The Lady MacBeth of Soap

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He was lying on his back as hard as armor plate, and when he lifted his head a little, he saw his vaulted brown belly, sectioned by arch-shaped ribs, to whose dome the cover, about to slide off completely, could barely cling. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, were waving helplessly before his eyes.
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemies.
Nelson Mandela

...I try to have compassion for all things...all living things, in particular...and yet, when I see a cockroach running across my kitchen linoleum...smack goes my bare hand, as nothing else can be grabbed quickly enough to get the fucker before he disappears into a crack somewhere...which means I’ve got cockroach pieces & guilt all over my fingers...so I go to the bathroom & wash it off with water & my environmentally conscious soap...and yet, some little brown slice o’ cockroach sticks to the soap...and it won’t come off...seriously, it’s like the Lady MacBeth of soap...

One Hundred and Eight...

This is the hundred and eighth Yoga for Cynics post...108 is an important number in the Yogasphere...for some reason...I could google it, yes, but wouldn’t that just take the fun out of everything?...I mean, what if I googled “meaning of life” and then, scrolling beneath the IMDB, Wikipedia, and Amazon entries for the Monty Python movie of that name, found out exactly what it is? Wouldn’t that just ruin the whole “quest for truth” concept—particularly the part about the journey being more important than the destination? But I digress...

Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.
Monty Python, The Meaning of Life

...as previously mentioned, the inspiration for this blog came from a yoga and writing retreat I attended in Mexico...where I’ll be again in less than a month...woo-hoo!...and where we did approximately 108 sun salutations on the last day...and I consider writing this blog to be part of my yoga practice...regardless of whether that makes sense to anybody else...so, in that sense, this right here is Yoga for Cynics’ 108th sun salutation...the conclusion of the first big cycle...woo-hoo!

Look around again

It's the same old story

You see, it's got to be

It says right here on page 43...
David Crosby

...today’s also my forty-third birthday...to get really whiftily metaphorical about it, the turning of the 43rd page in my life...god...I promise never to get so whiftily metaphorical again....I don’t understand what that David Crosby song’s about, anyway...but, that’s probably fitting...every year is another big step into the unknown...and that’s probably a good thing...one thing I’m sure of: we’re not here to be bored...

Accentuate the Positive...but not too much...

Dr. Jay after a really strenuous yoga class, thinking about his next Yoga for Cynics post....

...since starting this blog, I’ve developed a reputation as one of the major badasses of the yoga world...kinda like a cross between B.K.S. Iyengar, Keith Richards, and Vladimir Putin...some have even called me a bad mutha...shut yo mouth!....can ya dig it?

...okay, admittedly, it’s mostly been me saying that about myself...nonetheless....yo! I live in Philly...popularly known in some circles as Killadelphia...famous for, in addition to its murder rate, police brutality, tendency to drop bombs on its own neighborhoods, and cheesesteaks that’ll likely clog up yer arteries and kill ya before anything else can (in one famous location, you can even purchase them from a well known and outspoken racist!)....it’s also been called the rudest city in America...and, true, people here do boo their own sports teams, really good opening acts at rock concerts (like the Clash when I saw them opening for the Who, or Sonic Youth opening for Neil Young and Crazy Horse, though both simply cranked it up so they couldn’t hear the boos)...even Santa Claus...

...then, that's kinda what I like about the place...people are straightforward, no BS, no fake smiles....if people are nice to ya, it 's probably because they actually like you...

We are living in the age of inhibition. The 1960s and early 1970s were the years of letting go, doing your own thing in your own time, rolling with the flow, and being cool. Now, it’s no smoking, no alcohol, no drugs, no casual sex, no fattening foods, no fun. We have learned to feel good by jogging, eating brown and tasteless foods, and going to bed early. One of the few remaining thrills available to us is looking down our noses at people who can’t inhibit their urges as well as we can. The New Self-Righteousness has arrived.
James Pennebaker

...there’s this psychologist named James Pennebaker who wrote a book called The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions...does studies in which he has people write about traumatic experiences and then sees if doing so improves their physical health....it does....then he analyzes the words they use, including the number of positive words, and the number of negative words....the test subjects with the best health outcomes, it turns out, are those who use a lot of positive words, and a moderate number of negative words....those who use a lot of negative words tend not to do so well...like Bob Marley says you just can't live that negative way, make way for the positive day...but here’s what’s interesting: those who use very few negative words tend to do as poorly as those who use a lot...

...in other words, it’s good to accentuate the positive, but not too much...if you’re gonna walk around with a forced new-age smile on your face, pretend to have all kinds of positive emotions you don’t actually feel, and generally try to convince yourself that shit doesn’t stink...ya might as well dress in black and sit around reading Camus and quoting Lou Reed lyrics...and some kindsa love are mistaken for vision....well, you get the idea...

News You Probably Can't Use #1

The surest way to corrupt a young man is to teach him to esteem more highly those who think alike than those who think differently.
Nietzsche

...was just reading about a kid marrying a dog in India...apparently to prevent him from being eaten by wild animals...and, not long ago, read about an Indian woman being married to a snake, which was apparently seen as a god (google it yerself, dammit)...don’t worry, I’m not bringing this stuff up to make fun of a foreign culture I don’t understand...nor am I gonna bend over backwards to defend it, as yoga types are wont to do with anything involving the oh-so spiritual nation of Indyaaaah...

...I do find it a bit ironic, though...as oh-so spiritual American politicians argue that, if gays and lesbians are allowed to marry, next thing you know people will be tying the knot with their pets...that it is, in fact, in a country where homosexuality is illegal that people are marrying dogs and snakes...

Cocaine is God's way of telling you you are making too much money.
Robin Williams

...the world’s most expensive coffee is called Kopi Luwak...it’s made of beans eaten by a creature known as the palm civet and then excreted by it...the stuff sells for up to $600 lb....

...another sign you’ve got too much money: you pay high prices to drink coffee made from beans that have passed through a jungle rodent's asshole....

All generalisations are false, including this one.
Mark Twain

One More Cup of Coffee....

One more cup of coffee for the road
One more cup of coffee ‘fore I go
to the valley below...
Bob Dylan

...ran my bike into a concrete fencepost on the way to a yoga class downtown yesterday....actually, if yer gonna run yer bike into a concrete fencepost on the way to somewhere, a yoga class is a pretty good somewhere for that somewhere to be...as you pick yourself up, feeling somewhat dazed and unsure of whether you’re merely a bit scratched up or actually injured...one of the many uses for a yoga class is that you'll work out any minor trauma, and, if there’s anything seriously wrong, you’re probably gonna know it before the class is over ...

...and, as it turned out apart from a couple bits of skin lost on the right pointer finger and a slightly bruised right knee, no harm was done...

...but how, you ask, did this misfortune occur? I’ll give ya three different versions and let you decide which ya like best:

Version A: Going at incredible speed while doing a headstand on the seat, I suddenly hit a patch of black ice. A less skilled cyclist would have been killed.

Version B: There I was riding along when a little girl ran out onto the path. Having to make a split-second decision between possibly injuring this sweet, innocent child and the likelihood of grave injury to my own person, I of course turned valiantly toward the fencepost.

Version C: Riding along with a general lack of mindfulness, I didn't notice I was riding into a concrete fencepost until it was right in front of me.

...to those of you unimaginative and ungenerous enough to choose Version C, allow me to point out that this lack of attention might be attributed to a recent decision to cut down on coffee....as of about three days ago, I’m only having approximately one cup...or, at least, not-much-more-than one cup...per day...and my stomach’s already thanking me for it...

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, morning, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons....
T. S. Eliot

...the people at the coffee shop rolled their eyes and said oh god, not again! when I told them that....I generally quit completely for a month or so every year or two...just to let my insides recover from the general rich, full-bodied, incredibly tasty onslaught...oh god, just writing about coffee makes me want some...though my daily quota was filled hours ago...damn, I can hardly wait for that post-Saturday morning yoga class coffee tomorrow...which is why I have no desire to quit permanently...at this point, at least...some of the good things in life remain good things even when they’re not actually good for you....

Purple Prose

...saved for last...hardest to write about...perhaps operating out of some very deep kinda purple synaesthesia...I tend to be covered in it...purple sweater, purple shirts in numerous styles, purple sheets, purple blanket, purple towels...purple prose all over the place...even that Sanskritish title up there...purple lotus...purple Kool-Aid...Riders of the Purple Sage...and the wild mountain thyme grows around the purple heather...raspberries are best when they turn purple, almost but not-yet overripe...but only when you eat them right off the bush...really, they shouldn’t be eaten any other way...and, in an ideal purple world, they wouldn't be...

...blending blue and red...blood and the sea...rage and contemplation...celebration and melancholia... red-faced embarrassment and boundless sky...purple nurple...owww...

...prime color of psychedelia...even as all colors swirl together...Owsley Purple...Purple Haze...Jimi Hendrix himself seems to me to be purple...maybe that’s how he managed to cross the musical color barrier...he was more purple than anything...lately, I’ve been meeting up with old psychedelic friends...now all invested in purple yoga mats...

...Obama talked about a purple America during the campaign...not sure how well that’s working out, now...purple, of course is the color of royalty...nobility...people you're supposed to call your majesty or your holiness...as if kings and emperors could be any more majestic than convicts and elevator operators...popes and lamas any more holy than prostitutes and laborers...purple should always be for everybody...

It's Not Easy...

...there’s nothing more clichéd to be said about green than that it’s the color of spring...though that might be a perfect example of the dictum that a cliché becomes a cliché because it works...though that, as somebody pointed out in a movie...though I can’t remember which...is also a cliché...and, by now, the point that the cliché is a cliché might be as well...and thus far more old and tired than spring-like and green....I’d better start over...

...spring, like green, is more complicated than we might think...April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire...rising fresh and green from the comfortable dirt can be painful...things get buried for a reason...but spring brings it all back up...

...I tasted green for the first time in April 1983...seventeen and far too alienated and miserable to be too bothered that, according to all I’d been taught, green would quickly lead to heroin and death...it didn’t, was actually rather refreshing, for a while ...even if it ended up a dead vine that held on tight for far too long before finally peeling away....nowadays, I’d rather do yoga...

...or take a walk in the woods...consumed in luxuriant green....it’s hard not to be clichéd here, too...might as well give in to my inner muppet...why wonder, why wonder I’m green, guess that’s the way I wanna be...though it might never be the same after I ate that deep fried frog at that Chinese restaurant back in November...like chicken, but a lot more bones...so you're right, Kermit, it's not easy bein' green...

...even worse, though, would be talking about the environment...the green of photosynthesis, mountains, meadows, and life in general squaring off against the most all-consuming green of all...and guess which wins almost every time?...“green” labels seeming to represent the first serving only to bring more of the other to oil and pharmaceutical companies...

...god, is it possible to be more cynical and morose in writing about green?..those reading this in the archives, or the tropics or southern hemisphere might wanna note that it’s February in Philadelphia...my 43rd birthday rapidly approaching...(as mentioned previously, my sign of the Zodiac is Charlie the Three Toed Sloth...though I also share the day with the guy who wrote show me that I’m everywhere, and get me home for tea)...and green seems far away...

...in the end, though, green is a state of mind...I now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin wrote Walt Whitman...knowing, even though 37 back then was a lot older than 43 now, that a person can begin at any time...and, however misused, let’s face it, green will outlast us all...

Rhyming With Nothing

...a word that rhymes with nothing...and so, called difficult...like anything else that refuses to fit into the formalities of a society’s ever-conventional poetry...unappreciated...reduced to cheap jokes...orange you glad I didn’t say banana?...denied credit endlessly...like those old blues singers dying in poverty after writing the songs that made Elvis, Clapton, Zeppelin, and the Stones famous...waaaaaay down inside...it’s Muddy Waters, dude...and it's orange...and you can see it, even...and yet still you call it red...but orange never complains...

...flames, “red” rocks and cliffs...worlds of orange defining the most inspiring and mystical grottoes of the American southwest...‘red’ foxes...corgis...Mittens the corgi was our first dog...named after her white paws though most of the rest of her was orange...I was terrified of dogs when we got her, having been jumped on at two or three by what I’m told was a yellow lab...apparently, the dog just wanted to play and inadvertently knocked me down...though I took it as an attack...thus, mom and dad deciding to get a puppy to help overcome the resultant phobia...and it worked...it was I who kept poor Mittens alive when she got old and ornery, parents knowing life with teenaged me would become completely unlivable if they dared have her put to sleep just because she snapped at them...repeatedly...then, I was considered a bit of a problem, too, at that point...my good points, it seemed, underappreciated, like orange...

...orange oranges...clementines...peaches...mangoes...mango daiquiris on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean...orange tastes goooood...again, falsely called “red,” like the fire it resembles, a hair color associated with quick temper, with passion...with heat...with Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore, with Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with anonymous wild women of the Australian Outback...red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme sings Richard Thompson, though I have faith he knows in his heart that ‘red’ is really orange...

...with freckles, the visual equivalent of an Irish brogue...(Dogs and Irish Need Not Apply read job postings a century ago)...(making the political associations of orange in Northern Ireland rather strange)...(even Ireland, it seems, saves its love for green)...orange the robes of Buddhist monks and swamis...orange prison jumpsuits...orange birds of paradise...orange the color you wear to keep from getting shot out in the woods during hunting season...orange sunshine...along with black, color of Halloween...pumpkins...makings for pumpkin soup generally dumped in the making of jack-o-lanterns...so much orange wasted...

Tyger, tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy mortal symmetry?
William Blake

...the tiger, yes, also orange...but cares little about being called red...no need at all to be concerned with such things when you’re a tiger...

A Series of Dreams

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
Sigmund Freud

Nothing too very scientific, just thinking of a series of dreams....
Bob Dylan

...there's this dream I had, around the time of the Clinton impeachment hearings, and a few months after I’d passed my qualifying exams....I realize there’s still something more I need to do to fully pass...another examination....turns out it’s a face-to-face thing, with one examiner...who, as it turns out, is none other than the senator from Mississippi, Trent Lott...with his smooth Southern accent and perfectly coiffed hair...and I know, the minute I walk in and see him, that I’m doomed, that he's gonna fail me for purely partisan reasons...and he seems to acknowledge that, saying “look I don’t wanna ruin your life,” suggesting things I might do while waiting until I can re-take the exams...so I start pleading with him, telling him I’ve already started my dissertation...he seems interested and asks what it’s about...I start to tell him it has to do with Native Americans...immediately realizing that I should have said “Indians” since the term “Native Americans” pegs me as a liberal...and I’ve therefore sealed my doom....

...a mathematical dream—starting out with figuring out grades on a grid—what happens if you go by elevens instead of tens, up to 110, thinking that it’s simple, but then I realize that 110 isn’t 11x11, but 11x10, and that in fact 11x11 is something completely unsymmetrical—not the perfect 111 one might expect, or even 110, that 11’s lose their magical quality when multiplied beyond the single numerals (since even 110 isn’t 1010), and I see this as something violent, bloody and personally tragic for poor 11...

...series of fragmented dreams in cough-filled night, in which I'm the mafia, and the coughs some kind of foe or possibly inside informant, ruining all of my carefully laid plans...

...one of those cable news talking heads is doing a financial report on T.V....and, to dramatically portray the state of the economy, bleeding heavily—blood pouring from his leg like a waterfall on whatever’s below his desk...

....waking from a dream—seeing printed words and hearing a voice, giving a fragmentary review of the dream—criticizing, I think, its weak characterization...

Sick! Sick! Sick!

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
William Blake

...sickness will surely take the mind where minds can’t usually go...
Pete Townshend

...it should say something about how crappy I’ve been feeling that I’ve barely been able to do my morning yoga thing this week—this despite the fact that I generally put less time into it than most people spend in the bathroom first thing in the morning—this despite my apparent reputation as the on-line yogamaster supreme—really: people keep e-mailing me at this blog to ask about yoga—though I stress that I’m still working on doing basic asanas without hurting myself...and thus am not about to try and teach anybody else....

...though not a doctor of medicine, I nonetheless try to follow that part of the Hippocratic Oath...the only part I know, in fact...that says first, do no harm...which according to a google search I just did, isn’t even in the Hippocratic Oath...so it’s all good...

I have a good friend I call...affectionately...the foul evil bringer of pestilence...that’s because I believe, on good, solid evidence, that she was responsible for passing on to me the two worst colds or flus I’ve suffered in recent years...and, actually, while she was across the country when I contracted this one, in L.A., city of the fallen angels, I did meet up with her husband for lunch in South Philly on Saturday...

...anyway, the illness—apparently a flu bug of some kind—seems to have passed, leaving only the slightest rusty residue of the red nail that was lodged in my forehead for three or four days...and so life begins again...like I’ve just come back from a really crummy vacation...though at least I didn’t have to pay for airfare or hotels...sickness is the crappy vacation you experience in the discomfort of your very own home....

...and, actually, it does have some of the advantages of a trip away...even a crappy one...in terms of knocking a person out of the standard routine, and thereby providing a view of it from somewhat on the outside, allowing one to evaluate it from the standpoint of not-quite-in-it...ask if it’s really a horse anybody’d wanna climb back onto...or if changes need to be made...yeah, I know I’m mixing metaphors...like I said, I’ve still got some lingering symptoms, including being a good bit stupider than usual...so I’ll blame it on that...and wish good health to everybody reading....

25 Ways of Looking at Facebook

1. I got tagged on Facebook for one of these 25 things about me things.
2. I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone by making it a blog post.
3. I don’t actually approve of the expression “kill two birds with one stone.”
4. I consider throwing rocks at birds to be cruel.
5. Nonetheless, I suspect it must take impressive skill and perseverance to kill two with one.
6. I once read a quote: “one does not talk to the skilled hunter of that which is forbidden by the Buddha.”
7. I don’t really know what that means, and am probably misquoting it, anyway.
8. “Kill two birds with one stone” is not the only common expression I have problems with.
9. Recently, someone gave me something and then took it back, and I told her I’d call her a non-racist equivalent of “Indian giver” as soon as I could think of one.
10. I haven’t come up with a good one and, anyway, the moment has passed, so I’m not trying very hard.
11. People I never expected to hear from again keep contacting me through the Facebook thing.

12. That's cool.
13. For the most part, though, we only seem to be reconnecting through comments like “I liked that Narnia thing much better before I understood the symbolism,” or “Battlestar Galactica’s cool, but I’m paranoid enough as it is.”
14. One exception would be my friend Joyce, who I worked with at Greenpeace a long time ago, and recently met for Mexican food—which was nice, but we haven’t talked since.
15. I was the worst canvasser ever.
16. I also keep getting friend requests from people I used to know but didn’t particularly like.
17. I'm positive they didn’t like me, either.
18. I’m wondering how long it’s gonna be before I get a friend request from somebody who beat me up in seventh grade.
19. I’ve run out of things to say about Facebook.
20. When I was a kid, we had these gerbils named Ralph and Rachel that lived in one of those plastic gerbil contraptions.
21. When they were in heat...or one of them was in heat...we had shocking displays of sexual violence in our kitchen at all hours.
22. When they had babies, we took them to the pet store, thinking other little kids would get to take them home as pets.
23. The pet store employees were happy to take them off our hands.
24. They fed them to snakes.
25. But that’s still better than throwing rocks at birds.

Not So Mellow...

my yellow in this case is not so mellow, in fact I’m trying to say it’s frightened like me
Jimi Hendrix

...yellow is the color of the sun and, yes, the color of piss...the color of light, and life...though, yeah, I know, light is really white, in its purest form...but we live in an impure world...even though a banana really is, sometimes, just a banana...

....yellow slapstick banana peels...yellow is the color of my true love’s hair...well, not really, but it’s the color of my hair...at least I try to keep telling myself that, even as it's increasingly invaded with distressing grey and white...so, in that sense, yellow is youth...though also jaundice, and cowardice...and my somewhat cowardly golden retriever, Duncan...walking in the grass, sniffing yellow dandelions, chasing after yellow tennis balls... my good friend when no people were...used to lie in the driveway outside my dad’s office, on the other side of the garage from the house, by the lawn where the dandelions were...one of his patients would crouch there for what seemed like hours after appointments scratching the dog behind the ears and talking to him...my dad said she teased him that Duncan was a better psychiatrist than he was...to which he replied, “maybe he is....”

...yellow, for some reason, I associate with Buddhism...maybe it’s all those golden Buddhas...or the Flower Sermon...though who knows if that flower was actually yellow, though I might think of it that way...or perhaps, I fear, some lingering racist association with yellow people...as if there really were yellow people, or black or white or red people, rather than bogus divisions created out of some deeply yellow fear of the knowledge that we’re all simply shades of some indefinable human color...which may look something like sadness, which I think is also yellow...as, of course, is joy...and candle flames, like I’d see in the windows when we’d sit in silence Christmas Eve at the Quaker Meeting...

...yellow journalism, yellow fever...mellow yellow...yellow corn...waves of grain I’ve seen generally tending, I think, more toward yellow than amber...mustard seed...school buses...yellow submarines...doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to, isn’t he a bit like you and me?...daisies...sunflowers...the yellow rose of Texas, whose image seems a bit tarnished at the moment...yellow desert sands...yellowing pages of books and old thoughts...Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper, representing repression and madness....when life gives you lemons make lemonade, but if the lemonade isn’t any good, maybe you can get a soda or something...

...the sun’s out today, for what seems like the first time in forever...though I can’t see it from here...yellow in blue...coming across if you’re not actually looking at it as clarity...but to look directly into it is to go blind...

Seeing Red

...red has always been my least favorite color...seems the antithesis of blue...though purple has always been my favorite, strangely enough, since it’s where red and blue meet...

....red, I think, was my older brother’s favorite color when we were kids...or at least I vaguely remember hearing him say that at least once...and his being red and my being blue always seemed significant, still does, though more in thinking about then than now....red is fire, supposedly, though I’ve always thought it looks more orange, and closer to a yellow orange, at that...but fire engines, nonetheless, which excited me as a kid...one of my earliest memories standing in a crowd watching a fire in center city, Philadelphia...though all I remember seeing were the fire trucks, and smoke...color of anger, certainly...color of spite, color of revenge...my friend who studied Buddhism in Colorado spent weeks meditating in different-colored rooms...wasn’t, as I remember, the most pleasant person to be around during the red week...color of cherries, Valentines, and bricks...color of sunsets, but what isn’t?

...color of lava, certainly...at least I think so, never having actually seen any except in solidified form, at which point it was grey or black...The Red and the Black, a book by Stendhal I failed to appreciate, though there was a great epigraph to one chapter: To think is to be full of sorrow, so should really try reading it again some time...once meant communist, now means Republican...the red rock canyons in Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, also more orange than red...which may be why I’ve always liked orange, even long before I’d ever seen high desert...those craggy canyons, arid orange space-scapes existing already in my mind...or maybe they were my mind...

...Mars...Satan...Hell...but also the words of Jesus in some Bibles...lipstick, while lips, generally speaking, are far more pink...which is another matter entirely...could I write something up about pink without getting pornographic?...probably, but it wouldn’t be much fun...color, along with white, of ambulances...can you believe they charged me over $650 for a two mile ride and didn’t even give me anything for pain since they said by the time they had it ready we’d already be there?...along with blue and white, color of the American flag, and the French flag, and with orange the Russian communist flag...have they changed that?...I remember seeing it up above the train station, having just made it into Yugoslavia, which was all one country then...had to ask a friend recently what country Dubrovnik’s in, which is strange since I’ve been there and she hasn’t...and how strange that was in the Reagan era, missiles pointing and primed in a game of chicken we apparently won...color of the insides of my eyelids when I’m lying in the grass facing upward on a sunny day...

...my favorite sweater, for some reason, is red, though at this point it’s pretty raggedy, so I don’t wear it much...but that’s what happens to favorite sweaters, isn’t it?...read, the heteronym for red is the past tense of read, the heteronym for reed, a kind of plant that sways in the wind by a pond, and is therefore gently active, while read/red is something else...read, dead, spilled on the sidewalk...blood, which is of course the course of life...which confuses things...

...red can make me upset...seems to represent rupture and division...but also roses with their thorns...and blood when they prick fingers...though sometimes I seem to be relatively okay with that...

Blue Blue

Nothing is as visible as what we try to hide.
Japanese proverb

...been reading these books on therapeutic writing...with all these suggested prompts for venturing into the jungle inside...shadow selves, inner critics, masks and mood colors...all that shit...and finding it’s taking me a long time to get through it...keep doing all the exercises in my head...including the ones they keep emphasizing should only be attempted with a qualified facilitator...preferably with a degree or two in counseling, present...can make for a rather harrowing reading experience....

Blue blue electric blue, that’s the color of my room, where I will live,
blue blue
David Bowie

...pick a color that expresses your “current life or state of being”...all I can think of when I read that is blue...it’s not even like I pick it...or that it picks me...it’s just there...in the forefront and behind my entire field of inner vision...any other colors just dancing around ephemerally...and we all know what blue means, right?...every day, every day I have the blues...blues fallin’ down like hail...when she turned blue, all the angels screamed...but, just outside, there’s the sky above the snow...I mean, it’s trite, but it’s real...all we have here is sky, all the sky is is blue...and but for the sky there are no fences facing...and, then of course the ocean, water...chaos between earth and sky...giver and destroyer...blue all the life giving waters taken for granted, they quietly understand...when the levee breaks, there’ll be no place to stay....

...synaesthesia is that exquisite little misfiring of the synapses by which sounds are interpreted as smells, or smells as shapes, or shapes as flavors...kinda like saying you want a red flavored snow-cone, but a bit more sophisticated....a friend and I used to sit around listening to music and making tapes for each other...he had these multicolored magic markers, and I’d write down song titles with those...always trying to choose the right color for a particular song...sometimes we’d discuss it: would you say those two are red songs or blue songs?...I’m thinking kind of a blending of the two, not quite purple, really, more like red and blue tendrils interweaving, swirling together, kinda....the strange thing was, he seemed to know what I was talking about...at least at the time....

...so, here I live, in between the mean old lonesome blues and the clear blue sky...embroiled in the raging ocean or floating on the calm sea...then, don’t we all...the ideal, I think, is to float peacefully on a raging ocean...but I’m not anywhere near there, yet...hey blue, here is a song for you...because it all, somehow, feels like music....

[particular shades of blue provided by Pablo Picasso, B. B. King, Robert Johnson, Lou Reed, Jane Siberry, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Memphis Minnie (by way of Led Zeppelin), the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell]

Really, Really Loaded Questions....

...though it’s absolutely meant as a compliment, yoga teachers don’t seem to like it when I say you fucking killed me with that shit at the end of class...though a person can't possibly be born to new possibilities without dying now and then....

Finally, I got it: a heart that is open to the world must be willing to be broken at any time. This brokenness produces the kind of grief that expands the heart so that it can love more and more.
Stephen Cope

...one time in college, I was feeling pretty down...not sure if my heart was broken, or if class work and the endemic to college ever-present threat of not-being-smart-enough was weighing me down, or if it was just another wholly ephemeral case of late-adolescent angst...though it could’ve had something to do with the people I hung out with...one of whom I ran into, a globally-thinking person I’ll call Alice....she asked how I was doing, I said I was feeling down...and she replied, with a contemptuous smirk, yeah, I bet a straight white male has a lot to be unhappy about....I knew some really lovely people in college...but, then, it seems like it’s difficult for most of us sometimes to get the point that compassion actually means being kind and empathetic—rather than something where, when you expend a bit on the oppressed of the world, you gain scorn credits to dump on those closer at hand....

I think it was Diogenes Laertius who told the story about a philosopher who studied for three years to rid himself of all passion, paying money to every man who insulted him. When his period of study was completed, he stopped giving out money, but the habitual skills remained with him: one day he was insulted by some ignoramus, and instead of setting about him with his fists, he began to laugh. ‘Well, did you ever,’ he said, ‘today I received for nothing what I’d been paying for three whole years.’
Victor Pelevin, The Secret Book of the Werewolf

...sometimes I help recovering addicts through practice GED tests....I hate that standardized test crap, but sometimes the best you can do is teach people the stupid rules needed to pass, including the rule that use of imagination and originality should be avoided....anyway, there are these essay questions: write six sentences about your family...write two paragraphs about a goal you have....meant to be innocuous, no doubt, for the average suburban teenager, but really, really loaded questions for those with so much trouble behind and only the most desperate hopes ahead....so, they write about staying clean, about not going back to jail, about getting a job, about getting custody of their kids again...in a nutshell, wanting to live...

...and, when ya think about it, what better goal could there be?

Bruce Springsteen, The Wrestler, and Fleeting Moments of Grace

Totally bizarre true confession: I once spontaneously bellowed out the first verse of Thunder Road in the middle of doing 108 sun salutations in a yoga class in Mexico...believe it or not, it went over quite well...got a rousing ovation at the end, even...though I was horrified recently to learn there’s video footage out there....it’s a long story...

...didn’t see Springsteen’s halftime show...missed the whole Superbowl, in fact...but I did go see The Wrestler, with Bruce over the closing credits, which was fitting, since it was kinda like one of his slice-of-a-fucked-up-life songs in movie form...

...listen, I’ve never once referred to Springsteen as the boss...and never bought into the Bruce persona...yeah, I hear ya: what?! The boss doesn’t have a persona! He’s a regular guy from Jersey, just like me!...um...yeah...that’s kinda my point....anyway, each of his albums has at least one or two of these tiny-but-remarkably-complete short stories that make Raymond Carver seem long-winded...about people on the bottom and most likely staying there...American dreams crumbling into the dust of disappointment and desperation...I got Mary pregnant and man that was all she wrote...there’s a sadness in her pretty face a sadness all her own from which no man can keep Candy safe...I’m tired of comin’ out on this losin’ end so honey last night I met this guy and I’m gonna do a little favor for him...like Mickey Rourke, washed up, ailing and alone, doing the only thing he knows, even though he knows it’s gonna kill him...but, somehow, all finding fleeting moments of grace...remembered swimming in a transcendent river, driving deep into the night, walking the boardwalk in Atlantic City, flying through the air as the crowd cheers...or, like Eddie and the other guy in Meeting Across the River, a couple of lowlifes who’ve stumbled into a big score that’s likely to leave them either dead or in prison...that’s their last chance...nonetheless, in the brief moments before their seemingly inevitable doom, saying tonight we’ve got style....