This link is swiped from StrangeBlackCat:

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday he would give equipment and training to Palestinian security forces and he offered to help rebuild the Palestinians’ crumbling infrastructure in Gaza, which Israel is withdrawing from this summer.

Article: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/04/29/meast.putin.ap/index.html

In other stories, my return to the United States has been delayed because the Teamsters have been causing road obstructions in Canada protesting high fuel prices. This has resulted in the Uhaul truck we rented not having made it into Vancouver, sticking us here.

My dad used to be a Teamster and suggested that I should support the strike. The problems I have with that:

* Petro fuel should be expensive. If they’re protesting something, it should be that they’re not getting paid enough for their deliveries to cover fuel costs.

* The Teamsters took a major part in undermining the American rail system. Yeah, I know, these are Canadian teamsters, but I’m still annoyed about it.

I’m not a “will never cross a picket line” type of person. I need to know the reason behind the picket line. See, I keep saying I’m a bad “liberal”.

If they were protesting their pay not being high enough to compensate for the increasing costs of fuel, I’d be in far more support. As base costs go up, those costs need to be passed on, eventually being covered by the consumer of those delivered goods.

Don’t blink or you’ll miss the turns. It doesn’t look like we’re doing St. Kitts in May after all. Makes sense – it seemed like we were burning more money than we needed to going down there.

Normally, I’d just include a link to something like this, but it is well worth reading for anyone with a taste for or a curiosity about Zen:

ZEN IS BORING

Let’s face it. Zen is boring. You couldn’t find a duller, more tedious practice than Zazen. The philosophy is dry and unexciting. It’s amazing to me anyone reads this page at all. Don’t you people know you could be playing Tetris, right now? That there are a million free porno sites out there? Get a life, why don’t you?!

Joshu Sasaki, a Zen teacher from the Rinzai Sect, once said that Buddhist teachers always try to make students long for the Buddha World, but that if the students knew how really dry and tasteless the Buddha World actually was, they’d never want to go. He’s right. Look at Zen teachers. Not a one of them has any sense of fashion. They sit around staring at blank walls. Ask them about levitation, they won’t tell you. Ask them about life after death, they change the subject. Ask them about miracles and they start spouting nonsense about carrying buckets of water and chopping up fire wood. They go to bed early and wake up early. Zen is a philosophy for nerds.

Boredom is important. Most of your life is dull, tasteless and boring. If you practice Zazen, you learn a lot about boredom. I remember the first time I sat Zazen, I was real excited. I figured I’d be seeing visions of four armed Krishnas descending from the Heavens, or I’d be fading into The Void just like the old Beatles song, or reach Nirvana (whatever that was) or some great wonderful thing. But the clock just ticked away, my legs started aching, and stupid thoughts kept drifting by. Maybe I wasn’t doing it right, I thought. But no, year after year it was the same. Boring, boring, boring. After almost 20 years it’s still boring as Hell.

People hate their ordinary lives. We want something better. This, our day to day life of drudgery and work, is boring, dull and ordinary, we think. But someday, someday… There’s an episode of The Monkees* where Mike Nesmith says that when he was in high school he used to walk out on the school’s empty stage with a guitar in his hands thinking “Someday, someday.” Then he said that now (now being 1967, at the height of the Monkees fame) he walks out on stage in front of thousands of fans and thinks “Someday, someday.” That’s the way life is. It’s never going to be perfect. Whatever “someday” you imagine, it will ever come. Never. No matter what it is. No matter how well you build your fantasy or how carefully you follow all the steps necessary to achieve it. Even if it comes true exactly the way you planned, you’ll end up just like Mike Nesmith. Someday, someday… I guarantee you.

Your life will change. That’s for sure. But it won’t get any better and it won’t get any worse. How can you compare now to the past? What do you know about the past? You don’t have a clue! You have no idea at all what yesterday was really like, let alone last week or ten years ago. The future? Forget about it…

People long for big thrills. Peak experiences. Some people come to Zen expecting that Enlightenment will be the Ultimate Peak Experience. The Mother of All Peak Experiences. But real enlightenment is the most ordinary of the ordinary. Once I had an amazing vision. I saw myself transported through time and space. Millions, no, billions, trillions, Godzillions of years passed. Not figuratively, but literally. Whizzed by. I found myself at the very rim of time and space, a vast giant being composed of the living minds and bodies of every thing that ever was. It was an incredibly moving experience. Exhilarating. I was high for weeks. Finally I told Nishijima Sensei about it . He said it was nonsense. Just my imagination. I can’t tell you how that made me feel. Imagination? This was as real an experience as any I’ve ever had. I just about cried. Later on that day I was eating a tangerine. I noticed how incredibly lovely a thing it was. So delicate. So amazingly orange. So very tasty. So I told Nishijima about that. That experience, he said, was enlightenment.

You need a teacher like that. The world needs lots more teachers like that. Countless teachers would have interpreted my experience as a merging of my Atman with God, as a portent of great and wonderful things, would have praised my spiritual growth and given me pointers on how to go even further. And I would have been suckered right in to that, let me tell you! Woulda fallen for it hook line and sinker, boy howdy. If a teacher doesn’t shatter your illusions he’s doing you no favors at all.

Boredom is what you need. Merging with the Mind of God at the Edge of the Universe, that’s excitement. That’s what we’re all into this Zen thing for, right? Eating tangerines? Come on, dude! What could be more boring than eating a tangerine?

Some years ago some psychologists did a study in which they sat some Buddhists monks and some regular folks in a room and wired them up to EEG machines to record their brain activity. They told everyone to relax, then introduced a repetitive stimulus, a loudly ticking clock, into the room. The normal folks’ EEG showed that their brains stopped reacting the stimulus after a few seconds. But the Buddhists just kept on mentally registering the tick every time it happened. Psychologists and journalists never quite know how to interpret that finding, though it’s often cited. It’s a simple matter. Buddhists pay attention to their lives. Ordinary folks figure they have better things to think about.

If you really take a look at your ordinary boring life, you’ll discover something truly wonderful. Our regular old pointless lives are incredibly joyful — amazingly, astoundingly, relentlessly, mercilessly joyful. You don’t need to do a damned thing to experience such joy either. People think they need big experiences, interesting experiences. And it’s true that gigantic, traumatic experiences sometimes bring people, for a fleeting moment, into a kind of enlightened state. That’s why such experiences are so desired. But it wears off fast and you’re right back out there looking for the next thrill. You don’t need to take drugs, blow up buildings, win the Indy 500 or walk on the moon. You don’t need to go hang-gliding over the Himalayas, you don’t need to screw your luscious and oh-so-willing secretary or party all night with the beautiful people. You don’t need visions of merging with the totality of the Universe. Just be what you are, where you are. Clean the toilet. Walk the dog. Do your work. That’s the most magical thing there is. If you really want to merge with God, that’s the way to do it. This moment. You sitting there with your hand in your underwear and potato chip crumbs on your chin, scrolling down your computer screen thinking “This guy’s out of his mind.” This very moment is Enlightenment. This moment has never come before and once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. You are this moment. This moment is you. This very moment is you merging with the total Universe, with God Himself.

The life you’re living right now has joys even God will never know.

FOOTNOTE

*For those of you not up on old US pop culture, The Monkees was a TV comedy show about a rock and roll band that ran from 1967-68 and was rerun throughout the 70s. The Monkees were supposed to be just like The Beatles. Mike Nesmith was the “leader” of the band, the John Lennon character. To everyone’s surprise, when The Monkees, a fake rock band, went on tour they attracted almost as many squealing teenage fans as The Beatles had a few years before.1

It is frustrating how much I seem to “get it” any time I think about it, but how much I seem to forget it as I go about my life. As anyone who knows me can attest, I crave the intense. Motorcycling, drugs (legal and otherwise), dancing, sex, spicy food, loud music, polar bear, speeding, moshing, etc. – anything that gives me a thrill, a rush, an experience. But when I think about my best experiences, they’ve generally been intense in their own way, but due to depth rather than intensity. Some of the same things, even, but not as superficially, not trying so hard. When I think about some of my worst experiences, they’ve been when I’ve tried so hard to get a rush that I destroy myself or those around me, especially when I include intoxicants.

Not making any resolutions here, I’m still very attached to my vices, but it is food for thought.

Ok, a quick update on 2005, somewhat vague, and poorly written due to low levels of sleep:

In January, I came up to Vancouver BC to visit a friend. Somehow, the company he worked for got the impression that I knew how to code Macromedia Flash MX and told him to have me come in and work on it. I didn’t actually know how to do Flash, but came in and committed to hitting a deadline in early March, and I managed to hit it.

The original reason I’d come up to visit was that my friend and a couple people he knows were interested in starting a business, and he asked me to join in. We set up an office and have been traveling back and forth between BC and the Twin Cities monthly. To be frank, we’ve been shifting directions and ideas so often that not a lot has gotten done. My perspective a couple weeks ago was that I’ve burned through about as much cash as I can afford to, and I need to pack up my computer and my cat and head back to the states. My friend is no longer working at his job up here, so he was planning to head back to the Twin Cities as well.

However, in the last week or two, it has begun to look like we have a direction, and one of the guys who has access to a bit more liquid assets than we do is willing to pay both my friend and I a bit as we spin up. So, instead of being home in May, we’re just going to be back for a couple weeks, then heading down to the Caribbean to meet with some other people who we’ll be working with to get the project kicked off.

So far, the first half of 2005 has not been lucrative, but it has certainly been interesting!

Non-work related things I want to get to happen this summer: At least one good motorcycle tour. At least one good bicycle tour. Yearly “cabin” trip. Get together with the folks, possibly house boating…. Start regular band practices again and have a couple gigs by late summer. Get something in the garden before its completely too late.

This article, entitled “War is a Racket”, was written by Smedley Darlington Butler, a decorated, retired Major General who served in the US Marine Corps. The article was written as he saw the ramp up for World War II, and is well worth the read.

http://costofwar.com/

While I certainly can’t keep up with reading all the post on my motorcycle list, I sure do enjoy the forum. My bike tends to appeal to mature riders, so we get a lot of perspectives, view points, and kidding around about age. I particularly enjoyed this one:

“Hey Dad,” one of my kids asked the other day, “What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?”

“We didn’t have fast food when I was growing up,” I informed him. “All the food was slow.”

“C’mon, seriously. Where did you eat?”

“It was a place called ‘at home,’” I explained. “Grandma cooked every day and when Grandpa got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn’t like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.”

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn’t tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table. But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it:

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore Levis, set foot on a golf course, traveled out of the country or had a credit card. In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card. The card was good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears AND Roebuck. Either way, there is no Roebuck anymore. Maybe he died.

My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we never had heard of soccer. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow). We didn’t have a television in our house until I was 11, but my grandparents had one before that. It was, of course, black and white, but they bought a piece of colored plastic to cover the screen. The top third was blue, like the sky, and the bottom third was green, like gr ass. The middle third was red. It was perfect for programs that had scenes of fire trucks riding across someone’s lawn on a sunny day. Some people had a lens taped to the front of the TV to make the picture look larger.

I was 13 before I tasted my first pizza, it was called “pizza pie.” When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too. It’s still the best pizza I ever had.

We didn’t have a car until I was 15. Before that, the on ly car in our family was my grandfather’s Ford. He called it a “machine.”

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was in the living room and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn’t know weren’t already using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home. But milk was.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers. I delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I got to keep 2 cents. I had to get up at 4 AM every morning. On Saturday, I had to collect the 42 cents from my customers. My favorite customers were the ones who gave me 50 cents and told me to keep the change. My least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home on collection day.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies. Touching someone else’s tongue with yours was called French kissing and they didn’t do that in movies. I don’t know what they did in French movies. French movies were dirty and we weren’t allowed to see them.

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with your children or grandchildren. Just don’t blame me if they bust a gut laughing.

Growing up isn’t what it used to be, is it?

How many do you remember?

Head lights dimmer switches on the floor.
Ignition switches on the dashboard.
Heaters mounted on the inside of the fire wall.
Real ice boxes.
Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.
Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner.
Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.

Older Than Dirt Quiz: Count all the ones that you remember not the ones you
> were told about Ratings at the bottom.
>
1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
5. Coffee shops or diners with table side juke boxes
6. Home milk deliver y in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OLive-6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15. S&H Green Stamps
16. Hi-fi’s
17. Metal ice trays with lever
18. Mimeograph paper
19 Blue flashbulb
20. Packards
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-5 = You’re still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don’t tell your age,
If you remembered 16-25 = You’re older than dirt!

Later!

Hell Money

Here’s one from xxxIceAngel, that I’m going to copy. I only need change the name:

Living Will

I, Jason Trevor Goray, being of sound mind and body, do not wish to be kept alive indefinitely by artificial means. Under no circumstances should my fate be put in the hands of right wing politicians who couldn’t pass ninth-grade biology if their lives depended on it. If a reasonable amount of time passes and I fail to sit up and ask for a shot of Jameson or a good bottle of Irish Whiskey, it should be presumed that I won’t ever get better.

When such a determination is reached, I hereby instruct my significant other, family members and attending physicians to pull the plug, reel in the tubes and call it a day. Under no circumstances shall the members of the Legislature enact a special law to keep me on life-support machinery. It is my wish that these boneheads mind their own damn business, and pay attention instead to the health, education and future of the millions of Americans who aren’t in a permanent coma. Under no circumstances shall any politicians butt into this case . I don’t care how many fundamentalist votes they’re trying to scrounge for their run for the next presidency, it is my wish that they play politics with someone else’s life and leave me alone to die in peace. If any of my family goes against my wishes and turns my case into a political cause, I hereby promise to come back from the grave, curse them and make his or her existence a living hell. I request to be buried with a bottle of nice aged scotch to bribe my way through the Borderlands

Glad I was in Canada for most of the drama this post was in response to – I probably heard 1/100th as much about it as you yanks.

Don’t forget to offer the Irish Whiskey.

Frequently.

Have a couple shots yourself.

Bored and in Minneapolis this weekend?

For those of you in the area, a couple events:

Sat. 4/2 @ 11am @ CWA Local 7200 Union Hall, 3521 E. Lake St, Mpls.$5 cover. Food provided.
A national hero and internationally revered political voice for the oppressed, “Don Rafa” has dedicated his entire life to the liberation of Puerto Rico. He served 25 years in U.S. prisons for his role in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence from US colonialism and the last 25 years furthering that struggle, linking it in solidarity with the working people of the Cuban revolution, the working people of Venezuela, and liberation movements globally. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear a living legend! FFI: (612) 730-9076
Volunteer Day

Sunday, April 10th, 3pm. at the First Unitarian Society, 900 Mt. Curve Ave., Mpls.
Jimmy Massey will speak at a public event with music by Pete Wagner and readings by well-known TC writers. Massey, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, is a twelve-year veteran US Marine Corps Staff Sergeant. He was honorably discharged in December of 2003. He took part in the initial invasion of Iraq and the drive to Baghdad. He witnessed and took part in the killing of innocent civilians which turned him against the war. He has recently completed a book “Cowboys From Hell” and is seeking a publisher. Please attend to hear Jimmy and his story!!! Sponsored by Veterans for Peace and Iraq Peace Action Coalition. Co-sponsors include the Anti-War Committee.

Support our vets!