Of Antimatter and Cell Phones

So in case you were wondering if this blog had gone the way of M. Night Shyamalan's last several movies, let me hasten to assure you it's not so.   Firstly, you probably missed this controversial post.  Secondly, I started a new job in June, and it's been quite the adjustment. It's hard to explain what I actually do, but I can tell you what it's like.  It's like being the navigator on the Starship Enterprise.  The captain tells me where we're going, and I calculate the heading to get us there so that we don't go right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, because that would end our little trip real quick, wouldn't it?  Then I run down to Engineering and make sure the engines are pointed the correct direction, and I talk to the cook to make sure we have enough provisions, and I see the fuel guy to make sure we have enough fuel, and I talk to the guys who line up the, I dunno, space fins, to make sure the space fins are lined up properly, and then I go back and tell the captain we're ready and then he or she says, "Engage."  Yeah.  That's what it's like.  So there have been some extra hours and there have been lots of meetings and for the most part when I come home from work, I fall asleep on the sofa in front of the re-imagined "Perry Mason." Don't ask me what's going on.  I have no idea.

In my spare moments, though, I've been thinking about the concept of duality. The guys down at the CERN high speed supercollider have apparently created antimatter, at least for a few nanoseconds.  Turns out if you have a particle, you can also have an anti-particle, which is like the polar opposite of a particle. No, I don't know what the polar opposite of a particle would look like, but it's pretty cool, no?  If the particle and the anti-particle run into each other, they either explode, releasing energy, or cease to exist, which should be impossible.  (Matter is neither created nor destroyed and all that.)  And while the implications for physics are positively mind-boggling, the implications for philosophy are even greater.  For example, is there an anti-Elvis?  (Yes.  Michael J. Fox is the anti-Elvis.)  Is there an anti-Trump? (Yes. Beto O'Rourke is the anti-Trump.)  How about an antiChrist?  Well, that one's been kicked around a lot over the millenia, but I'm of the opinion that if there's a God, the physical manifestation of all things good, there must also be a Devil, the physical manifestation of all things bad.  Good thing I don't believe in either one, because that'd be pretty scary.

All of this leads to a question much dearer to my heart.  Is there such a thing as an anti-Buddha?

Yes.

People, the cell phone is the anti-Buddha.

Yes, your cell phone.  My cell phone.  Every cell phone.  Do you know our cell phones are more powerful than all the computers that steered Apollo 11 combined?  They do amazing things that even Star Trek didn't imagine (though it did imagine a communicator that you could activate by hitting yourself in the chest--I guess that's pretty cool.) And cell phones are the anti-Buddha.  Seriously, it's hard to imagine anything less Buddhist-y than a cell phone.  

Think about what Buddhists do.  We meditate, we practice mindfulness, we cultivate certain states of mind like happiness and compassion and selflessness.  Cell phones basically unwind all that.  They're bright and shiny and full of nifty graphics.  They're an endless distraction.  Even when you're not looking at them, they chime at you wanting your attention:  Look at me!  Look at me!  They present an endless parade of news, mostly bad, and invite you not only to comment on it but to get into public spats with other commentors.  Spend half an hour on a cell phone and you're practically guaranteed to be less happy, distracted, anxious and wanting to hide under a rock until the world ends, which it's obviously going to do any second. 

Yes, you can also use your cell phone for Positive Things.  You can keep up with your family and friends, communicate with your work peeps, give donations to charity with PayPal and gently encourage your elected officials to do the right thing.  But people don't.  They use their cell phones to compare themselves to other people, get into arguments, work themselves into a state of despair about Current Events and just in general make themselves really unhappy.  I include myself in that assessment; since Yahoo quit allowing commentary, I quit going there, because if I can't post provocative responses to articles and get other people mad at me, what's the point?  (Yes, I was somewhat of a troll on Yahoo.  Thankfully the sun has since come up and I've frozen in place.) 

Now that we have cell phones, though, I don't see people giving them up in large numbers.  They've kind of become ubiquitous to our landscape.  We expect them to be around, too.  I've seen a number of movies where the plot actually depended on the existence of cell phones, and it's kind of funny to watch a movie or TV show made in, like, the late 80s or early 90s and think how different the outcome would have been if the characters had had cell phones.  So nobody's probably going to get rid of theirs.  I'm not getting rid of mine; I need it for work, but of course everybody says they need their cell phones for work.  So the challenge, then, is to change how we use cell phones. To put it bluntly, we need to use them instead of letting them use us. 

We have had some practice with this.  If you own a car, you're probably familiar.  You can own a car, or you can let a car own you.  If you bought, say, a Maserati to show off to your neighbors or because you thought you had to, you can barely afford your payments, your insurance is through the roof, your car requires frequent and expensive maintenance and you lose sleep at night pondering what you're going to do about the damn car, then you don't own it.  It owns you.  If, on the other hand, you have a cheap, reliable car that's paid for, the insurance is a nominal amount, maintenance is occasional and not very expensive, and it gets you where you need to go when you need to go there, then you own the car.  It feels much better to own a car than to be owned by one.  I've never had a Maserati, but I don't think I'd enjoy the experience if I did.

(Sammy Hagar, though, who is practically a billionaire, owns several race cars and apparently enjoys them very much.  So, you know, circumstances differ for each of us.)

Back to cell phones, though.  How do we go about owning a cell phone, instead of being owned by one?  Well, I hate to suggest this, but I think we need to start by strictly limiting or even no longer using social media apps.  I hate to suggest this because I am a Twitter fiend.  I love Twitter.  Millions of humans gathered in one place tossing off pithy one-liners about their lives and how to navigate this crazy world we live in.  I follow something like 500 people and they all feel like good friends.  But, I spend way too much time on there, and inevitably some bad-news issue comes up that everyone starts commenting on and I read the attached articles and stuff and my old friend, chronic anxiety, rears its ugly head.  

I used to spend a lot of time on Facebook, too, but I've pretty much stopped.  Well, actually for the last I don't know how many months I've stopped altogether because when I went from Old Cell Phone to New Cell Phone, I somehow lost my password and I haven't been able to get on there.  Which sucks, in a way, because the only reason I was still going on there was to keep track of my cousins and their kids and now I've kind of lost track. But on the other hand, I didn't have access to Facebook during the whole election drama, the January 6 fiasco or any of the happy-go-lucky days that followed.  (Hey, did anyone else realize that January 6 is Epiphany on the Christian calendar?  That's the day the wise guys showed up to Bethlehem and acknowledged the Christ child as a newborn king.  Which seems significant in a way.  Hmm.)  Facebook is, I say without hesitation, a political sewer.  Unless, of course, you keep your friend list to your cousins and their kids, and unfriend anybody who wants to drag you into the political sewage.  So I really don't miss it that much.  I could, reasonably speaking, also drop Twitter.  But I hope I don't have to do that.  I hope we can come to some sane and moderate usage of Twitter---thirty minutes a day, let's say--that means I don't have to drop it altogether.

Then there are the news apps.  As much as I'm for moderation and not total abstinence, the news apps have to go.  For one thing, I'm not supposed to be watching the news.  Doctor's orders.  And while I interpreted that literally and quit watching local news, I'm pretty sure Doc meant all news, from all sources.  Anyway, I get plenty of news from Twitter.  If you follow the right people on Twitter, you will get not just a good idea of the prevailing issues of the day, you'll get the news before the news people even do.  For example, I am hearing about the fall of Kabul as it is happening. from people who are actually there.  (And in case nobody knows that Kabul has fallen to the Taliban, it has.  Just FYI.) Now, if Twitter is a source of news, that's another really good argument to get rid of it.  But again, moderation versus abstinence, if that's possible.  If it works.  We shall see.

Now I have to tell you something witheringly ironic.  I have a meditation app on my cell phone.  Yes, on my cell phone, the anti-Buddha, there is a meditation app.  And I love my meditation app.  I'm not getting rid of it.  But I need to get rid of the scrolling through the latest news and the Twitter updates and so forth and so on before I log into it.  (Does anybody else have this happen?  You pick up your cell phone to do a particular thing and it makes a chimey noise or something pops up so you go see what it is and 30 minutes later you put down your cell phone, having completely forgotten why you picked it up in the first place?  This happens to me a lot.  Annoyingly, it often happens at work.)  The meditation app is Important.  Everything else, somewhat less so.  Because the everything else unwinds all the time I spend on the meditation app.  Probably as effectively as alcohol, if not more so.  And by the way, if someone tells you that he/she believes that he/she is addicted to his/her cell phone, believe him/her.  It's totally possible.  It's even likely, in some instances.  

So that's the story of the anti-Buddha, the cell phone.  If Shakyamuni were a modern man, he'd be sitting under the bodhi tree chasing enlightenment and Mara would walk up to him and hand him a cell phone.  Hopefully, Shakyamuni would grab the cell phone and throw it to the ground, whereupon it would turn into a lotus.  I hope so.  What scares me is that he might pick up the phone instead and log into Twitter.  Cheers, all. 

And The Quarantine Rolls On

Tomorrow is Joan's birthday and we've been celebrating all weekend.  Well, of course we've been celebrating all weekend.  The older you get the longer your birthday should last, and when it comes  to one of those big "zero" or "five" birthdays, the party should never end--at least until everyone's either passed out or gone home, the lead guitarist in the band has broken a string, the margarita machine is out of tequila and there's maybe only one bowl of chips left. This isn't a "zero" or a "five," but it's still a birthday, so of course there were presents and cake and a longish session of D&D.  (Yes, I've finally started playing D&D.  It only took me 50 years.  What's more, I've started looking online at nifty sets of dice I might like to own, which is a sure sign that you're hooked.)

Anyway, we didn't really have anybody over because quarantine.  We play D&D via Skype which, unlike Zoom, doesn't kick everybody off after 40 minutes.  That's good because our D&D sessions can last upward of five hours.  They'd go on later still if my circadian rhythm isn't still set for early morning, despite almost seven weeks now of not being able to go to the pool.  Yes, my chlorine content is at critical lows, but there's nothing I can do about it.  Even if we started swimming again tomorrow I couldn't go.  I can't be in a 2 1/2 meter wide lane with three or four other people all panting for breath from swimming 4 IMs in a row and expect to remain uninfected.  Seriously, I have asthma and Joan has underlying conditions, too, and if one of us brings this thing home, both of us are going to get very sick.  That. Can't. Happen.  I won't try to re-establish anything like a normal routine around here until the new case count is not only down, but dropping steadily for at least 2 weeks.  Right now it's doing the opposite, at least in Dallas County. And so the quarantine rolls on, no matter what Gov. Abbott has to say.

Fortunately, both of us are still employed, and more fortunately, neither of our bosses has said anything about either of us moving back to the office.  My boss is being pretty reasonable, and even if he wanted everybody back at the office tomorrow, I think I could present a fairly compelling case for continuing to work from home.  The Dallas Public Library, on the other hand, just furloughed slightly less than half of the total employees. (Not Joan, though.) The furlough lasts until August 1, but when the library reopens is up to the City Council, and that august body hasn't been terribly forthcoming with information.

It's been a lot like that movie Groundhog Day.  We wake up every morning at roughly the same time and do certain things in a certain order. By about 8:30 we're both sitting in the kitchen in front of our respective laptops.  Then it's law firm this and law firm that for the next nine or so hours, followed by the making of dinner and the cleaning of kitchen and maybe some programs on the All Paranormal, Tedious Reality and UFOs Channel, formerly known as the Travel Channel.  Or I come back here to my laptop and maybe write something.  Once in a while we leave the house to get groceries or prescription meds.  That's about it, though.  (I am extremely annoyed that the price of gas is so low and I haven't been able to buy gas because there's too much in the tank already.)  I have a temporary crown that's been needing its permanent coronation since mid-March. According to Joan, I also need my hearing checked. (Let's be honest here; does anyone out there who's actually had their hearing checked ever do it for any other reason than that their spouse insisted? If so, write to me.  I'm taking a poll.) I don't think I can get my hearing checked until this is all over.  And I don't know when this is going to be all over, and I don't think anyone else does, either.

One thing I'm reasonably sure is going to happen: The number of coronavirus cases is going to start shooting up again, and maybe get a lot higher than it is right now, because a lot of states, like Texas, are "reopening" way before it's safe to do so.  If enough people get sick and emergency rooms and ICUs start running close to capacity, we're all likely to be ordered right back into "sheltering in place", only for a longer period of time this time.  Figure another sixteen weeks or so, just based on how long it typically takes an epidemic to peter out. And there won't be a vaccine for another year yet, and they don't know who's going to be able to get it once there is one.  And let's just add to the pile of uncertainty by stating that there's no evidence that getting the coronavirus means you're immune from getting it again.  There are multiple strains of it now, and it's possible you can get strain A even if you've already had strain B.  Kind of like the common cold or plain old flu.

Se we may be here, with our respective laptops, for quite a while.  This is the first time I've had office mates that purr.  The commute is awesome, except that one part of the hallway where the traffic always piles up.  And I don't get in trouble for calling my wife during work hours because she's, uh, sitting right here. I don't have to be anyplace after work.  I don't have to color my hair or style it.  I don't have to wear makeup or sunscreen.  I don't have to get up at four dark thirty to go to the pool, though it's such an ingrained habit I usually wake up then anyway. And I'm quarantined with people I like, including two that have fur.  So silver lining, sort of.  We have been incredibly lucky.  There are so many ways that this could be worse.

Which brings me back to something Buddha said; "Your problem is that you think you have time."  A little while before this all happened, it occurred to me that I was sort of treating my days like they came one by one out of an inexhaustible well.  That everything would continue rolling along just like it had and nothing would change.  But everything changes.  Things change.  People change. Haircuts change.  So accept and embrace what is, and let it go when it's time to move on, or something like that.  Probably Buddha said it better.

Reintarnation, or, Coming Back To Life As A Hillbilly.

I found this painting while looking for "images of reincarnation."  Two things
immediately jump out; why are they all men? And why
 is a cow further along than a horse?

I've been a Buddhist for a while now, and while I didn't grow up in that culture and didn't ever go to Buddhist Sunday School, I've come to have my own opinions about things Buddhist-y, and maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong. (And maybe we won't ever know until we get to the other side, and maybe not even then, because what if there is no other side?)  For example, meditation: Meditation is cool.  Meditation is great for your brain, makes you feel good and helps you be nicer to other people, which is also cool.  Furthermore, there is scientific proof that if you meditate an hour a day for a year, your blood pressure will drop, your heart rate will slow, and all kinds of other good things will happen to your body.  So meditation is cool.  That is my opinion, backed up by some science.

And here's my opinion about reincarnation, backed up by nothing in particular: I think Buddhism has the whole notion of reincarnation ever so slightly wrong.

I mean, the standard narrative is that being born a human is lucky, because it gives you a chance to work on your issues and become a better being overall.  (Humans, as far as we know, are among the very few self-aware beings out there; there's some evidence that chimpanzees, some other primates, octopuses and dolphins are self-aware and may even Ask the Big Questions, but it's really impossible to know for sure because we can't communicate with them very well.  For further exploration of this notion, check out Jonathan Livingston Seagull.)  If you're a good human, you're supposed to come back in the next life as a better human (meaning a better rank and position in society, or you'll have an easier life next time, or something like that).  If you're not, you'll come back as a bug, or a snail, or maybe a samurai.  (That's a Japanese take on the subject, anyway; a samurai is maybe the worst thing to be born as, because A. you know that killing a human being is the worst thing you can do, and B. you have to do it for a living.)  I mean, if you need to have a system where the good get rewarded and the bad get punished, and you don't have a hell and a heaven to conveniently provide those things, you have to come up with something. Coming back as a bug/a higher ranking member of society sort of works. Sort of. But I don't think that's the deal.

Recently, because of some of my reading on how brains work and the nature of consciousness generally, I've come to believe that consciousness in general is kind of like soup.  There's a big pot of consciousness percolating somewhere, and every time a living being is born, a ladle of soup gets poured into them, from human babies all the way down to microcelled organisms.  Consciousness, anyway, doesn't seem to be a thing we're born with; it's a thing we receive from somewhere.  Our brains are even filled with tiny receptive structures called microtubules to do this receiving, at least according to some scientists. When you die, your consciousness, and all its memories and dreams and so on, gets poured back into the soup. 

This is why I think the Buddhist view of reincarnation can't be right.  Firstly, Buddhists are not very convinced that that there's an "I" in each person that's transferred smoothly from one body to the next. In fact, a lot of Buddhists believe that the "I" is an illusion, and when we achieve enlightenment, what we realize is that there is no "I". Just "we." So if we're all "we", what's there to be transferred from one body to the next?  Nothing. It's an illusion. 

Secondly, back to the soup.  A lot of people, especially as young children, have memories of past lives. (I do.  You might or might not.)  If there's no "I" going from one body to the next, how can people have memories of past lives?  Well, if consciousness is soup, we're all everybody.  In fact, we're all every being that has ever been, every being that is and every being that will be, because our consciousness all comes from the soup.  Lots of people have claimed that they used to be Napoleon, or some other famous person from the past, in a previous life. If we're all soup, then they're all right.  We have memories from each other, and somebody like Napoleon would necessarily have really vibrant ones (given how many lives he affected, and ended).  So a lot of people would remember them.  Comparatively fewer would remember being a housewife in the 1400s, a journalist in the 1870s or a crafty trilobite in the Pleistocine.  It just wouldn't have been as vibrant, even if you were a darn fine trilobite with sharp black eyes and a penchant for dodging incoming meteorites. 

In case you're wondering, I'm gonna keep my past-life stuff to myself, but I will tell you this; I was usually a guy.  In fact, I'm not sure I've ever been a woman before, which would explain why I suck at it.

If the idea of a collective memory is giving you the heebie jeebies, though, ponder this: Who ladles out the soup?  Yes, the notion of a higher power of some kind still has room to exist in the Soup Theory of Consciousness.  I just don't think it makes sense that we pass fully intact from one living being to the next.  I mean, shouldn't something happen in between?  Shouldn't there be some learning, or something? Like some sort of space to say, "Okay, I really screwed up there, but I did something pretty good right here."  So you might say that being good, in life, means coming up with good things to add to the soup.  The more good things you do for other beings, the better your addition to the soup, and then the whole soup will be slightly better, like if you sprinkled in just a little bit of Penzey's 4S Special Seasoning Salt. 

But regardless of whether I'm right or wrong about reincarnation, we could all stand to be a little nicer to each other.  And in any religion, isn't that the point?

You Can't Do That On Television

I hope it's okay to get your shit together the day before you die, because I think it's going to take me about that long.  There's all this stuff I'm supposed to be doing every day that I'm not doing.  Reading from the Big Book (that's Alcoholics Anonymous, not the Bible, in case you were wondering).  Writing stuff in my journal. Working on The Book (still not the Bible; just the book I'm working on).  Meditating.  Household chores.  Cat cuddling/paper ball tossing/feather toy flinging.  Honestly, adulthood is like a to-do list just never ends.  I get to the meditating most days, but the rest of it doesn't seem to happen very often.  Most days, when I walk in the door, I'm all up for sitting down to dinner, looking at my cell phone for a bit, then going the hell to bed. (Well, I get up at 4:30, so…)  

Apart from baseball, I'm trying to think when I last even sat down and watched a TV show.  Unless you count "The Dead Files," the haunted house show that Joan is crazy about and that puts me right to sleep.  See above re: I get up at 4:30. 

And it's too bad, too, because suddenly there are a LOT of good TV shows out there.  Once Netflix and Hulu started cranking out their own content, the gloves suddenly came off and everybody was making good shows. We got shows about music producers and we got shows about hair stylists.  We got "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" (again) and we got shows about what happens after you die (that aren't documentaries).  For a second there we even had a show about Van Helsing, but I think we can write that one off without too many regrets.

And in the middle of all this, we got "The Handmaid's Tale," and honey, this show is doing for television what "The Hunger Games" did for YA fiction.  If you thought it couldn't be done on television, "The Handmaid's Tale" has done it.  And I'm not just talking about sex and violence (yawn, how too too passe, dear).  I'm talking about subject matter that you couldn't get on TV before now.  This show is way beyond cutting edge. It's maybe 20 years ahead of where we are now.  (Maybe even in real life.)  Oh, and it also won a pile of Emmys, including a Best Actress nod for Elisabeth Moss. 

So why aren't I watching it, you ask.

Well.  That's kind of hard to explain. 

I watched the first season.  For the most part I watched it 20 minutes at a time, before bed, while falling asleep, but watch it I did.   Joan didn't like it so it never really graced the screen of the TV in the living room, but it looked just fine on a tablet.  (If you ever watch this show, keep an eye on the colors.  They mean different things. There's a lot of red in this show.  Lots of deep green, too.  Interesting.)  And it was riveting television. I mean it was edge-of-your-seat, nail-bitingly tense watching.  Even if you've read the book and you know what happened, you don't know what happened, because a TV show is a whole different universe and Just Because It Ended That Way In The Book Doesn't Mean It'll End That Way On TV. 

In case you've been hiding under a rock and you don't know jack about "The Handmaid's Tale," the story takes place in the near future.  There's been a war, the United States no longer exists, and most of the northern East Coast has been turned into something called the Republic of Gilead.  The birth rate is dropping precipitously all over the world; only one in every five pregnancies results in a live birth, and that's even assuming you can get pregnant in the first place.  There's no birth control, no abortion, no morning after pill, nothing like that--and the population rate is still dropping.  So the government of Gilead is hunting down all the women who have proven that they're fertile (previous pregnancies, an actual kid, etc.)  and turning them into handmaids--women who have babies for the elite households.  Doesn't matter if you had a job, husband, kids, family beforehand; if you're fertile, you're now a handmaid and your job is now to have babies.  Oh, and your children are taken away and raised by other people.  Gilead comes up with a religious explanation for how this is all okay, but they don't really need one; they're doing it because they can.  And because they're desperate. Something or other about the danger of the human race going extinct trumping individual rights.

And it's good.  As I mentioned, it's riveting.  But the whole second season is out and I haven't watched any of it. And I'm probably not going to, at least not for a while.

I blame Donald Trump.  

In all seriousness, I'm not supposed to be watching the news. The doctor even told me not to watch the news. He didn't specifically say anything about not going to news web sites, so I still do that sometimes, but without watching the news, I'm in a much better frame of mind. Because, frankly, all the news is bad.  And there's so much more of it than there used to be. Well, of course there is; something had to fill up all the news channels and Web sites and magazines that have been proliferating at a ridiculous rate since, oh, the advent of cable TV.  

I dunno about you, but I kind of like being in a better frame of mind.  It beats the heck out of the way I feel after I watch the news.  And the way I feel after watching "The Handmaid's Tale," as good as it is, is about the same, unfortunately.  It's a very hard show to watch.

This must be why parents don't want their children to watch horror movies.  (Though, personally, I think a lot of parents don't want their children to watch horror movies because they don't want to have a lot of conversations about man's inhumanity to man and what happens to us after we die with a nine-year-old. But I digress.)  In short, I'm trying to be an adult about this. And a Buddhist.  Precept Five is all about not consuming intoxicants, which includes certain TV programs and Web sites in addition to drugs and alcohol. (And gambling. In fact gambling is specifically mentioned.)

And, really, why would you want to consume something that's bad for you? You know, like heroin or cocaine or maybe lots of sugar. But people do. Fortunately for me,  it is just a TV show,  and I can stop consuming it by not going to a particular Web site. So that's easy.

NOBODY TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS. I still have this fond hope I can get back to it someday. And hopefully it won't jump the shark in the meantime, like "The X Files" did in season 4. Cheers!

Rohingya

So I guess the way I've been feeling lately is kind of how you ordinary Christians probably feel when somebody like the alleged Reverend Robert Jeffries gets on TV with some Fox News pundit and says it's totally irrelevant if Donald Trump cheated on his wife with a porn actress but that all gay people need to die.  There's sort of a collective cognitive dissonance, a wanting to jump up and down and yell, "But we're not really like that!  The church isn't really like that!" to anyone who will listen and at the same time wanting to hide under a rock rather than attract any more attention.  Or to use another example, maybe the way you might feel when you see the Westboro Babtist folks picketing some soldier's funeral with signs that say "God Loves Dead Soldiers."  You want to throw rocks at them, and at the same time you notice they're wearing the same t-shirt as you are and so when the TV reporters show up you want to deny that you're wearing a shirt at all.  Three times.  Before the cock crows for the dawn.

After which you eventually what?  Go home, watch TV?  Or maybe pray over it.  Maybe hold focus groups, meetings at which a lot of church ladies with clipboards twist their pearls into a knot and look concerned. But how do you DO anything about it?  You can't, right?  I mean, you can make sure everybody at church and in your community knows that cheating on your wife with a porn star is verboten and you're totally cool with gays and lesbians, but it's not like Fox News is going to come over there and film you because people being nice to each other don't get any air time.  Basically, to attract any media attention at all, you have to be an asshole.  And people wonder why my doc has repeatedly told me to stop watching the news.

Anyway, that's sort of how I'm feeling about this whole Rohingya refugee crisis.  What?  You haven't heard of the Rohingya refugee crisis?  Well, I can't hardly blame you.  Even with our blood-hungry news media, the Rohingya are getting like two inches under Dear Abby. Time Magazine ran a pretty decent article about it this week, but it didn't even run on Page One; in fact, the only time Time ever covered this story as a lead article, it ran in the international edition, so we U.S.ians didn't even get to see it.  Maybe the wire services have had a few stories about it, so you might vaguely know that there's something going on in Myanmar that involves Buddhists and Muslims.  Well, there is, Blanche.  There is.

Most Rohingya are Muslim, though some are Hindu.  Unfortunately, Muslims and Buddhists have a very uneasy history over many hundreds of years, and usually the Muslims won.  Well, yeah; if your religion tells you not to touch weapons and to run away rather than fight, you will probably lose most geopolitical confrontations.  That's just the way it is.  This time around, though, the Buddhists are winning.  And by "winning," I mean they've managed to chase at least 700,000 Rohingya out of Myanmar and into Bangladesh.  And kill about 300,000.  And burn the villages of many of the survivors, and rape them and torture them and cut off their sources of food.  Meanwhile, the rest of us Buddhists are wanting to jump up and down and yell, "But we're not really like that!" and...yeah.

(It reminds me a little of when a cult of otherwise ordinary Japanese citizens declared their willingness to die for Buddhism by launching a sarin gas attack on the Toyko subway during rush hour, killing 13 and injuring hundreds.  Die for Buddhism?  I mean, that's so--so unBuddhist-y.)

Let's back up a little here.  Who are the Rohingya, anyway, and how did all this get started?  Well; they are a group of people who speak their own distinct language, and they're an ethnic minority that has lived in Myanmar since at least the 1800s (documented) and possibly as much as a thousand years before that (myth, legend, family stories).  For much of that time, their presence in Myanmar has been a thorn in the side of certain "ultranationalist Buddhists" (and that's another contradiction in terms; I've never even met a nationalist Buddhist, much more an ultranationalist one).  The Myanmar government's official position is that the Rohingya are invaders from the Bengali region of India that crossed into Myanmar from Bangladesh; illegal immigrants, in other words, who shouldn't be there. They cannot be citizens or hold civil service jobs, and their kids are legally kept out of state-run schools.  Tensions between the Rohingya and the Buddhist majority rose up in 1978, 1991-ish, 2012, 2015 and of course just recently (interesting observation; two of those dates coincide pretty neatly with global recessions. Hmm.)  This time around, though, it's not just arguments over whose land is whose and who married whose daughter; this time it's out and out ethnic cleansing.

The Myanmar govermnent looks like it's ready to kill, chase out or forcibly remove every single Rohingya in Myamnar. The military is leading these attacks on Rohingya villages, and stirring up anti-Rohingya sentiment though officially, the government denies involvement (where have we heard that before?).  Aung San Suu Kyi, who's sort of the leader of Myanmar and who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent struggle for peace and democracy, hasn't done a thing to stop the violence or even spoken up against it. The government of Bangladesh's official position is that Myanmar has to take the Rohingya back, because it can't handle an influx of so many refugees. Nobody else has spoken up to say, "Send them over here, we have plenty of room," so the crisis continues. 

As a bad Buddhist myself (I eat meat, I meditate with music, I'm pro-abortion, I make mala beads out of pricey gemstones), I dunno why I'm so surprised that this is happening, but I am, Blanche, I am.  You would think (or anyway, I would think) that the Buddhists would be the first ones to hold up their hands and say, "Can't we all just get along?" Certainly, burning out your neighbors, or killing them, is about as un-Buddhist-y as you can get.  And over here I'm crawling under a rock, waiting for the first person to say "Oh, you're a Buddhist, right?  Isn't that you guys killing all those people in Myanmar?"

Which, I guess, may never happen, since hardly anybody seems to know about Myanmar anyway.  But it could.  And when it's all over and all the Rohingya are dead, I really don't wanna be the one answering the questions.  Especially if I have to follow it up with, "But we're not really like that."  Because if one of you is, then all of you is, especially if the one of you is the only one who can get any attention from Fox News.

What Happened In Vegas

Well, I had a really good blog post all set to go here, with lots of links and subreferences and even a few nice photos, but now I can't run it because after yesterday in Las Vegas it's totally and completely lost its immediacy.  That, and Joan said there were too many things that linked it to the Real Story,  and somebody out there might recognize it, which is a problem because confidentiality and stuff. so I just scrapped the whole deal.  (Yes, Joan vets my blog posts. Well, most of the time.)  Alas, blog post, you are not to be. Also, I walked into the office this morning and one of my cow orkers immediately said to me, "Do you think the world's getting worse all the time, or was it always this bad?" which is, you know, slang for hello, I guess.  

And I told him the truth.  I told him I didn't think the world was any worse today than yesterday, or yesterday than it was the day before, but the interconnectedness of everything (by which I meant primarily the Internet, but I'll come back to this) means we hear about everything that happens regardless of where or why or who's involved.  Plus, there are more of us now than there ever were, so by definition more stuff is going to happen.  You just have to figure in a population of X number of humans, X / Y equals the number of violent events that could feasibly happen, so an increase in X will proportionally increase Y.  Or something like that.  

(Incidentally, did you know that we use X as an unknown because in Spanish, there's no sound like "sssh"?  The character that the Arabs use to denote the unknown was pronounced "sssh," but when they were translating the first algebra texts from Arabic to Spanish, the scholars didn't have any equivalent sound.  So they borrowed the X, which is pronounced "ch," which was close, from the Greek alphabet.  And that's why the unknown is X.  Just fyi.)  

Anyway, to be honest, I don't know if the world is getting worse all the time, but I don't think it's really getting any more violent.  I think up until the 1960s and maybe even a little later, the majority of violence in this country went on behind closed doors, and was inflicted primarily on women and children.  In the 1960s, with divorce being more acceptable, women starting to figure out they were human beings too and just a general refusal to subject kids to this kind of thing, men who would ordinarily beat their wives and kids, found themselves with fewer wives and kids around to beat.  So they moved out of their homes and, I dunno, started fights with other people in the harsh light of the rest of the world.  Well, that's one of my theories, anyway. I have a lot of em.

One thing I don't have, though, is a theory that explains mass shootings of innocent people.  I doubt very many of us do.  My understanding is that this guy killed himself, like a lot of mass shooters do, before the police got there, so we're not going to know what made him tick, at least from his ownself.  I'm sure there'll be forensic examination of this guy's diaries, bank account, family members, political views, religious beliefs, the manifesto he left behind (if any) and half a dozen other things, which will ultimately tie into somebody's pronouncement that "This guy experienced X (see the unknown again?), and so he did Y."  Which will make us feel safe again, because obviously X is a very rare occurrence and we don't experience X in our own lives, so there won't be another Y anywhere we might happen to be.

Which is all great, right?  We all need explanations for This Sort of Thing.  Even more so, I think we need to believe that somebody somewhere is taking care of all the Xs.  But here's the Buddhist theory, and I promise you're not going to like it:  This event happened not because of one crazy guy and his experience with X, but because we all, as a group, have forgotten our true nature--that is to say, our interconnectedness with other beings.  And in the process, we evidently failed this guy in about the worst way you can possibly imagine.

Told you you weren't going to like it.  

See, if you listen to Thich Nhat Hanh (and I do, though I argue with him a lot, at least in my head) you can't possibly miss how dependent we all are on each other for basically everything we need to get through life, not to mention being happy and healthy.  I can't phrase this as well as Thay* can, but let's take a piece of paper, for example.  If you look at a piece of paper, you can start to see that it contains the entire universe.  Don't believe me?  Think about it.  The sun is contained in that piece of paper.  If there were no sun, then the tree that eventually became the paper would never have existed.  There's also a tree in the piece of paper, obviously.  There's rain, there's rich soil and loam, and the farther you get into this, the bigger it becomes.  The logger who cut down the tree is contained in that piece of paper. No logger, no cut tree; no cut tree, no paper.  The mother and father of the logger are contained in that piece of paper.  And I mean, when you start doing this (and you should try it, it's really neat) you will eventually realize that there isn't anything in the universe that isn't also in that piece of paper.  Including you.  Because if you didn't need paper to write on, the sheet of paper wouldn't exist, or it would exist in some other form, or some other person would be holding it. 

The same holds true for us as human beings.  We contain and are connected to and are part of every other being that has ever existed, that exists now and will ever exist.  (This is why I think the Buddhist theory of reincarnation is just very slightly wrong, but we'll do that one another time).  You can do nothing for yourself. Nothing, do you get that?  Everything you do and will do is completely dependent upon the existence of other beings.  You can't, for example, buy a house by yourself, because someone had to build the house, and someone had to pave the road to where the house stands, and someone had to install air conditioning and electricity and so on, and--yeah. Keep going.  You'll have the whole universe in your house in no time.  

(Remember when Obama said, "You didn't build that" and everybody freaked out?  He was right, people.  He wasn't as articulate as Thich Nhat Hanh, but then, few people are.)  

Back to our shooter, though.  The only way you can possibly want to do harm to other people is if you forget your interconnectedness to them.  Otherwise, shooting them would be like shooting yourself.  If you forget your interconnectedness, then you're drowning in delusion, as Thay would say.  When you become enlightened, you realize the complete and absolute reality of interconnection.  (Or so they tell me; I was only there for a second, not really long enough to get a good look at the landscape or the trees or even all of the rocks.)  And then your heart will always belong to others and you will want nothing but the best for them, because what benefits them will ultimately benefit you. 

So how do we get there, you ask.  How do we get people to understand they're fundamentally interconnected to everyone else.  Well, we're working on it, one heart at a time, but what you can do right now is take a look at the barriers you use to keep other people out.  Do you really need them?  Maybe it's time for some of them to come down.  Maybe it's time to be more honest about what you're thinking and feeling with the people you're close to.  Maybe it's time, in other words, to be more yourself.  To be more compassionate, with yourself and everyone else. And to be willing to love other people, no matter how obnoxious they are. 

It's risky.

But consider the alternative.  

*Thich Nhat Hanh is often referred to as Thay, an honorific.

Because Cake Is Speech, And Other Stories

Thich Nhat Hanh, in case you did not know this, is a big proponent of what he calls "engaged Buddhism."  Which means that he thinks monks should leave the monastery whenever it's appropriate, go out into the world and do everything they can to relieve suffering.  And that so should the rest of us. While that sounds logical, it was pretty radical in the 1960s, so you can safely call Thich Nhat Hanh a 60s radical.  In fact I think he'd be pleased.  And I think he'd also be pleased to know that my gang of Buddhists, or a small faction of them, anyway, went to Richardson City Hall here in North Texas last Sunday to put together meals for people in shelters after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.  They were vegetarian meals, just incidentally, and I was in charge of weighing the finished product to make sure it was between 320 and 330 grams. Sounds easy, but it wasn't, actually; especially when the meals were coming at me like an assembly line. I'm so glad I don't work on one of those.  Anyway, together we cranked out 65,000 meals, which is a lot of meals.  Here's a pic of me and the gang in front of a stack of finished product.

I'm hoping that this will be the first of many volunteer thingies we do as a group.  My thoughts are, if you're going to be part of a visible religious body, you sort of owe it to people outside that body to show them what it's all about.  One of the reasons I hung around so long with the Lutheran church in San Diego was that we fed the homeless meals every night, and we had chiropractors and doctors come in to treat people for free, and we had a lawyer who came down and helped people get Medicaid and food stamps, and oh yeah, we had this church over here, too, and if you came by on Sunday you'd hear some pretty good music and maybe learn something, but that's kind of ancillary, you know?  It's about being the message, not just carrying the message.

Speaking of strange messages, the Department of Justice just submitted a friend of the court brief in the infamous "Cakegate" case (which I'll get to in a second) stating that cake, the lovable confection that for me at least is the black tar heroin of the food family, is free speech.  That is, if you make a cake, and you decorate it, and it says something like "Congratulations, Larry" or even if it doesn't say anything and just looks pretty, you have made an artistic statement and you should be free to do so.  Nobody should tell you that you can't make a certain cake (except maybe the Laws of Physics, the inflexible bastards) and nobody should tell you that you must make a certain cake.  In fact,  "...(F)orcing (the cake guy) to create expression for and participate in a ceremony that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs invades his First Amendment rights in a manner akin to the governmental intrusion in Hurley. Colorado has not offered, and could not reasonably offer, a sufficient justification for that compulsion here." Brief for the Department of Justice as Amicus Curiae, p. 8, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Civil Rights Commission, no. 16-111, Supreme Court of the United States.

The Cakegate case all began one sunny day in Colorado (or hell, maybe it was a snowy day; I don't know) when a couple who wanted a wedding cake sat down with the cake guy at his "cake consulting table" at his business, Masterpiece Cake Shop.  When the couple told the cake guy they wanted a cake for their wedding, the cake guy told them he couldn't do it because of his religious faith and because the state of Colorado (then) didn't recognize same-sex marriages. (Did I mention the couple were two men? No? Okay, the couple were two men.)  And that might have been the end of it, but then somebody's mother got involved (I'm not kidding; the brief actually says this) and the couple ended up complaining to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which determined that in fact the couple had been discriminated against.  The cake shop appealed to an administrative law judge, motions and countermotions started flying through the air, and a whole bunch of legal stuff happened that's really not relevant here.  Suffice to say that the case was eventually accepted for review by the Supreme Court, and now the Justices are going to have to decide if cake is speech, or if cake is, you know, just cake.  Now that the Department of Justice has weighed in, though, it gets even more interesting.  Does the Trump administration eat cake? If so, whose? And only if there's no bread, or what, exactly?

Anyway: I'm really on the fence about this case. Restaurants and other places of public accommodation are usually legally prohibited from discriminating against people and/or couples because they are the "wrong" race or interracial, and it seems like that should also apply to businesses like the cake decorator. But on the other hand, some restaurants will turn away patrons that aren't "properly" dressed or who don't have reservations.  Do they have the right to do that? I'm not sure it's ever been tested, but it would sure be interesting.  Also, Bob Jones University won't let you into their art museum, which I've heard is really top notch, if you're a woman, unless you're wearing a dress, presumably because women's asses might distract men (and some women) from the art.  (They have wrap skirts available for pants-wearing female would-be patrons.  I am not kidding.)   Do they have the right to do that? It's a private university and a privately-owned museum, so you'd think they do, but it's also a "place of public accommodation," so maybe they don't. If there's ever a legal case about this I suggest we call it Skirtgate.

Also, I want a right as a business person and as an individual to turn down a job I don't want to do. Maybe I'm discriminating against you because you're a cake-wielding asshole, but also maybe because you're ugly and I don't like your suit.  I'm also a Buddhist, in case that's not screamingly obvious, and because of my faith, I wouldn't work for a company that, say, made weapons or championed the death penalty. (Yep, the DA's office is Right Out.)  If I were a private contractor and I made my living writing legal briefs for people, I'd want to be able to turn down a gig from the DA's office or some company that made weapons, if I knew about it.  I probably wouldn't tell them it was religious, though. I'd probably just say I was totally swamped right now and couldn't get to it.

Which leads to another interesting question.  If Cake Guy had told our couple that he was swamped and couldn't do their cake, would we even be having this conversation? I'm not saying that he should have said that, if he felt like he'd be lying, but what if you genuinely are swamped and you genuinely can't get to the project, whatever it is? Would you have to prove that in court?  I can see it now; Cake Guy and his lawyers carefully balancing the other seven cakes Cake Guy had to make that week on the way through security to get to the courtroom.  Oops, dropped one.  What a mess.  Get one of the security sniffer dogs.

So I don't know how I feel about this whole Cakegate thing.  I can see, however, that depending on how the ruling is written, it could be catastrophic for either A. people's individual rights or B. the rights of other people not to be discriminated against in public.  Sounds like a pretty delicate juggling act.  In case I haven't said it lately, I'm so glad I'm not on the Supreme Court.  If I were, I'd have to throw this ruling out of the airplane as I left the country for somewhere like Sweden, where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2009 and there's universal health care, besides.

Mini-Post: Follow-Up to The Great Divide

Okay, I'm gonna go off my nut here and post an article from The Federalist.  Yeah, that The Federalist.  What's more, it's an article written by a man, a conservative man, and it's about abortion, for God's sake.  But I think you guys should read it if you have the time.  Why?  Because this guy is bearing out exactly what I talked about last blog post.  The radical idea that by listening to people who disagree with you, you can maybe learn something.  Now, it happens to be that this guy learned something about one of the hot-button issues of our time, never mind the one issue that I simply can't seem to be rational about no matter what I do.  But don't let that stop you.  Here's a guy who came in with his mind made up and left with some things to think about.  If more people did things like this, then it's possible that a lot of these intractable problems we have wouldn't be so intractable and for that matter, might not even be problems anymore.  So do give him a read.  Here's the article:

http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/25/5-things-right-can-learn-abortion-supporters-yale-law/

The Great Divide

--Here comes the great divide.
I walk the slide
That only killers should fear.
Here comes the great divide
I walk the slide
I hope I never fall.

--Stuart Adamson

A while ago Joan installed a "podcast app" on my new cell phone. (I had to get a new cell phone because my old cell phone was flipping into "airplane mode" by itself, and at odd times.  A real problem if, say, my boss wanted to call me.  Naturally, T-Mobile couldn't fix it and gently "suggested" that I get a new phone.)  If you're not familiar with "podcasts," all I can say is, check a few out.  They're like radio programs, usually about half an hour long, recorded by regular people, some with agendas and some who just have a topic they like to talk about and educate other people about.  You download them from the Internet and you can listen to them on your computer, or through your tablet or cell phone or what have you.  Because my cell phone talks to my car somehow (I still think this is magic, or else the little guys inside my cell phone talk to the little guys inside my car dashboard and tell them what to say), I can now listen to "podcasts" while I'm driving to and from work, and in rich, stereo sound, too.  This was a revelation.  Imagine; all this time I could have been learning something instead of bouncing around at intersections and belting out the lyrics to "Come On, Eileen" for the 9,827th time.

Anyway, one of my favorite podcasters is Dan Carlin.  He's a political commentator, in a sense, but he approaches U.S. politics as though he's a space alien who has just come to Earth and is starting to learn a little bit about human society.  He's neither conservative nor liberal but kind of a maddening mix of both, which is what makes him so interesting.  Mr. Carlin has two main podcasts; "Common Sense", which is about politics, and "Hardcore History", which is also about politics but in the context of what happened during, say, World War I or the Holy Roman Empire.  (We interrupt this blog post for a quick plug: Although the podcast about World War I was six episodes long and each episode ran about three hours, it was totally and completely worth the time spent and you should go download all six episodes from his web site right now, while they're still free.)

Up until just before The Election, Dan Carlin was saying in his "Common Sense" podcast that he thought the biggest problem we face as Americans is corruption in government.  What, you might ask, did he think the solution was?  Well, he thought we should vote in an outsider who would do things in a way nobody's ever done them before.  So we did that, and, uh, guess what happened.  Now Dan Carlin is saying no, I was wrong; the biggest problem we face as Americans is not corruption in government, nor Donald Trump, as you might expect, but the fact that a large chunk of our population hates another large chunk of our population.  And the reverse.  Which is where Donald Trump came from.  And there are smaller groups that hate other smaller groups, and those smaller groups hate lots of other small groups, and primarily it's just a great big hatefest out there, and if we're not careful, the whole country is going to break up into a bunch of nationalistic, nuclear, surly little rocks.  Sort of like the Soviet Union did--oops, I'm getting ahead of myself.

 See, back in the 1960s, and even probably up until maybe ten or twenty years ago, if you told somebody the United States might break up, their likely initial reaction would be, "Oh no!  What can we do to preserve the Union?"  Nowadays, the reaction's a lot more likely to be, "Good.  I don't want to live with those people anymore."  Whoever those people may be.  The Jews.  The blacks.  The gays.  The conservatives.  The liberals.  The Society of Left-Handed Spanish-Speaking Librarians Without Tonsils.*  Pick your label.  Depending on who you talk to, you'd be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that in the very near future, you'll have your choice of Californiastan, Texasberg, the Kingdom of Washoregon, Utahsville,  New Yorkguay and the Republic of Gilead--oops, I mean the Confederate States.  (Maine, of course, will make like a tree and join Canada.) Presumably they'll all have separate currencies and you'll need a passport to travel from one to another. What's more, you'll have to pass an ideology check. No one beyond this point may openly advocate interracial marriage, for example.

So what can we do about this?

Maybe nothing.  Maybe us fragmenting and falling apart would be for the best.  We are using 25% of the planet's resources, after all, which is all the more shocking when you know that we only have 5% of the world's population.  We export our environmental damage by buying lumber from countries that don't have sustainable forests, messily manufacturing our products in countries that don't have air pollution controls, and overfish oceans that aren't subject to our environmental laws.  Breaking us up might be good for the world.  I think it'd be just terrible for us, though.  For all kinds of reasons. I mean, we've been a country for a long time.  It'd be kind of cool if we could keep on being one.

Dan Carlin isn't sure what to do, but I have a suggestion. It's kind of Buddhist-y, but here it is: Let's try actually listening to each other, instead of just seeing who can shout the loudest.  Let's get to know some of our neighbors who think differently than we do. And more to the point, find out why they think differently than we do.  How they came to those conclusions.  What pieces of information they considered.  And whether or not they're convinced of the truth of those pieces of information and, if they're not, if they've ever considered any other pieces of information that might point to a different conclusion. And (here's the hard part) let them get to know the same things about us.  And give us the same pieces of information.  After all, we might be wrong about a thing.  It's not unheard of.

In Buddhism we have this thing called "nonattachment to views."  About which there have been lots of words written, but what it basically boils down to is, "I might be wrong.  Therefore I'll listen and see if I can learn something."

How important is nonattachment to views?  Well, Right View is one of the eight things on the Eightfold Path that leads to enlightenment.  And I quote:  "“Right View” is also called “right perspective”, “right vision” or “right understanding.”...You need to see the world and yourself as they truly are, not what you have been conditioned to see."  And nonattachment to views is a big part of this.  In short, if you've grown up, say, in a country that has a dominant religion, and you and your family are of a different religion, you could perhaps be forgiven (at least for a while) for thinking that people of the dominant religion are inherently bad, evil, or otherwise nasty--especially if people of the dominant religion went out of their way to harass, repress and terrorize you.  (And I have no experience with this whatsoever, as I'm sure you know.)  But, once you got out there in the world and met some of the people of this dominant religion, you might learn that they have the same dreams, aspirations and ambitions as you do, that they want all the same things you want, and that just because they believe something other than what you believe, they're all individuals and it's unfair to paint them all with the same bad/evil/nasty brush.  Even if they've done the same to you.  Which, let's face it, a lot of them have.

We have so many choices anymore for our sources of information, and it's easy to get stuck in a bubble by turning only to those sources of information that support things we've already made our minds up about anyway.  Like, say, watching only Fox News, logging in only to Breitbart, and hanging around only with the #tcots on Twitter.  Conversely, you might watch nothing but CNN, log in only to The Daily KOS and hang around only with--with--I'm not sure there's an opposite label from #tcot.  But if there is one, that's the one I mean.

So what am I suggesting, you may ask.  Am I suggesting you watch Fox News for ten minutes a day?  Follow Karl Rove on Twitter? Log in to LifeSite News, for crying out loud?!  Well, yes, sort of, but more to the point, I'm suggesting you actually talk to people.  People people.  Human beings people. People who think differently than you do.  Find out why they think differently.  Ask them what they believe.  Here's a thing--people love talking about what they believe.  Get them started and you probably won't have to say a word for ten minutes or more.  Excellent tip for cocktail parties where you don't know anybody and you're only there to be arm candy for your wife.

And if you can, without being obvious, ask people why they believe what they believe.  And don't take "Because that's what it says in the Bible" as your answer.  Come back with "Okay, but you decided to believe that the Bible is true. When did you decide to do that?  What happened?"  And maybe the person had a born-again experience when he was fourteen or maybe he was in a terrible accident and almost died and thinks that God saved him or maybe he hasn't a clue when he made that decision or why.

Ah, now you are getting somewhere.  You have, after all, just learned something about this person that you didn't know before.  Maybe it will be enough to alter your view of him.  Maybe not, but more to the point, he's learned something too.  About himself as well as about you. If nothing else, he now knows that you're a good listener.  And what's more, you want to learn things.  Curiosity may have killed some feline back 70,000 years ago, but trust me, intellectual curiosity is about the best asset a human being can have.  Besides being a good listener.  I really think that trumps just about everything.

So that's my suggestion.  Maybe it'll work and maybe it won't, but it's certainly worth a try, isn't it? Because breaking up the country isn't only stupid, it would be really expensive.  You think taxes are high now?  Buddy, just wait until Utahville figures out it needs to host the Olympics again  You ain't seen nothin' yet.


*Not a real political action committee, but wouldn't it be interesting if it were.

Zen For A Day

So for about two years now, I've really been wanting to go to a retreat.  That is, a meditation experience where you go someplace, usually a nice place with lots of plants and trees, and do some serious meditating for days or even weeks.  I don't think this is strictly a Buddhist thing -- I went on a Christian retreat once as a teenager, though no actual meditation happened -- but Buddhists are kind of known to do this.  The idea is to have really deep meditations, so that you realize profound and awesome things about your nature and the universe.  Or at least you get a break from the phone ringing and people texting you every five minutes.

The last time I went on a retreat was I think in 2013, when Brother ChiSing was still alive and we all went to Praxis in far North Texas, just south of the Red River. That was awesome.  It was three days of meditation, walking, quiet and general restfulness.  I had a close encounter with a grasshopper, which is sort of a long story but you can read about it here.  And there were stars. Lots of stars. Zillions and zillions of stars. And grasshoppers.  Anyway, a great time was had.  And now it's been a couple of years and I really want to do this again and I keep running into the same two barriers:  One, there just ain't a lot of Buddhist meditation retreats happening in Texas.  This here's the Bible belt, in case you didn't know. And two, the ones there are, are either A. prohibitively expensive or B. far away or often C. both.

There was this one in Austin, for example, last weekend.  It was for women only, and it was hosted by the Plum Blossom Sangha, which is kind of a sister group to the Dallas Meditation Center, where I hang out. Same school of Buddhism, same guys in charge.  So it would have made a lot of sense to go, except the cheapest accommodations they had available were still too expensive for our budget.  I jist ain't got that kind of money for a weekend.  (And if I did, I'd be saving it up for a new mattress, which I desperately need.)  There's another one in April, which is cheaper, but still too expensive. Life is expensive, you know.

So, last Saturday I hauled myself over to the local Zen center, another Buddhist group in the Dallas environs, for a daylong retreat. It was better than nothing. (It was also cheaper.  A mere $35, and for that you get tea and crackers, too.)  Now, there's meditation in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition, which is what I do, and then there's Zen, which is a whole nother thing.  A Zen retreat basically involves a whole lot of sitting, not a whole lot of anything else, and it's all very formal.  No stars. No grasshoppers.  You sit facing the wall instead of facing other people; people bow at you; you do certain stuff when the bell rings, etc.  Which, again, is great, unless you're like me and you have A. very little patience for formality and B. no clue what to do when the bell rings about half the time.  Or maybe more than half the time.

Now, I knew what I was getting into.  I've been there before.  But, that was an hour and a half long regular session, not a daylong retreat.  I also knew what I was bringing with me, which is, a right hip that gets very cranky sometimes, especially when you want to sit on it for what seems like an inordinate length of time.  So, being a smart person, I asked for a chair.  Yes, you can meditate in a chair.  It means you're not touching the Earth like all the cool kids, but you can do it.  The trick is not to rest on the back of the chair, and just kind of sit forward with your spine straight but not rigid and incline yourself not exactly forward but not exactly backward, either, while avoiding being straight up and down.  Yeah, it's kind of like flying a helicopter.  Not that I've ever flown a helicopter, but I don't imagine you just sort of wing over to where you want to be and press the "hover" button.

So anyway.  I was in this chair, and I was meditating, and everything was going more or less well, and then the teacher showed up.  The teacher is a pretty cool dude.  I think he's a comparative religion professor someplace besides being a Zen master, and professors of comparative religion (and Zen masters) tend to be rather even tempered and sanguine about this whole what's-my-place-in-the-universe thing.  I've only met him like once three years ago, but he remembered meeting me and I, remarkably, remembered what he'd said to me last time, which made him very happy.  (I imagine most professors of comparative religion would be overjoyed if they ran into a student who still remembered the basic plot of the Bhagavad Gita.)  So that went well, and we broke for lunch, and that went well, and honestly, I was doing fine until time for the tea ceremony.

I hope y'all have actually been to a Japanese tea ceremony, because I don't know if I can possibly describe what it's like. Let's just say, like all things Japanese, that the presentation of the thing matters as much or more as the actual substance.  You know how when you go to a Japanese restaurant, the food is very artfully designed and served on attractive little plates with contrasting colors and stuff?  Yeah, well, they do that with everything. Not to mention tea.  Well, especially tea.  Tea is very important. How important is it?  Well, it's important enough that I scooted out of my chair and got down on the floor, with the cool kids, so that we'd all be sitting at the same height and the tea servers wouldn't have to bend at a different angle to offer me a cup.  Because that wouldn't look right. 

Unfortunately, scooting down onto the floor was a mistake.  My cranky hip was already cranky, in spite of the chair, and being on the floor did not make it any happier. There's something about leaning outward at that angle that it just really doesn't like after a while.  So we meditated for half an hour, and then the teacher said a few words, and then the tea ceremony started, and by this point my cranky hip is making it really obvious that I'd better do something, like immediately, if I want to be able to limp down the stairs to go home.  So what did I do?  I straightened my right leg.  Rolled my toes to the inside.  Rolled my toes to the outside.  Then tucked the leg back in, figuring it would be good for another ten minutes.  Maybe.  Possibly.

And the second I saw the expressions on the faces of the people across from me, I could just tell I'd committed some kind of horrible faux pas.  Which, in a Japanese setting, is ridiculously easy to do.  And it had to be during the tea ceremony.  Of course.

So, being the brave person that I am, I snuck out the back door an hour and a half early, which was the second I had a chance and before anybody could talk to me.  Eesh.  Maybe if I don't show up back there for like thirty days or something, everyone will have forgotten all about it.  Or maybe it'll become one of those apocryphal fairy tales people use to scare hell out of children; "And that, young grasshopper, is why we don't straighten our right legs during the tea ceremony."

(Like how I came full circle on the grasshopper thing?)

Well, anyway, how embarrassing.  But I got my retreat, sort of.  Somebody just please remind me that the next time I go back there, I'm not to get out of the chair for anything. Yea verily, even tea.  Unless, of course, that would be another horrible faux pas.  Which is possible.

Trolling For Outrage

A while ago the manager came into my office and caught me on Twitter, as I sometimes am (@jenstrikesagain).  She asked me what in the hell I was doing and I told her I was trolling for outrage.

"Trolling for outrage?" she said.  "Yes," I said. "Usually I can sit down and do my job just because I like what I do.  But sometimes I come in here and I don't feel like it or I'm tired or I don't feel well or whatever.  And that's when I have to go trolling for outrage.  I get on Twitter or I get on Yahoo News and I look for a news story that's outrageous.  It never takes very long to find one. And then I'm outraged and I have all this energy and I feel like smacking somebody but instead I get to work and do my job because maybe there'll be a little less outrage out there if we win this motion or we settle this case or we mediate this dispute.  Trolling for outrage. That's what I call it.  What do you do when you don't feel like doing your job?"

The manager gave me a long, slow blink and said, "I drink another cup of coffee."

Well, hey, that may work for some folks, too.  But ever since November 9 of last year, it's been ridiculously easy to find outrage.  I no longer need to go trolling for it. It shows up at my doorstep daily in freshly wrapped packages.  Here's a sample just from this morning:

•  Trump fired his acting AG for refusing to defend his unconstitutional order banning people from seven different countries from entering the US.  (In case you don't know this, attorneys can't argue for or defend anything they know is unconstitutional. They can be disbarred if they do.)
• The entire upper echelon of the State Department has also been fired.
• Fox News spent all of yesterday and part of today stating that the Quebec mosque shooter was from Morocco. In fact the shooter was a French Canadian university student.
• The Education Secretary nominee apparently plagiarized her answers to written questions propounded by the Senate.  Let's get this straight, people: Only legal professionals can plagiarize at will, and only from other legal professionals.  Educators must do their own work and keep their eyes on their own papers. 
•  A Danish citizen has been denied entry to the United States because he excavates archaeological sites in Iraq. Really.
• A Mississippi lawmaker has submitted a bill that would make wearing saggy pants a crime. I would argue that's double jeopardy, since it's already a crime against fashion. 

You see what I mean?  It's getting ridiculous.  It's almost to the point where I think a long, extended break from all social media would be a good idea, though realistically, I'll probably never do that.  But the whole thing does raise some questions about the role of social media in life, anyway, how we're shaped by our environment and how we may be doing the shaping, without even knowing it. And how Buddhist-y it is, anyway, to deliberately go look at things you know are going to piss you off?  Probably not very.

One argument against spending time on social media, for example, is that it puts you in a bubble. Unless you really like to argue with people, you're probably going to follow people who think the way you do and tweet the way you tweet (or Snapchat, or whatever).  So you're bouncing the same old, tired ideas off people who are bouncing the same old, tired ideas off you, and pretty soon it's like being in an echo chamber, and then when you happen to run into people who disagree with you out in the real world, you're first shocked, and then angry.  How dare they. Which, of course, leads to increased conflict, more arguments and more suffering for all beings.

Another thought: Docs are telling us now that more than a small amount of screen time is bad for people.  Parents all over the country restrict their kids to no more than a certain amount of time on the iPhone or the tablet for fear their eyes will fall out, or that they'll meet predators in chat rooms. Yet, when the kids suggest maybe Mom and Dad should put their phones down, too, a lot of moms and dads find out that they just can't do it.  When a day care center put up a sign about it, outrage followed.  People have become hooked on the instant-information fix. Well, a lot of us have. You are, after all, reading this, aren't you?

(Incidentally, the Thai Buddhist temple here on Dallas, off of Forest Lane, has handpainted wallpaper that depicts, among other things, old Buddhist stories and modern dilemmas.  It's got an illustration of Siddhartha meeting the sick man, the old man, and the dead man, for example,  It also has a picture of a man with a computer, on Facebook, drowning in the Sea of Delusion.)

In Plum Village, the Thich Nhat Hanh hamlet near Bordeaux, France, they have a "second body" policy when it comes to going online (and yes, monks and nuns do go online; it may be a monastery, but it isn't a 12th century one). That means that somebody else sits there with you while you get on the Internet and do what you need to do.  Kind of a pain if you feel like pulling up some good porn, but then I suppose monks and nuns aren't supposed to do that anyway and it's probably great for not getting lost in the clickstream for hours at a time. (It's a little culty, though, if you ask me.)  I don't have a "second body" that I can haul around when I need to get on the Internet, so I installed this little chime thingy that rings once an hour. That at least tells me how much time I've been there, and since I'm on the Internet at work basically all day, it's a good reminder to get up, stretch, walk a little, take a few deep breaths.  You know, interact with the actual world.

I get sucked in by bad news; other people get sucked in by fantasy football, Twitter, the Kardashian sisters or who's winning American Idol (is that even still on?).  We've managed to design a world where it's hard to live without instant tech. In 2010 we had a huge power outage that affected most of the northern part of the state, and besides being freezing and having to cook in the dark, Joan and I were terribly worried about how we were going to charge our cell phones.

Anyway, I don't know what the solution is.  But maybe taking an hour or so a day to unplug would be a start.  Seriously, an hour a day without your cell phone close to hand.  Can you do it?

New and Exciting Medical Saga!

And here I thought this post would be about how I sent all the contributions to Heifer and they sent a nice letter back and named the water buffalo "Jim" and sent him to Southeast Asia.  Well, that's still going to happen (this week, I swear) but in the interim, Joan's having a new and exciting medical saga.  For anybody who doesn't know what's going on, Joan woke up about a week ago mostly unable to see out of her "good" eye.  She has a "bad" eye, too, where the visual field is limited, so to have the "good" eye poop out on her like this is not a good thing.  Obviously this is causing all kinds of problems, like you would expect if you were suddenly struck about half blind.  We've spent days in doctors' waiting rooms and testing facilities, and while we were at it, we hit Joan's out of pocket maximum. So at least everything's free from here.  

At this point there is no news, except that things are not getting better.  Nobody seems to be able to tell us if the eyesight will come back once they figure out what's causing the problem and start treating it.  Oh, and what could be the problem ranges from papilloedema, a condition caused by diabetes but usually on a much older person (don't Google it, it's scary) to a brain tumor, which is--well, I'm not gonna say anything more about that.  And all of that is incredibly sucky, but what I'm having the most trouble with now is just the sheer logistics of this thing.  

By that I mean, how to cope with the world when you can't see most of it.  I dunno if you've ever thought of that before, but it's a lot.  I mean, for example I've had to go through the house, and will have to do it again on a regular basis because we have a kitten, looking for trip hazards and things below radar that Joan could get hung up on. (And our house is an OSHA nightmare in that respect.  We're working on it, though.) There are some chores I've more or less taken over because I just don't think she can do them.  And of course there's driving.  When you can't see, you can't drive.  So now, instead of just driving myself around, I actually need to think about it, sit down and make a schedule; where Joan has to be when, when I need to pick her up, how long it'll take to get to here from there, and therefore, what time I can expect to, say, arrive at work.  Bonus, though; We're spending a lot of time together.  Kristen was right; that part is actually pretty cool.

(And just incidentally, my work has been great about all this.  No complaints about my lateitude or about my being gone on a semi-regular basis to take Joan someplace or other.  Essentially, they don't have to pay me while I'm not here, but that aside, they've been really nice.  And this may be coincidental, but one of the Downstairs Guys came upstairs to tell me he was running low on work and did I have anything for him.  Oh, honey.  Do I ever.)

And me? you ask.  Has my head exploded from the stress yet?  Well, actually no.  This is very Buddhist-y of me, but I've just been taking it one day at a time.  Say today is Thursday.  What time do we both need to be at work?  Any doctor's appointments? What time do I need to be at the library to pick Joan up?  What's for dinner?  And that's all I can really think about.  I don't deal with the long term possibilities because they're just flat-out beyond me. We'll have news when we have news.  It'll get better if it's going to get better.

(Of course, I can say that, right?  It's not like it's my eyes, after all.)  

But, seriously, this is a marriage.  And in a marriage, things change all the time.  You might not notice it, but if you take a look at yourself you'll realize you aren't the person you were ten years ago.  Everything's different now.  You're different now.  If you're married, you're in a different marriage than you were in ten years ago, even if you're still married to the same person.  You've plainly found a way, and many people don't, to navigate those changes with your partner.  Now, this is a particularly sucky change, and it's a big ugly nasty one, but still, it's a change.  The only way to handle change is to handle it together.

That's all I've got for now.  Sorry, but I've been really tired. Those of you that are in good with any particular deity, if you  wouldn't mind dropping him or her a line about Joan's eyes getting better, that would be great. And the checks go to Heifer tomorrow.  All I need is an envelope.  And a really good picture of a water buffalo.  

Mindful Swimming

So something happened yesterday that's probably happened about a million times before, but I didn't notice for whatever reason.  Probably because I wasn't being mindful, which, you know, a Buddhist kind of should be.  Ironically, Thich Nhat Hanh's school of Buddhism, which is my particular sect, is All About Being Mindful; my Buddhist name, for Godsakes, is "Deepening Mindfulness of the Source," which is pretty Jedi, when you think about it.

But anyway. I woke up in a bad mood, which happens.  I kind of grumped around the house having coffee and getting ready and so on, and then I went to the pool. There was a New Guy in my lane.  This is not surprising; new guys often show up in my lane because I swim in what we shall call the Slow Lane, with the older guys and the guys recovering from injuries and the guys who, for whatever reason, don't want to swim in the Fast Lane with the ex-Olympians and the 30-year-old doctors and, you know, the kings of the water.  (And they are mostly guys, now that I think about it.  We probably have twice as many men as women.  It's a pretty egalitarian sport, but I bet women have more trouble getting out of the house at 5 am to get to the pool what with kids and pets and jobs and--stuff.)  So the first question that always comes up is, "Does the New Guy know the rules?"  There are a couple of different ways to share a lane--like circling, going up one side and down the other side, or splitting, where each of you stays in one half of the lane. and I could tell this guy didn't know the rules because he was kind of all over the place. In that circumstance it's not very safe to jump in and start swimming because there could be a collision, so I jumped into the water and just waited by the wall for him to come back from the other end so we could Discuss.

And an amazing thing happened.  I guess I never noticed this before because I normally jump in and then immediately push off and start swimming, and in this case I was just holding still, but the second I jumped into the water, the happiness meter started going up.  I swear, it was like watching the mercury increase on an oven timer; I came in grumpy, I jumped in the water, and just by being in the water my mood started to improve.  Never mind the actual swimming.  When I started actually swimming, my mood just shot up.  Sure, exercise and endorphins and all that, but still, this was pretty remarkable.  Instant happy, just add water.

And speaking of swimming, how's the swim-for-distance thing going?  Pretty good.  I'm at  19.7k or 12 and a quarter miles.  I still have the better part of two weeks, so it looks like I'll hit at least 20 miles and hopefully 23.  This Sunday I'm hoping to do a double session, or a session and a half, which comes to at least an hour and a half in the water and 2700-3000 meters.  The big 5k swim is in September and I lost a lot of ground when I was out with a month with pneumonia, but we'll see how that goes.  Somebody told me recently that there's a two-hour limit on the 5k swim, anyway.  There's absolutely no way I will get fast enough to swim 5k in 2 hours (more like 2 1/2, maybe even closer to 3) but I can probably swim between 3500 and 4000, and that's a lot.  (Hm, maybe I'll take bets on whether or not I hit 4000.  Proceeds to go to some charity.  Not sure which one.  There are a lot of them out there.)

I have several sponsors pledging me by the kilometer or the mile, with all proceeds going to Heifer, International, but I could always use more.  It's easy; just be around when I post my final tally at the end of the month and send me a check, made payable to Heifer (which is tax deductible and all that) so that I can mail it with all the other checks and a nice letter from everybody.  If I raise $250, we can buy a water buffalo for some family in Southeast Asia, which would be cool.  If not, we can still buy goats and chickens and hives of bees and so on. Farm animals make a huge difference in the lives of poor families and they are not to be eaten, so there's something for the vegetarians.

He Had Me At "Motherf___er"

So a little while ago, Joan showed me how to load a "podcast app" on my cell phone.  In case I forgot to tell you this, my new car talks to my cell phone. Put one inside the other and I can talk to people through my stereo speakers and stream music from Pandora.  Which is pretty cool.  But not nearly as cool as having a "podcast app." I've subscribed to a couple of podcasts, including one about history, one about space science and two or three about Buddhism.

I have, most of the time, a half-hour commute to work.  Sometimes a little longer.  I'm seriously annoyed to discover that for ALL THIS TIME I could have been learning stuff on the way to and fro. I have, like, six months of lost time to make up for.  So there's not a minute to lose.  At the moment I'm making my way backwards through what is by far the coolest podcast I've ever discovered.  It's called "The 12-Step Buddhist" and it is absolutely awesome.

It's run by a guy named Darren Littlejohn.  He's a yoga instructor, "life coach" (whatever that is--I have yet to hear a good definition) and a few other things.  He's also a person in recovery who happens to be a Buddhist.  He's Tantric and I'm Tiep Hien but the principles are basically the same, and best of all, he's addressing the fundamental thing, the thing that gets you in the most trouble in 12-step meetings of any stripe when you bring it up: Despite all that talk about defining a Higher Power of your own understanding and that the Twelve Steps should work with any faith or even the lack thereof, the Program is very, very Judeo-Christian.

Really, there's no way of getting around that, no matter what they tell you at meetings.  The Twelve Steps came out of the Oxford Group's Six Steps and those were based on the Bible.  The Oxford Group was a Christian mens' organization and it didn't change much when it morphed into Alcoholics Anonymous.  The people who wrote the Big Book were Christian, and the way the whole Program was set up followed typical Christian principles.  (In fact I was once told that if I didn't become a Christian, immediately, I would never recover. No kidding. I've been told a lot of stupid things by a lot of stupid people.) Sure, technically you can work the Program if you're a Hindu or a Muslim or even a pagan, but all of those faith systems presuppose a belief in some kind of deity, whatever you happen to call it.  Buddhism doesn't presuppose that (and doesn't deny it, either).  If you try to get a straight answer from ten Buddhist monks as to whether or not there's a God, you'll get twenty different answers and 400 deep discussions.  So if you need a Higher Power, and your tradition doesn't really have one, what's a Buddhist to do?

Well, one could do a lot worse than listen to Mr. Littlejohn's podcast or read his book, The Twelve-Step Buddhist.  It came out in 2009 and he's written other books since.  While you're at it, you might wanna pick up Mel Ash's The Zen of Recovery, as well; I think I've mentioned him on this blog before.  But back to Mr. Littlejohn.  The parallels here are a little eerie.  He moved to San Diego fairly recently.  During one of his blog posts, a big airplane flew overhead, and I thought, "I know exactly where he lives.  He lives in Little Italy."  (Or maybe Banker's Hill, but my money's on Little Italy.)  He talked about Overeaters Anonymous for a while in another one of his posts, which was awesome because personally, I think OA gets ignored in the recovery community.  (I mean, it's just food, right?  It's not illegal to possess it and nobody's going to kill you if you deal in it.)  But the thing that really got me was his explanation of what it's like to be enlightened vs. not enlightened.

Paraphrasing very roughly here:  Let's say you're an alcoholic.  You drink, you rage, you yell at your loved ones, you cause a lot of misery.  The next day you wake up, realize that you caused a lot of misery, and you're miserable.  So you drink more, to feel better.  And you rage again and you yell again and then the next day you--yeah.  And this keeps going on and on because you don't realize addiction is a sickness, you don't know that you're sick, you don't grok that your sickness is following a predictable path, and you don't understand that there's even a way to get out of it, much less that you might succeed if you give it a try.  Until somebody comes along and says, "Hey.  You might be an alcoholic.  Why don't you give AA a try?" And maybe you do and maybe you don't but the point is, now you have new information.  Now you know there's a way to end this endless cycle.  Once you know that, you can't go on drinking in ignorance.

Being unenlightened is very similar.  You go about your predictable routine.  You suffer, and you cause suffering.  The next day you realize you've caused suffering and you feel bad, but you don't know how to not cause suffering, so you do it again, and then the next day you feel bad but you don't know how to not cause suffering and...you get the idea.  Until somebody comes along and says, "Hey, there's more than this."  And now you know that there's a way out.  And once you do, you can't keep bumbling mindlessly along...

I'm not explaining this very well.  What I'm saying, though, is I got it.  I mean I really got it.  It went straight past my cerebral cortex and down into my lizard brain.  I've been a Buddhist for a while now, seven or eight years, and nobody's ever explained it to me in a way that made that much sense.  I mean, wham.  Straight to the brain stem.  I almost drove off the freeway in sheer surprise.

Yes, I listen to his podcasts while I'm driving.  I'm not sure what a good idea that is, because he has a pretty soothing voice.  Anyway, if you're interested in Buddhism or the Twelve Steps or both, you might wanna read what Mr. Littlejohn has to say.  If nothing else, he's engaging, funny and profane. One of his blog posts is called, "Get Nondual, Motherfucker."  That pretty much sealed the deal for me right there.