Advice

You should never take unsolicited advice; consequently, since you didn't ask for this, you ought to resist it.  If you do, however, you haven’t, so you might as well take heed.  Or not.

Never text while walking across the street.  It’s not only dangerous, but more importantly, it makes it seem like you had a mom who didn’t love you enough to warn you against doing so.

Don’t drive stoned.  It cuts into the buzz.

Nelson Algren said, “Don’t eat a place called ‘Mom’s;’ never play cards with a guy named ‘Doc;’ and don’t sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”  Sound counsel to be sure, but to be on the safe side, you ought to also resist sleeping with a woman called “Moms” especially if she is cooking for a  guy named “Doc.”

My friend, Chad Worcester is of the mind that one should never purchase perishables like food or drink with a credit card because when the bill comes, you’ll have nothing to show for the cost.  I think it makes more sense to only purchase food and drink with a credit card; you just need to make sure it’s not your own.

“Never mix, never worry” is what they tell novice drinkers.  For the more seasoned alcoholic the counsel should be simply “Never worry,” an outcome more likely to be achieved insofar as one keeps mixing all evening long.

The most important piece of advice anyone of a certain age can offer to someone who is approaching their golden years is to always refrain from wearing khaki pants to an all-day meeting.  If you don’t know why, then you’re just not old enough to understand the reason.  But one day, you will be.

It’s not a good idea to eat a heavy meal right before bedtime, but if reading this has made you tired, then you should fix yourself some toast and Tabasco sauce.  That will perk you right up.

Arbor

One of the things that makes trees so easy to admire is that, for the most part, they’re older than you.

All of the big ones—the massive American elm down the street, the huge Coast Redwood in Volunteer Park, the giant-sized Bigleaf Maples all over the place—have seen at least a hundred summers, meaning they were around before I was, a feature of the world (at least the world where I live) that becomes less common with every passing day.

Many of the buildings the pre-date me are being torn down to make room for brand-new condominium developments and a good number of the people who peopled the earth before I did are making their ways off to the great beyond.  The old trees, however, are, for the most part, still sticking around to see what’s going to happen in the current century and probably, for many of them (unlike me) the one after that.

A team of arborists did just remove an ancient maple tree down the block whose trunk had split apart in a recent storm, but they left the mighty base of it to serve as a reminder of its presence and a pretty cool throne on the parking strip of the house it used to dominate.  That seems like a decent model for one’s own demise: to fall apart quickly in a single event but be able to have a memory of you remain for little kids and lovers to enjoy after you’re gone.

It’s a bit too woo-woo to imagine that the trees remember the events they’ve witnessed during their lives, but it makes scientific sense to assume that the conditions under which they grew are somehow embodied in their cells.  The black locust across the street from my house doesn’t literarlly recall Seattle’s development over the past 150 years; it does, however contain molecules that were around before 1900; in that sense, its memory is way better than mine.

Patience

Patience is alleged to be a virtue, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find many examples from real life where people view it as one.

Maybe there’s a case to be made for it when baking bread, but in pretty much every other walk of contemporary life, impatience rules the day.

Employees never get rewarded by employers for asking the boss to be patient about completing a project; students aren’t encouraged to be patient when it comes to submitting assignments; we don’t ask the barista to be patient in filling our orders for double lattes; and who has ever wanted to exercise patience when the possibility of sexual intimacy is at hand?

So, it’s something of a mystery as to why patience has earned a reputation as something desirable; perhaps it has a good press agent.  If so, however, you can be certain that such a successful representative exercises little, if any, patience in getting the word about patience’s virtues out to the world at-large.

When you sit in meditation practice, you get to notice how impatient you really are.  And then you get impatient about being impatient and can’t wait until the impatience goes away.  Under normal circumstances, you’d make an effort to stop being impatient as quickly as possible.  But presumably, the lesson here is to simply observe one’s desire for what’s next and wait patiently to see what happens.

Fat chance.

One important question is whether in order to be patient, you have to be waiting for something.  Suppose, for instance, you are told to be patient until dinner is ready, but in the meantime, you start reading a book, get really into it, and forget about dinner altogether.  Are you still being patient, or are you just doing something else?

Or, perhaps you are reading this, patiently waiting for an important point to be made or an amusing phrase to be turned.  But now that it’s over, have you really been patient at all?

Blue

You might think there’s not much at stake umpiring recreational league softball games; it’s all in good fun; nobody wants to get hurt; and people have lives outside the diamond so they’re not going to get too worked up about what happens on the field.

But if so, you’d be wrong.

As it turns out, there’s plenty on the line: players get so into it that a single questionable call is enough to incite cursing, dirt-kicking, and the throwing of bats by people who work in cubicles.

Consequently, you do your best to not screw up and hope that those bang-bang plays at first base don’t happen in the later innings with the score tied.

One good thing is that, in virtue of having read the official rules of the game, you’re likely to know a little bit more about what’s permitted and what isn’t; still, that won’t stop a 77 year-old man in the Senior League game from getting in your face and complaining that he shouldn’t be called out because he swung at an illegal pitch, hit it, and was thrown out at first when he stopped running.

Here’s the kind of thing that happens after the game: a player comes up to you and says, “Let me say this as politely as possible: that call at first was the worst call I ever saw,” and then proceeds to hang out in the stands second-guessing every judgment you make in the following contest.

Or, the captain of a team on which you called an infield fly theatrically asks your name so he can supposedly report you to the Umpire in Chief because he’s displeased with your assessment of whether the ball could have been caught with ordinary effort.

But still you keep showing up and taking your place behind the plate because it remains perennially intriguing and usually delightful and how else will you have the opportunity to see a 94 year-old man throw pitches?

Absurd

Doing yoga asana practice is inherently ridiculous. 

Why would you want to stretch your body into somewhat painful positions, anyway, when you don’t really have to?  Surely, the health benefits that accrue from the practice could be achieved by some other means. 

And even if posture practice is a superior means of health care, it’s far from obvious that doing as much as the Ashtanga model calls for is optimally salubrious.  Presumably, you could derive just as much with far less effort and save yourself lots of time in the process, as well.

Some days this is more salient than others and it seems particularly strange to engage in the practice.  Your alarm goes off before six AM on a summer day that doesn’t require you to get up before noon, if at all.  Nevertheless, you rise and ride uphill to a cavernous dance studio where you unroll a plastic mat and spend the next ninety minutes getting all sweaty and sore when you could have far more easily remained dozing beneath the covers.

The nonsensical nature of the activity is made more apparent by the presence of a dozen or so other human beings doing essentially the same thing; you can’t help noticing how weird it seems for others to be spending their mornings in this way, too.

Maybe we actually are all stilling the fluctuations of the mind so as to be able to perceive that which we really are—our true nature as the indivisible Oneness of All.  If so, great, but couldn’t this be achieved without having the opportunity for forty more winks?

I often observe, on my ride home from the studio after practice, someone standing in the morning sunshine, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette; I wonder what my days would me like if they started that way. 

Perhaps I wouldn’t feel as good about myself afterwards, but is there any reason to believe it would be a more absurd existence?

Consumption

You can poke around on the internetz for hours, reminiscing over old Talking Heads videos and feeling aghast at various types of excess that can be purchased by people with, as my mom used to say, “more money than sense.”

If you do that, though, you’ll get to this point where you might long for the days when the closest analog was flipping through magazines and mail-order catalogues and if that happens, you’ll realize it’s time to create some content, or at take a walk around the neighborhood.

There’s only so much you can take in before you have to expel; it’s like breathing in and breathing out or other forms of evacuation, equally common if not quite so polite.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors no doubt faced a similar challenge: they could spend many an idle hour examining leaves and tubers or they could rise up from their haunches and head out to slay a mastodon.  While the former may have provided them with plenty of fodder for cave-paintings and ceremonial dances, the latter would have been required, eventually, for their protein needs to be met.

Today, we experience something akin when we’re compelled, at length, to stop diddling about and head to the supermarket for dinner items: one’s hunger, however slight, will never be satisfied simply by perusing recipes online.

All of this seems to suggest that human beings are hard-wired to make some sort of contribution to the world at-large; it’s not enough for us, in spite of what we’re told by Hollywood and the wireless technology industry, to simply observe the world; we also want to make it in some way.

Of course, it’s important to be skeptical about essentialist appeals to human nature; just because we’re genetically disposed to desire something doesn’t mean we ought to embrace it.  Case in point: sea salt and vinegar potato chips.

Which reminds me: while the internetz will be here perpetually, the supermarket closes in an hour.

Overstimulation

It’s pretty amazing what you can pack into a mere 18 hours on two wheels: beer on a patio opened just for you and your friends; a ferry boat ride with more than forty fully-loaded cyclists, all of whom are cleared from the “poop deck” by the power of Derrickito’s crop dust; something remarkably similar to bike touring on country roads past naval bases on a peninsula; then up and up to a vista point that really afforded one some swell vista, and all this before setting up a campsite where beer and spirits far outnumbered water, and many, if not most, stayed up way beyond the horses’ bedtimes; afterwards, come morning, there’s still plenty of time to roll downhill, make a return boat, and be showered and shaved at pretty much the same hour you would have anyway had you never experienced the entire whirlwind in the first place.

Many a rule was broken, notably the one about not following the Angry Hippy up a mountain, but it turned out to be well worth it, even if coming down meant a snapped front brake cable for the effort and since you learn something new every time you go bike camping, the lesson here is twofold: first, bring a spare when you go to the woods and second, in a pinch, you can substitute a gear cable if you jam the leftover end of the broken wire into the lever socket to keep it from slipping.

I lay in my tent with the sound of a screech owl behind me and a lilting chorus of Karadactyl squawks, Botorff bellows, and TicToc gongs towards the front—animals and humans in the wild, making their own presences being heard.

Somehow, if you’re lucky, you may even get forty winks in before dawn breaks, but if not, it hardly matters, since, like Fancy Fred, you remain in a waking dream state with all that happens at the speed of bike.

Reading

Stay in school; don’t do drugs, natch.

But if you’re gonna indulge, then at least enhance your academic career with the illustrious combination of marijuana and great literature.

The stereotypical stoner does bong hits and watches cartoons; however, a far more original version of the model can easily involve a well-rolled joint and a classic of, say, Russian literature.

I’ve come to know from experience, for example, that few experiences are more enjoyable than getting reasonably baked and curling up on the couch with Anna Karenina.  Tolstoy’s prose, which is already luminous, takes on an added burnish.  His imagery and characterizations spring doubly alive and rather than just observing the action, you start to feel as if you’re really in it, curled up—literally—on the couch with the Princess Karenin herself.

Now, granted, one’s ability to recall some of the details may be slightly compromised.  Thankfully, my copy of Tolstoy includes a character list so I can flip back and forth to distinguish among the various Alexei’s who populate the story.

And it’s not uncommon to find oneself reading the same passage over and over and over—although given the beauty of the Russian master’s language, this is hardly a point against the practice.

Which isn’t to say that all reading materials lend themselves well to the combination of toking and text.  I’ve assayed contemporary analytic philosophy while under the influence; let me just say that a passage like this: “Reflection on any special discipline can soon lead one to the conclusion that the ideal practitioner of that discipline would see his special subject- matter and his thinking about it in the light of a reflective insight into the intellectual landscape as a whole,” does not get any easier to make sense of when one’s senses are slightly deranged.

On the other hand, as long as you’re not going to understand something, you may as well go whole hog.

Hopefully, therefore, you were stoned reading this.