America Essaus Pt XI - Love After The Fall

The next morning I awoke and got back on the road. The desert finally began to give way to green. After about an hour I pulled over by a riverbank and stripped down naked.

One pleasant surprise I have found on my trip is that there are clean, cheap showers available at truck stops all across the country. Usually for five or six bucks you can get a hot shower and most are surprisingly clean.

During the desert drive there were no truck stops, no travel centers. My body felt grimy with highway dust and with the sweat of my troubled thoughts. I used a paper cup from McDonalds and dipped it into the stream and poured the cold fresh water over my head and back. The cold water was a revitalizing shock to my body that was warm in the hot sun.

By the end of the day I would be in San Francisco, the city I marked as the goal point of the journey. It was a long journey, the joy of it undercut by the shock of 9/11, but I didn’t feel road-weary. I felt strong. I could have kept on going for months to come if the world would have allowed it.

As I stood naked on the riverbank washing my body with a bar of Dove soap and a blue washcloth, the highway was just behind me. A little too close for comfort really, but beggars can’t be choosers. A few yards away a yellow steamroller sat nestled among the trees. The little sanctuary was already threatened by the proximity of concrete and combustions engines, perhaps soon they would be plowing the whole place under.

It’s funny how boys are attracted to construction equipment. I never quite got it, although I suppose it might be cool to drive that big thing and maybe run over a few things for fun. Maybe flatten over America and make a fresh start? When David Letterman’s show was young and irreverent he used to run over stuff with a steamroller; six packs of beer, TVs, packs of hot dogs… It seemed hilarious at the time, but perhaps it is the time of humor that only guys find funny. Like the Three Stooges poking each other in the eye.

Despite my tales of struggle and woe, humor has always been a big part of my life. I suppose it comes from my father who had an abstract and surreal sense of humor. He was like an Andy Kauffman-type of performance artists. Usually his own goofiness was the butt of his jokes. Although at times there was an edge to it that kept you guessing.

When I was a little kid I used to ride with him in his tractor-trailer truck. The cabs of the trucks are high in the air. When I would go to jump out he would tell me, “Now remember Caeser never trust anyone, not even your father. Now go ahead and jump I’ll catch you.”

Everything he said, you had to think twice about it. You always had to stay sharp or he’d suck you into one of his farces.

At a later age I used to travel with him as he shuttled overweight loads of steel between Pittsburgh and Philly. Hanging out with the truckers was a trip like no other. Once I went bowling with a bunch of them just outside Philly. These guys were a hurricane of beer-swilling bad behavior. First they got the lightest bowling balls they could find, then they hurled them through the air like baseballs, usually landing on top of the pins from above instead of rolling down the lane. Often the pins would explode with such force that they would land four lanes over and the attendant would have to come and clear the lanes by hand.

Their loud mouths and foul language must have terrorized the other patrons. The truckers seemed completely oblivious to their own behavior. They were like a bunch of schoolboys run-amuck.

Their practical jokes were over-the-top and borderline dangerous. When they left the bowling alley they quickly began dismantling each other’s trucks. Pulling the pins so that when they pulled out the trailers would be left behind, or taking off the tall silver smokestacks and hiding them in a nearby dumpster. It was total bedlam.

That night I sat in the cab as my father slept. The trucks were lined up in a row by a dirty truck terminal. All night long white prostitutes with puffy blonde afros, blue foil hot pants, silver halter tops, and high platform shoes prowled among the trucks. As a twelve year old virgin the sight of them about made me cum on my pants they looked so lecherously enticing.

The next morning a small explosive device was thrown in the passenger window and greeted us with a deafening bank. It seemed the truckers also liked to play with fireworks. But no Chinese firecrackers for these boys, they hurled quarter sticks of dynamite at each other.

The fireworks were illegal in Pennsylvania, but the truckers would buy them on trips down south where anything that goes bang is protected by the law. I took this opportunity to start a side business selling the smaller firecrackers to my school chums. The demand was amazing. I had an eighty per cent profit margin and couldn’t stay stocked with product to meet the customer demand.

At one point nine of my classmates got suspended for the things in one day. Although they ratted me out like a flock of canaries, because my little business transactions commenced outside of school property they couldn’t suspend me.

The school principle called my father in hopes of discussing the matter with a concerned parent. When the phone rang, as a joke my father picked it up and answered, “Maggie’s Whore House.”

When he heard the principle on the phone he hemmed and hawed and explained that he was expecting a call from a friend. He assured he principle that he would curtail my business practices and hung up the phone. My mother laughed and said, “Well, maybe ya learned a lesson, didn’t ya?”

“Yes Dad, what if it would have been one of my friend’s calling?” my sister reprimanded.

I think my father was secretly proud of my go-getter entrepreneurial spirit, but at my mother’s insistence my fireworks supply soon began to dry up.

I think my childhood was a golden era for comedy. Richard Pryor could make you angry, laugh and cry, and in the end leave you enlightened and hopeful. He spoke of racism and poverty, yet brought people together in the process. George Carlin was brilliant in his prime. The comedians seemed to be reaching for something more than just delivering one-liners. They were philosophers and social commentators who helped bring self-awareness to a society struggling with social change.

In its early days Saturday Night Live seemed revolutionary. It was a national catharsis that spoke the unspeakable. They were really letting the cat out of the bag. Every one of them seemed to have a major chip on their shoulders. The truth they expressed with their humor, as often as not, made you want to holler out “Amen” and “Halleluiah.” They wielded comedy like an axe, cutting away at hypocrisy, commercialism, and rampant materialism. On that show the drug culture walked right out of the closet and the moral majority just about had a hemorrhage.

When I finally reached California I crossed the border on a highway that seemed to be suspended in the air. To my right was a tall cliff from which very tall pine trees shot into the air. The highway seemed to float among the tops of the trees. The scenery was majestic. Deep green covered the landscape and the sun was warm and bright.

Ten or twenty miles into the state I got off the highway to have lunch in a little college town whose name I have forgotten. It was very clean and immaculately groomed as college campuses are apt to be. Lots of walkways lined with green. I walked around looking for a friendly place to eat. The houses had an old fashioned quality about them. Potted plants hung from wooden porch trellises.

I settled on a boheme-café with outdoor tables. It had been quite awhile since I had any human contact and was feeling rather lonely, hungry for some stimulating conversation. The students came and went enveloped in their own worlds. This clearly wasn’t a place for a stranger to make new friends. After forcing down half of a bland sandwich I got back on the highway.

Driving with one hand I scrolled through the phone book in my cell phone, searching for someone to call. During the trip I found myself reconnecting with friends I hadn’t spoke to years, thanks to long lonely highways and the magic of cell phones. This time I chose Dan Spigelmeyer.

“Hallow?” he answered the phone as if asking a question.

“Dan, what’s happening?” I asked.

“Caeser? Aaahhhll, not too much. Are you in Town?”

Dan spoke with a bemused drawl. Most people took it for the sound of a depressed man, but I recognized it as carrying a tinge of sarcastic humor. He way a guy who always perceived life’s absurdities even as he labored under them. He was a broken clock that continued to tell time for the sake of others, even though he was secretly an initiate into the cult of those who know the futility of such delineations.

“Oh, I’ve been getting’ some overtime in. One day they say they might be closin’ down, the next we have to work weekends to catch up,” he explained when asked about his days.

Dan worked at the old steel mill that Lewistown was founded upon. The town grew from a bunch of row houses the factory built in order to entice workers to the area. Dan had a wife and a couple of kids, and built a house in a lot beside his parent’s home.

“What do you do fun these days?” I inquire.

“I really don’t get out too much,” he explains a bit woefully, “ahh, Y’know with the babysitters and all. I go fishin’ every now and then, and went huntin’ a few times.”

I was searching for away to pierce he façade of his humdrum existence and tap into the more rebellious spirit that I knew was hidden there, but all my jousts failed to connect.

“When I came through town I noticed that they are trying to reopen the old Embassy Theater,” I put forth, “Remember that time we snuck all those Malt Duck into that horror movie and caused a ruckus?”

“Oh yeah, I remember that,” he repeated with a little more energy. “You stood up and yelled ‘what the fuck is wrong with you people watchin’ this shit. You disgust me,’ then we ran out the fire exit,” he laughs.

“I won’t admit to anything,” I counter with a giggle.

His tone again sinking, he asked with a sigh, “What was wrong with us, doing that shit? Do you know?”

“I think we were just alive,” I offer.

This seems to hit a little too close to the bone. “Oh yeaaaah,” he responds with a long drawn out sigh.

Dan and I became friends in high school when we sat near each other in a history class. Just before I met him he got suspended for making a bomb threat to the school Soon afterwards he had a nervous breakdown and refused to come to school for many months. He later told me he was walking down the hall in school and began to hallucinate. He said felt like he was walking on the moon, and each step was a giant bounce. After that he was stricken with debilitating anxiety attacks.

We became friends as cohorts in bad classroom behavior. I don’t think anyone was doing much learning in that place anyway, but we sure didn’t make it nay easier. And if you’re going to be a class clown it’s always good to have someone to play off of.

After high school we became drinking buddies. We would hang out in front of a beer joint and wait for someone over 21 who would buy us a few six packs of Genesee beer. Then we would spend the evening driving around getting drunk and listening to the tape deck. We would cruise the dark streets of our nowhere town looking for excitement, wishing we knew how to meet girls.

Dan had a penchant for getting his hands slapped by the authorities. Once while we were driving drunk a cop pulled us over on a dark country road. Dan threw a can of beer out the passenger window in hopes of avoiding an underage drinking charge. When the cop came to my window, even though I was driving and obviously wasted, Dan got a $300 fine for littering and I got off scott-free.

On another occasion we were drunk and walking down the street when we passed a ‘no parking’ sign that some other vandal had bent into a U shape. For no apparent reason Dan decided to straighten the sign. It was a rare good deed on his part. As soon as he put his hands on the sign we heard sirens.

“Mr. Spigelmeyer, why do you feel the need to destroy public property?” the officer asked.

Dan protested that he was fixing the sign, not destroying it, but they weren’t buying his story. The more he talked the deeper he got into it with them. I couldn’t stop laughing the whole thing was so ironic.

When Friction formed Dan became our first court jester. Dan would follow the group and entertain us with his antics. These were the days when Quaaludes were the drug of choice and
Dan would eat a couple of them and then invent crazy new dances while the band played with a blitzed look in his eyes.

During those days Dan and I worked at a government run tree nursery hidden high in the mountains up in Amish country. On any given morning we would start the day by grinding a couple horse-pill sized Quaaludes into a chunky powers and then shooting it up our noses with a cocaine bullet. (A pocket-sized contraption that blasts powder into your nose.)

The shit made you an instant moron. If you could stay on your feet it was a minor miracle. In fact I hear that one of the miracles under consideration in John Paul II’s bid for sainthood includes walking a straight line after eating a Quaalude.

Of course, the brain trusts that we were, in this state we would arrive at work and climb tall rickety old ladder to paint the government buildings and garages. That we survived is a mystery that defies logic.

Except for one gay party-boy named Joe Slemons, and a violent drug addict named Randy Himes, our co-workers at the nursery were mountain Mennonites and hillbilly rednecks. Dan and I had a habit of saying surreal things to freak out the crew. The first day that we worked with Randy Himes I casually remarked, “Man, I shouldn’t have eaten those last three hits of acid. I’m getting’ the heeby-jeebies.”

It was total nonsense, I hadn’t eaten any acid, and the implied four hits seemed like suicide to me. To my surprise Himes replied “Do you have some? I ate three hits, but could do another!”

It’s hard to imagine that a guy would do acid on his first day on the job, but three hits really was crazy. But Himes was a crazy guy all around. He was way-too into violent action films and often came to work with a tall tale of the previous night’s adventures.

“Ooh man, last night I was walking along route 522 and these four big guys pulled over and came after me. I pulled a reflector post out of the ground and took them all on fuckin’ ninja style. I split this one guys head wide open.”

Himes was always good-natured with us, but on one occasion he took off his shirt to impress us with his manly physique. Dan responded by plucking one his chest hairs. Suddenly Himes got a look in his eyes that spoke or murder. He made it clear the affront was no laughing matter. It was a Jekyll and Hyde switch that left me warning friends that one day he would kill someone.

One morning he told us that the night before he had went to a gas station with a ski mask and a hunting knife. His story was hilariously absurd and I assumed it was just one of his tall-tales. It sounds like something from “The World’s Stupidest Criminals.”

“I took the gas-station guy into the office,” he said, “then I showed him the knife and told him to open the safe. He was dickin’ around with the safe and a fuckin’ car pulls up at the pump. I told him to go pump the gas and not say a word or I would kill him. So he pumps the gas and comes back and starts fuckin’ around with the safe again and another fuckin’ car pulls up! I tell him again, ‘go pump the gas but don’t say a word or I’ll stab ya.’ So he pumps the gas and come back and starts messin’ with the safe and another car pulls up. I finally just left without the money, what a bunch of fuckin’ shit,’ his voice trailed off with disgust.

It was such a nutty story that I didn’t think anything more about it, but about a week later the cops came and took him away. They should have locked him up for good because a few years later my murder prophecy came true. First he threatened his parents with an axe, then set the garage on fire. When the firemen came he shot and killed one of the firemen and wounded another. When the police came he shot and wounded one of them. The last time I saw him he was in shackles being led from the courthouse to the county lock-up. He now resides in the state pen and should be there for a long time to come.

The boss of the tree nursery was a crusty old marine that carried himself like a peg-legged pirate. One day he came into the room, stopped in his tracks, and took a long look at Joe Slemons the gay Party-boy. Spying his earring he came up to him and yelled, “You fuckin’ faggot! You see that? You fuckin’ queer. I used to have one of those and it got torn out of my ear by some motherfucker, look at this.”

He pointed to a shredded ear that looked like a piece of chewed-up beef jerky. Turning away he said with a cold laugh, “I’ve got you pegged you fuckin’ queer.”

The workers were a ratty collection of hicks if ever I saw one, and I’ve seen way too many. There was a big bloated Mennonite kid who used to brag about harassing his Amish kin. His favorite hobby was to drive up behind their buggies and push his car bumper against the buggy wheel. It must have been a frightening form of harassment for the Amish. At least once a year some hot rod white-boy ploughs down one of the buggies on a dark country road.

Dan and I used to egg the bastards on just to see what kind of racist rednecks they really were. We’d usually start by making a racist statement then waiting until they felt comfortable enough that they were among likeminded-company to show their true colors. Then once we got them riled up and revealing what a band of bigots they really were, we would take it further and further until our statements were so mind bogglingly idiotic that it began to dawn on the dimwits that either we were completely out of our minds, or were playing them for fools the whole time. Needless to say we weren’t making a lot of friends among our country cousins.

Among our co-workers was a crippled Mennonite named Rob. I’m not sure what happened to him, but his spine was bent up and his feet pointed in such cockeyed directions it was a wonder that he could walk as well as he did. When he spoke, his speech was a little slurred, kind of like a deaf person’s tends to be.

He didn’t say much anyways, but he worked harder than anyone. No laughing or joking around, down to business all the way. I think he was the only honest one of out of the entire bunch, bosses or workers alike, present company included. I always respected the guy because no matter how absurd the situation became he tried to keep his faith in an honest day’s work. And I’m sure that wasn’t easy given that the entire job was a bit of a farce.

The state gave us the jobs to ‘provide a positive work experience.’ The problem with the thing was that the nursery no longer planted trees, and therefore there was no real work to be done. Our bosses would scrounge up any menial tasks they could find, then think of the most ass-backwards way to do it, so that it took as long as possible. Because of this, no one took the job seriously. Except Rob, who refused to admit that the whole thing was a farce and no one really cared about a job well done.

Finally near the end of it all, after a weekend of rain a large mud puddle formed in the lower side of one of the fields. Our task was to remove the water from the field. To achieve this goal they gave us a couple of shallow shovels and a handful of garden rakes. Now in the unlikely event you’ve ever tried to move water with a garden rake, you would quickly learn that it just ain’t gonna happen.

The group spent the day in the hot sun half-heartedly shoveling and raking the water. Through it all we bitched and moaned while Rob went about his work as earnestly as ever. Then about two in the afternoon something seemed to snap. Rob threw down his rake and ran into the middle of the mud puddle and began to jump and down, splashing in the muddy water while flapping his arms like a trained seal and braying “Fuaaackkkk, fuuuaaackkk!”

At first the rest of us stood shocked and a bit stupefied, but soon we broke into applause and cheers. After a few moments he picked up his rake and quietly returned to his Sisyphean task as if nothing had happened.

It was funny as hell to see him finally admit that he saw the absurdity of it all, even if it was just for a few sweet moments. Afterwards he warmed up to us just a little bit. I think he knew that although Dan and I were a different breed, even while we harassed the others, we accorded him a little bit of unspoken respect.

The tree nursery job was seasonal and not long after we left, Dan married a local girl who had pretensions of becoming a rich sophisticate, and Dan and I soon began to drift apart. Quite a few years later he went home one day to find that his wife had unexpectedly left and took the furniture with her. It appears she felt that even though Dan always held down a steady job, that he wasn’t motivated to strive for great wealth.

By chance, at the same time I was ending my relationship with Leilani, and for a few short weeks Dan and I spent our weekend nights as bachelors prowling the local dives, looking for girls and having bizarre adventures with the oddball yokels we would meet.

I thought it was great fun but it seemed Dan couldn’t wait to return to the security of domestic life. The first girl he managed to hook up with, he quickly married, and soon had a couple kids.

I’m not sure why after a certain age people seem to panic if they are not married. With each year more and more friends join the breeder ranks. Men who were once full of fire quickly dissolve into contented homebodies, working their days to support their broods then collapsing each evening in front of the idiot box. The qualities that made them unique characters seem to evaporate in conjugal bliss.

For some even mentioning their bachelor days is taboo, like alcoholics who fear that a nip of the sauce will knock them off the wagon. One of my friends refuses to come see The Imperial Orgy perform because he fears that if he steps inside a barroom he will revert to his bad boy ways.

People seem to think that to be a single adult is a disaster. Once I ran into a female friend in line to buy popcorn at a movie theater.

“Are you married,” she asked.

“No, not yet,” I smiled back.

“Ooh, you couldn’t find anyone,” she intoned with a sympathetic frown.

I nodded my head and smiled, but was secretly thinking, “couldn’t find anyone?” Christ, I think it’s great to be single. The freedom and independence, the pleasure of discovery and adventure, and it keeps one hungry and vital. Contentment is a dangerous thing in life. While it may feel nice, it is also a form of surrender. Happily ever after means the battle is won, one can rest on their laurels, grow fat and prosper.

For me, even being in a long-term relationship seems to steal away my very will to live. I grow numb way too quickly. I once heard someone say that for a man, being in love is to always be saying, “I’m sorry.”


For me there is nothing like a lonely night to fill me with the urge to fight, to take on the world, to work harder, reach further, strive for loftier heights.

It was once believed that male animals fought each other for the best females. After some study it was learned that most animals fight over real estate or dominance in the social hierarchy. Then the guy with the best piece of land, or who is the top dog in the pack, gets the bests females based on his achievements.

The world of human interactions is far more complex, but essentially the same. I must admit that when I find myself as a single male in a public gathering with a beautiful woman in the room that I can’t have, a subtle taste of rage seeps unto my tongue. A primitive instinct beckons from within. This little fire makes my spine grown stiff and my eyes acquire a steely gaze. There’s no time for merriment. I would rather work, struggle, fight, be smarter, more creative, more aggressive, more wiley, more cunning, more vicious.

This feeling in public has often led to no good. I can often become a trouble starter at a party. Pushing people to misbehave, seducing and antagonizing them into losing their cool composures and behaving with uncouth manners. Every now and then it’s good to have something to regret in the morning.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead expressed a theory that it took eons of social conditioning to make men devote themselves to a family unit and help care for offspring. It is a modification that benefits the species, but goes against a male’s more primordial instinct to spread his DNA far and wide.

In the waning days of the year 2005, as I write these words, I testify that this tug-of-war between the two instincts still goes on within me. There are times when I see cute little black, Asian, and Indian children I feel the pangs of desire for fatherhood.

There is also a constant social pressure, a herd instinct to conform, to settle down and breed. It’s funny that often when people tell a man to grow up, what they really mean is to settle down with a family. It seems that people think you can’t be a mature adult unless you are married with children.

It seems a single adult male makes married people a little uneasy. To them it is a dangerous social aberration. The universe will always be off-balance until he finds a nice girl and moves into a house with a white picket fence.

Meanwhile each year I see my friends fade into the woodwork. Once they marry they cease to exist. They permanently retire from the roaming pack of wild dogs that once inhabited.

I am left feeling like the last man standing, making this strange left hand path I have chosen a little more lonely. My married male friends can quite decide whether I am a tragic figure or their secret hero.

A couple of years after I got to New York I picked up a book my roommate Samantha was reading. It was a pop psychology book that made the claim that personal happiness can be hampered by a person’s inability to make a psychological break from the mother and become a whole independent individual.

The author told a story of how little children often run from their mothers as a way of testing their independence, but they always look back, confident that their mothers will run and catch them. In fact, will save them from going too far.

When I read this it brought to mind a re-occurring dream I often have of being chased, but never being able to get away. I have heard it is a dream that many people have.

That night I had another re-occurring dream. In this dream the motif is always that either people mistakenly think that I have killed someone, or sometime in the past I have accidentally killed someone and now it has been discovered. It is usually a strange situation where it is a long buried memory that I now recall with a sense of dread. I was never been able to figure out this dream, but I always awoke filled with anxiety.

On this night the person I killed in the dream was John Lennon. I awoke with my heart racing.
As I tried to calm down I pondered the strange dream. Then it occurred to me that John Lennon is someone I identify with. Therefore, perhaps the person I am killing is a symbol of my self.

This idea seemed to give way to a rapid succession of thoughts that burst forth out of my head in a torrent. As troubled as my childhood was, I always felt like I came out of it without any unresolved issues with my parents. Especially with my mother, who gave me a lot of independence from a very young age. She was a woman who gave a lot and asked very little in return.

But with this eruption of thoughts there came some long buried feelings, I can’t even call them memories, from a very young age. As a child of two or three I must have sensed a need in my mother, a need that made me feel very guilty about asserting my independence. I think at that young age I must have felt a bit smothered, but soon after that I became very independent and she accorded me an inordinate amount of freedom.

I also realized that this dynamic has carried through and colored my feelings towards relationships with women. In relationships I have always felt a sense of being smothered and dreadful feelings of guilt for wanting my independence.

It was at this moment in life that I realized I really don’t like being in long-term relationships, and I must say, from that moment forward my relationships with women tilted in my favor.

Guilt has always been a factor in my relationships. I could never quite be what women wanted me to be, and they could never accept me for what I am. Usually my sense of failure was associated with money. I grew up in a traditional household and have always felt a failure because I couldn’t support a wife and children, although few men can these days.

But as an adult my financial troubles are all connected with being a musician and artist. I would likely be a millionaire if I wasn’t an artist. As an artist one has a separate goal that defies the demands of family. And again the pressure arises to get serious, grow up, and drop all this artist nonsense.

It’s funny how you can tell a woman exactly who and what you are, and they will nod their heads and say they can accept that, then soon after do everything they can to change you.

In my younger years I would try to explain right off the top that I was a musician and artist and wouldn’t be changing my ways. I guess they wouldn’t really think through what that meant because soon they would realize that they needed someone with a more stable lifestyle in order to have a happy domestic life.

I recent years I tell them up front that I don’t want to be married, that I don’t want to even be in a relationship, women will nod their heads in understanding then completely ignore everything I said. I can say it a hundred times, but they seem to be able to put that out of their minds. As one female friend warned me, ‘they always think they can change you.’ One of the things I appreciate about Jodi is that she accepts me as I am.

It’s odd how we grow up with these traditional ideas about life and love. People assume love automatically leads to a lifetime commitment. Possession is inherent in most people’s understanding of love.

I don’t believe that in-itself love has anything to do with possession, or marriage, or even sex. Love is something more pure and simple, something that is born and dies in each moment. All the baggage we hang on love limits our ability to love, and limits the amount of love in the world.

People tend to see a difference between the love one feels for family and friends, and the love one feels for a lover. I really don’t see that distinction. To me it all springs from the same source. The fact that you have a sexual relationship with someone, or make some kind of commitment to them, are separate practical issues. Love is not practical. It is inspired and purely spiritual.

I might see a withered old man from across the street as he is sitting on a stoop watching the traffic go by with a bored look in his eyes, and be filled with love.

As I write these words I sit at my usual table at the back of the Greenpoint Café. A young woman is at the counter. It is a gray, gloomy, wet November day. Everything feels like it is moving in slow motion.

Although it is fairly warm out the girl at the counter wears a long heavy winter coat. Her brown hair is tucked underneath a knit cap. From the tangled strands that fell out from under it, it appears the cap was meant to hide the fact that she didn’t bother to brush her hair before she ran out for the morning coffee. She looks tired, and her hands look so small as she reaches for her cup. Although I will likely never know her name, and might not even wish to make love to her if the opportunity were to arise, but in this moment I feel awash in love for her. I feel inspired by her ragged beauty, I feel a paternal sympathy for her weary expression on this dark day.

Tantrists believe that the material world is the body of God, and to love another is to Worship God. Our ability to love is boundless, but too much love threatens the social order, so love is bound and shackled by religious edicts, social taboos, and legal sanctions. Love, like truth, can destroy the old order and brings revolutions both in societies and in the hearts of men and women. Love is a dangerous thing, more threatening to the status quo than a terrorist’s bomb. If it isn’t carefully kept in check the walls might tumble down, and God only knows what might be left after the fall.