BEATING THE POISONED DRUM

Past a certain point it is not enough to be quirky; you must be fucking insane.

The secret preliminary exercise for students of extraordinary capacity: Consider that That Guy you meet who reads Whitman’s Leaves of Grass on his cousin’s hammock and talks about the lesser-known Bob Dylan bootlegs — every one of these That Guys was once your mother in a previous life. Consider also that your beloved in this […]

“Tell me about your own fundamental matter, the one you hide away treasuring so zealously. What is it like? Is it a piece of solid emptiness fixed firmly in the ground somewhere — like a post for tethering mules and horses? Or maybe it’s a deep hole filled with a sheer black silence? Whatever it […]

There are people who say that this modern world — this world of Crossfit brutality, Twitter feuds between smartasses, political circus acts, raging toxic masculinity, and obsessive gain — is not a world in which “Samurai Zen” can thrive.

I feel different. “I” feels different.

Starving the kleshas leads to hungry kleshas.

  “How do I sit through the paranoia?” “In a seated position.”

Sometimes there’s laughter. It comes abruptly, stops, starts again. Sometimes it goes on so long that the mind forgets it’s going on. It happens that I see I’m laughing, I’ve been laughing. And then return to the absent-minding.  

I beat the poison drum by telling the truth. I beat the poison drum by lying through my teeth. Whether I am lying or telling the truth, the drumming goes on. No one hears it; not even me.

The game of struggling assimilating moments, looking for the Unassimilable Now.