Solitude

I used to really enjoy being alone but recently I've gotten very tired of all the crazy people.

Of course, other people may also be crazy.  But at least they are telling me stories I don’t already know.

The Path of Alice

Hinduism prescribes two paths for overcoming the ego, the self with a small ‘s’.  One is to become nothing through the practice of love and devotion.  The other is to become everything through the practice of wisdom and discrimination.  The word ‘become’ is wrong.  Perhaps it’s more like snapping out of a trance.

My path appears to be inflate deflate inflate deflate: grain of sand / Mona Lisa, worker ant / Don’t Cry For Me Argentina -- until this ‘I’ is revealed to be so manifestly absurd that neither I nor anyone else can revere or revile it.  To be “somebody”, then “nobody” in such a swift procession until it becomes obvious that the ‘I’ is completely made up.  A path of absurdity and nonsense.

This is my spiritual practice.  I do not know yet if it is effective.  (I’ll let you know?)  I do recognize that it may be psychologically hazardous -- but isn't that true of all paths?

There is the path of devotion and the path of wisdom and then there is this way which, in honor of Alice, its best-known practitioner, we might well call the practice of Wonderland.

In my defense

In my defense, I really think I could have resisted all the young men -- if only they had not begun to wear beards.

As it is, I feel reasonably evil, now that all the psychic powers I covet involve the capacity to grope any backpacker I choose.

Oh, why can’t I love men as purely and unconditionally as I love geckoes!

Narrative Structure

Plot is entrails.  Details are tea leaves.  All people are clouds as I hope to God you already know.  It’s all just some place to stare at while the truth comes clear.  An excuse to admit what you know.  Reality’s ruse.   The best and the bravest can see it all in thin air and most people say they are mad, mad, mad.

Life-Everlasting

In New Hampshire, in the mid-eighties, one of my pet mice was resurrected from the dead.  I think my personality makes much more sense, if you just always keep this in mind.

One morning I found my mouse dead.  I wrapped him in a Woody Woodpecker washcloth in preparation for burial and laid the corpse back down in the cage.  It was entirely too cold for the mice on the porch in the New Hampshire winter, but my dad wouldn’t let the mice live inside.  They were male mice and they stank.

I admit I didn’t like this mouse much.  It bit.  I think I’d killed several mice already by then, with winter as my accomplice.

After preparing the corpse for burial, I went upstairs and read the entire book of Genesis.  In those days, if faced with trouble, I read a book.  (Unlike now when, if a problem becomes apparent, I promptly seize hold of the situation and take small common-sense steps in order, oh fierce pragmatist that I am.)

At that time I was maybe ten, my mother was dead, I had horrific nightmares every night, and I hadn’t slept with my light off since the Carter administration.  I read from the Bible because I believed the Bible would protect me from terrors.  I’m not talking about Christ or the afterlife; I read because I believed that holding the Bible would protect me right there and then.

I read all forty-six chapters of Genesis and returned downstairs to find the mouse gnawing away at his shroud.

Please keep this in mind when you see me curled up in the corner with some book no reasonable person would read.  Dreamily reading when I really ought to be doing something more sensible, especially at this age, past forty.

Have patience, please.  I am probably attempting to resurrect some mouse or another.

Stereo

Turns out that Cambodia has drastically better frozen margaritas than you might expect.  And part of me, I admit, just wanted to sip my mango margarita (salted) and stare into space -- but how often do I get the chance to hear from a 17 year old from Texas?  He started talking to me from the next table over as he downed strawberry banana smoothies one right after another, as if there was liquor in them.  The trouble with Texas, he said, was that there was a lot of Discrimination, but personally he didn’t have any problem with The Gays.

His problem nowadays was with girls.  He explained to me that girls nowadays were so well-developed there was no telling how old they were.  You might see some voluptuous woman and think she was in college: she’d turn out to be in seventh grade.  This had been a major problem for him, but he said he was off romance for now.  Got my heart broke too many times, he said, and ordered himself another smoothie.

His cordial world weariness was so obviously borrowed that, when his handsome pickled father showed up an hour later, it didn’t seem like the conversation had gained another person, but simply switched to stereo.  Within two minutes of shaking my hand, the father told me that lots of people in Texas were prejudiced against Homosexuals, but personally he didn’t have any problem with them.

I always think people don’t figure me out right away because I’m so masculine and unassuming.  Evidently this is just another of my over-numerous fantasies.

Daddy was an oil man and traveled all the time, though, to tell the truth, he was terrified to be in the air since the time his helicopter went sideways two years before.  He drank as fast as he smoked, one right after another.  He’d obviously been at it for a long time and was starting to look kind of dissolute.  Craggy and heavy-faced.  Rough around the edges.  I noticed that dissolute was no longer such a negative word for me.  I kind of liked dissolute.  Dissolute was maybe my type.  And I wondered if this was the sign of a problem.

The son began to complain again about girls who turned out to be way under age.  Evidently this was his chosen theme.  This is just how kids are nowadays, he told me.  Same as him.  He was six foot at age 13.  He’d been buying his own cigarettes for years.

He said, One time me and my friends saw a girl skinny-dipping.  She was a really hot girl.  She had a lot of everything, both up here and down there.  I admit I was getting kinda excited so I asked her, How old are you?  And she said to me, Twelve.”  I said to my friends, We Gotta Get Out of Here NOW and we did.

The son continued, Nowadays I try to meet the father first.  That’s my policy.  Disarms ‘em.  Those Dads think, He wants to meet ME?  Makes ‘em more agreeable.  But I’m sick and tired of getting my heart broken.  I’m not interested in a Relationship anymore.  During my youth I just want to Have Fun.  Later I’ll get serious.  Later when it’s time to Make Money.

The father looked at him fondly.  This was their first trip together outside the USA, except for Mexico which doesn’t count because you can drive there.  “We’re more like best friends than father and son,” said one or the other.  Then the Dad hauled himself out of his chair and went off to buy smokes.  The waitress came by and picked up his empty beer glass.  “Want another?” the waitress asked and the son said, “Sure he does.”