Damned Spot

The Buddha said there are three marks of existence: impermanence, dissatisfaction, and the absence of self. It’s a relief for me to read these words because I check all three boxes. I didn’t even need to try.

Impermanence

I hit the townie bars in Cedar Rapids when I was in my early thirties. There was one place, on 3rd Avenue I think, down by the Cedar River, a dark and smoky place that smelled like sour beer and cigarette ash, like any bar in those days did. Old regulars would show up in the morning. They’d sit there. And smoke. Drink beer. Watch “The Price Is Right” on the fifteen inch screen of the TV mounted above the register. The tavern was on the first story of an old wood frame tenement, wobbly pine fire escape running helter and skelter on the north side. A hand painted logo on the big storefront window of what looked to be a black and white bear with a bucket grasped in one hand and a fishing rod grasped in the other. Just skipping along. On his way to the fishing hole. The name Southside Tap rings a bell, but I’m not at all sure that was it. The woman who owned the place was a slim woman probably somewhere in her sixties with a hugely distended belly. I loved her. And I loved that place. It was one of those places that makes you believe in permanence. Good old values. Like fishing holes. And cirrhosis. I thought those old regulars were immortal. The jealous old prick who muttered the words, over the top of his beer, one day when I was having an animated conversation with the old, slim, distended-bellied owner, “There’s always a mother fucker.” The memory stands. I thought everything would always stand. Just as it was. How could it change?

That was over 30 years ago. I’m thinking I’m the only one still living. The building stood empty for years before the flood of ’08. I stopped once. A ghoulish voyeur. Peeked through the big window. Into that rotting, hollowed out address. Worth not even the cost of demolition.

Dissatisfaction

I had a dream last night that Deb and I were living in a parking garage. Our bed was positioned beside a white pickup truck with work body. In the evening, when the angle of light was low, I watched one man reach beneath a condensing unit with his cordless nut driver and begin to disassemble it. I watched, through the window of an apartment across the way, a young couple move around the kitchen preparing dinner. A woman watered her houseplants. Kids in the streets shouted. And I had a rush of goodwill for everyone. A thorough sense of wellbeing. Everything was beautiful. The last of the sunlight glinting off the dirty apartment windows. The good evening becoming a good night. And then I awoke to the old foreboding, An awareness of some lurking presence nearby. Some shadow of doom. What was it? Some job that had gone awry? Something I had written? Something I was about to say? What was it? When would this terrible thing step into the light?

Absence of Self

Sleep. That knits up the ravell’d sleave. What else can separate us from ourselves so demonstrably? The state we enter into, each one of us, for a third of our lives breaks down the boundary we thought we’d established and fortified through our waking hours between ourselves and everything else. I firmly believe, for example, at this writing, that I’m not someone other than myself. And then the day will pass. And I’ll be in bed again. And everything will go away. And I’m a young boy. And you are my wife. Although you are an old woman I’ve never seen before. And we’re living in our house, although it’s someone else’s house, a place I’ve never seen, although I’ve seen it many times in other dreams. I’m sure of it. And now I’m crawling through the attic and I’m no longer a little boy. Now I’m sleeping next to my wife, who is not my wife, in a parking garage, which is our house, and why is it we’re not dissatisfied? Why is everything so beautiful? Can it be because I have gained the ability to accept the impermanence of all things? Can it be because I am no longer myself, but all people and all things at once, like Whitman, not to mention the Buddha, has insisted upon from the beginning?