Occasionally you notice a perfect word. “Lumber” isn’t a bad word. I drove to work behind a lumber truck this morning. I like the smell of lumber, the way it looks, the sound of the word and the way it describes a heavy way of moving. There is a word in Austrian German for what is called the hiccough or hiccup in English, not a bad word itself; unbeatable in onomatopoetic terms. When you drive a little girl to her daycare place in the morning, who has just lost both front teeth to the tooth fairy, and she’s hiccupping in the back seat, and says she has a “Schnackerl”, that’s a perfect word. It is an Austrian dialect diminutive form, that “-erl” at the end, but as far as I know “Schnack” itself means nothing in German. But Schnackerl, perfect.

What’s a cathedral next to a field of poppies? Not literally next to, I mean; “compared to” a field of poppies, I mean. There’s this field of them — of poppies, not cathedrals — beside the freeway at the moment that is nearly sluttish in its profligacy, sluttish in a holy way, though, that conflagration of red exploding in what started out as a wheat field. Daily I am amazed that it has not caused accidents yet, because I nearly have to pull over onto the shoulder when I see it. Next to that, a cathedral is a dank dead place. When I die, put me wherever you want, because I’ll be dead, in a better or worse place, or no place at all, who knows; but for now I’m alive, and I’ll take the poppies, or the jasmine or the sweet purple bush in my back yard, or little girls with no front teeth saying “Schnackerl”.

War is not freedom, not even for the dead.

That wasn’t half bad.

[I've added a bit in the extended entry part.]

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Our youngest daughter, small for her age, has been getting so much money lately from the Tooth Fairy (lost both upper incisors) that she decided to go shopping, alone, for our breakfast this morning.

Her mother helped her with a list – juice, ham, six rolls… and walked her to the local Eh Market (too small to be a Super Market, but since they know everyone in our village they let you run a tab) but had to wait outside.

“There’s the cutest little girl shopping in there,” people coming out of the store told my wife. And, “she stood in front of the bakery section forever before getting up the nerve to order, ‘six rolls please’.”

When she finally came out, she had everything. Six fresh rolls for breakfast, juice, cold cuts. And the latest “Princess” magazine, of which she never misses an issue.

And to think the Tooth Fairy nearly woke her up last night, after silently finding the tooth (right under her head as always) and replacing it with a

Negative Pleasures

I can perform fine, as long as there’s no audience; that’s one reason why I don’t attend a lot of orgies. Next Monday I play cello with the recorder ladies at their recorder class recital. We (this is sounding familiar to me, if I’ve already posted about this please just humor me) rehearsed Monday in the hall where it’s going to take place, and I did just fine until I made the mistake of imagining the room full of an audience, at which point my fingers switched to autopilot and started wandering around the neck of my cello, no longer under my control. Also, I blushed and got all flustered. At the mere thought.

Last night I tried to practice the piece at home, and had all sorts of new problems. I don’t know what to do about it. There’s nothing I could take. The amount of any drug sufficient to calm me down, even the most harmless, such as chamomille tea, would poison me first.

Michele once remarked on her blog that, before giving a speech or something, she tried to imagine the members of the audience dead. I don’t think that would help me either. My oldest daughter, who plays lots of concerts, recitals, etc., has little sympathy. My youngest daughter, on the other hand, strongly resembles me in this manifestation of shyness. My wife says, “you better not make any mistakes, your children will be sitting in the audience.”

I need a different creative pursuit, one with an invisible audience, say, but that could somehow still give feedback. Ideally something I could do from work…