There Could Be Worse Ways To Spend My Time

...tonight the women at the rehab were in the living room, that legendary Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon mash-up playing on the T.V....I told ‘em you may be the most sober group of people who’ve ever watched this...

God knows, it’s sacrilege to waste the talent for idleness which I possess.
William Faulkner

...to get busy, first get organized...(sounds like something Sun Tzu would've said...or maybe it was me)...made myself a big to-do list...a series of bulleted goals to be accomplished...with, one hopes, a sense of optimism, hard work, and perseverance...in the coming days....and then, within an hour or two, started feeling a dry, crusty, utterly nasty feeling from the back of the throat to the sinuses, along with an overwhelming need to bundle up, lie down, and close my eyes at two-thirty on a sunny Saturday afternoon...

...that was more than week ago...the nasty sinus cold still lingering just a bit, but mostly, it seems, off on its way....that to-do list serving as a bookmark in the novel I tried to read in between blinding headaches, desperate noseblowing, endless games of FreeCell, and the latest seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Breaking Bad, watched from start to finish on the computer....so now, I’m starting over...

...and I went down to the demonstration,
to get my fair share of abuse,
singin’ we’re gonna vent our frustration...
Mick Jagger

...at least managed to get some yoga in, if far less than usual...including a vinyasa class on Friday, where, actually, not having biked for a week, I noticed a refreshing lack of soreness in the leg muscles...and, then, ever the glutton for punishment, got back on the bike for a ride downtown on Saturday....a pretty day along the river, except where I had to detour around a gathering of aryan nations-type people blocking the path....seriously....maybe ten beefy, angry-looking, Gothic-tattooed, generally goonish-looking skinhead guys holding flags, one speaking into a bullhorn...though whatever he was saying...(apparently something having do with the statue, there by the path, of Viking explorer Thorfinn Karlsefeni...no doubt muttering can’t you please just leave me out of this crap? in some ancient Norse tongue, somewhere beyond the grave, at that very moment)...was drowned out by a slightly larger, equally angry-looking, group of dudes, perhaps fifteen or so, dressed head-to-toe in anarchist black chanting “nazis suck,” while a couple of cops stood in between, simply looking miserable...

...and it occurred to me, thinking back on over a week of relative inactivity in the face of a long list of important shit to do, there could be worse ways to spend my time...

Botticelli's Niece

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Rumi

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner

Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room, where I got me a date with Botticelli’s niece...
Bob Dylan

...trying to write but can’t ignore that classic profile...pre-Raphaelite...if moderated by a nose ring...hair straight outta Botticelli, eyes staring into another world...but there I’m editorializing...or, more accurately, fantasizing...more likely she’s thinking of some boyfriend with six-pack abs straight outta Jersey Shore...and, certainly a lot younger than I...but maybe that’s just cynicism...hard to stay out of these frames...a year or two ago on my birthday, a younger guy I was talking to said he bet I got laid a lot back in the day and asked if I regret never getting married...since, apparently, a man in his mid-forties is ineligible for either marriage or sex...no matter how much time he spends on the yoga mat...then, I always say, while it’d be great to have a twenty year old body again, I’d rather hold on to the mind I’ve got now...and sometimes believe it...and, anyway, now she’s stepping out the door to get away from a screaming child, carrying a paperback copy of To the Lighthouse, which, to tell the truth, I saw before coming up with the eyes staring straight into another world thing...and Botticelli’s Venus always looked more classically vain than anything, a yoking of Renaissance ideals with those pretty girls who wouldn’t talk to me in high school...which was exactly what appealed to me, wandering through the Uffizi after crouching awake all night on the train from Brindisi, having last slept, for only an hour or two, the previous afternoon...passed out from all those godawful early morning shots of Ouzo on the boat from Patras...covered by my rail-pass, of course...I’d slept out on the deck and rolled over in my sleeping bag at around seven a.m. to an invitation from that somewhat older guy I’d been talking to the night before to join him for a drink...and, later, somebody lent me a Walkman and I passed out blissfully listening to a scratchy Dead tape...twenty years old beneath a Mediterranean sky...

Dr. Jay Saves Lives

The other Dr. J

...this year, on the summer solstice, I...(no need to make a big deal about this, folks...I’m sure you all would have done exactly the same thing under the circumstances)...saved a life...

...to be more specific, the life of a young mannequin...like I said, no need to sing my praises for such a selfless and courageous act of heroism, which, no doubt, is exactly the course of action you yourself would have taken, if told to by a qualified CPR instructor...

...nonetheless, anybody so inspired to draw a deep, meaningful poetic connection between the saving of this imitation-life and the summer solstice may feel free to leave it below as a comment...

...more pressing is the matter of my official bio, which, evidently, needs to be changed from

the kind of doctor who, in case of emergency, can explain Faulkner while you die

to

the kind of doctor who, in case of emergency, can stand there for a minute or two looking stupid and thinking “ooooh shiiiittt” before finally stepping to the fore and saying "soooo...ummmm...anybody know CPR?...Like, y’know, other than me?...No? Oh...ummmm...okay...”...then get down on the floor and, we can only hope, remember to pull the head back and squeeze the nose, and recall that it’s two breaths to thirty compressions*...though, if that doesn’t work, we’re of course back to Plan A: “Fragmentation is central to Faulkner’s work. His entire wide and rambling Yoknapatawpha saga may be seen as a collection of fragments attempting some kind of desperate cohesion, themselves often broken up and confused...”**...***

...on second thought, maybe I’ll leave it as is...



* yes, that’s the appropriate ratio...really...get re-certified now...

** actually the first two sentences of Splendid Failures in the Old South, the first section of “One nation: no longer anywhere;” Going Native in Yoknapatawpha, itself the second chapter of my dissertation, “The Painful Task of Unifying:” Fragmented Americas and “The Indian” in the Novels of William Faulkner and N. Scott Momaday...seriously...

*** now that I think of it, change the names and it could also be a pretty reasonable description of this blog...

Do You Have to Do Something Wrong To Be Forgiven?

...famous yoga blogger Brooks Hall wrote this lovely poem about forgiving the world, and I left a typically silly comment...

and the world forgives you, too...or, at least I do...or I would, if I was mad at you or you'd done anything I'd need to forgive you for...does a person have to do something wrong to be forgiven?

...then I thought hmmm...that might not be such a silly question...though it certainly wouldn’t be the first time acting silly led me to insight...

...I mean...forgiveness has been called divine...an incredible loving gift we give to one another... grace, itself...the very essence of love...representing the highest kind of interconnectedness between human beings...oneness...even, dare I say it, God...

...in that one long ago instant at least out of the long and shabby stretch of their human lives, even though they knew at the time it wouldn’t and couldn’t last, they had touched and become as God when they voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all that each knew the other could never be.
William Faulkner

...so...do I really need to piss somebody off to get me some?...

...of course, the question may be, ultimately, kind of academic, since, let’s face it, anybody who knows me well enough to love me has had to forgive me for all kindsa crap...

...and I’m grateful for that...

...so...for what it's worth...this blog sends out forgiveness to you who are reading it...regardless of whether you've done anything wrong...





*I also hereby forgive anybody who missed the irony in my latest Elephant article*

Too Pissed Off to Blog

too pissed off to write Yoga for Cynics posts this week...so tried to create one in which I didn't say anything...just some pictures and quotes...that Jasper Johns American flag up there, with the opening lines of Song of Myself beneath it...followed by a postcard of a lynching and two words from Faulkner: they endured....was gonna call it Two Americas...subtle, no? Almost better to write a rant, I thought...and so ditched it...

been trolling political threads in on-line forums...making ad hominem attacks...then leaving...vowing to stay away in the future...at least for the next few weeks....

earlier this week, an elderly fundamentalist Christian relative forwarded a patently racist Revelations-quoting election-related e-mail to me...I hit the reply button and let it rip...and I mean really let it rip...not that charming good-humored therapeutic yoga-retreat kinda letting it rip...(though, to be fair, I got accused of supporting the Antichrist first)...as it turned out, she forwarded it to me by accident, and apologized for the mistake...I apologized for my tone...

still, to end on an idealistic note, I’ll include here the Martin Luther King quote I was gonna put at the end of that deleted post:

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

and promise to try harder next time....

Is There Life Before Death?

People are shocked when I say I don’t take pictures (last week’s sublime banana-on-a-yoga-mat excepted). Somebody, upon hearing I hadn’t taken any on the Appalachian Trail, said: “what’s the point of even doing it if you’re not gonna take pictures?!” I found that fascinating—the notion that the only value in an experience is in displaying souvenirs after it’s over. I wonder if that guy takes pictures of himself showing his pictures to family and friends—if not, what’s the point of even doing it?

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important.
Eckhart Tolle

Don’t worry, I’m not gonna get all Eckhart Tolle on you...this ain’t Oprah...or like those yogis whose favorite topics are 1) living purely for the here and now, and 2) reincarnation....Faulkner had a point when he wrote The past is never dead. It’s not even past...and the future may be as abstract as the brick wall you’re driving towards when the brakes go out...and hope, according to Emily Dickinson, is the thing with feathers...(though, notably, Woody Allen said Hope is not "the thing with feathers." The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich)....

I like the words of Walt Whitman, partially immortalized on a mossy, broken bench along the Wissahickon Creek (near West Mt. Airy, state of Wistful Inebriation, USA):

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.