What Men Want

A Substack meditation on the emotional lives of men has been making the rounds. Fruit of Drunk Wisconsin, whose timeline is one of those digital live traps that will keep you scrolling and surfing all day if you're not careful, Men Only Want One Thing (And It's Disgusting) is that rarest of things: a brief, well-written rumination on the never-asked question of what men want.

Given cultural assumptions on this matter, if you're not a man, you likely haven't the slightest accurate idea.

If, on the other hand, you're one of "those" men, you'll probably be disgusted by the whole thing. Look, brother, the writer warned you.

And if you're here among us left–overs, you may feel that welter of repressed, conflicting emotions that signals a direct hit.

For further proof, check out the comments below the Substack post. Important: read the text first, and only afterward the comments. If you reverse that order, you'll lose the ability to read the post at all.

Because bombarding a challenge with self-mocking parody is the jiu jitsu of the reflective male. (If you thought it was middle school insults embedded in dripping sarcasm… see "those" men, above.)

Let the author of this pithy, penetrating, precise manifesto be Exhibit A.

I'd say "I feel seen", but the truth is I feel x-rayed.


(Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com and a generous photographer.)

WW: Desert snapshot

(Photo taken during my outbacking trek through the Columbia Basin last summer. Mt. Rainier in the distance.

Open in a new tab to see it to better effect.)

WW: Classic Puget Sound house

(Another in my unintended series on endangered Old Settler houses in the district where I grew up. I've loved this one since I first rowed the lake at the age of 8. Its classic Puget Sound lines – detached garage, gable roof, dormers, shed-roofed second story, barn paint and gleaming white trim – I associated with grandparents, partly because my own raised their kids and still lived in one like it.

Lacking a boat these days – embarrassing as that is – I took this shot through the back fence; bit of a shame, really, because the view from the water, while less bucolic than it was those many years ago, is much more evocative of the prewar era in this part of the world. [See photo below, taken by a school chum from his front yard in 1965.]

A popular city park was built beside it in the 70s, and I'm told the city bought this property too when the last elderly resident moved out a few years ago. That explains the nominal effort to make the boarding-up less unsightly, but sadly, almost certainly also signals the end of this fine old example of Green Side architecture.)

Arriving

With a motorboat you get there faster,
but with a sailboat you’re already there.


(Winslow Homer's Breezing Up courtesy of the National Gallery of Art [US] and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Sunbeam chair

Squeezing The Legs Out Of The Snake

That's what the Tibetans call it, when you try to force your delusions on objective reality.

You find a snake. It's an animal; it should have legs. But where are they? It has no hair in which to hide them, no feathers, no shell.

Well, they must be inside.

So you squeeze. I picture the unoffending reptile, coiled around my wrist: bug-eyed, silent, indignant.

You want it to have legs. You'd feel better if it had legs. You insist it have legs. In the end, you'd rather it were dead, than to go on existing without legs.

But the thing is, it has no legs.

And that's only a problem for you.


(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges [manuscript in progress]. Photo of Epicrates cenchria, the rainbow boa, courtesy of Rawpixel.com and a generous photographer.)

WW: Late winter check-in

Street Level Zen: Captivity

"Zoos are full, prisons are overflowing... how the world still dearly loves a cage."

   Maude.


– From lifelong favourite Harold and Maude, which entire movie has an atmosphere I would later recognise as the precise texture of Zen koans and stories.

    "Why not kill yourself?" asked the monk

    "No place to start," said Caoshan.




(Photo courtesy of Chris Fuller and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Winter afternoon

Responsiblity Kyôsaku

Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.
Exodus 23:2


(Photo of Fudo Myō-ō statue courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Evening spectacle

(Garlands of old man's beard [Usnea longissima], catching the winter sun at this specific moment of day.)

The Most Lost

I practice the religion that suits me.

The one that says I'm right and you're wrong.

That I'm the ideal, and you the mistake.

We all do that.

Except the most lost,

Who commit the sin their sanghas condone

In full knowledge.


(Photo courtesy of MC1 Chad J. McNeeley, the United States Navy, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing

Samuel Hoffenstein was my parents' poet-laureate, which explains why several of his anthologies dwelt upon a shelf in our house, already well before I was born.

My parents also had a brilliant take on the transmission of literature, generally. They never attempted to introduce us to their appreciated writers and poets, unless by passing quotation in context. Instead they stored representative works in a floor-level bookcase, and waited for us to get around to wondering what might be in those books we'd seen all our lives and never opened.

Which is where, a year or two after I learned to read, I pulled out Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing.

I'd cultivated a budding interest in poetry as a genre, but really, it was that title: the mutual contradiction of "poems", "praise", and "practically nothing", flouting the piety with which the first two words were always presented in school.

Satirical versifier of a populist American school that includes, to list just three, James Thurber, Edward Gorey, and Dorothy Parker, Hoffenstein also had – as did those other three – a grown-up day job. (Hollywood screenwriter, in Hoffenstein's case.) But he found time to fill several volumes with typically brief, slightly mind-bending poems.

Better still, he was able to get them into print, and therefore into our hands.

If Hoffenstein has since dropped into obscurity, he was quite as widely fêted and bemoaned in his day as the above contemporaries.

I still remember the first Hoffenstein verse I encountered, having opened Practically Nothing to a random page. I was soon laughing out loud, and when my mother glanced to see what I was up to, she rolled her eyes and told my father, "He's reading Samuel Hoffenstein." Which he too found amusing.

But really, whose fault was that?

These many decades later, I find a certain koanic character – even Zen chic – in much of the Hoffenstein œuvre. I mean, come on! Who else praises nothing? In fact, that first-discovered sonnet, which remains my favourite to this day, is outright literary dharma combat.

Read it for yourself. Isn't this Issa-grade haikunist-shaming?

The camel has a funny hump—
Well, what of it?
The desert is an awful dump—
Well, what of it?
The sun it rises every day—
What about it?
Roosters crow and asses bray—
What about it?
The stars shine nearly every night—
Don’t bother me with it!
Grass is green and snow is white—
Get out o’ here!

Some tastes are in-bred, I guess.

If you'd like a deep dive into these lost treasures, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing is available free on the Information Superhighway in at least two places:

• Archive.org's Digital Library, where this title and several others may be read online or downloaded.

• And this compendium of Hoffenstein's entire shelf, available for download.


For as the Master himself taught:

Let the winds of fortune blow
To the metres that I know:
There are always better times
Waiting to corrupt our rhymes.


(Photo courtesy of Mrika Selimi and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Abandoned barn

(No stronger proof of disuse in an old barn than a rotten hay hoist. Because this tackle can easily kill people if it fails, farmers tend to obsess over its health.

This classic old red barn is part of the miraculously preserved dairy farm in my old neighbourhood. It still housed the herd, hay, milking machines, and cold storage for the milk when I was a kid. Whole district, including the pastures that used to be attached to this operation, has long since gone suburban.)

Emptiness

"It's the hole that makes the doughnut."

The I Ching. (Probably.)


(Pre-certified doughnut courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Sunset on the Columbia Plateau

(Another shot from my trek through Eastern Washington last summer.)

Zenola

I brought rather austere food when I sat 100 Days on the Mountain. Lunch and dinner were an identical bowl of rice and beans, spiced up with hot sauce, and curried after about the midway point. I brought very little in the way of snacks or sweets.

(I don't recommend this approach, by the way. An important practice point I learned out there is that discipline can be as egocentric and obstructive as indulgence. It's wise to keep your diet simple, wholesome, and habitual. It's unwise to eat like a zek.)

But breakfast came from a large trash bag, and it's these morning meals I remember with the most affection. Because from those unpromising origins rose each morning a braw bowl of zenola.

Zenola is a marriage of trail mix and cereal developed in the months before I left, for the express purpose of launching each day of practice. The ingredients supply essential nutrients deficient or absent in my other staples. And the rainbow of bright colours and flavours is a proper party when you're living on rice and beans.

The recipe is as follows:

30 lbs rolled oats (I like thick-cut the best)
1 1/4 lb powdered milk
3 3/4 lbs salted mixed nuts
1 3/4 lb each:
  cranberry raisins
  dried apples
  dried apricots, bananas, or other fruit
1 1/4 lb crystalized ginger

(If you don't require a metric tonne of zenola all at once, reduce these quantities proportionally to get the amount you want.)

At a cup a-piece, this comes out to about a third again more than 100 breakfasts, but when you're living alone it's a good idea to bring more food than you think you'll need. (And also to store it in several secure places.)

I almost always ate this in cold water, but you can use boiling water for a soft and steamy bowl. I find rolled oats most satisfying uncooked, but once or twice, on biting cold nights when I needed encouragement, I rustled up hot zenola and tea by the light of my candle.

Under the strict daily regimen, this stuff became such a treat that I used it as incentive, denying myself the pleasure if I rose too late. Other times it was a reward, to celebrate milestone days or cheer me up in bleak moments.

In all of these occasions, zenola was hearty and sustaining, and excellent support for practice.

WW: Sky on the Hanford Reach

(Here's a photo from my outbacking excursion to Spokane last summer, taken on the northwest limit of the Pasco Basin, just a few hundred yards short of the Priest Rapids of the Columbia River. This view is west to Umtanum Ridge. [Open the link in a new tab to see it bigger.]

I never get used to those electric Gold Side skies. People who live there walk around under them like nothing's going on, oblivious to the Greensider ratcheting off shots of nothing in particular above them.

But I recommend you avoid driving these backroads – lowest elevation in the state – in July if you have the shadow of a choice. Especially if your truck has no air conditioning. A thermos of heavily-iced tea was all that stood between me and posterity.)

Sobriety Kyôsaku

An intoxicant is any external source that draws you deeper into yourself, your beliefs, your egocentrism, and away from direct experience of the real, present moment.

Samsaric life is floating down a river of intoxicants; it’s difficult to go against the flow but it’s the only hope.

– insight from a fellow Zen hermit in my Twitter sangha.


(Photo of Oregon's Rogue River courtesy of Hamad Darwish and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: King boletes

(Boletus edulis. Part of a generous outbreak that burst up not far from my house during the record rains of last month. Some of them were the size of dinner plates. Unfortunately I neglected to get a photo of one of those, but had quite a feast on the lot notwithstanding.)