I walked to a shop to get some shaving cream on my lunch break. A bakery had sandwiches. I bought a ciabatta with mozzarella, tomatoes and lettuce. You get a bottle of Emotion free with it, the lady said. Emotion is this drink they sell here. It is like water, only with some sugar and a choice of essential oils or flavors, I think. They have, maybe, lemon grass or pear or guarana and so on. But the lady was out of most of these. All she had left was either frustration or ass-consciousness. I have enough frustration already, I joked. I’ll take the ass-consciousness.
Today it’s hot so I’d better eat this salmon-cheese spread sandwich I made early before it can spoil.
My physical therapist told me one half of my ass was significantly bigger than the other half. Your wife has probably told you this already, she said. Nah, I said.
So ever since then, everything I do, I feel how my ass is lopsided.
I can barely sit on a bike. It’s a miracle I don’t walk in circles.
It ties in with my back pain. I have a bad knee from a fall I took skiing a long time ago. That might have set everything else into motion, affecting other joints, giving me bad posture and a crooked pelvis and so on. And the back pain.
She said the a(s)symmetry might be because the pelvis was crooked and go away when it was straight.
She straightened my pelvis last time, but I forgot to ask about my ass.
I should never have drunk that Emotion.

Jann won first place in the famous 2007 Metamorphosism.com Valentine’s Day Limerick Contest back in February. I told her the grand prize was a link to her site. She said I could link her flicker site when it was ready. Later, she mailed me and told me it was ready, but I had forgotten my promise and didn’t know what she was talking about. Eventually I figured it out, and am hopefully making up for it here, and apologizing for taking so long.

I got a CD with a recording of the tune I composed a while back. I know nothing about file formats etc, but this seems rather large, at 6 MB for a 6 minute tune. The file suffix is m4a. I would like to upload it and link it here so anyone interested can hear it. Do I need to convert it to an MP3 or anything?

The tortoise was lonesome, staring at its reflection for hours at a time, so Gamma gave her a rock for company.

Despite certain indications to the contrary, we persist in calling the tortoise “her”, I guess because “tortoise” is a feminine noun in German.

Busy on research into the side effects of painkillers this weekend. It’s kind of a lousy study, with only one subject – me – but a big control group – everyone else, and the fact that I’m taking four different products simultaneously might appear to the casual observer to make it difficult to tell which product is causing which side effect, but in fact if one reads the fine print carefully, it becomes clear that each product can cause, in theory, different side effects so that, for example, if I go into shock, it is product A and if my heart slows it is product B whereas if it stops altogether it is product C and we’ll know it’s product D if I become psychotic, which if you ask my wife has already happened. The only side effect one doctor (I have in fact been to two so far, because try getting a single non-internet doctor to prescribe four painkillers nowadays) warned me about was dizziness in the case of the one you’re not supposed to take if you are or ever have been addicted to narcotics, because it could make one dizzy and also you could sweat, so don’t drive on this one.
I ran straight home (figure of speech, I am not actually running at the moment, but rather taking tiny little resthome steps with a Nordic Walking pole in each hand – I highly recommend Nordic Walking, by the way, as a form of exercise, better upper body workout than walking or running, and easier on the joints than running, and always good for a joke) and took the first one he prescribed me (I had been at his office getting an intravenous other painkiller after taking a different one in the middle of the night) and it didn’t seem to do much so a couple hours later I took the one that makes you dizzy but so far I’m not dizzy, although my composition/editing skills have obviously taken a hit.
Doctor 1 and doctor 2 both also considered prescribing muscle relaxants, of which I am in favor, but product 1 makes me suicidal (previous research) and product 2 gives me a persistant facial rash similar to acne (which then makes me depressed) so they passed, unfortunately. I figure if I get really desperate, a little gin would have a relaxing effect on top of the rest of this stuff.
Take good care of your back kids, this has been a public service announcement.

You sit there in the rain and realize how beautiful it is.
You sit there in your seat and the world turns.
You sit there at your desk and life rolls at your feet.
You sit there in the moment and hear, first, the clock ticking, then a chicken clucking outside the window, then your stomach growls as gas bubbles through a valve.
You sit there in the moment and see the fresh green of new growth and hear the laughter of children playing in the school yard.
Nine times out of ten everything is okay. Ninety-nine out of a hundred. The odds are on our side and when things do go wrong they do it on a spectrum of from bad to worse, from irritation to horror.
It’s not always immediately horror, is what I’m saying.
In a world constructed such as this one is, one ought to have a lot of trust.

I jump into the deep water although I cannot swim, because you will save me.

Jump and a dragon will appear.

Imagine, however, a pervasive and omnipresent technology dedicated to skewing people’s perception of the probability of horror. Fear, for I am with you. In Japan, a boy brought his mother’s head (in a bag) to a police station (after spending a few hours in an internet cafe with it first) saying war and terrorism should stop and it didn’t matter who he killed. See how the technology feeds on itself?

It is said by some that there have been societies so afraid they worshipped evil. Perhaps there have been others so trusting they worshipped good. Neither seems to have been viable.

You sit on the terrace under the tent, or as it said on the box, the garden pavillion, with your father-in-law in a thunderstorm. The frame is heavy metal and not grounded. Neither one of you says much.

You sit under the tent at night with your wife, drinking tea and listening for hedgehogs in the bushes.

Where was I? Flat on my back on the wicker sofa with my feet up over the arm (of the sofa). I had just arrived home from work so I was tired, and explaining this to Gamma and how, no, I don’t feel like playing cards right this second, give me a minute.
Alpha was picking Beta up at the music school, so when the phone rang Gamma, after going, “Hello? Hello?” for a minute, brought it to me.
It was a neighbor lady.
Yes, hi, she said, I guess my daughter was afraid to talk to Gamma. We wanted to invite Gamma to a birthday party this Wednesday, well, not really a party, because only one other girl can come, so I guess to a get-together in our back yard.
Every childhood has one, doesn’t it? A little boy or girl to whose birthday parties no one wants to go, so your parents urge you to?
Hrm, I said. Might be okay. I’ll have to check the calendar first to make sure. We just got back from Pompeii, so I’m not really up to speed on the schedule for this week.
Where’d you go?! she said. What?!
Er, we went to Pompeii, I said.
Bombay?! You went to Bombay?! She was talking like a hard-of-hearing person.
Bombay, Pompeii – in (Austrian, at least) German they’re homonyms.
We went for the weekend, I said, just to increase the confusion for a second before clearing her up. Here I am, having a who’s-on-first conversation and sad at the same time. Southern Italy, I said. By Naples, big volcano?
Our front door opened, Alpha and Beta were home.
Hang on a second, I said. I’ll give you Alpha.
Alpha explained that Gamma was busy that day. She suggested the party be rescheduled.