My alternate life fantasies are spinning again. It all started with a lovely weekend spent at my aunt's house on Tomales Bay where I got to go running among the oak trees and kayaking through the clear waters of the bay and where I ate oysters and drank crisp, cold white wine and showed Maggie her first sea anemone and "drank" cup after cup of the "tea" Oliver made out of Boggle dice. It is a place of such beauty, it is literally almost painful. My father calls places like that the "God realm," places where life is extraordinarily good and beautiful and infused with good karma.
So, of course, instead of just being there and feeling lucky to be there, I start to think about how I can hold on to the God realm, and scratch out a little piece of it for myself. Enter Buddhism's main tenant about desire and suffering. I am so, so far away from enlightenment, and so, so close to the God realm (a mere 40 miles!)
Some of my new alternate life fantasies:
•Moving to Pt. Reyes Station and starting a lavender farm
•Becoming a ridiculously successful writer so that I can move to Pt. Reyes Station and just write
•Becoming a second grade teacher so I can move to Pt. Reyes Station and not have to commute
•Living in a world where money has no consequence so I can move to Pt. Reyes Station and just stare out the window eating oysters and drinking crisp, cold white wine
My real life is pretty sweet too.
And PS. I'm so sad about the suicide of David Foster Wallace. Man! What a terrible thing. I got to meet him a couple of times when I used to host literary events, and despite my fears that he would be intimidating and cooler-than-thou and just way dismissive of a little nobody like me, he was one of those extraordinarily kind, polite, interested people. He remembered names. I always really like that in a person.
Posts
1 comment:
Ridiculous to blame John McCain, but after a strikingly even-handed 2000 Rolling Stone piece, DFW was lamenting the derailment of the Straight talk express in a May Wall Street Journal interview,
"McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It's all understandable, of course—he's the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing."
So the reformed maverick didn't help any.
Post a Comment