There's No Such Thing As An Original Sin

...driving Philly’s infamous corridor of angst, the Schuylkill Expressway, with the radio on, heard an old Elvis Costello song...I’m Not Angry....with one line that goes:  there’s no such thing as an original sin...which I’ve always thought was kind of a clever play on words and traditional Christian doctrine...

...sin isn’t a word I use much...associating it, as I tend to do, with traditions in which any baby worth knowing seems to have drowned in the guilty bathwater a long, long time ago, leaving a tub I have little interest in entering....though I do think an awful lot about faults and mistakes...and all kindsa not particularly commendable behavior...mostly my own...

...and, gotta admit, even while basking in recrimination and self-loathing, I tend to look at these little blemishes on my character as kinda special...unique, even...enough that the world might recoil in horror if the charges against me were read in public...

...like, y’know, I’m one badass evil kinda dude...

 

...but, the truth is, it’s the same old tired crap...stuff millions if not billions of people around the world are probably guilty of at this very moment...that’ve been causing problems for a hundred thousand years...not particularly good, maybe, nothin’ to be proud of, some of it best apologized for, with reparations made, in fact.......but that’s all...

 

...like somebody I was helping with her college application essays a little while ago, who wasn’t sure what to say about a period of her life which was notably blank on her résumé...said she didn’t want to mention that she drank herself into jail and rehab...which was understandable...

 

...and yet, I told her, you’ve had a drinking problem....you’re not an axe murderer....half the people on the admissions committee have probably had drinking problems....that it was best be to simply be open about it...

...and she got in....one of those admissions officers even noted how touched she was by the honesty of her essay...

 

...(it should be noted, that, even if you are an axe murderer, that’s hardly a groundbreaking accomplishment....have you cleaved as many heads from necks as Genghis Khan? I don’t think so....so if that’s how you’re planning on making your mark, might as well forget it...it’s been done)...

...there’s no such thing as an original sin....and not need to go through life as if our faults are anything special...

You Better Do As You Are Told, You Better Listen To The Radio

So you had better do as you are told.

You better listen to the radio...

Elvis Costello

 

...so here's the deal...I think I got into writing because I've never been so good at spoken communication...have a tendency to stumble and say things that are, y'know, impolitic....so, thanks to my growing fame as a yoga blogger, I've been asked to go on the radio...

 

You turn me on, I'm a radio...

Joni Mitchell

 

...seriously...from 1-2:30 Pacific Time...that's 4-5:30 for us more urbane, sophisticated, non-surgically-enhanced East Coasters...I think...the accidental yogist will be interviewing yoga bloggers...yes, yoga bloggers...who are gonna tell the people all the things their mama shoulda...or something...at Kill Radio...which operates out of L.A., but, thanks to the wonder of the interwebs, you can listen to it anywhere by hitting on this handy-dandy link....apparently you can even download it later as an mp3 and listen to it at your leisure, in your car, while having sex, or even make it part of your yoga class playlist, right in between Snatam Kaur and Rage Against the Machine....anyway, the Yoga for Cynics portion of the show should start around 2:00/5:00, preceded by the likes of It's All Yoga, Baby and Daily Downward Dog....I'm gonna set a sincere intention not to use any foul language...check it out...



Getting Personal...

...contrary to the impression some may have gotten from that last post, this blog’s not gonna prostitute itself for hits, gratuitously throwing around keywords like big boobs...kinky sex...or hot throbbing orgasms...so don’t worry...

Oh I just don’t know where to begin...
Elvis Costello

...actually been doing some intense personal writing...off and on...since the trip to Mexico...where somebody told me I should write about the stuff I don’t wanna write about...things I tend to hint at before making a joke about big boobs, kinky sex, or hot throbbing orgasms...

...finding I can only dig into that stuff in pieces...going in, then backing off, then going in and backing off again...sometimes it helps to drink three quarters of a bottle of red wine first...saving the last quarter for afterwards...but, in the long run, that’s probably not the best idea...

Humanity’s hope lies in its capacity not to accept the way its past has played out.
Joel Kramer

...I didn’t really need to be told that...I mean, hell, it’s what I’m trying to get other people to do...dig into their deep trauma and put it into words...capture it in narrative...encapsulate it...put it outside where they can look at it...re-envision...reevaluate...reinvent...

...then, other people’s problems are always easier to confront...and it’s not exactly unusual for the cobbler to wear no shoes...ask anybody who’s spent any time with shrinks outside of their professional capacities....I’m the son of a psychiatrist and a social worker, have had a couple messed up shrinks as friends, even went out with one for a mercifully brief time...I’m not gonna tell ya what she was into...

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
J. Krishnamurti

...as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better, if you’re gonna try and help somebody else, than an awareness of just how fucked up you are yourself...to know you’re not one inch above or below the person you’re trying to help....sometimes I get the impression that the addicts I work with see me as more like one of them than one of the staff...and I take that as a compliment...

The Obligatory April Fool's Day Post

In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it – thou art a fool.

Lord Chesterfield

If they had a king of fools then I would wear that crown,
and you could all die laughing because I’ll wear it proudly...
Elvis Costello

Chapter 18, in which many events transpire, none of them of any importance whatsoever...the Vikings walked on water again this afternoon...big whoop...I don’t know why we put up with them...okay, actually, I do...they’re Vikings for Chrissake...if they wanna bore the hell out of the whole neighborhood insisting we watch them walk on water every afternoon, it sure beats being raped and pillaged...still, not exactly the way I wanted to spend my time...I came to Tulum for a yoga retreat...not this, not at all...apparently the spiritual crowd welcomed the Vikings at first...I mean, what the hell...they could walk on water...how much more spiritual than that can you get? And then the crazed brown bunnies came, in the wake of the Vikings...crazed brown bunnies, it turns out, often come in the wake of Vikings....and they started picking dandelions and tossing them in the air whenever the Vikings appeared on the beach...which wouldn’t have been a problem, except that dandelions really aren’t native to Mexico at all, at least not this part of Mexico...where the hell did the rabbits find them? The rabbis, I almost wrote there...actually, I did, but changed it...the rabbis are an issue I don’t like to talk about much....they were a problem, too...really, it really had nothing to do with their being rabbis, but they sure didn’t get along with Jesus or Mohammed...I think the problem with Jesus came when they first met him and said “step down off your pedestal, Jesus, you’re just another rabbi, like the rest of us.” “No I’m not,” said Jesus, “I’m Jesus.” I’m not even gonna go into what Mohammed said about that...Buddha, meanwhile, had a lot of different opinions since, y’know, everybody’s the Buddha except we don’t all realize it...I’m told that even rocks are the Buddha...what happens if you break a rock in half, though?...do you get two Buddhas? Is it like mitosis or whatever the hell they called in back in 10th grade biology class?...god, that teacher was an asshole...but this isn’t a book about him...and, anyway, the red birds that might’ve been planes but didn’t really look like much of either were everywhere that afternoon, as well...the eyes kept looking down on them but didn’t care...personally, I didn’t care about any of that...I didn’t have to look up...who the hell needs to look up when there’s so much interesting down, forwards, and sideways? The Vikings, though, they were a real problem...a real problem....and not just because of their cheesy walking on the water stunt...you ever smell a Viking?...seriously, you don’t want to...and you sure don’t ever wanna eat enchiladas de mole sitting next to three of them...but I hadn’t had lunch without Vikings in nearly three weeks...and this didn’t make my life one of contentment and/or joy...

Mistakes, Brilliant and Otherwise

Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass was badly damaged in transit. He considered the spiderweb of cracks an improvement.

You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps the holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.
“Fonzie Kafka,” according to Bubbles, in the final episode of The Wire. The real author was probably named Franz, but I like it better attributed to the sitcom character I idolized in fourth grade, like most of his young fans never imagining that his incredibly self-conscious obsession with cool was meant as a parody.

The title of a recent post, Old Roads Rapidly Fading, was a misquoted Dylan lyric, “your old road is rapidly aging”—changes in tense and syntax purely conscious and intentional, fading instead of aging not so much, but I liked it better, anyway. And why should a correction be the end of the story? I mean, sure, if the Pope says "I like muffins" and the New York Times misquotes it as "I like your muffins," that’s a problem, even if it makes a better story. But that’s not what we’re dealing with, here. Somebody once told me his favorite Grateful Dead lyric was “look into any eyes, you’ll find value,” which he saw as a powerful evocation of the inherent worth of every person. Holding back the natural urge of the pretentious liberal arts undergrad and would-be hipster, I didn’t tell him the line was actually “you find by you.” Why ruin such a lovely sentiment for something so crass as accuracy?

Elvis Costello, in Accidents Will Happen, does not actually sing a perfectly pithy half-rhymed evocation of how it might feel to return day after day to an unhappy living situation, she says she can’t go home without a shot of rum. Instead, he sings she says she can’t go home without a chaperone, which isn’t bad, kinda clever, in fact, but not nearly as good as the way I heard it...so why not call it a creative collaboration between Elvis and me? Jean Paul Sartre called reading directed creation (or so I remember, and it works, so I’m not gonna look it up)...and Herbie Hancock described, in a documentary on Miles Davis, how he made a mistake when they were playing live, and Miles picked up on it, and made it right (I'm not gonna double-check that one, either)...and some of the best places I’ve ever been were found when I was lost. Isn’t every misstep really just unconscious improvisation? Why hold back, just because you goofed?

Why I Disagree With Everything

Knowledge is a good thing—of course it is. I’m all for spreading knowledge. Hell, I’ve been a teacher, and a tutor, and a writer of informative articles in which I barely made anything up.

And yet...maybe...not knowing can have its value as well....

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
Shakespeare

Guess I can be somewhat of a contrarian—that’s kinda the opposite of a chameleon—in blue surroundings, I turn red—not so much politically—at least not in the current “red states” and “blue states” sense—though, admittedly, back in the late ‘80’s when I was at Evergreen State College—one of our nation’s most celebrated granola schools, with alumni including Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, and the founders of both Sub-Pop and the riot grrrl thing—prevailing local winds of academic Marxism and acid-burnt utopianism did blow me away from the far left...though the icy gusts of ReaganBushism then blanketing the country certainly prevented any serious drift toward the right....

Good and bad, I defined these terms so clear, no doubt, somehow...
Bob Dylan

But here I’m more concerned with that sticky “spiritual” stuff that people I hang out with either get all gooey about or have complete and utter contempt for. When I’m kicking back with the atheistic academic crowd—to the extent that people on the long march toward tenure ever “kick back”—I tend to be much more likely to indulge in the mysteries of cosmic consciousness, life after death, and the possibility of some kind of something for which the big G could be a workable metaphor. If I really wanna get antisocial, I’ll argue that to negate takes as much a leap of faith as to believe, so that atheism’s really just another religion, and that, anyway, if absolutely forced to choose, I’d probably trust the sages of the ages before the likes of Derrida and Foucault....

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God....Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us....Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.
Pema Chodron

Of course, when hanging in the yoga crowd—to the extent that one can “hang” with people who pay such careful attention to their posture—my perspective changes...especially when people start talking about that new age crap—fake tribal bullshit, self serving evocations of karma, positive affirmations with all the substance of green jello....When people ask my sign—and won’t let me change the subject—I say “I’m a capricorn,” to which the answer is inevitably “just as I thought,” to which I reply “actually I’m a libra,” eliciting an “okay, I knew you were either a libra or a capricorn,” but... “I’m really a virgo,” “that explains it...,” “no it doesn’t, because I’m a scorpio,” “of course!” and so on....Then, who can blame them for failing to guess that I was born under the sign of Charlie the Three Toed Sloth?

If they had a king of fools then I would wear that crown
and you could all die laughing because I’ll wear it proudly.
Elvis Costello

I was on a yoga retreat where we did these writing exercises, which were then shared with the group...one of them with a prompt of something like “what surprises you at this point in your life” and, after a couple of days of wondering if there was truly a place for a yoga cynic in such mellow touchy-feely environs, I went off on the whole group: “I’m surprised I’m here. I don’t believe in crap. I hate that all that new age shit. I hate positive attitudes. I hate people who have positive attitudes. I hate people who believe...” for twelve minutes. Hell, it wouldn’t be the first time I had to eat lunch alone. But get this: people liked it. Told me they appreciated my honesty and sense of humor. Hugged me and shit. What’s a contrarian to do?