March 6, 2008
I Am So Popular: Big Dick on Buddha Mountain
So, I produce and co-star in a little show called The Dick Monologues. We have four shows this month—three more than usual. Two are in Dallas this weekend at the Water Tower Theatre as part of the Out of the Loop Festival. Two are here in town—one at the Victory Grill on March 21st and the other at Hyde Park Theatre on March 30th. Please tell your Dallas friends to come to the show up there. And if you want to attend an Austin show, please email me at spike@spikeg.com for info.
This week, I present a piece I wrote that sometimes appears in the show.
Big Dick on Buddha Mountain
To meditate with the enlightened Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, is akin to playing guitar with Pete Townsend, making cookies with Martha Stewart, or tying your shoes with Mister Rogers. And so, despite my tight budget, when I heard that Thay, as he is known, was leading a retreat in California, I did what any overzealous aspiring Buddhist would do: I mailed off a hot check to procure my place at the monastery.
All Thay wants is for us to be happy with ourselves and each other. He reminds us that intent is the key—aim for your compassionate goals but don’t worry if you fall short.
When we follow the North Star, says Thay, we don’t really expect to reach the North Star itself. We just hope to go north.
Though I am, put mildly, far from enlightenment, decades of self-observation and a small fortune’s worth of psychotherapy have led me to know certain things about myself. One is this: put me in a room full of 10,000 men and I will, within seconds, be chatting with the biggest loser in the room.
Similar to Where’s Waldo? I call this exercise Where’s Dick? Like Waldo, Dick is probably wearing a striped shirt, only the stripes are black and white, the shackles on his feet only recently sawed off, the bloodhounds still hot on his trail. Ultimately they all leave me singing that same country song, When I Said I Like Big Dicks, I Think You Misunderstood.
That said, I did not know that so sharp had my dick-honing skills grown that I, Spike “Dick Magnet” Gillespie, would manage to find the biggest dick of all at a Buddhist Retreat.
Buddhists strive not to have attachments. But humans, like vacuum cleaners, come with many of these, more than a few unnecessary. What can you do about it? Well if you want to sit with Thay, I’ll tell you what you can do about it— you can find a way to let go of some of the more obvious ones, like smoking, ass picking, meat eating, impure thought thinking, sleeping past 5 a.m., drinking, shooting up, watching TV, and daily masturbation.
Other attachments we were required to release during the retreat included iPods and laptops.
Which left me with my cell phone to contemplate. Technically cell phones were not banned, though they were strongly discouraged. If we did use them, it had to be outside of Noble Silence time, which went from 10 pm. every night through til 2 pm the following day. During these stretches, all attendees were required to keep their pieholes tightly shut or else risk coming back in the next life as a teacup Chihuahua at a rescue ranch for hawks.
Pre-retreat I’d toyed with leaving my phone at home. But soon enough I was rationalizing—what if my son needed to reach me? Which was, I admit, code speak for: What if I can’t live without talking to my man, Warren, for five consecutive days?
I also had to factor in that I was leaving Warren on International Talk Like a Pirate Day—how could I not at least text him crucial messages like, Being aparrrrhhhht is drivin’ me nuts! and I can’t wait for you to shiver me timbers with your mighty plank, matey!
Still, though I brought the phone, I swore to myself I would only use it to call Warren from airports, not from the monastery. And I maintained this vow. For about twenty hours. And then, midway through day one, Noble Silence having ended with the conclusion of Afternoon Gruel Consumption, I just had to tell him something extremely important. So I texted this urgent message:
I CAN’T WAIT TO DO YOU BABY.
Thus began the exchange of Porno Texts from Buddhist Camp.
Having convinced myself that it really was okay to utilize my phone—come on, if they were that serious about silence they could’ve knocked out the cell tower—I decided what the hell, I’ll save wear and tear on my opposable thumbs and just call Warren.
And so it was, on day two, that I climbed halfway up a little mountain path, far from the meditating crowd, and talked dirty to my man. Once I got off... the phone that is... I found I had a message from a friend in crisis and so I called to offer counsel, figuring it was the most compassionate, and thus most Buddhist thing to do.
A fellow retreatant happened to hike by me at that moment. When he got about fifty yards away, he shouted down at me.
“Can’t I use this mountain, too?!!” he bellowed, by which he meant, Pardon me, I’m a loud, domineering dick disguised as a peace loving Buddhist and I am using angry sarcasm to shame you and I am yelling to let you know you are talking too loud!
There are few things in this world that chap my ass more than being shushed, particularly by a man. To say I dislike being silenced is an understatement akin to saying Stevie Nicks just, you know, sort of liked her cocaine.
So I went after him.
“Excuse me,” I said, when I found him on the edge of a cliff. “Are you the guy who just YELLED at me?”
“That’s your perception,” he hissed, launching into a Zen Orwellian doublespeak that made Tim Robbins’ character in High Fidelity seem highly lovable by comparison.
“Do you want to know what I was doing?” I asked. “I was counseling a friend in crisis.”
“And now you’re confronting me!” he said, and he shushed me again.
Oh, Buddha help me. That did it. I busted out my most angry line, given the fact a huge statue of Buddha was watching over us. “You are making me very unhappy,” I said.
“Your unhappiness is an obstacle of your own creation,” he replied, smugly.
I walked away. He came after me. “So you’re just going to walk away?”
“You never would have yelled at me if I were a man,”
“Not true,” he said. “That’s just your issue to work on.”
“No, my work is to rip off your head and shit down your lungs, asshole,” I said, using my patented Irish Buddhism which involves enlightening dicks by metaphorically punching them in the nose.
Okay, so I didn’t really say that. But I wanted to.
That night, I pointed out the dick to my friend, Kymmie.
“That can’t be the guy who yelled at you,” she said. “That’s Jon. He’s from Austin. He’s really nice. He’s part of my family.”
At Buddhist camp you are assigned to groups and your “family” gets to perform chores like moving mats or scrubbing pots or, in my case, the porta-potties, a concept which, as an aside, let me say amused my teenage son to no end as he later asked, “You paid how much to go eat crappy food and scrub shit for five days?”
The next day, Noble Silence again having ended and my porta-potty duties about to commence, I decided it would be another perfect opportunity to talk dirty to Warren. The porta-potties were way off in the corner of a parking lot, out of everyone’s earshot. Jon could kiss my ass. I was going to get me a phonegasm.
I brought a chair with me to maximize comfort. I wrapped up in my hand-knitted recycled tibetan silk meditation shawl. I settled in and got ready to make the call. Along wandered Kymmie.
“I thought you were cleaning the port-a-potties,” she said. “I came to take pictures of you in action.”
And then, from nowhere, he appeared. Jon. Mister Go Yell it on the Mountain. Yes, in a camp filled with a thousand meditators, with me far off, next to a toilet on the perimeter of the property, my dick radar was strong enough to pull him to me.
He did not recognize me. “I’m Jon,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “You yelled at me yesterday.”
“WAS THAT YOU?!!” he shouted. I did not shush him. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Jon wanted to share his feelings. He wanted to work through it.
Oh. Wait. No he didn’t. He just wanted to continue being a pig in a blanket, a dick wrapped in enlightened language. Picking up where he’d left off, he unsuccessfully attempted to disguise his vitriol in words that suggested he wanted me to believe he was talking about spiritual growth.
When he was done, I thanked him and then, in equally carefully selected words, I ripped him another new asshole.
Kymmie, ever the peacemaker intervened. “I know,” she said brightly, as the tension between us mounted and I prepared to be the first person in history to get in a fistfight at a Buddhist retreat. “You two to pose for a picture!”
And so we stood, side-by-side, our smiles actually grimaces revealing this truth: Our sphincters were performing a synchronized slamming shut ritual at the idea of this feigned closeness.
But we did it for Kymmie. And we did it for Thay.
Yes, we aimed for the North Star, not reaching that goal, but making it as far as the plastic rental toilets.
Spike Gillespie puts on The Dick Monologues and blogs for LaunchPad Coworking and for her own amusement at www.spikeg.com. She knows who you are.
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For god sake. Leave the cell phone at home next time.
It is kinda funny (to me at least) that, of all the attachments listed, the cell phone gets mentioned as the toughest one to shed. I'd much rather give up my cell phone than eating meet, much less my daily wank.
for who's sake? and really, people, have you HAD phone sex with Warrrrrghen? believe me, you'd take your cell phone, too.
for who's sake? and really, people, have you HAD phone sex with Warrrrrghen? believe me, you'd take your cell phone, too.
I'm skeptical, but if you'd like to leave me his phone number I'll give him a ring tonight. Don't cheat and give me the White House phone number, I've already been fucked enough by them.
I am so in love with this column. I look forward to it every week!
~SWAK~ from your geekiest fangirl.
Have you ever inadvertently left your cell phone at home? It's a very liberating experience which I experimented with today...
Love this story. So much so that I might return to the show for the 5th time.
Not a stalker. Honest.
I wanna see the picture!
I wanna see the picture!
“You paid how much to go eat crappy food and scrub shit for five days?”
Haha, nice :)
I tried to find that country song you mentioned but google wasn't in the mood. So if you made that witty joke up, would you mind releasing the concept to the world and letting me write an actual country song about the two varieties of big dicks?
here's a link to a post on my blog, called "bringing">http://myrobotispregnant.com/?p=1687>"bringing retards to orgasm" which sounds kinda bad out of context, but it's about the human need for sex, not about abusing people. Just to clear that up. I think you'll like it. I like your blog, so you should like mine, right?
well, something weird happen to that code i wrote. try cut and pasting this:
http://myrobotispregnant.com/?p=1687
sorry for the mess.