Tonight's Fortune Cookie

...kitchen so small in the new place it’s not exactly curbing my tendency to get take-out instead of putting in time and effort to make dinner...particularly not with that Chinese place down the road with its five buck heaping portions of General Tso’s and rice...deep frying, high fat content, MSG—check, check, check...does it help at all that I biked the half mile or so and back for it?

...there’s also the ongoing cold and wet that’s making Philly in June more like Seattle in April...I’m a negative creep, I’m a negative creep, I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned...Kurt Cobain...been there, done that, of course, but not now...

...now I’m sitting in my mellow room after midnight, reading poems and typing away on another blog post...was getting heated there for a bit, reading politics on the web...which, of course, is outside the purview of the mellow room...but, then, the number one rule of the mellow room is that if I break the mellow room’s rules, it’s not a big deal...

For now, my life is enough. There’s not much more to expect.
Simon J. Ortiz

...still going to four yoga classes and biking between fifty and a hundred miles most weeks...cut down to not-too-much-more-than a mug of coffee a day months ago and, amazingly enough, have stuck to it...even if I’ve started drinking soda again...don’t drink much alcohol, though...don’t smoke anything...so, all in all, really not doing badly...even if...oh, god, do I love junk food...that fortune cookie merely a final sugary bite to cap off the day’s indulgence...but it's alright...

...and its fortune, as it turns out, was memorable enough to cap off this post...

Don’t ask, don’t say.
Everything lies in silence.

Broadcasting Live from the Mellow Room...

...I’ve got all my yoga books arranged on a windowsill...I’ve read a whole bunch...and most have a lotta good stuff in ‘em...even if they also, sometimes, include stuff that makes me gag...and, no, I’m not talking about that vastra dhauti thing where you swallow the twenty-foot-long cloth...though, yeah, that’d probably make me gag, too...

...one instruction you see commonly in books on yoga and/or meditation is practice in a part of your house that you don’t use for anything else...to which I tend to reply, with, uncharacteristic as it might seem for one so pious and reverent as myself, some sarcasm: why just a part of my house? Why not tell the servants to clear out one of my guest cottages?

...nonetheless, in my new place, small as it is, I’ve managed to reserve a tiny room to be, if not technically a yoga room, as I’m not gonna be using it exclusively for practicing yoga, at least a relatively yogic room....that’s where the aforementioned books are, along with some poetry, and various art objects, that big round piece of coral I found kayaking in St. Lucia, a couple candles people gave me, and an incense burner, arranged on the broad windowsill...and there’s no furniture, just some cushions on the floor, and my small moon and stars rug and purple yoga block and yoga mat...and some mellow artworks on the walls...like Alfred Sisley’s Meadow...see above...and it’s where I’m sitting typing this with my laptop on the rug right now...

...if I really wanted to be all cosmic and spiritual about it, I’d point out that the room is at the front of the house, in the middle, on the third (top) floor...and has windows that, if anything was, would have to be called the building’s third eye...

...the idea, really is simply a peaceful space...no work I don’t really want to do, no reading political blogs and leaving ranting comments, no cranking up the old Stones, Clash, or Kings of Leon albums and stomping around...that has probably more to do with what my intentions are before going in than anything else...simply the conscious decision to go into a space that’s specifically set aside for cultivating that ever elusive opposite of angst...

...and, I gotta admit that, today, coming in for the first time since it’s been officially the mellow room rather than simply the one room without boxes and crap piled everywhere, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at what I’ve found...