Introducing Our New Via Stultus -- the Dumbass Way of Knowing
The Life and Death of Gary -- best meditation teacher in the industrial park
If you’re like me—a dumbass who learns more from getting a nasty road rash than from well-intentioned and good advice—this path is for you. While the rest of the world has its fanny on a zafu, entering the doors of enlightenment, we’re stuck wrestling with our ex, our cloud passwords, or our zipper.
This is our way, our dharma, our Tao, my friends. Inspired by the Via Negativa, I’m claiming the term Via Stultus — the Dumbass Way of Knowing.
“Hang on a second,” I hear you whisper, as you fumble for your Sticky Notes. “Okay, so what’s the first secret?”
A negative lesson is still a lesson
Let me introduce Gary, the greatest Via Stultus master of our time
Old Gary was not a Zen master. Nor did he touch grass, stare at sky. He was my former co-worker, a data jockey who kept auditors off our sad collective asses. In his spare time, he enjoyed tinkering with gasoline engines, 3D printers, and making his own gaming computers from spare parts picked up at the flea market.
He lived alone, smoked like a tire fire, and had sketchy political views he liked to discuss loudly at lunch. His shirts were all coffee-stained, and brown nicotine rings lined his collars. He bought frozen tacos in mega-packs from the Dollar Store and ate two of the dark, greasy, dogfood-looking things for lunch each day.
I wasn’t a fan of Gary.
He was a master manipulator of Time
Lo, Master Gary worked only 6 hours and 40 minutes for every 8 hours the rest of us put in. How did he work this magic? By taking a 10-minute break each hour, on the hour, to grab a butt in the smoking lounge — AKA the back entrance to our building. The female smokers were an especially lively bunch, and the guys chummy. A good time was had by all in the smokers’ lounge for a cumulative 80 minutes a day while the rest of us were upstairs, you know — working.
Though fairly easy-going, I don’t always manage to smile and say, “oh, what a lovable scamp!”
No. A burning resentment of Gary kindled in my tinderbox heart.
Each time Gary rose from his chair and ambled toward the door, happily patting the shirt pocket where he kept his cigarettes, he unwittingly tossed another coal upon the fire of my anger. Yet another coal was added upon Gary’s return as clouds of cigarette smoke followed him into our small, windowless office—then he’d groan, and cough that deep, chortling smoker’s cough that made everyone’s insurance premiums rise with every croupy hack….
This is where I should mention the year was 2016.
The morning after THAT election, Gary and the other guy in our office crowed loudly about the results with delight, while our supervisor and I sat in stunned silence, wondering what the fuck had just happened.
Goddamn
So, how to fix this Gary problem? I rattled through the few options I could think of (Lock the office door so he couldn’t get back in? Spill a café au lait all over his keyboard?) and came up bereft.
Wow, I told myself one day. Babes — you really need to chill.
That was when I first set the timer on my phone for five minutes, and went to the fairy-sparkled, wooded glen in my mind.
By the time Gary stumbled back into the office, I was happily typing away. I had a vice that I could enjoy every hour, on the hour, just like he did.
Better yet, it was a secret vice…which made it even more delicious. As the days passed, though, I realized it wasn’t a vice.
Sure, I was wasting five minutes every hour my employer paid for my time, but screw that kind of thinking, when Gary got 1/6 of his day off, with pay
But let’s step away from that for a moment.
I realized I was a happier, more cheerful person to have around the office. Surely that was worth something to my employer, right? Instead of glowering across the room at Gary for 6.666667 hours each day, I felt the scornful sneer on my face begin to loosen.
Gary’s stream-of-consciousness chatter about carburetors and CPUs even started to sound vaguely interesting, and sometimes, even charming.
By listening instead of tuning him out, I learned:
His parents immigrated from Romania, and struggled to farm in Upstate New York soil.
His father couldn’t speak English, so bribed someone at the Albany DMV to let him pass the written exam.
He’d joined the Marines to be a tanker, and hated it.
His most profound romance died in a storm of recrimination and stolen tools. Tools are, I learned, the most valuable thing a blue-collar guy owns. Steal his tools, steal his livelihood.
After the Marines, he’d traveled most of the U.S. and Canada, working as a carny.
All that stuff just made him human. Then came the most sobering thing.
His family harbored a rare and deadly genetic mutation
At early middle-age he’d outlived everyone of his family members except a teenaged nephew, living somewhere in the Midwest. Gary figured his days were numbered and no amount of cigarettes or crappy Dollar Store tacos was going to kill him quicker than his own DNA.
One of the things that had always pissed me off about Gary was the sense that he’d given up…that he just didn’t give enough of a damn to try.
This one data point explained why.
If nothing else, he was punctual
That’s why we were all curious when, one day, Gary didn’t show up for work. The supervisor was salty; no, none of us had heard from him. Hopefully, Gary was sleeping it off with one of the smoke-break women, right?
Then, the police called.
Passers-by had found Gary unconscious on the sidewalk early that morning, and called an ambulance. Medics helicoptered him to Boston. Gary’s security badge told the cops where he worked.
Was the bloody head wound from a fall or an attack?
Did we know how to contact Gary’s next-of-kin?
No answers — we’d never learned the nephew’s name, or where he lived.
Some of us drove to Boston to visit, to leave cards and gifts, but Gary never awakened. When the state took over guardianship of Gary, information for non-family members in the age of HIPAA shut down completely.
Sorry to bring you down.
So here’s to the Via Stultus, master of our age
Let’s raise a glass to Gary.
Sure, his political opinions sounded like the gurgle of a toilet flushing. He was, however, with all his disgusting diet, failed hopes, and emotional scars, worthy of love — even more so because the world seemed intent on denying it to him.
If he hadn’t been so damned annoying — or if I hadn’t resented him so much — I never would have built up the level of desperation required to start my brief, cigarette-break meditations.
Without him, I would still be the annoyed and shallow person who couldn’t see past the haze of my irritation, the cigarette stains on his fingers, the Truth Social memes.
Life makes martyrs of us all, in the end. It’s just more obvious with some of us than others. Every day, I (think I should) burn a Camel and pour a libation of burnt coffee at the feet of my concrete garden Buddha, in Gary’s name.
Hahahah — I’m just shitting you. I’m not going to go out and buy a pack of Camels for chrissakes — but I should, right?
Thank you, Gary. Godspeed and carburetors, my unlikely mentor!
Godspeed, Gary — Master of the Via Stultus!
So on the nose, Holly. We all have our own version of Gary in our lives. I no longer work in an office and I'm double grateful about that after reading your story.