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....