I listen to her radio show on my way into work. She has a classical music show on that radio station I recently started listening to because it spends an hour on the news in the morning and in the evening, not just 5 minutes like the other station I used to listen to, and the music they play is so eclectic, as eclectic as you can be playing serious, classical-type music all the time, plus a show in the evenings, coinciding with my evening commute home, where they play other things, jazz or serious songwritey stuff or odd music from around the world.

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Half-hour one way, half-hour back again. Early in the morning, about five o’clock. Ran out of the village and along the bike path between the fields and the creek, fog still rising from both in the sunrise. Made it past the strip mall but not quite to the McDonald’s sign, which is my half-hour goal that I haven’t made yet. Felt wet from the fog. Turned around and ran back home again. The sun was up by then, burning off the fog so things looked less mysterious on the way back. A white duck watched me by the bridge.

Gamma was practicing an Irish song on the piano recently and I played the bass part on the cello with her and afterwards she’s all like, “man, that sounds a lot better with cello.” And I’m all like, “what doesn’t?”

It was, for me, as nice as if an Italian poet had given me a book of his poems.

Speaking of allergic rashes, I have a cello recital coming up later this month. My cello meister has assigned me two pieces, one a Beethoven prayer that is to be played together with a piano (I play one part on the cello, that is, while someone else plays another part on the piano). It sounds alright when both instruments are playing; that is, it sounded alright when I was playing my part on the cello and my teacher was playing the other part on the school cello, slow and meditative and pretty. My problem is practicing it at home, because my part consists of a lot of long notes, long long notes where you run out of bow if you’re not careful, and doesn’t have a lot of rhythm or structure on its own, not that I can bring out. So I sort of lose the narrative thread, so to speak, when practicing it at home. My teacher warned me this would happen. He gives me tips on how to work around this problem, but I usually forget what they are by the time I practice and just mush around until the next lesson.

The other piece is one part, the easy part I suppose, of a cello duet. I learned it for another recital I ended up not being able to participate in, to my great relief, several months ago. I tried it again in class last Monday and it went very well, which made my teacher happy cause, you know, I didn’t forget it in all that time! So I didn’t have the heart to mention that I had been secretly practicing it now and then because I hate the idea of paying money to learn music and then forgetting it again before I learn the next piece. There are a couple tricky spots in the piece, tricky for me, pieces where I lose track. Luckily the other person, the person playing the other half of the duet is another adult student, a nice lady with her own classical music show on my favorite station. I listen to her in the mornings on my way to work sometimes. She has a pleasant voice and is a classical music Eloi to my Morlock. She has, I suppose, a problem attaining the state of Beginner’s Mind when playing, which would be the one problem I don’t have.

My in-laws moved back home last night. As I practiced, my mother-in-law mentioned she would miss the cello practice. I was shocked, as she has not an ironic bone in her body, and it didn’t sound like sarcasm.

The blistery stripe on Gamma’s forehead, the doctor said, and the blistery spot on her cheek looked like something she called “Kontaktdermatitis”. She prescribed antihistamines. Gamma had come into contact with a blade of grass whilst playing in the woods near the river. It’s also important to know she inherited her hayfever from her father, who is me.

For various reasons I decided to go for a run Sunday morning. I ran from our house to the river, about half an hour, 45 minutes. The chest pains weren’t so bad so instead of running home I turned left and ran upstream, intending to return home in a big circle, big giant circle, instead of boringly retracing my steps. Running up the river got boring too, though, plus it was a lot farther than I expected, so for a change I took a left on the next trail I found heading into the forest and quickly got thoroughly lost.

This is no problem in that particular forest, because, I figured, it’s not like the region is unsettled. Go far enough in any direction and you eventually come to something manmade, like a road or a town, or you come to the river and that takes you back to civilization.

I followed a road that turned into a path that turned into a trail that turned into a bunch of bushes. Then I scared what I figure was a deer because it ran off into the woods a lot faster than I hope the wild boar that live in the woods can run. Then I came to some water. Then I found a couple deer trails and followed them for a while, because deer are always going someplace, you know deer. Always a destination in mind. Except these particular deer seemed to take a perverse delight in constructing dead-end deertrails leading to bodies of water, which turned out to abound in those woods, or solid walls of summer-green vegetation.

I was jogging along all the time, crashing through brush and grass and leafy shit. My tight, clingy running pants were all green in the front, green with these velcro-type vines that were sticking to me and slowing me down. Wild hops grow in the area, and it quickly became obvious that the first clotheslines must have been based on ideas some caveman got running through woods like that and all of a sudden boing, you know?

My clingy pants, besides interlocking perfectly with the velcro-type vines, only went halfway down my shins, leaving an exposed area that was beginning to blister. As was the rest of my body, the front half, because these functional running clothes I was wearing wicked the perspiration from my skin professionally, but provided little protection from whatever I was allergic to in the bushes there.

In the deepest part of the forest, the forest’s rectum if the forest were a giant whale, tangled up in vines, ducking under a dead tree, I told myself, Pay attention. Pay good and close attention right now. It’s not every day you find yourself stuck inside a metaphor like this.

I got untangled and kept running along a path that turned into no path, and that eventually intersected with my road, and I followed that and two hours after I had left found myself back home, uneventfully except for not getting eaten by a big furry German shepherd a lady was walking without a leash, etc etc.

Thanks to Gamma I had the antihistamines and the antihistamine skin cream and that helped a lot, but my crankiness knows no bounds today. Plus, boy are my legs sore.

In the conference room, delegates listen to speakers through plastic devices that fit over one ear. Or they listen to the translators through them. Interpreters I mean. Plastic ear cups are connected to your chair by a curly plastic cord that stretches out to about 6 feet when you forget about the cup and get up and walk off before twanging back across one or more surprised fellow conference participants (just the cup not you, normally). This is very funny to watch from a distance, and yesterday I discovered it to be equally funny, in a slightly embarassing but what the hell life’s too short to worry about stuff like that way when it happens to you. By “you” I mean “me”. Although the possibly Malaysian delegate didn’t find it especially funny to have the thing snap back at her, and the probably Chinese delegate gave me a downright dirty look. Lighten up, dude. It’s only a plastic ear thing. Happens at least once per conference, sometimes more.