The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Six Seconds

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Mount Shasta, California, March 13, 2011: Today on the radio I listened to Arnold Schwartzenegger’s gubernatorial speech. The guy is a pretty good inspirational speaker; I liked it.

I’ve read two of his books, and there he says that if you can imagine it, you can do it. In his radio speech, he used similies from his weight-lifting career, and he said, “It’s always surprising to discover one thing: You’re always stronger than you know.”

Stronger than you know?

And this reminded me of a young woman in a weaver’s studio in San Francisco.

My friend Maggie Northcott introduced me to Susan the weaver, and we became close, and I met Susan’s friends. Most of them were weavers, too. In fact, a whole bunch of them shared a large studio space on Potrero Hill, and when I visited there one day, I was introduced to a most unusual young woman.

She was about 26, sturdy built and very pretty, with even features, clear eyes, and very frizzy dark blond hair. Susan told me that the woman had won an Olympic weight-lifting medal.

This was surprising. She didn’t look like what I imagined a weight-lifter must look like. I asked the woman it. She said yes, and named some hugely staggering amount of weight that she’d lifted.

“You’re not kidding me?” I asked.

She looked me in the eye. “No,” she said, “Of course not.”

“Then tell me, please,” I said. “I’d like to know. How in the world can you do that?”

She paused, looking down and perhaps inward. “It’s like this,” she said. “For this lift, you only have to lift it for six seconds, see?”

I nodded. She paused.

“And the way I see it,” she said, “Six seconds really isn’t very long at all. I figure I can do anything for six seconds.”

I suppose that’s how it’s done. Simple, isn’t it?

The Men in the Rocket Ship

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San Francisco, 1984: Back in Henrietta, Texas, the Edmonds Public Library was calm, quiet, and cool in the summer. The children’s section and the Science Fiction section had that same smell as a grade school, a scent of varnish and puppies.

I got to know those books very well. Books about secret codes, books about the Hardy Boys, and books about Rocket Ships. Those were favorites. Even today, checking the news online, whenever a new photograph appears — Jupiter, a comet, the Crab Nebula — it’s astounding, like deja vu of something never seen.

In college, I was complaining to Crazy Becky Jarvis one day, about my sorry love life. She tilted her head to one side.

“I bet you’d like Patty L.,” she said.

And I did.

A small woman, with that hair that moves all together, she wore a plaid skirt, a white blouse, and tall boots. In those days of beehive hairdos, she was a welcome relief. An infectious smile, mischievous nature, and a cozy attitude.

On a certain day, I was to pick her up from visiting her parents in Dallas. As it turned out, I was early, and, having nothing much to say to them — or perhaps, they having very little to say to me — they invited me to watch the television, where I saw Star Trek for the first time.

I no longer recall the plot, probably it was about a terrible monster.

We left, and drove the Morgan back to Denton with the top down, always fun, but I was thinking about the guys in the Rocket Ship. And now, we’ll leave Pretty Patty and move forward to San Francisco, many years after.

In San Francisco, Star Trek is still on television, but as it begins to wind down, they begin making movies. And one of these was playing on Van Ness, so Derek S. and I went.

This particular Star Trek movie, however, had them coming back in time to San Francisco, where we are watching the movie. With their space ship in high orbit, they have beamed down, and now these men from the future are walking around the Marina Green. Now they’re downtown. And now they are walking on Van Ness.

And now they are standing at the bus stop outside the theatre where Derek and I are watching them standing at the bus stop outside the theatre where we are watching them.

Yes, that’s right, these people from my past, who are from the future, at a later time in the future have come back to a time later than my past, which is in fact now, and are now standing just outside the theatre where we are watching them from inside the theatre.

The movie wasn’t great.

The mental meltdown was superb.

Does God make up these practical jokes? Or do they just happen?

April’s Mystery Avocado

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>San Francisco, 1983: April R. was a pretty girl with red hair and pale skin. She and Madonna M. started work at Network Answering Service at the same time. Madonna was a beautiful black woman, and the two of them were physical opposites in every way. April was thin, quick, shrill. Madonna was voluptuous, languid, calm. They went through training together and became best of friends.At Network, operators worked in pairs, according to an eccentric scheme I’d developed with Bob back when we were the only two operators. With your team partner you develop a coordination, passing calls back and forth. The training was extensive, including training in how to communicate effectively with another human, as well as how to operate the telephone machinery. April and Madonna worked together with style, wit, and humor.But today April was in the kitchen, very unhappy. She was hungry, and somebody had stolen her avocado.

The system in the kitchen was that people didn’t need to label their food. Although you might not know who owned something, you knew darn well that it wasn’t yours, so you weren’t to eat another’s food. This generally worked.

What's in the Bag?

In this case, April had brought her lunch, an avocado, in a small paper bag, and put it on the cabinet shelf. There were about eight paper bags there. I asked the obvious.

“Did you look in all the bags?”

Miserably, she said she’d checked them all, twice, thinking that surely it was there. But it wasn’t.

I told her that the best possible solution was that it was just there in one of these bags, because if it could magically disappear, then it could magically reappear. It’s as if magic doesn’t like to disturb the physical universe. Big puff of smoke and a flash? Not the way magic likes to manifest. It likes to perform its miracles unseen, unexplainable.

Sour at my chatter, she went through the bags again, bitter because she was hungry and had no more money for food today. She asked me what I was talking about.

I told her about a small miracle I’d seen, and how it felt so natural, so unforced. “For example,” I said, “with no sense of effort at all, you’d just pick up a sack …” I crossed to the cabinet and picked up a sack. I handed it to her. “You’d just say ‘There is your avocado,’ and it would be there.”

April peeked down into the sack she was holding. She looked up at me, looking much like a siamese cat.

“How did you do that?” she said.

Was it the avocado? It was.

How was it done? I don’t know. Bishop Nippo Syaku used to ask, “Where do we go when we die? Nobody knows that.”

But of course, the avocado was there all the time, and she had just been unable to find it, while searching the eight bags carefully three times.

Sure it was.

Buddha Next Door

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495 Third Avenue #8, San Francisco, 1975: Reading a lot of metaphysical books, I studied astral projection and conscious dreaming. Success was limited, but on this particular night the dream-like experience was clear.

I was lying down and deeply relaxing, in the evening, and mentally I left my body. I rose and floated outside, finding myself now walking the sidewalk. In this vision, it was daytime, and in crossing the street, I found myself wading through a heaving mass of alligators.

When I made it across the street, there was something odd about the door of the house on the corner.

This door was now painted red, and upon it a paper notice fluttered. I climbed their stair to read it, but once there, the door was open, and I stepped into the dim hallway. A dark stair led to the floor above, and to the left an open door revealed a lighted room, with rows of folding chairs, like a classroom.

I took a seat, and perhaps others were there. A monk in a brown robe entered, and at the blackboard he drew a large circle, with a hub and spokes, using many-colored chalk.

As I watched, this diagram began to spin, growing larger in my vision until it became a vast wheel, spinning in space, blurring at incredible speed, and yet ponderous, revolving as slowly as the aeons.

In this vision, I thought, “The Wheel of Dharma.”

At the time, I didn’t know what Dharma was. I still don’t know what Dharma is. But what happened the next week was real enough.

This corner house in my vision was a real house. It was just across the street. From my windows, it looked like any San Francisco flat, meaning no yard around, of two stories and touching the neighbor house to either side. Except, this was a corner house, and the long side faced my windows. Painted white like others on the street. Nothing notable.

That is, until the moving van began unloading the strange crates.

Some of these were huge, and all were labelled with symbols in a foreign alphabet. Please note, I’m speaking not of any vision, but of what occurred outside my second-floor apartment the following week. Huge wooden crates with strange symbols in some foreign language.

Somehow I was not surprised when, the next day, thin monks in brown robes began to come and go around that house, and a few days later, towards the evening, when lights went on inside, I discovered that my window looked down and directly into a long room in that house.

There, at the end of the room, a huge statue of the seated Buddha, pale white, in the bliss of contemplation.

Bishop Nippo Syaku

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San Francisco, 1975: I saw the flimsy poster, but it was quaint rather than crude. Bishop Nippo Syaku would give some short talks about Zen. In the rawboned Victorian near Filmore street, poor lighting made the room seem drab, but Bishop Nippo lit up the place. The Bishop was a round-faced, cheerful fellow, very chipper he was. He spoke often of the nature of things.”We say, ‘Oh the flower is pretty!’” He beamed, “But flower does not care!”

On this evening, he spoke of how the True Buddhist is without fear. This amazed me, and made me ponder. I raised my hand.

“Yes?”

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. I pointed to an empty chair. “Let’s say the True Buddhist was sitting right there.”

Bishop Nippo nodded.

“And let’s say that a Sabre-Tooth Tiger came through that door.” Everybody looked at the door. I continued, “Now the True Buddhist would feel no fear, but he would jump up and run like hell, correct?”

“Ah!” said Bishop Nippo Syaku. “That is True Buddhist!”

Being Happy Today

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Mt. Shasta, CA, June 2010: For several months now I’ve been engineering a secret project.

(Shhh. It’s a secret- Uh, no, wait. It’s not a secret any more. Never mind that hush-hush stuff. You can blab this all over, if you want to, OK?)ears ago, back in San Francisco, and even earlier than that, I did some counseling. I didn’t stick with it, because other things caught my interest. (Mainly women, I can admit it.)

The type of counseling I did was kind of unusual. It uses a very sensitive biofeedback meter. This thing is so sensitive that it reads on your thoughts.

And that’s why it’s so useful. If we’re in a counseling session, I can ask you questions, and then when a resulting thought occurs, no matter how quick it goes by, I can steer you to that thought again. It’s kind of like a compass and a steering wheel right inside the mind. Oh, it’s not perfect. But it’s pretty darn good.

And if that thought that just flashed by just happens to be the answer to why you feel stuck in your job for example, why you feel frustrated and can’t seem to get ahead … well, that’s a pretty handy thought to be able to track down.

And I’m going to let you in on a little secret. [Read more…]

How to Gain More Power in this World

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[reprinted from Shyguy’s How To Get A Girlfriend Blog, March 28, 2009]

All too often, in our lives we find ourselves being manipulated or influenced by other men, by women, and sometimes even by the damned television.

Of course, as a kid against a schoolyard bully, perhaps the only options are the Charles Atlas course, karate classes, or a tactful withdrawal. But in later life usually we’re not influenced by physical threat.

HOW DO ‘THEY’ MANIPULATE US?

It’s done with worths, with images, and with social pressure.

If you’re being influenced this way … what that tells you is that you DO NOT actually understand how it’s happening. Oh, you may have theories and opinions about those bad people.

But if you’re still being manipulated, either “having” to go along, or even resisting but feeling upset or angry about it .. then you DO NOT fully understand how it works.

But here’s how to change that …

[Read more…]

Mental Health Made Easy

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[reprinted from my former site How to Tune a Human, August 17, 2008]

What is it about taking a shower that causes new ideas to pop into your head?

Is it the invigorating ions that are caused by splitting water droplets?

Or is it a simple as Murphy’s law triggered because you will never have pencil and paper in the shower?

I don’t know the answer to this time-proven rule, but as of this morning’s shower, I do know a super-simple way to look at mental health, a simple way to be happier and more productive.

It’s simply this —

[Read more…]

 
 

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