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Captive Audience

Letter to Esme 1

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S: This woman then whipped out her cell phone, and called God-knows-who and started yelling, right in front of the receptionist, "This fucking bitch won't let me in the gallery, I mean, now I don't know if I even WANT to see this stupid exhibition anymore," and I had been holding back but I finally stepped in and asked her what the problem was.

A: I cannot believe it, what is wrong with her?

S: And she just rolled her eyes in a huff and said that her "friend" who was already inside the gallery, had forgotten to leave her ticket at the front desk, and I gave her the option to either pay the measly $10, or walk through the gallery to locate her friend, or leave. And she huffed around and swore, and was like, "I can't fucking be-LIEVE this." And I just wanted to say to her, do you not find any irony that you are having this asinine hissy fit in front of the Zen Buddhist exhibit?

A: Well, there you have it for Buddhism in New York.

The Supreme Goal

Whatever there is there of form, feeling, perception, determinations, or consciousness, such ideas he sees as impermanent, as subject to pain, as a sickness, as a tumor, as a barb, as a calamity, as an affliction, as an alienation, as a disintegration, as a void, as not-self. He averts his heart from those ideas, and for the most peaceful, the supreme goal, he turns his heart to the deathless element, that is to say, the stilling of all determinations, the relinquishment of all substance, the exhaustion of craving, the fading of passion, cessation, extinction.

—Buddha

All is burning

1963. Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist priest in Southern Vietnam, burns himself to death protesting the government's torture policy against priests. Thich Quang Dug never made a sound or moved while he was burning.

what I saw of paris, france