The new desk & other matters

Whoa. This thing looks a lot bigger in here than it did in the store. I really don't know what to do with this. It's in the living room right now.

I think I did something to my back dragging it in. Just that little twinge I sometimes get when I lift something I shouldn't. I hurt it pretty badly about ten years ago -- running a weed-eater, of all things -- and I've had intermittent trouble with it ever since.

When I lived in San Antonio, my entire living space was the living room and dining area of a one-bedroom apartment. The bedroom was full of crap I brought with me. That apartment was really nice. Lots of windows, trees all over the property, not at all like most modern apartment complexes. Beasley, Smudge and I were quite content in that living room and dining area. Beasley was a full-time indoor cat back then, as Smudge still is, and we all got along great.

Now I'm in a space three times that size, and I feel worse off in many ways. I have a back bedroom, again filled with crap, which I can't bring myself to enter. The laundry room -- which is a walled-in sleeping porch -- is so nasty I can't stand to be in it. I'll go out the front door and around to the back to avoid going through that nasty little laundry room.

There's an interesting article in the current Buddhadharma magazine questioning whether Western Buddhists have 'gone soft' on renunciation. As I mentioned here before, although probably in different words, renunciation shouldn't be a chore or a sacrifice, but a joy. I certainly didn't feel I was sacrificing when I emptied those twenty or however many trash bins of junk. (Was that just last year? How did the place get so full again?) Getting rid of that stuff -- renouncing it, in essence -- was liberating and exhilarating. As was giving up the 'suit life' when I ended one of my previous careers. I need to renounce more stuff and get my material life back to where it was in 2000-2001.

Hit Borders and B&N today -- yes, more material stuff to renounce.

Two CD's: Three ragas by Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and Didgeridoomania II by David Corter.

Plus a book on the teachings of Ajahn Chah -- the 'glass is already broken' guy I mentioned a few weeks back.

So, iTunes is back on, I have a bigass desk in my living room, two sticks of Nag Champa are burning, and even as I write this, my back is starting to bother me. I'm going to take some aspirin and try to sleep.

iTunes: Tibetan Sound Bowls, Karunesh