PART I: CORPORATE SALVATION

Call it survival instinct, call it whatever. I'd been meditating for years, but didn't really "get it" until I got stuck working for minimum wage at a Starbucks on the outskirts of Boulder. There's a reason Ramana "Captain Vedanta" Maharshi made begging a daily practice: nothing pushes you running and screaming towards a deeper perspective on life than boredom, pain, and dire poverty. And this wasn't even a regular Starbucks, where employees get full health benefits for working 20/hours a week and can take tips. This Starbucks was INSIDE of a Safeway Supermarket, and as such we fell under the employment restrictions of Safeway: no benefits, no tips.

It all started one day when I was walking down the magazine aisle to go to the bathroom. I was working my third opener in a row, which meant I had to set my alarm for 5am and dash down the highway on my bike in pitch blackness to set up coffee pots and stock the mocha pump before opening at 6. After 5 hours of pouring espresso and steamed milk for soccer moms and mountain biking dads, my legs were rubber, my skin drooped, my head was light and my eyes were losing focus.

But as I breathed deep, and relaxed my shoulders, and realized something: none of that pain was me. Somehow, what I called I had "stepped back" in a sense from my own body, like my mind was hovering somewhere "behind" (or "inside") my head, and everything in my field of awareness was an object in one big field of objects which included all the parts of my body, all the thoughts in my brain, all the Condé Nast publications to the right of me, all the Speed Sticks and Right Guards to the left of me, each note of the Gloria Estefan song filtering overhead, each screech of the store manager over the PA.

All of it was somehow inside of me, and all I really was the space it was all floating inside of, all I was the Witness, watching this 135-lb., hair-covered half-Italian, half-German body with the “Paul” nametag on its chest walk into the bathroom, unzip its milk-splattered black pants, watching the stream of piss sour the clear water of the urinal, watching a memory of bathrooms past float through the body's brain, watching the body wash its hands, walk back up the magazine aisle, around the corner and back into Starbucks.

"Paul, can you stock the pastries?"

I sighed: so much for The Witness. Nancy was the manager, and she was always on my back. I kept a small piece of paper under the register to write ideas on whenever she went to the bathroom, and two days before she had caught me with it (I told her Safeway didn't pay me enough not to screw around).

"Sure" I said, and grabbed a shopping cart to gather the brownies, blueberry muffins, and butter scones we kept in a freezer behind the seafood department.

The freezer was well under 30 degrees, and I felt my lungs harden as I pulled down boxes in search of frozen anti-Atkins snacks.

"How's the coffee business?" asked Eli, the tall, big-eared fish hawker standing in the freezer doorway.

"Not bad," I said. There was no way in I could stay in the Witness state with people like Eli making small talk all day long.

There was a line of lunch moms backing up at Starbucks when I got back, and Nancy was wild-eyed with customer service.

"PAUL, CAN YOU DO DRINKS WHILE I DO THE REGISTER?" she asked over the din of order requests.

I slammed the cart full of pastries into the wall and ran to place two Venti-sized cups under the espresso machine. A Sharpie-drawn "L" marked the "Drink" box of each cup, "L" meaning Latté. Latté, latté...

I poured whole milk into the metal milk pitcher and placed it under the steaming wand, estimating to myself that I'd made at least five hundred of the overpriced stomach-rotters in the two months I'd worked there. Five hundred of these dark espresso and foamed milk monsters had passed through my awareness and into the fidgeting hands of the addicted, five hundred....

As these thoughts passed through my brain, I remembered my realization from earlier that morning. It made me sad that it was so easy to get distracted and forget about The Witness, to forget that my "I" was an empty space with a an entire Universe of objects floating through it. I was lost in the making of lattés, lattés, lattés and more lattés...

And then it occurred to me, as I topped off the two Venti cups and plopped lids on top, that the lattés themselves could serve as a reminder to stay relaxed as The Witness in the midst of working, like the bell they use in Zen Centers when it’s time to meditate. Each time I made a latté, I could remind myself to fall back into the Witness, into Emptiness, to watch as the forms in front of me danced and suffered and spilled caramel sauce and fumbled with credit cards and asked for directions to the frozen pizza aisle.

Lattés were the perfect combination of Darkness and Lightness, of Emptiness and Form, of Witness and Witnessed. The espresso was dark, heavy, filled with energy and hidden from view, just like the Emptiness I'd just discovered, whereas the milk was light, fluffy, dense with disease (this was Safeway milk after all), and floating on the surface--much like the world of Form!

With a new sense of pride, I shoved the two venti-sized lattés into the hands of a grey-haired mother of three and dunked my withered limbs into the utility sink to wash the milk pitcher. When the lunch run was done a half hour later, Nancy excused herself to use the bathroom, and I ran to the register to pull out a new piece of paper.

In red ink: "Witness Latté: a contemplative solution for the salvation of Starbucks.” What had started as something of a shift in my psychology became an actual business plan for using espresso drinks to achieve what the Buddhists call "right livelihood". Not only would I use the Lattés I made everyday as constant reminders of my need to relax into The Witness (and thereby find an interior freedom from the rigors of the Starbucks lifestyle), but I decided I could find a way to save these twin evil corporations via a repackaged coffee-drink which promised metaphorical enlightenment with every gulp. In Boulder terms, not a bad marketing scheme.

But alas, some corporations are beyond salvation. A few weeks later, after my hot Mexican co-worker was wrongfully terminated for giving one of the guys in the deli a free coffee (coffee which was about to be dumped down the drain), and after I found a far more lucrative web design position, I hung my green Starbucks apron on the plastic hook in the utility closet, cleaned the milk froth from my forearms, grabbed another pen and paper and told Safeway to go fuck themselves.

PART II: THE EIGHT-ARMED WHEEL OF TORTURE

While the dream of marketing the Witness Latté soon evaporated like so much 2% on a badly-made cappucino, The Witness itself would prove handy months later when I accompanied a friend to an amusement park just north of Denver. While Lakeside Amusement Park is much smaller than the brand-new Six Flags across the river from downtown, what Lakeside lacks in acrobatic postmodern roller coasters and cartoon character corporate tie-ins it makes up for in sheer number and variety of nauseating, small-scale "spinning" rides, including all manner of ferris wheels, carousels, round-ups and caravans of little cars with fake guns.

The worst of these is the Octopus, an eight-legged instrument of orbital torture where not only the ride as a whole spins in a tight, black circle, but the cars attached to each arm spin in even tighter circles, all the while moving up and down in some rejected NASA engineer's idea of "fun." The twelve-story, zero-gravity and doom-defying somersaults of our nation's mightiest coasters have never bothered me, but when the safety bar locked me down into the Octopus, I closed my eyes and started writing out my will.

Imagine your brain being cut loose from your spinal column and slammed into the side of your skull in one direction, while your stomach wobbles inside out and slams into the side of your rib cage in another direction, all while the blood from your legs shoots up through your lungs and squirts out in clotted chunks from your tear ducts: that's a bit what the Octopus was like. While my date laughed and chortled in mild appreciation, I clutched the bar tight and preyed for a hang glider to sweep down from the mountains to pluck me from this certain doom. As the sun set over Lakeview, the Octopus spun faster and faster, the little Mexican kids on either side of us shrieked louder and louder, and I clamped my eyes shut and found... The Witness.

Suddenly, the pain was no longer a problem. While It did not diminish in the slightest, my subjective attachment to the whole experience did, and I found once again that "happy empty place" that once saved my ass at Starbucks. *I* was not weaving up and down in a multi-level mechanical orbit, the body in the center if my field of awareness was. I was not plotting out which brother to give my book collection to and which cousin to place in charge of my CD collection once I died, the brain in my awareness was. I was an empty space, completely independent of every withering, dying, screeching and screaming form in my awareness, each leg cramp and throbbing vein and gag reflex a mere collection of grains of sand blowing through the empty beach of my real Self, here one second, gone the next.

I was not suffering, I was aware of the suffering, and everything was fine, and soon the ride ended, and I watched as my date grabbed my hand, and as my body stood up, and as it wobbled a bit, and as it ran for the bathroom.