Everything is Alice

There are silly things that occur with morning writing like going back and putting commas between the day and month where I’ve forgotten them in this here little digital diary. Normally, I get up, drag myself to the bathroom, do my morning toilet, make coffee, and hit this document. However, this morning I woke and forced myself to meditate immediately as I did last night before bed. I’ve been on the meditation kick again and knowing myself, I’ll forget all about it in a month from now, or rather, I’ll have grown frustrated and impatient and reverted back to morning coffee to meet the day and a stiff martini (I made a watermelon and Thai basil martini the other night that did the trick) to take me down.

Meditation seems wholly incompatible with both caffeine and alcohol although, I’ve known few meditation practitioners who abstain from both. The one who I can think of genuinely thought he was a wizard. He was a tall, balding fellow, with a long beard (always have facial hair if you’re losing your hair), perfectly round, penetrating eyes, and a wardrobe that suggested he may have been a full-time Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master. I asked him what his secret was once as he was rarely tired and always smiling with what I would normally consider disproportionate regulatory. He said only, “The secret is to feel good all of the time.” That wasn’t much help, however, he never drank caffeine or alcohol and wore blue light blocking amber glasses so I assume he slept a hell of lot better than I did or do. You’ve got a head start on life if you’re sleeping like a teenager. (Well, maybe not a modern teenager since they’re most likely swiping and tapping until the wee hours like an adult these days.)

I have, at least temporarily, cut the caffeine consumption directly in half. I seem to have found an appropriate amount of caffeine that renders me somewhat alert, despite the continuous yawning throughout the day (I’ve paused here for a long moment to stare off into nothingness since the small amount of caffeine, let’s be honest, isn’t quite giving me the ability to focus in the way I had been previously), and yet, I’m far less irritable (but still plenty irritable to make me fun) than I had been with the double shot of espresso in my morning Americano.

Enough about caffeine. What I wanted to mention was that during meditation a few nights ago, a mantra came to me (which I assumed was just me sitting erect and thinking as always), my own personal sacred utterance. Feel free to steal it should it tickle you. I think I was sitting here in the sweaty garage, not that the environment necessarily had anything to do with it, however, it’s worth mentioning that I’ve probably had low expectations of “getting anywhere” with meditation as a solo practitioner, sans sangha—no fancy rituals, fine smelling incense, and all of that junk. The mantra went like this: Everything is alive and I’m alive with it. Afterwards, I jotted down the line in my Notes application in my iPhone, however, autocorrect replaced alive with Alice. I like that better: Everything is Alice and I’m Alice with it. That feels a little more fitting for the irreverent.

I read on the website for the Jack Kerouac house in Saint Petersburg, Florida, that while he was living there with his mother and wife, Gabrielle and Stella respectively (great names), he was “…attempting to reconcile his Buddhist leanings with his overwhelming urge to drink and carouse, he spent many nights in the peaceful back yard, dragging a cot outside to sleep under the stars.” The poor bastard died at 47 of a stomach hemorrhage from all of the booze.

I attempted to visit Kerouac’s house last week while I was in Saint Petersburg. I hopped on one of those electric scooters near my hotel and mapped out my itinerary: take a right, straight for ten blocks, left, about thirty more blocks, another right, two blocks…and then somewhere over there. I made it about halfway until I hit a no-scoot zone. The scooter shut off after a loud alarm and I was forced to push it back into the scooting zone. It was nearing ninety degrees, was nearly noon, and therefore time for lunch. So I abandoned the Kerouac house and had a few tacos, a nap, and walked to a neighboring sports bar to watch UFC. The rest of the evening was largely uneventful, which really was the idea as the plan has been, just with caffeine, to cut the alcohol in half. While I didn’t get to see the Kerouac house, nor the McGregor fight as it was on well past my bedtime (I know, he broke his ankle), potentially it was enough to have read and identified with, however unfortunate it may be, my own attempts to reconcile my Buddhist leanings with a moderate urge to booze and certainly carouse.

And yet, despite all of my efforts to perfect my routines, habits, and life, I’ll usually come around, as a number of folks have reminded me that I’m “too hard on myself.” There is a quote I read recently, a Zen saying apparently although I’ve never heard it before, that brought some temporary calm and eased up my obsessively controlling side: “The bad news is we’re falling and falling. The good news is that there’s nothing to hold onto.” So I took a deep breath…and made myself an espresso martini. When in doubt, go with both caffeine and alcohol. Santé, Monsieur Kerouac!