Saw my friend yesterday. I was trying to be a better friend to him. We’d been trying to see each other for a while but hadn’t been able to until yesterday. I live in a city next to his city and had to travel into his city to see him. On the twenty minute walk to the train I thought about the creator of the cosmos and how they still dwelled in the womb of the cosmos waiting to be born and how their face was everywhere.
Somebody on the train dumped half their chicken nuggets on the floor and at first I thought it was a mistake and I felt sorrow for them but then I saw them smile wide and dump approximately half of their soda fountain (Dr. Pepper[?]) on the floor and I understood. I watched with delight as their mess tumbled and flowed about the universe. I got off in the other city and went for a stroll through the shining day.
On my twenty minute walk part II, I thought about this guy I’d recently met named Natchiketa, whose father gave away all worldly possessions to become holy back when Natchiketa was a kid, and Natchiketa had sarcastically asked his father if he was going to give him away too. The father had said, “Sure! Go die!” And Natchiketa went on a long walk through forests and over mountains and eventually arrived at the God of Death’s house and knocked but the God of Death wasn’t home so Natchiketa waited there for three days. Sat by the door and waited. Finally the God of Death showed up and found out the kid’s story and was impressed he had waited there for him and said, “You can have three wishes, one for each day you patiently waited for me.” The first wish the kid made was for his father to love him. Done. Granted. The second wish Natchiketa made was to know how to do the fire ritual so he could perform it before he was killed and then enter into Heaven. Done. Granted. This is how you do the fire ritual. The third wish the kid asked for was to know the secrets of life and death. The God of Death got nervous and tried to back pedal out of that wish, saying the kid could have unlimited beautiful women, and be the ruler of a great kingdom, and have untold vaults of riches, but Natchiketa didn’t want that, on Natchiketa’s long walk and during all that waiting, he had come around on his thinking concerning the worth of worldly things and decided no, he didn’t want worldly, finite things; what he wanted was infinite. The God of Death taught Natchiketa that hidden in the heart of every creature there lived a Self, subtler than the most subtle, greater than the greatest, and when he was slain, his body would perish, but his supreme Self would live on eternal, beyond the senses, beyond name and form, without beginning and end, beyond time and space. And then the God of Death taught Natchiketa how to meditate and taught him how to say OM, and through this meditation, Natchiketa found all kinds of other answers, and surviving his meet and greet with the God of Death, he came down the mountain and returned to his father who wrapped him up in his arms and loved the hell out of him, and eventually Natchiketa even became immortal, which happened through meditation and by using the knowledge he had learned on his journey but also because I’d one day write about him on my SubStack I imagined, and sometime after that you’d probably tell your kids about Natchiketa and what happened to him and what he learned, or you’d tell somebody’s kids about him, and it’d go on forever like that. I thought about all this as I walked down 9th street.
Lilies had burst through brickface, concrete gaps, jackhammered voids, come up out of mud and dogshit and unlimited tiny white pebbles and encircled green tree trunks, which if you followed up with your eyes, one could see itty bitty brown birds screamsinging in the branches in their unknown language, and how pretty the tulips of all variety spied in raised flower beds, and the pansies and daisies and violets in carefully curated cedar boxes hung outside brownstone windows, and how stately and impressive those fine slate steps leading up to brightly painted doors with million dollar brass knockers, oh how I’d like to go in one of those brownstone doors and stand inside, with a cup of coffee in my hand and look out the window at the people, you people, all you people passing by on this sidewalk, but I couldn’t go in, I had to meet my friend in fifteen minutes and strolling by I was among the passerbys, out here in the spring wind with the pink pedals falling on my head, and not a special creature, yet I knew even the ugliest people walking with me and walking past me were beautiful to some one, just not me.
I had with me two books, one of them was about a family that emigrates from Sweden to Nebraska in the 1890s (weird to think about that in the present tense, it was so long ago, but that’s what art and immortality does) and though I was only a few pages in, I already loved the wife of the dying fool who’d acquired the land, I loved how she refused to live in a sod house and made the guy build a log cabin, and then she missed all her fish breakfasts and fish lunches and fish dinners so she takes the wagon twenty miles just to go fishing, and damn, twenty miles was a long way to go in 1890—but then I thought, what kind of guy buys a homestead twenty miles away from a river? I guess they could get you with all kinds of tricks back then, and they still can. Promise a river, or imply a river, in a place on the other side of the globe. But damn, how could your Swedish wife ever be happy that far away from a river? What were you thinking John Benson? Best go die. Best go to the God of Death’s house and knock on his door.
I came across a street fair.
I stopped and actually said to myself, “Oh look, a street fair.”
I didn’t go into the street fair.
I got a double espresso from a place just outside the street fair, a regular, permanent business built of steel and concrete and bricks, rather than entering the street fair and getting streetfaircoffee. I came back out onto the street and looked at the street fair and all the people packed together, roped in by the street fair security guards, the people scrambling and fighting to get lunch. One of the tents said ‘Jerk Off the Grill’ and there were people standing in line to jerk off the grill and those people had an ironic look about them, or a sarcastic look about them, or a knowing look about them, or something, I don’t quite know the difference between ironic and sarcastic and ‘having a knowing look’.
Somebody walked down 9th street and stopped right where I had stopped just minutes before and I saw them see the street fair for the first time and I heard them say, “Oh look, a street fair.” Then it happened again, somebody walked down 9th street and stopped right where I had stopped and I saw them see the street fair for the first time and I heard them say, “Oh look, a street fair.” Then it happened again, somebody walked down 9th street and stopped right where I had stopped and I saw them see the street fair for the first time and I heard them say, “Oh look, a street fair.”
I walked on and had to go quite a few blocks out of my way to get around the street fair and to my delight I saw a guy I used to know, Yaj, who’d gone crazy and left his wife and went to live on the streets. What streets I didn’t know. Maybe this street. There was Yaj, I thought, doing pull-ups on a scaffold, but when I got closer I saw it wasn’t Yaj, it was just some other kind of homeless guy who looked a little bit like him. This is how Yaj left his wife: it’s kind of nuts, and I don’t really want to write about it because I think she is subscribed to this newsletter but also, well also, I don't know what. When Yaj was leaving his wife, she came home and found him packing his clothes and she broke down in tears, they’d been having troubles for some time and he couldn’t keep a job and begun to think that money was evil, which it is, sure, and she tried to convince him to stay with her and talk to a psychiatrist, but he wouldn’t, he was leaving her, and leaving society, besides the jeans and shoes and shirt he was wearing, and the other outfits in his backpack, he was leaving behind all his possessions, including her, and he said the saddest thing, which was that she shouldn’t cry to see him go because to cry to see him gone from her life was a foolish thing—he said, When you see a leaf on the ground, just know that is me. When you see a bird land on a fire escape, know that is me, everything is me. He explained to her the meaning of the Self, which she had never known before. That he had a body, everybody had one, but also he had a Self, and so did everybody. She had heard of the Self before, referred to as the spirit, the soul. And he said his body would one day die but his Self would live forever and always love her. He told her his body was leaving and going to live under a bridge and eat bugs for breakfast but his Self was all things, and when she missed him, all she would have to do is look up at a leaf on a tree and she would see his Self, and if she broke a branch off the tree, the sap that came out, that was his Self too, and she went in the other room and called me for help but I let the call go to voicemail because I hate when people call instead of texting and when she came back into the room, Yaj was gone. He never came back. Later that week, when Yaj still had not returned, she went around to all the shelters and he wasn’t in any of them, and she finally texted all his friends, including me, and none of us knew where Yaj had gone, and it was just last week that I heard from her again and she wanted to know if I wanted any of his books, she was moving into a smaller place and had to re-home some of those books, and I said no, because Yaj had terrible taste, and then she asked me if I wanted one of the sweaters she had knitted for him but I said no to them too because I don’t wear shit like that.
I got to the restaurant early, and I was leaning against the wall reading that novel about those pioneers out on the prairie and I thought, damn, some people just cannot be stopped. Some people will not take ‘no’ for an answer. They’ll make the material world their bitch. That made me think of an expression, and suggestion I used to hear, “You gotta make your own conditions.” I’d mostly hear this expression on job sites, back about eighteen years ago, when guys would also say, “It is what it is.” I like that second expression but don’t ever use it, but I feel of all the pat expressions, all the expressions that men have and say, as if they were toys and had a pull string and a pre-recorded pat expression was uttered when the cord was released, “It is what it is” happens to be the most Zen and most useful of all pat expressions. The expression, “You gotta make your own conditions” is probably the least Zen, but just as useful—you might have to destroy the universe to make yourself a place in the universe and all that. Guys would say, “You gotta make your own conditions” on construction sites I was on, usually on a cold day when we’d have to go to work in the freezing rain. Somebody would say, “Make your own conditions.” Which just meant, you could hang a tarp up and stay dry, or maybe build a whole hooch out of tarps and wire and run an electric cord and put a heater in the hooch where you’d be working, or if they didn’t have heaters on site (they seldom do) you could acquire a 55 gallon drum from somebody who wasn’t looking and fill it with sand and steal five gallons of diesel and soak the sand with diesel and light that on fire with an oxyacetylene torch and then you could stay warm. The other phrase I liked to hear people say was, “Let your wallet be your guide.” They’d say that on rainy/snowy/cold/heatwave days when the bosses weren’t sending us home but it was obvious that no one really wanted to stay and work and we wished we’d get sent home. But me, I haven’t had to deal with any of that lately, about five weeks ago I stopped going to work, and I’ve never been happier, I’ve just been living off the land.
My friend arrived at the Chinese restaurant and we went in and got sat in a bamboo booth and were given tea and we ordered hot pepper chicken to share and I gave my friend the other book I had with me, which was, The Essential Writings of Jimmy Breslin. He hadn’t ever read Jimmy Breslin and I hadn’t either until recently but I bought my friend a copy of this book just after I had read five or six or so of the newspaper columns collected (some for the first time ever back in print since the paper ran then all those years ago) in the book. Mostly the book was newspaper columns, just a few pages each, with other longer articles and works of journalism appearing later. The columns were incredible partly because of Breslin’s prose style and what he chose to write about, but also the way he would arrive at his point, often going on some wayward journey in order to arrive at a thing that other men would go straight down the middle for and miss conveying completely. I explained to my friend that Breslin was the kind of guy who would go to JFK’s funeral just like everybody else, but seeing how crowded the press corp was around the casket and all those people packed in there scrambling to get a quote from Lyndon Johnson, or Jackie O, Breslin went for a walk behind the garage where the gravediggers were taking a break, sitting in the shade and he found the man, Clifton Pollard who had, just that morning, used a back hoe to dig Kennedy’s grave, and he profiled Clifton Pollard for his column. The hot pepper chicken came, and it was hilariously, ten thousand hot peppers cut up and a couple scraps of chicken tossed in. We carefully chopsticked the chicken out and went on living and afterwards went for a couple Guinesses and talked for a while about a marathon he’d run and completed but lost, and how his training had changed recently, following major surgery on his knee. I was listening intently, even though I didn't care, because I needed to make a better friend of this friend of mine, especially since I’d lost so many close friends recently from ‘this’ ‘that’ and ‘the other thing’. My friend said he’d switched up his marathon training, which used to include lots of running, but now hardly had any running at all—what he did do was a lot of bike riding. Since he lived in the city and it was so dangerous to ride a bike, he had bought a rig for his living room, where he took off the back wheel of his bike and bolted it to the rig, and as he pedaled, he watched a virtual version of himself do a bike race in a virtual world. I said, “Wait, what?” He took out his phone and showed me a screenshot of a virtual version of himself riding on a bike through a virtual cartoonish world. I understood then exactly what Yaj had been talking about to his wife. This was the Self. Look at that shit. There’s the body and there’s the Self and it was better to go for a long bike ride in your apartment and watch your Self on a big screen TV (or in my friends’s case, a rather small laptop), than to have to go for a ride out there among the cars who were in some cases trying to kill your body. (And I even understood what Yaj had said once to me back when I used to be able to hang out with him at this very Chinese restaurant on slow Sundays, back when he’d looked at me knowingly and said, “Hey man, there are no chariots, no horses drawing them or roads on which to travel, but he makes up his own chariots, horses, and roads. In that state there are no joys or pleasures. In that state there are no lotus ponds, lakes or rivers, but he makes up his own lotus ponds, lakes and rivers.” I hadn’t understood Yaj then, but I understood him now, and partially got why he bounced. He wasn’t crazy, he just thought of himself as a character in a video game is all.) I got it. Besides when you went for a real-world bike ride, like my marathoner friend, you couldn’t see your Self, all you could see was the world, and the world was ethereal and temporary, what was the fun of being reminded of that? In contrast the Self, even a Self at 720p or 1020p, let alone an HD Self, was eternal and would never age, and never die. My friend then told me that when you won virtual bike races, you got better virtual bikes and they made you go faster, were better for drifting, and you could win races easier without so much exertion in the real world, which seemed kind of like cheating until I remembered there was no such thing.
Natchiketa is one of my favorite stories, especially when his father tells him, Go to hell! And the kid dies! How you wove this story in under all the threads was cool to read.
This is fire.