The Bodhisattva of the Lottery:

Sleep (and writing) schedule has gone totally random. Did the three am wake up followed by the nap later in the day and then again I crashed at ten only to wake up at midnight wondering how late I’ll be up.

Every once in awhile you come across a voice you connect with, it can be a teacher or an author, some other source perhaps, but whatever reason the stars align and you get more out of your encounter with that voice than you normally would. Somehow your receptors line up, as though you’re an ant with just the right pheromones on the antennae to hatch a mutual plan.

I’m feeling that way about William Gibson right now and I think that I am actively not writing in part because I need to process what I’ve learned. To be sure, he has notable weaknesses. His characters are on the two dimensional side and he can at times tend toward repetitive structures and vocabulary (we each suffer from the run on sentence), but you can forgive the two dimensionality in deference to his power of description. His true characters are his settings. The complexity of his farms out weigh the ubiquity of his ants, and all his ants are less there to act than to observe; to witness the worlds he’s made for them.

If you read this blog with any sort of regularity, or ever listen to me talk, you might be aware of certain proneness to hyperboles. What Midwestern “writer” who lives along the Mississippi and has been to the boyhood home of Samuel Clemens on numerous occasions wouldn’t be influenced by the power of exaggeration to season a story? I’ve got a Clemens like hang up for living in those exaggerations, maybe even for living larger than I am able to; myself a flawed character, missing his third dimension.

I stood in the Shakespeare home in Stratford-upon-Avon in the spring of two-thousand-and-one looking at evidence of notable tourists to the site. As a fan of Jorge Borges I am into doubling, so the Russian nested doll-ness of me at the boyhood home of Shakespeare looking at the guest book signature of Clemens on the same tourist wander, when I as a tourist had taken students of mine to see Clemens’ home in Hannibal, was entertaining.

I am nothing if not a man of excesses. I couldn’t afford that trip to England, but I took it anyway. I can’t afford to live like I have been living this past weekend, but I’ve done it anyway, as sometimes you must. Then, oddly, enough unexpected income came in, from an early birthday gift from my brother and a little money for helping a friend move on Friday and again on Sunday, to cover exactly what I’d spent out on Friday reconnecting with my sister, on Saturday with an impromptu celebration of Brad’s birthday, on Sunday with a late afternoon and well into the evening BBQ. (To be sure, most of the money went to gas, laundry, groceries, and a memory card for the digital camera. So it wasn’t all squander and motion.) Even in unemployment with the bills rising, why does there always seem to be enough? Is trust enough?

The newagers have this fingernail theory of abundance most notably and recently championed by Wayne Dyer, who I saw on his last visit to St. Louis as a required gift of my previous employer (I was expected both to be inspired and to save the seats). To paraphrase Wayne, you shouldn’t doubt that the same universal force that grows your hair and beats your heart will also keep you in financial threads that meet your needs. The newagers are often closet Calvinists looking to join the elect, but rather than investing they try to clap their hands for Tinker bell and ride into tinsel town on the belief train.

The newagers tend to be about empowerment, so Wayne will judge you for seeing yourself as a victim in order to motivate and inspire you with his criticism, like Catholic guilt. You are fiscally and spiritually self destructive by coming to the well of abundance, which is in fact an ocean, with a thimble rather than a bucket. This theory draws from adaptations of karma and caste in that it ignores the socio economic pressures that could construct barriers to abundance for whole genders, races or nation states. It simply states that you’ll get exactly what you expect to get in life (so the third world just needs to set their sights a little higher).

The thing is, I have always been a nail-biter and my mom collected thimbles so I’m not sure how to get to bucket from here. I actually want to believe some of Wayne’s nonsense and I’d like to use “the power of my intention” to get there from here, but I have no idea what my future looks like and I seem unwilling or unable to find the path that leads to it. The Taoist method of waiting for the correct action to arise seems to be a bit of a crock. Perhaps I simply lack the inner quietude to recognize the call to action, which from a Taoist perspective should be constant.

There was a woman in Schnucks today buying pick three lottery tickets and she had these five sheets of notebook paper on which she’d worked out this complicated system of what numbers were more likely to hit on a given day – no training in statistics there, just the same kind of pseudo science of faith and will that you get from the newagers. She was explaining to the young girl behind the counter how you can’t go for the big score, you have to get a system and work the angles. She was pretending to a knowledge, which if she had she wouldn’t be there trying to explain it, unless she was the bodhisattva of the lottery, there to save my eavesdropping soul, there to remind me that angles have edges and all I want is smooth.

Maybe that’s an American thing, a hyperbolic hope that we’re all just a red ticket away from the big score, if we could just figure out how to show up at the right ocean with the right bucket when the tide is coming in. I am beginning to think that thinking about money as a motivator is the problem, instead of seeking the big score and the life of leisure perhaps I should get working on that third dimension of character and leave abundance to sort itself out. After all, it always seems to.