A young student asked of the Master "what did you do before you became Master?"
The Master replied "I fetched wood and carried water."
The Student asked "What do you do now that you are Master?"
The Master replied "I fetch wood and carry water."

I got into a great novel tonight (Songs From The Stars by Norman Spinrad.) It's about this post-atomic culture with one of the main characters being a "perfect master" of "The Clear Blue Way." Just got me thinking about my Way. Lately, I've done nothing really, but work, read at work, and sleep. It's an old behavior. I just get myself totally focuses on some external thing, that I think is superimportant, as the main thing in my life, and then I ignore everything else. I should be in a more positive space. Shit, I haven't had a Marlboro in two weeks, and my next paycheck will be as nice and fat as the first one I got this week. I should be doing the Hora. Or least singing Havah Negilah. Yet, I'm sort of numbly shambling through my days. I can understand that I am on the way out of The City, but hell, it's San Francisco. I should be using my two days off to exploit the high weirdness while I can. This is all about the journey now. The life I am trying to leave, everything was about destination. I justify my life on a single issue, as the Prime Mover, and that justifies my major extracirricular activity being lethargy. I'm tired of living for some nebulous future where all would be well and good, and there would be much rejoicing. This is about the meaning. That's why I thought of the Zen story above. How can we live in the spirit if we have to do the mundane. You make the mundane sacred. Enlightened or not, you have to shit, shower, and shave. So to speak. There have been "Golden Ages" in my life. And those were the time that each day felt meaningful, even if it was mundane. Honestly, meaningful... and funny. To have the world, I have to live in it, right? Why am I waiting for the move to start this? Oh, don't see myself becoming a boddhisvata between now and then.. I just like to live in a clean apartment, have some nice walks, and get plowed with friends a few times. I want to go across the bay and see the Bay Area Anarchists take on Local Communists in a soccer grudge match. I've missed the first of three games.

I want to ride The Clear Blue Way.

All week I've wanted to right about what happening in my fair corner of the world, home of the supposed progressive elements. Someone pied Ralph Nader, okay it was cake, but it was pastry-based. That shmuck Dubya ends up King of the Hill by subversion of the electoral process of the Supreme Court, and people out there are still mad at Ralph for taking away votes from Gore, who was elected by the popular vote, anyway. People out there are considering listening to some ambitious white Republicann' campaign to trash the current Guv and select a Austrian weightlifer turned action hero, who hasn't even sat on a school board before this. I think I'm more mad, because as a humorist, even I couldn't come up with something so ridiculous. I am again bowed to power of absurdity in these times. I'm just not twisted enough to think these things.

I've been darn naughty about keeping up with my Just Finished, because I'm tearing through novels like a chainsaw. I've read 5 in two weeks. well two weekends. But I did finish The Arch Conspirator by Len Bracken. I'm finding situational thought very interesting. Now is why I quit smoking. Now I can afford a few more books a month. Well, something classic in using one vice to take over from another. I'll list the novels, in a few days. Honestly again, I think maybe two or three are worth even mentioning.