It's not fair

It was not strong enough to be called a craving - my decision this morning to go to my computer and automatically renew a prescription. Should take five minutes at most. Then I wanted to finish carrying trash out of the kitchen, get dressed, meditate, blog before I left for lunch.

I will not try to trace the labyrinthine depths in which I got lost as the prescription site refused to boot up, would not tell me how to put this scrip on auto renew, refused to print an order form, and so on. It is not fair, it's not right! As I saw how the hands of the clock had crept on - I hate time - I realized my spacious morning had been lost to this idiocy. I told Tom I felt like flying a plane into my computer.

Of course Wun is preoccupied with the fantastical narrative of Andrew Stack, who did commit suicide by flying a plane into an IRS agency yesterday. It happened on two channels before my eyes in real time (real time, there's a thought) as I worked away on the Nustep in my health club, making up for the sedentary affluent life to which I am not entitled.

From what I read, Stack had a righteous grievance against an unjust tax law that has prevented many computer engineers like himself from making a living self-employed. If you read his entire 3000 word statement, this is inextricable from money, money. And from some belief that the regulations of a huge bureaucracy ought to be comprehensible, and kind, that one man ought to be able to change things.

I learned about unfairness and being kept ruthlessly under the heal of Authority when I was eight years old, and my mother gave my chocolate pudding to my brother, to stop his tantrum. I recall how frustrated both she and I felt as he lay kicking and screaming on the floor, then holding his breath and turning from red to a bluish-white? I said it, "It isn't fair!" Children have a keen sense of fairness.

I was not tempted to violence in return. I suppose I moped, a kind of kid depression called pouting, which you're not allowed to do. Is violence not what girls do by nature, having little testoserone, or is it conditioning? Both, I think.

The world I grew up in was affluent and safe from overt violence, but heavily unfair. Loaded against women. Run by the Bernie Madoffs. Once in a while the system cracks and some lava of justice pours through, and a Madoff gets put in jail. I find it tremendously amusing that one of his investors has written a book about how she now fears "being a bag lady."

Andrew Stack took money very seriously. And his ability to fan his own belief that the world should be fair, and his anger that it wasn't, were so developed that he set fire to his house before he took off. His wife had taken herself and daughter away the night before, afraid of his gathering rage. I suppose he wanted to leave her nothing. A real man, acting like men are supposed to in America.

Oh, Buddhism, speak to me. Doesn't the Buddha's story tell us with breathtaking clarity that the road to enlightenment is not entitlement, but includes giving up everything you were taught could be yours, your kingdom? In some lineages, monks still make patchwork robes of used materials - recently I read an interview in which the Dalai Lama talked about that. He said, This way we have nothing to lose.

Nothing to grasp. No desires. No well-developed dreams, fantasies of what you need in life to be happy. No hatreds, abandon even them. Imagine that.