the weeping buddha

"The statue of the weeping Buddha depicts Buddha in a bent over position, covering his face with his hands.

"There is a story about two warriors associated with the weeping Buddha. The warriors often faced each other during several battles. Both the warriors used masks as part of their costumes as a result of which they couldn’t see their opponent’s face. Following several such confrontations, the older warrior triumphed over the younger warrior. The younger warrior was killed. When the older warrior took off his mask, he realized that he had killed was his own lost son. Seeing this, the older warrior – who is none other than the weeping Buddha – began to cry.

"It is believed that the weeping Buddha takes away the grief and troubles of the world. In return, he bestows peace and provides strength to those who rub his back."

I am not actually sure where that paragraph came from. It was sent to me by my curmudgeonly opinions editor via email, after he bestowed upon me this awesome and inexplicable statue for our office Secret Santa gift exchange.

Like so many mass emails about angels, written by the anonymous poets among us, I am assuming the text is historically, religiously and grammatically correct, and, as many technologically challenged aunts have assumed in opening their inboxes, meant for me.

As is the Buddha.

I find myself, as I descend ever more into my loopy, dog-lady, tarot reading middle age -- just one existential crisis before decking myself out in jangly bracelets -- believing in, and relying on, the power of objects, moments, places, things that carry weight beyond their usefulness.

I am not sure why that's important. But I am sure that it is. 

I think things find you, or me, for a reason.

Beyond that, they provide a soothing outlet for the things in your (my) brain that smash around and muddle things.

The bestower of this gift is not one I would associate with the Buddha. He's best known for his Christmas columns, and the World of War Craft, and the weekly editorials grumbling about issues we have hyped on our front pages, and will forget for the next week's fling with public corruption or incompetence. 

When I first arrived on island he was writing a series about a near-death brush with complications from diabetes, and his herculean efforts to win back his health after years of neglect.

The series was candid, and was more useful than any of the other generic weight-loss stories I, and others, have written.

Most recently he has become the arbiter of online updates, in which we convey important breaking news such as the next meeting of the utilities commission or the response to a response to bill or other political hijinks initiated by the people running things.

And he gave me a Buddha that is full of enough energy that requires me to keep it in a similarly awesome woven square box.

And I'm in love with it.

So he is now equally awesome (until he makes me rewrite a press release about the next middle school musical).

My point is I think this is my way of saying thank you to him, the universe, whatever compels people to be surprising and nice, and all that.



And also I have power rocks. Not that that's related at all. 

Merry Christmas to me

It's awesome to date someone who has both carpentry skills and enough of an obsessive compulsive disorder to build me a spice cabinet, and individually label each of my spices (and herbs).

Corrections, nay, clarification, on the parrot fish

So, in the all too familiar ritual of clarifying earlier reporting, I have to add a slight alteration to my narrative of the great parrot fish story.

But it actually makes the story cooler, and proves that even the feminist intellectualizing inculcated into me during my four-year venture into incredibly expensive liberal arts education has been lost.

So, it turns out, as it turns out with many a legend, men had nothing to do with the vanquishing of the parrot fish.

In fact, the women at the pond, who were using the citrus limes to scent their hair, used a more subtle tact to defeat the fish.

They  made their hair into a net and charmed the fish to the surface.

Much better. 

the parrot fish

There is, apparently, and I have this on no good authority, a Chamorro legend about a parrot fish.

The legend goes that sometime, presumably long ago, a giant parrot fish was devouring the island. I'm not exactly sure how a parrot fish does that, but it was.

But no one could figure out exactly where the parrot fish was hiding, and daily it was consuming more and more of the island -- so much that ancient residents feared the island would break in half.

(Like that one congressman dude).

The answer to this quandary came from a spring where the culprit parrot fish was found to be hiding in between munching on rocks and trees and coral and other such tasty snacks.

Chamorro women frequented the pool -- washing their hair, or clothes with orange and lime or some kind of citrus fruit -- and cast the rinds into the water.

The rinds floated down into the cavern connecting the secret parrot fish lair to edible parts of the island, and great Chamorro warriors vanquished the fish.

And the island was saved.

This legend -- which I have loosely interpreted from no particular source -- and the promise of seeing something new on an island where all the caves and ridges and jungle and odd corners have been explored, by someone, sometime, was enough to motivate an expedition.

The problem is that neither I, nor my banged-up-truck-driving fellow expeditioner, knew where the spring was. And as we drove around in circles, up and down hills on little roads leading to jungle turnarounds and cramped flat-roofed houses with menacing garages -- it became clear that no one else did.

Half the problem was that we went around in circles in Agana Springs (the village), looking for Agana Springs (the springs) -- and everyone who warily and bemusedly gave us directions seemed to think we were looking for the village, and thus sent us down one set of hills, or up another, before we realized that we had done this before.

At last, we found a friendly middle-aged lady, and asked where "Agana Springs, the springs" was.

"Oh, you don't want to go there," she said.

She proceeded to warn us not to go in the water -- alluding to what I can only assume are unspeakable environmental horrors of days past.

Because I am like this, it also seemed to be a warning that you give to stupid non-locals (there's a Hawaiian word that is used liberally here on Guam for white people, but I don't know how to spell it) who are looking for a muddy pool haunted with the spirits of an ancient vanquished parrot fish.

Our environmentally conscious friend gave us directions anyway, which actually got us where we were going -- more specifically she pointed out the water pump station, behind which the pool is now located.

Even then, it took a little investigating behind bamboo scaffolding and down paths marred with old refrigerators and TVs to find the actual springs.

Not so much a springs anymore, it was more of a dank pool, still populated with fish, but tiny ones -- and no giant island-eating parrot fish to be found.

It was brown, and a little sad, and probably incredibly polluted.

It was also alive  -- with trees and bamboo and a sloping jungle cover that persisted despite all efforts to exorcise the beautiful.

I like it, and imagined that someday the pool will be resurrected as a home to mythical creatures, long after pumping stations have melted into jungle.

Sometimes that's good enough.

Concrete jungle where dreams are made (oh)

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I used to work for an insurance company across from this park, in the building with the stupid cock-eyed red square modern art installation out front, circa 2006.

I didn't actually do anything on my job, because I was a temp paid to sit and answer a phone one hour a day, in thrift store dresses and oddly fitting suits, which no one actually told me not to wear.

My only responsibility on this job was to cover the lunch break of an opera-singer-turned-receptionist, and occasionally label folders while surfing the Internet, and/or writing my first heartfelt journalistic theses.

But I still had to take a lunch break, mainly so they could pay me for one hour less of not working.

Mostly I was broke. On the good days I could buy tempura from the sushi place down the block, which didn't actually sell sushi, and mingle among the stock brokers and executive assistants who all had cooler clothes than me.

On the bad days I just wandered and wished I had enough money for an eggplant curry at the hole-in-the-wall Indian place on Fulton street that still managed to get reviewed in the New York Times.

So I would sit in this park and try to read, but mostly just watch people eat and talk on cell phones, and sometimes catch a few elderly men playing chess, because they had chess boards painted onto some of the ubiquitous granite decor.

And I would rue the world, the hard benches, the tall buildings, the muddy hole whose tragedy wasn't mine, and which I could not really understand, and contemplate my place wearing checkered sun dresses among the suits and blouses and fashionable shoes.

Alienated is not quite the word -- befuddled, distracted, trying to see only parts of this overwhelming whole made up of ill-fitting cubes crammed together -- bored, resistant, yearning. All that stuff.

I think most people must have thought me borderline autistic, or a homeless person passing for employed, which, I sort of was.

I was still fairly new to the New York grungy activist scene then, having only recently been inducted into the circle of desperate defiants, motivated by either principle or by a realization that there was really nothing beyond grey offices and cubicles -- and the terrible discovery that one actually has to make money.

(I knew this, but didn't realize how lame it would be).

At that time, whatever scene I had found had retracted into a skeletal collective of the committed and cynical, grasping for significance in a very small ghetto of self-induced poverty.

Some, most, of the younger ones would eventually wander out to actual employment (me), while others sank deeper into the mire of dysfunction, viciously guarding the only territory they had.

In those days the hub of my activist world was in a dirty office on 43rd street, just above Grand Central.

There I worked, and dithered, sometimes all night, typing at the shittiest computers that one could still turn on, reading page after page of unevenly printed proofs of a newspaper that didn't really need a deadline.

Often we were too poor to buy ink, or if we did, it was, like, paid for by unwitting volunteers who just came into help, and our volunteer proofreading created this dialectic of mistakes and editing that would have been comical (okay it was) except we were tired and working on other people's volunteer time.

It was dim and often uncomfortable, and on the second floor of a building owned by a cult, whose wayward members would occasionally brush past us before returning to the safety of delusion and domination.

I'm not really sure why I didn't see the connection, or mostly ignored it. I think I liked the chandeliers and the large spiral staircases of the building, which had been an old hotel, and had a faint Shining quality about. I grew fond of the creaking elevator, and I heard tell that there was a reflection maze somewhere in the building's nether regions.

I knew my fellow activist colleagues (who I was really only visiting -- I think the word is tourist in the vernacular) were without perspective, and with nothing else to do but throw rocks either aimlessly or at causes that needed more than shouts in the wind.

But throwing rocks is often fun.

For me sitting on that hard bench, that world was still inviting. It seemed true, partly because of its hardscrabble veneer.

I welcomed it as a respite from every other glossy thing. It was a way out, because otherwise I would spend an indeterminate amount of my life sitting at a desk labeling folders, answering phones and making sure I exactly pronounced the four-syllable gauntlet of a name belonging to the she-devil office manager, who eventually retired to a gated community in Florida, to make sure she only mingled with the "right people."

Even in my tempered 30-year-old wisdom, I am still bugged by that.

The protests I went to at that time were either dull, ill-conceived, momentarily thriving before hitting the end of the barricade, or a premeditated circus directed mainly at the selves we wanted to be, screaming cries that meant something, somewhere, but not to Manhattanites and the commuter hoard.

And now, in the park where at 25 I prostrated myself to better things, there are people sleeping in tents, dirty and pissed off and no doubt psychically harassing the business men who quickly walk by.

It may be small. It may be in its zenith of organizational serenity before interest flatlines and the earnest but unprepared file out only to leave the irrationally committed clinging to tents.  Mainly because they have nowhere else to go.

But I don't care.

Dirty anarchists and the unemployed white collars, living momentarily in tents, have, apparently, made enough of a dent to confuse the usually dismissive "mainstream" media -- a fairly hilarious term given the all-seeing eye of twitter --  to be more effective than anything I can say I did in my years of organizing/fighting/believing/writing.

More than anything when I marched with big signs and shyly shouted slogans, and tried in an exacting way to speak truth to power, I was doing it for myself. And also because horror and the Bush administration was happening around me, and more importantly to the rest of the world, and what else does one do?

All in all, it was not a bad decision.

But sleeping in a park next to the Nasdaq and a few blocks from Wall Street doesn't seem to be a bad decision either.

I know both sides of that world of aimless activism and mindless business, at least cursorily, and even from 10,000 miles away both still feel like home.

Once, on a lunch break in my park, I read lower Manhattan's tarot cards, or rather, the cards of the bench on which I was sitting , for a reason I can't explain -- well, mainly boredom.  And all I saw was death, collapse and the world of inorganic construction, male drive to make towers into the sky, and what happens when they fall.

That is likely still in lower Manhattan's cards.

But I am rooting for the people who are, at least metaphorically, trying to fill that collapsed hole, and replace the edifices that have not yet been torn down, with their honest, inconvenient pleas for something better.

It is more than I could do. And enough to make, at least a part of me, wish I were still doing it.

10 years to forget

fell. commemorate. collapse. dedicate. mark. mourn. honor. heroes. sacrifice. determination. valor. American. soil. USofA. bless. mastermind. evil. good. terrorism. win. freedom. our freedoms. inspirational. Islamic. Osama. extremists. Islamists. jihad. Guantanamo. blacksite. Fallujah. IED. detention. Abu Ghraib. wounded. warriors. why. we. fight. remember. never. forget. first responders. ground. zero. fire. fighters. reflection. suicide. bombings. grenade. rocket. launcher. threat. unconfirmed. credible. air. plane. security. terrorists. depose. weapons. mass. destruction. enemy. freedom. intelligence. secure. security. officials. stop. search. at home. surveillance. patriot act. sunshine. why. hate. us. them. bodies. execute. struggle. ongoing. loss. lost. fear. terror. hearts. minds. drones. civilians. casualties. efforts. military. personnel. troops. service. men. women. mourn. son. daughter. father. husband. wife. mother. cousin. uncle. aunt. sister. brother. friend. thousands. millions. exile. vigilant. mosque. God. faith. holy. war. burned. buried. resilient. determined. foe. hit. us. stand. salute. hood. detain. tireless. law. enforcement. defeat. victory. never. forget. silence. lessons. meaning. regrets. decider. victims. me. I. remember. there. names. names. names. unnamed. reports. reported. scare. counter. offensive. rescue. trauma. rights. then. now. muddy. hole. rebuild. success. president. probe. water. board. suspect. NSA. surveillance. evesdropping. radical. right. left. march. stop. support. resist. defend. clarity. justice. never. forget. lead. protect. peace. silence. speak. out. truth. power. lie. divide. conquer. forces. anti-. post-. memorialize. free. world. never. remember. forget.

the inevitable righteous indignation

I hope everyone appreciates my little beat poem to the last decade.

It was all I could muster after a day of chasing around 9/11 memorials with my pen and paper, dutifully taking notes as fathers and mothers and wives and children of the war dead all sobbed or held back tears stoically as they were once again trotted out for the annual grief fest organized to help them staunch wounds that they never should have had;

After a day of listening to speech after speech from leaders, elected and otherwise, about why were are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why 19-year-old soldiers came home exploded into pieces in little body bags, why the wars' disfigured roll themselves onto podiums to get medals of freedom, or honor or whatever;

Why there are terrorists who hate us, and how we have to stop them;

How this tragedy CHANGED US ALL FOREVER. And how we can never forget, ever, this event that we all watched on TV.

I hate this day. I doubt very many people like it.

It was a terrible day.

But when I watch guys on Harleys riding motorcycles for the benefit of the limbless, armless vet being pinned with an honorary medallion, and listen to twangy songs about kicking the terrorists with our American-made boots, and see the same determined vacuousness that emerged when the Sept. 11 attacks chiseled the nation from an ignorant, inert stone into a blind directionless god of war -- crying and cheering as it launched expletives and platitudes and missiles at the rest of the world -- I am particularly resentful.

I am not going to waste everybody's time talking about all the reasons why the start and continuation of two(ish) wars is wrong, or try to speak about my own, unique connection to this event, whatever it would be, as everyone seems to have a special and unique reason why they were touched by 9/11.

We all were.

Any thinking, half-conscious human being knows, feels, that death is wrong. And torture is wrong. And killing innocent, and even not innocent, people is wrong.

It is wrong.

But, somehow there seems to be a deep internal conflict between basic human empathy and the compulsion to blow shit up.

I have given up trying to convince people to change by telling them all the gritty details of wrong done to other people by our country, trying to waive about facts about torture and detention and civilian casualties, and young kids still barely out of high school being shipped to a war zone.

This approach has clearly failed.

So today all I want to say is just fucking stop riding Harleys for a half second, or singing God Bless America and the National Anthem really fucking loudly, and holding the American flag, or whatever flag, as if it could save you.

Just stop, and think of the most painful experience you've been through, and think about how you felt when you saw people falling from a burning building -- in your own country -- and how you would feel, or do feel, about your son or daughter or whoever coming home in pieces. And then fucking ask yourself how you, or anyone one, or any nation, can do that to someone else.

And if you're really happy to see them all get blown up anyway -- fuck you. I'm tired of this shit.

If not, maybe we should be coming up with a better way of dealing with this day than regurgitating mindless sorrow, and analyzing 10 years of failed military intervention, and vomiting our grief all over the world with an air of entitlement that we do not afford anyone else.

And maybe we as humans should try to find a better way to stop wreaking incalculable damage on people -- our own and others.

Thoughts?