Found this - brilliant! An Old Zen Joke: "Don't just do something! Sit there!"
Another birthday. This is the sort of thins one remembers. Craig treated me to two dinners last weekend. And a breakfast, as he pointed out last night when I summarized my birthday. Indeed! Found a fantastic pancake place in Jordaan.
Martin sent me an article in which I am featured! I will here post the parts which feature me - the article is really very long and is about long- and short term memory.
Years back, I spent about 3 hours entrenched in ferocious battle with then girlfriend about something I can no longer recall. After we had stormed the exact same emotional beachfront for the nth time, I demanded a cease-fire, declaring, “Babe, I am tired, and I have work tomorrow. I am going to sleep. We can continue hating each other in the morning.”
Her gorgeous frost-blue Scandinavian eyes narrowed into cracks on a glacial field.
“You do that. Go to sleep. And I’ll cut your balls off.”
Slept in the RAV 4 that night. With the doors locked. And the garage entrance bolted. And a male chastity belt equipped (basically, hands-over-testicles). Terrible nightmares of Laurena Bobbit winning the Nobel Peace Prize and Thai women feeding penises to poultry. But at least I still sing the National Anthem as a baritone.
Relationship endured over 18 tumultuous months and 3 bruising continents. Ended somewhere in southern Sweden when she punched me in the face, kicked me down a flight of stairs, and ejected my suitcase, clothes and person into 8 inches of snow at 2 in the morning, after I had inquired (quite naively I now admit) just how many guys had she been with before me anyway.
She wrote me an email recently, after about 4 years of non-communication, claiming she had nothing but fond recollections about us. No mention of the “I’ll cut your balls off”, or the “Go to hell”s, or the “I’ll see you in hell”s, or even the “If I see you in hell, I’ll cut your balls off”. Funny how time distills all things.
... (extremely long passage about other things)
The mind is an amazing place, and if our memories tend to be selective, it does not make it a less perfect space, just a more human playground. I hope to bump into all my friends in this area and share a collective emotional resonance. And if my ex-girlfriend is there, too, I’d like to give her a hug. But just in case, my RAV 4 is going to be parked pretty near as well.
Copyright? Martin Valdes.
Brought back a lot of memories of good times! Or so it seems now. It really does. For the record, I didn't kick him down any stairs, I think I kicked him first and then he ran down the stairs and out the door.
