I tear to bits a quarter loaf before I see it. The words and the countering. Post revisioning (revision: to see again) reminding that I will forget remembering wisdom, warnings, the Way Things Are:

I go through phases fazed, raised on razed, burn myself down like breathing’s easier through flames and brick by brick build up again, thick with premises rearranged, ideas about myself that aren’t fully false but aren’t really real, either.

I’ve all sorts of books on meditation. Rarely do I sit. I’m a thinker! Not a not doer! An I! Not an absence! for clearly there is something that enjoys dissatisfaction. Distraction from whatever it is I’m missing.

I can say this with distance. That tells something. Right.

Searching for videos on mediation I come across Jon Kabat-Zinn talking to Google people about the Now and I lol myself happysick into the dishwater I try to be intentional about so Thich Nhat Hanh will like me, but am not, really, I am divided, watching my laptop cracking up that Jon Kabat-Zinn is talking about the now… then. “Every moment is” was “now” then—this is only a recording, an audience I wasn’t in. The books I read are decades, centuries old but timeless because there is no time? no, because I’m boring holes through the universe, constructs of mind? no, I’m predictable. I’ve always been here before. Was now was, cuz. The story I write in the present tense happened in the past, and this post was future dated. What have you to say about that?

Everybody needs something. Temporary. Temporarily. Temper tantric tantrum. Tempering tampered thought.

Did I ever tell you Eckhart Tolle was my bus driver? In Vancouver, where he in fact lives, I am not making this up. He was carting sleepy kids to UBC. I was going to the library. I don’t remember what he said or what I said that got us talking, but allah sudden we engaged in The Now. He told me about his life like it wasn’t him living it, like he was another person and probably he was, why would Eckhart Tolle drive a city bus? but it looked like him so much, why wouldn’t Eckhart Tolle drive a city bus? I said yeah yeah I know about you him me but not fully, not like I read your book or wrote one or anything, but I do try to be present—persistent without insistence—not interested to wake the snake that wraps around my spine but wanting to know her name if I ever need to shriek it.

I will own my inattention when the stick comes to whack me but won’t be accused of ignorance without a broken fist. “I can say this with distance.” Doesn’t mean I do it.

Hands sunk in the sink, halfway through the video my memory triggers oh wow, aw hell I’d seen Jon Kabat-Zinn speak in person years ago at the U of M—a lecture on a lark, long before I pretended to be interested in mindfulness. I’d forgotten. Completely. Now was now. This post is late.

Processing what this means, the personal policies of forgetting, tension of now pretension of power presence inner peace, I miss the point, and break a plate.