Vignette City 23.

*** ‘Vignette City’ is an ongoing project of daily writing and urban photography ***

In the newspaper this morning there was an article about how a half dozen white Buddhist-convert monks from the homeless collective under the freeway overpass on Grand Ave showed up at the City Council meeting advocating that the city should allow property taxes to be paid in “good will” and “yaks”.

One of the city councilors asked exactly how many yaks the Buddhist Collective had down there at the camp under the freeway and the monk replied, “Seven or eight, perhaps more” and then the City Council meeting apparently digressed into a byzantine discussion about whether or not yaks were allowed within city limits and it ultimately turned out that they are, because of a 1968 city charter amendment pertaining to the rights of citizens to keep and care for “beasts of burden” within “reasonable tolerances”.

When asked whether or not any members of the the homeless white Buddhist-convert Collective paid property taxes in the first place, the same monk replied, “Not under current regulations, as such.”

There was very little additional discussion of extending the payment remediation types to “good will” or “generally pleasant vibes”, as was also briefly proposed.




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The End.

If you don’t read clickhole, you should. It is basically The Onion's version of Buzzfeed. Not only is it funny, but it can also be great. This is from a listicle about how the world might end, according to Buddhism. It has nothing to do with Buddhism, or perhaps it does …

Anyway, I wish I had written this:

A light rain falls on a man standing on a nondescript street in a rural farm town. As he turns and walks away, the world starts very slowly fading to black while the credits roll. Next to the word “Director” it says “God,” and listed under “Cast” is every person who ever lived. All the songs recorded during human existence play over them simultaneously. Then the credits for all those songs scroll across the earth. When the credits end, the world ends.

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Being at the airport made me think about this other time I was at the airport.

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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