it seemed like a pretty uneventful day, until lynn called (it was probably about 1 or 2 in the afternoon) and told me that she had a flat tire. she was on kilhau (later, she corrected to kilihau) street. i looked it up; it was somewhere near nimitz, somewhere near the airport.
so i took aiden with me, and a cross bar, and a jack, and drove off to find my wife. all along the way, i started cursing. i'm not sure why. maybe i was irritated with this event, even though it was nobody's fault, really. maybe i was stressed that my gas was so low, and getting lower. there seemed an inordinate amount of traffic for this time of day, and maybe that was irritating me too. at one point, i almost wound up at hickam afb. let me tell you, i HATE going to military bases. i had this one incident where i headed into a base by mistake. i tried to tell the guard there that i had made a mistake, and that i just wanted to make a u turn to exit the base. but he asked for my safety and registration anyway (my registration was expired). he actually held me, and was going to call the cops on me because my registration was expired, even though i didn't even want to enter the base.
so anyway, i absolutely didn't want to go into hickam (i happen to have an expired driver's license, which i would have taken care of, had covid-19 not come along and force the closure of all the dmvs, and cancel my appointments). i could just picture the freaking guard announcing that my license was expired, and to pull over to the side so that he could issue a citation or call the cops on me...
fortunately, i noticed that there was a turn off to the right. at first, i thought that it was just a visitor center for civilians. but then i realized that it was an actual road. and as i turned down it, i found, to my great relief, that it was a familiar road. it was the same road that went to pearl harbor kai elementary, where we had practiced taiko. it occupied this kind of liminal space between the gated and fenced military base, and the surrounding community...
so, anyway, i wound up avoiding going into hickam... still swearing up a storm. past the destination, and had to circle around, going onto king. there was so much construction, that it made progress difficult. at a lot of places, i wasn't able to make the left turns i needed to. and as so many lanes were closed, well, it just dragged my progression through the area...
suffice to say, i eventually made it. kilihau is a run down street in an industrial area near the airport. the good thing was that it was a quiet street, with little traffic, so it was pretty safe (at least in terms of cars) to change the tire. i did so with great dispatch (i'm not sure if that's the right way to say it)... one strange aside-thing i noticed, was that in the puddles beside the road, there were tiny fish swimming. i'm not sure where those fish must have come from, or how they survived when the hot summer sun evaporated all of that water... but they were there nonetheless, casting little shadows.
*****
other than that, nothing much to report...
well... as i said, i was angry when i was driving to help my wife. i'm not sure why. i suppose, as i may have mentioned before, that i have a great deal of rage concealed within me. i'm extremely impatient with reality... i often feel, when things are taking too long, that- and this is weird, kind of a quirk of my psychology- that i'm somehow being left behind, and that i'm wasting my time, and that someone somewhere is laughing at me...
for some reason, i recall having this thought: what if my wife's flat tire had been a blow out, and what if she and my daughter had spun out and gotten killed in an accident? i don't know why or where the thought came from... but do you know what i thought about, irritated as i was? i thought about how angry i would be with god for allowing it to happen. and i thought about how angry i would be with my brother and his family, for shutting my family out... and how he would be trying to console me, and all i would do is shout at him, and shout out all his dirty secrets for his children and the world to know, because it was too late, too late. i would be spouting off all about how lynn had tried to reconcile, out of the kindness of her heart, but that my brother and his wife would repeatedly just give us the cold shoulder... and now (in my head) that she and my daughter were gone, it was just too late for my brother to come in and pretend as though he cared for my loss...
that's the kind of crazy, vengeful thinking that filled my head.
i realize that i wasn't being very buddha-like. in fact, i'm not really sure where all that rage came from. it certainly wasn't justified. but i guess it's there. and i let it just burn me up.
i know my son probably felt pretty- i don't know- embarassed? disappointed? at my lack of peace and composure...
but as i thought about that, i imagined my brother, and all the rest of the world, laughing at me, because of my attachment to my rage. and it just made me even more angry...
what is wrong with me!?
*****
well, i know i've got to meditate more. of all the things i do in my routine, i think i skip meditation the most. it's just not feasible most of the time... but as today sort of pointed out, i sorely need it.
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