and peace

For the second year running, I am in a local amateur orchestra. For those of you in a similar situation, I offer the following tips on participation in rehearsals, which can be challenging and complicated interactions.

• Come on time. This means a few minutes early, because you have to find your place, and unpack everything, and tune, and yada yada yada.

• By no means come, like, half an hour late when everyone is in the middle of the Mozart piece and the only spare cello seat is in the middle of the orchestra somewhere.
• If you do come late, unpack quietly and when you wrangle your way to the empty seat in the middle of the packed rehearsal hall, try not to forget your cello.
• If you do forget your cello, and have to get back up and excusemeexcusemeexcusemesorry your way back to the grand piano in the back of the room where you left it, pretend you’re going because you got an urgent call on your mobile phone if, luckily, your daughter calls to check where you are because she forgot you had rehearsal.
• When you go to your seat for the second time (excusemeexcusemeexcusemesorry), with your cello this time, by no means are you to forget to tighten the little screw that holds in the spike, because it is, like, a two-foot, half-pound piece of sharpened metal that can make a loud noise when it falls out and CLANGs to the floor between a viola player’s feet.

Gamma has been very protective of Red Cat since his recent crime (see previous post). She often sticks up for underdogs like that, although in this case it feels more like devil’s advocacy. I’m guessing there is a certain feeling of kinship there, although most of it is, probably, softhearted sweetness.

Last night she asked for a bedtime story. Anything I wanted, she said, as long as it did not involve something nasty happening to a cat. This meant I had to toss my first story idea. To be honest, I did not toss it, I just gave it a happy ending, and told the short version so I could more quickly get on to the main story for the night. The cat story, about an evil cat that ate the birthday cake of a poor one-legged boy I knew in school, so poor that his parents went without lunch for a year in order to afford the first birthday cake of his life, with the result that the cat was thrown out an upper-storey window, landing on telephone wires and dancing from one telephone wire to the other, and was discovered by a circus, where it thereafter performed, financially saving the family, was just the opening act for the story of the shit weasel. Please don’t inform CPS.

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Guest post by Anton Pavlovich Chekov
Mig came home from somewhere yesterday. He had driven his daughter to a museum, that was it. He came home, let in the cat, which he carefully loaded and hung on the wall, and started reading.
His cousin loaned him the latest novel by what’shisface the High Fidelity guy when he was in the States for his father’s funeral. He started reading it this weekend and found it a good, crisp read. Also, reading a story about people who wanted to jump off a building had a positive effect on his mood.
He had a turkey breast to roast. He had also cooked chili con carne the day before. Actually, there was so much of that left that he wouldn’t have needed to roast the turkey except the turkey was set to expire in two days and he figured if he roast it then it would eventually get eaten, whereas if he didn’t roast it right away who knows? So he put it in the oven with some carrots and potatoes and read his book some more.
He basted the turkey a few times. He saw kids off to bed. His wife as well. Eventually the turkey was finished roasting and he put it onto the stove to cool before he carried it downstairs to the cold room in the cellar for the night.
The book, it’s called “A Long Way Down,” that’s it. By Nick Hornby.
Everytime Mig reads that name, it strikes him as though it ought to be Hornsby, although he can’t explain why.
He was about to the end of a chapter. He was about to get up and see if the turkey had cooled enough, when he heard the noises coming from the kitchen.
Immediately he knew what was happening.
It hadn’t happened since one Thanksgiving more than ten years ago.
The noises were like this:

Licklicklicklicklicklicklick.

It was the sound of a cat making the most of a small window of opportunity.
It was followed quickly by other sounds – profane sputtering, hurried footsteps across a polished maple floor, “shoo”ing noises, a door opening and closing quickly, then a minute of profane lamenting, then another minute of quiet thought.
Mig fired up the oven, to a higher temperature this time, to the maximum actually, and after carving off the begnawed end of the roast, slid the whole works back in.
It was boiling away within a couple minutes. He let it roast for a quarter of an hour. This, he thought, most definitely would sterilize everything.
But who would eat it but him?
But what if he didn’t tell anyone?
He couldn’t do that. Not even to his mother-in-law.
And even if he could, how could he serve it to her and to no one else without someone getting suspicious?
After it had cooled, he put it into the cellar. When the grey cat woke him at two in the morning to be let out, he cut off a bit of the chewed piece he had earlier removed and fed it to him, since the grey cat was innocent. It was very pleased. It ate it so fast it nearly gagged.
He left the rest of the gnawed piece on the counter and, with both cats outside and the ruined turkey in the cellar, went to bed.
In the morning, the red cat was somehow back in the house and the chewed piece was gone.
What a pig.
He told the story to his wife and she said to put a warning sign on the turkey so no one would eat it by accident.
Mig wished he hadn’t told her the part about her mother, as she didn’t find it very funny.

• The grouper, of the family Serranidae, commonly weighs between 50-100 pounds, although they can reach 750 pounds.

• The biggest one ever caught with a rod and reel weighed over 400 pounds. Imagine that.
• You wouldn’t want to eat one that big, though, because the bigger ones can cause ciguatera poisoning, whatever that is.
• Some marine biologists claim that groupers like coastal areas. That is what the groupers want them to think.
• The grouper is an angrier fish than the casual observer would guess.
• The grouper hates arcade games where variously-colored blocks fall unpredictably and constantly from the sky, piling up until the window clogs and the game is lost, because it reminds them too directly of their life.
• In fact, if it had the time, the grouper could spend an entire day sitting on a park bench thinking about a single thing: how much it hates its life.
• Despite this, the grouper appears to be a friendly fish, and can be fed by hand.
• It requires a great effort of will on the part of the grouper not to eat the hand, which is a delicacy for the grouper.
• The grouper is a popular food fish, used for many kinds of cooking.

Man: How was school today, honey?
Girl: Okay.
Man: That’s nice. Everything okay?
Newspaper: Two-headed baby massacre disco fire.
Girl: Bzzbzzbzz.
Newspaper: Deadzone meltoff oilslick.
Girl: Bzzbzzbzz.
Man: I’m sorry, honey. Could you repeat that? I’m having trouble listening lately.
Girl: That’s okay. I have a Latin test tomorrow, I said.
Man: So you’re going to school tomorrow? You feeling better?
Girl: A little bit. If you miss the test you just have to take a harder one later.
Man: Yeah. Totally.
Newspaper: Downturn collusion deficit.
Girl: Bzzbzzbzz.
Newspaper: Bulimia prolapse.
Train of thought: Since when is prolapse part of our normal vocabulary, and what does that say about us?
Girl: Bzzbzzbzz.
Man: I’m sorry. The bus?
Girl: I said, I will have to take the bus to the train station tomorrow, won’t I?
Man: I suppose so. I could try to get your sister up early so we could drive you, but we’d have to leave by when, 6.30 AM, right?
Girl: More or less.
Man: You feel okay enough to do that?
Girl: Sure.
Newspaper: Alligator body parts. Celebrity investigation.
Newspaper: Contamination plunge. Suspicious gadget discount.
Newspaper: Bedbug tragedy.
Newspaper: Daycare arrest.
Man: Ham sandwich okay for lunch tomorrow?
Girl: Sure.