She's Alright: A Short Story

I create an ambience of calm with the very pressure on the brake. The car slows in a gradual way. It’s clean inside and out. No cold shrilling squeals, no grinding edge, no musky smells, just the perfection of a stop that can only indicate to nearby drivers that I do not need to be anywhere particularly. I take this really nice breath. In through the nose, then out through the mouth.

It is spoiled soon enough as cars driving by shake the stillness. But it’s ok. The pine smell from the car refresher I bought this afternoon makes things better, feel better. The car wobbles uncomfortably fast then slows while I listen to the Doppler effect. I stare at the red and then at the sudden green. Motion and then deep breathes.

What will we talk about?

My nerves will follow me to the door, I suspect. They are worries of appearance, anxieties of acceptance; and despite the familiar curves in the streets and the calm dark trees with their recognizable roots in the sidewalk, this tension will continue without release. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Pine. I see that I know the way just as one knows one’s way to all of their houses, jobs, and schools, years after. It’s the kind of knowing that lends itself to one’s dreams: you always know the way back school in your dreams.

Left lane, left blinker; red light, slowly stop.

I make a point of looking at a nearby church. I haven’t seen it since I left for school but I remember it well enough. They put these vaguely religious phrases on a large black and white sign and light it with a light bulb. It reads: What have you done for Him lately? I wonder if they are suppose to be jokes after all.

Beside the church and its sign is the shabby park. Next to which is this flower shop that I still wish I could get hired at. Submit application, nothing. Submit application, still nothing.

I pass by the public and private high schools that are opposite one another. They look more like a maze of parking lots and detention halls with high fences and stuffy professionalism. You look down the familiar empty halls for a moment. The suburbs are all such mazes of asphalt, private and public divisions, churches, and doctor offices. Warm alienation - everywhere‘s local specialty.

The lights on the streets come on. Remembrances as well as pieces of sentences, her timbre, and vague feelings that were had in and around this neighborhood. The evolution of shyness, to tasteful bravado, to meaningful intimacy, to controlled aversion, and then to indifference. But it all doesn’t seem to matter so much now. I have some other hopes and optimism. I have humor.

Somewhere inside me says: go and park and look down the row of similar houses, no hurry in face or motions.

Pale tones, sharp tile roofs. Unimpressive small patches of grass that hired gardeners keep up. Excitement and also defensive straight faced-ness. You’ll walk up the concrete path between the grass and then up the steps onto a porch. You’ll ring the bell and wait and try to relax. When she answers, smile when she smiles.

But you can’t prepare for spontaneity. Static and ringing.

We’ll see.

I look both ways, exit the car, up the path, and ding-dong. Dog’s bark, quiet footsteps. The door flies open. She smiles, says hello, and gives a tentative hug. She stands on her toes and her sweater touches my bare neck

Warmth.

Cinnamon.

Itchiness.

We look past her porch at the windy trees and the clean 2-door coupe I borrowed from Paul and then she walks back inside for a heavier coat.

Huh.

I look into her parents’ house through the blurred glass by the door and can’t remember if it looks the same - just tables, a sofa, knick-knacks, and glass and wood cabinets. Plain and warm. Dog still barks, keeps me wary. When she returns, a smart black belted raincoat over her sweater, she locks the door and then jogs to the street with a smirk.

Look at that! Energetic steps. Follow behind her. But please don’t comment. I spot the duality in my motives at once.

She chatters to me and we catch each other up without much trouble. She mentions the grinning fellow I saw her draped upon at the park as well as her father’s newborn daughter - Devin and Alexandria, respectively. I listen as we drive our way into town, remarking very little. I notice a urge to impress her on the one hand, and a movement of boredom on the other. She talks about Devin: she sits next to him in a film class – homework friends and then kissing friends. She talks about her part-time job and the regular customers. She says, Do you know that I work at a coffee shop? I nod and politely say, Yeah, I remember. Politeness is easy with people you don’t really know anymore.

She tells me about a group of homeless people who come during the afternoons. They order tea and sit by the window and just stare, take up space. She says that she talks to them a lot, now. She says that she is thinking of writing a book about each of them. It would be a factual narrative about who they are and how they got to be the way they are.

There’s a tension and hurt. Please repress it, somewhere says.

I get caught up in my thoughts as she talks about the project: Don’t laugh or pout. One can’t remember everything, obviously. But breathe for gods sake. What have you done for Him lately? Smaller than a shadow in the corner of the car. In the cracks with the dark. Don’t you remember! At the Italian deli a few months ago after you spotted me reading in the park, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I was smoking a few minutes earlier, wondering if you realized, we drove separately to the arts and crafts store to get a notebook and some supplies, and you wanted me to go with you to a homeless shelter in Los Angeles in a week or two and interview whoever would want to be apart of the project. And you talked about who you had already interviewed, like that woman who, when you asked what her favorite color was, she said rainbow and who used to live with a guy who abused and raped her and that she only stayed there because she had nowhere else to go, and then she finally left, and you said it was kind of a good thing that she was homeless.

What do they think about this? I ask, suppressing the noise.

I don’t think they mind, she says. They all seem to tell me the basic information.

When we stop at a Mexican restaurant by the freeway she orders for me while I get a table. I’m vaguely proud of myself. Cold breeze, stiff chair.

She asks me in a less polite way how I’ve been as I stare at some loud children free of their parents by our table.

I’ve been fine, I say. You know, calmer, fitter, healthier, and more productive. Like a pig in a cage on antibiotics.

Certain sad old men with grimaces and certain worried women with few words, she says, trying to be me.

Poetic, I say. I don’t really know how to answer the question and I say so.

I know that, she says.

And then she smiles like a child. Too large – or maybe cute-naive. She's alright, you think to yourself. Nice even.

It starts to rain as we eat and the ambiance makes me feel warm and vital. We discuss parents some more and our old friends. I refill our sodas and chips. She asks me when I will be leaving.

In a few days.

Cycles and SelcyC dna

You don’t know how it worked out but it came to that you were doing the same things over and over. You’d get up late, feel stupid, feel disgusted about your parents, feel trapped, drink, drink too much, try to chill out, sit and try and get in touch, do this for a while, forget about it, come back to it, feel as if nothing really helps, feel mechanical, feel there is no way out, shut the fuck up, go on a jog, skive off commitments and drive out to the middle of nowhere, work on interpersonal skills, write about that thing that you were reminding yourself to think about, try to get close to someone, feel like its worthless, watch a lot of tv, recall that things don’t really matter, recall that this means that the self doesn’t exist, recall that feeding the self pleasure and shielding it from pain only escalates matters, forget how this makes sense, wash your truck, mow the lawn, clean your room, do the laundry, want to dress better, go to the library to sit quietly, pick out a billion books you won’t read, wish you’d grown up with a different family, masturbate, look at your cell phone to see if anyone called or text, feel lost, feel very depressed, watch old movies, drug yourself to sleep, try to get up really early, feel as though you must exercise much more than normal, think that its all about discipline, read something and think about putting it at the start of a novel or essay, feel stupid and dull, go back to something you wrote, remember how you still have to read this book someone lent you, remember its your mothers birthday soon, feel that you are too old to be disgusted by your parents, their habits, and the environment they bring with them, feel trapped, spend a few days away from home, notice how different you are while not at home, wonder who you are, remember that you never figured it out when you were first burdened by the question, feel stupid because you don’t know what is important, think that sensitivity is a virtue, feel okay, want to destroy the vulgar bullshit in the world, want to throw yourself into a spiritual practice, feel neglected because you haven’t met an experienced practitioner that could help you, resolve to get to sleep earlier, resolve not spend much money, face some fears, feel okay, not feel able, not feel warmth, believe in yourself, hate things, fuck them, notice how weird it is…

A Mediocre Essay for a Film Class

Pulp Fiction: Pop-Culture, Crime, and the Longing for Vitality

Like many postmodern works, Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 box-office and critical hit Pulp Fiction is saturated with pop-culture: fast food (“Royale with Cheese”), The Beatles (“Ringo”), celebrity personas (the waiters and waitresses of Jack Rabbit Slim’s), surf rock and rock-and-roll, the Pepsi-challenge (Amsterdam drugs vs. American drugs), and what is perhaps the biggest pop-culture reference one can make, the Bible – to name a few. Even the use of neo-noir and the gangster content in Pulp Fiction allows for a play upon pop-culture expectations. For instance, the two central thugs in the film, Vincent and Jules, walk into an apartment building to make a hit, and among other things, they intelligently discuss the differences between McDonald’s in America and McDonald’s in France all the while planning to retrieve a mysterious suit case from inadequate business partners. In addition to the constant presence of pop-culture in Pulp Fiction, there is also a constant presence of drugs and violence. The wife of the big-boss of Los Angeles, Mia Wallace, goes to “powder her nose” with cocaine after a lull in conversation while out at a 50’s diner with Vincent Vega, her husbands employee (who shot heroin just before the meal); experienced boxer Butch, after being captured by a pawnshop pervert, breaks free from the ropes tying him down and instead of fleeing the premises, decides to kill his captors and free his boss, but not without first deciding between available weapons – a baseball bat, a chain saw, or a katana. That Tarantino’s main characters all exist on the fringes of society as outsiders, that Tarantino himself was something of an outsider in the industry at the time, and that the narrative is told in a fragmented but extraordinarily humorous way, points to some of the concerns of the postmodern society – namely, that we experience ourselves as alienated, not feeling connected to any order or whole anymore, and that we must work to seek release from this ridiculous state. In constant nearness to pop-culture and against the backdrop of the banalization of drugs and violence, Pulp Fiction points to, basks in, and ultimately seeks to leave behind the televised and alienated mass of Reagan and Bush’s suburban society.

By the 1990’s the convergence of pop-culture and the mass media had been fundamental to the American psyche for some time. For by the end of the 1950’s ninety percent of American homes had television sets, the new suburban “leisured masses” entry into pop-culture (Belton 322-323). One effect of this is that even the outsider, the person who exists on the fringes of society, even she derives identity and substance from pop-culture in a way similar to how the suburban 9-5’er does. The outsider is just as likely to have a television and watch movies as anyone else. Hit man Jules admonishes his partner early on in Pulp Fiction because he says he doesn’t watch TV and doesn’t know what a pilot is. We could say that Tarantino uses pop-culture in Pulp Fiction for seemingly two reasons: to show the pervasiveness of its reach and to make the violent and drug addled gangster world feel relatable and humorous.

Pop-culture, essentially the “transcript” or social-narrative of a culture, may also be thought of as the public value system of a society: “that set of images regarding space, time, relation, evaluation…which is shared by the mass of its people” (Boulding 64). Such a reality forms the background to which we as individuals move around in the world: it is a lens or a filter placed on our senses that focuses everything taken in so that specific associations arise and so that we all can understand one another to an extent impossible without. When we say Marilyn Monroe, for instance, we associate her with Jane Mansfield and other such starlets of past eras. When we pass through the door of an office building we look to see if we may hold the door for anyone. When driving we stay on a designated side of the road. When we need to release our bladder we use a restroom. When making decisions that affect others we collect a census or tally a vote. Traditionally, the pop-culture is passed down from generation to generation via formal education (books and teachers), one’s parents, and one’s peers (informal education). With the development of the motion picture camera and the dissemination of televisions, however, a communicator may literally spread information to everyone in the world as if they were standing in the living room. An effect of this is that images and values could now be spread in a much quicker and palpable manner as well as from subculture to subculture, unifying them in sense. The California gangster and the South African novelist share the same scene, associate images similarly, and observe manners in like ways. Mickey mouse is recognized no matter where one may happen to be. Our world has entered a state of globalization.

Throughout the destabilizing happenings of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the civil rights era, and the woman’s movement, a large group of the American culture found themselves unable to follow the line – that is, the mainstream way of life – anymore. A broad counterculture, a mass that cultivated its own media and its own system of values in contrast to that of the mainstream, bloomed naturally out of this dissatisfaction. The communal lifestyle and beat attitudes of the hippie, her anti-establishment idealism, drug experimentation, and perception that there is an “incoherence which informs the social and cultural reality” of today, such things were eventually stitched into the tapestry of the mainstream pop-culture as the counterculture’s steam faded away (Belton 374). Even though the Reagan and Bush era with which Pulp Fiction’s audience would be most familiar with was marked by economic posterity and produced a cinema in which nostalgia for and rejuvenation in the past reigned supreme (Back to the Future / Indiana Jones, etc.), something remained of the suspicion and deep-seated dissatisfaction which arouse pointedly during the time of the counterculture in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The absurd logic and consequences of Reaganomics, the unsettling arms race, the Iran-Contra, the continued ideological foreign policy resistance to communist groups, and the new spectacle of televised wars, such things irritated the wound (Conlin 818-842). If this carrying over of the counterculture’s dissatisfactions did not find its way into postmodernism and its mainstream, as a people we would not relate to (or find affecting) films like Taxi Driver, Do The Right Thing, The Graduate, and The Matrix: films which address alienation, prejudice, and the desire for transcendence from the humdrum.

As if to reaffirm the dissatisfaction with the social-narrative that has become characteristic in postmodern art, Pulp Fiction begins with two lovers, veteran robbers, eating breakfast in a small coffee shop. In order not to feel cheated by the system, by the alienating labor of daily desk jobs, the couple has learned how to cheat. But even this insight has failed them because it’s become too dangerous to go on robbing liquor stores and gas stations. As with virtually all of Pulp Fiction’s characters, the way out of the unfulfilling and alienating drudgery is to utilize some form of crime. “Well what then,” Honeybunny asks, “day jobs?” “Not in this life,” Pumpkin replies. Life by the rules, the spirit of the counterculture suggests, is a life of the square and the alcoholic (Easy Rider). In other words, it’s a life of slavery. And so a further insight occurs to the couple: they will rob coffee shops, collecting not only the cash register but also the wallets of the customers. And so there, in the sunny vitality of a Los Angeles coffee shop, the two kiss, get up, and declare their criminal intensions jammed full with characteristic profanities. Tarantino freezes on the two, guns out, faces lit with tremendous energy as a classic surf song blazes on the soundtrack. The powerful, subversive, and near adolescent intensity that is achieved with this short introduction paves the way for how to interpret the rest of this film. The outsider is dissolute perhaps, but contains innocence and non-cruel intentions.

In effect, the film is broken down into three separated story lines: The Bonnie Situation, Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife, and The Gold Watch. In the “Bonnie Situation” Vincent makes a hit with Jules (1a), experiences a miracle and helps to clean up Marvin (1b), Pumpkin and Honeybunny plan to rob the coffee shop (1c), Vincent eats breakfast with Jules at the same coffee shop, altering Pumpkin and Honeybunny’s plans (1d), and then they both deliver the suitcase to Marsellus (1e). In “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife”, we follow Vincent the day after the happenings of the “Bonnie Situation” as Vincent obtains heroin and shoots up (2a), has Dinner with Mia Wallace (2b), and deals with her O.D (2c). The final segment “The Gold Watch” starts with a flashback regarding the meaning of the watch (3a), moves to Butch making a deal with Marsellus to throw the fight (1e/3b), from here the story is picked up two days later when Butch boxes (3c), drives back to his hotel to see his French girlfriend (3d), wakes in the morning to retrieve his watch, ‘accidentally’ kills Vincent (3e), runs into Marsellus, gets trapped and frees himself at the pawn shop (3f), and rides back to the hotel to pick up his girlfriend on Zed’s motorcycle (3g). However, these three interrelated storylines are stringed together out of order. The film is presented like this: 1c, 1a, 1e/3b, 2a-2c, 3a, 3c-3g, 1b, 1d.

In editing Pulp Fiction in a non-linear manner, Tarantino achieves two things. First, he allows the most transcendent conclusion of the three segments to be the conclusion of the film: (1d) Jules’ expresses his ambivalence about crime, discusses the possibility of ‘walking the earth’, and saves the amateur criminals. Second, the structure functions as an allusion to (or pastiche of) the pulp-fiction magazines of the 30’s and 40’s whose contents typically were arranged with short stories that “began in the front of the magazine, competing for the reader’s attention, and were then continued in the back” (Stone). We are introduced to the hopped-up couple that plans to rob so as to avoid the doldrums of day jobs, and are brought to the conclusion (after having been immersed in the gangster world) that such a ‘way out’ is not ‘righteous’ but ‘weak’. Jules, re-interpreting his bible passage suggests that he, himself has been the ‘the tyranny of evil men’ with his vocation as a professional hit man, but has since felt the presence of ‘God’ in his activities and wants to become the guide “in the name of charity and goodwill [that] shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness…” The valley of darkness is tantamount to the postmodern predicament: the fleeing from the enslaving narratives of the pop-culture by the reactive employment of drugs and destructive activities. Jules dismisses these activities and submits that they are sleep inducing. You got to stop running and start to walk if you are going to flourish. But unlike other films of this time, Pulp Fiction doesn’t end with the reaffirmation of the community or of the family. Rather, Jules reaffirms some aspects of the counterculture and its spiritual path and points to the kung-fu paradigm of mindful being: he’ll ‘walk from place to place, meet people, get into adventures.’ It is irrelevant if he is called a bum, he’s just Jules. One of the errors of the ‘weak’ is to follow a way of life prescribed by others – consumerism and crime, for instance. You got to ‘calm that bitch down’ in yourself if you are to get past the urge toward drugs and mechanical retaliation against society. The way is beyond society, alienation, and late-capitalism.

The more formal aspects of Pulp Fiction deserve note. The acting style is straight and never over the top despite the ubiquitous humor. Vincent Vega, as Alan A. Stone points out, is a “laid back, get-along kind of guy who is living a depraved and drug-addicted life as a paid killer, but has an astonishingly innocent soul, as do most of Tarantino’s low-life characters.” It is this innocent feature mixed with qualitative humor and compelling intelligence that keeps the film afloat despite the violent content. The use of pop-music and the bright, non-judgmental cinematography incite vitality and clarity, as one might expect a line of cocaine or a big cup of coffee might. We go along with Pulp Fiction diverting our attention away from the baser realities of the gangster world, choosing to play along with this fragmented narrative because it hits all of those deep-seated desires we all carry around with us – namely, to cut out the acquired apathetic tendencies of the armchair anger toward our culture that lies in ourselves, the one that suggests our culture has left underdeveloped our finer fruits and instead made us mechanical and greedy. Pulp Fiction allows us to get high, and to kill and destroy, getting it out of our systems so that we may learn something perhaps in the catharsis.

Works Cited

Boulding, Kenneth E.. The image; knowledge in life and society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956. Print.

Conlin, Joseph R.. "'Morning in America" & "The Millennuim Years"." Since 1865 . 8. ed. Fort Worth [u.a.: Harcourt College Publ., 2001. 818-842. Print.

John, Belton. "The Film School Generation and Into the Twenty-First Century." American Cinema/American Culture. 3rd ed. New York, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 339-415. Print.

Stone, Alan A.. "Boston Review: Alan Stone on Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction." Boston Review — Home. N.p., 1 Apr. 1995. Web. 5 Aug. 2011. .

On 'Recoursing'

Wasted time is murder of sorts. You sense that in order to not commit this crime you must be able to ‘recourse.’ To recourse is to return to your highest purpose, to get in touch with the warmth and meaning of the endeavors of your circumstances. Such a movement, in order to be an effective tool, must be made available in a variety of habitats and moods. It must be utilized not just in moments of ease and deliberation, but also in moments of crisis, and in moments of near despair and pervasive dissatisfaction. More important still, this most-basic-vocabulary, this grounding project, will need to be sensed when distraction sets in or is about to occur – for movements of distraction and escape are far more prevalent than crisis in an environment of air conditioning, automobiles, Avon, and supermarkets.

So, the most-basic-vocabulary will need to be fleshed out, translated from experiential value to existential project. Trust in the project is essential. Deliberate projects, that is, goals that one makes a resolution to bring about do not often work. Sleep sets in. One forgets the ‘why’ of the project and so the effort to remain resolute loses its justification subjectively.

The problem of how to remain resolute has been with you for sometime – at least since you independently undertook to face your fears socially. Philosophically, you noticed Gurdjieff/Ouspensky and Krishnamurti to be talking about this problem: How to stay awake, they would say. Hyrum Smith in his book on Natural Laws of Success articulated many helpful things in this direction. Yet there is still the problem. There is still the submitting to sleep, the forgetting, the hopeless lost feeling of having no most-basic-vocabulary ‘at-hand’, for you often fall off, give in to pressures, to peers, you often indulge in entertainment and other releases, waking up out of their resultant hallucinations days later. As for meditation, you stopped looking at this direction because of its hurdle of boredom. Perhaps it is essential to get beyond this.

There is, though, the yearning for purity, for clean honesty, for a practice and a walking of the path at a stable speed.

If you blame a lot of this suffering from self-forgetting on environment, and you feel a lot of it is because of the ‘noise of thought’ of the familiar – from expectation and poor ways of living of family and community – then how do you live upright, stably, purely, in this environment until you move up to Arcata in January? How to prevent entanglement?

Discipline is necessary but not sufficient. For you will need to develop trust in the reason for the application of the discipline if you are not to develop resitance to it and so fall into entanglements. The search for Quiet will have to be subservient to the deliberate project. In the past Quiet was sought when it was not in play even if it was in conflict with what the high project necessitated. You have noticed the limitations of this. Quiet is essential. This is true. But it is not an end in itself. Or perhaps it is, perhaps the highest end is Quiet. You notice however, that such an end will not suit your circumstances, circumstances wherein action and decision are demanded. And so you will, for the moment, let the highest end shift and leave the evaluation of its meaning and assumptions for another time. This is where trust must come into play if ‘recourse’ will be a useful tool in times of distraction and crisis.

Hike, The Source of Cynicism, and The Mode of Resistance

A hike tomorrow afternoon to camp the night in Indian caves.

You wonder today about where to go philosophically. The day is spent comfortably – a sandwhich at Dino’s, a coffee at Café Noir, and the quiet of a library sofa.

Yes, the social narrative, the lifestyle, aims, and governing values of our people are ungrounded. They provide confusion and a source for cynicism to those seeking good, honesty, effortlessness, and self-knowledge. When we see one another in the ‘street’ we do not acknowledge each other. Perhaps this is a universal occurance in all societies that have grown large in number.

Man in this narrative is constituted by resistance. He resists almost everything he hears. Growth, as a person, is not possible when in the mode of resistance.

Peer/Friend and thoughts about The Memory of Earth

A warm day. Nice and blue with little, if any, wind. It was pretty awful. You felt dull and drained from a night of drinking with friends. Acquaintances, really. You’d call them friends in normal conversation but not to yourself. They were acquaintances because 1. at bottom you didn’t feel as if you could relate to them and 2. you didn’t sense as though it would be helpful to speak seriously with then to move things toward self-disclosure. They were peers, of course, but again only in normal conversation. To yourself a peer and a friend were nearly the same thing. The terms both implied similarities in lifestyle. For instance, a peer is someone who you can relate to because they share with you a role, a niche, in a society. A peer is someone who is at the same level of development as you and who is likewise endeavoring to move in the same subtle direction. In short to be a peer is to encounter similar problems and confusions. To contrast this, a friend is someone whose disclosure of the path is possible and who finds sharing enjoyable. So a friend is a little more than a peer and a peer is a little more than someone of similar date of birth.

You forget about flourishing sometimes.

Maybe it is lost in a sense of injustice: the conditions seem all wrong, they don’t let you grow, no one around here is of any value, has ever said anything worthy of the effort of speech. This rebellious Margo Roth Spegelman thing.

The curative imaginings: go off and ‘get it’; move in with her and intimately share.

The movement of the tao.

You occasionally grasp this insight that you have had in the past. The insight is: there is only the circumstance, and everything flows from it. From this perspective its perhaps impossible to get angry with oneself and other people because there is no other possibility of movement. Yet it is confusing.

Getting up early may be helpful. The social guilt or shame will not be a variable.

“I felt like is was something being done to me instead of something we were doing together.” (The Memory of Earth by Orson Scott Card, pg 20-21)

Thoughts on The Memory of Earth:

• The conflicts of movements of transitional-adults, the unease of relationships of those beyond who feel themselves being usurped in someway.
• The curative imaginings: go off and ‘get it’; move in with her and intimately share, quiet down, be well, figure out.
• It is necessary to move beyond instinct in order to develop. In fact nature is urging one not to.

Sort-of-Friendship and the Path without Risk

There is an emerging pattern: you fall into sort-of-friendships. And as such, you wonder if it’s possible for you to have genuine friendships. What would that mean?

At first the other arrives on the scene, and there is a genuine eagerness to explore the possibilities of the other, to see what the relationship may bring up, to see how far it can go, and so on. You encounter; you test the water; you manifest what you imagine to be your highest tastes. In short, you enter into the scene very conscious of how you are being understood by the other. The other has a narrative about themselves and the world and you try to feel it, feel what its like to be that person. If you see some possibility, if you sense that there is a meeting of interests you get the other to like you. You do a lot of stuff that you really don’t want to do, but it is done with the view of opening yourself up to the others way of being, to bring out into the scene your deepest way of being. You desire something that will only come when it’s possible to say anything and to be utterly honest with the other. So, you are flawless for a time in your relations. You pay debts, you yield favors for favors; and then, as if you’ve come to the end of a chapter, something invariably happens: you cease to care. You sense there is nothing they may teach you. And it’s a chore to be with them; the same tendencies come up, the same awkwardness. Trapped. There is both a wanting to hang out with the other and a notation that it will be a waste of time. The aloneness makes you look around and think about what to do with yourself: what books to read, what to do this afternoon, this evening.

This, of course, occurs with individuals as well as with groups. But the upshot is usually the same, you tend to look about you and see how off your situation is. You always walk onto a path or stop at a street corner and wham – an attractive couple talking softly. The yearning comes. You berate your awkwardness, your lack of confidence. You blame poor parental upbringing, yourself, society, and god. The mixed-up quality regarding the faltering sort-of-friendship becomes more apparent and pronounced in your thoughts. Blah, blah, blah, right? It goes around and around. Stupid thought, the body dull, irritation, on edged-ness, and yet you are apathetic.

And through this process, you just want yourself to shut up. You’ve heard all this before, the circular sensational thinking. You want to operate differently, on a higher level. Quiet down.

Down the path you forget the intention – It falls out of the pouch strapped to your middle. And since it’s the intention that points the way both the heat and the wind start to get to you. You start hiding behind big, mangled trees along the side of the road to block out the piercing of the sun. When the wind picks up you take to throwing yourself onto the ground and covering your body with your sleeping bag. And behind the tree and under the sleeping bag, you complain about the state of the path: it’s lined with sharp bushes that hurt your legs, and the road itself is washed out and rugged, which doesn’t help much, either. And you go on complaining until its dark and your cold. You fall asleep. The next day you can’t remember which way you were suppose to be heading – it looks the same in every direction. So you keep up the game: you duck under the wind, you hide from the sun. On and on it goes until you stumble upon the intention. You look at your pouch and notice it was empty. You pick it up and feel it. And so it goes.

Friendship dies so long as there is hiding. Risk. Risk is good.