Joining the Hare Krishna movement has, thank God, conferred me with the priceless boon of being convinced that I’m totally righteously exempt from observing “holidays” that aren’t inherently holy, and in fact have no meaning at all except some historical edict proclaiming such and such day to henceforward be such and such holiday, thus providing the working class with yet another excuse to get drunk, loud, and dangerous.

From where I sit I can hear the unmistakable, unrelenting, hysterical cackles of the inebriated, the roar of the most perilous traffic of the year, as well as sirens, and the rumblings and cracks, near and far, of gunpowder blasts. My Internet didn’t work for crap when I was composing this or I’d have included some half-assed cranky research on who decided January first should be appointed the first day of the so-called “new” year anyway.

What’s “new” about it? One digit on the calendar, that’s what. Or potentially a lot more digits on your auto insurance premium, or potentially one less digit if your blood whiskey level impairs your ability to light a jumbo firecracker and get rid of it quickly enough.

All day today (New Year’s Eve) I’ve been wishing everyone “happy old year,” in true iconoclastic spirit, to cheer everyone the hell up about the relentless passage of time. I’m not feeling miserly or left out that I’m not pickling myself into an alcoholic stupor or blowing off fingers through improper handling of massive firework mortars. No. But what has changed besides a number? Why make a big deal?

Maybe the observance of New Year’s is required for mourning another year gone, like funerals are mandated public events for establishing beyond doubt that someone is in fact dead.

“It’s nine a.m.” I said, trying to be Mr. Helpful Human Alarm Clock. I’m terrible at this.

“Wanna see what’s in back of my head?” she asked, very chipper.

“What’s that?” I asked, not sure if I heard her properly.

“What’s in back of my head.”

This baffled me. I looked carefully at what might in fact be in back of her head.

I didn’t immediately see anything out of the ordinary, but hey, maybe she’d survived some freaky head injury in the middle of the night, and was expecting me to gasp when I finally noticed the immense clump of dried blood and hair. Or perhaps she went to sleep wearing the scalp-tingler tool by mistake, which we all do occasionally. Or maybe “Wanna see what’s in back of my head?” meant, “talk to the hand,” as in, “don’t you see the pillow? I’m trying to sleep.” In any case, I was stumped.

“What’s in back of your head?” I sighed.

“The puppy!” she said, with great delight. Talking to a sleeping person is like talking to someone on drugs. They’ll say any damn thing and forget it immediately.

“There’s a puppy in back of your head. OK. I’m gonna go write this down.”

She smiled brightly and rolled over. When I read this conversation to her an hour later, she couldn’t stop laughing. She didn’t remember a word of it.

To honor the request of my local Physical Fitness Expert (wife) that I make some effort to stave off decrepitude, I’ve begun doing pushups and squats in the morning, in addition to walking on the beach. I’ve been getting “body tired” like I haven’t been in years, which is fine. I’m not complaining.

Some of my happiest years were when I ran cross-country — probably something to do with the proliferation of serotonin uptake inhibitors in my teenage bloodstream. Physical activity is a major tonic for the mind, which I believe cramps up into a twisted, stiff knot without it. And my mind, when it cramps up, which is like every few seconds, has major tendencies toward negativism.

It manufactures stuff like, “Why take up any course of self improvement when war could break out at any moment? The dollar could be totally devalued and we’ll be in a financial crisis with wheelbarrows full of useless currency notes like Germany in the early 20th century. The oil will run out and we’ll all be scrambling looking for food because the grocery stores will close and you won’t be able to use money anyway because it will have no value. Nobody knows how to grow food or even hunt. The modern industrial economy is a horrifyingly failed experiment which is driving all those who participate in it towards extinction,” and on and on and on. Time to go for a walk.

Have you seen the BBC’s Wild China video series? It shows people living in Tibet and other out-of-the-way places in China under all kinds of (to my mind) terrifyingly austere crazy tundra situations. These people know what to do when it comes to practical living. There’s one shot of an eighty-year-old lady smoking a clay pipe while zooming across a ravine on a zip line with a pig tied to her waist on her way to market.

Another scene shows some rural fishermen with trained cormorants. They paddle their bamboo pontoon boats to the middle of a pond, loop threads around their pet cormorants’ throats so they won’t swallow fish, and send the cormorants diving. They catch fish in their beaks and bring them back to the fishermen, who say, “thank you very much,” in Chinese and put the fish in a bucket. The cormorants keep diving back down to nab more fishy fish, until finally the nooses come off and the cormorants get fed. And this tradition has been passed down since practically forever.

That’s pretty cool, I think. So, how am I supposed to live? What kind of wisdom will I be able to pass down that might be of practical use to hyper-mental worrywarts of the future?

“Go. Go write a blog post. I’ll do the dishes,” my wife said. “When’s the last time you wrote one?”

“Late September.”

“Oh, and the last one you wrote is the one I tore apart. I remember now. What a softy you are.”

“Yup.”

So I’m out of practice. “I don’t know what to write,” I said.

“Just write something.”

There. My job is now done. The word “something” appears in that last sentence (you saw it, didn’t you?).  I have a long history of attempting to duck writing assignments through wiseguy methods:

In my college days, I snootily refused to write anything my teachers wanted me to. For my college English term paper at the end of my first and only semester at NYU, instead of digesting and regurgitating three months’ worth of Herr Professor’s grievously mind-numbing rants on how every atom of reality is part of a great, spiraling dance of life exemplified by Breugel’s painting the Kermesse, I handed in a book of total doggerel and aggressively minimalistic poetry, some only one word in length. Example:

TITLE

Poem.

He wasn’t pleased, amused or impressed, and I received no credit for the class whatsoever. And this from a kid who, at age ten, once wrote with absolute conviction, in nice cursive script that this middle-aged incarnation can’t even begin to imitate today, that he would one day be a writer. I still have that book of poetry, though, along with its cartoon illustrations done by my roommate. And I still have my solemn declaration of career destiny.

A few weeks ago, my mom gave me a box containing every report card the North Syracuse Central School System ever gave me. My grades were usually pretty high, but reading some of the comments I’d received really depressed me. They were from some of my favorite teachers, too, the ones I thought I had a real rapport with. I remembered joking around with them a lot and hanging out after class. One even let me borrow her Peter, Paul and Mary albums during my hippie folkie phase. “Work often incomplete or poorly done,” read one comment. “Writing skills weak,” said another. I had let them down.

Whatever my sieve-like memory had to say about how much I entertained them, when it came down to actual performance, I was a disappointment (except maybe for one total piece of B.S. I actually got an “A+” for, Eating Habits of the Iroquois).

I know they’re probably not reading this. They might not even remember making those comments to my much younger self, who had a different name than the one I’m known by now anyway. They might not even think they’d ever find any evidence of my continued existence in the form of a single publicly written word, but if you’re there, Ruth R., Debbie W., I’m sorry. I’ll try and make it up to you. See? At least I wrote something today. Twice.

I was in a grumpy mood the other day. I mean all day long. An astrologer once told me my personality can swing from extremely high sattva to extremely low tama. Well, telling you this was one hella tama kinda day.

I don’t even remember what kicked off this particular grumpfest, but once it set in it was stonelike. I couldn’t be moved from it. Everything I saw, heard, touched, smelled, or thought about made me either depressed or mad. I cursed inanimate objects (a favorite pastime while in dark-ville). I used vocabulary absent from any Sanskrit dictionary.

People who don’t know me very well – that is, practically everyone except my wife — think of me as mild-mannered, meek, quiet, lighthearted, and occasionally funny. I’m here to debunk such thinking. For example, when I’m in one of my modes, and I do mean modes, I’m likely to out and out willfully break things. Once, while adjusting the position of a plastic storage crate in our living room, the crate wouldn’t budge, so I considered it appropriate to curse it in language that would melt the ears off Long John Silver while punching it until it shattered.

“What happened to that crate?” my wife asked, a few days later.

“I punched it,” I said.

“What the HELL? You think you can just go around punching things? What’s WRONG with you?”

Most of the time, I am indeed levelheaded. I don’t wantonly and constantly lash out at household furnishings. It’s just every so often, I don’t know what comes over me. It’s like I morph into a fiery demon with Tourette’s.
This most recent case of the ultra-grumps had me depressed on top of being grumpy; “Why should I have to be this way? This is awful! This sucks!” I remember praying to our Deities for relief. As I sat before Them, feeling like the most condemned, miserly curmudgeon to ever besmear the face of the planet, I reached for the Krishna Book.

With aggravated fury seeping out of every pore of my body, I opened the book, searching for some antidote to my inner foulness, until I reached the adventure of Krishna killing Jarasandha’s army multiple times and sending him back, defeated, again and again.

As I read about the carnage inflicted by the Supreme Personality of Godhead on Jarasandha and company, I felt fifteen pounds lighter. I began to laugh. By the time Krishna led Kalayavana to the cave where Mucukunda was sleeping, and Mucukunda awoke and burned Kalayavana to ashes with one angry look, I felt completely revived. I was cracking up. I felt like I was back to as close to normal as I get.

What is it about our life here that makes us sad?

Everything we love and identify with is temporary. Defining events that are gone never come back. It’s not enough we can access them through memory. It’s not enough we can talk about them. We want to re-live them. Forever. We want more than what we get. We don’t want our best memories to be only memories. Life is too short for our liking. No sooner do the good times begin than they end.

Then our memories fail. The experiences fade. The keenness of emotions felt, the thrills themselves, all evaporate. Then our bodies drift into uselessness and sometimes our minds, too. Everything we’ve lived for, every memory we’ve tried to preserve, the dear moments that seemed to give the pain of our brief lives meaning, all totally disappear from our minds and the world.

We want more than what we get.

Considering how much bugs bug me, I picked the wrong state to live in. I remember soon after coming to Florida I watched what appeared to be a ten-inch long shiny bright blue armored caterpillar-thing burrow into the ground right in front of me. I mean it was surreal, the kind of event that makes me want out with a capital “O.”

Another time, my wife had created some fabulous munchies which I didn’t ABSOLUTELY clean up after. I returned to the kitchen after a neglectful pause to find a seven-inch, black, slithery, multi-long-legged spawn of the devil slurping on the remains of a jar of tamarind sauce. As soon as he saw me, I let out a Moe Stooge-style yowl of horror and wished I’d had a shotgun. In the seven nanoseconds it took for the sauce-sucking demon spawn to disappear through a crack in the pantry floor, I’d developed a case of the shivers that still clings to me.

The latest thing (though this is not quite as cinematic) is ants. They started coming in through, over, around, and under our kitchen window and onto the counter and swarming around the sink. The first day they visited, I could easily see the error of my ways: a not-completely-scrubbed-out jam jar. They were partying hearty in force in there and passing back snackage sufficient to satisfy the whole colony.

I cleaned the sink, dried and put away all the dishes, polished every visible surface, and finished with a light application of peppermint oil (the reputed anathema to ant sense gratification) all around. The ants kept coming, however, so I realized I would have to clean even more. I removed the mesh drain traps and scrubbed them thoroughly. I reached down with a soapy green pad into the bottoms of the bottoms of the sink drains, as far as my hand could go without getting my elbows caught in the grease trap. I left not even an atomic morsel of solid matter carry-able in the eager mandibles of even the most puny ant.

But the ants continued to keep coming. I reason that because the first crowd got such a scrump-diddly-icious strawberry jam buzz they reported their findings to every ant citizen in the ‘hood, who keep visiting on word of mandible alone.

At one point in the Great Ant Influx, I saw one carrying what looked like a potato flake (heaven knows where he got it from) about eleven times his size. But then, oh no! It got caught on top of a drop of water and remained there. My wife and I watched as the once lucky critter stood motionless, disappointed and defeated next to the drop of water that he couldn’t even see, which had robbed him of his good fortune. He looked like how I feel a lot of the time. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” my kindhearted wife said.

But anyway, the ants keep coming. They seem to keep finding things too small for me to clean and filling their little ant pockets with them. If one of us so much as lightly touches any surface near the sink with a fingertip that’s anything less than industrially degreased, sanitized, and aridly dry, a new gang shows up and parks themselves around the newly established Greasy Fingerprint Bar and Grill for a hog heavenly slurp fest.

I suppose it’s meant to make me a cleaner guy. At some point, they will stop coming, won’t they? I may be on my way to Godliness, but at this point I feel closer to Obsessiveness. I’m morbidly fascinated by the relentless march of ants into what has become Florida’s most antiseptic counter top. I’m trying to psych myself into Blessing-counting Mode, and thank God I haven’t yet had to endure a plague of larger, more destructive critters.

These days, when I want to buy something, first I’ll check to make sure I’m not distracting myself from something actually important. Usually I am, so my shopping plans stop right there. But, if I’ve determined that my well-being may genuinely depend on me increasing the number of things in my possession, I’ll look online at whatever reviews I can find for whatever thing it is I’ve decided I can no longer hold my head up in public without. Then I may, if absolutely needed, check out discount stores, eBay, anywhere on the face of the Earth but in one of those high-overhead, hyped magnets for those with nothing better to do than to bask in the reflected glow of epitomized artificially inflated retail nightmarishness known as a shopping mall.

But I remember when going to the mall, just for something to do, without even a shopping list, used to seem like a pretty OK way to spend the precious moments of my human life. My friends and I would hang out at the record store, the skinny tie store, check out the girls, the ice cream selection, plan our fifth viewing of Star Wars, and maybe have a slice of pizza. We were eleven. These days I’m more of a mind that eleven-year-olds would benefit much more profoundly from a trip to the local penitentiary than to a shopping mall, but back then my concept of the heavenly realm was the same as my grandmother’s: shopping at the Paramus Park shopping mall in Paramus, NJ, next to which my local mall seemed as exciting as a post office.

My Grandma's car is the '66 Bonneville over to the left.

how it looked in 1976

I decided that an exploratory visit there, for old times’ sake, to see whatever changes the ravages of time hath wrought on my pre-teen version of the celestial kingdom, might boost my sense of detachment from temporary, material things. Plus, I’d have a cool, indoor place to chant (for me, walking means chanting) out of the hot sun.

First thing I noticed was a closed sporting goods store. The obscenely gigantic decorations were still in place – eight foot-high basketball and net, giant roller skates – but no merchandise. No people. Masking tape was on all the windows. When I went through the mall’s main entrance. I didn’t recognize the place at all. Then I realized I hadn’t been there in at least thirty years.

The glass elevator was no more. The waterfalls were no more. None of the stores I used to visit were there. It looked like all the life had been sucked out of it, all the sparkle that had made it seem spectacular and wonderful to me had been rubbed off.

I wanted to ask someone if there was anywhere I could go to find out the history of the place, just so I could see some evidence that the place had once actually had been able to charm me so profoundly. I found a security guard, a man perhaps in his sixties, looking like a genuine New York police officer. I explained how my grandmother used to bring me there thirty years ago, and I wondered how and why the place had changed so much.

“I been coming here for thirty years,” he told me, eyeing my beadbag suspiciously. “Yeah, it’s changed a lot. The elevator’s gone, the waterfalls are gone, they moved the merry go round down the hall, and they moved the turkey upstairs.”

I took an elevator (the new, prosaic, plain kind) up to the second floor, where Grandma used to take us to lunch at Farrell’s Old Time Ice Cream Parlor, where all the waiters dressed like it was 1917, with straw hats, striped shirts with garters on the sleeves, and a player piano played endless variations on Scott Joplin tunes. They still have stores in southern California and Hawaii, I’ve learned.

In a Post Office-like hallway there, in between a Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s (“under new management”), surrounded by empty food court chairs which looked like they were on loan from a Greyhound station, was the turkey and its youthful Native American rider, with a plaque declaring how it had been presented to the Paramus Park Mall on it’s opening Day in 1974 by such and such.

I took some awful photos of it with my awful new cell phone, to accentuate the dreariness. There’s a plaque underneath it, which I’m sure I read many times as a kid:

Man, this whole material world is one big turkey.

For the past twenty-two years, visiting my family has been a challenge.

It’s been a social challenge, because for my whole life I’ve never felt they really understood me. And since I’ve broadened my interests to include Krishna consciousness and exploring the practical applications of the Bhagavad-Gita, my feeble and infrequent attempts to communicate such things to them have resulted in no end of misunderstandings and silent time on the sofa watching TV — and I have zero to say about televised college sports.

It’s also been a nutritional challenge. I’ve become accustomed to the finest vegetarian cooking on the face of this Earth, thanks to having a wife who’s a faithful Acharya of Gourmet Vedic Cuisine. My family’s idea of exotic, international food is Stouffer’s Frozen French Bread Pizza. It’s usually a “kill and grill” situation there.

I’ve tried to bridge the gap by volunteering to cook for them every time we visit (which usually means volunteering my wife to cook), but then they complain that every time we come we turn their kitchen upside down. And cooking in their kitchen, with implements that have been used to boil, fry, bake and fricassee every species of sentient life on the planet, always leaves us feeling creeped out and exhausted.

Plus, after twenty-two years, my dad still doesn’t quite get it that I’m vegetarian.

I visited him last month. He was planning to cook some barbecued chicken on the grill, the kind he used to barbecue on the grill when I was a kid. I had planned ahead and brought the fixings for cheese sandwiches, not wanting to throw his home into upheaval. But dinner being a bonding experience, he wanted to share his with me.

“What can I cook for you? Anything? Do you eat chicken?”

“No, Dad.”

“Fish?”

“No. We don’t eat any meat, fish, or eggs.”

“What the hell can I cook? You guys don’t eat anything that’s cookable!”

My wife is a confident, relaxed driver. She’s been driving since she was fifteen, which is I’m Not Going To Tell You How Many years. Her first car was a Camaro, a racecar, whereas mine was a ’63 Chevy Bel-air, an aircraft carrier.

I drive more and more like an old lady. Especially when the roads I’m driving on aren’t the straight, flat, divided highways I’m used to in Florida. I’ve had episodes on hills, bridges, and tunnels when I think I’m really going to lose it, come totally unhinged, and wreck the car.

And when my wife takes the wheel? Forget it. I become a dangerously Nervous Nelly, the worst backseat driver ever. If I don’t close my eyes tightly, I become my wife’s worst enemy. If I gave voice to every twinge of nerves, my side of the conversation might sound something like this:

Look out! Oh my God. OH my GOD! Watch where you’re going. Watch where you’re going! Do you HAVE to fidget so much? Stop LOOKING OUT THE SIDE WINDOW! DON’T TELL ME HOW BEAUTIFUL THE SUNSET IS!

And so on, and so on.

My body/mind type is Vata, which means ruled by air. My wife’s new theme song for me is “Call Me the Breeze” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I’ve moved thirty-eight times during my forty-four year life. I leave projects in half-completed condition, like a cyclone. I look at my condition this way: when you hang wet cloth on the line, it’s usually heavy enough to stay there. But the cloth dries, there’s every chance of it blowing away. I’m the same way when it comes to carbs.

We just drove from St. Augustine to New Vrindavan, West Virginia, for a 24-hour kirtan festival, where we were scheduled to participate.

The last leg of our trip took us alongside the eastern bank of the Ohio River in West Virginia, as the sun was setting over the western hills. On this stretch of the river are factories, nuclear power plants, and all other manner of gigantic industrial enterprise. I remember one smokestack that looked as tall as a mountain itself. I mean it was ginormous.

The relative comfort of the divided highway was behind us. It was all two-lane traffic from here on out. I was consuming Pure Bliss brand Pretty Good Stuff (our latest favorite addictive snack food) in an attempt to not completely blow away. Every time a car approached in the oncoming lane, I closed my eyes, thinking, “here it comes. This is it. better get ready for it, and make my peace with the world.” I could feel myself break out in a sweat every time a pair of headlights came into view. I felt certain that a deadly combination of slight inattention from my way-too-sightseeing wife would coincide with a slight bend in the road and send us directly into a head-on collision.

I’m telling you, I was suffering. And it was all in my head. As soon as we arrived, everything was OK. Actually everything was OK the whole time.

What do you think? Should I give up driving? Or is there a miracle cure-all for nervous wrecks?