I Could Be Wrong, But...
Was $14,345.95— |
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Where I Lived
June 10, 2008
©2008 David Boyne
To Erin, the oracle of the Pannikin Chalkboard, and to Pauline, who knows a Happy Accident is announced, “HA!”
Stand in the place where you live
Now face North
Think about direction
Wonder why you haven't before
Now stand in the place where you work
Now face West
Think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven't beforeFrom the song Stand, by REM (©Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe)
Some people, including Zen Buddhist monks at monasteries, use the sound waves from bells, struck once, at random, throughout the day, as a way to call them back to being more present in this one forever and only moment.
I use the air-horns of trains roaring past at 70 miles per hour.
If equating a resonating bell struck at a quiet monastery with the air-horn of a train blasting through town doesn’t add up for you, then, as salespeople all around the world command, “Allow me to demonstrate!”
On June 10, 2008, on or about 6:15 in the morning, driving my car in my half-awake pre-coffee trance, I approached the intersection of D Street and Pacific Coast Highway in downtown Encinitas and the traffic lights began flashing red, the railroad crossing alarm began clang-clang-clanging, and the black-and-white barriers began lowering to block the road. The air-horn of a fast approaching train blored. (Technical note: ‘bloared” is blared and roared, train-wrecked.) From the other end of town the shock waves from the train horn going BLOARRRRR reached me—and then the train was THERE—the horn going BLOAR-BLOAR-BLOAR—the shock waves of sound hitting against and entering into my body—and then the train was PAST—and the Doppler diminuendo of its horn BLOARRRrrrreeddd off on down the line.
I was suddenly being more present in this one forever and only moment. I perceived myself, and the world I swam inside, as if watching from outside of my body—which, I knew, I was.
For one lingering moment, I was aware of the alarm bells still clang-clang-clanging, the red lights still flashing, and the barrier blocking the road lifting. Then all was silent. As suddenly as it began, it was over. Like this one forever and only moment.
Alone inside my empty car I whispered, “I love this.”
Just like the bells being rung for the monks and others, my trains come randomly. (I’ve never bothered to get, let alone to memorize, a schedule.) Just like the bells being rung at the monastery, my train horns send out sound waves—very big ones—that cross space and pass into my body, vibrating me wherever I happen to be, whether I’m standing on the street just five feet from the train blasting past, or lying awake in bed a half-mile away in the middle of the night wondering how long I have to live before I go back into the silent nothingness, from whence I came.
Wherever I chance to be when the invisible shockwave of the bloring train horn reaches me, I’m reminded to drop the weight of the past that I am hauling around and to let go of the future I am loading with expectations, and to be more present in this one forever and only moment.
On the morning of June 10, 2008, after the train passed, I turned left, drove North on Pacific Coast Highway, waved to the guy wearing the yellow reflective vest and standing at the big STOP sign with a stack of newspapers he sold to drivers who stop at the STOP sign. Two years ago, I STOPPED reading newspapers, as many years before I had STOPPED watching televisions, having come to an understanding that the stuff which others call ‘content,’ and that fills the space inside newspapers and televisions, is all about insisting that I feel afraid of this world I live in. Still, I always wave to the man who stands by the STOP sign selling newspapers, and he always waves back. We are in this together.
As it turned out, I lived long enough to drive the mile from my home, to the Pannikin Café.
I parked behind the yellow wood building with its white trimmed peaked roof and second-floor balcony that once upon a time in a former life before working as a café had worked as a train station. I walked to the front, to the entrance. Outside the entrance to the Pannikin Café in Encinitas, California, there is an easel with a chalkboard on both sides. And on this easel outside the entrance to the Pannikin Café in Encinitas, California, almost every day, cryptic, meaning-filled messages appear. Once upon a time, Life arranged for me to meet the woman who writes cryptic, meaning-filled messages on the easel with a chalkboard on both sides outside the entrance of the Pannikin Café in Encinitas, California. Her name is Erin. I had asked Erin, “Why do you write these messages on the chalkboard?”
Erin had said, “I want to help.”
As it turned out, I lived long enough to read Erin’s message on the morning of June 10, 2008:
Where Are You Dwelling?
The Neighborhood of Possibility?
Or the Valley of Discontent?
Location. Location. Location.
I was about to laugh aloud, but was stopped by the sound of laughter behind me. I turned to see a woman who had just read Erin’s message. Smiling, her brightened eyes found mine, and she said, “Always worth the reading!”
I could be wrong, but I suspect this is why Erin writes messages on the chalkboard outside the entrance to the Pannikin Café in Encinitas, California.
As it turned out, I lived long enough to leave the Pannikin and to drive myself and an extra-large black coffee and a still warm-from-the-oven raspberry bran muffin a few miles north to the cliffs in Carlsbad. Parking tight to the curb, and looking straight out the windshield, it felt as if my car were floating on the grey-green ocean. I watched as curving backs of black dolphins swelled above the white-frothy waves, then disappeared, then swelled up again, farther along on their journey, again and again until beyond my sight. We are in this together.
I watched pelicans surf the micro-thermals made by the rising, cresting, and forever rolling forward waves. The pelicans skimmed inches above the water, swooshing along the troughs of the waves, making micro-adjustments to their body, their angle, their wing conformation, until the wave began collapsing and they swooshed to the wave forming behind it, perfectly surfing the micro-thermals created by the waves for half-mile-and longer distances without a single flap of their wings. We are in this together.
To my left, there was a promontory of the cliff jutting out twenty feet, where, if I wanted, I could go stand at the very edge, as some mornings I do, and look straight out to the horizon, and feel as if I were standing on the ocean.
But on June 10, 2008 I sat in my car, sipping very, very good hot coffee; nibbling, when I remembered to, a very, very good and still warm-from-the-oven raspberry bran muffin. I had opened the windows of my car so the air, perfumed and salted and carrying roiling sound waves from the surf pounding on the beach straight down below my car, flowed into my car and flowed into my lungs and flowed into my blood with each slow, deep breath I took.
As I watched as much of everything of the world I live in as I could see, I felt excitement and sadness and eternal aloneness, as if I were drowning, without dying, in a forever fluid, molten world of forms. Which, I know, I am.
To my left, on the promontory, I saw a blue plastic trash barrel. There was more trash on the tan dirt than inside the blue barrel. Which, I knew, was as likely due to hungry seagulls and crows plucking out the trash to search for food, as it was due to hungry humans plucking out the trash to find aluminum cans that could be redeemed for money, and the money redeemed for food or alcohol or some other drug of their choice. We are in this together.
Near the blue plastic trash barrel, I saw a ground squirrel. (Technical Note: squirrel is a word for cute rat.) From a crumpled white paper bag on the ground, Squirrel expertly extracted a small white rectangular plastic pouch. With astonishingly dexterous hands and nimble fingers that would be the envy of any micro-surgeon, Squirrel sliced the plastic pouch and began licking at the neat incision he had made. It was a bag of hot sauce. Squirrel spasmodically licked the hot sauce, and then spasmodically shook his head. The same thing I do, when experiencing wasabi or habanera. Squirrel then went back for more, the way I, when experiencing the fire of wasabi or habanera, go back for more. As I watched Squirrel spasmodically lick the hot sauce and spasmodically shake his head, I thought how addiction, like pornography, is difficult to define. But I know it when I see it.
Squirrel finally dropped the emptied packet of hot sauce from both paws, the way a Bowery bum would release the promise of his Past, or a drained quart of cheap sugary wine, to shatter on the sidewalk. Squirrel, swaying on his hind legs, staggered to the left, stopped, dropped to all fours, shook his head spasmodically, became perfectly still for a full three seconds — — — then methodically set about exploring the contents of the other crumpled white and brown paper bags scattered around the blue plastic trash barrel.
I dropped a bit of my still warm-from-the-oven raspberry bran muffin out the car window. Squirrel paid no attention, and continued rooting around the scattered trash. I shrugged off the snub, looked out at the ocean, sipped coffee, nibbled muffin, went empty of words each time the curving black backs of dolphins traveling north came up from under the water and into my world, or the pelicans, alone, or in pairs, or sometimes in long lines of 7 or 9 or more than I could count, swooped down to skim just inches above the waves and glide half-mile distances with not a single flap of their wings. And, as always happens, I fell out of being more present in this one forever and only moment, not coming back until I realized that I was in the middle of a lively back-and-forth conversation with a beautiful and unhappy woman I loved with all my heart and who I had not seen or spoken with, outside of my mind, in a long time. We are in this together.
In this distracted state, which, I know, is my home state, I chanced to look to my left and I saw Squirrel beside my car now, eating the bit of still warm from the oven raspberry bran muffin I had dropped there.
I then offered advice to go with the muffin. “My friend, you damn well could use some whole-grain fiber after all that junk you’ve been eating.”
Squirrel ignored me, standing on his back legs, nibbling bran muffin, and looking straight out at the ocean, perhaps thinking how it felt as if he were standing on the ocean.
I watched Squirrel in his trance, from within my trance, and I sipped my coffee, a drug to which I am addicted, and wondered how many animals have become addicted to man’s trashy food. As I thought this, I watched the front tires of a large SUV pulling in to the curb appear in my vision and pass two inches behind friend Squirrel’s back.
I whispered, “Whoa!”
Squirrel sprinted to the safety of the car-free promontory.
From my car, I watched a woman get out of the SUV. She wore black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt that had the letters MICKEY embroidered across the back. She carried a large plastic bag filled with cracker crumbs. She began spreading the cracker crumbs on the ground, aiming clucking noises, and come-hither nods toward Squirrel.
Squirrel was having none of it.
Minutes passed. I traveled somewhere I cannot recall. When I came back, I watched MICKEY, looking disappointed, climb into her big vehicle, and start the loud engine. But then she got out again, leaving the engine running, walked onto the promontory, glanced at the ocean, glanced at a watch on her wrist, then quickly began gathering handfuls of the trash scattered on the ground and carrying it back to the trash can.
Then she drove away.
Squirrel immediately ran onto the flat ground near the suddenly re-filled blue trash barrel. He stood on his hind legs, I am sure, but if he were truly shaking a raised fist at MICKEY’S disappearing SUV, I am not sure. It could have been a trick of my trance.
Nonetheless, breakfast was over.
I lived long enough to drive three miles from the cliffs, to my office. Walking inside, I did what I always do first, raise the blinds covering the wall-to-ceiling windows to reveal the trees and bushes and flowers and hummingbirds and spiders and bees roaming just inches from where I work at my desk. I then sat at my desk, staring into the vivid colors of the box called computer, and fell into work, the way a child, exhausted by a long good day and not wanting it to ever end, falls into sleep.
The train horn, the message on the Pannikin Chalkboard, the cliffs, the ocean, the surging black backs of the dolphins, the wave-surfing lines of pelicans, the blue plastic trash barrel, Squirrel buzzed on hot sauce, all I have tediously described above, were gone gone gone from my awareness.
Then.
There was a soft thump against one of the big windows and it brought me back to being more present in this one forever and only moment.
I knew the sound. Hearing it now, caused a hurt in the center of my chest as if there was a permanent purpled bruise there and a hand had just pressed on it. Which, I knew, was true.
The soft thump had been the sound of a small brown-flecked bird having flown into the virtually invisible glass door that I had left open at a right angle to the virtually invisible windows of my office.
I stood in the doorway, watching down on the injured and dying fluff of stunned life at my feet. As every small meaningless event of each forever and only moment of the morning came flooding back into my thoughts, the center of my chest ached as the pressure of that invisible hand pushed hard against the bruise, my birthright, that I carried there.
I watched as the small life form made three slow attempts to lift it’s head, as if it were trying to sight up the long straight line of life form that was me, into eternity. I felt like a skyscraper, with a child at my base, craning his neck to sight along my length into the eternal bright sky of the future.
In the slowed down time of the bird straining to raise its head three times, its neck broken, on the screen of my mind a silent movie from my past played. From within this movie, I watched out the huge windshield of a large rented U-Haul truck that I was driving across the Great Salt Lake of Utah. Asleep in the passenger seat beside me was the woman who was my wife, but would, a few months later, be the woman I had once been married to. The truck carried all the worldly possessions contained in our rapidly disintegrating union and with each mile west that I drove, I became aware of my breath becoming heavier and heavier with the inarticulate sadness I had accumulated in my just over thirty years of life. In that moment, an iridescently blue and vividly bright yellow bird smashed into the big high windshield of the rented truck carrying everything that I had gained and was in the process of losing. My wife slept. I drove on, knowing I would never be the same again.
As it turned out, I would live long enough so that on June 10, 2008 I would watch down on a dying bird at my feet and simultaneously watch everything around me, letting it all come flooding into me as if I was drowning without dying. Which, I knew, I was. I felt as if I had slipped behind a diaphanous veil, slipped past a secret border, slipped past an invisible boundary separating me from everything, absolutely everything, in this world of forms of which I was but one more form. Which, I knew, I had.
Then the phone rang.
The shockwaves of the ringing called me back to being more present in this one forever and only moment.
I would never be the same again.