pent-up tears

Perhaps I am paying the price for not having wept enough in my life: Maybe saving up, in whatever realm, implies that eventually there will be an imperative to spend.

Whatever the case, yesterday -- and more generally of late -- the tendency to cry has seemed to take hold. And it's not for the wracking stuff -- the wars, the poverty, the greed, the unkindnesses -- that my tear ducts have kicked in. Rather, it is the happy endings, the times when things work out, the beauty and the smiles that seem to tear (pun intended) me up.

Watching news, watching even thin-evidence movies, reading ... I feel unwilling to immerse myself in the high-voltage and often sad elements. These are the elements that need improving, and improvement requires a step back and an axiomatic sense that things could/can be 'better.' Also, a sense that "I deserve it" is at play and since much of my life rested on the axiom that somehow I do not deserve it, the tears have been dammed up ... and that damming is pretty energetic ... and the energy dwindles.

I crave the happy parts and duck the fiery furnaces of the human potential. I want to smile and feel the smooth satisfactions ... even as I may know the downside of the smiles I hope to smile: How miraculous the joys! It's enough to make me weep pent up tears and the tears feel good... not, it seems, that I could do much about them even if I wanted to.

I hesitate to mention all of this for fear some well-meant commentary will spring up -- beginning, perhaps, with "we all feel sorrow; we all feel joy ... best to let them run their course." Another TED talk; another stylized bit of extol-and-control. The dread "we" -- a word that tears do not recognize.

Maybe it's a romantic comedy that turns out predictably well, but not before some lumps and bumps I am unwilling to add into the mix. Childishly, but honestly, I want the good stuff and when it comes, as I know it will, I am grateful and happy and cry. Or a bit of music that melts my butter. Or a human interaction that is kind before another TED talk or spiritual encomium gets hold of it.

Yesterday was a day of tears that I had, perhaps, saved and saved and saved by trying to make improvements and feeling strongly that solving the wracking stuff required a step back.

I still feel that way, but the ability to step back and raise the flag on behalf of what is sincerely awful or vengeful or vile ... well, that ability seems, increasingly, to elude me. As my Zen teacher once said to me, "I am growing weak."

It's not sad, I guess. If a miser cannot spend what s/he has so lovingly husbanded, what good is it? Tears of joy are the same tears as the tears of sorrow ... only better from where I sit.

It's just an old man's smiling lament ... "ain't it awful" is not enough. Or maybe it is, but my capacities lose their vigor. I like the good stuff, the warming stuff, the stuff I have tried to impose with mixed results.

writing the magic

Listening to some music a little while ago and feeling the tears welling up in my eyes, I realized not for the first time that I have always wanted to be able to write with whatever magic spills over when the music I love begins to play.

And of course it can never happen.

And still I wish it could.

And I wish it right down to my eye teeth.

George Carlin on euphemisms

It may be old, but I saw it for the first time today ....

human decency? get real!

No need to thank us: Our results speak for themselves.

Since it happened in 1975, the American withdrawal of support from Cambodia is probably best forgotten so that America can commit the same mistake again with a glowing sense of fitness.

Meeting me one day, a haggard [American Ambassador to Cambodia John Gunther] Dean, who had lost 15 pounds, asked rhetorically: "Isn't there any sense of human decency left in us?"

From 1975 to 1979, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians lost their lives to the regime that filled the vacuum after American withdrawal. That was 21% of the entire population.

More recently, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, was quoted on Democracy Now, an independent-ish news channel, as saying, "the volume of major [weapons] deals concluded by the Obama administration in its first five years exceeds the amount approved by the Bush administration in its full eight years in office by nearly $30 billion. That also means that the Obama administration has approved more arms sales than any U.S. administration since World War II."

"A sense of human decency" is just a quaint and somewhat addled phrase in the minds of those inclined buy-buy-buy Congressmen and sell-sell-sell weaponry. The Middle East is such a selling opportunity.

Decency ....

No rich and powerful person ever got that way be being nice. The skeletal remains are the least of the proof of that.

the other side of the earth

On the other side of the earth, meanwhile ....

But the earth is round and by definition has no 'sides.'

How many things -- perhaps all things -- are just like that?

Sides create what is in-between.

But in-between doesn't pan out. It is fool's gold, isn't it?

I suppose all this could be serious as a porcupine quill.

On the other hand -- on the other side of the earth -- perhaps it is as jolly and loving as a mother tickling her toddler child.

Bristling with laughter.

At the turn of the 20th century there was an expression to describe a (wo)man who lived directly. I heard my father use it from time to time: "(S)he has no side" or "there is no side to him/her."

I guess the expression is lost, but the capacity remains the same.

"news" graffito

Passed along in email:

Holocaust for combat vets

I wonder what it might be like if the same outrage and horror and bone-deep sorrow that is sometimes accorded to the Holocaust were transferred and infused into the plight of combat veterans left writhing and wounded years after the fighting had 'stopped.'

Those who have, so to speak, cornered the market in Holocaust memory might claim "it's not the same," but I wonder if it's not also every bit the same -- a deliberate and well-contrived policy that rends the souls of otherwise decent men and women and is remembered too blithely by those who were not directly affected.

The speechless screaming cannot be transmitted. The past cannot be undone. And yet ... and yet ...

After World War II ended, many Jews took up the assertion and prayer, "Never again!" And yet I once heard the story of a Catholic priest who was likewise interned by the Nazis who were bent on a "final solution." When asked how he felt about the guards and government that had enslaved him, he said simply, "I might have done the same."

War wounds are excused by the liberal application of words like "hero" and "valor" -- the blithe solemnity of those like me who have not been there and been shredded. Such excuses are not generally applied to the ritualized slaughter of the Holocaust. But how is the vast dehumanization of Holocaust or war not made of similar cloth? Why should that dehumanization be accorded more tenderness and caring in one instance than another when the rending is the same ... the "better angels of our nature" left corrupted and paralyzed and begging?

Like an arrow to the heart, there are the words of a Vietnam War era mother who reflected after her amputee son returned, "I sent them a good boy. They sent me a murderer." Why should such words be written off as mere hyperbole?

Knock off the patriotic squirming and Jesuitry for a moment ... isn't the need for reflection and tenderness the same?

Rounding up the vulnerable and unwary ... shipping them off to a place of ineffable flame....

Perhaps it is only the flags that vary.

eight shots in the back

(Reuters) - Activists planned to protest in South Carolina on Wednesday after a white police officer was caught on video fatally shooting a 50-year-old black man in the back as he ran away following a traffic stop.
The officer has been charged with murder and the FBI and U.S. Justice Department are investigating the shooting, the latest in a series of incidents that have raised questions about U.S. policing and race relations.

£200 million heist

Anyone who takes a look at a police blotter knows that the average criminal is pretty stupid ... not least because s/he got caught. Movies and TV may depict splendid criminal minds, but the batting average at street level is pretty much "stupid."

Except ... except ... well sometimes, even in reality, criminal genius has its day... and I'm not talking about the halls of Congress or some Wall Street or banking finagle.

In London, it appears that thieves had a four-day window of opportunity over the Easter weekend just passed. They put it to good use, broke into Hatton Garden Safe Deposit, Ltd. in the middle of the jewelry/gold district, and made off with scads and scads of loot. No one is saying how much but ... well ... £200 million was mentioned in the BBC story.

This was not a robbery for stupidos, that's for sure.

getting my chain yanked

After watching the documentary alluded to in the previous post -- "American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein" -- I came away feeling like a much-used sock left in an athletics locker ... smelly, somehow; clouded with unpleasant odor; icky.

At first, it was hard to say why I should feel turned off by a topic that has all the makings of a theme that turns me on: Norman Finkelstein has made a habit of challenging the Israeli narrative about Palestine and the Palestinians. He has made a lot of high-profile enemies, but the fact that he brings facts to bear and that he himself is Jewish by heritage and it is harder to nail him to the cross with the always-kept-handy "anti-Semitic" put-down.

So ... a topic (dead and dying people often referred to only as an afterthought in the bright hope of a beleaguered Israel) that lights my fire. So... an underdog challenging the tales told in media and society; and I like underdogs when they're any good.

But I felt uncomfortable and somehow scuzzy after watching the documentary. I watched not because I really wanted to or because I wanted to put Israel down or for any other reason I could quickly identify except perhaps that "collateral damage" and "righteousness" tend to nauseate me.

I watched, went to bed, and got up still feeling as if I had been slimed.

A friend put me on the track of my own failing. His experience, he said as an academic among other things, was that academics tended to be cowards more interested in their own status than in the truth. His was just a suggestion, not some off-hand piece of opprobrium.

But it made me realize how infuriated I can become when I consider a topic serious and those addressing the issue insist on injecting themselves into the argument/debate/discussion: I don't give a fuck who said what first, whose appreciation is more profound than everyone else's, whether someone's ox gets gored or elevated, whether a cause is righteous or not ... what I care about is the issue itself. What are its parameters and implications? All comers welcome ... those seeking to get credit or laurels, well ... go jerk off someplace else.

This is a failing on my part because every argument involves a choice of words and arrangement that is personal and to that extent, perhaps, self-serving. It is unreasonable to ask anyone to keep their self-serving demands to themselves.

And still, I hate it when I hear the overt or sub-text bid for acclaim when the topic -- the death of children, for example -- is serious. I react viscerally... and pay the smelly-sock price.

Oh well, maybe I will be more patient and understanding in another incarnation.

But in the meantime, it seems that I am infused with a growling memory of Voltaire: "May God defend me from my friends: I can defend myself from my enemies."

the ... uhhh... war in Gaza

Passed along in email was this video about the Israeli 'war' in Gaza. I found it powerful, though I wish someone else had presented it:



And, of possible further interest, here is the full-length documentary, "American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein."

thin-gruel noodling

As the early morning flexes its rainy, grey shoulders, the sentence likewise limbers up in my mind: "It is easy to lionize or demonize the dead: They are no longer around to correct the praise of blame that may be heaped upon them."

I wonder whether to add this to the newspaper column homework I have agreed to imagine I have to do. The column is based in the premise that complaint and criticism may be my conversational habit -- "ain't it awful" tucked neatly in among the crescendo-ing arguments/observations -- but what is it like when I attempt to praise or place my trust in someone ... and name the name of one such someone.

Many of the most memorable and praise-worthy individuals I can think of seem to have cloaked themselves in the camouflage of death, a cheap-date defense if ever there was one.

My longing to trust and praise override all objections: I don't care if an investigation brings the whole business to its knees ... trust and praise feel good; I like feeling good; therefore trust and praise are both true and warranted. How's that for fucked-up and completely human 'logic?' I feel only mildly assuaged/relieved to at least try to see.

Oh well, there is a bagel in the kitchen with my name on it: Time for breakfast.

And if anyone suggests I "trust the bagel," I will come over and shoot your tires out.

spare time

The comparison won't shut its yap this morning, so here it is:

Maybe anyone's personal spiritual persuasion and practice is like having a favorite -- sometimes a red-hot favorit -- sports team: There are the victories and defeats, the tears of joy and tears of sorrow, the anger and love, the foul balls and home runs, the scandals and bright lights, the perfections and mistakes ... and the uniforms ... let's not forget the uniforms.

Barrooms are awash in booze and sports chatter and several other enthusiasms. It's fun and creates camaraderie, even if there are occasional fist fights.

Sure, you take it seriously, but at some point you need to stop dallying and go to work. Leave the games to others. Come back when you can spare the time.

But it is a chosen spare-time agenda.

the fruits of whose labor?

A living wage

In the early night yesterday, I could see a set of headlights dead-stopped in the middle of the street. I looked from the porch, waiting for them to move forward or back, but they didn't. The engine sound was not one I recognized on my block. Then a car door slammed and the lights moved up towards my house, where what turned out to be a pickup truck slowed and then stopped.

I didn't recognize the truck, so when a man opened the cab door and descended, I thought I might have a visitor. "May I help you?" I said in a fairly loud voice.

The man did not reply. The noise of his motor may have blotted out my sound. Instead, he went directly to the garbage my wife had laid out for collection -- a rolling bucket of waste weeklong waste baskets and a smaller box for recyclable plastic and metal containers. Garbage pickup is Mondays around here.

An ornamental bush blocked my view of what the man was doing, but I could hear him sorting through the recyclables -- sifting out cans and bottles that had a return-deposit value of five cents each. He took an armload to the truck and distributed his haul among several boxes in the truck bed.

And then he was gone.

The man's truck was well-worn but well-kept -- a used vehicle, clearly, but not a rattle-trap. And the man himself consulted a cell phone that is hardly a mark of poverty. The neighborhood he was in is part of a community that is largely lily-white enough and well-enough-heeled to be able to afford the luxury of being 'concerned' about the indigent and homeless.

Five cents per bottle. Five cents per can. When I was a kid, it was the kids who scavenged for returnable bottles and made a little money. Now it's grown men and women, perhaps with families to feed.

But of course the 'economy is getting better.' Listen to TV's Nightly Business Report or watch the talking Wall Street savants on TV. "Wealth management" is for the wealthy and they know it.

Nowadays, China is leading the worldwide economic outlook in several senses, not the least of which seems to be....

More than three decades after Beijing began allowing market reforms, China's 168 million migrant workers are discovering their labor rights through the spread of social media. They are on the forefront of a labor protest movement that is posing a growing and awkward problem for the ruling Communist Party, wary of any grassroots activism that can threaten its grip on power.

Strikes?! In China????!!!! Will pigs fly? It seems they might.

In China, yes. In the United States -- outside the recent longshoremen's dock-strike on the West Coast -- labor cowers. No one wants to lose whatever job s/he has and a lot of people are afraid they might. Fear suits the outlook of power. If you doubt it, check your 'representatives' in Washington: Never mind your job, war generates profits and diverts attention, so let's have another war.

It might be laughable if it weren't so sad -- today's reaction of the Chinese to labor unrest when compared to the U.S. reaction to labor unrest in the late 1800's and early 1900's ... send in the cops/troops, beat the crap out of them, scare 'em silly!

It's ironic to think that the very masters and manipulators who shape the response to labor unrest are themselves the beneficiaries of such things as the 40-hour-work-week, health care, Social Security and other American benefits that can be directly traced to the labor movement that once got the crap kicked out of it ... and kept on coming despite blood and bruises and death.

China holds a small candle. The U.S. seems to be content to watch football on Sundays. In the end, it may be the same Internet that challenges China's rigidities that will challenge America's: Money, after all, is a strong incentive.

defying death

The quote below was taken from a Washington Post article passed along today by a friend. The article's idea of living longer or outwitting death was titillating, but there was something superficial about it, as if the problem might be agreed upon without really investigating why or how it might be a problem. But that was just my take.

The quote that caught my eye was this:

No one seems able to predict what life might be like when half a dozen or more generations are alive simultaneously.

Easter hymns

Without criticism, I do wonder how often Jesus has to be resurrected before Christians get used to it.

Whatever the case, it's a brilliant Easter morning and, rather than sing my own songs, I will borrow again the songs of others. Nothing like a nice song, a little hallelujah, to brighten the day.

The first was written by my younger son when he was nine:

THE VERY BIG TREES

The very big trees
Are in my backyard.
I visit them every day
So they won't get lonely.
They give me shade
And keep me dry from rain.
I can climb them
And get delicious fruit --
The most delicious fruit.                 -- Ives Fisher

The other, entitled "Homage to my Father," was written by Seido Ray Ronci, and, like my son's words, soars in my mind:

HOMAGE TO MY FATHER

My father said:
Fuck Father Farrell,
what does he know, that old bastard!

Study all the religions. Learn Italian.
See Venizia, Firenze, talk
to all kinds of people
and never, never think you know more
than someone else! Unless,
unless they're full of shit.

And if they are, tell them;
and if they still don't get it, fuck it,
there's nothing you can do about it.

Learn how to bake bread.
If you can make pasta and bake bread
you can always feed your family,
you can always get a job.

Keep your house clean
and don't worry what anyone else does.
Cut your grass,
prune your fruit trees
or they'll die on you.

Don't drink too much
but don't always be sober --
it makes you nervous.

A couple glasses of wine,
some anisette now and then,
a cigar never hurt nobody.

Nervous people always got an ache here,
an ache there, they get sick,
they die --

Look at Father Farrell:
he'll be dead in a year.

Fuck him!

OK, that's my resurrection schtick for the moment ... resurrecting on someone else's dime.

volume control

Passed along in email:

A fundraiser for the owners of an Indiana pizzeria that became the target of widespread animosity after they said they wouldn't cater a same-sex wedding reception has collected more than $828,000 from anonymous donors.
A GoFundMe page started by a producer from The Blaze, a conservative news network founded by Glenn Beck, has drawn more than 28,500 donors.

These days, it sometimes seems, everyone is touchy as a wet cat and the result is so much animosity, little and large, that the constructive common good goes begging.

In Congress, members are busy verbally dissing a far-from-complete nuclear-arms accord in Iran. I was under the impression that Iran's practical capacities to create a nuclear bomb were at least a decade away even if they did find some way to deliver it... but everyone is seriously concerned. Why aren't they concerned about Israel or Pakistan or ... whomever?
In Australia, there are clashes as some protesters assert Islam is not a religion because of its links to Islamic State extremism. Islam, for Christ's sake! -- the religion whose bomb zone encompassed many of the most compelling discoveries in western knowledge ... the cradle of (western) civilization before Greece even got out of diapers.

And then there are the pizza parlors/gay pride to consider and wax outraged about.

I'd step back, play the age card and say, "let's you and him fight," but the volume is so loud I really want to call the cops (did I really just write that?) as on some passing Saturday night when neighborhood teenagers insist I hear their music from five houses away.

Isn't it time to let the moms of this world administer a couple of tablespoons of shut-the-fuck-up?

France bans skinny models

(Reuters) - France will ban excessively thin fashion models and expose modeling agents and the fashion houses that hire them to possible fines and even jail, under a new law passed on Friday.
The move by France, with its fashion and luxury industries worth tens of billions of euros, comes after a similar ban by Israel in 2013, while other countries, like Italy and Spain, rely on voluntary codes of conduct to protect models.

Next, perhaps, there can be some pressure brought to bear on designers of women's shoes.

noodling on a grey morning

A soft, grey morning around here, intermittent rain plip-plopping in the aluminum gutters outside the porch door. A no-real-contrast kind of day that invites and allows all comers. In the here-and-there, the birds accept the invitation and sound off, creating a sound-stage of action against a soft, unexceptional backdrop.

Territory and sex and come-play-with-me resound in their insistent chirps. Suddenly the world is off and running and for all I know, the birds are running it. "I am what is," they seem to say, "and what is is only me." They aren't arrogant about it. It's just a statement of fact.

Yesterday a willowy Mount Holyoke College freshman came by to pick my brain about Zen Buddhism. She is doing an "ethnography." I'm not entirely sure what such a sonorous word might mean, but I like company under whatever aegis. Willowy ... thin and quiet as a powerful, pale-green blade of springtime grass ... uncertain ... with a soupçon of "if I act polite, religion will open its doors to me."

"Without you, there is no Buddhism," I said at one point ... and was immediately embarrassed by the assertion, an assertion that happens to be true. But telling the truth is hardly the fodder of conversation or academic pursuit. Conversation is the process of telling good lies. The truth is experience and experience is what leaves all else in the dust. (How do you like that lie?)

Once I asked my Zen teacher some question like, "Who or what is Buddha?" He told me not to ask. And when I pressed him -- he was, after all, a Zen monk and if he couldn't define his chosen line of work, how good could he possibly be? -- he looked confused. "You know, it's really pretty hard. You ask from the intellectual point of view. I answer from the Dharma point of view (because that is as truthful as anyone can get)."

His answer annoyed me, as if he were keeping a secret under wraps ... spiritual life is rife with secret teachings and handshakes and rituals and telling such secrets to the unwashed is frowned upon. I thought he was putting me in my unwashed place.

But of course I was wrong... and was reminded of it yesterday. The young woman asked her ethnography questions and I did what I could to tell her the truth of my experience. I wasn't trying to heighten my status. I was just trying to tell what experience I had had ... and secretly hoped that that experience could be transmitted.

Not for the first time, life snickered, "Get real!" I was, in one sense, on the other end of the problem my teacher had expressed ... a problem that anyone, Buddhist or otherwise, confronts: Experience cannot be transmitted. There is something galling and lonely about it since my experience or yours is so clean and clear and obvious within.

Experience is convincing -- not necessarily true, perhaps, but convincing -- but there is no convincing anyone else with the same assuredness. The moth can fly close to the flame for warmth, but if it comes too close, well, that's all she wrote!

With all this mental mastication, I wonder: If experience cannot be transmitted to another and cannot thus form a bedrock for judgment and outlook, why then should I be so convinced by experience, even, or perhaps especially, my own. Of course this is me and me is dreadfully important to me, but really ...

I can hear the soothers and soothsayers in the wings: "It's just the best we've got, old son." But is that true. Is experience the best we've got? Is there some way in which it could possibly NOT be the best we've got?

I have been a fan of saying, "experience trumps belief." And in an ordinary sense, I think that's true. But is doesn't really address the issue of what, if anything, trumps experience. What happens when "me" takes a vacation?

I'm stuck.

But the intermittent rain plip-plopping in aluminum gutter is not.

Or, for all I know, maybe it is.

Sweet springtime blades of grass.

Zero fighter pilot, 98, wages anti-war campaign

Kaname Harada, 98, is on a mission to educate an increasingly militaristic Japan about the horrors of war he experienced as a Zero fighter pilot in World War II [Ko Sasaki for The New York Times]

It's enough to bring tears to the eyes:

"Nothing is as terrifying as war .... I want to tell you my experiences in war so that younger generations don’t have to go through the same horrors that I did....

“I fought the war from the cockpit of a Zero, and can still remember the faces of those I killed,” said Mr. Harada, who said he was able to meet and befriend some of his foes who survived the war. “They were fathers and sons, too. I didn’t hate them or even know them.”

“That is how war robs you of your humanity,” he added, “by putting you in a situation where you must either kill perfect strangers or be killed by them.”

Was there ever a peace advocate who did not say the words uttered by Kaname Harada, 98? And was there ever -- god forgive us -- a snowball's chance in hell that his experiences would inspire and inform those bent on the next military adventure, the next 'defensive' or status-enhancing thrust? Be assured that the younger generation, wherever they are, will have to see the horrors for themselves.

Yes, we must try, but I see little or no reason to sidestep the fact that that effort will end in failure.

virtue

Is there any honest person who has not fallen victim to his/her own virtues?

Doesn't it -- mustn't it -- go with the territory of what is called virtue?

The object of this observation is not so much to disparage or demean virtue, of whatever sort, but rather to give virtue its honest due. How could virtue flower and bloom without passing through this sharp-toothed gate?

Maybe it's like having a cat and loving it dearly. The cat loves you back with purrs and a warming presence in the lap. Cat lovers really do love their cats.

But cats come with very effective teeth and claws -- tools that make even the most devoted owners bleed and feel the pain. Cats and virtues have the wherewithal to warn the unwary, "Don't fuck around with me!"

How could anyone honestly love their cat without knowing, acknowledging and embracing this?

Are virtues that don't nip and rend really worthy of the name "virtue?"

how Americans view Zen Buddhism

It has happened before and it happened again the other day -- an email out of the blue from a young woman who has an earnest homework project: "My general topic is how Americans view Zen Buddhism," she wrote. The overview statement reminded me of the old-final-exam-question joke: "Describe the universe and give three examples."

She wanted to do an interview. You'd think at my age I could slip into the no-thanks shadows with ease, but n-o-o-o-o-o-o! Topics like this, however academic and juvenile, still stir my juices, I think as much as anything because I remember my own fumbling, uncertain, hydrant-sniffing, drawn-yet-scared approaches to spiritual endeavor. I find human uncertainties, even those camouflaged with academic expertise, touching. I want to 'help' and in so doing, ignore my very own observation, "Just because you are indispensable to the universe does not mean the universe needs your help."

Oh well, another failure. What else is new? Might as well wallow if I can't get shut of it.

How do Americans view Zen Buddhism? The question as it stands is on a precise par with the question, "How do Americans view chocolate ice cream?" It only sounds different because chocolate ice cream is a direct, immediate pleasure and spiritual endeavor is 'virtuous' or 'mystical' or 'good' ... and no one is entirely relaxed around things that are virtuous and good. Chocolate ice cream needs no improvement; spiritual life seems to nag relentlessly.

What do Americans think of Zen Buddhism, that splinter of a splinter of Buddhism which some Buddhists do not even consider to be Buddhism? Ask the adherents and there will be a lot of swooping and soaring and demonstrably serene tones of voice. Depending on the emphasis put on actual practice, and, I suspect, dependent on age, Zen Buddhism can be pretty serious: "After all, 'I' am a serious matter, ergo Zen Buddhism is likewise serious." And I can't fault the reasoning: How else is anyone to iron out the wrinkles of this life if s/he is unwilling to take this life seriously ... or even just solemnly?

I like Zen Buddhism because, although it really is too simple and too hard, still, it's direct: As sports columnist Red Smith once observed approximately about writing, "Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein."  Zen Buddhism too is easy ... you just sit down, shut up, focus the mind, open a vein ... and see what happens. After all the folderol attending on other serious matters in life, it is healthy, sensible and, yes, somewhat scary to find something that cuts the crap and goes for the throat. Or anyway, I think so.

Zen Buddhism in America. I like it, sort of. I think it's useful, sort of. I've used a lot of energy-years on its behalf, whatever 'it' is. I dislike praising it and I dislike damning it: It's like chocolate ice cream -- take a lick if you like and leave the opinions to other "Americans."

Sprinkles anyone?

April Fool's Day in England 1957

Pointed out earlier today ... a classic that fooled many a wily Englishman:

a productive day?

Suddenly, spring seems to be in full flux.

The birds (grackles? blackbirds? -- hell, I'm not an ornithologist) that crap on cars are out in swarms. The bunny rabbit whose placid ways make me want to add the word "bunny" nibbles at patches of grass that show no obvious signs of greening. The spindly, naked etchings called "branches" seem to be changing colors ... or is that just wishful thinking? It's impossible to tell, but even the wishing seems to be part and parcel of the springtime ritual.

Yesterday felt like a 'productive' day in my generally unproductive life. Felt good, somehow. Off to the supermarket to get a couple of days worth of supper fixings since I generally do that bit of food preparation. Naturally, there was a prescription to pick up, so I did that as well.

After storing the goods, there was a TV interview seen the night before that crept into my mind and whispered ... an interview by Charlie Rose who is one of my least favorite interviewers -- the man simply cannot seem to realize that he is not the reason anyone might watch his interviews. He was interviewing Bill Nighy, a British actor who did a superlative job in one of my favorite English dramas, "Page Eight."

Nighy said at one point that he was always drawn to the unremarkable man who tried as best he might to do "the next right thing." No high-profile characters, just -- and Nighy tried not to use the word "ordinary" -- ordinary men. It took courage to do the next right thing and Nighy said he admired it.

The thought lingered -- despite Charlie Rose and his self-referential chitchat -- and I realized that I was happy that someone else -- anyone else -- felt what I too felt.

That happiness led me to bat out a potential newspaper column that allowed me to include one of my favorite interviews -- a 1939 talk with Charles Monroe, a mail clerk in New Marlborough, Mass., and a man of character and what used to be called "substance" or "sand."

Generally, I am hugely suspicious of writing in which the writer uses the thoughts of others to bolster his or her own persuasion ... as if his or her own conclusions were somehow unworthy. Further, I suspect that quoting Freud or the Bible or whatever is more a way of burnishing the writer's imagined status ... by association, dontcha know.

But yesterday I was willing to hand the reins over to Charles Monroe and let him help me express my satisfaction with a point of view. I batted the column out in about  40 minutes and will go back to it when column-writing time comes in the middle of the month. Maybe yesterday's satisfaction will hold water. Maybe not. But for yesterday, I was pleased and wore an interior smile.

After that, there were a couple of only-mildly-suspicious hard-boiled eggs for lunch, a few pages of "Foucault's Pendulum" -- a ludicrously ornate intellectual thriller that feels like an intellectual lullaby and helps me to sleep -- and then a nap and then cooking dinner.

Not a very productive day, as the crow flies, but it seemed enough at the time. When there is no one else against whom to place the yardstick, productivity (which habit says is somehow desirable) is hard to assess, let alone apply.

But it seemed to be a good day or felt good inside or something.

good pornography, good people

Is it true or is it just slick -- I'm not quite sure but it crossed my mind:

Good people are like good pornography: As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart is said to have said approximately after conferring with a law clerk on a pornography case: "I may not know what it is, but I know it when I see it."

Are good people like that? I sort of think so, but I can't prove it and I certainly can't convince anyone else.

It's like laughter, perhaps: Try to dissect it and it disappears, although to say it disappears is clearly not true.

Otter Creek

Like all friends, I guess, Bill McKechnie and I would, now and then, share and embellish and wallow in some whimsical future. And such was the case when I went to visit Bill in Chiefland, Fla., in 1980.

Bill in whimsical mode

At the time, Bill lived in Florida and I lived in New York and I scraped up the money to fly south and visit him. We had both been German linguists stationed in Berlin in the early 1960's and remained friends though our geographical paths diverged. Bill got into collectibles/antiques/junk racket after trying unsuccessfully to follow his father's footsteps into professional baseball and I strayed into book publishing, then news reporting and then apartment painting. Bill was a laughter person -- someone whose mind could light and delight on anything and, like as not, turn it into humorous grist. I lived at the other end of that spectrum -- serious to the point of boredom -- but likewise intrigued by whimsical associations that could link anywhere and anything with anywhere else and anything else. Bill's humor could drive me nuts as my seriousness could drive him nuts ... a couple of nuts ... a couple of friends.

Anyway, this morning, for reasons I cannot fathom, I woke up thinking about Otter Creek, a mostly

abandoned collection of houses Bill took me to visit in Florida. His vision -- which I embraced -- was that we would buy this ghost collection (neither of us had much money) and become legends in our own minds. I could be mayor and he could run the local whore house ... or vice versa ... or we could race goats ... or, since Otter Creek, or what we saw of it, was literally a ghost community, we could do anything we wanted, create any atmosphere we liked, rule like kings in whatever kingdom we decided to create.

No one lived in the Otter Creek we ambled through. Whimsy was about all that was left. And so we whimsied for a couple of hours, moving between and among the structures that someone had once taken some care to construct in order to ... in order to what? I'm sure Bill told me -- he had a history streak -- but I haven't got the energy to research my own journals. Wikipedia has stuff, including ghost tales.

I think Bill and I both liked Otter Creek, aside from anything else, because of its name. It was a plain name, a functional name, a name unembellished and in that lack of embellishment, somehow strong and straightforward and admirable. Someone had worked hard to create and nourish this place and now ... well, there was something eerie about what had been carefully crafted and now was cast off whole ... without even the decency of a funeral pyre.

Maybe that's the lot of the dead -- dead houses, dead people, dead empires --: To be at the mercy of whimsical travelers. And bit by bit whimsy overtakes us all.

Goat racing still appeals to me.

excuses

Excuses, excuses ....

Others may be content, but I am not, when harmful behavior -- behavior which may benefit one point of view but hurts or frightens others in the neighborhood -- is written off with phrases like, "oh, that's just an aberration" or "you don't understand," or "one rotten apple does not mean all the apples are rotten."

Vatican pedophilia ... it's just an aberration.

Collateral wartime damage ... it's for the greater (American, Islamic, etc.) good.

A flourishing economy raises all boats ... and leaves some splintered on the gimme rocks.

I find it offensive (and have no doubt done the same) that the person or movement that makes its best efforts to do something "good" cannot acknowledge that that very movement or philosophy is simultaneously responsible for wounding and sometimes fatal spin-offs. It's like some grade-school claiming "the dog ate my homework." Idealism is dangerous -- alluring, but in the end, self-serving and dangerous.

What brought this to mind was this article, passed along in email -- the tale of a Polish priest who, while running a retreat for kids in an attempt to "explore God" instead scared the crap out of them with a mass exorcism. The story lacks meat on the bone, but even as it stands, it's a good example of the excuses-excuses approach:

School children have been left screaming and sobbing after a priest carried out a mass exorcism on them at a religious camp.
The 1,000 young people, from schools in the town of Gryfice, north-western Poland, were attending the three-day camp to help "young people explore God and devote themselves to spiritual renewal through prayer".
But instead of singing songs and praying, priest Tomas Wieczorek, 37, was more interested in exorcising their demons and replacing them with God.

The sensationalist story does not get into the excuses, but you can hear them hovering in the (in this case) Roman Catholic wings. This guy is just a wing-nut extremist in a well-intended movement that targets a better, more peaceful and more consonant way of life; sure, some slip through the cracks ... blah, blah, blah.

Where -- in this situation or in personal life -- is the adult who says, "Yes, I am responsible as well for that harmful activity or set of activities and will not attempt to cover it up with well-intentioned treacle. It is part of the human capacity to create not just what is good, but also, simultaneously, what is vile. 'Vile' is not made any less vile by beating the drums of goodness. I will try to do better. That's "I," personally."

At a time in my life when I read a lot of books, I once came up with a formula for the sorts of novels I enjoyed most. That formula was "good + bad = good." I recognized it was a bit too facile, but it was pretty close. What I did not delve into too much was that the latter "good" was simply that roulette number on which I was willing to place my bet ....

And then correct as necessary.

"you can't bullshit the silence"

Yesterday, a college student who had recently transferred to the University of Massachusetts which is not far away, came by to snoop some of the local Zen landscape. We looked at the poor old zendo and then went out for coffee.

Adam -- his name as well as mine -- seemed to be inclined to the outdoors, was studying landscaping and had been on a number of adventurous trips, one of them to Alaska where a part of the adventure was to take a tarp and some supplies and spend two days alone in the whiteness. The adventure was part of what put him on a Zen-snooping path, he said.

Imagine that: Absolutely alone, with nothing but cold and white and silent for company.

And the words just popped out of my mouth: "You can't bullshit the silence."

Just hearing the tale second-hand made me wonder about 40 days and 40 nights in the desert, whether fairy tale or not... the strange and inescapable moment when each person hits a wall and none of the devices work any more. Is it God or is it Satan and....

Is there a difference?

the wondrousness of human birth

I wonder if, in their tracking of Buddhist spoor, a house cat, elephant or humming bird might accord with the occasional assertion that being born human is a rare and wondrous thing -- something to be cherished and nourished and used to best advantage.

Among Buddhists, there are times and places in which such an assertion is made. I wouldn't contradict it, certainly, but I notice that the ones making the assertion are generally human beings and one of the things I have learned in Buddhist training is to take a little skeptical care where my own judgments, however scrumptious, are concerned.

And so, when I hear my fellow human beings asserting good or bad news about the human condition, I feel a little as I do when I hear that the Vatican plans to investigate instances of pedophilia in its ranks or that the police department will handle "police brutality" cases: Is there no other source, one not so cozily aligned, to render a sensible point of view? In-house investigations aren't always the same as "in reality."

And if there is not, am I wrong to wonder if this isn't a bit like a teenager admiring his or her reflection before a high school prom at which s/he really wants to look good? "'O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'"

I am aware that there are men and women of great learning and, for all I know, great accomplishment, who will extol the good fortune of being born human -- how rare! how fortunate! -- but how much of this is worth crediting?

The best I can figure out is that if it is true, it's true. If not, then not.

And the house cat, elephant and humming bird may be the exemplars worth heeding.

elephants in Delhi

Elephants are revered in Hindu culture and they have been making appearances at weddings and functions in the Indian capital for generations, but their presence on the streets of Delhi may soon come to an end.

The government is no longer issuing new licenses to elephant keepers who are struggling to look after the animals in the growing city and environmental groups say it is time working elephants were taken off the streets.

For some reason, the framework of this situation reminds me of the anti-abortionists who deplore abortion with much high-moral-dudgeon breast-beating, but seem to have strikingly few adopted children.

Those proposing to withhold elephant licenses have education, jobs and income and can afford to be 'kind' to elephants ... which I applaud since I like elephants. But it is interesting that the same humanitarians cannot extend similar kindness and try to eradicate the poverty they would insure with their kindly philosophies.

Elephants do not deserve to be chained up and manipulated.

Do people?