Author: frankisemptiness

April 22nd, 2020

As I was taking my third walk of the day, I heard a noise coming from behind me on Oakwood Road. It was a loud, rhythmic, clunking sound. I turned to look, and I saw a beat up Honda Civic closing in on me. A young man was driving it, and he had his four-way flashers on. He was doing probably 25 mph.

The front tire on the driver’s side was completely shredded. Strips of black rubber clung to the rim and flapped crazily as the wheel rotated. With every rotation the rim hit the asphalt and left a small gouge. It was painful to watch the metal wheel hammer on the pavement.

I thought to myself, as he started to pass me, “For the love of God, pull over!” I have had blowouts in the past, and even I know better than to just keep rolling. This man was in the process of totally trashing the front end of his car. He was going to have much more than just a flat tire to worry about.

The guy had obviously been driving like this for a while, and he fully intended to keep going. I saw him go past me, and I watched as his lights faded into the distance. I could hear the sound of the bouncing wheel even after he was out of sight.

This incident makes me think of the COVID-19 crisis. Actually, almost everything makes me think about COVID-19. It’s just that the pandemic is a bit like a huge blown out tire, and the U.S. is the tired, old Civic. Yeah, I know that this is a wretched analogy, but our health system, our economy, and our civil rights are all shredded. So, maybe we have three flats. As a nation, we have at least pulled over to the curb to look at the damage. We know that we need to fix the problem before we move on. Unfortunately, we don’t have a spare, and we aren’t willing to wait for one. We want to get somewhere in a hurry, and we are going there, even if the vehicle (the United States) is undrivable once we arrive.

We are going to ride the rim.

Maybe we will get lucky. Maybe we will find a vaccine (i.e. spare tire) really soon. Maybe we won’t destroy our political and economic struts and tie rods.

Or maybe we will wind up stuck on the side of a deserted highway, and have to abandon the car. I guess we could empty out the glove compartment and remove the plates.

 

 

 

April 20th, 2020

Karin was on the computer, looking at posts from her Ravelry group. Ravelry is an international knitter’s society. The gang somehow reminds me of the Freemasons, except that the women members are all armed with needles.

I came to Karin with a book in hand. I told her,

“I got this in the mail today.”

Karin squinted at the title, and said, “Generation of Swine? What kind of book is that?”

“It’s from Hunter S. Thompson. He’s the guy who wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

Karin laughed. “Oh, then it’s about crazy people.”

“Uh, yeah.”

She smiled at me. “You like crazy.”

I shrugged and said, “Well, yes, I am attracted to it.”

Karin went back to looking at a knitting pattern from some lady in New Zealand.

The full title of the book is: Generation of Swine; Gonzo Papers, Volume 2; Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80’s.

Seriously, who can pass up a book with a title like that?

I need a road trip bad. The destination doesn’t even matter. I just need a shot of crazy.

This is not to say that there is an insufficient amount of craziness here. Oh no, we have plenty of that. It’s just that a person becomes accustomed to local forms of madness. The homegrown types of insanity start to look normal. One forgets how profoundly twisted the neighborhood really is.

That is where a road trip helps. It is always good to view craziness with fresh eyes. Shock and awe. Drive a couple hundred miles and witness new varieties of lunacy. Take a look a look around and go,

“What the hell is this shit?”

Where to go? Actually, any place will do, but I know of some locations that are better than others for observing weirdness. Let me think of a few…

New Orleans. Yes, oh yes. I went there for the first time as a chaperon on our youngest son’s 8th grade class trip. I was in charge of Stefan and eleven of his barely adolescent classmates. It was in 2008, just three years after Katrina. Half of the city was still desolate. The 9th Ward looked like a setting for “The Walking Dead”. The French Quarter vibrated with strangeness: Harley riders, blues musicians, homeless folks, hustlers of all sorts, voodoo fortune tellers, lap dancers, and twelve wide-eyed eight graders from Milwaukee. Some streets were lined with expensive homes that had enclosed gardens like those on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. In the heart of the French Quarter, which is the heart of New Orleans, was the Cathedral of St. Louis. I went to Mass there and wept.

Manhattan. An entire city on meth. A place where nothing ever stops. People start clubbing at midnight. Or at least they did before COVID-19. The Port Authority Bus Terminal has uniformed soldiers with automatic weapons guarding it. Mary House, the center of the Catholic Worker Movement, is the same street as the national headquarters for Hells Angels. Times Square has enough flashing lights to induce an epileptic seizure. I spent a day in Manhattan with Karin. Jules and Rose gave us the tour. We saw a herd of skateboarders cruising down the center of 9th Avenue. We lunched in a Soviet-style, subterranean, Ukrainian restaurant. The streets were a roiling, surging sea of humanity, which is unfortunately currently at ebb tide. One day was enough to put me into sensory overload.

Las Vegas. Mostly thieves and knaves, but entertaining ones. Vegas exists to separate the rubes from their wallets. Donald Trump has a gold hotel there for some reason. I have bad memories from Vegas. Most of those memories have to do with a short, but interesting, stay in the Clark County Detention Center in the spring of 2017. It’s amazing what a person can learn in fourteen hours, especially if those fourteen hours are spent in jail. I met a variety of outcasts and deviants, and those were just the cops. The CCDC is in downtown Las Vegas, right next to the Gold Nugget Casino. Two very different worlds in extremely close proximity. I didn’t do much sightseeing in Vegas. I was eager to leave Nevada.

Crazy. The possibilities are endless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 17th, 2020

Thirty-eight years ago, I was assigned as a section leader in the 173rd Aviation Company in Hanau, West Germany. I was an Army lieutenant back then. I made friends with the company safety officer, whose name I can no longer remember. I do remember having a conversation with the safety guy about OERs (Officer Efficiency Reports). Every year, every military officer got an OER from his or her superior. Part of the OER process required the officer being reviewed to explain in detail what they had accomplished during the last year. Often, it was hard to come up with anything extraordinary. Sometimes, it was hard to think of anything at all. I complained to my friend that I was just trying to do my job, and I really didn’t know what write down for my boss.

My friend shook his head. Then the safety officer told me that in a way I was lucky. He said that I could always find something that I had done: flown X number of missions, trained Y number of pilots, passed Z number of inspections. My friend explained to me that I could always show that I had made something happen. He, on the other hand, had to show that his efforts had prevented something. In his job he had to somehow convince his boss that he had kept something bad from happening. He had to provide a negative proof.

I think about that now with the corona virus crisis in full swing. Our governor in Wisconsin, Tony Evers, just extended the “safer-at-home” rules until May 26th. A lot of people are very unhappy about this. I know I’m not happy. There is already a political backlash on its way. There is a growing sentiment that we don’t need all these rules any more, and that we instead need to get people moving and working again.

Governor Evers, like many other governors is in an unenviable position. He can talk all he wants about how the social distancing and the business/school shutdowns have saved lives. He can tell the residents of Wisconsin repeatedly how the lockdown is stopping the disease from spreading. However, Evers is in a the same situation as my friend, the safety officer. Evers cannot prove that his rules have stopped the disease or saved lives. He cannot point to any particular group of people in the state and say, “You’re alive today because we are following these rules.”

The people who are angry about the extended lockdown can clearly see the downside of the “safer-at-home” policy. Some of them know that they are now unemployed. Some of them know that they cannot go to church. Some of them know that they cannot travel when and where they like. Some of them know that their kids are not getting a school education. These drawbacks are obvious and indisputable.

The advantages of Evers’ policies are not.

This is not the governor’s fault. We, as a people, simply don’t know enough about the virus. We don’t have enough testing to know who is infected, we don’t know how best to track it, and we don’t know how many people will fall ill and/or die. We don’t have a vaccine. There is no cure. We don’t have a clue.

It is very possible that Governor Evers is overreacting, but how can he know for sure? To a certain extent he is guessing, and that is all anyone can do right now. He is erring on the side of caution.

I don’t know if that is the right thing to do. All I know is that I am glad that I don’t have his job.

 

 

 

April 15th, 2020

“There is no zero-harm choice here. Both of these decisions will lead to harm for individuals, whether that’s dramatic economic harm or whether it’s loss of life. But it’s always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.” – Trey Hollingsworth, Republican Congressman from Indiana

Wow.

Representative Hollingsworth’s quote about the re-opening of the U.S. has made me think. Mostly, it has made me ask questions, few of which seem to have clear answers.

First, what does the Congressman mean by “our way of life as Americans”? Is his way of life the same as mine? Is my lifestyle (comfortably retired) the same as that of a Syrian refugee family I know? Is the way of life of this refugee family the same as that of my combat veteran son living down in Texas? There are as many different American lifestyles as there are Americans. Who is Hollingsworth talking about? What does he see as the most important aspects of “our way of life”?

The Congressman has also stated that the answer to our current crisis is “unequivocally to get Americans back to work, to get Americans back to their businesses.” Okay, so this implies that “our way of life” is primarily defined by economics. It apparently revolves around money. Personally, I would be happy to see the nation’s economy humming again, so that my retirement fund would rise up from the depths. I am sure that the seventeen million recently fired people in this country would like to be back at work, so they can pay their bills. Economic prosperity is a big deal, but does that also mean that our way of life only consists of insatiable consumerism? Does our lifestyle require unsustainable growth? Is the American way of life solely based on a sort of heroic materialism?

The American way of life also seems to hinge on personal freedom (or, extreme individualism, depending on your perspective). The Bill of Rights has not been doing very well during the last few weeks. Do individual rights trump (no pun intended) the common good? Does our way of life mean that we have unlimited Freedom of Assembly and Freedom of Religion? Americans love to fight for their rights, but we seldom talk about our responsibilities toward our fellow citizens. I have heard people say that they have a right to take the chance of exposing themselves to the COVID-19 infection if they choose. Maybe they do. But do they have the right to expose other people to that same infection? Where do my rights end, and where do yours begin?

Hollingsworth talked about “the loss of life of American lives” as being something that is acceptable in the service of preserving “our way of life”, whatever that means. That notion makes me squirm a bit. If COVID-19 vistims die, will their deaths somehow save the lives of people who are suffering greatly in the lockdown? When talking about “loss of life”, is the Congressman talking about the loss of his life, or maybe the lives of his family members? It really matters to me whose lives are expendable. Does he expect that certain people will volunteer to die for the cause? Who are we willing to sacrifice on the altar of capitalism?

I wonder if our way of life as Americans is really worth saving.

 

 

 

 

April 12th, 2020

It’s a grey and cloudy Easter morning. Karin is in bed. so is the girl we love. The dogs asleep, so I will let them lie.

Karin started making prepations for Easter yesterday. She is dyeing boiled eggs. Karin uses natural dyes for the egg colors (e.g. onion peels for a soft brown hue). She baked braided Easter bread. It looks a lot like challah. She also baked a chocolate coffee cake from scratch.

At some point this morning, three of us will have breakfast together. I suspect that will be the extent of our Easter celebration.

Karin watched the livestream broadcast of the Easter Vigil Mass from the Cathedral of St. John last night. I went to bed. I could have watched the Mass with Karin, but it would have only been a source of frustration to me. The Easter Vigil is a liturgy that should touch all of the human senses. It is not something that a person simply observes. At the Vigil, a participant smells the aromatic smoke from the burning incense, she tastes the bread and the wine, he hears the chanting and the tinkle of the bells, she sees in the darkness of the church all the candles being lit from the flame of the original Easter candle, and he feels the warmth of human company. To me, watching the service is worse than nothing. It seems like voyeurism.

Someone cries out, “Rejoice.”

I’m not good with joy. Frankly, I don’t understand it. I certainly don’t comprehend it in the context of Easter. Not today.

Someone cries out, “Jesus is risen from the dead!” And, your point is…

Easter only makes sense if Jesus is God, and if God loves and cares about humans. All humans, as individuals. I fully accept the idea that there is a God, and that this deity is omnipotent and all-knowing. I have no problem with Jesus being resurrected. However, I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that He/She/It gives a damn about me or anybody else.

I close my eyes, and often I see the face of a young woman who is lying on a concrete floor. The face is smeared with blood, and she is unconscious. This is a very recent image seared into my memory. When I see it, I can taste the fear and sorrow. I feel lost. I feel that the young woman, the one I love, is abandoned.

Some cries out, “God loves you!” Really…?

David Wolpe, in his book, The Healer of Shattered Hearts, tells a story about the Chasidic rabbi, Levi Yitzak of Bereditchev. It goes like this:

“Right before the Kol Nidre service, the opening service of the Day of Atonement, he stood before the ark as the sun was about to set. For a long time he stood, silent, still, as the evening approached. Noticing that the time to begin prayer was upon them, his students and disciples became uncomfortable, worrying that the rabbi would begin too late. At the last possible moment he spoke.

‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘we come before You this year, as we do every year, to ask Your forgiveness. But in this past year I have caused no death. I have brought no plagues upon the world, no earthquakes, no floods. I have made no women widows, no children orphans. God, you have done these things, not me! Perhaps You should be asking forgiveness from me.’

The great Rabbi paused, and continued in a softer voice, ‘But, since You are God, and I am only Levi Yitzhak, Yisgadal v’yishadah sh’mei rabah (May his great Name be exalted and sanctified), and he began the service.”

Now is the time to pray.

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 10th, 2020

I read the news. It’s a disgusting habit, a true vice. It’s like being hooked on political pornography. I read the latest report about COVID-19 crisis with utter dismay, and then I then eagerly read another one. I try to ignore the obvious lies coming from our Federal government, but I get caught up in the surrounding noise and confusion. Nobody is really in charge, and nobody seems to know what will happen next. Many of our leaders are just making this shit up as they go. I think of one leader in particular.

That one leader is bound and determined to get the national economy running full bore as soon as possible. He wants everything to go back to normal. I think most people want that. The question is: What is “normal” going to look like? It’s not going to look anything like it did back in February. We will have a “new normal”, and that might be pretty weird.

I think back to my childhood. When I was at Franklin Elementary School, we would have occasional fire drills. The bells would ring, the kids would momentarily freak out, and then the teacher would line us up to go outside to the playground. We would stand around until the “all clear”, and then the teacher would sweetly tell us,

“Now, class, we are going back to our room to continue working on our math assignments.”

We did. We all went back to our desks and wrestled with numbers for a while. Life went on as if nothing had happened.

I think that is what our leader imagines will happen once the crisis ends. He expects that everybody will go back to their seats and work on their assignments.

Probably not.

I also think back to my childhood and remember playing musical chairs. I hated that party game. It always seemed sadistic. When the music stopped somebody was always left standing. I see this happening in the work place once the lockdown is over. People will rush back to their seats, and some of those seats won’t be there any more. There may be new and different seats available, but many of the old, comfortable ones will be gone forever. It may be a rough transition.

Many people, especially people like me, do not change their habits easily. I have to be forced to change. Well, right now, like millions of other people, I am being forced to change the way I do things. Once I alter my habits, it is likely that they remain changed. I doubt that I will go back to doing things the old way. I will not be the only person in that situation.

By necessity many people have gone to buying products online since the lockdown began. Even curmudgeons like myself have used the Internet to make purchases. Are we going to go back to driving to retail outlets when we can easily buy things from home, and have them delivered to us? Many big box stores were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy prior to the arrival of the COVID-19 virus. Are they going to to open back up? Are those retail jobs going to come back?

I can ask the same questions about restaurants, coffee shops, and gyms. Are these places going to be profitable now that people have learned that they don’t need them?

Will the people working from home go back to their offices? Are offices, to some extent, now obsolete?

What about churches and other places of worship? Once people getting out of the habit of participating in daily or weekly services, will they go back to them?

I don’t think that we are truly aware of it yet, but there has been a seismic shift in how we function as a society. We aren’t going back to the old way of doing things. We can’t.

 

 

 

April 8th, 2020

I voted in the Wisconsin primary election yesterday. I voted for Bernie Sanders. I’m not sure why I did that. I don’t even like Bernie. I sincerely doubt that he will ever be President. I am almost certain that Biden got more votes in the primary than Sanders.

Bernie won anyway.

For months now, actually for years, people having been screaming that Sanders is a socialist (which, of course, he is). Being that he is a socialist, it seems that to many people he is clearly un-American, and that his policies would undermine the very foundations of our great country.

These folks need to take a look around them.

The Congress and the President just recently passed and implemented an economic rescue program that costs over two trillion dollars. After a week or two, they have decided that it’s not enough money, and now they want to go back to the well and draw out another 250 billion.

How does this look any different from socialism?

There are now Federal loans/grants for small businesses so that they keep employees on the books. Federal students loans are suspended through September. President Trump has said that the Federal government will pay hospitals for COVID -19 treatment. Soon millions of people will start getting checks from the Federal government to keep the economy afloat, at least for a while.

Hmmmmmm…

All of this makes Franklin Roosevelt look like Ayn Rand.

I’m not saying that these programs are wrong or unnecessary. I just find the situation to be a little ironic. The Republicans (some of them) used to be fiscal conservatives. No more. They compete with the Democrats to see who can spend money the quickest. It’s funny in a twisted sort of way.

I guess what really amuses me is that some people believe that, once the virus is under control, everything will return to “normal”. I think not. This crisis is a unique event, and there is no unringing that bell. Certainly, there will be some reaction, some push back. But it will never return to the status quo. Temporary changes often become permanent.

As an example, millions of people are now working from home. Many of these workers were toiling in offices until quite recently. Are they all going back to their cubicles when this show is done? No. Work life for many folks has radically and forever changed. How does that transformation affect things like vehicular traffic? How does affect home life? What are other ramifications?

There is definitely at least one dark side to this Brave New World. I am thinking about our basic rights as citizens. I would like to see the Bill of Rights put back into practice at some point. I miss little things like Freedom of Assembly and Freedom of Religion. I seriously wonder if those foundations of our republic are also collateral damage from this crisis.

Come November, it might not matter that much if Biden wins or if Trump wins.

Bernie already won.

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 6th, 2020

Karin and I watched the Palm Sunday Mass on Sunday, as it flowed online from the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Milwaukee. It was for me an odd experience. I sat on the couch and watched the show only because it meant so much for Karin. It really was a “show”. I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense. It is just that Karin and I were, for the most part, simply spectators, as opposed to active participants in the Mass. As Catholics, we are supposed to be engaged participants, but it was impossible for us to do that.

If a person lives long enough, they remember things. I am not going to argue whether or not these memories are in any way accurate. I’m just saying that current events often trigger thoughts of long ago. Sunday’s Mass online brought up a number of memories for me. I remembered my grandma.

When I was young (I’m not even sure when it was), my Grandma Pestotnik lived in a tiny apartment near the corner of 76th Street and Beloit in West Allis. She cared for my grandfather who dying of Parkinson’s disease. Both Grandma and Grandpa were Slavs. Grandma came from a Polish farm family, and Grandpa was a Slovene. Grandpa wasn’t terribly religious, but Grandma was. She was an old school, pre-Vatican II Catholic. Her home was chock full of holy pictures, statues of the Blessed Virgin, rosaries, and crucifixes. Oddly enough, our house looks like that too. The only real difference is that we also have a statue of the Buddha.

Grandma couldn’t go to church, because she needed to be home with her husband. So, on Sundays she would watch the liturgy on television, “The Mass for Shut-ins”. Now, Karin and I are doing the same thing, albeit for different reasons. The only difference that I notice is that, when Grandma watched the program, the church service being filmed was in a room that was packed with people. The service that Karin and I watched was celebrated by only a few people. There was a bishop or two, a priest, a lector, and a cantor. The laity was conspicuously absent. During the liturgy on Sunday, I could hear the words of the archbishop echoing in a nearly empty cathedral. It was eerie, like listening to somebody speak in a mausoleum.

In my grandmother’s day, before Vatican II, it was accepted that the laity played no active role in the Mass. Part of the reason for that was that the Mass was entirely celebrated in Latin, and most Catholics had only a minimal understanding of the language. This being the case, parishioners sometimes sat in their pews, and prayed their private devotions or said their beads. An acolyte would ring bells during the Eucharistic Prayer to alert a distracted congregation to wake up and pay attention. Catholics were (and are) required by Church law to attend Mass, at least physically. Mentally and spiritually, they were (and are) often somewhere else.

All that changed after 1965. Suddenly, Catholics were supposed be an integral part of the liturgy. The Mass was said in the vernacular, with only a minimum of residual Latin in the prayers. Changes take time. Often an entire generation has to die off before new rituals are accepted (think about the forty years that the Israelites spent in the desert). The laity became part of the liturgy, and the laity expected to be active in the process. Catholics do not worship like they did fifty years ago. The change was not just some tinkering with the ritual. The change involved a whole new perspective of it means to be Catholic.

I don’t know this, but I suspect that it was easier for my grandmother to watch the Mass on television than it is for me to do so. She was used to being part of an audience. She was used to being an observer of sacred events. I am not. I am used to being part of the action, so it is hard for me to a religious couch potato.

Here is another memory. I remember going to Mass the Sunday after 9/11. The building was packed; standing room only. It was a time of deep fear and uncertainty, so people came together for solace and comfort. They took refuge in the sangha, or the shul, or the mosque, or the church.

Now we can’t do that.

 

April 5th, 2020

“I wonder if there are twenty men alive in the world now, who see things as they really are.” – Thomas Merton

In many ways I am a Luddite. I embrace technology with extreme reluctance. It’s not that I am averse to learning new things; it is that sometimes I don’t see the point in doing so. I am often comfortable with old ways (e.g. I like to write snail mail letters). I have never used Twitter or Instagram. I used to be on Facebook, but then I gave that up because I got tired of reading stupid political commentary and looking at pictures of cute puppies. I generally restrict my self to emails, online news articles, and this blog.

Yesterday I was wrenched into our Brave New World, and I participated in a Zoom meeting. Since nobody on the planet wants to get any closer than six feet to anyone else, Zoom is how we have to gather together. I had been a member of a Zoom conference a few months ago. I was underwhelmed by the experience. I think that part of the problem then was that most people were unfamiliar with the system. Some folks were too loud, some too quiet. Some were hard to see because they were far away, others had their faces right up in the camera. The meeting eventually degenerated into frustration and angry chaos. Some of the confusion can be blamed on the actual subject matter of the meeting. Some of the unpleasantness was due to the group’s inexperience with operating Zoom.

Yesterday I was part of a virtual Zen practice. For those of you who do not know what Zen practice is, let me try to explain. There are different schools of Zen, each of which has its own quirky kind of meditation practice. I am only familiar with the Kwan Um School, which comes from Korea. Typical, in the Kwan Um practice, we chant together for maybe twenty minutes (in Korean/Chinese, mostly). Then we sit on a cushion, and stare at a fucking wall in silence for half an hour. After that, the dharma teacher reads a passage from a book about and/or by the founding Zen Master, Seung San.

Now, one might think that this sort of meeting would be perfect for Zoom. Um, kinda. There were some issues that came up.

Apparently, there is a momentary delay in transmission when somebody speaks (or chants). This means that when a group of people attempt to chant together, the system goes crazy rather quickly. What happened at our practice was that one person in the group, Jorge, tapped the moktak (wooden percussion instrument) and chanted “kwan seum bosal”, while everyone else was placed on mute. So, actually only Jorge was chanting to the group, while the rest of us were chanting privately.

Zen puts a huge emphasis on “together action”. As the phrase implies, we need to do things together, like chanting. Were we chanting together at yesterday’s meeting? Not so much.

We sat silently and meditated after that. That was weird. I could see the picture gallery at the top of my screen, and I noticed everybody else sitting at home with their eyes closed. We were trying to meditate together separately. Does that make any sense? Maybe. It might have been better to just stop the meeting for twenty minutes, let everyone meditate privately, and then regroup. The truth is that, when we sit silently in the same room, we are united. It is hard to explain, but when I sit on the cushion and face the wall during a normal practice, I still feel the presence of the others who meditate with me. We are one. There is an energy when we are physically together that does not exist in cyberspace.

After meditation, Peter, our dharma teacher and Zoom host, read a story about a Zen Master who gained enlightenment after walking through a village that had been decimated by a cholera epidemic. That seemed appropriate. I don’t think that Peter pick that passage by chance. We discussed the reading, as we usually do. That was a bit awkward. Once again, I think that was a result of us being new to Zoom. Fortunately, the eight of us took turns speaking. There is a tendendacy with Zoom for people to talk over each other, and that gets messy. Everybody in our group was courteous and polite. so the conversation went well.

Peter said, “This can’t substitute for an actual meeting.” Then he laughed and said, “Well, it’s going have to substitute for an actual meeting.”

He’s right. Zoom will have to substitute. It’s all we got, but somehow it makes me feel more lonely.

Zen practice is there to help a person to see the world clearly. During meditation, something should be learned.

I learned that I miss my friends.

 

 

 

April 2nd, 2020

“Hope is beauty,
Personified.
At her feet, the world,
Hypnotized.

A million flashes,
A million smiles.
And on the catwalk,
She flaunts her style a long mile.

An angry sign of darkness,
Our hope lies lost and torn.
All flame like love is fleeting,
When there’s no hope anymore.

Pain and glory,
Hand in hand,
A sacrifice,
The highest price.

Like the poison in her heart,
Like a whisper she was gone,
Like when angels fall.

And on this side of darkness,
Our hope lies on the floor.
All love like flame is fleeting,
When there’s no hope anymore.

Like the poison in her heart,
Like a whisper, she was gone,
Like an angel, angels fall.”

“Hope” by the heavy metal cello quartet, Apocalyptica

4:00 on a dark, rainy morning is probably not the best time to write about hope.

It might be a good time to write about fear.

The rest of the house is still asleep. I go to bed quite early. Karin and the girl we love go to bed quite late. When I try to fall asleep, I still hear the rumble of confused life in the background. When I awake, it is quiet, except for the patter of raindrops on the skylight and the steady breath of Karin lying next to me. I don’t often go near to the room of the girl we love. She might be wrestlng with her demons in the night. Or, I fear, she might not be wrestling with them at all. She may have given up.

I did the modern thing, and looked for quotations about ‘hope” online, thinking I could one in this essay. I looked for Bible quotes because, despite all evidence to the contrary, there is still hope in the Bible. I was disappointed. The only quotes I could find were on sites that were Christian versions of Pravda. It was all propaganda, and it wasn’t even good propaganda. Why can’t some religious websites even try to be real?

The girl went yesterday afternoon to get her broken teeth fixed. I drove her to the dentist, and I waited in the parking lot. As I waited, I sat and listened to the song from Apocalyptica over and over. My OCD kicks in when I am bored. The young woman didn’t get what she needed. Because of the Coronanvirus, the dentist office is shutting down. Instead of getting her implants, she got a temporary partial denture. The denture is probably good enough for now, but it isn’t what she really needs. Actually, a dentist can’t give this woman what she really needs. He or she can only help with her teeth. There is a lot more involved.

Back in 2009, my younger brother, Chuck, died. He died from alcoholism, mental illness, and the crushing weight of the world. I remember the sleepless nights I spent worrying about him. I remember the sudden trips to the ER when it looked like he was about ready to leave us. I remember abandoning him because I was too scared to help him.

Sometimes, things feel the same with the girl that we love. I could not save my brother. I cannot save this young woman.

I hope that she will heal. I fear that she will die.