Suburban Seeker

I used the restroom at work today. In fact, I use the restroom at work every day. To be perfectly honest, I use the restroom at work three to four times a day. I work four days a week, so I use the restroom at work twelve to sixteen times a week. Around one hundred people work in my office, so assuming their bathroom habits are similar to mine, that is more than twelve hundred trips to the restroom in my office each week. (It kind of makes you wonder how any work gets done.)

Each time I use the restroom I wash my hands – honestly! – and when I am done washing my hands, I dry my hands on the paper towels my work is kind enough to provide. I have written elsewhere about the insanity of delivering fresh water hundreds of miles to facilities where the water is treated and tested to ensure absolute safety and purity before finally being piped to our homes where we piss in it or pour it onto our lawns. So I won’t go into that again.

But how about those paper towels? The same principle is at play. Trees are cut down and processed and packaged and shipped and delivered and stocked. And at the end of this cycle we absentmindedly grab three pieces of what used to be a tree, rub our wet hands on them, then throw them away. This is convenient, I suppose, but convenience is hardly the best metric by which to measure something.

We live in a society that, though it doesn’t like to admit it, values convenience over anything else.  Not that long ago, in evolutionary terms, an adult human had to walk several miles a day, digging through dirt, picking fruit, and hunting in order to eat. Now you can walk to your car, drive to a fast food dispensary, get things to put in your mouth without ever leaving your car, drive home, and walk to your couch to consume said items.

This is the definition of convenience.

I realize this is a tired complaint. Everyone knows being sedentary and eating fast food is bad for your body. Your body evolved to move and does not do well with convenience. However, it’s not just bad for your body – it’s bad for your soul or your spirit or whatever you want to call the little spark that makes a human being a human being.

It is impossible to find value and meaning in convenience. Achieving something only counts for anything if it is an actual achievement. Someone who takes a helicopter to the top of a mountain and someone who climbs the same mountain are going to see and experience very different things when they reach the top. The view will not be the same because a view isn’t just what your eyes see.

Convenience devalues the world and it devalues us. It feels good in the basest sense of the word to live a life of convenience, but it feels good in the true sense of the word to live a life that is inconvenient. A life in which you work and think and create. A convenient life can never be your own. It can only be packaged for you and marketed to you.

What does this have to do with paper towels? Nothing in particular. Paper towels are just one facet of our convenient lives that we don’t even notice because we have grown so acclimated to convenience.

I would argue that by wiping your hands on a tree that died just so you don’t have to wipe your hands on a towel, without at least giving pause to acknowledge that that is what you’re doing, is to do a great disservice to the world. It is to be unthinkingly wasteful which in the very recent past was a sin. It is to take without thinking about the act of taking. It is to be ungrateful.

We are very lucky to live when we do, but this is a double-edged sword. Effort used to be required in life. Now it takes effort to exert effort. But it is well worth it. It is good for the environment and society, and it is good for you.

For the past few years I have spent most Thursday nights at a small brewery in my town called Ale Industries. Thursday night is open mic night. Music starts around six and ends around nine although, because it is a gathering of musicians, those times are subject to change.

Ale Industries “Live and Local” featuring my friends and me from December 2012

Open mics are great. Anyone can play. If you get there early and sign up you can probably play quite a few songs. If you get there late you may only get to squeeze in one or two.

There are older guys who can rock the blues. Young women who write and sing beautiful songs. All sorts of performers in between. There are awesome bartenders who everyone loves. A host who sings songs of sex and heartache and occasionally the Muppets. And of course, delicious craft brewed beer.

I have met many good people there. After a few years it feels like an extended family.

And come January, it won’t be there anymore. Ale Industries is doing well. They have outgrown the little hole-in-the wall commercial building with a roll up door that has been their home since they first opened. They are moving their brewery to Oakland, over the hill and twenty minutes away.

Oakland isn’t far, but it’s enough of a drive that I won’t be able to make it regularly and when I go I’ll probably miss some of my fellow regulars who maybe also won’t be so regular.

The owners have found a location for a taproom in town, but it will be different. It will have new smells, a new layout, a whole new vibe. Which is fine – life is nothing if not change.

What I sat down to write about, what I’m finally getting around to, is the idea of change and memories. If you stop and think about it you will find that nothing ever exists but the present, the moment you are experiencing right now. That moment is razor thin. And it never stays still. Or maybe it does and we’re the ones that move.

In any case, what you did today, what you are doing right now, is in a real sense already a memory. Life is fleeting because the present is fleeting.

Living in the present is something that I am told the sages can do. For the rest of us, it is only during those occasional beautiful or terrifying moments, when you realize how small and fragile and strange and impossible your life is, that you truly understand the present moment and how precious and transitory it is. You can feel it deep in your bones.

I feel it now at the Ale Industries open mic. The regulars know that pretty soon we won’t be going to our old hangout, won’t be seeing each other in the same place anymore. We know that our routines and lives will, in a small way, change forever.

Usually we ignore change, even though it is all around us, driving everything and everyone in the world.  Only when we look back over a year or two, or experience a big life event, do we notice the fact of change. For the most part we live our lives on autopilot, forgetting or ignoring the changes we are going through and the memories we are creating.

It is such a difficult thing.  We may claim to embrace change, and clamor for new and exciting experiences and distractions, but deep down we want to control the change in our lives. We don’t want it to control us. We want to hold on to the pieces of the past we would rather not lose.  But it doesn’t work that way.

The world will always change beyond our ability to control it. I suppose that’s what keeps it interesting. And somewhere in the midst of the drama and the laughter and the chaos of change is where we build our lives. We draw a circle around our memories and call the story they tell “me”.

I will miss Ale Industries and the time I have spent there. It already feels like I am walking through a memory when I am there. And yet life as always moves on. There will be new places to go, new people to meet. New songs to write and new memories to create. Therein lies the beauty of life.

In the words of the inimitable Jim Anchower, hola, amigos. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya. But I’ve been busy!

I’ve been writing fiction lately, though none of it is ready for sharing. I am writing a silly book about zombies to try to get my writing juices flowing as well as a bunch of short stories about, in no particular order, fraternities,  war,  and the end of the world.

(If I were to write one book about the subjects it would be something like: “Why The Fact That Men Who Were In Fraternities Run Things Should Concern Us.”)

But on to the seeking!

I’ve spent a lot of time reading the works of Huang Po who was an old Zen master but is now dead. It has completely revitalized my seeking. I was inspired by a user in r/zen who sometimes seems like he is trolling and sometimes seems like he is trying to be helpful. The internet is a funny place.

He directed me to the writings of the old guys, guys like Bodhidharma, Huang Po, and Hui Neng. He’s not a big fan of Dogen or Shunryu Suzuki or spiritual entertainers like Alan Watts.

I remain unconvinced on the latter point – I could read and listen to Mr. Watts all day – but I am deeply in his debt for pointing me towards Huang Po who spends an entire book just pointing towards IT, the Absolute, Tao, God, Mind, whatever you want to call it.

“That which is before you is it. Begin to reason about it and you will at once call into error.”

“To say that Mind is no-mind implies something existent. Let there be a silent understanding and no more.”

“The matter is thus – by thinking of something you create an entity and by thinking of nothing you create another. Let such erroneous thinking perish utterly, and then nothing will remain for you to go seeking!”

Beautiful and wonderful! How could it be otherwise, and yet how often we forget!

This is an unfocused post because I am feeling unfocused today. I hope you are experiencing an optimal level of focus however you might define it.

Here is a picture of an otter in outer space.

I had a good conversation with a fellow seeker about Facebook the other day. We were running through the normal litany of woes against the site when he pointed out a phenomenon I had not noticed before.

He pointed out that when he had Facebook (he has quit the site) he knew what his friends were up to. All the time. Which means that when he ran into a friend he hadn’t seen in a while, the conversation-starting question, “So what’s new?” was entirely rhetorical and he found himself not paying any attention to the response.

I had never noticed this before but it is largely true! The whole idea of catching up with friends is rendered mostly moot by a constant stream of updates from them. Which is a damn shame because I would rather hear how a friend is doing over a pint than as a blurb in my “news feed” and yet am probably less inclined to do the former now that the latter is default.

Just wanted to share a friend’s good food for thought. Now back to social networkin’!

I love music, and I have loved it for as long as I can remember. I love to listen to it and I love to play it. It is very easy to grow numb to life’s inherent beauty and mystery and to be distracted by petty annoyances. Good music is one of the few consistent places to take refuge from that. However I realized recently that I very rarely listen to music.

When our forebears picked up the guitar there was very little music to be heard. Before the 1930s, no one owned recordings of music save a few sound engineers. All that existed were fleeting live performances. Even through most of the 20th century a kid growing up could go to a few concerts and listen to records that he bought with his hard-earned money.

But a kid growing up today is an entirely different story. Between YouTube, Spotify, and vast catalogs of (frequently free) MP3s, music has become something that is always available, wherever one happens to be. The same is true for us grown-ups and, though this should be a blessing, it has led to us valuing music less than we used to.

I realized that I am always listening to music and surfing the internet, listening to music and driving, listening to music and playing video games. It’s always listening to music and…fill in the blank. But I have the opportunity now to listen to more, better music than at any point in the history of mankind! No king through all of history had access to more music than I do today.

The problem is that now we take it for granted. Because we can always listen to anything we want at any time of the day, music loses its magic. Music has become tap water. You turn on the faucet and nearly-free, clean, life-giving water comes out. How often do we give thanks for that simple fact? Rarely, if at all. It has become our default. And yet without it, most of us would be dead pretty quickly. The loss of music wouldn’t necessarily kill us, but then it might. And it would certainly leave us soulless.

So I have made a resolution to listen to one album (at least!) a week. I lay on my bed or the floor and put on a pair of headphones and listen to an album from start to finish. Sometimes it’s something new, but frequently it is something I have heard before. But when I’m not doing anything else and I’m just right there with the music, my old favorite albums always sound new.

Music has become the background of our lives. Music has become Muzak. The song Rock and Roll by Led Zeppelin was in Cadillac commercials awhile back, and I’ve been hearing Beatles songs in a bunch of commercials lately. This is a shame. Music should not be associated with a product. It should not be something that is done solely for profit. And it should not serve as mere background noise to other activities.

Because, as a musician myself, if I never truly listen to music, how in the world am I supposed to create it? And, as a human being, if I never truly listen to music, then what the hell is the point of being a human at all?

I am an atheist. Fortunately I live in the United States where that is a statement I am free to make. (Unless you live in the South.)

To put it more accurately I am an agnostic.  I dislike this term, however. I see no evidence in the universe for a “God” so I see no reason to posit one – Occam’s Razor and all that. (Prior to the Big Bang there was either something or nothing, neither of which make any sense to a brain like mine that evolved to seek out food, shelter, and opportunities for reproduction. If you want to say It came from God or It came from nothing, go ahead. Neither, as I said, makes any sense. How can something come from nothing? How can you have an uncaused cause?)

Where I differ from my fellow atheists is that I see value in religion. I do not like its political application (see: the entire history of the Catholic Church) but I do think it is important to get together regularly – once a week, say – to marvel at our lives and discuss how to live good ones knowing that our time is fleeting.

This is what draws me to Buddhism. Of all the religions I have found, it seems to be the most flexible and adaptable. It’s most famous spokesman has recently written a book wondering if “religion” as it has historically been defined is even necessary or desirable anymore. Compare that with pretty much every major religious figure in the world today.

Buddhism posits no God. It doesn’t require one to believe that the creator of the universe (a universe which every day we learn to be exponentially more amazing than we can ever conceive) cared an awful lot about a tribe of nomads living in the desert of a small planet in the corner of a relatively insignificant galaxy a few thousand years ago.

It requires an honest appraisal of our human situation, namely this: everything changes.

And the more we learn about the universe, the more profound this statement becomes. Everything we have yet discovered, does change. God, as the notion has traditionally been defined, provides a constant we can take refuge in. Buddhism starts where western religions have feared to tread.

Everything changes. We will get sick. We will age. We will die. Yet amid this, we can find a way to lead good and happy lives. This is where you find true beauty. Not in hiding from the facts of life, but in facing them head on and finding solace and comfort among your fellow humans.

I will probably write more about the details of “Buddhism” in the future, but for now I just want to say that though I am a Godless pagan, I firmly believe in the power and value of religion. I just think that religion needs to evolve.