Woke up cold, coffee on my mind. Still dark out but the kind of neverdark that passes for dark in Manhattan. Fucks with your mind not ever seeing stars, but that’s another story about the homeland for some other time. Got the coffee going and fired up the computer. Had to finish writing some stuff for some client about some thing I don’t care about but need the money. Coffee, balcony, peek around the corner and yeah, Manhattan Bridge is still there, and Brooklyn too, American flag waving in the middle. Look out straight, Empire Straight Building, yeah she’s still there, looking good but maybe a little nervous.
And the Williamsburg Bridge, aka The Hipster Chute, still quiet this hour save for a few slow-mo joggers racing themselves up her broad incline. Later, and even more later, this end of the bridge will start spitting out skinny hairy hipster boys who don’t work out riding single speeds through red lights, punctuated occasionally by yoga bodied hipster girls in funny glasses. hipSTER…hipSTER…hipSTER…hipSTER…like some factory designed to emit kids from the Midwest and Long Island disguised in black and gray flannel and matte painted fixies bleary-eyed from band practice and too many ironically named artisanal beers.
A few kids from the projects cross in colorful puffy jackets, choreographing their dance to P.S.-This or P.S.-That. But it’s the motion of the toy cars that keeps pulling my eye, and the weird strobing on Clinton street.
I tiptoe back inside, light some Nag Champa, think about burning bodies in Bangalore and sit my ass down on the black cushion facing East to a wall of brown brick and brownish gray dawn. What faith this requires that this version of the game – the one we call Buddhism – has the rules right. That it makes sense that we are born to discover how to transcend our own ego. That’s the rules of the Buddhism Game. You are born, there is dissatisfaction, here are some tools to overcome dissatisfaction, knock yourself out. Makes more sense than anything else I’ve heard, but it sure would have been easier if we just came out satisfied.
How do we know this isn’t just some vast prison like Josh and I talked about last night, all of us just the descendants of some intergalactic criminals shat onto planet earth 10,000 years ago out the ass end of some rusty universe-cruising penal colony. After all we are the only species that takes great pains to fuck with, pollute, destroy and pave our habitat. Never saw a rhinoceros dump toxic waste in a river. Never saw a giraffe paving virgin forests. Welcome to Planet Jail. The Anunaki? The Hathors? The Nephilim? Who are our intergalactic brethren? I sit, I clear my mind, breathe in, breathe out, and I sit. And listen, and sit….
to be continued, maybe….