a-n-g-r-y

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Yesterday, my younger son came home in a rage. It was his second day of college. A couple of classes had been canceled without notification and he had been forced to wait around and wait around until the next one began. Add to that his distaste for academics and he ... was ... pissed. A whole day, shot to shit! He was as pissed as a rivulet of magma drooling down a volcano's slope ... don't try to talk me out of it! I will burn your face off!

And part of what pissed him off was that there was no way out of it and he desperately wanted a way out -- to find an activity or set of circumstances that would run smoothly and he would like, a time and place without the bullshit getting in his way.

And now, today, he was forced to return to the scene of the crime, the scene of the bullshit, the scene that piled up bullshit in his world-without-bullshit mind. Back to college ... what a fucked-up world!

Is it true or am I wrong? -- if you bring your love to bear on something you seriously love and are willing to make a commitment to and stick with it as the days and nights go by ... eventually your love will lose its magma hotness and what you hate will rise up not just because all things contain light and dark, but because the same ol' same ol' becomes stale and boring and you need a bit of salt and pepper. And the same is true of hatred.

Liberals get tired enough to consider conservatism and vice versa. The upstanding virtues of spiritual life hold you tight and then, because you have been there and done that, slip slowly into wider and more nuanced unvirtuousness. A diet of granola and tofu becomes a longing for a Big Mac and vice versa.

There was once a Zen teacher who, when asked what the Middle Way was, replied, "It means the extremes." Reining in the extremes may seem a noble and courageous adventure ... but even that gets old.

What's the matter with things as they are? Not some other way ... not some virtuous or vile way, just as they are?

My son will have to get through his anger and get through his love. I may wish I could do it for him somehow and save him the agonies and confusions and delights that spring up in a world without bullshit ... but I can't.

And if he is even half the man I think he is, he wouldn't thank me if I could and did.
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