An evening on Alki

As I left work tonight, I faced a not uncommon dilemma - I had been planning to go to a meditation talk - you know, try to be among like minded, hopefully kind community - but I was hungry, and tired, and, well, lonely. And the paradox is in the evening, when I'm most lonely, I am also the most tired and unable to muster up the energy to go interact with new people. And the "old people" in my life have, well, lives - and partners and kids and the like. And sometimes - most times - being around strangers amplifies the loneliness, rather than ease it.

So, the point is my desire to soothe the loneliness via nachos won out over the Buddhist dharma talk - so I went to my favorite nachos place - Cactus. Yummy nachos. Right on Alki. Creme fresche and guac. Heaven. And aside from the loneliness amplification factor of being the only person sitting alone at a table in the cavernous place (it was happy hour time, you see) - and being too far from whatever was on the sports channel to get lost in it - it was a nice time.

One of the many activities I engaged in while dissociating from the frenzied happiness and increasing drunkeness of people around me was to watch the Mars Hill Bus loop around, and around, and around. Because tonight, you see, was the mass Baptism for a few thousand or so of the members of our local mega church. Which apparently has two full length public transit sized busses - in Heavenly white, of course, and a really nifty huge graphic "M" that circles halfway up the windows in the back of the bus. And they were transporting people from the makeshift park and ride at the high school to the waterside Christian rock/mega Baptism event at the beach. And there were thousands of people there. I mean, they were crammed together and spanned along pretty much the entire open space on the beach. And they were dead silent. Enraptured, no doubt, by the preacher's cadence and enthusiastic evangelical shouting. I walked back and forth several times, just watching this little slice of humanity. Not sure whether to be glad they have this community and a faith that sustains them, or frightened by the sheer number of them and their collective power to cause suffering through their intolerance and hate.

But, lest I became too bitter, after a while I wandered down to an area of the water front that was beyond earshot of the preaching. I sat on the retaining wall, watching the ocean undulating below. It's higher tide than I'd seen, and the water would sort of bounce back and forth between the ocean and the edge of the wall, then crash against the wall a few minutes after a ferry had passed - and then would still again.

At one point a fish threw itself out of the water, then fell back to the ocean. Then another did the same. I love when fish jump like that. I kept waiting for another to jump - but I guess they did their little show and were done for the night. Or perhaps they were playing with the seagulls who were circling and diving from above. Kind of tempting them, only to swim back off into the depths, far from their reach.

Or perhaps the sound of the preaching was amplified through the water, and the fish were throwing themselves out to have a moment of peace - or perhaps, to be caught by a seagull and put out of their misery.

Because everyone knows jumping fish are Atheists.