Of fits and tents...
Another journal sent in from Jim. We said, 'Jim, how is it that all these crazy things happen to you?' He said, 'man I don't know.' But Jim, we said, its always one thing or another.' 'Yea man, well I think the thing is to find the crazy moment in everyday, and cherish it, because thats how you know you are alive.'
Well said, Jim. Only that at 1430, that crazy moment usually comes from our files. And if not there, we look to our neighbors before we look to ourselves. Anyway here's the man.
When I started rubbing my hip against the tent pole, wanting it to shake, it was on purpose. When the tent came down on me, the whole system of tents, I felt bad for a moment, but soon realized that it was nothing to get too upset about. Well let me explian this a little, cuz I have the feeling this entry is going to be one of those that cease to be a jounral and become something I send out to all interested parties because I need the support of your listening to me. As many of you know, I scored a free trip to Tagore this week. We were filming a Beyonce video and I actually got to be in it. Well not exactly, it turns out that there was going to be so much CGI in the video that all they needed was body doubles to take the place of the faces that you'll see when it comes out. It was pretty great actually, the girl playing Beyonce was definatly no Beyonce, but she sang and made her gestures with total diva gusto.
Same goes for me I guess, cuz when we were on break I was hanging around the food table and the director comes up to me and I complemented her on her other Beyonce video, and she, in return, thanked me and said I had a "bright" face. I liked that.
Anyway I'll skip the afternoon where me and some of the other crew got to rolling down some huge dusty hill and then played almost naked basketball with some local kids. It was one of those perfect moments, though.
What I wanted to get to was this totally fucked up thing that happened to me. So I had gone with a friend to this temple they had there. You could walk all around these stone walkways- they were very beautiful. But the thing that this monastary is really known for is this network of three-foot high tents about the size of a football field (how american is that reference). Each tent is really just a little peak of cloth rising up between four poles, and the whole thing is multiplied, the edges of each tent sewn to the next to make the whole network. The tents are made of a kind of burlapy material that lets some light through, and the thing you do is find your square and sit under it and meditate.
Anyway, the fucked up thing. So while I was walking around the grounds suddenly I notice my sister's fucking ex-boyfriend. The hari-krisna muthafucker that totally screwed her over in San Diego! It was such a crazy coincidence to see him there that I was kind of following him, just marvelling in every moment that he was there. After a while he totally noticed me, but he never let on. It became so obvoius that everything he was saying was meant half for me, half for the girl he was with. It was like he was telling me he was a good person after all, just because he knew a lot about a religion. I wanted to puke so much that I kept following him. I wanted to out him. I wanted to get him to acknowlege me completely. Instead he just kept wafting wisdom over my way. I wanted to beat his ass.
We ended up where the garden meets the tents. They were standing there at the edge and I had gotten under a tent in the first row. My tent was the last before the whole thing ended in a fence. It was made of a hundreds of thin shoots of some bamboo-like plant. Suddenly I heard the dude talking again and he was talking about the fence itself! About how the monks curled the shoots up of those plants that are alongside the tents so that they don't grow any more. I looked at the fence right beside me and saw that it was true, and realized that he was purposely talking about the exact place where he knew I was sitting. This drove me nuts. I started convulsing with anger, and became conscious that my hip was touching a pole. I felt a little voice inside me say, 'yea, shake the pole, let the motherfucker know you are here, let your anger be known" and so I shook it and I shook it and suddenly I realized the tent was coming down. As it came down I put my chin on the earth and looked out under the vast plane of poles and cloth and saw that the whole thing was coming with it. And this thing had been standing for 750 years.
For the first few moments under the cloth I felt pretty fucking stupid. But then I thought, if these monks are really chill like they should be, they should take it in stride, no matter how dumb the cause of the end of their tent-streak should be. The more ridiculous, the better the test of their disattachment.
And the scene after the disentangling of all the cloth proved my point. It was only the tourists that had been under the tents that were hysterical, begging the monks to understand that it wasn't them. The true followers just sat in the garden staring straight ahead. I felt like I could even have admitted to one of them that it was me, but I didn’t think it was worth the attempt considering I didn’t speak their language. Then again I probably could have communicated myself with a look. Whatever, I fucked up big. I just hope that fucker understands that its all on him.
Well said, Jim. Only that at 1430, that crazy moment usually comes from our files. And if not there, we look to our neighbors before we look to ourselves. Anyway here's the man.
When I started rubbing my hip against the tent pole, wanting it to shake, it was on purpose. When the tent came down on me, the whole system of tents, I felt bad for a moment, but soon realized that it was nothing to get too upset about. Well let me explian this a little, cuz I have the feeling this entry is going to be one of those that cease to be a jounral and become something I send out to all interested parties because I need the support of your listening to me. As many of you know, I scored a free trip to Tagore this week. We were filming a Beyonce video and I actually got to be in it. Well not exactly, it turns out that there was going to be so much CGI in the video that all they needed was body doubles to take the place of the faces that you'll see when it comes out. It was pretty great actually, the girl playing Beyonce was definatly no Beyonce, but she sang and made her gestures with total diva gusto.
Same goes for me I guess, cuz when we were on break I was hanging around the food table and the director comes up to me and I complemented her on her other Beyonce video, and she, in return, thanked me and said I had a "bright" face. I liked that.
Anyway I'll skip the afternoon where me and some of the other crew got to rolling down some huge dusty hill and then played almost naked basketball with some local kids. It was one of those perfect moments, though.
What I wanted to get to was this totally fucked up thing that happened to me. So I had gone with a friend to this temple they had there. You could walk all around these stone walkways- they were very beautiful. But the thing that this monastary is really known for is this network of three-foot high tents about the size of a football field (how american is that reference). Each tent is really just a little peak of cloth rising up between four poles, and the whole thing is multiplied, the edges of each tent sewn to the next to make the whole network. The tents are made of a kind of burlapy material that lets some light through, and the thing you do is find your square and sit under it and meditate.
Anyway, the fucked up thing. So while I was walking around the grounds suddenly I notice my sister's fucking ex-boyfriend. The hari-krisna muthafucker that totally screwed her over in San Diego! It was such a crazy coincidence to see him there that I was kind of following him, just marvelling in every moment that he was there. After a while he totally noticed me, but he never let on. It became so obvoius that everything he was saying was meant half for me, half for the girl he was with. It was like he was telling me he was a good person after all, just because he knew a lot about a religion. I wanted to puke so much that I kept following him. I wanted to out him. I wanted to get him to acknowlege me completely. Instead he just kept wafting wisdom over my way. I wanted to beat his ass.
We ended up where the garden meets the tents. They were standing there at the edge and I had gotten under a tent in the first row. My tent was the last before the whole thing ended in a fence. It was made of a hundreds of thin shoots of some bamboo-like plant. Suddenly I heard the dude talking again and he was talking about the fence itself! About how the monks curled the shoots up of those plants that are alongside the tents so that they don't grow any more. I looked at the fence right beside me and saw that it was true, and realized that he was purposely talking about the exact place where he knew I was sitting. This drove me nuts. I started convulsing with anger, and became conscious that my hip was touching a pole. I felt a little voice inside me say, 'yea, shake the pole, let the motherfucker know you are here, let your anger be known" and so I shook it and I shook it and suddenly I realized the tent was coming down. As it came down I put my chin on the earth and looked out under the vast plane of poles and cloth and saw that the whole thing was coming with it. And this thing had been standing for 750 years.
For the first few moments under the cloth I felt pretty fucking stupid. But then I thought, if these monks are really chill like they should be, they should take it in stride, no matter how dumb the cause of the end of their tent-streak should be. The more ridiculous, the better the test of their disattachment.
And the scene after the disentangling of all the cloth proved my point. It was only the tourists that had been under the tents that were hysterical, begging the monks to understand that it wasn't them. The true followers just sat in the garden staring straight ahead. I felt like I could even have admitted to one of them that it was me, but I didn’t think it was worth the attempt considering I didn’t speak their language. Then again I probably could have communicated myself with a look. Whatever, I fucked up big. I just hope that fucker understands that its all on him.
posted by M.N.V.L. Local 1430 at 2:04 PM
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