Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

"I'm not really a good person."

"I coulda told you that. And you're also talking to yourself," she said, then sniffed the air, "It smells like incense in here. Are you trying to hide something? Have you started smoking the reefer?"

I sighed. "That was weeks ago. Great. And it's too cold to air the room out now, so the smell will probably linger all winter."

She looked at me in surprise. "Wait, so you actually did? Woah. No way!'

I looked at her in confusion. "What?" then I mentally replayed the past few seconds of conversation, "Oh. No, of course not. Why would I want to smoke pot? No, the incense was somebody else's fault. He redecorated my room for some reason."

She leaned back and sat on the bed. "I almost hoped for a second there. You should, you know."
"Should what? Smoke weed, or redecorate."

"Either! Both! Something. I really don't care what at this point."

"Um, yeah, I'll keep that in mind."

"Seriously, dragon posters? Come on. Do SOMETHING, I'm dying over here! Sloth is the most boring of sins!"

I spun around to face her again. "I'd be tempted to do the opposite just to spite you, except then you'd do the whole reverse psychology thing. I'm not falling for that."

She leaned forward. "Well, why not? I'm evil, so whatever I suggest can't be good, right?"

"Meh," I said, and spun back to the computer, "I'm not really a good person."

I heard her get up and step over to lean on the back of my chair. "I know tha...woah. Is that chair even safe?"

I almost knocked the keyboard on the floor catching my balance. "As long as people don't try and knock it over! Watch it!"

"You're grumpy," she said.

"And you're not helping," I said. "But I guess that goes with the whole evil thing, huh?"

She leaned on the back of the chair again, more carefully. "Wrong place to look for sympathy, honey. You'd rather I lied to you? It's my job to know everything bad you do. And it's a depressing list. Mostly sins of omission, but those still count for Spidey, don't they?"

I tilted my head back and looked at her upside down head. "Do you seriously use superhero ethics for sorting out bad deeds?"

"Do you?" she asked.

"I was being serious though, about not being a good person. I try not to be too bad a person, but that's not the same thing at all. And I'm suspecting I'm worse at it than I thought."

"Okay," she said.

Silence reigned for several seconds. I looked side to side, she just stood there. "Um. Okay then?" I said.

"Okay," she said.

"Well?"

"Well what? Sorry honey, I'm not gonna give you advice you won't take. Especially when it could cost me my job. And like you keep pointing out, I'm evil."

"Okay," I said, and sat back straight, then she leaned forward and almost tipped the chair over. "Hey, what?"

She grabbed the keyboard and mouse, and I probably would have put up more of a fight, but for the physics of the situation. Besides the tipsy chair, I had no leverage, and I wasn't gonna try and shove her off me by her boobs. Stupid gentlemanly habits.

"Okay, there," she said after a couple seconds, and stood up.

"Where? What did you do?"

She bounced and squealed like a schoolgirl. At least that's what it sounded like. "I'm HELPING!"

I slowly turned and stared at her. "What?" she asked, "I am. I deleted all of your video games, so now you have one less excuse to not go out and get into trouble. That should cover my quota for this week."

I checked. She had. And thinking about it, I didn't really care one way or the other about that. Not just 'cause I have the discs. It just didn't matter.

I spun the chair around back to her. "Um. Damn you, I guess?"

"See, there's the kind of enthusiasm that can be turned to evil!" she said, "Just doing my evil deed for the day!" she threw a salute before vanishing in the by now standard pink sparkly vaguely sulfur cloud. That was...odd. She was practically anime at the end there. Huh.

(This is going to contain spoilers for Fight Club. If you haven't seen it and want to, go watch it. The Internet will still be here. If you haven't seen it and don't want to, I'd recommend it. But since I'm probably the last one on my friendslist who actually hadn't seen it, I'm not gonna bother to LJ cut. You've been warned.)

"Huh."

"You're trying to overload that poor interjection with too many shades of meaning."

I shut off the DVD player and looked toward the voice. The buddha was sprawled out on the back of the couch, almost exactly like a cat. "Does Brad Pitt know you have his jacket?" I asked.

"He's beyond such concerns now."

"Hang on, isn't that leather? Can't that get you kicked out of the Buddhist club?"

He pulled one of the sleeves up to his nose and sniffed it. "It's fictional imaginary leather. No animals were harmed in the making of this jacket. Why do you care, anyway?"

"Nerd. Internal consistency is one of the things that irritates me," I said, then realized something else, "Wait, did you try and do the haircut too? It didn't work. You look like Rod Stewart."

"Appearances are as much illusion as everything else in the world. Perhaps more," he said.

"That's... Wait, I don't care enough to go through this whole argument again. If you stopped by on your way to a con dressed as Tyler Durden, hey, good for you."

"There's more than a few parallels."

"Yeah, yeah, imaginary friend. Only to the best of my knowledge you're not flying around the country selling soap. But that's not the point, either. Fight Club's a good movie. A very good one. And I can see why so many people went all OMG AWESOME at it. There's been a couple things I've read and seen lately like that, where I know if I'd seen or read it sooner, when I was a teenager or so, it would have blown my impressionable little mind. But now I'm not quite so impressionable, and I've run into other things that blew my mind at the time, a lot of which covered the same kind of stuff. Or maybe I've just seen some of the flaws in their philosophies."

"Or you're just old."

"I feel old sometimes. But mid-twenties isn't old. It's really not the age, it's the living. Or lack thereof. Which is sorta the other thing that's bugging me. Like, a lot of the reason I never saw the movie before was because so many people were squeeing about it. And partly because I don't watch that many movies by myself, I usually waste my time on the Internet now. But there's things I avoided not so much because they were bad, but because they were popular. A lot of the people who liked things just because they were popular were assholes. Still might be, I don't know what happened to most of them. I don't know if it was more a matter of being like them, or a matter of admitting the might be right about things once in a while. You never want your enemies to be right, it's so much more annoying."

"It's so much more satisfying to write your enemies off as always wrong and deluded and evil and stuff, isn't it?" he asked, "Because then you don't have to listen to them or deal with them as human beings."

I raised a finger at him. "Or you could just lump them all in as illusions and deluded by the illusionary world."

"Touche."

"So, yeah. I was wrong. Not that Tyler Durden was right either. But that's not even the point, because there's other things kinda related, that I've been thinking about, that I realize now I was wrong about when I was younger, and now I feel stupid about them. So I end up sounding like an old man or something, talking about how young and stupid I was."

"The folly of youth becomes the wisdom of maturity," the buddha recited.

"Sure, why not? Being wrong sucks though. Especially when it's something you've been wrong about for a long time, because then you're used to thinking that way, it's habit. Your thoughts are used to running that way. And you, well, I, have no practice in other ways, so I'm gonna keep being wrong and screwing up."

"That was extraordinarily vague," he said, "Which probably means it's about women. I'm deliberately obscure to make people think, what's your excuse."

I shrugged. "Partly, I said, but women are hardly the only thing I've been wrong about. I wish it were. I wasn't being vague, I was being expansive. Or generic. Whatever."

"But what about the movie?"

"It was good. I've been told there's two groups of people who like it, ones who like it for the testosterone cult fight part, and ones who 'get it.' I'm not sure that's the only things people can get out of the movie though. The thing is, the Fight Club stuff started out as a decent idea. Not for everybody, obviously, but yeah, a bare-knuckle brawl would probably do a lot to make all the other little hassles of everyday life seem a lot littler. But Tyler Durden's an asshole. A charming and mostly likable asshole, but still an asshole."

"Are you sure you're right?"

"Sure enough," I said, "Yeah, I could be wrong. But just because I can be wrong doesn't mean I am. The whole corporate homogenization and making people into wage slaves part I can totally understand. I had the sad realization I'm a sales-drone for a megacorp the other day. And I can totally empathize with the trickster side of things, throwing things into confusion to make people think and knock them out of their routines. But that's not where his ideas went, he wanted to get rid of civilization. Thought it took away everything that made men men or something. They even spelled it out in the movie. When he started ranting about climbing up vines growing on the Sears Tower, and looking down and seeing women doing laundry on an abandoned superhighway."

"Would you really mind seeing vines on skyscrapers, or superhighways abandoned?"

"No, I wouldn't. But here's the key thing. They'd be there on purpose. And the superhighway would be abandoned because we'd have moved on to something else. None of this primordial primitive romantic bullshit. Civilization all the way. Sure, there's romance to the hunter-gatherer life, but that's all it is, romance. In real life, it pretty much sucked. There's a reason the main thrust of history has been to get as far away from the 'natural state of man' as possible."

"Paraphrasing Gaiman and Pratchett again?"

"Yup. They got to me first, before Mr. Durden. The movie makes it clear he's totally batshit insane, though. Even aside from the split personality part of it. I guess he's supposed to be all the repressed stereotypically male parts, with violence and sex and taking on the whole world. But having just that's no more balanced than having none of it. I think I'm thinking about this too much, because it's late at night."

"Do you think you're supposed to think about it?"

"I think the studio doesn't care as long as they get paid. Hey, are you going to do anything other than ask questions every so often so it doesn't seem like I'm monologuing?"

"What would you like? Do you want me to tell you to hit me? A final metaphorical showdown to represent the conquest of your inner something-or-others?"

"Nah," I said, "I'm not that impressionable. Besides, when it does come down to metaphorical inner conquest thingies, it's not going to be a fight. Or maybe by then I won't even have to bother. I'm definitely not going to bother tonight, though, it's late and I'm tired. You can find your own way out."

He was still sprawled there when I flipped the lights off. Like that meant anything.

She looked grumpy. Cute, but still grumpy.

"You were drawing cartoon owls."

"Yes. Well, one. Multiple times."

"And that's why you were too busy to talk to me."

"Yeah, pretty much."

I'm starting to think you really are hopeless."

"Maybe, but look at the owl."

"Aww, that's cute," she said.

"See, even works on succubi. And mine is but a poorly rendered shadow."

"Dude, if you used language like that on women, you might get some more action."

"And you have no ulterior motive."

"Me?"

Then she poofed and was gone. Sulfur and perfume really don't mix at all well.

He's been hanging around for a couple of days now. Not saying anything, just sort of there every so often. Occasionally, a toenail spanged off somewhere. Finally, I decided if he was going to hang around, I'd get something useful out of him.

"I have a question," I announced.

"I know," the buddha said.

"Of course you do. Cosmic one-ness and time being an illusion and all that. So if I didn't ask, would you get a headache?"

"I'd wait. Like you said, time is an illusion, whenever you ask, that would be when you ask."

I pointed at him. "That," I said, "Is complete and utter Mystic Bullshit. Of course whenever I ask will be when I ask. That's not metaphysical wisdom, that's a tautology. But that aside, the question. There's a whole bunch of various vaguely new-agey CDs out there called things like 'Buddha Lounge' or 'Buddha bar' or 'Buddha Laundromat' or so on. Are those all approved and do you guys get any royalties from them?"

"Unfortunately, there wasn't anything like the Trademark Office around back then. And by the time things like that were invented, there were already so many competing claims, there would have been no point. Besides, a buddha's not interested in money or the things of the world."
"I dunno," I said, "that kind of cash could buy a lot of saffron robes. And what if somebody does something stupid and slaps your name on it?"

He shrugged. "What of it? Their stupidity would be of their making, not ours. And it would hardly be the first, nor the last, stupid thing done with or for the name of religion."

"Speaking of things done in the name of religion. There's something I started wondering lately. Why does it seem like so many religions, especially conservative ones, have such small and petty and fragile visions of God?"

He perched across the room, on my awesomely ugly retro bedside table. "I'm not sure if asking you to explain would make anybody any less mad at you, but you'll probably go on anyway."

"Yes, I will. Okay, obviously, this doesn't apply to a lot of religions, mostly some of the stripes of Christianity that get on display here in the US, but. Okay. So God is omniscient and omnipotent, and yet, we humans can meddle in God's plans. It just seems like, y'know, if God's all of those things, wouldn't any Plans have a capital P, and be flexible enough to deal with a little meddling? I mean, hell, half the time more interesting things come out of actual interactions than what you planned, you know what I mean? So saying God's Plans can be wrecked by us meddling kids seems kinda weak. Not very Ineffable."

"You might want to investigate philosophers besides Terry Pratchett some time."

"Hush, I'm pontificating. Except I don't have a funky hat like a pontiff. Hang on." I dug around a little and found the Robin Hood hat I'd gotten at the renfaire last year. "There we go. Hat. Now, as I was saying. Yeah, a lot of the stuff I'm thinking is covered in Good Omens, but some of it, actually, I got from C.S. Lewis. Which is why I don't understand the God of the fundies. Any God worthy the name, I'd figure, would care more about what kind of person you are and what you did, rather than if you said the secret words to get out scott free. Of course, that leads to all sorts of fun theological arguments I really don't care about, like if God is infinitely just and infinitely merciful, which wins? Rock, meet object."

"Do I even need to be here? There's things I could be doing."

"Yes. Mad ranting always needs an audience. See, the thing in particular that set me off was sex, which lots of religions seem to hate. But in particular about sex, birth control. The Catholic Church doesn't like birth control, for reasons I've never quite gotten. The Internets tell me it's because Catholics should "always be open to the possibility of pregnancy" and suchlike, and that just sorta baffles me. Okay, so you're telling me, if God wants somebody to get pregnant, God's going to lose to a piece of latex? I don't think making something that thin rip would take any kind of miracleing, you know? It's part of the whole thing I was talking about before. If God made humans, God knows what humans are like, and God would know how people are going to react. And if God knows all that, there doesn't seem to be much room for free will, but that's a whole extra ball of stuff I don't feel like getting into, this was just inspired by the ridiculous idea that an omnipotent God is going to be defeated by a condom."

He perched there quietly for several seconds. "What? Oh, you finished. Part of the problem is you're you. You're not these other people, so you see things through what you've seen and done and think. And a lot of religion ends up being a giant ink-blot, since it's almost by definition about things that the human mind isn't capable of understanding, yes, objection noted, people project themselves onto it, their hopes, their fears, their values, through all sorts of different things. How many different ways do people read any holy book? And you value cleverness, so you figure well, of COURSE, God's going to be clever, if there is a God. Other people look for other things, so those are what they see the most."

"Like the cliched anecdote about blind men and elephants," I said.

"Cliche, but yes. And the other thing you forget is not everyone thinks like you. People don't think all of their values out all the way, to see where they conflict. Not even you, for all that you sit around typing to yourself. Cognitive dissonance isn't a fun feeling."

"Meh," I said, "It's not like I have anything else to be doing."

He tipped gently over onto the bed, without moving otherwise. "So you say, but is there any real excuse for being bored in this world, now?"

I shrugged. "Probably not," I admitted, "But that still doesn't answer my original question."

"Perhaps you should ask the Pope. That might be interesting to see. On the other hand, you made up a world where the plans of the gods can be knocked willy-nilly pretty easily, would you really find the world interesting if things couldn't be hacked?"

He had a point. Which is of course when he got up and left.


Prior:
Stories from the Rabbit Hole
Stories from the Rabbit Hole, Part 2
There's a Buddha on My Bed
A Discussion of Procrastination and Buddhism
Buddhablog
Haven't Seen Him in a While
The Illusion of Pain
Stuff that Binds
The Joy of Scrubdom
More About Failure
Book Reviews with a Buddha
Who's Afraid of a Little Enlightenment?
Special Guest Star Daily Drabble
Conversation

My new network card arrived off Ebay today. The instruction manual was printed in some kind of Asian gibberish, but really, it's just a network card. Who needs instructions? Okay, so I never got my graphics card to work, but that was some kind of bizarre incompatibility between it and the motherboard that even tech support and the magic of Google couldn't fix. But this was just a network card.

A very shiny network card. It looked like something out of anime, all streamlined and with random LEDs. I'm not really sure why, but hey, it was cheap. And it had the right connectors, so I just shut the computer down, stuck it in, and rebooted. Beep Boop, Windows login, enter, detecting new hardware, yadda yadda. Even detected it without the CD. Len Nor Ver 23.5. All seemed well, so shut down, plug in the cable, reboot. Again. It's really annoying how often you have to reboot when trying to install something. Ah well.

Okay. So just to make sure it worked, I pointed Firefox at Google. If you can't get to Google, either your connection's crapped out, or the rest of the Internet has ceased to exist. Google wasn't there. There was the white page, and a colorful logo, but it wasn't Google. It was some kind of weird lettering. Not Asian, not Arabic, but it looked naggingly familiar. Maybe some new movie coming out, or some obscure holiday I missed, or some Google programmer joke. Since reloading and retyping didn't make it go away. Good to go.

When I went to Yahoo to check my mail though, it was all in the same weird moon letters. What? BBC, CNN, /., all the same. I had no idea what any of it said, but it still looked familiar. Squiggles, but familiar squiggles. And it wasn't April 1, either. Hang on, let me check some settings.

Okay, there. Somehow Windows got set to display in Elvish. I hate when things change settings without asking me, must be the stupid network card. Had been loading fast though. Okay. Time to check out some webcomics and get back to my regularly scheduled time-wasting. When did Gossamer Commons start a new story? Ah well.

I didn't really get worried until I came here to LJ. During the night, my friendslist somehow got taken over by a bunch of kids writing slashfic. I don't even know anybody who writes much slashfic. But that's not the worst part. The worst part was it was all written by exceedingly bubbly or angsty (or both) teenage girls, but it was all so incredibly boring. It was all about people in the suburbs doing laundry and things. It was slashfic about the mundane, with obligatory sex thrown in.

And that's when Trillian popped up with a name I didn't know. "A/S/L?" somebody named Druidicia asked.

Maybe I'm just exceedingly boring, because that kind of thing never happens to me. Not that I really want it to, so I didn't answer.

"A/S/L?" Druidicia asked again, "ill go first. 147/f/lorien."

What the hell. Maybe I could figure some of this out. "26/M/US." I typed back.

"dude ru a kid or r u playing?"

"I'm not a kid."

"sure. rofl. bye kid."

At this point, I had a pretty good idea what was going on, but honestly, it seemed ridiculous. So I checked the userinfo on a couple of those ficcers. First, I realized, their icons weren't CG anime elves, they were photos. And their userinfo led me to several communities, all about RPing in an exotic world of humans and cars and day jobs. And that clinched it.

I shut down the computer and put back my old network card, then came and posted this. But I'm thinking about reinstalling the other one. Because, dude. They were tons of them fantasizing about boring humans. C'mon, you can't say you wouldn't do it. I wonder if their version of mapquest would work here.

I looked down at the fortune. "This is ridiculous."

"What's that?"

"Even fortune cookies are outsourcing now. Look."

I read the fortune and handed it to the buddha. "If you cannot find wisdom within, try the Internet."

"On the other side, you get the Chinese pictogram for Cheeze-whiz."

"It's not a fortune. Monkey loving proverb cookies have been taking over the market. You don't seem annoyed."

"Being one with the universe gives perspective. Wisdom can be found on the Internet."

"If you can get past the porn and the wankers whining on LJ."

"Cynicism is best directed at itself."

The shoulders of...well, not giants, mostly me, really:
Stories from the Rabbit Hole
Stories from the Rabbit Hole, Part 2
There's a Buddha on My Bed
A Discussion of Procrastination and Buddhism
Buddhablog
Haven't Seen Him in a While
The Illusion of Pain
Stuff that Binds
More About Failure
The Joy of Scrubdom
Book Reviews with a Buddha
Who's Afraid of a Little Enlightenment?
Special Guest Star Daily Drabble

"Wankers, the lot of them."

"Who?" the buddha asked.

"Y'know, you seem awfully attached to my scooty chair, for all that it's an illusion. I thought you'd buggered off to somewhere else."

"We're British tonight?"

"The British have better profanity. All we've got is damn, and then your bog standard anglo-saxon terms referring to sex or poop, and yes, I KNOW what the British words mean. But they sound better, and aren't offensive to Americans, because they're not part of our culture. Sorta like how the British were weirded out when Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me opened over there."

"So we are British then."

"No, we are just fanboy. I blame Monty Python and Terry Pratchett. And probably Neil Gaiman, but I don't want to mess with him, he's got a satanic tomato."

"It's only a model. So which wankers roused your ire?"

I flopped down on my bed, on top of the pile of shorts. It's already starting to get chilly, and I just unpacked them. That's planning, that is. "Oh, 'literary' authors. Seriously, they write books that are about wannabe writers, and OMG TEH DRAMA, and then the character in the book meets some amazing chick and things go either good or bad, and Great Lessons Are Learned. Or similar dibble. It's like Real Life Self-Insertion Fanfic."

The buddha didn't say anything, but I'd gotten rolling, so I went. "I mean, seriously, you want to whine about your life and bitch about drama? Get an LJ, that's what they're for. Many of the novels would fit right in as LJ posts. And hey, they'd save a few trees that way. But I can't really blame them. Well, yet, anyway. The real culprits are the teachers who repeat crap like 'Write what you know!' over and over again, without mentioning things like 'Go and do something interesting.' And the ones who bash anything 'genre' as addlepated fluff. When they're told to write what they know, and all they know is being an underemployed wannabe writer, what else are they supposed to write about? All that creativity wasted. Oh, but hey, it's Real Life! It's Serious! It's got Great Human Emotions and Deep Meaning. Whoop-dee-doo. You can have Great Emotion and Deep Meaning and still have spaceships or dragons or guys in tights punching each other. But that's not 'Serious' literature. PAH! And of course, the kids they've trained grow up to become the next generation of gatekeepers of Literature with a capital L. And the cycle repeats itself."

The buddha spun quietly in my chair for a second. "Are you finished?"

"I could go on, but I think you get the point. Trust me, I could go on."

"So how much of that isn't sour grapes?"

"Bah," I said, "As you Californians would say, 'Whatever.'"

"Well, if people are buying it, what's your problem with it? If they're enjoying it, and the readers enjoy it, how's it hurt you?"

"Because they keep up this facade of what makes something 'Real Literature', and sneer at anything that doesn't meet their standards."

"Ah. Completely unlike what you're doing, then."

Unconcerned by my glare, he started trimming his toenails. "Do you show up just to annoy me?" I asked.

"If you just want comfort food, ask a fairy godmother. You wanted an imaginary spirit guide debate."

I sat up. "Yeah, but shouldn't you be trying to help? Infinite compassion and all that."

He leaned back in the chair. The chair's not set up to DO that, damnit. I wish it could. "Hey, I've got compassion. I totally feel your pain. Infinitely."

"That's because you live in my head."

"Bingo. But the other part of the whole Buddha thing you're forgetting. Infinite patience. I've got nowhere important to be. Nirvana's not going anywhere. Besides, time's just another illusion. So yeah, I feel your pain, but I'm not gonna kick your ass into gear. Even if I could. That's your job."

"That is almost entirely unhelpful."

"Ah, but only almost! I can only show you the door, you're the one that has to walk through it."

"That worked out so well for Neo."

"He got a cookie out of it. And phenomenal cosmic powers."

"And he got killed, then brought back for a pair of bad sequels."

"He got the chick."

I held up a hand to stop him. "And then SHE died. Twice. And what's with stories always rewarding the hero with nookie, anyway? Even stories for kids. Go out, kill something, get laid. There's a very caveman vibe about the whole thing..."

"We're wandering from the subject again."

"Not really, I think we've said all there is to say about it right now."

"So you're going to get to work?"

"No, I'm going to bed. Have you looked at the clock?"

"Time's an illusion, remember?"

"Fine, but I still have the illusion of Arabic class tomorrow afternoon, and I'd like to be up BEFORE five minutes before class."

"Sleep is for the weak and unenlightened."

That's me to a T. At least at this hour of the morning.


Things Wot Come Before:
Stories from the Rabbit Hole
Stories from the Rabbit Hole, Part 2
There's a Buddha on My Bed
A Discussion of Procrastination and Buddhism
Buddhablog
Haven't Seen Him in a While
The Illusion of Pain
Stuff that Binds
The Joy of Scrubdom
More About Failure


Tags: Rabbit Hole, Mindscribbles, Religion, Movies

"Well, that sucked," I said, and threw my backpack on the bed.

"Not a good trip, I take it?" the buddha asked, in my spinny chair AGAIN.

"What're you doing in my chair?" I asked, "Isn't it just an illusion and distraction from Enlightenment or somesuch?"

"It's a comfortable illusion. And your bed is covered in stuff."

"Whatever," I said, and dropped down on top of a random pile of clothes on my bed. "No, it wasn't a good trip. First we got lost, and drove through DC because nobody was willing to turn around and go back to the turn we missed. And the tournaments both sucked. I can play better than that. 1-4 in Regionals, and then lose in the second round of a bloody booster draft. My deck was good, too. Sheesh. I suck. Why did I bother to go?"

"Was it all just about winning?"

"I didn't trade much, 'cause I suck at it. And so most of it was just to hang around and play Magic, and that's no fun when it sucks. Especially when my deck should have done better than that, and I should have done better than that. But no, I decided to scrub out. So got nothing to show for it, not even rares from the booster draft, 'cause I was an idiot and never drafted any rares. And lost to one of the ones I passed. Whee, a waste of a day."

"If people are going to win a game, other people have to lose. Sometimes you'll be both."

"344th out of 380? That's PATHETIC. Why did I bother? Guess I'm a worse player than I thought. And no, I'm not gonna make excuses,'cause it's my own fault for how I did. Feh."

He spun in the chair. "You're not big on failure, are you?"

"Who is? You fail, you don't get what you want, and bad things happen. Failing sucks. And it happens because you screwed up, or suck, or forgot something, or the universe just hates you. What's the good side? Oh yeah, learn from failure! Whee! I learned that I suck at Magic more than I thought! Woo! What a learning experience! I learned to get more than 4 hours sleep before doing mentally challenging things. I learned not to let people drive when they didn't sleep at all! Woo! That's SO HELPFUL!"

"I'll take that as a no. And not much good at dealing with it, either. Shit happens."

"That's not a fortune cookie."

"Cliches are nuggets of wisdom. In the same way that diamonds are nuggets of carbon."
I sat up. "That doesn't even make any sense."

"So you had two bad tournaments, and you're convinced you suck and ready to quit Magic for a while? How are you supposed to win then?"
"I probably won't."
He nodded sagely. "Ah, I see then. So it's simply everything else where you don't know how to deal with failure."

"What are you, a therapist?"

"Broadly speaking, it could be put that way."

I stood up. "So what, now you're trying to psychoanalyze me and find the subconcious root of my problems or something? Or get me to find them?"
(To be continued)


Prior:
Stories from the Rabbit Hole
Stories from the Rabbit Hole, Part 2
There's a Buddha on My Bed
A Discussion of Procrastination and Buddhism
Buddhablog
Haven't Seen Him in a While
The Illusion of Pain
Stuff that Binds

Do you have any idea how hard it is to drive when there's a Buddah sitting beside you, clipping his toenails?

"Do you have to do that in the car?" I asked him.

"The car is just an illusion," he said, "Besides, they itch. Your attachment to it is the cause of your pain."

"I'm attached to my insides being inside, too, so I'd like to keep this illusion on the illusion of the road."

A toenail clipping ptanged off the windshield in front of me. "Maybe the Universe is trying to teach you something."

"not to let nutters in sheets into my car, right. You're not even the Buddah anyway, you don't look Indian at all. You look like a bald surfer and sound like a fortune cookie."

"What else did you expect?" he asked, "Somebody who looked like Ghandi? Or maybe a little fat laughing guy?"

The stoplight changed and I turned left, headed into town. "Something along those lines, yes. Wise and serene, all that kind of thing."

"No you didn't," he said, "How much do you really know about Buddhism? Kung fu monks, distilled bits from a dozen unread books, and stuff from made up pop culture parodies? You haven't even taken a comparative religion course."

"You're still not the real Buddah," I said.

"Nope, I'm not. He's busy. I'm just a strawman you built up to argue against. Hey, that light's red."

I stupped two inches from the bumper of the car in front of me. "Who the fuck are you, then, and how did you get in my car, anyway? You just here to insult me?"

He cracked open a fortune cookie and handed me the fortune. "The foundation of true knowledge is the knowledge of ignorance," it said.

The car behind us honked, impatient. The road was clear, I turned out, then took the first turn into the bank. I pulled into a parking spot then looked over at him. "So, if you're a stereotype, what's next? Is this gonna turn into some Dante-ish voyage of the psyche? Or am I just losing my mind?"

"Why are we here?" he asked.

"Because I need to go to the bank."

"You're angry a lot. That's not good for you," he said, "I mean, I haven't even done anything to you."

"Not good in some spiritual sense, huh?"

"No," he said, "It'll probably give you heart trouble. You need to relax."

I shook my head and left him there and headed into the bank. Maybe while I was gone, he'd clean up all the toenail clippings.

Part 2

(And the Rabbit Hole link: http://www.livejournal.com/users/crisper/26562.html )
Tags: Rabbit Hole, Writing