WHO AM I? WHY AM I WRITING THIS STUFF?
Since I have the audacity and hubris to suggest that I might know something worth sharing, I want to explain a few things about why I am here and how I choose what I say, and, how I choose to say it.
I have never been one to document my life. I don’t have any picture albums, diaries, or archives of past work. At one point in my life, I wrote a lot of poetry. For a while, I saved it. But as time went on, I simply misplaced the binders and eventually lost them. That was not a serious problem for me. By the time I realized that I couldn’t find any of what I had written, I had moved on (in a variety of ways). However, because of this carelessness with my past and my lack of attention to documentation, when I try to communicate what I know, who I was, or where I have been, I have to rely almost completely on memory.
I can guarantee you that my memory is 100% run-of-the-mill. I am subject to dropouts, distortions, and complete inaccuracies.
I am still close friends with my ex-wife and we often talk about our time together 40 years ago. I am surprised how differently we remember things. Sometimes she insists that I am completely wrong about the sequence, content, or even reality of past events. Sometimes, I am surprised by how wrong she gets things. And, sometimes, neither of us has any idea who the hell has things right or wrong.
On top of that, this ‘Spiritual/Buddhist/Meditative/Life’ journey is rife with false narratives, delusions, hallucinations, great insights, joy, depression, guilt, remorse, fear, etc. Just when you think you have it all nailed down and neatly packaged for nutritious, simple ingestion . . . you find that your perspective on everything has changed.
Since my wife and I fully share my obsession, and always share the dark, chocolaty fruits of my labor, the portafilter on our machine is a two cup unit with a stainless steel removable filter. Unfortunately, from the day we got it, the flow to the two shot glasses below the filter was uneven. When the shot glass on the right side of the machine was full, the left hand glass was only about 2/3 full.
Everything else the machine did was amazing. The steamer worked flawlessly and I was soon able to produce wonderful, shaving-cream-thick foam. The quality of my pulls was beyond reproach, each taking exactly 30 seconds and perfectly balanced – not bitter, yet, a satisfying expression of the full potential of the rich dark roast bean that I was currently using. There was nothing about the machine that I could fault except the uneven flow through the portafilter.
Initially, because the machine was working flawlessly, I ignored the problem of the uneven ‘draw/flow’. When the right side shot glass was full, I removed it and slid the left side shot glass under both spigots. When it was full I poured the two shots into the cappuccino cups and got on with my life.
Unfortunately, as I become more intimately involved with the process I realized that the last 3rd of the left side cup was watered down compared to the smooth continuous draw on the right side. I decided that I was not going to put up with this ‘malfunction’. I was going to figure out how to solve it.
I purchased a small pipe brush and scoured the two feeds on the portafilter. As well, I removed the filter basket and carefully insured that none of the filter holes were blocked. When I was done, the thing worked - for a couple of days, then the problem returned.
As I became more obsessed with the repair, I also became more aware that it was intermittent. Sometimes, for a week or two it manifested every time I made coffee, and then, suddenly, the machine would draw perfectly and the two shot glasses would be filled evenly with no discrepancies. Then, suddenly, the stupid machine would fill the shot glasses unevenly again. I examined, poked, prodded, disassembled, descaled, detoxified, reassembled, reviewed and, finally replaced everything I could imagine might be involved in the problem.
Finally, I bought a new expensive, fool-proof, after-market, portafilter. Clearly the old one was flawed!
This whole process had gone on for more than a year and had become a real source of pain and frustration. Once I broke down and replaced the stock portafilter with the super, high quality, custom manufactured, life-time-guaranteed portafilter, I knew that finally everything was under control. With a bit of a twitch when I thought of the replacement cost, I unpacked the new portafilter, filled it with perfectly ground, rich dark roast coffee, and prepared to draw two perfect cappuccinos.
MY GOD! As I stood there watching, I got two horribly uneven shots of coffee.
Over the next few weeks, I alternated between the two portafilters and ran through all the fixes I had tried previously. Nothing helped! Then, one day, after having given up and resigned myself to the fact that my coffee machine was a ‘lemon’, I had an epiphany!
As I was tamping the coffee into the portafilter, I noticed that I was favoring my left side. To get a good purchase and to ensure that I exerted proper pressure to the tamper as I compressed the coffee, I was leaning significantly, to the left. I looked closely at the tamped coffee and there was a discernible difference in the height of the coffee on the two sides of the portafilter. It was higher on the right which clearly indicated that the left side was more tightly packed than the right side. I pulled the shots and, sure enough, the left side shot glass was less full that the one on the right.
I refilled the portafilter with coffee and tamped it down again. This time I concentrated on tamping the coffee evenly. Of course, I got two perfect, even fills in the two shot glasses.
There was never anything wrong with the machine . . . there was something wrong with the operator!
One of the few great addictions left in my life is coffee. Not simply coffee, but rich, dark roast, perfectly brewed cappuccino. I start every working day with it and am constantly looking for ways of improving my coffee experience. To that end, a few years ago, I purchased a magnificent, Italian built ‘Rube Goldberg’ monstrosity of a cappuccino machine. It has levers, and handles, and spouts, and double boilers, and a whole variety of gauges - all to ensure that I am able to concoct the Perfect brew.
Let me digress . . .
This may seem like a trivial issue, but this kind of dysfunctional mental process can distort everything we do. We distort reality in terms of our likes and dislikes, our past experiences, our expectations, our lack of information and proper observation, what we see on television, what we hear from friends, and what we spin out of our own butts. As a result of the distortions and delusions foisted on us by our own fictional narratives and those passed to us from external sources - entertainment and information media, social and political processes, and educational, philosophical, and religious systems (to name a few) - we have a lot to think about and evaluate.
On top of all of that, one of the least effective means of measuring, evaluating and communicating truth (the one I am trying to use here) is language.
There is an old brain teaser, “If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is there to hear it, is there a sound made by the falling tree?” The problem is not one of assessing the ‘true nature of sound.’ It is really a question of how we define what constitutes sound. Once we come to an agreement regarding our use of the language, the apparent issue with the nature of external phenomena disappears.
Imprecise language, biased interpretation of language, and a misplaced trust in the accuracy of language can be seen as a major cause in a great many of our problems as human beings.
That fundamental problem with communicating using words, combined with the mental issues inherit in being an 82 year old, ‘historically irresponsible’ person, leads me to consider this site and my writing here as a kind of Docudrama/Cliff’s Notes.
In many cases, I am not going to use real names, times or places. I will attempt to move this narrative forward as accurately as possible, but I realize that I might just be another ‘blind man’ holding an unidentifiable appendage attached to Schrödinger's Elephant.
