“Mig is in another wood phase.”
-Alpha, to her mother, yesterday

Gamma and I built a feeding box/and/or living quarters for the hedgehog that’s been lurking about, and we built a birdhouse.

“It’s okay to cuss in dad’s workshop.”
-Gamma, to her sister

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That Waris Dirie is one fine-looking person, wow. I mean it. Wonder if she can mix a mojito.

Gah, I’m out of gum…

I’ve been thinking about that race my wife and daughter ran in. There is a long post I could put here, but I think I’ll keep it to myself, to the extent that I am able to do that. I will list a few of the highlights, though, for me, in no particular order:

• Gamma got to do somersaults in the inflatable castle.

• Watching a chubby young Moslem woman in a headscarf start, and finish the race (with a decent time). I was rooting for her.
• You know that cartoon character Tintin (has different names in different languages, I believe)? There were two young women running who had that exact same haircut – short with that cowlick sticking up in front, in bright orange. One finished way before the other, then came back through the crowd, climbed back through the fence onto the course and finished with her friend, holding hands. The race, in general, was a big mix of people from every political etc quarter. These two women were wearing shirts with a team name on the back with Dyke-something in the name. There was also a group named Run Against Racism, and some lefties, and the Social Democrats had a tent, and the conservative party did, and the rightist party also had a tent.
• After the race, we walked around eating food. At one tent they were giving away Kaiserschmarren which was this desserty thing that looks like badly-made crepes and was pretty good. Some guy took our picture, but I wandered out of the frame, a habit of mine. My daughter was a bit put off by all the women milling about wearing t-shirts embossed with some slogans of the rightist party here. Later, we went back for more and noticed that it was the tent of the rightist party. So we figure my wife and daughter will eventually turn up on some FPOe campaign poster… Not crazy about their politics, but they can sure make Kaiserschmarren.

Gamma wants to enter the kids’ race next year.
There, I got all the way through the post without writing anything embarassing about how it felt to see your kid finish a race like that, after watching her struggle for life as a little preemie. In fact, I didn’t actually see her cross the finish line, as it was so crowded all I saw was my wife race past with a big grin on her face. But you know what I mean.

Some people I’m related to ran in a 5k race in Vienna today together with 9000 other women and Gamma and I watched and cheered them on. Weather was perfect, overcast and cool and windless and Gamma got to jump around in an inflated castle with other little kids and I saw this beautiful woman sitting in the VIP area who I thought looked a lot like Waris Dirie, only better looking and when we got home someone told me that Waris Dirie had been at the race, and I was all like, Well, I saw someone even better-looking.

Also, Ronald Reagan was still alive?

Otherwise known (starting now) as “solar rectum syndrome”. I was reading this article somewhere, see, about some woman with a little kid, otherwise known as a “baby” and she mentioned that she tried to… not to make it behave, as you can’t make a baby behave, but tried to time said baby’s feeding times and sleep patterns to her restaurant visits, such that said “baby” would not disrupt the dining experience of other diners. And she mentioned that other mothers — especially, in her view, mothers having their first kids over forty (mothers’ age, not kids’ — my mother has her first kid over forty right now, as I was her first kid and am now over forty; what I mean is that these mothers this woman was referring to are over forty when they have their first kid) (this woman felt okay in saying this as she herself was over forty, with a little “baby” but had other kids much earlier) and she said these other women seemed to believe that the sun shone out their children’s asses and they as a result found it cute when these little kids ran around stealing other people’s forks etc. And she tried to avoid being irritating in that way.

It made me wonder whether the sun really shone out my own kids’ asses, as I had always believed, or whether I suffered from SRS and just thought it did.

I suppose both are possible – ones kids can be genuinely exceptional and the parent can still be less than objective.

This occurred to me just now because I caught myself about to type something describing Gamma banging on the piano as sort of Johnny B. Goode decomposed in an elevator by John Cale.

On the other hand, she stood me in front of the piano yesterday and told me which note each key was, and she’s never had a lesson.

A Volkswagen Touran was in front of me in traffic this morning. It is a sort of van. If there were a compact version of that, wouldn’t “Tourette” be a great name for it?

After midnight, summer, I’m sixteen or seventeen which would make it ehm 1975 or so. Everyone else in the house is asleep and I’m in bed listening to my dad’s radio down low, some local FM station out of Portland. This time of night Alan Watts is on.

This radio, if you turn on the little light by holding down the small white button, you can see the station it’s tuned to, but it wears down the batteries faster. This is the only station worth listening to, though, so I didn’t use the light much. Later, in 1976 or 1977 they’ll be the first ones to play the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.

Right now, Alan Watts and Zen and stuff. He tells a story about a master and a disciple walking around and they see a guy with an elephant, and the student asks the master, So if this is all Maya then that elephant is illusion too? And the master says, yeah but… and the disciple to prove his faith in his teacher lies himself down in front of the animal and asks the elephant guy to make it step on him, which it does, and he is crushed. Guess I should have explained to him that he’s also illusion, the guru says.

Imagine another man, years later, now in fact, or yesterday to be precise, squatting down inside a gigantic wading pool so that those outside the pool cannot see him. And he is scooping water into a bucket and dumping the bucket into the yard, totally concentrated on this action, living in the moment. And he doesn’t exactly reach enlightenment in this instant, but he does think, This must be a lot like what Zen must be like. And he thinks, You know, Zen retreats are for pussies. This is on his mind because he just heard from someone about someone else who’d spent 7 years in a Zen monastery in Korea.

He thinks, any path to enlightenment is as good as any other path, because only the enlightenment counts. Whether you shave your head and let some guy hit you in the shoulders with a long bamboo rod and meditate or whether you have kids and pets and mortgages and bills and lessons and a large wading pool that fills with awful filth during the winter and must be laboriously cleaned out in the summer, the precise path does not matter as all lead to enlightenment, and none do.

He thinks further, if anything, the Suburban Path to enlightement is superior, since attaining Enlightenment, if it involves anything more than simply attaining enlightenment, likely involves letting go of desires and frustrations and attachments, and what has more of those than this life? Consider this pool I am currently squatting down inside, not for the first time this weekend, but the second, he thinks. First I make my wife promise, if she wants a pool she has to clean it out herself, but then she has something else urgent to do and who woulda thought, here I am scooping black gunk into three buckets, then lifting them out of the pool, then climbing out of the pool on this rickety ladder made of tubular aluminum, then dumping the buckets into the yard, then climbing back in and repeating the process. Then after that is completed and the pool is emptied and scrubbed (and here he admits to himself that his wife did the scrubbing while he did the scooping and dumping) it is filled with fresh water. And once it is full, he thinks, once it is full and only then, we noticed the little hole in the very bottom, through which water was leaking out and very, very slowly flooding the cellar, so he pumped out all the water, cubic meter after cubic meter of expensive clean drinking water, and climbed back in and scooped a second time, this time helped by his wife. If I could let go of that, he thinks, I would be enlightened maybe.

Or waking up on a morning with a hangover and realizing far too late that a seven year old girl with a brand new piano can mean only one thing: 8 solid hours of improvisation.

Or the hedgehog that visited. He thinks of the wonder he felt himself at watching it, and the look of wonder in his daughter’s face when she said, That’s my first hedgehog ever. And he realizes then that, yes, the last ones they had he released up in the woods far from the streets on the very day she was born.

Or the sound bites this Path provides him, such as his kid saying, I have a piano in one ear and a hedgehog in the other.

He wonders if enlightenment would be worth giving all this up for. When he finishes scooping, he pulls a few weeds.

Oh, goody, the breathalyzer on my PC is broken.

“…excellent as a pre-dinner drink”??? WTF??? Here it is, 23.50 at night, I’ve been pouring this stuff for hours, and it’s supposed to be a pre-dinner single-malt? Hell with that, I had a gin tonic as an aperitif, dude. Then a nice red with dinner (pasta), and since then, Glenkinchie.

I shant be embarrassing, my kid reads this. I’m never embarrassing to my kids. Around my kids. Whatever.

Heh.

Self-publishing is a double-edged sword, isn’t it?

Two things: be careful what you hate, and not interesting in person:

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