…not only are you an asshole, you’re a multipurpose asshole.

Melissa is talking about all of us. I dunno. I was going to leave a comment on her site. I probably still should. It’s not nice to talk about people behind their backs. She’s talking about the asshole nature of being human, which sounds like a title that would make Milan Kundera go, “Hey… that’s pretty g… nah.”

I pretty much agree with her, if I am understanding her right. If what she says about asshole nature is what I think about when I think about our inescapable culpability in everything.

I was at a big conference this week, of a large, very large international organization dedicated to development aid. Where a very eloquent American gentleman spoke in a very critical tone of changing priorities, of how a billion people live on less than $2 a day, of how the the United States, for example, but other developed countries are not necessarily doing better in this regard, spends so and so much on “defense” and so and so much on development aid and the “war on poverty” and how the two figures are shamefully out of proportion.

I spend $15 a month for hosting for my blog empire. What some people spend to live for a week, or two weeks. So I’m culpable too, as are you.

And asshole nature, yes, I’m ashamed of things I have done, of other things I continue to do. Less so, the older I get, partly because I grow more shameless, partly because I grow less shameful, I hope.

All you can do is move towards the light.

Recently I was wondering when I would be able to play on some sort of amateur orchestra. Stuck way in the back, say, hidden well away, but playing still. Today my cello teacher asked whether I’d be interested in playing on the music school orchestra, for some concert in May. Nothing difficult, and lots of it. I said okay, barring conflicts with previously-scheduled stuff. Yay.

This little cat might think it queer
To shit without a catbox near,
But fucking does it anyway…

I vote Eeksy-Peeksy for Poet Laureate.
And start lobbying now for the 2008 Nobel Literature Prize.

We went to an international bazaar last weekend. Xmas gifts, national foods, etc. Many people, many families milling about.
I couldn’t find the Irish stand right away, so instead of buying a can of Guinness I went to the Belgian stand and asked the man to recommend one of his many beers to me. He had cherry beer and raspberry beer and Weizenbeer and light beer and dark beer. I forget the name of the one I had. It’s the strong, dark one. Joeri probably knows which one I’m talking about.
Then I saw a guy drinking Guinness and asked him where he got it and went and got one for myself. It’s the best way to experience the world, all concentrated into a single convention hall like that, with a Guinness in your hand.
Then I heard bagpipes and went to investigate and it was the Scotland stand, where Alpha had a tea and scones, and I had a shot of Macallan’s fine single malt whiskey. I think Macallan’s is my favorite to be honest. I’m partial to the Islay whiskies, but Macallans is even better, I think.
Then my wife said I was drunk and we got into a big fight and she went off into Vienna to hang out with friends.
I wasn’t drunk, though.

Justice is, I think, the one thing all our souls hunger for most. Justice applied to other people, I mean. Especially Germans. We realize this on those rare occasions when we witness it in action.

I commute to work by car five days a week. On my drive, there is one spot on the freeway with an extra-long off ramp leading up to a bridge that is usually congested, meaning the cars on the off-ramp are backed up, sometimes for a mile, waiting to get off. And every day, some asshole jumps the line and merges into the off-ramp traffic at the very last moment, right at the end, where it veers off to go onto the bridge.

This requires you, usually, to slam on your brakes to avoid rearending them, and every week one sees glass on the road there, or sometimes even two smashed up cars where someone didn’t quite make it.

About once a month, you also see a police car parked on the emergency lane between where this offramp veers off, and the freeway. Watching for people taking cuts. Far too seldom, but whatever. They also have bankrobbers to catch I guess.

As an American, I learned only one thing in school: you don’t take cuts. Austrians don’t learn this lesson. They learn Latin instead. Europeans in general, except maybe the British, and even there I’m not sure, are not big on waiting their turn. Although, never having traveled much in Northern Europe, I might be leaving someone out, sorry if that’s the case.

I’ve also lived in Austria long enough to internalize the slight antagonism many people here feel towards their larger neighbor to the north. So when a BMW with German plates (Munich) took cuts right in front of me this morning, and I had to apply my brakes robustly to avoid an accident, I was doubly miffed. For some reason, though, I neither flashed my brights at him, nor availed myself of sign language. I just sighed and turned 9 Inch Nails up another notch.

Maybe it was the good karma points I earned by not reacting with anger; we’ll never know. But there was a policeman waiting on the emergency strip. And he flagged the BMW over. And he stopped me and when I rolled down my window, he asked, “Did that guy take cuts?” (actually, literally, he asked he in fine Austrian dialect “if that guy had pinched in front of” me). To which I could only nod, and say, “Oh, totally.”

I wanted to hug him.

Q: You have one fourteen-year-old harpist, pretty, for extra bonus points pretty in the way the pretty ones in your family are, pretty like your cousin who defined beauty for you, and she plays beautifully, you were so moved, everyone in the church was, the way she led two violins and a cello through Morfar Frenhines and The Burning of the Piper’s Hut. When did she get that big, you wonder, her in a borrowed skirt and motorcycle boots up in front of the altar, when did she get so grown up? When you leave, and she climbs into the car, a medium-sized car, a Fiat Dobl