Alpha thinks I’m configuring her new e-mail account, but that went faster than I thought so I’m blogging. Today is a holiday here, see, and she would put me to work doing something else if she knew I had finished the other task.

We went to see Anne and her guys on the weekend. We enjoyed it thoroughly, and not only because my wife’s parents have moved in with us while they wait for my MIL’s cyborg knee installation to take. Once this knee heals, she’ll get the other one replaced, after which she might be able to run at speeds up to 60 mpH.

But until then, she’ll spend a few weeks on the sofa telling us how to do things. So we take walks, and make telephone calls trying to find a plumber to fix the leaky pipe, and go to the Czech Republic to visit nice people, and the stuff you do in situations like that.

Nine weeks of blogging gold in sight.

We went to see Anne, who just for the record had the most incredible blue eyes I’ve seen since 1976 (seen then in a woman’s head at the airport in Washington D.C.) and plus she is a spookily good palm reader.

The Czech Republic is as beautiful as Austria, and this time of year, with the lush spring growth, both are quite smashing. The Czechs seem to have more whorehouses, at least they have bigger signs than in Austria, but they appear to be clustered near the borders.

Czech fields are bigger. Maybe their farms are in general larger than Austrian ones. So this makes the landscape look a little different.

Brno is hillier than Vienna, and easy to get lost in because the street signs are not only in Czech, they’re also somehow hidden. So as we looked for Anne’s address, me driving and Alpha reading the directions to me, there was a lot of conversation like, “Turn right, no left, at the street starting with a Z. Does this street start with a Z?”

Also they have different currency so I was reduced to infantile tourism, where you don’t know anything and just go where people take you and pay what they tell you to pay. Alpha, on the other hand, learned Czech after about 30 minutes.

What can I say about the trip? We took a walk through the town, along streets and trails in the woods, making fun of participants in an orienteering competition running around with their maps and compasses. Around this time we discovered we were lost in the woods. Then we found a pub and everything was okay again. Not only okay: I discovered an idea I’m going to steal from the pub and become a very, very rich man with. But more on that at a later date.

I can’t give a good account of the trip here, because I’m still so hungover, a strange gin hangover where you don’t feel so bad physically, you just question the meaning of existence. At the same time, it was one of those visits where the kids get along, and your wife likes your friend and her husband, and you like her husband and you’re relieved everything turns out so well. You rifle through the books on their bookshelves and they all look interesting as do the CDs on the rack. The furniture is tasteful in a comfortable, agreeable way and they cook well and their son draws cool maps and takes knightly good care of Gamma.
The Murphy bed was cool. I slept well, although I suppose I would have slept well inside an industrial clothes dryer that night. The food was good. The neighborhood was charming. If only existence had a meaning.

I think I figured out why harmless comments are sometimes denied. Included on my blacklist are words such as c4sino, g4mes, b3tting and d3bt and similar words that are potentially harmless but common in spam. I hate to remove them from the list because they keep out a lot of the riff-raff. So try L33t if your comment gets denied. Unless you’re a sp4mmer.

There was a bottomless lake not far from where I grew up. It was where my parents’ generation went to have fun, and mine too, until they opened up the gravel pits closer to my house. Nowadays, there are other things to do. There are malls and stuff.

There was a high slide at the lake. A high tower with a slide leading straight down into the lake. I never went down it. I was a fraidy cat. Now that slide no longer stands, felled by liability laws, I guess. Instead, they may have a fancy fiberglass one spiralling around. But I don’t know this, I haven’t been there in years.

I went swimming there one summer when I was in college. I packed my pocket watch in a baggy so it wouldn’t get wet. I needed to know the time so I wouldn’t be late for my swing shift job at the cannery. The watch got wet anyway, and stopped, so I left way early just in case.

My brother let me try out his scuba stuff there one summer. Visibility was zero, the water was very muddy at the edge. I put on the diving mask and the tank and started breathing and stepped into deeper water and gradually sank and that, in combination with the lake being bottomless, freaked me out so I got back out of the water.

A diving platform was anchored 50 yards or so out into the lake. Kids swam out there and sunned themselves and jumped off. Laughter, water drops, sparkle, sun, skin. I’ve always been a good swimmer so I could swim out there easily, but I never did because I didn’t know the other kids. There was grass on the shore and I had a big towel.

About thirty big deer were standing around in a field right next to the freeway the other day. Several husky bucks with velvety antlers. A bunch of does. The evening light was clear and bright and the woods behind them and the grass in the field were this bright, fresh green. I slowed down to look at them. I wanted to strip naked and frolic with them, but that would have been a mistake on several levels.

I am standing on this diving platform. I am wearing heavy, steel-toed logging boots and a heavy coat and clothes. I got here by climbing down a ladder but now it’s missing its rungs and I can’t climb back up and were I to swim I would sink because of the boots and clothes. This is this dream I had a while back that won’t leave me. The dominant feeling is one of being fuxxored.

The lake is bottomless. Also, in the dream, it’s the ocean. And the boots are heavy, heavy as deep-sea diver boots. This is where the dream ends. But if I continue it this is what I do: take off the boots. Fold my clothes in a neat pile. Dive in naked. I’m a good swimmer, I just forgot for a second.

“Gamma told me last night that she tests whether you’re listening or not.”

“That’s nice.”

“She says she can say anything she wants and you agree to it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She says the weirdest things she can think of, and you say okay.”

“Mmm hmm.”

“If you’re listening, she says, you catch on right away.”

“Okay.”

“Otherwise, she can get you to agree to about five weird things before it dawns on you.”

“Cool. Hang on. Wait, what?”

Mornings, I let in the cats and stand at the counter and open their astronaut-like foil envelopes of food and squeeze them into their dishes, twisting my bare feet around in a miserable dance as they lick my toes as if they posit a causal relationship between them licking my toes and me giving them food.

I give them their food and drink my coffee and wonder if God (if you believe) or life or whatever (if you don’t or if you’re not sure) is like that too, with our prayers and demands. We pray and he’s/it’s like dude, stop licking my fucking toes, I was going to feed you anyway. Go torment a mouse or something.

Every few years I have a grand nightmare that permeates me like a poison and takes days to get out of my system and I never really forget. I had one last weekend. I mentioned it. I’m still hungover from that, and it sounds so harmless to tell about. Once I dreamed about a boulder in the middle of a river, a thin layer of water flowing over its smooth, flat top. That still haunts me. This dream was about being stuck somewhere. There was more to it than that but that was the basic thing. Same thing with the boulder – I had murdered someone and hidden their body under it. Backstory is important. Once I dreamed I was fighting a guy. That was maybe more conventionally interesting. Other people sat around, watched television and didn’t notice that I was sawing at his jugular with a piece of broken window glass, or that blood was spraying out in a thin jet. Took forever to kill him, and he never really died.

With that on the inside of my head yesterday, I went to the luthier and bought a cello. I hated to do it, because I was enjoying the quest so much; learning so much about cellos etc. Ideally, I would have wanted to travel to a cello maker and buy one directly from him or her. See where they stack the wood they use to build it, see half-finished instruments scattered abo ut. Smell the wood shavings. But a time comes in the affairs of men when you have to shit or get off the pot, and that time was yesterday. The cello was at the upper end of my price range, well beyond it actually, my wife had granted permission, I had the money, sort of, in pocket and the likelihood of finding anything either better-sounding or prettier for that price was slim. Somewhere, someone I don’t know has a wonderful instrument gathering dust in their attic, but pff. So, nightmare in hand I went and bought it.

I always get shy and awed when I’m there. Imagine a jellyfish in a black suit, gasping for air, running a tentacle around its collar nervously. To make matters worse, two parents walked in looking for a “school cello” for their kid.

Things went well, though. I told the luthier my price, which was lower than the price he was asking. You’re saying you want to buy the cello for that price, he said. I’m saying I want to buy it, period, I said, but my wife and I discussed it, and my limit is this amount. For reasons unknown to me, he accepted that and I left with my cello. He even loaned me a case until I buy one: if any of you know where I can get a fantastic deal on a hard case, let me know.

Now, to find a bow.

I’ll have to post a picture of the cello, though. The maple back and sides are quite attractive, tiger-striped, which resonated with me as perhaps my most interesting nightmare ever involved a tiger; interesting because Gamma was not only in the dream, she remembered it too, after waking. It impressed me so much I am using it in a novel.

In other news, Alpha gave me a folding tripodic chair so Gamma and I don’t have to fight over the one we had when we go into the woods to draw, it was a wonderful present. And I think I’m getting a cake when I get home, because Gamma and I had this conversation this morning:

Girl: Maybe you’ll have a cake for your birthday.
Man: Maybe, but I doubt it, but that’s okay.
Girl: Everyone needs a cake on their birthday.
Man: No problem, I’ll survive. I don’t think I’m getting a cake.
Girl: Don’t you want a cake?
Man: I like cake. But that’s okay, honey.
Girl: Don’t feel bad, dad. Maybe you’ll get cake!
Man: No, I don’t think so.
Girl: Dad, no, maybe you’re getting cake!
Man: That’s nice of you to say that, but…
Girl: Dad, you’re getting cake!
Man: Heh.

We went… a friend… hang on. There was this concert. My wife mentioned it to a friend of ours, who discovers the coolest music etc. She said the dulcimer player was good, she had seen him perform once where she also saw the Vienna Vegetable Ensemble. The concert was in a small town out in the country. We drove out. The countryside was beautiful, like a moonscape if the moon were covered with rolling hills and plowed fields, and had a big full moon hanging over it. The place wasn’t so big, small stage, eight or ten tables. Despite that, and what you would expect to be the attraction of an electric dulcimer/accordeon duo, with vocals, sort of ethereal, the place was nearly empty. That is, when we got there we were the entire audience. Then more people came, and more, and more, until there were at least ten people in the audience, not counting the guy moving levers up and down on the mixer.

It was really good. I had no idea dulcimer and accordeon could sound so modern and like that.

After the concert we went outside and talked to the singer for a while. She was surprised to meet someone in a small town in the Austrian countryside who spoke fluent Japanese. By “we” I mean “my wife.” I stood in the background and smiled and nodded and wished I’d worn a warmer coat.

The singer was a Japanese woman, FYI.

That was a few weeks ago. Last Saturday we were at another concert. This one was in another small town, but the audience was quite large and knowledgeable. Interestingly for us, by “us” I mean my wife and me, the musicians were too good. They were classical musicians – their regular job is playing with the V1enna Ph1lh4rmonic. This was… the music at this concert was Schrammelmusik, which it would be oversimplifying to describe as the urban folk music played while drinking wine in Vienna, but I can’t do any better. And we agreed, although they were really, very good, that the music could have used a little more dirt, wasn’t imperfect enough. Lacked the seeds of its own destruction.