On Inaccurate Maps

Something that makes us human is our tendency to try to make the world less overwhelming by placing things into categories, with those things we know the least being placed in the biggest scariest buckets.

The first maps depicted known lands in relatively high detail while relegating the unknown/unexplored to large areas of empty space, sometimes occupied by sea monsters.  The map above, picked up on a trip last year to Texas reflects the attitude of many a person I met while there.

Where we are from often distorts our view of the world around us. I am from New Jersey, yet have never said "Joisee" in my life, nor have ever met anyone who pronounces it that way. Except people who are not from New Jersey who find out I'm from New Jersey and say, almost to a person, "Oh, you're from 'Joisee'."

Recently, Dharmaspoon Gal, Maebe, Django, Cadence and I took a road trip through "Miss Again", "Old High", "Canned Turkey", "Ten Seeds", All Hammy", Judgy", and finally to "Swamp Land. "

Being from the North, I confess that I had my own preconceived notions about who I may meet, how we may be treated and what we would encounter.  Think "Deliverance." I didn't want to squeal like a pig.

For some, the war between the states has never ended. In the South, you still see some signs of the Confederacy. Literally. Like giant rebel flags and monuments to various Confederate figures. It's not in your face, all the time, and when it is, it's out there. In the North, things are much more insidious. It's more a patronizing elitist attitude.

Largely I found the people I came across to be either just like the people from Miss Again, but with a Southern accent or maybe a little more outgoing. Not once did I hear banjo music and start to get freaked out. I learned some neat expressions, like "it's coming a flood" to mean it's pouring rain. In Swamp Land, I did have a guy get a little too interested in what we were ordering at the Chinese restaurant, but I think he was just being friendly.

I think that we all need to explore the terrain once in awhile to see how accurate our maps are and to update them if necessary.

On Two Joyces and the Elephant

"Safe!" - Jim Joyce, Umpire
"A man's errors are the portals of discovery." - James Joyce, Writer
"Do not carry with you your mistakes. Do not carry your cares." - The Buddha (in the Elephant verse of the Dhammapada)

The dharmaspoon guy has too short an attention span for baseball, but all he has heard about from his co-workers since Thursday has been talk of a bad call by the veteran umpire, Jim Joyce, at a Major League Baseball game between the Tigers and the Indians that resulted in the Tiger's pitcher, Armando Galarraga being "Robbed" of a perfect game (one in which not a single member of the opposing team was credited with a hit), which is pretty rare and kind of a big deal.


Following the game, the umpire was able to watch a video of the call and admitted it was a bad call, and apologized to Galarraga. Footage of the umpire in the aftermath of the game showed a humbled, sad man who showed remorse over the mistake. Scheduled to umpire the following day for the same two teams at the same stadium, he showed up to a mostly supportive crowd (although had to endure some booing). The pitcher came out and publicly shook Joyce's hand and patted him on the back. The game went on without a hitch.


For fans of baseball, no doubt it would have been a beautiful thing for the Tigers to have their first perfect game, but for people everywhere, what a great example has been set for how to conduct yourself after a mistake has been made. First, there's Joyce, who admitted he was wrong, apologized, and then showed up the next day and did the best job he could do. Next, there's Galarraga, who accomplished something great in the sport, yet will not be officially recognized for it, yet handled his disappointment with dignity and grace: in the immediate aftermath, he actually just smiled and then walked away. Finally, there are the majority of the fans, who recognized that Joyce represents our basic humanity, that despite our best efforts, we sometimes make mistakes.

On Doing Things Properly

"Before we do anything, we should always ask ourselves whether we will be able to do it properly and complete it.  If the answer is no, we should not start." - The Dalai Lama

I love taking pictures and I am somewhat crafty, so I thought that it would be fun to make my wife a cargo bag with pictures of one of her dogs all over it. I had a photo project book with plans and thought it would be relatively inexpensive to make, and so started off in earnest.  True, I had not used a sewing machine since the 7^th grade and true, I had never used the complicated photo software that was required to get the pictures the exact size that I needed, but I knew that I could do it.

I started out by downloading some free photo editing software.  Loaded my pictures. Struggled with the software for a few hours (thought it would take a few minutes) but prevailed.

My wife and I picked out some fabric for the bag, which came to about $15. Spent another  $20 on some photo canvas. The kind that you can use in a home printer. Except, as I was to find out, MY home printer.

I tried and tried to get the printer to take the canvas, to no avail. OK, I thought, I’ll just take it to Kinko’s. Maybe I can supply them with the canvas, which was letter size and they could just print a color copy on it. Wrong. They would not use my canvas, but told me they would be happy to print it out on their machine, at a cost of $100.

Once I start something, I finish it, but I was going to be damned if I was going to pay Kinko’s $100 to print the pictures. I decided to shop around. I went to another printing place and discovered that a) no one wanted to touch my photo canvas and b) it really costs $100 to do what I wanted.

Still, on principal, I was not going to let my photo canvas go to waste, and I wasn’t going to pay $100 to get the job done. I started to research printers and found one for $150 that would take the photo canvas. I wasn’t happy about getting it, but it had all sorts of whistles and bells and I could then use it for other projects, so at least I’d get something for my money beyond a onetime printing.

Excited, I got home and printed out the pictures. Had to throw out the first canvas as it was printed in the wrong mode and didn’t look right. Printed out the rest. Used up almost all of the ink. Once I laid them out side by side, I realized that they were the wrong size. I was out of ink and out of canvas, so now I had to order them, at a combined cost of $60. 

One week later, the new canvas came in. Printed everything out, the correct size this time. Now the only thing left was to sew.  In other times, I may have attempted to do this myself, but finally, I realized that I was in over my head and so deferred to my wife, who has much better skills in this area.

My wife finished the bag, and it came out very well. While the initial idea was to make it for her completely, this ended up being a nice way to do it because we got to work on it together.

So, in the end, we made the bag, properly and completely. The path there was not easy and it was not cheap, but we did not give up. I think that is important as there are too many things in life we start but never finish…

Why you should never bring dessert to a dinner party with mostly strangers

"Offend in neither word nor deed. Eat with moderation. Live in your heart." - the Buddha

The above quote reminded the Dharmaspoon Guy of a dinner party he and his wife recently attended. I perhaps should have shared the quote with the guests. Highlights of the evening's surreal events are described below. I warn you that several animals are harmed/killed in the telling of this story, so reader, beware:

“…so, I decided that I have had enough. I wait out in the garage, for him to come back. Well, eventually he does, and so I corner him and start beating him with the shovel…and he’s not having any of it…he’s giving me quite a hard time…”

“Pardon”, I say, thinking maybe I’ve heard something wrong, suspecting that I hadn’t.

I guess it’s my fault. I had been trying to tune out the incessant chatter, instead focusing intensely on my fork, wondering if I stuck it into my hand if it would be less painful than enduring the rest of the conversation.

I usually pride myself in being able to endure brutal dinner conversation, yet I was unprepared – from the domineering, pedantic, dinner host, who apparently made something of a past time of bludgeoning small animals to death, to Herman and Agnes (not their real names, although they probably deserve to have them used), the insufferable couple who monopolized most of the conversation, alternately by describing their dull and uninteresting jobs in excruciating detail, and coming up with fantastic lies built off of random things said in conversation, like it was some kind of improvisational exercise. And maybe it was. How else could you explain discussion that included talk of firemen burning down houses “to make a point”, theories about how the homeless guys with signs at highway exits all make $300 a day and are actually part of the mafia, descriptions of how Guatemalans ride on top of trains even though “there are no seats up there, so they have to hang on tight”, and the fact that if anyone did actually have something interesting to say, a few second later, Agnes would remember that she had the same thing happen to her or had an encounter with one of the players in the story. Like if you said there was an arsonist in your town in the ‘80s, she’d say that she remembers, that the arsonist was in fact her neighbor, and that she had tried to burn her car, “but it didn’t take.”

With the exception of my wife, the only other people at the party worth talking to were in exile at the far corners of the room. Had my wife not been directing all of her resources to preventing herself from actually leaping across the table and throttling the female member of the insufferable couple, we may have talked.

“I said, I was beating the raccoon with the shovel, and he was giving me a hard time…”

Why did I bring dessert? It pretty much guaranteed that we would be there for the duration. I thought of making some other excuse, so we could leave early, but I really liked the pie plate we brought. It was actually a nice piece of pottery and I didn’t want to abandon it.

“Oh.” I said, hoping the rest of the story was about a rabid animal that had been terrorizing the household… “Did it seem rabid?,” I asked hopefully.

“How should I know?”, the host replied. “Anyhow, the raccoon kept getting into the food, so it had to go…”

“So you beat it with a shovel?”

“I believe in a fair fight”, he said, with no sense of irony.

I wanted to ask him if the raccoon had a shovel too, but I got the sense that if I kept it up, I would be next. He continued to describe the act of bludgeoning the animal to death.  He really got into the story and when he was done, we all sat there in stunned silence. For about 30 seconds. Then Aggie cleared her throat and announced: “There was this one time I came home and Herman was beating a rooster with a 2 x 4…”

Some compost

“If you determine your course with force or speed, you miss the way” – the Buddha

I enjoy writing the way some people enjoy taxidermy. I enjoy the details. I like to capture something, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, and present it in a way that is a somewhat idealized or amplified version of what I started with.  Add some meaning, some interpretation to it. Build a story around it. When you see a stuffed bear, I doubt the person who dispatched it confronted an 11 foot growling menace, standing on its hind legs, swiping at the hunter before finally being subdued after a lengthy bout of hand to hand combat.  More likely is a scenario involving sneaking up on the doomed bear and shooting it before it even knew what was happening.  

I don’t rush my writing, because doing so makes you end up with the written equivalent of pulling a radish out of the ground before its ready. You can’t force it. 

I always have a number of ideas of what I would like to write floating around in my head. There is often a gap from a few days to a few years before I actually put pen to paper.  In Writing Down the Bones, author Natalie Goldberg calls this waiting process “Composting” and it’s something I have been doing without having a name for it for some time.

For awhile now, I have wanted to write a poem that expresses my love for my wife. Poetry is something I know very little about and write even less. I mainly stick to short stories.  Still, I felt I had at least one in me. I just didn’t know how to get it out. So I waited and I waited.

The other day, and don’t ask me why, I was researching the meaning our names and when I saw what they were, I knew that the poem was ready to come out:

young wolf and messenger from god

i, young wolf, have wed

messenger from god

who has taught me beauty and love

and truth and grace

i keep her safe and protect her

and she, me

together we walk in the same direction

to nowhere and everywhere in particular

                                                            -dsg

On noticing the details: The monkey in the theater

I was sitting in the doctor’s office the other day and there was a picture of a local historic theater on the examination room wall. It was a highly detailed ink drawing that, at a distance, looked like a black and white photograph. To the right of the picture was block of text almost the same size as the picture. The text summarized the history of the building, noted the specific make, models, and years of the cars in the foreground, and recounted the story of the opening night of the theater; which apparently involved dancing girls and a loose monkey climbing in the moviegoer’s laps while the theater’s owner and staff, Keystone Cop-like, tried to capture it. I learned that there was originally a bowling alley in the basement and that the carpets and water fountains were exact replicas of the ones found in the Roxy Theater in New York City. 

When people visit us, I often take them on what I like to call semi-speculative historical tours.  My narrative is a mix of things that I have heard, things that I have read, and things that may well be true about the various structures, streets, and natural features of my fair city.

People politely listen and silently wonder why we can’t just walk from point a to point b without a lecture seem to appreciate learning these tid-bits as much as I do and I think it really adds to the enjoyment of the visit.

Whenever I am some place new or come across something that is old, I learn whatever I can about it. I read every sign. Listen to every story. Google and Wikipedia the heck out of it. I think it makes me able to appreciate it more. Plus, it kills me not to know how things came to be.

Prius Driving Whole Foods Shopping Litter-bugging Hypocrites

On my bicycle commute to work I rode past a Whole Foods Market shopping bag filled to the brim with trash, lying in the middle of the road.  I was reminded of the following passage in the Dhammapada: "Bright but senseless are the fine but empty words of the man who does not mean what he says."  A few weeks ago, I read about a research project in Canada that, according to the authors, demonstrates that when we do things that we think are good, we accumulate a sort of credit that allows us to be ironically less altruistic in our future interactions. I couldn't help but picture someone, upon finishing their $40 hot bar dinner on the way back from their post-yoga shopping trip throwing the bag out of their Prius window. Upon further reflection, I decided that this was not really a fair or productive exercise and finally recognized that it's not like I stopped to pick it up. I was too busy condemning the imaginary scofflaw (who I am sure was listening to his ipod at the time.) This brings me to perhaps the more relevant part of that passage: "Look to your own faults. What you have done or left undone. Overlook the faults of others." And still I try...

You can read the article yourself and decide what you think: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/03/01/0956797610363538.full