Panning for Zen

There's probably some Zen in a pan of frying crickets, but I have no interest in looking for it. My interest in a pan of frying crickets is not getting popped in the eye by a drop of boiling olive oil. Eating the crickets once they've been cooked, all the way through the guts to kill the tapeworm larvae, is also on the list. That's pretty much it.

The main Zen deficiency of a pan of frying crickets is that they don't chirp. Sizzling, popping and whistling like chitinous little teapots is a poor substitute for chirping. The sizzle, the pop, and the whistle are produced by phase changes in the stuff that crickets are made of, but these changes occur without any deliberate participation by the crickets themselves. Chirping is different. Chirping rate is a neuromuscular response to the cricket's physical environment. A male cricket chirps faster when the air is warmer. This change is probably not a very deliberate act on the cricket's part--it's a function of poikilotherm physiology--but the act of chirping itself directly affects cricket reproduction. It attracts female crickets and warns away competing males. A popping, sizzling, whistling cricket in boiling oil does none of these things.

So where is the Zen in a pan of frying crickets?
I don't know. If forced to look more deeply into that skillet, I might say we need need not assign meaning to every whistle and pop we hear, nor to every drop of hot oil that stings our eye, in order to appreciate the connection between the change we impose and the change we experience. But that would probably be a bunch of crap. I suggest you consult Steinbeck or Huell Howser, because I have no answers for you.

© Pseudocognitive



Apologies for the out-of-focus picture. It's the only original one I had, having lost the others.

Meatball Photography

I'm not sure why, but I like this image. It was selected from the thousands I have that range from very, very ordinary to downright bad (with the occasional good exception) that I shot during brief stops on motorcycle rides within a 200 mile radius of home (no, the geographical limit is not imposed by an ankle monitor and a parole officer, although my grandmother, still alive and spry at 98, was a career parole officer for the State of California until her retirement in about 1975). In "M*A*S*H" (the Richard Hooker novel and Robert Altman film, not the TV series, which was okay for the first few seasons but went downhill fast when Trapper John left, Henry was killed en-route back to the States, and Hawkeye evolved into a sanctimonious caricature), they referred to their brand of intervention as "meatball surgery," a term that has remained in my head for decades. They operated on soldiers with horrific injuries under primitive conditions and did the best they could and then sent the survivors to a rear area for better treatment. I have used this as a metaphor for all kinds of completely unrelated processes and phenomena throughout my life, mainly because once something gets into my head I can never, ever get it out of there. I call my style of picture-taking "meatball photography" because I do it with basic gear,  under extreme time constraints (ride, ride, ride, that's the thing; stop for a little while at some spot that looks like it might be interesting and rip some shots off real quick in a state of semi-photographic pseudo-concentration, in between snacking briefly on some kind of gluten free vegan Kosher thing called a Lärbar), then ride off again. Once in a while, this method produces something that seems to be enhanced, rather than compromised, by my peculiar procedure. The gritty, contrasty qualities of the above photo were influenced by this method. It's a state of mind, I think. I want to really go off the deep end and make some connection to Steinbeck's peepholes in the fence and how your choice of viewing portal shows you "...whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches" or "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men." In other words, the same thing. I will avoid that particular exercise in grandiosity right now, though, and simply say that once in a while my fractious mental processes work to my benefit to some degree, and I count myself lucky if that happens for maybe one shot in every thousand. That's why I like this particular picture--its imperfections mirror my own.

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Originally posted 6 August 2011

© Pseudocognitive

A clumsy search for Zen

Apologies to Steinbeck

Big Oak Flat in Tuolumne County in California is not a poem or a habit or a dream. It does, however, emit a definite stink if you stand too close to the portable toilets in the gas station parking lot, and if you happen to be there at just the right time on a fine spring afternoon, the quality of light may indeed evoke a peculiar nostalgia for a time when you still believed  that making sense of life was something  in the ballpark named Possible. That’s about it, though; as far as deep philosophical pondering and the like, no matter what knothole you look through, I doubt you’ll come away with any insight into the human condition beyond what you already have. In fact, I am not at all certain that new insights have been possible since about 1945. So if you do look through that knothole, you’re just gonna see the same old wooded area behind the fillin’ station that’s always been there. Bring your own Zen in a sturdy steel vacuum flask tucked into your right saddlebag.

If you were to ask me how it was that I came to lose my mind, I might give you some obfuscatory answer like, “Don’t burden me with your extraneosities.”Or “Melvin eats blubber.” Or “Define mind.” Maybe I’d even try to answer truthfully, but the sad fact is that I simply do not know. So if you were to ask me that question—how did I lose my mind—I would simply say, “Yes.”

I came to terms with my loss of that which cannot be empirically proved and subsequently grew tired of my old gig—the one I’d been working at for a quarter century—so I quit and decided to become a private investigator. Not an officially licensed P.I. like Thomas Magnum, but one who looks into things without the strictures of state oversight or the constraints of having to answer to a client, or of even knowing what it actually is you’re investigating.
I decided to start this new line of work immediately, so on a brisk Saturday morning, I and my brother left Herd City and headed up into the hills. I will spare you any account of the places I have excessively described before, save for the mecca of western hemisphere truth-seekers, the wall at the Shell station in Jackson:

After searching in vain one last time for any small vestige of the old  Honda dealership where our dad bought our first dirt bikes back in '67, we left Jackson and headed south through some other wide spots. San Andreas was one of ‘em. We didn’t see much there except some tourists from Canada, and we were “aboot” to mock their vowels as needing to be voided, but I figured that would just be mean.

Southward, on to Sonora, and the mood there was edgy.
A kid in a straw Stetson flagged us down and said there was gonna be trouble in the center of town any minute, so we headed there directly. It turned out there was no trouble, really, just a few folks who took their talk radio a little too seriously and had trouble tracking reality (we were not yet familiar with their puppet masters, the Koch brothers, nor did we know the full extent of the vitriol and outright treasonous elements their movement would support in the near future). On this day they were just a small crowd jumping around trying to get vehicles to honk if they supported their bizarre cause.

It took us about ten minutes in heavy traffic to pass through town. I heard two people sound their horns, but one of them was just impatient at a couple of gawkers slowing down the line.  Most passers-by either ignored the protesters or gave them what is apparently the foothill version of the Bronx cheer. We put this case in the easy-solve column and concluded that although there are a few eccentrics (like anywhere else), most folks in Sonora are pretty level-headed. Little did we know then that nationwide, the numbers of the Koch brothers’ minions would continue to swell.

We got to Big Oak Flat later that afternoon, after stopping off in the Old West town of Chinese Camp to look at some deserted buildings. After filling up the bikes, we rode to the back of the lot to make use of the facilities. Ever since the big biker riot of ’06, the proprietors of the Big Oak Flat gas station have made customers use the outhouses.
I can tell you with near 100% certainty that these particular outhouses are the filthiest, most disgusting portable toilets on the west coast.

An old guy from the Goldwing riding club decides against opening that door.

The proprietors of this establishment will never get one more dime from me. If Tuolumne County could afford a health department, I’d call ‘em in on this. Sincerely. The one redeeming quality of that particular destination is the fence in the back. There you may find several different and conflicting views of the woods behind the lot. A comparison between these may yield higher truth. Or not.  Probably not, because I don’t think any of us can ever really know precisely where we stand on any continuum at any given moment, and the context we seek is, by necessity, embedded within contexts perceived and modified by countless others.  Still, pondering such things is what keeps me alive.

Post and photos © Pseudocognitive, with profuse apologies to John Steinbeck (and apologies of a medium nature to Robert M. Pirsig)