Missing sandal

I've misplaced a sandal. By all logic, it should be close to its mate, but I can't find it.

Lost a cat

One of my cats was hit and killed by a car this evening. I called him Spotty. He was about ten months old. He was crossing the street between my house and the home of the cat lady across the street.

He was tame, I guess, but not especially friendly. In fact, I don't think I ever actually touched him. He always ran from me. He was one of the many cats who were born under the deck or behind the storage shed and just stayed around, never being trusting enough to let me near. Most of the cats around here have similar backgrounds and behavior.

There was a time this would have upset me a lot more than it does right now. Now, I just see it as the coming and going of little specks of existence – tiny waves in the bigger ocean of the universe. There's no point in being attached to my existence or anyone else's, because the perception of being alive will end eventually in any event.

If something happened to Beasley or Smudge, who have been with me ten and nine years, respectively, I'd be a lot more upset, I suppose.

But we all come and go. How real are we?

Something Blogblah! said...

...about man having a hard-wired genetic drive to collect Hawaiian shirts and cats...

Or something like that... I forget the details...

what the hell was it I was supposed to be doing?

My Hawaiian shirt problem

I don't know how many Hawaiian (aloha) shirts I have. A lot — I can say that. Enough that I can always look like a tourist even in my own neighborhood. I've been accumulating them for about ten years.

I don't even look that good in Hawaiian shirts. There are some people who just ought to wear solid colors and avoid bright colors and busy prints, and I am one of them. It's not just Buddhist egolessness. Even when I'm at my ideal weight (which I'm certainly not), I'm a fairly large guy, and a Hawaiian shirt makes me look — well, like that beefy second-string cop on 'Miami Vice' who always wore Hawaiian shirts.

Or like 'Ski' Jablonski, the eccentric sidekick of ninja/special forces/crimefighter Raven from early 90's TV. (photo courtesy obscuretvsidekicks.com)

Do you know who this is? Look closely.

It's Lee Majors. Lee Majors!! I mean, good god, if a Hawaiian shirt makes the Six Million Dollar Man look like a dope, what chance do I have?

Nonetheless, I have this attachment to Hawaiian shirts — and an attachment is absolutely what it is.

I have a long history, as well, of accumulating more of certain things than any human being needs. When I had to wear business clothes to work, I had about 100 neckties at one point, and probably thirty pair of suspenders (or braces, as they were more commonly known back then).

I remember one time masking tape was on sale at the hardware store and I bought about twenty rolls. That was in about 1987, and my ex probably still has two-thirds of them.

So here I am with this pile of Hawaiian shirts, and a few more on the way via amazon.com. I will stop buying now because I've run out of room to hang them.

But what is with this need to acquire stuff like this?

I've talked so much about non-attachment some have suspected I'm attached to non-attachment. And Buddhist teachers say such a thing can happen. But every time I've unloaded some attachment from my life, I've felt better after having done it, as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Even so, I have difficulty freeing myself of remaining attachments.

There is some sort of false sense of security or well-being that comes from having large amounts of certain things. Even though that feeling is more than offset by the annoyance of being buried under all the material stuff, these have been difficult attachments (or neuroses, perhaps) to overcome.

I need to have someone put me in a coma — under medical supervision, of course — while a team of trained experts gets rid of my accumulated crap.

Miscellaneous

Sometimes I think I should change the name of this blog to 'Nothing to Report.'

I have less going on these days. I wake up and I do whatever it is I'm going to do, which will probably include a trip to the coffee shop and maybe an errand or two, and maybe I'll take a nap in the afternoon. I may go back out in the evening for awhile — dinner with the group most Wednesdays and Fridays, maybe with a friend or alone other nights. I don't eat at home much.

I still obsess about some of same things I've always obsessed about, but I stop short of needing to write about them. The obsessions are empty, no point to them; why write about nothing?

I bought a new weedeater this week and spent some time clearing underbrush and weeds in the backyard. Whack weeds, mow grass – those are my magic and subtle understanding. The pear cactus are growing rapidly — I remember when you never saw pear cactus this far north — and the elephant ear has finally started putting up shoots.

I'm reading some Thich Nhat Hanh and Seung Sanh — two different approaches to the same destination/no destination.

I need new brakes on the car.

Saturday AM

Just woke up from a dream about work.

A guy is coming out to fix the AC today. It seems to have run out of refrigerant. I told him the house was still tolerable and he could wait until Tuesday or whenever, but he wants to do it today.

This house was built in 1930, and probably didn't have any air conditioning until the late fifties, and no central air until the nineties. Obviously people got along without it somehow.

Every year, I promise myself I won't turn it on until June, but I always break down the last week of May.

It's Wednesday

Anything to report?

Well, no.

Panda rescue

From the London Telegraph: Chinese pandas rescued from earthquake-stricken wildlife refuge.

Disorganization

I've been less organized than usual lately — and I'm not very well-organized under the best of circumstances.

I discovered this morning that I had forgotten to pay bank cards this month. I only missed them by about four days, and I pay off the balance every month, so my cost will be negligible. But I haven't been late on a payment in years.

I've gotten behind on a couple of art projects.

Laundry has been piling up.

I've been napping a lot in the afternoon.

I suppose these are all signs of depression again. I don't feel depressed, but neither do I feel very motivated.

Allergies

I guess the allergy season has finally caught up with me. I'm loaded with Claritin right now, and still sneezing and sniffling. I've been up since about 4.

In other news...

There is a large yellow tomcat sleeping in one of my front porch chairs as I write this. He's been hanging around the house off and on for months now — ever since the stray tom who bit me last spring shuffled off this mortal coil. I assume he just moved in to take over the territory left open by Butthead's departure.

I try to be a friend to all stray animals who come my way, but this guy is making it difficult. He comes in the house if I leave a door open, which doesn't bother me in and of itself, but he tries to bully the other cats when he's in here and I end up having to chase him out.

(This is something I do with much more caution than I used to after being bitten last year. Cat bites are really nasty, and last year's incident required a trip to the ER and a follow-up trip to my doctor for industrial-strength antibiotics. Even then, it took a long time for the infection to clear. If a cat bites you and breaks the skin, get to a doctor or ER quickly, even if it looks superficial.)

He also appears to be the father of at least some of the litter of kittens that recently appeared in my next door neighbor's garage. The mother may or may not be Lark the Cat who has previously always appeared in my backyard in the spring, then wandered off when her current crop of kittens was weaned, only to return the next spring. She is also hanging around the house. Her disposition is much better than the tom's, and I don't mind having her around.

I don't feed cats outdoors anymore, because the stray population had just grown beyond manageable proportions. I feed Lark/not Lark, but I make her come inside to eat, and I don't feed this tomcat at all. I don't know where he eats, but I wish he would stay near the food supply instead of at my place. I think I'm going to order one of those humane animal traps online. Then I'll try to catch this joker and at least have him neutered so he'll calm down some and quit making kittens.

Doctor, my eyes...

I've been very fortunate this year to have almost none of the congestion and runny nose that allergies usually cause for me in the spring. My eyes, however, have been a different story. They've been dry and itchy for days now. I don't have eye drops in the house — I guess I should go to the pharmacy and get some.

Nothing to report

The days when I have nothing to report are actually the days when everything has gone the way it's 'supposed' to go. I put 'supposed' in quotes because strictly speaking, there isn't any way things are 'supposed' to go, but I think you get the idea.

I would never have guessed

From cnn.com:

Getting my bearings

It's only today that I feel like I've completely gotten my bearings back after Wednesday.

And my cold seems to have taken care of itself.

Monday

I felt better than I expected to when I woke up. I got down to the RC for awhile, then came home and did a small amount of house cleaning. I also pulled some stuff out of the minivan that had been in the back awhile.... some of it more than a year. There's still more to go.

Bloggin' pneumonia

I went to bed about ten feeling like I was running a low fever. I don't have a thermometer around here, so I couldn't tell for sure. I also seemed to have a bit of a chill.

But I eventually fell asleep and I when I awoke a few minutes ago, the fever and chill seemed to be gone.

I still have the sniffles and the beginnings of a cough. This is typical when I catch cold. If recent history is any indicator, I'll have the cough for weeks. But the sniffles will clear up and I'd rather have the cough than the sniffles.

My bed is surrounded by bits of torn up tissue paper I've used to blow my nose and dab at it, and there are a couple of cereal bowls I need to move to the kitchen sink.

Looks like I'll be staying home again Monday.

Head cold

The cold is still with me this morning.

Ain't it the truth!

Lifted from Flibbertigibbet!:



In case you can't read the fine print, it says:

The only consistent feature of all your dissatisfying relationships is you.

I'd like to get about a dozen of those posters and give one to every woman with whom I ever had a dissatisfying relationship.

Sunday AM

As I post this, the death toll is at 18 from tornadoes that hit far northeast Oklahoma as well as Missouri and Arkansas. Six people died in the EPA Superfund town of Picher, which has been in the process of being abandoned. The town celebrated its 90th anniversary this weekend, and according to news reports, some former residents had returned for what many thought would be its last annual anniversary celebration.

Saturday evening

My neighbors across the street have a mariachi band performing in their front yard. I'm going to sit on the porch and listen for awhile.

Saturday evening

Yeah, it's definitely a cold. I made a run to the grocery store for a few days' worth of comfort food and I'm settling in for the duration.

It's tough to be pinned down like this when I've got so much going on and so many busy activities planned, but I need to take care of myself to stay at my peak energy.

I'll be back in circulation when I'm well.

Saturday morning

I think I may be coming down with a cold.

Other than that... nothing to report.

The electric non-attachment acid test

It's easier to consider yourself non-attached, I've learned, when the object of your non-attachment is not within reach.

Shenxiu, who was the senior monk and teacher under the fifth zen ancestor, Hongren, probably didn't consider himself attached to the idea of eventually ascending to the position of sixth ancestor and leader of Chinese zen — at least not while Hongren remained in authority.

But how did he feel when the day came to choose a successor, and Hongren, as tradition tells it, picked the monastery's cook, Hui-neng, over Shenxiu? That would have been the moment when Shenxiu would have known for sure whether he had attachment or not — the acid test of his non-attachment.

I spent a couple of hours visiting with someone I used to be very close to, and with whom I had not spoken face-to-face in more than a year. At one time, I was very attached — up all night, pacing the floor, talking to myself attached. She may have been a little attached, too, back then, but never as much as I was.

She became a major exercise in non-attachment — not just non-attachment to her specifically, but non-attachment to all the wondering and speculating and second-guessing and blaming her and blaming myself and all the other samsaric bullshit that goes on with this kind of thing.

She dropped out of sight for awhile, and during that time, I felt that I had gotten that attachment out of my system.

Not entirely.

I wonder if she noticed how much my hands were shaking today. I finally had to put them flat on the table to keep them under control. Eventually that stopped. But during much of our conversation, I was just nodding mechanically while thinking, 'Non-attachment... non-attachment... non-attachment...'

---

In other news, there were four previously-unseen kittens, just a month or six weeks old, sitting on my glider when I got home. Three were calico and one was black. The calicos all scattered when I came up on the porch, but the black one followed me inside.

Also

I will also mention that I'm sick of the presidential primary. The cynic in me says Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, perhaps after the abduction, torture and murder of sufficient Obama delegates. Get back to me when it's November.

Tuesday AM

I was awakened by another TV news dream — one which featured a curious cast of characters from one job I had about thirty years ago and another job from about eight years ago, brought together in some dream-imagined town I don't think I've ever seen in waking life. It also featured, oddly enough, an old old computer newsroom program from yet another phase of my career — one which I haven't laid eyes on in many years and which I don't think I've even thought about since the last time I saw it. It wasn't the worst of those dreams, by far, but I hate having those old memories pulled up to the front of my brain.

There's a thunderstorm rumbling overhead. I checked the web, and there are no watches or warnings, so I'll assume it's just a generic summer thunderstorm.

Here's a story from the Telegraph about middle-aged men giving up sex.

"What we have is a lot of men who say, as women did in the 1950s: 'I can have sex but I do not want to. It’s not rewarding’".

What else?

I've misplaced some socks. They're in the house somewhere, but they've gotten separated from their mates.

I mentioned several days ago reading H.G. Wells' The Outline of History. This was the 1919 first edition, which stopped at about the creation of the League of Nations. I picked up a similar but more recent book, The New Penguin History of the World, to cover events from 1919 to the present.

I'm also reading a book called Doubt, by Jennifer Michael Hecht, which had been sitting on my bookshelf untouched for a few years. She's basically assembled some historical sketches of people and groups who went against the conventional wisdom of their eras. For example, she describes how the biblical books of Job and Ecclesiastes are so out of synch with the rest of biblical teaching that she wonders how they were included in the Bible in the first place. ("Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity," is still my favorite Bible verse, and the only one I've carried with me from my thumping days.)

I've been on 'vacation' for a month or so from Zen and Taoist books. I figured I needed to spend more time being it and less reading about it. But I miss having that reading, and I think I'm going to find Wen-Tzu again for another read.

I'm still fat and I haven't gotten any younger.

Eating lentils

A friend of mine recently quit a job in what was, from her description, a rather unpleasant and even somewhat abusive environment. She had not been there very long. Like anyone who leaves a job without a new one ready, she was worried about finances and finding something else.

"Tell me I'm not a failure," she said, and I was happy to do so. Hell, I've been fired from more jobs than she's ever held. If she's a failure, then I'm a total disaster.

But that got me to thinking about our definition of 'failure.' Once we let someone else define 'success' for us, we pretty much take their definition of 'failure' along with it. So if we allow The Man to define 'success' for us as material wealth, social prestige or outstanding loyalty to our employers, then 'failure' is bound to be the opposite of those things: home in the wrong neighborhood, generic automobile, low-level job, lack of enthusiasm for the mission statement.

Lack of enthusiasm is my specialty, by the way, and it saddens me there's not more demand for it in corporate America.

Another friend, who occasionally posts here as dzaster, told this story at the Red Cup over the weekend:

There was a servant of the king who lived a comfortable life, surrounded by fine possessions. One day he saw a man eating a bowl of lentils. 'If you'd learn to suck up to the king,' the royal servant said, "you wouldn't have to eat lentils."

"If you'd learn to eat lentils," the man replied, "you wouldn't have to suck up to the king."

Craving redux

Epson has a new — well, relatively new — printer called the Stylus Pro 9880 which can produce inkjet prints 40" wide. And it costs $5,000, which is a fraction of what a printer this size would have cost even five years ago.

I do 100% of my art on the Mac now — no natural media at all. One of the drawbacks to this method of working is that there's no way to hang it for display.

There are a couple of companies in town that do this kind of printing on a per-piece basis, but they are insanely expensive. If I bought this printer, it would pay for itself versus commercial reproduction in about three to five years.

So I'm struggling with whether to go forward with this. I'm guessing that with paper and archival ink, the price would be closer to $7k.

Is this a purchase I can justify? That's what I have to decide.

Attraction redux

Years ago, I dated a woman who had two sons. My memory tells me they were in the second and fourth grades. I spent a certain amount of time tending the kids while Mom did other things such as cook dinner or argue with the kids' father on the phone. One of the two sons was a video game addict who seemed to need much more attention than his brother. I spent a lot of time sitting in a beanbag chair pretending to be interested while he ran around virtual dungeons loading up with ammo so he could kill Blofeld or Nazi werewolves or whatever. If I got up and left the room for more than about two minutes, he'd pause the game and come looking for me and drag me back.

My life today has more peace and serenity than I would have ever hoped for back then. I get up when I want to, go to bed when I want to, socialize when I want to, spend time alone when I want to. No supervisors or coworkers monitor my political or religious beliefs. There are no office politics to navigate or avoid.

At home and around the 'bubble,' I listen to the music I like, and I don't have to change playlists or stations because someone else wants to hear Keith Urban or Amy Winehouse. I dress the way I want to dress, even if I'm a fashion disaster. I have a spiritual belief system that is consistent and workable for me. I drive a car I like, even though many people consider it not elegant enough or sporty enough or macho enough. The house is mostly a mess (I bought a Dyson hand vacuum yesterday! I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like some sort of Imperial Storm Trooper weapon.) I don't plan to give up any of my independence to make myself more interesting to women.

But in the midst of this peace and serenity comes the occasional moment of attraction, and it's just like that ten-year-old who kept dragging me back to watch him play video games: 'Come back! Come back! You have to pay attention to me!' Even when I am deep in the throes of infatuation, I would still rather sit at home and read a good book than spend time with the object of my fascination.

I recognize that sexual attraction is programmed into my DNA. That's what makes it such a damned nuisance. I'm allergic to ragweed, and sneezing is programmed into my DNA, too. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

Other than that, I have nothing to report.

Attraction

Speaking of craving... I would like to be able to say that my spirituality has ascended to such lofty heights that I no longer even think about physical attraction. But I am still sometimes afflicted with it — and I don't choose the word "afflicted" casually.

Being attracted to someone is for me like having a head cold, which is to say it's an unpleasant nuisance which I know will eventually pass, but must be endured until it does. It's too bad there's no NyQuil-like product available for it.

The good news is that I recognize that I have been irrationally obsessed many times in my life, and not often in love. Maybe never in love.

Irrational obsession doesn't appeal to me anymore. It's too much of a drain. Five years and thirty pounds ago, the pre-Buddhist/Taoist me was more prone to give in to it, leading to all kinds of stomach-churning worry, intellectualizing, second- and third-guessing and bizarre behavior. In my current configuration I don't consider it an option.

Just as I would like to never catch cold, and never be depressed, I would like to cut myself free from these crazy attractions. They are, of course, genetically hard-wired, and I'm not likely to ever be totally free of them.