Massive Tribal Dump

Give that man a job. Seahawks seventh round draft pick
Justin Forsett ran like a cat dipped in turpentine last night
in the 'Hawks preseason 29-26 OT victory over the Bears.

Greg:

I'm glad you finally got to witness first hand the huge screaming steaming drinking throbbing mass that is a Seahawks game at Qwest Field. Granted, it was only a preseason game, and therefore was only "sports orgy lite". Still, it made our backup QB Charlie Frye's foibles - the interceptions and whatnot - no less rage-inducing. (If he were more competent perhaps we could get "World's Most Athletic Human" Seneca Wallace out where he should be, catching passes instead of backing up Matt Hasselbeck.)

But I have to tell you, every year at the first game when the players come flying out of the tunnel to all the smoke and fire and beer-gurgling fanfare, it reminds me of the scene in "Gladiator" when the fighters are brought up into the light of the coliseum for the first time and all nearly crap their loincloths over the sheer fucking size of it all.

Now you also know how oh-so-very-goddamn loud it is. Again - it was only a preseason game, so it was "ear-splitting lite". Increase that cacophony by a factor of 2.5 and you get an idea of what a post-season game is like.

Now that you know what I mean when I say that I find it quite satisfying to take a gigantic emotional dump in public, and to do so without consequences, and to have it be an expected behavior. Also, as you pointed out, to not just take an emotional dump individually, but tribally as part of the tens-of-thousands-strong screaming steaming drinking throbbing mass. (SSDTM for those of you who need an acronym for everygoddamnthing if it gets more than two mentions. I'm looking at you, Microsoft. -Ed.)

If you know me as well as you do, dear brother, it begs the question how I, who never had the athletic inclination to throw my voice fer Winchell's sake, would become a frothing sweating screaming flailing fan of football. (Or FSSFF. Not the second mention yet. I know. I'm just getting ready. -Ed.)

Easy. I think football is a dharma. It represents an integral concept of this difficult and oft-confusing life that is represented in my favorite fuckin' haiku of all goddamn time from Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828):

It is a dewdrop world

Surely it is

And yet

And yet -

Football is only a concept. (Oh yeah? Try convincing Bears backup QB Caleb Hanie that the 600-pound sack of man-crete that flattened him last night was a concept. I'm sure his chiropractor would like to hear that too. -Ed.) (Quiet you! -TRG.) It is what it is - to flog a hackneyed football interview phrase - because we all agree that it is. The fans, the players, the coaches, the ticket scalpers - you get the drift. It only has as much importance as I interpret it to have. I scream until I hyperextend my pyloric valve in anger when our backup quarterback Charlie Frye throws an interception, but I do so by choice. If it were, say, Bears QB Rex Grossman throwing the interception, I would shriek with glee and dispense high-fives to everyone within high-fiving range.

I find it enjoyable to become a FSSFF (Nice! -Ed.) because it is one of the few times in life when I am conscious of the emotional choice. In the rest of my life, it's not like that. Someone tells me shocking news and I startle. People die and I weep. My brother grieves and I despair. The cat pukes on my bedspread and my heart is filled with blackest rage. All of these things, though they seem appropriate to the situation, arise spontaneously and therefore seem as autonomic as a sneeze.

All these emotions, however autonomic they may seem, arise from values that I possess: the worth of my bedspread and the importance of my brother's well-being, for instance. These could be subject to emotional choice as well. I could choose to help others breathe through their upsets as I breathe through mine, to listen compassionately when my brother grieves, and transform the urge to punt the cat into compassion for his dyspepsia. (Or if you must punt the cat, punt him delicately and with loving-kindness. -Ed.)

But I will always rage over the foibles of Charlie Frye, because as Issa put it so succinctly two hundred years ago:

It is a preseason game

Surely it is

And yet

And yet -


Cheers, -Thaddeus

The Church Of Crunch

Namaste, Motherf#$%er! The Buddha of Violent Compassion drops
220 pounds of enlightenment on Cardinals kicker Mitch Berger.

Greg:

I took time off from being a mold farmer to attend Sunday's Seahawks v. Cardinals NFC West Divisional Championship Extravapalooza at Qwest Field ("Home Of The Loud Crowd"). I cannot tell you how much joy it brings me to be able to go to games, especially games where a hardcore Nichiren Buddhist like Seahawks kick returner Josh Scobey delivers the full weight of karma to Cardinals punter Mitch Berger in his own end zone, resulting in a safety for the Seahawks and instant enlightenment for the entire crowd of 68,000 (see above). Ironically, (...or not. -Ed.) Qwest Field is where the Dalai Lama will be laying down the hits on happiness and compassion next April. Believe me, I'll be screaming my guts out from the 300-level on that day, too. I predict that he will sack ignorance for a loss. I can hardly wait to see his end zone dance. (Wait, the Dalai Lama plays both offense and defense? No wonder he won the Nobel. -Ed.)

Digression: I heard this great bit in a standup routine once. "Why is it that football players blame themselves when they do poorly and thank God when they win? Just for once I'd like to hear a player say, 'I was doing great until Jesus made me fumble.'"

Which brings me to the subject of sports and religion as the two things seem to be inextricable. And I'm not talking just during player interviews. I submit as evidence Exhibit A below:


Exhibit A: The Reverend Leonard Weaver, who coincidentally plays fullback for
the Seattle Seahawks, resists tacklers like he was a solid steel I-beam rooted
in The Jesus. He had four receptions for 56 yards on Sunday as the Seahawks
beat the Cardinals to clinch the NFC West...with yours truly propelling his
team to victory by screaming his guts out from section 342, row EE, seat 1.

I mean check it out, what was that crazy basketball game those Aztecs used to play? (Mayans, but who's counting? -Ed.)And weren't all those games to the greater glory of the god Chocolatl or something? And the Olympics - weren't they also for the greater glory of the Divine Residents of Mount Olympus? And now football - isn't pretty much everything that happens in football for the greater glory of The Jesus? I have no answer for that, nor do I have further musings. Although I find it interesting how at the end of each football game, a large contingency of players from both teams gather at center field to pray. One presumes that because they're praying en masse, it is a group effort of peace and compassion. Maybe it's not. Maybe they're all praying something like, "Lord, whensoever we see these muffuckers here present up in our house, may we rain Thy vengeance upon them, and tear they muffuckin' heads off fo' sho' next time. We ask this in sweet Jesus name. Amen." (It reminds me of a line from the Civil War film Glory: "May I fight with the rifle in one hand and the good book in the other." -Ed.)

Sylvia Boorstein gives a nod to football fans in her book "It's Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way To Happiness". She dispels the notion that we (meaning Buddhists) are all about serenity and equanimity 24/7. We don't watch sporting events hoping that just the best team will win. Buddhists get as wound up about competition as just about anyone else, and it's perfectly okay to do so. Gelugpa monks go after theological debates like they were being televised on WWF Smackdown. Besides, there's nothing in the dhammapada about not freaking right the hell out over sporting events, like when some douchebag official destroys the sanctity of the Super Bowl by making a spate of doubtful calls. (Still bitter? -Ed.)

Likewise, I think it makes a huge difference when you choose to recognize both fandom and the game itself as dharma. Then football becomes a play that has the power to reveal the deepest values of nature, just like anything else would that you choose to recognize in that way. Football, fans and all, has no inherent reality, and is purely a contrivance based on arbitrary rules. And upon close inspection, (introspection?) I could say my life is pretty much the same damn thing. (Put. The Bong. Down. -Ed.) But in either case, it doesn't keep me from screaming my head off when I feel moved to do so, either in real life or at Qwest Field. The difference is that I often forget that real life is just a play as well.

I'm glad that I didn't forget that while my basement was flooding all to hell last Monday. As we were mopping and bailing, I said to Aaron (mostly to remind myself) that we should probably nevermind the rug, the walls, and the other tangible losses for now. I said the most valuable thing we probably had at that moment was our sense of humor. (Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how'd'ya like the play? -Ed.)

Speaking of play, I have to work now.

Cheers, -Thaddeus

Who Flipped The "Old Man" Switch?

Because he's bony and he tastes like shit, that's why.
Apparently my squeaky-clean vegetarian lifestyle hasn't done
my heart any favors. If I'm going to stay youthful, it looks like
I'm going to have to start eating people's pets.

Greg:

So I told you about the exam I got last week. Well I just got the blood test results and greeted them with a resounding WHAT THE CRAP?! Last year when I went in for my 40,000 mile checkup, my cholesterol was low, my blood pressure was fine, and they told me that I was in great shape for a guy my age. They even did an EKG on me and told me that I had the heart of a much younger man. And I said, "Yes I do. I keep it in a jar on my desk."

But then comes this year. Dr. Pitt's assistant calls me up day before yesterday to tell me that in the last year, somebody came by and flipped the "Old Guy" switch. All of a sudden my cholesterol is up, my blood pressure is up, I have "moderate cardiac risk" markers (whatever the shit those are), and they tell me to go on aspirin therapy. All of a sudden I'm 70. Fucking hell. Oh yeah, and there's blood in my whiz. How unbelievably not-awesome is that? And apparently all I had to do in the last year to get into this decrepit state was to maintain a strict vegetarian diet, work out at least three times a week, and hike about 200 miles - including, mind you, the transect of a 10,000 foot mountain pass - twice.

There can only be two explanations for this. 1) Jesus hates me. (That's a given. -Ed.) 2) When my old doctor, Dr. Cranky McGrumpenstein told me last year that my cholesterol was low, he warned me that my "good" cholesterol count (that's HDL for those of you who don't obsess on WebMD every day) was low also. He said - what was it now? Oh yeah, he said that might eventually lead to an increase in my bad (LDL) cholesterol since one balances the other. So he told me I oughtta go eat some fish once a week or so. I said no fuckin' way. He said how come? I said because it freaks me out. So he said fine, it's your funeral. Which, according to my recent blood test, it most assuredly is.

The good news is (or so they tell me at Dr. Pitt's office) that all of this can be corrected with diet and exercise. I gotta eat more oats, get more exercise (if that's possible - I'm going to see if they'll let me put a cot in the gym), and - ulp - eat fish oil. I don't mind telling you that last one freaks me out major bigtime. But I'm doing it. I'm freaking out on the inside, but I'm by God choking down my Omega-3 Fish Oil pills...chanting the Jewel In The Lotus mantra under my breath the entire time. But if I don't do it, I'm afraid my entire contribution to this life is going to be the following ironic headline: MODERATELY ATHLETIC VEGETARIAN PACIFIST DIES OF HEART ATTACK. Everything we know is wrong, say weeping pack of mantra-yodeling holistic doctors. But hey, on the upside, I figure if I was a fish, I'd want to be eaten by a Buddhist. Wouldn't you? Of course you would. So there you go. Maybe it's not all that bad.

Which brings me to the dream I had last night. Yes, there was meat in it. I dreamt that I was sitting at the dinner table and there was a big, juicy chunk of prime rib on a plate in front of me and I was really really really hungry. (One of my elementary school classmates back in Pontiac, MI once defined the word "ravenous" as follows: "Whens youse hungry, dat's whens you jus' wants sumpin' to eat. But whens youse ravenous, dat's whens youse hoonnngry!") In other words, I was ravenous. But the idea of eating meat was still freaking me out, as it always does. So I sat there and started reasoning about eating it, which led to rationalizing about eating it, which lead to outright denial and lying to myself. And then I cut a chunk off and put it in my mouth...and yeccchh. Not only did it taste rancid, it tasted like soap. Rancid meat soap is what we're talking here. (Soap? WTF? -Ed.) I durn near puked. Guess that means I'm still a vegetarian.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Loving Everyone, Squirrels And A-Holes Included

Scariest book you'll ever read. It's a scary, scary
squirrel world, and we're just living in it.

Greg:

It's me, Thaddeus. Remember me? I showed up in your house somewhere back in 1962 - June, I believe. The 27th, to be exact. 45 years and three days ago. You thought mom and dad had brought a puppy home from the hospital. Ring a bell?

I'd have to use a calendar to recall how long it has been since I heard from you. And not just any calendar. I mean the Mayan Calendar, because it seems like millennia. I know you have a penchant for holing up inside your tuba with a peanut butter sandwich and a book of Green Stamps, thrift and nut butters being your keenest interests. But you should really poke your chalky-white face outside once in a while and take a look at who's making all the racket. You may find that it's me, the puppy your folks brought home from the hospital, begging you to throw me a bone. Or a word. Whatever.

I've been doing things. Working, for one. Reading, for another. I got a couple of really great books for my birthday. One was "Squirrels of the West" (Tamara Hartson, editor). Squirrels have filled me with a combination of warmth, fascination and horror ever since we had one as a pet when we were kids. Remember Desiree? Our little pet squirrel that we kept in the house who taught herself how to ride the turntable on the stereo? (Squirrels are such smart little bastards! Cross a monkey and a rat, get a squirrel. S'true. It's in every squirrel's creation mythology that they are the descendents of Hanuman and Karni Mata. Just ask one.) And remember how she pooped on, like, everything we owned? Living with a partially-domesticated squirrel is like randomly firing crap-rockets inside your own home. Few except us will ever experience the exhilaration of a chittering, crapping blur whizzing by their oatmeal bowl and caroming off the walls first thing in the morning. Unbelievable that we got away with it. No wonder dad drank so much. Either he let us get away with it because he was anesthetized by a half-rack of Carling most of the time, or he kept himself half-racked as a defense against random crap-rocket attacks. Not too sure which. Anyway, the book lets me feed my fascination with these vituperate, tree-dwelling rodents in the comfort of my own home, where I'm now safe from crap-rocket attacks. That is until I step outside of course.

Perhaps this book will teach me how to harness the power of squirrels for good. This has been one of my goals in life, believe it or not. A friend of mine once wrote a play wherein squirrels were a pervasive and aggregate evil. Hundreds of them would combine to create human forms and then attack the unsuspecting, Trojan Horse style. Not too far from real life, if you ask me. Judging from his personality, my cat could be nothing more than a dozen bilious and phlegmatic squirrels held together by cat-shaped spackle who are just waiting for the opportunity to explode like a seed pod and attack me from every corner of my being. But what if I could harness those squirrels and use their combined power to mow the lawn, replace my toilets, or shoot out the legs of my rivals? (That's a job best left for raccoons. -Ed.) Then I could make some real money. Then I could drive down Broadway in a faux gold trimmed Lincoln with a license frame that read "My Other Car Is A Squirrel".

The other book I got for my birthday was "Best Buddhist Writing 2006" which is more of a hoot than its title would lead you to believe. Usually books on religious matters are all too serious and leave me feeling like I've taken some kind of medicine that does nothing more than make me feel bad for being a schmuck. Not so much with this book, though. Allow me to submit as proof the laugh-out-loud-funny and deeply touching "Hair Braiding Meditation" by Seattle poet Polly Trout that is included in the book.

May I be filled with loving kindness. May I be well. May I be peaceful and at ease. May I be happy.

May my daughter, who wants a billion tiny little braids this morning, be filled with loving kindness. May she be well. May she be peaceful and at ease going to school with a billion tiny little braids.

May her best friend, who got a billion tiny little braids put in her hair at Club Med Ixtapa last week, be filled with loving kindness. Also her mother, may she be peaceful and at ease. And the woman the mother hired to do all that cornrowing, may she be well. May she be happy.

May I be filled with loving kindness as I put in these billion tiny little braids. May I be peaceful and transcend greed. Also, may I go to Club Med Ixtapa next season, when the beach will be even more inspiring due to my newly enlightened and greed-free state. May I be happy.

May my coworkers be filled with loving kindness as they wonder why I am late for work as I make these billion tiny braids. May they be peaceful and at ease.

May my daughter not notice that these braids are not nearly as cute as her friend’s braids that got done professionally in Ixtapa, or if she does notice, may she be peaceful and at ease about that, please for God’s sake.

May my toddler, currently trying to vie for my attention as I make these tiny braids for her big sister, be filled with loving kindness. May she be peaceful and at ease.

May my mother, who did this for me when I was five, be filled with loving kindness. May she be peaceful and at ease. I wonder why I never thanked her for that.

May I remember this day sitting with my daughter, braiding her hair, late for work again, peaceful and at ease, happy.

There's also the work of Marc Ian Barasch, an apparently very prolific Buddhist writer who I've never had the pleasure of reading before. What I really like about him is that he's a sort of Buddhist Everyman, a Dharma-working shlub who readily exposes his multiple warts and confesses his manifold failings in the face of his Bodhisattva vows. It's kind of like what it would be like if Thich Nhat Hanh did slapstick. My kinda thing, in other words. I highly recommend his essay "Searching for the heart of compassion". Aside from being quite engaging on an intellectual level, it's just plain fun reading. There's something very refreshing about teachers who engage in this sort of reverse pedagogy: "I can't tell you how to do it right, but I can tell you how many times I had good intentions and still completely fucked it up. Maybe you can pick up where I left off."

Which brings me to a point which I consistently get hung up on: how to love the assholes in your life. As Barasch says in his essay, it's pretty easy to love the good people. Our expressions of compassion get winnowed down to the precious few in our lives. But compassion is supposed to be for everybody. And everybody means everybody: you, me, that guy I don't know, that asshole that wants to kill me, squirrels - everybody. The issue that I'd like to addressed exhaustively is how to express compassion for people who hate you. Better still, how to express compassion for people who will turn around and use your compassion to harm you. I mean, c'mon. Everyone has had that happen one time in their lives. There are people in the world who will do whatever they can to capitalize on the best part of your nature and will at some point use whatever you say or do to stab you. One of that species of person is mentioned in the article, but the issue is only dealt with briefly, and that is to say that a line was drawn in the sand. "Letting you use me as a doormat isn't good for either of us, so in the spirit of compassion, I'm telling you in the kindest way possible to fuck off and stay fucked off. Namaste." But there has to be more you can do than that, isn't there? Or is there? Maybe there comes a point when you're dealing with someone who can't help but be abusive that you just have to say "Okay, I'm done" and break that contact permanently. Maybe the only way to make that action compassionate is to not do it in a spirit of anger or retribution, but in a spirit of contributing to mutual well-being.

Or maybe I should just sic some squirrels on 'em.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Ruminating: It's Not Just For Cows Anymore (Happiness Part 10)

Joy may be fleeting, but self-loathing and doubt are
lifelong companions. Just ask my editor. (Props to my homey
Marc Chagall.)

Greg:

Remember that "happiness experiment" I was doing, the one where every night, I'd write down three things that had made me happy that day? Well I decided that I'd stop doing it for a while to see if any of the benefits that I had received from doing the exercise would disappear and if I'd go back to my old cycles of thinking. I got some interesting results.

By the way, this is how I help combat animal testing. I do experiments on my own brain rather than, say, a Rhesus monkey or, say, my cat. My own brain is less expensive, is right here where I can reach it all the time, and I don't have to clean up any poop. I foresee a glowing, cruelty-free future where all psychology students will do the same. I also foresee a future of totally wigged-out zombies who roam the earth in search of research grants so that they can feast on the sweet, sweet money inside them. But that's a discussion for another time.

So did I go back to my old thought cycles? Yes and no. The "lows" in my day-to-day mood never returned. I never had what I would term a "bad" day since I started the exercise or since I took a break from it. There was always something positive, some accomplishment that I sensed in the back of my mind. The feeling of "everything's going to be okay", even if it was only slight, never went away whether I was doing the exercise or not.

However, I did go back to ruminating quite a bit. As I've said before, I believe that rumination is at the center of every neurosis, so that covers pretty much everything except maybe the schizophrenias, brain damage, and organic disorders. I also think that rumination must be in large part a chemical process in the brain. I know that it can be controlled by the same supplements that help defeat the over-firing of neurons that occurs in the locus ceruleus of people like myself who suffer from panic disorder. (Think of over-firing as a sort of "feedback loop" that doesn't stop when it's supposed to.) Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is an over-the-counter supplement that works pretty well, but if you take too much of it or take it for too long, it inhibits your ability to...oh what's that thing? The thing that you do when there are thoughts in your head? Oh yeah...THINK. And that...ummm...what's that thing where something's really bad and you hate it? Oh yeah...BLOWS.

Don't even get me started on Elavil, Norpramin, Xanax, Valium, or Imipramine. I think those should all be reclassified in the PDR as Schedule IV Dick-Wilting Barbiturates. (Was that crude? Beg pardon.)

But back to the point. Since I stopped doing the exercise, any kind of...how shall I say this...negative stimulus, whether it was general stress (traffic, work, and the myriad daily frustrations) or specific stress (my ex-wife calling me names - everything from "sub-human", "complete failure" and "sperm donor" to "faux Buddhist"), caused me to go off into wild tangents of rumination, sometimes lasting for days.

(Hey, cut her some slack. At least she didn't call you "motherfucker" this time. Although I can see how her calling you that, while it may have been intended as hurtful, borders on comically tautological. -Ed.)

(Oh yeah. Hilarious. But c'mon, don't make fun. People who are that pissed are not having a good life. Don't contribute to the suffering. That ain't right. -TRG)

(Oh dude, c'mon that was AWESOME! I even threw in the word "tautological"! That was fuckin' SWEET! That'd get you hella points in Scrabble! -Ed.)

(May I continue? -TRG)

(Whatever, ya fuckin' faux fuckin' Buddhist fucker. -Ed.)

(Thank you for giving me an opportunity to practice. Namaste. Now onward. -TRG)

And I don't mean ruminating just a little. I mean quite a bit. On the upside, it wasn't the old, negative kind of rumination, like "how can I retaliate? or "on a scale of one to a billion, how hateful can I feel?" Instead it was more along the lines of "what is the best, most ethical way to handle this?" And then afterward ruminating ad infinitum on whether I handled the situation well or not.

Well I've pretty much decided that whether it's ruminating on good things or bad, ruminating at all - if it doesn't have any specific outcome - is a pretty huge waste of brainpower, not to mention a phenomenal waste of time. It's like putting your car up on blocks and revving the hell out of it in neutral. Even if you engage the clutch, nothing is going to happen. In the meantime it's a huge waste of fuel - and with gas prices being what they are this Memorial Day Weekend and what with the Global Warming and all the drowning of the polar bears and whatnot, and all the stinky of the exhausty fumes blowing into the neighbor's yard while he's trying to have a barbecue, and then him getting all aggro with the threats and the dog and the shotgun...well, you can see how ruminating just makes it bad for everyone.

Okay. So. Yeah. Here's the good part. Just one day of doing the happiness writing exercise brings all that unnecessary rumination to a tire-barking halt. I know because I resumed the exercise. It was like Baby Jesus poured out a mighty flood of calm that immediately extinguished my brainfire. The experience was truly phenomenal. It's as though the action of focusing on things that made you happy even for a moment completely negates the brain's ability to ruminate. It's as though you can't be miserable and happy at the same time. Shocking I know. (Whatever, ya fuckin' faux fuckin' failed cognitive scientist. -Ed.) (Namaste. -TRG) It's also probably something that Big Pharma would hate for you to find out, but there you are. If doing this simple exercise is all it takes to elevate a person's general mood and inhibit if not altogether stop neurotic ruminations, then Big Pharma is going to go broke. And I know there must be something to this because I performed this experiment on the most jacked-up brain I could find: my own.

Cheers, (Whatever. -Ed.)

-Thaddeus

Best. Week. EVER.

Man, what a jerk! It may surprise you to know that a lot of
people thought the Buddha was a douchebag of simply epic
proportions and told him so to his face quite frequently. Good
thing they did and he talked about it, otherwise I'd have no
idea what to do when it happened to me. Blessings come in the
strangest packages.

Greg:

I've had the best week EVER. You couldn't top it if you tried. And when I tell you everything that has transpired, you're gonna thing I'm being facetious, or nuttier than an acre of squirrel crap, or grasping your frilly underdrawers and giving them a firm tug, or all three. Let me assure you I am not. I'm totally serious.

Don't get me wrong. Nothing good happened. And a bunch of stuff happened that was quite arguably bad, or would at least make a minor saint wring his or her stigmata-covered hands in despair. But it was still the best week ever because I didn't forget to practice the Dharma!

Look, c'mon, I'm not holding myself up as a paragon of patience or virtue. I've been pretty much a hypertrophic bleeding heart at the parade of my own pity most of my life. And I still may very well be. But at least I'm figuring out how to not make myself or others suffer for it. And that, dear brother, is the very first step on the Eight Fold Noble Path. (Or not. You prolluby oughtta go back and read "Buddhism for Dummies" again. -Ed.)

So here's what happened. I gots a whole list.

A few days ago, I got two crowns way back in the hurty part of my mouth, way back where the ear canal connects to the hurt bone. First they stabbed me in the facial nerve when they were delivering the anesthetic (felt like somebody had clefted my chin with a flaming tomahawk), and then they just kicked my ass for fun with every tool in their arsenal of ultimate pain for a couple of hours. They put one mammoth temporary crown over both teeth, giving me a gigantic dinosaur tooth to crunch on stuff with, which would be ossum if I were seven years old and still liked to eat saplings, but is not so cool when I'm forty four years old and like to eat blazing hot lasagna...which doesn't feel so good on an inflamed double-mammoth-crown. So the pain wakes me up at night, and not just the pain, but the whoomp-whoomp-whoomping in my ear because the whole area is as inflamed as the Middle East. So what do I do? I sit. I breathe. I try to remember other people who are also in pain. I try to visualize them all. I don't try to make my pain subside. I just sit there and observe it, and let that pain build more empathy within me for all those other people - like Michael Coates, that guy in the paper I sent money to so he could get his teeth fixed. Why just sit there and observe the pain and use it to generate empathy? Because the Dalai Lama said to. That's what he does when he's in pain. Who am I to argue with that? (Hey, look at what I found! Wikipedia tells me that aspirin was invented in 1899. I bet they're still making it. Maybe you could eat one and sleep at night and dream of all the other people who are sleeping, hmmm? -Ed.)

And then - well I won't bore you with how I spent more than four hours on the phone with Qwest trying to get the long distance at my new house to work. Everybody does that. If you haven't spent four hours on the phone with Qwest, you're just not living a human life.

And the DirecTV guys have been showing up (or not showing up) at my house at all crazy hours. They were supposed to come over between 1PM and 5PM one day. They showed up at 9:30. That's PM. And it wasn't even on the day they were supposed to show up. I made 'em go away. Then on the day they were supposed to show up, they called and said they had a hangnail or terminal ennui or some damn thing, and so they'd have to reschedule me. So I said, sure fine, why not Tuesday night between 6 and 8? And they said why 6 and 8? And I said because I like even numbers. So I get a call this morning - Tuesday morning - at 9:45, which is in no way an even number or night - from a DirecTV guy saying there was nobody at my house to let him in except this one crazy guy who was digging in the backyard for no apparent reason. And I thought "Hey! Great! That contractor I hired showed up to do the excavation!" So me and the DirecTV guy had a big laugh over all the miscommunication and he said you have a great attitude and I said hey, it's my TV not my dialysis machine so who cares? If I miss The Daily Show my kidneys won't fail. And we laughed some more and when I went home for lunch, lo and behold there was a satellite dish perched up on my roof. Finding humor is practice, too.

Is there more? Mais oui.

I got a letter from the IRS telling me that they were disallowing my IRA contributions, and that I owe another $2,211 in taxes for 2005. But if I freaked out over it, that'd mean that I was attached, right? So I didn't. S'just money.

But that's okay.

My ex-wife sent me an email. That doesn't happen every day. She was asking for something, and I thought that when I declined her request I was being pretty reasonable. I said I'd rather take it up with the person it concerns, which was not her. She, on the other hand, did not share my view, and returned to me a raging screed that was awesome (as in it inspired awe - I'm no-shit serious here) in its terrible majesty. As I recall, no portion of my person, heritage, parentage, profession or religion was left unassaulted. (She left out your complexion. I mean, get some dermabrasion for that keratosis, wouldja? -Ed.) You may think I'm poking fun or trying to capitalize humorously on someone who has enraged themselves way beyond reason, but in all seriousness I'm not. First of all, it's pretty apparent that you have to hate somebody pretty bad to disparage their religion as false, call 'em half a dozen names like "phony", "sperm donor", "miserable life entity", a "blind fool", sub-human, and then compare them to George W. Bush. (Surprisingly, no common swear words were used. What the fuck is up with that? -Ed.) I mean you have to sit down and think through what would hurt the worst, and then spend time crafting it into a letter. Malice aforethought. Again, I have to remind you, I'm not making a joke here. So what do you do in a case like that? How do you reply? Even more to the point, why would you reply to someone who is trying to impress upon you in a very specific and exhaustive if not catholic manner that they hate you - as though they were vaulting all their energies into describing the breadth of the sky?

Illuminating point: I have a card on my desk that sits right next to my computer. I read it every day about a million times. I don't think of it as an adage or a bromide. I take it absolutely to heart. It reads:

"Every day, think as you wake up, 'Today I am fortunate to have woken up. I am alive. I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others. I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.'" -H. H. The XIVth Dalai Lama

So, instead of answering rage with rage, I figured that if I really wanted to make difference, I'd have to take that moment to become the peace I wanted to see in the world. You can take refuge in the Dharma only if you can remember to. Again, I can't say that I'm Joe Serene or that I'm the best Buddhist in the world. I get mad, I'm self-centered, I'm short-tempered with people, and I think badly of others sometimes. Christ, I cut people off in traffic yesterday! (Man do I suck!) But at least in this one case for one moment - in the middle of a week like this one, no less - I remembered the Dharma and tried to practice it as well and honestly as I could. (My reply to her is below.) It gives me a little hope that I can do something about the only thing that I can really do something about, which is me.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

L~-

Your opinion is yours, your insults are yours, your anger is yours, and your hatred is yours. However you choose to act on those things is up to you. I can't share that with you, take it away from you, or return it in kind. Nor do I need to defend myself against any of it. Also, it would be wrong of me to try to change you or change your mind and not accept you the way you are. You may believe that you hate me, but I think the fundamental reality is that I am your best friend, and you are mine.

I've never been called names like that or had someone slur my religion until your last email. Being Jewish, you probably have had people slur your religion to your face, and not being Jewish, I can only guess how awful it makes you feel. When I feel like somebody is really trying to make me feel bad, instead of getting really wound up over it, I think of a newspaper story that I read once. I've reprinted it below.

"...try to empathise with the person who harmed you. The Dalai Lama believes that no-one is congenitally evil. He believes that all of us have a right to a certain measure of happiness, and, remember, even people who love you will hurt and sometimes betray you; it doesn't necessarily mean you should sever the relationship.

If these things seem difficult, think of forgiveness as a gift to yourself. The Dalai Lama calls this an 'enlightened self-interest'. No-one benefits from forgiveness more than the one who forgives.

Whenever the Dalai Lama talks about forgiveness, he likes to use the example of Lopon-la, a Lhasa monk he knew before the Chinese occupation. Lopon-la had spent 18 years in a Chinese prison before he was released and came to India.

The Dalai Lama told me: "For 20 years I did not see him. But he seemed the same. Of course he looked older. But, physically, OK. His mind still sharp after so many years in prison. He was still the same gentle monk. He told me the Chinese forced him to denounce his religion. They tortured him manytimes in prison. I asked him whether he was ever afraid. Lopon-la then told me: 'Yes, there was one thing I was afraid of. I was afraid I may lose compassion for the Chinese.'

Namaste,

-Thaddeus

The Big D in SF: Part 1

The Dalai Lama, right, listens to Imam Mehdi Khorasani of the Islamic Society
of California during a discussion of ways to promote understanding and lessen
religious intolerance among Muslims and people of other religious faiths. During
his public talk in San Francisco last Sunday, His Holiness said that since 9/11 he
has become a particularly staunch defender of Muslims. (Genaro Molina/ LAT)

Greg:

Sorry I haven't written in a while, but I was down in San Francisco over the weekend getting a triple-dose of the Dalai Lama. Teresa and I flew down for two days of teachings and a public talk. The whole experience was quite blowing of the mind, so forgive you me if speech mine disjointed becomes. Random observations will I make, rather than unskillfully trying linear thinking to execute. Bicycle underpants; yet frequently razorblade? To be sure. Dilute dilute OK!

Here are the points, in no particular order:

San Francisco is desperately trying to become New York, if only inasmuch as everyone is pissed off to beat the band and is as surly as a legion of wet cats. Why? Search me. (This is not my imagination, by the way. I've had it confirmed by a few returning SF ex-pats.) Never in all the years that I have visited that city have I seen unexpurgated rage on the streets and roadways. One guy actually leapt from his car amdist a sea of tourists at the corner of Union Square to accost another driver. Nor have I ever been exposed to such unpracticed rudeness by metro transit operators. I say "unpracticed" because they're bad at it. They don't seem to have been at it for very long, like their Cheerios only got peed in just this morning. New Yorkers, on the other hand, have had nothing but pee 'n' Cheerios for breakfast since they cut teeth. I can credit New Yorkers for their attitude as they seem to come by it honestly if not genetically. San Franciscans, on the other hand - well, what the fuck, you guys? The last hundred times I visited you were all goodness and light. What happened?

Speaking of surly nutbags - we're at His Holiness' public talk on - what was it - Sunday. First of all, I have to tell you that it's a whole different environment than the teachings. The public talks are always for the scenesters, the same people who would be there if it were Howard Zinn or if it were, hell I don't know, Dave Matthews/Trey Anastasio Duet Nite. They're the curiosity-seekers and a few of the stinky rich Marin County former hippies who dropped $25 large to sponsor the event. So - first nutty experience - I'm walking down the concourse to enter the auditorium, and the guy walking in front of me stops, so naturally I run into his back. Lo and behold it's fuckin' James Hetfield of fuckin' METALLICA. (Per the Chicago Manual of Style, 3rd Edition, METALLICA must always appear in all caps. Otherwise it's just not metal enough. -Ed.) So. Yeah. That was weird. I had half a mind to tell him not to listen too closely to His Holiness. Otherwise it was going to drain the angst out of all his music, and then where would he be? Just another douchebag greasemonkey working in a body shop.

So second nutty experience: The Dalai Lama is taking the stage, getting ready to do his talk, when all of a sudden some guy in the front row starts shouting, "Dalai Lama! Dalai Lama! Can I give you something?" And of course His Holiness cheerfully toddles over to the corner of the stage to accept whatever "gift" this wingnut has to give him. Needless to say, the boys from the Secret Service found absolutely zero humor in this bullshit, and started closing in on the nutbag. I, on the other hand, was in my seat twelve rows back, feeling like I'm watching a movie - you know, like the part right before the killer jumps out of the closet or the starry-eyed nutbag in the first row gives the Dalai Lama a live hand grenade. So now here's the Dalai Lama, extending his hand to take whatever it is that this guy has, and the Secret Service dudes are lined up alongside him, and all of a sudden, Mr. Wingnut hucks - and I mean like pitching a baseball, not a lob - an apple at the Dalai Lama. And then the Secret Service guy closest to the Dalai Lama does this ossum kung fu move and whacks the apple out of the way. I got the impression I was seeing hundreds of hours of Secret Service training in action. I don't think it would've mattered if it were an apple or a grenade or a flaming hedgehog that the guy threw. That Secret Service agent would've done the same thing. And now because of his quick-thinking and bravado in protecting the life of the Dalai Lama, he will receive total consciousness. Nice perk.

So yeah, they bottled Mr. Apple-Hucking Dipshit up and scuttled him out of the auditorium and all was well in the world again. The rest of the talk went off without a hitch.

While I'm on the subject of nutbags (I am, aren't I?), this is the third time I've been to a talk by the Dalai Lama (but only the first time I've been to a teaching), and I've noticed each time that all the white people at the event look like they've been beaten with pillows. Look, you don't have to tell me how my prejudice regarding white people lurks only scant millimeters beneath my skin. (...or on top of your skin; have you seen a mirror lately? Or your parents? What the hell is wrong with you, anyway? -Ed.) But all the white folks have their hair on sideways and have that faraway look in their eyes like they've been beat to shit with a big-ass feather pillow, and if they take ten more steps they're going to fall right the hell down. I know how contact between disparate cultures usually freaks people out, so maybe it's that. We come from a largely war-like culture. So do the Tibetans, come to think of it. They were #1 in the pillaging business way back when. But then they met the Dharma and it freaked them out so hard that they became pacifists. Maybe this is what I see happening to the white folk at these gatherings.

Although I did see/hear a guy in a t-shirt that had the Jewel In The Lotus mantra printed on it give a resounding FUCK YOU! to a cab driver at the event. Change comes slowly I guess, even in the presence of His Holiness.

More next time,

-Thaddeus

Up His Nose

...and believe me, he means it.

Greg:

Want to try something that's just nuts? Stick a Q-Tip up your nose. Seriously. That is some freaked out shit. I did it this morning. It was like I'd taken a tiny sheep or a bunny or something and put it on a ramrod and stuck it in my snout. And then my eyes got all watery and my head got all swimmy like I had just sneezed. It's nothing like sticking your finger in there. Q-Tips have no sensory structures - nerve endings and whatnot - like your finger does. You have no clear way to judge how far you put that thing in there until it's way too late. I swear to the Patron Saint of Otorhinolaryngology (...which is Saint Blase. I'm not shitting you. Google it if you don't believe me. -Ed.), I poked myself square in the frontal lobe. I nearly retarded myself by doing it, and it was a retarded thing to do in the first place. Is that what they call a paradox?

But retarded or not, using a Q-Tip is just a great way to clean your nose. Your finger has all kinds of microscopic beasties on it, but a Q-Tip is made from Cherub Down. It's sterile. You could get impetigo or gout or some other eighteenth century disease from picking your nose. Or somebody could bump your elbow and you could inadvertantly self-lobotomize. And don't even get me started on the time that I stuck the vacuum cleaner hose on my beak and nearly collapsed a lung.

You may well ask what I was expecting to accomplish by sticking a Q-Tip up my nose, and I may or may not tell you. But it's a well-known fact that I've been nasally fixated since I was a wee one. Remember how I used to jam cotton in my nose when I was a kid? Jesus Paint-Huffing Christ, you'd think somebody would've called a social worker or something and said, hey, this kid's packing his nose like he's fixing to ship it to China. Maybe there's something wrong with his brain.

Well we both know how that turned out, don't we? I switched from balls of cotton to fistfuls of cocaine, and by my mid-twenties I had turned into a disc jockey. Everyone knows that cocaine is a gateway drug for broadcasting abuse. If I were an adherent of a 12 step program, I might think that this morning's escapade with the Q Tip was a relapse. As it is, I regard it as acting out - a form of stress release, if you will. I've been doing this house-hunting, mortgage-brokering, contractor-wrangling, paint-chip-selecting, Ikea-safari-ing way too long. I can't drink booze any more because I've already proven to everyone within chundering distance that I'm just plain bad at it. So what opportunity do I have to act out my self-destructive-yet-benignly-weird tendencies that seem to bloom when I'm under stress for protracted periods of time?

Speaking of which, Teresa and I were down at Ikea the other day. (You don't say. -Ed.) As is to be expected when a couple is going through something stressful, like - oh I don't know - buying a house, we were sniping and bitching at each other and getting short tempered. And suddenly it dawned on me that nothing, not even buying a house, was worth souring our relationship over. I mean, c'mon, I go around preaching this happiness stuff like my poop was made out of sunshine, and do I remember to practice it when it counts? Well not always, but at least this time I did. So I told Teresa that while I'd been waiting pretty much most of my life to own a house, I'd also spent a good chunk of my life looking for the girl of my dreams. And lo, here she was. I considered myself one lucky Son of the Lineage to have met her. (It's a Buddhist thing. Google it if you don't believe me. -Ed.) But if owning a house meant fighting with the girl of my dreams, it was totally not worth it. In fact, I told her I'd rather lose the earnest money than be unhappy with her. So yeah, we kinda refocused our perspective on this whole house thing. While we feel fortunate to be on the brink of home ownership, the truly important thing is our happiness.

And that's why we're installing morphine-dispensing Tickle Me Elmo dolls in every room of the house.

I kid! I'm a kidder!

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

HouseHunt '07: Home At Last

GunnMansion 3.0: The Cottage of Industry. It's gonna take
some tough love, brow sweat and hammer blows, but she'll be the
most ossum cottage in the shire when we're done with her.

Greg:

We did it. We made an offer on a house and it got accepted. This was owing in no small part to the efforts of our agent, President-Award-Winning John L. Scott realtor Gloria Lee who put the seller's agent in a headlock and rapped her soundly on the snout until she acquiesced. (Figuratively. Not the "acquiesce" part, the snout part. -Ed.) But more on that later.

So yes, we are 30-some scant days away from posession of a 2BR, 1BA 1930s cottage with a 1BR, 3/4BA legal mother-in-law apartment. And - oh yeah - arched doorways. Picture molding. Coved ceilings. SWEET. And - dig this - a climbing wall in the detached garage! DOPE! (Stop it with the 90s-era hip-hop slang. It does not suit your Urban Bur-Zhwa-Zo-Honk lifestyle. -Ed.) The lady who lives there currently is a mountaineer, so she built a full-on-Kevin's-mom climbing wall, and yes, it can take my weight. I leapt upon it the moment I saw it, bringing the full force of 220 pounds of Scottish love to bear on its frame and it did not protest.

Oh oh oh! Wait! And check this out. She has a full free weight set with dumbbells, a bench and everything, plus a speed bag and a heavy bag. These will be ideal items for relieving the stresses of first time home ownership if I can talk her into either leaving them behind or leaving them behind for money. But yeah, if I can get all the workout equipment too, I'll be a SUPERHERO! The yard will go to hell because I'll be down in the basement every day feeding the pythons, baby!

And speaking of yard, it's hooge! The house is on an 8,800 square foot lot, which in Missouri terms is "cozy" or "a window garden" but in urban Seattle terms is "freaking vast, yo". (Again with the slang. -Ed.) 'Nother thing about the lady who lives there currently: she does landscaping, so she got in the habit of bringing home orphaned plants and plugging them into the ground. Therefore we have three apple trees, three or four lilac bushes, raspberries, blackberries, bamboo, rhubarb, bluebells, rhododendrons - I mean it's like we have some kind of Audobon collection going on back there. Plus we have a gi-normous cedar tree. (Sacred to Buddhists! Big plus! -Ed.) The downside is that the yard, while rife with flora, is undisciplined and looks like exactly what it is - a place where somebody randomly took orphaned plants and plugged them into the ground.

We'll get around to taming the yard eventually. Our first priority, though, is the house. Since the plumbing and wiring are new, the only work we need to do is cosmetic. And I just want to make it clear that we're going to be restoring, not remodeling. Thank the carpenter Jesus that in 70 years nobody came along and screwed up the kitchen or the bathroom in the name of remodeling. They're both still structurally the same as they were when the place was built. And the kitchen still has the original sink and cabinets. Someone did, however, come along and put recessed light cans in the kitchen (why, Jesus, why?). I will be plugging them right the hell up forthwith and restoring the original central and sidewall fixtures - plus cheating a little by installing under-cabinet lighting.

However the first order of business is to throw some new linoleum, carpet and paint into the mother-in-law so we have a decent place to live while the chaos of restoration reigns on the main floor. Teresa and I know you're handy with the tools and stuff, so don't be surprised if you get offered an all-expense-paid "vacation" to Seattle some time this summer. Snicker. Grin.

Oh wait, I was going to say something about the headlock thing. You'll appreciate this since you're in real estate. Yeah, so the house had been on the market three days and we were the only ones who submitted an offer. The owners had planned an open house for last Sunday, but our offer was set to expire on Saturday at dusk. It was a full-price offer with an inspection contingency and a pretty handsome chunk of earnest money, so it wasn't bad. But the seller's agent tried to tell Gloria that maybe if we offered more money, they'd just accept our offer right then and there. But Gloria said NO YOU DIH-INT! NUH-UH GIRL-FREEE-IIND! Knuckles were bared. Claws were unsheathed. Hair flew. Caps were forcefully placed - "popped" as it were - in asses. Forsooth, the seller's agent soon saw the error of her ways, and mutual acceptance ensued.

The inspection is this morning. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Flipped Off: How Speed And Greed Kill Houses

DON'T KILL THIS FLIPPER. Save your rage for those d-bags who
ruin houses and then jack up the price.

Greg:

Know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get a pump-action 12 gauge Remington and ventilate the liver of the next "handyman" I see attempting to "flip" a house.

Yeah, OK - I won't. Yeah I know, I'm all Buddhist and stuff and the whole shooting somebody with a shotgun kinda runs against the grain of the whole compassion thing. (Yeah. Kinda. -Ed.) But I'm hacked at what I see these guys doing to houses, not to mention to what they're doing to prices, and I desperately need to vent my anger by at least soaking one of these guys with a squirt gun filled with wee-wee. That's harmless and it'll get the point across, right?

Let me back up. Here's how I hyperextended my spleen on this particular subject.

Teresa and I are in the market for a house. We have to get something by July 1 because that's when our lease is up. Besides, Crashy McThunderfoot just moved in upstairs, so our apartment is kinda like living in the basement of a bowling alley now. If only to save our eardrums, we must move.

So we're out looking for houses now. You are already well acquainted with my inclination to obsess on turn-of-the-century Craftsman architecture, not to mention work myself into a pungent lather over small domestic gems of the early 20s. So the first house we go to was - at least architecturally - a classic small Craftsman bungalow. My kinda place. Looked great from the street. But oh, Sweet Mother of Gustav Stickley what this man - the owner, who we'll call "Flipper" - had done to the place. It was obvious in very short order that he had tried to flip this house - to improve its appearance quickly and on the cheap so's to fool the first cloth-eared bint with a swollen wallet and leaden aesthetics that walked through its ill-hung front door.

First of all, he must've got the paint and plaster buckets mixed up. The place needed plaster desperately. What it got was 36.8 coats of paint. Even that did not stop the canyons that were forming in the walls even as we watched. Then he replaced all the interior doors with hollow-core pieces of shite; turned the kitchen into a mustard-colored, black-marbled, 1970s love pad, and then - and THEN - painted the Christ-all-freakin'-mighty out of the exterior without - withOUT! - scraping it first. It looked like a case of post-adolescent acne that got a dermabrasion treatment from Lizzie Borden.

Needless to say we didn't buy it.

But - man! - don't you think people like that oughtta be arrested? At least? The Craftsman bungalow is an American architectural icon and legacy. Anyone who compromises one of these places in any manner should at the very least be forced to live in a rusted-out single-wide on the Hanford nuclear reservation. Surely there must be some rule of law whereby these speedy, greedy Home Depot recidivists can be flogged in a very conscientiously designed village square.

But no, this is America, and those who throw art into the meatgrinder of commerce get their own TV show. And those who throw Thomas Kinkade on their walls are looked upon as "art collectors". (Frankly, I'd rather draw on my walls with a poop crayon. But that's just me. And my poop crayon.)

So off we went and continued down the list of homes that we had decided to view that day, and the next was no better. Someone had turned the back porch of a cove-ceilinged 1920s cottage into a very long, narrow bathroom - or rather Bathing/Pooping Assembly Line. If you turned sideways in there you'd be trapped forever. Best to just face the wall and move along. And again, plaster that was practically basted with dusty flat cheap-ass acrylic.

Oh, the price on both of these palaces? 'Bout $380k. I think you can buy Utah for that much now. Which brings me to my next point, which is the fact that house flippers have contributed in no small way to the hysterically inflated prices of real estate in our formerly affordable neck of the Pacific Northwest. (Not exactly so. The increased focus on Seattle because of the Grunge Movement, microbrews, our "liveability" index, and MegaJillionaire Paul Allen's Seahawks - not to mention overpaid Boeing veeps, Genentech billionaires, Immunex zillionaires, a feistly little startup with a can-do attitude called Microsoft - and - the predilection of the mossbacks to fleece California transplants all contributed in their own small way. -Ed.)

Yeah. So. Poop. Not going so well so far with the whole house-hunting thingamadillyo. However, we are venturing down to Tacoma on Saturday to take a look at a Craftsman we found there for a buck-two-ninety-five. We've discovered that you can still find unmolested architectural treasures in Tacoma for cheap. And we've been assured by our agent that the low, low real estate prices have nothing to do with the fact that the city is riddled with crime and smells like baked ass, or that "Tacoma" is the Salish word for "the place where evil dwells". We'll give you a full report when we get back.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Tashe Dalek, Yo!

Snow cornice. Hurricane Hill trail, Olympic National Park. If you're looking for
a place to freeze every single one of you 'nards off during Lunar New Year,
I can't think of a more beautiful place to do it.

Greg:

Tashe muthaphukkin' dalek, and a Gung to the Hay to the Phat to the Choy! It's Lunar New Year, yo! It's 2133, Year of the Boar! Hope this letter finds you eating something made of pork, which in Chinese medicine is a warming food. (Although, don't get me wrong, I can't really endorse the eating of pork since I'm a vegetarian and all. But as I recall your diet consists of about 68% pork so I'm probably correct in assuming that you are reading this with a bag of chicharrons in one hand and a ham hock in the other whether I like it or not.)

Instead of staying in Chinatown and watching my little dog freak right the hell out over all the firecrackers and whatnot I decided to split town, hit the frozen road and do some snowshoeing.

Wait! Wait! I have to tell you something funny that happened even though it has nothing to do with Lunar New Year. Last week I was walking back to the office after lunch and I was just about right in front of the building when I encountered a lady out walking a great big beautiful golden Lab. Musta weighted about 150 pounds. Real pretty dog. So I asked her if I could pet her dog and she said yes - but, "Watch it. He jumps." So I put my hand down there by his snout to let him sniff it and BANG! The dog totally fucking tackles me and - more startling still - starts making those earnest, arduous gyrations that dogs are wont to make in fits of sexual passion. I don't know if you've seen me recently but I'm fifteen and three-quarter stone heavy and eighteen and a half hands high. It takes a shitload of sex-crazed Labrador to knock me down. So the lady starts screaming "CHICO! CHICO! GET DOWN! JESUS CHRIST, GET DOWN!" And I was wondering to myself - while being dry-humped with all the might and mechanical determination of the steam hammer that killed off John Henry - whether the lady knew what the word "jump" actually meant. Once I had wrested myself free from her dog's unsolicited - er - embrace and got to my feet I wanted to say, "Ma'am, your dog doesn't jump. It does something that rhymes with jump. But it does not in fact jump. Get my drift?" But by the time I got my shit back together she was throwing all of her weight into the dog's lead and dragging it off up the street.

As usual, I have digressed. Onward now.

So anyhoo, Teresa and I rounded up some friends and rented a cabin Wayne the Hell out in the wilds of Port Angeles (where the yards are more plentifully sown with rotting Volkswagens than a beach-hippie's crack is sown with grains of sand) and made a snowshoeing weekend of it. T'was a gaye auld tyme. We went to one of our usual summertime stomping grounds, Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. It's a whole different ball of wax (or snow) in the wintertime, though. We decided to take a pretty easy trail that we'd done in the summer a bunch of times: the Hurricane Hill trail. Well, in the summer it's a walk and in the winter it's a freakin' trek, especially with tennis rackets on your feet and snow and 40MPH winds stomping you in the face most of the way. Although don't get me wrong, it was still a blast and a half and rather a hefty workout, and the stunning beauty of the park in winter was more than sufficient fuel for the usual breathless exclamations of love, sacrifice and self-enucleation.

Can I stop right here and do some product endorsements? First, let me just say that there's nothing like brewing up a cup of Boyd's Country Creme with your JetBoil on a snow-covered ridge at 5,500 feet after having trekked a few miles on the best goddamn snowshoes ever. The tenacious grip and feather-like weight of the MSR Lightning Ascent makes snowshoeing a - well I won't say breeze, but it makes it way nicer than doing it with queen sized bedframes of beaver sinew on your feet like the Cheechakos used to do. We were lucky that one of our party - Tami Fairweather, the most mirthful person on this otherwise drab planet - (No, seriously. It's a huge compliment. -Ed.) works for Cascade Designs and five-fingered us a few pairs of these bad boys from the promo pile at the office. Her promotional ploy worked. I shall purchase my own pair anon.

Wait - another word about Boyd's real quick. Every other beverage they produce blows. Their coffee is simply atrocious. You should use it to stun tobacco beetles or something but for God's sake don't drink it. And it probaby took the combined brainpower of thirteen marketing executives to come up with the term "Country Creme" for something that is essentially hot egg nog made from chemicals that would otherwise be sprayed on tenement rats. But with all that said, it's goddamn delicious.

Final product endorsement, then I gotta skeedaddle. The guys from Tempur-Pedic are coming over to replace my box spring. They didn't even quibble for a second when I told them that my box spring was squeaking. They're just up and replacing it - snap - like that. Now that's service. They should be here any minute so I gotta run. Have a looksee at the photos from our trip below.

Cheers, and Happy New Year!

-Thaddeus

Snowshoeing 2.17.2007

WTFWBD?

Michael Coates today. You've probably never seen anyone so happy to see
a dentist.

Greg:

First things first. Michael Coates is gonna be okay. Like I told you in my last letter, an oral surgeon is going to do the work pro bono. I'm sending the money I was going to use for his care to the Auburn Community Dental Clinic instead because as they said in the follow-up article in the Seattle Times ...

...to really get an idea, people should visit a community dental clinic at dawn on the days they treat poor people needing urgent care. "You'll see a line of people holding their teeth and crying," [Coates] said. "I'm not a special situation."

I did write him a letter directly and sent a few bucks for him to get some ice cream. I told him that when I got my wisdom teeth pulled that's about all I could eat. I told him that I even had to put my birthday cake in the blender. (Cake shake is freakin' ossum, by the way. You should try it!)

Onward.


Mahakala, the wrathful deity of violent compassion. He will
kick your ass, but in the nicest way possible. This is the thangka
that hangs in my dining room. Mahakala reminds me to eat
my vegetables...or else.

I watched a documentary yesterday about the destruction of the giant Buddhas in the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan. You may remember that the Taliban government sent out a decree back in late 2000 that all non-Muslim art and statuary was to be destroyed, so that meant the two 1,600 year old giant Buddhas of Bamiyan (180 and 121 feet tall) had to go. So the Taliban rolled up there with a shitload of explosives and spent a couple weeks trying to blow them up. Eventually they were successful. Sixteen hundred years of history and culture blowed to hell.

Seem like a shame? Well here's the ironic thing. Think of it from the dhammapada's perspective. Didn't Buddha preach that "nothing is permanent; everything changes"? As great a loss as it was of irreplaceable historical objects - to paraphrase the ubiquitous bumper sticker, What The Fuck Would Buddha Do? I'll tell you what he'd do. He'd prolly just say, "See? Like I said." And then go off and do shots of rice milk with the monks. I mean, c'mon. Ever seen the kalachakra ritual? A whole phalanx of monks spend a week or more laboring over an exquisitely detailed sand mandala, only to have the Dalai Lama come along and fuck it up. Either it's an object lesson in impermanence, or those monks really have to figure out a way to keep His Holiness' mitts off their sand paintings.

Okay, so the site where the giant Buddhas stood was not uninhabited, mind you. There were hundreds of rooms carved into the cliffs around them, vestiges of an ancient monastery that was part of the whole complex. These rooms were inhabited by the Hazaras, the most persecuted ethnic group in all of Afghanistan. They had been the protectors of the giant Buddhas for the past 1,600 years. Even when the Taliban blew up the statues, they left the Hazara there. It wasn't until some very well-meaning folks from UNESCO and several art-hugging European nations got together and decided that they would rebuild the statues that the Hazara got removed from their ancestral homes. Seems like once you turn something into a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it's okay to keep the frescoes and kick out the folks. No longer living in their cliffside caves, the Hazara have been relocated to a windblown plateau somewhere out in the desert. They're now half an hour from their water source, three hours from the closest bazaar, and freezing their Buddha-loving asses off in the howling wind on a daily basis. Where's the love?

Again, I ask What The Fuck Would Buddha Do? In my self-serving fantasies, I see the Buddha calmly taking in the situation through his all-seeing eyes. Then raising his right hand in the mudra of blessing he says, "Verily, that is some fucked up shit, man." Then, instantly trans-carnating into the form of Mahakala, the deity of violent compassion, he busts down the door at UNESCO HQ and kicks every ass in the place twice. (Those who are not present at that time because they're traveling for business or out sick will have their names taken down by the Buddha for ass-kicking at a later time.) Then re-forming himself into Avelokiteshvara, the Buddha of compassion, he bandages their wounds. Finally, transforming himself one last time back into the Sage of the Sakya tribe, he does shots of rice milk with the entire posse. Then the Hazara go back to their ancestral homes in the Bamiyan Valley caves and live happily ever after. Amen.

So yeah, I know I'm not waking you up to the fact that there's a shitload of misery in the world whether it's infected teeth or eviction from one's ancestral home by well-meaning dipwads. Like I said in my last letter, with so much misery going around, I can see why people do nothing. There's just too much of it, the problem is just too big, and one person can't do anything about the whole problem. But I think that a solution that keeps getting missed is that one person can help one other person. That's not too much to do. There has to be a way to do just that little bit and make a huge difference. Each one help one. That is my rumination for today.

All of this reminds me somehow of my favorite quote from Shantideva. It needs a little introduction if you're not hip to how reincarnation figures into the Buddhist religion. The point is not to try to reincarnate, but to break the cycle of samsara and quit reincarnating. Boddhisattvas are folks like you and me who have sworn off enlightenment and nirvana for themselves so that they can assist all other sentient beings in attaining Buddhahood. Sound like a big job? Oh mais oui. It's probably both the biggest project and the most shit detail on the Buddhist job roster. It's tantamount to saying, "I'm going to forego nirvana and spend eternity trying to bring shitheads to Jesus." (...or possibly bring them to some more appropriate Buddhist deity. -Ed.) So bearing that in mind, it takes compassion-balls the size of pickle jars to say what Shantideva said way back in the 8th century:

For as long as space endures,
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I too abide
To dispel the misery of the world.

Hopefully he got his wish and he's still out there somewhere, bringing shitheads to the Buddha.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

I'm Going To Write My Own Goddamn Book On Happiness

Is this woman really happy, or is she just
being stabbed in the ass by a vengeful Turk?
You be the judge!

Greg:

You know me well enough to know that there are two things in this world that I eat with abandon. One is cheese. The other is self-help books. I became intrigued by the whole self-help genre when I heard about how many billions and gazillions of dollars people spend on that stuff each year. Self-help is the top category by a country mile. They've got everything from books on smoking cessation to websites about dynamite sex for septuagenarians. (Warning: sex and high explosives do not mix, especially if you're old and you have that shaky-old-guy-thing going on. -Ed.) So I thought to myself, hey, what's up with this stuff and why do people buy so much of it? Well I found out after reading everything from the venerable Think And Grow Rich to Change Your Life With St. John's Wort that the single point of all these books is - wait for it - happiness. Period. That's all they're talking about. They're all advocating different ways to make yourself happier. (Or happy at all if you're talking about books on suicide prevention. -Ed.) You could make "How To Be Happy" the title of every single piece of media in the category, and make the current title the subtitle. Like this - "How To Be Happy by not drinking so goddamn much." "How To Be Happy by squirreling away a jillion dollars." "How To Be Happy by losing 38 pounds." "How To Be Happy by smoking an ounce of Jesus every day."

So I found a book simply titled "Happiness" by a fellow named Mathieu Ricard and put it on advance order. It came with endorsements from practically all of my favorite self-help authors, like Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence), Martin Seligman (Authentic Happiness), and Jon Kabat-Zinn (Wherever You Go, There You Are). But in the meantime, I started doing that very simple happiness experiment that I told you about in a previous letter, the one where all you do is before you go to bed each night write down three things that made you happy that day. The effects have been amazing, but I'll tell you more about that in a minute.

Lo and behold, the book shows up seemingly out of nowhere (as I had forgotten that I advance ordered it). And I got about one and a half chapters into it when I suddenly hit my threshhold for self-help books. Something just clicked. I mean, I don't want to sound dismissive of self-help books certainly, as there's a lot of good in them. The thing that made me finally say (internally, thankfully), "OH for the LOVE of PETER DINKLAGE!" was that chapter 2 was all about the Buddhist idea of reality. Look, I'm already a Buddhist, and just thinking about that stuff makes me feel like my ears are screwed on too tight and I'm just about to start peaking on 'shrooms. I can't understand how a non-Buddhist would ever make it past the first three paragraphs.

I mean isn't there a single book out there that goes, "Here's how to be happy. You don't have to understand or adopt an Eastern philosophy. You don't have to be a PhD. You can smoke or not, we don't care. We're not going to beat around the bush. We're going to go straight to the fuse box and touch the freakin' wires. Ready? Here we go." There has to be a completely secular, non-philosophical sort of mechanic's guide to happiness. Call it "Happiness for Shmoes" or whatever. But c'mon, enough with all the method and dogma. Words are a precious resource. They should be rationed. So to all you guys in the self-help business, just shut up and get to the point already before you eat up all the words in existence. "To be happy, just do A) followed by B). The End." Good enough for me.

Why do I believe that it's that simple? The only way to show is you is to have you do it. So here you go. Get a journal - a wirebound notebook or whatever - and a pen and put them on your nightstand. Every night before you go to bed, write down three things that made you happy that day, and what it was about it that made you happy, even if you can't explain it well. No less than three. And they don't have to be complex. I note when I saw a really great sunset, or if I made a particularly bitchen cup of coffee that morning. Little things. Nothing is too small.

But no fucking around! You must do it every night, night after night, without fail. If you choke and fall asleep too quickly one night, do it first thing in the morning. But regularity is key.

I can tell you from experience that this will not make your problems go away. What you will notice, aside from the fact that you will start having a solid night's sleep every night, is that you start reframing your diffculties. You will not see them as less severe or bothersome, but instead will see them against a backdrop of expansive possibilities and options. This will go a long way to reduce your desire to choke the living shit out of the guy who drives the street cleaner past your window at 3:30AM every Saturday.

One of the forefathers of our country - I think it was the guy with the wig - wrote about happiness (or the pursuit thereof) as being a birthright of humanity. I mean look, when you get right down to it, what is our only pursuit in life? Happiness. Life is a means to experience happiness. Liberty is supposed to beget happiness. Either the job you have or the one you want is the thing that'll make you happy. Either the relationship you have or the one you want - your body, diet, wardrobe, car, hair, batting average, four-foot blown-glass multichambered bong - all routes we embark on hoping for that same end: happiness.

Look, we'll talk about this more. I know you're going to hit me with a ton of questions, like about what definition I'm giving for happiness. Or like what a grumpy old fucker like me could possibly know about happiness? Or if I'm so goddamn happy, why did I give a complimentary pressed ham to that guy who stole my parking spot? The answer to these questions and more will come in short order. In the meantime, just put down that tuba, grab a journal and a pen and hit the hay. You have some writing to do.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus