P-Town (That would be Peoria, Illinois – let’s see if it plays in Peoria.)
December 9, 2021
I was over to P-Town today just to see what I could see.
I went over to P-Town, baby, just to see what I could see.
I was surfing for you baby, and my own sweet destiny.
Well, sir, I was over to P-Town to see a doctor at the Illinois Neurological Institute and I had some good experiences, and then I was going to head right back to BNormal, IL, but I saw an unusual-shape building on Knoxville Avenue and I thought was a bar, so I did a U-ie and turned back into the place. It was a building with ANHEUSER BUSCH built into the orginal structure.
Then I pushed the door open and there was a bear!
So I thought, “Huh, a bear in a bar.” But it wasn’t a bar – it was a coffeeshop, the 30-30 Coffee Shop. Well, I needed a nice cuppa Joe more than I needed a drink, so that was good. Yes, the 30-30 Coffeshop, the logo of which bore a strilking likeness to the main part of the Indian OM or AUM symbol. Here’s a good reference I found: “It looks a bit like the number 30 with a little hat on top. It’s probably familiar to you from the Om chant you hear at the beginning or end of some yoga classes. Made up of the sounds of the letters A-U-M, Om is all about threes.”
https://www.yogiapproved.com/the-meaning-behind-5-common-yoga-symbols/
I’m just trying to establish my prior knowledge here. Ever since the early 70s, when I first started reading some Vedanatic texts and encountered the Om symbol, I doodled it incessantly, like it was a mud volcano or Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind that was going to lead me somewhere. Yeah, I read the Bhagavad Gita – the Song of God and The Sermon on the Mount according to Vedanta, and I liked them.
See the resemblance?
So I walked over to the ordering place and I saw the joint had two sides, with boomers on one side and students on the other. Very pleasant and well-behaved students. There were no public restrooms, but the place was nice without being pretentious. There was a pleasant-looking kid – young man – at the counter, so I said hi and immediately I began talking about the Om symbol. He didn’t know anything about it, had never heard anything about it.
Well, sir, I began to instruct him, but he also told me about the various coffees they had. The best for me seemed to be the Rwandan and the Guatemalan brews, and I thought of the genocide in Rwanda and decided to go with the earthy Guatemalan stuff. The guy made quite a production of fixing my one cup of coffee, but it was very interesting to watch him using different little pots, and he didn’t give me a rap so much as he just maintained pleasant and easy conversation. This is rare, in my book anyway.
I wondered whether I was falling in love. In short, we really hit it off. But there was more. I get back to the Om symbol resembling the 30-30 Coffee Shop logo. I explain that it’s a symbol of enlightenment. I do a brief meditation pose – index fingers to thumbs, and I go “Ahoomm.”
Then I see the fellow has tattoos on his arms and one is the traditional comedy/tragedy masks. It’s nicely done, so I ask, “Are you a thespian – an actor?” He says, “No, I got that to remind me to keep my emotions in balance.”
I was slightly dumbstruck because the balancing of emotions had been very much on my mind.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324602#symptoms-of-hypomania
In the past few days, I have felt much better than I have in a long time. What happened was I recovered from a very bad month of pain after I had an accident in the woods on November 8. It took me a month to recover and I felt awful and puny. I thought if this is what it’s going to be like, then I don’t really welcome it. In fact, let’s get it over with.
The Everlasting Now 