'Nother Mini-Post: Kitten!

Well, I came home from work yesterday and lo and behold, we have a kitten.  Joan picked her up from the side of the road and took her straight to a vet. She checked out OK. Unless we start seeing a lot of signs around the nabe for a lost kitten, we seem to have a new family member.  No name yet, although we're kicking a couple around. The older cats are hating on her right now, so everybody has to be supervised 24/7 (or else kitten has to be closed in a room by herself, which isn't a great solution).  She likes to play at 2 am and eats like a horse (or a kitten, in this case).   More details (and a name) to follow.

Mini-Post: Damn, I Got Old Quick.

In case anybody wants to know what it's like to jump back into the pool after a month away and a lot of that resting in bed, the answer is, IT SUCKS. I feel like I've gone back in time to the month I started with the swim team way back in '07.  I get extremely tired, I take hits from my inhaler because I get so winded and I actually get out of the water with sore shoulders and arms.  Last Sunday I swam 1800, my longest distance since I started back.  Yeah.  1800.  When I was turning in like 3200 at least once a week and training up to 5000.  If that 5000 meter race were really in July, as originally scheduled, I'd be screwed. The rumor now is that it's going to be in September.  I'd like to say September is no problem and I'll be back to fighting form in nothing flat, but then I also said I'd be over this pneumonia thing in a week and that didn't exactly work out, so I'm hesitant for my brain to start writing checks my body may not be able to cash.

So I realized today that I've gotta do what I've been putting off doing.  I gotta go back to the gym and start lifting weights again.  I'm no Arnold Schwartzenbarfer, but I used to lift weights and it helped my swimming a lot.  I gotta build up those wing muscles.  Luckily there is an LA Fitness right down the street from my office, and if I actually leave on time I should be able to squeeze in a good 30-45 minutes on Tuesday and Thursday nights.  Again, that's leave ON TIME, not whenever I get to a logical stopping point.  I could feasibly work all day and all night for weeks and I'd never get all the stuff done that I'm supposed to do.  But I do keep us two steps ahead of the next crisis, and sometimes that's all you can ask for.  Especially in a law firm.

In other news, I'm going to turn 47 in a couple of weeks here.  This means I'm no longer in my middle forties; I am now in my late forties.  Joan, who just turned 57, is probably laughing at me right now, but the other day it occurred to me that I'm probably past the mystical halfway point, unless I plan on living to be 96.  Yep. Half my life is already in the can and I'm working on the second half.

So what am I gonna do for the second half, you ask.  Well, let's see. I think I'm going to hang around with family and friends as much as possible, share big laughs and small stories, and be as unserious as possible.  I'm planning on a little more meditation and a little less anxiety.  Less sugar, for sure, more fruits and vegetables.  Less wasted time on the news (I'm not supposed to watch the news; it upsets me).  More trips to Austin.  Fewer doctor's appointments.  And who knows, maybe I'll write something.  Else.  Something else.

By the way, it's Mental Health Awareness Month.  So be aware.

That Convention, And Sugar, and Stuff.

Apologies for the greater-than-usual space between blog posts here, everybody, but I've been really sick. I mean about as sick as I've ever been in my whole life, not counting the time I was in the hospital for a week with abscessed tonsils, and definitely sicker than I've been in at least ten years.  It started out as a bad cold that I picked up at the convention.  After a week it still wasn't gone, so I saw a doc-in-the-box because I couldn't get in to my Regular Doc. That happens sometimes.  They examined me (poke, prod) and did an X-ray (inconclusive) and decided that I had the beginnings of pneumonia.  So off I went to the pharm to get antibiotics, which then proved their worth by doing absolutely nothing.  Well, I was maybe feeling incrementally better, but I wonder how much of that was popping ibuprofen to keep the fever down and guzzling cough syrup and nebulizer fluid so I could breathe.  And yes, I did keep going to work, mostly, though I took a few of the worst days off.  I sort of had to.  It's a small firm and if I ain't here, stuff don't get done. (I had this horrible feeling we'd end up going to trial, but that didn't happen, thankfully.  Me in a suit at the plaintiff's table coughing up Lung McNuggets every five minutes would have just made a great impression on the jury, I'm sure.)

Then my ears and throat went south on me. Both ears swelled up so I couldn't hear, and my voice got so distorted I could either speak in a whisper or AT A SHOUT but nothing in between.  So back I went to the doc (the Regular Doc, this time) and he said, "Well, whatever they gave you isn't working, let's give you something else." And some prednisone, which I completely hate because it wreaks all possible badness on you, from making your face break out and your nails split to making you gain five pounds because you're hungry all the time. But, it also lets you breathe, and let's face it, breathing is kind of a good thing.  And I'm pleased to report that the Something Else has finally started to work. Meaning, one of my ears has opened up, I have a voice at a more reasonable volume and the coughing has pretty much stopped, except for occasional rattles.

But I am still pretty sick. So, I'm still not Doing Anything.  Anything I don't have to do, I mean.  Just going to work and then going home and resting.  I've been staying in bed all weekend, too.  I haven't been to my meditation group or OA meetings in three weeks, and I'm gonna miss all of this week, as well.  I haven't been in the pool since I think April 8 (Joan's mom's birthday; always a memorable date even if she's not with us anymore).  I hired a guy to do the lawn, which I can't afford, but I also can't push a lawn mower around and at the rate it keeps raining around here, the entire house could disappear under the lawn if I let it go more than a week.  You don't wanna see what the interior of the house looks like, either, though I've kept up with the laundry and the dishes pretty well.  When one of us is sick, the slack just don't get picked up.  It's like somebody hit "pause" in early April and the tape just hasn't really gotten rolling yet.

So for anybody who's missed me, that's where I've been.  If I'm breathing all right I'm going to try to get back in the pool this Saturday, which coincidentally is the last Baylor Saturday swim until fall.  Forget the long distance stuff for now.  I mean really, forget it.  I have fond hopes of making it to 1200 meters my first time out. Realistically it'll be June before I can knock off 2000 meters, and if the 5000 meter race were in July, like it usually is, I'd be pretty worried right about now.  But it's not. Rumor has it they're kicking it to September because the water was so warm last year that some people got sick (hey, it's an outdoor pool, and it's summer in Texas).  Rumor also has it that they're canceling the whole thing. Now that last part would suck, but I am but a minion in the swimmer heirarchy and not in charge of things like scheduling. If they do cancel it, though, I will find some other race to swim in, even if it's not as long.  There's a great one in June, that I won't be ready for, but you have to raise like $500 just to start anyway and it's for cancer research, which is not my favorite charity.  Cancer research gets plenty of money.  Women of color, torture survivors, underprivileged kids and cooperatives that foster economic development by way of providing farm animals to needy families, not so much.

But anyway.  Back before I got sick, I went to this convention.  This was Overeaters Anonymous Dallas's annual convention, and I was also on the planning committee (though, as they say, I was not on the results committee).  It was pretty well attended; about 130 people, not counting the streams of small children that came and went from the conference room next to us and kept shouting stuff for Jesus.  (Really, they were better mannered than most groups of conventioneers, but they were kind of loud.)  I ran around handing out serenity coins and was in a skit and so forth and suchlike. And I might have actually learned something, which, you have to admit, doesn't happen every day.

The main speaker was what we would call a "Big Book thumper."  If you're not familiar with AA parlance, the Big Book is the blue book called "Alcoholics Anonymous" that was first published in the 1930s and is still pretty much upheld as the single most important work in the literature of addiction and recovery.  OA is based on AA so it follows the same principles, the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions and all of that.  If you wanna know more about this stuff and the history of and so on, check out any of the videos on this page or this article.  Anyway, in the Big Book, there's a paragraph right before it lists the Twelve Steps that reads something like, "Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path."  (And just for the record, I love that 1930s parlance.  "Rarely have we seen a person fail..." Doesn't that sound better than "You won't screw this up if..."?)  And the speaker was reading this section to make a point about something or other, which completely escapes me now, but one word of it stood out in my head in great big letters with glossy highlighting and multiple exclamation points.

The word in question was, "thoroughly." The thought I had at the time was, "I ain't doin' this right."

I mean, we know I'm addicted to sugar.  (And if you didn't know that, now you do, so you can be included in the great royal We.)  That's not a secret.  If you're addicted to anything, you're not going to recover unless you get rid of the stuff.  With alcohol, this is simple, if not exactly easy.  Look at the ingredients.  If it says, "Contains alcohol," you don't drink/eat it. Simple.  With sugar, though--Sugar is ubiquitous.  There's lots of it around, too.  It's in everything from the bread you buy at the store to ketchup (yes, ketchup actually contains enough sugar that the American Diabetes Association recommends you phase it the hell out of your diet, or at least your kids' diet.  No foolin'.).  Peanut butter has 3 grams of sugar in it per serving, unless you're buying the "natural" kind, like we do.  Even stuff that tells you it has "no added sugar" probably still has plenty of sugar, in the forms of corn syrup, fructose, galactose and so on (because our government lets food manufacturers list these separately with food ingredients like they aren't really sugars, which they are). So it's probably impossible to entirely get rid of added sugar in your diet.  However, just because it's impossible to be perfect doesn't mean you can't try really hard to get rid of as much of it as possible, and when I took a look at how hard I was trying, the answer was basically, "Not very."

I mean, yes, I don't eat most junk foods anymore, and I try to stay away from stuff that's made to be sweet, like cakes and cookies and things like that.  But there were loopholes.  I'd somehow convinced myself that frozen yogurt, for example, had less sugar than ice cream and was therefore okay to eat. (Which it does, but not much less, and it varies by type and flavor, so it's really not a good guideline at all.)  There were two other foods I couldn't seem to stop eating, either.  Chocolate and breakfast cereal.  Yeah, breakfast cereal doesn't really seem to be a big deal, but if you stop and look at the package labels, a lot of breakfast cereals have a heck of a lot of sugar in them.  And chocolate--well, it's chocolate. Even the bitter varieties that I was eating to ward off menstrual cramps (which did work, actually, though the success kind of came and went) still have plenty of sugar in them.  I get a serious, mad rush from added sugar.  If I snarf down something with a lot of sugar in it, especially on an empty stomach, something happens to me that's very much like what I imagine cocaine would be like.  I could never afford cocaine to test this theory, though.

So I came back from this convention pretty well convinced that I had to get rid of as much sugar as possible. And then I got really sick, and I ate whatever was there because I didn't have the energy to cook, so I'm kind of just starting now.  I've been able to quit the frozen yogurt (partially because it's expensive; I mean like $5 a fix--that's almost as much as a dime bag of heroin).  I've been able to quit the breakfast cereal, because Joan buys the groceries and I told her to quit buying it and she did and we ran out and now there isn't any.  I'm not sure about the bitter chocolate, though I made it through this last menstrual cycle without munching on any of the stuff.  But I'm pretty optimistic I can pop ibuprofens instead of bitter chocolate and the world won't end.

So now it's time to look at all the little things.  Read labels.  Check ingredients.  Figure out ways to get the amount of added sugar down to as little as possible.  I think I'm going to have to start making my own bread again, for one thing, because I know how much sugar I put in bread when I make it (very little) and I know how much is in the loaves you buy at the store (lots).  Oh, that's just heartbreaking, being forced to make my own bread (I love making bread, though I don't actually eat that much of it).  I'm making breakfast smoothies with tofu instead of plain yogurt, because plain yogurt actually has 8 to 10 grams of added sugar in it (yogurt! Plain yogurt!) whereas tofu has none whatever (and it's cheaper, too).  You have to blend it longer, but that's okay.  I will be eating a lot of fruit.  I love fruit, it's sweet, and because there's all that fiber and nutrition and stuff in it, it doesn't hit my brain like a cocaine rush. I can happily eat fruit instead of sugary things.  Well, mostly happily.  Well, sometimes grudgingly.

But I'm gonna do it.  What's more, I'm gonna do all that other stuff, like call people (I hate calling people; maybe I'll just text people) and work on the Steps and all that. I think Joan would call this "drinking the Kool-Aid," but hey, I'm a nicer person without the sugar.  I'm like actually sponsoring somebody now, which means I have to be responsible and set a good example.  Bleah.  Today I managed a 15-minute walk at lunchtime.  And I'm getting right back into the pool.  As soon as I can breathe, that is.

Mini-Post: The Visitor

(not for arachnophobes)

So I went to this conference over the weekend, and I definitely want to talk about that, but first I have to tell you about something that happened this morning.  I'm at the pool, right, and I'm swimming, right, and I pull up at the other end of my lane to, I dunno, change fins or something, and there on the lane line is a big creepy bug.

You know what lane lines are, right? They're made up of numerous plastic circles and they stretch across the lane, dividing it from the next lane and breaking up any waves that form, right?  Well, there's this bug, sitting on top of the lane line like he owns it.  Now, I don't like creepy bugs, and I definitely don't want one in the water with me, and it's bound to end up in the water if it's sitting on the lane line.  So I try to get it onto my kickboard so I can flick it away toward the Aquatics Office, where there's a handy drain and some plants and stuff where a creepy bug will probably be fine.

Swim paddle

It will not cooperate. Every time I try to get it onto the kickboard, it goes to hide between two of the plastic circles.  So finally I swim down to the other end of the pool, grab one of my paddles and swim
back.  Aha, now I have a scoop-like thing that I can use to push this guy onto the kickboard.  But he still doesn't want to go.  He crawls down the other side of the lane line.  Then he crawls between two of the plastic circles. Then, finally, he climbs on top of the lane line and cusses me out.

Well, that's what it looks like he's doing, anyway.  He's waving his forelegs and carrying on.  And at this point I lose my temper. I say, "Look.  If you sit here, you're going to get hit by a wave sooner or later, and you're going to end up on the bottom of the pool and you're going to die.  And I don't want you in the water with me, because you might end up on my head or something and then I'll have apoplexy and maybe stroke out.  So if you would please get up on this fucking kickboard, right now, I'll get you out of here and then we'll both be happy.  Okay?"

(This must have been great for my fellow swim team denizens. "Hey, Coach, the fat lady's talking to a lane line.")

Anyway, right after I finish this speech, the creepy bug turns around and climbs right up the kickboard.  Thanking God, I take my swim paddle and flick him toward the Aquatics Office.  He rolls across the floor just like a marble.  And I'm thinking "mission accomplished" and I'm about to get back to what I'm doing when suddenly he explodes.

Well, that's what it looks like, anyway.  Lots of little pieces fly in all directions.  But the pieces are--moving.  And they appear to be running after the creepy bug, which is running down the drain.

And then it hits me.  It's not a bug.  It's a spider.  A big spider.  With babies.  Lots and lots of babies.

I can't see very well with my goggles on, you see.  They're not prescription.

So I can't decide which is creepier.  That there might be thousands of baby spiders crawling all around near the pool, or that spiders can apparently understand English.  I mean, I've heard they're fairly intelligent, figure out mazes in laboratories pretty quick and stuff like that, but mastering communication with big beings like me?  I mean, that's pretty amazing.  And creepy.

And I thought, what about when you're in one of those bad situations that you have absolutely no idea how to fix, and it looks completely hopeless, and suddenly something changes and it all turns out okay?  Is that something like a higher being coaxing us up onto a kickboard so it can flick us and our babies out of harm's way? Because if it is, I'll bet that happens all the time.  Only we're not spiders, so we don't know it.

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.

Kindle This

Okay, it wasn't this bad. It was bad, though.

So I went to Brother ChiSing's funeral last Sunday.  I gotta say, it was the best Baptist funeral for a Zen Buddhist I've ever been to.  Let this go to show you, folks, that no matter how explicit you are in your will about what you want for your funeral, your family will always win, because they're alive and you're not. And it's really for them, anyway, isn't it?  But there were some bizarre moments.  Firstly, Brother ChiSing made an appearance in a coffin. That's not very common in Buddhism, though I'm aware it's common in America in our time.  (He looked awful, too.  Shriveled up.  Not sure what caused that, the illness or the fact that he'd been dead for almost a week.)  Second, he was buried, like in a coffin in the ground, which I'm positive wasn't his idea. Thirdly and most odd of all, they put him in a suit, jacket and tie for the occasion. Look, I didn't know the man well, but I did know him for almost ten years and I promise you, he did not ever wear a suit, jacket and tie.  Worse still, it was a  brown suit, jacket and tie.  I mean, does anyone even wear brown suits?  I thought they went out with green ones in the 70s, and good riddance and all that.

And I mean, the Bible readings and stuff were okay, and the barbershop quartet was a nice touch, but when the pastor announced that "Norman" (yes, his real name was Norman) "will be waiting for us in the Christian heaven, with all those that have gone before him," I expected ChiSing to get out of his coffin and just walk out in disgust. Of course, he couldn't do that because he's probably already a newborn in Sri Lanka or someplace. ChiSing was not one to wait around.  Thankfully, there will be a second memorial service at the meditation center, and it will be a raucous, noisy celebration of life. Plenty of music, some dancing, snacks to be served afterward.  That would be Sunday, April 3 at 5:00 at CSL, 4801 Spring Valley Road  No. 115, Dallas, TX. See you there.

Meanwhile, a really good friend gave me a nifty gift; a writing master class with James Patterson.  Yes, that James Patterson, purveyor of airplane books the world over. (And in case you do not know what an airplane book is, I'm going to tell you.  It's the sort of book that you pick up because you realize when you get to the airport that, in spite of careful packing, you don't have anything to read on the airplane, which, if you're a reader, is like trying to cross the desert without any water, and so you run into the little airport bookstore thingy and grab something from the display in the front and then you read it on the airplane and forget about it half an hour later.  Which doesn't mean it's a bad book.  I mean it kept you entertained on the airplane, didn't it?  It's just usually not all that memorable. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was my lucky exception.)  It's online and I've logged in and so on but I haven't actually watched any of the lectures yet. Why? Because my life seems to be in free fall at the moment.  Between work and swimming and training for this frick'n 5,000 meter race (which just got moved from July to September, which means that I get to train an extra three whole months for this thing, and whose idiot idea was that?  Idiots) I feel like I haven't been home for more than ten minutes at a stretch, except to sleep.

Yet, somehow, this thing I'm writing keeps crawling along.  And, to my surprise, I recently came to The End.  Well, not the actual end.  There's still a little wrap-up and banal dialogue to go, maybe a chapter or so.  But the basic narrative has ended.  The plot has resolved, I guess you could say.  And I've just run into a problem that I basically have never had before in my life: The darn thing is too short.

Too short? you say.  How could a book be too short?  Plenty of books are too long, but too short?  Doesn't happen.  Well, except that it does.  This li'l work of mine just topped 31,000 words.  That is, seriously, between 20 and 30,000 words too short.  Publishers like to print books that are of a certain length because that's how the big ol' printers and cardboard cutters and so on are calibrated.  Make a book that's too long and it's too expensive to print because you have to reset all the calibrations and the page counters and the--actually, I have only the vaguest idea what I'm talking about here, but anyway, there are machines involved and things do need to be of a certain size.  Make a book too short and it's not worth the money to fire up the machines in the first place.  A work of 30,000 words is pretty deep into novella territory.  And what is a novella, you ask?  Let's let Stephen King tell you (I paraphrase, very loosely):  "Buenas tardes and welcome to Novella, senor!  How long will you be staying with us?  A few weeks, you say?  Senor, I have to tell you, you will be in Novella for a very long time, si?"  Silly stereotypes aside, though, it's true. Novellas don't tend to go anywhere.  They just sit there.  Unless they're written by Stephen King, of course, and then they get wrapped up in a collection with three or four other novellas and published like a group of short stories and sell bazillions of copies and make everybody rich.  But I am not Stephen King and this ain't no Stephen King novella.  It's just a cheery yarn about statues coming to life, the impending destruction of all reality, and why it's critically important that we get Fleetwood Mac back together, preferably pre-Rumors.

Believe me, I've tried to make the thing longer.  I've been able to stuff in a few extra sentences here and there.  But for the most part, it just won't go.  It's the length that it is, and the length is too short.  So I'm not sure what to do with it, except maybe publish it on Amazon for 99 cents or, as has been gently suggested to me by people who actually know what they're talking about, more like $1.99.  You don't need calibrated printing machines to make a Kindle file. And you don't even need a Kindle to read one.  You can just go here or to your app store of choice and download the Kindle app, and then you can read it anywhere on your phone or tablet.

So that's the plan, and at the rate things are going I'd say it'll be ready in another month or so. If you think this is a bad idea, let me know, willya?  Because everything sounds brilliant at 3 in the morning when you can't sleep.

Brother ChiSing: 1969-2016

Well, we knew this was coming for months, but somehow nobody was even remotely prepared when Brother ChiSing died on Monday.  Brother ChiSing was my Buddhist monk friend and spiritual director of the Dallas Meditation Center, sometimes called the Awakening Heart Center. He founded the Center back in 2007 with a few friends and some rented rooms at Unity Church of Dallas, and by the time he died we had had our own building and there were something like 200 of us, not counting the walk-ins and general hangers-on.  Besides running the Center, Brother ChiSing recorded music, appeared at local interfaith events, hosted meditation workshops for beginners and just in general did as much as one human being can possibly do to get non-Buddhists interested in meditation.

He's been eulogized plenty on Facebook and there's not one but two memorial services coming up.  We weren't good friends and I wasn't part of the "inner circle" so I feel a little weird about adding my own "what-I-remember-about-ChiSing" thing.  But, I'm gonna do it anyway.  I was one of the few people showing up at the Unity Church back in 2007; not one of the original founders but I was there pretty early on.  The main thing I liked about ChiSing was his endless enthusiasm, which was sort of like a puppy being placed on the floor next to a bunch of new toys. When giving talks he often interrupted himself because such-and-such had just come to mind and he just couldn't wait until later to tell anybody, leading to a lot of "Where was I?  Oh yes..." moments.  And sometimes we never did get back to the original point, whatever it was, but the trip was always fascinating no matter where we ended up.

Brother ChiSing started out as a fairly liberal evangelical Christian pastor of the Baptist stripe.  He ended up getting kicked out of that role when some of the higher-ups "discovered" he was gay, though I can't imagine he was ever very quiet about it so they must have been pretty obtuse.  How he ended up becoming a Buddhist monk was going to be the subject of a book called "From Baptist to Buddhist and Beyond," and I don't know how far into it he was when he got sick.  I hope he left his notes with somebody because I'd love to see it finished.  Anyway, ChiSing met Thich Nhat Hanh at Plum Village in France sometime in the early 2000s and that meeting put him on the Buddhist path.  I've never met the man myself, but I understand Thich Nhat Hanh does that to people.

Anyway, I remember plenty of Sunday evenings at the Unity Church meditating and listening to ChiSing's talks (some of which can be found here, and really, you should give one of them a listen if you have a few minutes.  They really give you a better idea of what the man was like).  ChiSing also hosted daylong meditation retreats about once a month, and I looked forward to those like it was Christmas.  Even when my work schedule changed and I couldn't get to the Sunday night services anymore, I tried never to miss those daylong retreats because they were awesome.  Once, when I'd first been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was still on a manic tear, I thought about not going to the retreat because I wasn't sure I could sit still.  But I went anyway, and kind of bounded into the church like Tigger from the Pooh stories. Bound bound bound bound bound up to the circle of meditation cushions and then dropped down onto one of them.  I looked around at everybody and said, "HI!!"  I could see Brother ChiSing trying really hard not to roll his eyes.  But anyway, he was incredibly patient with me, and I actually did calm down enough to meditate that day.

Another time, I went to a half-day meditation thing, to which I was the only one who showed.  There had been some kind of mix-up with the schedule, apparently.  But ChiSing and I sat and meditated together, and then we went over to the Thai temple to drop off some food for the monks (which is good luck) and just to have a look around.  It's a beautiful temple with a huge golden Buddha inside, and on the wallpaper inside are numerous Buddhist stories, including one picture of a man drowning in delusion while looking at Facebook!  ChiSing pointed this out to me like a kid would show off a tree house he and some friends had built in the forest.  It was a fascinating afternoon.  

In 2012 Brother ChiSing went to Thailand and entered a monastery for a couple of months.  He came back with hair that was about 1/4" long.  Sort of the "punk rock" look.  It was SO not him.  He put up with a lot of teasing about his hair, some of which came from me.  I think I dubbed him "ChiSing Rotten" (after John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten) but that might have been Cornell.

Anyway.  In 2014 ChiSing announced he had been to the doctor, and found out that he had nasopharyngeal cancer.  Chemotherapy was probably never an option due to where the tumor was located but he'd decided against it anyway.  He did have some radiation and some herbal therapies but mainly, he tried to do as much as he could in the time he had left.  During this time, the Dallas Meditation Center got kicked out of our building so it could be torn down to make luxury condos.  This was probably one of the biggest tragedies of his life, but he was focused on getting the rest of us through it instead.  We are now renting space at the CSL Dallas, which is fine, but having a permanent building would really be nice.  Our funding kind of comes and goes with the seasons, though, and landlords have this habit of wanting to be paid every month. To say nothing of employees, maintenance people, etc.

Through most of 2014 and up through this year, ChiSing split his time between his family in Houston and his Dallas family of friends.  He had just decided to enter hospice last week.  He died in his sleep Monday morning.  Not many people have the opportunity to make the kind of impact ChiSing did.  He was lucky.  He will be greatly missed.