My favorite Alan Watts story is about a teacher whose student asks him, so if everything is an illusion, then that elephant is an illusion too? And the teacher says, yes, that’s right. So to prove his faith in his teacher, the student lies down and tells the elephant guy to have it step on him, which it does, and he is crushed. Maybe I ought to have told him he’s an a illusion, too, the teacher mutters.

Still, picking out a tie this morning, I had to think about money and slavery. Are we slaves? Is money imaginary? If money is imaginary, does that mean we are slaves? What is a slave, what is the definition? I’m thinking sort of, in the sense of drudgery, or submitting to a dominating influence, or bondage of some sort.

If money is imaginary, does that mean we are slaves?

Is money the gold leaf on an iron glove? Does everything come down to money, or to the power structures beneath? Maybe money is the smiley face on the prison guard’s taser.

Maybe we should be grateful to people like J

Drivers are so uptight lately.
Honking and gesturing.
I’ve been noticing this since Monday, when I started taking muscle relaxants for my back again.*
They’ve been harshing my mellow at work, too. My supervisor has been all, like, do this, do that. She’s been like, I’ve discovered if I sit here next to you and give you input, you do more work.
On the plus side, great Olympic torch run, guys.
Honestly, on so many levels.
Also: had a nice walk along the creek yesterday morning.
Sunrise reflected on glass-calm water.
Two black bunnies crossed my path.
Then, at lunch, found this video over here. It is the coolest thing I’ve seen lately, except maybe Gamma’s tie-dye shirt, the sunrise and the heron (which will appear later in this post): a scientist giving a great scientific lecture that is rigorously scientific and at the same time so deeply emotional that it had her, her studio audience and me in tears.
Then: on my way home last night, moving slow in traffic on the bridge, got to watch a grey heron fly (real slow, against the wind) across the lanes, right in front of my car, almost at eye level.

I read somewhere, What would you do if you knew you would succeed?

What. What would it be? My first thought: buy a lotto ticket.

I was thinking a few weeks ago, standing outside under a perfect blue sky, about how very happy I am. I was telling this to Beta. The surprisingly big response to my request for voices for the composition had really thrilled me, and I was having a lot of social contacts with a lot of nice people, and I was thinking about a nice guy who has had a dream come true, not only being a talented painter but also making a living at it, and other friends who have achieved things.
And I realized, well, my dream was to live in Europe and make a living as a writer and I’ve achieved the first part. And Beta pointed out that I might have a better chance at achieving the second part if I actually submitted stuff.
Everything you can think of is true. Dick Cheney shits hornet eggs. I publish something finally.
I’ve actually got a couple manuscripts here I want to send to agents and publishers. I have a subscription to writersmarket.com and have been looking thru their listings.
The problem is narrowing that down a bit. How does one go about that, I wonder. One can’t send a submission to every single one all at the same time.
And so on.

*I stopped on Tuesday again, cause you don’t want this to turn into a habit or something.

Yeah, fuck you too, jerk
Where’d you learn to drive, asshole?
The crescent moon smiles

Otherwise, whatever. There was something I’d been meaning to say but then Heath Ledger, who lives in my lower back now, told me to take another muscle relaxant so I forgot.

It was something clever.

Yesterday I was sitting on the living room floor, meditating after doing a little yoga for the back, very carefully. I realized I was wearing a tie-dye t-shirt. All I need is a gray ponytail now, I thought.

Gamma was supposed to make a purse at school, in her sewing class, but failed utterly and was downcast. Her next project was to make a t-shirt, so we spent the weekend tie-dying t-shirts.

Her assignment was to design a shirt and make it. I suggested making the shirt first, then making a design that looked like the shirt, because harder to go wrong that way.

Her shirt turned out really cool. She wanted diagonal stripes, and she GOT DIAGONAL STRIPES! It was the first time either of us had ever tie-dyed, and it totally turned out.

Mine didn’t turn out so well. The spiral was a spiral, and the other pattern was right too, but I was too impatient with the dye and didn’t squirt on enough, so there’s too much white IMO. But it’s good to know how the patterns work.

Maybe we’ll start a t-shirt company. We could make sand candles too. Or macrame.

That’s like about the only Led Zeppelin lyric I can actually understand.
I was lecturing to Gamma about The Immigrant Song on the way to school yesterday, and watched in the mirror as she rolled her eyes. She gave me a sweet smile when she caught me looking at her, and the look she got when I said I’d love to be in a Led Zeppelin cover band is hard to describe. A lot like the look you get when your father said the same thing, I guess.

Last night at bedtime, she was listening to Dvorak.

“My birthday is in exactly one week,” she said a while ago.

So I’ve been thinking about her birth. I barely made it. I dropped Alpha off at the hospital, went home to get her stuff and a bottle of champagne to celebrate, and a bottle of MacCallan’s in case it took a long time, decided not to shave and got back to the delivery room just in time to see Gamma shoot out like a cork and go boing at the end of the umbilical cord.

The doctor looked at the whisky and said, boy, you Irish know how to have babies. Instead of explaining my family history, I just poured champagne.

When she goes to America this summer, Gamma will be eleven and will attend a marine biology class with her cousin. I attended the same class at the same age and liked it. Maybe that’s why I am such a fish expert now.

This morning, for reasons unknown, I had an earworm, Nena singing 99 Luftballons. As we got ready to leave the house, Gamma started singing it.

Using my key, I entered the music school early this morning and made my way up to the teachers’ lounge, where the cleaning ladies were goofing off, standing around smoking and talking about sports* and deposited the completed notes to my composition in the cubby-hole of my composition workshop advisor, only one month late.

Next step, I guess, is recruit musicians and start rehearsals. A performance is scheduled for 14 May. I hadn’t exactly forgotten about it, it had just seemed so far off when I began.

Now I can get going on all those voice recordings people sent me. If you are still working on a recording for me, it is still not to late to mail it in.

_________
*not really. they are industrious workers and nice people.

About playing the cello: something I read a while ago gave me the idea that a note is not, as I had previously thought, a dot on a page with a lot of other dots, but rather that one can break it down further upon closer examination, into a beginning, a middle, and an end. Since then, when playing, I think about that occasionally.
It doesn’t actually help, or it hasn’t so far, but it does make me think about my bowing, and I find it somehow encouraging to take this micro-view of each note and have the feeling that it will end up helping.
Most of the time, though, when I play, I’m still all, For god’s sake, look at all these notes! And I’m always like that in orchestra rehearsals.
I mentioned this micro-view of notes to my cello teacher and I had the feeling he wasn’t deeply impressed by it. He seems to tend more in the other direction, seeing a piece as phrases and arcs of music instead of individual notes, which also totally makes sense to me.
I wonder whether I’m just screwing myself up with this note anatomy thing.

Aghast at the fact that one can feel quite solid in one’s identity but, when pressed, realize one has forgotten vast sequences of the past or, if not forgotten, require a great deal of reminding before something, some sensation of recall begins to shimmer even faintly, like a word on the tip of the tongue, he drove down the freeway in his father-in-law’s Fiat Doblo, the very one he himself had complained about for so long; he drove in the traffic at night, after hurrying home from work and finishing packing and stowing everything into the back of the car and changing clothes and hurrying down the road to join his family (who had left a few days earlier to ski, since he had less vacation time) for an Easter vacation, eager to hear in greater detail about Gamma’s miraculous explosion of ski talent — having gone in just 4 hours instruction from a cautious snowplower to fearless and faster than all but her older sister — and maybe pick up a couple pointers he could use in his own life on exploding talent; he drove and enjoyed the spaciousness of the Doblo interior and how easily it handled and the smooth ride, and wondered why he had ever given it up, and what had irritated him so much about it; he wondered and drove and got out his mobile phone and called his wife and asked her to ask his father-in-law, who was with her, and who was a retired automobile mechanic, what else it might mean when the battery warning light came on on the dash besides the battery is not being charged, due to a broken alternator or bad fan belt and whether it would be wise to continue his journey to see them that night or whether it would be more prudent to turn around and try again with a different car the following morning, due to considerations like fatigue, and the battery going dead and losing headlights in the middle of nowhere and perhaps breaking down altogether and so on.

His wife said his father-in-law said it should be okay, a diesel runs fine once it’s started even with out the battery, which had not been the precise concern but whatever. Then she called back a minute later to say, turn around after all, you never know, so he did and the cats were happy to see him when he got home and he transferred luggage and took his own car the next day. His back was bad so no one skiied while he was there. Instead, they went for a walk in a nearby nature park and looked at cranes and geese and where beavers had chewed everything. Another day they went to Salzburg, a pretty town full of stuffy old robots and dedicated to shamelessly flogging the hide of Mozart to tourists, even though he (Mozart) had been happy to leave Salzburg back in the day.

They did some other stuff, and then they returned home and listened to the in-laws’ story of their own drive home, and how they had been so relieved to finally get home, after narrowly missing a 5-car pile up in the snow on the freeway, only to find the tortoise on its back in the kitchen in the center of its latest Jackson-Pollock-inspired large-format shit painting, perhaps exhausted by its burst of creativity.

The tortoise is fine now, though.