Like castles in the sand.

Originally Published November 28, 1985 from gocomics.com

Well, it's late and it has been a long day hanging out with librarians in Downtown San Antonio. This strip reminds me of playing Simcity 2000 which one only played well in order to destroy something interesting. It also reminds me of God in Noah which is a great movie that you should go see. Also I used to do this sort of thing all the time. Also there was a time that my family lived in a beach house for a few weeks and my dad and I made a sandcastle close to the high tide line and watched it fade everyday.

Such is impermanence.

goodnight

Don't Let Calvin Drive the Car.

Originally Published November 26, 1985 from gocomics.com

This week I am at the Texas Library Association conference in San Antonio. I came up, (yes, that is right, I come up to San Antonio) this afternoon and walked in late to the first panel I wanted to go to which was animals misbehaving. It was with five children's authors four men and one woman. The audience was all women except me and one other guy.

Male children's librarians rock.

Just saying.

Anyways it was a great discussion, entitled "Animals Misbehaving" which to me are some of the best kinds of children's books. Calvin and Hobbes falls into this category at times, though not in today's strip. However this strip does remind me of one of the most popular animals misbehaving books Don't Let Pigeon Drive the Bus:

Here is the Amazon link

The story is: a bus driver leaves his bus to have lunch and tells you the reader to mind it and whatever you do, don't let pigeon drive the bus. The rest of the book is pigeon's side of the conversation, who tries to plead, cajole, threaten, and trick you in to letting him drive the bus. It is hilarious and highly interactive. The author is Mo Willems and I like all his stuff. It is great for reading out loud in story-time.

The authors in the panel talked about how using animals instead of kids lets them get away with all sorts of things such as nudity, characters with no gender, race, age, or class, murder, not to mention all the things kids actually do but parents like to delude themselves into thinking they don't... (or at least, their kids don't.)

I also was introduced to the TLA exhibit hall where there are many free and cheap books and librarian goodies. I ended up buying four books from the Peguin publishers for ten bucks as well as receiving an advanced readers copy of a book in a series that I enjoy by Lev Grossman, which starts with The Magicians, then The Magician King, and now The Magician's Land which doesn't come out officially until August but has just jumped onto the front of my reading list as soon as I finish Words of Radiance. The Magicians Trilogy, as now it is apparently known, is a gritty secular "realistic" take off on Harry Potter and the Narnia books. It is also as you can imagine, pretty dark. But good. Give it a shot especially if you were going "wait a minute" when things were a bit too tidy and and neat in  the Harry Potter and Narnia books.

Anyways I should head towards bed. Need to get up bright and early to make my way downtown to the conference tomorrow. There is another pigeon book entitled Don't Let Pigeon Stay Up Late. But don't worry, you won't have to convince mzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....

Monsters beware, here be humans.

First Published November 25th 1985. From gocomics.com

For almost a year I worked at the Buffalo Gap Historic Village as a maintenance man and store clerk. Every month at the village at the time they invited a speaker to give a talk on a historic topic or one relating to the village. That October for Halloween they brought in a ghost hunter. He said, among other things, that if you believe you are being messed with by a spirit, it is best to acknowledge them and then ask or tell them to go away and stop bothering you. This was colluded in an On Being episode with the Irish mystic poet philosopher John O'Donohue when he was talking about "thin places" and related that he had been told that if he encountered anything weird in such a place he should stop and ask what whatever it is wants. All thins came to mind again when I was watching a youtube video of a Indian mystic Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev answer a question about the effectiveness of astrology where he basically says: don't let the stars bully you.

I loved that. He sums up what the other two are saying as well as what Calvin is doing in the comic above. Don't let the supernatural bully you. There are so many characters in fiction who could have profited from this advice. Hamlet comes immediately to mind. What would have happened if he had said to his father's Ghost "I love you dad, but you had your life, let me have mine." and just went back to school. Come to think of it there were characters that I grew up with that never gave an inch to spirits, spooks, petty gods, faries (the mean kind) or eldritch abominations namely the Witches and Wizards of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, as well as Sam Vimes of the Watch, and Susan Death (who was half eldritch herself and couldn't stand it). Granny Weatherwax is the epitome of this spirit in the books. She once infected a family of vampires with Weatheraxism so that they all craved tea and cared for people when they bit her and tried to make her a vampire (remember that book that kept me up for four hours after I went to bed that I mentioned a couple of posts ago?) Anyways we don't have to be magical to stand up to supernatural bullying. 

Traditionally people are thought of as a mixture of body and spirit. The body actually gives us an advantage spiritually over spirits. What exactly the advantages are depends on the metaphysical system, but the general idea as I understand it is that the body roots our minds and spirits and gives us properties that the supernatural cannot affect, a form of reality, of energy that does not interact with theirs, and is much stronger. There are many stories such as the Fall of Satan where the spirit is jealous of us for this. Possession is a outcome of this jealousy. They want to be embodied, but they cannot handle it and people tend to notice and get the spirit out.  The Ghost hunter that gave the talked mentioned doing exorcisms and he said the key is to be emphatic, use sacred scripture, and be unrelenting until the demon leaves. On a lighter note, in Buddhism it is said that a body is necessary for enlightenment. Demons and angles cannot be enlightened, and are stuck in the wheel of life and death until they are born in a precious human body. 

So don't let the supernatural bully you. You are a human and nothing can take that away from you. Christ showed us this on the cross. If nothing else we can join Simon Peg's character, Gary King in The Worlds End as, belligerently drunk from a twelve pub crawl, he talks alien body snatching invaders into stopping invading the earth in the most amazingly depressingly awesome defense of humanity speech ever filmed by basically saying "Hey, we're human and we don't give up, f*** off."

So now if some supernatural force or entity bothers you, you know know what to do.

Well if it turns out they need help and you can, you probably should. But don't let them force you into it!

Humans rock!

Also watch The Worlds End.

Darts Are The Dad-Killer

   "I must not fear.
    Fear is the mind-killer.
    Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
    I will face my fear.
    I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
    And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fears path.
    Where the fear has gone there will be nothing......Only I will remain."
--- The Litany Against Fear, Frank Herbert

There is an amazing tumbler page entitled: Calvin and Muad'Dib that takes quotes from the original Dune series by Frank Herbert, and puts them in Calvin and Hobbes Cartoons.

This is my favorite so far:

from Calvin and Muad'Dib

There is actually Calvin and Hobbes version of the Litany Against Fear on there, but this post is not about Calvin and Muad'Dib, I only bring it up because, well, its awesome. Also the Litany Against Fear pertains to actual comic for today as well as the topic it brings up for me, which is fear.

This comic is about fear.

Fear, besides being the mind-killer and the little death is a theme in Calvin and Hobbes. More specifically, there is a theme of facing what one fears. There is in this comic and many of the others a motif (I think motif is right) of the fear to everyone but Calvin and Hobbes to be completely unfounded. Most of our fears are like this too. Even are fear of how we are so fearful all the time doesn't stand up to scrutiny very well.

It is strange to me that in Christianity we are not taught how to deal with fear. We have this weird catchall method of dealing with all problems, material, physical, mental spiritual emotional etc. which is prayer or "Turning it over to God." We are taught to not fear, and that we should not fear, but not how to deal with fear when it actually comes up other than to wish it away through prayer. It is what made the Litany Against Fear so fascinating to me and my friends who read Dune. "You mean there is an actual concrete thing to do when fear arises?" It was immensely empowering and like saying "42" or "Ni" to people to let them know that you have read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or loved Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail and seeing whether they get the reference too, reciting The Litany Against Fear is the quick way to find and identify Dune lovers.

Since taking up Buddhist mental practices I have learned a whole tool box worth of tools to deal with emotions. Emotions are not one thing. They are many things, and when all the pieces are teased apart that sense of being carried away by emotions also falls apart. For instance there is the object of fear, the mental chatter about the object, the physical feeling of fear, and the cause of fear. Calvin's dad believes that the object is the cause. Since the object (a monster) doesn't exist, and he shows this to Calvin, he assumes that there is no cause to fear and so Calvin will not fear. Calvin however begins mental chatter about the monster which gives rise to the physical feelings of fear. In the first panel of the last line, Calvin's mental chatter turns from fear to courage. The physical feeling however lag, the energy of fear is still present and so when his Dad comes back in, the fear takes over and transforms his dad into the monster which gives Calvin the energy to attack, because his mind is with the fight of the "fight or flight" response.

When any of these pieces break, the fear dissipates. The easiest place to start is with the feelings in the body. When we learn calming techniques and can calm the body during tense emotional times, we can face the situation from a place of calm, even if the mental chatter is still fearful. The Litany Against Fear is such a technique, and is accompanied in the books by conscious calming breathing. The reason it is the easiest is because it is the most accessible and obvious. We don't always know what or why we fear, and focusing on the mental chatter we get into a argument with ourselves and usually lose. But the actual physical feeling of fear is visceral and identifiable, and actually not fear. It is just a set of body sensations. It takes all the other mental condition to form fear, but without the physical feelings, those other conditions don't add up to fear either. When the body is calm, the mind calms down as well, and investigation into the nature of the object of fear, and the cause of fear can commence. When the cause is found it can be dealt with. If Calvin had been calm, he would have recognized his Dad and not mistaken him for a monster. He could have simply looked for the monsters himself and speculated why in the absence of monsters, he feared them so much. But then Calvin is six, and not even his Dad knows anything about fear, so who would have taught him?

But what really, really, really, gets me about this particular comic is: how did he get those darts to stick?! I could never get them to stick like that on glass much less a person!

Anyways time for bed...

 

You know...

Originally Published November 23, 1985. From gocomics.com

So this is obviously the place to tell you how much of a picky eater I am. In fact, yes I have had this exact conversation with my parents. However, what I would like to do instead is talk about trust. I just got done watching the movie Captain America: the Winter Soldier which involves lots of betrayal mwahahaha! What is great about it is that the results of betrayal are almost instantaneous with the falling through in a weeks time of the plans in the works for decades by the secret evil organization. I am reading Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson which also deals quite a bit with the nature of trust and betrayal the perceptions thereof.

Trust is a tricky thing because we don't actually relate with people very often. We relate with our ideas of people including idea of ourselves. We build mental images of people and then trust, or don't trust that image. Western political philosophy is based on this. The early days of political philosophy was a war between two different ideas of what people "really" are: savage or noble. Are we dealing with Man Created in God's Image or Fallen Man. It is a debate that is still raging, and both sides can find ample evidence to support their side, and instances where each side would be wrong in their predictions based on such assumptions. The notion that someone is trustworthy or not depends entirely on the assumption that our mental image of them is complete and correct and furthermore there is nothing else to them. Of course, we know that people have "hidden" parts to them, so we fill in those hidden parts with the ideas of ourselves. "If I were them I would..." we think but this is just projection and our image of them is even more true.

I got into a discussion with a co-worker about this a few weeks ago. She had been watching The Walking Dead  and we had gotten to talking about that and post-apocalyptic stories in general and while she was all for taking the libertarian stance and getting a shot gun and heading for the hills, I tried to point out to her that this was a sure way to get killed, and not to survive, and that the most important thing was to make friends and work together with as many people as humanly possible. Selfishness and the post-apocalypse don't mix. Selfishness finishes the job that the apocalypse started. It makes for riveting stories but is a non-survival strategy.

Every dystopia starts as a utopia because a utopia cannot be. Utopias are built on distrust and society cannot run on distrust. If you ever find yourself talking to a villain who is spilling out a monolog about "building a better world" with the giant robot army, or the flying aircraft carriers, or the mind control slugs, just laugh and tell them "I dare you." Because it won't work. Not because people are brave, smart, strong, or willful and won't stand for it, but because people, every person extends beyond anyone's idea of him or her, and this cannot be accounted for in the halls of power.

Calvin does not trust his Dad. He thinks he understands his dad, and what he is "trying to do." But he never stops to consider that his dad does not know how the food taste to Calvin. That his fathers opinion of the food has nothing to do with the reality of the food. It could be the best thing he ever tasted but his ideas about his parents have shaped the ideas about his food and he rejects it. How often do we do the same?

Let's forget about trust. Let's just taste.

Say Goodnight!

Originally published November 22, 1985. From gocomics.com

The first bedtime ritual I remember was listening to Pachabells Cannon in D. I was so young that I thought it was and said it was "Taco Bells Cannon." It must have been on a loop for an entire side of a tape because for years I would go to sleep to it or the next song which was on the other side of the tape which was J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. There were other rituals. My dad would come in and bless us. I didn't have imaginary stuffed animal friends that I would insist on him blessing. I had a brother instead, but I am sure he would have done so if asked. However, my main bedtime ritual since I could do it up until the present has been reading.

Legend has it that when I was eight or so, sometime in elementary school, that I bothered my parents about not being able to sleep one too many times and so they handed me a flashlight and a book and told me to knock myself out. I have no idea what the book was. I didn't mentally keep track of what I read until middle school when I picked up Tom Clancy's Patriot Games and was quite proud of myself that I had tackled a 700 page political spy thriller novel. Anyways, ever since then I have read a book before going to sleep. There are very very very few nights when I have not. My brother has learned to sleep regardless of the light levels in the room thanks to me. When traveling I keep a flashlight and my current book in my bag. I read like this all through college and grad-school no matter what I was supposed to be reading. Sometimes I would fall asleep reading and wake up at 2am on my parents couch with the lamp still on. Sometimes I would stay up until 3am after going to bed around 11pm too engrossed in a book (Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett takes the cake for this) to go to sleep. Usually though my eyes gets tired and I put the book down, turn off the light, and crash. Which is one of the rules.

Oh yes there are rules.

1) The book has to be enjoyable. No reading dictionaries for me. No reading assigned books or text books. Those are for homework time, not bed time. This is supposed to be a pleasant way to end the day.

2) When you can't read anymore, stop, turn out the light and go to sleep.

3) When other people are sleeping in the room/tent use as little light as possible. Usually a flashlight, sometimes a lamp. The overhead light only with expressed permission. 

4) If the book is almost done, have another one ready. Preferably in arms reach. It is acceptable to have a source of books such as a private library, in the dwelling but too much time can be taken trying to find something that "feels right" so it is best to be prepared.

5) Go to sleep. This has become more important as I got older and actually decided I wanted to get up in the morning. As you can imagine this habit especially with real page turners made me something of a "night owl." When there was no school my parents were lucky and usually shocked to see me up before 10am of my own free will. In fact they are still shocked when they see me up before 10am of my own free will. I would talk about what made me change this way of life and willing to get up at 6am on a regular basis but it is a completely different story and will have to wait for another post. So now regardless of whether my eyes are about to weld together or not, at about midnight, I call it quits. Most of the time. Sleep is important.

I am trying to think of any other rules...

6) The books cannot cause or encourage nightmares. Some of my earliest night reading, even before Tom Clancy was the classic Hardy Boys mysteries my dad had. I think I read three or four of them before I made a connection between them and restless sleep. I don't read much horror because of this. Some Steven King, particularly The Stand, and The Gunslinger Series I got through, as well as The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, but that is the extent of my horror reading. I am sure that there were some nights when reading those novels I picked up something lighter and saved them for daytime reading.

The only time I plan on not reading before bed is on a meditation retreat where I fast from reading books completely. I do this partly to see if I can, and partly because it is a time for the mind to really settle over several days in a supportive environment. Books, even good meditation ones churn the mind up and give me lots to think about. I have considered giving books up for lent, but it hasn't happened yet.

Finally I should say comic strip books make for lousy bedtime reading. They are too funny (or not funny enough) and really unwieldy to hold up when lying down.

Feel free to share you own bedtime rituals below in the comments.

The Cheater.

First Published November 21st 1985. From gocomic.com

Cheating. I was never a fan. I liked finding out how much I knew about something. Actually I take that back. Let me be more specific. I didn't like intellectual cheating. Physical cheating was just fine. I called it "working smarter not harder." I don't mean cheating in a sports game, but cheating exercise.

Physical exercise and me have never really gotten along ever since I was introduced to it in Elementary school. Games were fine as long as they were games. Practices were not quite as fun and by the time gym sports came along in middle school and coaches were loudly encouraging to their charges, and I was failing grade-wise too much to actually get to play in actual games so I threw in the towel and stuck with PE where no one expected all that much of my body. If it hadn't been for Tae-Kown-Do, where at least you get to kick things and generally want to avoid being kicked, I would have given up on moving around all together. Even that was touch and go and it was a good seventeen years before I got a black belt.

So me and exercise did not get along, so I never felt much compunction about not pushing myself to the limits like I tend to do intellectually, and on occasion, not quite doing as much as I am supposed to.

I would like to say at this point that since I have been doing crossfit, all that has changed. I do all the warm-ups and workouts as fully as I can all the time, and that I love it. Unfortunately, I cannot because it is not true. I. Still. Do. Not. Like. Working. Out. There have been several times in the last couple of months that I would tell my self "This is it. I cannot do this anymore. This is the last month." It got really touchy when I discovered there was a martial arts class in town. But here I am at the beginning of April doing crossfit.

Truly a lenten miracle.

Now I would like to say something like "When you cheat you are only cheating yourself." and I will say it because it is true:

When you cheat you are only cheating yourself.

One of the things I am learning doing crossfit is my limitations. Not necessarily physical limitations, I already knew those all to well, but my mental and spiritual limitations. What I am willing to put up with when no one is making put up with anything. Crossfit is not my cup of tea. It is loud, it is intense, it is fast. Walking and restorative yoga is more my speed. Speaking of yoga I found out that yoga has body/personality types and I am a "Kapha dominate type" which is basically the naturally chilled out type. Both the Enneagram (type 9) and Myers-Briggs type (INFP) agree. Of the three poisons personality types of Theravada Buddhism I am the aversive type which means I tend to think and act against what I don't like more than I act on what I want (desiring type) or just don't know (confused type). I only bring up this last one because my mind tends towards the negative when I work out as well.

So what to I do about all this? All the personality systems agree that this is not for me right?

I say "Okay." and then do it anyways. I stick with it. The limits are there. The inclinations towards stopping are there. The aversions to making the next lift or pushing myself a little bit harder are there. Sometimes (let's be honest: oftentimes) I listen to them. Sometimes I don't. Either way I come back the next session for more. 

We put so much emphasis on what we like. What brings us pleasure. We cast out what we don't like what gives us pain. We cheat because we enjoy the pleasure of being accoladed for a job well done, or at least the pleasure of not being punished. When we look deeply at this, we see that this drive is such a small thing, one small thought in a sea of forces inside us.

I do crossfit because it is the right thing for me to do to help take care of my body which is sedentary for most of the day. I do crossfit because I am not invested in it emotionally. I go to it independent of my moods, or how I am feeling (short of being actually sick). I go because it is a place where I am uncomfortable on several levels and so have to be that much more aware. I go because I hate working out. I go because I cheat. I cheat my history with sports. I cheat a sedentary lifestyle. Most importantly I cheat myself, who endlessly chants "this sucks" and when I act on that thought finds the results to suck too.

My one crossfit shirt has on the back of it "This sh*& sucks! What time tomorrow?" Everyone goes "haha!" at it, but for me, it is simply truth.