So, anyway

Got mad at Beta on our drive into town this morning because she asked me why I was doing that, doing what, that thing, what thing, that thing with my hand, moving my hand like that, like what, what hand, that hand, doing this?, no doing that, you’ve done it like ten times or twenty times, doing this?, yeah, hm, maybe it’s a nervous tic no i see now i do it so i can see the speedometer it’s still a new car and i don’t have the steering wheel adjusted right yet, why not, because as i just said it’s a new car and you know what i’m tired of taking shit from people and i don’t like your tone, except i didn’t say the last bit i just sulked. And drove in silence. And noticed how wonderfully beautiful a field full of fog still is in the sunrise and looked briefly for deer before keeping my eyes glued to the road because, new car, that would really suck to slam into someone on only my second trip into town with it and boy do I like this little car.

Later I patted her leg a few times, not too much, I didn’t want to get punched. And I took the long way to work so I could let her out at a spot where she had a faster commute into school, because she has a test today and you figure, can’t hurt to get to school a little early. And I told her I love her even when I get mad at her and she said she knew. And I got to work and did stuff and checked my stats and see Teh Bgu is #1 in a google image search for fatherly love, at least as of this writing, and it was as if life had forgiven me. I cheer up easily, maybe.

My new car is a dark navy blue Mazda 2. I love it very much. I have this CD of some Italian playing Vivaldi on a cello made (the cello) I assume in Venice because that’s where most of the good ones were made; the recording was also made in Venice, which is also where I bought it, on our recent trip there, in ye olde Vivaldi shoppe, and it sounds just perfect in the new car.

I had a dream about Venice a couple nights ago. George Clooney was in it. In fact he starred in the first half, as himself. But first I want to say “hi” to all the Swedish readers who dropped by while I was gone over the weekend; that’s always the way it happens — someone famous links you or something, and you get a spike of traffic, and either you’re gone or tongue-tied when it happens, or your site goes down.


And I happened to be away hiking in southern Austria, right on the Slovene border, and let me tell you it is beautiful there. I’ll get back to the George Clooney dream in just a second, just let me get this hiking out of my system first. We lucked out in so many ways. I luckily got a couple days off at work. We luckily got rooms in a bed and breakfast there, which luckily was located right in what we agreed was the most beautiful spot in the region, and the proprietors’ son luckily makes the best white wines we tasted while we were there, and we tasted a lot. We hiked about 20 km a day, because the friends we went with are maniacs, but only like a km or two at a time, after which the next wine tavern or vintner or whatever came along and we went inside for more wine and food. All that hiking and I still gained weight. And the landscape! A child drawing hills could draw it, if the child drew hills, and then more hills atop them, and then more and more clear up into the sky, which was dozens of shades of blue at once. And, you know, October, the trees are golden. And each sort of grapevine on the hills (most of the grapes had been harvested) was turning a different color. It was almost too much to look at, but that was okay since I spent most of my time looking at my feet, and the trail, and wondering if this fucking hill had a top and were we going to reach it, ever, or what? And, hey, another chestnut. The woods were full of chestnuts, the edible kind, and we must have scavenged 10 kilograms of them, which Alpha kept putting into the pack I was carrying. Maybe we will roast them this year, maybe we’ll procrastinate until they get moldy, as happened last year.

So, anyway, Gamma and I were walking around this submerged piazza in Venice when this long metal pole that tapered to a sharp point angled out of the water towards us. We walked around the sidewalk around the piazza to get away from it but more and more of it kept coming out of the water and it sort of turned and pursued us around the square, until finally flipping up vertical and rising out of the water as a sunken ferry boat surfaced. Divers had put inflatable devices in and beneath it and inflated them to bring it to the surface. It was a smallish, blue-green fiberglass ferry boat, with a big open space on the lower deck for cars and passengers, a bit run-down looking as you’d expect for a boat submerged in a Venetian lagoon for what appeared to have been a long time.

After that I was inside a vaporetto talking to Beta, trying to get her off the crowded boat, but she wanted to go somewhere and insisted on staying on the boat so we did until I woke up. At some point she had turned into Gamma or replaced her in the dream.

That was the second half. The first half was I was sitting at a table near the water, some canal, talking to George Clooney. We had a nice long, friendly talk. He was talking about my writing, and telling me how much he liked a particular story and telling me that’s the story I must write. I have to write that story. I left our meeting all encouraged. As far as I can remember, no particular story was clearly specified in the dream.

4 responses to “So, anyway

  1. That story George Clooney liked, well, just pick one and do it.

  2. Wait till you see “Good Night, and Good Luck,” and then you can have a sharper George Clooney dream.

    Do they sell the Vivaldi record only in ye old Vivaldi shoppe, or is it available online?

  3. Speaking of Venice, I could not find the bakery with the oh so wonderful nut torte. I did attend a recital where they featured the Venitian hometown boy, Vivaldi….lots of fine cello playing there. I liked that almost as much as I might have liked the torte.

    I didn’t see George Clooney.

  4. mig

    Working on it, Francis.
    RJ, I will mail you the CD info once I retrieve it from my car. Everything’s available onlne, isn’t it? Not sure how the musicianship on the recording compares to others, but it sounds okay to me.
    Karan, we had the torte at a small pizzeria-type restaurant; I assumed at the time that they had just bought some desserts at a nearby bakery. It was on, or near, a corner by a canal across a bridge from the train station, how could it be hard to find with directions like that?