At church on Easter — which was packed, by the way but luckily wisely (having learned our lesson the previous week) we went early and got good seats pews, near where the pan-flute player (specially engaged for Easter) would be playing only he had fallen ill and a woman was playing the recorder instead and obviously had not had enough time to rehearse so her version of that Titanic song was a little shaky, not to mention you’re supposed to play that with a tin whistle, or at least a theremin and not a bloody recorder — the priest, speaking of resurrection and so on, said something about the grave some of us find ourselves in right here in life, and the resurrection we experience when we climb out of that or whatever and that for some reason spoke to me.

Little girl with flyswatter & glitter: [Runs into room] Dang! Where are all the flies? [Runs into next room]

And so I’ve been thinking about that. As far as thoughts upon which to meditate go, that one has some good elements — the creepy/morbid grave image, the rebirth image. Because I wonder about that a lot, in view of the American — is it only an American? — obsession with interest in changing oneself: can that be done? Do we change ourselves when we think we’re changing ourselves? Or do we only change our behavior? Is there any difference? Are we our behavior?

Little girl with flyswatter & glitter: [Runs back into room] Where are all the flies? I can’t find a single fly!
Dad: Oh, there’s one way up there. May I? [Takes swatter, kills fly.]
LGWF&G: Yay! [Picks fly up by legs, examines closely] Yay!
Dad: You want to feed Alpha II?
Mom: [Looks up from newspaper, narrows eyes]
LGWF&G: [Nods emphatically, eyes big]
Dad: [Reaches over, places Venus flytrap in front of LGWF&G]
LGWF&G: [Holds fly over gaping mouth of Venus flytrap, a little leery, finally drops it in.] It didn’t shut!
Dad: Eh, the fly landed in the corner. Hang on. [Blows fly into middle of flower, it snaps shut]
LGWF&G: Eek!
Dad: Wonder if we screwed up his karmic cycle?
LGWF&G: [Grabs swatter, resumes hunt for more flies]

Bauke, a Bug fan of the first order, mailed me this high-quality image a long time ago. Sorry it took so long, Bauke, but as you know by now I am a big procrastinator especially when it comes to posting creative work that is better than anything I could do.

Coming soon: a Bug strip by D. Until then, try chatting with EBug. The link is in the right column on the main page.

Four-day weekend here over Easter. The Easter Bunny got up before five in the morning on Sunday to hide eggs and baskets in the back yard. Some he hid waaay up in trees because he was sooo sleepy. Then he ate some cereal and went back to bed. The little one woke up around six and her big sister stalled her just in case and my wife woke me up and said, Are the baskets hidden? And I said yeah and went back to sleep, or tried, except the Easter Bunny had neglected to hide baskets for his in-laws and some elderly friends of theirs, thinking it didn’t matter as they weren’t going to come over anyway and, like, look for them or anything, but this turned out to be a bad idea since, What if Gamma should ask, where did these baskets come from? So the Easter Bunny snuck out the front door and hid the other baskets in front of the house, although Gamma had asked him, earlier, “Are you the Easter Bunny?” to which he had replied, “nah, nah” and Gamma accepted this, since kids aren’t stupid and prolong any myth that results in presents.

The kids got clothes and stuff. My wife got a watch. I got a new cell phone. Because I had exhausted any patience and brainpower hanging cabinets in the bathroom, my fourteen-year-old daughter had to program the fucker. I like how every cell phone company makes theirs a little different to program, since that’s good for customer loyalty: “it was so hard to learn how to program my Altoid Callmaster, no way am I switching to another brand now…”. So I was sitting at the PC last night, trying to layout a newspaper for someone, and my daughter is sitting beside me going, “Oh! Your phone has Snake! Mind if I play a little Snake on your phone, dad?” and my wife is reading articles aloud to me for some reason, like, “this guy ate only cottage cheese for a month and lost weight!”

Anyway, apparently the phone is programmed now. Will they someday make a mobile phone that is, simply, a phone? And nothing else? I even have a free advertising slogan for them: “It’s just a fucking phone, for chrissakes.” Or will people like me be dependent on teenagers all our lives?

Monday, my wife made steak and boy can she cook steak. Then we all went for a walk in the woods and dug up a couple flowers that I sure hope aren’t protected and planted them in our yard when we got home.

Continue reading →

It was twilight and it was raining lightly. Cloud cover was thick and black but thinned towards the western horizon. It is essential to the story that you see the light conditions this produces: the light came from a single direction, but not harshly, and it was horizontal and the rain washed dust and pollen from the air and gave everything a shiny, reflective surface. Although the clouds were low he could see for miles across a flat landscape from which the colors grey and beige had been removed. Even the dried grass standing in the fields had taken on a yellowish, orangish cast and the greens were intense in this rainy spring dusk.

Although it was still light enough out to drive without his headlights he turned them on after dropping his daughter off at the eye doctor’s for a vision exam. His wife was there with the other daughter and would drive them home later. He took a narrow back road, an access road that ran parallel to train tracks along a field behind the sugar refinery. The pavement ran out after a hundred yards and he had to slow down and this was good because he had to marvel at the evening.

This was the road he used to take when he drove his eldest daughter to daycare ten years ago. He drove a different car then, smaller and so unreliable his daughter used to pray in the back seat when he started it. In the distance he could see other cars on the new road. He saw their headlights first, and then when he concentrated he could make out the cars. There was an overpass where the new road crossed the old road and the railroad tracks. Driving beneath that he saw where there had been a small landslide on the overpass embankment; engineers had miscalculated the maximum slope or the subsoil was too rocky and when the topsoil had saturated in the rain it just slid down ten feet, the grassroots couldn’t hold it; it left a jagged scar along the top and made a bulge along the bottom.

Beyond the overpass the old road curved to the right, crossed the train tracks and curved back left. He stopped the car because he couldn’t drive anymore he had to look at all this. Anner Bylsma playing Bach concertos on a Stradivarius violoncello from the Smithsonian collection certainly had an influence on his mood, but when he turned off the car engine, the music stopped and he sat there in the near silence, just the hiss of the rain, and was still paralyzed. There were no other cars on the old road. The new road intersected with this one at no point anywhere. He was sitting in one era no one cared about or even remembered, looking at another. No one took this road anymore: it was bumpy and had ruts and big puddles when it rained. Rain or shine, your car needed a wash after you took this road. He watched the headlights crawl along the other road, if going 100 km/h is crawling.

Ghosts don’t hate us, he thought, not some ghosts anyway. Some feel sorry for us, sorry as in pity and sorry as in apology, as they watch us move along our new roads.

Paul Gaugin: The light here rocks. Doesn’t the light here rock? Have you ever seen light like that?
Vincent van Gogh: Lalalala.
Paul Gaugin: All the same, eh. [Drains glass] It’s like… how should I say it. It’s as if in an alternate universe there were a small boy, about five, with a pig shave and a shit-eating grin, with a hose in his hands. And he’s kinking the hose so nothing can get through. And this hose is the hose through which the cosmic energy flows to my brain. Or my soul or something. You know? [Refills glasses]
Vincent van Gogh: Sigh.
Paul Gaugin: I dunno. It’s a feeling like being constipated and entirely shat out at the same time.
Vincent van Gogh: [Takes drink, stares at so-so-looking waitress] Mmm.
Paul Gaugin: As if it were late spring, after a long debilitating winter and the tulips are finally budding, only their buds are like, tiny, because the garden hasn’t been fertilized in ages, and the bulbs are withering, so you wonder if they’ll even blossom this year.
Vincent van Gogh: …
Paul Gaugin: Vincent? More absinthe?
Vincent van Gogh: I beg your pardon?