The Buddha tells us that much as the string binds the yo-yo to the hand, so too all souls are bound to the causal cycle of birth and rebirth by our attachments to the world. Or so I was told in Japanese Philosophy class.

I'm confused by brand loyalty. Why do we allow ourselves to fall into it? Companies are incorporated, not incarnated. There's no reason to be kind to a brand. Yet, here I am, pro-Apple, anti-Microsoft, pro-Nintendo, pro-Coke, anti-Pepsi, pro-Target, anti-Wal*mart, pro-duct tape, pro-Post It Note, pro-Fort James Mini-mornap, pro-Waffle House, pro-Emperor Norton records and still quietly mourning the death of Grand Royal records. Attachments, the lot of them.

Or, as the Buddha would say, sankharas.

I've written some to you about Buddhist ideas before. The other day in a chat room, whilst probing our mutual knowledge of obscure Japanese Buddhists, I ask my friend Shige, if we perhaps know too much about a religion that's presumably wrong. Well, maybe from my Christian perspective, but on the other hand, considering other perspectives usual sheds light on one's own understanding anyway. So, I absorb the ideas from my Japanese Philosophy class and digest them. I try to pick out useful stuff. Buddhism by itself seems to be merely the belief in a troubling rebirth cycle that can be stopped through the loss of attachments. Of course, the Mahayanists, after Nagarjuna, came to see right perception (perception not cluttered by attachment to words and terms, which are inherently empty and self-contradicting) as synonymous with attaining enlightenment. This is why Zen is all about sitting around meditating until one understands nothingness and oneness, yada, yada.

Alcohol is a funny drink. I've started drinking it in earnest during weekends this year. Which is sort of sad. Alcohol makes me just content enough to enjoy social functions like parties, so that I don't sit around being overly introspective and not really having fun as I normally would. It seems I can now experience parties just as other people seem to do. Which is kinda sad. Go ahead; admit that intellect is a burden rather than a blessing. But it's rather enjoyable to be drunk and it probably won't result in too much long-term damage, so I justify it.

They say alcohol makes you impotent. I'm probably impotent enough as is.

The whole idea of girls and girlfriends is one to which I am overly attached. People say stuff like that, you only meet the right person when you aren't looking, blah, blah, blah. However, it seems that the right person is right, independent of the status of one's search for them. Anyhow, this girl from my Japanese class has invited me to dance with her (and her friends) twice now, only to cancel at the last minute both times. Another pair of conceptions of the future to be shed. Oh well. She's cute, but she seems like someone who does things, like clubs and stuff. I'm not sure how I feel about doing. Probably, my feelings lean more toward the against category. On the other hand, I'm getting sick of spending my life in my friends' room. I need to cut my umbilical cord to it. No more tethers.

Drunks tend to talk about their level of drunkness and other people's presumed level, and things like that. During homecoming weekend, I thought about the phenomenological difference in experience between my (altered) perceptions and the perceptions that others had of me. And of course, how this relates to Buddhism and the Buddha's denial of the existence of a higher objective level of reality, and the subsequent reintroduction of a deeper world-as-it-exists-without-judgments by Nagarjuna. Anyhow, my empirical experience was of a dizzy but happy life, whereas others seeing me may or may not have been aware of the difference in our perceptions of the world. They were possibly focused on the floats, and may not have shared my dizzy sense of global giddiness.

Material possessions are so bad at fulfilling their purpose. All that they need to do is to make people permanently content and happy, but do they? Not hardly. All those brands to which I'm loyal just want my money; there's no money in making me contented, satiating my desires. Meanwhile, I'm not a big fan of my job at school. I mostly sit in computer labs and hope no one asks me a question. It can get to be very numbing. In a good week, I can pull in about $75 in 12 hours of workin'. Anyhow, one would think that if there isn't any job-related work in my job then I must consequently spend my work time doing other work. Yet, I usually end up doing no work. I just surf the same websites like a cyber-rosary. I do my mudra with a mouse and keyboard. Anyhow, I just went through a huge eBay nightmare to get an MP3 player to replace my broken CD player. It was a huge fiasco that I don't want to get into. Now, I'm all obsessed with the Nintendo Gamecube, as if it could resolve my existential ennui. These sorts of major purchasing decisions are entirely too much for me, given my $6 - $7 hourly wage. Then, during fall break, I got my first ticket for driving to my brother-in-laws for going against a detour sign through a short work area as I had seen done by my brother-in-law. I still have to go to trial for that and plead guilt to knock off license points. That night, I felt so terrible. I just sat in bed and thought about how I was unable to do anything independently. I just waste my parent's money by the bucket. Even with my "job," I still take in much less than I throw away on Japanese import CDs and gasoline. Without my parent's continued patronage, I'd have nothing. Furthermore, I am unable to affect change in many spheres of influence, from the geopolitics of terrorism to cafeteria crushes. Dream as I may, the situations remain the same. Moreover, my spiritual status is laughably weak. All around, I'm a pretty ineffectual person in every category except for schoolwork, and that only to the extent that it is not difficult to me because of my wholly unearned intellectual talents!

Worthless, that's the word to describe how I felt.

Opposite day is a verbal game that some kids play, mostly just to make backhanded insults towards friends. As you can imagine, the phrase "today is opposite day" is a logical wash, whereas "today is not opposite day" has no informational content. Somehow or another, some of my friends and I started joking around about opposite day, and so during one of my lab shifts, a friend and I printed out fuzzy signs declaring in shifting font face, "Today is NOT Opposite Day." In the corner of the sign is the notice that the sign is sponsored by the "P.W.H.O.I.B.A.U.R.," people who hang out in Beaugh and Uthe's room. The uncut chord. Anyhow, the point of the signs as I saw it was to make people stop and consider the logical contradiction. The statement, "today is not opposite day," should instantly invoke its compliment, "OR IS IT!???" Today not being opposite day just shows more clearly the emptiness of words as described by Nagarjuna's Mahayanist descendants. It's like a koan, and maybe if someone thought about it, they would have a more anarchic fun filled day. Or maybe not. After all, "if today wasn't opposite day, I'd tell you it was," does contain definitive informational content. So maybe words aren't completely empty.

A big strand of Japanese Buddhism is the belief in the proto-ontological necessity of nothingness as the foundation of existence. Without nothing, there could be no contrast between the existent and the non-existent. All is nothing, and from nothing, all arises, therefore all is not nothing. Therefore, all is nothing and not nothing. Words are empty. Empty words to find their truth. And so forth. These words mean nothing. OR DO THEY!??? Childhood Zen.

All this Buddhism is so backassward to Christian thought. Life is suffering because of thirst, eh? Then drink the living water. All in the world is change? Then follow God, the unchanging. Words are empty? He is The Word, the Truth. Everything is nothing? To God, all is as nothing, yet for the world, He sent His Son to give up everything.

The other day, for the first time in a while, I had a good wander. I pulled out my almost completely broken CD player and forced it to squeak some lonely electronic Bossa Nova by Bebel Gilberto. I dragged my feet in the leafy gutters of campus and sang along as well as I could with her mixture of Portuguese and English. The stars still hang in the lonely chilled air the same way that they did when I was a kid. Back then, I'd wander out in the fields behind churches and schools, while inside there was a basketball game (sometimes even one in which I was a benched participant). Much as now, I built nests for myself out of straw attachments and waited for someone with whom to share it, though I hadn't figured out the whole sex thing yet. Nothing exciting can happen during a good wander, and you probably won't end up too far from where you start, if you do it right. In a perfect wander, all that exists is you, your dragging feet, and the stars, which must sit in for the gods. That night, the moon had set already, so I gazed up at Orion's adamantine belt, the Pleades' familiar cluster, the stern Taurus, and then down on the ecliptic, to the Gemini, Castor and Pollux.

I was born a Gemini, and I've been told you were a Gemini once too. Gemini VIII docked with the Agena target vehicle, then spun out of control. You handled it pretty well, given the circumstances. Electrical fault. A situation beyond your control. An fat, white State Trooper parked around the corner. According to the Shingon school of Japanese Buddhism, one must first put all focus into one object/action, then cut that focus too, leaving no focus but everything. First, climb to the top of the flagpole. Then keep climbing. First, go up. Then don't come down. Just live on the moon instead. Dogen Kigen, founder of Japanese Zen Buddhism, is usually painted cross-eyed, because his one eye was metaphorically always on the moon, which, needless to say, represents enlightenment. On the moon, enlightenment is hard to not see.

But how can one want to be that but what one is? As Robèrt in Japanese philosophy said on learning of the goal of no-self, "But I like Robèrt!" As for me, I am earthbound, earthbinding. I don't want to stop drinking. I don't want to stop wasting money. I don't want to stop being me. I just want to be me, with all the things I want too. Christianity isn't much kinder than Buddhism. Have your self killed, make Jesus your new self's center. At least in Christianity, one doesn't have to act in one's own strength. In Buddhism, the last step is losing your attachment to the goal of enlightenment. Check that step off.

*Sigh*

Cut away my sense of corporate identification.

Cut away my senses of power and impotence.

Cut away my social habitats and sins.

Cut away all that binds me.

Cut away gravity.

Float to up to the moon.

Seems easy enough.

PS My birthstone is moonstone.