2005-05-29 - 10:08 p.m.
I�ve been working so hard (12-hour days every single working day in the month of May) and on top of that, on-line and in real life, I have been having to deal with people who are either so unforgivably stupid or else view life from a point of view so alien to mine that I wonder how I slipped through some sewer grate without even knowing it. This is the kind of atmosphere I often get myself in, when I realize that the pendulum is about to swing back, thank God, in the other direction.
So part of that pendulum swing, here�s very surreal experience I had last weekend.
The weather was so great last weekend, in the high 80s or low 90s, and I was in a mood to get away or go on vacation, but I just couldn�t (refer back to those 12-hour working days), so an easy way to feel like it�s a vacation for a couple of hours is to have a meal at the Patio Caf� at the Sportsman�s Lodge Hotel. I can eat outside and people are having a ball in the huge and refreshing-looking swimming pool nearby. The wait staff will bring me a drink from the tiki bar and I can enjoy that while waiting for my meal to be cooked. They have comfortable, wide, loungy outdoor chairs that invite settling back in, so I did settle back, keeping the frozen margarita within arm�s reach, and immersed myself in the book I had brought with me.
Also sitting out there on the patio were an elderly couple with two-mid-sized poodles, not miniature or toy poodles, and not yet full-grown standard-sized poodles, but getting there fast so that I thought they were at the outer limit of being able to stay on a person�s lap, which these two were, one poodle on the man�s lap and the other poodle on the woman�s lap. These poodles did impress me with their affectionate nature, and also, I was glad to note that they weren�t panting heavily, so the weather wasn�t too hot for their thick fur.
Both poodles were a crisp, bright white, and each had hot-pink bandanas wrapped around their collars�somewhat chic. And they were both females, named �Maddie� and �Georgy Girl,� as the woman explained to some women sitting near them who had asked them.
Now, here to me was what I thought was a strange thing. These poodles were, as I said, bright white, and they were professionally clipped with a series of poodle-esque bulges and pom-poms periodically across their bodies and on their legs, ending with a fluffy ball of fur on the end of their tails. These tails remained perfectly upright the entire time they sat there, as if they desired to hold aloft like a flag the fluffy white pompom on the end. This meant, then, that what was also continually exposed and shown to the entire world was their completely black and very dark assholes. I don�t think this was something I ever would have noticed or paid any attention to, except for the obvious visual and philosophical contrast between that and their bright white, highly-groomed hair.
It suddenly seemed so strange to me, this contrast�this desire to move the animal into a realm of fashion and frou frou fastidiousness, yet it was impossible to do so without heightening the display of something that represented the absolute opposite. Wasn�t this something that concerned the dog�s owners (or ANY white poodle owner, for that matter), or didn�t they think it was somehow improper? And what of the poodle groomers? When I get a haircut, my barber has my head and only my head to deal with, and yet a poodle groomer, sooner or later after all the fancy pom-poms, is going to have to get down to carefully clipping around the black asshole. How is this lesson taught in �poodle grooming school�? �Lesson Number 12: Clipping Around the Asshole.� I�d love to hear how that sounds in French. How much further will I have to get in my French lessons before I learn that kind of phrase? (Never.) Right now, I�m learning about financial transactions at a store��Madame, pour la journal, j�ai cinq euro, ca sufi?� �Non, Monsieur, ca n�est pas sufi, vous me duve sept euro, es�que vous avez beaucoup des euro?� �Mais no, Madame, c�est trop, je n�ai pas beaucoup des euro, et le journal est tres cher. Je pe vous donner des dollares.� �Es�que vous avez combien des dollares?� �Ah, j�ai beaucoup de dollares.� �Bien, Mousieur, vous me duve deux dollares.� �D�accord, Madame, voila, deux dollares. Merci, beaucoup, pour la journal.� (I�m sure I�ve made some spelling mistakes, as my lessons, so far, have been primarly audio.)
Thinking back on it, I realized that every single dog that the family or I had growing up (nine of them) was either black or brown or a combination of the two. Can I remember their names? The very first one�s name was �Missy,� I think, but I�m not completely sure, I was so young at the time, but it was a black and brown Dachshund that ended up being run over by the milk truck that brought us our milk one afternoon (one of my first childhood experiences of death). After that were another pair of Dachshunds, one black and one brown, named Lucky and Lady, and then a brown Chihuahua named Quito, then a black and brown Airedale named Rascal, then a black (with tiny little white tufts) Labrador Retriever named Licorice, and my sister had a black Miniature Poodle whom she named Puff (who got no pom-poms, but only the dog groomer�s cheapest clip called a �utility cut�), and then a brown Miniature Doberman Pincer named Demi, and finally, my own beige and white Boxer-Great Dane mix whom I named Angel. No assholes on clear display in any of those dogs (but very vibrant and active tails, and everything else)!
Well, I wasn�t overly-disturbed by the poodles, only intellectually amused, and then I went back to reading my book until my food came.
After my meal, I felt in the mood to explore the rear of the hotel, where I remembered they had some kind of garden with bridges and a watercourse. But the only obvious way back to this garden was to go through the gate into the swimming pool area and then out the other side. Although nothing blocked me from doing this, the pool gate didn�t require a room key or anything, I somehow felt that I �shouldn�t,� that this was, for some reason, a violation of the guest areas of the hotel. I have no idea why I should feel this way, who cares if I walk by the pool?
Anyway, I decided to find a way to walk around, but the fence around the pool area went all the way across and attached to the wall of the building where the rooms were, so instead of crossing the pool area, I found myself forced to walk down the inner hallway where the rooms were, which was an even more intimate violation of the guest areas! I felt really strange doing this, like I really was some place where I wasn�t supposed to be, and I had a slight fear that somebody would confront me and demand that I show a room key. However, that was only a peculiar emotional reaction, as practically, that would never happen and the only people around who could have confronted me were various Hispanic handy-men or maids, most of whom would have had only a rudimentary command of English (hell, even the waiter I had just had at the Patio Caf� hardly knew English).
But the atmosphere in there felt creepy�I think the walls were too heavily wall-papered, or the patterns on the wall-paper were too large for the interior space and this gave me the impression that the walls were closing in on me.
Up ahead of me was a man with a brown paper bag, like a grocery bag, and he found his room and opened it with his key. When I got next to him, he had the room door fully open and was in the process of going into the room, so I naturally happened to peek inside as I walked by. And what should I see inside that room, but lying on the bed closest to the door was the absolutely FATTEST man I have ever seen in my life. This man was propped up against the headboard of the bed with a mound of pillows, and he had something that looked like an oxygen mask attached to his face and he had various other tubes coming out of him. His stomach was an absolute MOUNTAIN of flesh and no words that I could use would ever be exaggerating how fat this man really was. From the way he looked, he could have weighed 500 or 600 pounds.
I couldn�t imagine how this man even got there, he looked like he needed a forklift to move him around, nor could I imagine why he was even there at all. Surely this couldn�t possibly be a vacation, what kind of a vacation is it to stay stuck in a bed in a dark room in a resort hotel with it 90 degrees outside in the sun? He seemed rather entrenched, almost as if he lived there, but at $125 a night, that didn�t seem possible, either.
In thinking about it later, I figured the only reasonable explanation for his presence was that he must have come to town for some kind of bariatric procedure, a stomach stapling or something, and would be admitted to the hospital the next day. But in no way was there anything at all normal about this man and his presence there in the Sportsman�s Lodge. As for me, I suddenly felt as if I were walking down the hall in the hotel in the movie, The Shining, that I wasn�t actually seeing something currently real, but seeing with my psychic sight some past moment of abject human misery that had once occurred within the room of this hotel.
I continued on down the hall and went out the other side, which took me to the brink of the garden area. However, I was unable to get into the garden, because there was a wedding happening there�of all things, a Hindu wedding. There were a large number of Indians, the women all dressed up in silken pastel-colored saris, and the men were all crisp and handsomely dressed. The priest or minister or whatever he is called was talking into a microphone and he had a beautiful, clear, tenor speaking voice. He said something along the lines of, �Friends and loved ones, we are gathered here today to celebrate the union in marriage of Shriandribraham and Anaryachenackencar (I am just making up these names, but this is how they sounded), please join me in this prayer,� at which time he began to chant �Auuuummmmmm� and then proceeded to sing a highly amplified, beautifully sung prayer in Hindi or Bengali or some other Indian language in such a clear and beautiful voice that I wondered if one of the requirements of being a Hindu priest officiating at weddings was that they had to have a beautiful singing voice.
Leaving them to their wedding, I walked out into the parking lot in search of my car, still hearing this beautiful song, and marveling at how diverse of a population Los Angeles has, you are apt to find anything happening here in this city.
At work the next day, one of my co-workers asked me how my weekend was, and I decided to tell her about the fat man and the Hindu wedding, thinking that simply those events were the story, but just after I told her about them, a sudden thought crashed into my head, and I said, �Oh my God, I didn�t tell you what I had been reading before I had my meal.�
The book I had brought with me was Sex Matters, by Osho. Osho, who was from India, has become my favorite �guru�, every word he says pierces right into my heart and there is no one else I have found who is saying what he says, which are the truths I believe we all need to really hear (or perhaps only I need to).
The gist of what I had been reading there at the Patio Caf� was that all religions made the terrible mistake of condemning sex, sex is a sin, sex is evil, sex is of the flesh and we should be concentrating on the spirit, instead, but Osho says that sex is the foundation of love and is one of the primary energies of the human spirit (of ALL living things, actually), that we not only should NOT repress sex, but that we CAN not, that the power we have to vow against sex or attempt to ignore it is only one-ninth as powerful as the force of sex, itself, and the more we push down against it, the more powerfully it will rise up and burst through in uncontrollable ways. And so we have Catholic priests molesting altar boys, or homophobic right-wing Boy Scout executives arrested with thousands of images of child porn on their computer, or various anti-gay politicians discovered trolling for hustlers on the Internet or via telephone sex-lines�and that�s only what we hear on the news because it�s sensational. What about all the more �common� rapes (what IS the chance that a woman will suffer a sexual attack sometime in her life�way too high, that�s for sure) and all the various other and sundry sexual and emotional maladies that our culture suffers and now we have a government that is working even HARDER to repress and suppress all of it. The whole world is desperate for love and very few people seem to have it, or enough of it, and all this Osho lays at the feet of anti-sex religious teachings.
�How can you expect a young man and a young woman to get married,� I am paraphrasing, �to be told that they must love and cherish each other for the rest of their lives, and yet at the same time they are convinced that the woman is a treacherous demon with snares to pull the man down into the hell of sexual abandon, and that the only time the man and woman should come together physically is the two or three times in their lifetime when they want to make a baby�how are they to start a life of love with these conflicting instructions?�
I thought about these things and then wondered if the same concept applied to eating, too? That the need to sustain the body through eating food must be as powerful of an inner force as is the one to continue the species through the pleasure of sex. And yet how many people are hugely overweight these days, more and more and more, and the more they fight it, the worse they get. In all honestly, there is not one single item of food or drink that has not been condemned as detrimental in SOME scientific study�even WATER. And so, who, once they step into this problem, can ever fully and naturally enjoy eating ever again? Everything becomes a trap to be careful of or to avoid or to feel guilt over if you indulge�too many carbs or too much saturated fat, this has good cholesterol and this one has bad, this food is processed and this one is rancid, and if you eat this one, you then have to balance it out with that one, and count the number of servings of vegetables and fruits you get, but some of them must be cooked enough and others of them ought to be raw, or without salt, and you must weigh and measure and count the calories or points and write it all down in a food journal�.
Good Lord, is there any way to simply relax, forget it all, go into the flow, and allow the whole system to adjust back to a lovely, beautiful, joyful NORMAL? Surely the body, itself, must know what to do, if only the damned mind will get out of the way.
These were the thoughts I was having while I was sitting there at the Patio Caf�. And afterwards, while what I wanted was a visit to a lovely garden, what I got instead was surreal walk that revealed to me the fattest man on Earth at one end and a Hindu wedding at the other. What am I to make of that? Well, when things like that happen to me, I accept that as the Universe telling me, �What you are thinking is on the right track.� It is a cosmic confirmation.
However, I�m not sure that something else isn�t also completely true: That there really IS no real life, it is all, instead, something we, ourselves, make by the projection of our thoughts against some kind of cosmic screen. To be entirely expressive of the God-power within us for which we were designed as creative conduits, what we have to learn to do is to allow natural, loving energies to flow through us unimpeded by repressive and negative thoughts. That�s what meditation is, but carried out into the world of action.
Does the thought of this scare you? Do you think that to do so would be to allow the demons of hell to be released into this world, so instead you have to clench tight your heart and mind and soul, and yes, your asshole, so that you can keep a lid on everything you think is foul that flows through you? I don�t think so. I think that�s a received, false idea, not a reality at all; that what naturally flows is pure and clean and life-giving, that only that which is captured and held onto tightly becomes rotten and putrefactive and foul.
The Universe was made as a glorious dynamic benevolence and those two pure-white poodles with their pom-pom tails lifted proudly had the right idea after all. Relax, and let what is, BE what it is.
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