November 25, 2003; 4:13 P.M. - A soul named Kristin. I was driving east, she was going west by bus and we met at Carlsbad Caverns, NM, and we spent the day together and talked about everything. In the end, I dropped her off somewhere and headed to Texas.

Organ Pipe National Monument

Super Geek:
I used to . . . try to guess exactly one minute when I used to take public transporation regularly. Mind you, I don't bore easily. Myself, at least. I would look at my watch, note when the second reached 0, 15, 30, or 45, and then I'd go back to staring off into space. Then I'd try to look at it again in one minute, +/- 5 seconds.

+ or - five seconds is what I considered successful. If I guessed a minute was more than 65 seconds, then I thought my mind's current sense of time was too slow. If I guessed a minute was less than 55 seconds, then I thought my mind's current sense of time was too fast. The idea was to keep doing it and compensate for my wrong sense until my mind's sense of time was properly "calibrated".

You have no idea how freaky it is when you hit the minute on the second five or six times in a row, which happened only once. You're not counting, you're just trying to "feel" this very specific length of time. It doesn't seem too hard, it's only one minute, but to hit it precisely certainly is not a given.

Sometimes I would think consciously about it, asking, "now? now? now?", but it was surprising, or maybe not so surprising, how many times I'd start thinking of something else and then spontaneously snap back and look and it would be on the exact second.

I'm still planning my road trip back to New Jersey next week. Last month my parents told me they needed to buy a new car for the Winter since my brother smashed up their regular Winter car, and I told them they could have my car since I don't use it that much, and they accepted. They paid for it anyway, so no biggie. I just have to drive it there for them.

I leave this Friday to spend the weekend at the monastery again, which the back of my mind hopes will serve the purpose of keeping me in their minds and letting them know I'm serious, and the plan is to arrive in New Jersey on December 1st, after visiting Meghan in Arlington on November 30th and spending that night in Philadelphia with my brother.

I thought I had an itinerary divvying up the drive by days, but I'm thinking I might spend more time in the American Southwest, Organ Pipe National Monument, Tucson and the Saguaro National Parks, and Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico (I have a National Parks Pass that won't be of much use, I shouldn't wonder, once I get rid of my car). If those take up too many days, I might have to breeze through Austin and Nwalins and beeline towards Arlington to be there by the 30th.

As for getting rid of the car, I'm still filtering what it means to me and why it feels like it's a big thing to be letting go of, even though it's not. It's just a car, a big material hunk of metal that pollutes the environment. It may be just habit of my material-oriented mind to get all worked up about nothing, and once it's done, it passes like a cloud.

Today's a new day. Yesterday was the off day I've been needing since returning from the monastery to get a dose of what may be referred to as reality, ordinary being.

I was unplugged from whatever it was I plugged into while at the monastery. The highlight came early in the day, when I put the filter in the coffee-maker, ground the coffee beans, poured the grounds into the filter, poured water into the coffee maker, and turned it on. Without putting the coffee carafe into the coffee maker. Pure brillig. Yea.

Truth to tell, the rest of the day was pretty harmless, just unplugged, like a Borg separated from the Collective. Hm, that's a fairly poor metaphor – it's not a "resistance is futile" type thing or even being assimilated. How 'bout if Keanu took the blue pill? Mm, not even. But wouldn't it be great if life's profoundest metaphors could be made from Keanu films? (whoa!)

Anyway, it was a necessary day for me to make sure I'm not feeling brainwashed. Not that I was, but it's a matter of balance or reassurance. There was nothing to like or dislike, but it did remind me that I couldn't have done that in perpetuity for much longer.

Hehe, "in perpetuity for much longer". I crack myself up.

There is hope for my ability to give counsel!:

----- Original Message -----
From: S
To: me
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 4:48 PM

i did mean sitting practice, which i suck at to high heaven -- i'm already aware of the whole mindfulness thing and i keep trying to practice that regardless of what i'm doing.

----- Original Message -----
From: me
To: S
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 11:20 PM

that's great to be able to say you suck at something. In my experience, if you say you suck at something long enough, you find yourself not sucking at it at all! So keep at it, and keep sucking at it. I can even help if you fall into a lull and feel you're not sucking enough.

----- Original Message -----
From: S
To: me
Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 12:47 AM

your sucking speach is the best most inspirational speach i've ever heard.

you rock. :)

s

The ground is joy and my steps are happy
Still, my feet dissolve in the mud

My conception of the Big Bang is that out of nothingness – no time, no space, just an infinitesimally small, quasi-dimensional speck that contained everything needed to form the universe as it is today – instantaneously exploded and expanded in a blink of the eye or the snap of the finger. Whatever size it obtained in that instant is anyone's guess.

I wonder if it may not have happened so fast, so instantaneously. The current theory is that the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating, so why can't it be that at some point the universe was not expanding so fast, but quite slowly, relative to our current time frame?

Damn. Time is such a tricky little dimension. I vaguely remember reading an article about when exactly our three spatial dimensions and time were created, relative to the Big Bang, but I can't even remember the gist of it. It might be my imagination, but I also vaguely remember reading an article stating that time, at some point in the past, moved at a different speed, but I forget if it was faster or slower. How do you even measure that?

Perceiving our three dimensions is easy, look up, look down, look right, left, forward, do the hokey-pokey and turn yourself around. Perceiving time going by may take a little concentration, but yes, there it is going by, and I suppose it is going by at a certain rate. But if time suddenly sped up or slowed down, how would we even notice it? I think that was covered in the article, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't my imagination.

So maybe the Big Bang at the time it occurred was observably slow, no less violent and dramatic, but time-wise – slow. Strange, since I think we equate a violent occurrence with speed or rapidity.

It's uncanny how well Buddhism and modern Cosmology go well together. Not specifics, but basic things. For example, a component of enlightenment is an understanding or realization of moments in time, what a moment is, how it arises, exists, changes, and decays.

Also, the Buddha spoke in inconceivably large numbers, such as numbers as great as the grains of sand that line the holy river Ganges. Or if each grain of sand along the holy river Ganges was a Ganges itself, and numbers as great as all the grains of sand of all of those rivers Ganges.

I heard an astronomer state that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the planet earth. Take a handful of sand and watch it filter through your fingers and it's mind-boggling how many stars there are in the universe.

There are a bunch of things, through the years, that while reading some Buddhist tract, I'd equate it to some astronomical/cosmological concept, and vice versa. I like it even better when I think of the dichotomy of the Buddha coming to these realizations with just insight, and modern astronomy coming to them with a bevy of scientific instruments and observations. The two extremes just fitting so well together.

I recently watched the Pink Floyd "Dark Side of the Moon" DVD, and Roger Waters said something that I've always agreed with, that our basic personalities are formed in the formative years of our lives, and not much of that basic personality changes for the rest of our lives.

I bank a lot on what a child takes in prior to learning what "mommy" or "ball" or "doll" is. From the point our memory kicks in, what I consider the proverbial beginning of the end, we start discriminating the world around us. We receive stimuli and experience things, we learn and grow and develop, but our reactions and what we learn and how we grow are all informed by that basic personality; what our infantile minds soaked in unconsciously without discrimination.

This means two things to me, variations on a theme, really: 1) we should live true to our nature; and 2) we can't change ourselves into being what we aren't. But I don't want to give the impression that I'm making a huge sweeping theory that I think applies to everyone.

It comes down to: 1) I have always tried to live true to myself (that was a very conscious thought when I was a teenager); and 2) there are limits to how much I can change or stray from my basic core personality.

I think of this because of the seeming changes since spending a week at the monastery, but nothing has changed. We experience things that make it look like we've changed, but it's more blossoming of different realizations.

The idea of renouncing material living resonated in me a long time ago. It has never completely gone away, although it has never solidly taken root. The same goes with suicide (which is a form of renouncing material living if you think about it), it's something that resonated early and it has never gone away, and has never pushed itself as an issue over the edge. So to speak.

I'm not saying that renunciation or suicide was specifically planted in my subconscious infant mind, but something was that when I came across the idea of suicide in my life, a realization blossomed, something resonated. Same thing with the attraction to monastic life.

In Buddhism, they say physical manifestation occurs with causality and conditions. So looking at a barren hillside, it is not accurate to say that there are no flowers there, because come Spring and the cause and conditions presented by the sun, rain, and seeds, then will there be flowers.

Or here's a more modern-day example I thought while standing outside the SF Zen Center: when you have a date with someone, you don't immediately go into the bedroom and hit the sack. You prepare, get dressed to look and smell nice, you chit chat and charm, you have dinner, some drinks, maybe a movie, and then when the conversation winds down and the attraction is there, then all the causes and conditions are in place to head into the room with the bed to do the nasty. I can't wait until I can give Dharma Talks.

Anyway, maybe that's what's happening now for me with a decision to be made towards one form of renunciation or the other. The core impulse towards renunciation has always been here, never went away. But now the conditions have arisen in this life, informed by my entire history of karmic causality, whereby one of these two things must happen.

Living a normative life has never been a primary focus in life; job, career, family, growing old. I had a job and quit it because I find it meaningless to be caught in the cycle of making money to spend it; endure 9 to 5 in order to entertain and sustain myself from 5 to 9.

I haven't been in a relationship for five years, and now as a practical matter, considering my values, it would be pointless to get into one. My desire to obtain the benefits of being in a relationship is outweighed by my lack of desire to be caught up in that whole relationship thang.

Finally, playing music has been a motivating factor for continuing on with material life all these years, but even the desire for that gratification is completely gone.

To me, it all makes sense, and I don't feel trapped by feeling these are my only choices. It feels right and true to myself, although I can see how that kind of choice might be horrific to most folk. Hm, I hadn't thought about how other folk may react being in my shoes. Interesting. But then I read other folks' weblogs and I feel that if I were in their shoes, I would feel trapped and horrified at the choices I would have to make.

I'm still waiting for the effects of the monastery to wear off. 

It was overall a great experience; like a fish in water was I, and the possibility that I might enter the monastery, rather than a cemetery, has increased greatly. But I'm still getting my bearings. 

The overall experience has left me very happy, but not as in "happy happy joy joy" happy. Happy as in appreciative happy, as in glad to be able to feel alive happy, as in I can still kill myself and be happy happy. That is to say maybe it's more an objective happy than a subjective happy, although there is some overlap. 

This week since I've been back has gone quickly, though, and I'm not sure what the changes are yet. I went to Beale Street and that was fine, but to the extent that I had been considering them my last social group, that's not entirely accurate, as if they meant something. We go to play NTN trivia, not to be chummy. 

I've also gotten together with Sadie, and that was fine, too. I was willing to let everything go, but not letting everything go is also fine. I did feel sensitive to the hard times she's going through these days, and I did my best to respond positively, but I'm not really qualified to counsel or give advice. I gave my responses, but I felt they suffered from what I criticized about the responses to that Craig's List suicide note, that I wasn't getting into her shoes and walking around; that I was speaking from some way out plane, removed from her suffering. 

I noted her language and negativity and the resounding, boldfaced word "can't" and the idea of "impossible", and I felt such violence in that. It's such a violent way of treating oneself, building unsurpassable brick walls of futility, but it's a genuine feeling that shouldn't be cavalierly negated. 

I've visited violence upon myself in many forms in the past, but I recognize that always, on some level, I wanted to. It served a purpose and I recognized it as such. That's probably why I can't really empathize with other people's suffering. 

I rarely did what I didn't want to do, and I think that's often the case with most us, but not realizing that, it's useless to be told that. Having lost control, desperate trying to gain control, it's useless to be told that maybe you want to be out of control or that there's something to learn from it, and you'll gain control when you deep down in your soul realize you want control. Even if it's because you need it. 

I came back from the monastery to find Sadie had gone through this weblog. I knew I should have told her what I was doing and I'd be gone for a week. She was actually the last thing I thought of as I left my apartment, and I mean that in the good way, but I was too lazy to turn the computer back on and send off the email, so I guess I was asking for it. But now I have to consider the conundrum of people you know having access to your inner thoughts. 

I gave her this URL when it was still public and generally light. But since then I chased my regulars away and this weblog went underground to be unself-conscious and uncensored. Basically, that comments from the peanut gallery were no longer welcome. 

I can't tell her not to come here anymore, although I expressed my extreme reservations about acquaintances having access to each others' inner thoughts. First of all, taking weblogs seriously as a form of personal expression, they are purely personal expression, i.e., not intended for anyone specific. When I talk to someone or send someone an email, that isn't purely personal expression, it's shared expression because I'm taking into account what I know about them, how I want to say something, and what I want them to know. So going to the weblog of uncensored inner thoughts of someone you know circumvents that. 

There's also the risk of being grossly misinterpreted and people holding you to something you wrote and thinking that was written in stone. I think that risk is heightened with personal acquaintances who might succumb to the temptation to imbue everything with unintended meaning. 

Bottom line, you just can't know someone through their weblog. You can only get impressions, which is fine for strangers, but for actual acquaintances it gets messy without having your own safeguard reservations when reading someone's weblog.

Apparently, Sadie has also started a weblog and she's given me the url. But I won't go there until I feel comfortable that I won't be putting anything on her from her writings, or that there is a reason to go there. I'm satisfied that she will tell me what she wants to tell me and I don't need to go to her weblog to get information or topics to grill her on. If I perceive her emotional well-being getting more complicated, that is also a reason to go there, because maybe there are things she wants to express that are easier to put into a weblog than telling someone face-to-face. Also if someone says "go to my weblog if you want to know more about it", then that's also obviously a reason to go. 

But this weblog is not for anyone present, which is not to say that I don't appreciate the people I tried to chase away who have come back (or never left) and remained tactful about it.

What I don't understand is that happiness has never been a part of my life equations.

Never after the =. Never before or after + or -. Never as quotient or denominator or numerator. Maybe as square root of something or the other, but that's theoretical and starts to deal with imaginary numbers.

And yet, at the monastery, something flipped the "happiness" switch on the back of my neck to the "on" position. And suddenly it's just here as easily as I can conjure the word "joy" or "serenity" in my mind in glowing block letters on a dark background.

I skeptically take a pinch of it and rub it between my fingers trying to figure what it is, what is the nature of it, and it's something that just forms out of a calmness rooted both in a hyper-realization of the material world around me, and in the voidness of form once you start breaking down moments of time and its passing, and the impermanence of these forms as they move through this time. Woof.

And mind you, nothing has changed. Nothing I was before has been negated.

I left the the monastery this morning at 9:00. They invited me to stay until today since the Escondido fire, north of San Diego, interrupted monastic functions for two days. Three days, really, but one of those days was "lazy day" with no schedule. I would've been perfectly happy to have left on Friday. I saw the events of the fire and evacuation as part of the experience; part of my experience there. Things happening for a reason.

But I left the monastery happy and giddy, emotionally sensitive and squishy and smiling, listening to Broadway musicals for more than half the drive back home, which I did in one seven hour and fifteen minute shot, with one quick stop to put $20 of gas in my car.

"What good is sitting alone in your room
Come hear the music play
Life is a Cabaret, old chum
Come to the Cabaret"
- Cabaret

"Someone to crowd you with love
Someone to force you to care
Someone to make you come through
Who'll always be there, as frightened as you
Of being alive"
- Company

"The sun today will be scrambled for my souffle
I don't know whether to float or to fly
First I'll find something I don't need to buy
Something sweet like
(A hat with a belt, a blue parakeet
Whistles to blow as I dance down the street)
Beautiful candy, too pretty to eat
Stop living for reason
Time to start living for rhyme
I'm on a spree and I'm
Gonna make sure it's a perfectly good waste of time"
- Carnival

"See that star, I just might
Fly up there and shine as bright
But for a while I will, stand completely still
My heart's trying to tell me something
Yes, my heart begin, speak or pound or spin
Tell me something"
- Carnival

"Sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the days
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers
Blossoming even as we gaze
Sunrise, sunset, swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears"
- Fiddler on the Roof

"Just join the circus like you meant to do
When you were so high
Pitch your troubles under a tent
And you're bound to lose 'em by and by
Say so long to fair Schenectady
Greet sweet Santa Fe
Toss your hat and cane in a sack again
Shoulder your pack and then hitch up the shay
Kiss the cat and never look back again
When the circus comes your way"
- Barnum