I Still Can't Get Over What the Dalai Lama Did

This post contains lethal doses of sarcasm if read irresponsibly.

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Even as the sun shines unobstructed and the sky beams its most radiant blue and the birds chirp relentlessly, there is something inherently fuzzy and underwater about spring when your brain is buzzing with extremely high-handed and especially unpleasant tidbits from social media. It gives your noumenal surroundings the same sort of watery echoed-out sonic aspect you get while submerged in a swimming pool. As I stroll outside in perfect weather, the video clip of the Dalai Lama telling a kid to “suck his tongue” periodically stumbles warbling up out of the fog and into my head.

“Surely this is just another deepfake AI post like the Pope jacket,” I deliberate internally. “Or maybe this was taken out of context.” Nope. This is the most out-of-pocket shit for a religious leader to say. If you plopped me in front of a child, there are a million phrases that would appear as a part of my calculus before I’d ask them to suck my tongue. I’d go with the requisite, “Good afternoon,” or even something like, “I bet when people ask your parents about you, they immediately change the subject.”

I don’t think that boy will have fond memories of meeting the Dalai Lama. Instead, he’ll have fondling memories.

How the Dalai Lama even arrived at this avant-garde kerfuffle is something beyond my developed sense for the uncanny. Were they lovers in a past life? Was he humming to “Suck My Kiss” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers? Do you have to achieve enlightenment in order to join NAMBLA? Is this a marketing scheme to appeal to the Roman Catholic Church?

Even in the context of janky sexts exchanged lazily and buffered with a luxurious misuse of punctuations, this is still a deeply bizarre off-hand comment. Even as the dialogue gets hot and heavy, if the other person asked you to suck their tongue, you would at least pause for a beat and think to yourself, “Was that a typo?”

The Dalai Lama offered a Notes App apology. That’s how fucked the state of the world is. The Dalai Lama gave the same kind of apology as Kevin Spacey.

Climate change can have us at this point.

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