The key to happiness is your sense of function and utility, if you’re an iron lung. You are respirating another being, unlike an oxygen chamber, which is nothing more than a glorified bed for people like Michael Jackson. Happiness for an oxygen chamber hangs from a thin string tied to a twig of self-deception about as big around as your little finger.

We iron lungs, on the other hand, replicate the pulsation shared by all life forms, from the contractions of birth, pulse, peristalsis to the ultimate contraction and release that expels a being from this life.

Miners retired at 32, staring at pictures of God pinned to the ceiling, wishing their kids would stop singing those plaintive songs about them in the next room in their nasal voices; resigned polio victims; little children taken tragically ill, imagining walks down long corridors holding hands with healthy alternate selves, we’ve breathed them all.

In and out.

I hate clowns so a clown was out, as was that person who dances around in the sort of bird costume. McDonald’s was out, the organic farm where the kids can play in the dirt and pet the animals was too far away plus it was closed on the weekend I think. The Museum of Natural History wanted, what, way over two hundred Euro for seven kids or something like that. We did a pirate party last year, I think. At any rate, we’d done one already, with treasure map, treasure hunt, all that stuff.

Which left the art museum.

This is how I found myself sitting in front of The Two Fridas with my wife, a friend of ours kind enough to come along and help out, the tour guide and twelve 8-year old children: nine girls, Bill Gates, Hannibal Lector and Don Rickles. The sort of smart kids who are fine as long as you keep them occupied, which turns out to be impossible.

The guide was really good. She had been planning to show the kids a different picture, but they all sat down in front of this one so she explained it instead, off the top of her head, talking about Frida and the painting at a level the kids and I could understand. She told us how expensive it was, how it had traveled here with a courier who never let it out of his sight, as the boys swang pillows over their heads, sword-fight style, etc.

Alpha is a genius. We took the train to the museum, which fascinated the kids, some of whom had never been on one before. I had expected the kids to be rowdier. I even wore my steel-toed boots just in case, just to put a little fear in them. This is how scared the boys were: on the way to the restroom with them after the tour, Don Rickles asked me what my name is. I told him. “That’s a girl’s name,” he said.

Anyhow. The guide told us afterwards she had been surprised the kids were as well-behaved and attentive as they were. A previous group hadn’t been interested at all.

After the tour, they got to paint and we fed them and went back to the train. On the way we let them play in the creek, so they could fall in and catch colds. Hannibal Lector found a broken schnaps bottle and threw it back into the high grass. I went in looking for it so no one would step on it with his or her bare feet, and stepped in dog shit with my boots. It reminded me of that scene in Jurassic Park where the big game hunter is taking aim at one dinosaur and the other one eats him. So I went wading in the creek for a while too until the sole of my boot was fairly clean again.

Amazingly, no one was injured the whole time. No paintings were damaged. No one cried. Bill Gates was thirsty, because we had none of the beverages he allowed himself to drink (i.e. tap water). Everyone else seemed to have a good time. We were still talking to each other after we arrived back at our train station and handed the kids back to their parents, who seemed equally surprised they all still had ten fingers and toes each.

We went into town, where I got Gamma an ice-cream cone. She climbed halfway up a tree and ate it while listening to a big band that was playing outside.

That was Saturday. Sunday some relatives came over. We fed them until they went home again. Gamma had a great time both days. She said it was her best birthday ever.

Shopping for hardware is a complicated undertaking, so it’s essential to decide beforehand exactly what you want and how much you are willing to spend.

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I was, this morning in the shower, thinking about trackbacks and how my theory is they were a product of the obsessive-compulsive micro-managing personality of Mena, who once, years ago, mailed me when I linked her blog, asking me to change the text in the link to the correct name of her blog, I suppose for the search engine mojo or whatever, and how otherwise it would probably have taken a long time for anyone else to come up with the idea of trackbacks. And I was wondering, as I often had, what the hell the appeal of trackbacks ever was, since you could always see who was linking you from your traffic stats unless the link wasn’t sending any traffic your way and if it wasn’t who cares? And I guess, a trackback would be so other people could see who was linking you, and who cares if they do? Some people, I suppose. So for them, trackbacks might have been a good thing. I was never too crazy about them, because all mine did was show, on practiclly every post, how no one was linking that post. And I was also thinking how trackbacks are now dead, basically, due to trackback spammers, thanks a lot guys. And I was thinking how it would be ironic, or not ironic, but, well, funny, if Horst’s post on this topic, which I had just read, shortly before thinking all this stuff, got lots of trackbacks.

Beta’s not tired of blogging…

Girl: Who are your favorite female singers?
Man: Pff. Umm.
Girl: ?
Man: Uh. Annie Lennox is good. Cindi Lauper has a good voice. Uh.
Girl: ???????!???!!
Man: Oh, and of course Shakira.
Girl: Only third?
Man: Shakira, Shakira, Shakira.
Girl: Third place?
Man: So, so many singers. You know? Hard to… you can’t really rank… so, so many. Things to take into… to consider. You know?
Girl: Dad, dad, dad. Shakira is number one, Jennifer Lopez is number two.
Man: Naturally.

I was following this Orthodox Jewish guy around in my car, two guys actually, two young guys, then more, they were walking down the sidewalk and standing on the corner and I was looking for a place to park because I was on my way to a therapy session and my therapist is in a section of town where there happen to be a lot of your orthodox types and I always find good restaurants or a nice looking kosher shop looking for a place to park.

Cause kosher shops, you know, they can’t park just anywhere.

And I was looking at these guys, thinking, that’s a great look they have going. Dark suit, dark shoes, white shirt, you can’t go wrong. And I had to think about my grandfather. Not my Chicago-Irish paternal grandfather, the one who drank, the one who married the hot, young divorced Montana-Swedish singer with a kid already, the one who always said, You’re a gentleman and a scholar, the one who died before I was born, but my mother’s father, who also died before my birth, the one who spoke Yiddish, the one who suffered for years from diabetes and finally killed himself with a loaf of fresh bread when they left him home alone.

Yiddish, in Washington State. I listen to a radio station in Vienna, Oe1, which is so totally intelligent and interesting I’m kicking myself for not listening to it earlier. They have the most wonderful, smart programs and stories and music there and yesterday they had a special about Klezmer music and the scene in New York and they said around the turn of the century, the one 105 years ago I mean, there were a several million Yiddish speakers in New York, if I understood them right. 1-2 million, something like that. Or in the United States? or around the 1930s and not the turn of the century? I wasn’t listening too closely, I was driving, man.

Klezmer music is good music. It really rocks. They played a lot from the 1920s and 1930s, and to be honest the vocals, at least what they played… I can listen to the instrumental stuff longer. But any music gets on your nerves after a time, and what do I know anyway.

My mother still spoke some Yiddish with us, because her father had with them. Or she spoke it with me at least. I never spoke it to anyone, I know that. I feel like the ass end of American culture. I remember what it was like before it became homogenized and industrialized. As far as I know, my family is not Jewish, although there is this one great-great-grandmother who came from Alsace we’re not sure about. That would be his grandmother.

I used to work at a mortgage bank, back when I lived in the U.S., and there are these rules and conditions printed on the back of property deeds and they include, still today, things like, “the property may not be sold or rented to Jews” and so on. It’s illegal and carries no legal weight and no one pays attention to them; they’re just this historical appendix hanging there. It would be impractical to remove that stuff from millions of deeds, they just pass laws making that bit void. But what I’m saying is, I don’t know what I’m saying. He spoke Yiddish is all I’m saying.

When I was little I was attracted to flashier attire than I now wear. In a shop in Vancouver, when I was about ten or eleven, its name, back then, was “The Gay Blade”, I remember insisting that my mother buy me a paisley shirt. She said I had what her father would call “fingerspitsengefoo”. I said what’s that and she said it means you’re a flashy dresser. When I learned German, I found out that would correspond to the word “Fingerspitzengef