Rain is my favorite weather, so I’m enjoying this summer so far. Of course, I have enough empathy to feel sorry for sun-lovers, in much the same way that I feel a little sorry for cannibals who are upset that it is illegal to eat people.

Whenever it rains as much as it has been lately, I am reminded of Rod Steiger on the surface of Venus in the film The Illustrated Man, based on the book by Ray Bradbury.

Besides being one of my favorite actors, Rod Steiger is also the best-connected actor in Hollywood (in the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon sense) even better-connected than Kevin Bacon, for example, because has acted in so many different kinds of movies, according to someone who researched that.

And Bradbury was my favorite author when I was a kid devouring the sort of fiction he writes.

Anyway. Rain.

We had people over for dinner yesterday. Including a friend of Beta’s, whom we did not expect. As Gamma said to her two friends staying over, whom we also did not expect, “the French people are coming, and their friends, and their friends’ kids.” I think there were 14 of us. I stood outside in the rain and barbecued chicken satay, with the grill under the eaves of the house so the rain wouldn’t put out the coals. It made the side of the house a little hot but nothing caught on fire and the food was good.

Afterwards everyone played whatever musical instruments they played. Beta played the harp. A French girl played the piano. I put on a single-malt whiskey tasting thing for some of the guests, then I played my tin whistles.

Afterwards Beta broke boards with her fist. (Yesterday afternoon, preparing for our guests, we discovered that it’s fun to break boards with your fist. ) I don’t recommend doing this without proper supervision. I can just see someone punching an oak board against the grain and breaking their wrist. Impressed her little sister and her friends.

I’ve got a problem with my MT. Any of you have any idea about this? I keep trying to export all my entries from this blog, to have them all offline in a single file, but the file transfer (export) keeps petering out after about 700 entries (I have over 2000 at the moment), around 3 or 4 MB I guess. I’ve tried one solution I found in the MT forum but have been unable to get it to work.

I used to be the neighborhood rigger. You wanted someone tied up, you came to me. I was the go-to guy for all your bondage needs.

I was seven at the time. Six, seven. My career lasted several years starting in kindergarten or first grade.

How many tender pale wrists did I tie together with jumpropes in kinniegarden? Not all that many. Sherry I remember, and Tracy and a couple more in school I guess; and a few more in the neighborhood, mostly visiting cousins of friends and stuff like that.

Usually I tied them to the apple trees at recess, or to the climbing bars. A couple times kids tied Sherry and me together to the apple tree, but they weren’t very good at tieing knots and I got loose fast and knocked their heads together. It was part of the game. I was a hero of great power at that point in my life.

I was a one-trick pony when it came to knots. I was not really a knot expert, I just tied a single knot – granny knot, I guess, over and over. That was my secret: patience and persistance. No one got loose because I tied so many knots. Also, I got repeat customers because I didn’t tie you up so tight that the circulation was cut off or anything.

Times tables, I’m thinking, are what put an end to my career as a rigger. Around the third grade I started concentrating on memorizing the times tables, and then suddenly a few years had gone by and it was awkward to say to a girl, Let’s go tie you up. Plus, I did not go into Boy Scouts and after a certain age no one is impressed by granny knots anymore, no matter how many you tie.

I might buy a knot book and try to figure out a few new ones now, but I find the diagrams really hard to figure out on my own. It’s hard enough to learn a new way to tie my necktie.

Sometimes when things get boring at the office I find myself thinking about Sherry and Tracy, wondering who’s tieing them up now.

I got my hair cut yesterday. I could write an entire post about getting my hair cut, couldn’t I, but that’s not what this is about. I could also write an entire entry about how I am deaf at the hair place — the whirring implements, the stereo going, the people talking, the nasty acoustics in the room, which is in an old building with arched ceilings and meter-thick walls — and how my inability to hear conversation in that room, combined with the unfamiliar accents of both the stylist (from the Austrian province of Burgenland) and the apprentice (from Macedonia originally, speaks great German, but with a slightly unfamiliar accent) leads to my seeming stupid due to numerous nonsequiturs etc. But that is not what I meant to write about, nor about how although my wife said nice things about the haircut when I got home, and I liked it, Gamma made gagging sounds and said “you look like Ken! Only with grey hair. The Barbie Ken.” She has a gift for cutting to the quick of the heart of any situation. Beta said, when she saw me later, “you get your hair cut?”

What I wanted to talk about was, after parking my car and on my way to the little machine to buy a little slip of paper that said how long I was allowed to park on the street, I saw K. riding towards me on his bicycle.

K. I love. He is this guy in what, his sixties, very trim grey hair, trim artistic-looking goatee, always nattily dressed. He is a musician (violin? or cello? Not sure.) and a music-lover, a music maven, full of anecdotes about various composers and musicians of his acquaintance and always a story about some concert he just saw. He has commissioned compositions before, paid composers to write stuff for him, that sort of thing.

“Hi, K.,” I said.
“Hello there,” he said, stopping his bike. We shook hands. He asked me how I was. I wasn’t sure (after a day in the office I am often not sure), so I just asked him how he was instead of giving him an answer.
“Oh, just got back from Salzburg,” he said. “Saw [some opera, maybe Don Giovanni] there, and a couple other things.”
This is where, in the past, he has always gone into detailed description and analysis of the performance. But this time, I said:
“Oh, that’s really nice. My wife just saw Mitridate there. We had a cellist friend in the orchestra.”
That was the first time anything I’d said had impressed K. He always wears this mask of congenial, cultured gentlemanliness, but that was briefly replaced by pure enthusiasm.
“I’ve heard that was really good!” he said. “That was a real event!”
He couldn’t think of anything more to say after that, because he is used to topping whatever you say, and he had nothing to beat that.
He rode off and I went and put the little slip of paper on my dashboard and went and got my hair cut.
First, though, I wandered around a little, because I still had 15 minutes to kill before my appointment. The bookstore/CD shop smelled too musty so I left there after 5 minutes. I walked around outside in the semi-sunshine like a cop killing time before the end of his shift, idly twirling my-wife-just-saw-Mitridate like a billy club, back and forth, waiting for someone else to ask me how I was.

Went to a concert at an art museum last night, with Alpha and the friend we go to interesting concerts with. It was the second concert in a row for us where a guy played a conch shell. He also played a tuba and a cimbasso, which I don’t know about you but I don’t see one every day.

When we got there, there was a guy loitering in front of the museum. He was a barefoot white guy with dreadlocks and old jeans etc, and I jokingly said to Alpha, “there’s the tuba player,” because we had been wondering what to wear to the concert – casual, suit, something in between? We went with jeans, finally, because it was not only tuba, it was also electronic music (it was a tuba/electronic duo experiment) and after all in an art museum and not a concert hall.

We took our seats and the musicians walked in and I had been right about the tuba player. He played something, the electronics guy analyzed the rhythm and added a percussion track and doodled around and this went on for an hour or so.

Blat-blat-blat. Twinky-twinky-doing-doing. Click-click-click. Cool stereo effect with ping-pong-ball sounds clicking from speaker to speaker. Hoo-hoo-hoo (beer bottle). Ornk-ornk-ornk (conch shell).

A few people walked out at various points in the concert. A guy sitting in front of me grooved to the music and frowned a superior frown everytime someone left. Philistine luzer squares.

Coincidentally, in the room were works by an Austrian artist who specialized in painting scribbles over photographs. I once thought, dude, I could do that, and to prove it took a photograph and scribbled over it; turned out I could in fact not do it, at least not the way he did. So, my conclusion, he was a genuine artist; so I am careful not to let myself think things like, you know, “my kid could do that.”

So what I did instead was think, why is it always the nice guys who get assassinated? Like Gandhi, or that Catholic priest recently who had been working on behalf of ecumenical reconciliation? Why not an artistic fraud? I scanned the crowd for signs of a knife but no dice. I suppose it’s too hard to know with certainty, deep down, on the spur of the moment, if maybe you just aren’t getting it.

After the concert, the two musicians hugged each other and grinned as if to say, wasn’t that a great success. The guy with the dreads said CDs were for sale.

Oh, and there was a man with a big video camera taping the show, and a hottish blonde woman in a white outfit and white high-heeled track shoes with him with sort of a TV reporter look to her. They had a little tv monitor with them that they could watch what they filmed on.

The show was organized, I suppose, and introduced by the son of the man who owns the museum, or at least the art in the museum. He may be a respected expert on electronic music. At any rate, he has a sweet gig, putting on electronic music concerts in his dad’s art museum.

His dad came to the show at the end, sat in the front row, impeccable in a grey suit.

It is raining. It is cold. I built a fire in the fireplace last night and enjoyed mid-August coziness. Somewhere in the country it is probably nine degrees centigrade. Last time I went skiing, February last year, it was nine degrees and the snow was melting and mushy. Now it’s August and the same temperature. Nine Degrees Centigrade must be thinking, “You guys are never satisfied! Give a guy a break!”

I was listening to Sigur Ros on the way to work on Monday (Dear Anne, one of the Sigur Ros CDs you gave me is Sigur Ros, the other one turns out to actually be Chumbawamba, which is fine since “Mouth Full of Shit” turns out to be one of Gamma’s favorite songs, so thanks!) and thinking about how melancholy it was, and then about how one could describe its melancholy exactly, if one wanted to be as precise as possible.

I mean, when I listen to Snow Patrol it reminds me first of D, who introduced me to Snow Patrol in the first place, but then makes me think of, okay, snow but also the sort of sad feeling being a teenager or young adult or human in general gives you sometimes, that confusion and depression and vulnerability and so on. On the other hand, listening to this Sigur Ros CD, it reminds me of doing something fun with someone beautiful who is grieving, like spending the day at the water slide park with a beautiful girl whose identical twin just died; it reminds me of the time I broke up with a girlfriend on her birthday while we were backpacking and had to hike ten miles back to the car while she sang, softly, Happy Birthday to Me.

I wasn’t exactly thinking too many moves ahead that day, was I. Exit strategy, boy; what is your exit strategy? The American military must feel like that in Iraq, only worse. Context is very important, or as realtors like to say, the three most important factors when breaking up are location, location and location.

Beta and I were watching Kill Bill 2 the other evening. She put her arm around me. It was a nice surprise, after not having her around for six months. We talked a little, small things like, “hey buddy,” or “man, Carradine is so great in this” or “who’s he?” or “he used to play this Shaolin monk in the TV show Kung Fu when I was your age,” or “whatever” or holding our breath while The Bride tried to dig her way out of the grave or “ew, she’s squishing her eye between her toes” or “yow, look at that black mamba bite him in the face! Kewl!”

Or, at the part where she’s putting her little daughter to bed, “oh man” or “what?” or “I used to do that, I did that so many times when you were little, remove my arm gently and tuck you in after you’d finally fallen asleep and try to sneak away without waking you” or “you want more guacamole?”