Two Reasons to Stick Your Hand Down the Garbage Disposal

The last time I heard a garbage disposal making grinding sounds, I turned it off, then fished out a horribly mangled pair of formerly useful measuring spoons.

“You’re supposed to check it before you run it,” my wife despaired at my lack of wisdom. But don’t garbage disposals have a way of mysteriously turning on as soon as you stick your hand in?

This morning, I overcame those irrational fears. I felt around down in the dark, underneath those black rubber flaps, bare-handed. There was something in there, all right. Good thing I checked. I pulled out the bleached, decomposed remains of a medium-sized frog.

I shuddered. I shrieked. His dead black eye looked up at me. How the hell had he gotten in there? I rinsed and soaped and rinsed again. I found some cheap plastic forks to use as tongs to lift the body into a plastic bag, which I carried, grim and still shaking, down the hall, past my wife’s room, and out to the trash.

“Is anything the matter?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

I’ve touched frogs before. I went through a cruel childhood frog-killing phase. I’ve eaten frog legs in restaurants. Karmic justice would demand I suffer. Mercifully I got off easy today with a major case of the creeps.

Just see this nice, healthy froggie

The “Listen To Your Wife” Show, Episode 244

My wife called and said I should go out and look at the sunset.

I was getting ready to do some recording—setting up mikes, wrestling with cables, setting levels, messing with camera angles, microphone stands. It was pissing me off a little, probably because my day’s meditation wasn’t yet finished.

But I decided, just this once, to take my wife’s advice and go for a walk. Maybe a little more chanting would make me more peaceful, anyway.

“It’s a total Maxfield Parrish sky” she said.

By the time I got to the top of the street, where the trees open up on a wide section of field, where you can see three hundred and sixty degrees of sky, I could see what she was talking about.

Everywhere I looked, I saw every different type of cloud ever created, huge, pink cauliflower giants, wispy grey smoke trail-y ones, swirly white comb-overs, thick white mountains, dark grey rain clouds.

In places it appeared like a layered cathedral of light and color and vaulted ceilings of moisture vapors, against brilliant blue. It truly was an artistic masterpiece. I thought of angels, heaven, the Sistine Chapel.

But the scale of it was so vast. What artist but God creates on such a huge scale? The answer is nobody.

What I was supposed to do with all that beauty? Part of me wanted to get up and fly through it, to rub myself all over the canvas of the sky in appreciation of the glorious brushstrokes of the Master.

But all I could do was stand there; slack-jawed, knowing that no puny photograph could do justice to the awesome hugeness of the art I was seeing in the sky. The canvas, after all, was the sky. No matter hot big you blow up even the most perfectly composed photograph taken by the largest diaphragm lens, it ain’t gonna be the sky.

I thought—and said—to Krishna, “this is great. You are the greatest artist.” But what was I supposed to DO with all that beauty? My gaze wandered from gorgeous cloud formation to gorgeous cloud formation, each one defying my ability to even begin to describe what I was seeing in words. You just had to be there.

I wanted to somehow share what I was seeing. It was just too amazing to keep to myself.

I stayed up on the hill, where I could see the whole sky (at least the part above my head) until the sun went completely down.

As it began to sink below the horizon, a brilliant, blazing jewel, its orange rays lit up huge banks of clouds on the horizon to the left and right.

Then I imagined those low bunches of clouds, their sun-sides basted with pink and orange, were disciples hunched forward to catch their spiritual master’s every word. The sun, their guru, had in fact created the clouds by his own power, and they were basking in his brilliance.

And just as there were an apparently infinite variety of clouds in that sky, each one had its own function, its own size, its own color, shape and location. Not every cloud can be the huge, muscular, pink cauliflower variety, poised to strike the ground with thunder and mighty rain. It takes a lot of different types of clouds to make a sky.

Operation Apparition Upkeep

Today I saw a young-ish, whitish, long-ish haired guy in a baseball cap and a mustache driving a thunderous truck with his arm out the window. As he rounded a corner onto a dirt road, his tires kicked up a cloud of dust, I could see that sitting next to him was (I assume) his gal.

It made me think how so much of our frightfully limited time and energy is eaten up in striving to maintain not only our gross physical stuff, but more important, the idea that what we have actually belongs to us, and somehow it all adds up to a life worth living and dying for.

I imagined this guy working year after year, inside some corrugated metal building, pausing only to inhale cigarette smoke. It gets so hot in there you could get blinded by the sting of your own sweat and lose half your hand in the machinery.

I imagined how long and hard he worked—not only just to pay bills, feed and shelter himself and his gal, maintain his truck, possibly a beer habit and a dog or two or three—but to hold on to the precious thought that “this is what I wanted, I still want it, I’m going to do anything to hang on and make it worth the effort.”

I’ve imagined— too frequently— that my satisfaction is magically contained in the objects of my desire themselves, and that my strong desire to enjoy should itself be accepted as legal tender everywhere.

We rightly believe that some kind of happiness is our right, and we go on seeking it, despite so much disappointment and difficulty.

Sometimes we can’t afford what we’re desperate to have. Or we get it and turns out there’s something that bothers us so much about it—something we couldn’t see before but now can’t ignore—so much we kick ourselves for ever wanting it.

What if this particular guy, with the real truck and girl and the imaginary dog, somehow lost his grip on (what I imagined was) the fabric of his fantasy—that he was the center of a world, where all the things he wanted were only waiting for him to acquire, develop, and enjoy them?

How could he go on living without believing the carrot on the end of his stick would someday, upon coming into his possession, make him a kind of god?

Bhakti-yoga really is the end of the line, but not before most of us have tried beer.

How to Acquire Hundreds of Guitars through Personal Grooming

Sunday. Dwadasi. Party time!

Yesterday I gave our Gaura-Nitai deities a bath—the first in an embarrassingly long time. Afterwards, They looked soo good that I wanted to keep looking at Them, which is not the case when I avoid such service. It pays to engage the senses in Krishna’s service—that’s what they’re for, so I’m told.

Thanks to a tip from a helpful neighbor, I now know where the nearest forest path is. It’s been my good fortune (GREAT fortune) that for most of my life, wherever I go, I’m able—within a relatively short time—to find somewhere good to take a walk. I love a long haul through a sun-filtered forest, huffing and puffing, with a choice walking stick and a sweaty bag of Tulasi beads. It shakes out the mental wrinkles.

This latest path is an old road parallel to railroad tracks along a dried-up lake. The path snakes back and forth through old-growth, live oak forest and spills out into the sunny ex-lake bed. There’s even an old, rotten boat carcass in the middle of the woods. Somebody’s probably disappointed their lake dried up.

After my walk I planted a bush in the yard. Thanks to helpful advice from DW, I remembered to loosen the roots properly and give sufficient water. Now I keep looking at the bush, half expecting it to fluff out and bloom overnight. Just like with Gaura-Nitai—service is what builds relationships.

Then I needed to test my new Tequilacaster PVPE (Pancho Villa Punitive Expedition) Special on the Swamplifier That took a couple of hours, which flew by like a comet.

I still have some facial hair left over from Ekadasi, which I attribute to researching The Edge’s guitar rig specifications. (“Maybe if I looked more like him, I too could bring forty-five guitars on tour and have another two hundred sitting around the house.”)

The senses require real engagements. It’s better to be tired than mental, I’m glad today’s been a physical day.