I’ve been somewhat distracted by life lately, and yet not in a manner one could bitch about in any interesting way. Mornings have been foggy and beautiful. Luckily there were no law enforcement officers around because I was driving and taking pictures on my way to work again this morning. On the bad for your concentration while driving scale, photography falls somewhere between telecommunications activity and what I once saw happening in the Dodge Charger in front of me on a road out in some Wyoming wasteland once a long time ago.

With certain exceptions that may even be more conceptual than real, to the extent that real concepts are less real than, say, fog, or hibernating tortoises (I sometimes wonder whether Schr

It was badly stained. Using x-rays, Evco Institute restorers recovered the following text:

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Beta is learning to drive. She takes lessons at a school in town, and practices with me. We attach warning signs to the windshield and back window of her car with suction cups and off we go.

We drive all over. She does real well, I’m proud of her.

Today she’s driving me to music school. I have a cello lesson after work and she has harp. So I have to remember to drive home instead of to music school.

I had forgotten how hard it was to learn to drive. Or, I remembered that it was hard to learn to drive, but I had forgotten precisely how it was hard to learn to drive.

But she does real well.

• The colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni is thought to grow even larger than the giant squid (Architeuthis dux). Despite this fact, few people have ever heard of it.

• This is because few people ever descend to depths below 1000 m in Antarctic waters, where it lives; not even squid fans.
• Because of this, nothing is known about its life history, diet, or behavior.
• Until now.
• Life history: the colossal squid grew up in a blue-collar household.
• Diet: yo-yo, alas. The cabbage soup diet worked best, but the squid’s brain was so glucose starved it was delirious towards the end, and never really recovered. Also, it is tired of running sushi.
• Behavior: the colossal squid likes to float deep underwater, looking up at the sun, which looks blue from that depth.
• Once it watched a young woman sitting on a dock at sunrise. She didn’t know she was being watched (of course not: the squid was a thousand meters underwater; remember this the next time you feel you’re being watched) and was happy. The colossal squid often recalls the scene, because the memory of her happiness makes it happy, too.
• Just when the colossal squid finds itself getting used to the idea of being a failed, miserable, unknown nobody, it is reminded that it is a hero to its children.
• Anatomy: the colossal squid does not have a hectocotylus (an arm used to transfer spermatophores to the female). Generally, species that lack a hectocotylus have a relatively large penis. The colossal squid has been known to mention this at cocktail parties, after a couple martinis.
• The colossal squid makes up 77% of the biomass found in sperm whale stomachs.

There is a big chestnut tree outside my office window. The leaves look sick. Maybe it’s infested by that moth that’s been killing them off. The sky is blue and the air is crisp. A breeze just blew through and all the chestnuts rumbled to the ground. Then everything was still again.

It is 7.10 on a Sunday morning. Everyone else is asleep. The red cat is asleep on an afghan my mother crocheted in the living room. An afghan blanket, right, not an Afghan person or an Afghan hound. It is less interesting but quieter. And my mother crocheted it in her living room, not mine, but then she gave it to us and it has been in our living room since then. The grey cat I’m not sure about, it wanted back outside after I fed it. The turtle I sure hope is sleeping, haven’t seen it lately and it’s been cold. Sure hope it’s sleeping.
Tortoise.
The humans are all asleep.
They all expect me to go to the bakery this morning. There is one bakery in a nearby town that is open Sunday mornings. You can go there and buy goodies for Sunday morning breakfast, which is on the one hand nice, and on the other involves standing in front of the counter in a crowd of Austrians who have not internalized the Anglo-Saxon concept of “queuing” or “taking turns”.
One used to be able to sit down at a counter in the back of the store and order a coffee and give them your goodie order at the same time, and they’d bring your stuff while you sat there feeling like a Homo Sapiens watching Neanderthals at the watering hole, but the last time I tried that the clerk told me I had to “wait in line” and order at the counter first, so what’s the point?
Maybe I’ll try it again today and see if it works, but that will be difficult because I don’t know what I want this morning. I will probably have to stand there going, Hrm, one of these and seven of these and you have any more of these?
And then I will try to pay them with a hundred Euro bill, which is all I have – this is the next thing – I’ll try to pay them with that, which is not such a big bill – and they will say, I can’t change that.
Uh-oh. Someone is up, I hear noise upstairs. Gotta run.

I don’t know if this is a good idea or not. I am writing a work of fiction about pain and would like to ask you, in the comments or in email if it’s too much of a downer, for stories about any extreme experiences you may have had with pain, physical or other. Please note: I may publish this work of fiction someday, and by commenting or emailing me your story you would be tacitly giving me permission to use your story, as inspiration, background information or even (in some altered form) within the story somehow.

That didn’t sound very legal, did it?

Thanks in advance.