I try to speak English to Gamma so she’ll learn it. Sometimes she speaks it back to me, sometimes our conversations sound like this:

Gamma: (riding on my shoulders) Wieso sagt man “Glatze”? Woher kommt das Wort, eigentlich?
Me: (Sigh.) Um… I wonder…
Gamma: Ich meine… naja, von “glatt”! Nat

I’ve got a pattern going on here don’t I. I can see it.

Right now this works as a joke, doesn’t it? Just asking. In two weeks it’s vapid nonsense. But for a single fortnight… a two-week window of significance.

TV, radio, hammer: increasingly what… increasingly sophisticated forms of entertainment.

“It was probably just some little, tiny job too, wasn’t it?” he said to me when I explained how my finger got blue.

“I was hammering in a single… a single thing to keep the tortoise in, because she keeps trying to escape.” A single stake-like contraption to fill a hole in the fence. Got my finger on the first swing. When I hurt myself, I’m very efficient.

It’s not really that bad. It only hurts when I play a B-flat on the A string. Unfortunately, this new song I’m learning has a few of them. It goes from B-flat to D above that, so I’ve got my hand stretched out and press down with the right corner of the tip of my index finger, seen from above, which is the part that got smashed.

It had to be the B-flat, too, the note that, every time I play it, I have to think, why do they have to call it a B in German? In German, a B-flat is called B and B is called H. There’s a historical reason for it but I prefer to complain about it.

When I was a kid, my dad had this transistor radio that got AM, FM and several short-wave bands and I used to lie in bed at night and reel through the stations and press the little button that lit up the dial.

Just kidding. I mean, not kidding, he did have a radio like that, and it played an important role in my young life. I mean, kidding that I’m going to do another appliance post this… ok, either you get the joke or… if I explain it it’s not funny.

Maybe it’s…

Enough cellos and enough appliances for a while, is all I’m saying.

I didn’t write anything because I… for several reasons. Mainly I was in too good a mood until yesterday, when I was too cranky. And we had a three-day weekend here, and I don’t do weekends.

And I was busy doing stuff. Fixing the flowerbeds in the yard. Flattening my left index finger with a sledgehammer. Well, not a sledge hammer, just this blunt, about eight-pound hammer I use to hammer in stakes and stuff.

I used to work… I worked in a cannery summers when I was in college, for a while. Squirting big machines with a high-pressure hose, mostly, washing off the algae that grew so fast in that hot, moist, deafening climate. Every now and then I let a dead mouse ride past on the conveyor belt because then the ladies found it as they picked sub-standard green beans out of the other beans and we all got a ten minute break as the heavy-duty cleaning crew came in and disinfected everything.

I was… so long ago and I remember my job title: nubbin-grader operator. There were these big rotating bins with perforated sides; sliced-up beans fell into them and were sorted by size.

There was this one guy there, a boxer, little guy with solid, big arms, told lots of stories about beating people up in bars and driving grain threshers east of the mountains, and harvesting corn and coming out covered with red mites.

One day the boss praised me as I left, for doing whatever constitutes a good job as a nubbin-grader operator, not falling off the catwalk and not getting your hand torn off by the hypnotically-rotating drum I suppose, and I was so pleased by his praise that I stepped into an open drainage trench in the concrete floor and nearly broke my leg.

Since then, I’ve noticed that I take praise poorly. It makes me unwary, and I stab myself in the hand with a chisel or hit my finger with a big hammer so hard the tip ruptures and blood squirts. It was actually kind of cool. Blood dripped onto my other hand and I wiped it onto the injured finger on my way into the house to get a bandaid, and I noticed it made the finger look even scarier, so I wiped it around a little more to make it look even worse before showing it to Alpha, nonchalantly. “Eh, hit myself with the hammer again.” Drip, drip. She disappointed me by remaining cool.

I don’t know. Other people’s opinions shouldn’t matter so much. Someone says something nice, I send them a mail playing dumb and asking them to elaborate, just to drag it out. They say something nasty, I ban their ISP and delete their comment, or whatever the real-life version of that is. Or not. And besides, I’m far too nice, no one ever says anything nasty to me.

I used to listen to various preachers on that radio as my family slept. The dial glowed blue and they talked about redemption or sin or whatever. Later I found a station that played Alan Watts. The summer I was 17 they played the Ramones and the Sex Pistols and I thought, Wow.

Which Apocalyptica guy are you?
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A TV that just turns right off is no fun. When I was a kid, you turned a TV off, the picture shrank to a rectangle, then a bright point that lingered for a while. Maybe it made a crackling, static noise too, or was that just our TV? And maybe the screen was covered with static electricity, so more crackle if you touched it.

If it rained alot and you couldn’t go play outside and you’d already drawn every monster and dragster you could think of and got bored, you could amuse yourself for a time turning the TV on, then off again, and then back on just before that point of light disappeared for good. How long could you make that point of light last before it went black?

Now, you turn the TV off, it just turns off.

The human soul, I think, is like the old TV sets. Before you die it shrinks to a small, glowing point of light that grows weaker then vanishes. This process may take minutes or hours in some people, decades in others.

Another thing I’m thinking: if I sometimes act as if I consider myself the center of the universe, it’s because I am. Anyone that pisses off is overlooking the fact that they are also the center of the universe; that the universe has as many centers as it has points of consciousness.

That’s our job, being the center of the universe. God stands there at the side of a gravel road on a balmy summer evening, watching all these glowing dots hovering in the bushes like fireflies. Maybe he puts several into a jar with holes in the lid and uses it for a flashlight, shaking the jar now and then to make the dots glow harder. Maybe he squishes one and draws a glowing heart on his arm, just for the hell of it. But mostly, I think, he just watches.

A person will take the bad apple if it’s the last one in the fruit basket and they really want fruit for lunch. I know, I did this morning. I felt a little sorry for it, too. I have this thing for underdogs.

Gamma got the remains of some olive bread, sliced, with broiled turkey breast inside, and a banana with something written on it (note to parents: don’t get started with the banana notes, it seems nice at first and kids (etc.) like it, but eventually you run out of clever things to write and have a banana crisis every morning, standing there with a writing implement in one hand (in my case, a fork, I bruise the notes into the banana skin with the tine) and the banana in the other, a look of concentration on your face) and three cherry tomatoes. Alpha got similar turkey between two slices of a triangular loaf of whole wheat sort of bread, a banana with something else written on it and tomatoes. I took two pears and the apple. The pears are longish, yellowish-brownish. The apple is gravensteiny-looking, and is bad on one side where something got poked into it a few days ago and it’s been going soft since then. On the other side is a bare spot where I peeled off the sticker (Great Idea! Let’s put apple-shaped logos on all our apples, so when customers think of our product, they think of apples!).

The rest of the bunch was unspoiled.