Stop sign reflection in New Orleans street puddle. Photo by Author

We are having our kitchen remodeled. That is such an innocent looking sentence, isn’t it? And deceptively vague. It could mean that we’re putting a new coat of paint on the walls and buying a new set of Corningware. What is actually happening is all the walls and floors are being ripped out down to the dirt and studs, all the electrical wiring is being replaced, and all the plumbing is being…….re-plumbed, I guess. While all the ripping, rewiring and replumbing is happening we are still living in the house, with nary but a makeshift wall of industrial black plastic between us and a platoon of contractors and their nefarious devices….

None of which are worse than leafblowers.

One of the results of this is that when I am ellipticating….on my elliptical…the guys working on the new kitchen are just six feet away with only a garbage bag wall between us. Usually, no big whoop. But yesterday my earbuds were broken, and you gotta have music, so I played my exercise list out loud on the speaker without realizing I would also be playing it for the six guys currently sheet-walling a mere garbage bag away. That is until the Go-Go’s came on and the work suddenly got all quiet over there….

Oh shit. My stomach panged with anxiety as a thousand moment of hell from High School and beyond flung themselves at my psyche’s walls. But 15,000 hours of improv loomed in the wings, crafting responses, thinking of snappy comebacks, which in the end only makes it worse! I became a creature of pure reaction. All sense of personal identity were gone. Because other people are paying attention to me….

Song by song, my attention flies from my ellipticating to the unseen men behind the screen. I can feel my thoughts reconstructing the unseen scene in my head. The smirks, the raised eyebrows, the silent mocking gestures…and then my Dharma Barrage Balloons floated up from the battleship SS Mindfullness. Barrage balloons were used in WW I and II to protect ships from incoming shells. They were unmanned and tethered to prominent targets, floating far above, shielding all below. The first Balloon: who cares if they think I’m dumb, weird or goofy…I am. I’ve been paid to be dumb, weird and goofy, and paid well. Second Balloon: if they do hate me, I can take it. Being hated and mocked just for a guy’s music? That’s not a person I need to take seriously. Third Balloon: hating other people takes time and effort, and these guys are working for a living, they don’t have time for high school level bullshit. Fourth, who is this that’s getting worried? And changing his playlist? And thinking about what other people are thinking…..oh yeah. The self, that thing Buddha teaches doesn’t exist….Poof.

Can you imagine the huge ego of this self? It thinks the whole world revolves around it! That all things are reacting to only to it. It even believes the unseen and the unknown pay it homage, when the exact opposite is the truth. The Self is nothing but a series of reactions to the world, and it’s a never ending series of reactions to the world, I might add, which means this self is actually always in a state of flux, which then means it will always want something else and usually it will want something different that it claimed to want just a little while ago! That’s what a schmuck does! The Self is a total schmuck!

Until I began to meditate and study the dharma, I had no idea any of this was going on in my head. I knew something was up, as I was miserable, living a shitty life and my dawn was always lit by the burning bridges from the night before. Despite this inspiration, my conversion to teachings of the Buddha and his teachers, collectively referred to as the Dharma, was more of a gradual surrender rather than a life changing bolt from from the blue. Bit by bit, the dharma proved itself to me. I am still climbing out of the deep, deep ruts that this thing people call John and the World dug for itself. And I’m getting there, and I’ve worked my ass off to get there, but despite All the There I’ve Gotten Too, I can still instantly turn into a seventeen-year-old from the fear that strangers won’t like my playlist.

It’s a looping cycle of self awareness, based on nothing but guesswork, suspicion, self loathing and the need to blame something else for all my problems. I’ve gotten angry from imaginary arguments I’ve had with strangers I’ve passed in the street. How the hell does that happen? And the argument is never a Socrates style discussion where I learn about myself and the world from a cogent question and answer session. Nope. It’s like a bad Dragnet episode where I’m Jack Webb and I’m right about everything and the perp gives me all the perfect prompts for all the best points of my never ending lecture. Sometimes we get into a fight I miraculously win using combat techniques that I have never learned or attempted. Unirregardless of the genre of this imaginary conflict, I still get physically angry…. at an illusion about an illusion.

When it comes to how much this concept has wrapped itself around my life in negative and positive ways, the Gordian Knot is a weak-ass lame poser. It has taken some time to deconstruct, but it begins with a Bi-polar Manic Depressive mother and ends with an adventurous evening at a sex club.

I lived to make my Mother laugh, or to be at least not sad. I had to do this a lot. As a result, I subsumed my own wishes and desires under a persona that was agreeable and happy. I said things I did not believe, and did things I did not want to do, and rarely considered my own feelings in the matter. My only peace were books or TV, which I would enjoy by myself. Alone. I would pretend to be anything to get to the place where I could bliss out with blessed fiction and Histories of the grand and great. Alone.

Outside the land of counterpane, the only other place I ever felt safe was the stage, where I could continue to not be myself and win the approval of others. And so night after night, my psychosis was rewarded with applause. And sometimes they even gave me money! With every opening night, the scars got thicker, but there wasn’t any healing going on. The thing is, when you are pretending to be someone you’re not on stage, it’s easy. Off stage, it’s impossible, because it’s literally making you crazy. I would go along for a while seeming just fine and then fail, freak out and act out in irresponsible ways. Everything I did was in service of pleasing the person in front of me, in the moment, which meant I wound up lying a lot. I would be wonderful in my job at times, and then catastrophically incompetent the next. So, in the long run, my trauma transformed itself into the behavior of a Bi-Polar manic depressive. Hi Mom!

I ain’t telling you about the sex club.

In Buddhist terms, the experiences with my mother were conditional volitions, repeated activities that get worn into a grooves in my brain. Cool term, eh? Buddha spends a lot more time with this term than I’m going to. After all, We’re here to talk about me…or the lack thereof.

Admittedly, it took three weeks of hiking in Northern Spain to begin to understand what the Dharma teaches about the self. It will take a lot longer to apply that understanding to my life.

Do you feel eyes on you, even when they’re not? How do you handle it? How do other people’s needs alter your own? And who’s needs are more important?

‘cuz it would be nice to play music everyone likes, even beyond the garbage bag walls. But you can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself, says Ricky Nelson and The Buddha. Both are on my playlist.