Not without snacks.

I wish I were a scintillating conversationalist. I was standing in front of a canvas in my cellar yesterday thinking, “That’s not what it was supposed to look like.” I have conversations like that too, with the difference that you can paint over an oil painting. All I can do to salvage a conversation is blog about it.

Like this:

My wife and I were in a restaurant yesterday. Two women came in, one carrying a cello in a hard case.

“Look, a cello,” I said.
“I know that,” my wife said.

We had the schnitzel special. My wife and my daughter substituted potatoes with parsley for the potato salad. Judging from my digestion afterwards, a good choice.

We had been at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. Afterwards, my wife and daughter were hungry. Lunchtime. I couldn’t make up my mind if I was or not. My wife, hungry, sheds her human mask and reveals a ball of Taser-packing copperheads underneath and she passed the gene to Gamma.

I found the cafe in the museum overpriced, and my wife found the service too slow, and so the fun started. We left in search of lunch; my priority: reasonably priced, reasonable quality. Their priority: food, now.

Never forget: always bring snacks.

The restaurant in the butterfly house was full. Doh, lunchtime. The cafe in the Albertina museum theoretically has good food, but it’s up at the top of the museum and we figured we’d get there, discover it was full and have to wander on so we skipped it.

Gamma had her heart set on spaghetti. She was sort of chanting it. Alpha led the way, saying things like, “Come on!” and “What, you’re not wearing gloves? Are you crazy?” and, “if you’d gotten a Ph.D. we’d be eating juicy steaks Right Now.” I was holding Gamma’s hand and trying to distract her. I saw a poster for a documentary about a group of accordionists from various cultures. I’d love to see that movie. Alpha wasn’t interested in backtracking to come see the poster, though, and Gamma and I had to jog a bit to catch up.

Three granola bars, you know? Or animal crackers, or three bananas. The world would have been a different place.

We ended up at the restaurant waiting for our schnitzels. We warned Gamma not to drink up all her Fanta at once because it had to last her through her entree.

Two women came in, one carrying a cello in a hard case.
“Look, a cello,” I said.

I entertained myself on my way into work this morning, which was good because I was parked on the freeway for a whole hour while they cleaned up an accident. Parked.

I entertained myself as I sometimes do by devising new names for automobiles.

Fiat Maligna was one of my favorites.
Toyota names are fun: Toyota Cretina.
Body parts: Dodge Rectum. Volvo Uterus (a family van). Ford Sphincter (modernistic, concept sports-compact). Chevy Idiot. Ford Moron (or, if it’s a 4WD Ford Morono, with New Mexican desert background in the advertisement).

Chekhov’s pistol, you know? I was listening to the radio station I mentioned, Oe1, one late-night drive home, and they had this hour-long (at least) report on Japanese Noh theater. The report was nearly as slow-paced as noh theater itself, but I forced myself to listen, and eventually was engrossed.

One Austrian reporter remarked about all the people he’d seen sleeping in the audience. A Japanese university professor noh expert was asked about it and he said — you know how they play a bit of the original response, and then its volume is turned down but it continues under the translation? The professor said, among other things, “Noh de, yoku nemasu nee.” Which they translated as something along the lines of “it’s common for people to sleep at noh performances” but which means, to me at least, “noh is great for sleeping.”

They discussed the inherent boringness of noh — how it has been slowing down and growing more stylized since it was invented centuries ago, to the point where a performance that would have taken 45 minutes then takes 90 minutes now. And the zen nature of noh was mentioned. And how the slow, boring, stylized minimalism forces viewers to actively (emotionally) participate and empathize rather than be entertained. And this, which is my whole point: now it is not about external events or impressions, or anything else surface and temporary, but rather about the internal emotional world in each of us, the constellation that never ages, that persists from childhood to old age.

I like that idea. Because I’m still that lonesome 3-year old kid playing checkers with my uncle, unaware that he’s lonesome.

The missionaries kicked in my door and held their guns in my face and said, while I sniffed gun oil and cordite, DOESN’T IT GET U DOWN THAT U HAVE EXISTENTIAL CRISES AMONG DOPES WITH BETTER CAREERS THAN U OR THAT U REACH OVER ON UR DRIVE INTO WORK WITH UR PHANTOM ARM AND PAT HER PHANTOM LEG AND WONDER DO U FEEL THAT WHEREVER U ARE AND THINK BOY I MISS U KID, FULL OF WIST?
And I say, right before they knock in my teeth and I spit them like cherry chiclets onto the tile floor of our entryway, well you know, it’s not all bad. There is the way the lane behind me fades into the grey of the falling snow until it vanishes and there are the ninety or ninety-five greys of the sky and there is the little whirring sound the coffee machine at the UN briefly makes when it’s finished with my coffee order and it’s time to take out the cup, like the propellor of a toy motorboat spinning when you lift it out of the water, or imagining on my way home late at night from work and stopping by the music school to try out a new cello how Gamma will look asleep in my bed by the light of the lava lamp (knowing her mom is not home and she’ll use the situation to sleep in the big bed) and I get home and she’s really sleeping there and she really looks exactly the way I imagined and the stopping by the music school late at night: having my own key, wandering the halls of an old thick-walled convent in the pitch dark thinking about centuries of ghosts as I feel my way to the cello room and turn on the light and boy does the C string sound good on this new cello (although it looks a little dopey and I won’t buy it I don’t think)! So, I tell the missionaries, there are various phenomena limiting how down it can get me, now take your corny booklets and go bug someone else.

I get a modest amount of traffic and am rarely linked by other blogs so trackbacks were pointless for me; if someone linked me and it drove any traffic my way I saw it in my stats anyway. I fail to see the benefit of trackbacks, for me at least. Not to sound ungrateful to a charming person who is at least partly responsible for the blogging software I use for free, but part of me thinks maybe Mena is a control freak and trackbacks sort of grew from that, the need for absolute control over the blog; you know, like, Who’s Linking Me? But the only ones I got were trackback spam, and I got hundreds so I went and stripped anything trackback related from all my blogs and guess what, I still get them from automatic programs spamming me. I have a couple MT links to check out, I’m sure there’s a solution for it, I am just too busy this week at work to spend any time doing it just yet, but I’ll fix it eventually. But my question is, do any of you see a point in trackbacks?

We dropped the kid off at her friend’s house, apartment actually, Alpha and I walked her over on a bright cold weekend day. They let her in, we said goodbye there in the hallway, the mom in the doorway and the kid’s friend and Alpha didn’t see him because their Golden Retriever was out saying hi, licking me and jumping on me and she’s not a dog person and so all she saw was dog but I, being a dog person, was all Yeah, boy, howyalikedat Yeah, attaboy and relaxed and I saw him, peeking out from behind his mom, the kid’s friend’s little brother, pure psycho evil and only five years old. Eyes as dark as the deepest pockets of Johnny Cash’s blackest coat. The little kid stuck a 60 watt lightbulb in his mouth and it lit up. Not really, but I imagined him doing it; you wouldn’t be surprised if he had. Gamma came home later with a bruise on her cheek and a wiggly tooth where he had hit her in the face with a big chunk of icy ice when they were playing outside and for some reason her friend got grounded for it. And I thought, we got off cheap and I thought, this isn’t the last we’re hearing about that guy, some day his neighbors will be saying on TV, He was such a quiet person.
And then they’ll stick the microphone in my face and I’ll say, That little fucker’s given me the heebie jeebies ever since he was a little bitty boy.