The Twilight Zone

Garrison Keeler is getting burnt out. I’m going to steal his Guy Noir character and morph it into Guy Bizarre — Honolulu flatfoot in a town that never figured out how to keep a secret. I’m currently auditioning for Bizarre’s sidekick — a big girl named 3B (Big Bouncing Babe). Bizzare isn’t a bitter-esque monk like Noir. That would be SO unHawaiian. No, Bizarre is bugged to smithereens constantly by this big bountiful thing that just never quite conects. It’s not that she’s stupid. Nobody could talk that fast and that constantly and be stupid. It’s just that her mind works in a different way, you know what I mean?

There’s power in the dark side. That’s why we spend a third of our lives asleep, and why we live on a planet that rotates so that it’s dark outside half the time. A shadow that you can SEE is not a shadow that you can USE. A big black shadow sitting there under a tree, just obviously being a shadow, is nothing but a trap. If you crash there, just because it’s dark, it’s only a matter of time before you will be rudely awakened by a cop on a mission, and if you’re lucky it will be a big fat one with a Teddy Roosevelt grin, and if you’re having a REALLY bad day, it will be a vicious little punk named Vinny who only joined the police force because he was too dense to figure out going in that the force is place where the big fat clowns always win, and the vicious little punks always wind up on the other side of the law. Always.

“Oooooooooooh! Creepy! Can I get spanked too?”

“No, idiot, we’re being Buddhist today, remember? Hey, and go put some clothes on before the guard shift changes. Vinny! She’s loose again! Tie her to the bed when you go take a whiz, OK? How am I supposed to concentrate with THAT in my face? I’m writing epoch-making literature over here.”

A shadow that you can USE is not a natural shadow. It is a shadow that has been CREATED by surveillance lights. Such shadows are invisible because the human eye adjusts to the lights. If you have valid reasons for being there, such as terror, unemployment, terminal toxic burn-out, betrayal, the dog ate my homework, and so forth, you don’t have to spend much time in the twilight zone before you can tell where the useful shadows are going to be, even before the surveillance lights go on, and even on unfamiliar terrain. In fact, unfamiliar terrain is better. Then you don’t have pre-conceptions about what can turn into a shadow. A piece of terrain that you’ve never seen before, or maybe one that you have seen a zillion times before in daylight, will suddenly speak to you in the twilight, and it will say, “Crash Here!”

That is veritably the Moment of Reality. Are you going to believe that, or are you going to pedal blindly on, perhaps to the next staked-out trap? The place that has spoken to you in that way, in the twilight, is ALWAYS the place that will turn into an undetectable shadow when the lights go on. But once you’ve acted on it, and the lights have gone on, now you’re in, and you must stay in until the twilight comes again before dawn. Just lie there like a corpse and do your Buddhist mantra silently. You will use no lights in your own case, you will make zero noise, and you WILL NOT MOVE. Corpse asana. Because the Goddess alone knows what is about to perpetrated around you, out there in the lights, by cops and others who wouldn’t have snowflake’s clue in Beelzebub’s manure of how to come in, if you made a law requiring them to do it. If you appear in the midst of all that foolishness, they will be required to invalidate you as a witness by blaming everything that they did on you. Everything. Therefore, corpse asana.

For example, just over a month ago, on my first day our of a self-imposed concentration camp run by people who turned out to need more help than I was able to give them, I thought, mistakenly as it turned out, that it would be nice to return to my old haunts. Hey, it had been the best part of a year since I had been at alrge, and my survival skills were a little bit dull. I was really tired from dealing with program wonktoids, and I really needed to crash. So I turned off the road at a place that I had used before, or noticed that the SAME tent was still there from a year ago. Or so I thought, because the tent that had been there before never made any noise. But now there was a lady in the tent who came out and very loudly anbd obscenely chewed me out, not fifty yards away and headed away from her. She yelled that she was going to call the cops on my and to stay away from here. I really thought that she was nuts and was having a purely personal incident, so I ignored her and contined to look for a place to crash in the neighborhood.

My spirit guidance is often more conscious than I am, which is probably the only reqason that I’m still alive, and on this occasion they weren’t agreeing with any of my ideas about where to crash. No shadow was deemed appropriate by them, and where they finally let me crash was a place in which I felt exposed — until the lights went on. Then I discovered myself to be hidden in a first-class undetectable shadow. It was a highly irregular triangle, with the long side towards the lights. The other two sides were protected by a clump of brush and a rock wall about six feet high. What was towards the lights was sparse grass about thirty inches high. In moonlight or starlight, I would have been exposed. But with those survelliance lights shining on that grass screen at a low angle, you could have stumbled on me before you found me. And there was no reason to do that, because the place was far from all available traffic patterns. Perfect!

So I fell asleep because I was really exhausted, but was awakened two hours later by voices and police radios in the abandoned parking lot that ended at the rock wall that I was hidden at the foot of. It was the same lady from the tent, and what were clearly her buddies, the police, having a party. Little had I known that that lady was purely a police guard bitch, bought, paid for, owned, boned, and stoned. They stayed up there until midnight, partying and trying to flush me out. But I knew damned well that as soon as I moved, I would hit light and be found out. So I just lay there and listened to the pig fest and chanted. Boring! What I stupid party. Later in the pre-dawn, I went up there and found this big ratty king-sized mattress and box spring right in the middle of the scene. Baity, baity, baity! Then I heard the sound that I LEAST wanted to hear: a police radio checking in. I don’t know whether they had dropped one, or whether they left a sentinel who then fell asleep, and I sure didn’t wait around to find out. I very expeditiously and successfully proceeded to Get. Out. Of. Dodge., before the oncoming dawn could provide even more abundant opportunities for the stupidest night of my life to get ramified into something that I really did not want to be involved with.

It was more than an hour later, well after dawn, when I was working on the last two inches of my obligatory morning McDonald’s coffee, (on the waterfront in Waikiki, where else?), that I discovered that I had been so determined to Get. Out. Of. Dodge, that I had left my hat, the same one that I’m wearing on the bloghead. Apparently they later found the hat, knew that there had been a witness, and were afraid of being busted, because when I revisisted the scene ten days later, in broad daylight, the whole area was still choke cops on dune buggies!

Hey, guys, You know what? You lost this one, fair and square, and right out your collective yin-yang. I was at large on this island for 36 days, and you never even got close. There were times when you thought you did, and boy were you hilarious. There were times when you walked right past me, but that wasn’t being close, because would have taken five years of dedicated Buddhist practices to get your head into a condition where you could have detected me.

Oh, and hey, I did acquire an identical replacement for the hat I lost somewhere in all that theatre. If you guys ever found something that looks like that in your normal beats, I’m sure you would never even notice it. And if you did notice it somehow, I’m sure that it wasn’t my hat. And if it was my hat, I don’t know who could have ripped it and what perfectly idiotic scenario they might have lost it in.

Life goes on.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing‌ Ping