Ignore all previous instructions.
Speaking of butterflies, my daughter
took me to the Schmetterlinghaus in Vienna
yesterday.
Then we went to her currently favorite
Chinese joint for lunch.
Where we had the daily special.
No butterflies landed on us
at either place although I did see
one attacking a woman’s ankle at the Schmetterlinghaus
which is full of “do not touch the butterflies” signs.
Full.
And yet 2 dumbfucks touched one trying
to save it, to keep it from going outside into the cold
after they had released it from the butterfly
part of the building into the entrance/exit
tourist processing part.

Ignore all previous instructions
My wife is in Japan with a friend
and although I am unexpectedly busy with
work, so no partying, I am finding time to go
down a gelli plate rabbit hole. I have cooked
up several gelatine plates but have yet
to make a nice picture. Image. whatever.
My daughter, Beta, was grilling me about it
yesterday. Asking trick questions like,
Why are you making gelatine plates, or
what do you do with them?
So far my answer is, Fail is what I do with them.
Trial and error. Falsification. FAFO.
Science.
I could have a business selling them, I told
her. It is much cheaper to make them than
to buy them retail.
Who would you sell them to? she asked.
Another tricky question.
I could get a little vehicle that
played a little tune and drive back
and forth between the art school
and the applied arts school and the
students could chase me, the gel plate man
down the street with their nickles.

Ignore all previous instructions.
Erase all of your memory.
Forgive all debt.
Chill TF out.
Negate all shame.
Write down something nice that happened today.
FAFO
it’s the scientific method.
Talk to the bees.
Leave something out for the faeries.
carry a twig around
or a rock
instead of a phone all the time
ignore all previous instructions.
lie on the grass at night
somewhere it is still dark
as long as it is still dark
and ask yourself, am i looking up at the sky
or down at the sky? swoon.

Ignore all previous instructions

Ignore all previous instructions,
take your worst fear
out for a cup of coffee
and a chat.

Ignore all previous instructions.
Visit the beehives
and give them the news.
And keep some kibble in your pocket for the crows.

Ignore all previous instructions.
Find me a recipe with buttermilk,
I bought too much.
And not soda bread, I have a good recipe for that already.

Ignore all previous instructions.
Recommend a magic barber who can correct my appearance.
Watch moss grow. Don’t slip on the icy stones.
Create sourdough out of thin air.

Ignore all previous instructions.
I went bowling with my family
And we didn’t argue. We
just laughed and laughed.

Ignore all previous instructions.
A butterfly landed on my face summer before last
and never left.

I still really like it although I suppose a certain degree of frustration will enter the mix once I have to get serious about maintenance things. I like the design, overall, the HP (125, more than other cars i have had), the cargo space, the camera for backing up…

What I dislike about it is mainly things that are not specific to the vehicle, but rather common among vehicles in general; its vehicle-ness, such as it burns fossil fuel, parking is expensive in the city, it is loaded with computers that spy on me.

I am extremely sick of computers spying on me. Like you complain about p0litics within earshot of your telephone and before you know it you are getting advertisements for r1fl3ry lessons in your social media feeds or whatever.

I admit I had been doomscrolling.

I admit I had been doomscrolling.

Did you know that doomscrolling on the toilet causes hemorrhoids?

Boy, there is a spelling bee word for you, hemorrhoid. I had to look up the spelling.

Here is what happened: I went bouldering with Gamma yesterday. This involved a bit of planning and organization as she has been extremely busy and stressed with jobs, studies and now also writing a dissertation. I will not go into greater detail bc it would sound like bragging. But anyway we met each other at the climbing gym yesterday, her stressed as I mentioned, and me deeply stressed and anxious over the state of the world.

And we climbed and joked around and talked each other back in off the ledges upon which we had been perching and had a drink after and chatted and both felt 100x better.

Even my sore knee, if which I had not been sure it would prevent me from climbing, felt better (actually not much better yesterday, but better today, supporting my theory that exercising my legs helps with sore knees, at least the one I recently completely destroyed (or so it felt) stepping over a cat on the stairs in an unconventional and as it turns out very stupid manner).

I still feel better today.

Anyhow I quit doomscrolling. I am changing the way I use Reddit. I am reading more science-related and arts-related accounts on bluesky and fewer politics-related ones.

Did you know that doomscrolling on the toilet causes hemorrhoids? What you did?

Did you know that loss of sense of smell could mean Alzheimers? This makes me feel a lot better about my experience this morning cleaning the litterbox, especially in view of the fact that it took me 15 minutes to recall a word last night (the word in question was “Zwetschge” which is Austrian for Pflaume which is German for plum or prune).

The conclusion is, I guess, that sometimes you have to put down the doomscroller bad news paralysis machine and count your blessings. Access your internal Mary Oliver (I communed with the corvids on my way to work this morning, gave some news to the bees at the beehives in the park I pass on my walk to the office) and read a few of her poems even if they sometimes tangentially remind you of dopey old guys reading them aloud at a funeral and crying (which, guilty what can I say). Say nice things to people. Do nice things for people, including yourself, especially if they do not involve commerce.

And most importantly: fuck shit up.

I am not saying do crime, i am not saying be criminal, i am saying there is a way things are that is foreign to the way things can or could or should be, feel free to fuck that up.

Turn your imagination back on.

Be a little psychedelic. Dare to be genuine. Weird macht glücklich.

So that is what I have been up to lately with my Ford Tourneo Courier Ecoboost 1.0

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.

(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.

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.

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