Boxers

I am twenty seven years old, an American male, stranded in Fukuoka, Japan, 2001, stuck in a business man hotel. Not the room where they slide you into the wall like a coffin, but not much bigger than this either. I don't have any money because last night I got so drunk that the last thing I remember is eating ramen noodles inside a corner store before walking through the streets past newspaper vending machines with cards of sexy Japanese girls and every guy I passed seemed to be yakuza, seemed to be staring me down, seemed to know just who and what I was.

I bite off my fingernails and then my toenails and make a pile next to a black book called The Teachings of Buddha. It along with green tea have been my only company since waking up at noon. The traffic and smog are an arms reach. There is no way I could fit through the window, but reading this book brings me to the idea that I am here forever and always has been.

I drop my nails nine floors down to the street below where the constant stream of cars and bicycles flow together like water. I wonder if I will ever get back to Korea. I wonder why my boss sent me over here without telling me how much a passport renewal would cost. I know that if nothing else happens that I will be a part of Japan forever.

There is a passage about what should happen to clothes, how once they are no longer suited for wearing they become something with which to do the dishes, and once the rag no longer suits the dishes it can be used to clean the floor, and once the shreds of cloth no longer suit that purpose, it can be used for lighting a fire or something else that I cannot recall.

I am forty-two years old. It is the year of my Uranian opposition and I am not sure exactly what this means. I am sitting in an airbnb that my girlfriend owns. Sometimes I think she is my fiancé. I am in New Orleans, Louisiana, the greatest city in the United States. Blocks away drunk people are running up and down Bourbon Street and inside the Penthouse Club there may be similar cards to those I found in Japan fifteen years ago.

I bend over to pick up my shirt and realize my boxer shorts have a hole that stretches from waist to where the legs meet. The patience needed to take this garment through its proper Buddhist procedure is not there. Still I think of the moment, alone, in that Japanese hotel. And I think of now, alone in this airbnb. And I think about how neither time was I alone, and I think I knew this then. I know that I know this now.

Tomorrow I will take these boxers to the house where I live. I will check on the two ducks that a friend just gave me because the boy duck was trying to fornicate with her hens. I will bury these boxers inside beneath what used to be a pile of compost. Time will pass. The ducks will cross back and forth inside this cordoned off space where I use what might otherwise be thrown away to give back to the soil that gave me my life.

Worms will feast. Worms that don't need any of us to see anything that they are doing. Worms will turn what once covered me and stopped drips of urine from showing on my pants, worms will turn this back into the nutrients that will sustain. The ducks may eat some of the worms. The worms will die and other worms will eat these worms. Then spiders will eat those worms. Then those spiders will die and worms will eat those spiders, and so on….

What I did not know that day I ran out of money in Japan: that all of death is life; that nature figured out all of this long before us; that waste is a man made idea; and that love is where you find it, be that inside a room alone or out on the street where the lights are glistening and lust is calling and my toenails are slowly decaying at the base of a cherry tree while the blossoms blow through the street like snow in fall.

Tip of the Tongue

Listening to Beck live I realized how much I have been conditioned to think that what I hear on a record is permanent, that the same thing can be done the same way time and time again and further more, that I want to hear the album version of life, the rendition that I am used to, and not only that, I want everyone to sing along in my key, in my time, and I want to walk through the streets with people that know when to approach and when to walk away.

There are no signs I need to obey except for my own and it cannot be that much of this. I have things to take care of. Sleep apnea causes me to be tired all the time yet I have not had a machine in almost two years because I do not want to be hooked into the wall when I sleep. 

CPAP machines are straight out of a Philip Dick story. You see us in the airport. We are usually fat and jaundiced and look as if we have given up on life. Then there are those like myself. Or am I the anomaly? A man that survives years of smoking Winstons and Marlboro Reds and ounces and pounds of weed and resin, a man that puts chemicals in his nose and enough booze in his system to hold a family of ducks. Then he stops and his life carries on and this snoring that was filmed by a woman he might have loved keeps coming to the surface. It is like thunder among trains. It is like one of the favorite things that I love about my neighborhood: noise. Noise, and I want to be left alone.

That is another strange concept. I want to be around all of the action and I want to let love flow between me and the people I know and don't know. Then there are other times where I want to walk outside, from my truck to the porch and back without hearing, "Mr. Zach". I want to say you never move or you got nothing better to do than sit and wait to yell at the people passing by? I'm a busy man, goddammit, got things to do. Other times, on other days, the same exact scenario, and I walk down the street because I want to be a part of life, whatever that might be. 

I want to believe that everything I encounter is delivered by the divine and that it is the way I choose to let it seep through and collect, or whether I filter and sift some of it out, or whether I block what is coming in altogether. Sometimes it is necessary to block what is coming. This does not mean that every act of man is a gift from God. This only means that I must be aware of how every act of every other man affects me and then determine where I am.

Yesterday was not the first time I heard somebody say, "He's trying to play God." What that person meant was that he did not want to hear and did not like or agree with what the other person was saying. I think the wrong words were used. I think the one playing God was the accuser. I think the accused was just playing himself on a stage that was created by God and the accuser decided that he needed to not only write his own lines but the lines of the other actors as well.

So…if yes is the ultimate answer to the universe, are there ever times when I might be denying the divine by falling into a play that God has not made? The answer is yes. The determination is less simple. So if I am a part of God and I am walking around this earth encountering other parts of God, and I am also encountering a myriad of ids running loose and am not well enough equipped to determine the fine lines sometimes, what am I to do? This is when the need arises for silence.

What is it about life that man has been conditioned to think the best way to figure things out is to run and think and preprogram and drink of every idea and every philosophy and every question when sometimes the best answers come when we stop, when we let the water fill the bathtub and rest. Is that not how relativity was discovered? Is that not how Jim Morrison finally determined what was best for his tortured soul.

De Mello says that we do not want to wake up. If we woke up there would be nothing left to chase. What De Mello did not say is that we are already awake. Or maybe he did. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention. I am not one that retains all he reads, and I have been accused of reading to escape the moments of life.

I did read something that said that all we take in is available for recall, and although a man like me thinks that he remembers nothing about what he has read, that it is up there somewhere. It is like trying to think of the name of a person you have know all your life. It is one of those tip-of-the-tongue moments.

Maybe awakening is just like that. It is within us, sitting on the tip of our tongues and instead of getting silent and letting this come forth, I walk with a determined step, more determined that others follow the same path, I sing with a baritone, holding space only for Waylon and Wille and the boys when really my songs may be coming to me in the form of Nicky Minaj yet I do not want her on my sidewalk. I cut off what will lead me to the tip of my tongue. I sift through all that you say to prove you wrong.

I wrote nearly everyday of the year 2000. I believed that somehow it would be momentous to bequeath this gift to future generations. I believed it would be my opus. My magnum opus! There for the inhabitants of Mars to read what was happening in Iowa City way back then when people still lived on Earth…and as I wrote this magnum opus, I discovered one of my favorite things to do, alone in that room that had a permanent smell of bulgolgi and a window through which I wrote about snow and fallen leaves, was to race the clock, to start around eleven thirty at night and write as quickly as I could, to get all of the words out before midnight...

...somewhere I got the idea that this was not writing, that guys like Henry Miller and Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac were frauds. And somehow this aligned with my own notions, with the same notions that everyone has, that I am a fraud…Well…I'm here to tell you that I'm back. I'm here to have fun. I'm here to put down my words--words that are not carefully crafted (I have always been a bad editor), but words that come from a place that is sometimes beyond me, from a place that I cannot channel when I am crossing the street to avoid myself….And I am here to share them without thought or care of what anyone does or does not think.

END

You want Smells? Read the three pages of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel where he describes nothing but...

You want the Street? Read Ann Petry's novel of the same name

And there is a book by a Jewish writer about the streets of New York that I thought was called The Walker, but cannot seem to remember the exact name because I'm having a tip-of-the-tongue moment...

A Full Tub Can Become a Baby Tornado Roaring Down the Drain

Some thoughts you just can't share for fear of being locked in a room with no door handle. Like who is this woman cleaning my teeth really hooked up with? Or is my brother only a figment of my mind that people don't want to tell me about. How about why are they all watching me?  (Come on, we have all had this one.) These thoughts and others bring me to this: what is the line between madness and curiosity, between madness and genius, between madness and an ever loving zest for life?

There is an amazing new documentary called Bayou Maharajah about the incomparable New Orleans piano player, James Booker. If you thought my description of him unnecessary then you know exactly who and what I'm talking about. This man could do things with his fingers and mind that made both the jazz and classical world cringe with jealousy. He said that his gift was just the divine flowing though him.

The one flaw of the documentary was that they did not go deep enough into his heroin addiction, into the madness that exists within that world, into the loneliness that comes with being alone in a room filled with people. Would this divine outpouring of joy, this call to sail forth amidst the storm, this battle cry of ivory have been the same without the heroin? What about Ray Charles and Jerry Garcia and Hunter S. Thompson and Vincent Van Gogh and Edgar Allen Poe and Kerouac, and man could I go on and on.

There is something in a man (not unique to man, I'm sure, but I will speak for my gender) that causes him to question if what he is doing will garner respect or admiration or praise. Booker hit the nail on the head when he said that the divine poured through him, that that was all it was, that this did not belong to him. I wonder how often the divine sits in a tub plugged up with doubt and shame. I wonder where any of this comes from. I wonder about those that have died running from the divine.

I cannot stop thinking of James Booker, dead in the waiting room at Charity Hospital. I wonder who first noticed that this man with a star patch on his eye, waiting in the chair across the room or next to him was dead. I wonder if others in the room recognized him. I wonder if some realized that, hey, that's James Booker, tapped him on the shoulder to say hello, and then realized he was unresponsive and stiff.

I say all of that to say this, I guess, or maybe because I just like the saying: I say that to say this: Are there sacrifices? Are there times when it is necessary for a man to die in a waiting room at forty-three years old so that the world will forever have this divine gift bestowed upon them. Perhaps. Consider all those that have died dating the devil to court the divine.

Now consider a race raised without shame. A race trained to dance and Sing in the Rain, not to look like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire but because they're there and the rain is there and the joy of the moment does not care whether or not anyone is watching. Consider songs sung by those that should not sing songs. Consider Tom Waits and Bob Dylan. Consider the children.

There is not a map or a starter kit or any type of preparation manual that will cease identification with the mind and body, for we are mind and body, we are human, and I am not even sure I know what I believe happens when the breath stops in this body. Still I will search for a way towards the divine and I invite any that want to come along with me. I must admit that I don't know where I am going and that we will get lost and back track and fight and argue and step into ego suits.

I will start by asking people what was the last thing they experience which brought them joy. Or what have you been passionate about in the last week. People look at you strangely when you ask these questions. There is no box to put somebody in when he says, "My African Gray parrot said my son's name for the first time. Now I'm training him to sing happy birthday for when Charlie turns seven." rather than "I am a plumber," or "I am a student".

There is something to be considered in this unending quest for information, this interview style of meeting someone. I don't know what it means, what any of it means, really. I do think that this will be an interesting experience for me, leading with the questions about joy and passion. I think that their passions will influence my passions and together we will get that much closer to whatever divine is supposed to flow through us at that moment.

The Word of God

In Grist for the Mill, there is a section where Ram Dass is going to meet with some men in India or somewhere and have dinner and just be himself. As the night unfolds, the talks of the business world and politics unfurl, and because Ram Dass has read the entirety of the most recent Newsweek magazine on the plane ride over, it is his duty to let his hosts know of his expertise.

These men are so impressed by his wisdom that they invite him to speak at a dinner before their associates. He tells them that he first must ask his guru, so a couple of the men follow him into the place where Maharjji is staying. He asks his guru. In short, what Maharajji tells them is that Ram Dass would be happy to come and also that Ram Dass only speaks about God.

This presents a problem. The men wanted to hear his ideas, to have him share with those they know the perspective of a Westerner. They decide that perhaps somebody more equipped to talk about business and politics will better serve their agenda. I don't remember if Ram Dass had a great realization, but I did.

We think in terms of division and then go about wondering how we can bring people together, how we can get some of these people to realize the destruction they are putting this world and it's inhabitants through. We think in terms of solving problems and creating change and piling on more and more sand as if once we get enough, this sand will stop sliding down the sides.

People get uncomfortable when you approach them with the idea that we are not mind or body, that we are mere vessels that hold and pour out God. It is hard to be violent, to be right, to be afraid, and to need when this is the condition we live in. The mind wants to categorize, wants to have a reason why, wants to connect with other people not in order to share the God in their vessel with the God in our vessel, but to regurgitate the ideas that he has to make him feel safer. So we run with those that believe and do the same things and all of it is false.

No wonder there is a problem with separation, with fighting about who is right. No wonder so many succumb to whiskey or women or dozens of Snickers bars when the only thing that feels like home is a far away place we spend our entire lives running toward. What if I were to tell you that you are home right now? What if this is what I am telling myself? What if I fully realized that these words are not mine, just like the books of Ram Dass are not his, just like the land where I live is just as much mine as it is the frogs I did not even know were here until yesterday?

I am a steward whose answers come in silence. The answers then transfer through me and back out of me and into me through the awareness of a day that has started in silence. There is nothing to be fixed. There is only the notion that we are spirits and the unravelling of all that is not, the stripping away of the very ideas we have allowed to separate us from each other.

Each new butterfly I see is my reason to continue planting seeds. Each person that walks up and wants to ask me questions about growing is an opportunity to share what I have learned, what I have found, the mistakes I have made. Even saying that is a disservice to God and this world. We have been conditioned to think in terms of success and failure when what nature might tell us, what exists within the vessel is the notion that every action is an opportunity, for growth, for the world to work better as a whole.

I Am Only the Bottle

If I write my truth, surely I will find my audience.

I missed an opportunity with Desmond yesterday, when he stopped me in the street "You remember me," and asked if he could help with anything, said that he needed some change to get a little something at Church's. Not only could I have helped him to make a little change, but I could even have given him some food so that he didn't have to eat nasty fast food chicken.

Jasmine called me and said that the guy that was with Quinn signed a paper that said that he picked Quinn up after stealing the car and that Quinn didn't know about the gun. She said that Quinn would probably be getting out of jail after the next court date. This scares me because I want to work with him again. I want to plan these Sunday events where people come together to eat and to share music and art and whatever else anybody has to offer. 

I want the land to be alive with dragonflies and spiders and frogs and life. I want the chickens to feel comfortable enough to roam beneath picnic tables eating what has been dropped. I want to sleep like a normal person so that my lover will love me. I want to make love to my lover but I only know how to have sex and I don't know much about any of that.

Today she told me that I am not the wine in the bottle. That I am the bottle. That this land and these plants that consume me are the land and plants of god and that these people that I talk to are his, too. This is kind of like what others have taught me, about always saying yes, but then sometimes there is a perfection that I will never attain and then that same perfection that I expect of others. 

Then there is me wanting to run away from everything, to say fuck this house and this land and to just take a notebook and a pillow and write about fire and the stars. It takes a lot to admit that I don't know everything, that as much as I state that nature is perfect, that today I pulled bush killer and other weeds and then burned them because I knew no other way, because I believed Luke when he told me that there is an ancient tradition that believes that by burning the very things we don't want growing and then spreading these ashes on the land that the land will listen. Is this part of my own mistake? Is this my trying to be the wine?

In honor of nature and to create more space for what is already growing, I snipped molokhia, eggplant, and okra for soup and started up the crockpot. I ate a cucumber and shared some with the chickens. We also shared persimmons. I gave them the ends that the rats had bit through and I ate the insides. I gathered a few kumquats from the ground around the tree and made tea with holy basil and elderberries. I was determined not to drink caffeine and to live off the land. All or nothing.

Then I went to a meeting. I drank two cups of coffee. I ate five slices of pieces afterwards. It is far past midnight and I cannot sleep. I think too much about what people will think about what I write. I once listened to Elizabeth Gilbert give a Tedtalk where she explained that back in the day the Greeks gave all the credit to god or to the muse or to something outside of themselves, that they were just a vessel. a bottle, pouring the wine for others to drink. If this is the truth then I will just let whatever comes out come out and in the process I might find myself and he might find himself and she might find herself.

These old thoughts that I must be right are killing me. I can't stand them. I can't stand being around people anymore because i see everything in them that is not perfect about me. I keep looking at bottles, bottles everywhere, expecting to smell wine pouring forth from their mouths and from their pores and through them and into my bottle, but I don't even know yet about the wine that is pouring through me or how much I hold. I know only that every act is an act for god and each thing that I do brings me closer to or further away from the divine because you cannot spend a lifetime holding and pouring wine without a little bit remaining stuck on the bottle.