Life is Messy

often, the state of the kitchen is the state of the mind, confused and unsure men, pliable men, are the thinkers. their kitchens are like their minds, cluttered with garbage, dirty ware, impurity, but they are aware of their mind-state and find some humor in it. at times, with a violent burst of fire they defy the eternal deities and come up with a lot of shining that we sometimes call creation.... the man with the ever-orderly kitchen is the freak.... his kitchen is his mind-state: all in order, settled, he has let life condition him quickly to a basened and hardened complex of defensive and soothing thought-order....

Charles Bukowski

...badly underemployed and working on a novel about dysfunctional superheroes...biking downtown daily for the most intense and demanding vinyasa yoga classes I can find...discovering new ways and means for exploring and exploiting edges...leaving a pile of sweaty t-shirts, along with other laundry, by last week grown to the point that now I don’t want to deal with it simply because there’s too much to carry...sunlight can, now, be seen through four significant areas of my yoga mat...in line with hands and feet...which might seem cool in a sunny, happy, yoga hippie kinda way...put it in the right words along with a picture of a sunset and it’ll get a thousand “likes” on Facebook...but maybe, really, I just need a new mat, badly...writing about other people’s books*...piled around the deteriorating Ikea chair friends find so comforting...mp3 player blasting X, Cat Power, Mary Halvorson, Arvo Part, Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, and the Stones’ Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out...coffee ready if I can get up the gumption to go and pour a cup this early in the morning...glasses held together with tape on both sides under disheveled hair badly in need of basic grooming....for a while, I was getting haircuts from this old guy who’d be asleep in the chair when I got there, and I’d have to yell to tell him how I wanted it cut...the last time, he seemed so out of it, didn’t even ask...

....one thing you have to get used to living in the big city is that it never really gets dark...wildlife is the birds always coming and going from the power lines outside my windows, their flight sometimes causing shadows inside the apartment, making me think, for a moment, that they’re in here with me...

...Democracy is messy, by definition...the trouble with the concept of heaven is that none of us, in the long run, could really be comfortable there...an eternity of having our every failing magnified in comparison to the perfection all around...messiness is our condition, underneath all the careful ordering and cleaning products...but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to do something with that pile of dirty laundry, and soon...

* my latest rants & reviews at Elephant Journal: Addressing the Question of Whether Matthew Remski should be burned at the stake for Yogic Heresy and Ahimsa Be Damned: When Buddhists Attack...

Empty Voids or Open Space

It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.
Frank Zappa

...after much excitement, there’s little on the calendar...major holidays, of course...solid letters, in printer’s ink...lacking the passion of my barely-legible scrawl....weekly, bi-weekly, and semi-weekly commitments, of course, though they’re hardly necessary to write down, and some weeks, I don’t bother....what there are are days, lots of them...frightening or inviting...empty voids or open space...depending on how I choose to look at blankness...

The soul is a verb, not a noun.
David Mitchell

...was teaching...or trying to teach the men at the homeless shelter...who were having none of it....how do you give a well-meaning white liberal a hard time?...let me count the ways...

...at one point, my frustration reaching its ebb, a guy I’ll call Derek...(who, I was happy to find, had, since I’d last seen him, managed to get through a court date that might have sent him to prison)...turned to me with a smile, said: you can tell this is a house of pain, right?....I smiled back, grateful, said: yup...

To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
Stephen Covey

The Other People

We are the other people, we are the other people, you’re the other people, too...
Frank Zappa

...had some friends in Arizona...mix of college students and drop-outs...some planning on dropping back in, some not so much...living in this ramshackle house next to a scuzzy bar...narrow front porch butting up to the sidewalk...cool place to sit and watch people pass by...two real bedrooms, as I remember, and a kind of walk-in closet just big enough for a bed...often a person or two sleeping on the couch or living room floor, as well...a likely place to find weed, beer, and loud music at any hour...

...one day there was this new guy sitting on the porch...turned out he’d moved in with the girl in the walk-in closet room...which meant he wouldn’t be there long...but that’s another story...longish hair, dark sunglasses, big smile...into Kerouac and Vonnegut, Nirvana and P. J. Harvey, hiking and dogs...got us tickets to see Johnny Cash in Phoenix, just before he got sick and stopped touring...we became friends immediately...

...a couple weeks later, were walking down the sidewalk and ran into a friend of his, who had a dog...said he’d gotten kicked out of a pizza place because he took the dog in with him...my friend, grinning, snorted, I’m sure the dog’s cleaner than the Mexicans they got working in the kitchen...

...which, I told myself, must’ve been meant ironically...or something...though it didn’t really sound like it...and, soon, started hearing more...about blacks, gays, women, Jews, people who didn't respect his right to smoke cigarettes wherever he wanted, and, most of all, as this was northern Arizona, Indians...ended up in a big ugly argument with him every time we met...and, as gradually became clear, he liked it that way...fed off of the reactions his hateful words elicited...and I decided our friendship had to end...

All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody 'til they're all the same color.
Warren Beatty, Bulworth

I support gay marriage because I believe they have a right to be just as miserable as the rest of us.
Kinky Friedman

...saw that new Star Trek movie...younger, hipper, less boring...I liked it...and was reminded that the first...or, at least, most famous...interracial kiss on American TV was between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, in 1968...though, in order for it to happen, they had to go way into the future...and to another planet...and fall under some kinda alien mind control....strange as it may seem now, in 1967, when anti-miscegenation laws were struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, in the appropriately named Loving vs. Virginia decision, Gallup polls showed that 70% of the population was opposed to interracial marriage...a considerably higher figure than current...or recent...levels of opposition to gay marriage....

Of all dangers to our nation that exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn—they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.
Walt Whitman

Floating Glowing Beings of Pure Love

Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh (originally titled Night Filled with Floating Glowing Beings of Pure Love) (would I lie to ya?)

The first word in this song is discorporate.
It means to leave your body.
Frank Zappa

...two days ‘til the yoga retreat...as before any trip, I’m worrying about stuff going wrong...last year, the plane I was supposed to be flying had a cracked window...thanks to a piece of wing breaking off and hitting it on the way up from Miami...had to wait eight hours for another plane to arrive from London...this year I put in a request for Sullenberger, but the airline couldn’t make any guarantees...

...but what about the inherent problems in things potentially going too well? What if I become too enlightened? What if I discorporate completely and end up a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love?

...yeah, yeah, I know what they say...

Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
Wu Li

...but ya never know...

...in working with addicts, it should be a bonus...who needs cocaine or heroin when you’ve got a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love on call?...for dedicated readers of Yoga for Cynics, however, the question will be: can a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love maintain a blog? Does a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love have the tangible digits necessary to manipulate a computer keyboard?

...of course, with or without new posts, visiting this blog will be highly beneficial, as it will likely carry kinda the opposite of a virus...all e-mails, tweets, etc. received on affected computers will be filled with kindness, good tidings, and boundless affection....please note, however, that web browsers could have trouble accessing racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise hateful or disempowering content...not that they can’t...they just won’t want to...

...then, should I remain in corporeal, generally unenlightened form, never mind....the next post’ll be up by April’s Fool’s day...

Possible Yoga Terrorists and Paranoia Striking...Somewhat Shallowly

...back when I was a serious political activist, my friends all thought they were being watched...positive all the vegan potlucks were under tight surveillance...spies in every circle of self-affirmation....the international combine quaking in fear at the thought of kids temporarily out of school knocking on doors to save whales, smoking bongs till they couldn't form coherent sentences, talking about but not actually reading Marx, and blasting early Zappa at three A.M....one guy I knew went for months telling all the freaks at the local co-op the CIA was watching his every move, getting little in response but yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re watchin’ me, too before finally being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic....

Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you....
Kurt Cobain

...which is not to say that I don’t think anybody’s out to get me...hell, every time I get stuck behind some jalopy going ten miles under the speed limit, I’m sure it’s part of a conspiracy to mess with my life...for that matter, in the late 60’s, when I was a little kid, my dad, a psychiatrist—yeah, I know, that explains a lot...shaddup—ran into a guy he’d had committed...on the street...and the guy said I know where your children play...and, as it turned out, he did...Rittenhouse Square in Philly...whenever I’m down that way I keep my eyes out for that guy, likely in his eighties or so, possibly moving about with a walker, still looking to abduct me after all these years....

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
George Orwell, 1984

I’ve been asked to be a community organizer for my local yoga friends...or sangha if ya wanna get all spiritual, sanctimonious, and Sanskrit-like about it...creating some kind of on-line entity, I think, and maybe more...might have to hug people or something...not too clear on that point at this juncture....anyway, I know what yer thinking...how might this community organizing crap impact any plans I might have to run for the Office of the Presidency of the United States of America?

Jesus was a community organizer...
The Internet

It’s a real concern, too...just who are these people?...how do I know none of them have dark pasts as yoga terrorists? how do I know, a few election cycles from now, I won’t be seeing video clips at every commercial break showing a seemingly mild and benevolent yoga teacher saying as you move from uttanasana to utkanasana, visualize death to America...?