Do you remember MSN Messenger?

My kids sure won't. Ain't that a trip.


Anyway, that got me thinking

Things sure were easier in those MSN days, eh?

And

I find it funny that it's been a decade, and yet, here I still am, bitching about your shit on my blog.

And

Ten years. We should really, really just stop kidding ourselves about all this stuff, and just fuck, or argue, or stop talking to eachother, or maybe all three at the same time.

As far as I can tell, I truly, truly dislike you with a passion I can really only feel for things that are dear to me. I dislike the choices you've made in your life, and I dislike who you've become. I disliked who you were. I dislike everyone and everything you find appealing and chose to associate with you. I dislike that you are somehow still in my life instead of off fucking the Pope or snorting lines with the spoiled children of famous people or dead behind a dumpster or doing whatever else we both thought you'd be doing right now. Like, what the fuck, dude.

Similarly, I think you dislike me, and who I've become, and what I represent to you. I think you are more than fine being far, far in the past, but think you need to still be around because you are guilty about how things turned out for us and your massive fucking part in that.

So, on the off chance that you can still read minds and can hear me thinking this shit, let me lay out what I think should happen next here:

You need to realize that while I really could not give two fucks about what happened with us anymore, all that has shown me that you are not a friend. You are not a lover. You are nothing but a parasite, who feeds on the stability and happiness around you. I do not resent you, or hate you, but I do dislike you, and pity you, and want nothing to do with whatever fucking mess you're making right now.

You should take your fake, feeble personality, and your equally deplorable life, and keep it from intertwining with mine ever again.

This post easily could have been something else. Oh well. Sometimes all this is is a sounding board.


Anyway

Lindsay,

I cannot reply to your post at this particular moment without kind of being a dick or at least more blunt than required with my opinions. It is the mood I'm in, and as you know, things are usually pretty fucking black and white to me when it comes to other people, even ones who I should not perhaps be giving romance advice to.

If you were here, I think I would give you a book. It's an annotation to a theological textbook called Dancing With Siva, which I picked up the last time I visited the Kauai Aadheenam Hindu monastery in Hawaii. The textbook itself is by the monastic head, but the annotations are by a fellow named Acharya Kumarnathaswami, who is possibly the wisest person I have ever personally had the fortune to talk to. They are good to think on.

Instead, I think maybe I'll just leave you with this little koan, which is from an equally interesting and silly religion:



In olden days in Japan, bamboo and paper lanterns with candles inside them were used as portable light. A blind man, visiting a friend one night, was offered a lantern to carry home with him.

"I do not need a lantern," he said. "Darkness or light is all the same to me."

"I know you do not need a lantern to find your way home," his friend replied, "but if you don't have one, someone else may run into you in the dark. Please, you must take it."

The blind man left for home with the lantern, and before he had gotten very far, someone ran straight into him. "Look where you are going!" he cried to the stranger. "Can't you see this lantern?"

"Your candle has burned out, brother," replied the stranger.




There are no koans about love, because Buddhism is exclusively introspective and aloof, but I feel it says what I'd have to say pretty darn well compared to the other little tales I can clearly remember.


I think I will go sleep. Thinking about this sort of stuff, I just realized that in a month, I cannot go back to the monastery ever again. While I don't think I ever really would have, I've always wanted to be a monk, and this makes me sad.

As another koan puts it:

The Student asked “How does an enligthtened one return to the ordinary world?”
The Master replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”