8:55 p.m.

Dead again.

It's not the back-aches and physical demands of parenthood which exhaust me. It's the hour-after-hour of answering EVERY question, starting to fulfill one request only to be interrupted by a second, occasionally conflicting one, and then of course, while doing this stuff, also making sure to pull the kids out of the path of oncoming streetcars. That's what slays me.

I never learn. At 2 p.m., I'm always excited, thinking, 'Tonight's gonna be great--I'll knock out a blog post, surf the weirdest MP3 sites, finish that cool photo project, then build my punk rok website!' And at 8 p.m., as the kids finally lay smoldering under their comforters, I sit back on the brown couch and do not want to do Anything--including mindless surfing or calling one of the dear friends I miss the most back in the US of A. Even watching an episode of Deadwood seems too tall an order.

But last night, I staggered onto a number 5 train, then somehow perambulated my lifeless corpse into the Prater fairground. Otherwise known as the Wurstel Prater (Sausage Park), it was shrouded in fog, and about sixty percent shut down for the winter season. My favorite arcade is open for a few more weeks, though, and once I got there, I gawped to see there were already people playing Theatre of Magic, Invaders from Mars, and Monster Bash. So I made an unorthodox choice. The late classic Williams machine left unoccupied was Medieval Madness--that would have been the professional player's choice. Instead, I bellied up to Scared Stiff (also known as the second Elvira machine.) And I Liked it.



Pinball, of all things, remains one of the simple electro-magnetic pleasures that will almost always make me feel better. Even put a grin on my face. Tonight, as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, made "jokes" about Deadheads and oral sex, I--well--I laffed.

What is it about the recorded voice of a buxotic goth girl former horror movie host, making vaguely lewd wisecracks from within the guts of an obsolete console of blinking lights and metal switches that just tickles the adolescent in me? Even our most highly paid scientists may never know.

Sardinia, part 2

Five years ago, I couldn't have told you where Sardinia was, let alone why Europeans go all dreamy when they talk about it. Today I can say, definitively, that Sardinia is a big, hot-ass island off the coast of Italy, with beautiful beaches and an awful lot of German tourists.

Anette and Adinah and V. and I slept in a camper and cooked outside almost every night in a camping village by the sea. Adinah zipped in and out of the water like a flying fish and loved it, but V. never went all the way in--maybe something about the movement of the waves or the vastness of the ocean gives a 20-month-old kid the creeps. When we tried dipping her in the water, she just screamed. But she did have a lot of fun running around nekkid.

My favorite moment may have been wading into the waves with Adinah, turning away from her for a moment, then turning back to see her upside down in a small breaker, just two little crazy legs swirling around in a washing machine of surf. She was laughing when she came up and she instantly ran off to tell everyone else about it.

No. My favorite part was the routine: swimming twice a day, eating fresh salad and white peaches, actually reading after the kids had gone down in the evening, and then sleeping like a stone myself.

Wait, no. My really favorite thing was the Dr. Who pinball machine at the cantina, and the day I racked up the second-highest score ever, thus earning the title of both Best Time Lord and Loop Champion, and then put my name up in lights on the LED display of the machine!

Probably better than all of that was the fact that for almost ten days, I didn't think about my job, or e-mails, or the future of the publishing industry, or my phone, or the shitty weather in Vienna, or where we're going to be living in two years, or Barack Obama, or this blog. I, unplugged.

Sopranos Pinball in Italy

On Saturday morning, I sit through a presentation by Jonas Ridderstraale, the bald and black-leather-wristbanded author of a "bestseller" called "Funky Business." He's here to talk about revitalizing the corporation, but he waxes sociological too, especially when he proclaims that the citizens of the Republic of Britney Spears now matter more as a market to most companies than do the citizens of, say, Belgium. Because you see, nation states no longer have a sense of themselves, and instead, people tend to group themselves into tribes. It's meant to be deep, but it's just a twenty dollar makeover of Ned Beatty's climactic speech at the end of Network, a film made in 1976.

A short while after this, I find that I must leave this place, this Fair of Ideas. So I walk across the street to the shopping mall with the pyramid on top of it. Shop & Play.

What I discover inside is lane after lane of stores so tacky and fake-fur-encrusted they would make the merchants of Manhattan's 14th Street blush. I look for a little something for Adinah, but the toy shop is filled with chinzy plastic action figures and cartoon characters I don't even recognize, so I flee. I have lust for an ice cream, but all I can find is an American Frozen Yogurt kiosk. I get a small cup of strawberry.

And I play pinball. The arcade has four games, so I try each, pick my favorite and have been amusing it for a few minutes before I realize what I am doing. I am playing a Sopranos pinball game in Italy.

It's pretty fun, although I'm not sure how any regulator could have ever thought it was an appropriate machine for children or adolescents. There's a plastic stripper figure who slides up and down a pole, there's a dot-matrix graphic of a guy getting beaten to death, and one object of the game is to advance from the rank of Soldier to Good Earner to Boss. I get to Acting Capo. And I smack the stripper target hard enough to get the backglass to flash the words "Totale Bing!" But the best part of it is the old man voice who keeps yelling something which sounds like, "Bambi la Gada!"

How odd it must be for some of the Italian teens milling around me to play this game and see a cliche of Italy filtered through an array of Hollywood bells and whistles. Do they recognize anything of their culture or their country or themselves in this contraption? Maybe it's just entertainment for them. But I think that if they do play Sopranos pinball in Italy (because not too many kids under thirty do play the game anywhere anymore), they will at least recognize that this mechanical cartoon of the Mafia and pasta is supposed to be somehow Italian. Some of them might even be self-possessed enough to say, 'Yo, that is not how you get to be an Acting Capo.'

So please, don't tell me people don't know who they are anymore. To that I say, 'Bambi La Gada!!'