4th of July

I went to the spouse's house to have the best 4th I could, for myself, my kids, and her. It was nice. I fired up my own grill, got out my bar-b-que sauce recipe (YUM), and did some pork backribs. It was pretty damn good if I say so myself. *smiles*. We had a good view of the fireworks. The firecracker engineers were at their finest. There were some really cool designs this year, many I'd never seen. Somebody figured out how to make the shape of a 5-pointed star, that everybody took to stand for Texas' Lone Star, but some of them had a circle around them. The wiccan symbol of the pentagram did not go unnoticed, but could only be detected by my wry smile. If the Christian bigots in the multitudes only knew. Hehehe I wonder if there will be any of them that had the wherewithal to notice and raise a stink. That could enliven the letters to the editor pages for a while.

I had a good 4th.

I'm reading a really good Zen book by Brad Warner, "Hardcore Zen". The guy was one of those "weird types" like me, back in the day, and was a relatively well known punk rocker out of Ohio, later to take up zazen, found a teacher at Kent State to get him started, and then moved to Tokyo to study under an old Soto Zen master. The old guy gave him the "dharma transmission"--to a gaijin no less! He works for the Tsuburaya Productions company to make a living. They are the ones that created the Godzilla movies, and also produced Ultraman shows. The ironies there are great! I'll be posting some stuff out of the book for folks' erudition and comment.