Sober Reflections on Getting Wasted (Notes from a Car by the Ocean #2)

Wasn’t lookin’ too good but I was feelin’ real well...
Keith Richards

My earliest introduction to the whole Eastern philosophy thing came from friends who were mostly into attaining higher consciousness by other means....generally speaking, the emphasis tended to be on escaping from a world we never made...which, I’ve since learned, is the opposite of what yoga is about, ideally...though some would disagree on that....hell, even if escape might, ultimately, be impossible, it still sometimes seems a lot easier than being here without reservations...and that, it appears, is where drugs and religion tend to meet...with one, of course, far more destructive than the other...though I won’t say which one that is....

I inhaled frequently. That was the point.
Barack Obama

....in The Bacchae by Euripides, Pentheus, king of Thebes, decides the people of his city need to be more rational and sober...no more honoring Dionysus with drunkenness and revelry....to make a long story short, Pentheus’ head ends up on a stick carried by his mother as she leads a group of revelers marching into Thebes....nowadays in America, everybody agrees we’ve got a problem with drinking and driving, though, despite melting ice caps and 45,000 traffic fatalities a year, the main focus always seems to be on the drinking rather than the driving...with the perennial solution being, as with most problems, putting more people in prison...which, when a drunk with a suspended license slams into a school bus, is kinda hard to argue with....nonetheless, living in a place where the last train leaves two or three hours before the bars close, I can’t help wondering what might happen if we let just a little bit of the seemingly limitless supply of funding for new prison construction go toward providing alternative means of getting home from the bars....

...until that happens, if you’re going out for New Years’ Eve, take your toothbrush....

Notes from a car by the ocean #1

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.
Rabindranath Tagore

...gone cold turkey from the internet...walking in sand for two hours, watching clouds turn a deep blue early then dissipate...never a drop on me...the way back not necessarily shorter or longer, but mostly on pavement, or dirt, or those recycled plastic raised walkways in the wildlife refuge...so much work goes into creating natural environments...moving wetlands around, eliminating invasive species...all performed, of course, by the biggest invasive species of them all...though, as one specimen of it, maybe I shouldn’t complain....once upon a time, goddesses were born of waves like these...nowadays, people surf porn...angels we have heard on high...or we haven’t...too much dissonance...then, as a long time fan of dissonance, I’m not complaining...not exactly...

Forget the past, and just say yes....
Sonic Youth

...maybe I’ll go out in the car late tonight, laptop on the passenger seat, searching for a signal so I can post this....the one-man yoga retreat’s been uneventful...which, in such instances, is the definition of going well...certainly healthier than the dope-smoking, wine-drinking, and depression-wallowing retreats of old...though the body’s older, too...and so’s the mind...and at least part of that’s a good thing...

If I had it to do all over again...I wouldn’t!
Anonymous quote in my high school yearbook

...a couple years ago I hung out in a coffee shop where every afternoon these kids would come in...clearly the artist and outsider crowd at their high school...long haired boys with spiky purple haired girls...a mix of sub-cultural signifiers that once might’ve meant conflict...and their spontaneous absurdist repartee was so clever, so funny...I wondered if I should wander a table or two over and introduce myself...the couple decades between us be damned... hang out with them...hope they wouldn’t ask me to buy them cigarettes...though I might compromise on beer, if they were responsible about it...but then one day, the coolest of the cool kids...the one with the unworldly wise twinkle in his eye beneath the long sandy hair and above the mustache and beard he couldn’t quite grow...was holding court when a woman walked in...middle aged, short sandy hair, apparently out for a run...called him honey and suggested politely that could have dinner around 6:00, if that was okay...and suddenly the tart eloquence was gone...replaced with a guttural okay above the slumping shoulders of one unspeakably humiliated by the public recognition that he has a mother....I left town soon after, and never did go over and hang out with those guys....

The Return of the Not-So-Thin White Duke

Yoga for Cynics is back!

What’s that? You hadn’t noticed it was gone? Okay, judging by the date up there, it’s only been a couple days...but it seems like longer...maybe because the holidays happened...not all that eventful but, as always, so deep down expected-to-be-eventful that, on a deep down emotional level...they were eventful...kinda...and, in the midst of all that, the laptop that birthed this blog crashed on Christmas Eve...big time...Titanic into iceberg...kamikaze pilot into aircraft carrier...George of the Jungle into tree....not that I wasn't prepared...emotionally, if not financially...but who could have expected it to happen just before one of the only days of the year when you can't go out and spend money you don't have to buy another one?...drawing into sharp relief the extent to which I’ve become dependent on whatever computer I happen to own, as if it were a major bodily organ...

Thus...it’s somewhat fitting that the title of this post comes from Bowie’s Station to Station, which, like all good pretentious rock n’ roll songs from its era, is about coming down from a heavy-duty drug addiction...and yet, I had to alter it since, particularly after so much holiday indulgence, there’s no way I’m gonna pass for the thin white duke....One thing that's cool about the yoga crowd, they tend to be into healthy lifestyles but not at all into that anorexic ideal that tends to pass for being-in-shape in Western society...and yet, here I am feeling too fat to fit into a goddamn David Bowie song....

So, for now, I’m heading down to the beach for a one man yoga retreat ’til the New Year....began my boycott of New Years Eve events about a decade ago, after six lousy ones in a row...though there were a couple good times before that...sitting quietly on the red rocks overlooking Boulder until the hoots and hollers erupted far below to let us know it was midnight....tramping across frozen farmers’ fields in the Amish country at four A.M. to stumble upon cosmic vortexes...or at least they seemed like cosmic vortexes at the time....

...and, anyway, the shore’s a good place to be in the winter...walking in the sand from lunch ’til dusk...perhaps working off some waffle cookies and red wine...reading and writing late into the night...no internet access unless I wanna carry the computer around town looking for a signal....never mind if I end up doing less actual yoga on these retreats than if I stayed home and went to class like usual...in the season of giving, it’s always the thought that counts.....

The Obligatory Happy Christmas Blog Post

Tell me what you think about your friends at the top,
Now, who d’ you think besides yourself was the pick of the crop?
Buddha was he where it’s at, is he where you are?
Could Mohammed move a mountain or was that just P.R.?
Judas Iscariot (Tim Rice, Jesus Christ Superstar)

The letter killeth....
2nd Corinthians, 3:6

Is there any word in any language more devalued by misuse as peace? Love would, at the very least, be a close runner-up....might be interesting if somebody did a study of how many people have been killed for peace vs. the number killed for love....then, it’d also probably be pretty depressing...and the number killed for some peculiar combination of both would most likely eclipse the individual totals, anyway....

...so I’m not gonna say anything about either peace or love...or any creative mixes of the two....in fact, I think it might be a good idea to strike both words from the dictionary...along with any and all synonyms...that way, if you want to signify peace, you'll actually have to be peaceful, and, likewise, if you want to signify love, you'll actually have to be loving....

Happy Holidays from Yoga for Cynics....

Deep Dog Consciousness at the Winter Solstice

We had a kind of a special yoga class this weekend, for the Winter Solstice....all that nature & renewal kinda stuff....at one point...this is gonna sound really hokey to the non-yoga cynics out there...we were doing sun salutations and our legendary teacher told us to improvise for the next five minutes or so...move in whatever way felt most natural...needless to say, there’s nothing harder than being natural on demand...so I kept doing the usual thing...though noticing that it did feel a bit stiff...then, gradually, found myself swinging between upward and downward facing dog in an almost wavelike fashion...which did feel surprisingly right...like I’d really gotten into some kinda deep down dog consciousness for the Winter Solstice...

woof

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war is what William Shakespeare had Marc Antony exclaim over the body of Caesar....notably, though, neither Shakespeare nor Antony was actually a dog....

Fear and Loathing in the Holiday Season (Ghosts of Christmas Past #3)

It’s comin’ on Christmas, they’re cuttin’ down trees.
They’re puttin’ up reindeer, singin’ songs of joy and peace
I wish I had a river I could skate away on....
Joni Mitchell

Here we are at that time of year when loved ones reunite...and are reminded of why they see so little of each other during the year....One Thanksgiving, I drove up to Steamboat Springs in Colorado, where some friends had rented a house with a hot-tub on the back porch for a three-day party. We’d be out there in the hot-tub with the temperature all around us at something like -10 Fahrenheit, and would get so cooked that we’d get out and jump...bare-assed naked...these were some very crunchy friends...off the porch into deep snowbanks, then climb back into the tub once the cold started sinking in a bit...which took a surprisingly long time....Anyway, on Thanksgiving day, I called home, making a joke as I dialed to the effect that they’re probably having the annual family blow-up right about now. My mom answered, sounding cheerful but asking me to call back in half an hour...turned out I’d nailed it....

Right around that time, dreading going home for Christmas...for reasons that represent more of my family’s dirty laundry than I’m gonna air here...I was talking to some friends on a sidewalk in Flagstaff, AZ, where I lived at the time, and said something like shouldn’t your family be a sanctuary from all the meanness in the world, one place where you’re unconditionally accepted and supported? One guy I didn’t know too well said if it was like that, you never would’ve left...and he had a point....

Sounds of Music: Ghosts of Christmas Past #2

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels

Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles

Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings

These are a few of my favorite things....
Rodgers and Hammerstein

Christmas afternoon four or five years ago, I was watching the Sound of Music on T.V. with my niece...who I think was five at the time, but already knew all the songs. Responding to an on-screen exchange, she asked me what Heil Hitler meant....I said “um...well...Hitler was a very mean man. And, when that guy says that, it means he likes the mean man, but Mr. Von Trapp won’t say it because he’s a nice man and....” Fortunately, she lost interest.....

One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain....
Bob Marley

The day after my dad’s memorial service, I walked into a family discussion about whose house would be least depressing for the holidays....I said let’s go somewhere far away and warm.... Four months later, on Christmas Eve, my mom, younger brother, and I flew to the island nation of St. Lucia, after a bumpy drive through rainforest, mountains, and banana plantations, arriving at an all-inclusive resort on the Caribbean side...though I didn't realize until they kept bringing us these incredibly potent rum punches as we waited for our rooms to be ready that all-inclusive included unlimited alcohol...knowing at that moment that no writing or anything else productive would be done on this trip...very easily could have drowned wading in warm black water beneath stars not quite of Bethlehem late that very night...but didn’t....every morning after breakfast, would wander down to the beach, paddle a kayak along the shore for an hour or two, then shower off salt and sand outdoors, jump into the pool and swim over to the bar for the day’s first mango daiquiri....after lunch—probably some amazing fish, and more daiquiris, or anything else that could be crafted with rum, tropical fruits, and a blender—usually lie on the beach listening to reggae through headphones until nightfall...though giving myself credit for not visiting the Rasta craft stand at the public beach next door, until the final day....the house band, if I managed to retain consciousness following dinner—likely more amazing fish and a pina colada or two—could be counted on to play Gregory Isaacs’ Night Nurse and mellower Marley...more Jammin’ than Burnin’ and Lootin’...mixed always with the incessant high pitched singing of tree frogs...and a note perfect rendition of Killing Me Softly With His Song (Fugees version)...one time...one time....

Ghosts of Christmas Past #1: Acid, Incense, & Abject Terror of Nothingness

In other ways, too, our laments for lost paradises may really have much more to do with our own state of mind than with the state of the place whose decline we mourn. Whenever we recall the places we have seen, we tend to observe them in the late afternoon glow of nostalgia, after memory, the mind’s great cosmetician, has softened out rough edges, smoothed out imperfections and removed the whole to a lovely abstract distance. Just as a good man, once dead, is remembered as a saint, so a pleasant place, once quit, is recalled as a utopia. Nothing is ever what it used to be.
Pico Iyer
Christmas 1986, I’d just dropped out of college for the first time and, once the family thing was out of the way, flew out to San Francisco to fulfill a life-long dream of being a real-live hippie...Melinda asked if I we might’ve met, but we probably didn’t...I was one of those 80’s Grateful Dead types who, for the most part, the more punk types couldn’t stand...though, I didn’t fit in with the latter-day hippies too well, either...both too overtly cynical and, ironically enough, too into the Clash and Sex Pistols...who, ultimately, were as out of sync with the Reagan/Rambo/Van Helen/pre-yoga-Madonna present as the Dead....though, at that point, anybody else’s past seemed better than my own....

...acid, incense, and balloons...
the Jefferson Airplane

...no future for you...no future for me....
the Sex Pistols

...everything I owned fit into a backpack on the floor of a tiny unfurnished room with a bare lightbulb and mattress in a college friend’s sister’s apartment on Page St., just a block or two from the corner of Haight & Ashbury...where strung-out derelicts and runaways, well on their way to being derelicts themselves, breathed in two-decades-stale pretensions of creating a new society...$300 a month, which was a lot then, particularly for somebody trying to scrape by as a Greenpeace canvasser...a job at which, it should be mentioned, I was singularly lousy...lived on peanut butter and weed....then, one night in January, seeing the Dead at the San Francisco Civic Center, I got lost in some lonely, dark place between galaxies...unmoored...inconsequential...every body and every thing I might reach for dissipating into white space vapor....afterwards, having landed somewhat uneasily in the park across the street, a friend and I got grabbed by undercover cops who read us our rights before, following a quick search, deciding we weren’t worth their time and effort...and so, for just a moment or two there, I felt good about being inconsequential....

Same Crap, Way Better Package

so...ummm...welcome to the ****NEW & IMPROVED**** Yoga for Cynics....as you can see, it has a cool, attractive new header and footer with Sanskritish letters & everything...and no longer looks exactly like a whole bunch of other blogs with the same standard template...and that’s not even mentioning the ****NEW & IMPROVED CONTENT****, including: navel gazing, self-indulgent rambling, pretentious literary references, general incoherence, Lou Reed quotes with no apparent connection to anything...

aw just like Sister Ray said....
Lou Reed

...okay, so it’s the same crap as before...nonetheless, for huge improvements...no thanks to me...in presentation, I wanna offer a million thanks to my most excellent blogger friend Svasti...to whom I’ve promised a percentage of the profits from this site for her inspired work....in other words, she was kind and generous enough to do it for free...so you should go visit her blog...seriously...I’ll wait

..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

You back? I also wanna thank another cool blogger, Ed T., for the trippy Buddha above (which he calls a derivative work, which sounds like an insult, but apparently isn’t), which didn't make it into the header, but I like it a lot, anyway, and appreciate his letting me using it. Oh, and also thanks to Kim, who gave me a blog award a while ago which I was enough of an ingrate to forget about...and, while I’m at it, I really should thank all you people who read this blog...which is approaching its half-year anniversary (as it started just before the summer solstice, and we’re almost to the winter solstice, so ain't I in tune with...something)...so, thanks, y’all....gratitude, people, that’s what this post is about...not, as might appear, pure self-indulgence...yes, an honest to goodness positive yogic value on display right here...namasfuckingte 'til next time, folks....

Gettin' Soft

The softest thing under heaven
gallops triumphantly over
The hardest thing under heaven.
Lao Tzu

Who needs action when you got words?
The Meat Puppets

A couple years ago, my dog friend Fargo and I were taking a late night walk in the Park Avenue neighborhood of Rochester NY—not to be confused with that other Park Ave. somewhere else in NY state...I was looking after him while his human roommate was out of town...or he was looking after me...probably a bit of both. Anyway, we were over near some bars where college kids hang out, and, there in the back parking lot of one, a college guy and girl were grappling with some violence, as she—kind of a classic sorority girl—was trying to get away, and he—kind of a classic jock—wasn’t letting her, was holding on tight, in fact, as she struggled to escape.

This created a bit of a quandary. I’m really not the kinda guy who gets into street fights, especially not with drunk jock types slightly more than half my age who could easily kick my ass. Then, I also like to think that I’m not the kinda guy who’s gonna keep walking while a girl gets assaulted. I had to do something—though, preferably, something other than simply taking her place as his object of brutality. So...I stood there...for a minute or two....

Then, however, she, still in his drunken grip, turned to me. Tell him to let go of me! she shrieked.

It sounded like a plan. So...I, in a soft, calm voice, said let go of her.

And here’s the weird part: he did—almost as soon as I’d said that, she was released from his grip and walking rapidly across the street, while he, galumphing like some old Hollywood Frankenstein monster, followed. So she turned to me again, yelling tell him to leave me alone! And I, ever valiant, in the same soft, calm voice, said leave her alone.

And then—seriously—you can ask the dog about this—the guy stopped in his tracks like a trained bear, pivoted, and walked away.

Procrastination as a Lifestyle Choice

he not busy being born is busy dying
Bob Dylan

...haven’t been doing much productive lately...some editing and tutoring to not quite pay the bills...working with recovering addicts, writing this blog, practicing yoga, biking, a few other things...but not exactly doing my part to fulfill the hard-working, pulling-up-by-the-bootstraps American dream...more in fact, like the modern American reality of deficit spending and lack of accountability...and I’ve tended to think of that as a problem...and some of it—like that last couple of items—definitely is... but maybe not all...

Nonbeing penetrates nonspace.
Hence,
I know the advantages of nonaction.
Lao Tzu

...procrastination and inertia might be more useful than they seem...which is not to say that not doing shit is a good idea...necessarily...though there is stuff that’s better off not being done...and that really shouldn’t be done at all...or even thought about...actually, I disagree with myself about that last bit...everything should be thought about...because it’s being thought about anyway, down below, on an unconscious level...so it needs to be brought forward...looked at and understood....but, actually, the darker recesses isn’t really where I meant to go with this...I was thinking not of those deep awful urges from the id...even if there might be something to all that stuff about idleness being the devil’s play pen...though, if so, it’s the angels’, too...and that’s my point, I think....idleness is simply the space between something and something else...

Who can stop what must arrive now?
Something new is waiting to be born...
Robert Hunter

...in some cases, admittedly, inertia is caused by fear....the ongoing lack of real effort to get my novel published would be a perfect example of that...but I’m talking about other stuff...practical stuff...stuff that can make me money but leaves me cold....coldness freezes...can make life a glacier...slow moving, destroying whatever’s in its path...

One day you’ll wake up in the present day
a million generations removed from expectations
of being who you really want to be....
Ian Anderson

...sometimes procrastination happens because people deep down know that what’s to be done won’t get them any closer to what they want and need, and might prevent them from getting there at all, despite all necessary considerations....and inertia is the ground in which new, as-yet-unknowable life is going to grow...if we let it...

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi

I Saw Walt Whitman Strolling Through the Park Today

I saw Walt Whitman strolling through the park today...alive as you and me, like they say...along Forbidden Drive...called that—this is true—because you’re forbidden to drive on it...above the legendary Wissahickon Creek....I’ve seen him along there before...maybe up in Mt. Airy, too...though this was more notable because it was right near the broken bench with the inscription from Song of Myself that they got wrong,
I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware that I sit content
adding that that that doesn’t belong at all though somebody—maybe Walt himself...certainly this sighting makes me suspicious—kind of corrected it with a black magic marker....anyway, he seemed content enough...if a bit worse for wear...which you can’t blame him for...I mean, the guy is closing in on the end of his second century...and the Civil War really seemed to take something out of him...

I am nothing, and therefore I am everything, and all energy
J. Krishnamurti

Energy is Eternal Delight
William Blake

Tonight the bottle let me down, and let your memory come around....
Merle Haggard

It’s raining outside, started while I was in the park, and I brought the rain into the coffee shop. The rain follows me, and I follow the rain, and maybe I am the rain. The rain is in my hair and the rain is inseparable from my hair...though my eyes are two suns...sons absent a father brain, wandering aimlessly from place to place, but never lost because knowing always that lost is where they belong....

Coffee is energy. Then, so is everything else...maybe. Energy is in crisis, always. We fuel the wars we fight for energy with energy, though it’s often lacking when I need to go home but can’t get away from this window seat, looking out at the rain. Coffee fails me sometimes, like Merle Haggard with his inconstant whiskey bottle...like anything, really, but it tastes good, at least...and that’s not like just anything.

Walt Whitman wrote about Nature without check with original energy but he doesn’t come into the coffee shop to talk with me about it, at least not when I’m here. Perhaps he’s made his peace with the rain.

The Amazing Thing About Three Legged Dogs

The amazing thing about three legged dogs is that, in no time after losing one leg, they’re running around on three as if they never had four. I even knew a dog that got hit by a car and, with one leg gone and another in a cast—both on the same side, no less—she was zooming around the house like nothing had happened within days....

This is, needless to say, very different from the way big brained mammals like myself tend to deal with even minor set-backs. Hell, I broke my hand a few years ago and sat around depressed for two months until the pins came out—not writing anything because typing with one hand was too slow. With something bigger, I’d probably pull myself together eventually, though it might take a while, and, most likely, for a long time, maybe the rest of my life, I’d feel regret for the loss, dreaming in vain of being whole again. In fact, I’ve sometimes felt that way about other losses—incomplete, even if my body remains in one piece.

But the three legged dog is whole. There’s no sense of loss or incompleteness, no regret—just adjustment, as quickly as possible, to a new set of circumstances.

After that, it’s just living.

True Perversion (Kind of a Movie Review #7: Milk)

...went to see this movie called Milk which, as it turns out, has little or nothing to do with the dairy industry...instead, Sean Penn plays a guy named Harvey Milk who lived a long, long time ago, in an era far different from ours, when, in the state of California, pompous ignoramuses and cowardly bigots hid their hatred and stupidity behind cynical readings of the Bible and ludicrous homilies about protecting the family while pushing meanspirited ballot initiatives meant to deny basic civil rights to people based on sexual orientation....like I said, it was a long time ago....

More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, my friends, that is true perversion.

Hope will never be silent.
Harvey Milk

A blogger friend reamed me in a comment on that last post for using the word paranoid a bit too loosely in these days of ever watchful eyes....and, of course, she’s got a point....far be it from me to say that reality isn’t crazier than even the craziest among us can imagine....and yet...looking at the situation, I see concentric circles of crazed fear...with small time would-be radicals vaingloriously imagining themselves important and dangerous enough to the powers-that-be to be watched, and those very powers seeing danger everywhere, and vaingloriously imagining that they can and should watch everything....Michel Foucault wrote it is not on the fringes of society and through successive exiles that criminality is born, but by means of ever more insistent surveillance, by an accumulation of disciplinary coercion....I’ve read enough of Foucault to see that a) there’s wisdom in what he writes, and b) he’s full of crap...and can only hope that readers of this blog will think the same of me....

Possible Yoga Terrorists and Paranoia Striking...Somewhat Shallowly

...back when I was a serious political activist, my friends all thought they were being watched...positive all the vegan potlucks were under tight surveillance...spies in every circle of self-affirmation....the international combine quaking in fear at the thought of kids temporarily out of school knocking on doors to save whales, smoking bongs till they couldn't form coherent sentences, talking about but not actually reading Marx, and blasting early Zappa at three A.M....one guy I knew went for months telling all the freaks at the local co-op the CIA was watching his every move, getting little in response but yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re watchin’ me, too before finally being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic....

Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you....
Kurt Cobain

...which is not to say that I don’t think anybody’s out to get me...hell, every time I get stuck behind some jalopy going ten miles under the speed limit, I’m sure it’s part of a conspiracy to mess with my life...for that matter, in the late 60’s, when I was a little kid, my dad, a psychiatrist—yeah, I know, that explains a lot...shaddup—ran into a guy he’d had committed...on the street...and the guy said I know where your children play...and, as it turned out, he did...Rittenhouse Square in Philly...whenever I’m down that way I keep my eyes out for that guy, likely in his eighties or so, possibly moving about with a walker, still looking to abduct me after all these years....

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
George Orwell, 1984

I’ve been asked to be a community organizer for my local yoga friends...or sangha if ya wanna get all spiritual, sanctimonious, and Sanskrit-like about it...creating some kind of on-line entity, I think, and maybe more...might have to hug people or something...not too clear on that point at this juncture....anyway, I know what yer thinking...how might this community organizing crap impact any plans I might have to run for the Office of the Presidency of the United States of America?

Jesus was a community organizer...
The Internet

It’s a real concern, too...just who are these people?...how do I know none of them have dark pasts as yoga terrorists? how do I know, a few election cycles from now, I won’t be seeing video clips at every commercial break showing a seemingly mild and benevolent yoga teacher saying as you move from uttanasana to utkanasana, visualize death to America...?