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....
Christmas 1986, I’d just dropped out of college for the first time and, once the family thing was out of the way, flew out to San Francisco to fulfill a life-long dream of being a real-live hippie...
You back? I also wanna thank another cool blogger, 
Should I admit that this whole post is nothing but an excuse to use its title, which I came up with on my way out of the movie theatre and thought was really cool? (Stop giving me that confused look—go see the damned movie and all will be clear). Probably not. Nonetheless, in an attempt to further justify the existence of this shoddy little congregation of nouns and verbs: some shout-outs—that’s right, Yoga for Cynics is now cool enough to use cutting edge hip-hop lingo like shout-outs!....Huh? That’s not cutting edge anymore? Bummer (yeah, I know, that hasn’t been cutting edge since around the time I was born...at which time it referred to the at-that-time-very-cutting-edge experience known as a bad acid experience...but that’s neither here nor there). Anyway: props (that one’s not cool anymore, either, is it?) to my blog friends Roadgurl and her 
There was this Calvin & Hobbes comic strip a long time ago (yeah, that modern American version of “a long time ago”—we’re not exactly talking the Mesozoic era here, or even the pyramids...more like six or seven Madonna CD’s ago) where Calvin’s reading something and asking Hobbes what he thinks “religion is the opiate of the masses” means. In the next panel there’s a T.V. set with a thought balloon that says: “It means Karl Marx hadn’t seen anything yet,” or something like that (new motto: Yoga for Cynics: Where Sources Are Not Checked For Fear I Might Be Remembering Them Wrong). Right now, there’s a thought balloon hovering over my computer (yes, I am a cartoon character). It says: “Bill Watterson hadn’t seen anything, yet, either.”
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; 
It was back in the summer of 1990, I believe, though it could possibly have been '91, while I was embarrassing my parents living the life of a slacker out in Boulder, a year out of college, no prospects for or particular interest in a promising career of any kind, and, when not wandering in the mountains or otherwise sacrificing brain cells to unknown gods, attending a free Zen meditation class at the Naropa Institute, which was also attended, at least once or twice, by Ginsberg, who one Saturday (I think), as part of a benefit for something or other, along with some other poets, did this thing—basically, you stood in line, paid a few or maybe five bucks, and a famous poet would ask you a few questions, then write an instant haiku on the spot....I told Ginsberg I was just wandering, kind of a bum—apparently thinking maybe he’d be impressed and tell me I reminded him of Kerouac or something (he wasn’t, and didn’t)—I also told him I’d gone to a poetry reading the night before, and now, in the morning, was hung over...and so ended up with a piece of rag paper, with this poem, a little drawing of a flower and what looks like a snake, and Ginsberg’s signature on it. I’ve still got it, though in the midst of a long summer living in my van, something apparently got spilled on it, staining and smudging it badly, particularly the signature, though you can still read it...kinda.....
