Past Present

Okay, so I went through my old walkabout notes and wrote up one of the entries that I had previously skipped when I started getting behind in this blog way back in March of last year. I tried to backdate it in so that it would show up in the right spot, but the Gaia Gods would have none of that.

Looking back on it, I'm not sure why I took all the time and effort to write it all out. I guess I'm being a bit anal and probably need to let go of the past. Which is pretty darn ironic since the entry is largely about the past's influence on the present.

Sheesh.

Oh well, here it is:


Past Present

One fine day I was wandering by Reed Park (originally Lincoln Park) in Santa Monica when I realized that I was near the apartment that my family lived in during the first year of my life. Amazingly, despite all of the commercial development along busy Wilshire Boulevard, those apartments still remain above a few small shops. (But Santa Monica has made it a point to maintain its small-town charm, so I guess I shouldn't be so surprised.) The only memories I have of that early period of my life are of a neighbor's boxer dogs named Beanie and Buffy, and some kid's toy train set that entranced me as a toddler.

Stumbling upon my family's old apartment gave me pause to reflect on my life coming full circle back to my humble beginnings. Interestingly, after some brief nostalgia, my next thoughts were that I hadn't accomplished much with my life, especially considering my even more humble current homeless status, no matter how intentionally self-inflicted it may be. On the face of it, I don't have much to show for my crazy kaleidoscope of a life-----just a box of old photos, a few scars, a paper bag full of tangled memories, and a few kooky notions borrowed from some old dead guys with names like Lao-tzu and Patanjali.

My knee-jerk reaction to this kind of personal assessment is usually to start defending myself by reflecting that there are many kinds of accomplishment beyond just material assets and other standard ideas of achievement. Luckily, I usually realize what I'm doing and am able to remind myself that I am working to free myself from the crushing weight of hopes and expectations regarding accomplishment itself. (Again, accomplishment itself is not a problem, except when I let my desire for it ride me roughshod.) Ironically, letting go of accomplishment is quite an accomplishment for me.

In many ways, the past keeps elbowing it's way into the present of my walkabout.

The yellow school buses used to transport us to and from the overnight homeless shelter are exactly like the buses I rode to junior high and high school. (Except that the city is apparently required to tape over the word "school" wherever it appears on the homeless bus.) I grew up in a black neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles-----a conscious decision by my parents to raise my sister and I in a minority neighborhood as a personal effort to help integrate society. Yep, they were riding high on that wave of idealism ushered in with the Civil Rights movement.

So it was a little ironic that with the school integration programs I was bussed with my black friends to "white" schools on the West Side. They were long bus rides---upwards of an hour each way as we made multiple stops and muscled our way through rush hour traffic---so I spent a large chunk of my formative years on those buses. Whenever I get on the homeless shelter bus, childhood memories come flooding back as I make my way down the crowded aisle. It's worth noting that as a half white, half Japanese kid I never experienced a single incident of racism from the black community. (They never made me sit at the back of the bus!)

One recent Sunday morning I visited the same Quaker meeting house that my family attended when I was a kid. Upon learning my name, some of the members even remembered my family, especially my father who was very active with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization which works on social justice and development issues domestically and internationally. I don't remember much of my childhood at the meeting house, but their egalitarian and somewhat iconoclastic philosophy definitely struck a chord in me. Their doctrine of a direct and personal communion with the divine probably sowed some seeds for my future interest in mysticism. And their practice of "silent worship" is so akin to meditation that I really couldn't say what the difference is. After this recent service, I helped make a couple hundred cheese sandwiches "for the homeless". Two days later these very same sandwiches were handed out to us homeless folks at the Ocean Park Community Center. Talk about things coming full circle.

A slightly frustrating reminder of my more recent past has been watching others play sports. There are basketball courts in almost all of the parks that I frequent, as well as tennis courts in Lincoln Park. And there was even an ultimate (frisbee) tournament on the Santa Monica beach. These are three of my favorite sports, and while they elicit many memories, more often they trigger my longing to get in the game and play. But I've been holding back from getting all sweaty cuz of my limited access to showers. I hate going to sleep all sweaty and sticky. Humph!---free monk indeed!

One night I dreamt that my mother saw me playing basketball with homeless people and sent a young cousin to come after me. There were people dancing conveniently next to the basketball court, so I ended up stage diving into a mosh pit of anonymity. Apparently the guilt of not telling my family about my walkabout is weighing heavily on my unconscious. My conscious self too, for that matter. But evidently not enough to come clean just yet.

There's a Tommy's "World Famous" Burgers franchise on the corner of Lincoln and Pico. I often walk past it as I bounce back and forth between Santa Monica and Venice. Tommy's is famous for its chili-cheeseburgers, a delicious mess of artery-clogging gastric-frightening joy. You can also get fries smothered under a mound of toxic chili. Tommy's is such a popular joint that most of the franchises are open 24/7. At the original little shack not far from downtown LA, there can be a line of fifty people snaking into the parking lot.....at 2am! But the line moves fast as the servers bang out burgers made to order in about 10 seconds. Throw down your money, grab your burger and a can of soda from the fridge, then get the hell out of the way.

Besides being a frustrating temptation for the growling stomach of this hungry monk with his small ration of Vienna sausages and snack crackers, the smells emanating from "the shack" bring back great memories of our infamous "Tommy runs" when I was ostensibly attending the University of California at Santa Barbara. Whenever I or one of my friends shouted "Tommy run!", we'd dutifully pile into someone's beat up old car and hit the road south on a quest for the holy chili-burger. Invariably, this would happen quite late at night, so we'd end up making the four hour round trip to Los Angeles and back in the murky hours reserved for lovers and meth addicts. Well, we were neither, but dang if we weren't gonna have our "fix" too---usually a double chili-cheeseburger with all the fixin's. So we rumbled down that late-night wide-open highway, sharing the closest thing to a consensus religion: the road trip and the freedom it represents.

Our pilgrimage was a tribute to the Lords of the open highway (and perhaps the Gods of gastro-intestinal duress). This was our hajj, to our Mecca. (Uh-oh, if some grumpy imam sees this, I might get a fatwa slapped on my infidel butt.) And, like most crusades, jihads, inquisitions, or other poorly thought out religious campaigns, it was a good excuse for a male bonding ritual-----females usually being too uptight (read: intelligent, mature) to be cajoled onto such an asinine lark. For even the pimpliest of young men retain within them the latent DNA of the nomad, the explorer, the hunter, the warrior seeking out new territory, new spoils, and, in a sense, a new identity. So we pushed beyond the boundaries of the ordinary, even if that meant into the realm of inanity. Hey, anything was better than the mediocrity we associated with the status quo. Well, at least that was my motivation. The other guys may have just wanted a chili-burger, for all I know.

But there was definitely the wisp of mystery in the night air as we rattled and hummed down the highway. Possibilities beckoned in those magical hours after midnight, even if they only turned out to be the promise of severe indigestion and the likelihood of a different kind of Tommy's "runs" in the morning. At the very least, it was a great way to procrastinate that paper on "Platonic Ideals" due at 9am the next morning. Heck, you could make a Tommy's run after midnight and still have five hours left to write the paper before class! (Yeah, I've always had problems with writing...)

On one Tommy's run, we took a late night detour and drove onto the campus of UCLA. "Onto", as in on the walkways, bike paths, and even the grassy commons. We were nowhere cool enough to carve tire-screeching donuts into their main plaza, but we zoomed around a few of the buildings with wild abandon. UCSB was considered a pretty lightweight institution back then, and this was our juvenile way of thumbing our noses at our more prestigious UC brethren to the south. (A big shout out to all the hard-working students who have come along since my slacker college days at UCSB and bolstered the school's reputation, making my neglected diploma so much more valuable!)

This was a chance for us mild-mannered semi-nerds to be bad boys, to break the rules, to channel our inner warriors. It was our tribe vs. their tribe. Of course, us bold warriors were very lucky that the campus police didn't show up and throw our warrior butts in jail. In another act of brazen warfare, we even used the women's bathroom in one of the campus buildings! Take that UCLA! We were amazed at the heartfelt and lonely graffiti on the walls of the toilet stalls, especially when compared to the usually crude and unimaginative scrawlings in the average mens' restroom. We rumbled home, stomachs full, chests puffed, yet also somewhat humbled by the poignancy of womens' bathroom graffiti.

Several years later, as a somewhat less-than-responsible resident assistant in one of the on-campus dormitories, I once tricked quite a few of my student charges into "joining me for a chili-burger". We jammed twelve of us into my pick-up truck and hit the road south. My truck was a Nissan (nee Datsun) King Cab with a camper shell on the back, containing thick foam padding and a bunch of pillows inside. So while a bit crowded, it was a comfortable ride. After we'd motored through Santa Barbara, they began to wonder when we'd get to this burger joint that I'd been speaking so highly of. We played an extended version of "Are we there yet?" with me continually responding that we were almost there. After about an hour they finally gave up and resigned themselves to the forced socialization of sardines.

We finally reached Tommy's and poured out of the truck, uncoiling cramped bodies. It was a distinct pleasure to introduce so many virgin palates to the wicked combination of gastric anxiety and bliss that make up the Tommy's chili-burger experience. And while perhaps not quite a spiritual awakening for them, they were at least appreciative of a good burger. Sated, we piled back into my truck and headed back up the road. They all soon fell fast asleep and I drove back through the quiet night, proud of my contribution to their cultural edification. For days afterwards, some of them would threaten to take me out for a taco.....in Mexico.

I grew up not far from here, so it's really no surprise that my past keeps shouldering its way into the present. But how much influence does my past have over my present? Does the past really pull all of my strings, as the determinists would have me believe? Am I a slave of the past? Am I beholden to my past doubts and hopes, sorrows and triumphs? Am I doomed to repeat my conditioned behaviors? (Am I condemned to keep reminiscing about the past?!) Well, of course, I hope not. After all, liberation philosophies are based on the premise that we can break the chains of the past.

(A notable exception is the controversial teacher Ramesh Balsekar with his radical take on Advaita Vedanta philosophy. I visited him in Mumbai (nee Bombay) to try to come to grips with his provocative doctrine. I won't go into all of it here, but one of his fundamental teachings is that everything that happens is God's will. Whatever beliefs that we have or choices that we think we make have actually already been pre-determined by God. Hence, we should surrender our notions of free thought and free will. So let go into the stream of life and be "free". This will also help us realize that our belief in our individual identities is an illusion. The true fundamental nature of our reality is pure consciousness, God. It's an interesting form of religious determinism.)

Long before Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now or Ram Das's seminal Be Here Now, spiritual traditions have been exhorting us to focus on the present moment to free ourselves from the burdens of the past and our worries about the future. Without the phantoms of the past and the future obscuring our vision, we can learn to experience Reality directly. After all, the present moment is all we really have, right? Well, to be honest, sometimes I think we don't even have that. Whenever I look for the present, I can't seem to find it anywhere. It's just the name we've given the point where the bruising shoulders of the past and the future bump up against one another. This point, this present moment, has no length or breadth to it. It's gone before it even begins.

At various times, I'm able to convince myself that the past is all we have, or that the present is all we have, or that the future is all we have, or that none of them actually exist. Even time itself is just a human invention---a conceptual tool to measure the rate of change. It's not even standardized everywhere: time passes at different relative rates depending upon proximity to mass. (Scientists proved Einstein right by showing that an atomic clock flown in an airplane high in the atmosphere---thus farther from the mass of the Earth---ran incrementally quicker relative to a similar clock on the ground.) With no past, present, or future---no real time even---I'm left swimming in a Buddhist ocean of emptiness. I guess it's not such a bad place to end up, as long as I can enjoy swimming without clinging to anything. Ah, I'm starting to wander off (swim off?) again. Well, how about one last reminiscence then?

My recent encounters with the police keep reminding me of past run-ins with the law. After a tough break-up with my first girlfriend, I took a short hiatus from college and went on a meandering drive-about around the Southwest. I had barely just arrived in Phoenix, Arizona when I was pulled over by a police cruiser.

I was traveling around in the same pick-up truck that I later used to shanghai my dorm residents onto that Tommy's run. I really loved that truck. (Laszlo Emilio Rizzoli by name, for those who are interested.) Much later I would drive it all the way up to Alaska, then drive it back down four years later. The connecting window between the front cab and the back camper shell had been removed and the opening had been widened so that I could just climb into the back from the front cab without having to walk around outside to enter from the back. When I was traveling around, I would just pull over and park anywhere at night, and then climb into the back and go to sleep. With the aforementioned foam padding and copious pillows, I slept quite comfortably. Tinted windows and homemade curtains assured my privacy. Even when I turned on the inside lights for some late night reading, it was impossible for anyone to tell that I was inside.

Oh, and there was a pink plastic lawn flamingo that rode up on top of the camper shell. (His name was Rex, later to be replaced by Dex, Lex, and finally Tex as each one was stolen in turn). Well, apparently the Phoenix police weren't big flamingo fans (especially when they were perched on vehicles with California license plates). So the officers generously advised me that there wasn't anything for me in Phoenix and that it would be best if I just kept on moving out of town. Well I'm not a big fan of heavy-handed Big Brother tactics, so I thanked them kindly for their advice and let them know that I was actually planning to spend a bit more time exploring the charms of Phoenix than I'd originally planned. Heck, maybe I'd even relocate.

Now I'm not the paranoid type, but almost everywhere I went over the next two days there was a police car magically a few cars behind me or a few cars over or just around the corner. I was amazed that they would waste manpower following a lightweight like me. I became a very very law-abiding citizen, driving well below the posted speed limits and stopping well behind the crosswalk lines at intersections. I wouldn't even think of jaywalking. They followed me less when I was on foot, so I drove less. I finally discovered Arizona State University and began hanging out a lot on campus. After a couple of days, the police lost interest in me. Or so I thought.

Several uneventful days passed (well, except for a strange encounter at ASU with a red-haired, red-bearded, red-robed "wizard"---long staff included---who tried to convince me that I had amazing magical powers and that he could teach me how to unleash them) and then late one night I was jolted awake by someone banging on my truck. I looked outside to see a policeman smacking my camper shell with his baton. And five police cars arrayed around me. I climbed out and he informed me that it was illegal to sleep in my truck.

Considering the possibility of a night in jail and maybe a fine to boot, I decided that my best course of action would be diplomacy (i.e., groveling). So in my most apologetic and naive tone, I asked them if they knew of a place where I could sleep in my truck. Why, just my luck, the policeman did happen to know of such a place! With a sly sideways glance at his comrades, he told me to follow him in my truck. I caught that cunning little glance, but I was still too rattled and tired to think much of it. Besides, what was I supposed to do?---say no thanks, I'd rather spend the night in one of your charming jail cells?

So in the middle of the night I got a five car police escort to the middle of a huge parking lot. (It was probably next to some stadium, but again, I was too tired to really notice.) I thanked them, bid them farewell, and promptly went to sleep in my truck, amazed that even The Man could be big-hearted sometimes. Or so I thought.

Very early the next morning I was shaken awake by what I thought was an earthquake. But as my truck continued to tremble and rattle, I opened my curtains on an astounding sight. Tanks and other armored vehicles were rumbling around my little truck as soldiers marched all over the place. Not sure if I was having a bad dream, I scrambled up to the front cab and drove wicked fast out of there, steering well clear of any military hardware. After I was out of the area, I tried to collect my wits, but it still took me a while to figure out what was going on. I hadn't realized that it was Veteran's Day. The army must have been using the large parking lot as a staging area for some kind of military parade for the holiday. I had a good laugh, appreciative that even Big Brother has a sense of humor.



"Head the future off at the past, part the freeway, let my people go free"
---Exene Cervenka (member of the punk rock band "X"), engraved on the Venice poetry walls

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
---F. Scott Fitzgerald, from The Great Gatsby

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
---George Santayana

"Free will is overrated."
---frazzled robot having a drink at a bar in a framed cartoon on Ramesh Balsekar's wall

"I'll have a double chili-cheeseburger with no meat and no chili."
---vegetarian Laurie, one of my dorm residents, ordering her Tommy's burger

"What's your power rating?!.....I've been watching you. You are very powerful!.....I can teach you how to make women fall in love with you!"
---the Red Wizard at ASU

"You look like one of the Monkees. What was his name? Yeah, Micky!"
---ZZ, a drunk fellow I met one night in Chess Park (back in the relative present)

"No he doesn't, man. He looks like that little alien dude on the Flintstones. That's him-----the Great Gazoo!"
---homeless Dwayne, referring to when the Flintstones jumped the shark