GRUMPY OLD BASTARD ASSHOLE

Rain all day, sometimes big rain. Wind. Yellow leaves fly through the air on the way to the ground. This year, the trees with the yellow leaves turned first. The trees with red leaves are largely still green. We'll have an extended fall color season this year. First yellow, then orange, then red. The color change is so particular year to year, I wonder how it can be said what weekend will be the peak time or what kind of a coloration it will be. I don't recall but one prediction being accurate, the year the talking heads said it would be a poor year for color. It was a dry year. The leaves just turned brown. I pay little to no attention to predictions for what kind of winter we'll have. Already, I've seen two projected forecasts for the winter. One said it will be long and extra cold with much more snow than ever. The other said it will be the mildest winter ever. Winters are like Nascar races: impossible to predict. We've had four days and nights of dense fog accompanied by sprinkling rain, until today when it poured in torrents. It's on the verge of tiresome. Yet, no matter how muddy the ground gets, I prefer wet to ground so dry it cracks and the springs dry up. Springs are largely dried up anyway. So many exurban houses in the landscape draining the underground water. Wells have to go deeper and deeper. The society of waste comes to the mountains, drains the water, poisons the land, dismisses as ignernt hillbillies the people whose home this land is, impatient, intolerant, wanting everything now, just like on tv. I was about to compare it to white people pushing the Indians off their home continent, killing them by the millions, and say the exurbanites are all but killing us. But, they are killing us with cancer. County government doesn't care. The ones poisoning us are paying more taxes than we are, so we have no voice. 

I'm seeing an experience a few weeks ago when I was introduced to someone I already knew, though wished I didn't. She looked at me, nodded and turned away. I said in my head, Thank you. A few months ago in the coffee shop I mentioned to a woman I was talking with at the bar I watch Nascar races. The one above who nodded, who I was not talking to, said, "They just drive around and around in circles," smug, proving she's more sophisticated than I, doesn't waste her college-educated intelligence watching working class tv shows. I wanted to be vulgar, nasty vulgar, the kind of vulgar that makes an enemy for life, though condensed and softened my response to, "In the very most minimal way of looking at it, yes." Her nose shot straight up and she was gone. Again, I said in my head, Thank you. Made an enemy for life without even trying. It hurts so good. Such moments remind me that I left the city for the mountains to get away from people like her, the white middle-class suburbanites. Now they've packed in around me so tightly I am glad the Republicans are squeezing the middle-class into the working class. I actively despise how they regard and treat the mountain people. I told Selma at the beginning of the coffee shop that when the right people find this place, I'm gone. Turns out, Selma was Cuban and the right people stayed away. Now Becca has it and she's run off the wrong people, so now I go in there and all I see is the right people. I have no reason to be there. The people I used to go in there to see have been run off. Not high end. Not PC enough. The end came when a country club woman in there said to me, "I bet YOU voted for O-BA-ma." I said, "Sure did. He's a sharp stick in the Republican eye." She said, "I'm a con-SER-vative!" I thought, duh, and said, "I'm a SO-cialist!" I don't want this kind of conversation, ever, anyplace, with anybody. The coffee shop is past tense for me. Another one of those moments when I get with self and say, I didn't come here for this shit. 

The fun part in saying I'm a SO-cialist, she told within a few days everyone she knows that knows of me, he's a socialist. Hooray. Five or so people I never want to meet will see to it for me. I don't even have to think about avoiding them. They avoid me first. I'm pretty sure I have a name for being arrogant among those people. I can easily give them cause to call me much, much worse. Recalling a line from a Steven Segal film. A woman warning him about the people he's going up against, they're bad, really bad. He said, "I'm worse, much worse." And a line from Runaway Train when Voight was told he was a beast. He said, "Worse. Man!" That's how I feel in the company of people that look down their noses at the mountain people. I want them to call me arrogant. I want them to call me as bad as they can make it, inspire the people they talk to to avoid me, so when they're introduced to me they nod, turn away and think: asshole. Alas, I have some neighbors, the most openly fickle people I can think of, fake from the surface to the core, totally informed by tv, Republican, Christian, who once wanted me to be their friend. Didn't last long. Didn't get started. They really tried my ideal of loving neighbor as self. The closest I can come is to allow them who they are, recognizing we do not connect in any way. I'm old enough to know from repeated experience that attempts to go against the recognition never works, leads only to hard feelings and another cluster of enemies, their gossip circles, for life. An aunt passed to me something her husband told her when he was living, If you don't want it started, don't start it. Confucius could have said that. Often I am called to remind self of original purpose coming here, none of it social. 

Talking with my friend Jay at Chris Cox's reading at intermission, he was saying he has too much going on, too much he's involved in, it's stressing him. I said, Man, you don't need that shit. You live on a mountain. Get to know your mountain. It will be your friend. I mentioned that I've had spells of involvement in more than I was comfortable dealing with, going to meetings. Periodically, I've had to pull back to the people I care about who care about me and let the rest go. He's not of that kind of temperament. I didn't want to tell him to do as I do, because my way is not his way. I only told him how I've solved the issue for myself. Not to say do it my way. Only to illustrate how I chose for my own circumstances. He will find his way according to his own circumstances. I wouldn't want to influence him any other way. He's not as comfortable yet with being disliked as I've become. Or so I guess. It would not do for me to advise him. He has good brains. He'll figure it out. I just wanted to say he can find a solution to his satisfaction. If I were to hear myself start a sentence, you should, I would have to do penance for at least two days. First thing I'd do is retract everything said, immediately. Then I'd go inside to the place that sentence came from and educate self again that I have no right, any way I look at it, to presume to know anyone else's should, when there is no should to it. I can't name my own shoulds, sure as hell can't name somebody else's, especially when I don't even believe it is a word worth being in the language. I don't, and would not, rule the world, so I just don't use the meaningless word. When I don't use it, it's not in my world. I feel like I've found a good balance of involvement / non-involvement that keeps me engaged without stress. It has not always been this way. It comes from allowing the flow and flowing with it. Now that I think I've found my own flow, it feels really awkward when I step outside it. I have to pull back into it. As I get used to it, it becomes easier to keep in tune with and easier to jump back into when distracted out of the flow for a period of time. The flow is in my center, feels like solar plexus is where I connect with it. In my own flow is where I belong. I want for nothing else.  

photos by tj worthington

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NO TO HERD-THINK

meher baba

I heard a man talking on a Charlotte NC interview radio talk show with NPR about a religious demographic of people he calls the NONES. These are the people who have a spiritual life, see themselves on the spiritual path, who are not affiliated with a church, religion, by choice. For religion they have none. He has made a church for the people disaffected by religion. I listened to him long enough to find out what he was about. Even continued to listen after I knew he was no interest to me. It got worse until I just turned it off. By worse, I mean not allowing that an individual on one's own path can be valid. I've been told countless times by religionists in my life that I cannot go it alone, I need the support of a church. Support? Like my friend Melvin says, When I want to be judged, I'll go to church. I cannot give the opinions of an ego-maniacal man power-over my decision making. A preacher whose solution to the troubles in the world is nuke-em cannot advise me about anything. He has nothing to teach me. Faux news on the television gives him evidence he's right. A man whose racism is never spoken, because it's understood, has nothing to tell me. Even a preacher who is not racist or sexist and believes religion is the way, still has nothing to say of interest to me. I know a preacher who lives nearby with a church of beautiful loving energy bubbling among the members. I've seen his flock become truly caring, conscious people of integrity. Still, it's for people who need groups. I, personally, do not thrive in groups. In a group, I start looking right away for my own place on the periphery. Every herd has one that stays off to itself. I am that one in the herds I've been associated with. At a cocktail party I'm the lone penguin with drink in hand wandering between the groups of penguins chattering.  

ganesh

I forget the book, chapter and verse, but I've heard a zillion sermons on it's the narrow way, not the broad highway. The preacher meant by "narrow" the straight-and-narrow, the tightrope preachers use to control their flock with guilt, a misinterpretation of strait, a narrow passage to a harbor, which even a child could see. I mentioned the difference to two different preachers, one in childhood, one as an adult, that strait has a very different meaning from straight. No it didn't. Dismissed. A doubter. In hindsight, I am grateful I had such a twisted religious beginning. It was so obviously not what it claimed of itself, it spit me out like the human cannonball, made me a None, a contraction of no one, nobody. The preacher mentioned above starts out with Nobody his name for the people not associated with religion. He likes to have "conversation" with a None over pitchers of beer in a bar where he makes salient points to prove to the other, you're wrong, you're nobody. I think of Odysseus telling the Cyclops his name was Nobody, thinking ahead to the Cyclops screaming in pain with a beam stuck in his eye; the other Cyclopes called to him asking who was doing this to him and he answered, Nobody. They went back to sleep and Odysseus slipped away. The guy talking on the radio was slick, fast with a rebuttal to any point of view. Winning them over, convincing them he's right and they're wrong. Now he has a church of nobodies believing they're somebodies in association with him. Listening to his slick, evangelistic talk was enough in itself to put me off. I'd say he won over the ones looking for what's "right" with his I'm-right-you're-wrong explications. He talked like he was an insurance salesman, your good buddy with your interest at heart. And a little more money in the collection plate helps. The ones looking for what's real are the ones he fails to snare with his slick tongue. He'll never figure out why. The need to be right is the mother of countless atrocities. 

shirdi sai baba

By the time I turned the radio off, I was almost mad at him. The temperature was rising in my boiler and I assessed no need to follow this unto steam blowing out the ears. There came the time I was hearing him a smug Jerry Falwell, who, of the fallen televangelists, actually fell well. The guy on the radio wasn't saying a purple "teletubby" with a triangle on its head in a children's tv show was gay. At least the guy talking on the radio wasn't showing the stupid side of egomaniacism. He was showing the cold, calculating side with a smile of pretend caring in the reassuring voice of an undertaker, thank you very much for the free money you worked your ass off for. Nationwide is on your side. State Farm is there. He has a church of people he has convinced they're nobodies outside his herd; he knows what's right. His presumption got on my nerves to the point I almost started talking back to him, but realized I wanted no kind of conversation with him, not even in my head. For me, he was another voice calling to me to enter a herd, a Siren saying, Join, Be a Member, Belong, No more Lonely Boy, We're there for You. And my immediate response: No you're not. He brings to mind a phenomenon that when you prove somebody's belief about something to be wrong, it hardens them further in their own belief. This is what the Somebody who convinces Nobodies they're wrong did to me. He made me all the more determined in my own way. I believe he has the same right to gather Nobodies unto himself that I have not to accept the name Nobody just because he, for whom being right is important, says so. Pat Robertson is right, too. So was Joe McCarthy. All the great rogues of history were right. I cannot turn my thinking over to any form of rightness. 

sadguru upasni maharaj

Life on earth, everyday life, is too complex, change the only constant, illusion the foundation, for me to nail myself to one thing or another that calls itself or himself or herself right. What's right in one context is not right in another. This way of looking at it takes into consideration something only the individual can see for self. The spiritual path is a path, not a road, not an interstate, not a passenger jet, not a cruise ship. It is individual. Walking in a line on a path gets old fast. In line, the one in front is perky with energy, going onward, charged. The ones behind are overtaken with lethargy such that it becomes a labor to walk. Some of them lag behind and run to catch up. When it is just two, the one behind gets tired first. It doesn't work. Or anyway, it doesn't work well enough to suit me. All arrive at their destination, but only one experienced the path, the way. The others were going along. I feel like Jon Voight in Runaway Train telling Eric Roberts, who wanted to go with him when he escaped from the prison, to keep up; he is not slowing down for him. Roberts had a rough time keeping up. He was following. Voight had a goal, an end, a destiny to chase, while Roberts' motivation was following. Runaway Train is a great film. Clue: Akira Kurosawa wrote the screenplay. The film is a metaphor for the spiritual path on a kundalini fast-track run from locked in a cage to standing on a train engine running full speed, his arms out like a bird, leaning into the wind. He did what he had to do. Some of it was good. Some of it was bad. It didn't matter. He had a trip to make. Let go of stragglers, work through opposition at emergency speed, and get on with it. I liked about this story's characterization of the spiritual path the absence of judgment of anything. It was all bad and it was all good. He did what he had to do, call it good or call it bad. Neither pole mattered. Thus his path. My path meanders like a stream bed with the flow I have chosen for myself, rather the flow that flows best with my temperament. I like to think I'm in the meandering delta of my life. Many, many streams in the delta. This one mine.      

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