This summer I considered murdering, among other people, my cello teacher. He assigned me an etude. That is, I received the sheet music from him somehow, finding it on my music stand after he was gone, or he gave it to my kid, in a way that prevented me from asking him about it face to face. Just a few instructions penciled on the back.

It was slow and sad, something I remember requesting once. A slow, sad piece. It is an etude build mainly to practice double stops, however, so it sounded that much sadder while I was trying to figure it out.

It was hard to practice, I felt compelled to wait until everyone was gone, including the neighbors.

When you play double stops, you want to get the intonation right, which I was not doing. A piece without them, if my intonation is off, it still sounds roughly like a tune, to me at least. But this sounded like hell all summer long. I played it without double stops, just individual notes, to get an idea of what it should sound like. But despite that, I was swimming the entire time.

I dreaded going back to my first lesson of the new school year Monday. So imagine my surprise when my teacher expressed great satisfaction with how things stood. Amazement, even.

Even given the likelihood that he was wanting to start off a new year on a positive note and probably praised every student, his effusiveness made it impossible for me not to cheer up a little.

All I need to do is iron out a couple little things, like bowing and intonation. Everything else was already perfect, he said. That sounds like a joke, bowing and intonation being as important as they are, but I gather he was referring to things like the positions I had figured out and other elements.

So cello got off on a positive note this season. It was a real U-turn for me, attitude wise, because I had already begun wondering whether I ought not just sell the damned thing to the woman who has a crush on it.

My teacher asked me what I wanted to learn this year. How to read music, I felt like saying. More double stops, I said. What about thumb positions, he said. Sure, them too, I said. They could be useful if you’re considering doing more composing, he said. Absolutely, I said. thumb positions it is.

I have been doodling around on the piano again lately. So, maybe.

He also gave me some scales to practice. Fairly easy ones. I’m trying to figure them out. Not so easy for me, despite their simplicity. My problem is I still try to do everything at once, instead of taking it step by step. If I slow down, it’ll go faster.

but you would probably wake up, gasp and I’d be all, “it’s okay! It’s just Mig! Mig from the blog!” and you’d be all, “Goddamn it, get out of my fucking house you crazy goddamned bastard!” and call the cops so I just think about doing it, or rather, think about the words, not the action, and how poetic they sound, and melancholy, and about how one thing leads to another, like one minute I’m four, standing by Multnomah Falls with mom and dad, worrying my parents will abandon me there like starving woodcutters and then how will I get home, the next here I am, 48, sitting at a kitchen table in Austria at five in the morning all WTF happened? Or in a car in a parking lot waiting for eldest daughter to get back from walking her little sister to school for her second day at the new school because I was afraid to let her cross the street on her own yet didn’t want to embarrass her by walking her there myself.
Connecting the dots. It’s like a pile of dots you can connect however you want. Burrow through them like a worm. The slow road to realizing my touch might not make people unhappy, but it doesn’t make them happy either. Realizing my touch alone does not suffice, that the math is more complicated than the last chapters of your math book looked on the first day of school.
One thing leads to another. I swing through the jungle, from choice to choice, until perspective shifts and there is no individual, just the path, the worm burrowing through a heap of moments in all directions. No individual, just one thing leading to another. Someone’s sleeping lies at a tangent to the path and there is the lightest contact.
Mornings like this, I wake up at 4, give up a half hour later and get up, make sandwiches, coffee, feed cats; there are no things at this time of the morning, no leading, no next. Barely potential, just peace and a ticking clock and a cone of light in the darkness and, come to think of it, ringing ears and a pen scratching on paper. Soon, though, one thing will lead to another, and so on, and the narrative will resume.

Something about Saturn has allegedly changed, meaning things are set to go my way for a spell, allegedly, according to the newspaper. As evidence of this: I cannot sleep, I am in a state of constant low-grade panic and my boss is mad at me. On the other hand, I got another job lead through a friend, the rain is pretty and Gamma’s first day of big-kid school apparently rocked.

I had been worried about Gamma, going from being the biggest kid in elementary school (4th grade) to the smallest kid in the big school (Gymnasium). She wore a plaid skirt, white blouse under black sweater, white stockings and shiny black pumps. I suggested braided pigtails and she went along with that. I dropped her off on my way to work, so I was wearing a dark suit and tie. We were a fine-looking couple. She got lots of stares, because all the other kids were dressed, you know, cool. Gamma didn’t mind the stares, though. She appreciated the irony of her, Gamma, dressing like that, and did so at least in part to make a positive first impression on teachers, which would later come in handy, perhaps.

I told her she could wear her clothes with the skulls on them tomorrow.

She came home totally enthusiastic about school. She can’t wait to go back tomorrow.

She’s a Taurus too. Saturn’s got out of her way. I’m still waiting for a clear sign.

First Person: What’s new?
Second Person: [Reading newspaper] A guy killed a guy and ate his brain.
First Person: Yeah, I just read about that online.
First Person: Crazy.
Second Person: Mmm hmm.
First Person: Seriously crazy.
First Person: Good way to catch Creutzfeldt-Jakob.
First Person: Mad cow disease or something.
First Person: I mean, that was in a homeless shelter, right?
First Person: [Ponders] Although, gee, whose brain IS it safe to eat?
First Person: Nowadays.
Second Person: Mmm hmm.

[Later]

Third Person: Dad! Someone killed someone and ate their brain!
First Person: Yeah.
First Person: Good morning.
Third Person: They say there was a hole this big and the brain was coming out.
First Person: You had breakfast yet?
First Person: What you having, scrambled eggs? Mwahahaha.
First Person: Are you even old enough to be reading this stuff?
First Person: Don’t you have to be sixteen to read that sort of stuff?
Third Person: This is the NEWSPAPER. That’s okay. It’s true.
First Person: Oh, okay.
First Person: In that case.

To get to the convenience store so my father can buy a pack of Winstons one particular overcast afternoon, I must stop, wait for a hole in oncoming traffic and drive a green Ford Courier pickup truck across a couple lanes into the parking lot, which involves me killing the engine a good half-dozen times.

In on the gas, out on the clutch, he says. He is patient, the oncoming drivers waiting for me are patient, I’m the only one getting upset.

It’s okay, he says. It’s okay. In on the gas, out on the clutch.

Immediately after that, last night in other words: a vast local parking lot. Or, the vastest I could find, anyway. Rain gathers on the horizon, moving closer. We have returned a couple DVDs to the rental place and how here we sit in my blue Mazda, under a light, to our left a discount furniture store, to our right a big hardware store.

Here, get in the driver’s seat, I say.

Clutch blah blah motor blah and most important blah the breaks, I say.

Where have I been all her life? I think.

Here, move the seat closer.

The clutch works like this, I say. I gesture in the dark.

Here put it in neutral and start her up, I say.

What happens if I give it too much gas? she asks.

We drive into the electronics store, I say.

In on the gas, I say.

Out on the clutch.

On the weekend I stood in the library with a cup of coffee and watched you swimming in the pool in a red one-piece, back and forth, unaware of me, a soft smile on your face. The pool was a drag to build but this makes it worth it and today, stuck in traffic, I think, god, or mathematics or whoever, let me be a ghost afterwards. Let me haunt you like this and see you happy, unobserved, that is all I ask.

I have been discussing the subject of lucid dreaming with a number of friends recently, independently of one another; the subject just comes up somehow. The more I think about lucid dreaming, the less I see the point; my theory of dreaming is that it is the subconscious, or the body, or whatever, communicating to the conscious, or simply the subconscious thinking, or whatever, and it might not be good to tinker with that; I would rather spend the effort on understanding it better. It being dreaming, not lucid dreaming.

Another problem of lucid dreaming that any lucid dreamer would face is how to know when one is dreaming. It seems easy afterwards, to realize you had been dreaming, but in the thick of it it is not always so obvious.

Partly this is because dreams can be so prosaic, and life can be so surreal. So there are various tests, such as jumping (if you are dreaming, you might fly, if you are not dreaming, probably not); or spinning around – if you look away in a dream, and then back, things change. If you do it in real life, they generally don’t.

Only recently, I found myself chatting (I thought) with a friend pretending to be a Nigerian hacker who had hacked her account, but it turned out to be a real Nigerian hacker who had hacked her account for real. Later that day, late at night in fact, I went to the airport to pick someone up only they missed their flight (on my watch!) and I had to arrange a new one for them and managed to do so despite the fact that the ticket counter was closed and such things are not my specialty. This was surreal enough for me; when I returned to my car I waited for an elevator in the garage, and two models were also waiting, speaking Russian, in short hot pants and red fezzes.

All totally normal things, but odder than most of my dreams, at least the ones I recall.