The Zen Guy (3)

The Skinny Guy's teacher taught him to unravel in zen parables.

One of them was the story of a book smart student who wasn't very smart.

This student sought to impress the zen master with his erudition.

The zen master was not impressed and challenged the student with the following question:

"Show me your original face before your parents were born"

The book smart student was unable to do this

and the master would not provide any clues as to the answer

because you can't taste another person's food.

So eventually out of frustration the book smart student went down to the local apothecary

and sold off all of his books

because of course they were useless

and all those years he had spent reading them was a waste of time.

The book smart student also left his teacher

and from then on led a simple life tending to the tomb of a famous monk

Many years later

so the story goes

while the student was sweeping around the tomb

his broom hit a rock

and in hearing that sound

became enlightened

which was a bunch of crap

according to the skinny guy.

Things that don't go together

Is there a new kind of warfare going on?

The things that don't go together this time are the German invasion of Greece in 1941 and the German invasion (well sort of) of Greece in 2011.

In 1941 Germany invaded and conquered Greece in 24 days.

As a result of the invasion thousands of people died, starved etc in the Nazi occupation.

And of course the Greek economy was ruined. 

The Greeks rebelled and created an underground resistance movement.

In 2011, the Germans are again dictating the terms of Greece's surrender in a sense.  

The austerity measures imposed by the German's have led to general strikes,  unemployment, stipping away of pension benefits and certainly a decrease in the Greek standard of living.

This may not really follow, but....

Are we in the age of a new form of invasion, political domination and/or exertion of influence of one nation over another?

Instead of guns and bombs the new armaments are in the form of international banking and finance.

Wasn't that really how the cold war ended?  Without a shot being fired the Soviets had to sue for peace to avoid economic collapse?

I don't get the feeling that the Germans are intentionally invading the Greeks in 2011.   I'm sure they would rather not have the headache.

But what happens to the U.S. when China starts calling in their ownership of the U.S. debt?

The Music Lover (2)

After his wife went her own way

he called it another lonely day

The house was empty.

The room was empty.

In the dark who could see his face?

In the dark who could reach him?

He kept the blind down on the window

He kept the pain on the inside.

He shot out the lights.

He could not sit still

even to listen to music.

Music did not help

it gave him ideas about emotions

he didn't like.

The next morning he went down to the Chelsea drugstore

and sold all his records.

Tattoo you(2)

" Here, you should take it."

It was a picture of her and her twin sister

removed from the inside ceiling of her car.

She must not have been joking about being homeless and sleeping inside her car

It felt like a home

the wallpaper consisted entirely of photographs

with disney and dr. who figurines on the dashboard.

I wanted to say something about the inconsistencies of the sleeping beauty, goth, and sci fi themes in her life

and come up with some theory about how hanna montana and selena gomez were leading to the downfall of

something or another.

I put the picture in my wallet

next to the photograph of my other twins

taken on a family vacation in Orlando.

The Dancer (2)

They planned the wedding to coincide with the one year anniversary that they first met her mother in law was a fashion designer who created the dress her mother was ecstatic and kept dropping hints of expectations of grandchildren at the ceremony her father cried and the new guy's college friends toasted about all the crazy things the new guy did when he was drunk and younger the honeymoon was in cancun he was so thoughtful and there were flowers in their room on the nightstand and they went snorkeling and he sang her little cute songs about their love and she was almost caught in the moment and when they came back and went out to their favorite bar and drank and looked at the sports game being played on the big screen television and said less and less and she thought it would be ok and thought she was happy and she took it upon herself to start reading more and started looking back at old journals and time passed and she thought it would be ok.

The Hippie chick, Ch. 2

It inhabits the silence

It is the silence

It follows the wake

It is the wake

She avoids it

She fears it

beat the still

break the quiet

shake it up

on a sunday afternoon

(or any day of the week that Megadeath is in town)

The Artist, Ch. 2

It didn't take long to encounter her first man.

This one drove by her on this country road in his pickup

stopped up ahead

considered

formulated a plan

and circled back.

It was always the same.

Some were subtle.

This one could barely speak english.

The quid pro quo was clear.

He worked at a hotel up ahead.

He had a room for her.

She ignored him and kept walking.

She pitched her small tent in a grove of trees between two corn fields.

It began to rain.

She missed Kate.

The zen guy Ch. 2

The first rule of sitting facing the wall is that you don't talk about it

or write about it.

The second rule is that there are no rules.

He was confused.

That was the point

that there is no point.

Not even the absence of not having a point.

Just keep sitting was the instruction.

So he did.

The Music Lover, Ch. 1

The music lover knew everything about music

and nothing about music.

It all started in the high school halls and in the shopping malls.

He was not cool and he was cast out.

As coolness is a virtue held in some esteem

he estimated that his prophet was in music

for everyone knows that music is the Jesus of cool

and so it goes--or went.

He acquired every esoteric detail of the obscure bands comprising his massive cd collection.

He knew not only the band originated from Ronnie Hawkin's Hawks

but who supplied the cocaine which ended Richard Manuel's tortured life.

The music lover's wife knew nothing about music

but was privy to the secrets behind music.

After it became apparent the music lover could not relate to these

she left him.

That was two years ago.

The Dancer, Ch. 1

"You'll always come back to me," said the dancer's old boyfriend.

And she always did--until she caught him with someone new.

Not this time, she vowed.

She resolved to reach escape velocity with this new guy seated next to her at the bar.

Her friends had insisted he was a nice guy

that he wasn't a loser, that he had a job.

Lord knows she had been with plenty of those.

She danced around him, taking him in from stem to stern.

You know, if he had a decent haircut, he wouldn't look so much like Joey Ramone--he would be damn handsome actually.

So off went his hair.

That was two years ago.

The Artist, Ch. 1

It was more Thoreau than Kerouac

but the artist hit the road.

She had no choice

that she remembers.

What she does remember is her friend telling her

"so I heard you started smoking crack."

After that the miasma lifted.

She was in a room with a dozen people

with boarded up windows.

A peculiar plan emerged

She would walk from this place in St. louis

to California.

Living off the land along the way

starting now.

The zen guy, Ch. 1

The zen guy often told people

"you are the opposite of what you think you are."

The zen guy said alot of things.

But no matter what he believed, he still couldn't dance.

There was an embarrasing video showing this.

The zen guy wanted to dance

but his body was bound up too tight

or so he thought

A pecular plan emerged:

He would sit facing a wall

again and again

waiting to unravel.

The Hippie chick, Ch. 1

The hippie chick had no parents

after she found her mother in bed with the hippie's chick's boyfriend

while she was in high school.

Much later

She longed for substitute parents and found them

in bars.

One smiling widow with a wig and painted eyebrows

had obviously adopted the hippie.

The two shared their secrets

and swayed to the blues riffs

every sunday afternoon.

Denial

Its a parenting class for divorced parents.

There are five stages of grief, according to the presenter.

"But my children don't feel grief, they felt relief after the divorce," according to the african american man at the back of the room.

The next slide reads "The first stage of grief is denial"

I chuckle

No one else laughs

Except a knowing smile from the woman sitting across from me.

Her hair is ironed flat.

I have a theory:  flat haired women don't understand.

My terrain is too sinusoidal.

But I digress.

The man sitting next to the flat haired woman wears a tshirt that states:  "Pana EMT"

Pana used to be a sundown town

Does that mean the EMT would not help the man stuck in denial

At night?

Tattoo you, Ch. 1

I'm at this bar I haven't been to in 21 years.

With a 21 year old woman.

A different band is playing.

The band that played here all those years ago stayed at my house

And drank all my vodka.

She tweets:  "this band is too flashy and a bunch of show offs--especially the drummer"

She has tattoos and piercings

all over her body.


"That fat guy, the drummer, he tried to take advantage of me"

Huh?

"I was passed out--I woke up with the steering wheel hitting my back with that fat fuck on top of me."

So we leave the bar.

There are cop cars all around blocking the road.

Some moron hit a bicyclist.

"Over there is where i get my haircut."

I thought she wore a wig.

I look more closely.

"Lets go down this alley"

Her Iphone takes pictures of the graffiti

She stops when she sees the words:  Beware of the Dog