Krishnamurti

No website of mine would be complete without paying proper homage to Krishnamurti, which is actually kind of ironic, since Krishnamurti would say something like, “You should pay homage to no man.” Then he’d probably go on and say … Let’s think about this. When you say, I look up to so and so, aren’t you placing them in position to look down on you. Aren’t you placing them in a position higher than yourself? Is this fair to you? Is it fair to the person you admire? To place someone in a position as teacher, guru, leader, or some other fixed role, and you as student, follower, disciple, this is a dangerous action. To call someone a teacher or guru, you are placing certain expectations on that person, your own expectations of what you believe a teacher or a guru to be. When you do that, are you not placing limits on whom that person really is? Aren’t you, in a way, closing off your own mind? And by placing yourself in a position as a follower, a disciple, aren’t you taking the easy way out, giving up your own responsibility? Aren’t you saying, well I don’t know what to do, so I’m just going to follow this person. Or I don’t know what to think, so I’ll just believe what this person tells me. When you follow somebody, aren’t you giving up your responsibility to think for yourself? There are no teachers. There are no gurus. We are all students, learning together.

That’s Krishnamurti - a hard-ass, a purist, a free thinker. That’s why I love the guy.

Anyway, as if that’s not introduction enough, I’ll describe him more with a story. Stories are good.

One night I was at this party out on a farm. I didn’t know many people there. I felt a bit out of my element, so I spent most of the night sitting on the ground, staring into the fire, poking at it, thinking of something to say, and not finding much.

But later in the night, the sound of dogs howling in the distance was heard and it woke a long, lost memory. “Are those coyotes?” someone asked. “No, coyotes have a more eerie sound to them,” I said. Then I shared what was found...

“This one time I was at a Vipassana meditation retreat out in the middle of nowhere. A Vipassana retreat is where you go out and spend ten days doing nothing but meditating. There’s no distractions - no TV, no radio, no books, nothing to write with, nothing to read, no cell phones, nothing. You can’t even talk. All there is to do is meditate and walk the grounds. As you can imagine, after a few days of that our senses were kind of starved for excitement. So, even the smallest things seemed amazing. Looking on a blade of grass was like looking upon the universe itself.

Anyway, this one night at like four in the morning, we were all sleeping in the dorm room, and all of a sudden this pack of wild coyotes starts howling in the hills. They were yipping and making all these crazy sounds. Like I said, it was really eerie sounding - sent a chill up my spine. It would’ve been awesome any time, but the fact that our senses were at an all time high, made it even more amazing. So, we just laid there in our beds, in the dark, listening to the manic coyotes, not able to say a word.”

“Have you ever read any Krishnamurti?” this punk-rocker girl jumped in and asked. “Krishnamurti kicks some serious ass,” I replied twisting my head as I said it, adding emphasis.
“Wow. That has got to be the best response I’ve ever got about Krishnamurti at a party.”
“Who?” a girl across the fire asked. The fire light was dancing across her face. She sat in a kind of lotus position. I looked around the fire – everybody was listening.
“Krishnamurti,” I replied, “He’s like this eastern philosophy guy. But he’s not Buddhist or Hindu or Taoist. He doesn’t believe in any of that stuff. And he doesn’t believe in meditation either. He would say by meditating, you’re trying to be something. And you can’t try to be something; you just have to be it. Like you can’t try to be happy; you just have to be happy. But he’s got this attitude, like he’s pissed, like he can’t be happy till you’re happy. Yeah, that's Krishnamurti.”

We all sat there in silence for a moment pondering. Then the conversation drifted on into the night.

Anyway, that’s the end of my story. No point really, except to share a memory and introduce one of the greatest thinkers of our time – normally I’d say something like “all hail Krishnamurti,” but I don’t think he’d like that. So just go read him and decide for yourself.

At the Beach

Think of warmer, drier times...

The Way I Live

I eat my meals off of the plastic lid of a mixing bowl. My guests have to use the bowl itself, and since that’s the only one I own, when soup is on the menu, one of us has to eat out of the saucepan. All the better - less to wash. There’s only one chair in my place, so we have to eat on the floor, Indian style. My now empty moving boxes act as personal dinning tables. “It’s kind of like eat off of TV Trays,” Beth said the other night, “but you don’t have a TV, so it’s more like Wall Trays.” “Huh?” I responded with a confused look on my face, then the bulb went off above my head, “Oh, cause we’re staring at the walls.” My bed, if you want to call it that, is a sleeping pad and bag – but I do have a pillow. This is how I live. No plates, little furniture, few comforts.

I don’t have a radio, or a stereo, or a boom box, but music is essential. So I listen to the pirated collection off my aging laptop. That’s right pirated. What are the internet police gonna do? Take away the lid to my plastic bowl? If you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. When I get sick of the thousands of songs sitting on the hard drive, I stream a radio station off the net – indie, reggea, 80s, 90s, alternative rock, punk, blues, ska, world beat, whatever. It’s all there. A smorgasbord of sound. Oh, and I don’t pay for internet. No way. I have a friend that let’s me use her account from the university.

I don’t own a car. Never intend to. Polluter of skies, paver of earth, instigator of war. I ride a bike. And I get $115 in food stamps every month. A friend of mine once asked if I felt guilty about it. “No, I’d rather the government spend their money feeding me than bombing the innocent men, women, and children of Iraq.” The way I look at it, every dollar I take from the government, is one less dollar spent paving roads, damming rivers, or killing people. My friend just looked at me like, Typical Wes. He’s got an argument for everything. But he couldn’t dispute my logic.

Some people think I’m cheap, and I won’t deny it, but my motives go much deeper than that. I don’t like the current socio-politico-economic system, and I want to participate in it as little as possible. That means, I don’t work much – at least not in the sense that most people think. And when I do “work”, I prefer jobs that are under the table and off the radar. Of course, the natural corollary is that I spend as little money as possible.

Sure a bed would be nice, a desk, some chairs, a few plates, maybe a couch. But I’m not going to spend money on it. One less desk bought is one less tree chopped down in the Amazon. One less couch is one less batch of toxic foam rubber polluting the skies of Thailand. One less shipment of furniture and plastic crap being shipped across world is one less barrel of oil that people have to kill each other over.

Maybe I will buy something - a mirror. That way the next time someone judges me based on my lifestyle, thinks I’m lazy, cheap, selfish, unhappy, or just plain crazy, I can hold a mirror up to their face. If you want to judge someone’s actions based on the common good, maybe you should look at your own.

The Insects of South Corvallis

by Charles Goodrich

1) The Two Mosquitoes in the Bathtub

They've been here for two week
living on leaky faucet drips.
When I draw a bath, they fly a little
but soon settle back among the soap stains.

It's December, freezing outside.
That's why they don't bite me, or mate.
Enormous desires encoded on their chromosomes
lie dormant. They dream of summer.

Relaxing in hot water, I watch them
doing nothing. One, the male,
waves his feathery antennae. He's smaller
and has a broken foot. The female
is slightly swayback.
maybe just tired. Science
and Buddhism I call them,
orphan twins in search of lost family,
a couple of interant trapeze artists,
a secretly amorous pair of saints.

Whoever they are, they're my guests.
We're sharing our morsel of eternity.
We bathe together.

2) Sowbugs

Vagabonds, hobos, they trundle in
through a crack in the wall by the back door
and congregate under the washing machine
to drink soapy drainwater.

I'm not running a bug hotel. My home
is no flophouse for backyard dropouts.
But these folks are easy company.
They aren't evangelists
reveling all night in confession raptures
or teenage sons of bankers
cranking stereos and snorting coke.
They aren't revolutionaries or reactionaries,
athiests, pagans, or co-dependents.

They're just little bugs
who've seen the world some
and like to swap stories around the soap drain.

3) Yellowjackets

Cold as mummies
they come inside with the firewood
where an hour beside the stove revives them,
resurrects them
to their ancient throne
of pure animosity.

They throb. They buzz.
Suddenly they blaze against the windows,
whack the lampshades, attack the light.

I understand, I suspect
that I, too, am of royal parentage
and I awaken sometimes
enraged at having been so cruelly desposed
from the heights of power and grace.

4) Silverfish

These shy bristletails
are quick
as calligraphy.

Squashed
they make a vague Chinese
ink wash across the paper

I know I seem
inscrutable to them
an American

blue-collar male, married
but solitary
scratching poems in the night

while they busy themselves
being law-abiding insects
metamorphisizing nymph to adult

without complaining
even though
it's a hell of a headache.

The million eggs
they lay in my walls
I can forgive.

What I hate is -
(maybe somebody's
got to do it

but it fills me with loating)
- they eat
books.

5) Ladybugs

Every January they re-emerge,
anchorites from within our walls,
and cloister themselves on the upstairs window
for a few weeks of fasting and travail.

By day they wander the glass
like desert mendicants, each bug
nothing but a robe and a begging bowl.

By night they huddle
in a corner of the casement,
a little heap of rosary beads,
a handful of prayers incarnate.

Winter being the season of doom,
I have my own austerities to attend to.
But, mornings, when I find
their eclipsed bodies on the windowsill,
lovely and empty as little lacquered urns,

I sweep them up with a feather duster
and return them to the garden.

6) Fruitfly

That miserable winter I drank so much
there was this fruitfly
who loved to land on my lips.

I called her Mabel
(not her real name)
and told her my life's story,
all the women I'd done wrong
the generally rotten guy I'd been.

Not a smidgen of sympathy.
All she wanted
was to dance.
If I started talking
she'd tickle my moustache.
If I blew her away
she'd flirt right back again.

Pity wasn't in her bag of tricks.
She loved me, she whispered once,
simply for the sweetness of my breath.

A Night on the Town (Part III)

This is the 3rd and final part of a series. Click here for the 1st.

People were milling about outside – smoking, talking, refusing to give up the night. Rich, Tegan, and I joined their plight. Some guy was bumming cigarettes. “All I got is rollies,” I tell him, “do you know how to roll?” “Sure I do,” he replies. So, I hand over my pack and papers. He seems pretty messed-up, which I have no problem with, in fact I encourage such behavior, but he has a nervous energy about him that I’m not so sure about. Tegan senses it, because it’s not too long before she’s saying her good-byes.

“This guy’s got some smoke,” Rich says revealing an Altoid tin with a couple of big, green, sticky buds. I knew that was coming. There’s always people with smoke at Tiny’s and they’re always out front lighting it up, sharing.

We smoke a little. Not too much. I don’t need too much. We’re all buzzing, not wanting to quit, not knowing when to quit, not knowing how to quit, considering our options. Then the nervous-energy, sticky-bud guy says, “Let’s go to Wiley’s Corner Pocket. They’ll still be serving.” The part of me that wants more beer says, “sure”. But another part of me is having doubts. Then as we leave the guy shouts, “Good-bye mother fuckers. I hate you all.” Now I know where the doubts are coming from. But I figure I can handle it, I can handle anything, and I want more beer, and Rich wants more beer, so we move on.

There’s another guy tagging along with us. He doesn’t say much, but he’s carrying around these lottery tickets. When we come up to the 7-11, he goes in, and I figure, hey, might as well get a beer in case the bar is closed. The crazy, angry guy is across the street and notices we’re not following him anymore. He shouts something, holds up his hands in the air, and then let’s them flop to his sides in frustration. I shout to him, “I’m getting a beer, I’ll be right back.” I don’t know if he hears me and I don’t really care. Whatever happens, happens.

I’m well acquainted with the place, so I walk straight to the cooler of fourties and grab a bottle of Bud. It’s cold and heavy, and promises that the night will go on forever. The lottery ticket guy is up at the counter scratching away. He exchanges his meager winnings for yet more tickets, and when I leave, he’s still up at the counter scratching away. I know the type, he won’t quit until he hits it big or goes broke. Nothing in the middle will do.

Rich is in the parking lot. The wacko is gone. “Do you still want to go to the Corner Pocket,” I ask Rich. “No,” he says. “Good, either do I.” So we head back to the hostel.

Along the way, we come across an Italian restaurant in the making. It has a patio that’s sort of hidden from the street. “Let’s sit here,” I tell Rich, “We’ll have a smoke.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Rich says.
“Why?”
“Because, the cops will come by and we’ll get in trouble.”
“Come on Rich. That’s what’s wrong with the world. Everyone’s ruled by fear. Think about it. What are the odds that the cops are gonna come by here? And even if they do, what can they do to us? We’re not doing anything wrong.” So he sits down, unconvinced, looking around nervously, and starts rolling the cigarette.

I pull out my fourty. Rich’s eyes light-up and he says, “I didn’t know you had that.” “Damn, Rich, I’ve been drinking it the whole way over here,” which is the truth and I have no idea how he didn’t notice. Maybe he’s more messed-up than I thought. “Well give me a swig of that,” he says reaching for the bottle. I can always count on Rich.

We smoke, drink, and talk about life. Rich and I are alike in a lot of ways. That’s why I like partying with him, and I tell him so. We’re getting all sentimental like that.

As we’re getting ready to go Rich says, “that’s what I like about you John.”
I have no clue what he’s referring to, so I say, “What?”
“One minute it seems like you’re all fucked-up and you don’t know what you’re doing, but the next minute it’s like you got it all together and you know everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like sitting here, stopping for a beer and a cigarette. You were right. It was a good idea.”
I think about it for a moment and realize he’s right in more ways than he can possibly know.
On that, I guzzle down the last that the big, brown bottle has to offer. I get up. The empty weight is hanging from my hand, waiting, calling. It wants to be thrown. It needs to be thrown. So I throw it out onto the sidewalk. SMASH!!! “Geez John, I can’t believe you did that,” Rich says. Apparently, he doesn’t know me very well. He keeps on saying it – “I can’t believe you did that” – shaking his head, laughing. It felt good – like release. But then I think about the people putting in the restaurant and how they’ll have to clean it up. Then I feel kind of guilty. Sorry guys. Welcome to Whitaker.