WALKIN', YES I'M WALKIN'

Blog number eighteen

So ... between the time I left my first wife in Estherville Iowa and hitchhiked to LA, California, I inexplicably, out-of-no-where, wanted to be a cop. At no time before in my life had I ever entertained the idea of being a policeman. To this day I have no idea as to when this impetus to be a member of the chase and grab club came into my mind. I only know that when I left Estherville, the idea of my being a policeman did not exist anywhere. By the time I got to Phoenix two days later, I wanted to be a cop. It wasn't my idea. The desire was forced upon me.

I checked the chances of becoming a police officer in Phoenix, but they were not testing for another six months and I wanted to get to LA. I almost stayed in Phoenix, but my kind heart nixed that idea.

The guy I got a ride with somewhere in Kansas was running away from his wife. Small world. We picked up another hitchhiker further on down the road. Our driver was a heavy drinker and I believe he was running out of money and needed another sucker. He had already talked me into pooling our money which resulted in me paying for his alcohol.

The guy we picked up was a rather heavy, sloppy unkempt fellow with a logic engine that had a bad plug or two so that he skipped a beat every once in a while. This was to have an unforeseen repercussion later on.

Our driver decided to go back to his wife once we reached Phoenix, so me and the unkempt fellow slept in the bus station. I planned to go out to Camelback Inn the next morning. They were advertising for help.

On the way out there the next morning I ran into my new friend coming back from there. He said they weren't hiring. Well, I knew that they would not hire him. They probably served food out there and I wouldn't want that guy messing anywhere near any food I planned on consuming. So I told him I would go out anyhow and ask -- couldn't hurt. He insisted they weren't hiring. I told him it wouldn't be any trouble for me to go out there anyhow. He insisted I would be wasting my time. I didn't want to push it any further under the probably mistaken idea that he would catch on that I thought it was HIM they didn't want to hire and NOT that they weren't hiring. I still think that if I had went out there I would have beenhired.

So I went back to Phoenix with him -- from my point of view, so as not to hurt his feelings.

Later we caught a ride with a trucker at a truck stop that was going to LA as soon as he finished eating. We rode to LA in the back of the truck. Got a little sleep. We arrived in LA. The journey begins.

As told in previous Blogs, I got kicked out of the police academy due to some psychological quirk (I believe that is the correct psychological term for my condition). In order to find out why I failed a psychological test, I took a class in Psychology at Compton J. C. In Compton, California. It was in that class that I learned about Freud and his dream interpretations. Eventually, step by step, I met Dr. Burke, was psychoanalyzed and became a much different person very quickly. I thought I was done, but I wasn't.

In the sixties Zen was big. Self growth was big. Transcendental Meditation, est, Scientology, the Moonies, dream work, meditations on sounds, sights, ideas and nonsense words was big.

It was a time, that time, when there was a movement away from the traditional materialistic drive that we affluent humans had and a turning inward toward a spiritual uplifting. This movement has since ebbed, much like a retreating tide, leaving a bad smell in places where the retreating tide has left its rotted debris. Spiritual groups no longer have the pizzazz they once had. But it was a great time for the spiritually minded

My wife was into this new spiritual growth folderol. Books by Alan Watts, Jane Roberts, Christopher Humphrey's, Chogyam Trungpa lay all over the house, irritating me greatly.

"Seth says..."

This

"Seth says..."

That.

"A pox on Seth! I don't know why you bother with all that crap," was my mantra at the time.

I was a scientific minded atheist at the time, you see. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why people couldn't see that all that airy fairy pie-in-the-sky crap was hog wash. And why did my own wife have to be so idiotic as to believe that stuff just because some other nuts believed it.

I never for one moment thought about the fact that I based my opinions on nothing but emotions. I never read one word of any of those books -- of those authors that I so authoritatively condemned.

One night we went to Tower books. A display of Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was stationed as you came in the door. I became hypnotized by the cover -- a painting of a steel wrench superimposed over a lily. I almost went over and picked it up, but I thought, "nuts," and walked to where the good books were. None of that nonsense for me, thank you.

A week later we again went to that bookstore and this time when the display caught my eye and my mind, I went over, looked through it and bought it. My first nonfiction book that was based not on facts, but on experiences.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a popular book back in the late sixties, early seventies.

What I got mostly from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was that not everyone was as talented toward certain situations as anyone else might be. The author was adept at fixing his all sorts of items -- including his motorcycle. He tells of a friend that had a leaky faucet, tried to fix it with a washer, it still leaked, the guy gave up on it as if it just was not something that could ever be fixed. Not everyone is a mechanic, not everyone is a SunTzu., not everyone is a Betty Davis. We are all different plants, seeding different growths.

The author, I believe was stressing the idea that although quality couldn't be defined, everyone recognized it when they saw it.

A friend of mine read that book, started fixing his motorcycle himself instead of taking it to the shop for every little thing -- like an oil change. Everyone seemed to get something different from it. Strange book.

A side effect of my reading that book is that I no longer thought of Zen at least, as being something for the feebleminded -- the misguided. I was now able to look into other Zen books -- most notably those by Alan Watts. My first one of his had the enigmatic title of The Wisdom of Insecurity. Since I was a paradigm of insecurity, I liked the idea that maybe that meant I was wise. Worth a try, anyhow. Didn't turn out to be that way, but it did calm me down a bit about trying to get the world to work the way it was supposed to, and giving up on that gave me a lot of free time that was missing in my life. Made my life a lot less worrisome too. Danger seemed to decrease some 30%.

About that time my wife told me and the kids that we were going to learn Transcendental Meditation. I had no special interest in it, no special antagonism against it either. But by that time I had learned that if I obeyed my wife without question, my life got easier. So we all went, except for the second oldest child. I forget why he didn't want to go.

So I learned how to meditate.

My wife then took me to a class run by a friend of hers where I learned to do something that is called, "Beginner's Mind." This technique shakes loose the crud that solidifies the mind so that one is able to look at other possibilities without losing any pet beliefs.

One window-shops, one doesn't buy -- necessarily. This enabled me to branch out into books on Eastern religions, which is really a misnomer. These are not religious books -- they were not about Hinduism or Moslem, although the topic God is prevalent in them. They are more like philosophies -- ways to live a satisfying life.

I was still an Atheist at this time, but no longer stuck in a "scientific" mode of mind.