Going to need a plumber

Broken pipe under the house. From the sound, it's under the bathroom, but I can't tell for sure. I still have some water pressure, but not much.

Correction

It's actually three pounds of flax. Please adjust your satori experience accordingly.

Thursday update

Eight pounds of flax.

Let's face it... I'm adorable

I mean, how could you not love me?




I'm a bundle of energy, always on the go.

On the other hand...

I read somewhere that we may get a gourmet cupcake shop in Bricktown. Another of those things that will 'put OKC on the map,' as we like to say.

A gourmet cupcake shop is just as much the machinery of the cosmos as anything else, I suppose.

What the %$#& am I talking about?

There's a landmark here in town called the Gold Dome. If someone from out of town asked me what it was, I could describe it to them as accurately as I was able to. Even so, I would probably get some of the details wrong, and my choice of words might not suffice to completely portray it. (Gold Dome... does that mean it's made of gold? Plated gold? Painted gold? Used to store gold?)

As an alternative, I could just give the out-of-towners directions to NW 23 & Classen Boulevard so they could see the Gold Dome for themselves. That would sidestep the problem of my inability to describe it.

I've been struggling the past couple of years with concepts I was told right up front defy description. I think the reason Zen masters give their students these 'koan' riddles is to give them directions to the location, rather than trying to describe what the students will find when they get there.

Even if you ask (and some of you have), I really can't describe what I'm talking about. I think I've glimpsed it, at least, but I wouldn't dare say I've completely looked it over, strolled around the grounds, ridden the escalators, whatever.

Not only that... I can't give you the directions to get there yourself. Even that's out of my competence.

And that's all I'm going to say about that for now.

If you want your CPA to take you seriously...

don't bring in your tax records three months late, rolled up in an old Pop-Tarts box.

I have nothing to report

All I want to talk about is the Way, and I can say nothing about it.

Extensive branding initiative! Coveted psychographic! Unruly snowboarders!

or,

"Why I quit wasting money on cable TV."




Court TV's New Name Unveiled: truTV
July 11, 2007

As part of an extensive branding initiative that will also include a new look, new logo and expanded line-up, Court TV is about to become truTV. This new name reflects the network's popular line-up of series that offer first-person access to exciting, real-life stories, according to the announcement today by Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, and Marc Juris, the network's general manager. Through a dynamic original programming line-up that has been providing the network with strong and consistent audience growth, truTV will target a highly coveted psychographic known as "Real Engagers." In addition, the network has put four new projects into development in support of the new brand, including shows from Granada Television, producer of Nanny 911; Original Productions, co-producer of Deadliest Catch; Bunim/Murray Productions, creators of The Real World; and Tiger Aspect USA, producer of Ms. Adventure. The complete re-branding will launch Jan. 1, 2008.


...

In prime time, early fringe and late night, truTV will continue to feature a line-up of already-popular signature series that target Real Engagers, including such shows as Speeders, Forensic Files and Haunting Evidence. Upcoming series slated to join the line-up in support of the new brand include projects like Bounty Girls, featuring four tough, smart, beautiful and diverse female professionals on the hunt for some of Miami's most dangerous fugitives; The Real Hustle, featuring a trio of con artists going after unsuspecting marks; and Most Daring, a gripping series that focuses on life-or-death rescues.

The network is also in development on a number of unique, high-profile series and specials from top-name producers. "Our new development projects are the kind of compelling stories and people our audience of Real Engagers is seeking," said Juris. "We're proud to be working with successful, top-name producers in crafting series that will continue building on the network's growing success."


Among the projects in development are the following:

Neighbors 911 (working title) – From Granada America and executive producer Curt Northrup (Nanny 911) comes this new series in which former Green Beret Myke Hawke goes into the homes of people whose feuding has escalated into all-out war. He then uses video evidence to force them to confront each other and resolve their differences.

Ski Patrol (working title) – This exciting, character-driven series from Bunim/Murray Productions (The Real World) gets viewers up close and personal with the men and women who work in some of the most extreme environments in the country. They do everything from dynamiting snowdrifts and performing daring out-of-bounds rescues to busting unruly snowboarders looking to party on the slopes.

Black Gold (working title) – Few jobs have higher stakes than those of "wildcatters" in Texas, oil prospectors who race one another to tap into the last remaining U.S. reserves. From Original Productions' Thom Beers, executive producer of hit series Deadliest Catch, this show will follow several of these wildcatters and their crew of roughnecks as they risk their lives, limbs and hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up rigs in an attempt to strike oil.

Outlaw Chasers (working title) – Randy Hicks and Lanny Dean are a renegade pair of storm junkies who, armed with just a radio and some video cameras, pursue twisters all around the Midwest in their customized pick-up truck. Using incredibly dramatic present and past-tense footage from their most exciting pursuits, this collection of specials from Tiger Aspect USA and executive producer Lawrence Cumbo (Ms. Adventure) will tell their story while following them in their quest to fulfill their dream: filming a tornado from the inside.

This did not come from The Onion. It's real. When you see an expression like 'Real Engagers' pop up out of nowhere, you can be pretty sure some market research firm has jumped the rails and is spinning PowerPoints out of control somewhere.

Deep thoughts

MindOverMary commented:

"I'll give you something to think about other than those deep thoughts that run through your mind like a hamster on a wheel. Aren't you tired of digging so deep all the time? Life isn't that complicated, it either is or it isn't. Know what I mean?"

I guess I'm more comfortable with the deep thoughts than elsewhere. When I was a kid living in Louisiana, I used to go downtown to the main library and lurk in the stacks, picking books at random to read. Rarely fiction - mostly nonfiction. The library was a cavernous and dark building, and I liked losing myself in the shelves farthest off from the main aisles.

That being said, there's a great deal I don't know. I know nothing about Western philosophy, for example. I should pick up 'Aristotle for Dummies' and work forward from there. The only work of Western philosophy I recall ever reading was 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.'

But there is some wisdom in what M.O.M. says. I've mentioned some Zen quotes here before - "Eight pounds of flax..." "When I'm hungry, I eat..." etc., emphasizing the importance of ordinary life. Intellectual pretzel-making, as best as I can tell, will not lead you to the Big E (if you have some concept of a 'Big E').

But my ordinary life *is* what M.O.M. describes as 'deep thoughts.' I haven't had much fun 'having fun.' I'm just kinda bookish.

"It either is or it isn't," she writes. Well, sort of. "Is" is another of those things that just rolled out of someone's brain, and the rest of us just generally decided by acclamation that it was right.

An alien from outer space, upon seeing the Statue of Liberty, might radio back to the mothership that it was a 'large structure with a light on top,' and he'd be right, as far as he went. When we say something 'is,' we may come no closer than that to fully describing its 'isness.'

For that matter, how do we know that it 'is'? Or, if we think that it 'isn't', how do we know that? We can't even be sure there's such a thing as 'is.' So maybe life neither is nor isn't. How can we know? Why do we need to know?

Posting my thoughts

Lark commented:

"I know you have begun to question the value of posting your thoughts."

The problem with my thoughts is not that they're my thoughts... it's that they're my thoughts.

More stuff that just fell out of somebody's brain - in this case, mine - as opposed The Thing Itself, whatever you choose to call it or not call it (because The Thing Itself that can be named is not The Thing Itself).

I can use words to do this jaunty little dance around the truth, but I can't actually show you the truth (assuming that I have seen it myself, which may be a bit much to assume).

Better to see the truth than to see me doing my jig.

The Bug Update

The waterbugs or whatever they are have returned in large numbers. I've put more boric acid down in the kitchen, where they're congregating. They're also appearing in large numbers on the front porch. But no place else.

I know I just have to be patient and keep applying the b.a. and eventually they'll be gone for good.

As for the fleas, well the b.a. is supposed to work on them, too. Plus, I went online and ordered a buttload of Frontline for the cats. One thing I've learned from experience is that the most reliable way to get rid of fleas is to keep the cats dosed with Frontline or Advantage. That won't kill all the fleas as quickly as a bomb, but it will kill them all eventually, and I won't have to evacuate the house for a day.

A summer cold is a different animal

an ugly animal... oooh!
It hits you in the summer,
When you've got a lot to do!

Well, I don't have that much to do, but every time I get one of these summertime sore-throat-and-sniffles episodes, I remember that commercial from my childhood for Contac.

Do they even make Contac anymore?

Anyway, I'm home now with a ticklish throat - not as bad as yesterday or even this morning - sniffles, and maybe a touch of fever. Left the RC early out of fear of spreading it.

The Stand

The gong stand, at last.

Near misses

I have accumulated several draft posts over the past couple of years which, for one reason or another, I chose not to post. Presented herewith are selections from some of those drafts.

---

When I get home in the evening, my usual course of action is to feed indoor cats, feed outdoor cats, change clothes, light some incense, and check my email and surf the web awhile. Then I read and maybe do some housecleaning before I go to bed.

---

I was told the other day I have a "likability problem."

Well, yeah.

---

I'm still occasionally surprised by the number of people -- even people who vaguely know me -- who will pass me in a hall or on a sidewalk and look right through me as if I'm not there.

---

I drive a Voyager minivan, same thing as a Caravan, and while it is not a huge car, it is not a compact either. Yet I am able to fit it into the parking spaces, and I expect other people to be gracious enough to do likewise.

---

I'm not surprised that professional people seem crazier. I apologize for resorting to sweeping generalizations, but professionals tend to be people with more intelligence and better educations. They're crazier because they actually see what's going on around them and inside themselves as well.

---

I remember being home sick from work one day and some friends coming by to check on me -- this would have been 1974 or thereabouts -- and them being astonished at what a mess my efficiency apartment was. The room was full of Marvel Comics and H.P. Lovecraft books, neither of which I read today. (I know some people are totally caught up in that Cthulhu/Miskatonic University stuff, but it was just too damn dreary for me. Do not read Lovecraft if you are prone to depression.)

---

Back in March, I blogged about Tara, the Tibetan Buddhist goddess, and how I thought she represented my feminine, and in many ways human, ideal.

Now I understand I am talking about fantasy. But as I sit here tonight, listening to shakuhachi and sitar music, incense burning, Alan Watts' writings still on my mind, it is easy for me envision someone with those qualities just being around. Not wild sex, or any sex. Just sitting in the next room, reading a book. Or meditating. Or listening to the music.

Just there. Just around.

---

I'm on my way to my holojob in the holocubicle. Nothing is real.

---

There have been some times in my life where I have become infatuated with a woman because there was some element of her personality that I thought would help me be a better person. Remember that scene in "As Good As It Gets" where Jack Nicholson tells Helen Hunt "You make me want to be a better man?" That's what I'm talking about. In fact, I had actually used that line –– months before the movie came out.

As I look back on it, I see that I wanted to use these women as sort of personality Bondo to fill in my own rough spots, dings and inadequacies. And at the root of these infatuations, at least in part, was the sense that they were somehow better than me.

---

I have said this before but it merits saying again: during a time when my emotional state was far more unsteady than it is today, by friends on the Well kept me from going completely around the bend. It would probably not be overstating it to say they kept me alive.

---

But remember, all this happened in a parallel universe. So please do not complain to us about their behavior.

The gradually disappearing employee

I left work for lunch Monday, and while I was out, I sat and thought about my office, my cubicle, my two monitors, and the various tasks waiting for me when I got back. The more I thought about it, the queasier I got, and I ended up not going back.

Today is the 4th, of course, so I didn't have to go in, but I don't know how I'll handle tomorrow.

I picked up copies of two graphic design magazines yesterday - magazines I read regularly - and couldn't finish them. Typography and color matching don't seem very important to me right now.

Can't get worked up one way or another about Paris Hilton or Ann Coulter. The Scooter Libby thing at least has some real significance, but I'm not following it with laser-like intensity.

When I'm at home, I read. And all I've read for more than a year now is books centered around Buddhism and Taoism.

I have had a glimpse of the real nature of things, and nothing else seems interesting.

Goodbye, roaches. Hello, fleas.

This is like biblical plagues or something. Although I have various cats, I haven't had fleas in the house in a couple of years. Now they are everywhere.

Guess I'll have to have the cats dipped, or get some Advantage! or Repel! or Reject! or Get the hell offa me! or something.

But the roaches or waterbugs or whatever have disappeared.

Wherrizzit?

I had assumed that by now we would be seeing pix of a certain recently-completed gong stand built by a local artist whose blog is linked at right.

I have seen the pic and the thing is pretty cool.

Steamed vegetables

You may have seen Birds Eye ready-to-steam vegetables in your supermarket freezer. It's basically the same principle as microwave popcorn: you throw the bag in the microwave, nuke it for 5:30, then tear open the bag and dump the vegetables in a bowl or whatever.

They have finally gotten vegetables to a convenience level where even I will eat them.

Roach update

First of all, I guess they technically aren't roaches. I don't know what they are.

Secondly, there are far fewer of them in the house after a fairly light and hasty application of boric acid.

Thirdly, they are still swarming around the porch like Junebugs. Last night, there were a bunch of them gathered around my front door, as if waiting for me to come home and let them in. Just like the cats do.

Roach motel

A few nights ago, I came home to find dozens of roaches crawling around on my front porch. I attributed it to the rain and figured they'd be gone when it cleared off.

Well, it hasn't cleared off.

I've seen three or four roaches in the house since then, and tonight, chased three out of my freakin' bed. I don't know whether to go check into a motel or what.

Guess I'll be getting some roach traps at Target tomorrow.

3:44 a.m. update:

A little web searching revealed several suggestions to put out boric acid in areas where pets and children can't reach it. So I guess I'll get some of that tomorrow.

4 a.m. update:

I'm having some weird flashback stuff going on with these roaches. I had forgotten what it was like having them in the house. When I was a kid in north Louisiana, they were everywhere. It was this damp and rainy every spring there. Nowadays, I may see one bug in the house every six months or so... or at least that was the norm until this week.

I can't go back to sleep.

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.

Depression and 'The View'

I guess I've been aware for awhile that Rosie O'Donnell has been a regular on The View – a show I've never seen.

And I'm aware, through the process of Shit-to-Brain Osmosis, that she has had some dispute with Donald Trump and some other dispute with Elisabeth somebody – begins with an 'H.'

Based on various cues I pick up on The Huffington Post and elsewhere, Elisabeth H. is somebody whom I should instantly recognize as An Important Person, and yet I can't even remember her last name, nor do I have any idea what she does other than argue with Rosie O'Donnell on The View.

One of the symptoms of my depression is that I lack enthusiasm for living.

This, I assume, is an example of that lack of enthusiasm. I don't know who Elisabeth H. is, I don't know what she and Rosie argued about, I haven't made any effort to find out, and I don't give a damn.

Why should I care? It's The View, for crying out loud, not the U.N. Security Council. And if it were the U.N. Security Council, I'm still not sure I'd care.

If I were more concerned about The View, and whatever Lindsay Lohan is doing this week (another Important Person I'm supposed to care about, even though I have next to no idea who she is or what she's done), would that indicate I'm less depressed?

More thoughts on the tests

I've been trying to organize some thoughts about these test results.

Depression – my depression, at least – doesn't seem to be about anything. I'm just depressed. As I've said before, I could win the PowerBall, date Angelina Jolie and bring world peace, and I'd still be depressed.

It's like having a cold, as I've also said before, except it never seems to completely go away. I'm rarely desperately, want-to-die depressed, as I once frequently was. But the constant state is exhausting. It's like walking around with three or four bricks hanging around my neck... not too heavy to carry, but enough to wear me down after awhile.

I guess I could go back on some drug for it.

More test results

www.mentalhelp.net

"You appear to be suffering from moderate to severe depressive symptoms commonly associated with serious depressive disorders, such as major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder or dysthymia. These symptoms appear to be causing you some serious impairment and distress in your normal, everyday functioning. You would likely benefit from the immediate attention of your physician or a trained mental health professional for further evaluation and a more accurate diagnosis and treatment."

---

www.bchealthguide.org

"You may be suffering from mild to moderate depression."

---

www.mentalhealthscreening.org

"Your screening results are consistent with symptoms of depression or bipolar disorder. While depression is characterized by a consistently low mood, bipolar disorder alternates between low moods and "high" or irritable moods."

I may also be bipolar, according to this site, although the symptoms haven't surfaced in seven or eight years.

---

I'm surprised that the questions and format of each of these six tests has been a little different. You know how people just steal stuff off other websites. But all these have been unique.

Wed afternoon

Checking from the Red Cup branch office of 3:40 a.m.

I'm burning through the 240-odd hours of leave I've accumulated with a series of long lunch hours, and so here I am.

I'm a lot less stressed than I was 48 hours ago. But if I took another of those online depression tests right now, I'd still probably test positive. (or negative, or whatever)

Some loudmouth is blathering behind me about 60s rock. STFU.

Almost midnight

Slept for several hours, but I'm awake again.

I'm in transition, and it's got me stressed and depressed.

Of course, we're always in transition. But sometimes it seems scarier than other times.

Paseo Arts Festival - day 2 and 3

Obviously, nothing changed from Saturday. Why go back?

In part because I needed distraction. For all my talk about being/not being and seeing every small thing as just the tip of the whole universe, I'm not comfortable with my own thoughts. Nor am I comfortable in my ratty messy house.

The short version of my story is that I abhor repetitive tasks.

My neighbors loathe the way my house and yard look, and don't mind letting me know it. They are perfectly content pushing a lawn mower back and forth over the same grass weekend after weekend. I can't stand it.

I can't stand housecleaning or doing laundry.

So I have to get away, and I do. And I shall.

Paseo Arts Festival

I went twice today.

Bought art. (Yes, it is art.)

Saw Westika at the Blue Moon. Heard Kristen sing, and I hope we'll all have that opportunity again in the future.

Kelley O was working in the children's art section, wherever that was. If I could have found it, I would have had her paint something on my arm. No, I'm not a child... but I'm an adult male, and that's a lot like a child, isn't it?

I overheard someone say Paseo is better than the downtown festival, and I have to agree.

Saw a Paseo neighborhood home I liked today. Too big for my needs and the price is more than I want to spend. But the location is almost perfect.

If an elephant shits in the jungle and no one is around to see it, is he still huge?

What makes an elephant huge? I don't mean diet or DNA. I mean what makes it so that being the size of an elephant makes an elephant huge?

The answer is that we decided an elephant is huge, and by that we mean huge compared to us. Similarly, when we say a Pomeranian is small, we mean a Pomeranian is small compared to ourselves. It's always about us.

If field mice got to decide this stuff, the Pomeranian would be huge, and the elephant would be -- well, I don't know what. Ask a field mouse if you see one.

But the elephant is huge not because of anything the elephant did, but because humans decided he was huge. So if the elephant shits in the jungle and no one is around to think, "Wow, that's a huge elephant shitting in the jungle," is he still huge? Obviously, he's the same size he would be if he was shitting with a human audience. But it's only the human perception that makes him "huge."

No humans, no hugeness.

He is neither huge nor not-huge... because no judging, analyzing, measuring, categorizing human is there to attach a concept to his size.

Thursday PM

At the Red Cup tonight. Spaghetti with marinara is the special, and I could eat it every day.

---

It's probably just my perception, but this laptop seems to have become really really really slow.

Maybe it's had some brownies or something.

I'm due for a MacBook Pro. Maybe in June, if they update them at WWDC.

The Internets say I'm depressed

After making the previous post, I decided to check one of those 'Are you depressed?' quizzes on the web. You may recall I took one last year which said I was depressed.

I Googled the phrase "Are you depressed?" and turned up several depression tests. I decided to take three of them:

---

New York University School of Medicine

"Your answers reflect the presence of significant depressive symptoms. It is advised to seek a psychiatric consultation."

---

www.psychcentral.com

"Based upon your responses to this depression quiz, you appear to be suffering from a moderate to severe depression. People who have answered similarly to you typically qualify for a diagnosis of major depression and have sought professional treatment for this disorder."

---

www.everydayhealth.com

"Warning! Make an appointment with your doctor.

"Based on your answers, you exhibit many of the characteristics that are common among people with depression. While this quiz does not provide a definitive diagnosis, it’s important that you see your physician for a screening. Your doctor will want to rule out any physical problems first, and then he or she may recommend that you see a psychologist or a psychiatrist. If you have thoughts of suicide, or if you’ve recently tried to take your own life, seek immediate help. Call 1-800-SUICIDE, or a local suicide helpline, and talk to a crisis counselor."

---

Looks like I hit the trifecta. Especially with everydayhealth.com, where I seem to have also won the bonus round. That number again: 1-800-SUICIDE.

More great news

I can imagine the universe as a great river, infinitely wide. It flows slowly, eternally, with no thought of where it's going, or why it's going there. It has no concept of time, of distance, or even of its own existence. It is not alive in any sense of the word we understand, and yet it exists, always in motion.

And off in one little eddy of this unimaginably vast, unthinking, unknowing river, some joker has poured a box of laundry detergent. And in that little eddy, so small as to be essentially invisible on the vast surface of this eternal river, billions of tiny soap bubbles form, float briefly, then pop.

Those soap bubbles are us, bobbing along, full of our important goals and plans and projects, proudly and busily building our skyscrapers, fighting our wars, getting our bonuses, salting our french fries and buying our SUVs. But as profoundly important as all this stuff is to us, we are actually so small as to be invisible. We are a trail of soap bubbles a foot across and thirty feet long floating on a river a trillion to the trillionth power miles wide. We are a temporary and inconsequential anomaly in a cosmos that neither notices us nor is affected by our doings. Eventually the last of us will disappear, and a half hour later, it will be as if we never existed.


























Of course, if we win the PowerBall, all this will change.

The deed is done

I set my departure date today - officially gone August 31, but because of accumulated leave, I'll be out in mid-July. (I have yet to take three consecutive days of vacation.)

This is the best job I've ever had. Others paid more, but with far more craziness/megalomania/etc.

But the job has reached the point where about 70 per cent of what I do is clerical, and only about 30 per cent is the stuff I was hired to do five years ago.

I could stay and be a comfortably-paid clerk, but the mind-numbing repetitiveness has worn me down.

I suggested, quite seriously, that a computer program could do most of what I do now, and that they should go that direction for my replacement, or at least hire an actual clerk instead of paying a creative-level person to batch process Word files into pdfs.

As for me, I can afford to retire (barring some economic cataclysm) and that's what I intend to do.

2:09 am

I'm awake. Nothing else to report.

Depression

I was down a little this weekend. This comes and goes, as I've mentioned before, and I assume it will pass.

soartstar says I'm in amore or less continual state of depression, and that's why I have so little enthusiasm for things.

Personally, I think enthusiasm in overrated, and I wonder why other people get so worked up over stuff.

In all fairness...

I did, in fact, say in my profile I am an artist, while I believe I don't produce enough art to claim the designation. So, I am henceforth simply a 'sentient being.'

Also a sedentary being, but maybe I can change that when I have more free time. I'm serious about riding the bike everywhere.

Friday AM

As some of you already know, I am pondering early retirement.

I am also shopping, although not wholeheartedly, for a new home. I love the house I'm in, but I want a place east of Classen and within bicycling distance of my regular hangouts.

My plan is to use the minivan for grocery shopping and little else; the bike will be my basic transportation.

I hope to have all this accomplished by the end of the year.

What that dude said

TIME magazine has an excerpt from Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason.

Here it is

Look around you. Here it is.

But:

Free yourself from the concept of 'here.'

Liberate yourself from the notion of 'it.'

And forget about what the definition of 'is' is.

Now... what are you left with?

I know, but I can't tell you, because there are no words with which to say it.

You'll just have to see it for yourself.

Assimilated by the Borg

I got a cellphone over the weekend. I haven't had one since 2000, and didn't especially want one, since telephony can be a gateway drug leading to direct human contact.

But Nurse Kathryn insisted I needed one, and offered to do the human contact necessary to consummate the relationship with Cingular.

So we went to the Cingular store where I sat with a white-knuckled grip on the arms of the chair. I now have a KRZR (pronounced cra-zer, which isn't a word, but maybe it should be), and a plan that has 450 rollover minutes plus some number of regular hours plus some number of other hours plus some other shit but no text messaging but one friend has already sent me a text message which I'll have to pay $45 to have received or something.

And I don't even really want to talk to anyone.

Is it art?

Larry has a post on pop*modern describing a recent discussion session on the subject of 'What is art?'

I was a participant in that conversation. Whatever it was I said that evening - and I don't remember because, frankly, I was just blathering - I now retract.

While it may be appropriate to ask in a broad sense, 'What is art?' I think it's dangerous to look at a particular piece and ask, as we did hypothetically that evening, 'Is this art?'

When we look at something and ask, 'Is this art?' we begin to distance ourselves from it. It is another example of having an experience and, rather than letting the experience speak to us directly, forcing it to compete with a bunch of stuff we drag out of our footlocker of memories, opinions and preferences - all the stuff we use as benchmarks for classifying, measuring and pigeonholing.

Better to simply experience the thing - nothing else.

The danger in this approach is that crap becomes accepted as art because although everyone sees the emperor has no clothes, no one will say so, and the next thing you know the crap's being sold in mass quantities on cable shopping channels. But that doesn't seem to me to be as much of a danger as letting our experiences be limited by our preconceptions and judgments.

(There are exceptions to this rule. Somewhere in my brain is stored the notion that being hit by a semi on the highway hurts. I'll live with that prejudice - I won't stand in the middle of I-35 to experience it directly.)

---

Some time back, I read several passages about stuff being neither phenomena nor not-phenomena. 'Well, stuff has got to be one or the other,' I thought to myself. 'I sort of get this concept, but not really.'

Well, now I get it. (The usual disclaimer applies.)

If I say, 'This stuff is phenomena,' I've classified it. Granted, I've classified it at the broadest, most vague level, but I've classified it nonetheless. Once again, I've filtered the experience through my own memories and opinions.

But what about, 'This stuff is not phenomena.'? Well, I've classified it again, but this time by exclusion.

So the key is to view stuff as neither phenomena nor not-phenomena.

What stuff?

You know... stuff.

---

Another quiet Friday evening. Not phenomena, not not-phenomena.

Thursday PM

If a man dies and is reincarnated as a sparrow,
Has his karma rewarded him or punished him?

Thursday

I have nothing to report.

Monday

I went home after two hours. The sore throat is gone, but I'm running a fever and have a headache. I have been sick a lot over the past year - at least a lot for me - and it's wearing me down.

I think I have a little bit of a chill, too.

Hack, sniffle, sneeze

If you've had any face-to-face contact with me since Wednesday or so, you know that my allergies have knocked me on my ass.

I woke up this morning with a sore throat that persists this evening, coupled with all the sniffling and sneezing I've been doing four five or six days.

On top of that we've had this oppressive humidity all weekend, and it's drained me.

So I've spent most of the weekend in the house, trying to stay cool and sucking Hall's throat lozenges.

I almost prefer being really seriously ill to this annoying stuff.

Career advice

Never try to teach a pig to sing. You'll only waste your time and annoy the pig.

– Folk saying, sometimes attributed to Robert Heinlein

The usual disclaimer applies

As always, and especially when I'm writing about subjects more complex than cat barf, readers should be aware that I may have no idea whatsoever what I'm talking about.

No-mind

Erika West found on YouTube the 'big rubber ball scene' from I Heart Huckabee's.

I didn't understand the full significance of this scene the first couple of times I saw it. But it's essentially the same thing that happens when a student gets whacked with the zen stick: for a split-second after you get smacked, you experience 'no-mind,' which is what Albert means when he says "you stop thinking."

It's not in the clip, but the scene ends like this:

Albert: It’s like I’m a rock or a dish of mold.
Albert: I’m whatever else is around. So I’m free to just exist.
Tommy: This is the answer. We just have to be this all day, every day.

Look at what happens here. First of all, Albert feels a need to define the experience.

And as soon as he feels the need to define the experience, he starts to lose the experience, to distance himself from it: "It's like I'm a rock or a dish of mold."

After that flash of direct seeing, he reaches into his own mind to come up with something with which to compare it. Since he has no experience at being a rock or a dish of mold (unless you believe in reincarnation), he pulls the comparison, in this case, from his imagination.

And given Albert's personality, it's no accident that he likened the experience to being a dish of mold rather than, say, a sunflower or a songbird. So the direct experience becomes tainted with aspects of Albert's own neuroses.

This is the the challenge, and one with which I struggle: to experience directly, without comparisons, cross-references, suppositions or assumptions. The moment you say, even to yourself, "It's like..." you've lost it.

Also:

Is there some reason or purpose to me having a sock drawer? Do I actually need to have one?

No meaning/no purpose redux

In comments to the previous post, freedomauthority wrote

When you write: "Many people seem to feel safer believing that a deity is running their lives and setting their goals. But deprived of the wonderful plan some supreme being supposedly has for your life, you must pursue harmony, inner balance and morality on your own." What about the Sangha? What about interdependence? What about "No-Self"?

I don't believe that Buddhism arrived in this world as a mission delivered to us by a higher power. Buddhism has nothing like a 'Great Commission.' There is a pledge to forego nirvana in order to seek the enlightenment of all beings, but it is voluntary and called into doubt by the Buddha himself in the Diamond Sutra.

Buddhism and Taoism present themselves to us as totally man-made creations - the product of the accumulated wisdom of dozens of teachers, of whom the Buddha and Lao-Tzu themselves are the most prominent, but not the first or the last.

The 'punishment' for failing to follow the eightfold path or the precepts of the Taoist canon are essentially self-inflicted; there is no invisible super-being with borderline personality disorder waiting to throw us into a lake of fire because, after we were given 'free choice,' he didn't approve of the choice we made.

Great news! Life has no meaning or purpose!

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I was pleasantly surprised and relieved when I finally figured out life has no 'meaning' and no 'purpose.'

In other words... all that stuff other people say you were put on this earth for? Nah.

I was reading Wen-Tzu again last night. He quotes his teacher, Lao-Tzu, as saying that laws are of men and not from heaven, but are necessary nonetheless.

If nothing else, we need laws to protect us from all the people with meaning and purpose in their lives.

But suffering/dissatisfaction, the Buddha taught, comes from attachment. And that can certainly include attachment to some notion of an external force directing your life while you try to live up to its exacting standards.

Many people seem to feel safer believing that a deity is running their lives and setting their goals. But deprived of the wonderful plan some supreme being supposedly has for your life, you must pursue harmony, inner balance and morality on your own.

My experience is that it's easier that way.

Now as I was saying... self/no self.

So here's your left thumb, okay? And the four fingers on your left hand.

And your left thumb is thinking, "Wow, that index finger is pretty hot. She's probably out of my league. But hey... maybe not.

"But every time I see her, she's with that middle finger. What's that about? Do they have something going on? I'll ask pinky finger... she'll probably know."

So the thumb goes and asks the pinky finger, "So, what's the deal with that index finger? Is she in a relationship with the middle finger? Is she, like, more into fingers than thumbs?"

And pinky finger goes to third finger and says, "You're not going to believe what I just heard about index finger..."

And third finger tells middle finger, and middle finger tells index finger, and index finger is like totally freaked out and confronts third finger, who sends her on to pinky finger, who by this time no longer remembers where she heard that, but she was just reporting what she'd been told.

Meanwhile, middle finger tells thumb, who doesn't realize he's just hearing his own unfounded speculation being repeated back to him as fact. So he gives up on index finger, and decides that all fingers are psycho bitches.

And now there's all this angst and drama and confrontation and innuendo.

But what is it, really, when you tilt your head back a little and look at it carefully?







































IT'S JUST YOUR LEFT HAND.


























But we are a lot like the thumb and the fingers: we may think we're all separate, standalone entities, but we're actually tied together into a huge cosmic hand with several billion fingers. And if we could all stop seeing ourselves as 'selves', and see that we are all one huge hand, we'd make one hell of a banjo player.




Or something.





This concept may need more development.

dzaster, white courtesy phone, please...

Check in or something. We're wondering where you are.

Blog responsibilities

Amanda Joy does not randomly muse as often as I thought she would when I first linked to her blog. (Although she has about a dozen different web sites, I think, so maybe some of the others get updated more frequently.)

And Diatribe 101? Last post on July 5th, 1996. (OK, that's an exaggeration.)

Blogging is like hosting Hardball. Keep yammering whether you have anything to say or not. People want to be entertained, dammit.

Self, No Self

I think I still don't entirely grasp the Buddhist concept of no-self.

Every time I think I have the gist of it, I stumble across something on the web or in a book that gives a new slant on it, and I have to go back and rethink it.

What if there truly is no self? The first time I encountered that notion, it left me a little uneasy. I think that happens to everyone. At first, I didn't want there to not be a me.

But then I thought, 'you know, if I'm not real -- not a separate, independent entity -- that makes things a lot easier.'

Think about all the stuff we have in our culture that goes along with being a self:

Self-respect
Self-doubt
Self-motivation
Self-loathing
Self-love
Self-questioning
Self-sabotage
Self-confidence...

If there's no self, you can wipe all that stuff off the table with a broad sweep of your arm and then have some pancakes.

Someone was right... but I forget who.

Cougar, puma, mountain lion. All the same thing.

Just see.

The goal is to see reality. Or, to put it more succinctly, to see. Because if you're seeing, the only thing you can be seeing is reality. There ain't nothin' else there.

I read something (as usual, I forget where) that really struck a chord with me: our memories are not of our experiences, but of our opinions of our experiences.

I had some kind of weird flashback stuff going on during my three-day school. One session covered a disaster that occurred years after I was out of the news business. I didn't go anywhere near it. But the photos in the Powerpoint presentation were of scenes you'd see in any disaster, and they evoked a certain internal response - a response powerful enough that one of the instructors, who had known me in my reporting days, asked me if I was okay.

But get this: I wasn't responding to the pictures themselves, right? Because I wasn't even there when they were taken. I didn't have any memories of that event. I was responding to opinions and emotional attachments - both positive and negative - formed about some other event which, although it had some superficial similarity to what I was seeing, was actually completely unrelated to it.

So here's the photo of an event that I didn't cover, and bam! I'm reacting to some other event from ten years ago or longer... but even that's not really what I'm reacting to because that event reminds me of something else and bam! I'm thinking about some story where I felt like I had failed professionally and embarassed myself and bam! I'm thinking about being scolded by a producer or chewed out by a news director and how I felt about that and bam! I'm thinking about some snide thing my mother said to me when she was drunk and maybe there are a couple of more bam!s after that but they go so far back in time that I'm not remembering the reality, I'm not remembering the opinion of the reality, I'm only remembering some residual feeling I had about the opinion of the reality.

And now the color drains from my face and I start feeling a little queasy and this guy thinks I look a little sickly. (Well, I look a little sickly a great deal of the time - droopy, puffy eyelids and all that - but this was even moreso than usual.)

This story is a somewhat extreme (but true) example of something that happens to me - and most of us - all the time. We see something, but instead of directly experiencing it, letting it be exactly what it is, we throw it into the Cuisinart of our memories, attachments and opinions, whip it into a fresh, cool neurosis smoothie, and experience that instead.

It takes mindfulness to experience things directly, and leave the Cuisinart in the cabinet.

I frequently refer to the two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree because that was something I saw recently which I experienced directly. I wasn't thinking about some other squirrels I had seen when I was fifteen, or having an opinion about whether squirrels steal food from birds or pondering the concept that squirrels are really just rats with good p.r. -- there were two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree and what I saw was two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree and for about 45 seconds that was all I saw or experienced. I was totally there and I can tell it was pretty cool.

When you look at something, try just seeing what's there, without forming opinions or judgements or going back to stuff in the past.

Flashback

I'm going to break my self-imposed ban on writing about my job just this once.

I'm attending a three-day seminar whose subject matter is focused in large part on dealing with the news media in emergencies.

If you've been following this blog for any time, you can probably guess how I feel about this: I don't want to deal with the news media in any way, shape or form. (Nor for that matter, do they have any urgent desire to deal with me.)

I still have regular nightmares about being in the news media. I don't like reliving elements of that part of my life. I was on the brink of a panic attack by the time this thing was over today, and I pretty much bolted from the building when it was over.

There are not many people taking this seminar who have my background, although there are a few who've been through what I've been through and a few who've been through far, far worse. Some of them seem to handle this much better than I do.

I just want to be far away from it.

Maybe my fascination with Cold Mountain has its origin in the need to escape my own past.

Well, what else... ?

I posted my plug for Vino e Donne last night after I'd watched about 20 minutes of it. I ended up going to bed with the DVD unfinished, and watched the rest of it this morning.

The most interesting thing about this for me was getting a better insight to some of the interviewees who I sort of know, but don't know very well.

---

Another subject: a few weeks ago, I was rummaging through old emails and found some I'd sent to a certain someone –– not a long time ago, but not recently, either. I guess I copied them from a previous computer. I rarely delete non-spam email, although I've lost a bunch over the years due to accidental deletions and hard drive failures.

In any event, I was somewhat –– what's the word I want? –– not shocked, really, but more than a little surprised at the tone of these emails. I had quoted Rumi to her. Talked about Zen and Buddhism and Taoism in the way that a person who had read a couple of books about the subjects would talk, which is to say from a self-assured position of near-total ignorance.

I didn't say anything I didn't mean, and I don't think anyone would feel uncomfortable with the sentiments themselves, but the tone in which they were expressed was, in retrospect, rather overwrought and maybe a little creepy.

At the time, I had the idea they were quite moving and meaningful. Looking back, they were the semi-ravings of someone who, while a long way from being completely whack, had significantly lost control over his emotions and let his inner state get pretty far out of balance.

I think a general rule of thumb could be that when you start quoting Rumi to someone, you'd better go look in the mirror and see if there's a crazy person looking back.

And yet, how many people do I know right this minute who are in post-relationship hangovers and want nothing more than to go out there and do it again?

I've heard, of course, the familiar analogy about being thrown from a horse.

But if someone stuffs you in a laundromat-sized clothes dryer, loads five dollars worth of quarters into it and lets you tumble for the whole afternoon, should you at the end of the cycle throw in more quarters and have another go?

Vino e Donne

Here's the plug for Vino e Donne. Fourteen women. Fourteen bottles of wine. Twenty questions.

Get it here.

This is kind of interesting because I know some of the interview subjects, sort of know some of the other interview subjects -- and of course, some are strangers to me.

3:12 am

I'm sort of mulling over the notion that every time I post here, the very act of posting demonstrates that I don't have a perfect grasp of what I'm talking about.

There are some things in this world that, although they seem quite important to a lot of people, don't interest me at all. And there are things, such as politics, that interest me but I see that there are dozens of people who can speak more knowledgeably than I.

If I were in a perfect state, I think, everything in the world would fall into one of those two categories and I wouldn't have anything to say at all.

I used to have an old Dilbert cartoon taped to my cubicle wall. In the first panel, Wally says, "I'm running out of things to say."

In the second panel, he adds, "I'm going to have to start repeating myself just to fill the air time."

In the third panel, Dilbert replies, "You could try letting other people talk." And Wally says, "So anyway, I'm running out of things to say."

That's how I feel about myself most of the time. I could quit communicating altogether and the resulting impact would be negligible. Some of the stuff I talk about –– not just in blogs, but in life in general –– is of no importance at all. And for the stuff that is important, other people have said it far better than I have. I'm just trying to fill the air time.

Sometimes I think I'd like to buy five hundred copies of 'The Taoist Classics' translated by Thos. Cleary, hand them out to everyone I know, and just tell them, "Anything of substance I have to say is already better said somewhere in this book."

---

I mentioned previously that I'd like to have Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. for a neighbor when I die and go to heaven. I actually decided this several months ago after reading his final book, "A Man Without A Country."

I came up with the notion that when I die, I would like to live on a street of bungalows and foursquare houses with big wide porches, shaded by rows of sycamore trees up and down each side of the street. Vonnegut would live next door, with Alan Watts on the other side. The biggest, most stately house on the street would belong to Mark Twain, but I would be too intimidated to go near it. H.L. Mencken would live down on the far corner, a sarcastic old misanthrope, and nobody would pay much attention to him.

Seung Sahn would live across the street, and Hui Neng, the sixth Zen patriarch, would be next door to him. Wen Tzu would be on the street, too. And maybe Walt Kelly, who drew 'Pogo'. And Molly Ivins.

You'd think Cold Mountain would be on the list, too, but of course he wouldn't want to live in such a crowded place. He'd be out past the edge of town somewhere, just down the road from Henry David Thoreau, but they'd wander in every so often to visit.

The big question, then, would be: what is a guy who blogs about cat vomit doing on this block?

No... if there is a heaven, I'll find myself in a trailer park with my parents.

If there is indeed a heaven

here's who I want for my next door neighbor.

Speaking of things I don't have to think about:

Have you noticed that in all the news photos of Larry Birkhead today, his facial expression and body language suggest someone who's won the PowerBall?

Did he actually act like that all day, or is that careful (or misleading) photo editing?

Promoted from the comments

Blogblah! commented:

Your squirrels' tree is appropriately phallic for a Freudian response. Is it your love-worthiness or your sexual desires and/or frustrations that are in question?

Asking the right question DOES matter.

The tree analogy actually predates this question. I first used it in this post last month.

So it's more accidental than Freudian.

Lark, Sweeney and Patrizia will remember the long, long posts I put on the Well about this subject –– loveworthiness, that is. I went on and on and on. I remember saying something at the time about always playing the 'affable but oddball next door neighbor' role in people's lives... like Bill Daly or Sid Melton in old TV sitcoms... and ranting about how tired I was of being pigeonholed that way.

Well, that was then –– about ten years ago –– and this is now. The comparison still seems a little apt, but so what? What's the significance? What's the point? There isn't any.

Sometimes, when I'm in a ranting mood, or if I see someone else in a ranting mood, I think about that picture from the Hubble telescope I posted here - the one with the gas cloud and the galaxies glowing in the background. And whatever the rant is that's occupying my thought, I imagine it as a comic-strip type word balloon pointing to one of those stars.

Helps me put the matter in perspective.

But I meant to use the 'love-worthiness' issue as an example, not as the focus of the post. Here's another example: I found myself thinking about something at work this morning –– I don't remember what, now –– but something that first of all, had no bearing on my life one way or the other, and secondly, didn't actually need to be mulled over from the angle from which I was approaching it. So why was I wasting my own internal CPU cycles on it? I actually got myself a little stressed out with this before I realized I didn't need to be thinking about it at all.

The bigger picture is that human beings spend a lot of time thinking about things that just don't need to be thought about. We often approach these things from the wrong perspective, but more importantly, we would often do better to not approach them at all.

Almost any kind of gossip you hear falls into this category. What scandalous rumor have I heard lately that actually required me, for the preservation of the order of the cosmos, to think about it? And as I've gotten older, I've gotten a lot better at tuning that stuff out. Obviously, when I was a reporter, I loved gossip and rumor. But now? Not so much.

Back to my ruminations about 'loveworthiness' –– which isn't exactly a non sequitir, but something close to it. It's like thinking about 'baseball fluid' or 'brick grease'... if you'd written page after page of ramblings about either of those subjects, would you look back on it and think you'd done something profound and productive?

The good news is that it is just perfectly okay to not think at all about two-thirds of the stuff we think about, and maybe more than that. Just give our brains a rest, for god's sake. The stuff doesn't require our attention.

Sexual desires? Frustrations? Those at least have some relevance to my life, but I have found that they're not as important as they used to be.

One of the cool things about detachment is that you can do it on a trial basis. Detach, to use the immediate example, from obsessing about sexual desires and frustrations. If it scares you to be without the angst, as it did me at one time, you can always go back to them. They'll still be around.

(What happened to me, although I didn't realize it at the time, was that the obsessing became an emotional substitute for what I didn't have in my life. 'Hmmm. I seem to be out of Tylenol. I'll just take this Liquid Drano instead to tide me over.')

But if you detach from your obsessions ('Just put it down' as Seung Sahn might say) for a day or two –– and once you get past that initial fear that you're going to disappear from the face of the earth because you're not obsessing –– once you get past that point, it feels kind of refreshing. And you discover that you can choose to obsess or not obsess. And it becomes easier and easier to not obsess.

So I don't obsess as much as I did. I still do it sometimes. Habitual behavior, I guess.

Obviously I can still write mind-numbingly long posts.

Worthiness addendum II

In fact, instead of asking, "Am I worthy of being a chocolate doughnut?" one could simply ask, "Am I a chocolate doughnut?"

Except that the second question has an answer: since all things are actually one thing, the answer would be, "Yes. I am a chocolate doughnut."

Wow. I'm a chocolate doughnut.

I don't feel any different...

Worthiness addendum

It occurs to me that if someone had presented the same argument to me ten years ago that I presented in the previous post, I would have been utterly unwilling to accept or even consider it.

I was not ready to think that way in 1997.

Things change.

Worthiness

I went through a rough experience many years ago, romantic in nature, that left me wondering if I was worthy of love.

I went into therapy (because of that and other reasons) and got the usual adult child of alcoholics affirmations and reassurances, which included the reassurance that I was indeed worthy of love.

I accepted that and carried it with me.

Until about a week ago.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that I would re-examine this belief in light of my Buddhist/Taoist leanings.

Why does there have to be an issue of 'worthy/not worthy'? Why does 'worthiness' even enter into it?

We're always looking for ways to get a grip on things that are so ethereal and vaporous that they can't be grasped, and here we are trying to get a grip on 'love,' something which may exist, or which may actually just be a catchall term - like 'cancer' and 'nervous breakdown' - for a variety of symptoms and/or phenomena which may be related in some way but are not necessarily the same thing.

So if I ask myself, "Am I worthy of love?" is the proper response, "Yes, I am worthy of love"?

Or is the proper response, "Why am I even asking the question? Why don't I ask myself, 'Am I worthy of being a chocolate doughnut?' or, for that matter, 'Is a chocolate doughnut worthy of love?'"

I'm not sure I'm making myself clear here. I guess what I'm saying is that we pose questions to ourselves that have no valid foundation, then struggle to come up with answers to them. We argue, we debate -- in this case we buy a bunch of those Venus/Mars books -- and at the end of the day we don't know a damn thing more than we did to start with because we began with a flawed question.

Am I worthy of love?

I saw two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree.

That's as good an answer as 'yes' or 'no.'

Sunday

For someone who is thinking about becoming a recluse again, I sure seem to have a tough time being alone. Went to the EE Starbucks this morning, and from there to Jimmy's Egg with Dave, dzaster and Nurse Kathryn. Then home for a nap.

Later, around 5, I got restless. Went to Galileo - the only thing open in the bubble - in the hope of running into someone to talk to. I didn't, so I drank a Sierra Nevada by myself and left.

Now I'm home again.

I could sit, but ehhhh...

I rarely feel lonely anymore, but sometimes I'm bored.

100 Paintings, 100 Days

The 100 Paintings, 100 Days show is underway at Adalante gallery on the Paseo.

A blog with many of the works and a description of the project is here.

---

I stayed home again this evening. I've been spending more time alone lately, and I wonder if this is a temporary thing or another change in my life. I've done this before - had a fairly active social life for a couple of years, then overloaded and become a recluse for a few years.

---

The music's been off for a few weeks now, too. I seem to have lost interest in that.

Words to Wonder

Years ago, I worked for a company whose employee newsletter included a column written by a self-absorbed young marketing executive who was thinking, or so she imagined, deep thoughts. She called the column "Words to Wonder."

Which has that nice ambiance of profound wisdom to it, but actually makes no sense.

So here are some words to wonder:

When I run into Westika at the Red Cup or elsewhere, we smile and nod, but we've never talked. We actually have communicated far more by blog comments than in actual conversation.

---

I've discovered that when I'm sitting at the Red Cup, or Sauced! or elsewhere, I find myself wondering if a certain other person is going to show up. That's the beginning of chaos.

Mayday, mayday. Danger, Will Robinson.

---

I occasionally pass up the opportunity to sit with some friends because there may be one or two other women there around whom it is difficult to act in a rational grown-up manner. At least for me. I don't leer and make suggestive comments -- just the opposite, in fact. I sit still and shut the fuck up out of fear that if I open my mouth at all something awesomely inane will force its way out and parade around the table with a kazoo and bass drum to make sure everyone notices it.

---

I had a conversation with some acquaintances the other day who feel that they have too much chaos and drama in their lives, but also are afraid that getting centered will destroy their creativity forever.

It doesn't work that way. Getting centered is just the first step. Then you have to stay that way. A person is far more likely to slide back into samsara than to find themselves somehow permanently stuck, even against their will, in a calm enlightened (and not necessarily 'capital E enlightened') state. This is why the Buddha talked about mindfulness - it requires constant attention. Staying in the moment and all that.

---

But the slope is getting a little slippery for me right now. Not real slippery, but a little slippery.

---

Words to wonder.

Coals to Newcastle.

Kirk to Enterprise.

Hart to Hart.

Tinker to Evers to Chance.

Somewhere out there is the great zen master

He doesn't hit people with sticks or yell at them. He may not wear vestments.

He doesn't advertise in magazines or get endorsements from Ken Wilber.

He doesn't have an online store.

He has about six students, and hardly anyone else even knows who he is.

Cold Mountain, yet again

One of the first Buddhist books I ever read was Buddhism Is Not What You Think by Steve Hagen.

Someone sent me a quote from it the other day, in which he talks about the poet Han-Shan, or Cold Mountain.

I'm not going to copy and paste it here, because it's rather long. But the gist of it is that when Cold Mountain the poet is talking about going to Cold Mountain the place, he's not talking about his cliff dwelling in the mountains... he's talking about his own zen state of mind, which has nothing to do with where he lives.

Some of you have heard me use the expression 'The Buddha is not in Nepal,' which is another way of saying the same thing: what you find you will find within yourself, not in a temple or stupa or zendo, whether it's in Nepal or Japan or Warr Acres.

And yet...

Something drove Cold Mountain the poet to take refuge in the wilderness, far from any community. Something led him to isolate himself from the world at large.

One of his translators, Red Pine, has suggested Cold Mountain was a fugitive who had to flee the city after participating in an unsuccessful uprising against the government. Maybe so - the fact is we know almost nothing about him.

How does one know when it's time to retreat?

Monday PM

Took off work a couple of hours early (I'm maxed out on accumulated leave - whatever I don't take now, I lose) came home, changed into shorts and an aloha shirt, and headed over to Sauced!

The patio was full.

Sat down with Andre, Ron F and Kelley O and had a beer and a pizza. The Mayor of Slackerville arrived and sat with us awhile.

The air was warm, then cooled at dusk. We were under the awning, out of the sun.

It was another of those evenings where everything seemed just right.

Can't get hooked on it... they don't last. Impermanence, non-attachment and all that. But if you can sit on a just-right evening and eat pizza with friends, why would you want to do anything else?

Sunday PM

I don't have much to write about. I have the sense that I will not have much to write about for awhile. I am at a point where nothing seems particularly important or interesting.

I know that's supposed to be a sign of depression. I think in this case it's just a sign of realization.

I mowed the front yard over the weekend. I cannot say enough good things about my Black & Decker cordless electric mower. I left the thing sitting out in the back yard all winter. It was rained on and snowed on. I rolled it out Saturday and flipped the switch and it came right on. The battery was low, which was to be expected, but in every other respect it was ready to go.

I threw out a ton of old crap in my back bedroom - enough to fill the trash can that goes out to the curb. If I can do that, oh, 20 more times, that room may become habitable.

I ordered a 750 GB Seagate hard drive Friday. It should be here by the middle of the week. I almost can't imagine 750 gigabytes. I got into computing rather late and my first hard drive was 210 megabytes on a 486/33.

I also got my meditation bench in and have tried it. It does make sitting more comfortable. Now if I could just give more of a shit about meditation.

I finished my two FEMA NIMS training courses for work. I don't remember what NIMS stands for, which tells you how much I got out of the classes. National something.

Butthead the Cat is dead and in the landfill somewhere.