Walking back to the Ford Tourneo Courier Ecoboost 1.0 after the second funeral in as many days, a crow (corvis frugileus, or rook) hollers at me, I throw it the last Frolic brand dog kibble hiding in my pocket, which it then eats (for the sake of clarity, I was walking to the car, the crow was sitting in a tree when it yelled). I catch up with my group, who then go to the restroom, which is where I was returning from; eventually we all reunite and hop into the car and enter the address into the (really irritating) GPS thing and depart for the next station of the day, the Leichenschmaus, or funeral meal.
Earlier, standing in front of the casket prior to the talking, I thought about the woman inside, who had lived to 95, and how she had danced the boogie at her 90th birthday party and, when we were leaving and I kissed her on the cheek, turned her head and had me kiss her other cheek too. She was okay.
I had spare ribs at the funeral meal. They were a bit dry but the sauces were good, as were the french fries. Her 4 year old great-granddaughter ran around serving people items she had cooked up on the toy kitchen in the corner of the restaurant’s dining room — I got “spicy coffee.”
Afterwards, we left. Gamma caught a ride to the subway, I drove the rest of the posse home – Beta to her apartment in Vienna, Alpha to our house, Alpha’s mom Alpha senior back to her place.
I was tired. It was partly, I think, the spare ribs, alcohol and schnapps at the meal (of which I partook judiciously and soberly being the driver), partly all (both) the funerals – at which we were more supporting actors than principals, praise be; partly the usual struggle to be social in social situations, partly constantly worrying about a couple cultural things I may have committed myself to a while back involving public interaction with strangers; also the current state of things and, whatever, other stuff, other stuff, other stuff.
After too many funerals you think, first, “boy I hope i never see another funeral” but then you realize what that means and change it to, “boy I could sure use a wedding or baptism for a change.”
And then you go back to other stuff. Hydrating. Getting proper sleep and exercise. Doing a word puzzle for the brain. Learning something. Plotting your next shenanigan or your next hijink. Hugging somebody.
Category Archives: Familie
Leichenschmaus
Posted in Das Gehirn, Familie, Metamorphosism
Tags: family, grief, hope, leichenschmaus, life, love, putting the fun back into funerals
All the best, people
to all the best people
hope something good happens today
hope this day is good to you
maybe something expected
like my kid and i gave each other climbing equipment
we had shopped for together
maybe something unexpected
like the doctor saying
“want me to remove that malignant
growth from your face right now?”
instead of waiting til the end of
january
which lowered everyone’s worry
levels for the holidays
all the best to you
the leftover roast beef is delicious
all the best to you
my daughter gave us all framed
copies of our weirdest chats
my other daughter gave us pillows
she had sewn from beautiful
fabric she brought home from africa
all the best to you
the cats don’t understand why they can’t
lick my face
all the best to you
pancake batter is mixed
and waiting for someone
to wake up
Bella Ciao
God: Where are we now?
Noah: Erm, eleven. 9:11.
God: Ok.
God: So anyway, Yes, I am confirming my covenant with you. Never again will floodwaters kill all living creatures; never again will a flood destroy the earth.
Noah (writing): Ok, yep, good, got it. No More Floods.
God: Weeeelll not exackly.
Noah: You said, and I quote, “never again will floodwaters etc etc.”
God: Yes however.
Noah: Kill all living creatures.
God: Yes ok not all of them.
Noah (loses cuniform stylus in mud): Dang. Look, I’ll just put “no more floods” for now and add the details later.
God: You’re gonna forget.
Noah: I won’t forget! Man!
God: Yeah ok whatever.
The Damage Commission was at our house this morning.
They looked around.
My wife, who has been cleaning for over a week (with help from friends and relatives including me) apologized for the mess. Who apologizes for the mess after a flood has flooded your house?
Oh, we’ve seen worse, say the Damage Commission.
The Damage Commission decides how much damage money we get or something, at least is responsible for the first stage of the process, before it vanishes into bureaucracy. I wanted to wait on the cleaning until after their visit so the cellar would look worse but Alpha said they would know, don’t worry, which was correct.
They needed our children to sign a form so I hunted them down on the way to work. There has been much hunting down of people to sign forms lately.
I hunted Gamma down at the hospital where she is doing an internship, something to do with psychology and psychotherapy blah blah blah and out she walks to meet me, wearing a white lab coat and carrying a clip board and a book.
Oh, you have a pen to sign with, I said.
I have two, she said, flaunting the second pen.
That’s how together she is nowadays.
Then I drove to the other train station, my regular train station still being under water, and failed to find a legal parking spot because everyone who normally uses my regular train station is now also using the other train station so I went home and had Alpha drive me to the other train station. When I got to town I went to the ministry to meet Beta.
I hesitate to say which ministry because with Beta you never fucking know how secret something is. Anyway she came out and we went to Starbucks – I think I am allowed to divulge that – where I had a pumpkin spice latte and she had another beverage, I will not say which one. I also had a ham and cheese croissant. She signed the document and now I’m carrying it around until I go home at night. I walked her back to the ministry and she walked me back to the UBahn. I’ll go in here, she said, it’s a secret entrance; you may enter the UBahn station over there.
See you in November when I get back from [REDACTED], she said.
Then I took a couple subways and a bus to the office. On one subway a fellow got on, he was wearing an accordion securely strapped to his body. He said something and began to play. He played short versions of a couple songs I recognized but could not name. Others seemed to be ignoring him. When my stop came I gave him two 2-Euro coins and exited (he, ever the professional had been blocking the exit with his body so one was forced to interact with him one way or the other).
He thanked me and broke into a nice rendition of “Bella Ciao”, my favorite involuntary subway accordion song.
Standing on the platform watching the train leave, I had the same feeling as I had as a boy after loading a jukebox with a bunch of coins and punching in the numbers for many terrible songs before leaving a place.
Enjoy, suckers, I did not say as I watched the tunnel suck up the train. I caught a glimpse of a woman on the train giving the accordionist more coins, and felt good.
Posted in Das Gehirn, Familie, Metamorphosism
Tags: accordion music, cellar, commuting, damage commission, fatherhood, flooding, genesis 9:11, god, memory, noah, religion
Marked safe
Woman: Was that a joke.
Man: Yes.
Woman: Try harder.
(We all react to catastrophes in our own way.)
So we’ve had a bit of flooding.
Short version: a Flood of the Century that was, where we live, considerably worse than the previous Flood of the Century 22 years ago.
Man (trying harder): We had everything packed and ready to go: documents, spare underwear, cats. My climbing gear bag. A siren went off and your mother said it was time to go so we did. Shortly before the official evacuation notice.
Woman: Ok.
Man: I suppose you could call it premature evacuation.
Woman: That was another joke right.
The cats are extremely well-behaved here at Beta’s place.
So are we.
When we woke up this morning the sky was blue (still is) but it’s still too early to go back to the house and check on damage and clean up and discard etc.
Some villages in the area are still in the process of being evacuated.
The cats are sleeping.
My wife is checking the news on her phone.
My daughter is working.
Now I will stand up from the comfortable chair to put my breakfast bowl into the dishwasher, and my wife will steal it.
Later we will get dressed and go for a walk.
There is a climbing gym in the neighborhood but I don’t know if i am up to it.
I woke up at 2 and thought about all those who have to flee on short notice, all around the world.
I hope they are doing ok.
But not all of them are.
I fed the cats at 4:30.
I woke up at 6:30 so I did fall asleep at some point.
Equilibrium
So anyway. There I was in the woods. Looking around. Weather was beginning to cool, but still hot, not like today which is cool and rainy, perfect, perfect weather.
It was hot but the woods were shady.
I was wearing socks this time in case something ran up the inside of my pantsleg again (nothing did) and a straw hat and a pink Bikini Kill T-shirt and blue jeans. And shoes. I had clippers in my pocket, hidden by the shirt in case I encountered the owner of the forest or a hunter or whatever (I didn’t).
I told myself it was legal to clip the cattails; I wasn’t taking many and the ones that were protected are a different, smaller kind. These are ok to take.
I don’t know if they really are. According to something I found online it is legal in Austria to take things (nuts, berries, mushrooms) from the woods for your own use, but not, like, commercially, and not firewood etc. So I took 5 hazel switches (for possible basketry) (I didn’t take more because I didn’t want to look greedy should I encounter an owner or other authority) (I didn’t) and looked around for thick stands of cattails.
I found some near the edge of a pond. It was a steep slope maybe 2 meters down to the water’s edge.
I don’t know what happened. I was carefully going down the slope when I just tipped.
I was clutching at the grass and plants, but it was no good.
Voice in my head: “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” (all lower case, calm, more dismay than terror, more wanting to get this falling stuff over with so the climbing back up can commence). I did not catch myself elegantly. There was 0% elegance going on here.
Did I make a sound? I don’t recall.
At least I didn’t fall into mud or brackish water.
I bet Mary Oliver fell into the cattails sometimes too.
“There it was, the soft animal of my body, lying there on its back in the reeds, hoping nothing slithered up its leg.”
I resolved to start doing more squats and knee mobility stuff.
I got my cattails, a medium-sized bundle, and wandered back to my Ford Tourneo Courier 1.0 Ecoboost (which a recent passenger determined dings a lot, safety warnings that are, in sum, distracting).
I went home and set out my catch in the shed to dry under the wasp nests (3 at last count). That reminds me, I forgot to put my bicycle back into the shed and now it is raining. My motivation to put my bike back was mitigated by the 3 wasp nests.
I made some twine. I watched the closing ceremony of the Paralympics with my wife. At some point I went to bed, because I woke up in bed this morning, happy to see the rain and the cooler weather.
Posted in Das Gehirn, Familie, Metamorphosism
Tags: basketry, cattails, equilibrium, falling, ford tourneo courier, hedgebothering, scrounging, twine, wasps, woods
doo-dad
I weighed myself and then was immediately motivated to go to the gym where I seem to have spent too much time on the crotch machine as I am now walkin’ aroun’ like a bow-legged cowpoke.
I weighed myself because I was curious how much weight Gamma was belaying when she held the rope for me in our climbing class. Quite a bit, it turns out.
We hooked her up to a sandbag a couple times, and ran the rope in a z-pattern a couple times, to assist with my excess weight, as neither of us wanted her to be pulled upwards through a bunch of carabiners if I fell.
I was careful not to fall, but still. You do all that work to help them become awesome, you don’t want to pull them through a bunch of carabiners.
Yesterday I went to a climbing shop and bought a different doo-dad to increase friction on the rope in case of a fall, recommended to me by a climbing friend to help with the weight difference.
Meanwhile, working on decreasing the weight difference as well.
And limpin’ around
Posted in Das Gehirn, Familie, Metamorphosism
Tags: belaying, climbing, crotch machine, gamma, weight difference
The simple secret Big String hates
I accidentally shaved off my beard a few days ago.
This has happened before, so I was careful this time – carefully set the length with the length-setting dial. Started with my moustache because I wanted to leave the beard long, just trim up the edges.
However, the clipper protection cage is apparently how this clipper adjusts length – the dial slides the cage in and out, controlling its distance to the clipper element – and it seems to have been improperly clacked onto the clipper with the result that despite setting the dial to a moderate length, it shaved off one third of my moustache, leaving me with two-thirds of a moustache and a bare spot where the final third should have been.
I know from experience that had I tried to symmetrize my moustache by shaving a third away from the other side I would’ve been left with a rather narrow bit under my nose, a moustache that went out of style here in Austria in 1945. Yeah so anyway back to the drawing board.
Speaking of drawing board I have been looking for something to do with all the fibers in my garden so I fell down a Youtube rabbit hole of DIY twining/stringmaking tutorials.
Did you know that twine making is probably the oldest human cultural… thing? That led to everything else?
Like, after twisting some twine from the leaves of day lilies in our garden and… enjoying how soothing it is to just sit there and twine for hours while chatting on the terrace, I began to wonder what one does with all this twine. I finally found a website that had a list of things you can do. Three of their suggestions were, seriously, “wrap it around a stick, wrap it around a rock, wrap it around a seashell…”.
Did you know that the oldest man-made fibers discovered so far (and they were probably making string before this but being organic traces are harder to find) were found in a 90,000 year old Neanderthal settlement? My friends and family do! So string-making… predates homo sapiens? Or at least, homo sapiens have no monopoly on it.
And when you have all this string, it leads to other things.
You ask yourself, what am I going to do with all this fucking string? I am going to need a vehicle to move it around (invents wheel). I am going to need a bag to hold it in (invents weaving). Ack my bag fell apart (invents sewing and knitting).
Etc etc.
Actually I stumbled onto string-making while looking at basket weaving tutorials, after finding out that one harvests willow switches in the winter. So to kill time until then I started clicking videos of basketry-adjacent stuff in the right margin and the rest is history.
My wife used some of my twine without asking first to tie up the roses, I was shocked at first but I suppose that was ok, proved it works, and plenty more where that came from.
Feels nice to be out from under the boot of Big String.
Posted in Das Gehirn, Familie, Feral Living, Metamorphosism
Tags: big string, cordage, diy, fiber arts, handicrafts, string, string-making, twine