Easter Sunday

I'm not a Christian. I have nothing to report.

Random notes

Garage finished

It took fifteen months and a change of crews instead of the 90 days originally promised by the first contractor, but my new garage was finally completed a couple of weeks ago.

It has 32 electrical outlets, plus a spare 220 that hasn't been wired with an outlet yet. There's a half-bath with a shower, and a studio space for paint and an easel. If I want to, I can work out there all day without having to go into the house.

It doesn't have air conditioning yet, but that can wait awhile.

What I'm reading


I've been reading The Zen Writings of Stonehouse, translated by Red Pine. Stonehouse was a Chinese Zen (Chan) monk who lived in the fourteenth century CE. He left the monastery and moved to a hut on the side of a mountain, leading a secluded life for the remainder of his years. He wrote numerous poems about his life as a recluse. They are similar to the writings of Cold Mountain, who lived seven hundred years before him. In fact, Stonehouse quotes Cold Mountain in one of his poems.

I go to bed most nights thinking I would be perfectly happy living in some one-room cabin in the woods and seeing almost no human beings anymore. I usually feel differently about it when I wake up the next morning – but not always.

I'm also reading Daoism and Chinese Culture by Livia Kohn.

My kitchen stove

I've lived in this house since 2001. And do you know I've never turned on the oven to see if it works?

Friday Night

You have a meditation
I don't practice it
You have a teaching
I don't follow it
You have a koan
I don't understand it
When I'm hungry I eat
When I'm tired I sleep
You should see the birds
That come to my back yard

So, I guess the Olympics are on

I haven't watched any of it. I watched the games in the sixties and seventies. I still remember Jim McKay covering the murders of the Israeli athletes in Munich.

But I can't work up any enthusiasm for the Olympics today. I'd rather plump up the pillows in the Very Dark Room and snooze or read a book, or sit in the back yard with the dog.

The world beyond my own doorstep doesn't interest me much anymore.

Happy Lunar New Year

Chinese New Year

Tet

Korean New Year

Sunday morning

Old and gray
Big and slow
Shuffly and shambly
Came from nowhere
Going nowhere
It all means nothing
What's for lunch?

LED Bulbs

I decided to try one of those new LED light bulbs, and I'm pleased with the result.

The bulb I selected cost $59.95, uses 4w of electricity to produce as much light as a 65w incandescent bulb, and burns for 30,000 hours, or a little less than three and a half years.

You can't tell much from the picture, but the color temperature seems to be close to halogen. I half-expected it to have that creepy blue cast that LED Christmas lights have, but the color of the light is just fine.

Ceiling fans and light fixtures

Most homeowners want to add ceiling fans if they don't have them, but I'm getting rid of mine.

The ones that are in my house, installed by the previous owner, are simply attached to the eighty-year-old lath and plaster ceilings. There are no mounts or supports connecting them to the joists. Adding supports would be a huge job.

Ms. HRP retextured one of my ceilings just a few months ago, and it already has hairline cracks which I believe are caused by the weight of the ceiling fan.

Moreover, I never use the fans. The one that caused the cracks has not been turned on in the eight or nine years I've lived here. I prefer floor or table fans, and I have three of those.

Plus, the ones that are in here are all-white budget models, and they're frankly tacky-looking.

So I'm taking out all but the one in the den (which I installed myself years ago) and replacing them with ordinary flush-mount light fixtures.

I bought what looked like a pretty nice mission-style fixture over the Internet last week. It arrived today, and what a disappointment it has turned out to be. The fixture is a knockoff of a competitor's much more expensive version, and seeing it up close, it's obvious where corners were cut to bring the price down. Some of the metal parts are the thickness of colored craft paper, and bowed out slightly because they weren't fit together carefully by the maker.

Maybe it will look okay once it's installed, but if it doesn't, I may give it to someone else and buy the crazy expensive one that's the original product.

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.