on my mental bulletin board

Someplace on my mental bulletin board, like some odds-and-endsy post-its of reminder, are the snippets that linger but do not insist too volubly ... they're part of the collection:

-- I think it was the Zen teacher Aitken out in Hawaii who coined the observation, "Silence is golden and sometimes its color is pure yellow." Or maybe it was Kapleau. Whatever the case, the reminder is nice. Pointed, and nice.

-- I think it was my now-dead friend McKechnie who mangled Ben Franklin ("Early to bed/And early to rise/ Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise") nicely with

Early to bed
And early to rise
And you never see any of your friends.

--  In "Hagakure," Yamamoto Tsunetomo attributes the following to Yamamoto Jin'emon: "An affected laugh shows lack of self-respect in a man and lewdness in a woman." Affected laughter -- you know, the condescending, CEO, I'm-in-control-of-what-cannot-be-controlled shit -- strikes me as disgusting. Laughter is like sneezing -- you either do it or you don't. Pretense demeans what I can only think of as 'the gods.'

And yet Tsunetomo's compilation of observations in "Hagakure," while cuddly-soothing in its samurai-etiquette-prone tone, is simultaneously irritating ... like needing to take a good shit and being stuck with endless constipation.

Improvements and reproofs require, in the end, too much energy. What the fuck is the matter with an already-blue sky? As Ummon pointed out, more or less: "When you can't say it, it's there. When you don't say it, it's missing." I suppose my own long history of improvement and reproof is what irritates me today.

Another improvement.

Shiiieeeeeet!