I hate to waste sick leave on illness.

Reading Westika's blog post on Skipping School – especially the main part which really is about skipping work - reminded me of one of my axioms: "I hate to waste sick leave on illness."

Some of you have heard me tell the story of driving to work a couple of times in the mid-eighties, sitting in my car and looking at the building's employee entrance, and then backing out of the driveway and going back home to call in sick. That place was a full time drama-go-round, and there were days I simply couldn't bear to be there (although I would have to point out that most of my coworkers didn't seem fazed by it at all, and some thrived on it).

In my current job, we're allowed to take vacation time in 15-minute increments, so it's relatively easy to bug out for awhile - and as Crow said, 'if you in a bag, you gotta bug out.'

I've been bugging out more and more lately as my final day approaches. I don't hate the job - it's the best one I've ever had - but I've been doing it for five and a half years, and I haven't had three consecutive days of vacation.

The best job I ever had - but I'll be glad when it's over.

You've probably heard the expression 'If you don't work, you don't eat.' It sounds like some Protestant work ethic thing, but actually it's a Zen saying from Asia. And the idea of not working - even though I don't have to - still bothers me a little. I want to be doing something, and I guess I'll find something.

A dream

I dreamt I became a Pentecostal evangelist.

I was still a Buddhist in my own beliefs, but people were so swayed and energized by my dynamic, forceful personality and speaking (this is a dream, remember) that I was extremely effective as an evangelist.

I was preaching to a group of people. I don't remember what I was saying, but they kept interrupting me to speak in tongues and I was starting to get frustrated.

Old ways of thinking

I am still struggling with old ways of thinking. This is part of the reason I find myself depressed at times.

I won't go into a lot of detail, except to say that these old attachments and desires did me no good at all for the years they dominated my outlook. They caused me more pain than happiness, time and time again.

It would make sense, in a sort of perverse way, if I had made fifty million dollars as an email spam supremo and I was having trouble giving it up. But this is more like having repeatedly hit my my head on the ground while bungee-jumping from bridges, yet waking up in the middle of the night missing bungee-jumping.

---

"I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit."

– attributed to Mark Twain

Our default state, as I wrote previously, is to not exist. The universe was around for billions of years before my arrival, and the energy and atoms which at the moment make up what I still tend to think of as 'me' were, during all those millennia, part of the vast, unthinking, unknowing machinery of the cosmos.

The same thing is true of all of us. Our basic material spins and hums as the planets orbit their stars, then suddenly, bam! We are tumbled out of that eternal mechanism, jumbled, bumped and tossed about for a few decades, just long enough to wonder, 'Hey... what the fuck?!'

Then, with none of our achievements or failures, pains or pleasures having registered more than the most infinitesimal impact, we are pulled back into the cosmic clockwork from which we were previously ejected, and it all goes on as if we were never here at all.

Tuesday a.m.

The emperor asked, "I have endowed temples and authorized ordinations - what is my merit?"
"No merit at all," Bodhidharma answered.
The emperor asked, "What is the first principle of the holy teaching?"
"Vast emptiness, nothing holy," Bodhidharma replied.
The emperor was upset. "Who is this confronting me?" he demanded.
Bodhidharma said, "I don't know."

Follow-up

I don't have much to say about the thing I decided not to say, except that in retrospect, I still think it didn't need to be said.

Nor does this need to be said.

I have a lot of things to say.

Things that need to be said ...

... not so much.

The post that wasn't

Y'know, I posted something here about something... then asked myself why it needed to be said.

It didn't.

random Friday PM stuff

"Life is nothing until it is lived, but it is yours to make sense of; the value of life is nothing other than the sense you choose."

-Jean Paul Sartre

I saw a quote expressing similar thoughts from H.D. Thoreau somewhere, but now I can't find it.

raven wrote

it's really no wonder you're depressed...you are trying to talk yourself into believing in a system that declares that life has no meaning. how sucky is that? i bet, like most people, you probably rather believe there is meaning in those moments, and in those places, and with those people where you make it meaningful.

Well, yes and no. The idea that life has no meaning doesn't strike me as sucky at all. I find it liberating. Just because life has no meaning doesn't mean I can't enjoy it. (Which is not to say I am enjoying it... I don't want that rumor getting out... but I'm hardly in the throes of misery, either.)

Actually, we enjoy lots of things that have no meaning. Lightweight fiction that is sometimes classified as 'summer reading,' for example. Or cheesy movies.

I have pretty much purged my life of moments that are capital 'M' Meaningful, and to absolutely salutary effect.

Some zen monk asked his teacher, "What is Zen?" and the old master replied, "When I hunger, I eat. When I'm tired, I sleep." That's meaningful for me, and about as meaningful as I care to get.

And my depression doesn't stem from my worldview... if anything, it would be the other way 'round. My depression is hereditary and biological, plus perhaps the result of upbringing.

More to come...

...but I have to say, writing isn't working so well for me lately. I feel like I'm just fogging up a window with my breath, and the harder I breathe, the foggier it gets.

Thursday AM

I have nothing to report.

Sunday evening

Words obscure truth.
Wise men leave them behind.
Better to sit in a grove of trees
With squirrels and birds
And say nothing.

---

I think about things a lot.
Many hours of deep concentration.
And when I am done
Nothing has changed.

Paris Hilton

I wasn't going to say anything about Paris Hilton... but then this came along...

from the Colbert Report, via the Crooks and Liars website.

Three hours with my ex

I spent three hours with my ex Friday evening at her office, showing her how to do things like use a web browser and Yahoo! Mail.

She had always been toward the heavy side, beginning about a year after we got married (1987? 1988?), but she is now probably past 300 pounds. I was shocked that she had gained so much weight since the last time I saw her, but as she pointed out, that was two years ago. For some reason I had been thinking that was just last fall.

People complain about their exes, but I tell people my ex is a saint, and she is. We should probably not have been married to each other in the first place, but we were together ten years and she is a decent, caring, honest person.

On these occasions when I spend time with her, she's like a person I remember seeing in a movie or on TV. That's not the best description, but it's all I've got. That whole time of my life - the marriage, the TV job, living in Edmond - seems like something that happened to someone else and that I only read about.

There's no question that I have fared better in the years since our split than she has. I'm financially more secure, even though we parted on equal terms financially. I think I'm in better health and leading a better life.

I feel some guilt that I have done so well and sort of left her behind. When I stop and think clearly, I know I can't fix her life for her now any more than I could back then, but the rescuer in me still wants to try. She deserves a better life than she has had.

Tooth news

Had my first dental bridgework done yesterday. This was the part where they put in the temp... I go back in three weeks to have the rest done. $3k for the whole thing, and I'm not getting much help from insurance.

Last night it felt like I had a big chunk of rock stuck between my teeth... today it feels a little closer to normal.

This was something I'd planned many months ago, before I knew anything about impending retirement.

Sunday PM

I want to follow up on my post of yesterday evening.

I sort of wandered off the path when used the adjectives I did -- 'pointless,' 'meaningless' and 'silly.' I believe it's counterproductive to classify and categorize in that way.

Instead, I guess I would say that most of the things I encounter in everyday life that are important to other people seem not important at all to me. Also, things that seemed important to me in times past seem unimportant now. This may be further evidence of depression, but to me it feels like liberation.

"From the first," Zen patriarch Hui-Neng said, "not a thing is." I can't explain the meaning of that, but I think I understand it intuitively. And having understood it, I have no ability to get worked up about things.

Detachment is my watchword, and I enjoy being detached. I can save my emotional energy for things closer to home.

"mcarp is allergic to fun"

Thus spaketh blogblah! this morning, trying to explain why I am seldom seen outside my own small bubble, or for that matter, seen anywhere besides a couple of places.

I suppose there's some truth to that.

But it's not so much that I'm allergic to fun as it is that most of the things other people consider fun don't interest me very much. That's about all there is to that.

Saturday PM

Part of the reason I decided to quit working was the financial empowerment to do so.

But another reason, just as important, was the realization that most of what I was doing contributed to only imaginary, artificially created outcomes.

This is certainly not unique to my situation. It's what the unexamined, unenlightened life is all about, especially in consumerist America – the pursuit of pointless 'goals,' meaningless 'achievements,' and often silly 'responsibilities.'

Certainly there are goals, achievements and responsibilities that are important. But ninety-nine percent of the things we value as important or necessary are in fact neither. They're just stuff we made up, or that someone else made up for us. We'd do just fine without them. We have created around ourselves a hopelessly complex, tangled and contradictory reality in which all of our attention and stamina are required just to tread water, let alone get anywhere.

And when we have 'achieved,' we have usually just surrounded ourselves with another layer of material and psychological detritus, heaped upon the numerous layers that already obscure our view of the real world.

---

Other items of interest today: paid off a bank card and cancelled my match.com and Yahoo! Personals account, both long unread (in fact, I was stunned to discover I was still paying for match.com, when I thought I had cancelled it two years ago!).

These are in preparation for my transition from the workforce to the sitaroundtheRedCupforce.

There was a time when I considered match.com and Yahoo! Personals important. I even paid for the 'Premier' dating service on Yahoo!, which warned me in advance that most of the women whose profiles it was sending me would not actually be able to get along with me.

Yes. I was paying money to have Yahoo! email me, once a week, photos and thumbnail profiles of women who would not especially like me.

As if those were hard to find.

What if the entire universe is a single point?

As I recall from high school geometry (which I failed, so caveat emptor) a point has no height, no width, no depth, no volume. It is a theoretical construct - a reference point needed so that geometry may be built upon it.

Or at least I think it's theoretical.

It occurred to me that the entire universe could be a single point, which our perception then unfolds around us like a camping tent - even though we ourselves are part of that single non-existent point. Maybe our concepts of height, width, distance and mass are all wrong. Maybe nothing has any of those attributes. Maybe they're all as theoretical as the point.

Or maybe a point, having no height, width or depth, is large enough to be everything.

Or maybe those are both same thing, and there is no difference between infinitely small and infinitely large.

















Or maybe, to paraphrase Ike Turner, "bloggers be thinkin' too much."

Just what I need for summer

My very cool (both literally and figuratively) industrial grade pedestal floor fan burnt up tonight.

It had the 'lifetime lubrication.' This refers to the lifetime of the fan, apparently, which ends when the lubrication is gone and the fan burns out. In this particular case, that was about four years of heavy use.

So I'll be shopping for a new fan this weekend. Can't get along without it.

Some guy (doodle boy update)

Some guy at the RC, sitting with his back to me.

I will look like this myself in another year.

Short timing

For someone who is mildly terrified of retirement, I have the worst short-timer attitude ever.

I was up til midnight working on a freelance thing last night, so that may be why I'm a little brain dead today.

Here's what's going to happen

I'm going to get hit by a meteor.

OR

They're going to call me and tell me it was all a mistake.

OR

I'm going to contract Legionnaire's Disease.

OR

I'm going to be the innocent bystander victim of a drive-by shooting.

OR

I'm going to eat some beets tainted with plutonium, leading to a nationwide recall of beets imported from Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

OR

I'm going to be bitten by a rabid guinea pig that escaped from a delivery van on its way to a medical research lab.

OR

I'm going to be run over by an ambulance on its way to rescue someone whose penis is stuck in the thumb hole of a bowling ball.

OR

An aerosol can of Citrus Fresh Scouring Bubbles will explode in my face, choking me to death with a faceful of powerful dirt-blasting foam.

But my final breaths will be fresh and lemony.

Self-medicating with pizza

I'm not bipolar (or maybe I am), but I have in the past been subject to some rather extreme mood swings.

After being nauseated most of yesterday evening and again this morning, I lapsed into a kind of hyper twitchy mode this afternoon. I couldn't stop drumming my fingers, tapping my foot, singing under my breath. I tried reciting the Heart Sutra mantra for a few minutes, to no avail. It's been years since I've been like this – like 1998 or thereabouts.

I brought myself back down with pizza this evening. God knows I don't need any more pizza, from a nutritional standpoint... I'm morphing into a gelatinous blob as it is. But, hey... this was a medical emergency.

Retirement blues

I don't know which freaks me out worse: six more weeks of working at a job that has become unchallenging, or twenty more years of not working at all. This ought to be a no-brainer, and I keep telling myself that it is.

I don't believe in karma, at least in the traditional Buddhist sense. I believe good things and bad things happen to people regardless of what kind of lives they've led, and that it's often misleading to even try to identify such things as 'good' or 'bad.' The opportunity that has been presented to me has nothing to do with what I have done or not done with my life to this point.

But something keeps nagging me about this. Something keeps telling me it isn't happening, shouldn't be happening, actually isn't happening and that I've made some huge error, or that some awful calamity will befall me to balance the scales that are now so unnaturally tilted in my favor.

This bothers me so much at times – like right this minute – that it makes me physically ill. I've been like this since yesterday, and off and on since I first realized I could stop working.

Even when life is easy, it's too damn complicated for me. How do people with real problems get by? I can't even cope with mowing the yard.

Another weekend of pretty much nothing

Well, I did buy the bicycle.

And y'know, some other stuff happened... mostly a lot of sitting around... but what can be said about it?

Wanna kickit?

Nina recently posted on flibbertigibbet! ...

"Why, pray tell, would these words fall from a man's mouth at all, let alone only prefaced by the word hello and given to a grown woman?

"Whatcha up for?

"Want to hookup?

"And my personal favorite, wanna kickit?"

I'm not sure why I thought about this all this time, but I did. The reason these words would fall from a man's mouth is because, in one or more previous instances, they have worked.

We all occasionally make the mistake of assuming that other people share our same cultural reference points. Nina and I both would like to think that no one would be impressed or even amused by the line 'wanna kickit?'

But I guarantee you that even though it didn't work on Nina, it probably did work on someone else... possibly the tube-top girl at the Marriott blogblah! described in his comment.

I once had a woman - not someone I was trying to pick up, but just someone I knew - get upset when I used the word 'profligate' in a sentence. She was upset because:

1. she didn't know what it meant.


2. she suspected it was a profanity.


3. she suspected I used it knowing full well she wouldn't know what it meant, and chose it specifically to belittle her intelligence and education.

Of course, none of this was going through my mind at the time. But that event, along with a few others, made it very real to me that some people are intimidated by even average intelligence, resent even average intelligence, and are much more comfortable with the 'hey, babe' level of interpersonal communication.

(Y'know, there's a part of me that wishes women would get all dreamy-eyed and breathy when they heard a guy talk about neither being nor not being. And maybe they do in Tibet or Nepal or Esalen Institute or some other place.

But not here. In these parts, yer better off stickin' with 'wanna kickit'?)

Saturday, early evening

I bought a new bike today. It's a Specialized Globe, which is a utilitarian commuter bike.

I rode it from the Red Cup to Sauced! and back. The one-way trip is about 3/4 of a mile, and it wasn't easy doing it.

A far cry from when I rode around Lake Hefner three times a week. (That was ten years ago, and even then, I had other cyclists lapping me because I was so slow.)

But after I retire, which is only about six weeks away, I intend for the bicycle to be my main form of transportation.

Re: the Friday post... that's supposed to be 'the shoe thing down at the old funeral home,' which sounds pretty odd if you don't know anything about it, I suppose. It was show/auction of hand-painted Vans at an old funeral home which is now used for nothing, so far as I know. I ended up not going.

Friday afternoon

Burning through some more accumulated leave at the Red Cup.

Left the cell phone on the charger this morning, so I'm without it. Hope no one is trying to reach me.

I'm trying to come up with a name for my planned freelance art business. Nothing sounds right. I don't know how much work I can actually get - freelancers are all over the place here.

Gallery walk tonight on the Paseo, and the show thing down at the old funeral home, which seems to be trying to skew a rather younger demo than me.