So let me tell you about my recent adventures. Last Thursday I packed a PT Cruiser load of stuff into my car and crossed the border from Quebec, Canada into New York, USA. I'd already crossed this border twice during my stay in Montreal when I had some gigs in New York. Those times it was easy-peasy. Even with a carload of stuff the Canadian border guard passed me through. So I didn't expect much of anything when coming back into what is, for better or worse, my own country.But when I arrived at the DMZ separating the Peoples Republic of Canada from the Vereinigtes Großreich von Amerika I soon found out this was not to be the case. I was singled out for a secondary inspection. This involved getting out of my car, leaving my keys with the border gestapo and being taken into an interrogation center where I had to empty out my pockets and turn them inside out, where the little single serving cheese thingy my friend had given me was sliced open to see if it was drugs, where I was asked a lot of questions about my source of income and so on. Look, guys, I'm a US citizen. Even if I was a vagrant without means of support you couldn't send me back to Canada. I think they were a little confused about how this border stuff works.
I took all of this with good humor. What else can you do? But it was annoying and absolutely without even the smallest degree of sense. What does anyone smuggle in from Canada? Seriously. There aren't even any drugs you can get in Quebec that you can't get more of in New York, and I'm sure they're cheaper too. Everything is cheaper in the USA than in Canada. And that bullshit you've heard that the Sept. 11th hijackers came in through Canada? It's not true.
Feh. So after that I made my way to Brooklyn where, much to my amazement, I secured a parking spot just around the corner from the front door of my building. That was Thursday night and the street was closed to parking from 9:30-11:00 on Friday mornings for cleaning. But I wasn't too worried because I've parked in Brooklyn before and it hasn't been a huge hassle.
What I did not know was that about four blocks of my neighborhood is being resurfaced this week, which means parking has become much more difficult. At nine on Friday morning I started driving around looking for a spot. It took well over an hour, much of which time was spent getting a ticket from the NYPD for allegedly violating a "no right on red" that they say was clearly posted. I went back around to the same corner later specifically looking for the signs they told me were there. I did not see any. They had a line of three or four more cars behind me all getting pulled over for the same violation, they didn't see the alleged signs either. This is the New York City equivalent of a deep south speed trap. I'm gonna go check again, but I'm pretty certain those signs — if they exist at all — are deliberately obscured for the sole purpose of generating highly questionable revenue.
All of this coupled with the usual stresses associated with moving and with not having a reliable source of income (You think authors are rich? Guess again.) and a few other stress producing incidents that I'm not going to make public made for one pretty unhappy Bradley.
It was during this recent period of black pessimism and malaise that I began to reflect again on the whole "that's not very Buddhist of you" business. I'm sure lots of people reading this blog are familiar with it. I wrote an article about this in the March, 2008 issue of Shambhala Sun (it's the issue with the Dalai Lama on the cover. Oh wait! D'oh!).
That's when someone who is a Buddhist gets a bit flustered by whatever and all her friends say, "That's not very Buddhist of you!"
I'll tell you what, though, friends and neighbors, if it weren't for my steady practice I wouldn't be able to get through life at all. Forget about being all wide eyed and Enlightened. I wouldn't even make it through the fucking day. This is one of the thousand million reasons I take issue with all those assholes out there hawking meditation as the way to turn an ordinary human into Super Meditation Man, the guy who never gets his hair (or lack thereof) ruffled no matter what hurricanes life sends his way.
Yeah, yeah. I know. I know. You've seen that guy! He's on YouTube! He's got little videos in which he giggles and smiles and talks in this really sweet soothing voice about how he has found the way to be cool as a cucumber no matter what happens. He's the real deal!
You know what? Go follow that guy if you want. Buy his magic potions. I don't care. Just don't come belly-achin' to me when you realize what a scam it all was. That's all I ask.
Any decent actor can play that role for the ten minutes YouTube allows you, or the hour or two he's on stage, or for a 15 minute personal interview session where he gets to ring a bell and send you away the instant things get tense. It's not even a very impressive trick. Real life, however, is entirely different.
This is one of (again) the bazillion and two reasons I'm dead set against the whole on-line Zen Master thing. It's so easy to play the role of Super Meditation Man in a Skype interview where you can't see the mess the guy's room is just off camera (both concretely and metaphorically), where you don't get to see how your teacher acts after spending two hours in gridlock on the 405 expressway, where you can't smell the garlic on his breath.
Bah.
Anyway, last night I went out and had Belgian fries in the East Village and everything got a whole lot better.
