Sober Reflections on Getting Wasted (Notes from a Car by the Ocean #2)

Wasn’t lookin’ too good but I was feelin’ real well...
Keith Richards

My earliest introduction to the whole Eastern philosophy thing came from friends who were mostly into attaining higher consciousness by other means....generally speaking, the emphasis tended to be on escaping from a world we never made...which, I’ve since learned, is the opposite of what yoga is about, ideally...though some would disagree on that....hell, even if escape might, ultimately, be impossible, it still sometimes seems a lot easier than being here without reservations...and that, it appears, is where drugs and religion tend to meet...with one, of course, far more destructive than the other...though I won’t say which one that is....

I inhaled frequently. That was the point.
Barack Obama

....in The Bacchae by Euripides, Pentheus, king of Thebes, decides the people of his city need to be more rational and sober...no more honoring Dionysus with drunkenness and revelry....to make a long story short, Pentheus’ head ends up on a stick carried by his mother as she leads a group of revelers marching into Thebes....nowadays in America, everybody agrees we’ve got a problem with drinking and driving, though, despite melting ice caps and 45,000 traffic fatalities a year, the main focus always seems to be on the drinking rather than the driving...with the perennial solution being, as with most problems, putting more people in prison...which, when a drunk with a suspended license slams into a school bus, is kinda hard to argue with....nonetheless, living in a place where the last train leaves two or three hours before the bars close, I can’t help wondering what might happen if we let just a little bit of the seemingly limitless supply of funding for new prison construction go toward providing alternative means of getting home from the bars....

...until that happens, if you’re going out for New Years’ Eve, take your toothbrush....

Notes from a car by the ocean #1

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.
Rabindranath Tagore

...gone cold turkey from the internet...walking in sand for two hours, watching clouds turn a deep blue early then dissipate...never a drop on me...the way back not necessarily shorter or longer, but mostly on pavement, or dirt, or those recycled plastic raised walkways in the wildlife refuge...so much work goes into creating natural environments...moving wetlands around, eliminating invasive species...all performed, of course, by the biggest invasive species of them all...though, as one specimen of it, maybe I shouldn’t complain....once upon a time, goddesses were born of waves like these...nowadays, people surf porn...angels we have heard on high...or we haven’t...too much dissonance...then, as a long time fan of dissonance, I’m not complaining...not exactly...

Forget the past, and just say yes....
Sonic Youth

...maybe I’ll go out in the car late tonight, laptop on the passenger seat, searching for a signal so I can post this....the one-man yoga retreat’s been uneventful...which, in such instances, is the definition of going well...certainly healthier than the dope-smoking, wine-drinking, and depression-wallowing retreats of old...though the body’s older, too...and so’s the mind...and at least part of that’s a good thing...

If I had it to do all over again...I wouldn’t!
Anonymous quote in my high school yearbook

...a couple years ago I hung out in a coffee shop where every afternoon these kids would come in...clearly the artist and outsider crowd at their high school...long haired boys with spiky purple haired girls...a mix of sub-cultural signifiers that once might’ve meant conflict...and their spontaneous absurdist repartee was so clever, so funny...I wondered if I should wander a table or two over and introduce myself...the couple decades between us be damned... hang out with them...hope they wouldn’t ask me to buy them cigarettes...though I might compromise on beer, if they were responsible about it...but then one day, the coolest of the cool kids...the one with the unworldly wise twinkle in his eye beneath the long sandy hair and above the mustache and beard he couldn’t quite grow...was holding court when a woman walked in...middle aged, short sandy hair, apparently out for a run...called him honey and suggested politely that could have dinner around 6:00, if that was okay...and suddenly the tart eloquence was gone...replaced with a guttural okay above the slumping shoulders of one unspeakably humiliated by the public recognition that he has a mother....I left town soon after, and never did go over and hang out with those guys....

The Return of the Not-So-Thin White Duke

Yoga for Cynics is back!

What’s that? You hadn’t noticed it was gone? Okay, judging by the date up there, it’s only been a couple days...but it seems like longer...maybe because the holidays happened...not all that eventful but, as always, so deep down expected-to-be-eventful that, on a deep down emotional level...they were eventful...kinda...and, in the midst of all that, the laptop that birthed this blog crashed on Christmas Eve...big time...Titanic into iceberg...kamikaze pilot into aircraft carrier...George of the Jungle into tree....not that I wasn't prepared...emotionally, if not financially...but who could have expected it to happen just before one of the only days of the year when you can't go out and spend money you don't have to buy another one?...drawing into sharp relief the extent to which I’ve become dependent on whatever computer I happen to own, as if it were a major bodily organ...

Thus...it’s somewhat fitting that the title of this post comes from Bowie’s Station to Station, which, like all good pretentious rock n’ roll songs from its era, is about coming down from a heavy-duty drug addiction...and yet, I had to alter it since, particularly after so much holiday indulgence, there’s no way I’m gonna pass for the thin white duke....One thing that's cool about the yoga crowd, they tend to be into healthy lifestyles but not at all into that anorexic ideal that tends to pass for being-in-shape in Western society...and yet, here I am feeling too fat to fit into a goddamn David Bowie song....

So, for now, I’m heading down to the beach for a one man yoga retreat ’til the New Year....began my boycott of New Years Eve events about a decade ago, after six lousy ones in a row...though there were a couple good times before that...sitting quietly on the red rocks overlooking Boulder until the hoots and hollers erupted far below to let us know it was midnight....tramping across frozen farmers’ fields in the Amish country at four A.M. to stumble upon cosmic vortexes...or at least they seemed like cosmic vortexes at the time....

...and, anyway, the shore’s a good place to be in the winter...walking in the sand from lunch ’til dusk...perhaps working off some waffle cookies and red wine...reading and writing late into the night...no internet access unless I wanna carry the computer around town looking for a signal....never mind if I end up doing less actual yoga on these retreats than if I stayed home and went to class like usual...in the season of giving, it’s always the thought that counts.....

The Obligatory Happy Christmas Blog Post

Tell me what you think about your friends at the top,
Now, who d’ you think besides yourself was the pick of the crop?
Buddha was he where it’s at, is he where you are?
Could Mohammed move a mountain or was that just P.R.?
Judas Iscariot (Tim Rice, Jesus Christ Superstar)

The letter killeth....
2nd Corinthians, 3:6

Is there any word in any language more devalued by misuse as peace? Love would, at the very least, be a close runner-up....might be interesting if somebody did a study of how many people have been killed for peace vs. the number killed for love....then, it’d also probably be pretty depressing...and the number killed for some peculiar combination of both would most likely eclipse the individual totals, anyway....

...so I’m not gonna say anything about either peace or love...or any creative mixes of the two....in fact, I think it might be a good idea to strike both words from the dictionary...along with any and all synonyms...that way, if you want to signify peace, you'll actually have to be peaceful, and, likewise, if you want to signify love, you'll actually have to be loving....

Happy Holidays from Yoga for Cynics....

Deep Dog Consciousness at the Winter Solstice

We had a kind of a special yoga class this weekend, for the Winter Solstice....all that nature & renewal kinda stuff....at one point...this is gonna sound really hokey to the non-yoga cynics out there...we were doing sun salutations and our legendary teacher told us to improvise for the next five minutes or so...move in whatever way felt most natural...needless to say, there’s nothing harder than being natural on demand...so I kept doing the usual thing...though noticing that it did feel a bit stiff...then, gradually, found myself swinging between upward and downward facing dog in an almost wavelike fashion...which did feel surprisingly right...like I’d really gotten into some kinda deep down dog consciousness for the Winter Solstice...

woof

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war is what William Shakespeare had Marc Antony exclaim over the body of Caesar....notably, though, neither Shakespeare nor Antony was actually a dog....

Fear and Loathing in the Holiday Season (Ghosts of Christmas Past #3)

It’s comin’ on Christmas, they’re cuttin’ down trees.
They’re puttin’ up reindeer, singin’ songs of joy and peace
I wish I had a river I could skate away on....
Joni Mitchell

Here we are at that time of year when loved ones reunite...and are reminded of why they see so little of each other during the year....One Thanksgiving, I drove up to Steamboat Springs in Colorado, where some friends had rented a house with a hot-tub on the back porch for a three-day party. We’d be out there in the hot-tub with the temperature all around us at something like -10 Fahrenheit, and would get so cooked that we’d get out and jump...bare-assed naked...these were some very crunchy friends...off the porch into deep snowbanks, then climb back into the tub once the cold started sinking in a bit...which took a surprisingly long time....Anyway, on Thanksgiving day, I called home, making a joke as I dialed to the effect that they’re probably having the annual family blow-up right about now. My mom answered, sounding cheerful but asking me to call back in half an hour...turned out I’d nailed it....

Right around that time, dreading going home for Christmas...for reasons that represent more of my family’s dirty laundry than I’m gonna air here...I was talking to some friends on a sidewalk in Flagstaff, AZ, where I lived at the time, and said something like shouldn’t your family be a sanctuary from all the meanness in the world, one place where you’re unconditionally accepted and supported? One guy I didn’t know too well said if it was like that, you never would’ve left...and he had a point....

Sounds of Music: Ghosts of Christmas Past #2

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels

Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles

Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings

These are a few of my favorite things....
Rodgers and Hammerstein

Christmas afternoon four or five years ago, I was watching the Sound of Music on T.V. with my niece...who I think was five at the time, but already knew all the songs. Responding to an on-screen exchange, she asked me what Heil Hitler meant....I said “um...well...Hitler was a very mean man. And, when that guy says that, it means he likes the mean man, but Mr. Von Trapp won’t say it because he’s a nice man and....” Fortunately, she lost interest.....

One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain....
Bob Marley

The day after my dad’s memorial service, I walked into a family discussion about whose house would be least depressing for the holidays....I said let’s go somewhere far away and warm.... Four months later, on Christmas Eve, my mom, younger brother, and I flew to the island nation of St. Lucia, after a bumpy drive through rainforest, mountains, and banana plantations, arriving at an all-inclusive resort on the Caribbean side...though I didn't realize until they kept bringing us these incredibly potent rum punches as we waited for our rooms to be ready that all-inclusive included unlimited alcohol...knowing at that moment that no writing or anything else productive would be done on this trip...very easily could have drowned wading in warm black water beneath stars not quite of Bethlehem late that very night...but didn’t....every morning after breakfast, would wander down to the beach, paddle a kayak along the shore for an hour or two, then shower off salt and sand outdoors, jump into the pool and swim over to the bar for the day’s first mango daiquiri....after lunch—probably some amazing fish, and more daiquiris, or anything else that could be crafted with rum, tropical fruits, and a blender—usually lie on the beach listening to reggae through headphones until nightfall...though giving myself credit for not visiting the Rasta craft stand at the public beach next door, until the final day....the house band, if I managed to retain consciousness following dinner—likely more amazing fish and a pina colada or two—could be counted on to play Gregory Isaacs’ Night Nurse and mellower Marley...more Jammin’ than Burnin’ and Lootin’...mixed always with the incessant high pitched singing of tree frogs...and a note perfect rendition of Killing Me Softly With His Song (Fugees version)...one time...one time....