15 February 2018

I want to write an honest sentence about happiness. He turns on a cartoon video about our false expectations for happiness. It's the elephant in the Declaration, this pursuit of it. The boy who killed 17 students was adopted; both his adopted parents died. 4-4+0. He lived with a friend and loved his arsenal, his magazines. Why the president appended his tweet about mental illness to one about immigrants: the boy's name is Cruz. I tell him I got the bit about happiness and the cartoon annoys me. The students flung their arms up in the air; one pair of hands shook like autumn leaves in a fierce wind. Except it was Florida. Not again, not here, never would imagine. The negative of death is life, and life, friends, is boring. The morning's meditation is adrenaline: blood-red headlines, photographs of students in narrow files, a military vehicle, a voice that breaks like skin. We were joking that someone might be shooting up the school and then we were running and the boy behind us was bleeding. My son keeps airsoft guns out in his room; Bryant asks him to put them away. “So many dead today,” he says. When I sat facing the zen center's white wall, I felt the wall; I wanted to run into the woods screaming. It's watching you, too, the teacher says, but I want to call in a bulldozer to break it down, dry wall to dust. After dark, a large truck overwhelms the rain. Out back, pigs have burrowed around the bodhi tree. A statue of Buddha sits beside the tree's fertile cleft surrounded by patches of mud. The pigs are industrious; they work hard. Lori's Waipahu students mangle Trump's tweets: the trunchion calls on the pepperoni to do his bidding. They are new immigrants, testing out new words. Between times they speak more clearly in languages I cannot hear. One says in perfect English: “Trump is a racist jackass.” I'll sit on that.

--15 February 2018