Thoughts Like Raindrops

{index of lines from unwritten blog posts}

...dug out my first yoga mat...purple, bought at a Wegmans in Rochester in 2001...more craters than the surface of the moon though none, quite, going all the way through...wasn’t till I got to class that I realized I hadn’t used...or washed...it since the trip to Costa Rica...pungent waves of nostalgia rising with each sharp and mellow scent of suntan lotion, insect repellent, and year-old sweat from hours of vinyasa practice morning and night in tropical weather...

A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual.
Henry Beston

...a guy I hung out with almost twenty years ago died recently....found out about it on Facebook...where he’s still got a page....according to status updates, he’s still making new friends...

No one respects the flame quite like the fool who’s badly burned...
Pete Townshend

...slow day in the coffee shop...or slow me...the place itself is booming, Steve Reich, Sonic Youth, Ornette Coleman, and early Frank Zappa blasting through earphones a person with a history of serious ear problems shouldn’t be using...both drums surgically reconstructed, and chronic ringing in the left....my older brother a long time ago had a Black Sabbath album called We Sold Our Souls for Rock n’ Roll...can you help me? help me find my brain?...if they can sell their souls, I can at least sacrifice an eardrum or two...

...the desire for community was only strengthened in a month of such yogi-proximity, making the line between solitude and loneliness more hazy than ever...

...any god who is threatened by new truth from any source is clearly dead already.
John Shelby Spong

...it can be fun to have a friend full of juicy gossip and clever cutting remarks about absent people....only trouble is, you know damn well whose dirt’s gonna be dished the minute your back’s turned...

...been told, quite dismissively, that my attitude is very American...and it is...(to be more precise...or pretentious...it’s very Emersonian...very Whitmanian)...in the same sense, that is, that yoga, traditionally, is very Indian and something else is very Chinese, very Italian, or very Brazilian....since anything, ultimately, can be reduced to context...which is exactly what makes taking things out of context so valuable, sometimes...

Whatever we do with our hybridized yoga, the old man in the forest cautions against writing it down. Yoga has always been an oral tradition, fostering intimacy between its speakers and listeners, and resisting the dogma and myopia that fester in words written on anything more substantial than breath.
yoga 2.0

...people who meditate or practice yoga have been known, sometimes, to fall into the trap of feeling superior...ironic as that might be when it comes with claims of overcoming the ego...more grounded, higher-minded, more spiritual than thou....while I often suspect that what leads us to these practices is, in fact, simply being more fucked up than other people, who don’t actually need to sit in quiet rooms for hours on end or learn to feel comfortable with their feet behind their heads...

...I might feel perfectly fulfilled, I thought, glancing surreptitiously across the room, if I could only kiss the inside of that black-stockinged thigh...

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
Anatole France

...and even if I am getting better as I get older...(the cells don’t lie...whatever the attitude or aptitude...if you prick me I still bleed, but it takes a hell of a lot longer for the cut to heal)...I’m also getting older as I get better...

...strangely, sometimes, a refreshing tinge of possibility can be tasted right there in the midst of that deep, crushing sensation...if I can stop and tune in to it...swish the bitter wine around my palate it for a moment instead of gulping or trying to spit the bitterness out...

...the key is, I think, not to strip off the junk only to find different junk...

A genius is the one most like himself.
Thelonious Monk

Difficult Times Six

So...I’ve been called upon to share six (6) random things about myself...or something like that...but, listen, first I’m gonna tell something not-so random about me...that anyone who knows me at all knows well...which is that I’m notoriously difficult...very much so...so, for instance, since getting into this blogging thing, I’ve found myself a part of this blogger community...and, thus, I’ve made some lovely blogger friends...but also found that this community has its own strange language, customs, rituals, and unique sexual positions...okay, maybe not that last part...at least, nobody’s told me about them...anyway, among those blogger friends are Seeing-Eye Chick who “tagged” me for the six things thing...even though she knows I never follow the rules of these things...as well as Lea, who’s given me two blogging awards I’ve forgotten even to acknowledge, much less follow the rules of...and, dare I forget, my good friend Svasti, who’s once again gonna call me on recycling stuff I’ve said elsewhere...but I’ve done worse things...really...

1. 1966—the year I was born, as well as the year Bob Dylan came out with the Blonde on Blonde album, which features both the best pick-up line ever—she said ‘your debutante knows what you need, but I know what you want’—as well as the best after-it’s-all-fallen-to-pieces line—when we meet again, introduced as friends, please don’t let on that you knew me when, I was hungry, and it was your world....

2. 6 is the first digit in the address of the house where I grew up, and where my mother still lives. However, if you look my mom up in the phone book, you’ll see only the street name, without the number. The reason for that is that, shortly before we moved out from the city, when I was three, my dad, a psychiatrist, ran into someone he’d had committed, a fellow psychiatrist, actually, on the street. The guy said “I know where your children play.” My dad asked “where’s that?” The guy said “Rittenhouse Square,” which, as it turned out, was exactly right.

3. 6 is also the first digit of my phone number when I was a kid, and, thanks to cell phones, it’s the only number other than my own (which also contains a 6) that I still have memorized—I can, however, still remember what, according to the Guinness Book of World’s Records when I was a kid, was the world’s hardest tongue twister: the sixth sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.

4. 666 is, of course, the Number of the Beast according to the Book of Revelations in the New Testament. I tend to associate it, however, with the heavy metal bands that massively overused it in my youth, who I always hated, though now I realize that this was mostly because that was the music most popular with the bullies in my high school. I still don’t like heavy metal much, but will admit that the Paranoid album by Black Sabbath isn’t bad.

5. That 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing was never much of a challenge for me...he lived around the corner from the house where I lived until I was three...the one from which, apparently, that crazy shrink followed us to the park....

6. I could tell ya about the 6 Branches of Yoga...but you’d be better off asking somebody who can do twists and inversions without hurting him(or her)self...like Brooks or Linda or the aforementioned Svasti....