Tuesday was cello recital. It started quite early in the evening because some choir had booked the room for a rehearsal later. I wasn’t the only student who made it in the nick of time. I had just enough time to run upstairs and go through the piece, a duet, with the woman who was playing it with me.

I had asked my teacher for two things: an easy piece, so I could concentrate on the music and not the technique; and a duet or something, so I could play with other people. He found something and we practiced it a few times.

There was one hardish part in the middle, but the rest was pretty straightforward.

I was a little suspicious at the recital, because I wasn’t a bit nervous. Then we sat down to play, and we played it.

In the middle of playing, I realized we had made it past the hard part with a minimum of messing it up, and that the rest would be easy. And it was. I enjoyed it.

My wife told me I looked relaxed as well, and had smiled the whole time.

Gamma told me that the wee girl who played a concerto I had played a couple years ago didn’t play it as well as I had. I said thanks.

I’m relieved that the music school year is over, though.

They are at church because her cousin is singing in a new choir.
This being an Austrian church, they are standing around afterwards, drinking wine.
“You bought an electric cello,” she sighs.
“Remember when we first discussed it and you said okay?”
“No.”
“And then you said, hey, wait for a while? Well, I bought it in that window of opportunity between those two things.”
“Sigh,” she says.
“So what else’d you buy?”
What are the chances of getting murdered in church? he wonders. Certainly smaller than elsewhere. Plus, confession, church, right?
“A Moog Etherewave theremin, a musical saw, and an electronic doo-dad.”
“A doo-dad.”
“Exactly. Remember those sad frogs that were so beautiful? A digital recorder that looks like a Tazer and can serve as a USB interface for electronic instruments and computers,” he says.
“Or something like that.”
“Man, I feel so much better,” he says. “I totally get this confession thing now.”

He wipes up the ants with a sponge and washes them down the drain, figuring it’s better for his karma than squishing them outright because it gives them a theoretical chance. He mixes baking powder and powdered sugar and sprinkles it along their trails.

Naturally, they keep coming.

She observes them. She notices where they are going. They are going to a pot of chives on the windowsill.

She puts the pot outside. End of ant infestation in the kitchen.

More or less.

She is promoted to Ant Queen.

Scene I

[Sound effects: squish, squish, squish, squish]
Slug officer: Company, halt!
Slug officer: Scout! Anything good up there?
Slug scout: Sir! It’s just an old picnic table, sir!
Slug scout: Sir! I can scale it if you wish, sir!
Slug officer: That won’t be necessary, scout. We have reports of hydrangeas in the vicinity.
Slug officer: Company, march!
[Sound effects: squish, squish, squish, squish (fade out)]
Big pot of lettuce on picnic table: Whew.

Scene II

Woman: What’s that on your shirt? Is that a leaf?
Man: Where?
Woman: Turn around. On your back.
Woman: Ew! It’s a slug!

Slug: I’m the KING! OF THE. WORLD!

Man: Eh, get it off, please?
Woman: I’m not touching a slug.

Slug: I claim this territory in the name of my QUEEN!

Man: Here, knock it off with… with this watering can or something.
[Sound effect: watering can knocking slug off man's t-shirt]
Man: Thanks.
Man: I knew I was moving kinda slow lately, but this is ridiculous.
Woman: I don’t see a slime trail, though.
Girl: Maybe it jumped onto you out of a tree.

Scene III
Hedgehog: Ew, this cat food they put out for me is yucky.
Hedgehog: Pass.
[Sound effects: squish, squish, squish, squish]
Slugs: NOMNOMNOMNOM…
Hedgehog: Yum, slugs!
Hedgehog: Ew, they taste like that cat food now.
Hedgehog: Pass.
Slugs: NOMNOMNOMNOM…

• 2,000,000 BC: fire discovered.

• 1874: Othmar Zeidler synthesizes DDT.
• 1934: Enrico Fermi and colleagues split the atom.
• 2008: Mig discovers ebay.

This weekend we celebrated father’s day in Austria. I tried to spend quality time with my family, when I wasn’t checking ebay for deals on an electric cello, and maybe a musical saw. Beta gave me tasty cookies, Gamma tasty ice cream, and we went out to a Mongolian barbecue that is new in town.

The food is not bad at the Mongolian place, but I question the concept of all-you-can-eat restaurants, especially at a time when I am trying to eat less than all I can.

But the weather was perfect all day. Then it rained at night, which is a sound I love, rain, especially at night; but then it rained harder and harder, so that I couldn’t fall asleep, and got up and checked on the pool, which I could totally imagine bursting in all that rain and flooding the cellar. But it was okay. A little full, but otherwise okay.

Yesterday I put the pot of lettuce plants onto the picnic table in our yard because the slugs had totally discovered it, and I figured if I move it it’ll confuse them for a while.

We went for a walk in the woods this weekend, Alpha, Beta and I. We walked past one small pond and heard, for the first time, sad frogs. I guess it’s a new kind of frog. They sounded like sad pan flutes. It was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard, and made me want to buy a portable recording device so I could record it if I ever heard it again, and stick it into a composition or something.

I don’t understand how metamorphosism became a music blog. I am about as equipped to write a music blog as a bug stuck to the windshield of a truck is to write an automotive blog.

Driving rawks!1!

I’ll eventually get over it.

A hedgehog was walking around our yard in the daytime yesterday. He was all, dude where are the slugs? You moved the lettuce or something! I tried to give him a dish of catfood, but he said no thanks and went back into the bushes after a while.

In the evening, just as the first gentle rain was starting, Alpha and I sat on the terrace and had a glass of wine and listened for hedgehogs. She heard one scratching himself, but he was too well-hidden to see.

The setting: on the inside of an airtight, soundproof, shiny metallic chamber.
Man: [Sweats profusely]
Interrobot: [Looks up from dossier, smiles] You’re sweating.
Man: It’s hot.
Interrobot: No, you’re sweating like Nixon at the Nixon-Kennedy debate.
Man: If this is about the electric cello, I can explain.
Interrobot: Tell me what you think. Do you think this is about the electric cello?
Man: This isn’t about the electric cello?
Interrobot: I didn’t say that. [Eyes glow red]
Man: Well, neither did I. I was asking.
Man: And please don’t do that thing with your eyes.
Interrobot: The title says ‘short fiction’. That means we have to get to the punchline quickly.
Interrobot: What thing with my eyes?
Man: Interrobot junior does it too. That heat ray thing.
Man: If I have an electric cello, I can, you know, play it with headphones.
Interrobot: Like that time you borrowed the theremin? You said that was awful, playing with headphones.
Man:Well, yeah, with a theremin you’re making these goofy motions.
Interrobot: And with a cello you’re not making goofy motions.
Man: Pff.
Man: [Wipes forehead] With the headphones, you know, I can practice at night when people are sleeping. With practice, I might not suck as badly.
Interrobot: [Extends arm from corner of thorax, bends it at elbow to examine wristwatch, dramatically]
Man: Seriously, that’s a big plus.
Man: [Wipes face with handkerchief] And…
Interrobot: [Sets bobbing 'drinking bird' desk toy in motion, watches it]
Man: And…
Man: Ok! It’s basically a toy!
Man: A toy! Is that so bad?
Interrobot: [Extends arm from thorax with whirring sound, pats man on hand]
Interrobot: There, was that so hard? A toy, that’s an easier for me to accept than this song and dance about practicing.
Man: Just a toy! I just want to plug it into an overdrive pedal and a reverb pedal and a gigantic amp and go to town!
Man: …huh? A toy is okay?
Interrobot: Amp? Effects pedals? What? You said headphones.
Man: Er…
Interrobot: And how much will an amp cost?
Man: I meant headphones.
Man: Headphones, they’re practically free on ebay.

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Overheard: a brain talking to itself
Brain: Fuck
Brain: No kidding. Fucking fuck.
Brain: God.
Brain: Jeeze.

This is why other people were invented, so our conversations would be more interesting, like

Gamma: [Contentsofentiregermandictionaryatsuperfastspeed]
Me: No kidding.

I was talking to a guy. About prozac et al, as so often. He said his brother (who killed himself a few years ago) took one of those, but then stopped, because it worked.

I was all like, whoa.

Cause, what do you stop doing not because it fails, but because it works? I don’t mean something like scratching an itch, which you stop because the itch stops so you don’t need to scratch anymore. I mean something that succeeds, and the success scares you.

Or the idea of success.

I went and printed out two manuscripts and made multiple copies of one. As soon as I figure out which agents and publishers to send them to, I shall.

Cause, boy, there are a lot of them out there.
[Insert brain conversation here]

Right now, I’m all, melancholy is okay, it’s fine, I appreciate it greatly, but stasis is for the birds, one foot in front of the other etc.

Also: morbidity.

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