Mig had been planning to post something uplifting today but then it snowed yet again and he made the mistake of listening to Sigur Ros on his car stereo on his drive into work this morning, which combination put him in a frame of mind where all he wants to do is drink a pot of herbal tea laced with a quart of aqua vit and lie down in the gently falling snow and go to sleep while curious deer emerge from the surrounding woods and nuzzle his face with their velvety muzzles¹ and so it is necessary that I step in and, in his stead, uplift you with an essay on despair.

It is not the expected, the obvious thing that drives a man to despair which is why a man can emerge in good spirits from 77 days solitary confinement held captive as a prisoner of war in a darkened tiger cage fed only cloudy, contaminated rice gruel and released once a day from his squatting position for a sound beating² but then find himself, decades later, reduced to tears by transparent glittery gold effect paint and the way that it, applied with a short-nap roller over the dark red walls of a teenaged girl’s room, looks like hell, even the second time.

Not even the second time, applied carefully yet as fast as it would roll on this morning before leaving for work a bit late after letting his wife leave for work early so she could come home early, and himself seeing the younger one, the one known as Gamma off to school at eight; or, to make the actual chain of events clearer: first he got up, and made lunches, and coffee and tea water in anticipation of his wife getting up and wanting fresh tea, and took a shower, and dressed in his painting clothes, and after his wife and older daughter left made sure Gamma, was getting dressed and eating, after which the level of available light was such that he could see the walls in the aforementioned room and he unpacked his roller and started rolling, man. Evenly, from top to bottom, then horizontally to erase any trace of a roller track and leave the walls with a smooth, thin, uniform coat of transparent gold glitter effect paint.

Throughout all this he was keeping a close watch on the time, and was happy that Gamma has turned into the Keeper of Time, so every three minutes when he asked her what time it was and was it 7.15 yet because he had to quit and wash brushes and roller at 7.15 she had a precise answer for him until even she got tired of it and gave him her old Winnie-the-Pooh alarm clock so he would know what time it was.

At precisely 7.16 he ran out of paint, and all the walls of the room were evenly covered and he dashed down to the cellar to wash the bucket and roller and brushes and, on his way out, noticed that it was, for reasons mysterious to him, drying in patchy, flecky flecks and looking in general like crap. He ignored this, though, and washed and dressed quickly and hoped that it would look a lot better when finally completely dry but, eh, it didn’t the first time did it.

Then he swept the sidewalk free of snow, a vain, pointless gesture in view of the constantly falling snow and yet, it gave him a certain measure of desperate satisfaction and something to do while waiting for Gamma and her school friend whose mother drops her off at his house early some mornings because she can’t be arsed to wait around until 8 a.m. to put on their shoes and coats which kept him from getting nervous and hovering around them like some sort of large, male mother hen.

After that, despite his despair, he walked the girls to school, which is quite near the house, and although he was by this time teetering on the brink of a vast and deep and empty abyss of depression and existential futility, it made him feel a lot better and she asked him when he’d be getting home that night and he said a bit later than usual, maybe sevenish, and he even got a kiss goodbye.
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¹If, indeed, deer even possess a body part referred to correctly as a muzzle and if it is velvety and if they “nuzzle” anything with it, let alone sleeping drunken humans who the casual observer would assume present more of a threat to deer, traditionally, than an object of curiosity.
²Not that Mig, about whom this story is, this being his blog, was ever actually held prisoner in a tiger cage in solitary confinement, or beaten by anyone other than his parents^2a or ever actually in a war, or even in anything more military than the Cub Scouts and later, until the organized nature of it began freaking him out, the Webelos. It is more a merely metaphoric thought that occurred to him while washing his brushes afterwards in a metaphorically-susceptible meditative state, a man survives 77 days in a tiger cage and is reduced to tears by a red wall. Like that, rather.
^2aAnd that only rarely and, with one memorable exception, without great enthusiasm.

Famous designer and illustrator Bran has been helping me with the redesign here. Thanks, Bran. There have been many changes to improve your reading experience, you may have noticed some of the more profound ones, which I hope were not too jarring or disconcerting, such as moving the “about” information to the top of the sidebar.

All that’s left, once the archives finally finish rebuilding, will be to add a list of favorite posts, which might help the casual visitor go straight to some of the more attractive stuff here rather than wade through a lot of… you know, I love all of my children equally, but some people coming here for the first time might think, gosh, he writes about fish a lot.

Two or three of you are new readers, I think, and the other two have been reading me for a longer time. I’d like to ask you a favor: in the comments here, or in an email, please let me know if any of the content here has stuck in your mind (sorry!) or if there is anything here you have especially liked or would recommend, or if you have any, you know, favorites.

Thanks in advance. The email account I check most often is metamorphosist at gmail dot com.

[Added later: Little-Known-Facts are here, more or less]

Beta’s room was overdue for a paint job. She and Alpha picked out the paints, since Beta knew what she wanted and Alpha is able to visualize colors, unlike me. Then I went to the hardware store with the paint swatches and bought way more paint than I needed from a really good saleswoman, just in case, you hate running out in the middle of a job at midnight although who paints at midnight haha just in case, including a can of this transparent gold effect stuff just in case the matte paint I got rather than the semi-gloss option turned out to be too dull.

Then Alpha and I went somewhere while the girls cleaned out Beta’s room, I had assumed that would mean putting all her stuff into the hallway but turns out it meant loading it all into Gamma’s room meaning neither girl can use her room until the job is finished. Then on Sunday, because I had orchestra rehearsal (“okay Mig, this tricky part here you just play the quarter notes along with the little kids too”) on Saturday, I started painting.

The creamy yellow went on ceiling and top half of the walls, the dark red on the bottom half of the wall. The yellow covered with just one coat, the red took three.

Of course it was too dull. Luckily I had a can of gold effect stuff. I tried that last night.

It turns out there’s a reason they advise you not to paint rooms at night. I couldn’t see a goddamn thing. I had reading lamps and shit shining on the walls but it’s a glittery see-thru gold effect that you can only see, apparently, by daylight so it was like painting with invisible ink. Tried doing it with a brush, but that looked like hell so I tried a roller but that looked even worse, then Alpha came in and tried brushing some on because she thought the brush looked way better but I was all like You expect me to paint an entire room with a one-inch brush? and What are you doing painting anyway I’m the painter you choose the colors, that’s the deal plus I was really insecure because it was looking like shit, what I was doing, and hers wasn’t looking any better.

I ended up rolling it all on and then calling it a night. Hoping that in the morning, when the transparent gold effect paint had dried, the roller lines would magically have disappeared.

But they didn’t. Luckily Alpha had bought a second can of transparent gold effect. I had planned to roll that on tonight, in the hopes that it would average out okay, but she called me on my way to work this morning with the suggestion that I do it in the morning, by daylight, such as tomorrow before work. Apparently there is a window of opportunity where there is sufficient light now that it’s “spring” before I leave.

Meanwhile Beta’s junk is all over the house and Gamma’s sleeping in the big bed, or downstairs on the guest bed with her big sister, only last night she was in the big bed because Beta was in Vienna for some reason, and spent the night with someone in town.

• Between one and three days following the highest spring tide, the grunion lays its eggs in the sand at the high-tide mark on Southern Californian beaches.

• The grunion does this at night.
• Because it does this at night, no one has ever really seen a grunion, so this is all conjecture.
• Nevertheless, there the grunion eggs are in the morning, two to three inches below the surface of the sand. So somebody must put them there, why not a grunion?
• It’s the simplest explanation for the phenomenon.
• Sometimes the grunion comes home at the end of a hard day at the end of a hard week to find that a pipe is leaking in the cellar, and its father-in-law is down there calmly mopping stuff up while its wife and mother-in-law are in the kitchen drinking wine and getting upset about the plumbing emergency.
• For grunions, if no one gets upset, it’s only half the party.
• Grunion plumbing always springs a leak on the weekend, when plumbers charge between time and a half and double time.
• Grunions like snow, a lot, but it’s March already. Enough is enough.
• Grunions live for the weekend, although a grunion weekend lasts only like about a few hours.
• The average length of a grunion is somewhere between five and six inches.

• Monkfish prefer deep water, as deep as 2000 feet.

• Monkfish can distend their jaws to eat their prey, which includes fish, turtles and sea birds.
• Since they eat birds, monkfish can theoretically transmit avian flu.
• Speaking of avian flu, monkfish think the collective noun “a murder of crows” is finally starting to make sense.
• Young monkfish appear innocent and can lie so convincingly that father monkfish fall for it every time, and only mother monkfish can see through their stories.
• Mother monkfish attribute this ability of young monkfish to father monkfish’s habit of telling them Luegengeschichten.
• Monkfish is sometimes called “the poor man’s lobster” due to its taste.
• Monkfish is rarely sold in stores with the head still attached.

• The herring is about 16% fat.

• In winter maybe a little more.
• The herring is a social animal, living in schools, and quickly dies when left to its own devices.
• No matter what a herring eats, it makes it look delicious.
• A herring tries to do the right thing, but ehn, nobody’s perfect.
• A herring can sleep, but not like humans sleep.
• When a herring hears something interesting in a radio show about a bar for melancholy people at the National Gallery in Berlin called the Black Cube, that the depressed think about themselves and the melancholy think about other things, such as infinity, it tries to convince itself that it sees infinity in a shy black-haired boy, or some ice, or its wife and kids.
• Now that a herring has had its first orchestra rehearsal, it hears orchestral music totally differently: rather than hearing all this music, it hears the bass section, and the cellos, and the violas, and the violins, for starters, and it’s beautiful, especially if it’s baroque.
• Although a herring’s capacity for self-pity approaches infinity, it is quickly brought back to earth when a neighbor hangs himself in his (the neighbor’s, not the herring’s) cellar, leaving a sick wife and two kids.
• Or when a teacher at the music school who has to get chemotherapy tells his students he’s taking time off to go on a long journey.