Rock festival venue design has improved since I was a kid. I think so, anyway. The festival this weekend was my first so I can’t be sure. They have this security fence around the mosh pit, see, and then an eight foot wide security lane full of bouncers and then another security fence. The advantages of this are the main crowd can’t rush the stage and squish those in the mosh pit, and it’s easier for bouncers to keep an eye on things and evacuate people who pass out, and 10 year old girls attending with their dads can lean up against the second fence and sort of see the stage when their dads are taking a break from carrying them on their shoulders.

This system is better than what I gather it was 20-30 years ago, mostly involving mud.

Gamma and her friend also enjoyed watching the bungee-jump crane and razzing chickens who rode back down in the platform instead of jumping.

Before we went back the second day, I explained to Gamma: I have a slipped disc. I cannot carry you on my shoulders all the time, so please don’t ask me to, because if you ask I can’t say no. When I am able to, I will offer and then it’s okay.

And you know what? She went along with that. The first evening had totally been a study in the economics of love and pain, i.e. “I will carry her for one more song, just one more song, and then put her down before nerve damage renders my leg entirely numb; just one more song, one more after this. Or after the next one.”

She is an understanding and loving person.

She also enjoyed winding up the big kids. I asked her what she and her friend were doing up on their fathers’ shoulders and she said aping the kids in back of them. Doing the same dances and stuff. Some people at the festival thought, hey, cool little kids. Others were obviously miffed, because they thought they were cool, with their dreadlocks etc, and little kids taking the piss out of them made it harder for them to maintain that illusion.

Gamma was illustrating to her big sister various dance styles she had observed at the festival. “One of the people they let up on stage was dancing like this:” (headbanging/hairswinging dance). “And the girls behind us were dancing like this:” (Shakira-hipswinging). She nailed each style. Beta was infused with mirth.

Gamma was great the whole time. Her little friend got tired and whiny and demanding, and Gamma tried to cheer her up. We left when the aggressive bands came on at night, due to the squishing danger. Gamma was cool about it.

She liked different music than I did, but was nice about it. We both liked Kosheen. Calexico was great. Lambchop was good. Tinariwen was a surprise – Tuareg rock. The Roots (from Philadelphia) were a surprise. Gamma liked Senor Coconut, which I thought was lame because Latin lounge type music? Two marimbas? Horns? But no percussion section (that is, percussion from a computer?). Gamma liked Silbermond more than I did. We both sort of liked Wir Sind Helden (I like the singer’s enunciation).

And so on.

They’re back.

It works like this: we have a back yard, with a terrace a Hungarian fellow made for us out of cobblestones left over from when he made our driveway for us. On the terrace is a tent-like-roof-thing structure with a heavy metal frame (to which we attach buckets of cobblestones left over from our terrace in windstorms). Beneath this we, my wife and I, and sometimes kids or other people, sit at night and drink wine or tea by candlelight and chat.

This is out in the country, sort of. Small town. It gets very dark.

Then my wife says, “Ssh!” and we all freeze. She has heard a hedgehog in the bushes.

We get lots of hedgehogs every year because our yard is set up to attract them. We have lots of bushes for hiding, and a brush pile under the catalpa where they can spend the winter if they don’t like the little houses I built for them a few years ago.

The tortoise house in the flowerbed in front of our house also seems to have hedgehog squatters.

Usually, I have to take my wife’s word for it. Here is a picture of what I usually see, because my eyes are blinded by the candles and like I said it’s pretty dark:

“Look, Mig, fourteen hedgehogs!”

Alpha is the Jane Goodall of hedgehogs. She knows their habits and gives them names derived from their appearance or individual personalities.

She can hear them eating in the bushes, and she can hear them rustling through dry leaves and stuff.

Sometimes I do hear them, too. I heard a couple fighting a few nights ago. They are territorial. They sort of hiss at each other until one gets tired of it and gives up.

Sometimes I actually see them.

Night before last, there were two young ones in our driveway. Our guess was they had been living in the tortoise house with their mother and were exploring. Maybe she had kicked them out, although they were quite small. Maybe something happened to her and they were hungry.

They were nosing around. We put out a dish of hedgehog food (they sell it in cans in petstores here. As I have said before, it looks like catfood with a picture of a hedgehog on the can, but is of course more expensive) and they had an interesting reaction. One (the more adventurous one) made a sound that sounded like delight, and ran to the dish. The other (more cautious one) ran over and shoved him away. We figured this was because young hedgehogs are shown by their mothers what is safe to eat, and maybe she never showed them canned hedgehog food. The adventurous one was willing to try it, but the other one insisted, so they wandered off.

Later I leaned a board onto the driveway near the fence so they had a ramp down into our back yard, which they immediately used. I guess they’ve moved into the back yard as we haven’t seen them in the driveway since then.

Then, last night we saw a large, light-colored one. Our hedgehogs appear to come in two colors, light and dark. Some have dark grey faces, some are nearly white. It doesn’t seem to be an age thing, some young ones are light too.

Gamma estimates we have 300 hedgehogs in our back yard, 302 with the new young ones.

I’ve seen four, and heard another one.

An interesting side-effect of the various things I was taking was the inspiration; for example, it occurred to me that no one had made an album of metal classics played on Glockenspiel, and that the perfect title for such an album would be “Rockenspiel!”.

In other news, I think I nicked an artery shaving this morning. Do we have arteries in our chins? I went through three bandaids on my drive in to work, and about two feet of toilet paper sitting in my office.

There is a keg of beer on the kitchen table¹. It is there in connection with Beta’s high school graduation. This being Austria, my wife² bought it for the graduation ceremony at the school. This being Austria, it was not consumed entirely because 1) my wife had also organized prosecco for the buffet³ and 2) the chemistry class had also brewed a keg of hefeweizen.⁴
So some was left over and now it’s on the kitchen table⁵ and I and other beer drinkers in our family⁶ and social circle are being encouraged to drink it before my wife has to return it.
You can maybe see where this is heading. This is the point where I gracefully segue into talking about my kid and her graduation and how proud that makes me.
First, I wanted to mention where we went to celebrate her graduation. The restaurant, I mean.⁷
Before that, though: she played harp⁸ at the graduation ceremony. Part of her solo⁹ from our orchestra performances this year. Some people at her school, such as the principal, were surprised that she could play the harp. Beta had kept it a secret to avoid being asked to play, something she learned about in grade school, I guess.¹⁰
Anyway, this restaurant.
Oh, I also wanted to say how much the other kids impressed me too. Bunch of smart people.¹¹
The restaurant was pretty good. We went with my inlaws. Alpha’s parents were uncomfortable because it was urban and ritzy. The view was nice, it’s across the square from the big cathedral in Vienna. The prices reflect this, and the quality of the food, which is pretty good. Service was good too, until they got busy.¹²
I threatened Beta that I would make an embarrassing speech, as fatherly tradition requires,¹³ but she wasn’t horrified enough and I never really got a chance. I would have kept it short.
I would have said this:

Beta was born on [date] in [place] in Japan at [exact time] in the middle of a typhoon. She weighed [exact weight]. I rode my bicycle through the storm (carrying a small, transparent umbrella Japanese-style) to the hospital and got there in time to see them rolling her to the ambulance in a little portable pink incubator to take her to another hospital specializing in preemies. She looked very small, 38cm long, being born 10 weeks early. I visited her daily in the hospital after that, delivering milk her mother pumped.¹⁴ In the hospital they called me the milkman. Once my wife was well enough to go too, we went together.
The first time I visited her in the hospital, I disinfected my hands and put on a surgical gown and her doctor [name] gave me a tour and explained gently the risks she faced and that there was a 90% chance there would be no brain damage. She was so tiny, and yet when I looked around the ward, she was one of the largest babies there. They had 600 gram babies, too. They had a mentally damaged girl about 2 with no fingers or toes rolling around in one of those springy walker things kids roll around in rolling around the ward.
They had everything.¹⁵
Beta was small and yellow and hooked up to wires and had a feeding tube down her nose and was respirated for the first two or three days. “When can I touch her?” I asked the doctor and he said, “now if you like” and I reached into the incubator and she put her fingers¹⁶ around the tip of my right index finger. I managed not to cry, but only with great effort; I didn’t want to start a chain reaction and have all the babies in the ward start crying.¹⁷
Beta came home after a couple months and things went okay except, like, for me almost drowning her during her first bath¹⁸ or the bumping her head on the ceiling while tossing her in the air incident later on.
She appeared to develop normally except for never crawling (she rolled). Before she learned to talk, she had the scary habit of whispering when she was home alone with me and sleeping in the other room, but stopping whenever I went in to check on her.¹⁹
She learned to walk, from which point on trips to the grocery store down the street took ten times as long because she had to stop and pick up every single cigarette butt on the way. She liked the playground across the street especially the slides.
This is how we did the slides²⁰: I never told her to be careful or let her see how much it freaked me out. She climbed up the ladder,²¹ stood at the top for a while and slid down. Meanwhile, I stood behind her on the ground while she climbed, ready to catch her if she fell. Then I nervously waited for her while she stood at the top, trying to stand on the side of the slide she would fall out if she fell, and then ran around to the foot of the slide when she finally slid, and caught her.
And this is how things have gone for the last almost 18 years. Beta has explored her world with curiosity and without fear and I have done my best not to show her how scared I have been, in order to avoid passing any fear on to her, and to the best of my ability I have been there to catch her if she should happen to fall. And so far, things have worked out better than I ever dared dream or hope.

This is the speech I would have made, but I never got the chance.

Continue reading →

Well, that was easy.

I ripped the tune from the CD and converted it to an MP3 and uploaded it to my server. That’s the short version with all the bitching and whining cut out. Thanks to everyone who gave me good advice.

So, yes. As promised. To keep from exceeding the bandwidth limits of my hosting account, and for other reasons, I should leave this file online for a limited time. After that, if you still are interested in listening to it, mail me at metamorphosist [at symbol here] gmail.com and I’ll mail you a copy.

Llik Daor MP3, 7.4 MB

(For a logical reason that escapes me now, I originally had the link in the extended entry. Sorry to anyone that confused.)

The file is 7.4 MB.
The title of the song is “Llik Daor”
It was composed with ten harps in mind, and a cello, and two cellphones and a digital camera. At the debut performance, of which this file is a live recording, it was performed by six classically-trained harpists, a cellist (not me), two cellphonists and there was a young boy taking pictures, so it came awfully close to the ideal I had imagined.
When I spoke to the professional composers at the workshop as a part of which I composed this tune, they asked me if I envisioned further evolution of this piece and I said no, it’s done. But now I have changed my mind and may go back to this with several things in mind including arrangements for other instruments such as bells or saxophones and so on.
The piece was, as I may have mentioned, inspired by a dead fox seen at the side of the freeway, and the general sadness I felt at my father’s death; and the evolution of the piece sort of kinda reflects me starting to move out of that grief. It’s not supposed to be a sad song, although that was the original idea. It’s supposed to be about life winning, not that I want to put any pressure on it or anything.

• Native to Texas, the amazon molly, or poecilia formosa, is always female.

• They reproduce gynogenetically, by mating with males of related species, whose sperm stimulate egg development without contributing genetic material, with the result that offspring are genetic clones of the mother.
• Or do they?
• Maybe the males of the species just to have their existential crises in private.
• It is possible that, while the females are interrupting the mating rituals of the poecilia mexicana or poecilia latipinna with the result that sperm from the confused males of this species enter poecilia formosa egg cells, the males are driving down the street in a wind storm, watching trees break and blow into traffic, thinking, one good thing about global warming is at least the storms are more entertaining.
• It is not conclusively proven that the males don’t wake up at 3 AM with a splitting headache after drinking what turned out to be bad wine and eating what may have been bad cold cuts and finally puke, which makes the headache worse but then better although they can’t really fall asleep again so they get up and make coffee and pack lunches.
• It is not unthinkable that a male, when he drives his daughter to the train station for her final school-leaving graduation ultra-test, sits and blocks traffic while he watches her until she is out of sight.
• The maximum size of the amazon molly is 9.6 cm.
• They commonly live over mud.