The worst most shameful thing I ever did was to miss the Dalai Lama.   His Holiness came to visit our college, when I was a sophomore, 1984.  I still don’t know how I managed to do that.  And by doing so, I feel I shamed my father’s, the botany instructor from down the road, his science, his loose interest in things Theosophical, his spiritual tradition.  He had seen D.T. Suzuki the author of books letting things like Zen being understood in the West, and he was an old man by the time Dad saw him speak at Johnson Chapel.  The old man said something like, "the only proof of the divine is that we always think we'll have another day."  

Unfortunately, emblematic.  What was my focus then?  What were my influences then, that made me flout much of the opportunities for a wonderful future, there before me.  And so the ticks of the clock along the road of my own Personal Karma leading me to where I am now.

Caught in a perfect bind here, my old life standing back there in Washington DC, a false life I have led pursuing frivolity.  Vice and intoxication, aiding and abetting the same in the others...  I was in need back then as now in need of Buddhist psychology and meditation practice.  A depressive then, a depressive now, relying on the glass of wine to make things a bit more bearable.

And now I cannot even write without drinking wine or cider, for fear of interruption, my brain filled with my mother's reactions and words.  I write at night when mom has gone to bed.  And this too is a false life, a corrupted life and unhealthy life and unrealistic life.  

Away outside and far from the Buddhist monk life I would like to honor, and I feel very sad about all that. Bringing shame to the sweet gentle knowledgeable and reasonably well read and curious kid I once was.

Amherst College was the perfect place to enter into my Buddhist life. The connections and studies and professors at Amherst were the perfect introduction to Tibetan Buddhism. And yet I missed out on all that. I was selfish. I was mistakenly focused on hedonistic socializing and drinking beer.  I was not serious, even if, or though, I tried to be.

And now I must suffer the consequences of my actions. I must suffer the shame. I must suffer from my failures to make a scholarly Buddhist life happen.   I even failed to take a class with Robert Thurmann.  

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I have found Buddhist wisdom the wisdom of the Buddha to be correct and so as a sinful man I too must abide by the Buddhas truth. Of all the people I did not want to fail my father I failed. I did not become the Buddhist scientist, the creative scientist testing Buddhist law and psychology. Instead I became a nobody, committed to nothing, a pained lost prodigal son bobbing in the waves, tossed by the wind, a perfect fool.  One who blew all the opportunities he might have had, in the pursuit of a false personality he was not inclined toward anyway, but seemed to have a weakness for, a fault.  Never to have a decent life ever again.  Job.

And so all my work in the frivolous world of restaurants and sensuality has come to nothing. My karma then is to lose all I have tried to hold onto during those years when I was a bartender, not being serious. I was contributing greatly to illusion and delusion, a shameful waste of time energy and academic talent. Just about the worst that one could do. And so now I am being repaid in full and kind, examples of success all around me, myself the greatest of failures.

In a dream I'm trying to keep my old father's detached head alive, keeping it reconnected to his body, as if will graft back on.  He is a national hero, and I can't seem to fix him.

I find some documentaries about the Dalai Lama.  Dalai Lama, Scientist.  He's a charming happy guy, like my father.  Unlike me, who tries to hide his misery as best he can, though it eats from within.  And even still I seem to need a glass of wine to find the calm to write these things down out of my brain.

I came back from a walk today, cold, about 45, with winds of 15 mph, sunny.  I've taken mom for a ride, to get her a newspaper, along with a scoop of coffee ice cream, then a swing by the lake--they're widening the western pier, a construction project to look down upon from the high bluff, and in the wind the waves are up--where I have to feign some sort of interest when the news has hit that back in Washington, D.C., the bars and restaurants will be fully reopened a month from now to the day, which will have its implications.

Can I go back to the false life?  Can I endure this one here?  I should have bonded with Tibetan Buddhism thirty five years ago.  (I have read up on the subject a lot since then, but even before then...  Did it not seem practical at the time?  Did I think being a writer free of all interactions was a practical path?)

I sat in on a class my father was giving, in the Science Auditorium of the Hamilton College Science Building, in one of his last years of teaching.  Plants and Humanity, I think, and there were a lot of guys from the hockey team in, because they were sharp, and Dad was cool.   I was up in a back row, to his right, and he brings up something, a general note of education:  "There is a time to be praying, and a time for playing.  And one should not be playing, when he should be praying," his lessons being along those lines.  And this went right at me, and I felt it.  He saw, he knew, and I was corrected with chagrin, looking back.

He didn't blame it all on me.  Advisors left, left me down, some were more interested in self-image promotion then helping me out, didn't grade me fairly, he thought, as he would cut some slack for a good student having some trouble...

Wine is false to a writer.  It dulls the senses, for one thing.  It seems to give you the power and the patience to sift through things, but in doing so you don't make any headway in your own professional engaged life.  You have your space, free of torments, but you pay for it in the morning.  In the meantime, it seems to numb the pain, and the pain is probably caused by drinking in the first place, but now you can't really stop.

You get dragged out on rides, to placate, to entertain.  You get dragged out later at 4 PM for a ride, mom wants to go out for lunch, again to the Press Box, we just went there two days ago, mom...  and it's going to end up being a scene, eventually, because she will first have her fun, oh, so nice to be here, ha ha ha, but that will turn, sooner rather than later that will turn into abject misery and spite and crying and shouting.  Help, help, HELP!  You bastard.  My sons hate me!  Wish I were dead.  Wish I were dead.  (Just because the circumstances left you feeling exhausted, and in need of some re-balancing yourself from her craziness.)

I have a soda water.  She has her Kendall Jackson.  She gets a Mary's Salad, with chicken, of course, house dressing.  I get the Caesar with grilled tuna, rare, with creole sauce, and when the dish arrives, I'm reminded of the product I've seen in restaurant kitchens, a shrink wrapped frozen tuna steak, color added by however they do it, a treatment to keep it looking red.  Fake.  I should have stuck with the Buddha's harm no one, no thing, principal of vegetarian practice.

I am exhausted by it, and fall into a deep sleep, three hours almost.  Grim thoughts.  Feeling almost sabotaged, taken advantage of, so that others wouldn't have to deal with mom, like set-up, here in my paranoid mind deprived of curative meditation, and even last night I practiced Kundalini Yoga meditation with some success.  

Later, after waking, going down to the kitchen to assess the doing of the dishes, I remember to get mom her bed time pink pill.  I go upstairs and bring it to her, but that doesn't go well.  She's upright, sitting at the edge of her bed, which is covered with books, open books, books which have slid off the bed fallen on top of sweater and bathrobe, books left cracked, books stuffed with mail, books with covers about to come off, spines about to split, and I see she's into the mail again, with the bill from the local drug store in hand, and if she keeps it any longer it will get lost into her piles and her pockets, and her nonsense stuffings into the fleece she is wearing.  Mom...  But it's soon a shouting match.  I try to explain, look mom, this is a bill, we need to pay it, don't lose it, and then before I know it, she's accusing me of physical abuse and she'll call the cops...  Jesus Christ.

People pick up on when you're not being who you're meant to be, like when you're putting up some sort of foolish Hunter S. Thompson persona act, or acting like a punk rocker, as if that will be the cure to the world's problems.  You have to be responsible, and serious.

I've had wine with many a fine person.  Madam Korbonska and I, late at night, the Warsaw Uprising, politics, life in times gone by...  I've stayed up having fine conversations, many many night.  These were civilized evenings.  But I always come back, necessarily, to my life, such as it is.  Broke,  Jobless.  No more time to mess around.

The shame of bartending is that you sometimes have to sort of tacitly support things of the bawdy life, as honest reflections lead to sometimes in the barroom confessional booth at certain rare times, if the boisterous crowd doesn't start singing for it.  Oh yes, ha ha hah, great times, yeah, great times, and meanwhile all the people who don't to go bars are married and taking care of children and careers and each other.

Well, at least I was brave, at least up until the pandemic, going to work, putting on a jovial face, even quite enjoying talking to people who were kind enough to trust me, the idiot, with their stories and tales, with their lives, with their friendship.

Now everything and everyone feels detached from me, far away, out of touch.  The tree pollen of sprouting leafing out Springtime can make you feel weird, enhancing this situation here.

Do you have to see certain things to be able to understand Buddhism?  Do things have to, as Pema Chodrom has it, fall apart.