Autumn, Buddha, And My Personal Struggle With Entropy

           The temperatures are dropping and I am jumping for joy, not just because I am a typical New Englander and cannot stand the heat, but because I get to move back into my bedroom. For pretty much the entire summer I have been sleeping downstairs in front of the television. I am not such an addict to TV that I need it to go to sleep. Quite the contrary. The issue is that my house, like most houses in the area, does not have central air. This is the land of window unit air conditioning. I know several people who recall spending entire summers camping on couches in their own homes. My second home across the street would get so hot on the upper level that even walking by the stairs in the summer time you would encounter this wall of oven like heat. They also had the fun of no heat in the winter and waking up with frost on the inside of the windows. My little brother didn’t have any heat in his bedroom either. And so it goes – a region of the country that grooms its population to not be able to tolerate having the thermostat set above 65 (Or perhaps it is just here on New Fletcher St). We would rather have ice growing on the inside of the windows and be covered in six Polar Fleece blankets than be in a hot house. My college roommates (from Virginia and Barcelona) had fun living with me.

            Since I have not really been sleeping in my room all summer, it has become QUITE the dumping zone. If I’m not going to spend time there, there’s really no incentive to keep it tidy. I’m very pragmatic about my time. I don’t like to waste it. Many people would assume that in lacking a traditional job I am footloose and fancy free. I wish they were right. When I visit my bedroom for whatever reason, inevitably something gets moved out of place, or shifted, or dumped on the floor. This makes my room an excellent demonstration of the concept of entropy, not just in the sense of equilibrium and nature’s predisposition towards disorder, but also in Lazare Carnot’s concept of entropy as energy loss due to friction. I can’t go up there and get anything done without wasting time, making a mess, losing something, getting confused…. the list goes on.

            I am not a Buddhist by any means. I do think the Buddha and his followers and the Dalai Llama have some unbelievably wise things to say. And incorporating a lot of these ideas into your life could not hurt in any way. As I think about moving back into my landfill of a bedroom (which I assure you I will clean), I find myself wondering what Buddha would think of my bedroom. Why? I really don’t know. I have a funny feeling though, that he would laugh quite a lot, having never seen such a ridiculous mess, and then make some sort of proverbial correlation between the state of the inside of my head and the inside of my bedroom.

            I will not deny that I am odd, and sometimes forgetful, and occasionally do really crazy things. I am not, however, the complete and utter disaster that you would assume I was just by looking at the inside of my bedroom. Now I would like to propose that this chaos, this mess, this giant shit show, is a little bit orderly. I do not say that simply because I actually know where things are in the piles and mountains, but because by the laws of equilibrium and principal of entropy, I knew it was going to end up like this. I’m not a psychic. It’s the laws of physics that predict that my bedroom will become a huge garbage heap of a mess.

            My next odd thought: What would Buddha think about entropy? I think we can all agree that the world and all its parts are in a constant state of transition. If the inside of my head is predisposed towards chaos, then it’s going to be extra difficult to clean it up. If entropy and equilibrium are involved, reducing the entropy inside of my head (tidying it up) is going to cause the entropy outside of my head to increase. So, if I really wanted to achieve enlightenment, would that give me license to turn into the Tasmanian Devil and leave tornado style wakes in all of my paths? I certainly wouldn’t mind not ever having to clean. Buddha suggests that we should be clean, though, both for our own sake and for others. With the converse approach, if I make my surroundings perfect to inhabit, the entropy in my head is going to increase and I am going to turn into a bumbling buffoon.

            There seems to be quite a huge debate going on amongst the lazy about whether or not being messy is a sign of genius. Albert Einstein was quite a mess. There are plenty of people out there, on the other hand, who are dumber than chewed up bubblegum that live in slovenly filthy heaps. Have you ever seen that show Hoarders? People are messy (lazy and inconsiderate) – they’re not brilliant or enlightened. I AM going to clean my room, and it’s not going to make me less intelligent or less spiritually awakened. And it will immediately tend towards becoming a mess again. That fact I am quite certain of. I think Buddha would probably point out that in the time we’ve spent debating whether or not messes can be equated with intelligence and entropy with enlightenment, we all could have cleaned our spaces and found out for ourselves.

Are Those Fireworks For ME?

Happy 4th of July!!!!! (photo
copyright S Botham 2011)

            There’s not much to do in Chelmsford - during the week or on the weekend. It is small town New England at its finest. I LOVED going to the liquor store when I was little. It was an overwhelmingly exciting place. Not only was it filled with beautiful glass bottles of colorful treats that I could only imagine tasted like various melted popsicles, there were kid friendly toys! When you turned to the right and walked towards the refrigerated walls at the back of the store you would find the wishing well. Can you believe it? A WISHING WELL! With an acetate thatched wooden roof and blue water on which was floating a smiley yellow rubber duck. Little did I know that this was actually just a wine cooler.

The real treat though is one that still returns every Christmas. Model trains. The largest display I’ve ever seen. It runs the entire depth of the liquor store (and this is NOT a tiny establishment). I can press the button to start the trains on their journey around the tracks and feel about 25 years shed from my pericardium. The joy and wonder spreads from ear to ear, like it did the first time I set foot inside the walls of Disneyland. And when I analyze it, I realize that a tiny piece of this spark is present every time I set foot in Harrington’s liquor store, and I am certain that many other children and adults feel the same way. Then I wonder if perhaps it isn’t normal to instill this association of joy with liquor stores in small children.

            You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced small town New England patriotic celebrations. The first thing that must be realized is that the beginning of this country in this region is a matter of sick and twisted pride. There is a remembrance of bloodshed. After all, the Revolutionary War started HERE. People fight about whose town is more important, as if we were living in a bad Christopher Guest film (something similar to Waiting for Guffman). This is the place where people regularly dress up in costume from the 1700’s, and march around playing fife and drum and waving flags, and pretend that the British are coming. Naturally, these people need something to do so most towns have a 4^th of July parade. Chelmsford is no exception. We have a parade, a road race, and on the 3^rd of July there is a county fair-style mess (to us it’s “the booths”) on the town common where different groups from town either sell food or have raffles and silly games where kids can win things like glow in the dark bouncy balls (which they then take home and immediately test out in the closet with their little brother, and accidentally crush little brother’s fingers in hinge side of closet door, leading to a trip to the emergency room).

What does it mean to be an American? Is it something we should be proud of? There was a time when being an American stood as an association with those who saved the people of Normandy from the approaching doom of Hitler’s invasion. Being an American also matched you up with the painted caricatures of US government heads like Reagan and Bush and negative words on the sides of buildings in Havana. While the paintings are propaganda, it still remains true that the embargo made it near impossible for Cubans to access much-needed antibiotics and other medications produced by American pharma corporations. (Thankfully, now a lot of these medications are being produced overseas so I would hope that has changed).

I can call Barack Obama a f#$%$@#^ chucklehead many times a day (and I DO) and not have to sleep with a gun under my pillow, but for how long? How long until I’m no longer allowed to own a gun? Things are changing here, and some things I find worrisome. I applaud people’s right to worship or not as they choose. And I understand that people want the separation of church and state. I completely agree. I become concerned when people no longer want to be gracious to the country in which they live. And even WORSE, people are more worried about offending others by being gracious to their own country. THAT is offensive to me. To pledge allegiance to the flag, to me, is like saying thank you. Thank you; I’m lucky to live here; I’m glad I don’t live in Bhutan. When you’re in elementary school, and you are reciting the pledge of allegiance, you don’t yet know that you are glad you don’t live in Bhutan. But you are. And you will figure it out. Can we learn to appreciate the sentiment, and stop arguing about the dogma?

            As a musician, I am lucky to have an opportunity to play pops concerts for patriotic holidays. I am divulging a well kept secret right now: I LOVE playing patriotic pops concerts. I don’t mind playing off beats in Yankee Doodle and Sousa marches. It is unbelievably rewarding to play the Armed Forces Salute, which goes through the theme song for each branch of service, and the veterans and active members are generally invited to stand during their respective songs. I always think about my grandfathers during the Army and Navy tunes (they both served in WWII), and my friend Latoya who’s a Marine (Afghanistan). As select audience members stand I watch the pride beaming from their eyes, these noble people who let their guard down for a brief moment, just long enough to allow someone to acknowledge how much they have sacrificed. It brings tears to my eyes. At a recent concert, I had a similar reaction during God Bless America. It’s not one of my favorite songs (it’s growing on me), but it strikes a chord with many. During our performance, about halfway through, three men of my mother’s generation or a bit older (definitely old enough to be around during the War in Vietnam), rose up out of their chairs and loudly started to sing along. It wasn’t the kind of singing you get in a drunken show tunes bar party. They held their heads high and their shoulders back and opened their mouths wide. You could see and hear from their conviction that being American DID mean something to them. I fear for the day when these people are gone.

I think our government is filled with a bunch of rich buffoons who wouldn’t know what it was to struggle unless you threw them naked in a 20 feet deep, glass shard filled pit of starving lions. They’re out of touch, and they don’t care, including that dickhead of a president who has spent more tax dollars on vacations than I will make in a lifetime. They are not America. They are just a used up old Philippe Starck for Target fruit bowl. We are America. The struggling soulful people inside the fruitbowl. Fresh kumquats and tangelos.

            My next-door neighbor, who has since passed on from cancer, was Cambodian. He spent a large chunk of his life hiding in the jungle from the oppressive militia of Pol Pot to try and get here. He saw his own family shot down in front of him. He was the kind of person who would pick up hitchhikers and drive them anywhere they wanted to go. He felt it was his job to help other people because he was lucky to have made it here. I still can’t buy anything with a “Made in Cambodia” tag on it. His wife and daughters are still living next door. He has a beautiful granddaughter now. And thanks to his courage, none of them will ever have to worry about lions and tigers (or despots) again. That is something worth being proud of.