Though I knew intellectually that I should expect no reward from my Buddhist practice, nor from my experience of "god" now receding into the past, my complete lack of success in making the truth that had been revealed to me germinate in others, sprout, develop, and flower was a disappointment.

I'd feel resentment.

Anger.

I'd dismiss it.

Hello—

It would return yet again.

Accept.

No!

Accept.

No!

My intellectual life in Omaha was comprised of classrooms and cars.

Into the car and off to work.

Te ching English—

I found complex, terrible agonies in my classroom. One tensed, commaless, in the front row with his misput apostrophes. They sputtered and spluttered all over his snarled blue fishline script.

Into the car and back home.

The streets and highways were all mashed into pieces, broken up, crumbling, constantly under repair, chuck holes, pot holes, orange barrels, barricades, and barriers. The city streets lay across one another helter-skelter, every which way, and several intersections looked like double asterisks, six or seven streets all merging at the same point. North of town near 680 twenty-five different roads, streets, lanes, and entrances all merged within less than half a mile. Traffic lights were broken, on the blink, or deliberately ignored. Drivers accelerated on yellow, their vehicles speeding missiles. They whined down the city road and alley ways, eight or nine vehicles at a time.

High, fugitive teens.

Sullen, reckless cops all pissed off.

Headlines:

White Flight—

Might Right—

Night Fight—

Blight Plight—

I was reading about death camps.

About slavery.

On TV:

Famine images everywhere.

Hopeless—

Brown—

Dying—

Death—

"Brought to you by Insurance!"

Blood—

Sores—

Shit—

I needed a new suit, a new car, a new house, a new job, a new new.

Big, stinking buses sloganeered for the military, the lawyers, and the insurance companies, the black fumes rising and descending.

Turning to grease in the yearlong halfwinter.

Football—

Poverty—

Racism—

Crime—

Fear of walking.

When I headed out to work I witnessed the daily carnage, dead animals split open at the sides of the roads or swollen, bloated, and stinking at me as I drove by, skunks, six of them one day in February, and every day dead squirrels, dogs, cats, kittens, raccoons, opossums, and deer.

One day it was a collie, I think, opened up from collision and impact like a giant fleshy watermelon, ripped in half and torn apart. There was so much flesh, its ruin was so big, I couldn't see it for what it was. Confusing, it looked artificial and unreal, like red beef behind glass at the supermarket. At first I thought it had been a calf because of its coloring and its size. Then as I sailed on past I experienced the necessary flash of recognition and realized what it was—no, what it had been. Four days later its remains were still there, its pieces hammered and pounded and dried into three average gray and brown doormats that did not even thump under my tires.

"Here, Lassie!"

Another day it was a neighborhood dog, a mongrel cocker, black and white, average size, not big, cute, pretty, and gentle, with no visible wound, lying in my lane up the block in the early evening as I was on my way to my night class about 5:30.

I had to slow down and ease on by it.

I idled and looked.

Stopped.

Stared.

Oo—

It was lying dead in its tracks right in the middle of my lane.

Blood.

So much blood—

A huge, spreading, slick-looking dark red and reddish-purple puddle four or five feet across, and thick, viscous, its blood all run out of its mouth as in a maroon and blackish-red dark cartoon. It must have been bled empty.

There was so much blood I could hardly believe my own eyes.

Fascinated.

That urge to stop and stare like a kid, maybe touch it with a stick, poke it, something—

To respond—

To feel—

To care—

Even to carry it off to the curb and hunt down its owner.

But I couldn’t.

I was late to work and you know what that means.

Security—

Money.

I honored its passing with only a moment's short silent prayer.

"One day I too—"

Pfft!

When I came back three hours later it was gone.

Nothing.

No corpse, no puddle, no blood, not even a wet spot on the concrete street to mark the site.

Impermanence.

Nada.

Its owner must have discovered his puppy and carried it off, then washed down the street with his garden hose. I liked imagining this act, its simplicity, practicality, its unpretentiousness, lack of self-consciousness, its reverence, its fundamental decency and civic responsibility.

An act of love.

The summer heat and the heavy traffic took care of the rest.

Gone gone—

Gone beyond—

Gone beyond beyond—

Hail the goer.

Off towards Elkhorn in the west I could observe on my ten-mile drive the blackbirds and the crows. Along the edge of the road they looked like they were squatting. They did not even fly away when I came zooming towards them, they hardly hopped out of my path, they just strolled off to the side a few steps to let me pass, and then they returned to their breakfast of drying, wet flesh and innards of road kill.

Muscle.

Meat.

Driving my father to Red Oak one afternoon I saw a tiny ground squirrel frozen—who knows why—in my lane on Interstate 80 and it all transpired too quick and too late for me to do anything but wince and wish yet I hedged and blinked and ducked and dreaded and tried in a split second to figure it all out.

For—

For what—

No.

It and I both anticipated—

Wrong.

Under both wheels on the left side.

Crunch—

Snapsnap ch—

It sounded like a little bundle of tiny twigs.

Crushed.

A dog eating chicken bones.

Horrible—

To me driving.

I must have hit it full flush with both tires completely covering it up and rubberized the poor little sucker, its whole body smashed flat, and I'll never forget the sound though I can't spell it.

A raspy swallow—

Two whispers—

"Tsk tsk," the old cartoon-character moralists used to say.

Like that.

It pinched my heart.

Oh—

Heart heard.

Yes!

Hard heart—

The language I mean, the way it works, its getting it all in, always getting everything in, nothing left out, ever, it seems, so I felt it, and I heard it, and I winced, in my lips and teeth, and under my breath I issued a clenched—

"God damn it!"

My father heard me.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"I hit that squirrel."

"You couldn't help it," he said.

"No," I conceded.

"So?" he asked.

I thought.

"Everything can't all be all right when that happens," I said.

This puzzled him.

It was in my mind for hours and then still there off and on for three days.

Cars.

Dead animals.

Carnage.

On another afternoon I was with Harold, a friend, when we saw one chasing its tail, once more right in the middle of my lane of the highway. It looked agonized, crazy, as if earlier it might have been hit a glancing blow by a passing motorist and now was chasing its pain, howling if it had been able, and I had time so I braked and swerved to try to avoid it, not much, we were speeding down the highway after all, just a tap on the brake pedal and a short quick twist of my wrist.

Whap!

"Got him!" Harold exclaimed.

Uff da—

He'd misunderstood.

Everything.

Everything.

I picked it up in my rearview mirror, spinning crazily faster in the same tight circle, in the same place, as if I had given its deathly merry go round a hard slap as I'd hurried by on my way to my destination.

Horrible and grotesque my good intention.

Whap!

"Got him!"

Ugh—

It reminded me of the books of Carlos Castaneda and Jerzy Kosinski.

The rabbits.

It couldn't be right all this driving.

No.

But that was Omaha.

Down at the south campus near the stockyards the stench was unbelievable. You could smell the death, the fear, the slaughter, the blood, the piss, the shit, and the hogs and cattle you could hear shrieking.

I mean shrieking.

Shrieking—

Screaming—

Screaming—

There was no way I could get those noises into print.

Nor that stench.

A meat eater, I learned a fine lesson, a knowledge guaranteed to retard appetite.

Ad:

"Lose weight!"

Fear.

The noises of panic—

"If we think those animals are different from us," I told students, "we should listen."

Noises of agony and hell—

Animal terror.

Prey.

"We’re kidding ourselves."

Out at the far end of West Maple Road where I turned left to get to work there was a huge feedlot, black and barren, and the same sickening, stomach-turning stench, so disgusting that it made a man sick just to think and to write about it, always black with shit, piss, and blood and who knows what all, in summer, spring, winter, or fall, it made no difference, an eternally ugly, eternally brownish-black reeking cesspool of churned-up mud and excrement, no matter how deep the snow or how cold the day, no matter how thick the ice everywhere else, no matter how green elsewhere the grass, there in what was once a pasture, no matter how wet and cool the spring, there, there it was black, filthy, foul, a muck, and the air was full of the smell of cattle shit, death, and animal hopelessness, futility, and fear, and it seemed odd to use those words for cattle till you saw the horror for yourself and heard it, smelled it, recognized it for the brutal truth it was, and learned what survival, domination, subjugation, life, and death were really all about.

I thought of Auschwitz every time I drove by.

Forgive me!

Forgive me!

The ruminant cow was meant to graze over hundreds of thousands of acres, vast plains of tall, thick grasses and hays all across the prairie, following the storms and seasons from year to year, almost a part of the climate itself, its own elaborate, exquisite inner pink fruit torn open only by big cats and wolves. I could imagine the grass, green, high, laden with seed as heavy as oats, the cattle like buffalo, slow and lazy and harmless, content, hardly moving, loitering, idle, chewing and lowing at the dying light come evening, just as simple as milk, the clouds, shadows, coasting over the cool evening green like dark waves and tides.

Eden.

Now that was all sentiment and nostalgia.

A lie.

Penned, imprisoned, and bred.

Castrated, bled.

Trapped in their own shit, blood, pus, and piss.

Sores.

Sick, diseased, not even a grassy bed to lie on.

Our food.

Their feed was corn mostly, enriched with the protein of their own kind, ground cow, the meal funneled into a trough as black as the barren lot itself, and the cattle ate it, hey, they weren't complaining, they rarely complained, one of the reasons they are considered holy by some in the East, and don't get me wrong, in my life I had eaten more than my fair share of hamburger and filet mignon.

From meal to meat—just cross the l to make the t.

The language again—

I love it.

I got caught behind a huge cattle semi from California one time on the highway and the truck was so brown with filth it looked like it had moled its way through a dung pile and it was blowing back what at first I thought must have been chemicals right into my face, so putrid and rank I was almost overcome by the stench of it. The driver must have been mad to travel so far so dirty and I thought at the time that over the long haul the filth would probably kill both the cattle and him. I couldn't understand how those animals could even stay alive in that mobile sewer and unconsciously I began gritting and clenching and grinding my teeth and then realized I'd been doing it hard, so hard that for an instant I actually feared I might snap one of them off in my horror.

Dead animals.

Trucks.

Cars.

The frustration of cars.

The expense of gasoline and maintenance, bald tires, burned-out starters and generators, two hundred bucks here, two hundred bucks there, trash all over the floorboards, trash in the trunk, the ashtrays jammed full of cigarette butts and gum and candy wrappers, garbage of all kinds, credit card receipts, the buzzing, whining, coughing, sputtering, whining, buzzing broken bastards, no ignition, or the engine wouldn’t turn over, deader 'n a doornail.

Click click—

Click.

Fucking winter!

Scraping the goddamned windshield and the back window, chopping at the quarter-inch layer of ice and sleet, scraping the side windows, chopping at the ice on the windshield again, the handle of the scraper coming loose and then breaking off—

"God damn it!"

No gloves—I forgot them, left them at work—and the heater wouldn't work, the defroster wouldn't work, the blower wouldn't work, or the fan wouldn't shut off, or the radiator boiled over, thermostat busted, or the belt was slipping, and the mechanic was surly and smug, and the salesman had been lying, and the banker had been arrogant, oily, and there were bills, payments, debts, and loans, and what did I get—

Haunted mornings in the winter.

Sleepless nights.

Late to work.

Trouble with my fucking boss.

In late summer—

Insects splattering against my windshield.

Dead animals in the road.

Flat tires, no spare, spare flat, too, unchecked, unfilled.

Two flats the same day.

Gouges in my knuckles.

Scrapes.

Bleeding, blood.

"Fuck!"

Grease all over my best shirt.

Fumes up my nose.

Something broken, something breaking, or something about to break—

Constantly.

Yes!

That was cars—

I was sick of those sons of bitches to say the very least.

Sick and tired.

Sick to death.

Sick and getting rapidly sicker.

They were taking over my zen practice and my meditations and I wanted to set fire to them, to sneak out at night and perpetrate arson, to pound the living bejesus out of them with a ten-pound maul like a powerful sixteen-year-old fullback at a Thursday night pep rally, to knock the living shit out of those bitches, and to bury every goddamned one of them miserable motherfuckers ten miles deeper than hell.

Forever.

I was happy at Chrysler's corporate failures.

They were my solitary joy.

I was happy at the falling profits of car manufacturers. I imagined the suicides of the sons of automobile executives and I laughed. I was happy at the alcoholism and drug addiction of their daughters and wives. I was glad at their multiple coronary bypass open-heart operations and surgeries. I was hoping and wishing for quadruple repeated attacks. I grinned at the thought of their sudden inexplicable chest pains and I hoped that they felt like college shotputs had been dropped on their sterna, their arms and legs become numb, their chests only a cold and agonizing thumping, a profound pulsating, pounding hurt, a big hurt, their whole bodies confused, and their minds, too, wholly confused.

But I didn't want them to die.

No.

I wanted then to keep on living long, wary, feeble lives of fear and trembling, even on the golf course, always alert for the next grotesque event when they'd pale and pall, when, frightened and confused, they would carefully kneel and then lie down, so carefully, flat on their backs right at the center of the soft and spongey thirteenth green at just the slightest sign of indigestion, chest pain, their fingers clutching and tearing at the clean bright shirts at their chests.

Yes.

Because I hated cars.

I hated cars more than anything else on this godforsaken hell on earth.

But what could I do—

I had to get to work.

I had to buy a car.

All of this—

All of this passed through my mind in what seemed only an instant—

One cold winter morning—

In Omaha—

1983.