The Mirrors We’re Used To
This morning, I looked in the mirror expecting to see thin hair under the bathroom lights. I’ve been gone for the past week, now used to hotel lighting and a friend’s mirror in California, both of which showed very thin hair. I had many conversations about the difference between use and utilize, how they are synonyms, and that people only say utilize to sound more intelligent. I don’t know if this is true or not but I felt that I’ve utilized mirrors to reflect how much hair I do or do not have. Did I use it or did I utilize it? I cannot say.
The first night in California, I stayed in Oakland. I had heard that the city went downhill even more than when I had left in 2021. In the first six months of the pandemic, over 3k businesses closed in the county. In the following year, another 8k. I can’t seem to find further up-to-date statistics specific to the city or maybe it’s that I haven’t had enough coffee yet to want to find them. The hotel I stayed at was at the corner of Telegraph and Grand Avenues. I had a drink at the bar downstairs while staring at the Taco Bell across the street, trying to determine what was on this corner previously. A gas station. Some things had changed.
Ten years before, I had been in love with this city. So much so that I walked around for two years interviewing restaurants, artisans, and food-based organizations, asking them all the unifying question—“What will Oakland look like in 10 years?” Well, no one predicted that it would look like crap, and neither did I. The friend I stayed with in San Francisco had a copy of the book I wrote in his kitchen. I flipped through it one morning and realized that only one of the restaurants I featured was still in operation.
We’ve got leaf blowers in the courtyard this morning. I don’t think a worse tool has ever been invented. The broom was a perfectly designed item. Contentment. Challenge. Good. Bad. Tired. Anxious. Bored. There are so many concepts, feelings, and ideas lodged in my being that I find both worthy and ridiculous. I come back to things, leave them behind, come back again, leave them again. I become bored of them. I miss them. I idealize them. I return. I see it’s nothing special. I am self-interested. I think about myself, who I am, what I stand for, what I value, how I act, how I treat others, how they treat me, what I want, what I don’t want. There are tons of ‘I’s’ in everything I write. I even write personal essays because I find myself worthy of looking at. I find most people worthy of looking at. Sort of.
The false belief I’ve had my entire life is that the so-called spiritual path will deliver me from self-doubt, anxiety, difficulty, anger, any negative feelings I have really or that I identify as negative. What seems more accurate is that I can see the feelings clearly. What that’s meant—or continuously hope it means—is that I can choose a little better each time in my reactions when those feelings come about. I don’t always feel better as a result by any means. There is still quite a bit of emphasis on dwelling on how I feel. That’s my burden. Instead of shaking things off and moving forward, I stop and inspect for long periods. Maybe there is something to learn there.
Anyhow, I was saying that Oakland looks like garbage and how unfortunate that is. I only stayed for a single night. The next day, I hightailed it out of there and ended up on Market St. in San Francisco, also an unfortunate place to be. Since getting sucker-punched in Pittsburgh, I’ve been on edge in sketchy areas of the city. Those used to be my favorite parts of cities, so-called sketchy areas. You know what they look, don’t you? Maybe we all have different ideas of what that looks like. There was a guy, inspecting the sidewalk for half-smoked cigarettes behind me for too many blocks, with a large hunting knife on his waist. I find that sketchy enough. I suppose many more people than I can possibly realize are armed without any of us knowing it. I live in Florida now where the best assumption is that most people are armed. I hate guns, an unpopular opinion around here, and want nothing to do with them.
Why must I always do hard things? Why can’t I just do what I want to do? I’m tired of giving myself a hard time. I want to wake, enjoy my coffee, take a walk, lay on the beach, come back and cook a good meal, meet a friend for a beer, bite, and a few laughs. Then I want to lay here, watch Seinfeld, and then pass out, sleep soundly through the night without the fucking cat waking me up six times.
But instead, today, I’m to go to a meditation retreat for the day. I’ve got a few hours of meditation ahead of me that I’m dreading. Like all things, it’ll be over before I know it. There is no mindfulness left in me. I’m left with mindlessness, oscillating between rumination and fascination. I’m an absolute expert at giving myself a hard time. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m a perfectionist. I tend to think the worst of myself. And yet, when I’m capable of recognizing this cognitive distortion, I have to see it, challenge it, and really kind of look the other way. Speaking of looking the other way, I invented a fly-fishing cast. I call it the “forward backcast.” You cast is if you’re casting ahead of you and at the last second, turn and cast over your weak side. That’s it. It’s not exciting to the majority of folks but maybe my one contribution to the world (even though it’s probably already a thing). Sometimes the only answer is to avert your gaze.
