One dozen attempts on my life in the past 24 hours I’ve survived. I feel like an action movie hero. Tom Cruise. All ready to go be silly on Oprah and shit. It’s always like this on the roads around the full moon*, but yesterday and today have been odd in the extreme.

Also, I took a walk at lunch and was all like
When I was your age
Back when I was a kid
I can remember back when

All these things going through my head that cannot be spoken, only listed, in italics.

I remember when, you called someone on the phone, you knew exactly where they were: standing by the wall phone in the kitchen. Sitting in the foyer by the telephone table.

Later, people got extensions, but you still knew what house they were in. Nowadays, it’s like, Are you stuck in a traffic jam or are you in the men’s room taking a crap?

Sorry.

Where was I. Attempts on my life. Tom Cruise. Walking.

Did you know that when someone tells you that they are 47, and you say, Oh, nearly 50! that that jinxes you? Within a week headhunters posing as Girl Scout cookie saleschildren come to your door and cut off your fucking head with a fucking jigsaw?

At least I hope so. If there is a god, it does.

I mean, my image of god is pretty open. It doesn’t disallow a god that would not jinx people for saying that. I’m just saying, wouldn’t it be interesting if that were the way it turned out to work?

My daughter asked me to stop cursing people recently. Apparently in traffic I have a habit of calling down the wrath of god on their ass. With good reason, IMO, but eh.

A friend cursed her recently and she got on a subway GOING THE WRONG WAY so I have to be careful.

Indeed, I suppose, images are powerful. See what you want, and maybe you get it. Maybe it happens. Like a positive jinx. I got a cell phone that way once**. So, the fiberglass cello case is only a matter of time. As is peace on earth, or at least peace in my house.

This is what I was thinking at lunch: we laugh at children for what they say they want to be when they grow up, but.

Imagine, if you will, the following. Imagine that what a kid says she wants to be when she grows up is simply the best label she can come up with for what she sees herself doing. It’s an occult image, secret to her, hard to name.

A boy sees himself saving people, or chopping down doors, or standing helplessly by while things burn, any number of possibilities, and says, I want to be a fireman when I grow up.

A girl wants to ease pain, or handle drugs, or tuck someone in, or watch people die, and says, I want to be a nurse.

I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau. And here I am, mysterious affinity for fish, swimming underwater, holding my breath.

Maybe our dreams don’t change, maybe we don’t outgrow them. Maybe they are not dreams, but just children trying to describe something words can’t directly name. Like symbols in a dream, so not dreams but elements of dreams, dream-like things, things similar to dreams but not exactly dreams, strictly speaking. Quasi-dreams. So, more like dreams than goals, I suppose, I’ll grant you that, so for lack of a better word, okay, dreams. But in quotation marks, sort of. Or italics. Dreams.

What did you want to be when you grew up?
__________

*No one knows who built the roads around the full moon. They are hard to see with the naked eye, because, you know, the sky is black, and the roads are black.

**Thanks, Novala!

After I bought the lotto ticket I made the mistake of asking myself why, in fact, I wanted to win, and was plunged into an existential crisis of sorts. What problem, I asked myself, do I have that this money, were I to win, would solve?

The wheels in my brain whirred and creaked like the gears in a cheap watch turning over the date at midnight.

Continue reading →

(WARNING: CONTAINS THE WORDS “FUCK”, “ASS” AND “MARX”)

• Seahorses mate for life, under a full moon, and sing while they’re doing it.

• Seahorses have the superpower of invisibility, in the sense of changing color to blend in with their surroundings. Especially where waiters and bartenders are concerned.
• Male seahorses give birth to their young, and are very proud of their offspring.
• In fact, the sun shines out the asses of young seahorses.
• For example, say a seahorse couple has two offspring that both play in the same music recital because they have the same teacher. They make sure their offspring are bathed, brushed and dressed in clean clothes.
• Despite these efforts, the younger of the two seahorse babies manages to have a stain on her t-shirt, messy hair and socks that clash with the rest of its outfit when it marches up to play the piano. The father seahorse thinks, What a character, she plays with more personality than all the other seahorses combined. He thinks his offspring plays maybe not better than the others, but with a whole lot of Chico Marx. He figures the stain etc is the price of maintaining her personality. He also notices that she is the only seahorse to play by heart that evening. Or he thinks so, anyway.
• And when the older of the two young seahorses plays her Bach gigue, he thinks she is the most musical of the harpists that evening, and is in awe of her coordination, because there is much pedaling to be done. It reminds him, coordination-wise, of someone performing a kidney transplant on an unanesthesized ferret, on a bicycle, only it sounds better.
• The natural predators of seahorses are crabs, among other creatures. And man, of course, the natural predator of everything. Fucking man.
• One source says the average size of a full-grown sea horse is 2-8 inches, which what the hell kind of average is that? That’s like saying a person is between two and eleven feet tall. Or two and eight feet, I suppose, strictly speaking.
• Seahorses are fascinated by the sounds produced by the theremin.

It was warm so we put her in the flowerbed out front. It’s fenced off — tortise-proof-fenced off, because tortoises have this Great Escape instinct thing going on — and I have built her a cozy little tortoise house in which to spend the night.

Sometimes she spends the night there, sometimes not. Sometimes she just hunkers down among the flowers, settled into the bark chips.

It was warm so we put her out. Then a cold front came down from Scandinavia and it began raining cats and dogs. Beta and I were on our way to town, moving the concert harp and the cello and the Irish harp as well to the music school because a concert and some other gig for her Irish band were scheduled for the next day.

At any rate, we were moving the instruments. And it was dark. And raining cats and dogs, and Alpha says, Oh, bring in the tortoise before you go. Or maybe it was even my idea, We can’t leave the poor tortoise outside in this weather.

Beta and I looked for her. Tortoises have a million years, ten million years evolutionary experience at hiding. They are perfectly camoflagued, they look like a mixture of bark chips and tulip leaves from above. Rain was running down my neck.

Beta suggested a flashlight. I told her all the flashlights were dead. But we have new batteries, she said. But the bulbs are all burned out, I said.

I stood there, partially wrapped in the vines of the climbing rose bush, and remarked something about Here we stand, combined IQ over 300, maybe, outwitted by a turtle.

So we delivered the instruments and looked some more when we got back.

The tortoise is usually either at the left end under some bedding plants, at the right end in her house or under a rose bush, or in the middle under a particularly bushy and stickery rose bush. But we couldn’t find her anywhere.

I finally went into my shop and rigged up a naked light bulb to an extension cord. If you’ve never tried to find something outside with naked 60 watt bulb at night, they are very bright. You spend half your time figuring out the right way to shade your eyes, and blinking the spots away.

Plus, as I’ve mentioned, it was raining heavily and I began to wonder whether the last thing I would hear in my life would be ZZZZZT.

Then I found the tortoise. Under the bushy, stickery rose bush.

She was very wet, and cold and happy to be moved into the warm house. Happy. I say happy, but how do you know with tortoises? They don’t wag their tails. But she did do the pushup thing she does, and she extended her head quite far out.

The next day she celebrated by taking having two large bowel movements, one in the kitchen (she walked through it afterwards, and painted a large, irregular circle around the perimeter of the room). I couldn’t find the actual turd at first, because it was on a black tile (our floor tiles are white with smaller black ones in the corners). I eventually did find it though. The second dump she took in the library, which was quite nasty judging from the gagging noises my eldest daughter made cleaning it up.

The tortoise was quite lively after that, as you would be, I think, after taking a BM that amounted to roughly half your body weight.

The weather stayed cold for a few days, so there were one or two more incidents. She’s back outside now.

I’ve been taking cello lessons for almost six years.
Something like that.
I remember walking past the music school when Beta was still too young to learn an instrument, except maybe a tiny violin, she may have been around three or so, which would make me around 33 at the time, so almost 14 years ago now, walking past the local music school, which is in a nice, old building, a former convent; it was a summery day, and music was coming out of the windows, and flowers were blooming and I thought how nice it must be in that place and how we would support Beta if she ever chose to learn an instrument.
Then she chose harp of all things, when she was what, 7, and a few years later I surprised myself by starting with cello, just as an experiment, just trying it out and then of course was unable to stop because parents must set a good example for their children and quitting is not a good example.
Also, I like the cello very much.
I have not learned as much in those six years as, say, a diligent child might have, because I have other things going on and have not practiced as much as I could have.
But this weekend I played in an orchestra, twice, once to a full house, and didn’t fuck up massively.
Once or twice my bow touched the string prior to the beginning of a piece, and it made a little twang that I think only I, and maybe my teacher, who was sitting beside me, also playing, heard.
I did not fortissimo into a rest in this Bizet piece, which relieved me mightily, as I had feared doing it, and feared that fearing it made it more likely that I actually would.
But I didn’t. There were a couple fiddly bits I sat out, otherwise it went okay I think.
And the orchestra got some nice applause, and we had to play an encore.
I never imagined I’d end up doing this, when I started.

On my home planet I was trained in slime mold.
I am a highly-trained slime mold specialist.
Anything you want to know about slime mold, just ask me. I’m your man.
I was sent to Earth as the slime mold member of our research team. That was the assumption. The culmination of years and more years of specialized training.
So when our anthropologist was eaten by dogs and they picked me to replace him, it came as a surprise.
It caught me unprepared.
Certain slime molds, the going gets rough, the individual organisms can band together into a sort of larger organism, the individuals specializing in certain tasks such as locomotion, protection (dying to form a protective “skin”), perception (forming a rudimentary light-sensing “eye”) etc.
Humans, though?
With that caveat, here a couple observations.
Driving through their urban habitat yesterday, I observed a couple.
She was on the skinny side, with a lank blondish mullet hairdo that looked as if she cut it herself. About 35 years old. The man she was walking with, who seemed to be her partner, judging from body language, was recovering from a recent injury. This could be seen from the way he moved – large, round careful movements, with a larger space of vulnerability around him than humans normally have, moving his head slowly as if his eyes stuck out on 5-foot stalks and he had to be careful not to hit anything with them. Slow, careful steps.
Also, his head was completely bandaged except for one eye, with fresh bandages.
Just like this kid in a story I’m currently writing.
The woman was looking out for him. They appeared to be taking their first trip outside their apartment since his return home from the hospital. Get some fresh air. Some exercise.
She was losing patience with his whiny, overcautious demeanor and wished he would recover as fast as the heroes in movies. He was traumatized by a dangerous world and fearful of all its sharp edges, dirt and large, hard, noisy things full of momentum.
They stood there and waited for the traffic light to change.
Later, in the boardroom of an international organization, I observed a second couple. She was about 22 and beautiful. He was in his forties, small and appeared intelligent, well-educated and successful. Both were well-dressed. She entered the room from a door near where I sat and signaled to him where he sat across the room.
They communicated with hand signals and mouthed words. This proved insufficient for them, so she walked over to where he was and they had a whispered conversation.
Later they were standing by me talking. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. But it seemed likely that they were having an affair, although they didn’t touch, because she was wearing a man’s watch. A small man’s watch, as in the watch of a small man, the size and sort he would wear. Expensive, rectangular “doctor’s watch”, leather band. Too big for her, the band, she had it on the smallest setting, the last hole, and it still hung down loosely around the trapezium and pisiform bones of her hand, so to speak.
And women wearing guys’ watches is at least as sexy as women wearing men’s shirts.
Moreover: a human recently told me I was more attractive when wearing my reading glasses and should wear them all the time. This I did yesterday, when not driving, and had the following experiences:

Executive summary: a whole bunch of women made contact with me. Conclusion: either glasses cause women to talk to me, or they’ve been doing it all along and I didn’t notice before because I wasn’t wearing glasses.

A woman in her early forties (blonde, attractive, well-dressed, nice shoes, red mini-dress, elaborate diamond/gold ring on the ring-finger of her right hand i.e. married as that is the custom in Austria) came over to where I sat in a low chair in the lounge working on my Apple iBook and asked if the seat next to me was taken. I replied that it was not, to my knowledge. She then said, “cool computer,” and crossed her legs in such a manner that the battery charge on my iBook instantly increased from 28% to 35%. I responded by smiling and saying, “heh.”
Then I returned my attention to the work I was doing on the iBook. No further conversation ensued.
Between five and ten minutes later, the woman rose in what struck me as an abrupt manner and walked briskly towards the elevators and out of my field of vision, her nylons throwing sparks sufficient to light a medium-sized room or power an electric razor, and the heels of her high-heeled pumps making clicking noises although the floor was carpeted.
I feared she was on her way home to kick her dog.
I missed dealing with slime molds and wondered what else I should have said. I wondered whether I should have replied, Yes, and you’re pretty, and my batteries will be dead in 45 minutes but you’ll still be pretty. (I decided not).

Later, it occurred to me that the events had progressed in an optimal way because here I had said nothing at all and still pissed her off, some relationships are better off dead you know?
Later, two women in the conference, after checking me out for a long time, asked me if I were someone else. I replied that no, I was me, and apologized for that fact. The first one left without further incident, the second felt the need to explain that she had been given the description of a man who must be my cousin and gave me this hand shake/hold/squeeze thing humans do sometimes at funerals when they are consoling someone. It felt out of place.
Afterwards, I wondered whether I could have gotten more entertainment out of the situation by telling her, when she mentioned the description/cousin, Oh, you must mean George Clooney, that happens all the time.
I concluded, probably not.