Howling Dog part 2

I am sitting again. I can’t believe it. This time the room is familiar, I’m in the country I was born, in a dojo I’ve spent a lot of time in. Likewise the faces that surround me this time are all familiar. We are sitting crosslegged in two lines facing each other. Some people laughed nervously in the dressing room as we changed from our civilian clothes into our gis. I kept my head down in silence. The seshin begins with a sit and is followed by a walk and then another sit.

Like a true zen master, like any one the dozens of Dogens, as soon as the first sit begins, I immediately begin writing the sequel to “Howling Dog” in my head. “Hey its me again. That guy who hates sitting, and wrote that long essay about it that was a smashing success. In fact, it caused an international sensation. I heard there was a pack of Canadian zen monk extremists who were trying to kill me. Well let me just start off by saying I live at 128 Macdonough st. If you have a problem with this next essay, no more aggressive emails to the middlemen, I expect to find you outside my apartment when I go out for a morning coffee, sitting crosslegged with a menacing look in your eyes, ready to settle the score once and for all. I’m back sitting again. Who knows whats going to happen this time. You might be asking, along with me and everyone else I know besides these freaks in the room, why on earth am I doing this again? The answer is, I have no idea. Am I being forced to do it? No. So then, do I want to do it? Definitely not. Maybe I feel like I ought to do it? But not really. I actually have no idea why I’m here. Weird. But here I am.”

The first two sits passed in a daze. My mindset was calm, as you can tell, I was already on the brink of enlightenment. Next up we had the dokusan, the one-on-one meeting with Komyo, the zen monk. As I’m waiting for my meeting on my knees in seza at the bell, my neck is hurting and take the opportunity to roll my head back and forth a couple times. The dude who is “leading” the seshin, i.e. the guy who nags you while you’re meditating, his name is zooeyho, yells in an annoying voice at everyone but me in particular “do not move”. I look up above the bell and there’s a rack of wooden swords. Suddenly I’m on my feet and brandishing one over my head walking towards him. “What the fuck did you say to me?” But I’m still kneeling, I’m already in pain, Komyo is ready for me and I ring the bell. I approach the room where she is, and stop awkwardly in the doorway to bow the first of three mandatory bows. On the way back up I bump my head hard on the lintel. Then I immediately almost trip on my oversized feet as I go in for the second bow on my knees. I am a mess, and the seshin has barely started. I am supposed to “announce” myself like, “My name is Sam, my practice is pain management” but that feels insane to me, so I bow my head in silence. I half-expect her to begin, “So I read your article…” but instead she says, “so last time your practice was ‘breath-following’. I nod. Given to me at the last session, breath-following (or “mu” practice) consists of paying close attention to your inhalation and exhalation. Its a sort of hypnotic mantra I repeat to myself while sitting, “inhale the experience of the moment, follow the exhalation outward”. Sometimes you’re even supposed to say ‘mu’ in your head as you exhale. Like someone actually said to me, “Say mu.” without acknowledging that it is also the sound cows make. To think, all these people sitting in a row mooing to themselves silently, and no one even laughs about it.

I have a brief conversation about breath-following with Komyo, and she assigns me my new practice—gen, which means ‘origins’ or ‘source’. This is basically meant to beef up my mantra so the narrator will now say, “inhale the experience of this moment, what is its origin? Follow the exhale out as it dissolves back into the source.” In that moment it makes sense to me, my task is straightforward. I return to my seat and reflect on what just happened. The room was dark but it flickered, was it lit by candles? The whole thing had the feeling of meeting with the Godfather in his office on the day of his daughter’s wedding. Komyo is so authoritative and solid, but she’s also small and your eyes roll off her so that its like she’s a part of the room, almost like a piece of furniture. I’m sitting back on my cushion, trying to figure out if I just had a conversation with a chair that encouraged me to inquire into the origins of existence. Next thing I know this fucking guy zueyho is walking around with a bamboo stick and people are leaning over to receive the blows on their shoulder. So now I’m investigating the source of the universe while the person across from me is being beaten with a stick. And to make matters much worse, Zueyho keeps bowing very low to the people across from me and so his ass is right in my face. I inhale, what is the source of this experience?

Friday night is short and its over before the pain reaches anything close to unbearable. It doesn’t feel good though. I had been invited (you know how some invitations have threatening undertones?) to sleep at the dojo for the weekend, but I felt like it was important to keep up some boundaries during the experience. It definitely feels like the right decision because instead of eating dinner on my knees with the others I am free and celebrate that freedom with a glass of wine at the bar next door (good for circulation) and a cigarette (bad for circulation) and then get on my bike and head home.

Saturday morning, I wake up in my bed with my girl’s warm body pushed against me. Upon getting up out of bed she turns and calls me back to her. “Why are you leaving?” she asks. Oh, how could I answer her? I don’t know anymore than she does. I’m eating yogurt and drinking coffee, getting dressed, nervous that I might not be able to take a shit before I go. I must have said something, because my girl calls from bed, “well if you’re farting up a storm later today then at least you’ll know what the gen is of your fartstorm.” This dream woman, warm in bed, about to watch cartoons and wanting nothing more than to cuddle with me, and yet here I am getting on my bicycle and heading to the dojo. Now I’m back on the cushion 15 minutes before the sit begins. We do the morning chanting which I love, take our ceremonial tea which is bizarre and basically the worst way you could possibly drink tea because for some reason you have to chug it instead of sipping and enjoying it. But whatever, weirdly enough, the first sit is actually pretty nice. I’m tired, a little delirious but there is no pain yet and its peaceful. The light is soft, and the cars passing by outside on third ave sound like the distant ocean tide. I go there. First of course to the Hallows in Truro, but then I go to practically every body of water I’ve ever been in. Uncle Jonathan’s pool when I was 6, Grandma’s condo on the beach in West Palm, the pacific that day I biked around San Fran in 2014, the water in Maine last weekend, Zs pool where we took drugs and jumped off the diving board, the bay with Hallie when I was 18, even the mud at summer camp, miller pond, that stream in Pennsylvania where Garret made everyone laugh by covering his penis in river grass and then peeing through it. The swamp in the Louisiana bayou 2010, I’m in waders pile driving stakes in the river bed while the oil is slowly creeping in around me. I divide monuments around the world between old lovers and friends. The amount of shit I think about is endless and random. Am I done smoking weed? Oh yeah that reminds me, theres weed in my backpack, shit I got to take that out. Its funny how in Princess Bride he poisons both glasses of wine. Aerial a million times and a million different ways. The Hart street boys and how they owe me my security deposit. My 6th grade teacher Ms.Fitzpatrick and how her apartment burned down and I was there with my dad watching the firemen and she was sobbing and broken. Weird how I performed that Pearl Jam song in a talent show in her class by just putting on the cd and singing along. It was probably my brother’s cd. My brother. My brother a million times and a million different ways. The girl sitting next to me now in Brooklyn. Sofia and Greece. Some beautiful thing where I’m hallucinating trails behind imaginary aikido moves so I can truly visualize the circular movements of the techniques. And then the bell rings and we are standing up and walking around in circles.

More sits. At some point tea with pastries that look straight out of the Great British Baking Show, which coincidentally my girl is probably watching in bed right about now. A delicate and delicious pastry in the face of the ravaging horror of sitting still all day is an bizarre juxtaposition and it makes me laugh. The conversations of passerby’s outside on 3rd ave seem like split-personality voices in my head. When the historical Buddah vowed to sit still under the Bo tree until enlightenment, almost immediately several demons came out to interfere with him. Now its exactly like that, only: “Oh my god! I know! So crazy. Its like we never see each other until we do and then we’re like seeing each other all the time!” or “Yeah, I dunno, nothing, whataboutyou? I know, right? Lets meet up, ok I’ll just grab an uber and meet you over there.” and also “Yeah this is like a sports gym or something. Or like, a kung fu dojo. Yeah and this is a bar.” It becomes a mantra in my head. This is a dojo, this is a bar. This is a dojo, this is a bar. I look through the wall in front of me and see the bar on the other side. There are people standing around casually chatting and sipping some beers. I stand up and charge, breaking clean through the wall and walk right up to the bartender and order a glass of red wine. I’m still sitting. That was a real break-through. I actually find the small talk outside kind of beautiful. Its part of the enchantment of New York. On any given day, you’re wandering around frivolously and 10 feet away from you there might be a room full of people doing some straight up voodoo shit. And you’d never know it, but I think you feel it. The cacophony of vibrations emanate out and infuse the streets with tension and magic. Or maybe I’m starting to hallucinate.

A few more sits and walks, and then we have a dokusan. The pain hasn’t taken over everything yet so I feel like I can really have a conversation with Komyo about Gen. After my three bows I try to announce myself, and go right in. I tell her while I was here last night I felt clarity about the question, but it faded once I got on the mat. She nodded in recognition. I revealed to her that when a sit is going well, it sometimes seems to me that I’m just a mushroom sitting in the forest floor. And now the idea of the mushroom inquiring about its original source seems ridiculous to me. She seems to love the idea of me as a mushroom, and almost laughs. She says, “One way in which you’re different than a mushroom, besides your particular form, is consciousness.” And while that makes sense to me, I don’t totally get her angle because it also seems like she’s trying to break me free of my consciousness. This is a contradiction that she would probably be totally fine with. In fact, the entire operation and ideology seems to run on contradictions. At its core, the project of zen seems to be posing and then dialectically resolving, or transcending, these central contradictions of experience. But then again, zen is not a project, it’s actually nothing at all. You know what I mean? I’m actually ok with this, I like poetry, I’m drawn in by the contradictions of life. But theres still something about this zen context thats bugging me. I’m back on my cushion now thinking about it, and off the top of my head, I lash out— its ridiculous that they’re transcending these contradictions while at the same time they still care a lot about trivial superstitious shit like not stepping over your sutra book. Fuck that. What does any of it matter. Self care is hedonistic because there is no self, but also what are we actually doing? Why are we choosing to do this? Isn’t it a form of self-care? Whats wrong with that if it is? Would it better for them if we just go brain dead instead? Well, whats stopping you? And just like that it dawns on me; the pain is back. Its everywhere, and its affecting my thoughts. Here we go.

My knees are on fire. The inside of my foot is clenched up. My lower back is starting to ache. My hips are grinding against their socket. My heel is uncomfortable under my ass, everything is falling asleep. I’m pleading with the Zooeyho guy to ring the bell signaling the end of this particular sit. My vision is fixed on him from the corner of my eye. Do it Zuey, you bastard. I’m starting to freak out and he still won’t ring the bell. I’m seething. Finally a bell rings, but its not from Zooeho, it comes from upstairs—its time for lunch. We file upstairs and sit on our knees on the hardwood floor and wolf down a bowl of rice and miso soup. Then we split up for an hour of cleaning; my assignment is to wash dishes, deep clean the stove, and wipe down the cabinets. Behind me two people receive a lesson in flower presentation from Komyo. That seems way better than doing dishes, but I also remember that there are a dozen people in the basement right now doing God knows what and so all things said in done it’s not so bad cleaning the kitchen. It beats the hell out of sitting. But sitting is why we’re all here, and back to the cushions we go.

As we file back downstairs I see a lectern set up at the end of the dojo, I cringe knowing what cruel fait awaits me. Recall that normal sitting sessions last between 30 and 45 minutes, but the lectures usually last between 50-75 minutes. Its too much. She begins with a koan about a 200 year old monk who takes a boat from India to China and interfaces with the emperor where he answers questions in typical cryptic zen fashion. Right as the koan ends, zooeyho rings a bell for dramatic effect. These fucking people…

For the next 45 minutes Komyo waxes philosophical about the koan and the monk while I panic inside. I suddenly remember that last time I promised myself I would never do this again. It’s just not for me, but now its too late, I’m here. Why? I forgot! I’m screwed. I’m anguished. Tears start pouring down my cheek. I’m in excruciating pain and I am trapped; I am the suffering dog caught in the trap. It literally feels like I’m sitting cross legged on a piles of bricks. I look down to see what the hell is going on and I’m still just sitting on a cushion. I’m hallucinating, I’m disassociated from my reality. There is just no way I’m sitting on a cushion, it is a cold-hearted and rigid pile of bricks that are digging into my legs and destroying me. The pain has hit a fever pitch, I am past the point of no return. Even when the sit ends, I get no relief from the walking in circles. Everything still feels brittle, it’s like I’m actually injured. And am I? Who knows?

At some point the bell rings upstairs again, and we file up joylessly for dinner. By this point I’m broken. Sitting on my knees again on the hardwood floor is unbearable and I’m leaning hard to my left and slouched way forward. For some reason the sight of Cormac, my sensei’s son, is devastating for me. We usually play around and goof off with each other, he’s never seen me so broken and dejected, and it feels wrong that he has to. There are tears in my eyes and I drop my head down to hide them in shame. With chopsticks shaking in my hand I shovel the rice and squash soup down my throat. There is an apple slice in my bowl of rice, and Sensei informs us that it is to be used to get every last bit of soup out of the bowl. So when I’m finished eating I take the apple slice with my hands and start sweeping up the soup remnants from my bowl. It gets soggy and crumbles in my fingers, I go to eat the soup and its all over my hands. We have no napkins so I reach to the inside of my gi and wipe my hands in my armpits. I look up and sensei is looking at me with astonishment. He furiously gestures towards my tea cup indicating that I should use the tea to get loose the remaining soup particles. I pour my tea into the near-empty bowl and swish it around and bring it to my mouth to sip, but somehow manage to spill all over myself. Sensei is shaking his head disapprovingly, or else he hasn’t seen me spill at all and this is just how he looks at all times during seshin. This might be hell on earth.

After dinner we clean for an hour. Kate comes down and hugs me tightly and I almost break down completely. At some point Sensei comes to speak with me briefly, inquiring about my experience thus far. I tell him its going really badly again, just as much as last time. He says, “No you look a little better this time. Last time you were really on the gallows.” I tell him, “one things for sure, I can’t keep doing this. I can’t have almost no zazen as part of my daily experience and then just randomly jump into crazy zazen binge mode”. “Good,” he’s said, “maybe this a wake up call for you to sit more zazen.” “Actually I was sort of thinking, you know, the other way.” He smiled. “Well if you want to take the red pill or whatever and go back to a surface level existence your welcome to do that.” I didn’t answer. Instead I thought about all the things I would have done today had I not been sitting. Cuddling with the girl warm in bed watching t.v. Ike had a bbq in prospect park in the afternoon, the twins Margaret and Lydia had their house warming in Bed study in the evening, Edgar Olliver performed a one-man play in the village at night, and Evan had his late night going away party at a karaoke bar in chinatown. It was probably just getting started as I returned to my cushion to sit.

At this point of the night, the sits are getting rapidly worse and they appear to be getting longer too. Like this guy zoeyho is trying to prove something or is fucking with me. I stew in anger and suffering. Fuck zueyho. Just because he knows the little rules and restrictions of zen doesn’t mean he has to be an asshole about it. But he can’t help it, its who he is. Its who he always has been. Fuck zueyho when he was in middle school, fuck zueyho in highshcool for sure, definitely fuck zueyho in college, fuck zueyho when he started to get into buddhism, and fuck zueyho this morning when he woke up and couldn’t help but be an asshole all day. But please zooeyho. Please, I beg you. Your not so bad, just have a little sympathy, ring the bell. My silent pleading is a whimpering in my head, I am crying again. And of so course, now its time for the last dokusan.

I go in there, I bow and I can barely pull myself back up off the floor. Komyo takes one look at me and says, “The pain is back? And the anger?” I nod. “Once there was a zen monk who was stabbed to death—“ and I just can’t take it, its so absurd, and I start laughing but I’m also clearly annoyed and upset. “So what then?” she says. “What do you want to do about it? You want to scream at me? Curse me? Go ahead, do it. Yell at me. Go ahead!” I don’t know what to do, I’m stunned. “Come on! What’s stopping you?” she asks. “Decor” I reply. I might have meant to say ‘decorum’, as in the thing thats stopping me is that it would be inappropriate to yell given that everyone else is sitting silently in the next room. Then again, I might have actually meant ‘decor’ in reference to the fact that the tapestry in the office had somehow come alive and was commanding me to yell at it. Komyo replied, “I’ll do it” and followed with a loud and guttural yelp in my face, as if she were trying to startle me. I drop my shoulder and take a deep breath and start yelling at her at the top of my lungs. “AAAAAAAAAh” I cry. “AGAIN!” she yells. “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH” “LOUDER!!” “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH” I am repeatedly roaring with everything that I have, my voice is cracking, directly at Komyo’s face 3 ft in front of me. I forget everything. I am howling wildly and she is egging me on yelling repeatedly “LOUDER! AGAIN!” I have nothing left. I am ready to collapse. “Where is the pain now?” she asks calmly. “Its gone” I reply. “You must exhaust yourself completely. Scream again.” One final cry and my voice dies. She rings the bell and I return to my cushion. The pain comes back immediately, the suffering soon follows. It goes on like that for the rest of the night.

Sunday morning, my legs can’t believe they’re back in this position. Kate inexplicably moves me over to the left one, perhaps to be in better view of sensei who is taking over for zueyho today or perhaps to separate me from Rebecca who is also having a really terrible time. The first sit is wonderful. Peaceful, serene even. I am awake, but soft focus eyes, the morning light is changing slowly, shadows gently receding before me. There is no pain. A thought occurs to me that this is the nicest moment of the whole experience. Immediately it is answered by another thought saying, really? this is it? this is as good as it gets? why is this worth it? Even at the peak serenity there is still a lot of resistance to what I’m doing. Sitting. Walking. Sitting. Thinking more about Gen. Saturday morning, Komyo had told me she was more interested in my questions than in what I already knew. More curious about how my mind inquired, rather than the conclusions it rested upon. I felt like I was beginning to get it. In order to crack the gen code, I needed to abandon the scientific, rational mind approach, in favor of the guttural rejection of the premise itself. Gen is a concept. Gen is predicated on time and even space, and my hara cannot relate. Boom, I solved the koan. And now it was time for the final dokusan of the seshin.

I rehearsed what I would say as I waited my turn to go in. I bowed down three ceremonial times. I still could not manage to announce myself in the proper way, it just felt too silly. I wondered if either one of us would speak about the primal screaming from last night. I wanted to thank her maybe, and also ask what she was going to say about the monk who was stabbed to death. But I was also eager to tell her my thoughts on Gen. She spoke first. “So… Gen…” “Yes Gen”, I replied. Before I knew it I was well into my carefully prepared monologue: “My brain had wanted to answer the question of Gen with a montage of evolution in reverse, starting from this moment back to my birth to my parents to the first humans, to the mammals all the way to the beginning of the planet, and before, to the big bang. The origin. But when I put the question to my hara, my gut, as instructed, and waited for a response nothing happened, nothing came. After some consideration, I realized this is because Gen is a concept. There is no source, there is no origin; there is only this next breath.” I waited proudly for praise and validation. In a way I got it, she smiled and nodded and said I was on the right track, she said I should keep focusing on my hara and what it was experiencing. She rang the bell.

Thats it? I returned to my seat and felt let down immediately. Last night we were two dragons hollering at each other, there was fire and there was truth. But today? I was like a child, a proud little brown noser who came early to class with my assignments completed and was the first one to raise my hand to show off the answers. What a waste. I realized I did the exact thing she said not to do, she was not interested in what I knew, she was interested in what I didn’t know. But instead I tried to show off what I had figured out. I probably was right, but it was totally pointless. I thought about what she said, try to focus on my haras experience. I have no idea what this means, is it symbolic? What if she literally means, focus on the experience of my gut? So I angle my head down a little bit and keep my eyes fixed on my stomach, watching it sway in and out. I flexed at the peak of the inhale and released on the exhale. I pushed the air lower and lower in to my gut, searching for my hara. But where is it? Is it in the muscle where I flex? Is it further down where I clench my butt? I remained unsure, but spent the next couple of sits just watching my stomach move and searching for my literal hara.

Soon it was time for tea and a treat. This time the treat was a coconut cacou ball situation with a walnut on top. Another top notch little sweet. I pretended it was a drug that could shut my mind down. We are a cult and we were all about to drink the kool-aid, take the communion, eat the ayahuasca. I was using my imagination to manifest a power in the chocolate ball. I ate it slowly and paid close to attention to it dissolving into my body and my blood. I felt the chemical change inside me. It buzzed pleasantly behind my eyes, in my temples. It’s working, I thought. Then another voice said if it’s working you wouldn’t think “it’s working”.

As the day went on the pain started building up again, but I also weirdly felt good. In one quinhin walk, I almost started skipping. I was smiling, even delighted. This is fucking crazy I thought. Something really bizarre was happening, my mind was tricking me, or maybe I was tricking it. Perhaps I had reached nirvana, or a complete mental breakdown. It didn’t last. The sits were growing long and the pain was starting to hit its fever pitch. But I was also still locked into my hara. Something started to happening. This might sound weird, its still weird to me. But In addition to breathing down into my gut and flexing, I also started to drop my consciousness downward too. Upon the inhale, my consciousness would go to the back of my brain, right above my neck and slide down my spine closely following right behind the the path of the inhalation. Then it would rest for a moment in the flexed part of my stomach. Immediately after it would come bursting back upward and with the consciousness came the suffering. Like a ball being pushed under water, I could hold it down for a moment or so but it would respond with great force and push back up to the surface. But then again on the next inhale I would do the same thing. I could literally feel my consciousness going to the back of my head and then down my spine. It was like a life hack I had learned. I couldn’t do it every time but I was doing it with regularity. At first I couldn’t make it last for more than one breath, but slowly I could keep it down for two or three breaths at a time. Even as the pain started to sing loudly in my knees and hips, for those moments that my mind was in my hara I was not suffering. I had glimpsed this separation of pain and suffering last February, but now I was actually doing it. It was extremely difficult and required tremendous and unbroken concentration and effort. I still felt the pain acutely, it was immense, but it didn’t really bother me. Even towards the end of the sit as the pain swelled into enormous horrible sharp stabbing sensations, I just didn’t care. I saw out of the corner of my eye Sensei pick up the bell and for the first time ever I didn’t feel extraordinary relief knowing the sit was through. I felt indifference. In the following quinhin, I didn’t feel light and happiness as before, I actually felt more aware of the pain. I was limping badly, my knees felt brittle, it was like I had terrible shin splints. But I also felt confident I could endure the rest of the sit. And because of the perfect timing of session, the next segment was the dreaded lecture.

The lecture was endless. It must have clocked in around 75 minutes. It was an endurance test, it was crazy. But as long as I kept the ball of consciousness down I was ok, and then it would rush back into my brain I would be devastated. When that happened, instead of tears I almost broke out into maniacal laughter several times. I couldn’t quite believe the struggle I was engaged in inside my body. All my concentration and effort to keep my consciousness grounded in my gut as it periodically exploded back into my brain. It was hilarious. And profoundly terrible. I couldn’t possible tell you what the lecture was about, but it went on for fucking ever. I started hallucinating movements in my periphery. The matts swirled from gray to vibrant blue to ocean green, to treebark brown. The hands of the sitter in front of me turned gold, into a pendant. I was laughing out loud and breathing extremely deep. I could have gone on like that forever. I was on the brink of madness. My consciousness was in my gut, I was holding it there for 7 or 8 breaths in a row, and then it would roar back up with a vengeance and fill my whole body with dreadful suffering. It was fucking crazy. What was in that chocolate ball?

The seshin was approaching its conclusion. There was supposed to be some ceremony for Ashwini as she took some vow. Anyone who had white socks were asked to put them on while were we walking in a circle. It felt weird, the room filled up with tension. What was about to happen? What’s she about to do? Will they take her away after this? Will she have to leave new york to live in a monastary? Should I save her? I was considering grabbing her and sprinting out of the dojo when the wood clapped and we all returned to the cushion Its too late for her. She sits in the middle of the two rows in front of Komyo. We begin chanting in the group. I love chanting the heart sutra in Japanese. It’s this beautiful song, I don’t understand a word in it, but I still have all my favorite parts of the song. The chorus (“han ya ha ra mi ta shin gyo”) and some nice bridge sections (“ha ra gya te hara so gya te”). And then also my favorite part where it calls out my name twice “sam bo dai sam”. But to my horror we chant it in English this time. It is aesthetically ugly and the lyrics turn out to be just awful. “I will not eat not see not smell. This is no lie, this is no joke, this is the best.” Preposterous. I was disappointed, but happy that they didn’t end up taking Ash away (although they did give her a new name, so in a way they did). She vowed to not hurt anyone, not lust, not taking intoxicants (are chocalate coconut balls ok?), and then they gave her what looked like a nice black smock to wear around her neck. The ceremony was over and there was one final walk around and one last sit. As it was ending who was once Ashwini, now Haryo, got up to go hit the han, a ceremonial slab of wood you hit with a hammer at the beginning and end of the seshin. Its finally over I’m thinking. But seshin is like a horror movie, and just when you think the credits are about to roll, the villain comes back for one last battle. So on cue, the fucking tea people were back and we were still sitting and chugging tea like maniacs.