Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [19]
There were many times when raising the sixty-five bucks for rent was a major problem for me. I worked lousy temp jobs and survived on packages of Kraft® Macaroni & Cheese. Not that any of this was new to me; this was a lifestyle I had enjoyed, with minor variations here and there, for the better part of a decade. The Golden Prosperity of the Reagan Years my ass! I wanted out.
THE JET PROGRAM only accepts applications during certain months, so it took me nearly a year to get it together to get my application in. By then my circumstances had improved slightly. The band wasn’t doing much better but I had a steadier day job as an instructor for mentally handicapped adults, “consumers” as we euphemistically called them.
I moved out of that rathole in Akron and into a house Tim McCarthy, the Zen teacher I’d met at KSU, had dubbed the Kent Zendo (zendo means “place you practice Zen”). That place was run down too, but the people there actually made some effort to keep it reasonably clean and keep everything in good working order. The Kent Zendo motto was: “We’re the smallest.” Say what you will, at least we weren’t guilty of false advertising.
The living room was cleared out for holding zazen practice and a small altar stood at one end of the room, just to the left of the door to the toilet. Once, I made the mistake of leaving my camera unattended and much later when I developed the film, I found a shot of Tim pointing his willy at the little statue of the Buddha on the altar.
At the time I lived there, it was tough for Tim to get a lot of people interested in Buddhism. Only one of the other six people in the house was into it at all. The rest were Kent State University students who were not into subtle Eastern teachings so much as cheap rent. The weekly sittings would be attended by between five and ten people, mostly college students who showed up once or twice then promptly gave up when they didn’t find enlightenment right away.
As for me, I’d go through phases of being really hot on the practice and sitting at least two forty-minute periods every day, then getting frustrated and doing a token five or ten minutes half-assedly before bed. I rarely went more than a day or two without doing it at all, though. Whenever I stopped, I felt it: my brain just wasn’t right.
Even with my new job, I was still destitute. Midnight Records wasn’t selling enough Dimentia 13 albums to make me any extra cash and the major labels I kept sending my stuff to never bothered to even write back with rejections. I became increasingly convinced that all my problems would be solved if only I could earn a little bit of money and fulfill my dream of living in the land of Ultraman. I never actually believed money could buy me happiness. But not having money certainly seemed to be hooking me up with a lifetime supply of pains in the ass.
At any rate, before too long I got a letter from the JET program saying the Japanese government was willing to pay me more than three times what I’d been earning up ‘til then—plus half my rent in Japan!—to go to their wonderful monster-filled country and teach their lovely children to talk just like me. Sweet!
SMALL STUPID DREAMS
Suppose you are thinking of a plate
of shrimp. Suddenly somebody’ll say,
like, “plate” or “shrimp” or “plate of
shrimp.”
No explanation. No point in looking
for one one, either. It’s all part
of the cosmic unconsciousness.
MILLER ( PLAYED BY TRACEY WALTER)
FROM THE MOVIE REPO MAN
I WORKED HARD to improve my pathetic Japanese skills during my first year in Japan. At the end of year one I re-upped for a second year with JET. I would spend another year teaching in Japan—or rather, talking in English