the old girl is hobbling around

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Maybe not as elegant as optimal, but not dead yet.

I was walking through a parking lot to a bar and a very pretty married woman in a car had rolled down her window to tell me she needed some help. I said, sure, how can I help? And she told me there were some questions of sexual identity within her marriage. I said, well, I don't know about that, and kept on walking. She was very seriously put off by my apparent callousness.

A little right facing Swastika flashed up and I immediately identified it as not Nazi, but ancient Asian.

In the bar, the woman from the parking lot continued to exude hurt and angry energy toward me, but I was looking for someone, and only noted her negative energy.

Bars are figuring heavily in my dreams lately, and I'm always there to pluck someone out... actually, parking lots are too. This would be all about going into the world to save sentient beings. The matter of my efficacy is fuzzy as heck, but at least there is an effortlessness about it, a lack of disdain, an of-course-ness to all this roaming around in the stalled circus of drunken creatures of delusory notions unremitting....

I came upon the guy I wanted, and brought him out. The woman was back in her car with the window rolled down again, and I told her I was sorry I'd offended her, that there wasn't any offense meant, and what was the catch for her? Her hurt and wrath evaporated and now with an expression of agony she said, "You can't tell children everything that is in your house." I understood her immediately. She saw it, and was satisfied. Drove off.

Then I was with this drunken fellow I'd plucked out of the bar at the Zen Center where I lived many years ago, there to anoint a new Abbot from the stock of bald guys in dresses, to fill in for someone who usually performs that function. There was a piece of chocolate, a stick of licorice, and a hunk of sourdough bread on my little ceremonial tray for this procedure. The sourdough would make him poobah, so I offered him the chocolate. He knew that wouldn't work, and rejected the offering. So I gave him the licorice instead and he was satisfied. Mostly I was playing at being a bumbler because I wasn't going to give him the sourdough, but clever as he thought he was, he flunked before I had to make that plain.

Later, when the drunk had sobered, he was saying things to the Non-Abbot of the Zen Center and some woman bald guy in a dress whose hair had grown out too much. The Non-Abbot was getting angry and telling him a drunk was nobody who could tell him anything and the woman was in total solidarity with his affronted attitude toward a guy who was speaking the truth to them. I piped up to remind them that enlightening beings take the teaching from even the lowliest source, from a mentally-challenged toddler, if that's where it's coming from, and if they couldn't recognize truth from whatever source they were just a couple of quacks out to pose as some exalted form of spiritual authorities.

I said, look, I lived at this zoo for two years. I saw how many came and immediately took ownership of it, pretending they were of a rare clique, using their residence as some kind of bludgeon on newcomers, even if they'd only arrived the day before, and this trip they were pulling on their drunk teacher was no different at all from that.

Oddly, this shut them up.

Pfeh. I'll be switched. They never shut up.