So maybe this will sound crazy, but -- Well, okay, I'll be crazy. Maybe someone else will find it useful; maybe I can stop rolling it around in my head on the Repeat One setting.

It's like space aliens have taken over my brain. That's really what it feels like; and I worry that this space alien-influenced behavior is really me. I worry that this person who worries all the time, who thinks that everything has to be Under Control, who thinks that if others actually saw my anxious, fearful, controlling, nightmarish side that I'd be forever exiled from the fold, I worry that this person is the real me....

Space Aliens

14 November 2005

Veteran's day always finds me in a writing kind of mood. Usually I'm just grumpy and grumbly about a soulless system which chews people up and spits 'em out as broken soldiers; but today I find myself conflicted.

I spent my Veteran's Day in the hospital, recovering from a medication-induced seizure and trying to negotiate for appropriate food. Not that I was overly hungry, which turned out to be for the best. There isn't much for a vegan to eat at the Veteran's hospital.

My shoulders ached so much I could barely lift my arms. Apparently the seizure involved trying to pull off my own arms, and then beat myself with them. That's what it feels like, anyway. I'm covered in bruises, some from the phlebotomists but mostly from what appears to be the actual restraints themselves....nobodies

16 July 2005

It's been a long time since I've updated. I've written a great deal, but somehow I seem to have developed either a habit of procrastination or I've become much more critical of my work. This may or may not be a good thing, it's always hard to say.

I find, when I'm in the States for the summer, that my calendar fills up quickly. I find, in fact, that I really have to keep a calendar, keep track of things that I'm supposed to attend. These are all things I *want* to attend, people I want very much to see; it's just, well... it's starting to look like I'm trying to pack a years' worth of fun and social engagements into some three summer months.

I do have fun in the jungle, but it's different. More solitary pursuits, such as writing, reading, knitting. Working on my rented house-without-walls. Learning veterinary work, and also Spanish.

Time crawls by in the tropics, so slow as to be noticeably painful sometimes. Time speeds by faster in Seattle than I can blink; suddenly I've been here for one and one half months, and will not likely be here more than another two, at most.

I think what I want to do more of is rest. Good work is restful, in its own fashion; I have a restful mind when working, and a restful evening afterwards. I like resting, the kind of resting that comes after physically hard work; the kind of resting I get to do on a couch I built myself, by hand; the kind of soul-deep rest that comes from supporting my veterinarian through five or six surgeries. Watching TV isn't very restful for me, and I'm not sure why I've been doing it. Sure, they're really just DVDs of a TV show, any of the fanciful and well-wrought tales by Joss Whedon. But they're still TV, still the kind of entertainment that is overwhelming rather than comforting for me.

Anyway, dinner time.

19 February 2005

Here in my village in Mexico, for reasons currently unknown to me, the gringos have a huge costume party for Valentine's Day. Maybe it has something to do with the season; in October, gringos aren't really here in great force yet. This party is associated with the awards for the previous week's croquet tournament; I haven't been to any of the matches because I find most sports boring. But costuming is great fun....

Click here for the rest of the story.

9 February 2005

Paying attention is a simple task that is made out to be profoundly complicated. It's not, really, though sometimes the path to get there involves retraining our brains; making things less complicated in this modern world is a lot of work, and sometimes we have to spend years forgetting about all these invented complications before we can really start to pay attention. Zen monasteries have often been places one would go to start learning how to pay attention, and they still are today.

In the monastic system, the Zen Master's job description, such as it is, is to bring the younger monks face to face with enlightenment. It is not a comfortable place to be, sitting there facing the destruction of ego and the nothingness of being; and in past times, a few Zen Masters struck a student so hard that he died....

(Follow the link to my newest blog, tropicalzen.info, to read the rest of the story.)

26 December 2004

(Note to the faint of heart: If you're easily disturbed, you have no business reading my writing. This is fair warning.)

Barbara Kingsolver says, through one of her fictional characters, that if you want to have sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

My writing group decided on a new homework assignment this week: we were to write down one of our dreams. I was uncomfortable with the idea and I resolved to write an old dream, or maybe I would just talk about not remembering my dreams. But dreams are powerful--they have a way of coming through.... Dreams

11 November 2004

Hrmph. Today is Veteran's Day, and a bunch of schoolchildren and federal workers will stay home from work and sit around and do whatever they feel like doing. Some of them will go to cemeteries to leave garish red-white-and-blue bundles of flowers for the dead soldiers and think that's where it stops ˜ that the ones who died are the veterans we're commemorating. After all, they did make "the Ultimate Sacrifice."

These people will drive or walk to the cemetery, passing at least one vet on a street corner somewhere who is holding a cardboard sign proclaiming his status as disabled, homeles and desperate. This vet will possess little more than broken governmental promises. The passers-by will probably assume that the begging vet has substance abuse problems, which in all fairness, they may. But he'll be judged by those who have never experienced the changes in brain chemistry that veterans undergo in war time. They'll never have returned home to the expectation that they will just sort of forget "all that" and blend back in to society as if nothing happened....

Veteran's Day 2004

27 September 2004

I've got a fire under me, and I'm a writing fool. Yay.

Huge thanks to Mama and joXn, for inspiration, editing suggestions and idea-bouncing. Keep it up and I might actually become a writer.

More coming soon, after further editing.

(This "Aha!" moment is brought to you by the letter F.)

This past July, when I got to the States to recover from surgery (Footnotes), my arm and hand-fur was mostly blond, shorter, and there was less of it than when I left Seattle at the end of September.

I'm fairly fond of my body hair, maybe because I worked much harder than usual to get it. We have a pretty good relationship, I'd say. I think of it as a clear public signal that I am an adult male; it's one of the few secondary sexual characteristics that is on display.... Gas Stoves

joXn said: "a good teacher -- a really good teacher -- will have an idea which lesson a student can use at which time."

This is true. I got to thinking about it, and expanded.

Looking more deeply, we see that the Teacher merely offers the lesson; it is the student's responsibility to learn it. The teacher cannot be judged solely by their students' grasp of the teaching, contrary to the policies of the Texas public school system.... Good Teacher

21 September 2004

Sign in. Go to http://www.mamasboy.org/pictures/ and look at the photos that start with the word boat.

M and I went to Bainbridge today to look at this teak 40' Chinese Junk, to consider her as (my) live-aboard. We don't have a firm answer yet, but I did want to be able to look at the pictures online.

I wonder what will happen with all this. Hmm, I wonder.

17 September 2004

A friend (who attends SPU, the local christian college) was having a round-table discussion recently about God. The nature of god, perhaps, or what god is. I forget the exact phrasing.

After they'd been having a lively debate for over an hour, my friend turned to me and asked what I thought.

I don't know what sort of answer he was looking for, but I think what I had to say was not it. I've expanded a great deal here, but the ideas are the same; that evening, what I said apparently stopped their conversation. Perhaps they didn't want to dignify my answer with a response.

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I said I had two responses. The first is that god might be something that man made up, because he needed an authoritarian father figure to be rewarded and punished by; and that this is convenient for the priest class, because they get to speak for god... Another god rant.