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

It's My 45th Birth - Wait, What Was I Saying Again?

This is the look of old. The ravages of time as recorded by a camera held in my
quaking 45-year-old hand.

Greg:

Jesus Christ, I'm 45 today. That means that you're...wait, I have to do the math...plus five...carry the twelve...six hundred and seventy eight years old, give or take. I don't know why people get so wanged out about getting older. I really don't feel any different than I did when I was seventeen...other than a little smarter...and not so impulsive...and my propensity for using ellipses has increased....yes it has.

Know what gives away the fact that I'm old? Here's the difference between my 20th birthday and my 45th. On my 20th, all I wanted to do was snort coke and Jim Beam off hookers while jumping the Snake River Canyon on a Yamaha. And for the most part that was how I rolled in back then. Now all I want to do is spend the day in my back yard, sitting in my folding recliner, yelling at my cat to shut up. And that's most likely what I'll be doing. And it'll be ossum. And I'll be happy.

What was I saying again?

Oh yeah. So we filled our ears with coins and swam naked all the way to Boston. And that' s how we me and your uncle Humbert licked the Jerries back in dubyah dubyah ought five. The End.

Oh man! You know what I've got in my back yard? Raspberries! They just ripened up the other day. We only have a few little canes, but they're pumping out a crapload of fruit. We threw some on some Chex the other day. Chex with raspberries in the back yard - now there's a picnic! If only we could've found a way to barbecue it...

Didja see that we (meaning RealNetworks) just released a new version of the RealPlayer that'll let you download videos right off the Web and barbecue 'em on a DVD so you can show 'em on your plasma TV and make your friends blow milkshakes through their noses from laughing at stuff like this right here? (Friends and milkshakes not included.) S'true. I fully endorse its use, however I'm barred from using it for religious reasons as I believe that putting your image on a DVD will trap your soul, then expose it to ridicule by milkshake -snorting troglodytes seated 'round a plasma TV.

Tip For Campers: While I was in Yellowstone, I got some kind of rash on my ankles, most likely from coming into contact with poison ivy or poison oak or poison raspberries or some damn thing while I was running around camp in my sandals. After I got home, I'll be gol-damned if I didn't re-inflame my ankles by putting on my sandals without washing them first. My point is that once an article of clothing has been exposed to poison [insert plant name here], it must be burned, and the earth around it must be salted, and you must turn your back on it and never speak of it again.

Don't I have a job? Shouldn't I be at work right now? Yes, I probably should be. Too bad for them

I'm going to go eat cake for breakfast because I'm a grown-up and I can do that.

Know what I really want for my birthday? The Field Guide to Squirrels. I know it exists, even though I can't find it on the InterWebs. I saw it in a bookstore just last Saturday. I plucked it from the shelf and gazed upon its pages with a mixture of awe and terror. Teresa axed me why on earth I would want that book for my birthday. I answered her with one simple phrase: Know thine enemy.

Time to go wring out the dog.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

A Tale Of Two Toilets

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. My toilets offended me so I cast
them out...all by myself, even!

Greg:

Have you ever used a toilet? It's that big porcelain thing full of water in that "closet" in the house that has other stuff that water comes out of. Looks kinda like something that would be produced if the "comedy" mask mated with the Elephant Man. Yeah, that thing. If you find one in your house, give it a wide berth and approach it with caution. If my experience is any indication, it could capriciously explode at any moment.

I only ask because I know you're the practical sort and as such may have eschewed the use of such sophisticated and pernicious plumbing accoutrements in favor of a large yard, some wide-leafed shrubs and a sturdy spade. Hey, I'm with you. If it's good enough for the cat... Unfortunately my wife does not share this purview, and demanded that I replace the toilets.

Wait, I'm ahead of myself.

I have two toilets in the house, one upstairs and one in the apartment downstairs. The downstairs toilet had been a cauldron of filth since the day we moved in. From the looks of it, the former tenants attempted to flush toxic waste and dead prostitutes with little success. To make matters worse, the owner of the house left the apartment unheated when it wasn't occupied, thus creating a cave-like atmosphere which in turn caused the toilet to grow a rather stout green beard 'round about the seat. It more closely resembled a troll than anything else. To our credit, we did give it a very thorough cleaning. This removed the beard, but not toxic waste or prostitute residue. It was functional nonetheless, so we (meaning I) took occasion to make it feel useful from time to time. It returned my kindness by failing. To wit, the wall spigot went to hell and then the inflow valve went on vacation. And one of the bolts that secures it to the shitter cap snapped off. As you can surmise, using this toilet was like the combined thrill of riding a mechanical bull while hoping against hope for a payoff from a slot machine. It had to go.

On the upside, even if the downstairs toilet was ferkochte, we still had the upstairs toilet. But then that one decided - apropos of nothing - to fracture its tank and send wee little tsunami rumbling through the bathroom...at 9PM...on a school night. I mean no one was even sitting on the goddamn thing when it busted! I say if you're going to crack and flood my bathroom, at least let it be because I beat you with a Crescent wrench. (How frequently do you say that and to whom? The authorities would like to know. -Ed.)

So there we were, a household without Toilet One, having to clench our bowels through the dark night, into the next day, and down the street to the Starbucks. When morning came, I called the first number of the first plumber on the first piece of junk mail I could find. (By the way, I found out that your mortgage company pimps out your personal information to every Tom, Dick and Plumber in thirty states the minute your loan funds.) Luckily, these guys were the shit (pun intended). They showed up on time (which just about made me faint dead away), took an educated and meaningful look at my situation, and showed me the rate sheet. They told me that what I could do for ten bucks worth of parts, they couldn't do for $400 in labor. They told me the parts I needed, and bid me adieu with no charge whatsoever for the call. I am their customer for life.

In the process of replacing the parts, I got the overwhelming "fuckitden" urge. If we were just going to replace the toilet when we refurbished the bathroom, just fuckitden. Might as well rip the freakin' things out and install a new one. Which is precisely what I did. I tore out two toilets and purchased and installed a new one. Now at least we have one functioning toilet. We also have one hole in the floor downstream from it that roars and gurgles every time you flush. I'm thinking of jamming a big-ass funnel in there and using it just the same (pun not intended), long as I can keep it secret from the wife.

But here's the important thing, not only was my standing as a man increased by doing all of this*, my admiration for our brother John's vocation as a plumber is now boundless. Now I know that he has to deal with The Most Noisome And Disgusting Object Known To Man on a daily basis - the wax ring that seals the toilet to the sewer pipe and keeps the evil locked within. I'd go into more detail, but you no doubt have a peanut butter sandwich in your hand at this very moment and will chunder directly into your tuba if I say any more.

Which reminds me of something I heard the Dalai Lama said once regarding attachment: "Even a delicious piece of chocolate cake eventually becomes something that no one likes."

Namaste on that, my brother!

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

*...not to mention the angle that I stand at, considering that deadlifting and carrying two toilets fucked up my back Grand Royal.

Prune Back In Anger

The earth's fragile, beautiful biomass. Kill it first before it kills you.

Greg:

Got a yard? I wouldn't know. I haven't seen your new place. If so, does it have dirt in it? Hey, it's a fair question. Some places just have concrete or rocks or whatever that they paint green. Okay, so if it has dirt, are there any plants growing out of it? If so, -

KILL THEM NOW.

Scorch the earth. Pour salt on it. Get thirty eight dogs, make 'em drink six quarts of coffee each and have them piss all over the whole deal until it is dead dead dead. I've seen what happens to a yard when you have plants and you let them grow, and let me tell you brother, it ain't pretty.

First off, just get used to the fact that plants hate you. They're not "pretty". They don't want to "coexist" with you. They don't care about whether you need the oxygen or not. They know that all you see when you look at them is salad. I have a blackberry bush all the way at the far end of my yard that is just itching to strangle me. Every day when I get home from work, I notice that it has grown five more tendrils of six feet each. I just know that one night it's going to creep in through my bedroom window and wrap itself around my tender, tender neck and choke me 'til I'm dead dead dead. (...or "dead cubed". -Ed.) Why? Because I eat its children with abandon. I make them into pie. I put them in fruit salads. The blackberry bush knows this and has worked itself into a bloated, vengeful rage. It will not rest until I am deep in the humus. Good thing I'm the one with the pruning shears...and the opposable thumbs.

This does not explain why my lilac bushes are such bitches to me. I don't eat their kids. I thought I was doing them a favor by deadheading all of them and clearing out all their dead brush and suckers. Well, they returned my kindness by sending legions of now-homeless spiders into my house to set up shop in my dishtowels. (I know the spiders must've been told to do it. They're smarter than to come inside where my spider-eating cat lives.) Anyway, fuck them lilacs. Just fuck 'em. Who cares about a plant that doesn't pull its own weight? It blooms once, and then it spends the rest of the year taking up lawn space that I could be using for suntanning or burning tires. If the wife wasn't so fond of them, I swear I'd have a nice crackling lilac-wood fire in the fireplace right now.

Don't even get me started on you, pampas grass (rhymes with "pompous ass"). Your day will come, señor. And that day is this Saturday. You'll be staring straight down the blades of the shears that I have nicknamed Los Diablos Dos. I will first give you my special "butch" cut, the Howie Long special, The Flat-Top To End All Flat Tops. Then I will take my shovel, stab it into the earth, and tear out your still-beating heart....er...roots.

And you, House-Eating Camelia - I want you dead. I want your parents dead. I want your family dead. Your dog - if you had one - dead. Hamsters - dead.

So what kind of plant do I like? That's easy. Corn. It's tasty and makes a great fence. Think of it as "bamboo with benefits". And I like my cedar tree. It stinks pretty, keeps the bugs away, and provides shade for my surly old cat. Someday its mighty branches will be home to my Dubble-Seekrit Klubhaus (No Girlz!). And my three apple trees. Other than that, I could seed this whole place with alfalfa and be happy. And by that I mean that I could bury former child actor Carl 'Alfalfa' Switzer in my yard were it not for the fact that he's been dead since 1959.

Hey, speaking of which, who are all those guys who are allegedly shaving the Amazonian rainforest down to the nubs? And what's their phone number? I have a job for them.

Shears,

-Thaddeus

My Hot, Hot Legs - And Other Father's Day Observations

Actual photo of my left leg. I don't know whether I should tan it or
baste it.

Greg:

It's early Sunday morning - Father's Day, to be exact. I find myself puttering around the house in my underwear with a cup of coffee and a perplexed look. I've been going around the house looking for something, and by the time I get to the place where I think I must've left it, I forget what it is. I never understood why our Dad did the same thing - puttered about with a cup of coffee, mumbling to himself, "Now where did I - hmmm, oh! No, that's not it." All I know is now I do it, which leads me to believe that puttering is gene-based.

I can tell you exactly why I putter without pants on, though. I'm old and my legs are hot. Hot as in temperature, not hot as in "damn!" Although, I must say that the last time I was in San Francisco - well let me just say that the fellows there know how to make a man feel appreciated. I went for a run one morning and got two - umm - compliments within three blocks. One was a rather passionate yowl from two bon vivants in a passing car. The other was when a guy walked out of a restaurant, ogled my legs and said, "WOOF! Oh honey I needed that!" This is not the same response I get when I wear running shorts around my own neighborhood, though. I stopped by my neighborhood Starbucks yesterday on the way home from the gym wearing the self-same pair of shorts that had garnered me so much praise in San Francisco. The septuagenarian VFW members in the cafe gave a few homophobic snorts and chuckles; the girls behind the counter asked my thighs if they'd like to try the new orange mocha. I suddenly understood that whole "eyes up here!" thing that women sometimes do. But I really don't mind if the girls at Starbucks only love me for my legs. They can talk to 'em all damn day if they want to. I'd be really concerned if they loved me for my wobbling mancakes (or "chesticles" if you prefer) or the wide selection of keratosii that cleave like sheaves of barnacles to my back and shoulders. I'd be even more concerned if they loved me for my ass, which is - well my ass is just wrong. That's all I can say about it. And I would gape in disbelief if they got steamed up over my pythons. When fully flexed, one looks like it has eaten a mouse; the other like it has eaten a piece of spaghetti with a knot in it. To put the whole thing into automotive parlance, I may have a nice set of rims but my upholstery is shot. Best to just gawk from the curb, ladies.

All of the above begs the question why my ex-wife spends any time trying to insult me when I already do such a good job of it myself. But then again, perhaps there are some people who aren't strong enough to kick someone unless that someone is already bound, gagged, and face down. I often think of replying to her vitriol by quoting Cyrano: "I find your vain attempts to insult rather ineffectual. If you had really wished to skewer me you could have said, oh a great many things." But even being playfully facetious means that I'd have to walk the same low road as my aggressor, and that's something I can't afford to do if I really want to give more than lip service to "be[ing] the peace that [I] want to see in the world". That is something that I really am dead-sober-serious about. Perhaps I insult myself to inure myself to insult, which is also a way to concurrently immunize myself against the compulsion to return anger and hatred in kind. Maybe not the best system in the world, but it works okay for the moment. Besides, I don't really believe that I'm all that ugly. I do, however, still have to sneak up on a glass of water. And I must say that my teeth are so yellow that I spit butter. (Thank you! I'll be here all week, ladies and gentlemen!)

I have digressed. Indeed, digression is my forte (pronounced "fort" meaning "strong point", not "for-TAY" meaning "loud"). Therefore I have succeeded in completing the metaphor that I set out with: wandering around the house in search of that thing - you know, that thing! What was I looking for again? Jesus, I can remember the difference between "fort" and "for-TAY", but I can't remember the difference between my ass and -

Hey, did I tell you a dug a hole in the ground the other day? First time in years. I even have my own shovel now. I was installing a kitchen waste composter in the back yard. Coolest thing ever. Throw table scraps in there and it turn 'em into humus in no time. Has a lock on it to keep the rats out and everything. Got it from the city. Sweet deal. Plus I got a yard waste composter from the city as well, one of those barrel-shaped deals that you throw lawn clippings and whatnot in. And let me tell you, that sumbitch gets HOT! I took the lid off and took a gander inside and it gave me a complimentary facial steam. I'm sure Aveda will be capitalizing on the dermatological benefits of compost soon.

Which brings me to my next point of digression, which is that I have found that homeowning is not so much owning an object as it is creating an enterprise. My home is a veritable factory of domestic products which include construction, organic waste disposal, small animal (dog and cat) farming, small animal (dog and cat) sewage treatment, junk mail recycling, neighborhood diplomacy, and homeland security (viz., keeping those goddamn kids from the flophouse out of my backyard). The only challenge now is to create positive cash flow from all of those pursuits, and to stem the tide of currency flowing out of the gigantic hole in the money-dike. Were it only as easy as digging a hole, I'd be set.

Hey look! I have legs!

Speaking of which, Teresa got me a manure fork for Father's Day. I am now the proud owner of yet another item on the list of Things That Make You A Man. My manure fork takes a place of honor alongside my stainless steel Coleman cooler, the cargo nets in the back of my Subaru, my 6,000 cu. in. vol. Gregory (that's the brand name) backpack, my JetBoil, and my Seneca-Wallace-autographed football. And of course my Johnson, which is the name of the tiny stuffed buffalo that I purchased in the gift shop at Yellowstone. Why, what did you think I meant?

Now I forgot what I was talking about.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Happiness Is Wood

Fig 1: A cross-section of old growth happiness. In the future,
we may be able to practice sustainable happiness practices, and
not rely solely on harvesting irreplaceable old growth stands.
(You said "practice practices". Idiot. -Ed.)

Greg:

I had another realization about happiness (You don't say. -Ed.), and its relationship with other emotions and I thought I'd pass it along.

While doing my "three things" exercise, I suddenly realized that one of the three things that made me happy that day was writing down my three things. That seems like a paradox, but I'm perfectly okay with that. It's as though practicing happiness begets more happiness. That's kind of a "duh" realization, I know. But you'd think there would be a diminishing return in that control structure somewhere. (E.g., in psuedocode it might read like: "practicing happiness will make you happy UNLESS OR UNTIL some douchebag comes along and fucks up your day. CASE NEXT: Continue practicing. CASE ELSE: beat aforementioned douchebag soundly about the head and shoulders.") As a point of logic, though, it seems that if you practiced happiness regularly and without interruption, you would create a perpetual state of mental well-being that was unshakeable.

From my experience, it seems that's possible, but looking at my day-to-day emotional life, I know that's not the case. Not yet, anyway. For instance, last night we were getting ready to go out the door to the theater ("West Side Story" at the 5th Ave - not a bad show as it turned out), and I couldn't find the tickets. Did I undertake a serene mental recapitulation of my actions in order to recall where the tickets might be? As the French say, "Oh FUCK NO!" I ran around the house ripping stuff out of drawers and turning pockets inside out while hurling epithets and verbal assaults on everything and everyone including but not limited to mine own creator. I was on the verge of giving the dog a cavity search when lo, the tickets didst appear to me, verily in the spot where I left them. But where was my happiness then? Where was that unshakeable feeling of "everything's going to be okay"? I should've probably turned the house upside down looking for that instead of the tickets. As it was, once I had the tickets were in hand, I was instantly ashamed of how I had acted.

Maybe all of that is fodder for practice, too. As I said in my last letter, dealing with frustration seems to be the next big challenge in this whole quest-for-happiness thing. And in trying to ameliorate anger and frustration in order to gain happiness, I've come to realize that anger and happiness are not opposites. Not that practicing happiness doesn't go a long way as a prophylaxis against anger and discontent. It does. But it's like comparing apples and horse apples. They're completely different. (Glad you pointed that out. After the last time we had lunch, I was beginning to wonder if you knew the difference. -Ed.) I'll save the whole point-by-point explanation of exactly how they are different for another letter. Just suffice it to say for now that the only thing they share in common is the rubric of emotion, and that's where the similarity ends.

Anyway, getting back to the paradox (or tautology, if you will) that practicing happiness is a way to be happy. The fact that writing my three things is one of the things that makes me happy reminds me of that old saying about how wood warms you three times: once when you cut it, once when you split it, and once when you burn it. Likewise, happiness warms you three times: once when it happens, once when you recall it (like when you do the "three things" exercise), and once when you share it. That doesn't roll out quite as smoothly as the thing about wood, but you get my drift.

I tried explaining all of that to Teresa this morning. She waggishly replied with, "So happiness is wood." This only led to a back-and-forth exchange of very naughty puns, each more titillating than the last, and none of which are fit to reprint here. But just let me say this. While wood by itself may not be happiness, it can be a very important ingredient of happiness in consensual relationships between mature adults. Ahem. (A phrase containing the terms "spank" and "plank" also comes to mind. -Ed.) (Quiet you. -TRG)

Okay now I'm embarassed.

-Thaddeus

Happiness: The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis

Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz attempting to induce an aggression
response in a goose by blowing his stinky-ass pipe smoke in its face. The
goose later ripped off his beard and crapped on his nice new shirt.

Greg:

I feel like chokin' a fool. Lawd, lawd does I feel like chokin' a fool!

And through that statement, you may have guessed that our Cognitive Science lesson for today is on Dollard and Miller's Frustration-Agression Hypothesis. Put down your tuba and peanut butter sandwich and stop readjusting your frilly under-drawers and listen, dammit. This is important. The lives of thousands of customer service professionals are at stake.

Ready? Begin.

Way back in 1939 when everyone was nice (except maybe Hitler), a buncha eggheads (Dollard, Miller, Doob, Mowrer, et. al.) got together and worked out this crazy idea that frustration and aggression were inextricably linked. According to them, aggressive behavior was a response to what they called "goal frustration". In English, that meant that if you have a goal in mind, and you try to achieve that goal but you can't, you respond with aggression in order to achieve that goal. They said that pretty much all aggressive behavior could be explained that way.

Okay. So. A few years go by and a bunch of critics call bullshit on that, so Dollard et. al. come out with another paper that says, "Dear Chumps: We didn't say that aggression was the only response to frustration; we said that aggression was one kind of response to frustration. Love forever and - seriously - go fuck yourself. Dollard et. al. PS: We spent all the grant money on bathtub gin. Ha ha ha on you."

Konrad Lorenz - remember the guy with all the geese following him around? That guy - he was another one who studied aggression in animals 'round about the same time as Dollard and Miller. In his book "On Aggression", he hypothesized that aggression was a natural drive that had to be slaked by acting out from time to time. I say bullshit. First off, he worked with geese, and everyone knows that geese are the most predeterminately pissed off animals in the universe. Second, I'd like to meet him and his geese some Friday night down at the Fight Club. I've got something they can slake!

Look, I'm not saying that Dollard and Miller were right or they were wrong. (I am saying that Lorenz was wrong, though.) What I am saying is this: it seems that dealing with frustration is my next great hurdle in this whole happiness thing. The "3 things" exercise has worked out swimmingly. I highly recommend it. It seems to be a panacea for a whole spectrum of neuroses...half a dozen of my own, at least. (At this very moment somewhere in New York State, a certain Dr. C. J. Spezzano is higly amused. -Ed.) My state of mind is generally pretty - what's the word - "chill" I think is the correct clinical term. But every once in a while, specifically when I'm in some sort of frustrating situation with some public utility or Internet service provider or contractor or - well pretty much anyone you have to deal with to - what's that word - live, I find myself thinking very aggressively if not acting aggressively, and that certainly doesn't make me happy. To wit, the Death List that I have recently composed which consists of several public institutions and enterprises that have stymied my attempts to live a calm and peaceful life. Chief among them (with their various transgressions enumerated for your edification) are:

My Mortgage Company: who just this morning sent me on a circuitous jaunt through PhoneLand and the Valley of Being On Hold because they got my Social Security number one %$#@ digit off.

My Phone Company: who still have not flipped the tiny, tiny switch that makes my downstairs phone work, despite my manifold entreaties and requests...not to mention the fact that they just doubled my phone bill instead of halving it and combining it like they said they would...and don't even get me started on how &^%$ing long it took to get my service hooked up in the first place.

My TV Company: who...aww Christ, I don't even want to say it. The appointment is for between 1P and 5P. They show up at 9:30P, whistling a merry tune. Then they don't even install my...arrrrrrrgh. Choke, hell!Where's my gun, goddammit?! (You're a pacifist. Remember? -Ed.)

My Various Contractors and Service People: who, while they're very cordial and congenial and do good work, I still have to...every time I call they don't...and then I have to...arrrrrrrrgggggggh! I said where's my gun goddammit!!?? The big gun! The one with the knife on the front of it and the part that sprays poison!! Find it!! (Gun, hell. You need some booze! -Ed.)

Okay, there's more but I gotta stop. Otherwise I'm going to have to get someone to stand on this blue vein on my forehead to get it to go down.

Frustration is a part of life. That's just a natural fact. (Or a Noble Truth, if you like. -Ed.) If there weren't any frustrations, that would mean that things happened exactly the way you wanted them to every single time, and all you'd have to do was blink to get anything you wanted, and then where would you be? That's right. You'd be a ditzy blonde living in a tiny bottle, polishing the chrome on Major Healy every time he turned around. (You youngsters ever watch "I Dream of Genie"? -Ed.) And how's that a way to live? Fuckin' no thanks. The interesting thing about life is that it has some randomness and surprises to it, and that's what makes it ossum. Can't have surprises without frustrations. They're flipsides of the same thing.

But how to deal with the frustrations when they arise? It always seems to me that they're so sudden and unexpected that you're stuck in the middle of one before you can say "I need to kill a fool". And since these little, petty things seem to be the only obstacle left between me and a constant state of happiness, it seems like if I get this one solved I'll be doing pretty goddamn good. Plus, I'll be able to pass the savings on to you! (And by "petty" I mean for example that it was the TV guys that showed up late. It's not like I was waiting for a dialysis machine or rabies vaccine or something. That would be totally worth getting freaked out over.) And the solution must be at least slightly more complex than "just chill the hell out". It seems that frustration is one of those autonomic responses, like startling, sneezing or grasping at donuts. Or maybe that's just me.

Awright. So that's the next "assignment" that I'm going to give to myself: come up with a way to disarm frustration. But in the meantime, any suggestions that you have would be more than welcome. Remember (he said, polishing a .303 Enfield with a drop sight), the lives of thousands of customer service professionals hang in the balance.

Cheers, goddammit!

-Thaddeus

Yellowstone

If it gets any more beautiful here, my head will explode. Me and Teresa
near a rapids on the Yellowstone River. My hair is standing on end because of the
shocking amounts of beauty we were exposed to each day, and not because I rubbed
six quarts of DEET and #50 sunblock into it and then baked it in the white-hot heat
of the red-hot sun. I discovered on this trip that I could really give a marmot's ass
about civilization, and really never cared if I saw it again.


Greg:


Just - and I mean "just" - got back from backpacking for four days in Yellowstone. Yes, I mean capital-The capital-Yellowstone, and no, that's not a euphemism for some mosquito-infested water park that I spent the weekend at.

Where do I start? Christ, man - it's Yellowstone! The great-grandpappy of national parks! The one with Old Faithful (which I did not see) and the buffalo (which I did see) and the bears (which I had spray for but did not see)! How much more park-ier can you get than Yellowstone? It's vast, the size of something really big, like the InterWeb or maybe Stupidity. And - with the slight exception of the heavily touristed areas, like the steam vents or the restrooms - is as wild as wild can be. Animals spend their whole lives eating other animals there, and they never run out of animals! How freaking freaked out is that? It's like having a lifetime pass to Kentucky Fried Antelope if you're a bear. And you can walk for six to eight days and never, ever see a toilet. S'true.

We were hiking along a migration path for the whole of our trip, and although we did not see much large wildlife, we were constantly confronted by their bleached skeletons and almost loveseat-sized turds. We were compelled by these parts of our experience to write a new ad slogan for the park - "Yellowstone: Where Animals Come To Eat, Shit and Die". We think it'll be huge with the juvenile male demographic.

True fact that I just made up: The average weight of a single tourist at the Mammoth Visitor Complex is six hundred sixty eight pounds, not counting the Winnebago that they ate for lunch. And you can tell their age by counting the hairs on their back.

Oh oh oh! Speaking of Winnebagos - When we were driving back from the end of the trail to our hotel, Christina, one of our guides, happened to mention (apropos of nothing), "Didn't I tell you guys about the 'anal" thing?" To which we replied - in chorus - "NO." So she told us about how hilarious it is when you add the word "anal" to the beginning of the name of any motorhome that passes by you on the road. And she had just heard the so-far best of this ongoing "competition", and it was this: Anal Dutchman Express. And she was right. It was hilarious. And we howled like rabbits until we could no longer breathe. Of course I had to chime in with: "...when your usual Anal Dutchman just isn't fast enough." The Anal Pop-Up, The Anal Rimrock Express, and The Anal Sunseeker provided us with enough guffaws to make it all the way back to Jackson, where Teresa dished out an honorary self-propelled vehicular title to a wayfaring Anal Ram 1500.

Look, okay, maybe we were high on Gorp and had been massaging our bare hineys with prickly pears for four days. Anything would've been funny. I know I was in a physically compromised state. The two days previous, I drank six quarts of water per day and only peed once. Maybe I was high on thirst.

I wish I could give you some travelogue about the trip like what we did day by day, but doing that just seems so boring and mundane. Was the hiking difficult? At times, yes. On the third day, we had some pretty good elevation gain up some pretty rough terrain. Not the worst I've been on, but - hey, who wants to hear me whine about heat and exertion? I know I don't. Exertion and exposure and bug bites and all that are part and parcel of backpacking, and if I didn't like that kind of stuff, I'd stay at home and tape cheesecake to my ass. The rest of it you can probably guess, having backpacked yourself before. It's the usual pains, made completely immaterial by the unusual, unexpected, and at times indescribable glories of nature. At the end of the trail, I honestly thought I was going to cry. I saw the end of the trail come into view, and all I wanted to do was turn around and go back whence I came, back into the comfort of Yellowstone.

So yeah, maybe instead of trying to give you a blow-by-blow, I'll just include a link to the photos and let them tell the story. For now I'll just go curl up in my nice, warm, civilized bed and dream that I'm still out there somewhere near the Yellowstone River, happy as hell, face down in the weeds and the bugs and the dirt.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Yellowstone 2007

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

Jerk Appreciation Day

Soda Jerk ca. 1940: While most believed that Soda Jerks were
trained to be complete assholes, the truth is that they were hired for
their natural penchant for blatant assholery.

Greg:

Ever heard of rice? They eat it like crazy in Asia. They even make "milk" out of it. Word on the street is that a little farm girl offered some to the Buddha during his ascetic period and it was so tasty that he said (and I quote), "Fuck this 'starving' shit. Suffering is for the birds. Rice milk shots for everyone!" And then they all got enlightened. The end.

But wait - one more thing about rice. I've found that it is the training food of the future. I've been using it to train for my backpacking trip to Yellowstone, and let me tell ya, it works. All ya gotta do is load 40 pounds of the stuff on your back, and your legs will be as burly as oaks in no time. I filled my backpack with a Buddha-load of rice today (1 Buddha-load = 40 pounds or roughly 385 East Indian pala. -Ed.) and then commenced to haul my hiney up and down every hill I could find in Carkeek Park. It was awe-inspiring. I swear that I sweat out my entire body weight and achieved pure freedom as an Emissary Of The Light. Then I woke up and dragged my 260-pound rice-burdened ass home through the pouring rain.

I hear the only downside of training with rice is that you get huge, but you occasionally experience "rice rage". We'll see about that.

Speaking of things that are good for you but cause also cause you pain, I've developed a whole new appreciation for difficult people, or "jerks" as some refer to them in the vernacular. Perhaps you've met some. Perhaps you've been one. I know I have, so it is not without a certain affinity that I offer "jerk" as an omnibus term that includes people like me. (I foresee a new best seller: "Jerk Like Me", by T. Gunn. -Ed.) I realized a little while back that were it not for the jerks I've known, I wouldn't have some of the truly wonderful things that I have in my life right now. I'm going to take this opportunity to redefine the word "jerk" for myself like this. Instead of it being a pejorative, I'm going to give it the neutral definition of "anyone who gets your attention much as you would get a dog's attention by jerking on its choke chain". It is not pleasant attention-getting, but it is potentially useful attention-getting nonetheless.

This begs the question "what the fuck are you talking about?" Bear with me. As my Spanish teacher used to say, por ejemplo:

When I worked at Perkins-Coie, the mammoth international law firm in downtown Seattle, I used to share a work space with a woman who drove me nuts. Our personalities were as compatible as water and flaming trucks of dynamite being attacked by Mongol hordes with flaming trucks of dynamite. And I had to sit with her in a tiny room every day and listen to her blather and prattle while doing the most demeaning work known to man: litigation support. Just as my frustration with her was driving me to the point of double murder/suicide (meaning I would kill myself, rise from the dead, and kill myself again while she prattled on unawares), she brought in a newspaper clipping and showed it to me. "There's a story about a really cool company that just opened, and I think you ought to work there." The story was about AtomFilms. So strong was my desire to work there, and so strong was my compulsion to flee this woman's presence that I harassed AtomFilms until they gave me a job. (No, really, I did. There was no open position at the time.) So in a way I have her to thank for my job at Atom, which lead to - well pretty much the rest of my copywriting career. Thanks, Horrendously Annoying Lady!

More recently, there were the people who moved in upstairs from us at Uwajimaya. We'll call them The Thumpingtons. These people were so noisy that you could swear that they were made of solid lead, suffered from fainting spells (or at least leapt into the air and belly-flopped on the carpet for no reason), and flew into apoplectic fits where they threw their furniture across the room. (Their furniture was also ostensibly made of lead from the sounds of it. -Ed.) We let 'em know that we could hear everything that they did, not in a "shut the fuck up" kinda way, but in a more friendly "you are compromising your privacy by all that goddamn noise you make" kind of way. That freaked 'em out pretty bad (I'd say from the looks of them, they were born freaked out. -Ed.) and caused them to increase the noise forty-fold. Mrs. Thumpington started vacuuming with a power saw (from the sounds of it), and Mr. Thumpington attached a motor to the davenport and started ramming it into the walls (again - from the sounds of it). So great was our noise-induced distress that we decided to do the unthinkable. We called John L. Scott President-Award-Winning Real Estate Moghul Gloria Lee and got her to sell us a house. Now each night when we come home to nothing but birdsong and the wind in the cedars as a soundtrack (and neither crashes nor thumps emanating from the ceiling), we thank Scott and Tami Thumpington of the Uwajimaya Village Apartments for motivating us to achieve our dream of perfect tranquility through home ownership.

I've got a ton more, but I'll save all of them for another time. But suffice it to say, if I'd've been dismissive with these people and just shunted their presence in my life off as annoying jerkitude that I couldn't bother with (or worse, tried to engage it and do battle with it), I never would've experienced the gifts that they offered me.
I honestly bear no grudge against these people, these "jerks" as I've said. I truly feel that I owe them a debt of gratitude for all the good they've done, although I don't know what form the repayment of that debt would take other than to stay as far from them as possible. "Look, we don't get along, so I'll do you and me the favor of giving you a two-state-wide berth." So I've unofficially declared May 18th as Jerk Appreciation Day for every person I've ever known who gave my life a yank in a positive direction. (And why not? It's the same day that Mount St. Helens blew up and the anniversary of my high school graduation. Not to say either one of those things was a yank in the right direction, either academically or geologically speaking. Although there are certain fans of vulcanology who might disagree.)

When I saw the Dalai Lama in San Francisco last month, he had something interesting to say about jerks. The Chinese government has done some unspeakably reprehensible things to his people over the years, and someone asked the question of how he found it possible to still sit down and negotiate with them. He said - and this is an imperfect quote, mind you - that he always approaches the situation this way: he truly believes that the people he is negotiating with are his friends. He says that he knows this because as human beings, they have the same fundamental needs and desires as he does. But, he said, although I truly believe they are a friend, I never forget what they are capable of.

That's compassion tempered with wisdom, to be sure.

Cheers,

-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

Deeply Moving

Meet the new neighbors! Even though it is entirely
landlocked, residents of Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood
insist on wearing uniforms with a quasi-naval theme...
and carrying comically large signs that represent the area's
Year of Glory.


Greg:

We've done it. We've moved to Greenwood, which is precisely 6.9518 nautical miles (8 miles or 64 furlongs. -Ed.) and 71 years (1,851.07143 fortnights. -Ed.) from Chinatown. To wit, it is a long-ass ways in both quality of life and crow's flight from my previous place of residence. My new residence was built during the depression (1937 to be exact) and my neighbors seem to be of the same era, at least in terms of gregariousness. Or maybe it's their Tom Joad-ishness. Dunno. Anyway, as would be the case with any time/space traveler, I'm feeling unhinged at the moment in ways both good and bad. I'm like Dave Bowman at the end of Kubrick's 2001, filling one leg of my spacesuit with the pee of joy, and the other with the pee of abject terror. Lemme 'splain:

I lived in downtown Seattle for over 14 years. As it is in the coal-black heart of any large American city, noise, crowds and angst are constant companions. Rhesus monkeys raised in conditions similiar to downtown Seattle turned to cannibalism, and Seattle compared to other urban areas in America is freaking benign. I can only imagine that if you raised primates in conditions mirroring downtown Los Angeles, they might do something truly psychopathic like join Amway. Still though, living for more than a decade in a sea of 800,000 people who, on a minute-by-minute basis, want to take your parking space, your wallet and your girlfriend is, shall we say, a wee stressful.

Now I'm in Greenwood which is still inside Seattle proper, according to the map at least. But judging from the demeanor of its residents, you'd swear on your mother's wooden leg that you'd dropped straight through the Mayberry hatch. People greet you. They smile. They wave. And I'm talking about people you don't know. Excuse me, let me clarify: people you don't even fucking know. Example: we were somewhere in the neighborhood, looking at two cats lounging in someone's living room window that were - I swear - the size of ottomans. (The cats were the size of ottomans, not the window or the living room. The Ottoman Turks were, by the way, a gigantic people. -Ed.) Now anywhere else in Seattle you might get greeted with a stern middle finger or an even sterner firearm for staring into someone's front window. Not in Greenwood. The lady of the house just waved and smiled at us as big as you please. I don't know which amazed me more, the size of her cats or the size of her cheeriness.

Second example: I met my neighbors. Met the neighbors! They came across the street and introduced themselves. (Ward and Yoshi, in case you're interested. Nice folks. Ward uses a manual push mower, so he can't be all bad. -Ed.) And it's not just the people, it's the - whattaya callit - the nature, the environment...you know environment, that thing with all the dirt and twigs and animals and stuff. That thing. I have a gi-mongous yard now that has nature all over it. Quick tally - three apple trees, four or more lilac bushes, raspberries, blackberries, tulips, bamboo; umm..buncha other stuff...parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme - oh yeah, and The Rhubarb That Ate Manhattan. I got up this morning and went out and had coffee on my stoop and listened to the birds. The air was packed full of birdsong! They were jamming! It was like karaoke night in my cedar tree or something! For a minute I thought to myself, "Man, I wonder if all that racket is going to wake up the neighbors." And then I thought, "Oh by the mangy beard of Baby Jesus, what have I become?" It took me a while to key down and actually enjoy the moment.

Since the move only happened on Saturday, I'm still having to tie up loose ends. I have neither my InterWebs nor my fancy-schmancy satellite TV hooked up at the new place yet, so for all intents and purposes I could've moved back to 1937 and not even know it. I do have a radio in the house, but all it tells me when I turn it on is that Roosevelt has no plans for getting into another war in Europe, no matter how much trouble this smarty-pants Hitler fellah causes.

I'm off to the soup line. Long live the New Deal!

-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