In vino veritas

With dinner tonight I drank half a bottle of pinot grigio.  Then I did up the dishes and prepared to go to bed.  I took a glass of brandy with me, sat in bed for a while, and drank a second glass of brandy.  I’d kind of like a third but I’m afraid of the hangover tomorrow morning.  So I took two Tylenol instead, and I’m writing to you.

 

I spent the weekend at a non-residential Buddhist retreat.  “Non-residential” means it ran from 9:00-4:00 on Saturday and Sunday but we got to go home in between.  For me, that means I got to do my volunteer work Saturday night and then walk home talking with Suzie, as usual.  Tonight, between dinner and the brandy, I paid bills.  I hope to God I didn’t make any stupid mistakes when I wrote the checks – I’m not kidding when I say that two glasses is enough to put me away these days – but I triple-checked everything before I sealed the envelopes so it’s probably all fine.

 

The point of the retreat was for us to learn about the jhanas – intense states of mind brought on by highly-focused concentration, in which you experience a variety of ecstatic states and which are supposed to afford you (as a side-effect) any number of exotic psychic powers.  I remember that walking on water and ESP were both on the list.  (To his credit, the guy leading the retreat interpreted both of these claims in ways that made them not physically impossible.)

 

Anyway, during the last question-and-answer session someone asked the teacher to talk about the Buddhist precept against drinking intoxicants.  (Feel free to re-read the first paragraph above and smirk.)  And basically his answer was, “We’re confused enough already about the nature of reality, and about what’s going on in our lives. The last thing we need is to ingest some substance that confuses us even farther.”

 

I’ve heard similar answers from other Buddhists since I started meditating two years ago, and I suppose that the answer makes sense as far as it goes.  But I have to wonder something.  I concede that it’s not going to do me much good to drink a lot of alcohol just before I spend a lot of intense effort trying to understand the nature of reality, any more than I should get drunk before trying to solve a nasty differential equation (or pay bills … again, see above).  But that’s different from endorsing a blanket prohibition of alcohol, and this for at least two reasons.

 

The first reason – the less interesting one – is that alcohol affects far more than just our rational intellect.  It’s not merely a food that makes us more confused.  Rightly used, alcohol can warm our hearts, soothe our emotions, gentle our spirits.  Indeed, I have argued before that alcohol – like sex – is at least as much a spiritual pleasure as it is a physical pleasure.  Buddhism is perfectly willing to allow you to take medicine when you are sick.  Buddhists aren’t Christian Scientists.  And alcohol can be a medicine for the soul.  There must be an answer to this from the Buddhist side, but at any rate it takes some talking through.

 

The second reason – and the more interesting one – is that sometimes it is precisely alcoholic intoxication that leads us to truths which we have hidden from ourselves for years.  Naturally this doesn’t always work.  There have been writers who insist that they have to be drunk, or stoned, or otherwise high, to be able to create … and the evidence rarely bears them out.  But I know for a fact that during the bad years of my marriage there were times I would get stinking drunk at night, then go out for a long walk, yell for half an hour at the stars and the night sky how unfair my plight was … and suddenly realize that I was bringing it all on myself by something I was doing.  One way or another, the booze freed up my mind to see things that I hid from myself while sober.  And then, once I saw them, I couldn’t go back.  These drunken walks late at night had as much to do with my breaking free of my marriage as writing in this blog or fucking D’s brains out.

 

Even Plato acknowledges as much, in his long discussion of drinking parties in the Laws.  He starts with the simple observation that people are far more likely to reveal who they really are when drunk than when sober.  And from this he deduces that educators – at least those charged with training the characters of young adults – should periodically get them drunk under controlled circumstances as a way of testing who they really are.  Polus, Ion, Lysis, and Charmides may all of them seem demure, retiring and respectful youths by the sober light of day: but are they really?  How will they stand up to troubled times or powerful temptations?  Get them drunk and then watch them, and you’ll have a pretty good idea.  This is what the Athenian Stranger recommends in Book Two of the Laws and honestly he’s got a point.

 

In vino, veritas.

 

Does this insight explode the Buddhist teaching?  Not really.  It challenges any purported Buddhist dogma, no question about it.  But always there is this caution in Buddhism that you shouldn’t cling too hard to anything, including views or teachings … and even Buddhist views or teachings.  Hold everything lightly and empirically; be prepared to give up any idea when it conflicts with concrete experience.  We hear this over and over.  So maybe the Buddha would have recognized, if someone had posed the question to him, that sometimes alcohol has its uses … that we don’t have to give it up always, but only sometimes.  That we shouldn’t cling to it the way we shouldn’t cling to anything else; but that we can use it the way we can use anything, if only we employ skillful means.  That as philosophers, we should find nothing human alien to us. 

 

Admittedly the historical man Siddhartha Gotama, charged with keeping order among all his monks, probably didn’t make exceptions to any of his rules.  But, according to his principles, he should have.

 

 

Rethinking 1: making room for more friends

I just got back from a couple hours at the Downtown Sangha, and I have a variety of thoughts kicking around in my head.

 

A couple days ago I mumbled to you that I want more friends, and I said the same thing back before Christmas.  But I also raised the question – back before Christmas – whether I make room in my life to allow friendships to form, and I see one way in which I don’t.  I am awkward at small talk.  During the break, a woman came up to introduce herself to me … apparently she had waved to me in a bookstore a month ago and I had looked puzzled, as if wondering “Where do I know you from?”  And of course, she implied, where I knew her from was Sangha – but since we’d never exchanged names, obviously her face didn’t register with me.

 

I didn’t want to tell her that I had no recollection of the wave in the bookstore, and in fact that I didn’t even recognize her from earlier evenings at Sangha.  Clearly she recognized me.  (I’ve commented before that this is a running theme in my life … since Son 1 and Son 2 have started to experience the same thing, maybe I should call it “The Curse of the Tanatus”.)  But this is all beside the point.  The point is that we chatted for a couple of minutes, I made a friendly joke and she laughed, and then the break was over … and I have no idea how to follow up that exchange with another conversation where we might have a chance to get to know each other.  This has happened before.  Clearly I have openings to make friends.  Probably there are enough times that I don’t recognize that I might as well conclude the Universe is flinging friends at me.  But I feel self-conscious and awkward and I don’t know what to say next.  I can maneuver the immediate exchange pleasantly enough, if the other person initiates it.  I can make a nice joke and we can both laugh.  I’m good at that part.  But what that means is that I am good at a kind of social smoothnes that leaves no room for a handhold, nothing that lets either of us hold on and talk some more.  Come to think of it, I wonder if people feel like I’m brushing them off?  But I don’t know how to do something else instead. 

 

Suzie is the exception to this rule, but there were so many extenuating circumstances there it’s not funny:

• We both walk home from our volunteer work, and we live in the same direction; so we walk together for at least a half an hour regardless.
• Suzie talks a lot about herself (kind of like Wife); and (also kind of like Wife) she spills over rather easily into the kind of stuff that some people would find too personal to discuss.  That actually makes it way easier for me, because on the one hand I can listen sympathetically and offer advice; while on the other hand, those very topics (family drama, relationship drama) are the ones where I figure I have something to add to the conversation from my own experience.  And since she has already opened the door to talking about intensely personal stuff, I don’t have to feel self-conscious about saying, “It’s funny you should mention that because the same thing happened to me throughout my long, painful, dysfunctional marriage ….” 
• On top of all that, she’s Pagan.  Paganism is still enough of a minority phenomenon that it gives us something to talk about right there.  That first night we met, we spent the whole walk home talking about her experience with the Pagan community compared to mine.

 

There may be lessons I should extract from this experience that would help me talk to people who seem a little more mainstream, but if so I haven’t extracted them yet.

 

I also grumbled about wanting more interesting work.  For the sake of clarity (or to inflate my post-count) let me spin that off into a second post.

 

 

 

Rethinking 2: finding more interesting work

… continued from “Rethinking 1” which I finished writing just a minute ago.

 

The other thing I thought about was this question of finding “more interesting and meaningful work”.  I’m pretty sure I’ve whined about this before.  But during this evening’s Dharma Talk, the speaker casually remarked that of course Buddhism teaches there is no happiness to be gained in running after things Out There, in clinging to or grasping for things in the World.  Happiness, so says the Dharma, comes from cultivating your inner attitude.  And of course I know this.  It’s a commonplace that Buddhism teaches exactly this.  No big surprise there.

 

Only in that case … why should I expect it to make the slightest difference to my happiness if I find another job?  If suffering is constant so long as we don’t change our internal attitudes, shouldn’t I actually expect to feel the very same level of dissatisfaction in my next job as in this one?

 

Of course that’s just a theoretical point.  It might be wrong.  Maybe the Buddha Dharma isn’t right about everything.  But consider a few data points:

 

1. I have been puzzling over this issue of feeling mis-employed as long as I have been employed.  The question is an old friend, of sorts.  I have puzzled over it for years.  Decades.  And I have gotten nowhere, really. 

But on the whole I’m usually pretty good at solving puzzles.  I did well in school.  I’m good at Sudoku.  So if I’ve been puzzling over a question for decades and still don’t have an answer, is it possible that maybe the question just doesn’t have an answer?  Maybe the problem isn’t with the jobs I’ve held, but with my expectations for how rewarding a job ought to be.

Talking back, I could answer that I puzzled over my marriage for almost as long before I started getting answers.  Maybe I’m just looking for these answers in the wrong places.  At the same time I have to admit that, when it comes to the questions about my marriage, I already knew some of the answers right at the beginning.  I just didn’t want to admit them to myself.

 

2. And really, my job isn’t so bad.  It’s something I know how to do.  It’s something a lot of other people don’t know how to do, and don’t even want to know how to do … but the Company needs it done.  They pay me more than I’m probably worth … not that I’m complaining.  It’s not great wealth, but so far it has kept my kids in private schools.  So yeah, sure, it has its boring days … what job doesn’t?

 

3. It also has its fun days.  I wrote my post “Not at ease” after a string of boring and unproductive days – days when I had stuff to do and it was overwhelmingly difficult to get myself to do any of it.  But then the next day I was bright and chipper.  I found out that in three weeks I’m going to have to fly to Europe for a one-week project with Hil, and I spent the morning on travel plans.  For a while I even thought I might be able to stop off en route and visit Elly as well.  Turns out I won’t be able to see Elly this trip, but still it’s going to be fun: I’ll be up and out of my normal routine, and I’ll be travelling abroad again.  The last time work sent me abroad was 2011.  I’m pretty sure the only international travel I’ve done since then was the trip to Peru last February.  So yes, I was in a good mood all day.

 

4. I also remember the company where I worked before this job.  I was managing a department whose role was even more boring than my current one: a dull, routine clerical function which had over time become the designated whipping-boy for the entire company.  If anything went wrong anywhere, it was our fault: that’s how things stood when I took over.  It was a situation tailor-made for me to moan and whine that I wanted something more interesting and meaningful.  What was different was – yes – my internal attitude.

Right from the beginning, my first challenge was to get people to stop blaming us for shit, which in turn meant that we had to stop screwing up.  So for a while I had to work on that. 

Then people resented having to deal with us, because the way we worked was so painful for them.  That was the next thing I had to fix.

By the time I had gotten us over those two hurdles, I had come to see that we played, or had it in our power to play, an essential role in the company … unsung and unglamorous but absolutely critical, a role without which nothing else could work unless someone else picked up the ball.  And yes, in other companies someone else did.  But honestly, no-one was better qualified than we were.  So I concentrated our efforts on that role.  In time other departments began to see how essential we really were.  We ended up with a status in the company that no other department named the same thing in any other company could match.  Topics that normally belonged in any number of other places were all referred to us because “That’s what Hosea’s people do.”

But you know … our core work never changed in all that time.  The fundamental stuff we had to do every day, the sine qua non that they paid us for, was still the same dull, routine, clerical function it had always been.  In all this time I hadn’t been given a more glamorous job.  All I had done was to think about the job differently from my predecessor.  Everything else proceeded from that.

 

So maybe it’s not just a theoretical point.  Maybe the Buddha Dharma isn’t full of hot air.  Maybe it’s onto something.  Maybe I should stop whining about my job and just change my way of thinking.

 

Or maybe I should stop drinking and go to bed.  Sweet dreams, all.

 

 

Not at ease

I know, I know … you hear this from me a lot.  But it’s my blog, so I’m going to make a note here … to record this for some day, or to make myself write, or for some reason unknown.

 

I’ve realized that I just don’t feel at ease these days.  I don’t know why.  But one consequence is that I’m eating more, and I seem to be losing notches on my belt at an astonishing rate.  And drinking in the evenings: not much – two glasses of wine can put me away these days – but regularly.  From a health point of view that shouldn’t be a problem – two glasses of wine is supposed to be recommended for middle-aged men, I think.  But it encourages the eating.  And when I sit in Sangha, like tonight, it makes me wonder why?  Am I covering something up with the eating and drinking?  Am I running away from some discomfort … some suffering?  Isn’t it supposed to be better to be mindfully aware of my suffering so that it magically changes into a butterfly, or something like that?

 

Well, without it I feel like I feel right now.  Not at ease.  Just a little bit anxious or tense.  Not very much – and in fact once I’m done typing this I plan to go to bed and I bet I’ll fall asleep just fine.  But why?  What am I discontent at?

 

I feel like I should be doing something.  But I don’t know what.  If I’m not writing I often feel like I should be writing.  But it’s not like I use this space as a writer’s journal, to polish my style into beautiful, lapidary fiction.  It’s more like a stream-of-consciousness transcript, the sort of thing that provoked Truman Capote’s acid critique of Kerouac: “That’s not writing – it’s typing.”  Yeah, well mine too.

 

Or I feel like I should be doing something to make my life better … maybe reading some of those books on my shelf I’ve never gotten to yet.  Which one today?  Don’t know.  What do I want to change about my life?  Don’t know.  Besides, isn’t changing your life a lot of work?

 

Actually, in principle it shouldn’t have to be.  There’s a Japanese concept called kaizen, adopted by a lot of companies as a continuous-improvement philosophy.  The idea is that if you know where you want to get to, you take tiny, incremental steps towards your goal, but you do it every day.  Make the steps small enough to be easy, but keep at it.  And in time, dripping water wears away rock.

 

It’s a great idea.  Of course it requires constant attention (deep sigh).  And it also requires knowing where you want to go.

 

Maybe I can start making a list of things I want more of (or less of) in my life.  Of course as soon as I sign off and post this I’ll think of something I missed.  And I’ll probably decide in any event that some of the things on the list have to go, to be replaced by their opposites.  But what happens if I just start listing the first things that come into my head?

 

More interesting and meaningful work

 

More friends

 

More travel

 

More walking

 

Less eating

 

More cooking (oops! I see a conflict already!)

 

Less clutter (actually my day-to-day space is pretty clutter-free, but there are boxes of stuff in storage that should probably all be burned if only I knew what it was)

 

More self-understanding …  I mean, a better understanding of what I want and where I want to be going (but isn’t that what this list is all about?)

 

Do I really even want to write?  Well … I enjoy figuring things out, and writing helps me do that.  I enjoy creating something masterful, that speaks to people: 99% of what I write is just blather, but there have been a few pieces over the years that have been better than that.  Would I want to write for a living?  If I had to write for a living, I’d probably look for any excuse to do anything else at all.  It’s like Mark Twain observed: “Work is what a body is obliged to do, while play is what a body is not obliged to do.”  Robert Benchley once formulated exactly the same principle in slightly different words, pointing out that “A human being is capable of doing any amount of work there is to be done, provided that it is not the work he is supposed to be doing at that precise moment.”

 

How did I start talking so much about work?  Oh right, … writing ….

 

There are other points where I want flatly opposite things, depending on where I’ve been most recently or what I’ve been reading.  When I read Thich Nhat Hanh, I want to drink less.  (Also when I wake up with a hangover, but that’s really really rare these days, because – as noted – even when I do drink it’s nothing like five years ago.)  When I thumb through my Mediterranean cookbook or anything by Florence King, I want to drink more: only good stuff, and only in the right way, but still.  (The cookbook inclines me towards wine as a basic food group in the Mediterranean diet; Florence King’s lunatic evocations of The South incline me towards bonded bourbon.)  Maybe I should avoid the whole dilemma by just reading less.

__________

 

Oh hell, it’s high time for bed.  Staying up writing this means that my stomach is starting to growl.  And there is that open half-empty bottle of Shiraz in the refrigerator ....

 

Good night.

 

 

Suzie's dream

Now that I’ve told you something about Suzie, I should mention a dream she had last month, right around the Winter Solstice.  She told me about it that Saturday, as we were both working at the place we volunteer.  As Suzie is Wiccan, I had told her something about Wife’s Wiccan past: not a lot, I guess, because there hadn’t been time.  But some.  She has never met Wife and didn’t (at the time) know a lot more about her.

 

Anyway, that Saturday as we were working she said that I had shown up in one of her dreams. 

 

Really? 

 

Yes – she had had a dream in which she and Wife and I all went on vacation somewhere together, and then afterwards moved into a mansion.

 

Vacation … and a mansion.  Interesting.

 

We didn’t take the time to discuss her dream any farther, but I mulled it.  I was particularly interested that she should dream about Wife without knowing anything about her.  I assume that if the dream has any meaning at all, then the vacation – or maybe the mansion – has to have something to do with Wicca: what else did she even know about Wife at that point?  What else could the three of us possibly have in common?

 

It’s also interesting to note that years ago Wife promised Cerridwen (her patron goddess) to bear her a daughter and raise her to be a priestess.  She never fulfilled that promise.  We had two boys and then Wife’s health got bad enough she could never have any more children.  Now she has passed menopause.  But Suzie is just three years older than Son 1; in some hypothetical alternate universe, if Wife had gotten pregnant eight years after we were married, we could have had a daughter exactly Suzie’s age ….

 

 

Not a date

I had dinner with Suzie last Friday night, but it wasn't a date.  I had a lot of spaghetti left over from when the boys were visiting over Christmas; she had texted me when she got back to town from the holidays and said "Yum" when I mentioned the spaghetti, so I invited her to come over some night but clearly not for a date.  I had a bottle of cheap wine to serve with the spaghetti, but it wasn't a date.  Oh, and then at the last minute I saw there was an art opening that evening so I suggested we go there first, ... before heading back to my place for dinner.

But it wasn't a date.  She has a boyfriend.  I'm not looking for a girlfriend.  And she's more than thirty years younger than I am.

I realize I haven't told you much about her yet, so let me try for a quick thumbnail sketch.  She volunteers at the same place I do on Saturday nights, which is how we met.  She's a self-taught Wiccan ... well, self-taught and Internet-chat-room-taught, but she's never been part of a real, live, get-together-in-the-priestess's-living-room-at-full-moons coven.  She dresses garishly (I keep reminding myself that she's only 21 and so I can't expect better) but speaks very softly: I regularly have to ask her to repeat herself.  She chatters quickly and repetitively, but explains this by claiming to have ADD.  (Listening to her, I believe it.)  I keep an eye open to look for signs of narcissism, but so far haven't reached any firm conclusions.  She does talk a lot about herself, but I'm not sure about the blindness-to-others which is also part of the equation.  We'll see.  She works part-time, attends community college part-time, has vast but vague and inchoate aspirations ... and in many ways she's very young.  Lives with her boyfriend, four hours away from her parents.  Somehow, in ways I haven't itemized yet, she reminds me of what Wife was like at that age ... there are differences but also strong similarities.  That's enough for now.

Scattered notes from the evening:

She drank her first glass of wine very slowly, one little sip at a time with long minutes and plenty of food in between.  Her next two (we finished the bottle) went down like juice.

Her mother was very sick through much of her childhood, and Suzie got the idea at a very young age -- kind of like Son 2 -- that it was her job to take care of her mother: to care for her physically (because she was sick) and also emotionally (in fights with her father).  The similarity with Son 2 isn't absolute, because Suzie's mother now holds a responsible job (unlike Wife).  But when Suzie started talking about the troubles going on today -- over Christmas Break -- between her parents, she started sobbing.  (I think she was about finishing her second glass of wine by then.)  I'm a sucker for a woman in tears, so I got up from my chair across the table and came over to hold her; after a minute I sat down next to her and held one hand while she kept talking, and finally she felt better.  I also told her in several different ways that it's not her job to protect her mother, and that no parent wants a child to stay behind tangled in the same sorry messes the parent's tangled in: we want to know that even if we've screwed up our lives, somewhere out there our kid is soaring with eagles and conquering the world.  I don't know if I convinced her, but for a while she talked as if she bought it.

I told her about Wife's chronic infidelities.  She agreed with my having wanted honesty even if I couldn't have fidelity.  She said that if her boyfriend wanted to fuck some other woman -- that's how she put it -- she'd want him to come tell her, "I want to fuck this other woman."  Then she went on to say, 

And I might be hurt but I'd probably say 'Fine, go ahead and get it out of your system. If you want to fuck her, then fuck her; then afterwards you can come home and fuck me.' Or I might not even say that. I'm not very sexual anyway, because I have a lot of issues with it. Maybe I'd just figure he could fuck her and that way I wouldn't have to deal with the sex ....  

 "Not very sexual"?  That's interesting.  Then why does she always dress so provocatively?  I think the answer is that she doesn't really know how she wants to dress.  I believe the "issues" part ... other times she has said things that make me speculate (but not certain) that her father might have sexually abused her at some point in the past.  So maybe the ever-present tights and the loose, flimsy tops are really a sign of deep confusion on her part.  I kind of think that's likely, in fact.

She feels deeply inadequate to ... what?  I don't know, but she wants to have accomplished something that will let her believe she's made it as a grown-up.  Living on her own for the past three years doesn't seem to be enough.  But of course it's not enough.  I remember when I was 21, and I sure didn't feel like a grown-up.  I tried to reassure her that this is something that comes with time, and that she's got all the time in the world.  No-one feels grown-up at 21.  I'm not sure she believed me.

She walked home late at night after half a bottle of wine.  Maybe I should have walked her home, or driven her the few blocks separating my apartment from hers.  But I was ready to sleep, so I didn't bother.  And after all, it wasn't a date.