The Journal of a Perimeter Man
Vol. II
MOTOR ZEN
by
Jann Burner
Published by Jann Burner at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Jann Burner
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I feel I must apologize, or acknowledge, that a few of the pieces in this volume have been repeated from my book Metaphor Bridge, but I had received requests to write a volume “just about the taxi” and so here it is…MOTOR ZEN.
"Life is easy when you've got new tread!"
(taxi drivers creed)
"Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day."
(Oct 21st 1857--H.D. Thoreau)
“When time is halved and halved again; when years pass as months and days suddenly stream passed as seconds; somewhere in a small rented room in an urban center, (probably over a liquor store) seated beneath a bare 60 watt globe on a hard backed wooden chair with tablet and pencil in hand will sit--BURNING MAN...the writer.”
(Jann Burner)
Warning
Within this slim volume there will be a fare amount of rather home-spun, very personal philosophy. This is because intelligent people who spend a good portion of their waking hours observing the Human Comedy also spend a goodly portion of the time reflecting on what it is that they have just observed. So, if you are apt to be embarrassed or put off by the presumptuousness of an unqualified, blue collar worker reflecting upon his earthly experience, then stand forewarned because this little volume is certainly…full of it.
INTRODUCTION
In San Francisco, on the West coast of America in the state of California, there is a group of individuals called taxi drivers. For a very small fee they will be with you in their vehicle. They will transport you wherever you wish to go. They will talk, they will listen, they will even carry your baggage. Most of these people are writers, poets, old hippies, recovering substance abusers, out of work musicians or recent immigrants to this wonderful land. Dreamers one and all; the best and often the brightest fruit left unpicked upon the societal tree, turning to sugar and threatening to rot and stain the ground.
The urban taxi driver makes more life and death decisions than a $150,000 per year airline pilot, and yet the driver flies alone and gets paid little more than the allowable minimum. He receives no raises, no retirement, no medical coverage nor even any workman's compensation and he is treated by public and private citizen alike as a felon on parole. The taxi driver is, at one and the same time, victim and potential threat. He is often abused, verbally and sometimes physically, by passengers, fellow drivers, the police, and passing strangers in the grip of a bad day. He receives no ego strokes behind the wheel. Any satisfaction from the job he receives has to be generated from within. He is, in the truest sense, an urban Bracero; a fisher of men on mean streets wearing a coat of many cars.
Between 1975 and 1988 I drove a taxi cab on the night shift in San Francisco. That is over 3,000 ten hour shifts behind the wheel. All, I might add, without being wrecked or robbed. During my years behind the wheel, the taxi cab became my office. I sat in there for eight to ten hours per night. I had conversations (sometimes quite intimate) with strangers while the backdrop of one of the world's most beautiful cities slid by outside. These strangers would then bid me goodbye and place money in my hand.
I think that possibly driving is what Americans do best. Here are these terribly vulnerable creatures with complex nervous systems, so prone to fears, insecurities and phobias hurtling themselves about seemingly helter-skelter encased in 3500 pounds of steel and plastic. Constantly scanning with their eyes, making intricate hand-foot-eye decisions that result in life endangering moves executed...AT SPEED! People do this every day in varying configurations, some requiring the cooperation of hundreds of vehicles. And yet people are so casual, so offhanded about this highly complex skill that they give it not a second thought. They even let their KIDS do it armed with cell phones!
Watching traffic from a high place is like watching a flight of birds harvesting a freshly plowed field. I wonder, do they all have access to one common super brain? Or is there perhaps one bird-brain directing all the rest. There is obviously more going on here than we have words for today. It appears that we are perhaps growing in ways which we are unaware. Possibly we are being trained in this seemingly off-handed way for future tasks as yet not even imagined; all the while we continue to confuse the medium with the message. We rush about year after year thinking that it is the job, the position, the acquisition of stuff that is all important, when in actuality that is mere fluff; mental doodling with which to distract the ego while the really important work is the driving, and acquiring the skill and focus to do it really well.
Driving a taxi, I often found that after about six hours in the driver's seat a strange phenomena would begin to occur. It was as if I was sitting at home perfectly still, and a holographic projection of The City was flowing around me. No sense of movement, totally centered, no sense of motion or even thought. The closest most people ever come to this clear zone, is when they are about to become involved in an accident. At such times that moment of clarity is often reported--just before the crash.
Emotionally, taxi driving is neutral. It isn't oppressive like I imagine working in a factory or a bank might be and it isn't so thrilling that one would want to devote their free time and energy to it. It is--as the Buddhists would say--a left handed sort of a job. It allowed me to support myself and yet really didn't interfere with my life. It left me--free. It left me enough time and energy to pursue the real interests in my life. With energy and curiosity and persistence, I found it was quite possible to develop an entire bouquet of--other interests.
Driving a taxi, at least in San Francisco, is an ongoing experiment in self discovery. It is an eccentric job that offers very wide parameters. It gives the driver lots of leeway. It gives him the freedom to re-invent, re-imagine (or destroy!) himself every day. He spends perhaps sixty seconds with an authority figure receiving the waybill and small metal taxi medallion like some sort of unholy communion wafer, and then he is out on the streets, on his own--FREE! No boss, no supervisor, no one to tell him what to do. If he doesn't want to work, he doesn't have to. But remember that this also means that no one cares what he does. It is a two edged sword. He can end up drunk every day, (many do), behind in his rent, and suffering terribly from the lack of ego-stroking that goes on in most normal lines of employment. In order to survive and thrive in this sort of work environment, one has to have a very well-defined sense of "who" they are. For self-originating sorts of individuals who have more need of freedom than money and position, the art of Vehicular Tai Chi as practiced by driving a taxi can be very worthwhile.
The whirring of the tires on the late night asphalt, the blur of pedestrian faces through the glass often induced in me a blissful vacancy of mind that has no real equivalent in civilian life. For me, driving cab was part martial arts, part meditative practice, and part graduate school; sort of a graduate school of mind. It satisfied my voyeuristic impulses, fed my reclusive nature and inspired me to look deeply into the "why" of all things.
During my years of focused concentration behind the wheel I became a practitioner of what I call Motor Zen. Taxi driving very closely approximates the formal practice of Zazen. The driver has his seat cushion, his formal sitting position and in place of the white meditation screen he has the white city backdrop and instead of a Zen koan he has the mindless chatter from the rear seat and the endless circuits around and around the city...for ten hours at a time, looking for meaning. "Why am I doing this?".
But unlike ashram Zen, Motor Zen carries some serious risks. The price for inattention is often the destruction of the vehicle within which the body resides; sometimes even the body itself. No mere swat of the stick over the shoulder as in the Zendo. And the 'Makyo' encountered in the safety of the meditation hall is nothing compared to the phantoms encountered out on the street, behind the wheel of the speeding metal sled and in the back seat; not to mention those found in the deepest recesses of the mind after a late night shift when the questor lays curled alone in a cold metal bed, in a small rented room wondering....
***
Often in the taxi, I was privy to deep discussions and questioning. Over the years the most recurrent theme either stated directly or implied was simply:
"Why am I here? (in this life)." "What is it that I am supposed to be doing?"
Be they doctor, lawyer or Indian chief the general consensus seemed to be that 'that' (whatever that was), was not what they were really supposed to be doing. Seems we are all spear carriers in someone else's opera. All except for me. I was The Driver. For that period of my life I seemed to have a back stage pass.
From picking up people night after night I came to notice a growing restlessness in the population, a spiritual uneasiness. It was as if we were all waiting for something to happen; waiting for the weather to change.
I contend that the mechanism of consciousness is not fully understood. I believe that the brain, the Mind and the Spirit may have some surprises in store for us yet.
***
During my years behind the wheel I was an ardent journal keeper and I preserved my insights, concerns and observations on life and the human condition in a series of small three ring binders. The following volume is culled from those journals.
This is a collection of essays, interviews, insights and taxi stories--an eclectic mix of what passes through a man's mind as he dreams his soul's transformation behind the wheel of a taxi on the night shift.
This book is about paradox and contradiction. It is about ideas that are ridiculous and some that are sublime. This is about a dream of higher consciousness under difficult conditions.
After all is said and done, what are we anyway, except fictional creatures--figments, traces of spark and color from The Great Imagining in search of a worthy story.
***
One of the most difficult hurtles for a middle class, over educated white boy to overcome in driving a taxi, as a learning device and ultimately a realization tool, is that fact that everyone (or almost everyone) from fellow drivers to friends, family, people on the street and customers have a very low (dare I say negative?) opinion of taxi drivers. You'll get no ego strokes on this job. No room for self congratulatory vanity behind the wheel. You must be a self organizing sort of individual. You must have a strong central core identity. You must be capable of auto origination. You must know who you are!
***
Somewhere, sometime in the distant reaches of a probable universe, on a quiet street in ancient San Francisco, a car door slams and a motor starts. Its sound soon dwindles away to silence. Outside it is a quiet night. It is a very quiet neighborhood. At one time in the distant past, in a cheap cafe that once stood on the corner, the owner flipped the closed sign in the window and snapped off the overhead neon light. Further down the block a few years later a young taxi driver flipped off his meter and pocketed the money from his last fare of the evening.
In an upstairs apartment on a nearby street, a middle aged man and woman once rolled away from one another. She looked at him accusingly. He observed her apron of flesh fabric folding down over her naked groin like a quilt and reached for his first cigarette of the day. She too picked up a smoke and ignored his silent accusations, choosing instead to focus her attentions upon the dull glow radiating from a television set in the corner of the room, while thin wisps of bluish grey smoke trailed lazily from the corners of her mouth as if from the lips of a slumbering subterranean god.
Welcome to the night shift, where time runs in a concurrent spiral and all lives are simultaneous and all thoughts form realities and everything is probable.
***
THOUGHTS IN A TAXI AT NIGHT
Entry 1.
Monday:
I have been sitting in the rear of Zim's restaurant for the past ten years wearing dark glasses and sucking up cups of coffee like they were spare galaxies and my mouth a ravenous black hole in deep space. In vain attempt at directed discovery I have dragged my soul carelessly through captured dreams.
Outside, above the late night oily slick Frisco pavement a large, dark bird shutters low over the horizon, while on the corner, across the street, waiting for the light to change, a taxi driver angrily chews on the scraps of a yellowed wing...
The air about me reeks of speed, sweat and stale wine. My own physical self smells like burnt sulfur. What a distracting scab! It is indeed unfortunate that they are still being issued to earthly dreamers like uniforms.
I am a mute. I sing for the entertainment of the deaf, the dumb and the blind. I am a vendor at the Blind Babies Bazaar. I sell rides to plump tourists from the outback.
I was once a good soldier, one of the walking dead. I often marched along within the neon plastic grooved rings of Mars on the lip of Aphrodite's visor like a summer moth through a screen door--silently. I was a noncommissioned officer in the army of the ages passing through Eternity...
Quantum foam, light-cone, wilderness home; I wield my thoughts like a tongue. Sometimes when I look in the mirror I see the fly-catcher lizard, and he is hungry. Other times I see the condemned prisoner politely requesting a doggie bag with his last meal. Descriptions and concepts are quickly passed around and about like hives of gold.
My waitress approaches across the floor like a Seventh Day Adventist hustling Watch Tower Magazine on death row--slowly and without much conviction. She balances my short stack of hot-cakes before her, carefully. My Market Street Madonna with her jaunty waitress cap moves toward me like the fin of a shark through shallow water.
At one time I was quite a humorist. In those days my idea of a natural man was someone who had no further use for toilet paper. Times change. All I've ever really wanted was to keep myself amused and to have a good friend to bless me when I sneeze. And perhaps to be a national literary hero. To wear honor's helmet I would have been willing to go wide in the water. To wear the robes of grace I would have been willing to traverse the very retina of the mind's eye. At one time I would have gladly been an optimistic spirit; an igniter of stars...and the dead.
My food arrives. I slowly lift the syrup container and allow the strawberry-colored fluid to ease out and over my short stack. Beneath the neon glare the syrup flows smoothly over my pancakes--my plate; over my table, over my lap, down the rusty chrome chair leg and out and over the bright white tile floor.
The tension spring at the top of the strawberry syrup dispenser seems to be broken.
Somewhere behind me, hovering in the dusk, a giant blue whale tugs gently at the strings of my mask threatening my anonymity. Will it be Captain Midnight or the Masked Outsider? The decaying scorpions all bloated with lust twist slowly on their trunks in order to view the strangeness and the strawberry syrup. The ragged ginseng smelling poet of the Blind Babies Bazaar is not concerned. To the beatific fluidity of one soul dreaming its own transformation it is ALL just so much strawberry syrup. When The Outsider is set free--so is The Captain.
I stand to leave and carefully place two shiny new quarters on the table. They both quickly sink from sight in the pool of strawberry fluid. At the door I hesitate and turn back towards my table, perhaps fifty cents was not sufficient. My Market Street Madonna glides past silently, unconcerned. Her soul dreams of its own transformation. On her chest, immediately above her left nipple, rides a hefty black plastic name tag: CYN CLITTON.
I close the door and step from the valley of darkness holding my breath, watching all the corners of the sudden light and at once step back for a moment's breath, a sigh, a whistle and then on I move, into the murky brightness of the neon town, trying to drown myself in the vapors of civilization.
I am a thirty-nine year old ecstasy addict strung out on peak experience singing for the entertainment of the deaf, the dumb and the blind. I am a vendor at the Blind Babies Bazaar, and sometimes, as I graze on the open wounds of realization that bite deeply into the furrows of my being I feel like God's own Angels are making pee-pee in my hair.
But then, what do I know? I am just a cab driver. My thoughts often become entangled in my mind’s hair like stale gum.
What can I say except that I am involved. I am a prober of an emotional universe. I am involved because my pain is workable flesh. But it is not important. The beatific fluidity of one soul dreaming its own transformation is not concerned. "It is all just so much strawberry syrup," say us vendors at the Blind Babies Bazaar.
***
Every person represents an entire interior world. A world not known in all the universe until they arrived on the scene with new eyes and beheld and began to appreciate
***
Entry 2.
Thursday:
This is a very pleasant sensation, at this instant--being a writer; being able to entertain and introduce the three prime portions of human consciousness: the physical animal, the thinking brain and the transcendent mind. When these three parts come together they form a bubble which exists quite outside of time/space. The movement of this bubble seems to be a form of active prayer.
This bubbling is the creation of the Mind, not the brain and certainly not the robot narcissistic greed freak doing the stenographic work (me!). The brain is the interface, like the second stage of a rocket before the essential package reaches free space and is cut loose to orbit. This impulse comes from a disembodied state. There is no material consideration there. It is far reaching. It is holographic in intention. It is not often referred to in popular literature. It has been called the unnamable. Before that, they lived it. For the last ten thousand years the only thing we can say for sure about it is..."we can't talk about it!"
***
Sociopathic man has a monkey on his back. Creative man has an Angel on his shoulder. A natural man is a creator, an artist, a dabbler. A natural woman is an Angel come to earth to shine like a crystal and comfort man. Like a window, woman can do something man cannot (besides bare children). She has the ability to transmit 'The Light` from the great spiritual zone without interfering! She has it on the 'natch' (this is her magic!) whereas man at his best is merely a carnival performer, juggling his colored balls of metaphor and streaming his colorful scarves of analogy.
***
If my journal seems fragmented it's because over the years I've found that my Mind operates in a larger room in time. Bits of idea jotted down in my journal will complete themselves months or even years later. A second fragment will fit the other so perfectly that it's as if they are but pieces of the same vase broken years ago with the shards scattered across time. Whole sentences began weeks, months or even years before will have a beginning, middle and end separated by vast spaces of time.
It would seem my Mind illustrates an intelligence and a sense of persistent continuity that my brain can only dream of. It's as if my Mind is an artist spending large amounts of time painting extremely detailed oils, whereas my brain searches for the 'quick fix'; the immediate sign of life--the Polaroid print.
"No time for art", my brain says..." the paint takes too long to dry."
***
Sometimes I feel like there is a hole in my soul through which my spirit escapes. From time to time.
Sometimes it feels like a tire on a vehicle speeding through the rain on one of those ancient narrow streets in some exotic foreign country. Sometimes it is an ambulance on a mission of mercy, other times it is a black sedan. Maybe the tire has been punctured by an assassin's silent weapon.
At other times my spirit feels squeezed by external pressures like air from a faulty camp mattress on hard ground three days hike from the nearest settlement or maybe I am an empty catsup container on a midnight counter in a fast food franchise next to a freeway exit a thousand miles from nowhere.
***
He was a salesman, he told me. He sold vacuum cleaners door to door and his commission was $100 per machine. He made twenty calls per day and usually sold one machine.
"Don't you get depressed by all that rejection?" I asked.
"What rejection?" he replied. "Everyone who opens their door gives me $5."
***
Entry 3.
Friday:
The spirit sports with time. The soul is the light that shines through and all of our earthly desire and ambition is nothing but shadow play on the cave wall. There is a secret here that we have all sworn not to reveal.
***
Speaking with another person successfully has nothing to do with so called intelligence or even common interest but it does have to do with the commonality of the zone of conscious origination. (whether the person is coming from ego, personality, brain or mind.) These four zones of conscious origination don't seem to mix too well. The compatibility factor in as far as shared zones of conscious commonality is a given. Certain levels of realization or enlightenment can 'blow' the circuits in a normal person's ego/personality/brain machinery. Thus the seemingly meaningless excursions in metaphorical 'airplay' as practiced between certain artist/writers. The purpose (or at least one purpose) is to test the circuitry to see how much of a mind load it can take. Circuit integrity. Like testing a complicated piece of electronic gear. Power surges can be dangerous unless the brain is firmly grounded in mind.
***
He looked like a homeless guy after a cleanup night at the mission. He still looked bad, but not hopeless. I picked him up early in the evening on Christmas Eve. He was going home to his ex-wife. They got divorced a couple of years earlier, after he had lost his job and they had gone through their savings. She finally kicked him out. He hit the streets--hard. He was forty-two at the time and very down on his luck. After a few months on The Streets, he was down to two sets of clothes and jobs were--impossible to find. He told me he hadn't been much of a drinker before he hit the street, but, once out there on the cement in the cold, you couldn't help but start drinking hard and heavy--just to stay numb and keep warm. I looked at him and shuttered. All that separated us was a single DWI, or a minor fender bender, and I'd be out there on the streets with him within two months. The illusory shield of security is so thin...
He told me he hadn't seen his ex-wife since their break-up, but he'd spoken to her on the phone and finally she had invited him over, it being Christmas Eve and all. He was sure that once they talked things over, they'd get back together. This was his positively, absolutely, utterly last chance--at least in this world. Yes, yes, he was sure everything would be fine, once they "talked things over." (I wasn't so sure.)
I pulled up in front of the apartment on lower Russian Hill, a nice looking place. As he started to pay me, I noticed a corner store still open down the block.
"Keep the money," I said, "it's Christmas Eve. Buy her some flowers".
"Yeah," he said, "Flowers, that's a good idea. Well, wish me luck".
As he struggled to crawl out of the cab, he seemed so hopeful--and yet, so hopeless. Sometimes life is hard and then it just gets even harder...
***
Shaving ritual:
In the early morning mirror:
Zen is the moment of stillness
Once the plug has been pulled...
But before the water begins to turn.
***
Man is a creature of the Mind. Man lives within a rich interior landscape every bit as real as the penthouse in which his physical body resides or as real as the curb upon which he lays his head at the end of another fruitless day. And the more desolate one's exterior world the more pressure there is to escape into an interior landscape over which one has at least some illusory control.
Lacking a sense of spiritual presence, personal philosophy or artistic sensibility (not to mention a family, loved ones and a satisfactory job) one's interior landscape can quickly turn into a horrific battle zone. The impotent quest for power; for personal authentication can quickly translate itself into a violent nature. And the desire for fulfillment denied in the world can quickly and predictably be realized in a joint, a needle or a crack pipe. For make no mistake about it--drugs will make you high. The 'rush' that one can get from closing a million dollar real estate deal, or surfing a difficult wave, or skiing down a mountain of new snow or free falling from 10,000 feet can be duplicated instantly with certain drugs.
We have entered a new zone of experience and the old templates which have worked for the past couple hundred years will simply no longer fit the mold. Our feelings of reality result from our manipulation of our environment; either the exterior or the interior environment.
The cold reality is that this is the age of the Cybernetic Wars and the sad fact and sudden realization of this war is that our spirits are adrift in a chemical stew.
We live in a society that worships extremes. Look to the news, to the media that deifies the culture vultures. We have learned (with the invention of the machine?) to manipulate our exterior environment to an extreme. We have turned an entire economic system into a metaphor for getting high! And we have managed to turn an Eden of a planet into a battle zone and environmental disaster rivaling the worst blocks of the world's inner cities. Is it any wonder that the disenfranchised masses should turn towards the manipulation of an interior landscape when the exterior world is denied them? The neighborhood crack dealer is a perfect microcosm for the American system as it operates in the world at large. Profit first, last and foremost, and damn the future consequences.
So, now we have identified the problem, what is the solution? There is but one solution to the present dilemma. What we are faced with is nothing less than a complete rethinking of the way we perceive 'reality' and our position within it. We are literally faced with the awesome prospect of having to reinvent ourselves! And it is not an option. Ready or not; here it is! The future is NOW.
And is it any wonder that our approach to the solution is slow, limited and totally lacking in imagination? Those who are the present societal sculptors of the three dimensional environment are as locked into their ghetto as any housing project crack dealer. They are just money junkies in a velvet cell but addicted to the high nonetheless and just as apt to become violent when they crash.
We must first truly realize that we are absolutely on a war-time footing; psychologically, psychically and dare I use the word--spiritually. After untold millions of years of evolution and after uncountable war after violent war we have finally eliminated all the enemies but one: the last enemy, and the ultimate adversary! As the cartoon says; 'we have encountered the enemy and he is us'! The enemy is not the neighborhood crack dealer nor even the Colombian drug czar, nor the greedy banker or the corrupt politician. The enemy is the uncharted territory within the human mind which until quite recently we have not had either the discretionary time or money or interest to explore. It might even be said that rather than a war in the historical sense what we are involved in is a rather intense expedition of discovery. What used to be the private reserve of the wealthy, the overeducated or merely the creatively perverse has, through the process of democracy, been finally offered up at the Western buffet for one and all.
What are we to do? There have to be alternatives to the ghettos, to the pools of discomfort that have arisen. Until the 'new software' for the human heart is created there have to be exit points that carry no shame and no negative burden. These exit points have to be as relevant to the teenager in the ghetto as the abused housewife, the unhappy lawyer or corporate professional locked into his/her unhappy plight. So what we are describing is a need for an entirely New Model for the interior world. Wise men throughout history have taught us that what we see within will be modeled without. So you do unto others as you would have them do unto you. There has to be a renewed appreciation of the golden mean, the middle road that manages to avoid the extremes, both the high as well as the low.
We are quickly learning that all extremes can have dangerous consequences whether we are talking about the athletic female who over trains to the point where she loses bone mass or to the parents who, in their quest for corporate perfection, forsake family for financial security only to wonder upon retirement why they remain dissatisfied.
There must be room for relative poverty with dignity. We must develop a class of artists and philosophers who willingly give up the normal fame and gain games for a more spiritual path. We must offer the model of the individual who is unacknowledged but still accomplished; alone but not lonely, even without funds perhaps but certainly not poor. We must simplify. And it is not as if there weren't models present and accounted for. There are thousands of such people walking around leading perfectly glorious lives while the societal eye--the media--remains focused upon the victims and the casualties of the Cybernetic Wars.
What we need is not a generation of policemen and jailers and lawyers, but a generation of citizen philosophers respectful of this life form we call Earth and more apt to quest after The Spirit than the dollar....
***
The Da Da Warriors:
I picked up a guy one night, late, coming out of Golden Gate Park. He was wearing camouflage fatigues and carrying a shoulder pack. He was staying at a classy hotel down town and on the way there he told me the following story. He swore it was true. I remain unconvinced.
Down town financial district types. By day they lead very straight button down lives. By night and on weekends they turn into 'Da Da Warriors,' mock commandos. They group and form teams and play 'WAR' in the woods using tree marking pistols and fencing masks etc. Along with this they gradually get into the general survivalist movement, attending gun shows, stocking up on freeze dried food etc. Eventually, in search of greater risks, they recruit certain of the city’s park gardeners into their group and begin to hold night maneuvers in Golden Gate Park. They effectively sealed off the park through the use of hand held VHF radios and look outs. Once a month or so they have 'rat hunts' using silent weapons such as sling shots, bow and arrows, blow guns etc. Gradually this 'secret' nocturnal life becomes more and more intense and intoxicating. At one point they began taking psychedelic mushrooms before their 'game' just to heighten their sensitivity to the forest at night. They begin to identify with their da da warrior personas more and more. Couples begin to get divorced over 'The Game'. Their nine to five button down jobs become a 'sham' as their 'otra' lives become prime. As they begin to take their shadow lives more and more seriously their motto becomes...~Earth is night school for errant spirits!~ Then they begin to move into the streets leaving messages voicing their displeasure with the politics of the day, and eventually they begin to cross over the legal line by staging 'mock terrorist raids' marking non game playing figures with the infamous 'RED DOT'...
At least that was his story and then we arrived at the Fairmont hotel.
***
Advice for tourists:
In San Francisco there will be only one street sign per intersection and it will always be on a different corner (usually the one impossible for you to read as you cruise through).
Every intersection will come with a NO LEFT TURN SIGN. In order to go left you will almost always have to circle right.
You will find no white lines on the busiest streets. This is especially fun in rush hour in the winter, in the dark, in the rain.
At the busiest intersections at the busiest times you will NEVER see a traffic cop. Seems to be part of some de-stressification program that forbids traffic cops from being present during rush hour traffic in the down town area. Grid lock is encouraged this way and then the city capitalizes upon this sad state of affairs by doubling or quadrupling the traffic fine for being in the intersection!
You will have to negotiate every intersection with jay walking pedestrians (regardless of the fact that you may have a green light).
And be prepared for verbal/visual abuse from those same jay walkers if they should happen to catch you trying to drive down the street! Traffic lights are only an optional convenience for pedestrians but mandatory for automobiles.
This is possibly the only major city in the world where a jay walking pedestrian will flip you the 'bird' for driving down the road and having the gall to interfere with his (or more usually her) saunter.
***
Entry 4.
Saturday:
The driving serves as an edge; a point of tension. Things come up from that rough place. I sort of "POP" through. It becomes an adventure, a challenge and an opportunity. Suddenly I am thrust into the openness of the moment.
***
I remember once I was really trying to communicate with a woman I deeply cared about and at one point she recoiled and said,
"You are just trying to get into my brain!"
I was stunned! Getting into her brain? Of course, I wanted to touch her very soul! Getting into her pants was O.K., in fact that was fine but for gawd's sake don't try to open the brain box and see how the snakes are coiled, seemed to be her message.