First I would like to give a warm welcome to my newest international readers. The Italians have come on board. A warm welcome. Feel free to send me some truffles and a bottle of 100 year old Balsamic, if you have any lying around.
An early morning text from Lincoln Shivers has given me today's topic. Dan, you continue to inspire me.
In Buddhist philosophy there is a Tibetan word: Bardo. Like most Buddhist terminology, it has a Sanskrit cousin. Probably a Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Nepalese, and several other translations in several other languages. Also, like most other Buddhist concepts, it has more than one definition. We are concerned with only one of those today.
A Bardo is a window or door. More accurately, windows or doors. They are important, specific locations on the space time continuum. Opportunities for major Karmic impact. A crossroads for all the blues and Ralph Machio fans. They are a point where you have a decision to make. You may have only two options, or you may have several. But they are more important than what flavor nondairy creamer to use to attempt to make your crappy gas station coffee taste good. These are decisions that are going to affect your life or the lives of others or both. Cosmic scale decision making.
Bardos vary in their weights and potencies, their impacts adjusted accordingly. Some we never notice, and some have us wondering what the fuck we were thinking. Most are somewhere in the middle. The two major Bardos of Buddhism are birth and death, but we are talking about the lesser variety. All affect us whether we realize it or not.
It is not too difficult for us to look back through the years and observe the major Bardos of our lives. Maybe you're like me, prone to rash decision making, and you regret most of them. Maybe you have been smarter with your choices, and have no regrets. Or you could be one of those liars who say, "I have no regrets. Everything happens for a reason." Save the bullshit for someone else. We all know you have things which haunt you whenever the lights are out and your head hits the pillow. You are not human if you don't.
I happen to share the major Bardo of my life with my friend, Lincoln Shivers. I believe he would consider it his, too, which makes it even more special. Two friends sitting on the cusp of a momentous decision and making it together. There is chain link connecting the two of us that no bolt cutters could ever sever. If we live a million lives, that chain will stretch on into infinity, affecting all those eons of existence. And it all started with a shared hit of acid at the Old Pink.
Shivers and I were hanging out. Neither of us was doing anything worthwhile at the time. He was working at the Red Lobster by the Transit Town Mall, and I was sort of working as an ironworker. Dan was living with his father, and I with mine. My heart had recently been broken when Nikki Mitchell decided to dump me for another guy. (Everybody send her vicious, slanderous messages. No don't. This would never have happened if she hadn't dumped me, and we wouldn't be here. Everything is connected.) We were your basic 1994 early twenty-something slackers.
This seems to be the theme of my life lately. You can't escape the past, especially in this day and age. Could you ever? In the cyclical version of time, there is no past, present or future. There is only now. Everything goes in a circle, is connected, so who is to say if what you're doing now came before or after what you did yesterday? The future we are waiting for could have happened in the past, we are just now catching up to it. Sit and think about that at night while you lay there listening to your partner snore. Give you something to do besides wish you had been more selective with the person you chose to spend eight hours a day in bed with.
So Shivers and I share our major Bardo. Copilots in a barely running Mustang LX that made it all the way to infinity. That one decision, made over a communal hit of acid, set the direction for the rest of out lives. I suppose you could say Nikki's dumping me led to the decision to move, but I didn't make that decision, Nikki did (Bitch!), so it can't possibly be my Bardo. The thing about them is you have to be the person making the choice.
This is great, Shivers. I wake up to a mile long message on my phone, and now I am thinking. Teaching even when you aren't.
Some highlights of the trip:
We didn't actually leave that night. It wasn't completely spur of the moment. The decision was, the execution wasn't. But we had decided to go, and we stuck with it. We spent a couple days with Carrie and Sandy, both of whom are wonderful ladies I haven't seen in a long time.
We went to my father's house to grab my clothes. We went to Dan's father's house to get his. We also grabbed a cooler and raided the fridge. We took a bottle of Absolut Vodka from the liquor cabinet to drink upon reaching our destination, Key West, Florida. The end of U. S. Highway 1. Mile marker 0. Where the sidewalk ends.
We stopped at a rest area in North or South Carolina to grill some boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Dan had one of those small, gas fueled grills in the trunk of his car. I think we had some mayonnaise and cheese. Cars flying by us. The sun out.
We made it Key West in the middle of the night. We pulled off the road, onto a fishing spot on Stock Island, and slept. The next morning we drove into town, discovering the Foot of Simonton Street. There is a tiny beach, a boat launch, and a public restroom there. It is on the Gulf side of the island, and probably the nicest swimming hole in Key West, made even nicer because the homeless people gather there to bathe, us the restroom, and get intoxicated, scaring all the tourists away. We pulled the grill out, cooked some brats (I think), and busted out the celebratory bottle of vodka. It was fucking water! Dan's brother, Ken aka Captain Freedom, had previously drank all the vodka and replaced it with USDA Grade A water.
We met too many people to do a roll call. The first person we met was Brian, who showed us around pointing out the places where the locals hung out for cheap booze and food. He showed us the Southernmost Deli, which would become our daily hangout. We met Bernadette, who hailed from Perth, Australia, and I would end up dating after she joined Dan and I on Fall Tour 94. We met Barbara The Lady of Ill Repute. She had a liberal moral agenda and unique social skills.
But this isn't about what we did or who we met. That story is around and will be told one day, but this is about the fact that we did something, not the facts about what we did.
I am so easy to go astray and off topic.
Dan and I changed the future with one unsober decision. We are bound together by that decision, for better or worse. No court of man can divorce us from it. Our lives went on from their. We separated, had brief reunions, and soon will be reunited for what will most likely be a long time. We are partners on this journey because of our choice to choose together. And he is a pretty good travel mate.
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