bad karma
by mark moore
today, i have to shave my lawn and mow the face. lengths of grass and hair must be clipped within a certain range of growth, otherwise discomfort ensues. both of these tasks are futile, and yet i am propelled to do them by emotional forces within myself. these primal emotions are apparently beyond my ability to fully manage, which is maddening. this maddening quality of these emotions amplifies my frustration and makes me a tortured prisoner of my own mechanical impulses. all of this is completely unacceptable, and this unacceptableness then multiplies my intolerance by a factor of 100, which is a nice comforting even number.
these emotional forces are fueled by my rejection of natural states or conditions of the world. the grass growing on my face first produces psychological discomfort when, for example, i see my scruffy unmowed face in the mirror and judge myself a derelict; and secondly physical discomfort when the sharp tips of the grass curl around toward the skin of my face and start to prick and make me itchy. i have endured these discomforts for over two weeks on several occasions in an effort to discover if they might subside after reaching a magical threshold of unpleasantness. these efforts failed when my resistance suddenly collapsed under the stress and i mowed in a mad delirium.
the lawn is a parallel source of agony. it takes three full hours to shave my lawn, and the consequences of not shaving it are grievous and incremental. first of all, when the lawn hair grows to a certain height, i begin to hear my mother talking about what degenerate slobs the neighbors are for letting their yard get out of control, and then i realize that she is talking about me. but then there is the physical issue of my feet getting snagged in the morning glory vines as i walk the unshaven lawn, the 400 feet of hose becoming interwoven in the grass. the reality is that it's not my mother's voice i hear but the nagging voice of my cambodian-american "partner," who for some perverse reason has subscribed to "lawn & garden," at least psychologically, which is perverse because there is no grass in cambodia, not that she ever really lived there, but was only born there and escaped death when her father stole a plane and flew to thailand (that might sound heroic, except now that i have lived in scambodia for a couple of years i know a different story about the lon nol general.)
when i crank up the weed eater, then noise is very unpleasant. the weed eater shreds a lot of living creatures and instead of feeling compassion for those creatures, i feel revulsion because of their fluids flying around and possibly touching my skin. this gives me the willies. the willies suffices to make me throw down the weedeater and declare that i will never mow again.
rejection of certain natural conditions of the world.
i upholster myself. there, on the window, as if enjoying the view, was the fly. the kind with a filmy blue-green martin sheen on it's back. uuuhh. i hate flies. i hate them. i feel no compassion for any kind of bug. lady bugs are cute and i don't kill them. but it's only because i am shallow. if i thought about it for a while, i would realize that beneath that little red helmet with the black polka dots there is a bug, and i would be repulsed.
i comprehensively hate bugs. BUT, i hate killing them, because it is a messy task. but sometimes the killing becomes the lesser of two horrors. i shut my door to cut off the fly's escape. my eyes darted back and forth looking for just the right swatting implement. a newspaper is ideal, but i would never have one in my room because of the pungent ink stink. in fact, my room is so clean that i knew in advance that i was unlikely to find the kind of item that verges on becoming trash, the kind that i wouldn't mind using for the messy task. but there was a loose book jacket standing there that looked perfect. a paper bludgeon.
i am reading the book, "the art of happiness," written by the dalai lama and an otherwise unknown psychiatrist. the words are actually written by the psychiatrist. in the first few pages the psychiatrist confesses that he intended to right a self-help type book, but then he met the lama and yada yada yada, which elevated the endeavor to a new spiritual hullabaloo.
i always remove the glossy loose cover of a book and set it aside. and there it was, just begging to become a weapon.
i had a mischievous, lightly stimulating idea: i will kill the fly with the picture of the dalai lama!
walking toward the window however, i thought, "i bet it wont work." i bet the lama essence is in the book jacket and i wont be able to kill with it! eerie. so i swatted! TWHAP.
i swatted a fly with a photograph of the dalai lama. after the first swat, i looked for fly debris on the lama. there was a fly leg (or arm) stuck to his bald head.
but to my amazement, the fly was alive!
i swatted again. this time the fly was entrenched. it had gotten down into the frame of the sliding glass, just below the track the window rides on. and it was still twitching around and rubbing its legs together. not dead. but now it was unswattable.
just for good measure i slid the window across the track, but as i suspected it didn't even touch the fly. i felt delighted that i had predicted the dalai lama's far reaching influence to manage the karma of inert objects throughout the world. then, THWAP, i swatted once more to see if the percussion would dislodge the fly from his or her stronghold. this time, the fly disappeared.
the fly vanished before my very eyes.
you would probably be surprised to learn that i really am getting a lot out of mr. lama's book. for example, in the first few pages, the psychiatrist describes the behavior of a crazy woman and then asks the lama why the woman acts like that. the dalai lama pauses for reflection, and then states, "i don't know." and you know, man, i could really identify with the lama's candor! there are a lot of things that i don't know, and i suddenly felt exonerated by the lama! i realized, it's ok to be ignorant.
now, i'm thinking about the possibility of becoming buddhist, someone else. i'm also developing a vacuum cleaner attachment that will suck a bug right out of the air as it flies across the room. maybe with a robotic optical motion sensor so i don't have to be present for all the messy bad karma.
but, in the meantime, THWAP!
bad karma:
i am caught in a vortex of hate. perhaps it is instead a type of oscillating action and reaction. first i hate, next i react in hate, then in revulsion i react hatefully to my hate-driven reaction.