Our grey cat has caught a mouse. Everyone but me is out on the front porch yelling. From where I sit in the kitchen, finishing dinner, I can see they have left the front door wide open. Here we go again, I think.

Blogging has a social function, Petr said a couple months ago in Brno. I was there with my family meeting Anne and her supporting cast.

I have met several bloggers now. Maybe I’m becoming a more social person. It’s never a disappointment, at any rate, not for me at least. There’s always the potential for that, obviously, but if someone seems like a real asshole from their blog, or boring, you generally end up not reading their blog and it never occurs to you to meet them, so you tend to meet only the people who hold your interest, which is more than one can say about daily life, but there is always the possibility you could be disappointed, or disappoint them, assuming they have expectations.

All I’m saying is, that hasn’t happened to me yet, although if it had I couldn’t talk about it, could I. If I did that, then no one would want to meet me, would they, if I gave people bad reviews. You always have that slight pressure to say something nice about the people you meet.

He’s in the house! Get out of the house with that mouse, they are yelling. The mouse is still alive! He’s dropping it! Pick that mouse back up! The cat lets the mouse run around in the entryway for a while before recatching it.

I met four bloggers this summer for the first time. I found it interesting that all of them mentioned something about how they do not write about the experience when they meet other bloggers. I concluded I must be so boring and they were too nice to embarrass me and too honest to lie or something. I decided I wouldn’t either, avoiding that whole good review/bad review quandary.

And besides, there is the privacy thing. What they want people to know about them they already write on their own blog, you know?

Continue reading →

“I went to highschool with him. We both had Jaguars. His wasn’t quite as nice. It was grey.”
“And you haven’t seen him since then, and you recognize him?”
“Doubt he recognizes me. We’ve changed.”
The other man is what. Seventy three or four. Humpbacked. Thick glasses. As skinny as my dad. Snoozing in his recliner at the dialysis clinic. The airconditioning is on high, so it’s freezing inside the room. I have a splitting headache.
My father pats my leg. He recognized the guy right away. “It’s his second time here.”
When the guy wakes up the Ukranian nurse goes over and asks him if he remembers my father. He waves but seems a little disoriented.
I go out to my rental car and drink some water and try to eat an energy bar that is basically melted inside its mylar wrapper. The bottled water inside the car is the temperature of fresh tea. The Russian guy with no legs is wheeled out of the clinic in his wheelchair by his wife and son. There are lots of Russian immigrants around town now.
Most people doze for a while during their dialysis treatment. It’s exhausting and boring and takes hours so what else should they do.
They are dreaming about what, exactly? My father remarks several times during my visit that his fellow patients occasionally get tired of the treatment, move into a hospice and are dead within a week. The Japanese lady who lived next door to us when I was growing up did that a couple months ago.
My father dozes in his recliner. As does the man in the next chair. They all doze.
“I’m surrounded by Republicans,” my father tells me.
The noise level is rather high in the room, and it includes voices from televisions and several conversations, so it is very hard for my father to understand what I say, and for me to understand what he says. As I do every time, I had come here hoping to have a big father-son talk, but give up.
I never get to ask my father whatever I would ask him, no idea really what that would be. Why did you never amount to much, in material terms? Why did you never do anything, really? What stopped you? Does it bother you that I never amounted to anything either? What kind of hopes did you have for me?
I have his memory for faces. When I lived in Tokyo, I used to remember faces of other commuters I had seen once before through a train window.
My daughter’s friend is traveling with us and I feel sorry for her at the beginning because all the relatives we meet at the start are in their mid-seventies or older and the only one in good shape is my mother. There is the forgetful uncle and his crippled wife, and so on.
They are all slipping away. On my way into the office today Laurie Anderson sang something about Oh death, that creep that crooked jerk.
During my trip, I finally realized: I am the father now. It had to get really obvious for me to figure that out. I had to be 46 years old to see that. My brother, my sister, me, we’re the parents. This is it. Here we go.
“You’ll sell an article or a story one of these days,” my father says to me, out of the blue. We hadn’t been talking about writing. We had just been sitting there, not saying anything.
A guy I was paying $100 an hour told me once, “we think our parents will be hurt if we surpass them but they won’t, that’s what they want for us.” I suppose he was right.
Take this, take my melancholy, my sense of humor, my laugh, my memory for faces, my sentimentality. Take my short legs and my intelligence, my perceptiveness and my love for trees and words and do more with them than I did, and don’t look back.
It’s what I would tell my kids too.

There is an opera in Vienna, maybe you have heard of it. There are several, in fact. Opera is the city’s spectacle of choice. Music is loved here, as is theater, and opera combines everything into a single spectacle.

I saw an opera in the United States once, and I remember it as being a little crappy in comparison to a Viennese opera. That was more than twenty-five years ago. Ever since then, I believed Americans lacked the knack for such a public spectacle. Moon landing, okay. Atom bomb even. But regular public cultural spectacle?

I had never been to a pro baseball game.

I never thought I’d have anything nice to say about baseball. As a kid, it did not appear on my radar. My father had to wait until they had my little sister to have someone to play catch and talk sports with. They would watch TV and talk pitching and batting averages and to me arcane statistics.

When foreigners, assuming all Americans must understand baseball, would ask me to explain the game to them, I would often just make various shit up, in the hope that I was pretty close.

Infield fly rule? What?

So I was in the United States for the last two weeks of July. The coolest thing I did was attend a Seattle Mariners’ game.

My sister has season tickets in the very first row by the left field foul line just up from third base. I understand they are good seats. They seemed that way to me. I attended with my two daughters, and my oldest daughter’s friend, and my cousin’s boy who is their age.

It was bat night and all the kids got bats, so things got off to a cool start. It was an evening game. The stadium was enormous and new and clean and very neat. The architecture was very impressive and theatrical. The lighting was beautiful. The grass was a perfect shade of vivid green and the red dirt of the infield reminded me of the earth we had seen in the South of France a week or so previously.

My sister had warned me that balls were often hit into the seats we occupied. One had gone through the hair of a friend’s young daughter once, striking the seat behind her head and freaking everyone out. So I vowed to pay close attention. I did pretty well, too, although towards the end it often happened that I would be thinking about something, and there would be a CRACK and the crowd would roar and I’d be all, oh shit, where’s the ball, where’s the ball? But we never got hit by a ball, so it was okay in that respect.

The kids enjoyed it. The two older girls disappeared at one point and came back with foot-long hotdogs. I went upstairs with Gamma and got the same for her and me and my cousin’s kid, as well as an eight-dollar microbrew and some garlic fries (highly recommended) and some pop for the kids.

The Mariners were playing some other team. It looked like they had a D on their caps. The other team won, but not thanks to Ichiro, who was the star of the whole spectacle.

That guy is cool, let me tell you. The way he gets set up before hitting. The way he holds his bat out in front of him, vertically, and plucks at his shoulder with the other hand. The consistent way he hits, and the way he hustles.

And the other elements, the peanut vendors and the big television screens and the scoreboard and the people in the crowd goofing for the cameras and the way the sky went from blue to purple to black, and the lost seagull flying in big circles inside the stadium. Other people talking statistics and complaining about the pitching. The single guy a few seats away rooting for the other team.

My kids kept asking me to explain everything to them. Sometimes I tried, sometimes I told them to ask their cousin, who didn’t know much more than I did, which made me like him even more than I already did.

So baseball is American opera. I was able to forget about all the money involved, and all the steroids and my dislike of crowds and just enjoy being there. Enjoy the spectacle and the pleasure of being part of a crowd that was, for the moment, doing no harm. I never thought I’d say that.

Portland is a nice city, don’t get me wrong. Nicer than Vancouver, Washington, for example. Portland has an impressive meth problem, judging from the headlines I saw in the Oregonian during my visit, and I’ve long thought any description of the town ought, for the sake of completeness, include one or more of these adjectives: small, disappointment, second-rate, self-absorbed and shabby; and its freeway bridges have been the source of serial nightmares for me since early childhood, but it is a nice city.

And anyway, meth schmeth. Who doesn’t have a meth problem nowadays?

We stayed at the Mallory Hotel while we were there. “This place is way too nice for us,” Gamma said when we entered the place the first time. Gamma got chocolate all over the bed. Sorry, Mallory! Reentering the hotel at night after a Chinese dinner with an uncle, Beta said, “hey, where’s the guy who opened the door for us this afternoon?”

When we finally left, Beta or her friend had forgotten something, some books from Powell’s I think (buying books at Powell’s the previous day, I had panicked at the cash register, unable to find my credit card, and thinking I had lost it at Niketown (where I found all but one of the salespeople unhelpful (“Sorry, we don’t have the MP3 player your daughter’s friend wants and we don’t have those shoes in your size, now will you step aside so I can help this other person who looks like they’ll be spending more than you?”) and irritating (“can I take that to the register for you?”)), and began to melt down before ultimately finding it at the bottom of my Nike shopping bag. I should have bought a Sigmund Freud action figure to celebrate, I think now) , so I sent them back alone and waited for them in the parking garage. They came back eventually and told me they had met the Dalai Lama at the hotel. When I retold the story to relatives, I told them the girls had returned to their room and when they opened the door the Dalai Lama handed them their books. Actually it was just the cleaning lady and they just saw the Dalai Lama loitering out front, trying to score some meth maybe.

Before we left Portland, we had to drive around in circles because we got caught behind some traffic cones marking off the course for some sort of footrace held in the town that day; they were just in the process of setting up the course, closing off streets and so on, so we somehow managed to get trapped on the course itself; we had some streets to ourselves for a while. It would’ve been funnier if people had already been running, but you can’t have everything.

It’s also possible I overlooked something, because at Starbucks where we had breakfast the guy asked me how I was and I said a wreck and he said what would you like and I said what has the most caffeine and he said how about a cafe americanus gigantus or whatever, with an extra shot or two of methspresso and I said okay and regretted it. My nerves are still jangling.

OMSI was fun. It’s fun to go places with my daughter’s friend. She tends to nearly knock things over. Display mirror at Niketown. Pyramid of thermos bottles at OMSI shop.

So the trip is over now. I’m still curled up in a corner of my mind, behind the sofa, gnawing at the gristle of my trip. Beta and her friend stayed an extra week, they get home tomorrow.

Leaving Portland last week, Gamma and I finally made it through security (the Lufthansa lady, who was unfriendly, and also incompetent (putting Gamma’s name on both our tickets, which I didn’t notice cause, who expects that? which caused big problems for us in Frankfurt; and who also sat us in separate rows… luckily a nice cabin attendant fell in love with Gamma and helped us out) flagged me for a security check, nice of her, so we got searched good, etc.; and we wandered to our gate at Portland’s rather small and disappointing airport. The low ceiling gave the room a shabby feel and the skylights divided it into distinct dark areas of shade and relative coolness, and hot areas of blinding glare. The dark areas were already populated by waiting passengers arranged so that there were no empty seats adjacent to other empty seats left; sitting in those parts would have required me to sit next to another person, which I wasn’t in the mood to do. The blinding glare area, on the other hand, had plenty of empty seats so I sat us there, assuming in the five hours until loading (I like to get there early) I wouldn’t begin to sweat all too much.

So I sat there, arm over the seat behind Gamma, trying to talk her into something – explaining why I didn’t want to shop for more shiny crap (“We just got you a ball point pen with glitter and pink feathers attached, and the bead set, and the twelve dollar journal and felt pens so you could color, and another book, and those chocolates and the cookie”) when I felt a stabbing weight on my arm and looked to see a sharp little chin resting on it, attached to a chatty five year-old girl who wanted to know all about us.

And then her brother, three years old and suffering from hyperactive saliva, showed up on the other side of me.

“What are you drawing?” she asked Gamma. “Why doesn’t she have any hands?”

“Oooh goooh waaaah,” said her brother.

“That’s my brother. Is he your grandfather?” she asked Gamma.

“Dude,” I said.

Gamma set the record straight. “I thought he looked too young to be your grandfather,” the girl said. It was a very close call. Things didn’t look good for her for a few seconds there.

Their mother apologized for them pestering me. I said no problem, without wasting effort on sounding sincere. What I thought was, if I saw them being sucked out to sea by a riptide, I might try to save them, but only because you’re hot, lady, and I feel a certain amount of solidarity with other parents travelling alone with children.

Luckily, they did not bother us on the plane. They were sitting totally somewhere else and we never saw them again.

Nothing is as interesting as a good epidemic.

Continue reading →

Paco: That’s him.
Stipo: You sure?
Paco: Sure I’m sure.
Stipo: Absolutely sure?
Paco: Pretty sure. White hair, look at that white hair. Needs a haircut bad. Who’s he think he is, Jim Jarmusch?
Stipo: He’s not smoking. He’s supposed to be a chain-smoker.
Paco: Pff.
Stipo: He hasn’t smoked once the whole time.
Paco: Pff.
Stipo: And he doesn’t look like a… he look like a finance minister to you? Even one on vacation? Finance ministers don’t drive Dobl

In the country, a girl and her father traveling share the room across from us.