I've been watching that show on Animal Planet about the animals of the future and alot of those PBS documentaries on evolution and such things, and I've come to a rational revelation of what will become the future dominant sentient lifeform on earth after humanity is extinct. Now image this... somewhere in the Mojave desert, a lone can of Spam is left by some hiker or camper, where the sands bury the tin of processed and pressed meat. It cooks for months under the unrelenting heat and then freezes from the starry frost, until finally the can explodes and releases the pre-irradiated pork, a seething battleground of preservatives and bacteria, that expands in thin moldy strata under the desert floor. The incredible challenge for the mutating Spam to survive in this incredibly adverse environment turns the soupy legacy of luncheon meat carnivirous. The rush of new nutrients initiate unimaginable cellular acceleration until centuries later, strange crude descendents of the tin begin chasing their prey and learn to create structures to protect itself from the extremes of the desert. Soon family groups of Spam become tribes, and further adaptations develop digits and larger cranial expanses. An ice age comes and goes, turning the desert into more hospitable patches of areable land on which sentient proto-intelligent Spam beings as family groups become tribes, and tribes become settlements, and settlements become cities. Man long forgotten, spongy telepathic globular Spamians possess the Earth. It could happen. Really. Would you expect that some malcontent sea enzymes would crawl out of the sea, into the trees, out onto the savanna, and finally put on expensive sneakers? I step away from the dynamic flow of life and I've noted that alot of life is perfectly ridiculous. The more perfectly ridiculous the concept, the more possible I can see it happen. When in doubt, always expect the utterly absurd.

The task is done and apocalypse is held back. No, I wasn't playing a video game. I told my father last night that I was going to Seattle. Two weeks of sweating bullets for a fifteen minute talk that can even be more condensed into. "I'm going to Seattle." "I'm not paying you a cent." "Dad, uh, that's the point." It's not that simple, of course.. but the opening volley hitting the mark with unexpected accuracy is also damn spooky. "Why are you telling me this, son?" "Because you are my dad, and oh, would you least keep covering my medical insurance." "That I will do." He didn't even yell at me. He did say the word "No!" in an emphatic sequence of nine repetitions. I think he might have been trying to guilt me into seeing how crazy he thinks this idea is, but all he did was tell me what I was going to use to win him over. But now, third of the four major obstacles are out of the way. But he did say the one thing that I know he has to say, and I have to accept... "If it doesn't work out, even if you are in the streets, I will not bail you out." I move and the safety net is gone from beneath me. When he said that, I found my hands trembling. Now, I am committed.

It's nights like this that if I could meet Soren Kierkegaard, I think I would nut him.

"Sending Our Souls to Search the City
Drifting advances the progress of hedonism through the process of creating more life. By taking pleasure in the sensation of movement and simultaneously responding to the immediate impressions created by everything around you, you turn into a moment of poetry. This lyrical passage may take place in a space of a few yards - follow the nearby pedestrian alley between buildings, for example, not really knowing where it goes - but the mile-spanning vistas as just as likely to the Northwest Passage, as conduits out of the ordinary were called by the first psychogeographers.
Knowing, intuitively, that to form habits is to fail, you crisscross the smooth footsteps of the first hedonists drifting on the sandstone cliffs of what is now Libya. You recall from your youth how you instinctively sought pleasure and direct your present actions towards obtaining new pleasures. Your impressions are created by your immediate relations to everything around you, relations informed by the constant reminder that historical consciousness is the consciousness of everyday life. Why is it abstract or egotistical to recognize something of yourself in all the human endeavors that have come before you? A pleasurablly human response, indeed, the ultra-human response. You recognize the things around you as the cause of your impressions and you perceive the human touch in all these things. And then, at decisive moments, you possess the creations of your fellow humans and use them for your hedonistic ends, ends at odds with the current reproduction of daily life. You laugh at yourself that a hedonistic act is now a historical event because it's true."
From "A Psychogeographic Map into the Third Millennium" in The Arch Conspirator by Lee Bracken

Tonight's captured fragment: Two men walking at a brisk clip, debating in a language I couldn't identify, when one man raises his arm in emphasis and I catch one work. Republican. Spoken "Reepooblikan."

My behemoth of a cat is starting to show his age, he's getting some white strands in his solid black fur. It's hard to believe that he's coming up on ten years old, and we've been together all that time. I was checking the Internet about average cat lifespans and I found a chart for cat-human comparable lifetimes. My cat is something like 56 years old. I've always known that he's been the thin strand of sanity that I've held onto when things were bad and I had to face them alone. I've never truly lived alone because of th' jumpy and needy little bastard. I love him so.

I've thought about animals alot today. I was standing behind my desk and watching these two pigeons that seem to come to peck around the doors every afternoon. I don't know why I seem to have such an affinity for pigeons, but I do. Most people consider them ugly flying rats that cause random need for drycleaning, and in NYC, they are using hawks to hunt them down. Could be just that, that pigeons are underappreciated. If you look close they aren't just grey and white.. they have all kinds of patterns for their feathers. And the way they walk, with those big feet prancing and their heads bobbing with each step. They just do what they do, even getting really close to you. Have you ever watched a large flock all fly at once from a building on one side of the street to the other? I always stop to watch. The three animals I identify most with are pussycats, pigeons, and platypus. It also means I am damned to alliteration, probably. What else it says, I don't think I want to know.

Just finished: Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Bush-Cheney Junta by Gore Vidal. Also, A Case of Lone Star, by Kinky Friedman.

With the new order from on high, I had to spend three and a half hours on my feet today, to open doors, and smile at tenants and visitors, so that I might look more customer-responsive. This job only gets better. The new mantra is now, "Ten and a half an hour, November is not that far away, and they let me read the rest of the time." Lather, rinse, repeat. But as I played "lobby ambassador" today, the real diplomacy was going on inside my skull as it has since the end of my first week of work and the reality that I might pull the move to Seattle off sinks in. When I visited Seattle, one of the cool people I met there wanted me to play chess with him, and I told him chess wasn't my game. What I didn't see was I'm not good at that kind of chess. I have yet to utter a clue to my father of my intent to break away, and I'm playing mindfuck strategic chess as I have before every time I have told my father that I was going to do something I knew he wouldn't like. As I shelled out visitor passes and watched for cars parking in the red zone, I honed the tactical methods I would use to tell my father. Which power points to focus on, which emotions to evoke, which rational arguments to best wedge. I've been playing this game with my dad since I was a teen, and I've never felt more strongly why I have to do what I must do. This is a game I will never win. With my sister gone and my extended family falling apart as my parents' parents' generation drop like flies, I still cannot drive back the force of the sense that no matter how I make my arguements, I will be saying one thing. "Dad, I'm moving to Seattle, with or without your help. I am betraying you." What is worse is knowing that sooner or later, it would have to come to saying this. His world is a safe and comfortable place. And no matter how hard I try to make it otherwise, it is not my world.

Just Finished: Essays on Zen Buddhism, Volume One, by D.T. Suzuki. Normally, even the hardest books will take me a few weeks to finish, but this book took me a few months plus. I had to be ready for the impact of each essay, and each sentence in each essay. The kicker is that one of the major points in the essays is that book learning is a distraction from seeing your true self-nature. So I've just spent several months reading a book that told me that I didn't need to read it in the first place.

Now that I have finished that book, I've jabbed even harder by something I said, or didn't say being the case, a couple weeks ago. I was talking to the friend who first invited me to Seattle and then suggested I ask to move in to her home about how I've been feeling that something big is growing inside my deepest self, something coming together knit from reawakening memories and powerful synchronicities. She said that God was on the talking on the phone to me. I said that I think I'd picked up the phone, but I couldn't hear what I was telling the All. I directly quote her answer, "once more, since the answer is always YES...what do you want?" My response was something profoundly vague. I didn't answer what first came into my head. I wanted to answer, "Mu!" One of the Great Koans, the compact and cryptic stories given to Zen students to open themselves to the fullness of Zen, is this one. A monk once asked Master Joshu, "Does the dog gave a Buddha-nature?" Joshu answered, "Mu!" Meaning No! But this isn't really just saying, dogs are just organisms on four legs that like Milkbones, and therefore are without Enlightenment. This is the kind of No! that means Yes! and No!. It's the No! that defies the clouded mind to slice through the crap and find the All within. That's what I want. To say No! to the layers of illusion I've wrapped around myself to shield myself from suffering and risk, and yet say Yes! I am part of the All, if I reveal my self-nature and live without fearing life. Mu translates as Not a Thing. I seek emptiness, so that the I may refill myself from what is already inside myself. Maybe in the end, the answer I gave my friend was the right one. "The answer will be when I don't have to answer."

"Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh." - H.L. Mencken

So, I overslept by three hours. But, I still managed to get a new DVD drive and cleaning stuff for my computer, make a sizable dent in the cleaning of my apartment, install the above-mentioned drive (which did not explode when I used. I'm utterly amazed,) and watch some DVDs with a good friend after we went out and had a celebratory meal of meal with a side of meat and beer. Just felt like sharing.

This is the real reason I wrote today, I forgot to start a new feature: What did I just finish?

Just finished: Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett. As usual, another really damn funny Discworld novel.

I have finished my official first full work of week. A mind-numbing dozen and a half or so to go.

Tonight's capture fragment of perception: Watch the prancing step of two bright red feet on a fat pigeon with a tuft of white atop its head like some kind of bird mohawk.

I had a relevatory thought as I manned my desk. No, Seriously. I was thinking again about why I don't write stories or essays, after totally blowing it off since I left university. That was eight months ago. I've been trying to come around to the truth that you really can't be a writer unless you actually write. Amazing as that truth may seem. Although there is some reality behind the excuse that I can't seem to write what I really want to, long as I live under the auspices of my father's money, which I've done all my life. There is a nebulous fear, usually irrational, that if anything I write, gets out, somehow it will piss my father off and he'll finally pull the proverbial rug from right underneath me. It's what I call the velvet choker. But then that shouldn't stop me, really. So this move might remove my last really good excuse. But then when I saw that.. I wondered how much more I've been holding back because of this excuse. And I had the harshest reflection I've had in a long time. "I am really funny?" I mean, if I'm holding back what I think from paper... what else am I holding back? It was an asskicker. Now, I don't know.. I'm still working on this one. So far, I think I'm still funny, but how much funnier could I be if I just finally let go. I make people laugh. I am funny. Man, independence is just getting scarier by the moment, but somehow it's an optimistic terror.

Oh, there was one more thing. I promised myself I wouldn't use this blog as a kvetch launcher.. but in this case, I must. I was riding home on the subway tonight and I saw this mid-20's white guy wearing an expensive denim outfit from Russel Simmon's Phat Farm, which was easy to tell since the damn label was sewn in the shirt in bright red embroidery. He was wearing stylized hiking boots that were never meant to actually hike in, long and thick silver chains, and the top model headphones, connected to what I expected would be a primo CD player or even better, MP3 player, slapped over his ears. He had a shaved and spiked hairdo, dyed a color never found in nature for good reason, which probably cost my whole yearly hair budget. And he had done all this.... to look "street." Does he know what he says is "Hello, Aren't I Hip-Hop Cool, accept me." Kvetch over. Thank you for patience, signed the Management.

Okay, I am definitely quitting cigarettes. Er. Again. The elevators were out of action tonight, and I had to use the stairs to go to the twelfth floor. By eight, I was seeing spots from oxygen deprivation. I didn't think a human could make noises like that. Smoking is biting hard enough into my cash as it is. It's not quitting that is all that hard. It's the staying quit when I get stressed.

I've really begin to dig writing in my blog. It's typical Alan thinking. "Oh god, who blogs? What a stupid trendy way to sell out your privacy." Then I open Kosher Pork. "What an amazing experiment in public displays of free writing!" Least I haven't lost my skills lost when minoring in pretension as a professional college student. It's interesting to try my hand again at non-fiction. When I first started getting the literary itch, I wanted to be paid to write weird interpretations of real life, ala Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. I was reflecting on this earlier, and I realized that I felt this desire, and started calling myself a humorist after reading Mark Twain's Life on The Mississippi. You know, I've never read any of the classic novels he's better known for, but I've devoured most of his collected travel logs and a few of his gathered essays. I like to think of Mark Twain wandering San Francisco like I do, just watching people and learning from them.
It's all a hopeful sign. I was beginning to wonder if I was going to end up one of those San Francisco armchair intellectuals who just claim they would make great writers, but never actually write. Kind of a scary fate, actually. But its coming back. Hopefully, I'll ride it... and I'll see myself in print. well print that someone paid me for.

Today's captured fragment of perception: A slight young African-American man dressed for work, carrying a plastic grocery bag with a huge tub of mass gaining powdered drink and a self-help book called, The Millionaire Mind.

Not much really to say tonight. I did my Pilates exercise thingie. I worked. I took the trash out. I played with my cat. Today was very Zen.

Work continues to show itself as passable and possible. It is quiet and monotonous, with a crisis tempered here and there. There's another symbol for me in there somewhere.... but nothing can take down my mood, not even the sore gums from having another cavity worked on today. Seattle looms. A large obstacle falls. The only things I need now is the funds and the courage. I awoke this morning to find that the gonif San Francisco cable monopoly finally held to their promise. My channel lineup doth increase. There is now blessed Cartoon Network, The Learning Channel, Trio, Ovation, and a handful other channels that were lacking in the Kingdom of Alan. And the Kingdom does celebrate with glazing of the eyes, consuming of too many Ding-Dongs, and worry over increased tuchis size. This has been a good day.

"I like life. It's something to do." - Ronny Shakes

You know what? I'd never make a truly great security guard, anyway. I'd probably have to give up the silliest idea I have. That all humans are inherently good. Damned if I know how I managed to come up that idea, and grow up in the 80's.

My first day at work is done. It is work I can do. If they actually train me for emergencies this time. I'm already talented in blind panic, but those are usually not the skill sets you want in a crisis.

Security is a strange thing. Knowing you are there to make a bunch of people in a small quiet building, who are chasing bits of green paper with that desperate modern intensity, feel somehow safer from an image of a terrible world outside the lobby doors. But then, how am I different, doing this job in my own desperate pursuit of enough of those green pieces of paper to make materialize an etheric emotional desire. I don't know. It's that strange feeling that haunted me at my last post, that I'm being paid to do what I've always done. Sitting somewhere and trying to learn a world that isn't my own. It's like being the man who sits in the danceclub and nurses a drink as he watches others dance for hours; unwilling to dance because he doesn't understand the steps and can't follow the music. The one who watches and listens, believing maybe if he could just hear the music, then he'll jump up and dance. Okay, really sophmoric metaphor. But I do dance like Jerry Lewis on bad acid with a rabid wolverine down his overstarched pants, and the only thing most dance music makes me want to move is my bowels. But I can't shake off this wrenching hunger to understand the rhythm of life, when I know inside my deepest self that I can't understand it. I can only feel it.
Synchronicity is hell. The original 1946 version of "The Razor's Edge" is showing on my TV. I really should read the book.

"When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on Earth. So what the hell, leap." - Cynthia Heimel

Been a bit since I wrote... getting ready for my job. Today I start... in just a few hours. The challenge begins.

"The Buddha is your own Mind, make no mistake to bow [to external objects]. "Buddha is a Western word, and this country it means "enlightened nature;" and by "enlightened" is meant "spiritually enlightened." It is one's own own spiritual Nature in enlightenment that responds to the external world, comes in contact with objects, raises the eyebrows, winks the eyelids, and moves the hands and legs. This Nature is the Mind, and the Mind is Buddha, and the Buddha is the Way, and the Way is Zen. This simple word, Zen, is the beyond the comprehension both of the wise and the ignorant. To see directly into one's own Nature, this is Zen. Even if you are well learned in hundreds of Sutras and Sastras, you still remain an ignoramus in Buddhism when you have not yet seen into your original Nature. Buddhism is not there. The highest truth is unfathomably deep, is not an object of talk or discussion, and even the canonical texts have no way to bring it within our reach. Let us once see into our own original Nature and we have the truth, even when we are quite illiterate, not knowing a word..."
- from the essay on Satori in D.T. Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism

"Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, and a tragedy for the poor." - Shalom Aleichem

I know now the building I will be guarding ever so dilligently, and I have the monkey suit they want me to wear. But if you can wear a fast food uniform (which I have worn three times,) you can handle a truly hideous tie and a blazer that gives you old-school David Byrne shoulders. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. I get my schedule on Monday and start work on Wednesday. I have the job, and that will give me the funds to possibly radically change my life this year. This places me between elated hope and paralytic fear. Is independence actually within sight, and I'm not in the oxygen tent yet? The mind reels.

"The human tendency prefers familiar horrors to unknown delights." - Fred Woodworth

By the way, an unknown man managed to board a presidential press plane in South Africa and took a free ride to Uganda, carrying no ID or passport. And the pentagon is still looking for a missing 747 that vanished after leaving Uganda (read "stolen.") How safe do you feel tonight?

I think the biggest problem I have with reality is how unreal it is. I just wanted to make note of that.

Sunday was lost to a blockbuster sinus migraine that I had to sleep off. Now, of course, I can't sleep.
Today I find out what my new work schedule is. Maybe the reason I am fascinated by paradox is how aware I am of being subject to them. I'm frightened of the change to my life brought on my this new job and by the money I will save for my independence, but I am soothed by the idea I will have a regular schedule to reinstate my need for a clockwork structure. I'm always asking myself what makes humans so different from other lifeforms. I've tossed out the old faithfuls like speech and toolworking, because there are examples of them in other species. Maybe it is paradox. Well not, specifically paradox, but the awareness of paradox. It's like being a kid, when you were made aware of the necessity of breathing, and you nearly pass out when you forget to breathe because you've become aware of it. I think it's time to brush off the book with the essay by Henri Bergson. He says that comedy is a result of our awareness of the awkwardness of trying to enforce the mechanical on the natural. The US army invaded Grenada using an out-dated gas station map as one of their main sources of geographic intelligence. Think about it.

I've been thinking of my comments about meeting God. Then an old friend of mine, probably the most spiritual person I know (even if she goes in for all that Angels and Miracles kind of talk,) wrote me about reading my blog on above said comments. "What do you mean "IF?"" Yeah that's true. Technically, I have met God. Of course, I still would like to meet God over a nice nosh at a good deli. The last time was a surprise. God met me in late March on a frozen lake just off California Highway 4, somewhere in or around the northwest edge of the Carson Iceberg Wilderness. Looking back now on some maps, it had to be close to Ebbets Pass. Of course, I've never been sure if it was late March or Early April, but then of course, the details are helpful, but I'm happier remembering the impact of the experience.
Okay, I'm sure your asking yourself what the hell was I doing on Highway 4 late March, in the Sierra Nevadas at the end of the winter. The question presses more when I illuminate that I lived in Southern California on the edge of the High Desert, on the blue collar bastions at the fringe of the Great LA Sprawl. So what was I doing there? Hey, I'd like to know that. So I best answer it then. The memory has been leaking through, and been wanting to make me see that experience again.
My habit since my first set of wheels was to spend evenings wandering out past the borders of the city, and randomly drive the backwaters and scenic highways after dark. Head out just before dark, get back just before light. But it wasn't until I moved to Redlands that I began to master these evening drives. I could go over the mountains, come back around through the high desert passes, and end up cutting across suburbs until I hit beach. And then in 1996, there were many reasons to be driving. Most of them dealt with the questions formed as I think I finally first decided that I would be who I wanted to be, not who others wanted me to be. (Actually that really started after puking all over myself in the bathroom of San Bernardino's only passable British pub, but that is another story.) But I was in college, and spontaneous as these drives were, I never went farther than set points on the map, and always made sure to be back home before or at sunrise. That is, I never did, until late March of 1996.
I was full of nervous energy after the event at the pub, and I couldn't channel it in the usual ways. So I figured a really long drive was in order... I'd cut over the San Bernardino Mountains, drive through the desert and behind the Angeles range, until I'd come to the foot of the Sierra Nevadas and turn back at the point of no return on the 395, which was the 178 to Bakersfield. Going any further on the 395 meant committing to driving basically until Nevada. Even at that point in the year, most of the park roads or small highways were still closed for the season, or because the season wouldn't reopen for the season. I broke a couple laws wearing the earphone beads to listen to my portable tape player, since there was no radio in my beloved basic Toyota Tercel. The first few hours were uneventful, and around 2 AM, I was coming up on my cutoff on the 395. Also I knew I didn't have enough gas to really go any further without the promise of after-hours fueling. I took my phones off and stopped for that staple roadtrip food, beef jerkey at some podunk general store. I stood in the chilly parking lot and looked up the highway into the mountains. And then I said, "Keep going." Well, not me, really.. more a voice inside my head that spoke in my voice. I can recall hearing that little voice before, usually telling me to not do what I am going to do and will lead to people pointing at you and sniggering for an unnecessarily long number of months. And usually it was right. But this was the first time, I listened. And it wasn't a choice, really.. it was just like something I should do, and I did it. I climbed into my car and didn't turn back.
Not like the "choice" went over with flowers and cake. I had an important essay due the day after next. My Tercel was only a few months old, and I hadn't tested it on any really long trips for real rate of gas consumption. But that little Teddy Roosevelt kept saying to take that hill, and I had to believe in my steed. I drove on through the night, keeping myself awake with the old head out the window. They say that if you pray enough, you might see God. Maybe that is the missing factor. I prayed with my whole being as I passed through mountain towns with their sidewalks rolled up. I prayed with a fervor I never showed on Yom Kippur as I came down toward Nevada, with no habitation in sight. "Oh, mighty mighty are you, O Lord. Oh Ruler of the Universe, I beseech you, do not let me run out of gas in the middle of nowhere at 5 in the morning." Whether it was the Will of God, or the Super Unleaded I had decided to spend a few more dollars on, I made it through those mountains. Even for a Sunday night/Monday morning, it was startling how little traffic was there, and I coasted into a fuel stop at a low-end border casino on Topaz Lake. My relief was so great, and the view of the lake from the restaurant so dazzling, that I ignored how lousy was the 8 dollar breakfast special.
One of the sharpest things that morning, was that my mind was even clearer than the perfect blue sky. I'd been driving with very limited breaks for close to twelve hours. with no stops even for that insistent bane of male biology for the last four hours. Beyond the crap breakfast, I had been consisted on the miracle libation, the New Gods ambrosia, Coca-Cola, and processed meat snacks, but yet I had not had a total sugar crash meltdown. A few questions asked and a now much abused map of California searched, I was left with a handful of passes that were clear and easy, even if looked like it had snowed only the day before. You can always tell a cyncic on the road. He's the one who's driving on a perfect day and wondering if it can be too perfect. But onward I had to go. I slipped some J.S. Bach into the Walkman and turned off the 89 onto the 4.
I grew up in Texas, so the only snow I'd seen for real was the rare fall of wet flakes that never stuck. Then I moved into the mountains of Southern California, where there was snow, but it was nasty mushy stuff that was grey before it even hit the ground, and blackened by the hour. So, I'd never really seen snow. But what I saw as I climbed higher on the highway was snow. Feet of perfect crystalline water, undisturbed by any feet or wheel marks since they fell. The morning sunlight was catching against the snow in just that way that it looked like etheric diamonds were strewn by a great lazy hand. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #1 was filling my ears and I didn't get a few of those dramatically places drops leaking down the cheeks, I got the "Great Teton Dam Break Disaster" sort of thing. There was no-one, simply no-one. I've always bickered over why mysticism is mark by its ineffibility, but right then, I understood you can't always convey meaning to another, when you've slipt from time and space. I drove along, weeping at the completeness of the scene before me. A moment of pure beauty, so striking because how much I had denied myself the possibility of it. Maybe not so much beauty, but purity. If I had seen that alone, that day, that would have been enough. But as I've been known to say, "The Universe doesn't alert me to truth with a glad hand, but with a dropped piano."
I've never been one to put much umbrage in psychic powers. Oh, sure, I've been known to have a precognitive dream now and again, but usually all they do is alert me about a time when my fly is open on a job interview. The same spiritual friend says I am a powerhouse, a dynamo of mental energies, but for me, I have only one true and important ability. Psychic packing. I'm sure I am not alone in this. I think I might have inherited from my Jewish mother, and her stereotypical purse of hyperutility. It's not a packrat thing. Packrats just keep things they think they might need later on. a Psychic Packer has to keep things because he or she knows they are NEEDED. Case in point. I hadn't been living in the SB Mountains for a couple years, and my new home was in easy-winter valley basin, yet when my last Tercel became an over-grown paperweight, I still couldn't bring myself to not transfer my old pair of Sorel snow-boots to the new Tercel. Then, the little voice told me to pull over into the driveway of some vacant summer homes on the edge of a flat spread of snow over what was either a field or a body of water. The taps turned down inside my eyes and I climbed into those boots. But as I walked farther and farther from my car, over a berm, and into the middle of that untouched field of snow, I was weeping with another explosive burst of joy. I stopped nearly in the middle and that is when I met God.
Now, when I say I met God, it wasn't like a bursting of the divine light and singing of the angels, or a momentous intellectual realization of the truth of a higher being. I'd long given up on the God as the "cosmic muffin or hairy thunderer." F. Buckminster Fuller once said something definitive about the divine, "God is not a noun. God is a verb." God is not the force, God is a force. A unified dynamic universe, where everything and everyone are connected. That's what I wanted to feel, what I still fight everyday to feel. The connection. And as I threw my arms out, with the sparkling snow, the sky's blue that was the meaning of blue, and for the first time, I knew it. I hadn't met God, but I sure as hell got a direct line to God's operating board. For that one moment, I felt myself in contact with everything, and I knew the big hope. The hope that I really did belong... somewhere.. in this wacky cosmos. And hope is enough for faith. So as I finally walked back to my car, I walked with faith. And laughter. Always laughter. I guess I understood then, another thing.. that there was a place in the infinite for me, and that only made this a much funnier universe. It's something I've always wanted, to laugh because I just know something. I don't doubt it, not at the core. That's even funnier, because I can't dislodge something from inside me, and for once, I don't want to.
I looked for a pay phone to share what had happened, but found only one, and I had three quarters. So I drove on down through to Angel's Camp, and finally to the Interstate 5 with a straight-shot into LA and then San Bernardino. It was so lucid for me that day. I drove home, adding together a trip time of 25 hours, stopped for coffee where my friends hung out, and still finished the essay before I passed out. Yeah, I met God.. and God is a verb.

"We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house;
But it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.
Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not."

- Lao Tzu, The Way and Its Power (Tao Te Ching)

If Jesus Christ had choked to death on some matzoh at the Last Supper, would the Catholics and Protestants still be fighting over the authority of the Heimlich Maneuver?

Just a thought.

And the in-home vacation continues....

I do hope that this security post is like the last one, where I can read to pass the time. My to-be-read book shelf is overflowing. And that is without the Proust I finally plan on reading. I've felt some of the worst during this between-job funk about failing to read. Its like failing your courses when you are the dean of your own college.

I like reading books on Zen. When you finish them, you question whether you should have read them or you should have a small bowl of rice and stared at some pebbles instead.

I celebrate the day of American freedom by enjoying my last few days from new work incarceration. I spend it in front of the God TV, my 40 inch stereo set. Some people go off a few days to seek truth and to find their spirit animal guides. I am doing this, even if I am more searching for my spirit vegetable.

My best friend in San Francisco, Jim the Elder is coming by for our weekly Friday Night discourse. I know alot of Jims, and this Jim is a 73 year old intellectual fellow, so the reasoning for calling him Jim The Elder becomes clear. He is a remarkable man with a remarkable mind. I hope to have my mind that sharp at the age. I recommend that if you seek others to enhance your life experience that you should find a friend in an elderly free thinker. When the younger intelligensia, myself included, get together to discuss the mysteries of man and the universe, fiery principled passion tends to replace actual intellectual reasoning. The flow of memes between someone old and young can manifest itself in a dynamic balance of passion and reason. That and Jim the Elder just happens to be a really nice guy.

"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure." William Saroyan

"Billy was working on the second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:
"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past present and future always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments like we can look at the stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all those moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion that we have here on Earth that one moment follows another, like beads on a string, that once a moment is gone it is gone forever
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when i myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and sat what the Tralfamadorosns say about dead people, which is, 'So it goes.' ""

Kurt Vonnegut - SlaughterHouse-Five

Sometimes I see that the same trouble I have with the modern business is very close in association I have with traditional Judiasm. I did my training for the new security company I am working for, who won't tell me where exactly I'll be working until my uniform arrives. Yes, the true hell among hells is upon me. It's blazer and tie this round. Damn their eyes! I've already seen the affair I'll wear, and I'm just now coming down off hard ugly suit Bar Mitzvah flashblacks.. The purple velour... is crawling in my mind......

Uh, yeah. Sometimes I see that the same trouble I have with the modern business is very close in association I have with traditional Judaism. Even though the two other new employs and I all had prior security training, and most of the necessary permits, they still made us watch the training video tapes meant for untrained rookies, until we talked them out of it after an hour of training tapes. The corner of my eye is still twitching from watching the example of a guy getting caught smoking in the warehouse, repeated three times. The acting makes Pauly Shore closer to Sir Laurence Olivier. It was the unnecessity of the act of watching the training tapes, like Judaism, the delivery of blessings aren't complete without making the motions. Think about it. How much real difference might there be between management procedure and religious prayer. Why is it necessary to exactly follow the guidelines as if they evoke efficiency and propiety themselves, and were not always necessary to help production overcome cost.

But with much gladness, I am employed again. This crap job feels even better then the last security hire, because now I know I have something to make the mundanity worth it. The possible perspicious path from out of my gilded cage and out into the real world, which would focus somewhere around Seattle. I'm going to be running on caffeine and hope. Okay enough of this Jonathan Livingston Seagull shit. Be, not do. Do, not be.

Way too damn early.

But I am to be employed again, as another well-groomed and noble guardian of the San Francisco High Rise. I leave now to sacrifice a day of actually learning something to be indoctrinated by the video and papers of my new employer. I love security, it's like hiring misanthropic sheep to watch the rest of the lambchops. If my psyche wasn't nearly fully focused on the desire for a bottle of juice and one of those custard-filled donuts with the chocolate frosting, I should write something greatly profound about the life balance of means against ends. Hell with it.

"Like any man of sense and feeling, I abominate work." Aldous Huxley

Watching "Saint Valentine's Massacre" ( A Roger Corman Classic)
Jack Nicholson does a terrible gangster accent.. and could he have ever looked so young?

After yesterday's thought on God, on my walk to the psychotherapist, I decided that if I ever met God that it would be over lunch. Preferably at a kosher delicatessen. It's nothing that Jewish, mind you. Okay, it's something that Jewish. But, I realized that dinner would be too formal, and I'd never ask the right questions over breakfast. Lunch is a casual mid-day kind of nosh, where God and I could have some nice sandwiches after matzoh ball soup, and then have a nice walk afterward. I don't know if I'd ask the big questions, since I don't know if even God has the answers to those mysteries. I think God would just have the best opinions on the matter. The only real problem I'd have over sharing a meal with God would be, who picks up the check.