More Wednesday notes

My regular Wednesday night schedule was disrupted by eleventh-hour revisions to a freelance project... so, since I'm spending the evening at home, I'll get caught up on the bicycle thing.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm using a bike for basic transportation for the first time since junior high school. I use it maybe 30% of the time.

Riding a bike through neighborhoods is a lot different than riding on the trails at Hefner or the river. I'm much more aware now of the lay of the land between here and the Red Cup, which is where I usually go first thing in the morning. Small hills that I didn't even notice in a car are more evident. I know the residential streets around my house much better than I used to. When I was a kid, I knew every cracked sidewalk, every bumpy street, every shortcut behind a convenience store or through an apartment complex. I don't ride on sidewalks or cut through apartment complexes now, but that sensation of being a part of the neighborhood has returned for the first time since adolescence.

I'm also much more aware of what drivers are doing. I've always been very alert to traffic around me. I'm always at threat level red when there's an SUV on the street, or someone is talking on a cell phone while driving.

Gas prices didn't play much of a part in my decision to do this. I figure it will take two to three years to save enough on gasoline to cover the cost of the bicycle.

What did affect my decision is my dissatisfaction with my weight and the way I feel. I'm tired of not being able to bend over because my stomach is in the way. I'm not as worried about how it looks, even though it doesn't look very good. But I sure don't like the way it feels.

---

Someone told me the other day that I had the personality and demeanor of someone who smokes about a pound of weed a week. I took that as a compliment.

Wednesday notes

I haven't posted anything since Friday, not including the Modern Taoist Sage link, because I just don't have anything to say.

My life is more at peace right now than it's ever been, I suppose. I can fantasize, of course, about how it could be better - such as being able to look out my front window and see a lake, small and not overdeveloped, with no jetskis or powerboats allowed - but as a practical matter, things are as close to perfect as they can reasonably be expected to be.


All five of the rose bushes in my front yard are in bloom. It's the first time ever they've produced flowers simultaneously.

I paid off the credit card purchase of the Breezer this week, bringing my total financial liabilities back down to zero.

I come and go as I please, with few responsibilities and few expectations.

It's important, though, that I not get attached to this moment of my life. Just as the turn-of-the-century personal turmoil passed, so too shall this.

I have nothing else to report.

The Sage

The Modern Taoist Sage by Jos Slabbert

Friday morning

I've just awakened from another round of uncomfortable previous career dreams, punctuated by an allergy attack.

My allergy problems seem to occur in the middle of the night and again at mid-morning. By afternoon I'm usually feeling pretty good. The allergy attacks usually go away completely in early- to mid-October.

But what I actually wanted to post about was that my regularly scheduled spell of depression has not appeared. I've had two really bad spells of depression that lasted more than a year - one in 1971-3 and another in 1997-1999. But most last only a few days.

I've mentioned before that these brief spells seem to be mostly physical in nature and not strongly related to anything external. When I get them, I tend to treat them as if they were a bad head cold - annoying, but something that has to be temporarily endured.

I see three possible reasons they've stopped: retirement, and the removal of stresses related to work; the additional exercise from almost-daily bike riding; or the further elimination of personal attachments.

I think it's probably a combination of all three.

I want to post more about bicycling, but I think that can wait until later.

Well, of course I should find my good winter gloves now

But forget the rest of it. I don't know what I was thinking.

I'm sitting here tonight with Adobe InDesign open for the first time since I retired. I really didn't miss it.

Things to maybe do

I don't have a 'to-do' list to speak of. I need to pay some bills this week and do some laundry. That's about it.

Long term, I need to have some dental work done, preferably before year's end.

I've been thinking – very tentatively – about undertaking the relationship search again. But it's on my list of things that maybe I ought to think about doing:

· Should I wear sunscreen?
· Is it close enough to fall to trim back the wisteria and crape myrtles?
· Should I look for a relationship?
· Should I find my good winter gloves now so I'll have them when it turns really cold?

That's kind of where the relationship thing is. I don't know what a relationship would be like in my present state of mind. Not very dramatic, that's for sure. More intellectual than physical, probably. Neither being nor not being and all.

You know what I like to do? Sit around the Red Cup and talk about Chuang-Tzu and Alan Watts. Know what else I like to do? Sit around Sauced! and talk about Chuang-Tzu and Alan Watts.

And that's about it. You know how many women I know who like that? None.

I've reached a point where the level of crazy shit in my life is barely a murmur. The crazy shit meter isn't even twitching. Why would I want to risk screwing that up?

What does it look like?

After I finished the previous post last night, I got to wondering about what I'd written about seeing 'it.' What, I asked myself, would 'it' look like? And the first thing that popped into my head was a biscuit.

How did I get here? I didn't take notes.

"I don't necessarily want to give a lecture. I just want to live with you: moving stones, having a nice hot spring bath and eating something good. Zen is right there. When I start to talk, it is already a smoky kerosene lamp. As long as I must start a lecture, I have to explain, 'This is right practice, this is wrong, this is how to practice zazen...' It is like giving you a recipe. It doesn't work. You cannot eat a recipe."

– Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Not Always So

I like this because it supports my notion that it's difficult to explain – no, impossible to explain – some of the things I believe.

You may already know you have a blind spot in the middle of your vision. If you look at stars at night, and you stare very hard at a particular star, it will seem to vanish. But if you look just above or below it, or to one side, it will reappear. That's sort of how this is. I can see it if I don't stare at it.

And if I try to define it, even to myself, I get this mental picture of 'it' sitting right in front of me, and as I describe it, the adjectives in my mind pop up in front of it like a screen. And soon, instead of seeing it, I'm seeing a wall of adjectives - in black 36 point Univers extended.

I can't tell you how I got here. I recall some of the stops along the way, and I've written about them here, but I'm not sure I could retrace my steps if I had to. Just as important, I can't tell you whether it would be good for you to try to reach the same point. I don't even know what it is. I don't have a name for it, and I don't want to name it, in part because I'm afraid the correct name would be 'full of shit' and then my ego would be damaged.

Bloggy update

Joining the list of blog links at right is Mind Over Mary, aka sister of BlogBlah! Mary is a former OKC resident now living in Charleston, SC.

Also, Cutting to the Chase is on hiatus (a word I learned from TV Guide when I was twelve or so), so it's no longer linked. Leave a comment or send an email if you start blogging again, CM.

By request

Random notes for those looking for something... anything... to read:

First of all, I'm riding the bike most days now. I typically use it for my morning trip to the Red Cup, and then take it back home. If I go out in the evening, I take the van.

The bicycle I'm riding is a Breezer Liberty, which was designed specifically for around-town commuting.
I may be getting parts of the backstory wrong, but company founder Joe Breeze, if I understand correctly, more or less invented the mountain bike. Here's his bio on the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. Now, his company's whole line of bikes is geared specfically to basic transportation use.

Security is an issue. Having had a 30-year-old Schwinn LeTour worth maybe $25 stolen out of my garage a few years ago, I know that people will steal – and pawn shops will apparently buy – damn near anything. So the bike stays locked and indoors whenever I'm not using it. Dragging it in and out is something of a disincentive to ride it.

You'd think that someone would have come up with a nearly-bulletproof 'bike garage' that one could install beside a house or something. Like a reinforced steel hut that could hold two or three bikes on racks.

Anyway, the bike now accounts for perhaps 30% of my weekly travel, and when I'm in better shape, the percentage will increase. Some days this is a very easy morning ride, and other days it just wipes me out. Today was easy; yesterday's ride left me recuperating most of the afternoon.

---

A few words now about my gradually shrinking bubble.

It occurred to me a few days ago that if I could get the Red Cup, three kinds (ie., Italian, Asian, American, etc.) of decent restaurants, a grocery store and a book store all in a space of one square mile, I could live in that square and never leave.

I have no desire to travel and not much incentive to. I would prefer to stay in one little neighborhood for the rest of my life and enjoy the peace and quiet, such as it is.

In an enlightened nation, some Taoist master wrote, the citizens never go abroad because their needs are all met at home and they're content. My needs and desires are few these days.

---

There is a famous collection of drawings known as the Zen Ox-herding Pictures. Several versions are out there - here's one version.

These have been around since the 12th century CE. What you actually see in these pictures is a guy interacting with an ox, but it's all symbolic. This was apparently a common event in 12th century China, so the average person could identify with the experience as portrayed in the pictures.

You can find a lot of web sites explaining what's happening in these drawings. But I want to talk about what's not happening. The guy is not:

• taking calls on his cell phone.


• jamming along with his iPod.


• text messaging.


• dodging SUV's and Jesus-cab pickup trucks with chrome hand rails.


• repeatedly punching the button for the 'WALK' light with his thumb.

When you were out herding an ox, that's what you did. There was you and there was the ox. There wasn't much in the way of distraction. No wonder Bodhidharma sat at the wall for nine years... there wasn't anything else to do.

I'd like to think that if you blindfolded Hui-Neng or Dogen, drove them to the intersection of NW Expressway and Penn at rush hour, then suddenly pulled off the blindfolds, they would smile serenely and continue to have no concept of either being or not being. But more likely they would be like, "What the fuck, man?! What is this shit??!"

We have a lot more distraction than the ancient ancestors had. We're all about distraction, in fact. We're the nation of being distracted.

Before I encountered the Four Noble Truths, and later Chuang-Tzu, Wen-Tzu, Watts and Seung Sahn, I encountered Henry David Thoreau. Reading Walden in 2000 (along with Douglas Rushkoff's Coercion) set me up for the realizations that were to follow. Together, Walden and Coercion led me to see that I could get along with about one-tenth of the crap I had accumulated, and that most of what I had thought I wanted in my life wasn't really what I wanted, but what a bunch of marketing weasels wanted. And I saw that the stuff made my life worse, not better.

So here I sit in my shrinking bubble, free of desires that weren't mine to begin with.

I'm giving away a bunch of old computer parts. I'm going to box those up this afternoon.

But right now I think it's time for a nap.

Let's run this war like a bidness

If you start a business and it makes money, you don't abruptly say, 'Well, it worked. I started a business and made some money,' then shut the business down. No, what you do is keep the business going and try to get new customers.

If you're really successful, you expand and open a second location.

If you look at our glorious patriotic mission in the mideast from that perspective - a business that's making good money for its proprietors - I think everything you hear from the administration this month will make a lot more sense.

Labor Day 2007

Nothing to report.

Sunday afternoon notes

I have several things to catch up on.

First of all, the bicycling: the terrain between my house and the Red Cup is mostly flat, and I've made that trip rather easily.

Today, I ventured farther east. The terrain is more rolling when you get east of Western. I went by Galileo where I received a round of applause from the patrons astonished to see The Inert Mass of Neither Being Nor Not-Being actually in self-propelled motion. From there it was down to Sauced! (where were you, JohnX?), and after that home, going down Dewey into Mesta Park and then going west on NW 18. That was harder. I am in horrible shape, especially when you consider I'm a non-smoker and not much of a drinker. These aren't even really hills... more like bumps. But they're wearing me out.

In my previous adult biking experience, I've ridden around Lake Hefner or on the River Trails, which offer a more controlled biking experience. I haven't used a bike as basic transportation since I was a teenager. I'm refreshing skills I haven't used in forty-five years: remembering where the steep grades are... the safest places to cross busy streets... where the potholes and badly-patched stretches of pavement are... where I'm likely to encounter unfriendly dogs... watching parked cars to make sure there's no one in them who might suddenly open a door in my path...

This afternoon, my legs are okay but my upper arms are burning like they have muscle strain.

---

Several weeks ago, I mentioned that Amanda Joy, whose blog Amanda Joy's Random Musings is linked at the right, doesn't update as frequently as I thought she would. Previously unknown to me, however, was the fact she has several blogs covering a variety of subjects. You can find a list of them at the bottom of this page.

And if you scroll down on this page, you'll see the the sunflower drawing I mentioned in a previous post.

---

Last spring, I was given the job of coming up with a cover for a presentation to be used by a city trust seeking a corporate sponsor for the new water taxi service on the 'Oklahoma River'. The trust wanted an illustration to show the potential sponsor how its corporate logo would appear on the taxis.

I've been meaning to post it since about May.

All the raw materials the trust had for reference were some archive shots of the river and, from the boatbuilder in New England, a rudimentary CAD rendering of a boat, shown from a fairly generic three-quarters overhead view with flat light, computer-generated water and some placeholder 'passengers' who looked like large wooden clothespins.

In other words, the finished piece is about ninety percent freehand.

My job was to make the boat and the view more romantic, more dramatic and more appealing. And include the potential sponsor's logo.

I'd consider this a pretty typical commercial art/illustration assignment. I spent about three days on it.



There's a lot of dead space around the boat to allow room for copy. I think the headline was 'Join the Land Run Along the Oklahoma River,' which struck me as kind of odd for a boat project... but what the hell, I'm just the artist.

Although this was done entirely digitally, its 'canvas size' is about 28 x 20 inches. In other words, if you put it in a giclee printer, you'd get a 28 x 20 print. The piece actually ran at 8 x 10 or something similar.

Here are some details:









Some artistic license was taken. There is no angle, for example, from which downtown appears to be that close to the riverfront. And I don't think they'll actually allow people to get up and walk around on the taxis as they do here - but I might be wrong about that. All the lighting on the boat is just made up, too. They may or may not have running lights of some sort.

Basic Transportation

I rode the bike to the RC yesterday and again this morning. It went pretty well... I expected it to be more difficult, considering what terrible shape I'm in. This is a distance of slightly more than two miles, so it's not like it's a major athletic achievement.

We'll see where this goes

I aired up the tires on my commuter bike this evening. I'm in such terrible shape I'll probably be stiff and sore in the morning from pumping air.

Even so, it's time to ride this thing. I bought it with the intent of making it my main transportation when I retired.

I plant to ride it to the RC in the morning. It's about two miles. Because of my ever-shrinking bubble, two miles has become an epic journey for me. We'll see...

Tuesday AM

Just woke up from another 'previous career' nightmare.

I never seem to have an IFB earphone in these dreams. And in this one I also couldn't find my right shoe - a brown captoe oxford.

Where is the United States?

Recent polls have shown that one-fifth of Americans can't find the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?

A Miss Teen USA finalist explains it for you.

Or watch it here.



I wonder where she's anchoring the news now...

The rich are not like you and me

Seen via Eschaton:

"I do have to wonder, would you pay $15,000,000 to live in Irvine?"

Read the comments as well:

"Shady Canyon is right next to Newport Coast where you’ll find numerous sports stars and rich internationals..."

And yet, from the beginning...






















...nothingness.

Perfect Joy

from "Perfect Joy" by Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton

"Here is how I sum it up:

Heaven does nothing: its non-doing is its serenity.
Earth does nothing: its non-doing is its rest.
From the union of these two non-doings
All actions proceed,
All things are made.
How vast, how invisible
This coming-to-be!
All things come from nowhere!
How vast, how invisible
No way to explain it!
All beings in their perfection
Are born of non-doing.
Hence it is said:
'Heaven and earth do nothing
Yet there is nothing they do not do.'

Where is the man who can attain
To this non-doing?"

The 900th post

"Open your mouth, and already it is a mistake."

– Zen Master Seung Sahn

As I've mentioned before, I'm sort of backing off the spiritual awareness stuff.

I've come to the conclusion that every time I talk about this stuff, I just build a wall of words and opinions between the reader and the direct experience. I open my mouth, and already it is a mistake.

I know there are plenty of other people out there better able to address this subject than I am.
The late Korean zen master Seung Sahn is one of them. I'm currently rereading his book, "Wanting Enlightenment is a Big Mistake."

Here is a transcript of a 1985 session he held in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This comes from the website of Kwan Um Zen.

Three weeks down and life to go

Today is the three-week anniversary of my last day as an employee.

I cell-phoned this photo to my ex-boss this morning around 10 am.

Alan Watts Theater

More Alan Watts animations from Freshminds.

And a new (but brief) article on Watts at the Tricycle Magazine web site.

Monday evening

I've gotten over my immediate alarm regarding my overindulgence and cancelled my reservations at Jesus House.

I also remember now why I quit drinking wine - almost twenty years ago. When I got up this morning, my head felt like it was stuffed with wet sawdust ... allergic reaction, not a hangover.

I don't know how 'cute' I was - Jeebus, I'm 54 years old. I'm not supposed to be 'cute.'

---

Oh, and there was no danger regarding me driving home. I was fine by the time I got in my car, which was quite a while later - after dinner.

---

Spent the morning today as usual. In the afternoon, I did a little housecleaning and got a bunch of junk out of my car. Not that the car is clean, but it's better.

In a week or so, I should have it clean enough to take in and have the AC fixed.

Monday morning

I sat on the Paseo Sunday afternoon, had three glasses of wine, and got pretty buzzed. It occurred to me as I sat there that there's nothing to stop me now from doing that every day for the rest of my life.

When I drink, I don't know when to stop doing a lot of other things. I try too hard to be funny and witty, for one thing, and end up just being obnoxious. Or some woman lightheartedly flirts with me and I take it seriously because I'm too fried to know the difference.

There's been alcoholism in my family, and statistically I'm at high risk. It's been a combination of a lot of luck and a certain amount of self-control that has kept me from becoming one before now.

Tedium may soon become my worst enemy.

But I sobered up, drank a lot of water and went to bed early - before dark.

You know you're sedentary...

when you get up from your chair at the Red Cup and discover a spider has built a web between your arm and a potted plant.

On to more mundane matters

The electricity on my block went out at least a dozen times today. Sometimes only for a second, rarely for more than three or four seconds.

I live in an inner-city area where it would be just so damn unfair to shareholders to expect OG&E to provide reliable electric service.

But I don't see why rain should cause flickering and brownouts.

More spiritual stuff

dzaster thinks I should post more spiritual stuff, but I've run out of stuff to say. In fact, I think I ran out some time back and just kept going on fumes.

I have a fairly secure future. I could be hit by a bus or have some horrendous disease, but other than that I know pretty well what my future holds. Or at least I don't have to worry about being out on the street and living under an overpass.

In some ways, I already am Cold Mountain. Sort of an urban Cold Mountain, you could say. I'm the last leaf on my branch of the family tree, so I have no children or aging parents about whom to worry. There are no interpersonal relationships which economics or expedience require me to maintain. I can get up and walk away from everything and everyone at any time.

I think it's probably easier to be sanguine about nonattachment and your original face before you were born and so on when you don't have to worry about feeding yourself or paying your bills or caring for loved ones. If I were a twentysomething single mom working in a convenience store, I'd probably feel differently about it.

I'm thinking to I need to say less about this stuff rather than more. There are a wealth of other resources both in print and on the web, most of which were produced by folks more knowledgeable than me.

You look... mahvelous! (Or Photoshopped - take your pick)

Here's a web site for photoretoucher iWANEX Studio. Click on "portfolio" to see the artist's work.

A few observations: first of all, I think it's great that these celebrities allow these 'raw' photos to be released on the web.

Second, this gives you some idea of what's done with Photoshop in this nation every day of the week. Photoshop has distorted more reality than Karl Rove ever dreamed of.

Third, we hear a lot - and rightly so - about how advertising and celebrity journalism have given us all false expectations about appearance and image. As these before and after photos show, even the celebrities don't look like celebrities, so don't feel inferior if you don't, either.

Fourth, everybody who is in this line of work or anything remotely connected to it uses Photoshop, not Photo-Paint or MS Draw or The GIMP. ("Yew outta be usin' the GIYUMP," as the guy with the red clip-on hardware store suspenders would say, his face screwed up into a little knot beneath his woolly Twinkie crumb-spangled beard. "It's open source. Do you know what open source means?"

Okay, that last part was sort of judgemental. But what the hell.

It is now Saturday

This started out as a joke, but I am genuinely having trouble keeping track of what day it is. This after only twelve days of retirement.

Love hurts

British researchers find evidence love is bad for your health.

New blog

There's a new blog in the list of links on the right.

FootFingers

The last hippie in the Ozarks

Seven or so years ago, I had occasion to be driving from Mountain Home, Arkansas to Eldorado, Arkansas. I decided to take a winding, scenic route that paralleled the White River for the first leg, then went west into the Ozarks and south through the Ouachita National Forest.

While in the mountains, I stopped at general store that seemed to be more or less in the middle of nowhere. It was on the side of a mountain, shaded by a canopy of trees. I don't recall any other buildings nearby, although there may heve been a gas station across and down the road a piece.

The store was clean and plesasant, and the people there friendly.

As I was leaving, a man walked up the shoulder of the road toward the store. He was about my age, perhaps a little older. He had shoulder-length hair held down with a headband and a full beard. He was wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt, cutoffs and sandals. He looked as if he had fallen asleep under a tree in 1969 or 70 and had only awakened perhaps twenty minutes ago.

I invented a back story for the guy as he trudged up the road to the store. He had moved to the area back in the day to join a commune. The commune had long since closed and all its other members had moved on. He was the only one left. Maybe he lived in an old hand-built house back in the woods that had once been occupied by a dozen people.

I also had the thought that I should have been in his place. Not that I should have been like him, but that the ebb and flow of the universe should have led to me being the one living alone in some isolated Ozark cabin, separated from the world, and that guy should have ended up doing, well, whatever.

I suppose this was one of my Cold Mountain moments that just happened to come along before I had ever heard of Cold Mountain.

I'm not sure why I have this nagging feeling that I'm supposed to be separated from society.

99 degrees

I may not go out to dinner tonight. It's 99 outside and I just can't bear to think of setting foot out there.

I've heard enough.

A couple of days ago, I was having lunch in a restaurant and a couple of tables over, four IT guys were (somewhat loudly) discussing bundling VoIP telephony with web hosting services.

That's the kind of stuff I dealt with in Texas every day, and peripherally in the job from which I retired last week.

And as I listened to the guys in the restaurant talk, I realized I just don't want to hear any more about it. I don't want to hear any more about Web 2.0, or IPv6 conversion, or Ubuntu Linux on the enterprise desktop or any of the rest of that stuff. I've heard enough. Someone else can leverage robust infrastructure assets from now on.

I watched someone (Amanda Joy, actually) drawing sunflowers in a sketchbook the other day. That was more interesting than about 70% of what I've been doing professionally the past thirty years or so.

---

I'm going back to bed.

2:15 am

Just woke up from another TV news dream. In this one, a photographer tried to kill me and himself both by plowing the news car into a big installation of equipment in the station's parking garage.

(I never worked in a station that had a parking garage, btw. As is almost always the case with these dreams, this one happened in some place that was sort of an amalgam of all the stations I ever saw, either as an employee or a visitor.)

We were driving through the garage, and he kept accelerating. This big piece of equipment got closer and closer, and he kept going faster and faster. 'Is he going to stop?' I thought. 'What's he doing?'

At the last second, I grabbed the steering wheel, turned it, and caused the car to skid more or less harmlessly out of control. We still hit something, but not hard enough to cause injury.

I got out of the car and staggered into the station. There was a big commotion inside because the ratings had just come out and the station was number one. Everyone was yelling and cheering. I didn't recognize any of them. No one I actually knew was in the dream.

I tried to tell someone what had just happened. His name was Sam and he may have been a managing editor or something like that. But he was distracted by the ratings news and didn't want to talk to me. I got him into an office where we could talk privately, but then he took a phone call and I never got to tell him what happened.

Then my cell phone rang. It was the photographer, wanting to know why I had disrupted his plan. He told me he was waiting for me outside. I was trying to figure out how to get out of the building without running into him.

I remember the building was fairly new, but even so it was cluttered and the doorway to Sam's office was grimy and paint-chipped.

My mistake

turns out today is Saturday.

Isn't it?

My schedule for tomorrow

What is tomorrow? Tuesday?

Whatever.

Feels like Sunday

...doesn't it?

Does to me.

My schedule for tomorrow

Bwah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah!

The earth is roundish

I remember when the news broke that the earth is not a perfect sphere, but is actually slightly egg-shaped. It was a new way of looking at it, challenging a long-held assumption. But my emotional reaction to it was... nothing. The earth is a sphere, the earth is an egg... what of it?

I'm trying to figure out if I should expect to have some sort of emotional reaction to other new ways of seeing things. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.

The mountain is not a mountain, then it is, etc.

New to me, anyway.

This has apparently been around awhile, but I saw it for the first time today.

Effects of drugs on the wood spider. Be sure to watch the whole thing.

But enough about me

...no, I mean it. Seriously. The way I write you'd think I actually know what I'm talking about.

More precisely, I guess, I sometimes tend to write in a tone that is far more authoritative than my actual knowledge can support.

Well, WTF... I was a TV reporter for 25 years. I made a career out of making ignorance sound authoritative.

I need to take up stamp collecting or something.

LA Times: This is your brain on love

From the Los Angeles Times:

"... romantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs. The brain is playing a trick, necessary for evolution, by associating something that just happened with pleasure and attributing the feeling to that magnificent specimen right before your eyes."

More here.

My take: 'Love', like a lot of other things, is just something fizzing around in your brain. It has no reality outside your own skull.

No particular place to go

Today is my first full day of non-employment since about 2001.

I enjoyed the five-plus years I spent on my most recent job. I got to ramp up the hardware side of our operation and push the creative envelope. (Not that the average designer would consider what I did particularly daring. Within context, though, we made a lot of progress.)

Some other things changed during the time I was there. A few people to whom I felt especially close moved on. I fell off the non-attachment wagon in a big way with one of them. As our staff shrank, I found myself doing less and less of the work I was hired to do and more and more clerical-type work.

And I've re-evaluated a lot of things as regards the basic nature of reality. At the moment, it's hard for me to have a sense of importance about anything at all. As I've written before, our natural state is to be inanimate matter - talk about your ultimate state of non-knowing, non-thinking. All the stuff we get dragged through, or drag ourselves through, during our brief interregnum of sentience seems irrelevant.

From the Great Pyramid and space travel to oil changes and love affairs, it's all faint flickers of light on the periphery of the universe. (Well, maybe not the Great Pyramid. That was the tallest building on earth for more than a thousand years, and it will still be around long after we and our latter-day works are dust.)

So, I plan to use the rest of my time as animate matter watching the world go by with about the same level of interest one might have in a run-of-the-mill TV sitcom.

More on Alan Watts

MindOverMary wrote:

"I just finished reading about Alan Watts. Like you, he was a Capricorn and spent his entire life trying to figure it out. He died at the age of 58, an alcoholic who apparently never figured "it" out.

"I have two close guy friends here who are Capricorns and exactly like you and Alan and other Capricorns, always asking "why" and "how". They, like you, are depressed and suffer from General Anxiety Disorder so I'm wondering if maybe this constant search is a Capricorn trait and not something you can help being.

"Is it a trick of fate that you all were born under the same sign and therefore are always seeking an answer that doesn't exist because no answer ever satisfies you?"

There are a couple of Alan Watts biographies out there, including the one he wrote himself. He lived a very colorful life. He was indeed an alcoholic and he died young because of it.

But my sense is that Watts did indeed 'get it,' although the path by which he reached 'it' was an unconventional one by the standards of Zen orthodoxy. And he certainly wasn't the only person who 'got it' and ended up with personal crises of his or her own making.

I would encourage anyone wanting to know more about Watts to visit the website www.alanwatts.com.

In fact, I'm going to make it a permanent link. And of course, I always recommend his books. "The Wisdom of Insecurity" is my personal favorite - written at a time when his own life was more-or-less in shambles.

Was Watts depressed? I dunno. Am I depressed? Certainly, at times. (Not tonight.)

Do I have General Anxiety Disorder? From the NIMH website:

"GAD is diagnosed when a person worries excessively about a variety of everyday problems for at least 6 months.

"People with GAD can't seem to get rid of their concerns, even though they usually realize that their anxiety is more intense than the situation warrants.

"They can't relax, startle easily, and have difficulty concentrating. Often they have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep.

"Physical symptoms that often accompany the anxiety include fatigue, headaches, muscle tension, muscle aches, difficulty swallowing, trembling, twitching, irritability, sweating, nausea, lightheadedness, having to go to the bathroom frequently, feeling out of breath, and hot flashes."

Yes, I worry excessively. I grew up learning to expect the worst, because with two drama-crazed alcoholics for parents, the worst was usually what would happen. I don't have to worry about that now, but the worrying is habitual, and I'll probably die of old age before I free myself from it completely.

But I rarely have the physical symptoms NIMH describes. Fatigue and shortness of breath, yes, but I'm fifty pounds overweight and don't get enough exercise.

As far as no answer ever satisfying me... well, I think I've found one. It will not always seem that way, I think, because I'm going to always suffer from occasional rounds of depression.

And so....

Where the heck's my cell phone?

Must be around here somewhere...


5:49 update

Found it. And Happy Birthday. You know who you are.

More Watts animation

Another Alan Watts animation from the same folks.

And another.

I liked the one in the previous post best, but YMMV.

Alan Watts redux

An item of interest passed along from BlogBlah!

It's an Alan Watts recording with a cartoon animation, produced by the creators of South Park.

(South Park creator Trey Parker, according to his Wikipedia entry, was raised as an 'Alan Watts Buddhist' by his father.)

Thursday evening

At least I think it's Thursday. The days are all running together.

I've noticed I tend to blog more when I'm depressed or stressed, and much less so when everything is going well.

As I may have mentioned before, this is largely a matter of perception. Sometimes I'm depressed, and sometimes content, when circumstances are exactly the same.

No news is good news

I have nothing to report.

What it is

It rained this morning, but later it cleared off.
That's my philosophy of life.

What does that mean?

It means it rained this morning, but later it cleared off.

Oh, so it's a metaphor. Sometimes our lives are 'rainy,' but things will get better when it 'clears off.'

No, it's not a metaphor for anything. There are no hidden meanings in it.

I don't see how 'It rained this morning, but later it cleared off' can be a philosophy of life.

Well, get back to me if anything changes.

Plumbing update

Thank gopod there are people in this world who are younger, healthier and more motivated than me.

Harry Potter

I read the last two pages of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" tonight.

It's the only Harry Potter I've ever read.

SPOILER ALERT:






































He kills the one-armed man in a fight on a water tower.

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.