Zen stories to tell your neighbors.

"One day while walking through the wilderness a man stumbled upon a vicious tiger. He ran but soon came to the edge of a high cliff. Desperate to save himself, he climbed down a vine and dangled over the fatal precipice. As he hung there, two mice appeared from a hole in the cliff and began gnawing on the vine. Suddenly, he noticed on the vine a plump wild strawberry. He plucked it and popped it in his mouth. It was incredibly delicious!"

This is my oblique way of saying sorry I've been neglecting this blog. To breach Livejournal territory for a moment, I've been getting ready to move away from my childhood house and leave my hometown - probably forever. My parents are moving across the country and I will now see much, much less of them.

I wrote for almost two hours tonight and remembered this story in the middle of writing, so I came back and decided to look it up. The mice are not present in my travel-journal rendering, and it's a branch instead of a vine. It's funny how your initial experience of a story will change its significance to you, even if the only things that change are incidentals. I first heard this story at an aikido seminar in Birmingham, Alabama, which at sixteen was the farthest I'd ever been without parental supervision. And sitting there in a sweat-soaked gi surrounded by incredibly amiable, intimidating black belts, I tried to get it. The tiger is the past. The fraying vine is destiny. The bottomless pit is the future. And the strawberry is now. You are in the present. Live there. Eat strawberries while mice engineer your doom.

But the story always had an uncomfortable kind of fatalism for me, especially since I was miserably trapped in high school and at home at that age. Since an early age, the present has never been appealing to me - and I couldn't understand the protagonist's exultation over a piece of fruit. Here's this bumbling innocent, walking along, not hurting anybody. A tiger decides he'd be great lunchmeat. The guy runs, like anybody would, and ends up fucked because he can't fight the tiger. It seemed like the Buddhist version of Job.

Tonight it took on a different meaning. Try and bear with me here. I've been running from tigers in one form or another since way before I could do a forward roll and Shihan Blok asked us the difference between pianos and oranges (a: one is good if you're starving.) And now I'm leaving. Those mice are chewing like it's going out of style. And nobody, discussing the man with the strawberry, ever asked if he knew he had choices. Because he did, and there were three: climb back up and be eaten by the devil he knew, wait for the mice to finish their work, or just let go.

Death means something different for Buddhists - not Christian judgement or atheist oblivion. It means another life. One that might very well turn out to be tiger-less. Why did he waste all that time with strawberries, with so much waiting for him in the ravine? What I'm saying is, why didn't he know he could choose the future?

Why doesn't everybody?

I didn't want to blog because I didn't want to blog about the news.

But this made me so ill and so sad I called out of work tonight.

The Israeli strike killed at least 54 people, more than half of them children.

The BBC's Jim Muir said that for some of the rescuers, experienced as they were, the emotional impact of finding so many dead children in the ruins was too much.

"As I arrived, they were carrying out on a stretcher the limp body of a young boy of about 10. Many other children were pulled out of the rubble lifeless," our correspondent said.

"That's a Red Cross rescue worker sitting here in the sunshine just sobbing - he's so overcome with emotion here," he added.

Now let's talk about international responses:

UK PRIME MINISTER TONY BLAIR AND GERMAN CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL
The tragic events of today have underlined the urgency of the need for a ceasefire as soon as possible. It is now necessary to work in New York on the pre conditions for such a ceasefire, which is a political agreement on the full implementation of resolution 1559.

UN SECRETARY GENERAL KOFI ANNAN
The most urgent need is to bring the fighting to a halt without further delay. For that, this [Security] Council has a solemn responsibility. Action is needed now - before many more children, women and men become casualties in a conflict over which they have no control.

EU FOREIGN POLICY CHIEF JAVIER SOLANA
I have talked to the prime minister of Lebanon... I have expressed to him my profound dismay and deep sorrow at the attack and the death of innocent civilians in Qana. Nothing can justify that. I have transmitted to him that the European Union is continuously working to reach an immediate ceasefire.

FRENCH PRESIDENT JACQUES CHIRAC
France condemns this unjustified action which demonstrates more than ever the need for an immediate ceasefire without which there will only be other such incidents.

CHINESE FOREIGN MINISTRY SPOKESMAN LIU JIANCHAO
China strongly urges the two sides involved in the conflict to cease fire immediately to avoid further disaster. The Lebanon-Israel conflict has caused grave humanitarian damage.

SWEDISH FOREIGN MINISTER JAN ELIASSON
It is time to end this madness. The UN Security Council must accept its responsibility and immediately adopt a resolution to bring an end to hostilities.

SPANISH FOREIGN MINISTRY
The Spanish government repeats it call for an immediate ceasefire that would end the violence and spare us from having to lament tragedies like this one in the future.

POPE BENEDICT XVI
In the name of God, I call on all those responsible for this spiral of violence so that weapons are immediately laid down on all sides.

Can you find the common phrase? What's that? Well done! Immediate fucking ceasefire. One phrase that seems to have united the Chinese, Kofi Annan, Jacques Chirac, and the goddamn Pope. Congratulations, because if you found that phrase among the previous quotes, you are either much smarter or much more sensitive to the death of children than George W. Bush. His brilliant addition:

US PRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH
The United States is resolved to work with members of the United Nations Security Council to develop a resolution that will enable the region to have a sustainable peace, a peace that lasts, a peace that will enable mothers and fathers to raise their children in a hopeful world. May God bless those who lost their lives.

I'm starting to think I'm going to hell just for having been born here. How do I express the depth of my shame - that a nation we support has used weapons we gave them to kill little human beings who couldn't even have pronounced "Hezbollah", and our president's response is this blatant, sociopathic opportunism? For "peace that lasts" read "Western military presence."

At least Georgie knows enough to hedge his bets by asking God to bless the people who died. Bad idea to make too many promises to the living.

'You ever notice how all the prices end in nine? Damn, that's eerie.'

Let me start by offering my sincere apologies, and a statement of intentions: I do not want this to become a Work Blog, the type of thing a 'Clerks' character would write given reliable Internet access. That said, I need to write something. Something to a customer I serve every time I work. Something important.

Dear Sir:

It was cute the first time you waltzed in, during our ultra-busy post-lunch hour - when Jesus Christ and Satan themselves need to have a frappuccino NOW do it FASTER NOW NOW NOW - and ordered a tray containing "green tea in a mug, two teabags, an iced tea shaker half filled with water and half filled with ice - shaken, poured into a venti cup, and a Rice Krispies square on a plate cut into four pieces." It was amusing: the way you insisted that the square be cut lengthwise and not horizontally, or you would send it back. The way you flatly refused any other drinking vessel besides a large white ceramic mug. The way you wanted your ice and your water in exact half and half proportions. It was cute, and it was fun, and we, your servers, laughed to each other, perhaps relishing in a momentary relief from the constant, implacable grinding of blenders.

The first time.

Now, sir, I regret to inform you that your shenanigans are no longer welcome. It says something about your character that, in a line of people stretching to the magazine section, you have the audacity to demand "Sheila, because she knows what I want." Sir, do you see Sheila at the espresso machine? Not only is she making a triple-shot no-foam latte, she is focusing all her mental and bodily energies on growing a third arm - so that she can assist the trainees who are still practically useless. Sheila can be of no help to us now. I will take your order, sir. We will get through this. But for the love of God, don't you have anywhere else to go?

"Streets of fire"

A few things. First, and most compelling, check out my darling dearest's new blog. It's seriously interesting stuff and he's a hell of a writer, and I'm a very lucky girl.

I'm also obsessed. A brief Youtube search for Bruce Springsteen yielded some good results, one in which The Boss talks art and politics with Soledad O'Brien. Go there, watch that, then read these lyrics and watch this video, and tell me something in you isn't singing:

When the night's quiet and you don't care anymore,
And your eyes are tired and there's someone at your door
And you realize you wanna let go
And the weak lies and the cold walls you embrace
Eat at your insides and leave you face to face with
Streets of fire

I'm wandering, a loser down these tracks
I'm dying, but girl I can't go back
'Cause in the darkness I hear somebody call my name
And when you realize how they tricked you this time
And it's all lies but I'm strung out on the wire
In these streets of fire

I live now, only with strangers
I talk to only strangers
I walk with angels that have no place
Streets of fire.

What does 'cut and run' mean to you?

The Lone Star Iconoclast's Myspace page (progressive newspapers need internet love, too) just sent out a bulletin with a link to a very good interview with George Lakoff on tort reform and conservative linguistic framing. The man's a genius, not the least in the way he's able to center his own profession in a legitimate and respectable frame of academia. Nobody wants to sound like they're in a B movie when they discuss this sort of thing, so nobody calls framing what it actually is: brainwashing. What other term is there for the constant repetition of words or phrases with the intent of limiting or directing the individual thought of the listener? Lakoff clarifies:

Q: How have conservatives mounted their attack?

Lakoff: They have very cleverly framed the public discussion and have repeated these frames so often and for so long that they have become ingrained in the public’s mind, which means that those frames have become realized physically in the brains of many members of the public.

Q: What are some of those frames?

Lakoff: To begin, the very phrase "tort reform" evokes a frame. In two words, it communicates that something is the matter with the tort system, which requires reform or correction. In this respect, the phrase is similar to another effective conservative phrase, "tax relief." Once the public accepts these phrases, they have bought into the idea that they need to be relieved from the affliction of taxes and that they need to fix the tort system. The debate then turns to the question of how and how much. At that point, progressives can’t win the debate; the best we can do is limit the losses.

Q: What other frames have the conservatives employed?

Lakoff: They repeat the phrases "lawsuit abuse" and "frivolous lawsuits." They refer to "greedy" and "out of control" lawyers. These words suggest that the speaker is a good, honorable, hard-working, God-fearing person. Opposition to abuse communicates reverence. Being against something frivolous is to be prudent and serious. Opposition to things out-of-control implies being orderly and law abiding.

Boy-howdy, that's a fun realization. The language you use about an issue, for people who get all their information from you, does all their thinking for them! Shit, before I did my own research, I agreed with the spokespeople for this movement that there were too many frivolous lawsuits, and that lawsuit abuse was a real problem. No one brought up the fact that civil courts are basically the last bastions of corporate accountability.

We should watch out. It scares me that every conservative radio talk show host seems to have taken an invisible cue at once and stopped referring to the other side as the Democratic party. I guess it makes your fight harder when you're battling democracy itself. Now Hannity, Savage, and all the rest call them "the Democrat party," and the venom in their voices is fast-acting and paralytic. However, it also scares me that Lakoff and others for the left should, now, get so interested in language, narrative, and metaphor. I'm bothered that Lakoff wants to start calling trial lawyers "public protection attorneys." I'm bothered that he rightly understands the mental life of a person as an ongoing storytelling process, full of archetype and symbolism, and has immediately delivered up this knowledge into the hands of people who want us to think a certain way.

Forms and imitations of forms. Now taking your votes on whether it actually was a good idea to banish poets from The Republic.

"More human than human" is our motto.

Philip K. Dick Android Missing Head

This is too perfect, though people like me seem to be chastised in advance for thinking so:

However satisfying to those with a sense of irony, Hanson is not comforted by the idea of his homage to Dick on a jaunt somewhere or, more likely, stuck in storage.

"It's almost like it has some free spirit to it," he said. "A lot of people have said that it's almost like a PKD narrative, like one of those absurd twists that would occur in a PKD novel. But emotionally it doesn't feel that way to me."

I suppose it wouldn't. Got a minute? Head over here for PKD's terrifying essay (referenced by Richard Linklater - why I typed 'Art' originally, I have no idea - in 'Waking Life') on why we are actually still living in 50 A.D.:

Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

Today a WWII soldier returns to Japan after spending the last five years in Russia and most of his life on an Okinawan island.

And it's good to be a witch in Zimbabwe:

The Witchcraft Suppression Act was used fairly frequently, but prosecuting someone under the new legislation may prove difficult.

The new Criminal Law Codification and Reform Act will demand proof that a person has supernatural powers and that they are using them to harm others.

"It's not going to be easy task," says Custom Kachambwa, a judge with years of experience in the legal field.

'So, if... she weighs as much as a duck...'
'Then she's a...'
'Witch?'

"The future's all yours, you lousy bicycles."

Some introduction:

I used to have a Livejournal, and now this is what I have instead. All right, I still have one. I'll be damned if I'll tell you where it is, though. Tristan, a dear friend of mine, writes Quantum Mechanix - notes on politics and culture, managing to be witty and earnest at once. That blog was the inspiration for this one, and I picked up with Blogger on his recommendation... so, if you're reading this, blame him.

And, well - "Robot Redford"?

It started with a story my friend Sean told me in high school, which, three years later, I remember almost verbatim:

"Allright, so I'm at the dollar store with my dad, just kind of walking around, and I see this, y'know, action figure, and it's just this guy in this cop uniform - with what, like, sort of looks like a robotic arm? And that's not really special, and I wouldn't really have noticed at all if it hadn't been for the name, which was 'Robert Cop.' Which, I guess, was supposed to be like 'RoboCop'? And, y'know, it worked, because I went over there. But, I mean, who the hell is Robert Cop? Just a cop named Robert? That's not a fun toy. So then I started thinking about all the famous Roberts I knew, and switching their first names out with 'Robot'? And, I mean, oh man - you have to try it."

So we did. Robot Kennedy. Robot Goulet. Robot Heinlen seemed almost like we were cheating. We liked Robot DeNiro, but thought no one would get Robot Zimmerman. Robot Browning would probably have been a much better poet. It continues.

But my favorite, the one that infallibly sent me into fits of giggles, no matter how inopportune the occasion - was always Robot Redford. I can't exactly say why. I wrote a small zine of creative writing last fall, with the same title, with the same basic introductory notes. What I wrote about my writing there still applies, which is why I kept the title. I mean, yes, it's funny. Try it: I bet you know some Roberts. See, though, it won't be as funny to you, right? Because it's an inside joke about robots and dollar stores and celebrities I had three years ago with a kid who barely still remembers my name. When I tell people this story, as I always do eventually if I like them, it makes them smile - but I know they don't understand why I'm laughing so hard.

I'm always telling other people my inside jokes, is another way to put it. And it feels ridiculous. Everytime I do it I'm falling all over myself to get the context right, to communicate the specific magic of a moment that's gone for good. The stuff that made the moment worth writing down in the first place. Nothing makes me feel like a failure with as much regularity. But I can't keep that stuff bottled up anymore. It's gotten to the point where I don't actually care if no one gets it, because nothing is worse than the feeling of not sharing things like Robot Redford with everyone I know, anyone who will listen.

So, welcome to my great big stupid inside joke, internet.

It's likely to be a lot of writing about writing, which is possibly my worst habit besides not folding my clothes. Also things that interest me, such as art and politics and robots and zombies and cooking and critical theory. Also stories of the bizarre and absurd at my workplace and own true love, Barnes & Noble Cafe. I'd like you to keep in mind that we are not a Starbucks, though we do serve their coffee with pride.

Also, maybe giant squid. If you're lucky.