August Solon

Thelonious is now eating like crazy and hasn’t vomited in a week. I know this is probably just Prednisone-related weight gain, but it’s great to see her looking better. Come to think of it, I don’t know if the Prednisone is meant to fix the underlying problem or if the entire goal is to suppress symptoms, including weight loss. I’ll have to ask Dr. Press.

Yesterday evening I finished Melissa Bank’s earlier novel, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which I’m sorry to say is pretty awful. (On the other hand, the author photo is way better than the one for The Wonder Spot.) Clearly, she is improving by leaps and bounds, so I will certainly read her next novel, which I imagine will be fantastic.

I got an email from Sir Dave yesterday which said, in part:

“John Yoo, Berkeley's pride and joy, is the august solon who opined that ‘It would depend on why the president feels he needs to do that’ when asked if it would be legal for Bush to order a child's testicles crushed in order to force a parent to talk.

“I submit that if John Yoo thinks a measure is radical, it probably is.”

I heard John Yoo on KQED not long ago and was surprised to find that he sounds just like a regular person.

A coworker of mine was griping the other day about the same guy who inspired me to put my finger on my phone’s release button a few weeks ago. He was wondering how we’re going to let the managers know how terrible this guy is. I said no matter what group you work in, you’re always going to work with someone who is incompetent and that we shouldn’t torture our colleague.

“Why not?”

“Well, he is a human being.”

“Did you fall and hit your head?” asked my coworker, somewhat unflatteringly.

He explained that if I wanted my normal personality back, I would need to fall and hit my head again.

I’ve turned down the corner of the page with the picture of the “cow” in Steve Hagen’s book (in which he italicizes the word “see” every time he uses it) and have been checking now and then to see if I can see the cow. I meant not to read another word until I could see the cow, but I have to do something in between attempts, and it’s handier to read that same book than to pick up another book, so I’m reading it.

He discusses the three kinds of dukkha, the third one being the dukkha of being. I think that’s what Ezra Bayda is referring to when he discusses “the anxious quiver of being.” I think I experience it as a kind of claustrophobia: I’m trapped on this train that goes in only one direction, never stops, and ends with my death.

Steve Hagen says if you want an immediate glimpse of this third form of dukkha, you can ask yourself questions like “Why is there something instead of nothing?” I thought that was rather clever, because that question induces so much anxiety—really, the feeling that my mind is going to snap—that I have to say, “It’s impossible that anything is here, and yet here it is—the bookshelf, the bus, trees—and that’s all there is to it, and I’m not going to think about it any more.”

I’ve only really thought about it two or three times in my whole life because it gives my head a very unpleasant feeling and causes a general queasiness, or maybe more like a distinct fear in the pit of the stomach.

How was there ever nothing? Was something always here? How could it always have been here? It seems like it has always to have been here, because how could something come from absolutely nothing? Ooh, that’s a yucky feeling, to see the impossible all around you. Excuse me while I get a crisp brown rice cereal treat.

I’ve been thinking lately about how to give money to organizations anonymously. There are a lot of groups to which I’d like to send money, but I don’t want to see a lot of junk mail in my mailbox, from the entity I gave money to plus their ten best friends.

Over the past several months, I have written or called everyone who has sent me a piece of mail I didn’t want and asked them not to send another, and now almost every piece of mail I get is something I actually want. Several days of the week, I get no mail. I hate the thought of having to stop a hundred new sources of junk mail. It looks like USPS money orders might be the way to go.

However, maybe the average nonprofit wouldn’t bother to cash a small money order. I put a question on Craigslist about it and immediately got a note from someone indicating his or her willingness to receive my money (“I know this isn’t exactly what you were talking about, but …”).