Yogi Don’t Surf! (El Yogi Cynico en Costa Rica Parte Cinco)

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
William Blake

...someone told me the forecast for Philly for the following week, when we’d be home, had highs in the upper forties...which’ll feel just balmy, said she....or would if we hadn’t just spent ten days down here, said I...


Charlie don’t surf!
Colonel Kilgore, Apocalypse, Now

...the Pacific coast of the Nicoya Peninsula is renowned as a major surf haven, attracting incredibly buff wave riders from around the world...including most everybody else on our little retreat...and yet...alas...this cynical yogi...(with a history of ear problems...culminating in chronically infected scar tissue from operations meant to remove other chronically infected scar tissue resulting from previous operations meant to stop chronic ear infections)...(all of which makes water sports that involve submerging the head highly inadvisable)...does not surf...

...and, anyway, there are an awful lot of underwater rocks, there...so ya never know, when floating about the surf, just what might be lurking underneath....and this is starting to sound like yet another metaphor...

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
attributed to Swami Satchidinanda

...there’s a book called In Search of Captain Zero, about a couple of surfers and ex-weed smugglers who, earlier in their lives, decided that someday they’d find the perfect beach with the perfect surf break...paradise...to spend the rest of their lives...

The Paradise is in the desire, not in the imperfection of accomplishment...

Allen Ginsberg

...in time, though, they lost one another...and the author, Allan C. Weisbecker, has the idea that his friend, Christopher...Captain Zero...may have finally found it...so heads down through Mexico into Central America...doing lots of surfing along the way...

That ‘s how thick the wave was and how deep within it I found myself. I was in a crouch, which is pretty much instinctive in that sort of situation, but I could have stood up and still not gotten my hair wet. For the three, maybe four seconds before that wave spit me back out into the sunlight with my feet still planted firmly on my board, I was exactly and without doubt where I wanted to be on the surface of the planet earth. And there was not a drop of water in my universe that was out of place.

...eventually finding Christopher, and it, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica...only to learn that, having found his paradise, Captain Zero’s developed an addiction to crack....sometimes, it seems, there’s nothing more dangerous than finding your ideal...especially if the plan is to try and hold on to it for good instead of simply enjoying the perfect moments you get before letting them go...

...back in slowly-melting-snowy Philadelphia, found my difficult adjustment to cold weather after ten days struggling to stay cool, itchy skin flaking off from sunburn, arms and legs so bug bitten they've been compared to Saint Sebastian, garnered little sympathy...

...and, anyway, here’s where I am now...and, with temperatures reaching up toward the low sixties, and purple flowers blooming where snow was days ago, it's probably best to let go of that beach...for now...

Apocalypse Here and Now (Kind of a Movie Review #3)

The first time I saw Apocalypse Now was when it first came out, on big screen. I was somewhere around twelve years old, expecting a cool war movie—and why not? War seemed a whole hell of a lot more fun than those peace-loving sentiments associated with the incredible boredom of having to sit through Quaker meeting every Sunday...but wasn’t expecting to see that family get blown to pieces for a puppy, or the guy holding in his guts and begging for water, or the mother’s voice on the tape that kept playing, wishing for the safe return of the son lying dead, or the hanging bodies...the horror, the horror...and so, with the Reagan/Bush era that, thirty years later, we have yet to leave behind looming a mere year or two in the future, I felt my first glimmer of political consciousness...Charlie don’t surf to this day sounding like as good a three word summation of a half century's foreign policy as anyone’s likely to hear...as well as a good Clash song...though a decade later, already burned out as a left wing anti-war activist, and watching it again on VHS, smoke far less toxic than that from napalm filling the air, I thought whooooah...this shit’s trippy...particularly the opening sequence and ending, comprising what is without a doubt the coolest rock video ever....of our elaborate plans, the end, of everything that stands, the end, no safety or surprise, the end, I’ll never look into your eyes, again....but it was only in my thirties, in therapy, probing through the wreckage with an intensity equally exhilarating, liberating, and terrifying, that I could understand what authentically drunken Willard said in between Jim Morrison’s lines, beneath that Saigon ceiling fan...when I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle...wondering if perhaps the apocalypse—that ultimate battle between heaven and hell taken so literally by fundamentalists and conspiracy freaks, and so overmined for imagery by heavy metal groups and horror movie scriptwriters—might, in fact, be always here, and always now....

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats

Q. How Can You Tell That Your God is Man-made?
A. If He Hates All the Same People You Do.

One evening on the Appalachian Trail, I wandered into a shelter some few miles south of Delaware Water Gap. Sitting there already were another thru-hiker and a skinny guy whose jeans and flannel shirt showed he clearly wasn’t one, holding up his watch and asking what we thought he might get for it at a pawn shop. We made some guesses, and he told us a story of middle class woe—how he lost his wife, and kids with her, along with a house and three or four failed businesses, leaving, it seemed, only his “God”—a woman, as it turned out, who lived at some kind of ashram somewhere in New York state. He was walking to her. “She sees everything,” he said, “she knows I’m here right now.” We started preparing our respective dinners, and he just sat there quietly, until I asked if he had any food. He said no. “You hungry?” “Yeah!” I dug out a bag of instant grits I’d found somewhere, offering my stove once I was done with it. He didn’t want to wait, though, upending the bag and inhaling its dry and tasteless contents before pronouncing it good. That was when I realized his hunger wasn’t the haven’t eaten since lunch variety, but closer to haven’t eaten in days. Digging deeper, I found a bag of granola, which he wolfed down in no time, as well. It was the last food in my pack, which was okay, since I’d be getting into town in the morning anyway, and a diner breakfast would be all the better after a couple hours hiking on an empty stomach.

I didn’t see him again, but somehow doubt his “God” was gonna be too receptive to a supplicant showing up with empty pockets—no different in that way from third world dictators raising gilded cathedrals in their impoverished cities, or countless ministers of the "prosperity gospel" on cable TV with their bogus stories of people sending in their last dollars, only to have God drop hundreds in their path the next day. Those folks tend to be really into the apocalypse, too—no need to worry about global warming, the more things blow up in the Middle East the better, that just means the rapture’s coming sooner, so keep sending in your checks and you won’t get left behind. Faith can offer consolation to the desperate, certainly; all too often, though, it takes the desperate for whatever they may have left.

Thanks to Friendly Atheist for the God joke.