WORKS ON DIGITAL PAPER

The Flag of the Universe, Manhattan

Oh how the plight of Tibet rankles our moral souls. All those nice, peaceful, efficient-lung endowed people, downtrodden and pushed out of their spiritual homes. And so they have been pushed out of our spiritual homes as well. For their cause has become our cause, never mind that there are other causes, other spiritual homes. Richard Gere doesn't go there. There is no sweet, bumbling reincarnation in preciously unassuming cloth ambling about smiling and issuing kindly truthful platitudes, pleading their cause. Sure, the Uyghurs have their Turks, but no one likes the Turks in the first place. Remember Lawrence of Arabia? And the Danes have amicably returned Greenland to the green people, theirs is a cause off the table, right there. I have often been guilty of spiralling into diatribe against Buddhism. It is a pet project, really. A vanity affair. I'll poke my semi-informed knowitallness into that mode of thought that stirs up a pot of dogma, creating a system of salvation fulfillment aspiring masses hew to, twisting prayer beads, walking clock-wise and flying their quaint flags. Then, after my vehement performance, I'll go home and read the daily-Buddhist-wisdom book on the pot and it'll calm me and return me to a center and remind me to breathe. Life is interesting, perhaps, just for how creatively we can dig our holes.