What Time Is It?

Supposedly our national pastime is Baseball. I don't think so. Our real national pastime is building grudges! There are even professional grudge builders. They make a living through ranting and raving on either TV or radio. It's amazing because it's true! They are not necessarily from one end of the political spectrum, although right wingers like Limbaugh and Beck seem to get the most attention. Have you ever watched a so-called discussion on any of those TV News shows? Nobody listens they just shout each other down, interrupt and be sarcastic. I sort of like sarcastic I must confess.

It's not just political stuff that we love to get exorcised about. Remember that case in Florida, the woman accused of murdering her child? The furor over that reminded me of the pitchforks and torches scene from Frankenstein! There is nothing so invigorating as some good old fashioned righteous indignation! Being right is just so exciting, especially when you can focus your rightful pissed-off-ness on some poor slob who could use a good smiting!

It has been a while since we burned anyone at the stake, and that's good. Of course we are oftily fond of lethally injecting people here in Texas. Living on the island, I kind of like the bumper sticker which reads, "Galveston Island, Near Texas." Being near the beach may ameliorate grudge building to some extent. The ocean seems to calm people down.

Most movies and TV shows are about how somebody gets mistreated over and over until they finally build enough of a grudge that they go berserk and shoot the place up! Once they've done that everything is okay again (it's the hero, often a cop ala Dirty Harry, who goes berserk). Well in some martial arts movies they don't use guns, they just rip people apart with their bare hands (they are nonviolent gurus after all).

Shoot Baseball is way too passive to be our national pastime! We like Football because of the physical contact, hell it's more like physical assault! Believe it or don't but, Basketball was initially intended to be a non contact sport. Nowadays nobody would watch non contact Basketball.

None of this would even matter if it did not negatively impact our individual and societal growth. Grudge builders are not healthy happy people. Grudging societies do not create great works. Here we are in the 21st century and nobody has a flying car. We are not all brilliant and cultured. Why not? Maybe we have been spending way too much energy building grudges and shooting stuff up.

Just imagine watching some yelling match like the McLaughlin group and all of sudden they are listening to each other and saying stuff like "hmm you have a point there Monica." Of course Monica would have to settle down too. I do believe in miracles, but this one might take a while!

Russell

Zen And The Art Of Being Amazed

I really like the philosophy of Zen. At least I think I do. Which might be the same thing. I used to read alot of Alan Watts. Watts was one of those guys who popularized Eastern Philosophy. He also advocated the judicious use of LSD and Marijuana (for spiritual enhancement). I still like Alan Watts, hell I still like the Grateful Dead, despite my misgivings about their advocacy of drug use. I really don't care if people use or don't use drugs. I don't use them anymore but I don't regret having used them in the past.

I tried a Zen meditation class once and it was just awful! I got absolutely nothing out of it. It was me and three overweight women in warm up suits walking in a circle chanting nonsense syllables that meant something in a language none of understood. If I had had the guts I would have stopped and screamed, "What the #%@&!! are we doing?! Are you all crazy?!" but I didn't. I went along with the whole thing while thinking how ridiculous the whole thing was.

Why do spiritual pursuits lead to so much goofiness? Why do people figure they are going to find enlightenment by taking drugs or by walking around in circles chanting nonsense? We must feel  like being enlightened involves some sort of special effects or some kind of magic spell. 

There is a Zen story about two apprentices bragging to each other about their teachers. One of them says his Master can sit on one side of a river and move his finger through the air and a paint brush on the other side will paint a picture on a tablet. The other apprentice says his Master is even more amazing than that explaining that his Master eats when he is hungry and drinks when he is thirsty!

The truth of course is that we are surrounded by miracles all the time. Occasionally something happens that wakes us up to this fact. Most of the time we ignore all the miracles that are happening all the time. Here we are a collection of simultaneous processes which we call a human being, walking around on a wet rock orbiting a thermonuclear furnace on the edge of a galaxy and we think life is dull a lot of the time.

Russell

Don't Worry Be Happy!

I love to ride my bike. Right now it's too hot to ride until the sun goes down. Riding at night is okay but I miss all the stuff you can see during the day. Riding a bike is really the best way to see stuff. Walking is way too slow so you are limited by how far you can go in a reasonable amount of time. Going by car you miss just about everything. A bike is the perfect way to get around, especially on an island like where I live.

I wonder how I ever managed to stand summer before I lived by the beach. The beach is great! People talk to each other at the beach. Well adolescents don't talk but they are all crazy anyway. I think that shortly after puberty people start producing an invisible, odorless and tasteless gas that produces a psychotic state in anyone who inhales it. This would not only include adolescents but also their parents while they are within the "whiffing zone" which surrounds the youngster. Some kids have a giant whiff zone surrounding them! They can create a lot of craziness. The effects eventually wear off. Pubescent psycho gas is a growing problem. It seems that puberty is occurring earlier in the life cycle and adolescence is sometimes a greatly protracted stage. This helps explain all kinds of bizarre phenomena from things like "Toddlers In Tiaras" to Hugh Hefner.

I think we older adolescents should be called "Silver Back Adolescents." This name reminds me of silver back mountain gorillas. Those gorillas are like the kings of their domains. It is time to pay the same kind of respect to we people who have stretched the envelope on adolescence! But I digress (no shit!) the beach is the place to be in the summer. I always keep two low-rider beach chairs and a beach umbrella in the trunk of my Korean Mercedes (Kia Rio). I keep a beach bag packed and ready to go. Sometimes I just walk across the street and go to the beach there. Other times I drive to a far end of the island, walk several hundred yards and hang out on a less crowded more serene beach.

My bike has a basket and I can throw a beach towel in it and ride my bike in my board shorts and stop anywhere I want as I go exploring. No wonder the place gets perfectly lousy with tourists in the summer. Touristas are the only thing wrong with living in paradise but what are you going to do? I know the shortcuts if I have to drive in order to get somewhere. Otherwise hey "don't worry be happy," that is God's will for us afterall

The Meaning Of Life

I used to have a pretty bad addiction to cars. Cars can be just like a drug. No matter how many you have it's never enough! I never had enough money to get an auto stash of Jay Leno proportions, but I have owned way too many cars for me to maintain. The most I owned at any one time was five cars, none of which Jay would have given a sideways glance. I have collected other stuff too, magazines for instance. The urge to collect stuff seems to come from some misguided search for meaning. In a weird way it is almost creative. It's like making your own bizarre universe of objects that you have provided with meaning or even soul. Okay that's going too far maybe, but the attachment to this stuff only makes sense if the stuff means something.

I think we define ourselves by the stuff we get attached to. So if I had a bunch of junk cars at one time... hmm I'm not sure I like that definition of me! Thank God I only have one car now. But these old magazines, what will some future archaeologist think when he or she finds me buried under those? I need to get rid of this stuff. I don't have any car magazines anymore, but I have a bunch of ancient Life magazines and almost every issue of Oceans magazine (missing the first!). I am not ashamed of these but why do I still have them? I was saving them for some reason which I can no longer recall.

Maybe I should define myself by what I can do without instead of useless stuff I have gathered. I think that could be really liberating. I am going to get rid of these priceless treasures... but they need to go to someone who will really value them. Someone just like me! Of course there is only one person like that. Uh Oh!

Russell