Love and hatred arise uncontrollably

"If you view things through your ego, then love and hatred arise uncontrollably and you cannot avoid indulging feelings. When you indulge feelings, then you are being subjective. When you are subjective, you are ignorant. When you are ignorant, you are mixed up and confused; you are only aware of yourself, not of principle."

— from "The Cultivation of Realization," translated by Thos. Cleary

Monday afternoon

Sitting in the easy chair
With a box of graham crackers.
Long ago I ran out of things to say.
Why am I still talking?

Saturday morning

A wise man prepares for a rainy day
But I am only a fool.
Curled up under the covers
I wish I had some Pop-Tarts.

Friday night

Books surround my bed
wisdom of old masters long dead
the cat is in my lap
I don't know anything.

What the 'normals' do

I have a friend whose life has run a track similar, but not identical, to mine.

She's about my age, never married, no kids. She doesn't do relationship stuff well. She suffers from panic and anxiety attacks. She has a clutter problem, and her house is usually a mess.

'If we were normal,' she sometimes says, 'we wouldn't be sitting here in this coffee shop right now. We'd be home with our significant others, sitting in front of the fireplace or TV and drinking a glass of wine.'

Yeah, maybe.

Or maybe we'd be sitting at the kitchen table with our significant others looking at the mortgage coupon, the home equity loan payment, the lease payments due on our SUV's, the kids' orthodontist bills, plus various utility bills and credit card statements, and wondering how we're going to cover them all – or if we'd just walk away from the house and move everyone into some crappy apartment somewhere.

Or maybe we'd be fighting and arguing about it.

Or maybe we'd be stressing out about the latest round of layoffs at our cubicle jobs and comparing notes to figure out which of us would be first to be unemployed.

Or maybe we'd be at some Crown Heights cocktail party surrounded by people we loathed, jabbering about golf and OU football and Martha Stewart, because we had to make and nurture these connections for career or social status purposes.

This is far from a perfect life, but I don't have any illusions about the grass being greener on the other side of Shartel Avenue. It's all just tradeoffs.

Attachment

You can read something in a book or have it explained to you, and you may get it intellectually without having the 'a-ha' moment that really makes the truth personal to you.

I had the 'a-ha' moment about attachment years ago (although if you look at the way I live, buried under my umbrellas and computer cables and other junk, you might not believe that I ever really got the concept).

But even though I have already 'personalized' the Buddha's teaching about attachment/craving and suffering/dissatisfaction, I still find myself tangled in that trap.

I was driving down the street, and saw an old friend - well, more than a friend but something less than a girlfriend - standing on the sidewalk. I had not seen her in a long time.

I started to pull over, roll down the window and say hi. Then I thought, 'Well, what comes after "hi"? Will be she glad to see me, annoyed that I bothered her, or completely indifferent? Will I seem needy for having stopped to talk to her? How will I feel if her response to me is negative or unpleasant?'

And all this is going through my mind in the six or seven seconds between the time I first spotted her and the point that my car was even with her on the sidewalk.

I decided to just keep on going.

This is what comes of attachment. I pass people I know on the street almost every day of the week, and I never go through a bunch of mental gymnastics trying to decide whether to say hello. I just wave as I go by. Sometimes they wave back and sometimes they don't. I don't give any special significance to their response one way or the other.

But in this case, here I am driving down the street, paying more attention to the wheels turning in my own head than to the street in front of me, experiencing all those subtle physical reactions people have in stressful situations, over something whose significance exists only in my own mind.

This is the price of attachment. Forget about karma and what will happen in future lives – this is the payback right now. In this case, fortunately, it was just ten seconds of my life – plus whatever time I've spent this morning blogging about it – and not one of those fits of emotional turmoil that lasts for days or weeks.

It's one thing to say, 'Life is filled with dukkha, and tanhā is the source of dukkha,' and another thing to say, 'Y'know, attachment sucks.'

One is a teaching. The other is truth.

A View on Buddhism is a great resource for understanding Buddhist concepts. Well, I think it's a great resource — I suppose your mileage may vary. Anyway, here's the entry for 'attachment.'

Addendum: Here's the Wikipedia entry on tanhā.

Have you ever seen me with an umbrella?

Probably not, because I rarely carry one. I figure I might as well get wet as fumble around with an umbrella. It's just water, after all.

But I found four umbrellas while cleaning stuff out of the living room – one behind the sofa and two more propped up against a floor lamp. I don't remember where the fourth one was – under the desk, maybe.

But these represent four different instances where I was shopping for something else, saw an umbrella, and thought to myself, "Do I have an umbrella? Do I know where it is? Well, I'll just grab this one since it's here."

So, I'd buy the umbrella, bring it home, and it would soon disappear under or behind furniture or other crap I brought home on impulse.

And now all four of them have turned up. Or maybe there are more I haven't found yet.

Also found this afternoon: three sets of Airport Express stereo connection kits. These have the special cable needed to connect an Airport Express to the digital input on a stereo receiver.

They were under the sofa. I knew I had one of them; the other two were a complete surprise to me.

Bisbee, AZ

I looked at some web pages about Bisbee, AZ tonight. I think I want to go there.

Emptying the house

As I've written before, I'm in the process – the very slow process – of restoring order to my house.

Here's the hitch: there is so much stuff in this house that restoring order is, at the moment, all but impossible. As a prelude to the actual organizing, therefore, I have to empty the house.

I hate throwing things away. I hate throwing broken, worthless junk away, let alone the things which still work, but for which I have no use.

So, I have to change my frame of mind. I have to look at all this stuff piled up everywhere not as undiscovered or unappreciated treasure, but as an enemy that is cluttering my house and robbing me of my serenity.

It's not easy.

I'm still finding old software manuals and computer books which are too outdated to be of any use. Those are pretty easy to let go of, but they don't give me back much space.

What I really need to lose, I think, is furniture. I have three desks. The cheap, tacky, assemble-yourself desk is the one I regularly use. The one from the antique store is in the living room, functioning as a bookshelf. The small rolltop I bought when I first moved here (and which I had to drag myself from the second floor of Penn Square down to my car) is by far the nicest of the three, but it's small – the top is about big enough to hold a laptop computer and nothing else. It's currently just a repository for junk. I'm not even sure where it is. It's probably in the dining room, behind the extra dresser I'm going to just give away.

My sofa is too big for my living room. I bought it new, and never sit on it. But the cats have shed on it and barfed on it and scratched at it so much, it now needs to be reupholstered.

I have a really nice high-end dining room table and chairs. The table has never had a meal served on it. I could probably sell it and make better use of the dining room space.

My house is just a big storage locker. I can't say I actually live in it, so much as I store myself here, along with all the other stuff.

Not a monk

One of the things Flibbertigibbet (aka Nina) mentioned to me Saturday night was that some of my blog posts made it sound like I wanted to be a monk.

I've never been in a monastery (except for that place that used to be in Forest Park), but from what I've seen and read, the discipline and regimentation is a lot more than I could deal with. I am the least regimented person you'll ever know. I wake up in the morning with no fixed plan and go through day more or less spontaneously.

What I want to be, I think, is not a monastic, but what I am now: something of a recluse. I'm not completely cut off from society, but I can limit my exposure if I so desire. If I want a few days with no contact, I can have that. But if I want some time with other people, I can always find someone to hang out with.

Henry David Thoreau's Walden pond was right on the edge of Concord, not out in the wilderness. He was in town all the time, visiting his mother or his landlord and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The poet Cold Mountain, of whom I have written frequently in the past, lived in a more remote location than did Thoreau, but he was no hermit, either. He frequently visited with farmers and shepherds in his area, and often visited a Zen monastery a day's ride from his cliff dwelling home. That's how I want to live - not completely alone, but with more seclusion and private time than most people find comfortable.

I suspect that if I were completely honest with myself, I would also say that I am trying to get away from myself as much as I am from other people. Or at least from the person who has left behind the long trail of relationship failures, professional screwups and social gaffes. If I'm alone, I can feel reasonably sure that the only person in the room who knows my checkered past is me.

Historical note

The shopping center that hosts Sean Cummings Restaurant and Pub is on the site of the old Twilight Gardens Drive-In. I don't recall when the Twilight Gardens closed. I know it was around in 1970, and gone by 1980.

A night at the pub

The blogger formerly known as Flibbertigibbet! and I visited a place called Sean Cummings Restaurant & Pub, outside the bubble north of May and Britton Road.

This is one of Flib's regular hangouts, and I can see why. I've never been in a real Irish pub, so I have no idea how authentic it is, but I would tell you that once inside and settled in a booth, I felt like I could have been somewhere thousands of miles from here.

This is a tiny place - I would guess that it seats 80 customers at the maximum - but the smallness is part of the appeal. It's very cozy and dark.

We listened to a pair of musicians performing Irish and Scottish folk music, and I had fish and chips as good as I've ever eaten.

I don't like getting out of the bubble, of course, but this was worth the trip. I'm astonished that I didn't even know this place existed.

Hard Drive Memories

While rummaging around on my pile of old hard drives this week, I came across a couple of photos sent to me by a woman with whom I had a very brief online flirtation a decade back. No, they they are not that kind of photos – just ordinary pics of her life and her work.

We had met on the Well, where I was a daily visitor at the time. To make a long story short, we had several weeks of back-and-forth emails, then made arrangements to meet in a 'neutral' city. Then I did what I often did, which is to 'way overcommit, say some things I shouldn't have said while trying to be charming. Instead, I pretty much scared the bejeebers out of her. We called off the meeting and had no further contact.

I had forgotten about her until I found these photos.

It was another in a long line of instances of me fumbling around with my substandard social skills and alienating people instead of building friendships and relationships.

After my last 'woe is me' rant, I made myself a promise that I was going to go a year on this blog without writing any more self-examining or self-pitying relationship stuff.  That was 51 weeks ago, so I've come up a little short.

Well, it's all in the past now. But I think it's useful for me to be reminded what a mess I was making of my life year after year, and why I live the life I do now.

Stuff off old hard drives

I have several old computers around the house. And by 'old,' I mean anywhere from seven to ten years old. I've decided to get rid of them, so I started firing them up yesterday to see if there was anything I wanted to keep on them. Most of these computers hadn't been turned on in anywhere from three to seven years, and I wasn't sure what I would find on them.

Most of the computers were not fully functional, and it took some creativity to get files off of them. And after all the work, I didn't find much that I wanted.

The item above was done in 2002. I think it was for some city project, but it never got off the ground. This is the first time this sketch has seen the light of day.

I did this, I think, while I was still living in Texas. That picture is from my apartment there; and that's my Texas haircut. I don't remember why I did this... probably just goofing around.

There's quite a bit of stuff like this on these old computers, although these are the most interesting two things I found.

The holidays come and go

Well, here we are starting a new year. The new century doesn't feel new, anymore – we are well into the 21st century and it's old hat now. A child born in 2001 would be in the third grade now, right?

New Year's, and Christmas (and my recent birthday) all went by uneventfully. The holidays were just ordinary days of the week for me, which is how I prefer them. There is still a lot of snow on the ground from the Christmas Eve blizzard, and I haven't felt much like getting out and struggling with it. Temperatures are supposed to be even colder this week,  so I expect I'll be housebound at least a few more days.

I played host to Nurse K's dog, Frank, for a couple of days. He has a reputation for being cranky, but he was the perfect guest while he was here. Bailey and he get along fine. The cats ignored him and he ignored the cats. He's an old dog – ten or twelve, by the looks of him – and he's not much into romping around or creating havoc like Bailey is.

I finally met the author of the late, lamented 'Flibbertigibbet!' blog last week. Remind me to post more about that later.