I feel like elaborating on yesterday's telling God to sod off. There's some background about what this all means in my internal language that might be helpful.

The way that we live our lives--our intentions and desires--determines the reality we encounter around us day to day. I mean that in the most literal way. It offends my empirical sense, and that of many others: I met this person on a train, I locked eyes with this other person from across the room, I got the job I did or didn't want. Surely these things are outside my control. They're blind coincidences.

Until one day your approach to your life changes, down to your very core, and the blind coincidences change, too. And you realize they're not coincidences, at least not in the strict random sense. Not that there's necessarily a pattern, but as your way of being changes, the set of things that "randomly" happen to you changes as well.

As one example, for reasons I've never quite figured out, in my first two years of college I dated a long series of women involved in biology. The real kicker was the woman I met in the emergency room, who knew enough about me from our conversation that she managed to find me through web searches and we went out a few times. Many of this sequence ranged from emotionally unstable to really nuts, and for the longest time I thought I was just doomed to dating crazy women, because they were the ones I connected with, the ones I locked eyes with across the room.

One week it struck me that I could just draw a boundary there and say that I wasn't going to date any more crazy women, no matter how cute, because the relationships always left me unhappy. So I made that determination, and within a few weeks, I was connecting with more stable women who were much better for me.

Earlier this year I decided it would be good to be single for a while. Be careful what you wish for. This year I am again psychically zooming in on unavailable women: married, dating the same guy for a decade, just out of some nasty relationship and looking for good reasons *not* to go out with someone else.

Of course there's an unconscious component to this. As my friend Jeff acknowledges, who has witnessed far too much of my dating history, I can recognize crazy women pretty quickly, a look in the eyes, a way of moving the hands. I cannot, however, recognize biologists, or unavailable women. And I have a lot of experience to back up my intuitive sense that it's all connected.

So what needs to change? What intention, fear, or desire do I need to stab dead in the fucking face to produce the desired emergent changes in my day-to-day life? I have some ideas. But it's all me: no God involved. I'm always amused that my cosmic worldview, being largely Buddhist, doesn't really require a sentient presence. What would it do besides create? In a universe (or at least a humanity) of infinite threads connected to each other, nothing needs to be done; it's just how things are.

After sleeping from 0330-0530, I headed back up to the space in SF to do cleanup (my state of mind being sharpened a bit by nearly killing myself on the freeway offramp: I lost focus and nearly drifted into the guardrail, overcompensated on swerving away, and had the presence of mind to adjust and let the car straighten itself out before the wheels snapped off). I was kept standing by caffeine and anger, mostly--I'd been able to sleep only with an herbal knockout pill from Whole Foods. ("Sound Sleep"--they drop me like a rock about an hour after taking two or three. I need to look up a few of the ingredients, but valerian, kava kava, skullcap, poppy, and hops are all powerful calmatives or sedatives.) Normally doing aikido after a night like that is out of the question, but the next time I can train is Wednesday, and I could imagine sitting around the house with all the energy, so I took my chances. And it was brilliant. I felt focused, awake, alert. My friend Bob, a 4th dan of several decades' training and a lot of love and understanding, invited that I could throw whatever I had at him and we'd work it out. I can attack reasonably fast these days, but of course I couldn't lay a finger on him.

    *punch*

    *thwack*

    *punch*

    *thwack*

    [instructor walks by, raises eyebrow, as I'm going down very hard and
    very fast.]

    "Chris is angry. We're working on it."

    "Ooookay then. Good luck."

    *punch*

    *thwack*