When I get up, and have the courage, I look at these postings.  Rushes, they are like, to be looked upon as film, raw and unedited, for what they caught and didn't catch.

There are still the great worries, condensing in the lone night as dew out of the sky, profound.  As if everything were coming together, the November election, my mother's health, possible eviction notice from not having a job, from not being employable at age 55, something I've left myself open to.  But those cheery thoughts subside, and there is the writing again to look at.  As Buddha says, good will follow after pure thoughts, and so I look for how to think pure thoughts, rather than evil ones.

Our life is shaped by our mind;  we become what we think.  Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it.
Our life is shaped by our mind;  we become what we think.  Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves.  (The Dhammapada.)



I'm drinking my green tea, the gas on the stove working again.  My personal hotspot is giving me trouble again.  I never quite figured out how to get internet here, though I pay Verizon a monthly amount for a landline, no working phone jack.  Depressions make you irresponsible.

The Corona Virus Pandemic has come with different stages, globally, nationally, locally, personally.

There will be many more steps to go through, each one veiled, no control over it.  No way to get the mind around the shock, the misery.

Some of us are okay, sometimes, with the alone time, using it for something, we don't know quite what.   Meditation.  Thomas Merton might see it as putting out an ear for God.

I can't blame anyone for "not feeling comfortable," as my old acquaintance lets me know, wanting nothing to do with me.  Fine.  Not feeling comfortable having anything to do with me and my way of life, and all my mistaken paths.  Even I don't feel comfortable.  What if I have to pack up all my books and guitars and bikes and clothes, and the important papers, and the furniture...  what can I salvage?  Put it in storage?  Where?  How to pay for that?  No one would want me to be going through all this at my age, but that's how it is.  It's not always easy to be Zen.  And like a fool I still chase the supposed pleasures of life, as if I had no other option.  And thereby, wasting time.  Wasting years.  Wasting time away from the real joys of life, family, hard work, love, closeness, shared time.  Not alone time.

Only if you were "mentally ill" would you need "alone time," all that meditation, and all that exercise.

(Perhaps Siddhartha Gautama is the world's first admittedly open neurotic person.  Giving others the courage to follow in his path for mental, spiritual and psychological well-being.  The first person to say, "hey, what is this all about anyway..."   In doing so, grasping that which is, what we all have in common.)


The same way I felt before, looking for a career, and years go by.  Writing.  The old embrace of that which is unsatisfying about the human condition, of how we are not perfect academic scholars, perfect objects of love and desire, of how we somehow do not end up on the righteous career path we were cut out for, because of all the excess of things going on in our minds, the things we must cope and contend with in order to find out where our talents lie.

People like to portray themselves, if given the opportunity, as energetic, wise, smart, good at all things, policy, investment banking, perfect explication.  Perfection.  Human intelligence.

Dostoevsky liked the night.  He liked, at least in his fictional world, religious elders who had friendship for the rustic, the idiot, the simpleton, the sinful.  In his own fictional world, Dostoevsky was the idiot himself.