Conversing with strangers has become my new favorite hobby. I used to be a lot more skittish about it: reacting emotionally as though I had to get away immediately, like I had something important to do or somewhere to get to. And something about a creeping fear of being out of control of a situation with unknown variables. I now see more clearly (having gotten glasses today!) how ridiculous that way of being really is. Strangers have so much interesting and puzzling information to share that you simply cannot pass it up.

This first one was not really a conversation, per se, it was just me overhearing part of a monologue spoken by a man leaving Bartell’s, the drug store. The man walked away from the pharmacy counter in the back, explaining that something was “retarded.” And then he launched into a diatribe which began with: “I’m too goddamned smart for this world. That’s why I’m already a rockstar.”

He seemed really pissed off already, but I started laughing. Because that is just an amazing thing to say out loud to noone in particular. I can only imagine the geography of that guy’s internal landscape. It must be compelling, to say the least.

Another item overheard at a Goodwill last week. The first announcement over the loudspeaker came from a Latina voice, asking for someone to come to the front because of a customer injury. Three minutes later, the same voice cuts into the mellow hits being piped into the store:

“She’s bleeding! She’s bleeding!”

The words pierced the air with a kind of quiet terror. Everyone just kept shopping like it was nothing. I looked up, obviously alarmed, and no one else even seemed to notice.

I bought a book on sleight-of-hand magic today while waiting for my glasses to be finished. Oh, and I asked the optometrist at the end of my eye exam: “Is it really true that if you cross your eyes, they stay like that?” He seemed nonplussed and said that no, they would not. He did not seem altogether certain though, or maybe he simply did not share my amusement at the possibility.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to try it.”

I still might though.

Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita to focus his eyes on the tip of his nose. There has to be a reason why he says this. That book is hardly just idle conjecture. I did not attempt to go into this highly theoretical explanation with my optometrist though.

Getting glasses has made me feel like I just bought a new computer with a fancy new monitor. How nerdy is that? My entire view of reality is focused around the metaphor of computers, because I have filtered so much of my time and energy through that lens.

I stopped by Petco as well to check out the finches. Many years ago, I ran into a black-hooded nun finch at a small pet store in a mall outside Baltimore. This bird looked like a wizard. It had the most intelligent eyes of any creature I have ever seen. None of the birds at Petco seemed all that brilliant though. Maybe this one canary. What a gorgeous bird. But I am not prepared to shell out $120 bucks or whatever it was. I had an interesting conversation with the bird lady there. She told me how they cannot have large birds at the store, because of PETA.

“I fucking hate PETA,” she said. She may not have actually sworn, but it was 100% implied. And I can see why.

“If we get big birds in here, they break into the store and set them free.”

We both agreed this was not the brightest move on behalf of animal welfare - retarded, even. How is a bird raised in captivity from a totally foreign climate and environment supposed to survive when unleashed into the world by well-meaning but tactically idiotic hippies?

I also had a really long conversation with a guy at Trader Joe’s last night. I went with my usual Trader Joe’s tactic of choosing which line to stand on based on which cashier I thought was the cutest. Apparently the old guy in front of me had the same idea, except he was trying to charm the dread-locked young lady with words like “empire” and talk of Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming the next president (a pet topic of mine, stolen from the classic Stallone flick, Demolition Man). I immediately had to jump in, and while I did not get to talk much to the girl, I did end up talking in the parking lot with this guy for about half an hour. He regaled me with tales of time spent at ashrams in India at the feet of various masters, of meeting Krishnamurti and studying with Osho. He explained how Gurdjieff fathered over sixty children on different women: how he would impregnate them on purpose, “Not all of them, but certain ones. It’s an old Sufi tradition that nobody talks about,” he said.

He told me how in France, women get insulted when you walk past them on the street and do not look at them - which we both agreed was a far cry from how they act in Seattle. “Women want to be admired,” he said. “Don’t I have a nice ass?” He pretended to be a woman showing off. We talked a lot about fear being an invitation to discovery and about self-mastery and he gave me a list of books to read.

At first when we began speaking in earnest in the parking lot, some part of me panicked and wanted me to run away, to make up some excuse to break off the encounter and go enjoy the bananas I had just bought. I felt my heart rate go up. I felt certain areas of my body tense. I felt my weight shift around awkwardly from leg to leg in some kind of childish attempt to force me off balance and into the motions of retreating from what was an altogether entertaining and edifying encounter. But I just let those feelings wash over me.

Increased heart rate is a really interesting one. As I prepared this very second to write you about it, I felt the physical response of “nervousness” triggered. My heart rate spiked slightly, a wash of blood swept over the surface of my skin. A temperature change was effected. Sitting here though, I am not nervous about anything. I recognize it is just a sensation: one of an endless variety available to me as a human being in a human body. And that is the thing about these physical states which we have the habitual tendency of hooking into certain emotional states. An increased heart-rate does not necessarily need to be indicative of a state of “nervousness.” Who said it did? Where did we learn that the two went together? It is stupid. We can decide how to respond emotionally (or not respond) to our own physical states. We have the right and authority to do so. It takes a great deal of awareness to first even become conscious of the shift from one physical state to another. It takes even greater awareness to recognize that just because a state change has occurred, that we need not necessarily react to it emotionally or mentally. Once you get to that point though, all you have to do is be open to the possibility of changing your habitual responses. And doing that, you open the doorway wide for rapid changes in your life.

And not just in your life, either. In the lives of those people around you: loved ones, and so-called “strangers.” Is that not funny that we use the word “strange” to describe people we have not yet met? It is one of those root assumptions which underlie our culture and behavior which need to be pulled up and examined. One of the last things the old man said to me in the Trader Joe’s parking lot was that anyone you are afraid of is probably someone you need to learn from.

Strangers are really not so strange.