82

Sanctuary.

It stares up at me as the green glow of terror, of disappointment, of striving for all the optimism and idealism inside me, gleans its way across the glass. It cries to me. It screams for reasons why I insult it by sumbitting it to future in such a torturous, humiliating act. In an instant, words are replicated imperfectly. Colors of pens borrowed from the world's teahouses and passers by turn blackish shades of gray, and pages of personality blend to flat, dull, 2 dimensional crimson - nope, too alive. Black. Just black.

I almost can't bring myself to do it. I almost can't lay the journals down on polished glass in sterilized national-chains entirely dedicated to boring, rapid reproduction in a country where printing presses or, god-forbid, the pen has been replaced by that green sasquatch killing creativity and bolstering it all the same. As Jay said, "here you can let machines do things, so you can focus on other things." And yet part of it is lost. Part of the illusion of the unique as pages I suffered through sweltering Burmese heat, wiping sweat from pupils, appear as normal and unassuming as the mass-produced million-copies-sold perfection of straight lines and identical m's. We stare forward, moving only to avert our eyes from the blazing green lite saber threatening to shred our retina as it swipes past, and to change pages to replicate a moment of our lives - or of someone else's - anew every second or so. It hurts, and the questions begin anew. Why am I writing this? What am I creating?

Should not all that I learned teach nothing if not to swing the words I've penned into a drawer of my own life, and softly lock them down in my own being? Why replicate them to a world that will inevitably and inadvertently morph their meaning more than even I with my new eyes of experience?

As I write this book, it must be for me. Only for me. Perhaps that's a brutal fact worthy of quiet, calm acceptance.

So I thump my opposable digit down on that big green start button (green as though foreshadowing the terror of the light saber to come) 700 painful times as I ached for inner calm of acceptance. And it came, as page 400 or so swung its way into the heart of the machine and jammed. No, not only jammed, but destroyed. Condemned the whole operation to another day. "Error. Reboot machine." Perhaps the machine felt my unease. Perhaps it felt a similar pain at easy, trivializing reproduction as it swept out page after page of hot, bitter, exciting, bland, descriptive, demoralizing, and uplifting words. Perhaps it was all too much.

Whatever it was, thank Jesus, Shiva, Buddha, Pachamama, and Quetzalcoatl. It was all too much to create, or destroy, in a day. And now I have an excuse to reflect, and return. To take one more step before burying myself in committment. A step that would have been unnecessary without such gracious mechanical empathy.

In the meantime, I went on that night to experience the unrestrained kindness of the Verizon clerk, to make a bum's day with 4 quarters, and to meander my way home to a delicious dinner with my family as the only white face of the number 6 bus.