Bloganoia

My wife and I are very different which is usually a good thing.  One of those differences is that I obsess over the news and surfing the net has become a default mode of being for me when I’m not clearly engaged in something else.  My wife doesn’t like that for reasons that are perfectly understandable.  In fact, she takes the view that it’s possible to overdose on bad news and thus purposely avoids the news of the war, the state of the earth, etc. not because she wants to ignore it, but because she’s keenly aware that it drags her down.  We do have this continuing conversation about if and when our golden years come, what do we want to be doing with them?

Being me, I sometimes lapse into some scenario where America is in chaos, there is no oil, there are no social support systems, famine and plague are everywhere, and all businesses are owned either by Walmart or McDonald’s.  My wife prefers to talk about making things possible, like finding a pleasant town, a little house to restore, having grandchildren, and maybe opening a small business to keep ourselves busy.  She says ocean and I think tsunami.  She talks about opening a business and I think about debtor’s prison.  I’ve turned into Malthus.

For a while, I went to this local meditation group that I labeled the Buddha Club.  There are actually two significant Buddhist groups in my town.  There’s an actual temple where most of the congregation appears to have been born Buddhist and has the higher concentration of Asian members.  They chant from something that looks like a hymnal, sit in pews, and there’s a sermon.  In fact, if you didn’t understand anything that was being said or looked closely at the symbols and decorations, you could easily be in any protestant service in America.  

The other group meets in a community room next to a bellydance class and an aerobics group.  This group is all middle-aged white people or older.  They meditate for thirty minutes, do a walking meditation, then listen to its leader’s thoughts for about half an hour.  I wound up choosing the latter and they spend a lot of time there talking about the Buddhist time frame which tends to be in thousands of years.  Good Buddhists appreciate how genuinely hard real change is in the world.  

I don’t know why I stopped going for the time being, but there’s been little to filter out my persistent pessimism about the fate of the world and me.  It actually stopped me from blogging for a few days.  I was asking myself if I was spiraling myself into depression by trying to write at least every other day, usually about some anomaly of the public/political world.  My friend Pogblog  tends to write every now and then about what is essentially imagining the future in a universe that allows for multiple threads of reality.  Alan Howard another blogger, I have on my links, seems to swear off politics from his site every now and then and then mysteriously pop back a few weeks later.  I’ve noticed that Benny writes a lot of obituaries to say how various individuals have positively influenced her life (I confess I wasn’t sure if Benny was male or female for several weeks). In the meantime, Jamie at Intoxination, manages to find a couple items a day with amazing dependability.

Even when I purposely turn away from the political, I find myself writing about shooting turkeys in my front yard or being rejected by my own cat.  I do frequently try to write funny, but often it’s really dark funny.  Now and then I too easily forget that I have so much to be thankful for even in the straight-line version of existence.  Part of that is having the good fortune to be married to someone who does remind me from time to time that the glass doesn’t have to be full for us to have enough water to drink.  In the meantime, I suspect that there is some zen of blogging that remains just beyond my intellectual grasp.  

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