It's About Time

Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.
Steven Wright

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world--and never will.
Mark Twain

... There are times I feel I'm new and different...like the past is just a series of harsh cocoons I’ve sloughed off...left in a pile I can sort through if necessary, but no more parts of my self right now than banana peels and apple rinds tossed in yesterday's compost...leaving me nothing to do but grow....and there are other times I feel like I’ve never left high school...or nursery school...or my first experience of unrequited love...or my second...or third...or tenth...or that gradual, mostly forgotten disillusionment that comes to all of us when we realize our parents aren’t actually omnipotent, omniscient, or even omnibenevolent...

...just as I was writing that, got a spam e-mail, advertising products meant to temporarily ease the downward pull of time on male sex organs...which, if I’m to believe the official date and time, was sent at 8:55 on September 3rd, 1938...

...a little while ago was in the car listening to some early Stones...Aftermath...that collection of classic rock n' roll riffs, bad vibes, crude misogyny, and angst released just in time to mark the birth of the late 60’s love generation...not to mention my own birth....and opening, on the American version, at least, with Paint It, Black...which has that legendary sitar riff, followed by Charlie Watts’ drums pounding like the heartbeat of someone nearly consumed by dark anxiety...and I can’t listen to it without thinking about just how goddamn good it ain’t easy facing up when your whole world is black sounded when I was sixteen...which, at this point, makes the song a refreshing reminder of how much better right now is than those fabled best years of my life....and how, all in all, my thirties were better, if less exciting, than my twenties...as my twenties, for all their problems, were almost infinitely better than my teens...so, though my forties haven't been without difficulties so far, they still have a long way to go, and I seem to be on an upward slide...

More Questions for Meditation...Or Not...

You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
Steven Wright

...ever get an error message in your sleep....like, cannot connect to the unconscious right now...cannot display tonight’s dream?

...what exactly is the difference between a time honored notion and and a cliché?

...ever notice that an all or nothing attitude almost invariably leaves you with nothing?

Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you’ve been to some of those places, you think, “How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?”
Jerry Garcia

...ever think that, at times, confusion might be the clearest perspective?

...ever have one of those days when you feel like you have every reason to feel good...but you don’t...and that makes it worse?

...could it be that what’s really wrong with you might simply be thinking that something’s wrong with you?

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Lawrence Durrell


Contest Rules: readers who answer all of the above questions correctly* win: nothing...(my Zen Buddhist friends say it’s excellent)...


*note: there are no correct or incorrect answers to these questions...

Mental Mountains

In the mountains, there you feel free.
T.S. Eliot

I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.
Steven Wright

In Valley Forge National Park—best known for George Washington’s troops eating bark and freezing their asses off in the long winter of 1776—a couple of hills are home to what I like to call the allegorical hike. First, I walk up the soft, grassy slope of Mount Joy. Then, after a pleasant jaunt among the rabbits and deer, I come down, cross the road and creek, and begin to climb a steep colonial ruin-lined trail to the top of Mount Misery, following a noose-shaped course before going back the way I came, again reaching the heights of Mount Joy, descending to my car, and driving home. Deep, isn’t it?

I thought of you as my mountaintop, I thought of you as my peak
I thought of you as everything I had but couldn’t keep...
Lou Reed

There’ve been times I’ve been hopelessly infatuated with someone I didn’t know well at all. Looking back, after things have gone bad, or didn’t happen at all, I’ve wondered how I could’ve been so wrong, or what the hell it was all about in the first place. The trouble, I think, has generally been that I saw a projection of something I’ve always wanted, or needed, or lost, not another person at all. There’s this movie called An American Crime—young Ellen Page gets left with Catherine Keener who turns out to be a psychopath and tortures her to death, with the help of her children and their friends—based on a true story—the kind of movie that’s well-made with strong performances, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to subject yourself to it. Shortly after seeing that, I was reading about David Pelzer, who’s written a bunch of books about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his deranged mother. “How could they do that to an innocent child?” is a valid question, certainly. But I wonder if they see that innocent child at all, rather than a malevolent symbol, or some part of themselves they hate. Maybe it’s similar to the way depression causes a person to see nothing but itself, and mistake it for the world.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
William Blake

Sickness, Health, and Some Serious Yoga Crap

This has been a rough summer for a lot of people I know—first one friend broke his fibula, running, then another, who plays guitar for a band called Drums Like Machine Guns (the one time I saw them, they did a seven minute set of...well, you pretty much have to catch one of their gigs yourself), was crowd-surfing in a mosh pit until he got dropped—compound fracture, two plates and 14 screws in his left arm. So...I’m riding my bike in the park, thinking about how my mom says "bad things come in threes"—I'm not at all superstitious, but, for some reason, seem to believe in this—and really hoping one of these bumps in the road doesn't make me number three....but...I make it home and see there's an e-mail from another friend who, as it turns out, is laid up with pneumonia. So, much as I sympathize with her and the other walking wounded, I start thinking cool, I'm safe. But then, who do I hear from but my friend who's hiking the Pacific Crest Trail—except, at the moment, he's not hiking anywhere because he’s got a staph infection in his left foot from doing forty-mile days on a major blood blister. I tell this to the guy with the plates in his arm, and he, with the wicked smile of the already-afflicted, responds "they're coming in sixes, now. Two more to go....."

The best way to find out if yoga’s really doing anything for me is to stop for a little while...even just do less—go to class once a week instead of three times, skip the usual don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it morning practice for a couple days, stop trying to be mindful—I find myself thinking “jeezus, did I really usedta feel this crappy all the time?” Then, other times, going the opposite direction, I’ve gotten really buzzed—like John Lennon sang—the deeper you go, the higher you fly, the higher you fly, the deeper you go (though he was singing about hard drugs, not yoga) (seriously—you think “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” is a cute song about a guy and his pet primate? Try googling the phrase “monkey on my back,” then listen to it again). (Then, according to this hippie freak I know—he goes by Jedediah—yeah, that kinda hippie freak—if you meditate from the time you take a hit of acid until you start getting off, it really takes the edge off). (Whatever). Of course, the trouble with any kind of flying on the ground is that you’re bound to crash, eventually. But, I guess, even that’s part of the process...and the experience does leave behind the knowledge that a fresher, more vivid state of mind is possible...and that it’s better and lasts longer if you get there without the psychedelic drugs.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?
Steven Wright

I’m not even close to being an expert on the yoga thing—even though I have a blog with yoga in the title—I just go to classes, read books, think a lot about the stuff, and, even if the Hindu metaphysics don’t really do it for me, it all seems to be moving me toward much better physical and mental health. Basically, I see yoga as about opening, and cynicism as about closing, and wonder if humor might be a bridge between the two...we’ll see.

such an agnostic stance is not based on indifference. It is founded on a passionate recognition that I do not know.
Stephen Batchelor

Thanks to those who’ve left all the wonderful comments—including a person named Gina who said she spent all morning at work reading through past posts. Honestly, nothing could make me happier than to hear that people are reading Yoga for Cynics when they’re supposed to be working. Also, disagreement is more than welcome—half the time, I probably don’t agree with me, either.

Things To Do While Drinking Coffee #4

Should I pursue a path so twisted?
Patti Smith

A general rule for dealing with mental health professionals: never go to a shrink who doesn’t readily acknowledge that she’s at least as fucked up as you are.

I use the feminine pronoun above not to be PC, but because most women I know are more willing to acknowledge how fucked up they are than most men I know. Admittedly, a lot of men take pride in how fucked up they are—as do a few women—but they probably don't make the best therapists, either. So, another rule: if you walk into a shrink’s office, and the guy’s sitting there starting at the wall saying “duuuude, I am sooooooo fucked up," you should probably turn around and go.

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.
Jawaharlal Nehru

For the most part, I disagree with the kind of gender essentialism expressed in that last paragraph. When you start seeing stuff like “men are from Uranus and women look really hot in pink” all over the place, it should be taken as a sign that traditional notions of gender difference are in some amount of trouble and it scares people shitless. At the same time, I don’t really think the story about the guy with the beard and the female reproductive system having a baby means much at all, except maybe something about media shamelessness and the willing gullibility of people like me who can't stop ourselves from reading about a pregnant man. Hell, upon returning from a week-long self-imposed news blackout in Mexico last spring, that was the first thing I saw.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anaïs Nin

Then, at that point, it was preferable to the accusations of racism and sexism lobbing back and forth between the Clinton and Obama camps. Right now, of course, a lot of of the accusations flying around are about politicians acting like politicians. While I find most of the shifts Obama’s made lately disappointing, in the end it’s probably good for a lot of starry eyed progressives to have to acknowledge that he’s a politician rather than a liberal messiah or reincarnation of Martin Luther King.

Two monks were washing their bowls in the river when they noticed a scorpion that was drowning. One monk immediately scooped it up and set it upon the bank. In the process he was stung. He went back to washing his bowl and again the scorpion fell in. The monk saved the scorpion and was again stung. The other monk asked him, "Friend, why do you continue to save the scorpion when you know its nature is to sting?" "Because," the monk replied, "to save it is my nature."

(A refreshing counter-story to the better known and far more cynical “you knew I was a scorpion/snake” one, found on somebody else’s blog) (http://musingsfrommara.blogspot.com/).

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
Steven Wright

*yet more thanks and praises to the High Point Cafe, West Mt. Airy, State of Wondrous Befuddlement, USA*

What the hell kinda yogi writes blog posts at three twenty-nine in the morning?

Telephone’s ringing, but I don’t answer it
’cause everybody knows that good news always sleeps till noon.
The Cowboy Junkies

The truth is, I’d have nothing against morning people if more of them would simply acknowledge that they are morning people, as opposed to people who are livin’ right, unlike you lazy deviants still in bed. Yeah, we’ve all heard the old Ben Franklin, “early to bed” thing, and, of course, when people like Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett sing “the night time is the right time” and “gonna do all the things I told ya in the midnight hour,” religious leaders of all stripes can reply quite smugly “yes, and that’s exactly the problem.” The American attitude toward sleeping-in has always tended to combine traditional Christian attitudes toward sin with more practical concerns about lowering productivity in a capitalist economy.

And yet, when you get into that "alternative spirituality" thing, even among the mellowest of alternative spiritual types, you tend to find said people getting up even earlier. Seriously, we're talkin' Zen freaks getting up to meditate before the bars close...and B.K.S. Iyengar, "the pope of yoga," says yoga should be practiced early in the morning since that’s when the mind is clearest and body loosest. Dare those of us born under the sign of Charlie the Three Toed Sloth, as we drag our sorry selves out of bed, so stiff and fuzzy-headed that making that oh-so-necessary first pot of coffee seems as difficult and complicated a process as enriching uranium, say "speak for yourself, buddy?"

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Steven Wright