Static, static everywhere...  Where does mass culture end and the person's mind begin?  Wake up and try to avoid it.  What do I need today?  What do I need to check in on?  Pick up baseball tickets over in Georgetown?  Go grocery shopping--yes, but where, and what on the list?  Yoga, and meditation, surely, just like dishes and a load of laundry, careful to keep the pollen level low.  Walk to grocery store, or ride bike?  The pressing in of information, news, weather, reminder of the job...

What escape is there from popular desires, from the unquestioned habits and accepted behaviors of belonging, from the ticking of the clock?  To indulge in one popular release, leads to other, more wish to have wine, being out on the town, and all of that, you know, it's like a mass lie, a mass agreement, 'oh, this will do;  it's the best we can do;  try it, you'll like it,' and then everybody participates in it, primarily to belong, to fit in, to acclimate, to be social, to have a bit of fun along with work.

And yet all that provokes great anxiety.  Or is it that I feel completely uninvested, lacking sincerity when I try to fit in or do the popular things, always the lithe little voice in the back of the head, you'd rather be somewhere real, in tune with the deep truth of reality which in our world can be best described as agreeing with Buddhist thought.  There never was a heavy fixed self, so why make big impossible plans for it, be the great lawyer, the business person (unless you could really fit such activities into a meaningful pursuit of the Dharma.)

A little bit of camping gear arrives, and while I'm happy with it, the insulated sleeping mat, the mummy bag, the water reservoir, the water purifier, the backordered REI Quarter Dome 2 tent--yes, I like stuff too, maybe in the way the crow does, shiny objects, curiosities--there's an element of 'a child's game' to it.  Reading on the web has lead me this morning, to read up the Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, in particular on Taking Refuge (in the Three Jewels--Buddha, Dharma, Sangha) and, well, becoming a Buddhist.  It seems a pretty drastic thing to do, but maybe otherwise you'll to be left always facing discontentment, and somehow persuaded to do things you really honestly don't want to do, as if lacking a language, a way to propose, to say no, to say 'here's what one really should be doing now, forget all that society stuff, none of it is all that satisfying anyway.'

Try to find a connection outside of family, the life you already have, and even were it great and intimate, would not it be undermined by my own packings, my own lack of security, profession, real estate, etc., unless other people were miraculous too, like your mom.  Or would it not be undermined by your own timid weakness to offer in real understandable terms the truth behind human activities...

Well, draw up a grocery list.  You need to eat, healthily, as that much has been established.


So much of stuff spoken of in social barrooms is details, is a lot of strutting of unimportant things.  If people could check their egos at the door, that would be nice, but most of the time they sit and wait their chance to do what everyone else does, me me me.

The past, it turns out, has worked out just fine.  I wrote a book from the heart, and its overall effect, missed by the professional reviewer, has a point, which is to downplay the importance and the sway of emotions...