Look, if you’re a kid looking for something for your school report on Bach, move along, nothing of value here.

I just wanted to reiterate how great Bach is. Bach’s sonatas for cello, of which he wrote six, I still think those are a pinnacle of human evolution. I know I’ve said this before, but Anner Bylsma playing them on an Stradivari cello, what a combination. Almost too much to take. Luckily, listening to him on a CD in a noisy Dobl

It was raining, but traffic was good until my exit where it backed up about a hundred meters from the offramp. I was behind a semi with its hazard lights blinking. I turned mine on to reduce the probability of the next person piling into me – my wife’s car was crushed by a Mercedes that way once.

Traffic was moving at a crawl, but a steady crawl, and in a couple minutes it became clear what the problem was – a car, a four-door-plus-hatchback sort of car, had creamed the guardrail on the right side, then bounced off and creamed the guardrail on the left side and was now turned to face oncoming traffic in the fast lane. Hard to tell to what degree other vehicles had been involved, as none were parked anywhere in sight.

The driver’s door was open and empty, and the front driver’s-side tire appeared to be flat, and the rear one was missing entirely. The car was tilted that way, so perhaps the tires on the passenger side were still okay: every cloud has a silver lining, I guess. The car looked to be the color of the pavement, closer to asphalt than macadam, which is the color a car takes on after such a wreck, I suppose. It was now shaped like the steel box frame around the passenger compartment, and the frame around the engine compartment, all wrapped in crumpled metal.

There were parts of the car and parts of the guardrail, including a gigantic bracket of galvanized steel that must have weighed at least fifty pounds strewn about the surface of the freeway. Off to the right side, in the grass on the outside of the guardrail, at the top of a steep slope down to a creek or something, paced a dejected-looking man. The car-owner, I surmised. He was probably thinking, here I am, just had a life-changing experience, and none of these people give a shit.

Well, car-owner, you were wrong. I, for example, was totally worried I was going to drive over a piece of sharp debris and get a flat tire and you know, flat tire in the rain, what a pain in the ass. But luckily, no flat tire. I assumed the man or someone else had already called police. Assumed.

I planned to tell the big wreck story to the rest of the family when I got home, but by the time I got home I’d forgotten about it. I remembered again when I drove past the spot on my way to work the next day, and thought I would write about it here, but by the time I’d arrived at work, it had slipped my mind again. Also our Internet connection was down.

Driving home that evening, I had my kid in the car and when we passed the spot I told her about the wreck. Of which all evidence had been removed. Not a single shard of glass, not an inch of rubber. “Right there,” I pointed. “Right there by that shiny new strip of guardrail,” I said to her.

An explosion of beggars.

The doorbell rang.
No, wait, someone knocked.
“You get it,” I said. “One of you guys get it, seeing as how I’m not wearing any pants.”
Like puppies climbing over each other to get out of their basket when the mailman rings the doorbell, they all ran to the door.
See, I was going to be painting a table, so I had come downstairs in the teeshirt I’d slept in and a pair of underpants, because I’d planned on putting on my paint-covered overalls, which are in the cellar. And then they’d called me in for breakfast as I passed the kitchen, and so I was sitting in my kitchen at nine in the morning on a sunny Sunday.
I heard voices. “Whoever it is, dude, don’t let them in, since I am sitting here in my underpants, you know.”
“He’s in here,” my wife said.
“Thanks,” the music school director said.
“Would you like some coffee?” my wife asked the music school director.
“That would be nice,” she said.
“Good morning,” I said, and shook her hand, because in Austria it’s polite to always shake someone’s hand when you meet. “Pardon me for not getting up, but I’m sitting here in my underwear.”
She was carrying the draft of the school newspaper I do for them. “Didn’t you get my mail?” She had sent me a mail saying she’d drop by on Sunday, but didn’t give any particular time.
“No, no, I got it,” I said. “Look, would you mind if I went and put on a pair of pants?”
“No, go right ahead,” she said, politely looking somewhere else.
“Would you like milk with your coffee?” my wife asked.
“Yes please.”
“Sugar?”
“Yes, please.”

Hi mig,
Dlixx has mated you.
4 eggs were produced.

You too can receive mails like this every morning! Believe me, it brightens up your day. I’ve got all these eggs now, because all these young female, Dutch-speaking (women? insects?) are fornicating with me, which permits me to invite people to participate in Breedster. Breedster is, as near as I can tell, a thing where you (to quote one of my children there) eat, defecate, and run out of energy. So it’s a lot like life, only with more copulation. As far as I can tell, there’s no strategy other than that, but it could theoretically serve as another web networking tool: like Friendster, but with BUGS.

So if you want an invitation, let me know and I’ll drop you an egg. First come first serve.