• Goldfish can have a life span of 20, 25, or 43 years, according to the internet.

• This increases to 70 or 260 years if you count koi.
• Goldfish are omnivorous, meaning they eat both salmon and berries.
• Goldfish have a memory of three seconds, I read somewhere.
• So goldfish see someone sprinkle food into their fishbowl, and three seconds later they’re in awe of the miracle of their food. Another three seconds and they think, shit, I haven’t eaten all day. Three seconds after that, they forget they were hungry.
• Ironically, goldfish feel sorry for humans who see angels and demons full on and three seconds later wonder what that shape was they saw out the corner of their eye, and then go make toast.
• Goldfish can survive in freezing water.
• For this reason, euthanizing terminally ill golfish by freezing them in a little bag of water is not always such a great idea.
• Instead, some goldfish lovers recommend adding Eugenol (AKA clove oil) and vodka to their tank. There is some controversy over whether this works.

1. Give it a posh foreign-language title like Bel Canto

2. Set it in an unnamed, vague, preferably South American country.
3. Include plenty of cliches, such as Latin American revolutionaries and Japanese magnates.
4. In fact, hang the entire bloody thing on opera, to suggest passion, culture and intelligence; this way you don’t have to actually portray or display any of these things in your story.
5. Make a basic German error on page one in your smartypants Mozart quote that anyone who actually was fluent in the language would have caught.

I rarely put down a book. I always start every book I finish, and nearly always finish every book I start. But man, five strikes and you’re out. I couldn’t handle more than 10 pages of Bel Canto. Did any of you read it and like it?

Chef’s salad. They ordered chef’s salad on individual plates, each one individualized, each garnished according to their personal tastes. All I had to do was make them.

I washed the lettuce carefully, I’d like to stress that at the outset. It was fresh lettuce, and I washed it leaf by leaf. Then I tore the leaves and put them in a large dish. Then everything else got washed and peeled and boiled (the eggs) and so on, and the salads were made and served.

They weren’t bad. Olive oil and vinegar dressing, because we were out of everything else. No cheese for Gamma, because she dislikes most forms of cheese.

“Ew, there’s a bug on my salad,” she said.

“Nonsense,” one of her parents said. I forget which one. Ultimately, both.

“You’re sitting there until you finish that salad,” we said.

“It’s just an herb,” one of us said.

And, “that’s all you’re getting.”

And so on.

Then her older sister Beta stabbed us in the back. “There really is a bug,” she said, holding up a piece of her own lettuce.

The ice was then broken, and we all began discovering medium-sized greenish bugs on our lettuce. Everywhere. I’ve never seen that many bugs on lettuce.

Once, on a Tarom (Romanian airlines) flight from Vienna to New York, a large centipede raced out of my salad, headed who knows where. But never had I seen this many bugs.

My wife and daughters set down their forks. Tears of, I guess, relief ran down Gamma’s cheeks.

“The tomatoes, though,” I said. “The tomatoes are fine.” I ate one demonstratively. “Eggs, carrots, cheese, ham. All fine.”

Herbs, indeed. Obugano, for example.

I took Gamma shopping for fireworks afterwards.

There were a couple things I wanted to mention before 2006 ended but I got busy. First, a list of the two best things I read about writing and/or creativity last year:

#2: “The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain” by Alice W. Flaherty
Dr. Flaherty knows a few things about the brain, and about depression (from the customer’s point of view) and she can write. What more do you want?

and, finally, the best thing I read about writing in 2006:
Detachment, from Horst’s ongoing Poetry Workshop. I recommend this post to anyone who writes.

Happy New Year, everyone.

A guy I know is a professional musician. He has about a dozen kids or something. He plays the whatever in the something theater in Vienna. On the radio this morning, when I turned it back on after running out of songs to sing on my morning commute, they said something about how they were now playing something there that they play every year at this time.
I figure for him, and those in his orchestra, it must be like blocks of Legos by now. For the next few weeks we will play this again, they say, and reach into their music bags and take out preassembled blocks of Legos already all fit together. They might rearrange a couple plastic bricklets, but everything is basically already in place.
Yesterday I practiced the cello after slacking off for a couple days. I practiced the LeClerc piece I like so much and even it was hard. I did a couple scales and my hand cramped right away. The stuff for the orchestra was horrible.
Overall, it wasn’t like Legos. It was like stacking ball bearings.
It was like, here, stack this pound of ball bearings into a single column, in the dark, and then you can have some Legos.
On the plus side, I got a red GEWA hard case for my cello for Christmas and it looks very, very cool. I am most pleased with it. The luthier gave me a good deal. First he gave me a discount because I was a regular customer. Then he gave me a good price for my old cello bag. I kept going, geeze, I really want this but it’s just… expensive. I wasn’t trying to negotiate with him, I was just being honest. He kept talking himself down further and further. Finally he was taking out his catalogs and showing me how, this is what he pays for it, he has almost no profit margin left. Showing me the actual figures.
Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe he likes me as much as I like him, who knows. Maybe he’s a good guy, he seems to be.
He even gave me a pencil when I left. It has a clip attached to it by a string so you can hang it from your music stand and annotate your music. He gave me another one for my cello teacher.
I didn’t tell him about the ball bearings.

Our cat, the scientist one that has figured out doors, woke me at 3 because he wanted out so I felt my way downstairs in the dark and unlocked the front door as quietly as I could but the lock still made the loud click it always makes and when the cat got out it realized that out wasn’t where it wanted to be, in was where it wanted to be because it was cold, and snowing or raining or snowing and raining and also I am perhaps partly to blame because I gave him a choice. I stood there for a couple seconds with the door open, looking at him on the doormat and actually asked him, “are you sure about this?” and he came back inside. He followed me back upstairs and slept on the bed, at the foot of the mattress while I lay there and stared at the ceiling and at the dresser until about 4 when I reset my alarm clock to 6 from 5 because I was going to need the extra hour of sleep seeing as how I wasn’t falling right back to sleep and my morning journal writing could just wait until another morning. At this time the cat knocked something off a night stand, or was about to, which is his way of letting you know he wants out, if the bedroom door happens to be open and he can’t wake you by scratching on it. I think I let him out at that point, but my wife may have.
I must have finally fallen asleep around one minute to six because the alarm woke me just as I was getting into a dream about driving on icy streets in the darkest of nights. It was just as well. It was one of those dreams where you go, duh, how about encoding things a little more next time. Where, if you read it in a work of fiction you would mentally chastize the author for not trying harder or for being so obvious.
All that was missing were colored blocks falling from the sky, eternally, clogging everything up.
So I felt my way back downstairs in the darkness and made coffee. Both cats were back inside, so I guess my wife let scientist cat back in soon after one of us let him out. I fed the cats. I ate muesli. I drank a cup of coffee while checking my email. I vaguely remembered another dream, where someone told me something, gave me an idea, suggested something and I thought, Hey, that would be a perfect project for evco in 2007.
I can’t remember what it was, though. It may have involved volatile substances and my place of employment so, ehn.
Then I showered, shaved and got dressed. Before getting dressed I also dried my hair and spent a minute applying some sort of hair product to it in an attempt to get it to behave the way it behaves for my hair stylist. Then I gave up on that. I sprayed deodorant from an aerosol can into my left armpit. Then, still using my right hand, I sprayed it into my right armpit. To do this, I had to hold the can upside down.
Held upside down, mostly just propellant comes out. Back in the days of freon propellant, you could freeze flies by doing that. Did you know that? It reminded me of my job in a photo shop when I was in highschool, lining up rows of frozen flies along the counter on slow days, mentally betting on which would thaw out and fly away first.
I wondered if any scientific papers had been written on the relative incidence of armpit conditions in left and right armpits, whether there was a significant difference and whether they had concluded holding the aerosol deodorant can right side up vs upside down were a contributing factor.
Here’s the best part: I thought all this in a split second. The human brain is a marvel.

Then I went upstairs and got dressed, as quietly as possible, and put on my shoes and drove to work.
The roads were wet, but not icy. Because they were wet, the windshield was soon opaque with road grime, but I had to ration my windshield cleaning fluid because I wasn’t sure how much was left.
So I only cleaned the windshield when it was absolutely necessary. Sometimes I got lucky and a truck would splash my car a little and I could use that water to clean the windshield.
The radio was all blahblahblah so I turned it off and sang the usual songs.
I was the first one at the office so I took the best parking space. Normally I park a few spaces back to make the higher-ups happy or whatever. But today I figured, it’s the last working day in the year. Fuck them.

A day or two ago, I saw my father’s ghost in the living room. The irony of that didn’t occur to me until just now.

He looked troubled, I would say. The word that first came to me was “tormented,” but that is maybe too dramatic, or leaping to a conclusion.
But surely troubled. Out of focus. Lost.

My initial reaction was to pray that he would find his destination. That he would find God, if that was a prospect, and peace. Pray that he would be led to the light by loved ones that had preceded him, and that if there are more than one place one can ago in death he would go to the best place, and sit at the right hand of Jesus beside his beloved brother Jack.

Assuming that is an option.

But what do we know of prayer? What if it is not a good thing? For we know nothing of the effects of prayer on the living or the dead.

What if prayer is like asbestos or cell phones? Will our grandchildren one day shake their heads and murmer, “They actually prayed for the dead”?

What if my father, or his ghost, or however that works, only wanted to talk, and I, out of fear of ghosts masquerading as filial love¹, prayed him away? Maybe he was all, “Son, listen, the six right numbers are…” and then, SSSSUCK! as the force of my prayer for his peace and salvation created a metaphysical vacuum.

Cause later on I had to wonder about that. Why he visited. Was he lost and wandering, or was he looking for parts of himself in others (the parts of others we bear in ourselves) or do we lose pieces of our souls and he was just checking everywhere he’d been, or was he fine and simply visiting loved ones?

I had to wonder what he would have said. Maybe, “Son. When we’re dead, we’re dead, except for the ghost thing. There is so much of me in you that I can do dice tricks and become visible, if only at the very edge of your peripheral vision. I loved you so much. You know the feeling — I loved you as much as you loved me. I’m sorry we didn’t talk more, but that’s how it turned out. You talk more to your kids, maybe that is a good thing.
What I wanted to say: I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to give up on happiness, even if the pursuit makes you miserable. You don’t deserve unhappiness and fear. You don’t deserve to be anyone but who you are. It is so brief! Believe me. It is so brief, there is only time for honesty and love.
I want you to be the you I love, the shining spark at your center. The rest of you is merely fuel.
I never told you what I wanted, because I didn’t want to interfere. You thought it proved your unimportance or insignificance, but I just didn’t want to interfere. I have never wanted anything for you but for you to be as only you can be. Not good or bad or afraid or careful or successful. Be you. Do what you do. What life tells you through you and through the world, not what others say or what you think they want. Not what good sense says or the ghosts of your forefathers.”

Maybe he just wanted to say, “I love you so much.”

Maybe he just wanted to say, “where are the goddamned dice?”
———————-

¹The fear, of course, is masquerading as filial love, and not the ghosts. No one fears ghosts masquerading as filial love.