli!”

“Wait a minute, we seem to have it backwards…”

The small one noticed it was sunny outdoors and wanted fresh air, although the next town over was mentioned on the radio this morning as one of the three coldest in Austria today. I swang her on the swing, although the ropes are rotting. She climbed onto the bench swing and I swang her on that, until I had to hold the swingset down with one foot as she reached horizontal.

Then she went over to the wheelbarrow, waited until I had cleaned out the spiders and clambered in for a ride around the yard. Around and around. Then what did we do. Identify and count flowers. Crocus and snowdrops in bloom, daffodils just ready to explode. Reticent tulips not at all sure about this blossoming thing. Sprouts of perennial helianthus. Other shit.

I read her stories. She solved jigsaw puzzles as I read “Me talk pretty one day” by David Sedaris. When I paused briefly to wipe tears off the insides of my glasses she asked me what was so funny. “I’ll let you read it when you’re 12,” I said.

My wife and I not only went to a coffeehouse on Krugerstrasse this afternoon – it had Internet access. It was the “internet cafe” Pat and Grodon pretended to blog from while they were pretending to visit me so many months ago.

But as I went to drop a Euro into one of the machines and make a genuine post from there, a worker stopped me, saying they were out of order and would be replaced today or tomorrow.

So I had a Latte Grande instead, and my wife had a cappucino, and we ate cookies. Then she had a Snapple Lemonade and we went to the toilet, only as we waited a man came out the ladies and she was grossed out and wouldn’t go in, and a little Chinese boy came out the gentlemens and what are they feeding Chinese boys nowadays?

If I hear one more necktie-wearing motherfucker on TV wonder when they’re gonna see “Shock and Awe” in action…

Sunny day in Vienna today, but there were icicles hanging from an old fountain we walked past on our way from the underground parking garage to the place where our oldest daughter was scheduled for a day-long intelligence test as part of her application to a gifted school here.

The directions there were a little vague. We found the street entrance, but it led to a large courtyard with about a dozen doors, which could, if one were running late and suffering from self-image problems and persecution anxieties, have been a real kafkaesque situation. Happily, we were all in good moods, my wife, my daughter and I.

“I bet this is part of the test,” I said.

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