Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) Read Online Free PDF

work-mandated therapy, he focus on something he loves. They bantered back and forth about it and after Jimmy had said beer and pizza, and the other members who were taking it more seriously got on his case, he admitted a soft spot for dogs. Not little yappy ones, but big Labs and Ridgebacks, St. Bernards and Akitas. Stan, a black guy with the body of a weightlifter, suggested he cut out pictures of dogs from magazines and make a scrapbook. “Calm your shit right down,” Stan assured him as he described the one he was doing with a sailboat theme. The idea struck Jimmy as hopelessly insipid but the next day he went to a crafts store and purchased a forest green faux-leather photo binder. Jimmy didn’t want to cut pictures out with a scissor and glue them into some scrapbook. What he would do: photograph the dogs he encounters with the camera in his cell phone, feed the pictures into his laptop, print them and place them in his book. It would serve not only as a means of calming himself, but also as a record of his various days. Jimmy had taken a strip of duct tape and placed it across the cover of the book. With a sharpie he had scrawled
BOOK OF DOGS.
He would stop anywhere he saw one—an arthritic Lhasa Apso on a Palm Springs sidewalk, a matted Collie in a tourist’s station wagon, a chained pit bull in a fenced desert yard—and ask the owner if he could take the dog’s picture for his book. Usually they didn’t mind. The project has been extant for little more than a month and Jimmy already has pictures of nearly two-dozen breeds.
    He’s on his second cup of the Sumatra looking at a photograph of a Jack Russell terrier that belongs to a robbery victim he had questioned the week before he was busted from the force when his cell phone chirps. He’s not happy to hear it. He wants to crush it under his heel. The anger. Still working on it. Maybe he should buy a ringtone. Something by Willie Nelson. Can’t be pissed off when you hear that voice.
    â€œWhy didn’t you show the flag this morning, Jimmy Ray?” Randall asks. “Don’t you remember our brother?”
    â€œOverslept.” Jimmy used to wish he had different siblings. He eventually amended that to wishing he was an only child. He appreciated Randall intervening when he had some trouble at work, but whenever he saw him, and recently it hasn’t been often, he always found the man too concerned about the family “brand.” And when he thought about Dale, well, that was pleasant like an aneurism.
    â€œWould have been good to get a picture of the three of us. He’s out now, remember?” Randall still with an edge. Jimmy tells him he remembers, in a tone that adds: and perhaps the state is making a big mistake, without actually saying the words. What he says is: “Thank god he’ll be home for Christ­mas,” and assumes Randall will recognize the joke.
    But if Randall wants to parse the nuance contained in Jimmy’s inflection, he gives no indication of that. “Can you do me a favor and look in on him? You got that key I sent you, right? The one to the condo I got him?” Jimmy grunts an affirmative reply, then overcome by an atavistic need to discomfit his brother, says “So, Randall, I was at that Mary Swain rally yesterday.”
    â€œYeah, why?”
    Jimmy can sense his brother’s annoyance crackling through the phone. “She is Szechuan hot.”
    Randall says, “Just be sure come Election Day you vote for the family business,” and clicks off. It amuses Jimmy that his brother doesn’t remember he moved out of the district when his marriage broke up.
    After the second cup of coffee he places his meditation cushion on the living room floor, sets a timer, then sits cross-legged and for the next twenty minutes observes his increasingly bothersome thoughts. How can anyone sit on a cushion, he wonders, and not have their heads explode from the