Alpha is in Kyoto getting a massage, or something, so Gamma was kind enough to accompany me to a concert last night at the Konzerthaus in Vienna, where the Klangforum Wien performed Donatoni, Brice Pauset and György Kúrtag. It was quite good, if you want my in-expert opinion. We subscribe to their concerts, and are really enjoying this year’s series. I fall asleep a lot, I feel bad about that. It’s like borderline narcolepsy. When I have trouble falling asleep at home in my bed, I imagine I’m in a concert and I usually fall right to sleep. It’s because I get up so early, I think, and then have a long day, and then go to the bar at a hotel that shall remain nameless for legal reasons before the concert for a drink, and not any sort of condemnation of the music. Also a little more oxygen in the atmosphere inside the concert hall wouldn’t hurt.
Gamma is 14. She joined me at the bar last night. I had a beer although I wasn’t really in the mood for a drink, because they won’t bring you peanuts if you don’t buy a drink. Gamma ordered a strawberri daiquiri. With alcohol? asked the waiter. Sure, said Gamma. She let me taste. It was very good. That is something I find agreeable about Austria, they’re not all paranoid about carding people who order drinks.
Another agreeable thing about the country is that its president also subscribes to this modern music concert series, and sits two rows in front of us, just him and his wife. Either that or his security detail is so good that they’re invisible. Last night Gamma went over and said hi to him.
I think it’s neat to have a president who enjoys new music and is accessible like that.
And it’s also neat to have kids like I do.
Even my cats have been friendly and remarkably sane lately, except for the senile gray cat, who is as nuts as ever.
Speaking of alcohol back here in the States, my son Walt will be 21 in May. How weird is that? Of course, having 3 generations of alcoholics down his Dad’s side of the family, I have to warn him to keep an eye out for signs of a drinking problem. I went by the Varsity Inn the other day down at the end of University Avenue and it reminded me of a particularly heavy drinking session with you, me and Mike. It was fun at the time, looking back it seems perhaps a tad pathetic. Hmmm, “Tad Pathetic”, that could be my band name.
I hear on NPR that alcohol use among teenagers is down here in the US, but that one in fifteen high school seniors smokes marijuana every day. Not just occasionally or at parties, but every day. That can’t be a good thing.
connor (15) is rather extraordinarily non-social, except for online gaming friends, so i see him 100% of the time when he’s not in school. we’re taking him to see radiohead in feb. and i’m looking forward to the conversation once the good old scent of weed begins to float through the air…
I remember drinking with you and Mike, Paul, back when dinosaurs walked the Earth. I don’t remember this particular episode you refer to, but then I probably didn’t the next day, either.
K, I wonder about what to tell my kids regarding weed. I try to tell them the truth, to the extent that I can – that it is wonderfully relaxing, usually, and that it always made me real stupid, which is why I quit, more or less, since I don’t have a lot of elbow room in that department to begin with. Also that weed seems to have changed in the last 30 years, I hear.
it’s changed all right.
i think maybe possibly he may know i don’t think it’s as bad a thing to do as it’s made out to be, but i do know i believe it when i hear it’s not a very smart idea to try it when you’re young – probably exactly when someone would try it – because of better understood neurobiology of the teenage brain. i’ll tell him the truth, probably leaving some things out (certainly leaving some things out) and hope he is afraid enough of mucking with his brain that he at least wait till he’s….i don’t even know. in his twenties? at home? not driving? not seen by police?
it’s complicated. but i guess that’s the whole thing.