The Meditation Thing

I have been trying to sit for 20 minutes every evening. Instead of getting easier with each passing day, it gets harder. What started as minor discomfort in my right leg, right at the hip, has grown into distracting pain. At the end of the 20 minutes, it hurts to stretch my legs back out.

Some discomfort is to be expected, but I suspect this goes beyond what is normal. I also wonder why it is in one leg but not the other.

Tonight it was so uncomfortable that I stopped after 15 minutes.

So, dzaster...

...how is it out there?

A Quiet Mind

There is a famous story about a man who approached Bodhidharma with intent of becoming his student. "My mind is not pacified," he told the monk. "Master, pacify my mind."

"If you bring me that mind, I will pacify it for you," Bodhidharma replied.

"When I search my mind I cannot hold it," the student said.

"There," Bodhidharma answered. "I've pacified it for you already."

The house is turning into a mess again. I did a little house cleaning today, but only a little. When I try to clean, my mind sort of freezes up. I'll look at the stuff, ponder what to do with it, and perhaps throw a few things away. Then I get simultaneously bored and overwhelmed and just walk away from it.

When Kat comes over here to clean, she just wades into it and does it. There's no existential crisis attached. Even my ex-wife has come over and cleaned for me, and does a faster and better job than me.

My mind is not pacified. If it were, I would settle in to these tasks and do them.

I do not understand how Bodhidharma's answer to the student applies to my situation, but I think it must in some way.

I spent an hour or so this evening indulging in some self-pity about my failures in relationships. I think I have written about this before, but here it is again, anyway. I've always screwed up with the women I was really interested in. Always. This has inevitably been followed by weeks or months of soul-searching and agonizing about my flaws and shortcomings.

I finally learned from zen that I needed to stop analyzing and re-analyzing. I learned to see that the thing didn't work out, note in my mind that I was having some reaction to it, then move on.

Once in awhile, though, I lapse back into analysis and self-pity, as I did this evening. I saw it for what it was, which was good, but I continued to indulge it, which was not good.

Ten or twelve years ago, when I was much more active on the Well than I am now, I wrote page after page after page of self-criticism and analysis of my failed love life. At one point, I was the single largest user of disk space on the Well's conferencing system. There were users who posted more frequently, and users who had been there three to five times longer, but I outpaced them all in sheer tonnage of text. And it was all about my inept love life.

I mention this because I had the temptation this evening to revert back to that form right here. I was going to post a careful outline of all my inadequacies. But I caught myself in time. No inadequacies. No analysis.

Only don't know.

Even what I've written is too much. 'As soon as you open your mouth to speak,' the zen proverb says, 'already you've made a mistake.'

Master, quiet my mind.

Missing a Night's Sleep

I didn't go to bed Thursday night. I had slept until about 11 that morning. When 10 pm rolled around, I didn't feel tired or sleepy, so I just didn't go to bed. And I just kept on going until about 8 pm Friday. I was sitting at my computer reading blogs and Facebook, and realized that I hadn't eaten anything all day.

I decide to go to the Taco Bueno near my house and get tacos. I almost fell over when I stood up, and almost fell again going down the front steps. But I made it to the car, made it to Taco Bueno and home again.

My hands began shaking — so badly that I actually shook the first taco to pieces. But I got it and three more down, did some more Facebook, and finally went to bed about 9:30 pm Friday when I could no longer get my eyes to focus.

I woke up Saturday morning with a sore throat, and have been experiencing cold-like symptoms all day. I was a little groggy this morning, but other than that I seem to have suffered no ill effects from missing a night's sleep.

It just doesn't get any better than this.

gizmodo.com: Cockroach Found In Woman's Colonoscopy

How Does This Happen?

There's another story circulating in the Buddhasphere about a teacher sexually exploiting some of his female students. This one is a little different in that the exploiting has been going on for about fifty years.

Fifty years.

The teacher is now in his seventies, and is still apparently able to seduce, threaten and/or coerce female students into having sex with him.

I'll be damned if I know how.

I'm trying to not be glib about this. It's serious business. But I can't imagine what power a gnarly 70-year-old zen geezer with a shaved head could have over women that would lead them to have sex with him, especially since they seem to regret it almost immediately afterward. Am I just naive?

This is obviously not just a Buddhist thing. David Koresh. Jim Bakker. Cedric Miller, who was doing threesomes at Bible study. Earl Paulk, whose nephew and successor was later revealed to be his son from an affair he had with his sister-in-law. Some of these guys were charismatic, in the secular sense of the word, but others were just oily little snerts from the get-go.

And yet, somehow...

I simply don't get it.

Then again, there are apparently women who have fucked Newt Gingrich. So I guess anything's possible.

Well, shit. Gerry Rafferty's dead.

In the early eighties, I worked in another city. I had not gone there entirely by choice. I had been fired from my job (again), and I took refuge there because someone was willing to hire me.

I worked in an office with several people who had come there from other cities and towns. Of all the people with my job title, only one was local. The rest of us hoped to be just passing through, on our way to greener pastures in a couple of years.

It was, in fact, a basically journeyman profession. Across the country, hundreds of young men and women like us were doing their two years here, three years there, in hopes of eventually striking the big time in a city like Los Angeles or New York. In the meantime, we toiled away in medium and small cities and towns, paying our dues.

And on many evenings – most evenings, in fact – my coworkers and I would head to a local watering hole, have entirely too much to drink, get maudlin and depressed, and ask the bartender to put on our anthem, Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street:

Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well another crazy day, you'll drink the night away
And forget about everything.

This city desert makes you feel so cold
It's got so many people but it's got no soul
And it's taken you so long to find out you were wrong
When you thought it held everything.

You used to think that it was so easy,
You used to say that it was so easy
But you're tryin', you're tryin' now.
Another year and then you'd be happy
Just one more year and then you'd be happy
But you're cryin', you're cryin' now.

Way down the street there's a light in his place
He opens the door, he's got that look on his face
And he asks you where you've been, you tell him who you've seen
And you talk about anything.

He's got this dream about buyin' some land
He's gonna give up the booze and the one night stands
And then he'll settle down, it's a quiet little town
And forget about everything.

But you know he'll always keep movin'
You know he's never gonna stop movin'
Cause he's rollin', he's the rollin' stone.
And when you wake up it's a new morning
The sun is shining, it's a new morning
But you're going, you're going home.

Gerry Rafferty died this morning in England, after a long illness and years of alcoholism. He was 63.

Also...

Following up my previous post, I think what I got from those experiences is how fragile we are. We break easily. And inevitably, we do end. The end is sometimes violent, and even when it is violent, it is also often perfunctory. The first two corpses I ever saw had essentially been thrown out of a car like litter.

I was a cynical and negative guy before I saw any of this, but the experience probably helped reinforce my thinking.

I Saw Dead People

Recalling the story of the homeless man who died sleeping in the dumpster led me to remember the first time I saw dead bodies. It was probably in 1974.

The victims were a man and a woman who had been shot, then dumped down an embankment alongside a county road. They were there for two or three days before being discovered.

I eventually got so used to seeing dead people I didn't think much of it anymore. Two other instances stick in my memory now. One was a young woman who died while trapped in a wrecked car. She died as the camera was rolling, zoomed in on her face. In watching the film later, we realized she had died only because she had stopped blinking her eyes.

The other instance was another accident in which four young men were killed when their car was involved in a wreck and burned. They were probably dead before the fire spread, but there was no way of knowing at the scene.

There were many others, more than I can remember. People who were shot. People who died of drug overdoses. One man who was crushed by a vehicle that fell off a jack. A child who was hit by a van from which she'd just gotten out.

And, finally, I was at my father's bedside when he died of pancreatic cancer.

What I saw, of course, was nothing compared to what firefighters and police officers see. Nurses who performed triage at the scene of Murrah Building bombing saw more dead and dying in one morning than I saw in 25 years of my career.

When Prince Siddartha began to explore outside the shelter of his palace, he saw a corpse and had his first realization of the impermanence of life.

I can't tell you how seeing so much death affected me, but I assume it did in some way. I wonder how I would look at the world today if I had been more distanced from death and tragedy all those years.

Fifteen Degrees Farenheit

The temperature outside is 15.

Many years ago, like around 1976 or ‘77, I watched police pull the body of a homeless man from a dumpster downtown. He had climbed in the dumpster to escape the cold wind on a night like this and had covered himself with newspapers and flattened cardboard boxes. Hypothermia killed him while he slept. His eyes were closed, his hands folded across his chest. His face was calm and peaceful.

I don’t think of that often, but I remember it clearly.

At the time, those of us gathered around the dumpster pretty much shrugged it off: another ‘bumsicle’ found on skid row. Looking back on it with the benefit of thirty additional years of life experience, I view myself as being closer on the socio-economic ladder to that guy than to the millionaires who live in the exclusive neighborhoods. I’m grateful to have a warm place to live. I don’t think it’s all that far a fall from my state of grace to where he ended up.

Where Did That Come From?

I'm lying here in bed, trying to go to sleep. I was sort of drifting off, when suddenly a mental picture flashed in my mind.

I was on a landing at the top of a flight of stairs at the back of a house. I was inside, on the second floor, but the stairs extended outside. They were wooden, and painted a light green. They had no hand rail. A tall tree stood just beyond the stairs. It was tall enough that the top of it as at my eye level.

The sense of vertigo I got looking down the stairs was so strong that it completely reawakened me.

I have no idea where this mental image came from. It doesn't resemble anything I recall ever seeing.

Slept Through It

...but not well. I tossed and turned a lot. Heard the fireworks going off downtown, but I stayed in bed.

The high today is only supposed to be 35, so the creatures will be staying indoors today, whether they like it or not.

So, New Year's Eve

When I was younger, I promised myself I would not end up some eccentric old man living alone in a house full of animals. But I made that promise because even as far back as the seventies, I could see the direction I was headed.

The die, I now realize, was already cast then. The opportunity for a 'normal' life presented itself a few times in the intervening years, and I always passed.

And what if I hadn't? I try to visualize myself with a soccer mom wife and two kids, in church on Sunday, going to college football and NBA games, eating at Applebee's or TGIFriday's, still wearing a coat and tie to the cubicle. I'd be in the suburbs with a house whose mortgage I could barely afford, a pickup truck and small SUV in the driveway. We'd have cable TV, and it would be on all the time. Plus a Wii and an Xbox and Blu-ray and god knows what else.

That would be, in a word, hell.

I'm very fond of my cats, somewhat less fond of my crazy dog, and happy to come and go as I please. No TV, no video games, no SUV. I can't tell you the last time I ate in a chain restaurant or even a trendy local place. No coat and tie. No football, no basketball. I like sleeping on the porch.

I'm an eccentric old man living alone in a house full of animals. And that has mostly turned out OK.

But Seriously, Folks

Getting back to the meditation thing:

There are days when I literally do nothing except eat, sleep and web surf. I have a huge amount of free time. There's no reason I can't make 20 minutes available for meditation. I think 20 minutes is a good place to start.

Meditation Supplies

Loori Roshi makes it sound so easy in that YouTube video that I'm going to take another shot at establishing a meditation practice. I'm going to start by buying some cool Buddhist meditation stuff from this website: Still Sitting Meditation Cushions and Meditation Supplies.

I still have the space age Tibetan meditation cushion I bought back in '06. But it seems so... so unenlightened now.

Old Zen Proverb

“When you can do nothing, what can you do?”

Tuesday night

Mu.

A Cloud of Nothingness/Not Nothingness

At the very center — the core, the foundation, whatever you want to call it — there's nothing. Even that's not quite right, because there's not even nothingness. Sometimes I can actually get that in focus for a few minutes. At one point I held it in focus for most of every day over a period of about two months.

When that's in focus, everything else vanishes. It's as if none of it ever existed. All the random crap I write about is gone, never was. No broken bed. No farting dog. No willowy, no ethereal. No mind. Nothing moving.

Eventually, I have to 'zoom the lens' back out, and things, sensations, concepts and other stuff reappear. From where do they come? From what are they made? At the baseline, there is nothing from which they can be formed, so how do they get here? You could say I just imagine them, but then where do I come from? Do I just imagine myself?

From a certain perspective, yes, I do. It's the Buddhist 'thoughts without a thinker' concept. But if the thoughts I perceive are not mine, from where do they come? How do they spring from the nothingness/absence of nothingness which can make no thing?

Once you've gotten a glimpse of that nothingness/not nothingness, it's hard to attach importance to much of anything. It's all a blank, except that even a blank is something, representing an absence of something else.

I was getting ready to go out for the morning, and I stopped to browse the web. When I sat down, the cat jumped in my lap and went to sleep. I realized that's what I wanted to do myself. So now I'm back in bed. Or rather, the cloud of nothingness/not nothingness perceived as 'me' is back on the cloud of nothingness/not nothingness perceived as 'the bed.'

Not Even That

Isan kicked over the pitcher.
For me, not even that.

So, Zazen.

The late John Daido Loori Roshi was the abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery in New York.

Here is his very clear explanation of zazen, the zen meditation practice which I rarely do because I'm lazy and stiff and fat and I don't like discomfort.



The word 'zen', as he points out, literally means 'meditation.' So, if you say you're doing zen but you don't have a meditation practice, it's like saying you're a swimmer but you don't get in the water.

I don't have a meditation practice, so I don't know what I am. Not zen, certainly.

I'm not sure what I would get from a meditation practice. I don't feel like I'm lacking much in that regard. Zen has an answer for this, which goes along the line of, "You don't do it to 'get something from it', you do it because you do it."

Well, that doesn't help me much. Sorry. I could say the same thing about biting my nails or scratching my ass.

My Hands

Happy day after Christmas.

I have kind of a weird thing going on with my hands. It doesn't happen every day, but when it does happen, it seems to be in the evening, just as I'm going to bed. Or maybe I don't notice it until then.

What happens is that the joints in my fingers kind of stiffen up, most noticeably the second joints down from the fingertips. It makes it difficult for me to close my hands into a fist. It feels almost as if there were an invisible pencil lying across my fingers, preventing me from closing them.

The first time I noticed it, I just squeezed really hard until I closed my fingers. That worked for my right hand, but it made my left hand hurt like hell all night and into the next morning. I finally took some acetaminophen (a word I am only now learning how to spell – on my first try, I got every vowel wrong except the first 'a'), and that cleared up the pain.

So what is it? Arthritis? Some kind of repetitive stress injury? Carpal tunnel?

Well, now the heat's on.

It's 11:15 am here, but the temperature is still dropping. Now 29 degrees. Decided I need to turn the heat on, set at 60 degrees, which is pretty comfortable for me.

Plus, the air's gotten extremely dry. My heater has a built-in humidifier, but the air has to be warmer to hold the moisture.

The Enlightened Master

Read another story today about a Zen priest whose life has sort of devolved into a wreck. I always wonder what's up when these enlightened masters have lives that are 'way more fucked up than mine.

Sometimes I wonder if what we call 'enlightenment' these days isn't just some sort of racket, like televangelists, motivational seminars or multi-level marketing.

The Heat Is Still Off

I've had the heat on in the house only two days this fall and winter and then I did it mostly for the dog and cat. It's cold in here right now, and I'm in the coldest room in the house, but I'm under two acrylic fleece blankets and I'm quite comfortable.

When we had the big ice storm in 2002, I lived here for 11 days with no electricity, no heat and overnight lows in the teens and twenties. I slept under a couple of blankets and I was fine.

It seems foolish to try to heat the whole house with gas when all I need to heat is the actual space I occupy, and I can do that by just retaining my own body heat. I've got a furnace that runs at 98.6 degrees 24 hours a day. It's not very efficient, but it's free.

It's 30 outside right now and the wind chill is 18. All my critters are inside safe and warm, but I worry about all the other strays who have no place to stay warm.

Pee-noh Nwah

I have been drinking a little more than I usually do. I'm not getting falling-down slobbery maudlin drunk or anything even near that. But I have been getting a little more relaxed, a little more self-disclosing, a little more chatty than usual.

I don't keep many secrets on this blog, but I try not to barrage people face-to-face with all my baggage. But the wine (A to Z Pinot Noir, which currently seems nearly ubiquitous in local restaurants) loosens my tongue. In vino veritas, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily interesting or entertaining veritas.

It's interesting to me, of course — I used to say, in all sincerity, that I was the most interesting person I knew — but I know not everyone is riveted by my compelling first-person accounts.

And the sage says next to nothing, anyway. As Robert Thurman says, if you're not enlightened, at least try to act like you are. For me, that means, among other things, saying less and listening more.

Christmas Day, 2010

Everybody have a Christmas-y Day, or whatever.

Disappearing Blog

The author of the Clear Mind Zen blog has closed it to all but invited readers. I'll delete it from the permanent links when I get around to it.

Austerity

This is a little bleak for Christmas Eve, but I thought it was important to share anyway: The Three-Phase Austerity Plan for America

And, found via Digby, a related interview with journalist William Greider.

I take some issue with Greider's contention that journalists are over-educated or not doing enough to report what 'ordinary people' are thinking. This is how crazy tea party 'wisdom' finds its way into mainstream news narrative. Just because the 'common folk' are saying it doesn't mean it's right.

At the same time, it's obvious that the reporters and pundits whom Digby first named 'The Villagers' (after the isolated characters in M. Night Shyamalan's movie) report a set of locally-held assumptions as fact, and have become part of the political establishment, rather than watchdogs of it.

I personally don't see how this austerity program can survive without the government disenfranchising about a fourth of the electorate. I wonder how they plan to do it.

Cynicism and Negativity — Right Here

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you may have detected a certain underlying stratum of negativity and cynicism.

I am, in fact, a fundamentally negative and cynical person. I suppose that is the result of my upbringing. I remember being criticized for my negativity as far back as high school, and I think there were instances of it before that whose specifics I've forgotten.

I have always been on the outside looking in, and mostly a loner. I have seldom been completely friendless, though. There are enough of us out here on the fringe because of our looks, religions, clothes, accents, values or family backgrounds that we can easily find each other.

I live in a city eager to pattern itself after the regional capital of shameless superficiality, Dallas. Even so, I have found an enclave of people who are on the fringe as I am, and I have a broad support group.

But I try to avoid being around people who share my negativity and cynicism. You'd think I would seek those people out, and for a long time I did, but now I find my own dreary personality is enough. When others are as negative as I am, it weighs me down. I need some cautiously optimistic people around me to keep me from sinking into utter black despair.

I have a certain admiration for people who can remain cheerful and motivated in the face of the bleak, utter pointlessness of the whole of human activity and existence.

But my reliance on these people to boost my own mood makes me, as I mentioned to Blogblah! on the phone the other night, an enthusiasm vampire. I draw enthusiasm out of other people because I have none of my own. And sometimes they back away from me because they sense the life force being drained from them.

Cynicism and negativity are the way my mind moves. My samsara. I am not seeking to be more cheerful — that would be just as errant as my current state — but I am trying to be more attitude-free.

Nothing I can say...

...a total eclipse of the moon.

A Christmas Message From Bill Maher

No way to embed this Facebook video. I hope you'll watch it, anyway.

A Christmas Message From Bill Maher

Profile Pic

This is what I look like now.

Sleep

Due to the untimely collapse of my bed (as described in a previous post), I am now back to sleeping on my old futon. This was in the living room or dining room for about eight years, and for four or five years, I slept on it regularly, because my 'real' bed was always covered in laundry and other detritus. (There was also a time it was literally covered wih cat shit, but that's a story for another time.)

During Ms. HRP's abortive remodel of the house, we cleared out the junk-filled back room, and I moved the futon back there. I actually considered ridding myself of it entirely, and now I'm glad I didn't.

While I'm waiting for a new bed frame to arrive, I've been sleeping on the futon here in the back bedroom. There is no stereo back here, and no 24/7 music of Tibetan bowls, sitar music, Japanese flute, etc. I also never allow the pets in here, so there's no cat or dog hair, and no covertly dropped turds behind the furniture.

I notice I am sleeping better. I have had a couple of actually pleasant dreams, as opposed to my usual overnight fare of tornados bearing down on me or TV newsrooms exploding in my face. I am guessing that the quiet, animal-free environment is helping with this.

In addition, I've been drinking two or more cups of rooibos tea in the evening before I retire, and I think that's helping as well.

It Is Your Mind That (Still) Moves

Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. "The flag moves," said one. The other said, "The wind moves." Hui-neng, the Sixth Ancestor, said, "Gentlemen! It is not the flag that moves, nor the wind that moves. It is your mind that moves."

It is your mind that moves.

"Oh, My. It's As Superficial As I Feared"

That's what my friend said when I showed her the pictures of what a relationship should be like. This is the same friend with whom I was discussing relationshiponal phenomena a couple of days ago.

"Well," I explained, "I'm not saying I literally want to date a twenty-something Stevie Nicks. I'm just saying she's sort of an archetype."

"Oh," my friend said. "I bet Joseph Campbell would love to hear that. Even if you did date someone like that, where would she wave all that stuff around? There's no room in your house for it."

"In the back yard, maybe. I don't know. We can work that out when the time comes."

Look, I know this is just fantasy. The time is never going to come. But I don't want or need a relationship that's just plodding along, going to the mall, unclogging the dishwasher, wandering around Lowe's, whatever. I can do that by myself. I would rather be alone.

Also:

Laraine Newman!

Just an archetype, of course.

Bailey

One thing I've learned about basset hounds after having had one for a year is that they are not particularly good indoor dogs. Still, I've grown very attached to Bailey. It seems like she's been here forever.

See?

This is what a relationship is supposed to be like.

Relationshiponal Phenomena

I had this germ of an idea for a post earlier in the week about relationship concepts. I decided against writing it, mainly because I've already said far more than I needed to say on the subject. Then, out of the clear blue, a friend brought up the very thing I decided not to write about.

I was talking about the whole willowy and ethereal thing, and she said, "Well, if you had a relationship with someone like you describe, what would it be like?"

"I guess I would stretch out on the wicker sofa on the porch, and she would just kind of float around me," I replied. "She'd be wearing long, floaty, gauzy stuff — you know, like Stevie Nicks used to wear — and the wind would be gently blowing her hair, like a shampoo commercial. And she'd be chanting mantras or something. 'Om mani padme hum,' or something like that."

"And then what?" my friend asked, laughing.

"I don't know," I said. "I haven't thought through all the details."

I understand that in real life, relationships don't work like that. In real life, you argue about money and whose turn it is to take out the trash. And some people want that, or they've been convinced by peer pressure that they're supposed to want it.

I still think about relationship stuff occasionally, but not as often as I used to. Not nearly as often. I can take out my own trash.

Las Cruces, NM

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a half-formed, and occasionally half-assed, idea. A couple of nights ago I decided that I could throw a few things in a bag and go to Las Cruces, NM to study Zen with a priest I've read about there. I would stay perhaps three or four months. I'd rent an efficiency apartment, sleep on the floor (which I did as a matter of practice for about ten years) and spend my days learning from this priest.

After all, I've got the time. There's no place else I need to be.

But, on the other hand, I'm not all that into Zen as an 'official' daily practice. I appreciate the concepts, but I don't care much for the process. Days of sitting, staring at the wall, don't appeal to me. (As I think about it, I don't care much for any process. Process bores the shit out of me.)

I asked some Facebook friends if they'd ever been to Las Cruces. It turned out several of them had. Opinions of the place were mixed. One said it was more 'authentic' than Santa Fe, but another — a Santa Fe resident — thought I would enjoy Santa Fe more. Of course, I wasn't looking for a tourist or recreation experience; I was hoping to get a better idea of what it's like to belong to a Zen community and have a flesh-and-blood Zen teacher.

Now that I've had a couple of days to think about it, I am probably not going to go to Las Cruces. I won't be cutting off my arm, like Bodhidharma's student Hui-Ko, to get the attention of a teacher.

But maybe I will go to Santa Fe. I have never met my Facebook friend, Joan, who lives there, and I would like to.

Google Friend Connect

I've added Google Friend Connect because — well, I don't know why. Just because I like gadgets, I guess.

This is not something you want to try with the limited web navigation features of an iPad. I'll clean it up later, when I'm at a real computer.

Proof, by the way, that the iPad is not a substitute for a laptop.

No passion, no story

A friend asked me this evening what my passion was as a child. I told her. (I'm not going to detail it here. It's not weird or especially unusual. I don't want to go off on that tangent, though.)

"Well," she asked, "what is your passion now?"

"I don't have one," I said.

She smiled. "You have to have a passion." She said it as if I were breaking some sort of rule by not having one.

"No, no passion."

"If you don't have a passion, what will be your story from this point on?"

"No story. No passion, no story."

I have learned not to talk much about my empty, passionless life. It tends to upset people.

In fact, I wonder why I keep getting asked about it. My impression is that most people rarely discuss this, if at all.

But: no passion, no story. Unless you count this blog.

Eek the cat bugs out

That was quick. She went back to the house down the street. What a strange cat.

The cat leaving is zen. Me deciding she's strange is samsara.

Eek Comes Home

Eek the cat has come home — if this house can be said to be her home. The last time she was here was in March or April, I think. She had been living at a house about four doors east of here.

I had the doors open Wednesday afternoon, and I assume she crept in then.

I can't tell by looking at her, but I'd guess Eek is pregnant again.

Collapsing Bed Update

The splintered side rail isn't fixable. I looked at some new bed frames online and at Dillard's and saw nothing that really appealed to me. I ended up buying a simple metal frame from Amazon. I may be able to attach the existing headboard and foot board to it.

Collapsing Bed

My wooden bed frame collapsed tonight. I bought this bed about 25 years ago. About three years later, the plank on one side split and the head end of the box spring and mattress fell to the floor. I was able to fix it, but the same plank has just split again, and I'm not sure it's fixable this time. I'll give it a shot with Gorilla Glue and see what happens.

I'm attached to this bed. It's the first piece of furniture I ever bought. As I recall, it cost a lot of money, although I don't remember what I spent. Beyond the sentimental attachment, I'm also averse to buying a new frame. I don't want to buy any more big stuff.

The Zen of the Farting Dog

When the dog farts, that is zen. When I form an opinion of the odor, that is not zen.

Diary of a Daoist Hermit

I have found a blog that I need to put in my permanent links list. (But not right now, OK?)

It's called "Diary of a Daoist Hermit." The author calls himself the Cloudwalking Owl. He writes from the Canadian city of Guelph.

A segment from a recent post:

Being frugal is a constant theme in Daoism. In a sense, Daoists were the first proponents of what we now call "voluntary simplicity". Their stories are full of anecdotes about fellows who were once wealthy and powerful who chucked it all away so they could move to the countryside to live in the equivalent of tar paper shacks and subsist on food from their garden and what they could gather from the forest.

The point wasn't the same as that of St. Francis of Assissi, who saw poverty as being intriniscally groovy and something you "offer up" to God. Instead, it was simply an attempt to cut out all the stuff that makes life annoying in order to hold onto the stuff that makes life worth living. So a Daoist wouldn't take any pleasure in being cold, dirty or hungry---like some Christian saints. But he would be happy to wear straw shoes he wove himself because the hassle involved in doing what you have to do in order to afford expensive leather boots wasn't worth the effort.

'You're a very strange man'

A few weeks ago I was trying to explain something to a friend about freeing oneself from concepts, and experiencing directly without labels, thoughts or opinions. Or maybe I was complaining about the cat shitting behind the furniture — I don't remember. She looked at me and said, "You know, you're a very strange man."

Well, I did know, but it's good to have some independent confirmation.

Melancholy music

I am prone to being depressed by certain pieces of music. This is different from the depression I usually experience. In fact, it may be wrong to call it depression. It comes very quickly, is often much more severe, but lifts quickly — usually in an hour or two.

I recently bought an album by a popular singer of mantras. One of the songs induces this sudden melancholy I'm talking about. That song came up in the iTunes rotation this afternoon, and it hit me this time like a freight train. The lyrics are in Sanskrit or Pali; I have no idea what they mean. It is the melody alone that evokes the reaction. I could have slashed my wrists right then and there, and that's only a mild exaggeration.

I decided to go for a walk to shake off the feeling. It was cloudy, chilly and windy. The walk didn't help much.

Later, I called a friend who sat with me for ninety minutes or so until I recovered.

I have taken the song off my iTunes playlist. I won't listen to it again.

Stuff I quit reading

Stuff I quit reading:

Americablog
Regretsy
Lamebook
People of Wal-Mart
Damn Interesting
Look at this Fucking Hipster
Gizmodo
Engadget

Stuff I'm reading less of:

Firedoglake
Crooks and Liars
BoingBoing

I've just gotten to where I can't take any more.

I'm still reading io9, Slashfilm and Talking Points Memo. I look briefly at HuffPo, picking out news items from amidst all the gossip about 'celebrities' I've never heard of. And, though I'm ashamed to admit it, I read Gawker pretty regularly now.

I am listening to a lot more dharma talk podcasts from iTunes. There are hundreds available. They don't boost my cynicism or my blood pressure. And I feel like I'm getting something with some substance to it, instead of the daily outrage.

How Will It Happen?

I wonder from time to time how I will die. Car wreck? Stroke? Slow, wasting disease? With my history of high blood pressure, stroke is a likely candidate.

Being alive isn't a bad thing. But, as I've written before, it's an exercise in pointlessness. We pop into this world, stir up some shit that doesn't last, maybe do some good that doesn't last, and if we're really important, leave behind a monument that perhaps becomes a tourist attraction, but ultimately doesn't last. The whole history of mankind is nothing but the blink of an eye.

Enjoy it while you can, I guess, but it's no big deal. As I've said before, I feel like I'm stuck in an airline terminal, wandering around between flights. Yawn.

Depression cycle

I think the depression cycle is kicking in again. I'm not sleeping well and am sleeping later in the day. I'm also going to bed earlier. I've stopped walking every day. I'm engaging in behavior I normally avoid (see previous posts). Oh, well... so it goes.

DharmaMatch.com

I decided to explore dharmamatch.com. Although the name implies a Buddhist slant, in my Bible Belt city it seems to be full of wiccans and pagans. One had written her profile in what I suppose she imagined to be Middle English, with lots of random double consonants and superfluous trailing 'e's on words, to make herself sound more wiccan-y: "Alle haille and metes unto thee. I am ane Ordained Highe Priestess of Wicca, authorised to somethinge or othere somethinge or othere unto somethinge or othere. Aye, ande so be it."

Well, fine. I hope that works out for ya, Chaucer.

I'm just going to stay home with Ye Olde Fartinge Dogge.

Things are exactly as they are

I did something a little unusual for me a while back. I invited a female acquaintance to have dinner with me at a future date. It's the first time I've 'asked someone out' in about three years — maybe four. She agreed, and I told her I would email her to arrange a date/time.

A couple of hours later, though, I was asking myself, 'Why did I do that?' And I still don't have an answer. I decided I would just follow through as promised. All I had committed to was dinner, and that would be pleasant and completely harmless.

So, 48 hours later, I emailed her. She never replied. I was simultaneously annoyed and relieved.

There was a time being ignored like that would have completely freaked me out, even though in my dating experience, the 'now I'm interested, now I'm not' thing happened more often than not. I would have spent weeks analyzing it. I still don't understand it, but I barely care anymore. I recognize that it's a part of human nature. And in this case, not all that different from my own ambivalence.

If you understand, the Zen proverb says, things are exactly as they are. And if you don't understand, things are exactly as they are.

My Farting Dog

Sometime in the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning, my dog farted the most noxious, eye-watering fart that has ever been farted by man or beast. I mean, you could taste this thing hovering in the air of the bedroom. If the lights had been on, I might have been able to see it, too.

I thought I was going to have to get up and move to the back bedroom. Nothing like this has ever existed before, I'm sure, and probably never will again. I don't know how she did it.

Art Show

I think I tripped over an installation piece at a gallery the other night. Or it may have just been some loose packing stuff on the floor. Hard to tell.

Air Travel

I have been following — as strictly an observer, thankfully — the controversy over airport body scanners and body searches. I don't know why anyone flies at all. The fear level has been gradually inched upward since the first hijackings of the sixties. It's astonishing to me what passengers put up with. I was especially amused/repelled by the reports of hand searching for weapons in rolls of body fat — the perfect storm of fear and fast food.

Do people not see that this whole process has become insane?

Now we're all supposed to be terrified of 'crotch bombers'. As soon as we get used to that, we'll be subjected to a wave of fear over 'ass bombers', and the airport security industry will be lobbying TSA to buy and use anal probes on everyone.

I haven't been on a commercial airline since about 2000. God willing, I'll never be on another one.

The citizens of an enlightened state, a Taoist master wrote, never leave the borders of their homeland. All of their needs are met right there.

This presumes, of course, that their needs are actually their needs, and not a lot of horseshit cranked up by the advertising and marketing people.

I live in a medium-sized city. Like most medium-sized cities, it's desperate to grow itself into a huge city, so it can get even more marketing-driven horseshit. Personally, I would prefer to live in an even smaller city. I don't care if there is no Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters or whatever. As long as it had plenty of trees and a couple of good coffee shops and restaurants, I could live in BF, Egypt.

And if it didn't have an airport, that would be fine, too.

Happy Birthday

Today is the fifth anniversary of this blog.

Saturday night

"A Buddha is a person who has no more business to do and isn't looking for anything. In doing nothing, in simply stopping, we can live freely and true to ourselves and our liberation will contribute to the liberation of all beings."

— Thich Nhat Hanh

Dog Toys

I occasionally let a friend leave her dog here when she travels. During a visit a couple of months ago, she left a squeaking dog toy here, and my dog Bailey fell in love with it. I mean, it's not the deep level of profound love you'd experience at a meditation retreat, but she's still pretty fond of it. I bought her a toy of her own — a squeaking hedgehog — and she likes it, too.

I have never before had a dog that cared anything about toys.

It Is Your Mind That Moves

There's a famous old zen story about two monks watching a flag blowing in the wind.

"It's the flag that moves," one monk said.

"It's the wind that moves," the other argued.

The abbott came walking by. "It's your mind that moves," he told them.

When I obsess about some woman from years past, it's my mind that moves. When I work myself into a rage over the state of the nation, it's my mind that moves. When I fret about my lack of productivity, it's my mind that moves.

More on Being Productive

what counts as "productive"? do you count all the work you've done improving your house and back yard and garage as unproductive? is blogging unproductive? is cleaning out all the crap from your house unproductive? is reading and improving your understanding of the world around you unproductive? is having friendships you nurture unproductive? I have a problem with the premise, obviously.

Blogblah! raises some valid points in his comment to my 'Boredom' post. I don't consider the work I've done on the house unproductive, but I was thinking in terms of things I've done myself, as opposed to things I've paid to have done.

House cleaning and decluttering is productive, but I think of that as more in the realm of regular maintenance.

But John is correct, I think, in suggesting that my philosophical pursuits have been productive, and that my friendships have been productive. I think I've been a better friend in the past few years than I've been during most of my life.

I have many friends who produce tangible, creative things. Sculptures. Paintings. Textiles. Songs. I was basically lamenting in my previous post that although I also have the ability to produce tangible, creative things, I have no motivation to do it. Over the past few years, my motivation has gone from 'low' to 'zero'.

Boredom

It occurred to me Tuesday that I have not done a single productive thing, other than routine maintenance, in about two-and-a-half years. I guess you could classify last year's Tennessee trip as a productive thing, in the sense that it wasn't just another day of me eating and sleeping around the house, but that's the only thing.

I don't feel guilty about it at all, but I do have this sudden feeling of unease, or something like it.

I don't want to die, but living is boring. I feel like I'm stuck at the airport for a layover, twiddling my thumbs until the next leg of my journey — which probably is death. I know that finding stuff to do, whether it's a hobby or public service or something else, isn't going to change that. One of the frequent themes of this blog has been that most of us find life meaningless and boring, and we anesthetize ourselves to that with an extraordinary array of distractions, from TV and movies to video games to porn to extreme sports. I have seen through that, though, and entertainment generally holds no attraction for me. Obviously some people get all the fulfillment they need from Dancing With the Stars or whatever, but that doesn't get it done for me.

I have a couple of friends who have been trying to persuade me or pressure me to create art again. It's not working.

The deficit

I try to avoid writing about politics, as you know if you've been following this blog awhile.

But I have to ask, does anyone really think we're going to reduce the deficit? I don't. I think that what will happen, if anything, is that we will temporarily reduce the deficit by cutting services to citizens (what are often called 'entitlements'), then find some reason to run it up again in a way that will principally benefit the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street and elsewhere. We'll invade Iran, or Venezuela, or some other place.

I personally believe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dragged on so long because so much money is being made off them by defense contractors.

Taoism is rather anti-political. The ancient masters lived in an era when China was divided into constantly warring kingdoms, and the price of failure at court was often death. The Taoists stayed in small towns and rural areas, and let the Confucianists go to the big cities and get beheaded for their trouble.

To amplify my previous post...

I'm just trying to observe what is happening within these thoughts. Sometimes – not all the time, but just sometimes – I wish I were not alone.

There is no practical, real-world solution to this. It would require some sort of genie who popped out of the bottle when I was feeling lonely, which happens once or twice a week, and then only during certain times of the year, and left me alone the rest of the time.

One of the hangups in my last relationship, several years ago, was that she wanted a lot more of my time than I wanted to give. She wanted me there every day, in fact, and I just couldn't do it.

So I don't see my relationship status changing.

Again, trying to observe the thoughts, regarding them with the same detachment I would have for the sound of a car going by outside.

I do find my thoughts drifting toward Ms. Willowy and Ethereal often. Too often, a couple of my friends have hinted. But this is not the same thing as the loneliness, and I can see that whatever is driving this interest has more to do with ego or some other unresolved personal issue than actual romantic intent. I don't think about either of my two former post-marriage relationships nearly as much as I do Ms. W&E.

An interesting contrast there: in one case, I haven't seen the woman in ten years, and will be perfectly content to never see her again. In the other case, we remained friends after we broke up. I was even a guest at her wedding. Then she abruptly sort of cut me off, for no apparent reason, and I was content to let that happen. So why do I stay so focused on Ms. W&E?

She's kind of like whack-a-mole. She pops up suddenly, stays in contact for a week or ten days, then suddenly disappears again, ignoring emails and phone messages. Then, a month or a year later, she pops up again for a few days, then drops out again. Our mutual friends tell me this has been her behavior for years.

In some respects, I am the same way. I'll report for duty every morning at the coffee shop for a few months. Then I'll suddenly hit my saturation point, and I'll stay away for a few weeks or longer.

Fall

"I think fall is the worst time of year to be alone."

There are at least a couple of man-made concepts there to which one can be attached, if one chooses.

Or if one is unsuccessful in releasing them.

Which I am.

Vipassana Romance

This NYT article about 'Vipassana Romance' has gotten a lot of attention in the Buddhist blogosphere this week.

I've read other articles about 'falling in love' during meditation retreats. There's often some accompanying reader comment about how group meditation 'makes our hearts open to possibilities in the eternal now' and blah and blah.

No one ever seems to notice that this isn't romance — it's just infatuation.

"His wrist peeped out of the sleeve, endearingly bony and frail." I mean, really — Jesus Christ.

Speaking of whom, Southern Baptists do the same thing. They'll quote I Corinthians 13 while banging each other in the back of the choir bus, and reassure themselves it's a profound spiritual experience they're having.

I guess what bugs me most about this is people who get involved with allegedly spiritual pursuits, when actually they're just looking for hookups.

The iPhone-controlled helicopter

I mentioned my iPhone-controlled helicopter in the previous post. Fascinating gadget. It really does fly, and it streams low-res video back to your iPhone as it flies.

It was entertaining for about an hour, but then what?

Tea

During an afternoon of bored wandering at the mall, I was lured into a gourmet tea store by a very pleasant and knowledgeable sales person who was offering free samples at the door. I walked out with about $600 worth of tea pots, tea cups, tea accessories and, of course, tea.

The store has about 200 types of loose-leaf teas, and most look more like potpourri than typical grocery store tea.

Well, the cups and tea pots are great for show, but I ended up ordering an electric water heater from Amazon that's a lot more practical. It keeps a small amount of water tea-steeping hot 24/7, so it's always there when you want it.

And I'm now drinking about four cups of organic low-caffeine or caffeine-free tea a day at home.

I buy a lot of stuff that looks interesting at first glance but turns out to not have much practical use — my iPhone-controlled helicopter, for instance. But the tea and the electric heater look like they'll permanently change my daily routine.

Books

Well, I got bogged down in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It was too easy to imagine myself being in the midst of the Merry Pranksters, and not liking it one damn bit. Tom Wolfe's graphic description of the first leg of their New York trip, traveling across the hot, humid south in the old bus, almost made me physically nauseated. (The same thing happened with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.) I could imagine sitting in that hot, cramped old bus barreling on with a speed freak at the wheel, and wanting desperately to be someplace a lot more sane. If I'd been a sixties acid head, I would certainly have been more of a Mill Brook acid head and less of a 'on the bus' acid head.

I have had some other books recommended to me, one by the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson and one by Rollo May. I'll report back when I've read them.

Saii

We had dinner the other night at a place in the northwest part of the city called Saii. I had eaten there once before, years ago, but it's the kind of place that, for whatever reason, doesn't stick in my memory.

But it's an interesting place. It's one of those very dark, modern Asian fusion/sushi places. I don't know of any other place quite like it here. It reminds you of one of those bars Bill Murray and Scarlett Johanssen visited in Lost in Translation. You feel like you could be somewhere three thousand miles from the Bible belt.

The only drawback is that at the end of the evening, after you've been surrounded by bottom-lit bead curtains, dimly-illuminated statues and soft 'buddha lounge' jazz, you walk out the front door and bam! you're back in a strip mall on North May Avenue.

Out on the town

I went to an art opening last night, and from there went to VZD's, where I ran into a couple of old friends. Had a pretty good time all the way 'round, had a little too much to drink, but was still home by 9:30.

And when I got home, I was exhausted. I wasn't physically tired, but mentally, emotionally and perhaps psychically, I was drained. I found myself thinking I could have stayed home and read a book and would have had just as pleasant an evening.

Green autumn

Blogblah! raises the question, via Twitter, of whether the grass in our city has ever been this green this late in the year. I don't know the answer to that. I do remember that on Christmas Day 1979, the afternoon high here was 71.

I went out to a restaurant on the lake last night with Flibbertigibbet and spent a couple of hours there watching the sun set. It got a bit chilly after sunset.

I thought the East Wharf development was a good idea as originally proposed and was very disappointed with the final product — especially the addition of the office building. I thought the whole thing was overdone. But sitting out there last night, I decided that what's needed now is more development — houseboats, for example. I think there are good reasons why houseboats aren't allowed out there. But it would be cool to sit by the lake at night and watch the boats rocking gently at their moorings on a pier or two.

And pretty cool to live there!

A Dead Cat

One of the neighborhood cats was killed by a car this evening. It was a black shorthair that lived on the next block over. I saw him almost every day on the way to the Red Cup. In fact, I saw him this afternoon, galloping across the street. I don't know most of my neighbors, but I feel like I know their cats.

I'm a little upset by it.

Depression

...chapter 107 or whatever.

Finally broke out of it a couple of weeks ago, after spending the whole summer holed up in the house. But now it's coming back, and I can feel it coming on like a cold.

I'm sleeping a little bit later every day. I'm more acutely aware of past failures and current shortcomings. I'm feeling alone again, but wanting to disengage from people nonetheless.

More reading.

After finishing "The Harvard Psychedelic Club", I decided to bookend that with "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", which I had somehow managed to avoid reading all these years. (I am not nearly as well-read as some people think I am.)

Did you know Ken Kesey wrote "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" when he was 24 years old?

Still No Teacher

I watched a somewhat unsettling YouTube video the other day pertaining to Zen. In the tape, a young self-styled 'punk' Zen master 'debates' a sock puppet who represents an older, well-established (and apparently quite commercialized) Zen master. The video is followed by dozens of heated comments by supporters of both masters.

Maybe you've seen it. I'm not going into all the details, nor am I going to link to it. I have no desire to spread the antagonism.

I only want to say that this is the kind of thing that reinforces my continuing desire to have no teacher at all.

One of the great disillusions I suffered as a fundamentalist Christian 40-odd years ago was the discovery that many (or most) of the people I looked to as spiritual leaders were not much more than actors. They would have been just as comfortable being siding salesmen, and probably every bit as sincere.

I read about some of the stuff that goes on in Buddhist temples and organizations, and I suspect the same truth applies there.

One of the things I like about the lecturer and philosopher Alan Watts is that he frequently prefaced his presentations with the admonition that he was not a guru and not seeking followers.

"I am not advocating zen buddhism," he once told an audience. "I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I’m an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn’t want to convert you to anything. He doesn’t want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart’s music as opposed to, say, Beethoven’s."

I am near the conclusion that anyone who wants to set himself up as a leader or authority over other people – even in a democracy like ours – ought to be automatically disqualified from doing it. The very act of seeking the position suggests the person is too much of a narcissist, egomaniac or control freak to be any good at it.

Saturday Update

I guess I'm about ten days back into my normal schedule. I'm up early and usually off to the Red Cup to visit.

I tried drinking coffee again. You may recall I gave up caffeine a few years ago to calm my stomach. I tried limiting myself to one cup in the morning, but I was soon back to stomach cramps and EAS by late afternoon. So it's tap water for me from now on.

After the Red Cup, I generally go somewhere for breakfast. My appetite has unfortunately returned to normal. After breakfast, I often go for a walk.

Then I head back home, and may eat lunch around 1.

I spend a lot of time visiting and hanging out with my friends Diane and Kathryn. And I occasionally make it to Wednesday or Friday group dinner.

I have to say there are some advantages to being depressed.I find that when I'm depressed, I'm less prone to amusing myself by going for shopping for stuff I don't actually need. (And at this stage, 'don't actually need' encompasses pretty much everything. I could get by with never shopping again, except for groceries.)

This probably seems counter-intuitive, but I feel less lonely when I'm depressed. During my depression, I'm content to just stay in bed and sleep all day. It's when the depression has lifted, and I'm in the mood for a road trip or a movie, that I'm most likely to wish I had some sort of significant other with which to share the experience.

Another thing that's counter-intuitive: I'm less likely to drink when I'm depressed.

I'm continuing to immerse myself in the recorded lectures of Alan Watts.

Random Notes

Ordered a book called "The Harvard Psychedelic Club" last week after hearing its author interviewed on public radio's "New Dimensions" last Sunday. The book is a popular history of the psychedelic drug experiments performed by Harvard professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in the early sixties, and what happened to them and their associates after that. It was a fascinating book; I read it in one sitting.

It also led to some other books I am now working my way through. I'll write more on those later.

I'm also listening to a new (to me) collection of Alan Watts lectures released as "You're It: On Hiding, Seeking and Being Found" on the Sounds True label. I don't understand the impact Watts' recorded lectures have on me. I don't have a word to describe it. I would recommend his lectures to anyone suffering stress or anxiety. It's not just the subject matter, which is, of course, what first interested me. Watts could be reading the phone directory aloud and I would still get a sense of ease and relaxation from listening.

Watts, incidentally, was peripherally involved at the outset of the Leary/Alpert experiments at Harvard, at least according to the book. That must have been an interesting time in which to have lived. I was 10 years old when Leary and Alpert left Harvard.

My sleep cycle is now back to normal. I'm going to bed between nine and ten pm, sleeping fitfully, as I have for years. I wake up between 6:30 and 7:30 am. Some days I'll have a midday nap.

I started drinking coffee again recently, but that will have to stop. I didn't drink coffee until I was in my twenties, and I've always taken it black. I first stopped about four years ago. Coffee still screws up my stomach, I've found, so I'm going to swear off again.

Saturday

More to come...

Judge not

A friend told me the other day that I was the most judgemental person she knew.

That may be an exaggeration. But it's true I've often been an overly critical person. I've really struggled with it over the past ten years or so, with only middling results. I did pretty well with it for awhile, but lately I've been worse about it.

October is here

...thank God. Just saw a flock of ducks heading east, for whatever reason.

I seem to have my sleep cycle back to normal. I still wake up at night, but I just roll over and go back to sleep. I don't end up at IHOP or Beverly's.

I've gone walking three days in a row, now that the heat is no longer stifling.

I'm eating breakfast and lunch, but still skipping dinner.

Still adrift

Sleep an hour, up two hours. Sleep three hours, up five hours. Sleep two hours, up three hours. Repeat.

Early Sunday morning. It is Sunday, isn't it?

Not that I care.

I'm sitting in the Classen Blvd IHOP at 2:05 AM. The place is packed. I wonder if it's like this every night or if this is a weekend phenomenon. Either way, the place is a lot busier than Beverly's usually is.

Needless to say, my sleep cycle is still upside down. But over the past few days, I've started to not care. My daily life is about the same if I'm awake during the day or awake during the night.

I've ordered a breakfast T-bone and scrambled eggs. That's about a million calories, but it's probably the only thing I'll eat today. I'm down to eating once a day.

I realized I'm tired of food. Tired of looking at it, tired of smelling it, tired of eating it. I've eaten every kind of food I care to try; I seek no new culinary experience. Now it's just some biomass to shove in my maw to keep my meatbag producing shit, piss, sweat, pus, puke, dandruff, etc.

Damn, this is a big steak.

Man, there are a lot of posts here about sleeping

...and this is another one. I'm not sleeping as much as I was before I quit taking the allergy medicine, and when I'm awake, I'm more like my normal self. But I'm still sleeping strange hours. I went to bed at 9:30ish Sunday night after a fairly normal day. I felt sleepy, and I thought I'd fall asleep right away. But as soon as I got settled into bed, I was wide awake. I had brought Bailey in, and she was restless, too.

I finally got up about 3 AM and went to Beverly's and ate. Then I came home, and finally got to sleep about 5 Monday mornng. I slept soundly until 11:30 AM. I got up and went to lunch with a friend. Sleepy again, I came home and dozed lightly until about 2 in the afternoon.

I went to bed at 10 PM, slept about ninety minutes, then woke up again.

And here I am. I guess Tuesday will be more of the same.

Guess it was the allergy medicine

I skipped my evening dose of Zyrtec last night and felt like a new person today.

Zyrtec is the best thing I've ever taken for allergies. Typically in September, I'm sneezing and coughing all day, every day. Some days, my eyes are swollen almost shut. Zyrtec gave me more relief from the symptoms than anything I've ever used. I've gone through my allergy season this September with almost no symptoms at all.

The down side is that I've been sleeping sometimes 20 hours a day, and when I've been awake, it's been like looking at the world through two inches of glass. I suppose that could be just coincidence, but today was the first 'normal' day I've had in weeks – months, maybe.

The question now is whether I'll have a return of allergy symptoms. If I do, I guess I'll go back to taking Zyrtec on a limited basis. But I'm pretty sure I won't be taking it every day again.

It feels good to be back in what passes for reality.

Yawn

Went back to sleep about 4:30 am. Woke up about 9:30, looked around the Very Dark Room, and decided to go back to sleep. Slept soundly until noon. Woke up, looked around the Very Dark Room, and decided to go back to sleep. Woke up about 4, got out of bed about 6, went to dinner with DianeC, and now I'm back in bed, trying to stay awake long enough to finish this.

I'm wondering now if my allergy medicine is contributing to this.

More on sleeping

Staying awake is still the biggest struggle of my day. I'm getting up at a fairly normal hour now, but I'm often groggy and a bit disoriented. I stay up through lunch, then go home and go back to sleep. I usually sleep very soundly until 2 pm to 3 pm, then get up again. Thursday, I went back to bed at about 10 pm, and woke up again right at midnight. It's early Friday morning as I write this.

I wrote a few months ago about my One Productive Task goal, in which I would simply try to do one prductive task each day. I haven't kept that up for weeks now. On the other hand, since I'm asleep all the time, I don't have much opportunity to mess the place up.

Awake

Well, on Sunday I got up at 3 pm and ate something, then went back to bed and didn't get up again until 7 pm. That's when I was actually 'up'.

Today, though, I was up at 10:30 am — pretty good for me — and actually spent most of the day awake and doing stuff. That's a step forward.

About That Quote

dzaster asks why I posted that quote about priorities and options. I think it sums up a lesson which I learned too late in life to do me much good, but which might be beneficial to others.

It's easy to overcommit. Well, for some of us, anyway. Easy to overcommit in a new romantic relationship, easy to overcommit to a job or an employer. Easy to overcommit in a variety of ways.

When an employer talks about welcoming you to the "Fahrquahr Humate Corporation family," that's usually bullshit. It's not a family, it's a business. They would like for you to think it's a family, and make your job a priority. But unless you can make humate fly out of your ass, you are probably just an option to them. There's an imbalance in the relationship, which will become more clear if there's a sudden glut in the humate market.

I don't think I need to go into the issues of a romantic relationship. Let's just say it happens, sometimes because one partner encourages the other to overcommit, and sometimes because one partner is just prone to overcommitting.

The bottom line is, make sure your relationships are balanced.

A Pleasant Walk

I'm feeling a lot better tonight than I have for most of the summer.

I ate a late lunch with a friend at an Italian restaurant downtown. This restaurant is only about five minutes from my house, but I tend to think of it as outside my 'bubble.' I haven't eaten there in four years or more.

After we ate, I took my friend on a walking tour of downtown. She was planning to see an event in the Kerr Auditorium later in the evening, but she didn't know where it was, so I walked her over there. I suspect most people don't even know we have a Kerr Auditorium; it's part of the old Kerr-McGee complex now owned by Sandridge Energy. I don't think I've been in it since the eighties.

We spent about thirty minutes walking around downtown, and afterward, I felt as close to normal as I've felt in weeks. I guess I really needed to spend some time outdoors.

Somebody's words of wisdom

"Never allow someone to be your priority while you're just their option."

— origin unknown

Another day

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

— Yeats, or Gerry Rafferty, or somebody

Sleep/no sleep

I went to bed about 11 last night, which I thought was a reasonable hour. I was awake again by about 2:30 this morning. I don't know what time I got back to sleep — sometime after 3:29 am, obviously.

I woke up again about 6:45 am. I thought it was too early to get up, so I went back to sleep, thinking I'd be awake again in an hour. Instead, I woke up about noon, too groggy to even think. I went back to sleep, and awakened again at 3:45 pm, feeling rested for the first time.

Now, it's 8:45 pm, and I feel like I could go back to sleep right now.

Needless to say, I'm failing in my effort to get back on a regular sleep cycle. I wonder if this could be caused by something other than depression.

Ring of Fire

Here's a story I meant to post a few days ago. It's from the web site io9.com:

Ring of fire forms around a new supernova

"A 6-trillion-mile-wide ring of gas encircles a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, Supernova 1987A, and the explosions from the supernova are lighting it up like a candle, creating what will become a glowing ring."

Six trillion miles. Another example of how the scale of cosmic events is simply beyond comprehension. And relatively speaking, this is just a tiny thing.

Sleep

The most pressing issue for me right now is getting my internal clock back on a normal schedule — getting up at 7 am, maybe, and going to bed at 10:30 pm. I think my depression is being made worse by my bad sleep habits.

I made myself go to bed at 10:30 last night, and actually fell asleep rather quickly. But I woke up around 2, and didn't get to sleep again until about 5. I woke up again at 7:30, and made myself get up. Drove to the Red Cup, but it was closed for Labor Day, so I went on to Jimmy's Egg and had breakfast.

I felt sleepy by the time I got home, so I decided to lie down for an hour or so. Instead, I slept soundly until almost 1 pm.

And now it's about 11 pm, and I'm about to try again to force myself to go to sleep. I don't know what it's going to take to get my sleeping back to normal.

Calmer today than yesterday

I've been reading dzaster's advice in response to yesterday's early morning most, "Another Cheery Saturday". I don't think I'm giving away too much personal information by saying that dzaster moved from Oklahoma to another sunbelt state a few months ago, and has found the change significantly improved her sense of well-being.

I've considered the same thing, but I won't do it. I have too strong a financial incentive to remain here. And, while I have some sense of the kind of place where I'd like to live, I don't know if such a place actually exists.

Back in the early seventies, when I was a fundamentalist Christian, we were urged to separate ourselves, at least emotionally and philosophically, from the world. Of course, it was mostly bullshit; the church fathers doing the urging were no more separated from the world than any average consumer. It was salutary for everyone else, they insisted, but they were all so spiritually mature they no longer needed to deny themselves. Now we have this so-called 'prosperity gospel', and its New Age equivalent The Secret, and it's actually considered spiritual to wallow in material wealth and consumerism.

Meanwhile, I've drifted closer and closer to being detached from the world. I didn't do it on purpose. I wasn't pulled in this direction by the need for spiritual growth so much as I was pushed in this direction by boredom and frustration. When I was a Bible thumper, I struggled with this — unlike my pastors and Sunday school teachers, I took it seriously. But now it seems to have happened on its own, gradually over the years, with no prodding from the outside. I just looked at one thing after another, and said to myself, "Well, this is crap," and eliminated it from my life. This is my take on planet earth in general. Where would I move that would change this? I'd still be on this same speck of dust surrounded by people stirring up shit for no good reason.

I still have more material possessions than any human being needs. I get pleasure from music I've accumulated, but I think I could do without the rest of it now.

But being where I am doesn't make me feel more spiritual. I don't feel closer to God. I just feel farther away from crazy.

Sunday

What I need is a nanny.

Another Cheery Saturday

I have at least three friends who are suffering depression severe enough to disrupt their lives. One has moments of sadness, and sees herself becoming less organized and motivated. Two others are afflicted with panic and anxiety attacks that disrupt sleep. One of them talks of occasionally being suicidal.

I wonder what the hell is the matter with all of us.

I have had the panic and anxiety attacks, but it's been 25 years ago, and the direct result of working for an absolutely insane company. I've had the suicidal tendencies, but that's been about 12 years ago. At the moment, I don't feel sad, I don't feel anxious or panicked, and I don't feel suicidal. But I feel zero enthusiasm for anything. I just absolutely do not give a shit.

Human beings are, for the most part, greedy, self-serving idiots. And it's the greediest, the most self-serving, and the most idiotic who end up running things. Did you watch that clip of Arizona's Governor Brewer trying to make an opening statement in a debate? Just tell us what you think, Governor. Blank stare for ten seconds. And then something like, "We're proud of what we've did." The Sarah Palin School of Communications. And she's leading by 19 points.

We are doomed, doomed, fucking doomed. We're cretins. But we're also just a bunch of microbes screwing things up on one little speck of dirt in one little galaxy. About the only pleasure I get out of life these days is knowing that the universe is so immense that we'll never be able to pave the whole thing and put strip malls on it. We won't be able to pollute all of it or spill oil all over it. We'll never get to kill the people on other planets who are different colors than us or who don't believe in the same all-powerful invisible beings we do.

And then there's this: Mass Extinction Threat: Earth on Verge of Huge Reset Button?

But if we're publishing news stories with sentences like...

"Looking back in time, the diversity of large taxonomic groups (which include lots of species), such as snails or corals, mostly hovered around a certain equilibrium point that represented a diversity limit of species' numbers."

...then we deserve to die.

Shit.

I wish I felt better.

Autopilot

Went to bed at 8:30 last night. Woke up at 11:30. Met up with Blogblah! at Beverly's from midnight to 2 am, drinking decaf and talking about life. Then, back home and back to bed. Up at ten-ish. Breakfast at the Egg on May. Then back in bed. Slept until three-ish. Got up, joined a couple of friends at Will's, then we went to Diego's for dinner. Came home, rolled trash cans out to the curb. Now back in bed.

My life has been on some sort of autopilot for about three months now.