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.

Gamma was sitting in the woods drawing. Alpha was looking at a pond. I watched them both. Then I got restless and walked over towards my wife. A little brown frog jumped out from under some plants at my feet. I crouched down and tried to catch it, to show it to Gamma, but it got away. I put my hat over it, but it wriggled out from under and hopped away between my legs. By the time I turned around it was gone.

Then we saw two blue bugs. They were large and Gamma was afraid to walk past them until we explained that they were fucking and preoccupied. Gamma drew a picture of the pond.

I tried to draw a picture of a hunter’s blind, one of these rickety tower constructions they have here, but it looked wrong until I stopped looking at the paper as I drew. Then it still looked wrong, but more interesting.

I was in a dark, desperate mood all day because of some nightmare I had. Something about a tower.
Nightmares are my favorite dreams, usually, but still.

For breakfast, Gamma and I made waffles with whipped cream and strawberries and raspberries, because it was Mother’s Day.

The key to happiness is your sense of function and utility, if you’re an iron lung. You are respirating another being, unlike an oxygen chamber, which is nothing more than a glorified bed for people like Michael Jackson. Happiness for an oxygen chamber hangs from a thin string tied to a twig of self-deception about as big around as your little finger.

We iron lungs, on the other hand, replicate the pulsation shared by all life forms, from the contractions of birth, pulse, peristalsis to the ultimate contraction and release that expels a being from this life.

Miners retired at 32, staring at pictures of God pinned to the ceiling, wishing their kids would stop singing those plaintive songs about them in the next room in their nasal voices; resigned polio victims; little children taken tragically ill, imagining walks down long corridors holding hands with healthy alternate selves, we’ve breathed them all.

In and out.

I hate clowns so a clown was out, as was that person who dances around in the sort of bird costume. McDonald’s was out, the organic farm where the kids can play in the dirt and pet the animals was too far away plus it was closed on the weekend I think. The Museum of Natural History wanted, what, way over two hundred Euro for seven kids or something like that. We did a pirate party last year, I think. At any rate, we’d done one already, with treasure map, treasure hunt, all that stuff.

Which left the art museum.

This is how I found myself sitting in front of The Two Fridas with my wife, a friend of ours kind enough to come along and help out, the tour guide and twelve 8-year old children: nine girls, Bill Gates, Hannibal Lector and Don Rickles. The sort of smart kids who are fine as long as you keep them occupied, which turns out to be impossible.

The guide was really good. She had been planning to show the kids a different picture, but they all sat down in front of this one so she explained it instead, off the top of her head, talking about Frida and the painting at a level the kids and I could understand. She told us how expensive it was, how it had traveled here with a courier who never let it out of his sight, as the boys swang pillows over their heads, sword-fight style, etc.

Alpha is a genius. We took the train to the museum, which fascinated the kids, some of whom had never been on one before. I had expected the kids to be rowdier. I even wore my steel-toed boots just in case, just to put a little fear in them. This is how scared the boys were: on the way to the restroom with them after the tour, Don Rickles asked me what my name is. I told him. “That’s a girl’s name,” he said.

Anyhow. The guide told us afterwards she had been surprised the kids were as well-behaved and attentive as they were. A previous group hadn’t been interested at all.

After the tour, they got to paint and we fed them and went back to the train. On the way we let them play in the creek, so they could fall in and catch colds. Hannibal Lector found a broken schnaps bottle and threw it back into the high grass. I went in looking for it so no one would step on it with his or her bare feet, and stepped in dog shit with my boots. It reminded me of that scene in Jurassic Park where the big game hunter is taking aim at one dinosaur and the other one eats him. So I went wading in the creek for a while too until the sole of my boot was fairly clean again.

Amazingly, no one was injured the whole time. No paintings were damaged. No one cried. Bill Gates was thirsty, because we had none of the beverages he allowed himself to drink (i.e. tap water). Everyone else seemed to have a good time. We were still talking to each other after we arrived back at our train station and handed the kids back to their parents, who seemed equally surprised they all still had ten fingers and toes each.

We went into town, where I got Gamma an ice-cream cone. She climbed halfway up a tree and ate it while listening to a big band that was playing outside.

That was Saturday. Sunday some relatives came over. We fed them until they went home again. Gamma had a great time both days. She said it was her best birthday ever.

Shopping for hardware is a complicated undertaking, so it’s essential to decide beforehand exactly what you want and how much you are willing to spend.

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