The Velvet Underground and Yoga

Take the blue mask down from my face and look me in the eye.
Lou Reed

That silence thing, ever so important to the inner peace crowd, doesn't come easy. I find concentrating on much of anything (particularly reading and writing) difficult without music playing. That's due to what, if I were in grade school nowadays, would be diagnosed as ADD. The music is controlled noise that blocks out uncontrolled noise—both external and internal. Certainly, it's a symptom of our modern world (written with the caveat that I really don't think any other world is without its problems, either. Interesting how so many in the yoga crowd talk so much about the here and now, yet romanticize every there and then they can think of. I mean, Stephen Cope, early on in Yoga and the Quest for the True Self—a book that’s mostly great, by the way, much as it irritates me in places—talks about breaking up with his boyfriend, then later idealizes such famously gay-friendly milieus as traditional Hindu villages and pre-modern Europe.

What was I talking about? My inability to concentrate? Right. And I’ve even got music playing now—Lou Reed’s Blue Mask album—which reminds me...a couple of posts ago, I mentioned my top ten list of Lou Reed lines, as kind of a throwaway joke, though I really do have such a list. The thing is, I’ve gotten nothing but derision when telling friends about it. Mention it here however, and what happens? People, with, apparently, some of the same personal problems as I, come out of the woodwork and say they wanna see it. So:

Top Ten (partially annotated) Lou Reed Lines:

#1 How do you think it feels, and when do you think it stops? The Berlin album's so fucked up, you’ve gotta have something seriously wrong with you to actually enjoy it. I love the Berlin album.
#2 You made me forget myself. I thought I was someone else, someone good. Most people think “Perfect Day” is a lovely song about a lovely day in the park with a loved one. I wouldn’t want to disillusion them.
#3 I’m set free, to find a new illusion. Oh, Lou, how can you manage to describe such a positive sentiment, while being so utterly nihilistic at the same time?
#4 Won’t you recognize us? We’re everything you hate. Love that pain body.
# 5 The fact that you are married only means you’re my best friend, but it’s truly truly a sin. I have no idea what this one’s about.
#6 Taste the whip, in love not given lightly. Corporal punishment should only be between consenting adults.
#7 Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.
#8 Some kinds of love are mistaken for vision.
#9 There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out. People tend to see Magic and Loss as Lou’s darkest album, as it deals with cancer and death (and, yeah, it has that lighthearted song about the guy cutting himself up with a razor blade). And yet, this song is probably the most positive thing he’s ever written, dealing with walking through the "fire" of pain and trauma and finding when the past makes you laugh and you can savor the magic that lets you survive your own war, you find that that fire is passion, and there’s a door up ahead, not a wall.
#10 Put a fork in their ass and turn ‘em over, they’re done.

My Mind on Drugs

A few years ago, I lived in this rickety old house broken into apartments right around the corner from the Museum of Fine Arts in Rochester. One day I was sitting on the front porch and this crazy old woman who lived upstairs came out and started talking to me. She asked what I was doing. I said grading papers. She asked if I was a teacher. I said yeah. After a while, I thought it’d only be polite to ask what she did as well. She gave her psychiatric history, described her heroin addiction, her schizophrenia, her son who robbed banks while she waited in the car, and her experiences with Buddhism. “I reached enlightenment in 1977,” she said, “but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Having your mind empty can be painful.” I suspected she might be mistaking the effects of anti-psychotic medication for nirvana, but who am I to say?

Truth be told, there was actually this one time when.........
..................................................I saw God................
...................................really................................
...it was at this Allman Brothers gig.................
......in Telluride...................................................
......waaaaay up in the fuckin’ Rocky Mountains.............
......it was like sooooooooooooo fucking amaaaazing...........
.......................................but I’m not gonna tell that story here.

One thing I’ll say about the yoga thing, though, is that it definitely can supply a cool, clear, and reasonably consistent buzz. At times, in fact, I’ve wondered if it might be just another addictive behavior. But, as a good friend said, for those with a tendency to self-medicate, being addicted to something healthy is a good thing.

In an earlier post I went on a bit of a rant about the tendency to prescribe drugs like Ritalin and Adderall to what would appear to be the growing legion of kids affected by ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder). In the past, I’ve been called on this kind of remark, and told about people who were unable to read a page or sit down for half an hour before they were put on these drugs, and now they can. Am I saying they should be denied the medication that’s improved their lives? No, I’m not. I am, however, suggesting that such cases are a small subsection of the rapidly exploding total, and that, in many cases, the problem might be the educational system, not the kids. Allow me to provide a bit of autobiography. They tried to get me on Ritalin twice when I was growing up, as a way of dealing with my apparent inability to pay attention in math class (or for that matter, any class that failed to grab my interest, i.e. almost all of them). I refused and, fortunately, my parents didn’t push the matter. Was my poor attention span a problem? Yes. In fact, my grades were lousy throughout grade school, and I probably would've been held back more than once except that the teachers seemed to agree that I could’ve passed if I’d tried, and that forcing me to repeat would only make things worse for everybody involved. In the later years of high school, I did a bit better and, having taken a year off and written a personal essay describing my trials and tribulations and heroic overcoming of the same, I made it to college. It wasn’t until graduate school, though, that I really began to excel. I won’t say that I floated through two Master’s degrees and a PhD without a care, but I didn’t seem to have any more trouble than anybody else. Lectures rarely held my attention and, as always, I had to have music playing to study but, as courses were all discussion based, and the vast majority of work was self-directed, that wasn’t much of a problem. All in all, it was a whole hell of a lot easier than grade school. Do I sound like a learning-disabled person? Or might it be that I was struggling with an educational system which itself has a severe disability in terms of understanding that some minds work differently than others and allowing those minds room to flower? Alas, from what I hear, things have only gotten worse since I left high school, and any hope for change has been positively knee-capped by “No Child Left Behind.” Can there be any doubt that, as reliance on standardized testing continues to grow, the attention deficit epidemic and resulting drugging of America's youth will as well?