I saw a Buddhist monk in full-on bare scalped, flowing Saffron glory, smoking a Marlboro upwind of the baggage check the first time I ever flew out of Burbank airport.
That was maybe seven or eight years ago — which I am totally not cool with — and in those seven or eight years I have been living in/around greater LA and I have still yet to come up with a better metaphor for this town than that monk/Marlboro man. Though I guess you could — sorry, this is going to be the fancy-as-fuck-grad-student part of me talking now (sometimes I drop off into gulfs of my own astounding pretentiousness, like, just watch all this trainwreck of grammar that has to happen now ... ) — say that the Marlboro Man himself is just the embodiment of the imagined and idealized American “cowboy” of “The West” and that he has always been a kind of monk, but that of the quintessentially American sort: stoic, strong, with calloused hands from all that pulling he is doing on his bootstraps, and with that unimpeachable moral fiber that good Americans are supposed to have as long as you don’t look too long or too closely. This is all nothing to say of the 10,000 mile stare. I think we ascribe that to monks of every stripe, but the dude I saw puffing away at the airport that day wasn’t staring off into all of eternity. He was just standing there, just like the rest of us, getting one last fix in before going through security, just like the rest of us. So what’s that tell us about our monks?
Anyway.
LA is a weird place and this one time I saw a monk smoking.
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