a flash of lightning, passing.

We still refer to J as "the boy," and we will for a long time, even though he's now maybe an inch taller than Anna, which means 1.5 inches taller than me. It's weird for him to be taller than his parents, as though a body at 13 isn't already enough to contend with, so at his request we've stopped measuring for the time being.

He is a remarkable human by any measure, and further so as an autism-spectrum person, but he is more typically autistic in many respects, including a difficulty making friends. So we were blown away a few years ago when he made a friend on his own, a very sweet kid a couple years younger. We got to know his mother, and met his older sister occasionally. I don't think we met his father (though more on that in a moment). Years passed, and the friend decided to change his name from one masculine name to another, but also to start using they/them/their pronouns.

The dad has some typical abuse/control problems, and moved the family up to Oregon, away from the support network they'd built down here. It turns out I'd interviewed the friend's father for a job a long time ago, and further that the friend's parents had once brought a hailstorm of drama and heartbreak down on folks I met separately. I mean a crazy hailstorm, like "if they tried to get on Judge Judy, no one would believe it actually happened" kind of crazy. In the back of my mind, I knew the dad lived here in town, and it's not surprising that they should be at the same school (for quirky kids) together, but that they should independently befriend each other is pretty out there.

(The father's ex-wife is re-married but still uses his last name; the friend's mother uses her maiden name, so I didn't see the connection until everyone was tagged in a Facebook photo.)

Last month, J's friend N committed suicide, at age 11. Powerless, un-heard, un-seen, un-accepted. Just...gone.

"It is impossible, when we're children, to acknowledge how vulnerable we are."

It could have been me. It almost was. Nothing in particular made it be otherwise. It's not like I knew things would get better with time. Just...luck.

still listening to this one.

Following up on my previous post, I actually did take the Bar Violin and tuned it from GDAE down to DDAD. Nothing magical happened, viz.

1. It sounds crappy. No surprise there: a string's size and composition vary depending on what pitch you want it to sound good at (and what your instrument will tolerate without breaking).
2. "Midnight On the Water" doesn't sound that much better (the low D in particular is just a drone), and I still can't play "Bonaparte's Retreat."

They can, though:

I can play backup on the slow one. It's a process.

frets are for chumps.

I'm still learning the violin! It's great. It's an absurd instrument, but as long as I'm willing to spend 10 minutes trying to get the same 6 notes right, gratification is near-instant. My teacher says that's the great thing about teaching adults: we understand that repetition is not exciting, but that's how you learn stuff.

(Years ago a guy taught a first-aid class at the dojo, and he had this defensive/defusing banter down about how we were all going to hate him by the end because of the repetition. I went up to him at the break and said, "I see why you need that elsewhere, but you should understand that you're teaching a roomful of people who have quite literally spent decades doing the same movements over and over, and we get it. You can relax a bit." Which he didn't, very much, but I tried.)

I have a 5-day work conference in San Diego in May, and I don't really want to go a week without playing, so I'll bring the violin along and hope the practice mute and the normal hotel soundproofing work well enough that I can practice without complaints.

I'm at the point in Volume 1 of the Suzuki Method where the music gets more interesting, because "It's by Bach, instead of Suzuki." In this case it's Minuet #1, and YouTube is full of people playing it who clearly had it under their belts quite some time ago, if you're interested. I just play it over and over, mostly in bits and pieces, doggedly trying again and again until I get it better.

My fingers have a memory of their own. I'll play a passage, make an identifiable new mistake, decide to fix it on the next run-through, only to have my fingers make the same mistake. This is where I hit a wall performing as a classical guitarist, not just that I didn't practice enough (which was certainly true) but that my fingers just...didn't do what I told them to do, and it was worse with performance nerves.

Some years back, Anna read or saw a story from someone with autism, who said that they would tell their body to do something, like "raise my right hand," and instead their body just came out with some randomized action. Anna asked J if he ever felt that way, and without looking up, said "Yeah. All the time."

So it happens that trying to play an actual instrument with fine motor control might be my only analogue to his physical experience. (I can definitely be sensorily overwhelmed, but not in quite the same way, and I can power through it if that's what's needed.)

Did I mention I actually went to physical therapy for my left thumb? My thumbs took some heavy hurting from aikido, and then I fell on my left hand a while back walking the dog, which didn't matter much until I tried keeping my left thumb from clamping onto the violin neck. One of many differences about the violin is that you are not using the left thumb to press on the neck to counteract the force of pushing your fingers down on the string. This is the opposite of the guitar, so I was trying to keep my thumb away from the neck, at the same time as these accumulated injuries pulled in the opposite direction, and then that really hurt. PT's been so helpful, I forgot to make more appointments.

I was doing some reading this weekend and learned that:

• Aaron Copland's Rodeo was actually a ballet score;
• he was kind of in a hurry, so "Hoe-Down" (known to earlier generations as "the music from 'Beef. It's What's For Dinner.'") is a pretty direct orchestration of a fiddle tune called "Bonaparte's Retreat";
• actually, it's an orchestration of the 1941ish transcription of a single 1937 recording of one guy's way of playing a song he called "Bonaparte's Retreat."
• (It kind of keeps going, but I'll spare you.)

I did eventually track down some sheet music for it, and it's...well beyond my level right now, even if I were willing to alter my violin tuning. For an exploration of the subject, I refer the reader to the Bluegrass Intelligencer article "Old-Time Music Permanently Revokes All Song Titles."

at least we have high-quality weed.

[Seriously. I thought I smelled skunks a couple nights out walking the dog, then realized it was surely just the mighty marijuana available here, now even closer to legality than before.]

The Bay Area is headed for a painful inflection point, which I call the Low-Wage Apocalypse.

Go through a normal week's errands and far too many businesses have HELP WANTED signs on them. Restaurants, coffee shops, stores are all trying to hire people for $12-$16 an hour to be dishwashers, line cooks, register clerks, baristas. Rents have skyrocketed, and people who don't work in tech often just can't afford to live here any more, no matter how clever they get. According to Zillow, our house--which no one else wanted (and now we know why)--is worth 225% what we paid 5 years ago. Zillow's numbers trend high around here, and the house is nicer now, but not quite that much nicer. We did get it re-assessed for real a couple years back, and that assessment was a mere 158% of the purchase price.

Now see that rents have increased by at least that much, and it's a wonder more people haven't left yet.

We're getting wound up for a market correction, but I've never heard of this happening and it's not obvious to me what it looks like. I've only got two scenarios:

1. Hourly wages rise to match housing prices.
2. Non-housing prices (goods and services) rise to pay for the higher wages.
3. Consumers (a) suck it up and pay $6 for a small coffee that the hourly-wage set still can't afford, or (b) consume less, which damages small businesses in the ways small businesses can be damaged.

or...

1. Something stops the fountain of money: either a hollowing-out of the tech industry, or a major earthquake.
2. Prices tank precipitously.

Anna's in the middle of a few grand plans for the house and yards, partly for now, partly because J will probably be at home for some number of years regardless of how the Low-Wage Apocalypse plays out. Looks a little grim.

the intellect returns.

I've had lots of good sleep recently, leading to all kinds of strange conditions, like not falling asleep during the day, and holding more context in my head at once. As Anna points out, these are not necessarily the first things I want to recover--most of me would prefer to be jogging or doing aikido again--but they're no less real for my stubborn ingratitude. She pointed out that I'm reading more books at once, on steadily more esoteric subjects: I've been chewing through all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, which aren't challenging, only numerous (I think I've read about 20 out of 40something), but also Cixin Lu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, and the surprisingly erudite-yet-accessible The Chinese Typewriter: A History. For truly boring books, I slogged through A Natural History of the Piano, and after many, many months, I finished Cuisine and Empire: Cooking In World History, which isn't terribly obscure, but does contain a lot of detail I didn't just want to skim past.

Looking at my lists, I think the number of books I can usefully rotate through, approximated by how many books I can return to and pick up the thread of the text, is going up, as well as how many of those books live in the world outside undergraduate syllabi.

Learning stuff is fun. Not for any particular reason, except what the Nobel-laureate physicist(/chauvinist/womanizing asshole) Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out." I doubt I'll ever find a use for the contents of Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (a history of many-worlds/universes theories from antiquity until now), but more to the point, I'm not sure why it should have to be useful in order to be interesting.