Clever.

Drifting back to anti-war rhetoric… Gimme some more writing assignments!

This just in… Covering anti-war protest could yield low ratings.

So be sure and steer clear of that confusing, depressing stuff.

The Hidden Buddha

Somewhere in the darkness, out of sight, out of comprehension, there’s a 600-foot tall solid gold Buddha statue.

It looks to come from the Tibetan artistic tradition, but there are give-aways of other cultural idioms, as well, to those who know what they’re looking at. But the fact is that most haven’t seen it at all.

Someone told me about it. I was walking down the street, and this guy was coming toward me, and he stopped and his jaw fell open, and he pointed in the sky behind me. I turned around and saw nothing. I asked him, “What?” He said, “600-foot tall Buddha.” I shrugged and went on my way.

But I couldn’t shake it. He seemed sincere. I began to imagine the statue he had seen, even though I hadn’t seen it. Now, wherever I go, I think that if I turn around at just the right second, there’ll be a huge monument behind me.

I’m not sure whether I’m following it, or it’s following me. I’m also not sure how a 600-foot solid gold statue of anything can keep itself so well hidden.

PotFeet gives me a writing assignment: ‘spinning.’

I considered learning about making yarn and thus spinning a yarn about spinning, but I decided to combine it with the assignment about childhood memories.

I remember that for some reason there was Silly String in the house. I was about 6 or 7 at the time, I suppose.

To me, the best thing about Silly String was that you could wad it up, and it’d make this ball of spongy stuff with an interesting texture.

Being a weird kid, I put the ball of Silly String on the rug and began to run around it, my eyes fixed on it, the rest of the world moving around it in parallax. The rug was a big corded spiral type rug; white in the center and progressively more brown toward the edge. The spiralled groove formed stripes of shadow and light in my vision, constantly moving and in deep contrast.

I got queasy, but couldn’t look away. I ran and ran. I had a strange realization: That when I stopped, and looked up, I’d be even more queasy than I was at that point. So I just kept going.

I don’t recall how long I did that, staring at the ball of flourescent yellow Silly String as I ran in circles.

Finally I stopped. I think I fell to the floor and spread out, laying on my back. I think the only thing I could do was laugh, but that it made the queasiness worse. I think my mom came and told me the bad feeling would go away, except I knew that it wasn’t really a bad feeling, just what happens when you do what I had done.

I’ve been thinking about how childhood is a sort of rehearsal for life in a lot of ways. Not just in terms of socialization, but in terms of expanding the individual’s consciousness into what it means to live in a human body.

And I think little kids spin around sometimes so they’ll have some experience with being dizzy, to serve them later on, when they grow up to drink too much, get stoned, have inner ear infections, or become Sufis.

The new Linux Switch campaign.

I got some more writing assignments, and I think I want to write about food, since I’m hungry.


My very favorite food is… Well, there are different favorite foods for different occassions and different parts of my life.

Just now, when I asked myself what my favorite food is, I immediately came up with a food that I know, for a fact isn’t my favorite food. But it ranks really, really high on the guilty pleasure list.

It’s pathetically awful, actually. It’s the most satisfyingly WRONG food ever devised. It is edible guilt and shame. It’s probably a signifier of my own mental incompetence.

What is this astonishing food?

Two Regular Tacos For $.99 At Jack In The Box

They look nothing like the picture. They come in paper envelopes, and if you don’t want a lap full of taco juice, you have to leave them in the envelopes while you eat.

The shells are an interesting texture. The part next to the greasy meat is usually a little damp, but not disgustingly so. The outer edges are usually crunchy. The meat, as I mention, is mostly grease. There’s some lettuce-like material tucked in there, too, along with something you could call cheese.

But the best part is the sauce. They’ll try to give you some extra hot sauce at the drive thru, but this is unneeded. The sauce, which comprises most of the actual flavor of the taco, has an interesting quality: If you eat both tacos in a very short time, your mouth will become numb. Not the kind of numb that comes from real, actual hot sauce made from things that could be found in nature, but more like the numb that comes from novacaine. Just a sort of spicy unfeeling. So eat slowly and drink lots of liquids.

And yes, all this could be yours for the low, low price of nintey-nine cents.

And I love ‘em. Is it so wrong?

So, I have three writing assignments (because I’m not going to write about sex, because that would be too depressing). Family pets, happy memories from childhood, and experiences with large bears.

I can sort-of combine the pets and the bears ones, because I really want to get a dog. And the kind of dog I want to get is an Akita, which has a very bear-like face. And they were bred to use in hunting bears in Japan. Here’s a picture of an exceptional 10-month-old prize-winning Akita. Click it to go to the breeder’s web site.



I want an Akita, but they’re big dogs. They can conceivably live as companions to nomadic apartment-dwellers, but it just wouldn’t be right, I don’t think. So perhaps some smaller breed. Or maybe I need to move to a ranch.

One of the things I like about Akitas is that they don’t bark much. When they bark, they mean it. They’ll defend without warning, too. Don’t mess around with the Akita. But they’re loyal beyond belief, exceptionally intelligent, and kind and sweet to the trusted few. Kind of like me.

In the happy memories from childhood department, I remember opening the window of my room and calling the dog, and she’d come and put her paws up on the window sill, and I could pet her.

Her name was Sam. She was part pointer, and as my mom would say, part fence-jumper. She had more than a little Rotweiller, I think. She was mostly black with the brown patterns you’d see on a Rotti.

She never minded. She’d pull you on the leash. But she was a pretty good noise maker when strange people came around (or when chasing squirrels).

In fact, the story is that some burglars were caught in our neighborhood, after a sort of mini-crime spree. As these things go in affluent suburbs… Regardless, they had a map of all the houses. Ones with dogs were marked with a big red X. So it’s likely that we didn’t get robbed because of Sam.

And then, of course, there’s Weird, who’s as big as a bear. In fact, he looks a bit like a cat version of an Akita.

Before I start my writing assignment, I want to say:

It’s about freakin’ time!

About freakin’ time for what? About freakin’ time Kurosawa’s ‘Dreams‘ was out on DVD!

And about time I used up the rest of the Best Buy gift card I got for Christmas…

I haven’t ‘blogged much in the past little while because I’d end up writing more angry articles about the war. And I’ve already gone there.

So: Give me a writing assignment. Please.