Bodhisattva

(Originally published at joecsmolen.com 3/27/23)

How do I know it’s safe to be telling you this? Even privately. But, I can’t help telling it. I’m too stressed-out by it – not so much by what happened, more by the transparency I’m giving this admission.

See, I was at the seaside on holiday. On-line, before I left, I told all my friends I was going to the seaside to get healthy both in body and spiritually. They thought it was because of what Julia did to me that I put my Pearl District loft apartment up for sale.  

But they didn’t know, after being tear-gassed in the downtown riots last Summer, I’d had the realization the Police had inadvertently guided me toward my path to Enlightenment. I decided I didn’t have to wait. I was taking charge. I decided to be Bodhisattva.

Started out this retreat was a seaside holiday of abstinence - from non-fat lattes, without pizza, sugarless cough-drop binkies instead of tobacco, no TV, no texting, no on-line porno chats. I left my laptop behind in Portland. A week before, panicking in an anxiety attack, with a peen ball hammer, I’d beaten it to death – my smart phone. I can’t stand any more of my staple TV shows; I can’t cope with the glare of their smiles, their video bites, their 5G bursts of excited dialogue that just always drive-up my blood pressure.

But like I was saying, I’m at seaside – drove clear my first time down over to  Yachats – referred to locally as the “village.”

Super picturesque,

I hear,

Without the fog.

Seaside Day 1 - GoPro-Recorded Segment

I feel a need to keep telling you that I’m at seaside. It’s really foggy. And strangely peaceful and quiet. Right now, recording this, I’m climbing alone down on some rocks, where I hear that rogue waves are known to surge in and suck unaware tourists out into Kingdom Come.

But I’m thinking plastic – how I must do my bit – my little part – my garbage-baggie-size contribution – to purifying our precious planet by cleansing the ocean of plastic.

So I’m down now amongst some rocks, bent way over, nearly standing on my head, reaching for a clear plastic drinking water bottle I just spotted – reaching down into a solid rock pit – an ancient, igneous pit formed by a Cretaceous lava flow and there’s a tide pool down there with this ubiquitous plastic water bottle – which I must recover or die. This is how committed I am.

Directly below me on the surface of the little tide pool, I see my reflection. With my eyes, I watch the image of my left arm reach down to disturb the delicate stasis of the pool. I sense the bottle my hand seems about to grab has become a part of a continuum of a strange fabric melding the bottle to the surface tension of the water. When I snatch-up the bottle, little protesting wavelets radiate out. I watch the speeding pulses of fluid energy reflect off the tide pool’s opposing shores. As they bounce back to the center of the pool, I see the wavelets resonate and synergize, revealing to me a scintillating healing of the surface tension fabric – I’m pretty sure of it - exactly like in the on-line meditation course I’m taking. In the center of the pool - my Path to the Middle Way. Ommm

But the muscles in my legs are quivering from the strain. A transitory panic almost causes me to fall in. I’m standing back up. I’m light-headed and I feel my face flush hot. But it’s gone – the scintillation. I can’t tell which Way I went.

My vision clears. I look around me.  Maybe twenty feet off, right at eye level, I spot castled on a vertical lava face, a cyclops barnacle – same size as a baseball.

 It is staring at me.

You may be wondering. When I use the term “stare”, I understand the mechanical problem. I mean, when I feel that stare, I already understand that a barnacle lives its entire life standing on its head inside custom-fit body armor.  It’s easy to tell myself I don’t really see a barnacle staring at me. And I don’t know how I know it, but I realize now the barnacle had simply already accepted the presence of the abandoned bottle’s grotesque plasticity. I realize, too, the barnacle was allowing me the freedom to seek my own karmic Way. Still, I clutch my plastic water bottle firmly. Ommm

It feels really solid and urban to climb back up on the road right-of-way that passes above the rocks.  

Seaside Day 2 - GoPro-Recorded Segment

The tide is way out. The fog is way in, way dense. Down between the same Cretaceous rock flows, I’m standing on solid, wet sand. I can hear the receded ocean lurking far out in the fog. I’m talking to a friendly young woman who has an air of educated confidence and authority. We’re very alone together. She’s very enthused. I watch her feeding a tentacled green glob that lives submerged, attached to the big rock which holds the glob’s bucket-size tide pool.

She uses tweezers to hold a speckled little inch fish against the glob’s pale green, stinging tentacles until the fish stops struggling. I watch the life ebb into Ommm. Slowly, relentlessly, the palping tentacles convey the speck carcass towards where the young woman says there is a mouth.

 She says, too, that until she came along, the green lump she is “nourishing” had been “disadvantaged”. She tells me her glob had been a runt. She’s glob-proud. She points out that her green bulge is twice the size of its “peers”. She gets agitated, though, when she says that. I begin to worry she might be armed. She calls her submarine green pet Velda.

But then I guess it’s doubt that clouds her otherwise cover-girl face. She tells me haltingly that since she’s been regularly “nurturing” Velda, her green blob has become “passive aggressive.” I ask how she can tell. She asks back if I fear anemones. I deny. Mysteriously, she just says, “Best left that way.”

I decide that’s a really welcome queue for me to conclude our interview, so I turn and walk off. Ten paces later, I glance back. She reminds me of Julia. I want to on-the-spot ask her about dinner, but she’s already disappeared so completely into the fog I feel hallucinatory.

Oh well, I tell myself, she isn’t masked-up. One less risk.

Off the Record

Those are my only notes from my two days at the sea shore. I don’t any longer recommend the seashore. It’s a false fable. By that second evening, with nothing to drink the rest of the day but hot black coffee - straight pour-overs - I needed an antacid badly. At the store, I noticed that the active ingredients of antacids vary a lot - product-to-product. I couldn’t decide. Quickly, I bought four. Pretty sure they were all antacids. Back at my hotel, I mixed all. I used a coffee cup as a mortar, the end of a 32Gig Zip Drive I’d forgotten about in my glove box as a pestle. Anxious for relief from the burning in my gut, I swallowed the works.

By 1:30AM, my antacid admixture had caused a severe reaction not unlike hyper-impatience.

 Just moments ago, I left the parking lot of the Emergency Room at the hospital up in Newport.  I told the adolescent-looking woman Doctor and a bleary-eyed, yawning EMT that their sarcasm was unprofessional. They insisted “Well, your heart is still beating isn’t it?” was meant to reassure. I responded that I wasn’t stuck on stupid.

 The Doctor backed away from me. Not many men are larger than myself, but the EMT was. I saw the Doctor readying some sort of syringe. The EMT grinned insinuatingly, offensively. Hugely entertained, “Dude!” he snorted, “In a clinic is where you belong!”

The rest is sketchy. Seems like right after I dropped an abuse-bomb on the EMT, the Doctor’s eyes went saucer. I was asked to “leave the premises” – in the Imperative Case! Me! M.F.A. me!”

“Abusive of what!” the EMT demanded.

“’Please’ and ‘Please, Sir!’”

The Doctor should never have let me see her dialing 911. Her face went very pale. I was shocked! Just shocked! The EMT restrained me by my top-knot.

More than one Deputy responded.

It was warm and calming sitting in the back seat of the Police car. I listened-in to police radio chatter - to a 911 Dispatcher giving an impudent tow truck driver a proper talking-to about his thoughtless use of the word tuercos.

That wasn’t the first time I have been cuffed. It’s been over a year now, since Julia did me. Julia chuckled when she said she knew I was kinky. I should never have listened to Julia. She had two pairs of handcuffs.  “Oh, you just relax,” Julia purred, “I’m having fun.” She invited me to lay across her big brass bed. Calling me over to it, wheedlingly, she squeaked “Trust me?”

I never should have bloody well listened!

Forget Julia! Forget the woman! That was a galaxy far, far away, back even before the start of Covid, wa-a-ay pre Omicron-variant,

When things weren’t so crazy.