Karmic thought

Revenge may thump us (or our enemies) on the head, but karma chews away – usually for longer, and usually more annoyingly. Karma’s also the one more likely to lead us to change.

Incongruity and Coexistence

The show had artifacts, books, statues, period photographs (mostly of historical figures) in gilt frames. There were buttons and portable writing desks, Victorian jewelry, and a book with a title perfect for the day: Original Revised Manual. There was also a lunch counter (pulled pork, ham and cheese, roast beef and cheese, brownies, soda) and guns. Next to the guns and the lunch table was another table where two nuns, in full-to-the-floor black nun habits and full-to-the-side nun wimples, were selling fruit breads, glazed fruit custard tarts, and coffee.
I wore my “Proud Owner of a Rescued Dog” t shirt, and several people started up conversations that began with, “I own a rescued dog,” and developed into stories about their dogs. In fact I re-met a woman who had talked with me two years ago about adopting a rescue (she found her heart dog through a different rescue group: he’s a 16 pound dog with pointed ears, a white bib and paw tips, and a wonderful disposition. They’re perfect for each other). She found her boyfriend online; they’re perfect for each other, also, she said – though she might not have described him as the perfect boyfriend before she met and talked with him, just as she never knew her perfect dog match before she saw him and knew they were meant to be together. She recognized me by the shirt.
I’ve seen the Coexist bumper sticker formed of a variety of religious symbols, and I’ve also see the Coexist bumper sticker with some of its letters formed from the crosshairs on a target finder and a skull and crossbones. But what I saw at the show was coexistence.
Life is wonderful, and beautiful, and wide, when we have enough space in it for nuns to sell their wares next to gun and artifact dealers selling their wares, and nobody is busy actively hating anyone else.

Excerpt from a novel

Sleep's an intermission between car exhaust and drugs. It's the next oblivion, after liquor and sex lose their variety. 'At night all cats are grey,' the French sneer. If you don't understand that, you haven't been with enough women. Or men. Sleep is the epilogue: When there’s no juice left you sprawl like a stack of dried twigs, blanket piled around your hips. Wade claims the most fun sleep is with two broads working you over. I think the most honest sleep is with yourself.
There's been times when what I wanted most was to lie down in a convenient gutter, pull a blanket of slush over me, and go to sleep. I agreed with Sid: I could have used sleep in a cardboard box, if anyone offered some. But apparently I didn't fit any longer; there was no room at the bridge inn.
I sat still there in the dirty sunshine, maybe looking like I was asleep, listening to rat scratchings, car whines, and the low boom of railroad cars hunting for a permanent love.
"You gettin' out of here?" Sid asked. "You gonna tell that bitch to leave me alone?"
"Yeah."
"Then give me the smokes."
I threw the pack toward him. "Go to hell, Sid."
"Yeah, you too. Got any booze?"
"Not on me. For that you would kill me."
A sigh. "Yeah, you're right again, man. Tell that old fart if she shows up with a bottle I'll talk to her." He crawled into one of the boxes.
"Yeah, man," I whispered after him.
He didn't answer, but I could hear long drags from inside the box. I sat there for a while longer, smelling the warm cardboard, listening to some flies. Then I sidled along the boxes until I could angle around the bridge roots and come, blinking, into the remnants of a day.
Fifty feet behind me Sid squatted in his box blowing cancer spores into his lungs. On the other side of a concrete railing cars rushed past, hunting. A few miles away Emmaline sat, waiting for someone to bring life's news back to her. "You got to talk to my brother," she had said. "You got to bring him back. Got to save him."
I brushed my palms over my pants and ambled down the sidewalk. Stories where the beast transforms into a beauty aren't true. Beauty can't exist without a beast inside. A pack of cigarettes might entice Sid into daylight, but the sun wouldn't change him. A revival meeting, NA, six hot whores, a social worker, or love wouldn't either. Emmaline thought faith might, but either she or the faith was wrong. Remember high school physics? Two things do occupy the same place at the same time.
I dug in my pocket for the smoke. Creased and leaking tobacco shreds, lost behind Sid’s brand new rollups, but I stuck it between my teeth, scratched a match along the bridge to get a light, and started back to Emmaline's disapproval. As I walked, I watched sunshine change bits of trash and lost tin cans from pale gold to amber, rose, cinnamon, and finally a dark, rich red shadowed with royal purple.

Excerpt from Nobody Ever Died of Terminal Weirdness: The Taxi Driver

My parents don't travel very often. They would argue with this statement. My father would say he travels to an aberrant reality every day he goes to work, and my mother would say that, with all the traveling she does in books, why should she pack up fifty pounds of books with whatever shirt and pants are clean in order to travel? Then she would ask about reading lights plugging into trees along the campground, and home baked granola for breakfast. The only exception to her objections was once, when we heard her say she would drive to a large Oregon bookstore to buy more books, but that was about all she would concede for voluntary travel.
"Why not fly?" my father asked, head lifting at the mention of travel. "That way you would have more time there."
"But how would I get the books home? Airlines have weight limits."
"Have the bookstore ship them."
"Listen, if I went to get books I loved, I would drive them back. If I'm going to go to Oregon to find books, I'm not going to trust the books to anyone else once they and I have found each other."
"True love is difficult," my father agreed. He turned to me. "Listen, if she starts talking to her books, then we need to worry. Right now she's just talking about her books."
"Got you."
With this attitude toward traveling in general, it was a bit unusual my parents were cruising around Madison in the evening, and it was even more unusual they were not cruising toward a grocery store, which is my father's hobby, or a bookstore, which is my mother's addiction and salvation.
They were, instead, looking for a motel where they were supposed to meet some distant relatives in town to meet each other. My parents were, as they describe it, on the happy periphery of any relationships, but my father said it was important to put in an appearance. "We don't want them to think we don't like them."
"Why not?" my mother asked. "And it's not that we don't like them; it's just that we have more important things to do."
"Like what?"
"Go to bookstores. Read the books we find at bookstores. Take the dogs for a walk."
"The dogs are safely locked up at home."
"See what I mean? Go home, read the books waiting for us, and take the dogs for a walk."
"You're just getting testy because you didn't bring a book along in the car."
"It's dark," my mother said. "I know I can't read in the dark. But I have a few books slid alongside the seat."
"And we don't know where we're going because you didn't get specific directions," my father agreed.
"They said, 'slightly south of Mineral Point Road, after the expressway.'"
"Do you know how much of the city is 'slightly south'?"
"I know the name of the hotel where they are staying. It's Roadway. Or road-something."
"We could find a Yellow Pages," I offered helpfully from the safe darkness of the back seat. I was sitting on something with an edge that might be a book, I had no access to a video game, and the sooner we paid our respectful hellos to the distant relatives, the sooner we had a chance of finding what I wanted to find: electricity and a video game.
"If we can find a phone booth that hasn't been vandalized," said my father, "we could look up this place. How many hotels do you think begin with 'Road'?"
"We could check a library, but they probably are all closed," said my mother sadly.
Suddenly my father swung the car sharply to the right and pressed hard on the accelerator. "A taxi driver," he announced. "See? Over there. Two lanes to the right and three cars ahead. Taxi drivers know where everything is. I'll get next to him and we can ask him. I'll even give him some money if he will show us the way."
"You can't ask a taxi driver," my mother protested.
"Why not?" This last was said through his teeth, because my father was trying to maneuver the car as we cruised the six lanes of busy highway. "Darn truck. Why did he have to be in my way?"
"You can't ask a taxi driver. You can't just go up to a stranger and ask how to get somewhere? What if he is a crazed killer? What if he's strange? What if he leads us to a deserted part of the city and we never see daylight again?"
"Or bookstores," I added. "You forgot bookstores."
"Or bookstores," my mother repeated obediently. "He might be ... oh you can't."
"Watch me. As soon as I get ahead of the sports car." My father pushed hard on the gas pedal, shifted his weight, and mashed the brake. We paused, like a bird braking in flight.
"Be careful! You just missed the fender of that BMW."
"He just missed me. Why doesn't he get out of my way? You just watch the taxi. Don't lose the taxi." Dad added a word or two under his breath which I stuffed into my mind to add to Ben's collection.
"The taxi driver's accelerating," mother said. Her voice sounded relieved.
"He is not. He is going to get caught by the red light up ahead."
"You never know. Taxi drivers might go through red lights. That's another reason not to trust them. Anyone who goes through red lights..."
"Anyone who drives five miles an hour under the limit like you do," my father countered. "Now, I'm going to edge in here. I want you to roll down your window."
"Me? Roll down my window?"
"I can't turn the car around so I can talk to him through mine. Which is already down so I can easily hear the comments of the other motorists. Now roll down your window."
We slowed to a heated stop only three feet from the taxi. Streetlights winkled along the cars, store lights blinked off and on in red fluorescence, the smell of hot grease and burnt sugar seeped along the black air. All about us engines idled. The air pulsed with exhaust, radios, frustration, and night.
"I don't want to talk to strange taxi drivers," my mother announced as she lowered her window.
"Why not? You have so much in common." My father leaned across the front seat. "Excuse me," he bellowed.
"Look, you already cut me off; why bother," came a retort from Dad's other side.
"Smart aleck." My father took a deep breath. "Excuse me," he shouted.
The taxi driver shifted against his open window and swiveled his head. Then the traffic light clanked to green, and around us fifteen cars let off their brakes.
"Don't let him get away," my father called.
Fifteen cars spat ozone into the Madison night. The taxi driver looked over his shoulder at Dad, waved to his passenger, and began to slide to the right.
"He's turning," screamed my father. "Catch him."
"I'm sure a good library would be able to tell us the same thing. Or maybe maps at a gas station. I'll even go in and ask for a map."
"The taxi driver is waiting for us," I announced.
With a flourish of brakes we decelerated at the next stop light. Someone three cars back honked a drumbeat, and the sound wavered between warm metal bodies.
"Excuse me," screeched my father. "We're looking for the Roadway Motel. Do you know where it is?"
"Do you mean Roadstar?" the driver asked.
"Do we mean 'Roadstar'?" my father asked my mother.
"I guess so. How many motels have 'road' in their name?"
"Yes we do," Dad called back to the taxi driver.
The cross traffic's light changed from green to amber. We shifted forward in anticipation. "I'm going there," called the driver. "It's ahead about half a mile, but it's not easy to find. Follow me."
The taxi driver executed a cloverleaf maneuver and slid in front of us. Dad edged forward to the taxi's bumper. "See?" He chortled. "'I'm going there.' How much luckier can you get? I told you to ask the taxi driver."
Mother peered through her window into the night. I memorized the taxi license plate, and then slid off into a reverie about video game car chases.
We swerved through two more intersections. We ducked under an elevated highway, threaded along a shopping center, and nipped into the middle one of three dark driveways.
"Is that a grocery store?" asked my father.
"Follow the taxi," my mother reminded him. "You want to follow the taxi."
But we no longer needed to follow the taxi. Above a rise of ground we could see a large white building, and along its side in letters one story high: Roadstar Inn.
The taxi and our car slid together into a rectangle of lemon light. Above us, the square yellow moon of the Roadstar Motel's sign shone calmly.
"See?" said my father. "You can always trust a taxi driver in a strange city." He honked the horn and waved to the taxi driver.
No one moved. We all sat silent in relief. “It turned out okay,” my mother said finally. “Even without a library.” It was a radical statement for her.
I leaned back looked again at the Roadstar sign, and considered. Maybe people could change and start fresh somewhere else. I wondered if the same precept applied to dating girls.