Spent some time today laying out in the sun.

I have a lot of trouble slowing my mind down enough to do such a thing. I laid down on the towel wearing just some shorts, and was supremely self-conscious for about 15 minutes. Got something to read, and that helped.

I’m self-conscious about everything from the sound of my neighbor in her yard to Pink Floyd coming out of a house down the street. But I’m also self-conscious because I’m a lard ass.

I put fat on in strange places. I’m pear-shaped, though not morbidly so. I have a beer-gut pot belly and thunder thighs. This is adequately hidden by jeans and a loose shirt, but there in the back yard, I was exposed.

It took a while to get comfortable with it out there, and finally I did.

Somewhere about half way through, I ended up shifting from laying out mode to sitting mostly naked in zazen while reading mode. I read an article in a magazine I picked up on a whim: ‘The Journal Of Asian Martial Arts.’ The article was about a Chinese boxing master and teacher. While reading, my posture improved, and I got more and more grounded. Sometimes just reading about a teacher will affect me this way.

When I was done, I sat there on my little towel in my little back yard and realized how all the extra pounds of fat stored on my body felt like a costume I could take off. As if there were me, sitting with crossed legs, and then there were these other parts that could detach if I wanted them to, like taking off a robe.

So, naturally, I went for a drive and ended up at Cold Stone Creamery, which, it should be added, is a rip-off. $4.25 for a scoop of ice cream. It’s a big scoop, but not worth that much. I should have looked at the menu rather than just ordering.

Let’s hear it for self-discipline.

Rode my bike today, up to Lake Forest Park (the mall ‘anchored’ by a bookstore, with a library in it). To eat lunch.

There’s a very amiable Japanese man who runs the teriyaki-and-sushi part of the food court. When I approached to stand in line, he looked at me and lit up. He smiled broadly and said, “Oh! Hello!” He reached out to shake my hand, so I shook back. I had never seen this man before in my life.

I was second in line, so he helped the guy in front of me. While he was busy with that, though, he kept talking to me, “I haven’t seen you here in quite a while.”

“Well, that’s interesting, because I don’t think I’ve ever met you before.”

Puzzled look. “Really? Well, it must be that there’s someone who looks almost exactly like you. He used to hang out here all the time. He worked at the, uh… the Albertsons I think, the one downstairs. Maybe a little shorter than you, and without the facial hair. Haven’t seen him in about a year or so. Anyway, what can I serve you?”

He took my order. He was helpful and courteous.


I have to wonder about this doppleganger I have. A long-lost brother? A twin, separated at birth? Could I get discounts at Albertsons?

I thought… Maybe I could walk into Albertsons and chat up my ex-fellow-workers. Get invited to parties. They’d be sacker parties, but parties nonetheless. Maybe he walked out, and never got his last paycheck. I could cause a scene, demanding my last paycheck. “WHAT THE HELL kind of GROCERY STORE doesn’t PAY IT’S EMPLOYEES?” Walk before they call the cops, obviously.

Did he have an ex-girlfriend there? One who would slap me and call me a low-down good-for-nothing since I walked out of her life without even saying goodbye. “Why did you leave me?” “Darlin’, I had to blow this one horse town, and make a name for myself in Bothell.” “You mean, you had to chase after that harlot Scarlet.” “I can’t tell a lie, baby. She turns my crank in a way you never could.” “You bastard!”

Or maybe he passed on a year ago. I’d be his ghost, wandering the aisles, freaking out the stockers. Boo!

Then the alternate paranoid story occurred to me. This is like ‘The Truman Show,’ I’m the star, and he’s covering for a mistake he made. There’s a little camera hidden inside the sushi I ordered. Now there’s a fun story!

So: In this excellent post, FemmeDeLaCreme eloquently deliniates a state of mind. I quoted a Stump song in my reply, so I figured I’d make it the song for the day du jour with au jus.

‘Buffalo,’ by Stump, from the album ‘A Fierce Pancake.’

Ok, this is kind of cool:

NotGeniuses.com is spearheading an effort to subvert the GOP’s emails-to-the-editor technology.

For the past few nights, I was awakened by a strange sound.

It sounded like someone was doing my dishes, or like someone was rearranging my kitchen cabinets, or maybe someone was replacing my kitchen window, in tiny increments, in all cases being extremely careful not to let me hear.

I’ve had the experience of hearing noises that seemed to be inside the house, only to discover that they’re outside, and merely reflecting off the open windows. The windows in this house swing open like doors, on a crank system.

So I went about assuming that this was a sound coming from outside. I get a lot of crows and Stellar’s jays in my yard, and surely it was a bird doing something that sounded like moving stuff around in my kitchen. What other explanation was there?

Yesterday I woke to the same noise, but it was louder, more insistent. I went out to the front room and sat still and listened. There it was again… Coming from the garage! Open the door to the garage, sit still again and listen. The chimney! A bird in the chimney!



The picture isn’t very clear, but that lump on the left side is a bird. Looks to be a dove, and it’s pretty well beat up from flapping around in my chimney.

First, I opened everything that could be opened.. Flue, screens, the picture window leading to the backyard. Second, a container of water on the hearth. That bird’s no doubt thirsty, and if it finds its way to the water, it’ll find its way outside. Then I went to the back to the house, to the office and the computer, and went about my business.

Fifteen or so minutes later, I hear a faint thwoosh. Checking the water; some tiny downy feathers floating on the top. Checking the chimney…

In response to my ‘blog below, PennyDreadful makes this observation: “Love may be the currency, but what if I am broke?”

I think love is, in practice, infinite, in the same way that thought is practically infinite. Death is really the only thing that seems to put the brakes on it, and lots of people would argue that it’s not even an issue anyway.

But be that as it may… Love is a state, like anger is a state. Would anyone argue that anger is finite? Would anyone say that there’s just not enough anger to go around?

Love and anger both work to protect the boundary between belonging and exclusion. We get peeved at people who cross our boundaries uninvited, and we love those who are already inside.

The act of loving outside the boundary is the same as expanding the boundary. Luckily for us humans, plodding along haphazardly, we can love on different levels. We can ‘practice’ love before actually doing it. We can pray for the well-being of strangers we’ve never met, even though we might judge and snub them if they were to come knocking at our door. And this is good, because it means we’re capable of choosing how we want to deal with others who are outside and inside our boundaries.

Either way, we’re capable of loving or hating, into infinity. A person can be so filled with hate that they black out. A person can be so filled with love that they swoon. Either way, same effect. Love isn’t bigger than anger, and anger isn’t bigger than love. The difference is their effect.

If you look at the way marketing works, you discover that there’s an implied economy of scarcity. Hurry now, while supplies last. Or, if you don’t get something that’s cool, your neighbor will get it and be cooler than you. Or, if you don’t sell your soul, someone else will, and they’ll get the benefit you should have gotten, and that’s just too much to bear.

Those are lies. And they’re similar to the lies about love. There’s always enough, if you’re willing to do what’s necessary to change yourself to the state of love.

Back when I was a teenager, I used to sit around and think about things like: Why do we call time the fourth dimension? A line has one dimension, a square has two, and a cube has three, so as the cube moves through time, it has four.

But does the line move through time, as well? Would its temporal coordinates throw off the whole notion of a line having one dimension? That is, if I make an animation where a line moves across a flat surface, the line has sprouted a second and third dimension: the time it takes to move, and the vector in which it moves. So is it still a line? I came to the conclusion that time was the zero-th dimension, since the traditional wisdom of our Cartesian geometry typically unfolds over time within our minds.

I used to think about these kinds of things all the time. No one in my life knows I thought about them, either, not even my math teachers. I think I told my mom about the zero-th dimension thing, but I don’t know that she really got it. Not that there was much value in getting it, mind you, but there it is.

With that in mind…

I have this theory, and it falls under the category of evolutionary anthropology. And it goes a little something like this:

Back in the early days, back when humans evolved a neocortex quite by accident, and this neocortex was trying to assert itself in the order of all subsequent human evolution, the early proto-humans began to have the ability to remain calm and detached, able to concentrate within threatening situations. The human mind found itself able to filter out the stimulus of the outside world, and also to filter out the stimulus of the lymbic system, which governs emotional state.

The proto-humans were already social animals; they already knew how to love each other as a strategy for staying alive. I’m speaking from the perspective DNA here. But the neocortext gave them a surprising new capacity: Self-deception. They could fool themselves into believing they were capable of anything, and so they learned to be capable beyond their wildest dreams.

This is my theory: That self-deception and the deception of others it the basis of all society and civilization. And not only that, but that there is likely an evolutionary basis for this jarring fact. The most adept at self-deception are more able to survive as humans.

People are designed to love each other and also to allow themselves to be ignorant of the love they share. Love is the basic currency of the highly social humans, but one is allowed to spend this currency both by using it and by withholding its use.

Isn’t that odd?

I remember being free to sit at the table and just stare at the rain outside the window, without worrying about all the stuff I need to get done.

Watching the water form into stalagtites minus the minerals, hanging off the eaves until gravity overcame meniscus. Thinking there must be some mathematical equation to decribe what was going on; some underlying, unifying Knowledge which drove or pushed or somehow made it all happen. The structure under reality much like the stiff, angular frame under the skin of the Statue of Liberty.

Later I learned that the same science that can create such a math can also blow apart the notion of such a math operating in such a way. Science says the closer we get to the finest granularity of understanding, the more it subdivides and recedes away from our grasp.

So today I’m watching the dew that forms on one of the plants indoors, and it’s hanging on the very pointed tip of the leaf, as if for dear life. Where does this dew come from? It’s a mystery. The temperature change isn’t that great, and it never gets that humid in here. I think the plant is respirating the moisture. This is the plant exhaling, or sweating. Maybe urinating.

DNA makes the drop of dew hanging there. The metabolic life of the plant inexorably makes these things happen, because that’s just how they work. Or maybe it is that humid. I dunno.

I didn’t watch the dew droplet for very long; my mind went all those places in the time it took to worry about the finish of the chest where the drop would fall, and wipe it onto my finger. I had things to do, so I did them instead of sitting down and looking at it. Seeing the inverse world through it.

I’m sitting here feeling hungry, bloated, exhausted, and amped all at the same time.

Yay, complexity.

It’s only now that I learn that Henry David Thoreau wrote a work called ‘Walking.’

I remember being simultaneously embarassed and happy when my mom would put on her ‘Thoreau Sauntering Club’ t-shirt. Those were very different times for her and for me. But I just now made the connection, after finding a slim volume of extracts pulled from Thoreau’s journals, at a thrift store for $.99.

I WISH TO SPEAK a word for nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and Culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make a emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization; the minister, and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that.