Love in the Time of Climate Change (10 page)

The problem was no one else did.

Even the best and the brightest were doodling, drooling, outright snoozing. Those still awake stared wistfully at the clock, counting seconds imperceptibly limping by in slow-mo.

Even the Twenty-Nine-Year-Old, my go-to talker, contributor numero uno, was off in La-la Land, utterly immersed in nibbling on her cuticles.

Something was screwy with one of the overhead lights. It flickered on and off and on. Mesmerizing. A monotonous annoying buzz came from down the hall, one of the electricians drilling away, oblivious to the fact that I HAVE A CLASS TO TEACH!

Occasionally when I'm teaching I have a surreal out-of-body experience where I seem to float ever so gently up to the ceiling and observe my class from a perch high above. Maybe it was the residual pot still in my system, maybe it was actually happening, but there I was, hanging with the blinking light, witness to the pedagogic disaster unfolding below.

I could see myself, plain as day, dialing up the dull-as-dishwater blah-blah-blah with no end in sight. No interaction with the students. No eye contact. Other than cuticle munching, the blinking overhead light, an annoying snore from one of the boys-in-the-back, and the increasingly agonizing buzz from the hallway, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I asked the class a question.

“Anyone? Anyone? Anyone?”

No response. My lips were moving but their brain cells were clearly not receiving. The entire class was lost in a vast intellectual wasteland.

But hey, I thought to myself, I'm powering through it, right? Every day can't be Einstein and Ecstasy. At least no one was.…

NOOOOOO!!! The girl with the pink hair and multiple piercings! The silent one in the back corner! There was no mistaking it. I could see the twitching fingers and the poorly hidden flashing screen.

“Cynthia!” I shouted, desperate to make my voice menacing.

Students stirred. Eyes opened.

“You dare to text in my class?”

“Sorry,” she said, visibly embarrassed. “It was important.”

Like all teachers, I tragically suffer from another acronym: TIM—Texting Induced Madness, a.k.a. Text Rage. There is nothing—
nothing
—I hate more. Prominently displayed in big bold letters on my syllabus, as the first of my Classroom Ten Commandments, is the pronouncement:

THOU SHALT NOT TEXT IN CLASS!

“Important?” I yelled, my body plunging from the ceiling with a large thump. Finally I had the class's attention. I banged my fist on the table. “
Important?
Do tell, please enlighten me—what is so much more important than the fate of the earth?”

Cynthia squirmed. I knew I was pushing it. I knew
I should end it right then and there but I was in a pissy mood and it was a shitty class and I just had to take it out on someone. I shot her my most vicious evil eye.

“Well,” Cynthia stammered. “My boyfriend's at the market and doesn't know what kind of frozen burritos to get for dinner.”

BOOM!
It was as though lightning had struck the room. Like a bomb had dropped. The class, comatose a moment ago, sprang miraculously to life.

“Where is he?” someone shouted.

“Stop and Shop,” Cynthia replied.

“What the hell's he doing at Stop and Drop? He should get his tush down to Vera Cruzana. You can't get a burrito worth crap at Stop and Shop!”

“I beg to differ, hombre!” piped up one of the boys-in-the-back with the backward baseball caps, his first words of the entire semester. “To the left of the pizzas. Morey's Burritos. They rock!”

“Morey's?” yelled his neighbor, leaping out of his seat, shaking his head incredulously. “Morey's? Are you clinically insane? You want her to be glued to the shitter all night?”

These had been brain-dead folks snoozing through a dull class and now voices were rising, tempers flaring, accusations flying. Fingers were pointing at each other in a threatening way. Even Samantha had gotten in on the action and had abandoned her cuticles to loudly debate the fineries of burritos with one of her classmates.

Poor Cynthia, still frantically texting away, seemed on the verge of tears.

I was speechless. The class had erupted into total, complete chaos over burritos! Burritos! Not the environmental case against overly packaged, additive-infested supermarket burritos. Not the environmental merits of slow food and lovingly cooking your own. That I could have handled.
That I could have dealt with. But the fur was flying around which fucking brand of frozen burritos to buy!

Climate change had been totally trumped by a rising tide of burrito bedlam.

Certainly not my finest hour.

As the threat of violence escalated with punches soon to be thrown I was saved by the light. There was a
zap
and a
pop
and all of the classroom lights sputtered out, plunging the room into darkness—a fitting metaphor for the afternoon lecture. I could hear a string of curses from the electrician down the hall.

I gave up. Total defeat.

“
Chapter 3
!” I hollered hopelessly as students, still locking horns in the battle of the burrito, fled from the darkened room. “Thursday!
Chapter 3
!”

Grasping at straws, I took solace from the fact that even Socrates must have had bad days, losing it with disciples who surreptitiously passed stone tablets to each other under the table, or whatever the hell else went down back in the day.

As the wise man himself said: “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” The trick seems to lie in fanning the fire and keeping it burning in at least the general direction you want, rather than have it roar off into raging BIM: Burrito Induced Madness.

After class, feeling fatigued and unmotivated, I left school early. In somewhat of a trance I drove to Stop and Shop, where I found myself dazed and confused and frozen in place at the fast-food freezer, paralyzed with indecision about which damn burrito to bring home for dinner.

“W
HAT'S WRONG
?” Jesse asked.

Usually when I came home from meditation class I was the personification of peace on earth—relaxed, calm, one with the universe, comfortable in myself, once again ready to face life's curveballs.

Not so this time.

“I'm fucked,” I groaned. “I can't go back. I'm cast out. Done. Finished. Kaput!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sometimes I amaze even myself!” I flopped down on the couch, scrunched a pillow over my head, and groaned again.

I could hear Jesse shut down his laptop, lean back in his beat up La-Z- Boy, stretch out his legs, and roll a joint.

“So you amaze even yourself,” he repeated, but in a Sigmund Freud accent.

Silly accent aside, he was a good listener. Often his advice sucked, but at least he listened.

I had been going, on and off, to a meditation center for over a year. “Practicing” as they say. It was a mindfulness-based
stress-reduction program, the focus of which was to calm the mind.

Which, needless to say, I was in desperate need of.

I lived with a constant CNN ticker tape scrolling horrific factoids down the bottom of my brain screen. Other than a few, often restless hours for sleep, it ran pretty much 23/7.

“2012:
Worst drought since the
‘50
s!
” it would scream.

“
Fires blaze through Texas!
”

“
Temperatures expected to rise eight degrees!
”

Endlessly cycling on and on and on.

For years I had tried the “whack a mole” strategy. Every time an evil factoid reared its ugly head:
BAM!
The hammer came down. Hard!

Glaciers melting?

BAM!

Polar bears dying?

BAM!

Republicans obstructing?

BAM! BAM! BAM!

The problem was, it didn't work. The factoids were like the heads of the mythical Hydra: chop one off and two grew in its place. I was aware that somehow Hercules had sealed the deal and figured out how to end the madness, but, truth be told, I was not him.

Mindfulness-based stress-reduction seemed a much kinder, gentler approach.

As the monsters emerged, I would gently acknowledge them, observe them, and allow them to pass on through while I got back to the breath.

Back to the breath.

Always back to the breath.

I removed the pillow from my head just enough so I could take a hit. Fortunately, when meditation failed, there was always pot to take the edge off.

“So,” Freud continued. “Tell ze doctor vhat happened.”

“You know the woman who runs the show?”

“The guru.”

“Christ, you sound like my mother. She's not a guru. She's a meditation leader. There is a big difference.”

“Whatever. Go on.”

“You know how I've, um, had issues around her.”

“Yes. Difficult to focus on the breath when you're focusing on the breasts.”

The doctor spoke the truth. The woman who led the meditation group was absolutely gorgeous. In the prime of her fifties, she was the living refutation of the bald-faced lie that women in the second half of their century couldn't continue to stun. When she would direct us to close our eyes and enter that zone of tranquility, that place of peace, I was constantly cheating and sneaking a peak at those fabulous breasts of hers.

As I noted previously, second only to climate change on my list of compulsive obsessions were women's breasts. After all, what can be more perfect? Shape, texture, feel, look, smell. The single, or rather double, package has it all. Everything about breasts spells beauty.

On that issue I pity heterosexual women and gay men. I really do. I mean, look at a guy's chest. Man-boobs seem ridiculous, out of place, the nipples just some comical, vestigial remnant. I mean, hello, why are they even there? What is the point?

Women's, on the other hand—wow!

There is simply no comparison.

I'd try and match my breath to the rise and fall of her breasts. I knew our meditative exercises were meant to clear the mind, but it could be difficult to keep those gorgeosities out of my head. In any event, they were certainly a much more pleasant image than dying polar bears.

A number of months earlier Jesse had suggested I join another group, practice with some old, decrepit guy who would not lead my mind astray.

Yeah, right. As if that was going to happen.

I took another hit and continued.

“So, she was leading us through a guided meditation: ‘We are a lake. While the winds may whip whitecaps and the surface froth and churn, deep in the interior we are unruffled and serene. No matter how rough the weather, inside all is calm.…'

“It was a lying-down meditation. I was stretched out on my mat, feeling her voice, being the lake.…”

“Salivating over her breasts,” Jesse said.

“No. Not at all. For whatever reason I was all about the water. Or so I thought. Anyway, her voice was so soft, so soothing, I went totally under.”

“That's it?” Jesse asked. “That's all you've got for me? I've never been to a meditation session where I didn't fall asleep.”

“Let me finish. I'm totally out. Zonked. Probably snoring and screwing it up for everyone else. Next thing I know she's gently shaking my shoulder. The exercise is over. Everyone else is sitting up. And I'm still lying there, all eyes on me, with an enormous hard-on.”

“Visible?”

“God yes! I've got these tight yoga pants on and my damn thing is sticking straight up like the Washington Monument.”

“Come on now, bro. Don't kid yourself. No making mountains out of molehills.”

“Thanks. That's helpful. It really is. I mean, I couldn't even sit up.”

“Were people gawking? Laughing? Pointing?” he asked.

“How am I supposed to know? I was drowning. Drowning in the damn lake! With a boner the size of Superior.”

Jesse laughed. “But hey, your mind was free from OCD.”

“Only to be held hostage by EF.”

“EF?”

“Erectile Function.”

“Wow. Out of the frying pan into the fire.”

“God. Why do I always feel like I'm in middle school?”

“Aha! Now ve are finally getting somevere,” Jesse said, laying on thick the Freudian accent.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“The source of the fantasy is revealed. 'Tis not the guru you desire, but someone else.”

“Start making sense or I want my money back.”

“Think about it. Middle school. Fantasy woman. Doesn't take Freud to get to this one.”

“Oh god. Get a life!” I said, annoyed. “What am I going to do? I can never go back there.”

“To seventh grade? Count your blessings!”

“No! To the meditation class, moron.”

“Watch your name calling. Freud has feelings too you know!”

“My apologies. But seriously, I like that class. It's helpful. It keeps me marginally sane. And now I can't go back.”