Decades of Me

...a yoga teacher I know said something about the tendency, this time of year in particular, to set intentions...resolutions...that are essentially negative...centered around parts of ourselves we want to be rid of...suggesting that instead we might try focusing on good things that have grown in us over the past year or decade...ways we’ve become kinder, healthier...things like that...which I don’t find difficult...

...though I still have a bit of trouble with this whole big whoop about new year’s eve new year’s day start of a new decade thing...and not just because of that string of miserable New Year’s Eve party experiences that caused me to forsake them years ago...

...some writers have suggested that this almost-past-decade-nobody-could-come-up-with-a-decent-name-for began, actually, not with the flipping of calendar digits and immensely anticlimactic Y2K...(I mean, seriously, even if we can’t have the Apocalypse, is a worldwide digital breakdown really too much to ask for?)...but with 9/11....bringing an abrupt, if late, close to a decade of relative peace and prosperity that started early with the fall of the Berlin Wall...just like the 30’s began with the stock market crash, and the 60's ended with Watergate...or Altamont...or Disco....okay, clearly, this system isn't perfect, either...

...nonetheless, I found myself applying its logic a bit more personally...even if rushing to do so and get this post up before midnight...(yeah, I know)...

...starting in 1966...or so I’m told...there was a relatively innocent decade called childhood...

...followed, somewhere around 1978, by one that lasted only ’til '83 or so, even if it felt like an eternity in whatever circle of hell’s reserved for the lonely and despised...

...leading to what I’ve dubbed my psychedelic era...which could also be called the really really confused decade....which might be the same thing...

...and it lasted approximately ’til 1994 or so...eventually giving way to the (semi-)respectable decade...or the trying to put it all behind me decade...or the deep denial decade...

...which crash landed some time in 2001 in a period of depression so deep and dark that everything, it seemed, needed to be reevaluated...and, in order to do that, nothing could be denied...everything had to be seen and explored...opened up in a gradual process...commencing what might be called my second psychedelic era...without the artificial sweeteners...

...and I really don’t see that ending tonight...nor, truth be told, do I really think I’d want it to...

Nidra

I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are in case you don’t know...
Lou Reed

People are always calling me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?
Andy Warhol

...toes fuzzy and pink...remember dipping into cold water on the Oregon coast 1987...a mellow place, even if not feeling that way inside...scents of incense, wet bark, and self-righteousness...brightly colored star fish and those long green whips of seaweed...bright blue anemones in profusion on the rocks along the shoreline where I walked...

...knees harbor nostalgia for early childhood...when they touched the earth with every movement...dumb feet dragging behind...

...like a globe representing a tortured world...churning and rumbling at the most inopportune times...my stomach is prone to self-dramatizing...

...spine like an old soldier, too long stuck on guard duty...soldiering on, nonetheless...dreaming of learning to dance, like a snake...

...fingers have a regrettable tendency to get into trouble...well, a tendency, at least...can’t say I always regret it...

...shoulders tense, hard...impregnable bulwarks...or so they’d like to think...against dangers real and imagined...past and present...and far too often unable to tell the difference...

...throat feels lonely...too much struggling to express what needs to be said...to establish connections...victim of post nasal drip and whatever crap enters through the mouth...and yet, tirelessly bringing the breath in and out...I’m learning to pay more attention to my throat...

...nose often irritated...kinda like it’s the angry talk-radio host of my face...but open to whatever comes around...taking in as much as it throws out...hard to say what its politics are...

...right forehead, this morning, from the eye on up, a dark grey cloud...though dissipating as warmth and light gradually filter through...



...artwork stolen from Karin.......okay, so she gave me permission to steal it...which if yer gonna insist on bein' all literal n' shit means that, in a purely technical sense, it wasn’t actually stolen...but just lemme feel like an outlaw, awright?...

This Actually Happened...

...there was this woman I was feeling really attracted to, and she was sitting near me...not conventionally beautiful, I don’t think...but not notably unconventional...or unusual, looking, either...though I certainly wouldn’t want to say she looked ordinary...because she didn’t....and, beyond that, I can’t say much...since I didn’t have my glasses on...and the room was kinda dim...so, really, I could hardly see her at all...don’t know for sure if I’d recognize her if I saw her again...though I’ve been thinking about her ever since...

...anyway, she was talking somewhat loudly to this other woman across the way...can’t say much of anything at all about her...but they were talking in this strange language...kinda clipped, choppy-sounding, somewhat guttural and staccato, like an early new wave song...and I wondered for a minute or two just what language it was...until, after a little while, I recognized it...realized it was English...though I still didn’t understood a word they said...

Vegetable Wisdom

...“sweet,” in the somewhat archaic definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is that which “affords enjoyment or gratifies desire.” Like a shimmering equal sign, the word sweetness denoted a reality commensurate with human desire: it stood for fulfillment.
Michael Pollan

...my doctor told me my blood pressure and weight have increased the last three times I’ve seen him...not bad, but going up, nonetheless...which seems outrageous considering all the yoga, biking, and meditation I’ve been doing....then, perhaps, a bit less so considering all the cheap deep-fried Chinese take-out, Tastykakes, Mexican Cokes...with real sugar!...and margaritas....it really is all about balance...I’m positive about that...but, apparently, that particular balance hasn’t been balancing nearly as well as I’d hoped...

...generally speaking, that thing yoga teachers say about listening to your body is sound advice....trouble is, my body still thinks I’m a hunter-gatherer...struggling for bare subsistence against the ever-present threat of starvation...which is reasonable enough, considering that the vast majority of human beings who’ve ever lived have been exactly that...and thus far more attracted to the deep fried saber-tooth-tiger-on-a-stick at some stone-aged equivalent of my corner Chinese take-out than the organic broccoli bush frequented by those mellow cro-magnons down the way etching You Can’t Hug Your Children With Sharp Sticks onto their cave walls...

...as such, sometimes I gotta tell my body to shut up so I can exercise some vegetable wisdom...which is what I’m trying to do now...just in time for the holidays...

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
Lin Yutang

...went to see some bands play at this art space...technically a loading dock....it was BYOL...which at least one guy did to the point that he probably shouldn’t have been so close to the loading dock...but there were lots of snacks...including these colorful cupcakes...my friend who works at a coffee shop that sells really good, really high quality pastries asked how they were...I said they were good...but in that real old-school PTA-mom-who-buys-a-cupcake-mix-and-that-really-sugary-kinda-colorful-frosting-at-the-supermarket kinda way...which, really, is a more primal kinda good than you’re likely to experience with anything more refined...

When you’re a kid you can eat amazing amounts of food. All I ate when I was a kid was candy. Just candy, candy, candy. And the only really clear thought I had as a kid was get candy.
Jerry Seinfeld

...which, when you think about it...or, at least, when I think about it...could be a contributing factor...along with these holidays coming up just when things have started getting cold...and living in a culture of frenzied consumption...for my habitual resemblance, by the time the new year rolls around, to the StayPuft Marshmallow Man...because not only are there lots of high calorie treats around...but some of them are supplied by my mom...or at least in the presence of my mom, along with other family members and all kinds of rituals meant to evoke nostalgia for those sweet, squishy idealized childhood experiences...and, if I’m not feelin’ it...as, often, I’m not...there’s always more sugary stuff around...

...happy holidays, folks...enjoy some high calorie crap for me...

Talkin' Nonsense With Dostoyevsky

Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms. If you keep talking big nonsense, you will get to sense. I am a man, therefore I talk nonsense. Nobody ever got a single truth without talking nonsense fourteen times first. Maybe even a hundred and fourteen.
Dostoyevsky

...a guy I know shares a birthday with the guy who wrote Mein Kampf...I got the guy who wrote show me that I’m everywhere and get me home for tea...and I’m only a day away from the guy who said he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die....honestly, I don’t think this means much, but I’m not complaining, either...

...berenice left a comment on my Postmodern Yogi Bear post with a link to a story from the BBC involving a bear found sleeping in a campground in Washington state, surrounded by thirty-six empty beer cans...taken from campers’ coolers and opened with teeth and claws...need I mention that this makes me feel proud to be an American?...

...when I was twenty-one, hitch-hiked with a friend from Rome to Pompeii, where we had to leave our backpacks with this old lady in black who seemed like she’d probably been there since before the volcano erupted, to go and wander the ancient dead streets...climbing through windows where we weren’t supposed to go to see things closed off to other tourists....as we traipsed into the empty coliseum, history's weight seemed almost overwhelming...I thought wow...Pink Floyd played here...

...connections, it seems, are always tenuous...a shrink once told me small children go through a crisis when they realize they're actually separate from their mothers...autonomous, lonely beings in a frightening world....my question is when, exactly, does that crisis end?...

...if something is disappointing I know it’s not nothing, because nothing is not disappointing.
Andy Warhol

...Lao Tzu wrote when you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you....that is, with the right attitude, you can have everything you want...just like the new age people say....I doubt he was really talking about the mansion in the Hollywood hills, the private plane, or the movie star significant other, though...more likely, I think, he meant you can have everything you want when you stop wanting anything you don’t already have...

Making Imaginary Snowpeople Out of Rain

To recognize the basic goodness in everyone takes courage.
Tara Brach

...the holiday season is upon us....and I thought about being really postmodernly ironic and cute and putting a syrupy sweet Thomas Kinkade holiday image at the top of this post....trouble is, there’s kind of a fine line between being postmodernly ironic and cute and seriously sucking up the place...and that might just cross it...

...and, anyway, this is a time of year...or so I'm told...for dropping one’s cool, ironic stance and getting all warm, fuzzy, and spiritual...like so...

***THIS BWOG WUVS YOU***
***AND WISHES YOU A VEWWY MEWWY CHWISMUS***

...okay...that went waaaaaaay too far...and was kinda painfully ironic, anyway...so...perhaps an inspiring line from The New Testament?...

...I was stoned...
2 Corinthians 11:25

...alright, forget it...

...Bob Dylan came out with a Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart...and I’ve been listening to it while roasting chestnuts on an open fire, redecorating my apartment to look like a manger, and making imaginary snowpeople out of rain...all the while thinking if I keep listening to this, then maybe, just maybe, I’ll come to see it as something other than yet another twisted ironic joke Bob’s playing on his dedicated fans, like me, who he knows would buy a CD of him blowing his nose...which, truth be told, might sound better than his rendition of Here Comes Santa Claus....but, at least, the proceeds are all going toward providing food for people who need it...and that’s what it really should be all about, anyway, isn’t it?...

...(yes, I actually ended that last paragraph with something sincere...even providing a link...as if my Grinch heart grew three sizes...)

In From the Storm

If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

To be awake is to be alive.
Henry David Thoreau

...was talking about how I sometimes feel nostalgic for the most tragic and horrible times in my life....when, for a while, the mind stopped drifting so haphazardly...attention overwhelmed...focused, whether it wanted to be or not, on a gaping and unavoidable pain...every unhappy moment felt so deeply and intensely as to burn with a flame that continues to glow in memory....but this isn’t a story about that...

...went backpacking in the Rockies twenty years or so ago...Indian Peaks Wilderness, near Boulder, with a friend who’d never backpacked before...and probably never did again....we hiked about six miles, mostly up, and were way above treeline when dark storm clouds appeared off above the ridgeline....I thought better get the tent up...which is what we did...this old fashioned pup tent found in my dad’s attic...and managed to clamber in just as the first raindrops started to fall, which seemed to us like perfect timing...though it couldn’t’ve been more than a minute or two before wanton winds coursing across the alpine tundra unearthed flimsy metal tent stakes, bringing thin orange material down on us like a wet cowl....which, as best we could, we held up with arms outstretched like twin Jesuses as the scene through the open flap resembled the Apocalypse as much as anything I’d ever seen...lightning dancing and exploding everywhere, wind raging in countless directions at once, cold rain hammering down....my friend said, at one point, I don’t know if I can deal with this....and I said I don’t think we have much choice...

...not that I wasn’t terrified, too...I was, of course...but also felt a curious exhilaration...crouching in the midst of this all...the insane, spectacular lightning, the wind and rain rampaging at us from all sides...the inescapable knowledge that we could die at any moment, easily...but that, right there, right then, blood was pulsing through us with a ferocity rivaling that of the storm...

...at some point, we decided it'd be a good idea to get away from the useless metal tent poles, and went to crouch by a rock that kinda sorta almost gave us some shelter until the storm passed...which it did, after a while...but by then it was dark, though the moon shone limply through the clouds, and we went back to the tent, found it completely waterlogged, sleeping bags and everything else utterly soaked and cold...and, even if I’d had the backwoods know-how and fortitude to get a fire going, there was no wood up there....then, if I’d had any backwoods know-how at all, we would’ve turned around and run for treeline as soon as we saw those dark clouds....so, with hands numb from the cold, we crammed sleeping bags into backpacks, leaving the tent stuffed between two rocks, where I retrieved it, along with various other items strewn around the area, two days later, and started the long climb down...

...not sure where it came from...except that I shared it with Mittens, our otherwise fearless Welsh Corgi...but I had a phobia about thunderstorms from early on...by my mid-twenties, it was subtle...just a dark cold feeling somewhere inside whenever I heard that ominous rumbling...but very real nonetheless....after that experience in Indian Peaks, though, the fear was gone....my friend Jeff came out to Colorado and we spent much of the rest of that summer backpacking high in the mountains...often setting up camp just below treeline so that, when the inevitable afternoon thunderstorm came, we could go and watch it from close up....and even today, when I get caught on my bike in a storm...which happens at least once a summer, usually somewhere between downtown and home...I try to avoid it, but not always very hard...it can feel like a crisp, unruly baptism...

Laughing Matter

...Shakespeare had one of his characters say All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players...which would indicate, by dramaturgical standards of the day...reaching back to festivals of Apollo in ancient Greece, when theatre first emerged from religious ritual...that life is either comedy or tragedy...

...Bob Dylan, some time later, wrote there are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke...which would appear to indicate wide support for the comedy thesis...though how you take that might depend on your definition of the word joke...seriously...

...someone I knew well seemed to view life...or at least his own life...as something like a Greek tragedy....little to do but keep up a noble bearing, marching on toward a preordained doom with moral uprightness and dignity...knowing that even therapy and religious faith can only do so much to cure the inevitable tragic flaw....and that a joke is something inherently trivial, and often inappropriate...as life is no laughing matter...

...Ken Kesey might have said always star in your own movie...which could present a few more options in terms of genre....I’ve tended at times to see life as a dark comedy...like Heathers* or Dr. Strangelove...since, when tragedy seems to be attacking from all sides, tempting one to curl up into a ball and pretend not to exist, laughter can smell an awful lot like victory**...

Laughing at our mistakes lengthens our life. Laughing at someone else's shortens it.

Cullen Hightower

...Shakespeare also wrote a play called Henry IV...then a sequel and a prequel to cash in on the popularity of one of its characters...that’s not a joke, by the way...let’s face it: Shakespeare was no more aesthetically pure than George Lucas or Mick Jagger...or whoever created those brilliant Mentos commercials...and you have to decide for yourself whether I’m joking about the brilliance of Mentos commercials.....anyway, the character, Falstaff, makes no claims to purity, either...he's a drunken, amoral buffoon...though he often speaks truths that could only be uttered on stage safely by a fool....anyway, at one point...I think it's in the sequel...he responds to mockery with I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men...takes it as a compliment, that is...and there might be something to be learned from that...

For life is quite absurd, and death's the final word

You must always face the curtain with a bow.

Forget about your sin - give the audience a grin

Enjoy it - it's your last chance anyhow...
Eric Idle

...ultimately, it’s all there...the tragedy, the comedy, the tragicomedy, and everything else...but allowing for improvisation, and not at all bound by classical unities or conventional plotting....and, like any poem, wide open to interpretation....

...maybe it all comes down to matter...we are matter...and things matter...and yet we laugh...making us, essentially, laughing matter....these are the jokes, folks...



* just googled Heathers...turns out Winona Ryder says a sequel’s in the works....I hope that’s a joke...

** yes, that was a darkly comic reference to Apocalypse Now and the smell of napalm...

Surfacing...with Court and Spark, Enlighten Up, and my new chair from IKEA..

He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.
Lao Tzu

...I have very little to say...so this is gonna go on for a while...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 1:1

...have always loved Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark album...despite always disliking that really slick L.A. production kinda sound....but, then, that’s kinda what Court and Spark’s about: she trades her guitar player boyfriend with the madman’s soul for the city of the fallen angels...as her friend David Geffen gives up feeling unfettered and alive in gay Paris for stroking the star maker machinery behind the popular songs...turning to surfaces because depths and ideals have gotten too painful....and yet, it turns out the superficial life sucks, too...since, even at the most stylish and faceless people’s parties, the old emotions and desperate search for love and contentment keep welling up....so, in the end, she ends up with jazz and the therapist’s couch....I can relate...

...speaking of surfaces...finally saw Enlighten Up!...okay, actually, I’m watching it as I write this...while also eating my dinner...yeah, I know, not mindful at all...though, for what it’s worth, my dinner’s vegetarian...unlike my lunch....so it goes....anyway, this filmmaker sends this guy who has no particular interest in spirituality on a spiritual quest...which, to me, seems somewhat self-evidently silly...and—big surprise—he doesn’t end up having a spiritual experience...not even after sampling this vast yogic smorgasbord, ranging from your most fundamentalist religious kinda scenes to your most crassly superficial gym class kinda scenes to your most totally style-conscious new agey kinda scenes...not to mention all the disagreements about the history and definition of yoga, as well as the ubiquity of practitioners who don’t seem to know or care....raising, I'm told, all kinds of major, troubling questions...

...whatever...personally, I got into the yoga thing because I thought practicing in ways that made sense to me, and avoiding those that didn't, might have a positive affect on my life...and, as it turns out, it has...in some ways I didn’t anticipate, even...so I’m gonna keep doing it...no big whoop...

...gotta admit, though, in recent months I've mostly been trying to counteract the effects of sitting on the crummy beaten up futon couch in my apartment...lumpy as a gigantic, lopsided bag of potatoes on top of a bent frame...but, what the hell, it was there when I moved in...and filled a need, as I’d just returned the easy chair I’d been using in my last place to the dumpster where I found it....seriously, there was nothing wrong with it, then, other than a stain...and my chair before that one was this old recliner, which was basically okay except that I kept finding nuts and bolts and things every time I cleaned under it...I mean, lots of them...like more than you’d think would even be part of a chair in the first place...so, it seemed like only a matter of time before it collapsed, causing untold injury...and, when I saw the one with the stain out by the dumpster...which couldn’t’ve been placed there more than a few hours earlier...y’know....anyway, it started falling apart, as well, and most likely wouldn’t have survived the trip to the new place, and so began the physically abusive relationship between the old futon couch and me, which lasted until...

...one rainy Saturday morning...when I got in the car and drove to..............................................IKEA...yes, dear friends and readers...IKEA...and, before I left, made a vow never again to shop anywhere other than IKEA....if they don’t sell it at IKEA, I don’t want it....am even quitting the yoga thing in favor of whatever traditional Swedish equivalent to yoga they offer at IKEA....this blog will soon be renamed Whatever Traditional Swedish Equivalent to Yoga They Offer at IKEA for Cynics...which, I believe, will make it the first and only whatever traditional Swedish equivalent to yoga they offer at IKEA blog on the interwebs....and, thus, more cutting edge than ever...not to mention written...like this post right now...while sitting in my new IKEA chair...with matching IKEA footrest...and ooooooh is it a cool chair...and really not difficult to assemble at all...

....only trouble is, now I gotta make the rest of the room worthy of the chair...which could take a while...

Timeless Wisdom du Jour

...one way to see how mindful you can be is to bike to yoga class in a cold winter rainstorm...then try to get through the class without thinking constantly about how much it’s gonna suck to put your soaking wet socks and sneakers back on for the ride home...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 15:357

Silence is the mother of truth.
Benjamin Disraeli

Death is the mother of beauty.
Wallace Stevens

...truth and beauty are a couple of heartless, ungrateful bastards who can’t be troubled to send so much as a lousy Mother’s Day card to silence and death...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 643:278

The universe is not only stranger than we think, it's stranger than we can think.
a Hubble scientist, quoted by Barbara Crooker

...all is impermanent...except perhaps for that lingering scent of fish in the microwave...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 316:239

...it's better to give than to receive...but both beat the hell outta having to go Christmas shopping...
Swami Yoganandasutkatasanatikkamasalakaliyugaroseannadanna (author of much maligned 19th Century commentary on Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 316:239)

Life is both dreadful and wonderful.
Thich Nhat Hanh