The bodhisattva was so overwhelmed by the suffering in the universe that the deity’s head split into eleven pieces. But then, seeing the deity's plight, the buddha gives Guanyin eleven heads to better hear the cries of those who suffer—and a thousand arms to help them.
Autechre’s “VLetrmx” is the correct song for contemplating the horror and beauty of living in the future.
In Greek mythology, dreams were often personified as Óneiroi, black-winged demons that enter our sleeping minds like bats to deliver messages from the gods. Last night I dreamt I drank perfume and had a minor role in a detective show in which none of us could remember the name of the president between Johnson and Ford.
This week our previous president went on trial for being sleazy, and I envy the optimists who think this might save our republic. Meanwhile, my therapist taught me how to give myself a panic attack in twenty seconds flat. He wants me to do this five times every day. I’m finally giving psychology a shot, and it was long overdue. Gutting it out wasn’t getting me very far. Each night, I drive along deserted highways with the Chromatics, trying to get my interstate mojo back. Each day, I feel a bit better, even though the world feels a little more insane.
Strange how it’s perfectly acceptable to say ‘goodbye’ in person or over the telephone, yet it transforms an email or a text message into a suicide note. In other news, I no longer understand the atheist who wants to talk people out of their gods. I often think about this line in First Reformed: “The desire to pray is itself a form of prayer.”
Some Americans like to tie a pair of shoes together and toss them at a power line.
Some Americans like to tie a pair of shoes together and toss them at a power line or a tree branch until they catch and hang. Very few people have seen these shoes actually thrown, and of the witnesses who have been surveyed, their reports vary as to the average number of attempts before the shoes find their mark, ranging from three to nineteen. This practice is more frequent in urban areas, although this might simply be a function of population density rather than any fundamental difference between the psyche of the city and the country. The style of shoes and their arrangement, however, is worth noting. Lone sneakers are common in the city, but when dangling shoes appear in rural areas, the formations tend to be more elaborate. In some parts of the Mojave desert, dusty shoes cover dead Joshua trees like leaves. Hundreds of black army boots hang from irrigation pipes over neglected crops in Oklahoma.
Some say a pair of tennis shoes draped over a telephone line indicates a place to score drugs. Often referred to as cosmic kicks or crack tennies, they serve as a storefront shingle for the local dealer. Others will tell you they mark a shooting gallery where heroin is used, a reminder that you’ll never walk away once you get hooked. These theories, however, do not explain the shoes strung over desolate roads or beneath the highway overpasses where nobody goes.
Many of these shoes once belonged to children. Seeing a child’s shoes hanging in a bottle-strewn alley bothers the soul, calling to mind Hemingway’s famous six-word story: For sale: Baby shoes, never worn. Some say these abandoned shoes memorialize a gangland killing. Others believe they mark the sighting of a ghost. But most levelheaded folks chalk them up to run-of-the-mill bullying in which some asshole kid steals another kid’s shoes and tosses them beyond his reach.
If any of these theories are true, there are an awful lot of victims, ghosts, and bullies in the USA.
This is the third episode of Interstate Scenes, a fictional collection of homeless paragraphs, remixed and upcycled bits from the past, and bloopers from the stories I’m writing.
Part of me still believes grief has an ending. I’m still caught off-guard by haunted dreams or disorienting moments of longing for the ones I’ve lost.
Sometimes I find comfort in a two-thousand-year-old myth about a Chinese emperor. Unable to bear the death of his beloved, Emperor Wu offered a reward to anyone who could bring her back to him. A wise man carefully cut out a silhouette of the departed woman from a piece of paper and displayed it behind a white cloth for the grieving emperor, who found comfort in the sight of her standing behind a curtain before a shining moon. This story from the Han dynasty not only describes the origin of shadow puppets, it’s a reminder that art can mitigate grief and perhaps even deny death.