Let Freedom Ring

 ...takin’ it easy, with iced coffee, waiting for things to cool down a bit to bike downtown to hear the Roots and watch fireworks on the Ben Franklin Parkway....hot July 4^th Wednesday, West Mt. Airy, State of Mellow Mildly Caffeinated Satori, U.S.A. almost a ghost town, people staying in with the air conditioning, or maybe downtown with the parade...me, still recovering from dehydration and heat exhaustion, spending the weekend walking around D.C., a city built on a swamp, in 104 degree heat, sustained by coffee and margaritas with friends, making my way through the National Gallery for Van Gogh, Picasso, Gerhard Richter and the Mirò exhibit, catching a sunburn walking out to see the new Martin Luther King Memorial...

....(some ago heard a usually-pretty-hip public radio kids’ show identifying King on his birthday as a man who had a dream...nothing more specific to ruffle ideological feathers....all the world loves a dreamer and speaker of positive intentions, right?....and asking kids to call in and say what their dreams were...turned it off after one hearing one too many young voices voices their dreams of having millions of dollars)...

...(then, it was another great American who said very well, then, I contradict myself....this, too, is America)...

Cold February Drizzle, and a few of my favorite things

...driving through cold February drizzle...went to the bank to make a deposit...which, in itself, represents a certain modicum of good news...and the teller asked what plans I have for retirement...I smiled, said probably living on the streets...she smiled back, choosing not to pursue the subject...

...then was at one of those box stores...not gonna identify it, so you won’t have an opportunity to tell me about its evil labor practices, destruction of the environment, and/or support for frighteningly right-wing politicians/horrible record on GLBTG issues, etc....I know what a horribly un-conscientious consumer I am...and knowledge is the first step toward wisdom...or something...or not....anyway, was buying socks...got lots of ‘em, barely any match...and those that do have holes in ‘em...call my socks what ya will, they ain’t unholy....these are the jokes, folks....and a voice came over the loudspeaker announcing that another register was opening, so would the next customer in line proceed to......but, turns out, that led to some disagreement between two customers ahead of me, each at least thirty or forty years old....it went something like this: what the f&*&, b*&@?!...it said next person in line, a&*&)%#!!...f*+% you, b)%$#!!!...you’re a *^%$#!!!!...your mother’s a &*^(%^$#!!!!...my mother’s good!!!!!...I KNOW she's good!!!!!......

...headed back to lovely, organically-grown West Mt. Airy, state of Fiscally Sensible Lovingkindness, U.S.A., and my local coffee shop...where Yoga for Cynics posts are born...noting a pickup truck parked right out front with a blue plastic ballsack hanging from the rear bumper...

...last week, recovering from flu-like symptoms, struggling to focus, drinking too much coffee, and doing my best to ignore the endless scandals of the yoga blogosphere, was watching some old Woody Allen movies on DVD...the sublime Annie Hall and the not-quite-as-good-and-kinda-disturbing-particularly-in-light-of-later-events-yet-still-gorgeously-filmed-and-generally-brilliant Manhattan, in which the protagonist, near the end, raises the question, typical of a Woody Allen character, of why life is worth living, before concluding: Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile, followed by a list...

...and so, on this dreary day, thought I’d give a brief list of my own, just off the top of my head:

...John Coltrane playing My Favorite Things...
...biking along Wissahickon Creek...
...floppy-eared dogs...
...the way the young woman at the homeless shelter who told me she loves Walt Whitman smiled when I quoted him...all truths wait in all things...at the beginning of Tuesday night's yoga class...
...Haruki Murakami...
...Bob Dylan singing she said your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want...
...Virginia Woolf...
...an intense practice leaving me feeling like I’ve been to Jupiter and back...
...Bill Murray...
...Jorma Kaukonen...
...Joan Miro...
...successful headstands...
...red rock canyons...
...Vincent Van Gogh...
...Hamlet’s description of deep depression, beginning I have of late but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth....
...the frozen mango margaritas at that place down on Passyunk, especially when it’s nice enough out that I can bike home...
...Sufi grinding...
...a deep pigeon pose...
...that first cup of coffee in the morning...
...Light in August...
...the way Carrie Brownstein pulled off all those classic cheesy rock-hero guitar moves without irony when I saw Wild Flag play this past fall...
...long phone conversations in which nothing of import is said but much is communicated...
...Miles Davis’ solo a couple minutes into Shhh/Peaceful...
...Joni Mitchell singing Free Man in Paris...
...Beethoven’s 9th...
...Gabriel Garcia Marquez...
...The Brothers Karamazov...
...Joe Strummer singing it's up to you not to heed the call-up, you must not act the way you were brought up...
...mindfulness...
...solitude...
...friendship...
...compassion...
...kindness...
...orgasms...
...you...
...the coffee I'm drinking right now...
...Jon Stewart...
...Flannery O'Connor...
...Apocalypse, Now...
...The Big Lebowski...
....Casablanca...
...Keith Richards...
...Billie Holiday...
...people calling out my name and enthusiastically waving across the room though I can’t see who they are because I just took my glasses off just before yoga class...
...sudden surprising revelations I get while peddling...
...and laughing about all the rest...

Headlight On Wet Black Asphalt

...headlight light* on wet black asphalt at the intersection out the window from the coffee shop** on a grey late November morning...there and gone, then replaced, gone again, and there again with the slow movement of cars, controlled by STOP signs and crossing guard...if with a slightly different quality, angle, luminosity, each time...impossible to photograph***...seems all the illumination I’m gonna get, this morning...but, for right now, it’s enough...


* kind of a redundant-sounding, not very mellifluous description, I know...but “glare” really doesn’t do it, and “sparkle” would be way too far in the opposite direction...as, in a different way, would “luminescence” or any o' them there fancy-schmancy highfalutin' words...even “shine” seems a bit much...I’m just talking about a little bit o’ plain ol’ light here, folks, nothin’ more...

** High Point Cafe, Carpenter & Greene, West Mt. Airy, State of Highly Caffeinated Sadhana, U.S.A....

*** at least not with my cell-phone camera...****

**** or, at least not with my cell-phone camera operated by me...*****

***** especially not if I get the angle wrong, so the doorframe’s largely blocking exactly what I’m trying to focus on....looked right from where I was sitting when I took it...******

****** then, the picture’s not the point, anyway...*******

******* then, really, neither are the words...

Building From the Ground Up, Part One

...sitting at the usual coffee shop, drinking the usual coffee, thoughtlessly cogitating the usual misgivings, apprehensions, and regrets...self-judgment, ennui, and mild depression...life as usual seeming like one big obstacle course with no clear path apart from that defined by the obstacles themselves...

To be able to free oneself is nothing; the hard part is being able to live with one’s freedom.
André Gide

...trying to fly away might have been your first mistake.
Bob Mould

...but, idly there in my favorite sunny window seat, the thought comes that I like where I live......(not my apartment, so much...though it’s not bad, really...its problem, for the most part, its messy inhabitant...and the messy thoughts he wakes up with...more internal, that is, than external...though the Upanishads, I think, say that’s all one & the same)...(Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 438:901: ...don't believe everything ya read in the Upanishads...)...coffee gone, irresistible high-calorie toasted buttered cheddar and black pepper biscuit reduced to tasty crumbs I pick up with a dampened fingertip to eat one by one...thinking I really should be getting on with the day but focusing dreamily out at the corner, naturally illuminated...center of my laughably crunchy community...food co-op, meditation studio, alternative bookstore, alternative pet store, alternative whatever the hell that store is, alternative kid's store...run by somebody who’s also a yoga teacher...more certified yoga teachers here than plumbers, certified public accountants, or Republicans...by far...more organic vegan gardeners than people who’d admit to eating fast food or shopping at Wal-Mart...tree lined sidewalks, bicycles with baskets, two churches down the hill, one Unitarian, the other Presbyterian but with a lesbian minister...a community justifiably famous for its effortless integration, though the skin tone in the coffee shop's conspicuously lighter than that in the public school across the street...but, it takes just a beautiful seven mile bike ride following the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill River through the park, past the sculpture gardens and Art Museum, to get downtown...residents notably friendly, usually laugh at my jokes about scoring organic crack on the way to yoga class and wanting to call myself a Mt. Airyan but concerned that might give the wrong idea...moved all over the country to live in famous hip communities: Boulder, Olympia, San Francisco, Burlington, Flagstaff, Ithaca, had some fun but couldn’t wait to leave each and every one...then ended up back in this area where I grew up somewhat unwillingly, out of necessity...it's a long story, and kinda personal...to find myself nearly four years later thinking, sea of troubles and all, I wouldn't mind staying for a while....and that’s not a bad place to start...

Off the Deep End, Gladly

It’s easy to be a dedicated student of what you already think.
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 201:312

...long-suffering non-yogi friends think I’m going off the deep end...then, that’s kinda my intention...

...a yoga teacher friend was encouraging people to choose a word to represent their intentions for the new year...the kinda thing I tend to dismiss as new agey but end up finding useful...looked at my t-shirt, which read Springboard Studio...thought springboard...

...in preparation for the big intense yoga teacher training...6:30 in the morning to 9:00 at night six days a week, deep in the mountains in the dead of winter...kinda like nurturing, compassionate boot camp...been reading about fascia and synovial fluid (first time I’ve studied anatomy since 10th grade biology class)...(where I mostly sat there writing out Bowie lyrics on my notebooks, thinking about comic books and sex) and alignment...finding it kind of intimidating, though frequently coming to surprising realizations that I already know the stuff that seems most daunting and complicated...experientially...through the asana practice...just not the words for or theory behind...which seems a bit ironic...

Follow any analytic discipline, rigorously pursue any science or philosophy to its inexorable end, and you arrive at absurdity. From there, two paths diverge: toward despair of the overwrought intellectual, or toward the laughter of the gods.
Josh Mitteldorf

...first started practicing yoga as a grad. student, half way through a dissertation...more precisely, at the beginning of a lengthy break from said dissertation due to depression so severe I was just about picking a cliff to jump off....then, once the dissertation got going again, the yoga kinda faded away....never really got it going seriously 'til I left the land of theory and ironic quotation marks, entirely....not that there's a connection, necessarily...

...another teacher pointed out I tend to lead with the head...that’s Jay, PhD, she said...

Just how anti-intellectual can a guy with a PhD get before he starts sounding ridiculous?
Ancient and Revered Cynical Zen Koan

Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Ralph Waldo Emerson

...yoga is, to me...or, at least, for me...essentially experiential...making big debates about whether it’s a religion or whatever somewhat moot...does it feel like a religion?...if it does, it is...if not, it must be something else...

...we’ve found that yoga comes to vibrant life when we realize that while we have no stable idea as to what it is, we know that we embody its evolving pulse through our baffled wonder.
yoga 2.0

...then, maybe it's all how you define religion...some would say it’s all experiential, originally...somebody coming down from a mountain and saying whoa, some weird shit went down up there...lemme tell ya about it...beliefs, holy books, rituals, dogma, etc. all coming later...means to codify the uncodifiable, get a handle on what can’t be handled, put infinity in its place...making it clear that somebody else, in some spiritually privileged long ago time and far away place, slipped the yoke....you gotta shut up and do as you're told...

Editor’s note: it occurs to the staff here at Yoga for Cynics that this post about moving away from the intellectual and toward the experiential is getting highfalutin' in a manner that's, arguably, contradictory to its theme. We apologize for the apparent error and assure readers that it probably won’t happen again...at least not in this post....anyway, isn’t it all, really, about finding a balance?...

Philly Street Art Revisited...

...biked out last Thursday from West Mt. Airy...state of illuminated discombobulation...for the first time since last month’s blizzard-like-storm...(that’s what the Associated Press called it...just in case anybody was confused by the all day whiteout conditions and nearly two feet of snow and thought it was an actual blizzard)...into the harder streets downtown...

...ended up riding about ninety-five miles over the past week...which is a lot after not being on the bike at all for a month...and, yesterday, while doing some of that hip-opening, hamstring stretching, bending over the bent legs kinda yoga stuff, noticed that my legs hurt...like, a lot...

...nonetheless, managed to make use of the sunny weather to take some pictures around the city...street art...and the places where I find it...including the stuff that tends inevitably to be in front of it, blocking a clear shot...which, I’ve come to think, is essential, kinda like the random noises John Cage incorporated into his music...

...and often enhances rather than taking away from it...like the painted cloud mixing in with the real one, and tree whose small branches seem in danger of being set afire by the guy’s fingers...

...or the KEEP OUT! spray painted in white right next to the dreaming girl...like a strange, discordant caption...

...movement’s always felt comfortable to me...as countless friends and acquaintances have learned that my idea of walking distance doesn’t necessarily correspond with theirs...maybe part of that is the constantly changing contexts...and the constantly changing meanings attached to myself that go with them...

...of course, sometimes ya just wanna disappear...or, at least, make other people disappear...

...Laura compared meditation to being a passenger...simply watching and enjoying the ride rather than feeling the need to always be in the driver’s seat...I said I guess that's also part of what makes meditation difficult...feeling like I need to get up and put my foot on the gas pedal to drive my life forward...as if it’s not gonna keep going, anyway..

It's All About Balance

...went to a wedding night before last and woke up yesterday morning more hungover than I’ve been in years...two parts 7-Up, two parts champagne, and a whole lotta Southern Comfort makes a helluva fruit punch...then back to yoga class in the evening...it’s all about balance...

...last wedding I went to was a little over a year ago...two hours and three lengthy dissertations on the proper godly nature of marriage...some people these days think they can redefine marriage, but you can’t redefine marriage, God decreed what marriage is...man on the top, woman—having blown her chance at self-determination in the Garden of Eden—meek and submissive on the bottom...guy behind me let out a deep MMHHH! of spiritual satisfaction every time his inherent mastery over womankind was extolled....and these, I thought, are my relatives...

...this time, just over the bridge from West Mt. Airy, State of Caffeinated Reverie, U.S.A., two young cousins of the bride determined who would read vows first by rock-paper-scissors...and, in a spirited mélange of Quaker meeting and Jewish ritual, journal reading and storytelling, nods to Chagall and classical ballet, and quite a bit of heartfelt creative anarchy, the deed was done....and this, I thought, is where I live now...

...for Sarah and Jason...long life & happiness...

Disillusionment Gets Pointless and Boring (After a While)

...back in the summer of 1959, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a bunch of kids were kicked out of a swim club on account of their skin color...a move defended by the club’s president, on the basis of concerns that they would “change the complexion” of the club...

...oh, wait...turns out that was the summer of 2009, in my home town of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...

...meanwhile, in India, consensual same-sex relationships have at last been decriminalized...but not without controversy...including some very vocal protests from an extremely popular and highly influential guru, Baba Ramdev...

...who, as it turns out, is one of the country’s leading proponents of...oh, good god...yoga...

Sittin’ in a park in Paris, France, reading the news and it’s all bad,
They won’t give peace a chance, that was just a dream some of us had...
Joni Mitchell

...West Mt. Airy (State of Gentle Inebriation, USA) is somewhat famous for how easily it integrated...it also happens to be in Philadelphia...the city where I was born and never wanted to live again...and wouldn’t have had it not appeared absolutely necessary two years ago....a friend said Mt. Airy seemed like it might be a cool neighborhood, so I found it on a map, took the infamously dangerous-though-lusciously-scenic Schuylkill Expressway to the even more dangerous-and-lusciously-scenic Lincoln Drive, then followed signs and parked in what appeared to be a deserted neighborhood...looked around a bit, feeling somewhat lost, before this young guy came along with sticks in his hands, drumming on air to music on his headphones...I asked him where I was...he asked where I was trying to go...I said I was thinking about moving to the area...he said I probably wanted to go a little further up the road, the way he was going...ending up having a lovely conversation with him for seven or eight blocks....a bit later, walked into a coffee shop called the High Point Cafe...the woman behind the counter asked what can I get ya?...I said I was more a prospective customer...thinking of moving to the area...she said you should definitely move here and started writing down names of apartment buildings and giving all kinds of advice until a long line of customers stretched out behind me...even though I wasn’t even buying a cup of coffee...and I thought wow...I do wanna move here...

...and, once I did, got back into the yoga thing...something I’d started and then stopped some years before...as many people do...but this time more seriously...started getting in with the serious yoga crowd...which made me nervous...suspecting they’d stop being so nice as soon as they found out I didn’t pretend to be happy all the time and wouldn’t use The Secret to wipe myself....as it turns out, though, that hasn’t happened....for that matter, when I started this blog, was actually kinda semi-looking forward to passive-aggressively nasty comments from self-righteous and dogmatic yogis disapproving of my attitude...and yet, the rare times the on-line yoga crowd criticizes me, it’s generally for being too hard on myself...

(...on top of that, in the past week, got blog awards from Tonya at When Life Gives Me Lemons, I Have to Take Prozac and a shout-out from Melinda, as well as a kind and badly needed reminder from Brooks that it's been five days since the last Yoga for Cynics post...)

...point being that, yeah, things are fucked up all over...including racist swimming pools and homophobic yogis...but, after a while, disillusionment gets pointless and boring...there’s really no need to choose between being a lobotomized Pollyanna and that guy dressed all in black and scowling at you over his dog-eared copy of L’Etranger on the subway...it’s possible to see, point out (in blog posts and elsewhere), and even act on things that suck without being dragged down by them....

...a special namaste to black kids in Philly who want to swim and all the gays and lesbians in India...

Two Easters

Easter...theological arguments aside, it’s a time of rebirth...connected—call it a big coincidence if you want—along with all the pagan fertility symbol rabbits & eggs—to the vernal equinox...everything coming back to life...which would make it kinda the opposite for our friends in the southern hemisphere...but anyway...

...it was right around Easter two years ago when I decided I had to leave my lonely apartment outside of Ithaca, NY, and move to Philly...an area where I’d really never conceived of living again...the site of all my early—and not-so-early—failures...representing everything I’d been running away from ever since...even as it kept pulling me back...like Michael Corleone in Godfather III...okay, maybe nothing like that...but still...there were some lengthy periods in my 20’s...coming home broke and unsure of where to go next...working lousy temp jobs and hiding in the storage room upstairs to smoke weed listening to the Stones’ Black and Blue album every evening after work like a strange pathetic ritual...you’re just a memory of a love that used to be...after that, only a couple times a year to visit family, though at times things got so strained I didn’t wanna go at all, and sometimes didn’t...and to visit an old friend or two...but that was it...

...until everything changed in the summer of 2005, when my dad died suddenly...less than a week after I’d finished teaching my last college class...the day before August 15th, which I’d declared as day one of my new life writing full time, as I’d always wanted to do... in between, I’d visited with the family...had breakfast with mom and dad at a restaurant on the Cape May boardwalk on Saturday the 13th, when dad, not generally known for putting a positive spin on things, told me how excited he was that I was setting out into the unknown like this...like Walt Whitman: The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted, Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find...though neither of us knowing just how far from a safe, familiar harbor I was gonna get, or how soon....got the call the next day, while visiting friends on the way home...an urgent message left on my cell phone by my older brother while I was at the beach: call me tonight repeated a couple times with an unmistakable urgency...making clear that, whatever it was, I didn’t want to know, but needed to hear it anyway, as soon as possible...

...a year and half later, on Easter, mom, isolated and ailing, seemed to be tumbling downhill at an alarming rate...complaining incessantly about various physical problems, increasingly unsteady, memory disappearing fast, making clear more than once that she didn’t want to live many more years...and then, on Easter afternoon, when she finally rose from bed, things appeared suddenly to have gotten far worse...she couldn’t, it seemed, complete a full sentence, voice drifting off after a few words....my younger brother took her to the hospital, thinking maybe she’d had a stroke... I’m not sure what we ended up doing for Easter dinner...probably just fended for ourselves, taking whatever was in the fridge....I thought, and in retrospect was probably right, that she’d lapsed into a deep depression...not that I knew what to do about it...

...that was something I had a rather immediate familiarity with at the time....kayaking through the mangroves in Key West a month or two earlier hardly putting a dent in it...so overweight I couldn’t stand looking at pictures of myself from that trip...intense tension headaches every day...increasing amounts of ibuprofen every night, along with either a bottle of red wine or a six pack or two of Corona...and junk food, lots and lots of junk food...thinking I might need to start buying weed again, since being a stoner seemed preferable to descending into alcoholism...painfully lonely where I was living...barely any friends except long-distance, any romantic prospects seeming further and further out of reach...the big plans of a year or two before steadily crumbling into dust but no really promising ideas on the horizon...my life seeming in as inevitable and frightening a decline as my mother’s, if forty years earlier....really, I didn’t have much to lose in picking up and moving, even if it was to Philly...

Sitting here in limbo, waiting for the dice to roll
Sitting here in limbo, got some time to search my soul
Jimmy Cliff

...two years later, mom’s health problems are largely under control, even if her memory isn’t what it once was...and she’s a lot happier with two of her sons nearby, one of us at the house every weekend...a month or two after that Easter, I found an apartment and a friendly, reasonably healthy community in West Mt. Airy, State of Quiet Integration, USA...an easy train ride, or an eight mile bike ride through Fairmount Park along the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill River, to center city...a ten minute walk from the largest, wildest urban park in the world...got back into yoga shortly after arriving, a lot more seriously than before...finding through that a way to stop the tension headaches, as well cutting out the nightly boozing without reverting to old bad habits...in many ways healthier than I’ve ever been physically and...somewhat...mentally...still working on that...including gradually making peace with my past...as this blog attests three or four times a week...at Easter 2009, still in a transitional period that seems to go on and on, with no particularly solid end in sight...but coming to realize that’s not necessarily such a bad thing...

Untitled

...quiet November afternoon treading across arboreal curves high above the muddy banks of near-mythical Wissahickon Creek...exalted by Poe, as well as, in different registers, that motley assortment of dogs always swimming by the Kitchen’s Lane bridge...down from West Mt. Airy, State of Poignant Steady Exfoliation—which, quite unexpectedly last Tuesday, went green orange yellow even a bit of red as well as expected blue—along a narrow rocky path, not really marked on maps I don’t think but well traveled nonetheless...it makes no difference, not at all...feeling myself...but that didn’t come out right...or it did, but probably not conveying anything like what I meant it to impart...filthy minded readers...that sense of being embodied that gives an intense yoga session sometimes its more psychedelic qualities...the traipsing through some undiscovered country beneath and in the flesh...the body acoustic as well as electric...deep notes in every foot, toe, knee, back, neck, shoulder, head...knowing there...here...if only for a minute...then back to sleepwalking...along the muddy bank....

Now the Wissahiccon is of so remarkable a loveliness that, were it flowing in England, it would be the theme of every bard, and the common topic of every tongue....the brook is narrow. Its banks are generally, indeed almost universally, precipitous, and consist of high hills, clothed with noble shrubbery near the water, and crowned at a greater elevation, with some of the most magnificent forest trees of America....The immediate shores, however, are of granite, sharply defined or moss-covered, against which the pellucid water lolls in its gentle flow, as the blue waves of the Mediterranean upon the steps of her palaces of marble.
Edgar Allen Poe

All the bullshit of the past texts? Simply gossip. Simply someone else’s ahh-moments on record. What are you here to do? Discover your own.
Jennifer Schelter

I’m no fucking Buddhist,
but this is enlightenment.
Bjork

Now I’m wondering if I should title this post Feeling Myself...would that get me more readers, or fewer? Not that I’d have any problems with any connotations it might bring up...even if that’s not what the post is about...nothing worse, certainly, than Shakespeare using all those dick jokes to tempt groundlings away from the visceral thrills of bear-baiting for an afternoon of theatre....Once saw Jon Stewart—the man who, it must be acknowledged at this time, did as much as anyone to get me through eight years of tortured American history—asking a crowd of five thousand: if you’re a guy and you don’t masturbate, clap...and you could've heard a pin drop.... I told that to somebody and she objected to the singling out of guys. I said I didn’t know if it was the same thing, remembering all those Alice Walker type stories about women empowering themselves by getting in touch with their bodies for the first time when they’re like forty...when, for an adolescent boy it’s more like something that just happens...by sudden, unnamed, undefined, unprecedented, unbelievable imperative...and then happens again.....

Things to Do While Drinking Coffee #5

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

...in my usual window seat...though they still haven’t gotten me the promised nameplate... at the near-mythical High Point Cafe, located conveniently on the mean streets of downtown West Mt. Airy, State of Near-Erotic Caffeination, USA, having just passed the usual sardonic remarks back and forth with the counter staff—who I need to go bug for a refill now...and maybe a piece of that damn pumpkin bread I can’t seem to resist...can I make it through the darker, colder months of the year without gaining thirty pounds? Time and the tightness of pants will tell....aaaah, but coffee, my dark mistress, how you taunt me with your fine aroma and chilling warmth...and that guy just came in—the guy who I call Jerry ten years from now—though I’ve never met him—Jerry’s a friend from various places...it’s a long story...and not a very interesting one...so I won’t tell it here...but I’m pretty much positive that, due to some kind of time warp, this guy is him ten years from now...this neighborhood exists in between city and woods...is known for its seemingly effortless yet imperfect integration...is Philadelphia and yet not...listening to Thelonious Monk and the Velvet Underground and Nico through headphones that make my left eardrum ring incessantly...I may not have gotten to be a rock star, yet, but at least I’ve got rock star ear problems...and, if I manage to get through this entire post without saying anything of consequence whatsoever, at least I didn’t mention the election....

One day in the marketplace Mullah Nasrudin encountered an old friend who was about to get married. The friend asked the Mullah if he had ever considered marriage. Nasrudin replied that years ago he had wanted to marry and set out to find the perfect woman. First he traveled to Damascus, where he found a perfectly gracious and beautiful woman but discovered she was lacking a spiritual side. Then his travels took him further to Isfahan, where he met a woman who was deeply spiritual yet comfortable in the world and beautiful as well, but unfortunately they did not communicate well together. “Finally in Cairo I found her,” he said, “she was the ideal woman, spiritual, gracious, and beautiful, at ease in the world, perfect in every way.” “Well,” asked the friend, “did you then marry her?” “No,” answered the Mullah, “unfortunately, she was looking for the perfect man.”
traditional Sufi tale, recounted by Jack Kornfield (and edited very slightly for clarity by me)

Much as I try to create a space of grumpy negativity, twisted screeds born of hurt feelings and too much cheap w(h)ine, barbed whispers, gnarly pissed-off elegies of unfettered nihilism and endless caustic sarcasm here in my grey, isolated, misanthropic corner of the worldwide web, people keep seeing goodness and light in it...what can ya do when people like your best efforts at being disagreeable? So, I’ve been given blog awards by blogger friends Svasti and Lea—though accepted in classic curmudgeonly style, for which the former verbally kicked my ass (had it coming anyway, after all the kangaroo jokes) and also been called upon by Dano, another blogger friend—what’s with all this sense of community, anyway?—apparently lurking somewhere else in this strange metropolitan era—can I muster up some enthusiasm to cheer the Phils to victory? Probably not—to give another one of those seven things about me lists...but right now all I can think of is that I want lunch...and what a goofy lookin’ mutt that is out there on the sidewalk...dogs are pretty much like people—not as intelligent, for the most part, but with better personalities...oh, and check out After Stillness, created by my yoga friend who’s too shy to tell anybody about it (now she’ll probably wanna kick my ass, too)....

Things to Do While Drinking Coffee #2

*bowing once again toward the High Point Cafe, West Mt. Airy, State of Divine Caffeination, USA*

Rasta don’t work for no C.I.A.
Bob Marley

Somebody called me a sell-out...he may have been joking...anyway, if it’s true, I sold out pretty damn cheap...but, then, who’s the definitive sell-out? Judas Iscariot? What’d he get? Thirty pieces of silver? What’s that if you adjust for inflation? Anyway, it’s probably between him and Mick Jagger...who’s made a bundle...got knighted for chrissake. Then, an alternative approach to that pretentious liberal-arts major "sell-out" crap would be to acknowledge the need to find a balance between art and commerce—or, more broadly, that which brings joy and meaning and that which pays the bills. For a lucky few, the two mingle comfortably—but even they have to worry about bookkeeping, taxes, and other kinds of practical shit that can’t be dealt with so easily when in the throes of creative rapture.

I tend to idealize Van Gogh—not so much for the prostitutes & syphilis, psychosis & depression, or self-mutilation & suicide aspects, but for the absolute go-for-broke, follow-your-muse-no-matter-what type ‘o thing. Of course, he had his brother to support him, but still had to keep asking him for more cash, and manage that cash so rent got paid, food and paint could be bought, and some was left over for the prostitutes and absinthe; and he didn’t just paint for God or his own soul, either. Apparently he got quite frustrated that Theo the big time Paris art dealer couldn’t sell his paintings. So, even passionate Vincent had some sense of balance with crass practicality. Which is not to say one has to compromise everything. Shortly after graduating college, feeling disillusioned with...well, just about everything...I was doing temp work—generally minimum wage crap clerical jobs for investment companies, the kinds of places where I was still far too idealistic to even think about getting a real job. Then one day I got sent to work in the mail room in the local office of some gigantic corporation, not realizing till I got there that this was in fact the company’s nuclear division. Not long before, I’d worked for Greenpeace, demonstrated against nuclear power plants, been arrested protesting nuclear testing. And there I was, wrinkled suit borrowed from my Dad, wondering if I was really cynical enough to simply go with the radioactive flow. To make matters worse, my supervisor liked me so much that, there on my first day, he fired somebody, figuring she wouldn’t be needed with me around. At the end of the day, I went to the temp agency office and told them I had moral issues with the gig. The woman in charge said it was too late to get somebody else, so I’d have to go back the next day. I refused, which seemed like it knocked the wind out of her; “well then we can’t use you anymore,” she said. I said “okay” and walked out. Later, her superior called me and said she shouldn’t have done that, given the circumstances, and I was reinstated. My guess is that it hadn’t even occurred to her that somebody might stand on principle to the point of getting canned, and so figured she could make the threat with no danger of having her bluff called. Of course, after that, they only called me when they were desperate—graveyard shift, breathing dust with co-workers who never failed to share racist jokes.

The normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.
Peter Shaffer, Equus

Twenty years later, with a PhD, I try to scrape by as a freelance writer and editor, inveterate yogi, occasional teacher, and composer of cynical bon mots. It’s never too late to fuck up your life. Money is far from everything, but it sure is nice to have some lying around, ideally enough to serve as a cushion when you fall. Saw a great blog post (http://lindasyoga.blogspot.com) that told about a famous yoga teacher who implied you can’t do savasana properly without immersing yourself in a cocoon of holistic merchandise—as if the yogis in India for the past few thousand years had piles of expensive yoga props—(though, actually, from what I understand, Patanjali himself made a bundle on yoga-themed schwag, even copyrighting the word “sutra,” so that his successive incarnations got royalties whenever anybody came out with a sacred text). Seriously, it reminds me of books that say I should practice yoga or meditate "in a part of your house that you don't use for anything else." (Perhaps the room between the solarium and the indoor tennis court? How about one of my guest cottages?) My yoga practice begins with moving stuff out of the way.

When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land, and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.
Jomo Kenyatta

Exclusive Yoga for Cynics Theatrical Review:
I went to this play called Les Miserables. That’s French for “less miserable.” It’s called that because the main characters die and go to Heaven, which makes them considerably less miserable than running from monomaniacally obsessed lawmen, turning to prostitution to keep from starving to death, or getting shot at by French gendarmes while chasing after unrequited love. Near the end, the dead characters in Heaven sing, “to love another person is to see the face of God,” in perfect harmony. At this particular performance, though, shades of Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell, and Roy Cohn jumped onstage and added “unless you’re gay,” which kinda ruined it. Those guys couldn’t sing worth shit.