Dear Miss Fenty...

...My name is Tigger Niglet, and I live down the road from Christopher "31 Flavors" Baskin-Robin in Storybrook, California, near the Mendocino Mountains (Surely you know of local archvillainess Clara Bell, often joked about stupidly by your fellow New Yorker Kristen Wiig? But I digress...)

I beg for things as cleverly as possible, and always have paper towels in hand with my glass cleaning spray whenever I occasion to jump on a motherfucker's windshield, but I've never been successful enough to afford your shoes -- not even in jest!

But if I could, I'd like to ask you for a pair of size 8 1/2 men's hightops, in red vermillion lacquer (maybe bits of black showing through, Japanese-style?); with Imperial Yellow soles, laces and inners? I would rock them at least twice a week for years!

***

I think about Mikey a lot. I think about... What if he was horribly disfigured by burn scars, like the Marine mechanics who survived that serious accidental ordnance explosion or whatever on the tarmac at Travis a few months ago? I know I'd still want him, no matter what (yes, physically...) 

707 USMC Mikey, where art thou??? Waaah...

***

[DECISIVELY]: "Get Jason Bourne -- at once!"

ANALYST [INSTANTLY CRINGING]: "Um, ma'am, then maybe you shouldn't have initiated exclusionary protocols... Are you really sure you want to go crawling on your hands and knees to Mr. Bourne now? After all that?"

(Honestly, Leah, Jo, et alia: what the fuck do those movies *do* with Joan Allen, anyway?)

***

San Franciscans and guests of San Francisco who will be in the City: several tours seem to be scheduled for visitors to tour Salesforce Tower. This one is sold out (still points to a waiting list), but check around for others, or make your own not-exactly-#disrupty attempts at meandering through it. At 326 meters tall, it's a pretty notable new landmark, and who knows? In any sort of collapse event, it might be one of America's new Towers of David! Exciting, to muse on the post-apocalyptic, n'est pas?

(photo by William R. Way, on an LG flip phone, end of September, 2017)

***

"I SWEAR BY THE [UNINTELLIGIBLE] -- SWEAR [GRUMBLE]" Hey, it ain't Richard III. Try doing Charles II instead - but you better hurry, before he goes out the window!

***

Today is Sunday, and I may yet prevail upon my soon-to-be-dearly-departed-so-I-had-better-spoil-her mother to lend me the car that I may attend (Methodist? I think so...) services at the local community church -- just to be a sport, ya dig?

(Please join me in gassho, and... Namo Amida Butsu!)

Sacred Lotus

Original painting from 2012 or '13 (BY YOURS TRULY); acrylic, gold leaf, and rhinestones on birch board - probably destroyed by Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation during my criminal displacement by Donald Falk, Nicole Grays, et alia after October 2014 - called "junk" or "trash" by Nicole, in point of fact....

....Not to mention, a lesser lotus on white paper (the characters reading, "Respect for those who came before; compassion for those who come after"):

********

"From the deepest, darkest mud grows the most beautiful lotus."

南無阿弥陀仏

Sādhu

"The strength of your mind lies its conviction in the importance of its own actions, its ability to stick with what it knows is skillful; its qualities of mindfulness, concentration and discernment. These are the qualities of mind that determine how you’re going to deal with issues in life as they come up. The more mindful you are, the stronger your concentration, the more likely you are to deal in a skillful way because you’re coming from a position of strength. You not only know what the skillful action is, but you’re also strong enough to actually do it.

"Often we know the right thing to do but we just simply don’t have the strength to do it. And if that’s the way we live, imagine what it’s going to be like when we die. The body will be a lot weaker, the mind will be distracted by all kinds of things -- your thoughts of this, you’re going to miss this and miss that, you’ve only a little time left for this or that. The people around you are all in a turmoil. The mind has to be really strong to put up with a situation like that and not buckle under. And the shape of your mind at that point is going to have a huge impact on how you are reborn. The life you’ve lived is going to have a huge impact as well.

"They compare dying to falling asleep and dreaming, except that in this particular case you can’t come back to the body anymore. When you fall asleep, a little dream world will appear in your mind and you go into it: That’s your first dream. Now the nature of that dream world could be something realistic or something totally fantastic, pleasant or unpleasant. The nature of the dream world that appears has to do both with your past actions -- issues that have been weighing on your mind for a long time -- or your current state of mind.

"The principle that applies as you go to sleep applies at the moment of death as well, except at that point the mind does tend to be a lot weaker, a lot more desperate. It will jump -- especially if it’s untrained -- it’ll jump at anything. If you can train the mind to be more mindful and alert to what’s going on, then if you see something unpromising coming up, you don’t have to jump for it. You realize that you’ve got the choice, and if you learn how to keep in mind the good things you’ve done in life, that makes it easier for good dream worlds to appear at the time. But regardless, the important thing is that how you die is determined by how you live. That’s the issue right now. And so you need the meditation to develop these five strengths..."

- Thanissaro Bikkhu

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The Good, The Bad, And The Not-So-Bigly

My Mom, at her high school in Lincoln in the 60s, was an avid artist, and did cartoons for the Clarion -- it was her thing, her nickname: Quick Draw. After graduation she moved to San Francisco and was even briefly a student at the Art Institute on Chestnut St., a starting point for many modern luminaries, before she moved on to studying for her B.S. from Berkeley. She nevertheless continues to be an artist in spirit...

My Dad? Well, a competent enough draughtsman who could adequately sketch any renovation or carpentry project he'd set his mind to (until he started getting rather wacky in his later years...) His best work was probably the plan for the house that he and his friends, and me and Eric together constructed for my Grandmother in Century Ranch. Turned out quite brilliantly, at least until the pipes in the attic froze one winter, flooding the new construction.

I myself have been as susceptible to the charms of the visual arts as any other human; I have a solid aesthetic sense, a good eye. I doodled in my youth like many, and dabbled in studying how to draw. In my early 30s, I began to put my experience in melting my brain with drugs and alcohol to good use, coming up with the artwork that would decorate my last apartment in San Francisco, and that also found its way into friends' homes, and even into the collection of Tenderloin Art Lending Library (TALL), managed and curated by my good friend Mr. Rick Darnell...

Here are a few pieces I have pictures of from that era of 2010 to 2014 (heartfelt and important bleg after the cut...):

Still raising money as best as I can for the renovation project (donations may be sent to WILLIAM R WAY PO BOX 206 STONYFORD CA 95979); three more pics of why we need to do it:

Casual, Red-Eye Reflection

Dear fellow souls,

When I consider topical (Trump-derived and culminating-in-Trump) kerfuffles, what should come to mind but your average, inner-city, devout-Muslim owned-and-operated bodega... No, there's no liquor, but there are plenty of cigarettes; you can buy a $2.oo charger for your janky old flip phone (a nod to the geographic and socio-economic reality); and you bet the hot dogs are halal -- BUT THEY ARE A YEAR OLD AND THE CONSISTENCY OF SHOE PLEATHER. The business struggles in a way, when half mulled-over, it seems no urban American small business should.

Non sequiter-like, I now jump to the dynamic obviously shared between what and who really animate the Trump phenomenon; and its objectively more disparate and odd-bedfellows opponents: both "sides" exemplify, agree upon, and talk past each other about the imperfections in the modern human world that truly imperil humanity's long-term viability.  We truly are in the end-times, and what's at stake is our species-wide Linus binky best described as being a comforting, penultimate-resort fear we have that for certain, whether or not we continue to survive is to an unfairly large degree our responsibility, and will be decided by a painfully lucid, collective decision-making process, global in scope (Cylon model 2's faux-philosophical mutterings on our worthiness of survival be damned...)

Calls of "Let them in" at Dulles? Check and weak-yet-advantaged countercheck... The rigged game plays out, and even if you're as sappari Japanese as Zatoichi, playing your weighted die in a personally unfamiliar yakuza gambling house, presuming too much even as you are fundamentally certain never to incur traditional physical punishment, ultimately uncertainty takes over, and nothing is as our faith would have it.

Crisis will not be forever deferred... It inshallah will be upon those of us who live to endure that moment. The many recently deceased luminaries of American acting and performing no doubt earnestly pity the remaining billions who have yet to perish... (Thank you -- presumptuously -- Miz Fisher, Miz Reynolds, Miz Tyler Moore, et alia for your sorrow and compassion I now know you surely cast back at us from the sweet hereafter. Please rest in peace... May we endeavor to carry on.)

(I loathe what Mr. Trump appears to be about, but smvrti satya needs be connected by the ligaments of karma to the world of similitudes, which is so helpful to mullahs, rabbis, and other such boddhisattvas, whose burden and joy it is to successfully instruct the more fortunate among us... I right now, more than anything, am just keenly, primally and uselessly stung with my enviable place among hoi polloi, comparing as I cannot but the President's lot with mine...)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I guess what I'm wondering, in (you might self-servingly, blamelessly argue) a neo-liberal way, is this: is it so cruel, objectively, that refugees and immigrants be excluded? What quality of asylum does our greater-in-aspirations-than-in-concrete-accomplishments nation offer? Bootless speculation? Mayhap -- I'm hardly any more an agent than the sicaria running inexcusably toward the worst cardinal direction from obvious consequences, or a 1990s London party girl who just kind of got stranded with a murky immigration status in San Francisco lo these last twenty-odd years...

As always, yours in trying too hard to be of more use than a MSM pundit or an holidays-with-family-dinner-table-screaming match, and falling inevitability into the usual contemptibility,

American and human William R. Way
URGENT House Renovation Campaign - Venmo...

...Or donations can be mailed to:  WILLIAM R WAY PO BOX 206 STONYFORD CA 95979

Thai Forest Tradition

(Raw fucking tomorrow, at the latest...)

URGENT House Renovation Campaign - Venmo...

...Or donations can be mailed to:  WILLIAM R WAY PO BOX 206 STONYFORD CA 95979

Three Jewels

बुद्धं सरणं गच्छामि।
दम्मं सरणं गच्छामि।
सङ्घं सरणं गच्छामि।

So, Like, Yah, Fer Sure, Right?

"Oh, definitely, Frau Wiegler!  At times it seemed like an absolutely boffo idea to work over a 37 year-old white and Native American gay man who attends services at a Jodo Shin Buddhist temple -- who, moreover, has lived since birth in Northern California and exhibits such a reaction to programming -- and radicalize him to the point that he goes on a killing spree at a soft target like an emergency room, or who at the very least could be spun as a palatable patsy for the press as the perpetrator in a sting operation transparently engineered by the FBI; (the latter of course would be cast as heroes who prevented an attack on a hard target.)

"Not that I would have known which outcome would have been most satisfactory, of course.  You know your business better than I do.  Still, I'm nothing if not a patriot, and therefore could have been bought off.  And you were partially correct:  even with my IQ, I wholeheartedly agree that I suffer at times from the most abject stupidity.  Yet to this day I wonder why such a shoddy effort was made to gull me, and why circumventing my right to consent was apparently perpetrated by puling amateurs.  I mean, really...  Who was meant to be the target of insults in all of this?  The target, or those who for years had a bead on him a mile wide?"

Kami

The many deities of Japan.

On The Role of Fear

"Now, fear is not always an unskillful emotion. I've had many psychotherapists talk to me about this. They're curious about the fact that when the Buddha lists the roots of unskillful behavior, there's greed, aversion, delusion - or passion, aversion, and delusion. Where's the fear? For so many of them, fear is *the* unskillful emotion. Well, that’s not necessarily the case. Actually, there are some good things to be afraid of.

"Be afraid that you're going to do things unskillfully, be afraid you’re going to act in harmful ways. Be afraid of wasting your time –- the time that could be devoted to developing the mind. Those kinds of fears come under what the Buddha calls ottappa -- compunction or fear of wrong-doing. There's also the fear that comes with heedfulness: realizing that there are dangers out there and dangers in your own mind, and you've got to do something about them.

"So fear isn't always unskillful. It's when the fear gets mixed up with the greed or aversion or delusion: that's when you got a problem." - Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Nurturing Your Inner Adult"

To paraphrase Pema Chodron, to feel fear means you are approaching the truth.  (Not always true, but usually.)

She's also said that "Everything you want is on the other side of fear."  I think that was her -- I don't feel like looking it up.  But again, often true.

What The Yamabushi Told Ippen At Kumano

"Hijiri spreading the nembutsu of interpenetration, why do you go about it mistakenly? It is not through your

propagation that sentient beings come to attain birth. In Amida Buddha's perfect enlightenment ten kalpas 

ago the birth of all sentient beings was decisively settled in Namu-amida-butsu. Distribute your fuda 

regardless of whether people have faith or not, and without discriminating between the pure and the impure." 

- NO ABODE, translated by Dennis Hirota, page xxxv

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Great resources from a great teacher -- food for thought (and of course, non-thought) on your path to enlightenment.

Tough Teachings To Ease The Mind

"You can’t go preventing pleasure and pain, you can’t keep the mind from labeling things and forming thoughts, but you can put these things to a new use. If the mind labels a pain, saying, “I hurt,” you have to examine the label carefully, contemplate it until you see that it’s wrong: the pain isn’t really yours. It’s simply a sensation that arises and passes away, that’s all." - Upasika Kee Nanayon

Six (II)

So they were airmen.  My bad, thinking that because of the news they must have been Army or Marines.  Anyway...

Today we honor and remember the following:

Joseph Lemm
Adrianna Vorderbruggen
Louis Bonacasa
Chester McBride
Michael A. Cinco
Peter W. Taub

Thank you.

The Thirteenth Step

Drinking, smoking and drugging cover a multitude of virtues -- a valid and proven survival technique for those of us standing on the threshold of nirvana and turning back to help others reach the same goal.

Still, I've cut the drinking back to a pint a week; I'm no Chögyam Trungpa.  I've stopped partying for now, even though methamphetamine has time and again saved my life, and led to much insight and wisdom; I don't need that stuff any more to induce visions or hear voices.  The next project:  cutting back on or quitting the nicotine.  That last one is going to prove rather difficult, but I need to live as long as possible (as long as life is worth living...)

I've Braved 10,000 Hells To Bring This To You, Grasshopper

Basics for survival, sanity and enlightenment.  Read these stories and take them to heart.

The Future Is An Open Plain

Janet sat in the lotus position at the base of the acacia tree.  Mara's army was relentless.  It raged, it cajoled.  Among the many lies it told her, a precious few truths sparkled like dewdrops in the dawn light.  The army assailed her night and day.  It teased at her desires, filling her at turns with yearning and revulsion.  For three days and three nights she endured voices that spoke over her and through her, voices that issued death threats and insults, or that tried to tempt her with promises of wealth beyond imagining.  Once, General Mara himself came before her arrayed in a cunning disguise -- that of true love.

He was seductive, but in the end he wafted away on the East wind.  Janet remained silent and unmoved.

Following the three days and three nights, Janet, still in the lotus position, spoke her first words in reply to the onslaught:  a few whispers of gratitude to the worlds of the living and the dead, and of compassion for all beings.  She then fell into a heavenly slumber, her dreams populated by singing birds and honest friends and flowers that swayed to sutras threaded in the breeze.  She felt as though she anchored the world and it pivoted around her.  She could see all the faces on Mount Sumeru; they looked content and serene, their inner fires harmonious with their Buddha smiles.

Janet has dreamed continuously ever since, and it is this dream in which we all live and die and are reborn, over and over again.  Namo amida butsu.

Wake Me Up When September Ends

Three thousand miles away, there was tiny little flyspeck me still semi-thwacked from partying the night before at my South of Market residence hotel.  I boarded the 21 Hayes outbound to go to my job as a Grants Assistant at Catholic Charities.  There, on the bus, I overheard two women talk about planes crashing into the World Trade Center in New York.  Not until I got to work did I understand the scope and breadth of the tragedy -- we all of us huddled around televisions in conference rooms as we watched the scene unfold over and over again.  America had been attacked, a city devastated.

Brian Cahill, then Executive Director of our agency, the mission of which was to serve San Francisco's needy, disabled and elderly, told us we had the option of staying at work or taking the rest of the day off.  I took off, on foot, to look over what I could of the city that had always been my home.  I walked from Hayes and Stanyan to Haight Street.  I was immediately struck by the silence.  Everything and everyone seemed unable to make a sound.  There were no planes, few vehicles, and no chatter on the sidewalks.  Pedestrians were pretty scarce, actually -- a tourist trap like Haight is usually thronged that part of the day, teeming with visitors.  The few people I saw were all gathered at those storefronts that had televisions on.  Those televisions were the only source of sound.  At a pay phone near Buena Vista, a handful of gutter punks stood around with the receiver off the hook and were feeding quarters into the phone and listening.  But I heard no words, no conversation.

I ended up at my boss Ruth's apartment, where we watched footage of a woman from some 80-something stories up drop her shoes out a window, and then jump.

It was horrifying, and that horror continued for years.  Today, the wounds inflicted that day are still gradually healing.  The scars will always be there.  September 11, 2001 was a day of heroism, fear, sorrow, shock, denial, anger, and in small, humble places, tenderness and caring.  As a human, a former meth user, and a Buddhist, I am of course absolutely aware that everything is relevant and everything is connected, that there is no inside exclusive of any outside, that all hearts that are living beat, and that even the dead speak.  In fact, though few are heard, can we say that anyone is truly silent?  Yet that day, at least in the surface world of samvrti satya (the apparent world of cause and effect), the silence was overwhelming.  It was necessary, unavoidable, blameless, appropriate -- yet it was also in some ways detrimental and crippling.  As the activists of the 80s reminded us, silence equals death; and didn't the NYPD always tell subway riders, "if you see something, say something?"

I guess we can debate which is more appropriate, silence or talk.  Then again, we can't have one without the other.

In an abrupt, 180 conclusion to this remembrance of an infamous day from a life-long Californian, I'd like to quote Willie Jolley:  "The past is a place of reference, not a place of residence."  I'm not going to criticize how anyone else observes today, but I'd just like to say I intend on avoiding television, accessing social media sparingly, and thrusting myself into the present as wholly as possibly.  Blessings and love to everyone.  Take care.

Personal Gossip About A Private, Reclusive Man

"I hope Jon's still tooling around in that godawful silver Prius (Jeez, even my brother has a Volt these days.)  He probably is, isn't he, asking for directions from his GPS in a town of 810,000 people that's laid out like a grid along the directions of the compass.  Thank God, because otherwise he would have seen those ads all over the MUNI metro system promoting Dignity Health.  Could you imagine?  The man would have kittens, I tell you, kittens!  His little slave boy would start throwing rocks at him instead of at me...  By the way, I wonder if that lovely man Dan finally dropped Jon because Jon would call him stupid all the time..."