My friend Arjan gave me a Zen Garden for Christmas. It’s inconspicuous. Takes up very little room in my apartment. I don’t know jack about Zen or gardening for that matter but the happiness that I get just gently raking my one foot square plot (with one of 4 rakes provided), makes my cynicism for such things mystical get caught in my throat. Combing intricate Mesopotamian crosshatch patters in the fine ancient sand, I like to think that the makers of the Zen Garden at least use authentic Japanese fine grained number 2 white sand – I’ll be damned if they can just manufacture such beauty in some sand plant in Jersey, and the harmonic arrangements of prehistoric black opal agates atop the sandy fertile crescent, provide an intense context for total control. The stock market maybe crashing – and I can’t do anything about it. The line at the post office is third world country long – and I can’t do anything about that. But at least I have a say where the tinny black rocks go and whether today the lines in the sand will go east-west or perhaps a more random ‘connect the rocks’ approach would be employed for a Thursday evening when I can’t control the fact that everything sucks on the 106 channels of cable that I have.

Someday I think I would like to visit some real Zen Gardens.

I think the true act of Zen that I am still waiting to perform with the Zen Garden, will be achieved when I take my Stanley hammer and smash it into teeny tinny bits. Or maybe I’ll just chuck the whole thing off my patio and watch it disintegrate on the pavement. It’s all natural so no feelings of guilt would follow by returning the Zen Garden back to the larger “Garden”.

Again, I don’t know anything about Zen, but I would hope the natural entropy in the final destruction of the garden would be close to a paramount Zen state. But if not, it will still be fun. In either case, I’ll post photos of the final result.

There must be a ton of sites out there with photos or video of people smashing things. Please if you know of any pass them my way.

In heavy rotation: the Diabolical Biz Markie. Cause he never sleeps and neither should you.