So I’ve been away for a while. Doing what, I’m not really sure. It wasn’t terribly important, but it wasn’t a total waste of time either. I imagine. Anyway, it’s unclear how often I’ll be updating this site because there are other matters to attend to most of the time, and posting to my personal blog is usually rather low on the to do list. If you’re feeling bored or lonely, though, there are still a couple other places to look for solace.
The Red Team Tumblr is more than So Much This could ever hope to be, because it’s group genius instead of just my ideas.
Also, I’m co-hosting a radio show now with my friend and colleague Bronwyn. It’s called Thunk Tank and you can listen live on 91.1 WFMU every Tuesday from 6-7 pm, or get the podcast here.
Oh, this one makes my heart hurt, not because it’s so shocking, but because it’s so easily believable. The truth is, I (and I think many other people) have trained myself to ignore. Since moving to New York I’ve taught myself here to say, “Not my problem,” as a coping mechanism. It’s not hard to imagine people seeing a homeless man lying in the sidewalk and simply assuming he was passed out or sleeping. A little moral judgment could have popped up to bolster their inaction. “Probably drunk. Junkie. That’s pathetic. Might be crazy, or dangerous.” or even the libertine “Guy wants to lay in the sidewalk it’s his business.”
There’s simply so much suffering in this city I feel like I’d die if I tried to engage with every destitute mother and child, every sad story, hard luck case, and stray cat. When I first moved here, I gave money to every homeless person asking. I stopped and engaged, sat down and talked, and generally tried to be as generous as my meager resources allowed. Over the years, though, I got busier, and less patient, and in time I was saying, “Sorry brother,” instead of handing over a dollar, or just avoiding eye contact altogether.
Twice, I have been walking down the street and encountered homeless men lying on the sidewalk. Both times, I stopped and engaged with them, and they were both just sleeping. Those instances were years ago though, who knows, now, if I were late for work or running to meet a friend, if I would muster as much compassion. I’d like to think so, but it would be arrogant to declare with certainty that I’d do the right thing. This change in myself troubles me. I do “good” work at my job. I’m helping, in a tiny way, to improve the educational system, but I often think I’m slipping into complacency these days. I’m paid better than ever before in my life, I have more free time, and yet I feel I’m at a nadir of selfless action. I worry I’m degrading into an armchair radical. “I read the New Yorker and wring my hands over the state of the world. In discussions with friends, I advocate for anarchism with loose unsophisticated arguments. I try to include the work of women and minorities into my powerpoint presentations. I look poor folks in the eyes, sometimes, when I shake my head in response to their outstretched hands.”
I don’t mean to make this some public self-flagellation though. I’m really just trying to communicate that while the NY Post may take an indignant, morally outraged tone about New Yorkers ignoring a dying man, I’m pretty sure the callous folks in that security video could have been any of us. I mean, I actually give a shit about social justice issues, I volunteered at a homeless shelter and I have friends who are or were homeless, and I could have been one of those people making a bad snap decision in a crucial moment. The scale of suffering we’re blasted with every day is just so immense that I think it’s impossible not to block out some of it. I bet some of the people in that video gave money to Haiti, have chaperoned middle school field trips, and help with canned food drives. We’re just doing the damn best we can every instant of every day. We’re also constantly fucking up, making the wrong choices, and unfortunately when that happens people suffer. We’re all spiked armor and soft underbellies and sometimes children get to nestle in our laps and sometimes we’re careless with the swing of an arm and someone loses an eye. Life, it’s messy. It’s a mess.
I’m sorry as hell for Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax. I’m sure he was a good guy, he did a good thing, and in the end he died for no good reason. I wish I had some deep ancient wisdom that could make sense of such tragedies, but I don’t. In this world, shit just happens over and and over. The best we can do is be present in every moment. Actually see the man on the sidewalk instead of merely seeing an archetypical drunk or a memory of another scene encountered once before. That’s all I’m trying to do.
It is a terrible mistake that we often confuse continuity with permanence and characteristics with identity. In both cases, the former is related to the present, while the latter is a projection into the future. In both cases, the person conflating one with the other is being set up for disappointment. Because, see, in this reality, there is no such thing as forever. Everything that happens happens today. There is now. Sure, characteristics are real, but they’re not forever. And continuity, while comfortable, is not immutable.
Buddhism, if it says anything, says, “Shit happens.”
Everything ends.
People die.
Ming vases, precious though they are, often get knocked off their precarious and ill placed pedestals and break.
Loony Tunes taught me that.
Daffy was a true zen master, as irreverent as Ikkyu any day. And I’m not excluding myself here. I confuse continuity with permance too, characteristics with identity. But it’s just not so.
We say, “This is this and this should be like this and this should always be like this. You should always be like this. We should always feel like this.” But it’s terribly foolish. No one is ever always, no matter how hard she tries. Every instant, subatomic particles being knocked like billiard balls away from the temporary atomic cloud that is you. Every atom replaced seven times over, how could we not be hypocritical? Consistency is the hobgoblin of feeble minds. My new favorite saying.
Later, I’ll have another.
Ah, Bodhidharma, all those long years alone in the cave. Then what? You cut off your eyelids and from them came green tea.
One day, long from now, I’ll be today. Just like this, but different some how. Why is that so hard to understand?
I don’t know what RZA is working on these days, but I’d like to see him team up with Tim Burton and make a hip hop musical about the strange twisted lives of cordyceps. Alternately, I’d just like to hear some dark, grimy rap song that even uses the word cordyceps.
