RDeWald

Update on zen practice

2011-09-29T10:30:00.000-04:00

It occurred to me this morning that I have not written about zen practice in some time. In some ways, this is an indication of where I am with practice and it might be useful to other people to know about this place.

In practical terms I am sitting regularly every day, sitting sesshin (group meditation intensives) regularly, studying with my teacher through podcasts and other recordings, and I have added brush-work to my practice routine (what you might recognize as Oriental calligraphy). My ethical decisions are guided by the Buddhist precepts and fundamentally by the Bodhisattva's vow, I.e., "I vow to live for the benefit of all sentient beings." I mention this not as some role model to be emulated, but just to provide a window into these parts of my life that are not always visibly apparent. I am certain in the future things will change. They always do.

I am realizing the Truth contained in many of the pithy sayings about and around zen practice that regularly seem confusing and intentionally crafted to obscure or frankly Bullshit something. "Zen is useless" is a good example.

"Using zen" presents a double-bind. Anything that is useful isn't zen. Anything that is a means or method to attain something incorporates the deluded intentions of an abstracted conceptual view. Zen is liberation from such views.

I don't mean to imply that abstracted conceptual views are bad, inferior, stupid, or in any way something to be eschewed. If you didn't nurture and operate within these views you would be unable to get dressed and go to work in the morning, or feed yourself, or care for your family, or any number of things that have intrinsic value to us as social beings.

it is just that operating within these views is something different from seeing things are they really are. A baseball bat is actually mostly empty space (we know this from investigations into quantum physics, which seems to me to be another method for seeing things as they really are), but if you swing it at someone's head, which is also mostly empty space, the collision between these two concepts of empty space is going to appear as if both are actually solid.

Grasping some notion that we somehow are able to transcend the solid appearance of those two objects and cause them to pass through each other harmlessly is delusion. Just because I "get" the reality there conceptually doesn't grant me some special powers to change appearances, regardless of what may in fact actually be possible. If it can be that a baseball bat can swing harmlessly through someone's head it won't happen because someone had a conceptual notion of that coupled to an intention to accomplish it.

That is, we have to deal with appearances. You appear to be real, I appear to be real, but we don't have to confuse appearances with reality. That is, we don't have to grip solidly to the notion that these appearances represent reality any more than we have to believe that when we kill someone in a video game that anything really living actually dies. This background awareness does not change our ability to play the game

For example, I sometimes struggle with being single. My dissatisfaction with this state mostly springs from the notion that things would be better if I had a partner. For many reasons, this is a reasonable notion. Humans seem to do better in pair-bonds for the most part, it's likely I would find regular sexual activity with a partner satisfying, and there are undeniable economic benefits to sharing some resources in the maintenance of a household life in the world in which I live. Also, it seems that married people live longer.

Gripping tightly to this view requires that I dismiss some things I also see as being less relevant. That is, I have to dismiss the real pain and struggle that I see my married friends undergoing in their marriages. I have to dismiss the many satisfactions of the freedom to be the final authority on my living situation, budget, travel plans, etc, etc, etc. To be convinced of the notion that being single is an absolute tragedy I have to abstract a concept from the available facts. Including the notion that a longer life is de facto a better life.

The reality underlying all of this is we are all alone, even in the midst of orgasm with an ideal sex partner we are ultimately undergoing that ecstasy alone. It is only us. There is nothing but singularity. That's reality.

The buddha-dharma teaches that these concepts, while useful, are not real. That is, when I talk about "seeing things as they really are" I am talking about a constant practice of reminding myself that something very different is actually going on than the narrative in my head. The narrative represents my mind's reaction to reality, it is not real itself.

This is why sitting quietly and still while staring at a wall is useful to me. When I settle down my activity to this level, in spite of the fact that mind is as active as ever, perhaps because I am doing so little else, I am able to discern perception from awareness. Perception takes up a lot of space, it seems to be everything there is, but actually there's a space outside of it. This is pure awareness.

As I realize that all of my pain is derived from perception, awareness is indistinguishable from perfect bliss, I find significant comfort in knowing that however solid that baseball bat appears, it is actually mostly empty space. That is, my narrative about what is going on is not what is going on. There's real peace there.

This peace is with you, right now. All that any of us have to do is get out of our way. Christians, Jews and Muslims seem to call this God's love, finding comfort there. Hindus call it something else, Atheists find it in their release from the notion of external metaphysical authority. There is only one Reality, and it is right in front of us at all times.

That's where we are.

Three fairy tales

2011-09-16T22:24:00.000-04:00

I had an insight today. Much of the pain in life can be traced to my belief in one or more of three fairy tales.

1. Most people eat what they want, as much as they want, as often as they want, and they suffer no adverse consequences for this behavior, I.e., they are at the weight they want, have the body contours they want, and rarely deny themselves a food/eating experience they want.

2. Most people have romantic relationships that develop effortlessly with each participant confident in their position in the relationship, comfortable with the pace of the relationship, always sure of, and comfortable with, the next step in the relationship.

3. Most people are rewarded professionally according to their abilities and the degree to which they contribute positively to the organization. Success is the inevitable consequence of the diligent and faithful application of hard work, skill and integrity.

Stopped laughing yet?

Of course, I "know" these are fairy tales. The extent to which I believe that these fallacies do not operate in my consciousness is exactly the extent to which they exercise an unseen influence on my conclusions concerning how well things are going. That is, the more I believe that I don't really buy into these notions the more I kick myself for not living a life which lives up to them.

It's like advertising. Advertisers know well that advertising messages exert the greatest influence over people who have convinced themselves that advertising has no effect on them. Advertising has little effect on people who are aware of the fact that they can be influenced by advertising. These people factor in that fact into their buying decision. They know their opinions about what to buy are skewed by advertising and that very awareness mitigates the effect. I thought about this just today when buying batteries at Radio Shack. I almost paid more for the brand name batteries until I reflected on the fact that I have no experience that they are any better or last any longer than the cheaper house brand batteries. So, I bought the house brand.

When I realize that my dissatisfaction with my life mostly derives from the fact that I buy into one of these three fairy tales it dissipates as rapidly as my preference for the brown batteries over the black ones. What are your fairy tales?

My First Hike

2011-09-07T11:15:00.000-04:00

Two years ago, in October 2009, while visiting New Mexico, I drove two friends of mine to a trailhead in the Pecos Wilderness so they could hike up to a lake called Lake Baldy (near a peak called Mount Baldy). I wanted to go with them. That was not an option. I weighed over 400 pounds. Walking one tenth of the distance they planned to cover that day was my limit, and that was my limit on flat ground at sea level--they were climbing from about 9000 feet to over 11,000 feet in elevation over rugged wilderness trail.

I watched them disappear on the trail with tears in my eyes. I resolved on that spot to make this hike within a year.

Two years later, I just finished my first hike. It was not this one, it was shorter and not as demanding, but it was in the same wilderness, just sort of over to the east and a bit lower, but it was a real hike into the wilderness. I just did something I've never done before, something two years ago I could not do.

We hiked from the Iron Gate trailhead to the Mora Flats in the Pecos Wilderness of Northern New Mexico. We hiked trail 249 to where it crosses 250, then taking 250 down into Mora Flats. Mora Flats is a flat area between mountain ranges, a long oblong rolling meadow along a river bank bordered by mountain ranges on all sides. It is about 2 miles long and about a quarter of a mile wide. It is covered in soft grasses and wildflowers. Most people arrive on horseback.

It is about a 400 foot descent into the Flats from Iron Gate. Unfortunately, the trail is not straight down. You descend about 300 feet as you navigate over the ridges on the west side. That is, you begin with a 200 foot climb, then you descend 400 feet, then make 4 sections of 100 foot climbs (over three miles of trail) before at the end you drop over 500 feet down on to the flats. Once on the flats, we hiked about halfway up to camp right where two rivers ran together.

So, it is a little easier going in than coming out.

My companions live at 7000 feet. I live at sea level. I was carrying a 50 pound pack, but my limiting factor wasn't my legs or feet, it was catching my breath. I am long accustomed to carrying far more than 50 pounds in excess of my current curb weight. My problem was I was hiking 9500 feet in excess of the altitude to which I am accustomed. My companions weren't skipping through the tulips either, everyone was huffing and puffing, but they could hike faster than I so I became self-conscious about this.

Talk about never satisfying expectations! Even hiking high country with a heavy pack I wasn't performing up to my specs! The hardest part about being the slow hiker was that I never got to stop hiking. They would hike ahead of me and wait, taking in the awesome beauty around us for a moment or two while they waited on me without the burden of having to think about where to step next. Just as I trudged up to where they were standing they would take off again. I would never break stride, I would just keeping putting one foot in front of the other, my friends just momentarily in closer proximity than usual.

I was very focused on not falling down. I was very aware that a relatively minor injury could be major hassle. My attention was completely focused on my steps. Each step was the entire universe, I just took care of them one at a time. It was marvelous zen practice, but it meant I couldn't really look around. My eyes were constantly scanning the trail in front of me, I needed to be sure of every step. I was on a rough, rocky trail. I was carrying 50 pounds on my back. I did not want to fall.

My tent on the Mora River

Once we got to the campsite it became clear that a mistake had been made when packing. I had all the water. My pack was almost twice as heavy as anyone else's. We made camp fairly rapidly, within an hour of arriving I was napping on my sleeping bag. There were sheepish apologies about the packs. If it had not been my first hike I might have suspected the mistake, but I don't know how much my pack is supposed to weigh.

It was wet, and one of those effed up situations that follows me around came to a head. The day before I was making a run to REI for a few supplies. I solicited a list from my companions and they began just mentally calling out what they would need and checking what they had against what they needed. On the list was newspaper. I put it on my list and they both laughed at me, saying we didn't need to buy newspaper, there was plenty at the house, ha ha, funny guy for putting that in the list.

So, I took it off my list and forgot about it. Well, guess what we needed to start a fire and didn't have? We almost didn't have a fire because of it. If it had not been for a section of rope I found tied to a tree we would not have been able to start one. All of the leaves and twigs around were damp. It had been raining. But, because of the rope I found we had a fire, a truly great campfire, it did finally come together nicely. We went to bed after a while, which was good, because another downpour was on the way.

We had good tents pitched on good ground, so the rain was just a sleep aid. I was the first to wake up, so I hiked up on top of the ridge we were next to, made some instant iced coffee (that ice-maker was heavy, too!) and watched the sun come up after my morning sit.

I guess that's where it all hit me. I had hiked into the wilderness and spent the night. There wasn't anyone else around. We had gone far beyond the reaches of casual campers, they were miles back behind us. I was on an outcropping of rocks where two rivers converge, surrounded by spectacular wildlife, and I had gotten there under my own power with my shelter, food and water on my back. Wow. This is a life I've never known before, a life I thought I never would have until very recently. There's good reason why people go to all the trouble to do this kind of thing.

After my companions arose we had breakfast, freeze-dried chicken teriyaki, which was surprisingly good. They wanted to make a day hike up the river, which I didn't appreciate the appeal of until it dawned on me I wouldn't be carrying a pack. Oh cool, we can just walk. Walking is fun.

Vibram Five Finger Shoes
after a 12 mile hike in the Wilderness.

Because I had wisely risked my first hiking experience in my Vibram Five Finger shoes, I could walk on rocky trail, along river bottoms, grassy meadows, creek beds, and slog through mud without worrying about swamping my shoes. If and when they got wet they simply air-dried in a few minutes. I had not one blister or any kind of problem with my feet, and I could use my toes for fine balance. I can't recommend these things enough.

We hiked about a mile up river, bushwhacking (off trail hiking) the entire way, it was a slow go, but we went to places probably unseen by human eyes for many seasons. There's no way to describe how interesting and intimidating this is. You are on your own. If something went wrong out here a rescue would take days.

We got back down to the campsite after a couple of hours and took down the camp. I was really good at this, I finished long before my companions and I kept waiting for them to put stuff into my pack. It seemed too light. As it turns out, apparently out of shame for loading me up on the way in, my pack out was at least 20 pounds lighter. That was a good thing, because the hike out was almost all uphill.

As with most physical challenges, the real challenge was mental. As I climbed the ridge, my mouth got dry because I was breathing so hard and fast. I wanted to quit, but I realized that all of my quit had to do with a forecasted dread of what things would be like in the future. Right now, right then and there, I was fine. I had enough wind, I could take my next step, and the entire hike, even the "worst" parts of it in hindsight, were all like this moment. I can make the next step, I just can't imagine making all of the next steps.

Well, as it turns out, you only have to make the next step. If you keep making the next step, all the steps get made.

It rained and hailed on us on the way out. This was another odd wilderness realization I had. When it started raining, my natural inclination was to look for shelter, there's gotta be a Starbucks around here somewhere, right? No, there's no where to go when it rains, or hails. You just keep going. It wasn't bad, but leaving that inclination to shelter alone was also an interesting practice.

It got tired on the last mile, even though it was level or downhill. I was spent. I hiked even slower, but I kept putting one foot in front of the other. Never before has the sound of a car door slamming been such sweet music to my ears (we could hear the trailhead before we could see it). Never before has sitting in an automotive seat been such unending bliss. I was mostly looking forward to not carrying a pack, even if it was only 30 pounds on the way out.

I still had to drive down over a muddy road in ill repair before I could rest, but that was no big deal. I pushed down on a pedal and hills were climbed. Magic.

Mora Flats September 2011

I learned a few things. I can hike. This was not a terribly challenging hike, but it was no training-wheel experience either. My companions, both experienced hikers, were hitting the Ibuprofen when we got home too. They were tired. The last part of the hike out kicked their ass too. They've hiked much more, and much longer distances, but this was a hike. I can do this.

A tsunami of loneliness

2011-08-17T15:01:00.000-04:00

I have no idea where it comes from, but this morning as I was walking to get some coffee I was hit by a tsunami of loneliness. I was completely overwhelmed by the feeling, it washed over me, taking me, pulling me down like some tragic undertow, it brought so many tears to my eyes that I could barely see well enough to walk down a mostly empty city sidewalk.

I was thinking about the woman who works at the coffee shop that was my destination. We have gotten to know each other a little bit. We know each other's names and engage in a bit more than polite customer service chatter while she pulls the shots of espresso for my drink.

I think she's beautiful, and there's the clarity and energy of intelligence in her voice and manner. I'm sure she's much younger than I am, but I don't let that talk me out of my attachment to her. As long as she remains only my beautiful friend at the coffee shop details like our actual compatibility are irrelevant—just needless ways to spoil my fun. I indulge myself in my fondness for her privately except for what might be confessed to those who might notice my smile when I see her, nothing else really matters.

She's the only person at the coffee shop whose name I know, even though I am in there at least once a day. Her employer should know that she sells coffee for them. If I see her in there I stop-in, regardless of my actual desire for coffee. Her greeting and smile are reason enough.

She's not the cause of my loneliness, in fact, I'm not sure that loneliness even needs a cause. I mention her because it was her that I was thinking about when I was swallowed whole by loneliness this morning. Interestingly enough, she was at work when I got there, a surprise, since I had grown accustomed to seeing her in the evening hours. She smiles in such a way that the corners of her eyes turn up when she sees me. It's a genuine and warm greeting. We connect. My loneliness vanishes as quickly as it arose, fading, slipping quietly back to my ocean of emotion.

What does it really mean to be lonely anyway? We are all alone. What are these thoughts and feelings that collectively coalesce into this flavor of sad? We think that this has something to do with the people around us, and the quality of those connections, but everyone has experienced instances during which an irrational pang of isolation arises in the midst of being in the midst of some interaction normally thought to be intimate. Conversely, I think the experience of being connected with everything while in solitude visits everyone's life on occasion.

If we take these experiences, and their seeming ubiquity, as evidence of the lack of association between a dearth of actual social community and loneliness, then what is loneliness? What is it made out of?

Google+ killed the Social Networking Star

2011-08-14T09:37:00.000-04:00

When Google+ emerged I admit I was sold almost immediately. I trust Google technically. I long solved the problem of trusting them to mine my data by simply not sharing anything online (not even in e-mail) that I really need to keep private. I have friends in my physical surroundings to turn to for support about such sensitive topics, plus I have a 11 year relationship with a therapist with whom I share one of the richest relationships of my life.

So, when I've got something come up that is so sensitive that it's not appropriate for this space I simply don't mention it online. Yes, I have had such things happen recently. I have a number of wise, loving, understanding friends in my geophysical vicinity who are generous with their hearts and with their time when I need a true, exclusive confidant.

Further, zen practice has helped me move beyond the notion that the self is something that exists, much less something that needs to be protected. So I really don't care if people use information like the fact that I have a therapist, or have had bariatric surgery, or have a thing for Asian women, or any number of other potentially embarrassing factoids against this entity called rdewald (or Richard DeWald) that you all mistakenly believe really exists.

It doesn't.

it seems to, I know. It appears to, I will grant you that fully, it really does seem to be something individually-existing and separately-identifiable. But after looking at it carefully, I see that it's not real. There's no there there. Really.

So, Google+'s real-name policy doesn't bother me. They simply need to make an adjustment to associate handles with real names, and then enforce the one user instance per human being policy using the real name. This will accomplish their ends and it will be over with.

There is a social engineering aspect to this they are also acting to exploit. People are much better behaved when they can be held accountable for their behavior. Almost everyone I know uses online anonymity to enable something they otherwise hide. I don't. I've found that there's a good reason why I'm ashamed. Shame is very wise.

It seems fun to be sexy, or sadistic, or outrageous anonymously, but the truth is just like overeating is not an effective way to manage anxiety, or binge drinking to manage shyness, or indulgence in sadism to manage powerlessness, shameful behavior is unwise not because it is wrong, but because it doesn't work. There's no tranquility in a Big Mac, no confidence at the bottom of a bottle, no power in hurting people. These are all dead ends. They don't work, they just fool us.

Google has decided that their online community will be a nicer place if people have the accountability of their real names, since these are so widely identifiable. They're wrong. This is an adolescent notion and I expect they will abandon it. Humans are not so simple.

People already have a non-anonymous handle via e-mail addresses. There's a mature model already in place. We all have several e-mail addresses, but we typically use one of them as our primary account. That's the address we use to conduct online commerce, mostly stay in touch with people, and operate as an online citizen. That's what Google is interested in, they should keep their eye on the ball and give up social engineering. It doesn't work.

I can't believe that so many otherwise rational and seemingly intelligent people are getting wrapped up in this as if they, as users, have a stake in Google+. The users aren't the customers. The users are the product. Advertisers are the customers. They charge (or will charge) the advertisers. They are the true stakeholders.

The users don't pay the bills, the advertisers do. Get over it.

So, as a user, I have this contract with Google+: you enable my social networking, I allow you to analyze what I post here, both text and media, examine and track my relationships so that you can tell your customers, the advertisers, what I am likely to buy.

Agreed. Thanks for all the fish.

But, we are in an in-between time here. Google is following their long-successful model of development. They put something usable out there, let people use it, and find out from the users what is broken and what needs to be fixed. Once something is working, they are very conservative with deployment. It takes them a long time to roll out enhancements.

Meanwhile, Google+ kicks Multiply (my primary social networking platform) out of the park because of the user base. I had solved this problem personally because I belong to a very robust and cohesive online community that moved to Multiply. As a platform, Multiply is okay for social networking, more than okay actually. They have a few niggling problems to work out technically, but it works well for the most part. The problem is people have to sign up for a separate account. That's a high hurdle. It will be their undoing.

Multiply also faces a business problem. They have two customer groups to please with directly conflicting, mutually unresolvable needs. They regard both their group of users and their advertisers as customers. They can't do anything but piss one or both of them off in some way. Television dealt with this for many years by scarcity, they were the only game in town, now that industry has turned to unscrupulous pandering to the basest instincts, the lowest common denominator, and has all but killed off creativity in the medium, which completely loses people like me. I don't have TV service in my home. Their advertisers have completely lost access to me.

I just let my Multiply premium account expire because I don't see my social networking future on Multiply any longer, so I am seeing the banner ads and the pimping to my inbox that they must do to sell advertising. That makes this a MUCH less desirable social networking platform. If it weren't already circling the drain in my life this would have done it by itself. I can certainly see now why they don't attract new users. Facebook does this a lot better.

But Google+ didn't release their API in time, they missed that bus. There's not a large enough Android user base to sustain the model's reliance on third party app integration. They need to be fed by twitter, IOS, and Facebook. They need to be fed by third party apps. They needed to take a lesson from Twitter that they missed.

They'll get it. They're Google. But it sucks to wait.

Meanwhile, Google+ has sucked the air out of the room at Multiply, yet it's not ready to it's replacement. Sigh. My online social life is suffering because of it.

That sucks.

Rules for Google plus Hang-outs

2011-07-13T22:42:00.000-04:00

It had to happen, this is a new social form, someone has to get it started, so I'm appointing myself.

You don't have to stay. It is perfectly okay to stop in, say hello, (crash your browser) and leave.
Safari seems to work better for me (2010-era MacMini 4GB RAM). Not really a rule, but I thought that information might be helpful. Firefox 3.x seems particularly wonky (surprise!) Chrome seems to spawn dupe processes and memory leak (what a surprise that the Googlopolis codes up Apple products better...).
You don't have to talk. Lurking is okay as long as your video appears to be working. The whole black screen thing is creepy, unless you're doing something we don't want to see.
Pants are optional, but nobody wants the full-length webcam view. Nobody. The black screen isn't that creepy.
Be prepared for discussions about bandwidth.
There is no Rule number six.
Musical instruments are encouraged.
Try to be well-lit. Or, failing that lit-up. Drinking is also encouraged.
Come and go as you please. This isn't a social obligation and things are actually more interesting when people come and go, we can talk about you behind your back that way.
The system is in beta. It crashes, it can be choppy, A/V sync is sometimes fraught with lag, but hey, that's why we talk about bandwidth.
Our list of rules goes to eleven.

A follower of the Way does not intoxicate oneself or others.

2011-02-20T21:02:00.002-05:00

Like the third precept about sensual misconduct, this is another of the precepts that generates a lot of interest, both in myself and among those in my peer group. It seems most obviously to be an admonition against substance abuse (be that substance alcohol or any variety of other intoxicating substances). Moral guidance with regard to intoxicating substances does rightfully belong with this precept, no doubt, but I see a subtler and broader view as well.

As with the other precepts, I find a rule-making view such as "don't drink alcohol or do drugs" to be too rigid and easily grasped, though that can be regarded as good advice. On one hand, I like a drink now and again and I haven't found enjoying such to be a moral quandary, neither for myself nor for many of my friends and acquaintances. I've even enjoyed a modicum of recreation and relaxation via intoxicating substances with and in the company of people whose religious practice and sense of moral awareness I deeply admire, and I still do from time to time.

On the other hand, I have also known many people whose lives (and often the lives of those around them) have been literally destroyed by the abuse of intoxicating substances. At the same time, it has not escaped my notice that I've also seen similar destruction waged by means of intoxication with work, with various avocations, with excessive religiosity and by excessively ardent political views. I've seen people do real harm because of being dangerously intoxicated with Buddhism. I suppose one could even get dangerously intoxicated with the precepts themselves.

Welcome to human life. This is the mushy and dynamic netherworld in which we find ourselves with regard to this and every other moral question. One intoxicating notion that I think it is very important to disabuse one's self of is the notion that there are moral absolutes. There are none, not even that one.

The word intoxicant contains the word "toxic." I think that's the point here. For example, in my practice as a nurse I've been ardently drilled in the awareness that every single pharamcologic agent that I administer, no matter how life-saving and comfort-inducing it may be in the proper dosage, can also kill if administered by the wrong route, in the wrong dosage, at the wrong time, for the wrong reason, or to the wrong patient.

That is, there is no absolutely safe substance, not even water itself. You can kill someone with too much water, you can arrest someone's heart and breathing with too much oxygen. One can save a life with a single administration of a single drug one single time, and one can give the same drug in the same dosage to another person at the same time and end their life. That is, there are no pharmacologic absolutes either. Every drug is potentially a poison.

Similarly, every idea, every construct to which one can grasp, is potentially intoxicating. I read Tricycle magazine, an American magazine aimed at Buddhists. Periodically, they will run some recipe for something seemingly wholesome and innocuous like chicken soup. Inevitably, in the very next issue there will be some outraged letter to the editor demanding an apology, that they cease associating themselves with Buddhism, a immediate retraction of the recipe, or at the very least reminding them that an action like publishing a chicken soup recipe is tantamount to torturing innocent animals solely for the satisfaction of one's own selfish, misguided desire for a warm, savory broth.

I suspect the editors publish these recipes and the resultant letters for their amusement (I certainly find them amusing). They usually remind these outraged readers intoxicated with vegetarianism that the Dalai Lama eats meat (which contains the intoxicating notion that this is some official Buddhist imprimatur for meat-eating, but that's neither here nor there) in their editorial reply. I imagine (but do not know) that there are people out there who have summarily canceled their Tricycle magazine subscriptions over a chicken soup recipe. As a see this precept, this action would be a violation of it.

Similarly, there are people on very limited incomes who will miss their rent payments next month because of a first-of-the-month bender when the social security check arrives. This is also a violation of this precept. I know of a pastor in a small Baptist church in Texas who dismissed his own niece from the congregation and from further association with his immediate family because she admitted to seriously considering a premarital affair. This banishment is also a violation of this precept.

In each of these cases, someone attached themselves to a notion or an experience so tightly that they caused harm. Toxins cause harm. The fundamental moral guidance for me in my life is to live for the benefit of all beings (NB: I did not say "all other beings"). This seems wholly consistent with my direct experience of Reality. Harmony is our natural state of existence.

So, what I think the use of the concept of intoxication in this precept points towards is this notion that when there is something that when present in some measure may bring some comfort one must be careful. This very same thing, be it bourbon, vegetarianism, or Buddhism, can also be indulged in to the point where it becomes poisonous and harmful. The problem isn't out there. Addiciton is not dissolved in bourbon, it is contained within the mind. Intoxication is not non-tee-totaling. As any honest student of a 12-step program will tell you, a dry drunk is still a drunk. I find a modicum of comfort in the warmth and relaxation found by sipping a limited quantity of bourbon from time to time, this is not intoxication.

However, I also know people for whom even a single sip of bourbon seemingly inevitably brings about a cascade of events in their life that is harmful. They should not drink bourbon in any amount. I have a similar relationship with jelly beans. I seem unable to consume them in moderation, I will continue eating them until they are gone, no matter what quantity I have on hand, so I don't consume them at all. That seems like a silly example, but I used to be a rather severe diabetic, jelly beans were just as serious a situation for me as bourbon was for my friends who can't consume it in moderation. There are no absolutes here, really.

I don't offer my alcoholic friends a drink. I also don't lecture people endlessly about the wisdom of zen practice, or about how much I support a particular political persuasion. I used to do each of these things, I've made mistakes just as you have, but I seek to return to a state of being I enjoyed, and still can enjoy, before I grasp hold of the notion that alcohol is always okay, or zen practice is always wise, or that arch conservatives are always greedy hatemongers. There is a place one can exist before these notions arise, and one can return to that place at any time. This is also called Reality, some call it by other names, but it is always available to us at all time. It marks the Way,

So, a follower of the Way does not intoxicate oneself or others.

A follower of the Way does not speak deceptively.

2011-02-12T18:49:00.000-05:00

Don't tell lies. Like the first precept, this one is pretty clear as a moral standard. But, also like the first precept, it is problematic for people when applied too narrowly, and the mind is especially prone to crafting hypothetical scenarios in order to seemingly thwart it or disprove it.

The classic scenario goes something like this: Anne Frank is in your attic. The Gestapo stops by and asks you if you are harboring any Jews. Is it okay to lie? If it is, then what about this precept? If it is not, then this precept is bullshit. Again, this is your mind at work, doing it's thing. Just watch it.

What is at work there is your persistent dissatisfaction with not having a definite, concrete, eternal concept to which to cling. How easy it would be to just be able to decide "I will never lie" and have boundless confidence that every situation will magically work out peachy-keen! This is what your mind is in pursuit of here.

Anne Frank is actually not in your attic, and she never will be. The precepts are not rules to apply to solving abstract ethical puzzles, they are reminders for us as we make decisions about the conduct of our real, actual, everyday lives. They are not absolute, unchanging, concrete and definite. But, take a moment to notice something here--your real, actual, everyday life is not absolute, unchanging, concrete and definite.

When I have lied, I have done so because I bought into the idea that I would be better off if someone else understood the world in a different way than I knew it to be. This is the grasping, this is the delusion that this precept reminds us we can get caught by. However, there is a broader view still of this precept. Speaking deceptively can be much more subtle than outright lying, it can mean representing an opinion as fact, and this process can be entirely internal. That is, you can speak deceptively to yourself. As with all the precepts, this is where the mistake is really made, I.e., in your own mind.

I have several close friends who are couples. That is, I am friends with two people whom I met independently of each other who are now pair-bonded, either by marriage or some other similarly primary relationship. So, I can find myself in a situation where I am getting too sides of the same story, two versions of a single event. Now, I long ago decided to never step in the middle and this precept points to one of the reasons why.

Even after I have heard the accounts from both sides I don't really know what happened. I often believe I do, I often have a very concrete concept of where the misunderstanding lies, and who is at fault, and all that stuff. This precept serves me by reminding me that what I really have is a third version of the story, one step abstracted from the actual event (unless I was there) and to represent that to anyone, including myself, as the truth is to speak deceptively.

Of course, it is fine for me to discuss my view, or my opinion of a situation as long as I represent it as such. This doesn't mean that I can never talk about anything. But much of the speech in which I used to engage was some version of me trying to convince someone that the world really is as I see it. If I had limited myself to only things I knew to be true I would have really been a very quiet person all those years.

In fact, among people who have only met me recently, I actually have a reputation for being quiet. This may be because I do stop myself from simply babbling on these days some narrative being cooked up in my mind, because I see it for what it is--so much meaningless mental white noise. I endeavor to limit my speech to things I know to be true, helpful and kind. It never ceases to amaze me how little of what I want to say actually satisfies those criteria. Try it for yourself.

While this precept does represent an admonition against actual lying, and that is good advice, the real issue here is seeing what your mind does with an event as you relate it later. Whenever you speak to anyone about anything you are conceptualizing reality. You are extracting items from the whole picture, which means some things are inevitably left out.

There's nothing to do about that other than see it for what it is. You can never tell the whole truth about something. The only Truth is what is going on at this very moment, and that can't be spoken. But, as a beloved teacher in my lineage is known to have said, you have to say something or there will be no understanding. This is the double-bind we find ourselves in here, so what we can do is be vigilant to represent ourselves with speech as faithfully and truthfully as possible.

So, a follower of the Way does not speak deceptively.

A follower of the Way does not engage in sensual misconduct.

2011-02-11T22:02:00.001-05:00

This precept is often stated as "A follower of the Way does not engage in *sexual* misconduct" and because of that it generates a lot of interest. I'm guessing that is because a lot of people have really definite ideas about what sexual misconduct is, or they are struggling with their own definition of the boundaries of proper sexual behavior in their own lives.

I think probably most of that rumination properly belongs to this precept, but my application of this precept is much more broad. *Sensual* misconduct is much closer to the mark. I think most sexual misconduct arises from an abuse of the senses. Most people get focused on sex because of the sensations that arise from sexual behavior. However, that idiot blaring the loud music at 3 am in the apartment next door is also engaging in sensual misconduct, as is someone who habitually overeats.

It is easy to miss the point here by focusing too much on the term misconduct, as if this were a punitive declaration. Misconduct in this context just points to doing something unwisely. A person chanting sutras who so enjoys the tonality of their own voice that they distract and disturb those chanting with them is engaging in sensual misconduct. It's not all about frankly violent or antisocial misbehavior.

The problem here is grasping at sensual experience as if there is something there within that experience which you desperately lack. Again, you might be seeing a pattern to my approach in these essays, it this the projection of your focus outward to some external thing in an effort to make up for some feeling of lack you experience within yourself. That feeling of lack is real, it is what Buddhist teachings address in the Noble Truths, but you lead yourself astray when you buy into the notion that there is something out there, separate from you, that can somehow solve that problem. This grasping at an external solution for the persistent dissatisfaction you are experiencing can cause people to bring rise to harm, the extreme case would be rape, and that is what this precept reminds us of.

In the movie "Spinal Tap" there is a famous scene in which the guitarist shows off his amplifier. He calls attention to the panel around the volume knob, which often has markings on it from one to ten. His panel has eleven as the highest number. It is a joke, and a really clever one, because it elucidates this very grasping at extremes. Of course, painting a different number on the panel of the amp doesn't make it any louder when turned all the way up, but ten wasn't enough for this guitarist. He had to have eleven.

Customizing the front of an amplifier isn't misconduct, at least not in my book, but the thing at which he was grasping, needing his guitar to be just a little louder in order to achieve something, is the same kind of desire that gives rise to the conduct addressed by this precept. A love affair that violates a promise of fidelity, engaging in sex with someone unable to freely give their consent because of age, their position as an employee or some other subordinate context, or of course forcing someone to have sex against their will are all actions that arise from the notion that some sensual experience is worth causing harm to another.

It isn't. Not only is it wrong, but there's actually no solution there. There is a way to address this persistent dissatisfaction in our lives, but it can't be done by hurting someone else, it can't be done by getting something somewhere. We all know this before we jump to the conclusion that our senses really can satisfy us, the knowledge actually precedes our mental conception of some sensual experience as a solution, so a follower of the Way, that is, one who does not indulge these concepts, does not engage in sensual misconduct.

Seen on the L train

2011-02-08T21:22:00.001-05:00

Sometimes I really love NYC

Fort Worth on the Ice Planet

2011-02-02T08:53:00.001-05:00

Wow

Snow follows rdewald to Texas

2011-02-01T08:30:00.000-05:00

I know, it doesn't look like much, but there is a nasty wind and it is just starting. Blizzard in MN, Snowmagedden I and II in NYC, and now The Super Bowl Ice-Storm in Texas! All in 7 weeks....

Small fire in Fort Worth backyard

2011-01-30T19:29:00.001-05:00

Burgers on the grill, too.

A follower of the Way does not take what is not given.

2011-01-27T22:30:00.003-05:00

Buddhist fundamentalists interpret this precept to mean that their religious royalty should not handle money. So, when a person who is regarded in such a way travels to somewhere like the United States, for example, this person will require someone to always be with them who is singularly saddled with responsibility to pay for things like plane tickets, hotel rooms, and even meals, because money is tainted by this notion that it is not offered freely.

Even if the money is given to the teacher, it was presumed to have been taken from someone else at some point along it's karmic path, that is, someone somewhere down the line had to give something up in order to make the money manifest. The very notion of commerce is believed to be irretrievably intertwined with human greed, so the religiously pure cannot risk being associated with it by even touching coins or bills.

This pious being grips (or more likely this person's community grips) very tightly to something that is believed to have been attained, some high level of enlightenment, that would be stained and lost if money, I mean the actual coins and bills, got involved with this person's life in any way.

Of course, in a more practical sense, this precept is the moral admonition against stealing.

This precept serves to remind us that when we believe that there is something in the world that we need so badly that we are considering taking it away from someone else we have lost contact with reality. When we believe that we fundamentally lack something, and so desperately need to possess it that we would consider depriving another of it, we have lost sight of the simple truth that all we really need is available to us at all times. The only thing we ever need is right in front of us all the time. It is reality itself.

The Buddha was fond of lists, or those who finally committed his teaching to the written word were fond of lists (it's easy to see why lists would be popular in an oral tradition), and he is said to have asserted there are four basic human needs: food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. Everything else is a desire. When you think you need something other than the simple beauty of a full moon, your mind has led you astray in it's grasping, you're being fooled by the notion that peace, happiness and satisfaction is contained within and by means of the possession of that iPod, or that million bucks. This is delusion itself.

I use this maxim in my own life, it is interwoven into my personal decisions all the time. It is why I began a process of divesting myself of my possessions four years ago, a process that continues to the day, and I expect will continue for some time to come. It guides my decisions about what to buy every day.

I suppose one can steal food, money or clothing. One could skip out on the rent or a hotel bill. It is possible to craft a scenario in your mind to back one into a corner where one MUST steal in order to satisfy what the Buddha is said to have called a need. Yep, watch your mind do that, it inevitably will.

Once you've convinced yourself that this precept is flawed, you have just demonstrated it's fundamental truth, just as surely as the religiosity discussed above is profoundly deluded. You have reached for and grasped at something you decided you needed--the scenario to prove that it is sometimes okay to steal. Congratulations.

These monks, or their communities who insist on these "no handling money" standards are also grasping. There's something out there they have to have. They have to have it so badly that they are willing to insist that another person handle money for them when they could, and should, be doing it themselves. This sense of attainment, this notion that "I am now the kind of being that can be exempted" from something as basic to human existence as paying your own way is exactly the grasping of which this precept warns.

They take from this assistant their time and energy for this silliness. The assistant may be willing, or even eager to do this service, bit that's because they are grasping at another notion of attainment, some special status for being Buddha's butt-wiper or something. They are likely not interested in running around with you and I and paying for our sandwiches just because we can't be sullied by money, are they?

I just use this laughable extreme as an illustration. I'm sure there are teachers in those traditions that are very weary of this game, who just go along because to not do so would upset a cherished apple-cart. This isn't really the point.

The point is that when you take something that isn't freely given to you, either by exchange for something you give, such as money, or because it was given out-right, you are grasping, your mind is lost in the delusion that this thing is important enough to cause harm, or loss, to another.

The truth is that before you attach to such notions you are already aware that there is nothing you really need that is not always available to you, right in front of you, at all times. Christians may call this God's love, or the love of Jesus. It's the same assertion. Everything is desire.

So, this precept serves to remind us that when we want something so badly that we are willing to cause someone else to experience a loss, we are deluded. Whatever it is, we don't really need it.

So, when you see things as they really are, you do not take anything not given to you.

Remember me to Herald Square!

2011-01-27T08:22:00.001-05:00

Snow *is* beautiful...

I love the sound of a snow shovel in the morning

2011-01-27T07:26:00.001-05:00

Thursday morning on 118th in Harlem

A follower of the Way does not kill.

2011-01-25T21:24:00.000-05:00

A fundamentalist, myopic and narrow view of this precept is the reason many people believe that Buddhists must be vegetarians. Me? I love vegetarians, they're delicious. I like to eat dead cows. Venison is also among my favorite meats.

As I sit here and write I am breathing. Each time I take a breath I am ending the life of untold numbers of microbes as they encounter the lining of my lungs. When I walk to the kitchen to fetch another pot of green tea I squash millions more under my feet.

Carrots live, until you pull them up to put them in your vegan salad. Life and death are inseparable. One cannot live without constantly bringing about death. This is the way things are. We are all food. My body will be food someday, so will yours.

This walk with death that is a part of all life is not the killing referred to in this precept. This hand-in-hand partnership between life and death is part of the way things are. It is beyond concepts of right and wrong. It simply is.

Of course it is wrong to murder someone, but it is also wrong to kill a friendship, or a conversation, or an idea. What this precept is getting to is that once you've decided that anything is objectionable enough that you willfully end it's existence you have stepped off the path.

In the most obvious sense this applies to another human life. If you decide that you have something to gain from willfully ending another's life because you object to something they do, or are, you are deeply lost in delusion. But anytime that you believe that there is anything out there which is not you, and that ending it's existence will somehow benefit you, you have completely lost sight of reality.

When you realize that everything is interconnected, everything is one huge web of the same thing, you realize that there is nothing out there to kill that is not also you, and any killing you do is really killing yourself, because there is no other thing out there, and there's nothing to be gained from killing yourself.

Or, as one of my favorite Jimmy Dale Gilmore songs goes "it makes no sense, committing suicide in self-defense."

So, the point here is not about murder, although murder obviously falls into the category. It is about this idea that there are things that are here that shouldn't exist. Really? You might as well decide that the sun really shouldn't rise in the east.

If someone were to get up before sunrise, facing east, and as the sun came up scream "No! That's not right! Sun! Go back down! Rise over there! Out of the North!" you'd rightfully call the guys in the white jackets who check troubled souls into the padded rooms. The guy screaming at the sun is completely nuts. What else could that mean?

In the context of this precept, it's just as ridiculous as a guy in Arizona deciding he would somehow be better off if he gunned down some politicians. It's just as deluded. Of course, the consequences aren't the same, the guy yelling at the sunrise is just making some noise, that doesn't compare to the suffering of gun violence, but the delusion is identical.

So, the point here isn't really what one should or shouldn't do, it's about orienting one's view to see things the way they really are. Reality is one thing. Any notion that arises that something shouldn't exist is delusion. If it exists it doesn't require a reason to do so, so there similarly can't possibly be a reason for it not to exist.

This doesn't mean that one shouldn't act when acting is the thing to do. If someone could have prevented what happened in Arizona of course that's what they should have done, even if that intervention would have involved the gunman's death. That's not the killing to which this precept refers.

You will be tempted to create an endless number of such hypothetical scenarios in order to craft ways to deny the simple truth of this precept. That's what our minds need to do in order to persist in this notion that a self exists. Just look at that, it's your mind defending this notion that there is something separate that exists there. This is the fundamental problem.

This notion of separateness, a self and an other, is what is at the root of all human suffering.

This precept serves to remind us that this process, this insistence on the existence of this self, is at work. In the absence of a sense of self/other any notion of killing simply would not arise. There's nothing to kill, nothing to do the killing.

This is how things really are. So, when one is following the Way, that is, seeing things as they really are, one does not kill.

on the Ten Grave Precepts of Mahayana Buddhism

2011-01-24T20:48:00.002-05:00

In one sense, the precepts are the moral code for Buddhists. If one could just hold that notion of them very loosely, that's a complete description. The problem is, human beings being what we are, we can't do anything like hold such a thing loosely. Once you draw a boundary we want to test it, probe it, capture it.

The root "-cept" is derived from the Latin verb "capio," which means "to take" as in to capture, as in capturing a flag or something, and also to comprehend, to understand, to grasp a concept, or what Uchiyama might refer to as "closing the hand of thought."

The prefix "pre-," of course, means "before."

So, one way to approach a deeper understanding of the precepts is to look at them as the conditions of the mind before we mentally grasp something--pre-concept, i.e., before grasping. The precepts describe our natural state before we separate into self and other, into good and bad, into safe and dangerous, etc. So, as such, they serve to remind us when we have done just that, that is, when we are viewing the world of dualistic opposites, populated with individually-identifiable separately-existing entities. The precepts are a way to remind ourselves that the self has come into existence.

This is when all the trouble starts. Once we start to see the world as populated in this way, with definite separate entities that live and die, we are bound to suffer in the way that human beings suffer. Buddha's fundamental teaching sought to reveal this pattern to his students, and to further assert that it can be released, i.e., there is a way off this merry-go-round.

The precepts help us recognize when we've signed up for another ride.

Stating them is problematic all by itself. Stating anything is problematic, because once you do you have declared what something is and isn't, and reality really doesn't work that way. There is only reality, there's nothing not reality.

But, as one of the beloved teachers in my lineage is known for saying, you've got to say something or there will never be any understanding. So, here goes.

A follower of the Way does not kill.
A follower of the Way does not take what is not given.
A follower of the Way does not engage in sensual misconduct.
A follower of the Way does not speak deceptively.
A follower of the Way does not intoxicate oneself or others.
A follower of the Way does not slander others.
A follower of the Way does not praise self.
A follower of the Way does not possess anything selfishly.
A follower of the Way does not harbor ill will.
A follower of the Way Does not abuse the Three Treasures.

You could also say, don't kill, don't steal, don't rape, don't lie, don't get drunk, don't disrespect, don't brag, don't be selfish, don't hate, and don't defame the Buddha, the teachings of Buddhism, or other Buddhists.

I think that's pretty good advice, and like I said, if you could just hold that loosely, like a handful of sand, you'd be in good shape. But, you won't.

The value of the precepts for me is they help me recognize when I'm similarly gripping things too tightly, when I've lost contact with reality, when....oh anything else I say is just closing the fist around something, so I'll leave it at that. They help me recognize when my mind is leading me away from my direct experience of reality.

I am planning to "take" the precepts because I want to show up for my functioning role as a member of the human organization that is responsible for passing these teachings along. People have been doing things like this for 2500 years before me and I am grateful to them. They're dead, I can't really thank them, or buy them a beer or something, but I can show up for others the way they showed up for me, so that's what I'm going to do.

In practical terms this means I will be endeavoring at least to be a role model for others. I will live my life with attention to this moral code.

In these next few essays I will discuss each of the precepts singularly, relating a bit of what each of them means to me. Thanks for reading.

Testing blogpost via e-mail

2011-01-12T15:34:00.000-05:00

Please disregard, except to note that if you see this it is possible to post to a blogger/blogspot site over e-mail. That might be useful.

2011-01-12T15:12:00.001-05:00

Testing blogpost from SMS

The Tar Horn

2011-01-01T10:49:00.003-05:00

It was weird. I attended the NCAA Men's college basketball game played Saturday, December 18th, at Greensboro Coliseum between The University of North Carolina Tar Heels and The University of Texas Longhorns. I am a Tar Heel fan and a Longhorn alum. The Longhorns won, with less than two seconds left. It was an excellent game, hard fought and well-played on both sides, and with an few more seconds on the clock it could have gone the other way. It was one of those games that makes college basketball so compelling to watch.

I wore burnt orange to this game this year (burnt orange is the team color of The University of Texas at Austin), even though I am a very dedicated University of North Carolina Tar Heels fan. I also attended this game last year when it was held at Dallas Cowboys stadium, which was almost as much of a home court for Texas as Greensboro Colliseum is for the Tar Heels. I wore Carolina blue for that one.

Wearing Carolina blue for that game was entirely natural, I barely gave it a second thought. It was just like going to any game, I am almost always decked-out in Carolina blue when I attend a college basketball game. This year, as I was going to a Tar Heel game which was more or less on their home court as they played my Alma Mater, I decided I *should* wear the colors of my Alma Mater. So, I did.

It was disturbingly weird. As much as I intended to, I couldn't cheer for the Longhorns with any genuine enthusiasm, so as the game got close I found myself cheering on the Tar Heels, much to the confusion of those around me--why was the guy in burnt orange cheering for the Tar Heels?

Why indeed? This is a tale about unexamined notions and imagined expectations.

I felt like I should go in burnt orange. I was going with three UNC alums, and I felt like I was betraying my Alma Mater if I didn't at least make an appearance of loyalty, especially on what is essentially an away court for my Alma Mater. I felt wearing Carolina blue would have been less than genuine, like I was pretending to be something (a UNC alum) I'm not.

Bullshit. It was actually exactly the other way around.

Let me tell the tale of how I became a fan of UNC basketball. At the University of Texas I had the good fortune to take a year-long course in the history of the US Civil Rights movement. Since it stretched over two semesters we could examine a lot of different aspects of this topic in detail.

In January we got to intercollegiate sports. To make a long story as short as possible, Dean Smith, the long-time legendary coach of the Tar Heels, was a pioneer in the integration of intercollegiate athletics. His father played the first black player on a high school basketball team, under threat of his own resignation (and they won the state championship). Carrying on that proud family tradition of righteous courage, in the late 1950's Coach Smith defied popular opinion, his school administration, and even probably put his own life and limb at risk in order to do the right thing and treat college athletes the same regardless of their skin pigmentation. He stood down a whites-only restaurant in Chapel Hill in 1959 by bringing a black college student along with him (and a local minister) to eat one evening. He recruited the first black player to the Tar Heels at a time when the ACC was all white. Dean Smith did not waver, he took his Christian ideals, and his American ideals, seriously.

The timing for these revelations in my life was very fortuitous from a college basketball standpoint. It was the 1981-1982 school year, and UNC had a promising sophomore playing for them named Michael Jordan, along with another guy with some game named James Worthy. I decided to watch a few games and I was hooked. The Tar Heels won the national championship that year, beating Georgetown 63-62 with a now-legendary final winning jump-shot by Jordan. It was a good year to become a Tar Heel fan. I quickly caught on to the fact that UNC basketball was guided by simple ideals: play hard, play together, have fun.

I was no fan of the four corners offense, a creation of Coach Smith's earlier in his career, it's existence led to the shot clock, but I forgave him for that. I liked the style of basketball UNC played and they were in the midst of several seasons of great college basketball.

UT was not. UT's basketball team was never very good while I lived in Austin. It's a football school, and a baseball school. Even when the basketball team played well, no one really cared.

So, I've kept up with the Tar Heels ever since. For years and years I kept my fandom more or less to myself. I didn't have any friends who were Tar Heel fans until I moved to NYC in 1999. At my first job in NYC the woman who led the organization was a UNC alum, we discovered our mutual interest and quickly bonded over it. She is now my closest friend, in some ways the Tar Heels are responsible for one of the most important friendships of my life.

But, since I was not a UNC alum, I realize now that in spite of my dedication as a fan all those years (I am sure that until my first visit to North Carolina in May 2010 that I was the most rabid Tar Heel fan who had never stepped foot in the state), subconsciously I felt a little like a pretender, somehow less of a real fan because I did not attend UNC. I felt a bit like a party crasher, an uninvited guest, because I had *chosen* to be a Tar Heel, I was not Tar Heel born and bred.

I can't believe I took all that so seriously, (in fairness to myself, it was sub-conscious) as if there was some kind of litmus test I needed to pass, some sort of authenticity check I failed! Examined in the light of day, everyone knows that one chooses fan loyalties freely, it isn't assigned to you, or granted as a privilege of birth. It's just college basketball, after all. But, until I wore burnt orange to a Tar Heel game, this self-doubt was buried beneath the surface.

I harbor no desire to have attended UNC rather than UT-Austin, no regret for my choice of schools. I consider the education I received at UT to be world-class, I love Austin, and spending 20 years of my life there made me into the man I am today. But, I am a UNC basketball fan. This loyalty is heart-felt, it goes a little beyond just a preference to support a particular team, it goes to my resonance with Dean Smith's values, my admiration of him for truly having the courage of his convictions and my gratitude for many, many seasons of great college basketball.

Also, I have to say, it's also pretty fun to "hate" Duke, which is part-and-parcel of being a Tar Heel. Duke is over-run with the kind of self-impressed, arrogant, frat-boys I developed a enthusiastic distaste for while a student at UT-Austin (which is similarly over-run with these assholes), and I don't sincerely believe that Mike Krzyzewski, as good a coach as he is, is the kind of man who would have singularly confronted The Pines restaurant in Chapel Hill as Dean Smith did, but I concede I really don't know that.

I can sit down with any Tar Heel fan my age or younger and go toe-to-toe with stories, knowledge and insight about the teams and players, current and past. I witnessed the 2009 national championship game in person. I have plenty of credibility as a Tar Heel fan, and I did graduate from The University of Texas at Austin, so as few can can legitimately say...

I am a Tar Horn.

Rohatsu 2010, part 5 of 4: Great Guys

2010-12-17T16:22:00.002-05:00

Great Guys

After the sesshin ended at about 6pm on Monday evening, after I chatted a bit with a few of the participants, most notably the guy who I had been sitting next to all day for the last five days, I went out with a local friend of mine. We ate in the Mall of America, and walking though there was an exercise in managing sensory stimulation (the Hooters was particularly compelling) after sitting sesshin for five days, let me tell you. After a lovely dinner and visit with my friend I came home and hit the hay.

I got up the next morning and went to the regular zazen session, and then I went back over to the house next door where I stayed and packed up. One of the senior teachers and I had discussed getting together to talk on this morning back before the sesshin started, so we discussed following through with that plan. Everyone was concerned with helping me get to the airport, but everyone was too busy to drive themselves. They were all concerned that I'd be spending too much money on a taxi.

Ha! I'm a New Yorker. I am accustomed to giving money to cab drivers, believe me. I wasn't worried about it.

Apparently, behind the scenes there was some discussion and investigation about how to get me to the airport without enriching a taxi company. It was discovered that one of the other students, the gentleman who served as the work leader, was planning to pick someone up at the airport 30 minutes after I needed to be there. He was asked, and he kindly offered to take me to the airport.

Beyond that, he was also available to join the Senior Teacher and I for what had now turned into breakfast. Cool! We went to a lovely cafe in the neighborhood and had a most unusual conversation! We talked about zen! What was unusual about it is that for the first time I can remember I was discussing zen with people, not explaining it to them. That was incredibly awesome.

Usually when I talk to people about zen I am telling them what it is, or even more typically what it *isn't.* It was very nice to just discuss what I had been reading/doing/thinking with some people who know what this is all about, had helpful things to say, and could turn me on to some things I didn't know about. That was really, really fun.

Then, in the car ride back I was telling some stories and I found out that the senior teacher had actually *been* part of a famous all-night sesshin that Dainin Katagiri conducted, and that we had other rather notorious zen acquaintances in common. That is, this teacher was very well-connected in the line of American teachers I've been studying in. People I revered and knew only by reputation he was friends with, had studied with, and knew intimately.

Very cool.

Then, the student who was driving me to the airport and I dropped off the senior teacher, said our goodbyes, I picked up a few odds and ends from the zendo bookstore, and we headed off. He wanted to stop at a record store first, which was fine with me.

On the way, unknown to him beforehand, he fulfilled a long-time ambition of mine. He took me by the Minnesota Zen Center, the one founded and established by Dainin Katagiri, my teacher's teacher. He also told me that Robert Pirsig had funded the endeavor, something I did not heretofore know. I was dumbstruck by just sitting out in front of it. I had wanted to make this visit for many, many years. He just whizzed by on the way to the record store. That was awesome.

The record store was awesome. I walked over to the Japanese section and found two albums I had been looking for over a year. Amazingly, after searching for them again and again in New York City, in Minneapolis I went over and walked right up to them. That was a shock, but even better, they were used copies and were CHEAP!

We got to the airport in plenty of time. We exchanged contact info and said our good byes. Wow, that was a Great Morning among Great Guys!

I walked through security easily at the airport. No lines, no pornoscan, no pat-down. That was a first, too. I had a nice lunch at a local business in the airport called French Meadow, it was really good, then I went to the gate.

At the gate I sat down in the midst of a group of eight African-American gentleman in their 30s and 40s, all traveling together, at first I thought they were either a band, or some kind of athletic team. It didn't take long for me to learn that they were indulging themselves in a tradition of attending a professional football game together this last weekend. They do it annually, going to a different stadium in a different city every year. This year it was Minneapolis, to see the Giants play the Vikings.

As it turns out, they missed their game because of the snow storm I discussed in Great Snow. The roof of the stadium had fallen in and the game was moved to Detroit. They were endeavoring to witness Brett Favre's last game, but they ended up watching it on TV with everyone else.

They were in good humor though, and they welcomed me into their conversation while we waited on the plane. we had a spirited discussion about college basketball, a topic upon which I have some expert knowledge, and I really really enjoyed their company. It occurred to me that just a few years ago I would have been very wary of such a group, probably not speaking to them, or even sitting amongst them. Not out of fear, but because I would have felt that they didn't want me around.

Instead, it felt like being around old friends. I wonder what influence my zen practice has on my ability to settle into spontaneously joyous activities like my breakfast, and this conversation at the airport. I can't make a specific intellectual connection, but they certainly feel connected.

All in all, it was a Great trip to Minneapolis, and I got to end it among Great Guys.

Rohatsu 2010, part 4 of 4: Great Sincerity

2010-12-17T08:51:00.001-05:00

When I was having the crisis of confidence described in Great Sorrow I didn't know what to do about it. Lest you think I had parted from ordinary reality, the facts were that I knew I was voluntarily participating in an activity with a bunch of generous, reasonable, kind people and I was free to leave or quit at any time. None of them would have shunned me, shamed me, or rejected me in any way for resigning from the activity. They knew it was hard, and they probably all wanted to quit too.

I knew I would still be given warmth, food and shelter until I could leave on my own, and I also had a friend in town who would have ridden (driven, actually) to my rescue. There was no actual threat anywhere, the drama was all about the safety and integrity of my self-concept, not my actual safety and integrity.

However, within the confines of that envelope of protection, I did not restrain myself to some standard of taciturn equanimity. That wasn't what I came to do. I came to find out about my life, and if what I found out was that I can't be the Soto zen student I want to be, that's what I wanted to know. I would not come into full contact with that knowledge if I restrained my mind with the comfort that this crisis was just some game I was playing.

There were moments of mirth. On Friday, December 10th, I distinctly remember sitting in the classroom during the afternoon coffee break thinking about the fact it had been a year since I had surgery. I had been looking forward to my "surgiversary" for a long time. Over the year I had fantasized about the celebration I would have on this day.

I imagined a big party, with a bunch of significant others around, perhaps including my surgeon. There would review of my pictures over the year, stories of lessons learned, and lots of hugs and kisses from beautiful women, perhaps capped off by a night of fabulous sex with some willing babe.

Instead, here I was surrounded by a bunch of seemingly morose people, most of whom I had never met before, all dressed modestly in black or dark earth tones, drinking coffee, eyes downcast, silent, with pained expressions on their faces. There were attractive women there, but I was convinced they didn't like me.

Worst. Party. Ever.

This started a giggle that I had trouble stifling for the next forty-five minutes. When I told this story to my teacher the next day, he said "perhaps it was the best observance you could have had." He meant it. I had no idea what he meant until much later.

There are two senior teachers at Dharma Field. One is a published author and it is he, and his works, that drew me to this sangha. He's the one I singularly identify as "my teacher" in these essays. The other is not published. He is bereft of even a modicum of fame, even among zen nerds. When I was getting familiar with this group I considered him sort of the bench-warmer Zen Master--the utility 3rd baseman kept on the roster in case A-Rod got hurt.

He was the teacher who was available for Dokusan when I was undergoing the worst part of my crisis of confidence. I was in such distress I didn't care who I saw and could talk to. I would have pulled the mailman walking by on the street in for Dokusan if that was my only choice. I needed to talk to someone.

To be fair, I had gotten to know him since I first came to the sangha. My experience of him is of a warm, humble and funny guy always quick with a smile and a spot of encouragement. We shared a fondness for bad and off-color jokes, and over the years I had sent him the best ones I came across in the mail. He had also lost a lot of weight since I saw him last, he now looked tall and stately. He imbues the room with an understated sense of comfortable calm. He's the kind of man everyone would want as a grandfather figure in their lives. I'm fortunate to have him in mine.

I sat in front of him in Dokusan and the tears started to fall. I told him about my struggles, the weird dreams I had been having, and my doubts that I could do this, and how much those doubts devastated me emotionally. I told him I wanted to be a zen student more than anything else I had ever wanted and I didn't know what I was going to do if I couldn't make it work.

He looked at me with warmth and compassion and said "You are very sincere."

He went on to tell me the standard zen advice: take care of this very moment, look at what is coming up, there's nothing to do other than be present with it. That was all stuff I knew, it was the comment about my sincerity that turned my crisis into an opportunity. He was right. I have Great Sincerity.

The previous night I had broken into tears on the cushion during the final session of zazen for the day. Fortunately (for me) the man sitting next to me was beset with a cold, so he had been sniffling and wiping his nose with a tissue for days. I doubt anyone other than he noticed that I was now doing the same.

The tears streaming down my face didn't bother me. They actually felt warm and comforting, but crying also makes my nose run and there was nothing serene or elegant about snot on my upper lip, so I had to wipe it off. I had a napkin from the kitchen squirreled away in the pocket of my meditation jacket for this kind of thing, but we weren't even halfway through this sit before it was a slimy mess.

My back was really aching as I described in Great Soreness, this was the worst it got through the entire sesshin (though, be aware I didn't know this at the time), and my desire to quit was the greatest. I realized I had been feeling sorry for myself and that sorrow now turned to anger. I turned the pain and my resistance to practice into an entity, a wrathful entity, and I confronted it.

"Come on!" I shouted internally. "Kill me. That's the only way I am going to stop this practice. You have to kill me. Carry through with your threat! As long as I can draw another breath I am going to keep sitting here, so you have to kill me! Do it. Bring it on!"

I knew my life wasn't really threatened here, but the symbolism was the same if you consider practice as dear as life, and I do.

So, I stood up to this internal bully and confronted the threat. This went on and on throughout this period of zazen. I sat there, yelling at this wrathful entity, challenging it to make good on it's threat. I was not going to back down. My sincerity was expressing itself as anger. At one point every muscle in my body was tense, my jaw was clenched, sweat was now rolling down my face along with the tears and snot.

Then, a surprise. I heard the most beautiful sound in the world when you are sitting sesshin: the bell. The sit was over. Dreams with Miyuki were now just a few minutes away, and I could now go lay down, the one position left for me in which my back didn't hurt.

This sit was the only one the entire time during which I was surprised by the bell. Usually I was convinced that the person keeping time was either inattentive or a sadist. Being surprised by the bell was truly a surprise.

This was the nadir, or the zenith, depending on your view, of my sesshin. If I'm asked to identify a reason I came, or what I got out of it, this is it. I came to know my own sincerity.

I came to know some other things too. I got to know Minnesota better (people are so nice!), some important members of my sangha better, and I resolved a question I had about whether I should still regard this place as my dharma home even though it is hundreds of miles from my actual home (I should, and I do).

But, beyond that, most important to me was that I came to know my own sincerity. I am in possession of a quality that Dogen, a 13th Century zen teacher and father of my denomination of zen, repeated said is absolutely essential to practice--a will to find the Truth.

This is Great Sincerity.

Rohatsu 2010, part 3 of 4: Great Sorrow

2010-12-16T18:43:00.000-05:00

I decided to go to this particular sesshin when I learned that my teacher's wife died from lung cancer in mid-September. I knew her, she served as Tenzo (head cook, traditionally a very highly regarded position in zen) during previous sesshins I had attended. I didn't know her well, but I liked her.

This was far from the only reason I came to sesshin, but it was what pulled the trigger for me to go to this one specifically. There was a memorial service at the zendo in mid-October that I could not attend owing to an on-going tragedy in my own life. This sesshin just happened to commence on the day after the very first day I could get away from work without turning my own life even more upside-down (which was something that wouldn't have helped anyone).

I knew my teacher was surrounded by people who would care for him, that wasn't why I decided to come to sesshin. Even though I am a hospice nurse, I wasn't acting on the notion that I needed to go be his bereavement counselor, or that there weren't many, many people as skilled as I who were also as devoted as I to his well-being that were available to him. My motivations were far more subtle than that.

I simply wanted to offer my compassionate presence to my sangha as soon as it was possible for me to do so. Simply, put, I just wanted to show up for my group. The only thing I could offer (that others couldn't) was me. Other people could show up and be a shoulder to lean on, an ear to bend, arms to hug, etc. I'm sure there was plenty of that. Only I could show up and be Richard DeWald. It was all I had to give, so I wanted to give it.

I did not anticipate that my teacher would be grief-stricken almost 90 days after his wife's passing, and he wasn't visibly so at all. That's actually not that unusual, grief is not a constant, ongoing process, it comes and goes. Beyond that, he knows his mind, if anyone was going to be able to gracefully navigate the loss of a spouse, he would be able to do it.

You see, this is all not about him, not about the individually-identifiable separately-appearing entity that we know as my zen teacher. Step back a bit. This sangha is also an entity, and it had suffered a loss, and that grief was going to show up. Grief needs compassionate presence. People will run around thinking that it is some individual that is the sole locus of such a thing, but that's not the way Reality works. Grief will manifest. I had no idea how it would manifest, but I knew it would arise, and sesshin would be one such vehicle for it's manifestation.

I wanted to be there, not to *do* something about it, but just to be present. This is hard to explain beyond that.

I have never seen and heard so much crying at a sesshin in my life. Actually, I had never heard crying at all during a sesshin before, but I personally witnessed five people (out of twenty participants) crying during this sesshin, including myself. Since I only know why I was crying, let's start with that discussion.

My tears were about my fears that I wouldn't be able to make it. During the sesshin I experienced something completely new to me--the fear that I didn't have what it takes to be a zen practitioner, to sit a 5-day sesshin. Maybe I didn't have what it takes to be a zen student, at least not the kind of zen student I want to be. In the middle of day three my back was hurting so badly that my thoughts were completely dominated alternatively by a desire to quit and by the notion that I could not go on with this, not for two more days. I just couldn't, no matter how badly I wanted it. The ability was simply not within me.

I really thought I was a failure. I really thought I didn't have it in me, and that made me profoundly sorrowful.

I realized there actually are very few things in life I want as much as I want to study zen. "Studying zen" is not about reading books or taking tests, it is about showing up for your life as it really is. I was having trouble with the pain, everything in me seemed to be pushing me, shoving me, towards giving up. I was being mentally pummelled by the notion that I needed to give up, go over to my room, and lay down in bed and prepare to slink out as the Great Zen Failure of 2010 at Dharma Field.

My notion of who I was as a zen student was dying. I thought I could just walk through sesshin, maybe facing a little tough stretch here and there, but my ability to complete my plans would never be called into question. I was too strong for that, I was too committed for that. I had come too far, for too long, done too much, to face a crisis of confidence. That was for other people.

Suddenly, this notion who I am as a zen student was dead and lifeless at my feet. I could doubt myself. What until now seemed to be an endless reserve of confidence about this practice was no more. I could no longer confidently go forward knowing I would continue to notch my way along to what I believed would be my future. I might wash out. I believed that the power to practice zen was one of the few precious things in life that was always going to be with me. I might lose other things, people can take my belongings, they can even take my life, but they could not take away my desire to wake up to my life. It was eternal. This confidence in my simple ability to practice zen was something solid, fixed and permanent about who I am that no one or no thing could pry from my grasp.

Gone. All of that was gone. Words cannot express how sad that made me. I had lost something very dear to me, and I didn't even know I could lose it until it was gone.

Dokusan is the zen term for the private interviews with the senior teachers that are offered during sesshin. Sesshins are constructed so that the teachers are physically segregated from the students. They come in and leave separately from the students. They do not reside with the students, they do not take breaks with the students, there are almost no opportunities to just walk up and talk to a teacher during sesshin. Your only access to them is in Dokusan.

It is easy to see the logic in this. If this were not so, students would be huddled around them constantly, and those students willing to be rude and dismissive of other's needs would monopolize the time and space around them. It's the same reason you can't turn right on red in Manhattan. It would simply cause havoc. There's too much going on.

Dokusan is the answer to this. If you want to talk to a teacher you simply put your name on a list and wait your turn. The interviews are offered during zazen periods in a private room. At Dharma Field the actual procedure is that when you are within three people of the top of the list you sit zazen in a waiting room adjacent to the interview room, not in the zendo with the other students, and the teacher rings a high-pitched bell twice to announce that the next person on the list can come in.

At other zen centers one is often then asked to perform three full prostrated bows to the teacher (that is, ending up face down on the floor, arms outstretched at the teacher's feet). I think the notion here is that this action is symbolic of total submission of your ego to the process. Right.

At Dharma Field, a student simply opens the door, bows in gassho (hands positioned as in prayer, a bow of the head and upper body, this is an ordinary greeting in zen practice) and sits down across from the teacher. A white noise machine is just outside the door that does make it impossible for anyone outside of the room to discern any of the conversation going on in the room, but if you are sitting zazen in the waiting area you can tell when someone is laughing or crying in there. You can't tell what they are laughing and crying about, but you do know that laughing or crying is going on.

You hear both. I heard both, but I heard a lot more crying during this session. I wasn't the only one crying, that was for certain.

I also witnessed, by happenstance, another student receive some very significant family news during sesshin. I want to respect this student's privacy, so I am not even going to reveal their gender, or anything specific about the event, just suffice it to say it was one of those family events that sets phones a-ringing and e-mails a-flying. If it had been me to receive such news, I am not sure I would have remained in sesshin, particularly since my mind was really leaning towards getting the hell out of there anyway. This student remained, and they will always have my admiration for that. It wasn't selfish of them to do so, their presence wasn't needed somewhere, but no one would have begrudged this student the reason to leave. There was reason to leave.

A bit later I was sitting in such a way that I could see, even though this student was trying to face away from the group, gazing out a window, that tears were streaming down this student's face and they were trying hard to stifle the noise of sobbing. I wanted to go offer comfort, but that would have been rude. Sesshin is about mutual respect for the vow of silence. You do not ask another student to break their vow of silence in order to take care of something that can wait.

If this student needed comfort they could ask for it. That is certainly allowed, but I could not give unsolicited comfort and respect their silence, so I simply sat there, breathed peacefully for them, and witnessed their sorrow.

Later, the student I had heard crying in Dokusan was sitting next to me and I could feel their sorrow. It hurt. They weren't frankly crying, but they were clearly grief-stricken, they looked as if they were sitting at a funeral of a very dear loved one. Again, I simply sat there as witness. I simply sat quietly with them, feeling their grief as if it was my own, mixed with my own, not trying to do anything about it, just being with it.

Beyond that, there were sad, down-trodden expressions everywhere, particularly on the faces of the students who only showed up for the last three days. I had no idea why, but the first three days were by far the most difficult for me, so I imagined they were also struggling with physical discomfort, mental anguish and spiritual crises just as I had. Everyone there, at one time or another, or for some people for the entire time, looked like they were suffering some overwhelmingly profound loss.

Then it came to me. Here it is. This is the Grief for which I came to this sesshin. Whether or not it could be linked causally to the death of my teacher's wife was irrelevant. My grief, these students' grief, my teacher's grief, his colleagues' grief, it was all here. This is why I came. I was here to offer myself to this, so I did. I sat with this grief. I was here, I could stay here, and that's what I was going to do.

This is how Reality actually works. We think that one person suffers grief and this is something separate from other people who aren't suffering grief. I'm sad, you're not. If you look carefully enough to begin to see through the substantiality of individually-identifiable separately-appearing selves, you see there is no such locus. There is only sorrow. It doesn't belong to anyone.

This is Great Sorrow.

Rohatsu 2010, part 2 of 4: Great Soreness

2010-12-15T21:01:00.002-05:00

There's a story that makes the rounds in the zen world in various forms, I'm sure it has happened several times, with several different people, so everyone has their own version of it, but it goes something generally like this:

A new meditator has an insight experience. I've had them too, they're pretty impressive, like a spiritual orgasm or something. It's what is commonly imagined that enlightenment may be, or nirvana, etc. etc. etc. It can take a myriad of forms, and it is truly beyond description with words, which is one of the things so wonderful about it. Quiet sitting has a way of reliably bringing these things on just like caressing certain body parts in certain ways will reliably bring on a sexual orgasm.

I had my first one as a young meditator, age 16, while being taught to meditate by one of the Catholic clergy at my Catholic high school. He was using a candle as the object of concentration, and I had the experience of merging my awareness with the flame, for lack of a better way to put it. I had another one during my first sesshin at San Francisco Zen Center, yet another while on a retreat in New Hampshire, and another one while riding the C Subway line in Manhattan (go figure). Like an orgasm, you know one when you have one. They are not subtle.

Anyway, I digress. The young (or new) meditator has this experience and then rushes off to their zen teacher to tell them about it, using carrying along some fantasy that the zen teacher is going to say "Wow! It usually takes years of dedicated practice to reach this level of deep understanding! I've never had such an advanced student!"

If they have a good teacher, the teacher will instead treat the experience as if it is a minor annoyance best quickly forgotten. Why? Because in the context of waking up to what your life truly is, that is exactly what these experiences are--distractions. They are wonderful, blissful, peaceful, comforting experiences, just as orgasms can be, but they have as much to do with zen practice as sexual orgasms have to do with getting your car washed.

My favorite version of this story involves a student telling (I think) Dainin Katagiri about one of these experiences. The student describes this wonderful powerful experience in great detail and Katagiri nods and says "Hmmm. How's your breathing? How's your posture?"

If you could speak to me about how things are going during a sesshin, you're not going to hear me tell you about the wonderful insight I've gained into Dogen, or Huang Po, or how I now see that all beings are unique manifestations of Buddha already perfectly enlightened. You're going to hear about my knees, my back, and about my suspicions that the person keeping time during zazen is sadistically messing with us by letting the sessions go longer than they are supposed to go.

Zazen, i.e., sitting motionless, is, at the very best, a mildly annoying experience. It can be painful and difficult. During this sesshin I primarily struggled during zazen with three painful and difficult problems. First, my left leg would go to sleep. This is somehow related to an interruption in regular blood flow caused by something to do with sitting motionless cross-legged. This is not a huge problem because it goes away within a few seconds after I uncross my legs, and I've learned to do this subtly on the cushion with minimal disturbance to those around me (there is an Art to that).

The only problem with this is that zazen is essentially a yoga posture, like the downward dog or something, and if my legs are uncrossed I'm not sitting zazen. So, for whatever period of time that I rock back and swing my foot in front of me to resolve the problem is time I'm not doing zazen. Well, I'm sitting there to do zazen, so this time that I sit in a different posture in order to get the feeling back in my leg is "wasted" (for lack of a better term). No matter how much I try to retain my mental posture, this isn't zazen. It is not what I sat down to do.

My second problem, in order of the amount of distress it produced, was the pain involved with stretching out my quadriceps, the muscles on the front of my legs, because my knees are folded in, flexed almost as far as they can go. It hurts, particularly early. It's a sharp constant pain streaking down the muscles, and this merges with a very similar sensation in my knees also related to stretching tissues in that area. It's not excruciating pain, but it is significant. Many times at the end of a zazen period I would grab my thigh as I unfolded my leg and silently shout "Motherfucker!" to myself as I unfolded it. Something about this private, silent, screamed vulgarity helped, I'm not sure why.

My third problem, and by far the most distressing, was a dull ache in the middle of my back in the mid-thoracic region, roughly a few inches below the area between my shoulder blades. What was most annoying about it was not the intensity of the pain, I'd rate it about a four on a scale of one to ten, certainly tolerable. The worst part was this notion that if I could just lean back on something it would completely go away.

Imagine leaning against a steam pipe that was not hot enough to burn your skin but far too hot to be comfortable. All you need to do to rid yourself of this discomfort is stop leaning on the pipe, yet you are committed to leaning against this pipe for some reason that you don't really understand. After a while this fact--that you're doing something to make yourself uncomfortable that you can immediately relieve--causes all sorts of mental distress. This struggle with "why the hell do I do this to myself?" is actually worse than the pain.

I went for Dokusan, a private interview with the teacher, at my very first opportunity to discuss this problem. He has been sitting zazen for 40 years, certainly he knows about this, and he did. I described what was going on and he said "Is it a vertical pain or a horizontal pain?"

"Horizontal, a band across my back, below my shoulder blades, a dull ache." I said, leaning forward in anticipation of his wise counsel and immediate solution.

"Oh, if it is not vertical than this is something you're probably going to have to just put up with during the rest of this sesshin. You do slump some and round your shoulders, it probably has something to do with that" he said, probably knowing that wasn't the answer I wanted.

Great. It's like the old joke about going to the doctor and saying it hurts to do this and he tells you to stop doing that. I knew this was about slumping, because exaggerating my slump made it go away. Thanks, great Master of Zen, very helpful. What I wanted him to tell me was some minor adjustment to make in my zazen posture that would magically resolve all this. No dice.

So, I could exaggerate my slump, probably looking a bit like I was suddenly horribly depressed about something (not too far from the truth from time to time as I struggled with this, to be honest), but that's like swinging my foot in front of me to remedy my leg going to sleep. Slumping is not zazen. It is impossible to maintain the proper mental posture when you are not in the proper physical posture. Slumped time on the cushion is also wasted time on the cushion.

After three days of this the pain began to persist even off the cushion. My back hurt. My muscles were aching. I wanted a massage, preferably by a bikini-clad Japanese woman named something like Miyuki, but I would have accepted one from a bald guy named Fred who was clad in an dingy white t-shirt and grey sweat pants. It hurt.

I thought I had an insight. I'll just take some Ibuprofen! I had none with me, but there was a first aid kit in the zendo so I raided it. No Ibuprofen, but there was aspirin, so I took ten grains. This resolved the pain off the cushion, my back didn't hurt all the time any more, but it did very little for my experience during zazen.

Sesshin practice is different than daily practice. I sit zazen every day, at least twice, once in the morning and once in the evening. I sit for twenty minutes, and I experience some minor version of every sensation I had during sesshin in my daily practice too, but only for a few minutes twice a day. This is like the mild discomfort associated with working out, or climbing stairs, or shaving. You forget about it. It's no big deal, you put up with something for a minute or two and then you go on with your day.

In sesshin it goes on all freaking day, or that's what I'm thinking anyway.

Now, the truth is there is no "all day." There is only this present moment. Ever. There is no other time. The notion that a pain experienced for ten seconds is something worse than the same pain experienced for 6 hours (the amount of daily zazen done in these sesshins I attend) is just a story we tell ourselves. A pain is a pain. It either exists or it doesn't, right now. We make pain "worse" with these thoughts that linear time exists in the way that we conceive of it, but that's really another discussion for a different essay.

However, you can create another kind of pain, the pain that persists off the cushion, from extended periods of time straining your muscles like this. This is actually minor injury, a muscle strain, and I could eventually feel the swelling in this area of my back. I was "injured."

At the end of day three and four I literally almost ran to bed so I could lay down flat. It didn't hurt that way. At the end of day three I was so exhausted by working with this soreness that I fell into a deep sleep almost immediately after getting into bed (and was visited by a bikini-clad Japanese woman named Miyuki while dreaming, but that's yet another story). By day four I had some additional insight into my mental contributions to these physical problems so I wasn't so exhausted by them, but my back still hurt. I could still feel the swelling.

I'll discuss more about this in the essay "Great Sincerity." My struggle here was emblematic of what I will discuss there, but I do want to round-out this story about straightening-out my back. I did fix the problem. I did figure out what I was doing to make my back hurt.

When I sit, even as I sit right now typing this, I typically lean in my chair against the very same area of my back that was causing me all the trouble. My lower back is generally not touching the chair below it, and I bend forward a bit in order to make my upper back vertical so I am not gazing up at the ceiling while trying to type. It is a bad habit, I'm not recommending this posture, but it is what I do.

Extended periods of sitting this way, years really, has caused my muscles to orient in such a way to make this position comfortable for me (otherwise I would sit in some other position, duh). This is not zazen posture. When I orient to zazen posture, my muscles are not doing what they are used to doing, so they aren't strong in the ways and areas needed to sit comfortably with my thoracic spine perfectly straight, and they complain about it.

My zazen posture was subtly off. I wasn't maintaining enough of a curve in my lumbar region. When I made this adjustment (the internal experience is that of sticking out my butt in back and rounding out my belly in front) the pain faded. Fortunately, I did finally figure it out and zazen stopped being painful. Zazen finally fulfilled it's promise: it was only mildly annoying.

Unfortunately, I figured this out during the third-to-last sit on the last day. That is, out of 60 zazen periods I sat over five days, numbers 58, 59 and 60 were only mildly annoying. The rest were frankly painful, in varying degrees of intensity.

Sits in the morning were easier, and the first of a set of three sits was easier than the second and third. It was all very ordinary in this sense: exactly what you would expect, exactly like the soreness from doing anything physical (which causes soreness, yes, even that) that you aren't used to doing every day (no, I'm not, and that's Miyuki's fault). The more I did it the more sore I became. It got better over breaks, but less better over the course of a day.

It even started to annoy me during kinhin, walking meditation. At one point I was so tired of it that I moved to a chair to sit, but by the time even sitting in a chair didn't help. That was very discouraging, but that's yet another story.

So, this is what sesshin is like during sesshin. You aren't wandering between these experiences of being one with the universe, or running off to tell your teacher that you have figured out the sound of one hand clapping, or that you now know if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it whether there is a sound. No, you're dealing with your body. You're dealing with what shows up. This is zen practice. It's not very sexy (unless Miyuki is around), but this is the path to liberation. I know that.

Quiet naturally, you might wonder if this is all worth it. Yes, it is. What's at stake here is nothing short of personal liberation for all sentient beings. Caring for my back during zazen is no different than caring for the entire world. If you want to understand that, well, there's a method, but you might get a little sore along the way.

Great Soreness.

Rohatsu 2010, part 1 of 4: Great Snow

2010-12-14T22:53:00.000-05:00

Many of my friends think it is nutty enough to just voluntarily go to Minnesota in December. They are completely confounded by the notion that I am going out there to make it possible to sit and stare at a blank wall most of the day. However, in the most real and concrete sense, that is exactly what I did, and that's exactly why I did it.

When I arrived there was snow on the ground, maybe six inches worth, but it was no big deal, and everything was well-plowed and well-shoveled. The cold and the whiteness does settle the mind a bit, which is helpful for zen practice, so I was happy to see it. My anticipated activities were all indoors, so beyond physically getting to where I needed to be (which, due to a kind and generous friend was absolutely no problem) I really didn't think much about the snow. It was there, not out of place in a Minnesota December, but it was the first snow I had seen this winter. I was happy to see it.

During sesshin you really don't get much in the way of news from the world outside. You aren't reading newspapers, listening to the radio or watching television. Interaction with the outside world is not part of the plan, so it was a startling surprise in the middle of day 2 when the practice director for the sesshin announced that he had some news for us. Really? Who died?

"There's a storm coming, it looks like we're going to have a snow emergency, so we need to deal with the cars" he said in a calm voice also imbued with urgency.

I was both from out of town and without responsibility for a car, so I neither knew the implications of a snow emergency, whatever that was, nor did I much care. However, i did notice that people around me, already settled into two days of zazen practice, slumped a bit on their cushions. I immediately got the sense in the room that this was going to be something of a drama for them.

For me, since I was staying in the building next door, and it was plenty warm, and the zendo was plenty warm, I was rather looking forward to seeing some fresh snow, and it sounded like a lot of it was coming. All I ever had to do was walk about 30 feet outdoors and I didn't imagine that this snow emergency was going to be a problem for me no matter what happened.

This was a five day sesshin, it was nearing the end of the second day, but my zen center allows people to only participate in the last three days if that's what they want, so we were about to double in size from roughly ten to twenty people that evening. The snow would arrive soon after the three-day participants.

One of the most universal experiences of sesshin is the desire to leave early. Sesshin is difficult mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Anyone who tells you that they like it without also mentioning that they also don't like it is not being honest, or has never been to one. Sitting still can be comfortable, sitting motionless is not. What is normally regarded as "sitting still" actually involves almost constant motion, one just doesn't notice it.

Sitting motionless is something else. I'm sure this experience is different for everyone, but it is the same in some ways too. For me, it involves my knees aching, my legs falling asleep, and a dull ache in the back. I can sit motionless for about 5 minutes comfortably if I have oriented myself optimally physically. It doesn't take long before I am thinking I really want to be doing something else. That's only natural.

So, when my mind gets caught by the notion that I'm going to be feeling this way for days and days I naturally start negotiating with myself how I am going to quit. Can I claim I am Ill? Injured? Have an emergency back home? Decided that zen is bullshit? How do I exit gracefully? This rumination goes on for a while, particularly early in the sesshin.

The actual procedure would involve a discussion with the teacher (unless one just gets up and leaves without making any announcement, which also happens) and a good zen teacher is going to tell you that while you are free to leave, you should know that there's no where to go. What he or she means is that you can't escape your own life, and that is really your fundamental problem, not your back/knees/boredom/whatever.

With the snow, there was literally another layer on this notion that one can't really go anywhere. That is, for a while, one really couldn't go anywhere, literally, but I'm getting to that.

Friday night when we went to bed it wasn't snowing just yet. I woke up at about two in the morning to use the bathroom and I looked outside. There was a nice new layer of snow on the ground. I thought "well, there's probably going to be some shoveling to do in the morning, but I don't see what all the hubbub is about." I went back to sleep and set my alarm for 4:15, 30 minutes before everyone was supposed to arise.

At 4:15 I woke up to the sound of someone shoveling snow outside. I got up, got dressed, and went to the zendo. There was a good coat of snow on the ground, but it wasn't bad, maybe six inches. The practice director was already shoveling in back of the zendo and I asked him if there was other shoveling that needed to be done. He indicated that the front steps of the zendo needed attention so I walked around front, found a snow shovel and started to work.

It was quiet, the snow was absolutely pristine, and I simply shoveled a walking path from the front door of the zendo to the street. While I was doing this, the scene around me was exquisitely beautiful, beyond words. The only sound was my shovel and the faint crackle of heavy dry snow hitting my body.

I didn't know what the temperature was, which was probably a good thing, because I was told later it was about 20-30 degrees below zero at that time. I was just wearing my meditation jacket, actually just wearing what I wore inside throughout the sesshin, but I didn't start to get uncomfortable until right as I finished. It didn't take long, I was probably out there about ten minutes.

Just as I finished the work leader appeared at the door, all bundled up, obviously anticipating doing some shoveling himself. "I just cleared a path out to the street. It is still snowing, so there will be more snow practice" I said to him.

He nodded and said "that's probably good enough for right now" and we both went inside. I felt as though I sensed a little disappointment in him that the work was done, which I understood. I had really enjoyed it. Not only was I living our teacher's common admonition to just attend to this present moment, but I got to see the snow in a way no one else would. It was now shoveled, human intention had manifested, and that simple unbroken coating of white peacefulness was now interrupted by a human hand, never to return. There was no more an un-shoveled scene out front of the zendo. Only I had been privileged enough to see and live it before I ended it's existence.

But, my hands were cold. It was time to go inside. It was time for me to move on from my personal snow practice.

It wasn't much later in the day that the peacefulness I had so enjoyed outside also moved on. As the sun came up, the wind kicked up with it. The snow that was once carefully everywhere descending now was whipped sideways by a fierce wind. Flakes that had once drifted lazily to the earth were now forming white streaks painted across the canvas of the views out the zendo windows. During kinhin I would steal a glance outside every once in a while. At one point I couldn't really make out what was across the street. This was a full-on blizzard.

By the middle of the afternoon, when it was time for work practice, the snow emergency had been declared and it was time to both dig out the cars and dig out a place to move them on the other designated side of the street. There was something like two feet of snow on the ground, drifts were more than four feet high.

Minneapolis is well-organized when it comes to snow-plowing. There was a plan, the only printed material evident to students at the sesshin was the snow plowing plan. On one day you parked on one side of the street so they could plow the other side. The next day, the instructions were reversed. This was impressive. It worked well.

A team was organized to do the shoveling. The work leader asked me if I had my boots. I don't have snow boots. I have never owned a pair. I am from Texas, I am not sure you can even buy snow boots in Texas. I now live in New York City, but honestly I would only use snow boots a few days of the year there, so I don't have any. I told the work leader I would be happy to shovel anyway, I wanted to, but he said "I'll think about it," which I knew meant no.

Instead I was no part of the snow shoveling team beyond my first foray out early that morning. I missed out on all the rest of the shoveling, working instead inside on cleaning the zendo. That was fine, I like cleaning the zendo, and I realized my desire to shovel snow was more about an opportunity to gain something for myself rather than practice, so I returned to what there was to do and cleaned the zendo.

What occurred to me in the midst of all this was that we were sort of snowed-in. We were actually in a rather urban setting, if someone wanted to leave they physically could, but it would be more difficult than on a sunny spring day. For example, one couldn't really just pack bags and walk away unless one had prepared, as in having the gear, for being out walking during a blizzard. I wondered if anyone felt trapped by the snow. I imagined that if we had been in a more rural setting we certainly would have been snow-bound.

I realized that earlier in my practice, in my life, I would have constructed some notion that this was the work of God, or Buddha maybe, in order to "force" people to stay at sesshin, particularly those who just showed up for the last three days. I wondered if any of them had constructed such a notion for themselves. There was no way for me to find out. This was silent practice, we only spoke to each other when logistically necessary.

I was happy now that I harbored no such delusions, but it was sort of fun to think about, and it was neat the way it worked out--the three-day participants showed up and the blizzard showed up right behind them. It certainly had the appearance of some grand plan, and I actually no more knew that there wasn't a plan than I knew that there was one. I just didn't believe there was.

On subsequent days there was still shoveling to do even though the skies cleared to a brilliant blue. Now it was time to prepare the zendo grounds for this snow being around until the spring thaw. Paths had to be cleared, drifts obscuring windows had to be moved, and the life-long Minnesotans who made up the bulk of the sesshin participants quietly went about the work. They know what to do after the first major snowfall every year. This quiet activity was also beautiful to witness.

The snow was shoveled as carefully and as beautifully as any ritual performed during sesshin. I realized I was privileged to witness something special, something I had never known or seen as a Texan or even a New York City resident. These people knew snow. They knew what to do, they knew how it should be done. Snow manifested in this moment and the students cared for it as one cares for their next breath while sitting zazen. I was very moved.

The snow did sort of stop the world for a while, just as I had stopped my life, in order to be here now. There was less traffic outside, less activity on the streets, things seem a little quieter everywhere. I found out later that there had only been four snow storms in recorded weather history in Minneapolis that were worse than this one. This was a doozy. This was a Great Snow.

Sitting with Brad Warner

2010-11-25T07:06:00.000-05:00

"Peeling back the layers of the onion" is a potent metaphor for me. My life seems to me to be more like uncovering layers of something rather than a journey to some destination. As my understanding deepens for who I am, I have this experience of dropping concepts about myself rather than accumulating more. The more that I shed notions about who I am the clearer things become.

Dogen, a 13th century Japanese zen teacher I admire, says that to study the self is to forget the self. Reality ceases to be visible when you decide you've seen it. Once you have set something called "reality" in your mind, against something else, anything else, you are not having a direct experience of Reality.

Studying the self is similar. Once you start to observe "self," you notice that it is insubstantial, i.e., that it only appears to be something because you're not looking at it very hard. Yet, whatever is there is there, we all know and experience something we call "self." You never have to explain the concept to anyone. But, as you observe your self, because you observe your self, you have by these very actions forgotten, however fleetingly, some unspoken alliance with this thing we experience as self, both ours and others'. It disperses like a wave crashing on shore.

Then you notice how cool that is and it all vanishes. Sucker.

I recently sat a shikentaza-style zen retreat led by Brad Warner (who is known as the "hardcore zen" guy) with a dozen or so other people in a yoga studio on the lower east side of Manhattan. From the announcements I saw about this, it sounded a lot like a sesshin, but no one was using the word sesshin. I thought that was curious, because it seemed like it would involve some serious time on the cushion facing a wall with a group similarly committed to doing that. But, whatever it was called, I felt pulled to sit with a group, like something in me needed that, so I went.

Zen practice is hard, and going to sesshin is harder, but life really is easier when you do these hard things. There's something about sitting with a group of people that is restorative, affirming, and balancing. In another way it is like charging something up because after a period of time I want to do it again, even though I always promise myself at some point during sesshin that I will never waste my time in this particular way ever again.

Brad did not call this a sesshin because that's not what it was. There was no vow of silence, we started at the crack of ten a.m., and we were on our own for lunch. Sesshin involves a schedule that moves to a different rhythm, vows of silence, ritualized meals and hours spent in zazen practice.

On the other hand, in some ways it was traditional Soto zen: three bells to sit, two bells to walk, one bell to break. Dokusan, private discussions with the teacher, were offered. Instructions were simple: bow, turn, bow, sit down, face the wall, balance your spine, attend to your posture, be still, be quiet, keep returning to here and now. think non-thinking.

It was the first time I have seen someone run a group sit of any kind exactly the way I would do it. That really startled me. I realized that I had a mostly unconscious but deeply rooted belief that I was alone, as some sort of special case, as an America zen student, specifically as a Dogen student. I thought perhaps I had yet to see the real value in some of the Japanese-ness transferred to popular habits in American lay zen practice.

You see, I think a lot of the way zen students organize themselves in this country is grim, silly, and resembles being an overly committed frat boy, or a Trekkie, or some other kind of nerd (not that there's anything wrong with nerds, this just should be an identity that is held lightly). This sit with Brad relieved me of some of that sense of isolation. He and I seem to be looking at the same things. We seem to think the same things are important. Sitting with him in a yoga studio, on folded up Mexican blankets, next to young hipsters with brightly-dyed hair, I realized some things about my self, and my practice.

I was born in 1960 in Dallas, Texas. In 1978, in Austin, Texas, I was fortunate enough to have been part of the genuinely spontaneous arising of a punk rock scene. I didn't play in a band, I was one of the people who paid the covers, bought the vinyl, and came to the shows. Without people like me there would have been no scene.

For me, punk rock back then bears only a faint resemblance to what is popularly regarded as punk rock today. For a few short years, it was for me the experience of being in a collective of people dedicated to a radical decentralization of music-making. It was in some ways a reaction to late-70's hair bands, and country music, psychedelia, and pop poseurs like Olivia Newton-John and Linda Ronstadt, but it was a lot of other things, too. It was rebellion, it was a new conformity, and it was a search for a community based in Reality.

Something in me knew when it was going on that it was too fragile a thing to persist. I knew it would be corrupted and overtaken by something, and it was, by a horde of jack-booted cryptofacist cultural tyrants in dirty black jeans, Doc Martens, and spiky mohawks who were in search of little more than a novel way to worship themselves. The social contract at punk shows that allowed experimentation with things like mosh pits became co-opted and twisted into a license to indulge in in egotistical sadism and violence.

So, at the tender age of 23, in 1983, I was a guy who had spent much of the last four years immersed in and very supportive of a punk rock scene who was now disgusted by what punk rock had become as it entered the mainstream consciousness. I felt I had created this monster, I felt knew this was going to happen, and I so simply turned away in shame and disgust.

I've just recently learned that Brad Warner was similarly involved with a punk rock scene in Akron at about the same time. He's written a lot about that, and he even made a film about it. I'd known for a long time that he was in Zero Defects, a hard core band, but I had not looked deeply into his experience there until recently, when I read his two first books: Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up.

I wish I was wise enough to assert that it makes perfect sense to me that Brad and I had eerily similar experiences in Ohio and Texas, but the truth is that it shocked the hell out of me.

For many years I had foolishly dismissed Brad Warner and his books as so much poser bullshit of the kind that manifested when I became disgusted with punk rock. I would see his titles when I browsed the bookstores, sometimes I would even pick up one of his books, but then I would put it back down satisfied that I was far too enlightened a being and too serious of a student to bother with such trivial nonsense.

What I was really realizing was the dimensions of my own delusional douche-baggery.

Had I actually read either of the books I could have saved myself a lot of time as I struggled with far drier discussions of the things I really find compelling about the Soto zen slant on buddha-dharma. Brad discusses the dharma, specifically the dharma promoted by Dogen, a 13th century Japanese zen teacher with whom I strongly identify, in a very accessible way, particularly for someone of my age and cultural background.

Brad's critics slam him for being snarky and having a juvenile sense of humor. They have a point, which is exactly why I find Brad Warner to be such a clearly elucidating teacher. I am a snarky 50 year old adolescent who still snickers about jokes involving the word "boobies."

I realized all this right before I actually encountered Brad as a teacher. My experience of him in person just confirmed it. This sparked another minor realization.

As I have studied Buddhism, I've been turning Japanese, I really think so. Part of that is the influence of some dear friends who are Japanese, but part of it is the fact that I've been studying alternatively in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki and Dainin Katagiri, two Japanese zen teachers who came to teach to Americans. I also read a lot of Dogen, who is also Japanese. Even though I've always encountered the dharma through a Japanese lens, it only really sinks in to the extent that I can tweak it back to my cultural context as an American born in the mid-twentieth century.

Fortunately for me, my face-to-face encounters with zen teachers have all been with Americans, so maybe that's why I have mostly been spared of this propensity among many American zen students to don Soto-shu robes, take dharma names and shave their heads. My face to face encounters with zen teachers (before I encountered Brad Warner) have been with Steve Hagen of Dharma Field in Minneapolis, who is very much the pragmatic mid-westerner, and Barry Magid of Ordinary Mind in New York City, who is a bookish scholar very much in the North-eastern American tradition.

But, until I encountered Brad Warner I had not met a zen teacher around whom I quite plausibly could have grown up. There's a sense of kinship I have with people my age who grew up in middle-class suburban locales not on either coast. This lends a very direct quality to my communication to and from Brad that is really very, very helpful.

So, much like a person in 13th century Japan quite plausibly could end up studying zen with a teacher at whom they might have tossed spit-balls in pre-school, there's a certain authenticity to my relationship with Brad that is quite helpful to me as a student. I get his cultural references. I know the music he knows. We lust after the same women.

When his latest book was published I literally bought a copy as soon as I possibly could. By this time, my attitude about him had already turned around 180 degrees. It is now truly comforting to me that we have so much in common. Reading his books reminds me of thoughtful letters from my life-long friends. I also play bass guitar, as he does.

Finally, I realized I was right about something else. Sitting with Brad in this way confirmed for me that the accoutrement of ritual and form in sesshin--i.e., the vow of silence, the Oryoki, etc--while not useless, there are things genuinely useful about these practices, they do not create one's experience on the cushion. I faced the same mind on the cushion while sitting with Brad in this much simpler, and more culturally apropos setting, as I did when I sat in much more formal, more Soto-shu, more Japanese settings. The challenges were the same, it sucked just as much while I was doing it, I was just as grateful for the opportunity to do it, and I was just as happy I had done it.

You see, I confess this preference. I want an American zen practice, I want to sit in an American zendo. I want to study with an American teacher. I want to help evolve the American buddha-dharma. I want my practice to grow up out of the ground around me, not to be flown in from Japan like so much fatty tuna for sashimi.

Having said that, I also want to connect with the Japanese heritage in zen, but out of respect and curiosity, not out of some notion that real zen only comes from somewhere else. Interestingly enough, concurrently with this internal rebellion against the Japanese-ness of American zen habits, I've also developed a desire to learn Japanese and spend some time living there. But, that's not about learning zen more authentically. It's about considering Japanese women to be the hottest of all. That's right, it's about boobies.

These realizations, that Brad was something other than I thought, that there are others who see American lay practice as I do, were more than just a glimpse into my own delusions, they laid absolutely bare to me my own inability to direct myself as a student of the buddha-dharma. I don't know anything. But, it also revealed that, in spite of that I will eventually wander around to where I need to be because I refuse to rely on what I think. I rely on what I see. That's comforting to have pan-out from time to time. I love it when a plan comes together.

As Dogen says, its good to have a will to find Truth. It's true, even if it ends up revealing to you what a douchebag you can be.

2010 Update

2010-05-09T09:18:00.000-04:00

This blog has not been abandoned. It is just not the focus of my activity online at the moment. I am more actively writing my stack of pages about my recent bariatric surgery and writing a little blog for people who have had my particular surgical procedure.

I am also participating in my social networking groups and answering e-mail.

I have changed my default browser.

2009-11-28T08:08:00.000-05:00

I know, to a lot of people that's met with "so what?" but considering the way I work, it's more like changing jobs or moving a home.

I have changed the default setting from Firefox to Safari. Both AdBlock and XMarks (the plug-ins I absolutely can't live without) are available for Safari, it is faster, lighter, and it doesn't choke on the various anticipated security certificate problems I have in some environments. Also, it works with Facebook.

I never thought I would do this, I assumed I would hang with Firefox as I have since v 1.6, which I think was the first one to be called Firefox. It was a political move of course, away from the bloat-ware that Netscape Communicator became, which I moved to in order to escape the clutches of Microsoft's undermining of inter-operational web standards. I've been a loyal contributor to the program both with bug reporting and money for more than four years now.

I'll still use it, there are a number of plug-ins I find useful in specific situations, and I need to make sure it renders code that I've tweaked for IE correctly, but it won't be my default any more. That's a big deal. These days I almost consider my computer an appliance that I use to run my browser instead of the other way around.

Evidence-based medicine.

2009-11-20T08:19:00.000-05:00

To prepare you for what I think will be the next round of idiocy in the health-care debate, let's talk a bit about evidence-based medicine. It is pretty much what it sounds like, making medical decisions based on prognostic models built upon observed phenomena. In short, we believe this pill will work because when other people have taken it they experienced the desired outcome more frequently than can be explained by random chance.

Sounds logical enough, and you might think that this is the rational basis for all of medical practice. You'd be wrong. There's a major effort afoot in medical practice to move to evidence-based protocols, and it's been relatively quiet until we discovered that it doesn't make sense to do routine mammograms before age 50.

What does "doesn't make sense" mean? It means that the risks outweigh the benefits. In the case of mammograms the harm done from false positive results, and the burden of doing the procedure, harms more people than are helped by the early detection of tumors in the 40-50 year old age group. That's not an opinion, or a carefully-considered judgment, it is a fact. We can see this in the data. It doesn't require interpretation, it is as plain as the sunrise.

This cold, hard, fact is on a collision course with American medical consumerism, which operates on the notion that more is better, saving a life from preventable illness is worth any sacrifice, that we all deserve to get as much medicine as we might need--consequences and costs to others be damned.

In my opinion, much of the blame for this selfish and fearful mindset lays with the medical community itself, which because of "choice" and "market forces" has been placed in the position of having to appeal to patient preferences and shy from patient aversions, as if health-care was a consumer product. Insurance packages are advertised in terms of what and how much the consumer can get rather than how positive the outcomes will be. When hospitals and other organizations spend money telling people how comfortable they will make them rather than how healthy they will make them, you end up with the pickle we are in.

I am reminded of Dr. Grieve's magic pills. Dr. Grieve was a Texas country doctor who I had the good fortune of working with when I was a nursing student. I was caring for one of his patients in the hospital when I was puzzled about why the patient kept expressing a preference for getting discharged so she could go back to taking Dr. Grieve's pills. We had a full pharmacy in the hospital I was training in, I couldn't imagine why she would have to stop taking something that brought her such benefit while she was hospitalized, but she told me there was only one pharmacy in some little town that dispensed them, and she couldn't take them when she was in the hospital because she couldn't get out of bed. I told her I'd bring her whatever she needed and she looked at me impatiently and informed me that wasn't the problem. The problem was she couldn't go outside. I was baffled by this, but she seemed to think I was the idiot here, so I let it drop at that, being the nursing student and all.

I asked Dr. Grieve about it. He smiled broadly and fished a prescription bottle out of his bag, the label read "Take one daily after 30 minutes of vigorous walking." She couldn't take them in the hospital because she couldn't do the walking. He then told me, in all seriousness, that he never tried a new drug with a patient to treat a chronic illness until the chronic condition had failed to improve with these pills. If someone tried to take them without doing the walking, he just told them they wouldn't work without the walking. If they still wouldn't walk, he knew where he was with that patient and approached his plan differently.

No wonder I didn't see many of his patients during training. The pills, of course, were placebos.

That's evidence-based medicine. Try selling that on a billboard.

What I expect is going to happen is something analogous to the idiocy over death panels and the like. Those that are given to protect the interests of investors in health insurance companies will start to assert that this is yet another way that the government is going to ration health-care. That's not true, the new recommendations, if adopted (which they won't be), would save lives and reduce suffering. Fewer procedural-related deaths and injuries mean lower costs. That's not a theory, you can see it in the data, but it won't matter because people who are accustomed to the "more is better" model of consumerism in health-care are understandably going to see less as worse.

Sadly, the truth is that less is often better. Diagnostic screening procedures are not absolutely safe, nor are they absolutely accurate. Biopsies sometimes cause problems, and resources that are used in pursuit of a false positive (a determination that there is disease when there in fact is not) are resources wasted. With a lot of data, we can reliably predict when the risks outweigh the benefits. That's all these recommendations are about, but that's not how they will be seen by a public that feels cheated when some rich guy can get a full body scan and their insurance company won't pay for it. No one ever talks about the rich guy with the full body scan that ends up dying from a MRSA infection acquired after a useless biopsy.

Sad.

Stewart does Colbert better than Colbert.

2009-11-06T03:06:00.000-05:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The 11/3 Project

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

I have my computer back from the icy jaws of the Snow Leopard bug.

2009-11-02T16:55:00.000-05:00

My Halloween was truly scary. Computer borken.

Apple users, be afraid, be very afraid. Heed my warning: Apple does not have it's mind around this problem yet. It is a file system problem. My guest account has been disabled since Britney Spears was good-looking, I've never used it, that had nothing to do with this.

What happened? I fired up MacFuse, the Google-code user-space file system wizardry, using an old version of MacFusion as a front-end, and I had not updated either code for a long, long time, specifically, I had last used them with Tiger. They failed to mount the targets, locked up, and I did a force quit.

Then, I started getting a weird popup, the source of which I never identified. It was a typical brushed-chrome apple window, and it was telling me my Palm desktop background could not be located. It had one button, an OK, and clicking that just made it reappear.

I rebooted, it came back.

I shut down the system overnight. When I booted up the next morning it took forever to come back up and it looked like the snow leopard bug. Some of my software was there, some of my data files, but 100GB was gone, including all of my music, pictures, and movies. Those folders, standard OS architecture, were gone.

Lesson learned # 1 == The cloud is good. I was using Xmarks in Firefox, GMail, Google Docs for my most important works in progress, PicasaWeb and syncing up my contacts with my iPod Touch. I do my HTML/CSS coding directly on my web server, so when the OS on the HD slipped down the drain I was, at worst, annoyed. No panic, no lost work, no lost media (I had a TIme Machine backup, the one from which I just restored), I just had to work in a default environment, I missed iStatPro's monitors on the title bar, I couldn't get Quicksilver to work for some reason, and my dock was all big and in the wrong place. That's as bad as it got.

Lesson learned # 2 == Apple can be full of shit. They don't know what's going on with this bug. If you are using Snow Leopard, please have Time Machine going frequently. This story ain't over. It is a file system problem, clearly, and it wasn't just entire directories that were gone. There were odd Library tree files missing too.

Lesson learned # 3 == The Mac OSX Install Utility on the Snow Leopard upgrade disk is teh awesome. I rebooted with the disk, selected the Utility menu, chose restore from Time Machine backup. I plugged in my Time Machine disk, selected it, chose the latest backup (the Time Machine disk was not plugged in when things went bonkers) and let her rip.

It calculated the restore time as 3 hours and 17 minutes, it actually took 1 hour and 17 minutes.

Lesson learned #4 == As soon as I rebooted with the restored image the machine started doing something it had been doing before, i.e., running hot with mdworker32 (Spotlight indexing) eating up all the CPU. I Googled that, and found that removing a file called "Microsoft Office.mdimporter" from /Library/Spotlight will tame this process. Sure enough, it does. What a surprise.

So, I've had two computer consulting clients (using Windows XP) resort to buying new computers instead of paying me to repair a virus-infected system (Ironically, it's cheaper too). Who says Windows is cheaper? This fix cost me nothing.

Why I agree with the Nobel Peace Prize committee this year.

2009-10-11T08:34:00.001-04:00

After much reflection, I have concluded that the Nobel committee was right in awarding the Peace prize to President Barak Obama.

This is something distinct from saying he deserved it, though he surely does, along with anyone who has sought to bring people together. There is no doubt in my mind that I walked past a number of people on the way to work this morning in Manhattan who just as richly deserve it. Anyone who acts to join two in brotherhood deserves it, for this is how peace is achieved.

The nobel committee website declares that Alfred Nobel wanted the annual award to go to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Notice how quaint and naive that language sounds to our modern ear. Reduce or abolish standing armies? What? How can one have peace without protection from those given to violent conquest?

Of course, Martin Luther King didn't do a lot to abolish or reduce standing armies either, but please point to who among the previous laureates did. Perhaps the 1910 award to something called the Permanent International Peace Bureau was so directed, but I don't know enough of the history to do any more than speculate from the name. Of course, there was righteous outrage in 1964 when MLK was named, just as there is now.

That's because peace is not an absence of conflict. If it were so, you could argue that there's moment of peace between the rounds of a fully-automatic Uzi firing, or in every murder. That's not peace, that's a momentary absence of conflict.

The peace that I see comes when our common humanity is directly experienced. It is not a consequence of victory, it is the consequence of seeing directly to the futility of conflict. It is seeing that there is no distinction between harming another and harming one's self. It is seeing the violence as the problem, not who is promoting it. Peace comes in an embrace, or in the celebration of the Christian Eucharist when congregants are asked to turn to each other and physically embrace or shake hands in Christian love and fellowship. Peace is seeing things as the really are. Peace is a mother breastfeeding. Peace is love-making.

In this way, I think Barak Obama is an emblematic honoree, but no more-so than any of the previous award recipients, nor more-so than any of the nameless peacemakers I passed on Wall Street this morning. President Obama ran a campaign that sought to end conflict. He asked his rival in the primaries to join his administration, to her credit she accepted. I'm certain he asked McCain in as well but he was unable to answer the call.

President Obama went Cairo and called-out the US on it's mistakes in the region, as he called-out the Muslim world on their mistreatment of Israel. He shirked his pastor for most of his adult life when he revealed himself to be a man who shrunk to conflict and hatred. Again and again he has reached across the aisle to encourage his opponent to join together in common cause, I do not hold his responsible for their choice to not join him.

The part of Martin Luther King's legacy that is most important to me is his pursuit of what he called the "beloved community." His vision was of an integrated society, not a desegregated society. He sought a community where brotherhood and love would be manifest in all of social discourse. He saw this as the true actualization of Christian Faith. This is not a society where everyone is Christian, but a society where everyone is loved. As far as I can tell, this is also what Jesus sought.

Similarly, President Obama has not sought a country in which everyone is a Democrat, but rather where we all work together to make the promise of our individual abilities collectively manifest. In many senses, this is why his current agenda is seen to be failing. He's not interested in victory as much as he is interested in progress.

But, he can't do it alone. If the President was that powerful we'd be in a world of trouble. He can't make you decide to end your pursuit of harm in the name of righteousness, only you can. One example, Afghanistan, seems particularly vivid to me. There can only be peace in Afghanistan if the US "loses" there. The community there needs to reach it's potential under it's own power, according to it's own agenda. There are peacemakers in Afghanistan as well, just as there are peacemakers anywhere you find human beings, but the cause of peace can't be promoted with violence, no matter how well-intentioned.

President Obama will be wholly unable to simply walk out of Afghanistan unless the predominant attitude in this country is to seek peace instead of victory there. That's not up to him, it is up to us. And as long as we believe that it is more important to protect ourselves than to love others we will continue to be caught, as humanity has always been, in this cycle of destruction. There's no end to this game of the pursuit of conquest that can be achieved by conquest.

Similarly, we can't reform health care in this country by somehow bringing the resources that I currently have available to me as a well-insured upper middle-class white-color worker to everyone. It's not possible. I will have to give up my unfettered access to doctors and diagnostic resources, my "right" to insist on every remotely possibly life-sustaining treatment until I draw my last breath. I will have to accept, as everyone eventually does, that this body is temporary and prone to failure.

I will have to stand in line behind Jose and Maria and their twelve undocumented kids from Mexico for my share of our resources until we grow up and expand those resources to a level that is adequate for all. Until you and I are willing to accept the state of things as really are right now, we will be that far from the beloved community. The power to make this happens lies not with Congress, or with the sacrifice of health insurance company profits, it lies with us. It is contained in the kiss of peace during the Christian Eucharist, the simple acknowledgment of gassho (bowing with palms together) between Buddhists, the "Assalamu 'alaykum" between Muslims, a hearty "have a great day" between atheists/agnostics.

That's where peace is. It is my view that President Barak Obama has been the most public expression of that promise in 2009. That has nothing to do with what he has or hasn't accomplished, it is not an extention of a reward for good deeds, it is an acknowledgement, in my mind, of who the man aspires to be.

Congratulations, my good friend. Keep the Faith.

Get your flu shots.

2009-10-05T10:30:00.000-04:00

Please do not post your anti-vaccination polemics here, if you want to be a carrier for pandemic deadly illness, keep that to yourself. That is not something I can discuss rationally, you might as well discuss why you're a better driver when you're drunk, or try to explain that GW Bush didn't lie about Iraq. Vaccination is not only good for you, it's good for everyone's health. We really could blunt a lot of the effect of the pandemic this year if people would just act responsibly. This is not a matter of individual choice, it is a matter of collective responsibility.

Again, write your own blog if you want to argue. This is a heads-up for the wise.

I am getting some early signs that H1N1 and the seasonals might be a real problem this flu season. In my own life I have two cases, one from a colleague who was at a health-care conference in Florida, and another case in the daughter of a friend of mine in New Mexico. The sick daughter is a 19 year-old student at the University of New Mexico. These are not cases incubating in New York City.

Here's what you need to know. There are two flu vaccines, the seasonal flu vaccine and the H1N1 vaccine. You have to take them two weeks apart. You can take the seasonal now, the H1N1 vaccine is going out this week. To get yourself protected ASAP, you need to have had the seasonal for three weeks before you can take the H1N1. That means if you got your seasonal flu shot today, you can get the H1N1 on 10/19.

If you can get the pneumococcal vaccine too, that looks like a good idea, because a lot of the people who have died from H1N1 were also suffering from a variety of bacteria pneumonia that this vaccine protects against.

Of course, if I could predict the future I'd be a lottery winner, but it looks like this may be a tough flu season. If you can get vaccinated, and you're wondering what my opinion is, well, you should get vaccinated, soon, so you don't end up being a public health menace yourself, even if you one of those people who believes they don't get the flu.

http://www.flu.gov/

It wasn't a vacation, it was a healing.

2009-09-11T06:44:00.000-04:00

I am on the last day of my 10-days in Northern New Mexico. Let's see, what has changed?

I lost about 5 pounds.

I know what the next chapter of my professional life is going to be, and it will likely involve a relocation to near Portland, Oregon in late 2010. In 2009 I may relocate to Pecos, NM in pursuit of said goal in the interim. You'll hear more about this later.

I met (the person who may be) my life partner (related to above).

A lot more than that happened: I experienced the joy of friends coming together to make something happen for me. I had the delight of showing a dearly-beloved friend around some of the most beautiful country in the world (Northern New Mexico), and my friend "got it," and had a good time on her first visit to the US Southwest. I did everything I set-out to do, including the realization of several improbable circumstances in pursuit of said things to do. I had a lot of good food, a surprising amount of it home-made for me.

I found what is probably the best wine produced in New Mexico. They make enjoyable, drinkable wine, but it lacks the complexity of wine produced from grapes grown in places that should grow wine-making grapes. I love you guys, but there's no reason to make wine in New Mexico.

I completely let go of a desire to connect with an old girlfriend (who lives here, as best I know). Whew! It only took me 21 years to get over her.

I met some amazing people, had a weird "this is a small world moment" associated with one of them.

I drank a lot of tequila, ate a lot of NM chiles, and drank a lot of good coffee. I slept a lot. Watched a couple of good movies (Burn Before Reading among them) on DVD. I drove and drove and drove, something I like to do and don't get much chance.

I was at the summit of a 11,500 ft mountain. I sat by the Pecos river and had a good laugh, and a good cry.

I came to New Mexico not sure where I wanted my life to go. The process for selling my hospice began the week before I left. I was not enthusiastic about my career. I wasn't really even enthusiastic about the last half of my life.

Now I am.

Reason #35,716 why I am an Apple FanBoi

2009-09-02T07:57:00.000-04:00

I am on the road, currently in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I discover my CD/DVD drive won't physically mount a disk. I check the website for the local apple store, there are no genius bar appointments for two days. F*ck. For those who still suffer with non-Apple computers, the Genius Bar is the help-desk in every store. Geniuses are the trained techs who man it.

I go to the store anyway and plead my case with the Concierge, the guy who is the gatekeeper for the Genius Bar.

"THe last walk-in customer we had waited 2.5 hours" he said.

"I don't care, I'll sleep on the floor overnight if that's what it takes" is my reply.

"Ok, have a seat and we'll see what we can do" came the helpful reply.

That was about 8:00pm, at 9:15pm a tall cool drink of water named Elizabeth walked over to me and said "Can you move over here so I can help?"

I move to her station, open the macbook, and tell her "There's a mechanical problem with the optical drive. It won't physically mount a disk, much less logically. Can you replace it?"

She nods and types away on her computer. She's taking my word for what is wrong. "Yeah, I have one, let's take a look."

She goes to get a DVD. She takes a look in the slot with a black stick, prying it open "Your bezel in bent, I want to make sure we don't get a disk stuck in there." She slides in a Snow Leopard upgrade disk and the machine buzzes and crunches before spitting the disk back out.

"Yep, you got that right. That's a mechanical problem. One to three days ok?" She says while I'm thinking I want to ask her to marry me. A woman this tall, smart and good-looking who speaks geek is a rare thing, heretofore only spotted in Minnesota.

"Um, I'm from New York, and I'm traveling. I'll be leaving Albuquerque in the morning for the Pecos Wilderness, but I will be back in town on Thursday" comes my reply, accompanied by my best wounded puppy-dog look. The next thing I wanted to ask her was if she could get her family together by that time for our wedding ceremony.

"Oh, wow, when do you leave in the morning?" she asked.

Of course, I wanted to say 'as soon as we finish breakfast' but I said "When I get ready to leave, I don't really have to be in Pecos until 3pm."

"OK, I have a tech coming in the morning who could bang this out first thing" she said hopefully.

'Heh, you said bang.' was what I was thinking, but I said "That would work for me."

"Do you have a back up of your data? We don't expect to touch it, but I have to ask" she says while typing on her MBP. "Also, can I have an admin password so we can test?"

"I have a time machine back-up in New York, yes." Of course, this is a woman to whiom I would give my root password, but I gave her another one. Time Machine is the apple auto-backup utility, reason #18,496 why I am an Apple FanBoi.

"OK, we'll call you in the morning." she said with a big smile, and I bid her goodbye.

A night of separation from my MacBook ensues. Sleep was restless.

This morning, I get to the store at 9am, they open at 10am, but an employee sees me outside and comes to the door. "Richard?" he asks.

I reply in the affirmative and he unlocks the door. "Jim is just about finished, he's just doing the paperwork." He walks me back to the Concierge desk and asks for an ID, which I produce.

"Going back to New York today?" he asks.

"No, I'm going up to the high country, the Pecos Wilderness" I reply.

"Cool!" he says. "By the way, we also replaced the top-case and your keyboard, the case was chipped and the letters had rubbed off some of your keys. Here, sign this." He puts a piece of paper in front of me which I sign. No charge.

"Also, your anniversary is September 18, you might want to consider an applecare purchase before then." he said, smiling, as he handed me the macbook and the paperwork.

Damn right I will.

If you do anything important on a computer and you aren't using an apple, you are suffering needlessly. Don't give me that crap about "needing Windows." I need it too, so I run it on a virtual machine on my MacBook with Mac Fusion when I need to.

Apple is one place over to which I gladly hand my money. Service like this is why.

On death panels.

2009-08-30T06:11:00.000-04:00

I've been reflecting on why this lie, among all those that have been told about what improving health care financing models in this country means, stuck with the public psyche so powerfully.

I think the popular notion is that one of the ways that those looking to improve access to health care in this country will pay for it is by denying care based on age, as a proxy for social worthiness. There will exist some panel that decides that an aged person's care is just too expensive, that some sick people are of such an advanced age that they are really just costing us money. We'll then decide that it is time for this person to die, so we'll push their gurney down to the far end of the hall and wait for something to start smelling bad instead of starting another round of chemotherapy.

How black does someone's heart have to be to believe that is possible? How misanthropic must one be to think that legislators would even craft such an idea? How little faith does one have to have in humanity to believe that you could find people to do this even if it did become law? It really is tragic that we have people who are capable of believing such things, but we do. My heart goes out to them, they exist in their own personal version of hell instead of looking at the world around them.

What was in the bill was a provision that pays people for helping patients anticipate decisions at the end of life, and it makes the provision of this kind of care-planning a potential quality measure. In my business, that's about as controversial as praising someone for keeping their desk organized. Of course we should do this, and experts should be paid for their service. There are a number of complicated decisions to be made. People should have the opportunity to consider them with a sound mind and body, and they should be given that opportunity widely and robustly because people get paid to do this. Right now this kind of excellent health-care is essentially subsidized by a concerned provider. If it gets done, it gets done for free.

That's right, right now, this kind of excellent care is provided to people, but it is done for free. There's no way to pay for a conference between an end-of-life expert and a well person about their choices concerning end-of-life decisions. There's no code for it in the Medicare rules.

We socially engineer health-care in this country by what Medicare pays for. Don't even start to believe that your private plan is in any way different. Medicare sets the rules, everyone else just adopts them as a starting place from which to further deny people care. If Medicare doesn't pay for it, no one pays for it. The best health insurance in this country is Medicare. It's rules are the most thoughtful and fair, it's benefits are the most generous, and it's overhead is less than one third of private equivalents (because those other two-thirds are not going in executive and shareholder pockets).

That's government-run health care for you--cheap, fair and generous.

I think this whole national psychosis about "death panels" belies a deeper concern. People know that we don't have the money to keep the promises of the government, particularly after eight years of the profligate larceny during the Bush administration. Remember back before the bust, when financial concerns were taking huge salaries and obscene bonuses year after year after year? Where do you think they got the money from? They got it from this ponzi scheme of financial instruments that came crashing down a year ago. That TARP money and all the related taxpayer pay-outs ultimately ended up filling the gaping voids left in the system by the larcenous cash-out by the people running the financial industry. And they got their taxes cut while they did it.

At some level, people know this. They know that there will come a day when these roosters are home to roost. Someone is going to have to be hurt, so they're hunkering down, putting up as much resistance as possible, so it won't be them, or if it ends up being them, they can delay it as long as possible.

It is this desperation, this coming apocalypse mentality, that drives the opposition to improving our badly-broken system of health care financing. People don't want a health care system that is fair because, in fairness, you can't get all the care you can demand. There are people sicker than you who need the resources. That's the boogey-man in the distance, not death panels.

We have death panels now, by the way, they are called Ethical Review Boards and I sit on one. It exists almost entirely because a decision has to be made and the patient didn't have a chance to make the decision before becoming too ill to participate in it. Usually a balance has to be made between the benefits and burden of some treatment, i.e., do we keep causing this person to suffer pain and discomfort in pursuit of delaying death?

Most ironically, if the controversial provisions of this bill were enacted and practiced as intended, we'd have drastically fewer cases to review. There are usually two unknowns to consider: first, will their treatment do any good? Second, what would they have wanted? We actually have pretty good guesses for the former. We could have definite, unambiguous answers for the latter in a lot more cases. Then, those patients would have made these life-or-death choices for themselves, rather than having someone like I make it for them.

And the people fear-mongering with death panels are the same ones screaming "choice" as a slogan. We're not in a good place here, a lot of people are going to have to die prematurely before we collectively will be able to mature enough as a society to face our decisions here. This isn't going to be pretty.

My first Facebook death

2009-08-09T06:27:00.000-04:00

Regular readers might remember that I posted a note about this weird experience I had with thinking about someone from my distant past (like pre-1974) and then having the experience of that person submitting a friend request over Facebook a couple of days after I thought about him.

We had gotten back in touch, talked about the women we lusted over in high school and how kind or unkind the years had been to them (failing to note, of course, that the years had been unkind to both of us). We had plans to get together whenever I was in the part of Texas he called home, I was assuming that was going to happen in the next year or so. He lived near Houston. "Near Houston" is a part of the world I endeavor to avoid, but I knew I would eventually have to go near enough for some reason, and I would divert to see him.

This morning I saw a Wall post from a mutual Facebook friend that he died on Saturday morning from a heart attack. He's my age, we went to school together and were close friends, sharing the kind of mischief in which teenagers in small town indulge. He was truly more of a brother than a friend, and I regarded his father as one of my many surrogate parents from my youth.

Two things stand out in my mind about this.

1. We are the same age (he is exactly nine months older than I), had the same vices. I could die suddenly of a heart attack any day now just as surely. I may be taking better care of my health than he was, I don't really know, but the possibility exists.

2. This is the first time Facebook has been the conduit for finding out about someone's death. Without this Facebook connection, I would have never found out about this, ever. No one who knows us both has any other way to get in touch with me.

I last saw him in 1976, I think. His messages were warm and familiar--I recognized my childhood friend's unique personality there even after all these years. He was one of the very few people from that time in my life that I regretted having lost touch with.

Weird. Facebook just crossed some threshold for me.

How to prepare to fix the US health-care system.

2009-08-03T18:55:00.000-04:00

Outlaw the private financing of political campaigns.

That's right, make it illegal to campaign for public office with private money of any kind, including the candidate's.

Run a direct-mail agency, a travel agency, some TV studios, a server farm (with a VOIP solution), and make it possible for candidates for public office to effectively communicate with the citizenry on the public dime.

Give them a campaign staff, house a central campaign office, make hotel-ing offices available around the country. Give them a budget to hire political technocrats like pollsters and opposition researchers at G-whatever wages, or at some contractor standard. Give them 6 weeks to run for the primary election, two weeks off, then four weeks to run for the general election.

They can still use volunteers for the same reasons they use them now. Warm bodies will become the true campaign currency. Dominant campaigns will become dominant because they have a lot of people willing to put shoulder to the wheel for the cause.

You know what else would happen? Politicians would be forced into being accountable because the only way they could campaign for re-election outside of the above parameters would be by actually doing their jobs. Gone would be the constant stream of self-congratulatory fund-raising speeches to small groups of people with an excess of money with which to purchase political influence, which is legal now because these same grifters have convinced us that spending money is what Madison meant by freedom of speech. This string of empty polemics is what is perceived to be the politician's position. The politician is free to say whatever works best, because they are never bound to see that any of this actually happens. They can campaign literally non-stop.

What if they had to actually get things done? What if the only way a politician could claim to support health care access is by actually producing health care access? What if a politician could only lay claim to fiscal responsibility by actually doing fiscally responsible things?

I'm not sure a person currently in office would still have that privilege following the next election.

Yes, I mean him, too.

So, this will have to be done before we can get health-care fixed. Right now, the insurance and pharmaco companies have Congress bought and paid for. The current health care system works really well for the insurance companies. They get to keep 30 cents of every dollar that you send them. It's working pretty well for the pharmaco's too. It's illegal for the government to negotiate price with them, and they are the biggest customer. Sweet.

So, it won't change. And people won't vote these people out of office because they keep getting told it is not their fault, it's the other guys fault, and they know how to fight them, and they will win if they can only get the support they need to accomplish such big things.

Or, on Sunday they'll tell you that God loves people who send money to the church, and he rewards their generosity with abundant wealth and health in THIS life, and then eternal bliss in the after-life.

Either way, just pay up and you're in, unless those awful evil people thwart us again and we'll need your support now more than ever if that happens. Dang, those people are so obstructionist!

Health-care reform is going to require a wholesale change in the way it is done, and we are going to need some time to ramp-up to the new system, because we don't have enough people to see everybody right now.

This reform will utterly destroy the health insurance industry, and it will cripple the pharmaco industry. Pharmaco research will return to the academy, where it belongs. Yes, we will cure fewer obscure forms of cancer, but we will have cheaper and better treatments for chronic diseases. We will give something up there.

It's not pretty, and this sausage is going to be particularly ugly when being made, but the other choice, what we have now, will lay economic waste to this country when your children are your age. We can't afford to give-away 21% of the money we spend of health care (the difference between administrative over-head in private vs. government-run programs). We need it all, and we need to control the remuneration collectively to optimize the allocation of resources, just like a public utility.

Yes, there are things best done this way. Not making cars, not designing software, not journalism, those are best done as we do them now. We're smart enough to know the difference.

But, it will take real people committed to really solving problems in power in order to make this happen. Those people see no way into public office that doesn't involve selling themselves like soap. We need to fix that first.

I think that's the future I see coming through that door.

2009-08-02T02:06:00.000-04:00

The story of Veronica Ballestrini is also the story of a lot of uncredited hard work by countless people. So was that last sentence, and in tribute I am editing this post by directly writing the HTML.

Young girl, precocious talent, figures out that she needs an audience, knowing that if she gets that, she can get everything else. She dreams it up and does it. It's good when a plan comes together.

Genzo-e retreat - Day 5 - Anticlimax.

2009-05-05T11:48:00.002-04:00

The last day of the retreat was remarkable only in it's unremarkableness. We had to rush a little bit to finish up the text, but then again, the last part of the text is also a summing up, so it was okay to go a little faster.

These chapters in Dogen's "Treasury of the True Dharma Eye" were teaching aids for him, essentially his lesson plan for his students, and it is unlikely he intended that they be reviewed as we are reviewing them now. It is not the text of a speech,and these are probably just outlines and reminders about what he intended to say during the lesson.

It is important to remember that and not turn these into Holy relics.

However, I have further come to understand that Dogen is undergoing a bit of a revival now, and why. Zen Buddhism has become religious, overly so in Japan for some time now, and now that it is taking root in the US it is also beginning to veer in the direction. Shaved heads, robes, dharma-names, etc., these are all the trappings of setting up an separately-existing individually-identifiable group called "Zen Buddhists." Just as the greed, hatred and ignorance displayed by modern Christianity marks its break with the message of Jesus Christ, Zen Buddhism is making the same mistake by trying to be something special and separate.

The shaving of heads originally was done so that zen monks could travel in openly barbaric lands without being attacked. It identified them as NOT being soldiers, or any other kind of threat. Now, it is a seen as a mark of devotion to the rejection of seeking after beauty/virility, at best. It has nothing to do with the techings.

Dogen's teachings, if brought into full flower in modernity, could be an opposing force to all this religiosity in zen. I am not the only student similarly concerned, in fact, this is something like the groundswell that swept Obama into office. Zen's organizational leadership in the US seems sort of oblivious to the fact that a large number of zen students reject their emphasis on being grim, and formal, and Japanese. I think that is part of the reason that people are attracted to Dogen, he definitely rejects all that while vigorously making a case for the foundations of practice--sitting zazen, being generous, being kind, cultivating wisdom. He is to zen what Mother Teresa is to Christianity.

The drive back to Indianapolis was pleasant--nice weather, lots of wildflowers. My companion got on a flight that left as soon as we arrived, I flew standby on a flight that left about an hour and a half after that, which was 2 hours late itself. My flight didn't leave Indianapolis until I was already back in Harlem, and my bags were on that flight. Yay, air travel!

I am now enjoying my last down-day before returning to work. Zen retreat is done, back to practice. Thanks for reading.

Genzo-e retreat - Day 4 - Buying a book.

2009-05-03T20:46:00.000-04:00

There's always something that happens that is emblematic and symbolic of my experience with a new zen center. Today it was buying a book.

Like most zen centers, they have a collection of books for sale, usually those written and/or edited by the resident teacher, this one is no exception. Shohaku Okumura is a scholar, writing is what he does, and he's been doing his life's work for 40 years. Even though it is excruciatingly slow to do what he does, in that time he has authored a number of books.

I already own a couple of them, but I was trying to make a choice today about which one among those I do not own to buy while I am here. I consulted my traveling companion who is very familiar with these books, and he recommend a particular one, "Opening The Hand of Thought," which Okumura edited. It is Okumura's teacher's writings (Kosho Uchiyama) for "serious students of zen," or so it asserts on it's cover.

On the bookshelf above the books for sale is a stack of forms with a sign that says "fill these out to purchase a book." Behind that is a box that says "for book sales" on it. On the form it instructs you to place the money with this form in the box behind it.

I reached up to do that and someone told me "Oh, we don't do book sales like that any more, you have to give the money directly to the Ino." Actually, this happened more than once, and the exact same instruction came from more than one person. I have been picking up books for a couple of days and each time someone new has given me this helpful instruction.

Ok, I thought to myself, then why do they still have this sign up here, the forms available, and a box clearly labeled "for book sales" behind it? Never mind, I further said to myself, just take the book, find the Ino (pronounced EE-no, aka the practice director, sort of the administrator for the zendo), and get it over with.

So, this was just before the afternoon lecture, so I cornered the Ino in the zendo and asked him "I have some money for a book, when would you like to have it?"

He looked at me quizzically, and said "After the retreat," then he corrected himself and said "I mean, after the lecture today."

I thanked him and sat down. After the lecture I found him again and offered him the money.

He said, patiently, "We have some forms up there that need to be filled out, then you can just put the form together with the money in the box behind them" while looking at me as if he was wondering why I was buying a book if I clearly couldn't read simple instructions.

There you go. That's this place in a nutshell.

It's not bad, not at all, it is just a relatively new center and they have a lot to work out. One thing that frustrates me to no end about American Zen is that the centers eat their young. By that I mean new students have to endure a lot of bullshit uncertainty, almost hazing, in order to find their way around, and then each center operates as if they are the only center which does things correctly, and a lot of these procedures and traditions seem to exist only to support the practice of the more experienced students, who should be supporting the newbies! Every single center falls victim to this to some degree or another, one can't just walk in, read the signs, and know what to do. No, you have to mess something up and be corrected before the correct procedures are revealed to you. Argh.

So, the fourth day is over, the lectures continue to be eye-popping and fascinating, and I am very, very happy that I went to the trouble and expense to do this one. I will look back on this as a turning point in my zen practice, the point at which I realized that Dogen truly is my homie. I am in the right lineage, this is where I belong.

Tomorrow is just a half-day, one lecture, and then we drive in Indianapolis for the flight back to Newark. That will be quite the transition, and I expect I will sum it up tomorrow night.

Again, if you understood anything I said about zen, I'm sorry, I caused you to completely miss it.

Dogen: Let me make a stab at an example of what I am learning.

2009-05-03T11:07:00.000-04:00

Several people have asked me to provide an example of what I have learned at this retreat. OK, you asked for it. :-)

This chapter of the "Treasury of the True Dharma Eye" is called, by this teacher, "One Bright Jewel." Most teachers call it "One Bright Pearl," including my own teacher. If you search Google, for example, for "one+bright+jewel" you find references to a line from the chapter circulated as a relatively famous zen saying, mostly.

If you search for "one+bright+pearl" you find a multitude of references to the chapter we are studying, including books and translations of it.

One Bright Pearl is wrong. Fundamentally wrong. This is not a minor distinction.

The word in Japanese, ju, is semantically ambiguous, it can be pearl or jewel, sort of like "stone" can mean a rock in the driveway or a $4M diamond.

There is a metaphor in zen and buddhist literature called the mani jewel. Here's a typical reference to it. In some stories it is figuratively described as a jewel one could place in muddy water and the water would instantly clear and be safe to drink.

The difference between a pearl and a clear colorless jewel, as the mani jewel is figuratively known, is that the jewel will take on the color of whatever you place it on. If you put it on a red cloth, it will be red, on a blue cloth it will be blue, etc. A pearl is going to be it's own color no matter what background upon which it is placed.

In this chapter, Dogen is discussing the fundamental nature of reality. One of the most fundamental characteristics of reality is it's seamless integration with the environment. More than that, it IS the environment. Enlightenment occupies the very same space that you occupy. There is no form to it. It cannot be defined, it is analogous to some Christian metaphysical notions of the Holy Spirit. There is no "it" to point to. Searching for it is like a fish swimming around looking for water.

So, the fundamental line in this chapter is "The entire 10-direction world is one bright jewel." The 10 direction world just refers to the four directions: east, west, north, south, plus up and down, plus the four directions bisecting those six, sort of southeast up-ish, northwest down-ish, and so on. It is just a way to say in every direction.

So, the one bright jewel is "without form and it comprises everything in all directions" is one way of trying to talk about it.

Other renderings of the text, and you can use the google searches above to verify this, point to the notion that the one bright pearl is one's own buddha-nature, or soul, that is walking around experiencing all this, or in another way, we are all instances of the universe experiencing itself.

Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya...

That's not what Dogen is teaching here, in fact, he is teaching that this view, that there is a separately-existing individually-identifiable self experiencing all this wondrous stuff, including other separately-existing individually-identifiable selves, is precisely what keeps us from seeing the true nature of the world around us.

So, not a little ironically, this is like telling someone "if you want to remove the blindfold from your eyes, put this blindfold on."

Whew, I have a long way to go before I can really teach this stuff.

So, the jewel vs. pearl decision is extremely fundamental. It is in fact the difference between understanding what Dogen is pointing at and *completely* missing the point.

Or as Shohaku Okumura, the teacher, would say, with a wry smile "If you understood this, I'm sorry, that means you completely missed it."

Genzo-e retreat - Day 3 - Crap, everything I know is wrong.

2009-05-02T22:21:00.003-04:00

I realized during today's lectures that almost everything I thought I knew about Dogen is wrong. The English translations are all wrong, and most of the commentary is wrong, even those originally written in Japanese.

Crap.

Well, it's a good thing because for the first time Dogen is making sense to me, and it fits with my experience in practice, which is a very, very good thing, but I have a lot to un-learn now, and in some ways I am embarrassed because I should have known. My leaning mind misled me.

Shohaku Okumura, the teacher I am visiting now, has shown me this. He continually apologizes for explaining almost every word in the text, but he's right. Dogen did not write casually, and almost every choice of word and phrasing has meaning in the context of other works of zen literature, and that connection is vital to seeing what he is getting at.

It like when one Star Wars geek says to another, otherwise out of the blue, "these are not the droids you are looking for." That utterance has nothing to do with droids, or with looking for something, it is a reference to the power of suggestion, particularly when practiced by a skillful and wise person of metaphysical influence.

Litterally every line of this text we are studying contains such a reference, equally as opaque to the novice student. Okumura has been peeling off the layers for me, and literally every line causes me to figuratively throw up my hands in exasperation at how far I have been off in my study all these long years. When I get home, I am going to throw out every Dogen text I own. They are worse than useless, they have been misleading me.

Dogen is a cool guy. What I've felt about him intuitively all these years is correct. Basically, Dogen and I agree on a fundamental aspect of the dharma that all Buddhists *should* accept but so many of them don't--there is no persistent, individual, separately-identifiable self, or any other such phenomena. This is entirely a creation of the human mind.

Many, actually most Buddhists get around this by discussing something they call "Buddha-nature." That's just another word for the soul. Each branch of Buddhism (including Zen) has some version of this, this is what reincarnates, and the concept of reincarnation turns a lot of people away from the Dharma, because when you read that into it, it just becomes another doctrine to believe, another framework in which to have faith, just another way to deny the facts of life. Buddhism is just another flavor of bullshit if you insist upon permanence in anything.

Dogen, as I do, insists upon an epistemology that rejects conjecture and belief.

Some of his writings, hell, all of his writings that I've known until last Thursday are construed to assert that Dogen, at best, simply leaves the question of persistence alone, and the assumption is that he just never worked it out and allowed it to be unsolved. That never sat right with me, and since I can't read his writings in their original form I just assumed that these people knew what they were talking about, and just as The Bible really never explains how a omnipotent omniscient God who loves justice can permit injustice, I just assumed that this question just has an answer too impenetrable to comprehend.

See? I'm buying the bullshit.

No, Rev Okumura reads Dogen in the original text, and he is intimately familiar with all other relevant zen literature, and he reads Chinese, and he teaches in English. Dogen writes in a dense and academic style in Japanese, he mixes in Chinese kanji when he doesn't have a word in Japanese that works, and he is relatively unconcerned with how easy it is for a student to understand, he is concerned with getting it right.

Imagine reading a text in 13th century English, with Greek and Latin words thrown in when a suitable English word wasn't available, by a scholar who didn't mind if people who weren't as well-read as he, who did not work as hard as he at this kind of scholarship, didn't understand. Imagine that same scholar dropping references to other contemporary and ancient works of literature like so many crossword puzzle clues in order to illuminate the connections between his works and other works. Further, imagine that person coming from a fundamentally contrarian standpoint with a personality very resonant with the TV character on "House."

Now, imagine you have been studying the works of this individual as rendered by the editorial staff at People magazine for years, and you suddenly began to study with someone who gets it.

You see? Everything I know is wrong.

I had a good day.

Genzo-e retreat - Day 2 - Bodhidharma did not come from the East.

2009-05-01T23:44:00.000-04:00

Bodhidharma brought Buddhism from India to China, which means he traveled west, or came from the east, to China.

But, he really didn't.

Thanks to this retreat, I realize why that nonsense is not nonsensical.

So, it turns out that I was manufacturing a lot of strife in my head. Surprise!

I went and discussed my situation with the practice director and I was told that I could do what I wanted to do. So, I did. I completed my work obligations, gave the cook my copy of "Real Food," went to the store to buy my sequestered fellow students some cheese and fruit, went to the lectures, and otherwise conducted zen practice on my own, sitting today in my motel room because it was raining outside.

Otherwise, I enjoyed some unanticipated down-time, which was what I really needed.

This gave me a chance to see a little bit of Bloomington, something I didn't think I was going to have a chance to do. It is a pretty idyllic little college town--clean, homogeneous, seemingly untouched by the economic downturn, just as dryer-fresh as the college kids running around everywhere. There seems to be a lot of upper-middle-class money here. Lots of kids driving shiny new cars. Maybe that's who can afford to go to college these days, I don't know.

Unfortunately, the grocery stores suck, there's very little real food, and little in the way of indigenous culture or cuisine. It seems like you go to college here and don't stick around for much else. All of my previous experience with Bloomington was from the movie "Breaking Away" and it looks the same. The movie was released 30 years ago.

On the plus side, I haven't seen any sneezing pigs, so I think I am out of the way of H1N1 for the moment. Of course, that's a delusion, but at least I know that.

Speaking of knowing delusions, my traveling companion, the Japanese Zen Buddhist priest who is attending the retreat with me told me about a fight in the zendo today I *just* missed (it happened right after I left), lest you think that zen practice makes people all calm and tolerant.

It was, ostensibly, over black pepper.

First a little background for those who don't know my religious stuff. I refer to myself as a student of the teachings of the awakened (I don't like using foreign names when there are perfectly good English words).

Other people call me a Buddhist. I don't object to that, I just hope I don't think of myself that way. But, to explain something, I have to go ahead and say that one view of what I do is to say that I am a Soto Zen Buddhist practicing in the American lineage of Dainin Katagiri. I have not taken Jukai, which is sort of like Baptism for Christians, and I won't until there's a reason to. Again, I resist all of this accoutrement and these titles, like the wearing of robes at temple and such, because I want to encourage myself to hold a wholesome view of myself. That is, I diligently seek to preserve the view that I am part of things around me, not separate.

So, Soto Zen is distinguished by the unique and contrarian views of it's founder (though I am sure he intended to do no such thing) Eihei Dogen, who lived from 1200 to 1253 in Japan and China. The teacher I am studying with for a few days is one of the world's greatest living scholars on Dogen, certainly the greatest one to which I have access.

Dogen wrote an essay called, no joke, "Fukanzazengi," which translates to "Instructions for sitting meditation," more or less. That is certainly what it is. It is a short text and it is what I rely upon when I am trying to resolve a question about practice for myself. There are as many English translations for this text as there are zen translators interested enough to undertake it. You could say it is somewhat analogous to the Sermon on the Mount for Christians. That is, it is an important text, it deserves respect and study, but taking any one of those translations absolutely literally is going to make you look silly to anyone but the most ardent of self-deluded pious pricks.

There are such people in Zen just as there are bible-thumping anti-intellectual zealots in evangelical Christianity who think the King James translation of the Bible is modern literal truth. No religion has a monopoly on insipid and blind religiosity. No religion is exempt from the siren call of certainty.

Ok, all of that was to prepare you to understand the screaming match today between two of the resident students at this zendo.

Dogen mentions in the Fukanzazengi that one should be moderate in drinking and eating when sitting zazen, and some translations render that as "no stimulating food or drink."

Apparently some people consider black pepper to be such a stimulant. Equally apparent is that the cook does not. Further, it is apparent that those who hold a different view than the cook's think the prohibition is plain in the Fukanzazengi. This led to the screaming match in the zen center.

Hilarious. Zen and the Art of Screaming About Seasoning. Fortunately no one brought salt into the discussion. I didn't notice any of that on the food either, though I do see some in the kitchen. Meals are taken in a very formal ritualized style called Oryoki. Usually (as in at other zen centers where I have practiced) there is a salt and sesame mixture called Gomashio available at meals, using it is a part of the ritual, but this place serves ground black sesame seeds instead, which aren't salty at all. Salt may seduce us into self-delusion, I guess, I don't know (I'm eating on my own now).

Of course, the argument wasn't about black pepper at all. Who knows what the real issue is, but it does reveal that communal living can drive otherwise seemingly sane people to ridiculous extremes, even when they have devoted themselves to eschewing any extremes. So, please divest yourself of the conventional notions of zen practice being a reliable way to inner peace.

On the other hand, that is exactly what it is. See?

If contradictions seem to abound, blame your mind, that's what I do.

Bodhidharma, when he arrived in China, having traveled from india (by foot), did not come from the East.

Speaking of inner peace, time for bed. Be well. I am.

Genzo-e retreat - Day 1 - Ouch, I'm numb.

2009-04-30T22:44:00.000-04:00

So, I am missing out on some sleep to update you on my retreat, because this has been a big day.

First off, since I am going to be whining here a lot, let me say that the reason I came to this retreat was to hear this teacher, Shohaku Okumura, teach Dogen, specifically a chapter of Dogen's seminal "Shobogenzo" called "One Bright Jewel." As an aside, just to relate how good this teacher is, most other translators render that chapter title as "One Bright Pearl" (including my own teacher) and Rev. Okumura spent 3 hours today (in two separate lectures) explaining why that is wrong. The word in Japanese can mean either jewel or pearl, but there's a very specific reason, related to the history and religious culture at the time it was written (1230's), why "jewel" is the proper rendering. The explanation for that was the most fascinating and enlightening 3 hours of zen lecture I have every attended. No kidding.

My butt is sore, and not in a good way, and not in the usual way when I do a lot of sitting. I am in the midst of a bit of a practice crisis here and I don't yet know how it is going to turn out.

Rev. Okumura, as it is typically done in Japanese zen centers, conducts zazen (sitting meditation) for 50 minutes. I am in the habit of sitting daily for 25 minutes. I have been at a number of sesshins where 40 minutes sits were the rule and I have never had a problem with those.

At the risk of providing too much information, my groin is numb and I last got off the cushion almost two hours ago. It is still numb, though it is getting better. I have never had this problem before. I can't continue. I don't know what I am going to do.

I am travelling with a Japanese Soto Zen Buddhist priest from my hospice. He has some suggestions, but I need to take them up in the morning with the practice director. I also need to vent. I have been sitting with an angry, annoyed mind today.

First, this is a young sangha (think "congregation"), and young sanghas (as in the group's age, not the participants) often have a number of characteristics like this one. They don't have a member who regularly sits in a chair, as I do, and therefore they don't have good chairs (good chairs are those made for musicians, like cellists), they don't have a good method for dealing with chair-sitters during meals, and their zafus are all under-stuffed, which is what people who sit on the floor usually prefer, but they are not good for chair-sitting, particularly with a bad chair.

The chairs they have belong on the set of That 70's Show, around Red's dining room table, the seats are level with the floor (which means you have to arch your back to sit up straight), they are covered in a burlap-like upolstery, and they have no support in the middle of the seat, which makes it like sitting on top of a milk-crate stuffed with pillows. After 20 minutes I am in 7/10 pain, and after 30 minutes I am losing so much circulation that things go numb "down there."

This problem with sitting zazen, along with the exquisitely high quality of the teaching, is causing my crisis. I can't sit zazen with the group without practically injuring myself. The last time I sat for extended periods (at another center) I also weighed about 20-40 lbs more than I do now, and I had more padding on my butt. I don't know what the root cause of all this is exactly, but I do know I can't go on like I tried to do today.

I would just bag the rest of it and admire Indiana University co-eds (there are a lot of them around town) all day instead, but the lectures are too good to miss, and I came 700 miles to see this teacher. Like I said, the teacher has not only not disappointed me, he has far exceeded my expectations. If things go like they did today, this education I am getting at this retreat is going to a milestone in my life's zen practice. I am not overstating that at all. That also makes this a crisis. Just bugging out is not really an option.

So my priest companion tells me to "just freakin' stand up and stretch your legs" during zazen, he says they do this in Japan a lot, and that no one will care (as long as you aren't in a Rinzai temple, and we're not). I've never done this before, I pride myself on being scrupulous about practice, doing exactly what I am "supposed to," but doing that is not going to work this time.

What I'd really like to do is have my usual 25 minute sit in the morning, attend the lectures before/after lunch and spend the rest of the day admiring IU co-eds.

Then there's the food.

I could be really nasty, because I am annoyed and in pain, but I'll try to approach this from a neutral standpoint. The food is vegetarian, which is not unusual at zen centers, particularly young sanghas, but beyond that I think they are also hewing towards vegan and macrobiotic, which is at best annoying and at worst malnutrition.

If they continue to plan menus like they did today, it is malnutrition. Humans are omnivores, and they need fat and protein. We didn't get either today. Breakfast was some cooked grain, something like cole slaw, and some cold puree of greens. Lunch was another cooked grain, or rather the starch of a cooked grain (it may have been rice, but whatever it was it didn't appear to be whole), carrots and seitan (I think), and undressed salad greens. Dinner was a third cooked grain, I think it was millet, steamed broccoli and cauliflower.

Supermodels are more indulgent with their diet during an SI bikini shoot.

As regular readers know, I have been figuratively devouring a book called "Real Food" by Nina Planck, a woman I've met, who looks like a (now pregnant) supermodel, who will tell you that this kind of low-fat vegan macrobiotic diet made her chronically sick and put 25 pounds on her when she was in her 20's. Not surprisingly, the people who live at this center look pale, gaunt, pudgy (yes, that's possible) and tired. You can literally tell by looking who is in from out of town, the skin of the out-of-towner has a pink undertone.

Ok, so I got a little nasty. Like I said, I am hurting and Mr. Happy is numb.

I'll let you know what happens.

Impressions of Detroit and the 2009 Final Four.

2009-04-05T05:54:00.000-04:00

This is both my first trip to Detroit and my first Final Four.

You know more about Detroit than you realize. It is no metaphor for the economic crisis, it is the economic crisis. If you're having trouble getting your mind around what's happening right now, one quick crash course would be a weekend in Detroit, maybe at the faux-classical "Greektown Casino."

Crumbling infrastructure, blighted economies, eerily-quiet manufacturing plants, epidemic property crimes, slickly-organized gambling, frightened police officers, incompetent security procedures, hookers, an insulated excess-obsessed bourgeois, restless unemployed, unrestrained idle youth, it's all here folks, and it's no bad Mel Gibson movie, and it took me less than six hours to personally witness all this just as I was making my way around town to see a basketball game. If all that doesn't scare you, maybe you should try a Red Bull.

Now they have the bread and circus of a local working-class-identified always-underdog Gladiator squad on a string of vanquishing conquests of superior opponents--the Michigan State Spartan Men's Basketball Team.

"GO GREEN!" some drunken college student, usually a man, screams.

"GO WHITE!" some drunken college students, usually women, screech back.

It took me about 15 minutes to get completely effing sick of hearing that, even though I am a fan and admirer of Tom Izzo and his program.

Um, "there's a lot of green in here" has become an instant sports cliche because it is not only true, but it is a fact that assaults your consciousness when you are at Ford Field. If you didn't know otherwise, it would not be unreasonable to assume you were on the MSU campus.

The Tarheels will win if they play well, no matter how well the Spartans play, they simply are a better team. But, this 2008-09 Tarheels team does not always play well. One thing that has been a repeating pattern is that it seems that just wanting to play well has not been enough for them to win a game. They have to want something else as well, or they lose their focus and get beat. If the Tarheels are not on their game, MSU is good enough to beat them, lesser teams (*cough* BC *cough*) have also beaten the Tarheels when they were not playing well.

Being here is like having a hot affair with someone while in town to attend a funeral. It's great, it really is, but I am surrounded by the human suffering and hollow, quiet, remains of massive, sadistic, public governmental and private economic fraud.

Go heels!

Random Act of Kindness and Affection on NYC Subway today.

2009-03-31T07:26:00.000-04:00

I was riding the 3 train to work (that's the #3 Subway line for non-NYers) and I walked into a car just as a tall, slender, gorgeous, redhead entered from another door, walking towards me. We were both headed towards two adjacent open seats.

I need two seats. I'm big and fat. I actually occupy about 1.25 seats, but I need two adjacent seats to be open for me to sit down and still have those seated next to me be comfortable. So, I usually don't attempt to sit down unless I can occupy two seats without inconveniencing someone else.

When I saw this tall drink of cool water was headed towards these seats I motioned for her to sit down. She sat down gracefully, tucked her breezy spring skirt under her legs and motioned for me to sit next to her on her left. I leaned down and said "I don't think you know me well enough to let me to sit in your lap, but thank you" with an smile. She grabbed my right wrist and with one motion turned me around, put my arm around her and pulled me down into the seat on her left.

I am now sitting on the Subway with a stunning redhead tucked underneath my arm. She placed my hand on her hip and rested her forearm on my thigh. Her giant rock of a wedding ring sparkled on her left hand as she patted me affectionately on the inside of my knee. She leaned into me and rode quietly until her stop, 14th street, about a 15 minute ride from where we began.

When she got up, she pecked me on the cheek and said "I used to weigh 330 lbs. Don't be ashamed of who you are" and flounced away, skirt swishing behind her, as she disappeared into that great mass of humanity that is NYC during the rush hour.

I still don't think my feet are touching the ground.

What has happened to us? The sequel.

2009-03-27T05:42:00.000-04:00

I wasn't discussing the relative merits of Facebook vs. Multiply. It is clear to anyone that Multiply is a better platform for what our group does most of the time, but I don't find it necessary to make a choice. Facebook and Twitter have both filled a niche that Multiply does not address--synchronous communication.

Monday I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room coming into contact with some difficult feelings. I was there 2 hours and 45 minutes, plenty of time for isolation and fear to grow. I tweeted about it and a number of you got back in touch with me one way or the other to offer companionship. That was awesome. There I was, suffering the consequences of my poor planning, i.e., not asking someone to go with me, and by picking up my cell phone and sharing my situation I suddenly had friends thousands of miles removed geographically with me, metaphorically hanging out and sharing my experience.

That was awesome, and that wouldn't have happened *now* in exactly the same was if I had just posted to Multiply. There used to be a time when everyone sat around F5-ing their inbox page, using it like an awkward IM client, but that's not going on as much anymore.

To return to my mall metaphor, we may still be more or less hanging around at the same place in the Food Court rather than over at someone's house. It is almost the same except if you want a order of pot stickers you don't have to rely on someone having them in their freezer, you can walk over within everyone's sight and pick some up. There are more resources available.

I didn't say anything is dying, though clearly it is. Things are always dying. I was noticing change. It doesn't distress me, it interests me.

What has happened to us?

2009-03-26T18:57:00.000-04:00

In that dynamic field of human behavior we call the Intarnets there has been a lot of change. Our little neighborhood has been no different, we started at Slashdot and took advantage of the prescient social networking there. That went on for a while and we kept growing. There was weirdness, there was pain, there was stupid duplicity, there was clever duplicity, there was love, there was support, there was compassion, there was wisdom.

Then prominent and influential members migrated to Multiply, or at least those that I regard that way, and something more subtle and nuanced developed through the use of multiple media for expression. We rolled like that for a while, then something happened at Facebook and something happened at Twitter that sucked the air out of the room.

Worlds collided, suddenly our little house party came out of the tunnel and into the football stadium of Facebook and Twitter. Suddenly there's someone's sister, someone's parents, someone's ex, some *high school* friends of someone you've only known online (what could be less relevant?). Wow, the sense of organization, exclusivity and shared iconography evaporated, after spending time in our little shared living room we're suddenly at the mall!

Well, the mall is kind of cool, there's a lot of resources here, but who are you with? The friends you came with are being diluted by artificially equivalent connections based either on communities long gone (college, high school) or as conceptual objects (Texas Longhorns, New Yorkers, Democrats). Where is the significance of your close friends, those with whom you share a connection that is beyond description? Shouldn't you be seeing more of their cat pictures and less from that quiet girl you barely remember from high school?

Yes, there's Friend's Lists on Facebook, and I make use of them, but that's so analytical, and it is static--you have to update and modify your lists if you want them to reflect your life. That seems like a silly amount of work, and besides, to whom, exactly, am I providing all that information?

This is the kind of thing you think about at the end of your 12th straight day of work, particularly when this one was 12 solid hours.

Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate - a book review.

2009-03-15T23:53:00.002-04:00

Re: Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate - by Brad Warner

I like this guy, we are a lot alike in many ways. He's been practicing longer than I have even though he is four years younger, but our interest in zen more or less coincides. He says repeatedly in the book that he's been sitting for 25 years. If my math is right, that goes back to 1983-ish. I began studying zen in 1981, but I didn't have a regular practice until 2003, so Brad sat for 21 years before I stopped thinking I didn't need to. This means his butt is a lot flatter, and you might not know that one can tell how enlightened someone is by the flatitude of their butts.

He has two other books, which he says aren't as good as this one, so I'm probably not going to read them. I've picked them up repeatedly in bookstores, but I harbor such a cultivated distaste for punk rock that I let that cause me to put them back down and never buy them (Brad is also a punk rock artist). This guy has a life in my head, he has for years, even though I've never met him, and we're still circling each other warily in this little play in my mind, so maybe I will read the other books someday when I lose this need to feel superior to my little mental statue of him.

He comes from a different lineage (Gudo Nishijima Roshi, who received his transmission from Rempo Niwa Roshi), though he is reverent of mine (Suzuki/Katagiri). His teacher sounds pretty cool. When he does talk dharma in the book he makes sense, which distinguishes it from most Zen-y literature. He's not a phony, he clearly has a strong practice, and it comforts me that he knows that he is full of shit a lot of the time.

He uses the term "zen master" self-referentially a little heavily in the book, but it is not incorrect. He has a valid zen license--dharma transmission--and he is not caught by the trappings of his worldly authority, so he probably deserves the title. My little snit is about my own preference that "zen master" is one of those titles like "hacker," i.e., really only something other people should call you. He tempers this by calling out the irony, but it's not clear that he really means that. Oh well, this is all the Brad Warner I create in my mind anyway, so that all says something more about me than him.

He takes us through the death of his mother, family dysfunction, day-job career wheel-spinning, a creeping divorce, sleeping with a student, a very sweet affair with a Japanese woman, and the death of his grandmother--all in 2007. His description of his Japanese fling-object sounded so much like a close friend of mine that I did a mental double-take to assure myself that we weren't referring to the same person. That was weird.

In the last part of the book he reveals that he decided to "be an asshole" before he wrote the book and let all this out, like he was lancing some boil he was hoping would just go away someday because he could no longer stand the pressure. He's not an asshole even when he says he's trying to be one. He's a thoughtful, rigorously self-honest, zen practitioner who is trying to find his way around 21st Century life not unlike the wandering monks of 1000 years ago.

Dogen would have had a blogspot account, I'm sure of it.

So, who should read this book?

Anyone who wants a glimpse into American Zen Practice through the lens of an authentic practitioner, a master, even, who also realizes that you never get anywhere with zen, because there's no where to go. As David Chadwick says, Buddhism is the religion that promises nothing, and delivers.

Also notable is that this is the first book I have read on my iPod Touch, using the Amazon Kindle app, exclusively while sitting (or standing) on the NYC Subway system. Awesomeness. I doubt I will buy a book on paper that I can get this way again. Ironically, the last few pages of the book proudly detail the recycled paper, earth-friendly processes and soy ink used to print it.

Well eff that, I didn't use anything at all to read this book! I paid money and got, well, nothing!

I am such a Bodhisattva.

Linkage

Amusing companion for Best Reporting Ever.

2009-03-07T16:19:00.000-05:00

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Market Psychology - Jim Cramer

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Rap Battle
Joke of the Day

Best reporting ever.

2009-03-07T05:52:00.000-05:00

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

on Twitter

2009-02-24T07:27:00.000-05:00

I can imagine the days when the telephone was being introduced into people's homes....

"Why would I want a contraption in my house to enable a bunch of idle chatter with people I try to stay away from?" "I don't have time to make telephone calls." "If someone wants to contact me they can damn well take the time to come to the house!"

The nay-sayers are out there again, now it is twitter that is the target.

Twitter is a way to push 140 characters to somewhere, cross-platform, cross-network, for free. Most people can't comprehend the power of such a thing. The lunar lander accepted 8 character commands. Your bank PIN is 4-6 characters. Passwords are generally 6-16.

Just as the early nay-sayers of the telephone didn't understand that someday civilization itself would be defined by access to one, I think people are completely missing the power of twitter.

True, it is now being used for time-wasting egotistic narcissism by almost all of it's users. Name a communication media that has not been exploited, early and often, by those seeking to capitalize on other people's greed. But, you will make a mistake if you confuse the potential of the technology with the banality of the current user base.

The awesome potential of the ability to send a 140 character string of text to a device that understands text commands, no matter where it is, what network it is connected to, or from whence the message came, is beyond my ability to contemplate fully.

So, if you don't want to twitter, that's fine. Don't. But be careful when you cross-over into ridiculing and denigrating those who do. There's a big ole' train leaving the station that you're not going to be on. The more certain you are that the twitterati are self-deluded, idiotic, time-wasting narcissists the more you obscure your own awareness of what is really happening. You've been warned.

I've learned that Ashton Kutcher is actually a fairly interesting guy by following him on twitter. I've never really like his persona in his work (other than Kelso on That 70's show), and I thought the marriage to Demi Moore was a joke, but after following them both on twitter I've changed my opinion of them both. Ashton is a geek and Demi is actually sort of nice. They struggle with their celebrity and it's pitfalls, but they were home tweeting on Saturday night and when they pointed to something interesting via tweets, well, what they pointed to actually was interesting.

Now, I sort of follow what they're doing like I do old friends on Facebook, not with intense interest, but I keep a running narrative in my head of what's up with them and they clearly believe that this is a much more effective way to stay in touch with their fans than by being fodder for the tabloid media. Very interesting.

Shaq and P DIddy also tweet, but they shouldn't. Shaq's atrocious spelling and SMS-speak isn't helping his image with me much, and Mr. Combs just confirms his self-absorption.

That's real information, folks, and I feel this is only the tippy-tip-tip of this iceberg.

Breastfeeding on FaceBook

2009-01-26T02:00:00.000-05:00

I caught a story on CNN this morning (rare enough by itself, but that's another post) about FaceBook having deleted pictures of women breast-feeding because they included an exposed breast, which violates their terms of service. I could get all self-righteous and indignant about FaceBook, but the truth is they are just enforcing community standards.

Stupid community standards.

I used to teach breastfeeding as one of my duties as a Neonatal nurse. I remember one time we had a local news anchor deliver a baby at the unit where I worked. She was a most fetching young woman for whom I had nurtured a distant crush for years. As luck would have it, my name came up on the rotation when it was time to go help her baby teach her to breastfeed.

As I walked down the hall to her room I thought about all the times I had watched her on TV, staring lustfully at her breasts, and wondering what was going to happen to me when I went in there and asked her to slip her gown off one shoulder so I could see what kind of nipples we were dealing with.

I did, I saw she had good nipples for breastfeeding, and I showed her my favorite trick for stimulating the roof of the baby's mouth so it will latch on. She caught on quickly and when her baby latched on for the first time she flashed the brilliant smile at me that I had grown accustomed to seeing on the 10 o'clock news.

THAT, the smile, was erotically pleasing, her breasts were not. Why? The context.

I was not seeing her breasts in an erotic context. Breast-feeding (except for a tiny "proves the rule" group of fetishists) is not an erotic context. In some ways I'm surprised by my reaction, I mean in one sense it should be because all of this erotic energy around breasts is supposed to be about some unexpressed maternal longing, but that theory fails me. I find breastfeeding women and children beautiful sometimes because of the wonder of what is happening, but it is not erotic, not even a little. It is more like the beauty of child sleeping peacefully.

I think because we lock breasts away in the country, cover them up so, that they artificially acquire this de facto forbidden, erotic quality no matter what the context. I used to live in a clothing-optional environment where topless women were routine, and in that social context their breasts acquired the same status as any other physical feature. I really liked to look at some of them, but I really liked to look at other women's legs, or face, or hair, or any other feature of physical female pulchitrude, most of which are not routinely hidden.

So, I just think it is entirely ridiculous that we have this discussion at all. They're just boobs. Facebook should attend to the context in which a breast is exposed before taking down the pictures.

There's a FaceBook group to joining to express an opinion about this, by the way.

What do you think?

NCAAB: What they're made of.

2009-01-18T04:33:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, this week was telling for the 08-09 Tarheels. They had three conference games in seven days, two on the road. They lost the first one in a particularly ugly game against Wake Forest, a team that will probably emerge with the #1 ranking soon, and then had a couple of marginally-impressive wins against ACC opponents Virginia and Miami (FL).

They will see Virginia and Miami again this season, and either team could beat them, but they won't see Wake again until the ACC tourney, thank goodness.

This stretch has demonstrated a couple of things that every serious long-time college basketball fan knows: (1.) having a number of your starters back from a previously successful season does not guarantee that they will be better this year, or even as good, and (2) pre-season rankings and expectations get more poisonous as one nears the top of such things.

The Tarheels were the unanimous #1 team pre-season, people regarded them as such a sure thing that it almost seemed like a waste of time and money to ask them to play any games before The Final Four. Now, Tarheel fans are anxious about winning the ACC.

Last night, there was one point where Tyler Hanbrough had 20 of the Tarheels 31 points. Hansbrough wasn't a ball hog or mis-matched, he got a lot of those points at the line, this was just a measure of how cold the other shooters were. Bobby Frasior was consistently missing to the right, Lawson wasn't taking any shots, and Ellington couldn't get anything to drop and stopped taking shots. Danny Green was awesome once again, the best 6th man in the country has been impressive as a starter as defensive specialist Marcus Ginyard is still in street clothes with his slow-healing stress fracture in his foot.

They went into the half ahead because Miami didn't score in the last 6 minutes of the first half, then something switched on for Ellington and he went from 0 points to 17 in the first six minutes of the second half That salted the game away for Miami, despite being tough under the boards and mounting some impressive stabs at a run they could never put anything together.

So, where are we?

The Tarheels are a team that has suffered from believing their own press. They accept being behind early far too readily and it takes too much momentum to push them into aggressive play. Coach Williams has been making some inexplicable substitution choices. I don't understand why he is relying so much upon WIll Graves, and I wonder where Deon Thompson's game has gone.

The ACC is going to have at least six teams at the show this year and could end up with four in the sweet sixteen easily. This is a tough conference and the team is going ot have to earn it's expected place at the top of the conference. We still have to play a surprising Duke team twice, and as I indicated above, we are going to have to play a Virginia and a Miami team bent on settling a score before we get there.

This is going to be tough, if the Tarheels go this year, it will be earned. They can do it, but there's work ahead.

NCAA BB: The Tarheels tank.

2009-01-11T17:18:00.000-05:00

First you had the loss to Boston College. Undefeated season RIP. BC played well and took skillful advantage of the Tarheels poor play. They deserved the win and the Tarheels deserved the loss.

But the loss wasn't what really hurt. What really hurt was BC's loss to Harvard immediately following their victory over the Tarheels. Ouch, m-fin' ouch. It was Harvard's first victory over a top 25 team. Ever. Harvard can beat a team that the Tarheels can't? What?

Then there's tonight's loss to Wake Forest.

Wake Forest has a good basketball team. They're young, but they play well. They understand how to win. They earned the win, they played better.

The Tarheels clearly seem to be too impressed with themselves.

They are on the road at Virginia on Thursday and then meet Miami at home on Saturday. That's two road games and one home game in about 6 days and 3 hours. We are going to find out what this team is really made of in the next week.

Fun Fat Facts

2009-01-02T17:09:00.000-05:00

I read it on the Internet, it must be true.

-----

In 2006, the surgeon general called obesity "the terror within" and said it could "dwarf 9/11 or any other terrorist attempt."

A recent anti-obesity ad campaign featured a "suicide bomber" with bars of butter strapped to his chest.

A 2002 study found that 13% of men and 17% of women of recruitment age are too fat to serve in the military.

In 1997, the World Health Organization teamed up with the International Obesity Task Force to redefine obesity standards. "Overweight" was defined as a body mass index (bmi) of 25 or more, down from 27.8.

70% of the Obesity Task Force's funding comes from the two drug companies that make the popular weight-loss pills Xenical, Meridia, and Reductil.

In 1998, the US government adopted the new bmi standards, spurring fears of an "obesity epidemic."

That move was hailed by the American Obesity Association, a lobbying group that's received funding from Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig.

Sarah Hartshorne, a "plus size" contestant on America's Next Top Model, has a bmi of 21.5—well within the "normal" range.

Recent studies have attributed obesity to low-fat foods, lack of sleep, ear infections, intestinal bacteria, pollution, plastics, poverty, air conditioners, socializing with obese people, your mom's age when you were born, and your maternal grandmother's diet.

Researchers say obese Americans contribute disproportionately to global warming by consuming 18% more food and 938 million extra gallons of gas every year.

Southwest Airlines requires customers "who compromise any portion of adjacent seating" to buy 2 seats.

People who weigh more than 220 lbs are 150% less likely to survive a car crash than those under 130 lbs.

All 157 West Virginia public middle schools use the video game Dance Dance Revolution in gym classes.

Schools in Pennsylvania, Delaware, South Carolina, and Tennessee send "obesity report cards" to parents.

One Pennsylvania school district that does so serves pizza and churros for breakfast.

The federal government's list of banned foods in school cafeterias doesn't include fries, candy bars, or chocolate chip cookies.

In 2005, Sesame Street changed Cookie Monster's theme song from "C Is for Cookie" to "A Cookie Is a Sometime Food."

In 2005, British doctors said a 15-year-old who'd eaten only jam sandwiches and Pop-Tarts since he was 4 was totally healthy, except for an iron deficiency.

A 2008 study on "brideorexia" found that 70% of brides-to-be try to lose weight. Almost 1/4 try fasting, pills, or laxatives.

First-time users of Alli, a new over-the-counter fat-blocking pill, are advised to "wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work."

People consume an average of 28% more calories when eating snacks labeled "low fat," in part because they mistakenly think they're eating fewer calories.

In 2007, T.G.I. Fridays rolled out a "Right Portion" Cajun pasta dish with 4 times more fat than the usda's daily recommendation.

People served soup in bowls that secretly refilled ate 73% more than those eating from normal bowls. But they felt just as full afterward.

The "Diet Fork" has dull teeth and an uncomfortable grip that force eaters to "scoop less."

"Diet glasses," whose blue tint makes food look less appealing, were big in Japan last year.

Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna, and Christina Aguilera wear $250 sneakers by Masai Barefoot Technology, which claims they burn cellulite.

The net worths of white women whose bmis fall 10 points increase by an average of $11,800.
Loss Leaders

Christian weight-loss books include What Would Jesus Eat? and More of Jesus, Less of Me.

25 minutes of daily Islamic prayers burns 80 calories.

ChastitySF.com, a Catholic site, tells dieters to imagine a "Purgatory where every unnecessary mouthful of food you have ever taken will be purged from you as flaming vomit."

Liquids account for 22% of the average American's daily calories.

After New York City made eateries post nutritional data, a survey found that 80% of diners were surprised that a Big Mac meal had 1,200 calories.

A recent Burger King commercial included the line, "I will eat this meat until my innie turns into an outie."

Last year, a Republican Mississippi state legislator proposed prohibiting restaurants from serving obese people.

Researchers asked 3,000 overweight people how they responded to discrimination; 79% said they ate more.

Active obese people are almost 50% less likely to die of heart disease than sedentary thin people.

Playboy Playmates of the Year selected during tough social and economic times are heavier and have larger waists.

When the Dow lost nearly 778 points in one day last September, every S&P 500 company went down—except Campbell's Soup.

A good deed gone bad.

2008-12-16T14:56:00.000-05:00

I ended up with Pocky, which is not entirely a bad thing, but it wasn't what I went in search of. Pocky is basically straw-shaped crackers dipped in chocolate. They look like the picture. They taste as you probably suspect, like chocolate-covered crackers, or chocolate-covered very thin bread-sticks.

I decided that today was going to be my East Village day. That meant going to see a friend, stopping at Kiehl's (metrosexual hair and skin care products), The Strand (used bookstore extraordinaire') and Sunrise Market (Japanese grocer).

I also had reason to go down to my office because I left a Christmas gift there that I need to mail off post haste. A friend of mine at the office who is Japanese mentioned to me that she was desirous of some tea and she needed to go to the Japanese market to get some.

"No problem!" I said, foolishly becoming ensnared in fate's trap for me on this day.

I found out that it was Genmaicha she wanted specifically, that sounds pretty Japanese, so I thought it would be relatively easy to pick up. I told her I would IM her from the store and tell her what I found.

Now, the person for whom the Christmas gift is for is not Japanese, but she did live in Japan for a number of years and had shared her fondness for Japanese pickles with me on numerous occasions. Now, these aren't just pickled cucumbers, all kinds of vegetables get pickled in Japan. Apparently it is something of a point of national pride, so I asked my Japanese friend for whom I was fetching tea to help me choose some pickles.

"Perhaps I should come to the store with you" was the reply. Ah, this isn't simple, there isn't the pickle equivalent of Coke, not some sure category killer that I can easily find. In any case, I was going to the store now and my Japanese friend wasn't free, so I was going in alone.

The Japanese store is intimidating in the sense that they make no attempt to make Americans comfortable in there. They are polite, of course, but everything is in Japanese, which means I can't make sense of anything except by looking at the pictures on the packaging.

The tea sounded easy, and it was, I found the tea and started looking for genmaicha. Hmm, I don't see it. Oh oh, there it is! That looks interesting, but it is loose tea (and roasted rice) in a plastic bag. I did see an english sign on the shelf for "genmai-cha" and I announced my victory to my Japanese friend over IM (I have a jabber client on the Treo). She asked me to get multiple boxes, which I did.

Now, for the pickles. My Japanese friend knows this store so I asked her where to find the pickles. She directed me over to a refrigerated case where I found things in containers with indecipherable names that were mostly either red, green, brown, or black.

I need to ship these pickles UPS ground so I can't send perishable items. However, i was still personally interested in the Japanese pickle phenomenon so I looked at these fresh pickles. I sent my Japanese guide an IM with the name of something on the shelf.

"Yuck." she replied. "Yeah, there's that stuff."

Crisis averted, I bought some pickled mushrooms. They're awesome.

I've been pickle-hunting with my friend at Asian markets in Fort Worth, so I looked walked around looking for cans that resembled the cans that she picked up when we shopped together, shook her head, and put back down. These are what I found. I have no idea what I have here.

I sent that picture to my Japanese friend and she said "I dunno. I've never heard of that stuff."

So, I am riding the train (aka the Subway) down to the office and I am picking through my bags to get the Genmaicha tea out for my friend. I am going to drop this at my desk so she can pick it up later.

I have the wrong tea. It is simple green tea, not Genmaicha.

I bought some simple green tea for myself. Where's that? It's Genmaicha.

I bought four boxes of the wrong tea for my friend, and one box of the wrong tea for myself. I left her the wrong tea for myself, and the right tea for her, and I went back to the Japanese market.

Now, I have to tell you, I thought about just blowing it off. I felt like an idiot fish out of water in there and now I was going to have to go back and exchange some tea. I did want to go back and get the other three boxes of tea that I promised my friend, but I could just go buy them, i.e., I didn't have to tell my friend that I ate four boxes of green tea on her behalf.

But, I wanted to get it right, so I took pictures with the Treo of all the varieties available in the store and waited on her to review them and e-mail me back with her preference. I didn't take pictures of the wrong tea, the one I left for her, since I assumed she would know that this was a choice.

I'm shy around Asian women. I'm not sure why, aside from idealizing almost every one I've ever known well, but I am particularly adverse to making myself look like an idiot in front of them. The cashiers at this Japanese market are women and I had this internal hurdle to overcome to fess up my stupid mistake and get it made right.

Bravely, I went up to the cashier and confessed my crime. She wanted to see my receipt. I had not been able to find it. She was going to do the exchange anyway and I pulled the receipt out of my front left pocket, where it had been since I put it in there after making my purchase, and this greatly simplified the cashier's task. She suddenly remembered that it had been herself that checked me out an hour earlier, and I got the right tea (though they only had three boxes, not four).

As I was walking out she muttered something under her breath to the other cashier in Japanese and she burst out laughing. I wish I know what that was.

So, finally, I assure my friend that I had the right tea and she tells me that the wrong tea, the one I had picked out inadvertently, was great, and that she preferred it to the one she requested, which I had just purchased.

Ever the polite Japanese, she quickly recovered by saying that whatever I decided was just fine. Damn right.

Sunday morning TV preachers

2008-12-07T04:39:00.000-05:00

I watch Joel Olsteen and Creflo Dollar almost every Sunday morning. They have thirty minute shows that are excerpts of obviously longer sermons.

It is funny how my view of all this has changed over the years. I used to watch these guys for comic relief, ridiculing them for their delusions. Then I watched them as a prosecutor, vigilantly keeping an inventory of their transgressions. Now I watch them as fellow students of the teachings of prophets. We have different names for our prophets, but the teaching is the same.

Both of these gentlemen have insight into the human condition, the same insight, the same one that I have, that which can't be named. Both of them also love the camera and they are compelled to public performance, as I am. Both surely have petty drama, fundamental character flaws, and troubling personal issues to address, as I do.

My former views of ridiculing and disapproving of Olsteen and Dollar were a product of the fact that I believed that I was right and they were wrong. When I released that notion, when I began to see the ignorance in some of my own thoughts and the wisdom in some of theirs, I realized that my conflict with them was no more than a dance of thoughts in my head. I was insisting on the reality of a persistent separately-existing unchanging entity, several of them in fact, and it was this delusion that captured my attention, not what was really happening.

I mean, it is subtle, by "persistent separately-existing unchanging entity" I can sometimes mean definitions of words, i.e., you have to be mindful of the multiple translations of things like the Bible and the Pali Canon (Buddhist scriptures, as such). But, I also and simultaneously mean the self. It is all the same thing, all connected to the same delusion.

Huang Po said something like this: The foolish believe what they think and doubt what they see. The wise believe what they see and doubt what they think.

Of course, existential humor compels me to remind myself that all this is what I think.

Are we friends?

2008-11-30T04:46:00.000-05:00

I have recently come to find that Facebook is useful for me and I am punching up my presence there. If we are not connected as friends and you have an account on Facebook, can we connect?

Linkedin, too, though I have yet to find that service useful, it has promise.

Bombay/Mumbai - now its personal

2008-11-28T09:32:00.000-05:00

One of the Rabbi's I work with knew the Rabbi at the Chabad house in Mumbai, and his family. He came in this morning looking a little out-or-sorts because he had been at an all-night prayer vigil.

I consider this a cowardly attack on free people, it is little different for me than if this had happened down the street. I don't really have anything else to say, except if you were wondering if this had touched someone you know, it has. This Rabbi from work is a dear, dear friend. He's devastated, and he works with dying people all day. It's not like he's suddenly come to terms with mortality or anything, this is just senseless hatred.

By the way, every native Indian I know says "Bombay."

The lost art of the mid-range jump shot

2008-11-22T03:33:00.000-05:00

The Tar Heels handled UCSB pretty well last night, as they were expected to, but they didn't look great. Tyler Hansbrough is back, he played a full game, approaching his old form, but it looks like the conditioning is not quite there. Now the Heels are on their way to Maui for the Maui Invitational, which is somewhat interesting for me because they could end up playing Texas, my alma mater. In fact, that's the most likely outcome.

I have only a moment's worth of conflict over that, I was never much of a Texas sports fan while I was there. I worked for the Athletic Dept as a tutor while I was in school, so I saw Div 1 college sports Texas-style from the inside, seeing what they players go through (for one thing, they have practically no time to study) and how little they get (I used to take players out for pizza on Sunday on my dime because otherwise they'd be eating PB&J as the athletic cafeteria was closed on Sunday nights and most of them had no money) in spite of the fact that they generate millions for the school.

As an aside, we should consider athletic scholarships a work-study program and pay them the same money schools pay students to work in the library or whatever on their work-study programs. They earn it.

Anyway, all that left me with a less-than-sweet taste in my mouth for UT Athletics. I've gotten over it, and I know things are probably not much different at UNC, but I've come to be a UNC fan. I'm probably the most devoted UNC fan who has never stepped foot in the state of North Carolina.

In short, I became a UNC fan in 1983, while a student at UT, when I took a US Civil Rights History course which in part examined the role of college sports in the US civil rights movement. Dean Smith, the long-time (and then) coach of the UNC basketball team was a courageous leader in integrating college sports. I was interested in watching a few games once I learned this, and if you know your BBall history you know UNC had a guy named Michael Jordan playing for them back then. The rest, as they say, is history. These days, it doesn't hurt that the most significant other in my life is a UNC Alum and a particularly rabid BBall fan.

Anyway, this year they moved the 3-point line back a foot to 20' 9", still three feet short of the NBA line. People who follow the game like I do are watching to see what that does to the game. I watched the Tar Heels brick a bunch of threes last night, but frankly they were doing that back when it was at 19' 9".

What it is likely to do is re-introduce the mid-range jumper back into offensive strategies. There are a number of players for whom the foot makes a difference, not your great perimeter shooters, but guys who would launch one from out there when they had a good look because they could hit about one in three of them.

The mid-range jumper, a two-point shot taken from 10-18 feet, is a powerful weapon for the same reason an option play is useful in college football. It gives you another choice when you try to drive the lane and find some obstacle to getting in for your lay-up. You set up for the mid-range jumper the same way you begin a drive in for a lay-up, leaning in with one shoulder and forcing the defender to make a choice about to which side you are going to turn and break.

If the defender guesses correctly, cutting off your lane, his momentum is moving towards the basket and you can plant a foot and get a clean look for the jump shot. My theory is that the line moving back a foot is going to open that area of the court up a bit. This was Jordan's shot, by the way, it was the one he used to win the 1982 Tourney, and it can be devastatingly effective not only at scoring, but at making defenders afraid to commit to cutting off a lane, thus opening them up for drives.

It will be nice to see it come back, if it does. It is too early to tell yet. You can't really tell what is going on with a college basketball team in a particular year until they've played about ten games, right now everyone is at three or four. SImilarly, it's hard to tell what a minor change like this will do until about the same point in the season.

But, those jumpers are graceful sights to behold when done by the true artists, by people like Stephen Curry at Davidson. It'll be fun to watch.

Oh, and for Em, Duke handed Michigan their ass last night. It wasn't really close. Your boys are for real this year.

College Basketball clinics now on ESPN

2008-11-20T16:11:00.000-05:00

College basketball season is underway, and the first Tar Heels game I could see was Tuesday night, and the pre-game included the usual panel of commentators with one new guy--Robert Montgomery Knight, aka Coach Knight, who retired from Texas Tech but made his name at Indiana.

Now, being a Tar Heel fan, I didn't know all that much about Coach Knight other than the fact that people I respected were impressed with him. He got a lot of bad press, whether or not he deserved it I don't know.

Last Tuesday, I sat in front of the TV open-mouthed as he made more serious and substantive observations in the ten minutes or so he had the floor than I've heard out of Dick Vitale's mouth his entire career (and unlike Vitale, he was about to complete a thought without mentioning what a "class program" they have at Duke). I *learned* a lot, a shocking amount considering how much study I give the game in general and this team in particular, from his low-key off-hand comments and observations about the Tar Heel's up-coming game with a badly-struggling Kentucky squad.

Tonight, he provided the color commentary for Duke's game with Southern Illinois. As little as I can stand watching Duke play (Why can't they just play a clean game? Why all the elbows and tripping? Oh, never mind), and worse yet, win, I was unable to turn it off because I was endlessly fascinated by Coach Knight's commentary. I think I learned more about the game in those two hours watching him call a Duke game (I can't believe I'm writing that) than I learned in my first five years as a serious fan.

Whatever you may think of Coach Knight's career thus far, if you want to understand the way the game is played, and why defenses set up they way they do, and what works on offense, and what teams that are falling behind need to do to catch up, try to catch a game that Coach Knight is calling. It was absolutely riveting. He's got a great career ahead of him as a commentator.

QoTD: Becoming

2008-11-16T23:52:00.000-05:00

Becoming, which results from clinging, involves the idea of having or being something more satisfying than at present. We want to become a very good meditator, or we want to become spiritual, or more learned. We have all sorts of ideas but are all bound up with wanting to become, because we are not satisfied with what we are. Often we do not even pay attention to what we are now, but just know that something is lacking. Instead of trying to realize what we are and investigating where the difficulty actually lies, we just dream of becoming something else. When we have become something or someone else, we can be just as dissatisfied as before.

-Ayya Khema, When the Iron Eagle Flies

Firefox tells me (via the text completion feature) that I have posted a blog with the title before, it might even be the same quote. Interesting, this lesson is something I really need to realize, which is another way of saying that I believe I need to become a person who relinquishes becoming. Funny.

Shuttle Endeavor is in orbit.

2008-11-14T15:06:00.000-05:00

The crew assisting the astronauts aboard forgot to put in one of the locking pins for the inner door of the "white room," the retractable passageway that the astronauts use to board the vehicle, so it was flapping in the breeze as they retracted it (some poor sap might have lost his job this evening), but other than that it was a pretty nominal launch.

Election night in Harlem

2008-11-04T18:28:00.000-05:00

Being an old hand at electoral politics, I knew Obama won at 9:23 pm EST when whatever channel I was watching called Ohio.

But, as my election night friend and I watched PBS at 11 p.m., which wasn't calling any states, just reporting what others called, we heard a spontaneous uprising of cheers and general celebrations out the window in Harlem. The entire community had spontaneously erupted in shouts of "Obama" and "Yes, We Did."

I walked home about 20 minutes later and now I am blogging to you about it. On the way home a large African-American gentleman in a leather jacket walked up to me and offered his hand and we exchanged the handshake familiar to African-Americans in these parts, an elaborate ritual that ends in a hug, and he said to me "This is not just for me, brother, it's for you, too."

I said, "Oh, don't I know it. I moved to New York to get away from George W. Bush."

Harlem erupts. Everyone was walking uptown from where I was, probably to the State Office Building at 125th and Seventh Ave where a campaign celebration was sponsored by Charlie Rangel, my newly-re-elected congressman, out in the courtyard in front of the building. It's probably quite a scene out there.

Now I know that my electoral college predictions were way shy of where they're going to end up. I didn't have Obama winning Ohio or Virginia, but I'm still confident in my popular vote predictions, which has always been my forte, anyway. If you don't count 2000, since we actually did win (3,000 aging Jews in Palm Beach County did not intend to vote for Pat Buchanan, even he admits that), I have called every Presidential election correctly since 1976.

But, I have never seen anything like I saw tonight in Harlem at 11pm. That was utterly remarkable.

Voting in Harlem

2008-11-04T07:32:00.000-05:00

I went to vote this morning at about 8:15am, roughly 2 hours after the polls opened.

Usually, I walk right up and in to the voting tables in the cafeteria of the elementary school where I vote. This morning, there was a line for the first time in my experience (I voted here in 2004 for Kerry) and my name had been purged from the voter rolls even though I have not moved or otherwise changed my status. Thank you HAVA! I did cast an affidavit ballot.

At other places in Harlem which I walked past on the way to work the lines were like those pictured at the right. Specifically this picture is for a voting place across the street from my neighborhoods Starbucks, at W. 118th Street and Eighth Avenue.

Lots of young people in line, lots of people with their children in tow. I think this is hopefull

QoTD: How to Be an Adult in Relationships

2008-10-28T13:02:00.000-04:00

"When you see love as a way of being present for somebody rather than just "feeling" something for them, everything changes."

This is a blurb on an advertising insert from Shambhala, a book publisher, that was in a book I bought last week. It is advertising this book--How to Be and Adult in Relationships, by David Richo.

I have not read or even seen the book, I know nothing about it. This post is not about the book, it's about this blurb I saw in the advertising insert.

But, that one sentence has a treasure trove of wisdom in it. Oh, if I had just realized that 30 years ago....

Chicago dogs are awesome

2008-10-25T16:22:00.000-04:00

I'd heard about them, but I didn't believe.

Stuck at Midway for 3 hours, even the hot dogs are the friggin airport are dah bomb. Char-grilled, piled high with peppers, onions, etc.

Now I believe. I must master this dish.

Yes, I lived almost 50 years without having one, and this is not my first trip to Chicago, though it has been a while (20-odd years). I don't know what was wrong with me before.

On politics in 2008

2008-10-10T16:53:00.000-04:00

This election year has been unique in a number of ways, particularly for me, and particularly unique for the last 16 years.

First, some disclosure for those who don't know. I am a registered Democrat and I have been since 1984. I am proudly Liberal and Socialism doesn't scare me. I do not believe that G. W. Bush actually won the election in 2000. I decided upon Barack Obama as my choice for the Presidential nomination at the end of January, but if I could have had the opportunity to choose earlier, Chris Dodd would have been my choice. I have worked in 5 Presidential campaigns and two Gubernatorial races. I have voted for one Republican, Mike Bloomberg for NYC Mayor, twice, and I will vote for him a third time if given the opportunity.

This election is a change from the last two because neither of the candidates scares me. I knew in 1999 (as did anyone else who chose to open their eyes) that a George W. Bush presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for this country. In previous campaigns I was just working to express a preference, in 2000 and 2004 I was desperately trying to prevent a national tragedy.

I like this better. Even though I'm completed disgusted by the campaign McCain is running. his Presidency didn't scare me until he chose Sarah Palin. Ms. Palin is completely unprepared and unqualified to be Vice President. This choice was reckless and completely irresponsible. Something happened to McCain, something got to him. He wants this too badly. He's forgotten why he got into public service.

This is sad for me because i have a lot of friends who are life-long Republicans. They haven't had national leadership they could be proud of in 12 years. They aren't Republicans because they believe in borrow-and-spend legislation, corruption, abuse of power, torture, lying, militaristic opportunism, governmental incompetence and institutional hate. But, that's what their party has done with their support since Bob Dole lost to Clinton in 1996.

They had a chance this year, McCain has a long record of being a decent man, a competent legislator and an enlightened leader, particularly in times of crisis. Then, whatever happened to him happened. They're back in the idiot-bucket, either reduced to apologizing for their leadership and holding their nose to vote, or they simply have stopped discussing politics and stopped voting altogether, dismissing the entire field with the same brush.

While Obama has misrepresented McCain's record on Social Security and exaggerated the closeness of his association with (and emulation of) G. W. Bush, he hasn't even approximated the lows of the McCain campaign since the convention. Politics could stand some kindness, generosity and wisdom on both sides, but there's a palpable difference between the parties in tone and restraint. My Republican friends are decent, polite, respectful people whom I trust with my feelings and reputation. They deserve better leadership.

Winning isn't everything. It's not even the third or fourth most important thing. It's like watching Jerry Springer or Reality TV sometimes, I just can't believe that people are willing to act that way in public.

It is interesting that in the same year that Hillary Clinton broke such ground for women with her campaign, Sarah Palin trots out the worst stereotypes of anti-feminist lore. She's trading on her looks, she's vindictive, vicious, unprepared, and vain. Every old boys network that has whispered behind the back of a female executive promoted beyond her capabilities has practically described Ms. Palin to a T. The McCain campaign is treating her like a fiance that no one in the family likes, keeping her protected and under wraps, accusing anyone who challenges her as a childish, sexist, partisan while preventing Ms. Palin from having the opportunity to defend herself and demonstrate that she is something more than a cheerleader in a silk jacket and tailored skirt. The contempt that the McCain campaign shows for Ms. Palin by protecting her like some delicate, fragile flower is far more palpable than anything offered by the opposition, the press, or the public.

"Being thrown under the bus" is going to take on a new meaning when McCain loses this campaign. Sarah Palin is going to be virtually tarred and feathered. This trooper firing thing is going to hang around like a bad rash. She been the point person on the hate-mongering that has rapidly gotten so out of hand that McCain had to dial it back today, getting booed by his own rally for doing so. She's the reason that a large number of conservatives offended by her anti-intellectualism will stay home on election day. She is going to be the face of McCain's loss this year.

I expect she'll end up with a show on Fox News, though.

I'll make my prediction public now about the popular vote--Obama 55%, McCain 41%. Both Ron Paul and Bob Barr are going to poll more than expected. They won't throw the results, but they will embarrass McCain as the election will be compared to LBJ in 1964. In the electoral college I am thinking about 293-245.

I don't support everything Obama has proposed. I like HIllary's health plan better, I liked Edwards' focus on economic violence (aka poverty) better, I even found Huckabee's focus on small businesses and rural economics an interesting approach. But, I've been around long enough to realize that no Presidential candidate gets everything legislatively that is promised.

If we get a responsible government out of this election, it will be the first in a long time, and there will be a lot of work to do. One of Obama's core values is that compromise is better than loss, so I imagine a lot of work will get done on long-overdue domestic legislation. With regard to foreign policy, it's clear that the entire world is just holding its collective breath until Bush is gone, I'm confident we'll get a lot of good work done there as well.

WIll taxes go up under Obama? Yes. That's the price we'll pay for responsible government. Less spending on our children's credit. I live in one of the highest taxed locales in the country, I pay about 40% of my income for the privilege of living in New York City. I am a single childless male earning in the high five figures. I get no relief from anywhere, I just pay.

That's fine with me. NYC government is efficient and helpful People who need help get it, the city works. I value the quality of my life more than the quantity of my bank account. Taxes are not a dirty word to me.

So, that's it. I've been commenting on the election in other people's blogs, but not writing much on my own. I am not in a campaign this year. That's weird, it reminds me of the first fall that I didn't go to school. I'm a bit disoriented, but okay. It really is fun in a way to watch.

How you can help with the credit crisis.

2008-10-02T14:17:00.000-04:00

Save more.

I hope in my lifetime we get another President willing to ask the American people to sacrifice something when we have a problem. I am utterly dismayed that noticeably absent from all this discussion about the financial crisis is a rallying cry to the people to help.

We could all do a lot to put our house back in order if we would save more.

No, it's not the only answer, it's not a complete solution, but it would make a big dent in the problem if people simply banked more money.

For those of you still confused about what the problem really is, let me spell out for you what isn't in the public discourse. It all boils down to this--the banks are afraid to lend each other money because they aren't sure that the other banks actually have any money.

Money comes in many forms for a bank: cash, property, commodities and "paper," i.e., contracts for payment later. There's a lot of "paper" out there that might not be worth anything because the promise of repayment was accepted without any real evidence that it could be kept.

The plan is to have the government buy up a lot of the paper so that the banks have real money instead. That will allow the banks to comfortably lend to each other again and we can have a more stable economic recession in the coming years. The recession is a done deal, there's no way around that, the question is whether it will be orderly or chaotic.

So, if you want to help, what the banks need is cash deposits. Truly, if everyone would simply bank as much as possible of their paychecks for the rest of the year we wouldn't need any government bail-out. I know that's not going to happen, just like my diligent recycling and re-use isn't going to close any landfills, but it helps.

So, find something you regularly consume (and spend cash for) that you can do without and bank that money instead of spending. This economy needs correction as much as Wall Street. We have too many consumer goods (and services), too many jobs that depend upon their consumption. It's not healthy, it is not sustainable.

Bank your cash.

By request: How I became a Buddhist (and why I'm trying to un-do all that).

2008-10-01T12:24:00.000-04:00

Sam requested this one.

I have to reach back to high school to find the very beginning of what (I believe) led me to Buddhism. I went to a Catholic High School that was jointly led by a very progressive Benedictine Friary and Convent. Religion courses were required content every year, but by the time I enrolled (10th grade) they were through with teaching Catholicism, the courses were all comparative religion courses, and remember this was the 70s, before the Christo-fascists had achieved their domination of religious life in this country, so they were all earnest examinations of the common threads that run through all religious disciplines.

When we got to Buddhism in my sophomore year, the cleric teaching the course, a Friar (we called him "brother"), took us all into one of the chapels. We pushed the pews out of the way, sat on the floor, lit a candle, and he taught us to meditate.

Simple enough, right? I'll bet everyone reading this has had someone "teach" them to meditate this way at one time or another.

Well, this very first time meditating, on the floor of that chapel in my high school, I had what we Japanese-oriented Zen Buddhists call a "kensho" experience. I suddenly had the experience of non-duality, realizing a taste of the true nature of reality, truly "seeing" for the first (and only, so far) time in my life what is really happening in front of every one of us all the time.

I can't describe it, any words I put to it automatically become false as soon as they are uttered. It is a "what color is a sunset?" question. It can't be answered, can't be described, can't be discussed, etc. Those who have had a taste of this know why, but they can't really transfer that realization to anyone else.

In the way that you can say a sunset is "orange," I can say that the experience was profoundly comforting and satisfying, but just like calling a sunset "orange" when there are so many other hues present, not to mention the contribution of the blue of a clear sky in the east, the white of puffy clouds, etc etc, etc, similarly the words "comforting" and "satisfying" are puny and impotent.

I didn't meditate again for 7 years, but I sure thought those Buddhists were on to something. I also read everything by Alan Watts, who does a really good job of covering the intellectual life of Zen. There's an Alan Watts podcast service now which I highly recommend to anyone who likes hearing a lively philosopher discuss his work, even if zen buddhism is not a passion of yours.

In 1981 I was a taxi driver in Austin. I was a bad taxi driver, or I should say I was a good driver for everyone except myself, my customers and the dispatcher liked me well enough, but I didn't make any money because I lacked the cut-throat competitiveness that being successful in that line of work demanded. We didn't work on street-hails, we were dispatched, and we were dispatched over CB, so my calls were intercepted frequently by other drivers and I did a lot of driving around discovering that the person who called for a cab had already left. I also was tricked by a number of hookers and other hustlers out of money and into dicey situations.

I soon found that my best strategy was just to stay in downtown Austin and wait for a call that I could get to quickly. The dispatchers liked this, there wasn't a lot of dispatch from downtown, but when they needed one they had me and they knew I would get there in a hurry. This left me with a lot of time on my hands so I began reading.

I read The Three Pillars of Zen by Phillip Kapleau, mostly while sitting in my cab under the canopy of an old gas station in downtown Austin (a site which is now a large bank). This book, published in 1965, was one of the first books (in English) to discuss Zen Buddhism not as a mysterious and opaque philosophy, but rather as a way of living. I didn't do anything with my practice at this point, I was more interested in chasing girls and finding unique and unusual ways to alter my consciousness back then, but I did resolve at this time that if I ever found myself needing a religious practice this would definitely be it.

Over the next 20 years I would meditate off and on, usually to increase the esteem some bra-less beauty had for me (so I could seem all spiritual and stuff to coax her out of the rest of her clothes), but I never had anything I could honestly call a practice until (I followed yet another woman into) a meditation course in New York in 2003.

This was with the Friends of Western Buddhism Order in New York City. Vajramati, a very pleasant English gentleman, was my teacher. I can't explain why this stuck, the woman I was in pursuit of only stayed for the first class of an eight week series, but stick it did, and I have meditated essentially every day since.

As my practice matured I found it helpful to study. At first, I studied the FWBO literature earnestly, thinking that would be my path, but I quickly became disenchanted with the mysticism and complexity of it. Because of my roots in Zen I came back to Zen study. I came back to "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" and began to sit in zazen, the zen way of sitting, rather than in the way that the FWBO sits, and my practice began to deepen quickly.

Things went along fine, I was sitting at home alone on a regular basis, and I was reading voraciously every book I could find on zen, trying to find a teacher. I then came to Steve Hagen, the author of "Buddhism Plain and Simple," and I found his approach very resonant with my thoughts.

I don't like mysticism, I don't like religious-ness. I don't like hierarchy, formality or pretense. I much prefer simplicity and humility. I felt like I had a taste of much of practice except that I had never done so at a zen center. I arranged to sit a one-day sesshin (meditation intensive) at San Francisco Zen Center in the summer of 2006 that forever altered the course of my practice. I had a terrible time, but I realized that zen was for me.

Sitting with others made a palpable difference in my practice. I had heard a lot about different experiences that people go through in the course of practice but it was all theory to me until I began sitting zazen with other people. Suddenly all this stuff that people talk about--visions, hallucinations, bodily sensations, out-of-body experiences, etc--manifested in my practice. Ultimately, none of that is as significant as it sounds, it's all jazz, but having the experiences finally caused me to feel like I was a part of something.

The next turning point was regularly listening to the dharma talks broadcast as pod-casts from Steve Hagen, whom I now regard as my teacher. Steve and I are a lot alike intellectually and emotionally. We are both matter-of-fact scientists at heart, impatient with bullshit no matter how well it is dressed, and this makes him a very effective teacher for me.

Once I began to really study with Steve it all fell into place, or it all fell apart, depending on where you sit. (insert rim-shot here) I acquired a lineage, a tradition of teachers and teachings, and I really began to see things as they really are.

One important thing upon Steve and I agree is that we both regret becoming Buddhists. We don't regret our practice, we don't reject the opportunities to teach that the identification as a Buddhist sometimes presents, but we regret ever thinking that we had to form ourselves around something particular. That is, someone who is a Buddhist is not a Christian.

That's utter Bullshit. Total, complete, transparent bullshit. Look for a Buddhist, look for a Christian. If you really see, there's no there there. There's a lot of belief and thought around all that, but that's something very different from reality.

So, these days I don't talk about being a Buddhist and I am hoping that some day people will forget that I ever called myself such a thing. I still study the Teaching, and I always will, but my view of it requires that I reject "-isms" of any kind. I most like talking about the Dharma (the Teaching) without using any Buddhist terminology whatsoever.

I don't mind other people calling me a Buddhist, don't get me wrong. If it helps to do so, please do, but I do not apply that label to myself. Doing so is just grist for more disappointment and delusion.

I have plenty already.

Hope that was what you wanted, Sam.

What you got me from the Apple store (SoHo).

2008-09-18T19:44:00.000-04:00

39% of the purchase of a MacBook 13.3/2.4/2x1GB/160/SD-DL - White, (the beefier version).

My 2005 iBook is currently dead. I took it apart to replace the HD and after putting it back together (four times) it won't power up. I surrender, I am going to take it to my local after-market Mac Shop and ask them to repair my take-apart (nothing was wrong with it when I first put a torq-driver to it,I wanted to replace the HD, so in theory the "repair" should just be a matter of taking it apart and putting it back together correctly, let's hope), unless the estimate is more than it is worth, or I inadvertently shorted something out. I have a buyer for it when it is working, so that may cover a large chunk of the other 61% once I pay for the fix.

I couldn't live without a mac. It's official. I hated coding on Windows, I couldn't sync the iPod, etc.

I do not recommend you attempt to take apart an iBook. I know heart surgery, I've scrubbed in on heart surgery. Heart surgery is simpler and has fewer parts. A friend provided me with the "take-apart" manual for this model (late 2004 iBook G4) from Apple. I should note at this point what I really needed was a "put together" manual.

I bought an apple black stick.

I got the ice cube trays to keep the screws.

I plugged everything back in.

I have successfully taken apart as reassembled numerous Dell, Toshiba, Gateway, and Fujitsu laptops without the benefit of any kind of a manual. I can take apart and reassemble standard PC's in my sleep. I am not without skills in this regard, or so I thought.

Fortunately, I did a Time Machine backup right before I started. I will never attempt this again. Apple repair techs have my awestruck admiration now.

Setup Assistant applied everything to my new machine seamlessly (even though the old machine was PowerPC), I am back in my old environment, except I have a 16:9 screen instead of a 4:3 now. RIght now I am applying the Software Updates, next I'll be grabbing my 253 downloads waiting at iTMS.

Anyway, thanks again for the Gift Card (the 39% calculation includes the "late" contributions I have yet to actually have in hand, by the way, thanks for that). When the insurance claim is paid off I will be replacing my burgled iPod boom-box, the burgled LaCie drive, the burgled extra AC power supply, and purchasing AppleCare for the new machine. That list is what I really intended to use the GIft Card for, I just needed to get back to coding and I was tired of battling encoding-fu with Windows, so I jumped ahead a bit and got the MacBook to replace the ThinkPad T22 I lost in the burglary early. I'll get the rest of the stuff when the insurance money arrives, I promise.

Thank you all so much. It is good to be loved by so many. I can't express the depth of the meaning this has for me.

You guys are the very best

2008-09-16T17:16:00.000-04:00

So, I get home tonight and find a FedEx package with the mail. btlzu2 and I have been exchanging e-mail messages for the last few days about it's delivery. I don't use the apt number in my address because all of the mail for the 5 apts in my converted brownstone use the same slot. The mail just gets dumped on the floor inside the front door and one of us picks it up and sorts it on the table in the foyer.

FedEx, however, requires an apartment number (mine is #1, for the record, and a very unimaginative whois query will get you the rest of my address) before they will shove their envelope through the (only) slot, so that delayed the arrival. I knew something was coming from btlzu2, but I didn't know what it was, I figured he was returning the Taiwanese porn DVD's I lent him the last time he was in NYC. He wanted to tell me what was on the way, but I declined to ask him to spill the beans.

It's an Apple store gift card from you guys, a very large one, and I am floored by your loving generosity and kindness, and impressed by your wisdom in choosing the Apple store as the proxy benefactor. I indeed need to spend at least this much money at the Apple store in order to replace my burgled items, I've just been waiting to settle the insurance claim first, and this gift card covers 95% of my insurance deductable, so you guys made me whole.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I can't stop smiling, I can't stop the tears either. From the bottom of my heart, this means so much.

Reason #254 why Apple rocks.

2008-09-16T14:52:00.000-04:00

I sent Apple support a message (using their on-line form at apple.com) concerning the fact that I had lost my iTunes Library because of the simultaneous burglary (of the external HD and spindle of back-up disks) and iPod failure kindly requesting that they allow me to re-download my purchases.

Today I Fire up iTunes and I have 253 downloads pending. I guess that's everything.

Nice to know that Apple has my back.

Blocking ads in Google Chrome for Windows

2008-09-13T17:55:00.000-04:00

Here's a slick little hack.

Download and install Privoxy, a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data, managing HTTP cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups and other obnoxious Internet junk.

Click the wrench, choose Options, Under the Hood, Change Proxy Settings, which opens the control panel applet. Choose LAN Settings, set your proxy settings to 127.0.0.1 port 8118.

Flush your caches and cookies. It's not perfect, but it is good enough to make me not miss AdBlock in Firefox.

Hurricane Ike

2008-09-11T18:33:00.000-04:00

Link

Just checking out the auto-link service for my weather information service provider--wunderground.com.

This storm is forecasted to boomerang back across the US. I don't think I've seen that before.

Seven years ago today

2008-09-11T04:46:00.000-04:00

I was in New York City.

That evening, I wrote e-mails to my friends and family, mostly in Texas, and I learned later that these e-mails had been read to schoolchildren in Houston, printed-out and posted on bulletin boards at West Point, and published in newspapers in various locations, I lost track of exactly where.

If they are remarkable, it is because it was my little experience as a regular New Yorker on that day, not someone at ground zero, not someone involved in the tragedy or the rescue, not someone who knew they had lost a loved one (later I discovered I knew two who died there), I was just a regular guy living with what happened in my City.

I wrote one e-mail a night for four days.

September 11, 2001

September 12, 2001

September 13, 2001

September 14, 2001

This year is the first anniversary during which I work in lower Manhattan. I normally walk past Ground Zero on the way to work, I couldn't this morning because they have the perimeter blocked-off for the observance. There are fire trucks, police cars, garbage trucks, and ambulances parked everywhere on the streets, and there are firemen, police officers, sanitation workers, and EMT personnel all walking around looking somber.

It really brings it all back for me.

I am wearing a copper bracelet engraved with "FF Francis Esposito, FDNY Ladder 79" today, as I do every year on this day. I didn't know him or his family, it was a random choice from those available in the months after the attacks. I wear it in solidarity with everyone's loss.

Thanks for reading. Be well.

Things I've learned from my burglary - Part 1

2008-09-02T04:04:00.000-04:00

1. You friends don't know what you own.

My house was burgled while I was in Dallas for my mother's mastectomy. I asked two friends who had keys to go to my house and see what was missing. They told me that my things had been rifled through but they couldn't tell that anything was missing.

The count of stolen items thus far: 3 laptops, 1 17" LCD display, 1 250GB external HD, 1 belt (odd, but the burglars left me a t-shirt, so maybe that was a trade), 1 alabaster ashtray (a family heirloom, almost worthless to them, priceless to me), 1 set of PowerPC Leopard install disks, 1 iPod dock/boombox, 2 pairs of iPod headphones, two laptop bags.

2. My burglars were not in a hurry.

They took at least one shower, they went through every storage box, they went through my sock drawer, they went through everything. They clearly had no concern whatsoever for being discovered.

3. Off-site backups are important for personal data as well.

They took my external HD and my spindle of backup disks. Gone is my entire iTunes Library (in an unrelated but remarkably bad timing event, my iPod died during my trip as well and the data on it are unrecoverable), all of the web design work I have done since 1997 (except live code, obviously), all of my pictures, my own writing, everything. I was real proud of the fact that I had everything organized so well on that HD.

Fortunately I have been a PGP/GnuPG user since 1997, too. My privacy has not been seriously compromised. I am a diligent encryption user.

4. They're just possessions.

I'm bummed-out, but not heart-broken. I actually like the way my apartment looks with all that stuff gone. I had my most valuable possessions (the iBook, the broken iPod) with me. My cat is still with me. I hate what has happened, but in comparison to the litany of losses I have had in the past two years this is no great tragedy.

If anyone has a set of Tiger install disks for the PowerPC architecture they can loan me, I need some. I ordered a bigger HD for my iBook and now I can't install it because I can't restore the OS. I have a Tiger upgrade disk. I don't know why they didn't take that, it was out in plain sight.

Where I've Been

2008-08-31T02:12:00.000-04:00

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer about a month ago. For a number of weeks I helped her by long distance (I'm in NYC, she's in Dallas) figure out the specifics of her situation and investigate her various options so she could make an intelligent decision about what to do, specifically a decision that took into account her age (79).

When she did make a decision, and when her community of health care providers gave her approval for surgery, she elected to have a "lumpectomy" and follow that up with some hormonal therapy, since her cancer was of a type that responds well to that. A number of her consultants encouraged her to have radiation as well, but she decided against that (in my opinion a wise decision) because it offered little in terms of increased lifespan and carries a significant therapeutic burden (showing up somewhere five days a week for six weeks).

It was day surgery, she tolerated it well. The next day we did a little shopping and ate lunch out. She has a follow up appt with her surgeon 9/8 and we'll find out the final details about the tissue she removed and the margins and such. Essentially, this was a cure.

We didn't get a date for the surgery until about 1 pm on Aug 22, and the date was last Tuesday (August 26) at 7:30am, so I had to get a flight from NYC to Dallas in a hurry. My Gosh, that was expensive, even using a "compassion fare."

My best option turned out to be Jet Blue, JFK to Austin (Jet Blue doesn't fly to Dallas, but they do fly to Austin). Even then, the ticket was so much I couldn't afford to rent a car, so I asked my friend tuckfoot, who owns a Toyota Prius and has a lot of time on his hands, to drive me up to Dallas (about 200 miles) and around Dallas while I was there, in exchange for his meals and all car expenses (we have mutual friends in Dallas to visit as well).

It is good to have friends like that. After 5 days attached at the hip we were pretty sick of each other, and tuckfoot was sick of driving, but I have to say it's good to have friends like that, it was truly yeoman's service. I was never without someone to run an errand or talk to. That was good.

Flying to Austin also gave the opportunity to spend some time with friends in Austin, and to soak up some Central Texas culture--food, music and drink--something that always recharges me. I am in Austin now, though while here I jumped on a fare sale at American Airlines to book a return trip at the end of September to spend some more time with my Mom in a few weeks.

Also, while in Texas, someone broke into my apartment in NYC and stole a bunch of stuff from my roommate. I don't know yet what I've lost, if anything, but a nice thing about having few possessions is I had all of my really valuable possessions with me in Texas when this happened. More about that later when I know more.

So, while I was down here the Democrats had their convention and both candidates named their running mates. It hasn't been the focus of my attention, though I did hear all of the major speeches live.

Biden was my choice for VP for Obama, so I'm glad Barack took my advice there.

Sarah Palin is a remarkably inept and puzzling choice. I'm sure she's an awesome person, you don't go from Mayor to Governor and enjoy 80% approval without having some successes and charms, but if McCain thinks a pro-life, gun-toting, Evangelical Christian, self-styled "hockey-mom" is going to win over Clinton supporters in large numbers then he has even more contempt for Hillary's supporters than I thought.

Also, in one fell swoop he obliterated his top negative message, i.e., that youth and inexperience disable Obama's ability to serve as President.

McCain is elderly, cancer-prone, and has a risky lipid profile (bad cholesterol numbers). His supporters care about the VP a bot more than usual because the chances are better than usual that the VP will end up as President if McCain is elected. He had to dig pretty deep to find someone with even less of a governmental resume than Obama, but he did it. Now he has absolutely no credibility whatsoever asserting that youth and inexperience in a potential President are risky (you might have noticed that this message has vanished from the political discourse except in the way that i bring it up here).

The not-hard-to-look-at Sarah Palin will satisfy a swath of the Republican base, but these are the same people who still think George W. Bush is doing a good job. This is not a voter pool that is going to expand, college students (who may or may not actually vote, we'll see) alone overwhelm them in numbers, and these right-wing "values voters" would have either voted for McCain or stayed home anyway no matter whom he picked. I'm all for MILFy politicians in the news, I hope someone can dig up some photos from the 1984 Miss Alaska contest, particularly the swimsuit competition, but for an Obama supporter, the news couldn't have been better. It makes you wonder if McCain *wants* to lose.

I also didn't expect that Bill Clinton would give the best speech at the Democratic convention, but he did. Obama's was quite satisfactory, but he didn't hold in the audience in his palm like Bill Clinton did. I didn't actually see much of the convention, I mostly listened to it on the radio.

I'll probably see most of the Republican convention. I doubt I'll do so silently. :-)

Good to be back.

Awesome Salvage, now you Geeks help me figure out what it is...

2008-08-15T16:32:00.000-04:00

Incredulity aside, I saved this from the trashcan, or rather the salvage company that was cleaning up after us when we moved.

I know, I know, how could they and all that. Well, let's move right on beyond that.

I know it is a tape drive and I know it is a tape drive with 320GB capacity, and I know it has slide-in tape magazines and an auto-changer.

Here's a close up of the front panel. So, as I ask you to help me figure this thing out and make some use of it, I don't really need to be told that it is a Quantum SDLT320 tape drive, with magazines on the right and left. I know that. The magazines are also full of tapes so I don' t need to be told that I'm going to have to invest in tapes. I also have another 20 tapes or so that appear to be unused that I also salvaged.

Speaking of also-salvaged, I also have this server pictured below, which I have already installed Debian Etch on. I don't need so much help with it, except that I want it to talk to this tape drive.

I have plugged a cable from the tape drive into the server. Even if I can't get this tape drive to work, I am going to use this server as an image repository for my workstations. That is, I am going to keep drive images here that I burn with Acronis for deploying new workstations.

What I'd like to do, and what I am asking for your help with, is also making this into an Amanda server for backups of a few of my more critical production workstations..

Help.

My server doesn't seem to even see the tape drive, I find no mention of it in dmesg, so I'm thinking I am going to have to do some kernel hacking. Any ideas?

I have no money for this project, it is entirely corporate dumpster-diving.

Greatly exaggerated,

2008-08-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

the rumors of my demise are.

Busy, busy, busy.

If you're in IT and you've ever moved 260 workstations and three servers you'll know what I mean. There's a lot to do. Other people also need a lot from you. I'm buried in work. I think I'll be back to normal in time to enjoy the World Series.

My mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. It has been described by her doctor and both the experts I asked to review her case as "the good kind of cancer." That makes as much sense to me as "the bad kind of sex," but the fact is that there are a number of different prognostic indicators for breast cancer, i.e., size, location, degree of infiltration, number of lesions, responsiveness to estrogen, etc, and all of these indicators in my mother's case are positive. She has a form of breast cancer that responds very well to relatively easy-to-tolerate treatment. The surgery is simple, if she needs follow up radiation it is of a variety that is easy to tolerate, and she might not need it at all.

As you can imagine, it took me quite a bit of time to gather than information.

I'm also getting a lot of work in my side business (web design/hosting). That's good, because I need the scratch, but it cuts directly into the time I have for Multiply.

So, that's why I've been MIA. Hope you're all well.

Go J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets!

Let's all have a good laugh at my expense.

2008-07-27T18:46:00.000-04:00

I mean it, that's not some obtuse victim plea. This is a modern fable of geekiness overcoming one's self.

I thought GMail was broken. All of my messages were being marked as read. I filter a lot, and I rely on the filters and labels to virtually stash certain mail that I either want to attend to immediately, or ignore until I am ready to deal with it. I've been doing this a long time and it is an important part of the way I handle my electronic communication.

Most of you, all of you who have e-mailed me more than once in a blue moon, have a filter and a label set on your e-mail address.

Suddenly, everything coming in was being marked as read and nothing was staying in the inbox. WTF? I turned off Google Labs, I checked the message boards and mailing lists, no one else was seeing this behavior apparently. Why oh why was my gmail all brokey?

The culprit? MobileMe.

I have Mail.app set-up on one machine that fetches my mail when I open it. It's not the machine I use every day, it is a friend's PowerMac tower with a gargantuan HD that she doesn't use mush of. I'm her tech support, she uses me regularly (if it feels this good being used...), so when I am at her office I log-in, fire up Mail.app and download it to her machine where it is faithfully backed up on her awesome over-engineered back-up system. I'm her off-site storage, she burns incremental DVD's of /Users/* regularly and I pick up a copy, which has my stuff on it too, whenever I drop by her office for espresso and looking down her blouse.

While I'm there, I fire up Mail.app and DL a bunch of e-mails, knowing well that this flips the "Mark Read" bit, so I make sure beforehand that I've checked everything I want to check.

Then came MobileMe. I demonstrated it for her on her PowerMac by setting up my account and letting it fly.

That sent my Mail account information to my iBook, which I do use every day, and the iPod Touch, which I am sure is the real culprit. I got the message about it changing my e-mail accounts on the next sync and just clicked through it. I was still in her office when this happened.

So, I fired up Mail.app tonight for another reason (I usually process e-mail on the GMail web client) and lo and behold, the light bulb went on.

GMail was doing exactly what I set it to do. Mark Read and archive everything that gets POP3'd. Labels still work, of course.

MobileMe, I'm still getting used to the notion that my iPod is a fully functioning Internet terminal, getting pushed mail everytime I walk by an open WiFi access point, or at home, or in the office.

GMail, I'm so sorry I doubted you...

Things that are the bomb.

2008-07-20T16:24:00.000-04:00

Imagine the title of this blog as spoken by Chappelle doing his white guy. Now that I've had me some brown sugar I will endeavor to not revert to my conventional ways.

iPhone/iPodTouch 2.0 firmware

Damn, these guys know what they're doing. No, I don't have an iPhone, I have the iPhone wihtout the phone, the iPod Touch. Forgive me, Apple-brethren, but I think this is the superior device at the moment, given the problems with att and 3G coverage.

It's going to change, but for now, for me, finding ways of getting reliable wifi is easier than putting up with intermittency of cell service, particularly att, these days. They will fix this, the information economy demands it, but the way things are now, I'd rather plan my web browsing around being able to get a wifi signal than put up with not knowing if I can get cell service at all when it occurs to me that I want to look something up.

Again, something will give here, either att will tune up or the phone will go carrier-transparent. Cite all the contracts and business declarations you want, but the utility of an Internet-enabled reliable hypertext and webscript terminal universally where there are people is too big a wave to resist. We will make it happen.

At that point, the iPhone will be the genre-killer.

Until then, my iPod does everything I want, and it doesn't tell people where I am.

http://pandora.com/

The Music Genome Project

Then find the free Pandora app at the iPhone app store. Coolness.

Answer: Exim4, SMTP and my corporate overlords

2008-07-18T13:23:00.000-04:00

I figured it out, thanks for the help. They are blocking my outbound 25 TCP traffic.

The project specifically requests that port be open. I have been granted the access, last week it was open.

Sigh.

HELP: At wit's end with Exim4, GMail and my corporate overlords

2008-07-18T10:56:00.000-04:00

I now am at a loss at what to do. If you know something, please help.

I have Exim4 running as an MTA for a server that is inside a network run by paranoid network admins. There is a route-able IP which once incoming packets hit the gateway they get NAT'd to an RFC 1918 address on my box.

Exim4 can send SMTP traffic seemingly everywhere except google. The messages time out with google. That is, I am trying to establish an SMTP dialog with the servers in the MX records for gmail (and my google apps-hosted domains) and nothing happens:

-----

2008-07-18 14:24:30 1KJuTv-0001ca-Mq alt2.aspmx.l.google.com [209.85.147.114] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:24:39 1KJuX7-0001dS-9L alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [209.85.147.27] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:26:55 1KJucM-0001dd-KV ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM [72.14.247.27] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:26:56 1KJucM-0001dd-KV gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [72.14.247.27] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:26:56 1KJucM-0001dd-KV == treo@rdewald.com R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (110): Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:27:39 1KJuTv-0001ca-Mq alt2.aspmx.l.google.com [209.85.147.27] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:27:48 1KJuX7-0001dS-9L alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [209.85.147.114] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:30:05 1KJucM-0001dd-KV alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [209.85.147.27] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:30:48 1KJuTv-0001ca-Mq aspmx2.googlemail.com [209.85.135.27] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:30:57 1KJuX7-0001dS-9L alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [209.85.129.27] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:33:14 1KJucM-0001dd-KV alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [209.85.147.114] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:33:57 1KJuTv-0001ca-Mq aspmx3.googlemail.com [64.233.167.27] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:33:57 1KJuTv-0001ca-Mq == rdewald@hospicenyc.org R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (110): Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:34:06 1KJuX7-0001dS-9L gsmtp147.google.com [209.185.147.27] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:34:06 1KJuX7-0001dS-9L == rdewald@gmail.com R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (110): Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:36:23 1KJucM-0001dd-KV alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [209.85.129.27] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:39:32 1KJucM-0001dd-KV gsmtp183.google.com [64.233.183.27] Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:39:32 1KJucM-0001dd-KV == rdewald@gmail.com R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (110): Connection timed out
2008-07-18 14:43:48 Start queue run: pid=6419
2008-07-18 14:43:49 1KJuX7-0001dS-9L == rdewald@gmail.com R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (-53): retry time not reached for any host
2008-07-18 14:43:49 1KJucM-0001dd-KV == treo@rdewald.com R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (-53): retry time not reached for any host
2008-07-18 14:43:49 1KJucM-0001dd-KV == rdewald@gmail.com R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (-53): retry time not reached for any host
2008-07-18 14:43:49 1KJuTv-0001ca-Mq == rdewald@hospicenyc.org R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (-53): retry time not reached for any host
2008-07-18 14:43:49 End queue run: pid=6419

----

Then it finally times out.

Googling about this gets me all kind of advice about how to use GMail as a smarthost.

I DO NOT EFFING WANT TO USE GOOGLE AS A SMARTHOST.

I just want to send SMTP traffic. Do they not accept any port 25 traffic at all? I can't believe that.

How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

2008-07-14T20:09:00.000-04:00

That's not funny.

Ooh, some people are taking themselves a bit too seriously these days. This is the current cover of my favorite magazine. Some people who are perhaps wound a bit tight, such as the Obama campaign's troublesome Bill Burton, have called this cartoon tasteless and offensive.

I heard all about it on the BBC this evening.

Tasteless and offensive? Damn right, just as all good political satire should be.

I'm sure some people think Stephen Colbert is an enthusiastic conservative, too.

Aw hell, throw another flag on the fire. Budweiser is Belgian beer now.

Here's your clue.

2008-07-07T19:40:00.000-04:00

Advice for wedding guests.

2008-07-06T07:34:00.000-04:00

Don't give every piece of formal clothing you own to the dry cleaner at the same time. I guess you could combine this one with an admonition against procrastination. I had put off going to the dry cleaners for a while. I've been preparing to physically move my work office, so this week I was going business casual, wearing clothes that I launder myself, and I just let the dry cleaning hang in the bag I have for it.

I turned it in last Wednesday, I was going to ask for a shirt and pair of slacks to be expedited, but the ticket I got back said I could pick it up after 9 am on July 5th. Cool! That's plenty of time (the wedding was at 6 pm).

Saturday morning, July 5th, I go to the dry cleaners to pick up my clothes. They're closed for the holiday.

So, I have no shirts I can wear with a tie. Off to the clothing store I go. I find a couple of great shirts 50% off, they're winter weight (which is why they are on sale in July, I'm sure), but otherwise really nice. I'll be inside somewhere, I thought, no problem that they're made of this luxurious, high thread-count cotton.

The wedding was outside, in a very light rain (which makes for 100% humidity). The reception was in a beautiful open-air performance space that offered no relief from temperature or humidity.

I should note at this point that I had a number of beautiful summer-weight shirts at the dry cleaners.

One doesn't need a date for a wedding. I had asked a dear friend of mine to accompany me, a beautiful woman herself, as a favor so I wouldn't have to go alone. She graciously accepted, but I wasn't great about communicating and reminding her of the actual date and time of the wedding.

It was a wedding for a close friend of mine at work, for the last two weeks the bride had been coming to me to rant, ask advice, and generally blow off steam about the pressure of planning it (a ritual I really enjoyed, I actually encouraged her to do this). So, the wedding was regularly on my mind. My companion was not hearing about it all.

So, the day came and she is understandably perturbed that it crept up on her. This only compounded the mood she was in, which could be described as "why am I going to a wedding for people I don't know and will never see again?"

Well, my middle name was "fifth wheel" as a teenager and young adult. I never had a date for anything. My invitation came with a "plus 1" and that opened up all those wounds from my youth. I wanted to go to something with a date for a change, I wanted people to see me as someone who could get one. This was all regression to unfinished business, it was not about here and now. Well, that's a great recipe for craptasticness no matter what the event or who the companion.

I didn't share all this with her ahead of time, so she was just thrilled to be going out on a hot humid and rainy July day to stand in the rain and sweat just because of some vague intention she expressed weeks ago and had since mostly forgotten about. I told her she didn't have to go, and I genuinely meant that, but I did want her to go, I still was living my 17 year-old's pain all over again, so I don't know how genuine my reassurance that she could stay home sounded.

She went, and she looked like a very hot, as in looking good, and dissatisfied goddess.

The bride inquired about the status of our relationship beforehand, and I told her that we were both just friends, single and looking. She sat us at the table with her single friends, and she talked me up beforehand with two of her most gorgeous single female friends, they were both really interested in talking to me, and here I am with a dissatisfied goddess on my arm. The men at the same table, also attractive people, were talking her up, but what could they do with me sitting there? It was like going to a pastry shop when you're on a diet. Argh.

Don't do that. Going to a wedding solo is fine. Asking a loyal friend to go to a wedding for someone they don't know and will never see again is not something to spend the currency of friendship over. If your friend wants to go, that's another thing. Don't ask it as a favor.

Finally, being the designated driver where there is an open bar is just masochistic.

Also, get over the prom before you're in your late forties. Actually, do it now if you haven't done it already.

Please post in my blog!

2008-07-02T18:32:00.000-04:00

Introductory humorous hyperbole. Touching but meaningless personal detail. Declaration of solidarity with enthusiasts for something or someone.

Whimsical navel-gazing. Declaration of fealty to reality, resolve to try, try again. Passive solicitation of praise and encouragement. Earnest pledge to hew to high standards and rigorous discipline.

Tautological declaration of positive environment. Humble allegiance to higher power. Existential fall-back position, half-hearted and transparent well-wishing to readership.

Faith-based Community Action

2008-07-01T19:32:00.000-04:00

Most of you know I work for a hospice. My hospice has a caregiver support program that is conducted by one of our chaplains. I have worked closely with her on my own initiative to integrate her program into our electronic medical record. The more information our clinicians have about what's going on with a family (and hospice treats the entire family when it is done well) the better the care can be. Getting this information into our patient's charts was a win-win because it also provided evidence to the people who fund the program that work is being done.

The program is directed by a Christian Chaplain, who has a Masters of Divinity and extensive training in clinical counseling. We train Chaplains at our agency, which gives us the benefit of retaining the cream of the crop. She is one of the most charming and naturally therapeutic people I've ever known. I know she's a Christian, I do not know what denomination, I've never asked, she's never volunteered. She does wear a clerical collar from time to time.

She primarily conducts four distinct community service groups, one is at a nursing home, one is at our in-patient unit, and two are at a community church. These are caregiver support groups, each a little different, all designed to provide support and comfort to family caregivers of hospice patients. They aren't fancy, just talking, listening, seeing others' experience, having one's own experience seen, sharing some snacks, coffee, etc.

Now, the nursing home and the hospital both receive governmental funds to support the costs of providing the environment for these groups. Providing this environment promotes the mission and work product of these organizations, it's promotional advertising to make it known that these things exist in these places. That nursing home has a leg up on other nursing homes who lack such a service, the same goes for the hospital which houses our in-patient unit.

My hospice, which is mostly supported by Medicare, has a dozen or so Chaplains. We have several demoniations of Christians, a number of Rabbis of different persuasions, and a Buddhist Priest (not me). Medicare dollars pay their salaries. They provide secular services, spiritual counseling, which is a part of the hospice benefit, written into the Federal Regulations. They are all moved to provide this service because their Faith compels them too, however, including the Buddhist.

My reading of The First Amendment restricts the government from laws concerning the establishment of religion. They used the word "promotion" in the last 1700's. They didn't use it here. So, even if one wants to argue that funding the secular services provided by religious organizations promotes said organizations, there is little to distinguish that from analogous promotion of non-religious providers of social services. Why is it okay to fund secular services provided by an academic institution, for example, or at a multi-national corporation, but not at a religious organization?

That kind of disenfranchisement seems to me to smack of lawmaking which actively undermines religion. That a First Amendment problem in my book.

Trans(cending by City regulation)-Fats

2008-06-30T18:23:00.000-04:00

Press Release received today on the NYC.gov-News list-serv:

New York City restaurants will be safer for the hearts of New Yorkers. The final phase of the City's trans fat regulation takes effect July 1, requiring restaurants to clear artificial trans fat from all their menu items. As of tomorrow, all foods served, including baked goods, oils, shortenings and margarines used for baking, and pre-prepared items that contain artificial trans fat, must have less that 0.5 grams of trans fat per serving.

For more information, please go to http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/pr2008/pr047-08.shtml

I know this offends the libertarians, good for you. You sure love that Freedom. I think private businesses should be barred from using low-quality industrial food substitutes when doing so is known to be harmful to public health. Beyond the loss of life and detriment to health this causes, the economic effect of this "protection of freedom" is the transfer of wealth from the health-care system to the food industry, and disproportionately for the more profitable and politically-connected sectors of it. We need to keep our health care dollars in the health care system.

Also, sorry, but I am also not so simple-minded as to believe that this is going to change everyone's behavior or slip heart disease from it's top spot on the mortality and morbidity tables, so go on to your next talking point. I simply think it is piss-poor public policy to worship perfection as some counter-balance to the good. It helps. It benefits everyone. It's good government.

Reason # 1308 that Apple is Awesome

2008-06-28T17:08:00.000-04:00

A doctor I work with (who I have a little crush on) calls me today and tells me her new home printer won't print. I sold her on getting an iMac when she decided to replace her aged PC so I also had my reputation for good technical advice on the line. She lives out on Long Island (for those of you not familiar with New York City, that's an island, and a long one, that serves as a huge suburban community for New York City) so stopping by her house really wasn't practical. Going to see someone in Long Island, particularly without a car, is a day trip.

Sam and I had discussed a feature in iChat that mimics the Apple Remote Support app in many important ways, allowing you to "share your screen" with another iChat user. I was interested in it to solicit *his* help when I needed it, but today it dawned on me I might could use it to score points with this favored colleague of mine. I have no idea what I would do with those points, but that's not the point of points, is it?

So, I interrupted Sam's breakfast to check it out and I learned that it won't work over my corporate network (I was at work today). My corporate overlords block all the fun ports. But, it did work over a data connection with my (EvDO-enabled) Palm Treo 755p, and acceptably well. Once I established that it was "See ya Sam, have a great day" and I started e-mailing my favored colleague.

So, after introducing her to iChat and getting her .mac address, I connected my iBook to her iMac using my cell phone as an ISP. This absolutely blew her mind. She kept saying "I can't fucking believe this" until I turned up her volume so she could hear me talking and she realized that I could hear her. I tested the printer, the iMac couldn't detect the printer's presence for some reason, so I decided to delete the driver she had and install a new one.

I asked her to put in the CD that came with the machine. That installer was broken. When it asked you if you wanted to participate in the customer feedback program it stopped after you answered yes or no. Clicking "continue" would get you back to the feedback question. A buggy programming loop. Great.

I downloaded a driver disk image from HP. It worked. I printed a test page and she started screaming joyfully. She said "I have to buy you something."

I said "take me to lunch."

She said "How about Monday?" I checked my schedule and told her that was okay. "It's a date! You pick the place." she says, music to my ears even though I know well it's all professional and stuff.

So, here's the amazing part to me. The very first time that I ever used the iChat screen-sharing capability myself, I was able to remotely diagnose a problem, download and install a driver, over a mobile broadband connection (connected by bluetooth to the phone, no less), using native tools (just MacOSX, no third-party utilities) for a novice iMac user. And I scored a lunch date that I thought would never happen.

That's awesome.

The last group therapy session.

2008-06-26T18:45:00.001-04:00

My group had 7 members join and 4 leave. We started with 5, 2 joined in the middle, one each year, and we ended the group tonight with 3. The group was never larger than 5, and it was only at that size for a few months. I think that is too small, it's too hard for me to step back from taking things personally in a small group, there's too much pressure to perform, the silences are too frequent and too big.

My group started in September of 2005 and continued until June of 2008. It ultimately broke up because of me, I could no longer afford it, and two group members was too few. However, four people left the group before I did, so I was not alone in my judgement that the costs outweighed the benefits. Of course, for me, it was actual costs in my case, cold hard cash, but other people also made the judgment that it wasn't worth some sacrifice. I was not alone.

This group was not as successful as I wanted it to be. I derived benefit from being there, but it came at a high cost, and in the end my decision to leave was just like everyone else's. I do think that if I had not thrown in the towel someone else would have at about the same time.

I had a wide range of relationships in the group from a deeply connected relatiosnhip with someone as significant to me as almost anyone I've ever known, to a more polite and measured association, something more than an acquaintance that exists in and because of the context, like a co-worker with whom one has worked closely for a long time.

Like I've said elsewhere, there was a group member who targeted me with a lot of anger and frustration. I was not happy with her either for a long period of time, but we sort of resolved that tonight, as much as we could at a parting of ways. If we were remaining in our relationship we would still have a lot to work out, a lot, but I think we would, eventually, but it would require some purpose, like a therapy group, in order to sustain the effort. There's a lot in her that frustrates me about myself. Also, I think our mothers are a lot alike and that just means we'd get into well-worn grooves with old pain, each of us stepping on the other's triggers, and it hurt. A lot. I'm glad that's over.

The other member still in the group was the one who joined last September. It takes a while to get to know someone in this context and we were on our way to doing that, but because we were still just on the way there wasn't a lot of deep feelings to process there. We are a lot alike in our exterior world, similar jobs and ages, and we recognized that and were both very careful to not just fall into roles as we discovered each other. I appreciated that about her.

The other member, the one there with me since the beginning, finally got something off her chest she had been holding for some time. "Stop with the first sentence" she said, voice trembling. She was telling me that I have a tendency to get wordy and explain things too much, and this detracts from genuine communication.

She's right.

[Apple] Dude

2008-06-24T17:03:00.000-04:00

Taking Sam's advice I got a appointment at the genius bar for my busted iBook keyboard.

About 10 minutes before my appointment time I realize such and bolt from my office and catch a cab to get over to the Fifth Avenue store so I don't lose it. I register with the guy and he sends me to the group W bench to wait. I wait, thinking I'm stupid for dashing over here, many minutes pass. I look at my watch and notice that I showed up a full hour early. I still have another 40 minutes to wait.

So, I ask the guy about this and he says "well, we'll take you early if we can, but I can't guarantee that."

I see something in his eye, so I say "that's not going to happen, is it?"

"No," he says, "it's not."

So, I did bring a book with me, Obama's "Dreams From My Father" and I start reading it. Men, listen up. Four fabulously gorgeous women walked right up to me in 15 minutes and asked how I was enjoying the book. I am never going to finish reading this thing.

So, I get called to the genius bar about 15 minutes after my appointment time and the genius asks me what is wrong. I point at my absent enter key. He pops off the keyboard and scans the serial number, while he is waiting on the look-up I tell him it is not under warranty

My genius, a nice surfer-looking guy in a black apple t-shirt and cargo shorts with hair he has to keep flipping out of face, says "Well, it will be about $120 or so parts and labor to get it fixed."

"Labor?" I ask "you have to plug in a ribbon connector."

Surfer genius flips his hair out of his face and admits "yeah, that's it. It's $40 for the keyboard, $85 for the labor to install it."

"Can I just buy the part and do it myself?"

"No," he says, looking around "we don't do that."

So, I summon up a lot of emotion, nothing angry or over-the-top, just genuine emotion that I put behind a single utterance as I look directly into what I can see of his eyes: "Dude."

"You're right, I'll be right back." He walks down the bar and leans in to speak to a colleague. He comes back and says "I got a manual override here, I'll just install it myself." He takes my machine and disappears.

He's gone a long time, almost half a hour. I like to think he went out back to catch a buzz. I didn't mind because I had a gorgeous Asian D.O. sitting next to me who was getting her data migrated from an iBook like mine to a new macbook. I converted her to GMail while my genius was doing whatever he was doing. He could take as much time as he wanted as far as I cared.

He comes back, finally, apologizes for the wait, and not only do I have a new keyboard, he has also cleaned up the entire machine. It looks new. "What do you think?" he asks.

"Dude!"

He smiles. $43 (and two hours) later I have my IBook looking like it did when I first took it out of the box.

Customer Service, FTW.

Watching rhe pond-sprite.

2008-06-20T19:23:00.000-04:00

I have to do this everyday?

Yesterday went pretty well. What (and the amounts that) I ate will support my goals, I got in a solid hour of exercise which I also enjoyed (walking almost 4 miles from work to therapy and then from therapy to home), and I managed to endure a feeling of hunger and emptiness at the appropriate times during the day. I am noticing and remembering now that there is a definite physical sensation that goes along with losing weight—something not quite full-on emptiness and hunger, but something quite different than the satisfied and disinterested in food feeling that I usually pursue.

I also noticed that what I have been unconsciously in pursuit of when I eat is not satiety. It is a mark on the other side of satiety—a disinterest in food. I really crave and enjoy being in a state where I am not interested in food or eating, and I have noticed that this state is achieved by eating more than just what it takes to satisfy my hunger. It is a subtle difference and I am happy that I now notice it. I am hopeful about this.

But, back to this sensation that is present when I am in a negative nitrogen balance (losing weight). I associate it with feeling sick, though it is definitely not the same as being sick, but I naturally categorize it that way (which may end up being very revealing). It is hard to put words to it, the image that keeps coming to mind is of a wooden plank being scraped clean. It is a sensation at the core of my body, vertical in nature, and the thought I associate with it is that I should eat, though it is definitely not hunger. If it were a flavor it would be wheat bran, if it were a fragrance it would be smoke from good tobacco, if it were a texture it would be the surface of that wood plank after a good scraping with a putty knife, if it were a sound it would be the high, thin, pitch of an Oboe.

It is strongest before meals and most prominent in the morning when I wake up. If I eat only to the point of satiety it just fades to the background, still present but only very faintly, when I eat to this point of being disinterested in food it vanishes completely. For some reason I am actively investigating it is threatening to me in some subtle way, I want to rid myself of it.

In NYC the City health department is trying to require that chain restaurants post the caloric content of servings of food items right on the menu, next to the price. There's been a huge uproar over this, but a number of chains like Starbucks and Chipotle have gone ahead and done it. It matters. It has changed what I do at Starbucks and Chipotle.

Now at Chipotle I get the “bowl,” the meal sans tortilla(s), and I am not getting the bag of tostaditas I used to enjoy (570 kcals!) with my meal. I don't miss it really. I miss the habit of picking up that huge cylinder of food (when I ordered what they call a burrito) and devising a strategy to eat it while preserving it's structural integrity.

At Starbucks I have just about given up ordering any food completely, which is no doubt the reason why other retailers are resisting this, because almost everything in the display case is just short of 500 kcals a serving. The actually do have 300 kcal options (the bagels are 280 plain) but they aren't the things I thought would be on the lo-cal end. For example, the apple tart is 280 and the rice crispy treat is 270.

Of course, if I had given it much thought I could have figured that out, the tart is mostly apple and the rice crispy treat is mostly air (in volume), but I had this notion that a slice of pound cake was in the same caloric range. It is not. And muffins? Forget about it.

So, this is a public health issue and it is right for government to intervene. Seeing the caloric totals has changed my eating/buying habits, as it will no doubt do for others, and it is government's rightful role to enforce this kind of measure because it is in direct conflict with the interests of the retailers, i.e., it is going to hurt their sales. But, we will see the difference in reduction of health-care costs, and the non-monetary payoff of happier healthier people. I support this initiative and if it comes up in any of your cities you should support it as well.

Thank goodness that iced tea/coffee are almost calorie-free. I'm no angel.

I frequently find my mind wandering to thoughts like “Am I going to have to put up with this feeling every day?” “This feeling” can be anything from the feeling I discussed above to something else I find difficult or unfamiliar. Then I realize that I've been caught by the illusion of escape. I'm deluded by the notion that there is some other place than here and some other time than now.

Similarly, I find my mind turned to thoughts of being happy and satisfied at other times. I am reluctant to question the reality of these notions, but when I take a look I find that I am clinging to this time and place as if I could keep it by sheer effort or purity of motive.

I have never been anywhere but here, never lived at any time other than now. That's my real experience. But my mind gets caught like an “ooh shiny” Mercurial pond-sprite by that notion that there's something “out there” and people “other” than me.

Don't misunderstand me, as you well know, I operate in that context just like everyone does, I handle transactions as if there is someone else there and somewhere else to go, but my observations of direct experience don't line up with that at all. I don't find a place where I stop and everything else begins when I just look at it. The distinction requires that I believe something I can't see, and once you've done that the pond-sprite is back at the wheel.

Analogously, when I feel strong emotions, like in therapy, there are times when I take a backwards step in perception and see that wow, I'm really angry. The observer, the commenter, is not angry, it is just watching. My direct experience is that of observing myself being angry. I am sure that is happening.

But, when my mind turns to dominance, retaliation, and targeting others, then I enter this role and I begin to read from the script. I know how this goes, what will happen, under what conditions I will persist and under what conditions I will desist. I'm not observing anything at this level, I'm deeply embroiled in physical sensations and some construct of keeping score, protecting turf, and/or controlling another's behavior. That script is played out in my thoughts. I'm not observing anything, so why be so convinced that something is happening?

So, every day my direct experience is the same. There's no “every day.” This is what is going on. Watching the pond-sprite.

Feeling Empty

2008-06-19T07:47:00.000-04:00

One of the things I am going to do is write when I am hungry. I am hungry right now, I have lunch in 15 minutes with a friend in Central Park, but normally I would have gone for a pre-lunch snack, the justification being that will keep me from over-eating at lunch.

I know, get your over-eating in ahead of time, I know.

Anyway, as I was leaving the house this morning, not having time for breakfast (until I got to work), I noticed that I felt empty. Not emotionally empty, but physically empty. I noticed how that feels. It's a good feeling, really. I had this notion in my mind that I need to eat and there's a whole line-up of emotions there, but that was a separate things from just feeling empty. The emptiness felt good.

Do you notice it when you feel physically empty? What's your experience like

I'm onto McCain

2008-06-15T19:56:00.000-04:00

He doesn't believe a word of what he is saying.

DIsclaimer: This is pure fiction, written poorly. Any resemblance between this and any actual event is amazing, and unlikely, and what are you smoking?

I think there was a day back in February when John McCain sat down with his family and had this discussion:

-----

Roberta: John, this country needs you to be President more than ever.

John: I know that, Mom, I really do, but I don't like what I'm having to say and do to get the nomination. I can't actually do these things.

Cindy: Oh John...

Roberta: I've been around a long time, John, I've seen everyone since FDR get elected, none of them ever did anything in office that they didn't want to do. No matter what they promised in the campaign, they only kept the promises that were on their personal wish list and forgot the rest. You will too.

Cindy: John, you have to win first. You have to win to do anything. Bush still has a 30% approval rating, you need all of those people to come to the polls, then you only need another 15-20% to win it.

Roberta: Then you can be the man we all know you can be. Then you can help the country. If your performance is not enough to win re-election then you aren't going to want the job anyway.

John: Yeah, you're both right. This is just like a mission, I have to do my duty, as distasteful as that may be, in order to reach my objective. I have to.

-----

Just playing around here, it's nice to be able to write about the things I thought about during past elections but couldn't.

Time, Humidity and Temperature

2008-06-09T16:03:00.000-04:00

8:04pm Dusk
53% indoors
84.3 F indoors
90.3 F outdoors