If this is August, I shudder to think of September

I was talking last night with Dina about dates, schedules and such. Ours are opposites: I'm booked, sometimes overbooked, every hour of the day, every day of the week. She is between engagements. Which is not to say that whatever I'm involved with is any more important than how she's spending her time. I just have to schedule things to make sure they happen. She said something about "You don't have much down-time," and I replied, "No, not really -- or maybe it's the meditation. That has become my down-time."

Zazen -- i.e. the sitting meditation that zen practitioners do -- has been described as amounting to "sitting quietly doing nothing." I can't remember who coined that description, but it certainly works for me. It describes my meditation when it's going well (today was a good day). Sometimes I even use the phrase as a mantra of sorts, to keep me from doing something while sitting -- "sitting quietly doing nothing, sitting quietly doing nothing" -- while counting breaths. When done right, it's enormously relaxing, in such a way that it makes me more alert and less drowsy, even at 6:00 a.m.

This fulfills the requirements of leisure, at least on a daily basis (though I really should go hiking one of these days), in a way that watching television does not. Mainly I watch television these days to keep Cris company, or to kill time while waiting for something else to happen in a few minutes, or because the Giants are on. Or because there's one of those great shows on that show lots of videotape of fucked up freeway chases, car crashes, runaway speedboats, and airshow disasters. Yeah baby!

I love the freeway chase show. Have you noticed that every freeway chase is narrated by the same voice-over, someone who is apparantly pretending to be a helicopter pilot narrating the chases in real time? Whether the chase happens day or night, it's the same voice, as if the same copter pilot were on duty 24 hours a day. And he always uses the same phrases, my favorite of which is, "Oohhh! That is extremely dangerous!"

Anyway -- if I'm this busy in August, what will September be like?