I think I will be skipping this this year.

Could this mean mental health is just around the corner?

He has one of those handshakes like forklift would have. It’s weird: he has such a manly face, yet it looks so pretty on his daughter, who totally inherited it.
“Hi,” he said.
No, wait. Actually, it was me who spoke first. I said, “servus,” because we were in Austria. This was yesterday evening. “Servus” means “hi,” more or less. I had seen him when I got out of the car to go into the DVD rental place, but only out the corner of my eye and hadn’t recognized him. I told him as much.
“Returning a video?” he said. He shook my hand.
I said something like, Yes, and asked him what he was doing there. He said it had been raining and gestured at his bike in the back of his station-wagon.
“Raining, huh,” I said. Everything was pretty dry, but there were puddles around. I assumed his wife had met him there to drive him the rest of the way home etc., cause there his bike was, right, in the back of the car.
“Well, it was raining pretty hard,” he said. As it had been. On my way home, I had noticed a huge rainbow in my rear view mirror.
“Isn’t that a great sunset?” I said, “Look at those clouds.”
It had been a great day. The sunrise had been nice too, and I didn’t know yet that I was going to suck badly in my cello lesson.
I said bye and he also did and I drove away. I saw him go into the drugstore and talk to someone who I then recognized as his daughter, my daughter’s friend. One of her friends. She has more than one.

You start out as what, spruce, growing two hundred years up the side of a mountain then they cut you down and age you for another fifty or so. It’s a grandfather – father – son – grandson business. Eventually you’re a cello.

Eventually you’re a cello. In the right hands: wow. You’re the king. Even there in your case, leaned in the corner of the room: pure potential.

Look, in Mig’s defense I’ll admit he had an especially bad day yesterday. It didn’t seem bad to him until he got to his cello lesson then he finally noticed.

Still, it was painful. I felt like I was watching Michael J. Fox try to eat Froot Loops with chopsticks on a bad day. Or: Larry Flynt getting a lap dance. Whatever.

OTOH, Mig did learn something important that might help him vastly, about the relationship of the white and the black keys on the piano with his finger positions.

We’ll see.

“If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air Force One wearing a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would salute and sing ‘Hail to the Chief.'”

In view of the disasters the past four years have brought to the world, metamorphosism.com whole-heartedly endorses this morning’s sunrise. What started out dark as night and deerless turned, in the space of just a few minutes, into a glory of pinks, blues, greys and greens so intense that if you painted them, you could only sell the painting in a furniture store, and no one tried to crash into me on the road today (in stark contrast to the fools let loose on the weekend).

And Beta was nice to me.

One deer in a dark field this morning. Traffic was light.
Cold, cold and rainy. It felt almost like summer. The darkness shimmered, drawing me out, away from the back wall, towards the windows again.
When we were kids, we used to hold our hands in the icewater bucket when we were cranking ice cream in the summer, just to see who could stand it the longest. Yesterday, last night, I listened to Gamma’s Shakira CD all the way home.
The plot to a movie blossomed in my mind, starring Shakira. One-sentence summary: “Different enough from “Being John Malkovic” so they couldn’t really sue you.” And two short stories in progress developed a bit as well. Simmered. Bubbled in the crock pot of my head, with its matte no-stick surface.
This morning I listened to Shakira for a bit, then replaced her with the Clash. I thought about true love. I wonder whether the love of a parent for a child is the truest of all, because you don’t want anything from your kid, you only want good things for them. A partner, you want more sex from them or less sex, you want money or you want them to help out more with the housework or you want them to leave you alone or to say they love you. You want them to tell you more about their feelings or you want them to shut the hell up for once. Kids, all you want is their welfare maximised. You want them to study, but only because it will make them successful, and success you assume has a positive correlation with happiness.
And so on.
People who did not experience perfect love from their parents, or people who did: who is luckiest when they become parents, those who finally get a chance to create the perfect love they missed, or those who have half a chance of really managing it because they know what it is?
Only, does anyone get perfect love when they’re kids? Is any parent capable of giving the absolute love a kid needs? Are we all doomed to fall short?
Quarter-past eight in the morning and it’s still grainy grey out, drizzling and beautiful already.

I’m growing tired of the current title up at the top of this page, “You Forgot Poland,” and would like to change it, say (after listening to the radio on the way home yesterday) to “Lucky that my breasts are small and humble,” or (after listening to DePhazz on a sampler this morning titled “Bar Lounge Classics”) “Looks like time for that certain holiday.” Eventually it will change, sometime soon, but for now it stays since traffic has climbed by about 50% due to random innocent googleetceteraers coming by (repeat traffic has remained unchanged).

The only time I’ve seen a larger increase in traffic due to specific searches was shortly after 9/11 when the phrase “Bin Laden Jokes” ended up in a post somehow, and produced quite a spike.

Obviously, I have nothing to say today. The hedgehogs appear to be hibernating. It turns out that Central European hedgehogs are the world’s sleepiest mammals, moving my wife and me into 2^nd and 3^rd places. Also the turtle tortoise has hidden herself beneath some leaves in her box. My mother-in-law wanted my father-in-law to bathe the tortoise yesterday; luckily my wife caught them before they had disturbed the animal.

And so it goes. Wish I had a TV to watch the “final” “presidential” “debates” tonight. From what I’ve heard, the bar has been set so low for Bush that he somehow can’t lose. Scowling? Smirking? Confused? Defensive? Senile? Running amok? Cheating? Stupid or just brain-damaged? At least he didn’t reach into his pants and play with his poop.

It’s a sad world we live in.

Funny at times, but sad.