American Culture Triumphs Once Again

I recently returned from my annual meditation retreat, which was tremendous. It was a concentration retreat (samatha), not insight meditation (vipassana), and it did give me the ability, temporarily, to aim my mind at a chosen object and have it stay there.

Pointing the mind over and over at any given object happens to produce a very calm and blissful state after some days, but the main point of doing this is to use one’s improved ability to concentrate in the service of insight meditation.

At the beginning of the retreat, I was brushing bees away as I walked outside in the sun, worried about being stung. By the end of the retreat, I was saying to them (silently), “If you have to sting me to redress wrongs done to your people, go right ahead,” and not waving them away or trying to walk away from them. Of course, I didn’t get stung. They just wanted to see what was going on.

I’ve found that doing concentration practice regularly makes everything more intense, for good or ill, so it was most unfortunate that grilling occurred soon after I returned home, because my mind was then aimed in a decidedly unwholesome direction, and it was like a speeding freight train, in that it was pretty much going where it was going.

I had allowed a sense of security to creep in, and then firmly to take hold, when a few months or so passed without grilling. But on Labor Day, alas, there seemed to be extra activity outside my kitchen door, the neighbors going out and coming in. Sure enough, their little grill disappeared from outside their kitchen door only to reappear in the back yard.

The female half of the couple came over and said they would really like to grill a couple of things—would that be OK? I said it’s kind of a problem, but that if she absolutely had to, she should go ahead. She was a bit miffed when she left, and then the husband came over to announce that he doesn’t believe it’s that big a problem—he doesn’t, for instance, believe that it stinks up all the clothes in my closet, which is to say, he basically called me a liar—and that he was going to grill whether I liked it or not, and so he did.

He opined that grilling is part of American culture, and I would agree that it is, along with driving around in an SUV and violence against women and children—well, violence in general—on the down side, and, on the up side, Metallica.

I closed my windows and put folded-up towels over the obvious leaks, and then I just stayed out of my main room for the next two and a half hours or so for the most part; it did stink in there.

Then commenced three or so days of nonstop mental commentary along the lines of, “Listen here, sonny, if you think you’re not going to hear from my attorney, you’ve got another think coming …”

Some of this commentary was perfectly truthful, to the best of my knowledge, and some was outrageous lies, which is particularly useless: Why bother practicing speeches I will never give?

If you join the San Francisco Tenants Union, they will send you a manual, which may or may not be helpful—it wasn’t, in my case—and you get a secret number to call for phone counseling. If you call the secret number, you hear a recorded message instructing you to leave a message with every detail of your situation and wait for a call back. When you get the call back, it says something like, “Well, it’s hard to say, since we haven’t talked directly, but based on your voice mail, I’d say this … “

Which is to say: forget joining the SFTU, and just walk over there as a non-member, make a donation on the spot, and speak in person to an attorney.

I did once call the special secret number about grilling and eventually got a voice mail that said something like, “Well, I can’t really say, but you could try asking your landlord to fix the leaky windows. However, you really should be able to have your windows open if you want them open, so your best bets are to bring a lawsuit or to do a rent strike, and, of those two options, you’re probably better off with the lawsuit. This does sound like an issue of habitability.” I assume this is because I could place myself in jeopardy if I stop paying rent, but who can say?

I started poking around on legal websites myself and concluded it probably wasn’t an issue of habitability per se, but perhaps of interference with quiet enjoyment—it does appear that a rent-paying tenant has the right to enjoy her apartment free of nuisances caused by other tenants. An objectionable odor is specifically mentioned as an example of a nuisance. Having to leave my main room for two and a half hours whenever one of my neighbors is overcome by the desire to grill is a problem.

So I feel that, if it comes right down to it, I may possibly be on firm ground, legally speaking, which did ease my mind. It’s good to know that if necessary, I can sue, or maybe just having an attorney write a letter would do the trick.

But someone or other once told me, or I read online, that no party to a lawsuit ever feels happy or satisfied afterwards, which I can readily believe, so I resolved to think the matter over thoroughly before doing anything, and to consult my mental health professional.

I also asked Tom what he thought. He thinks suing a neighbor is an extremely bad idea. But then, if I am—ahem—highly attuned to all sorts of things, he is pretty much oblivious to all of those same things; somewhere between our viewpoints is probably where a balanced perspective lies.