EXCLUSIVE: The Yoga for Cynics Interview (yeah, I know...big whoop...)

The following is an *exclusive* interview with Yoga for Cynics, conducted by legendary blogger Kim with a K:

1. What is your favorite line from a song or book and why? Does it relate to a specific occurrence in your life?

...umm...dunno any quotes...except maybe George Harrison, show me that I’m everywhere, and get me home for tea...substitute coffee for tea and it’d sum up most occurrences described in this blog....okay, here’s a line from an actual book, even if it requires a hell of a lot of explanation...and, just to be a pain in the ass, I’m not even gonna reveal the name of the book or its author (and it’s really obscure, so there’s no way you’ll guess): basically, this runaway kid on a raft has to decide what to do about his friend, a runaway slave....as he's imbibed the official morality of his time and place, from which he's learned that stealing is a sin, and a slave is property, there’s only one moral course of action....but, alas, he simply cannot bring himself to do the right thing..."All right, then, I'll go to hell"....It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog....thus, ending up making the compassionate choice not because but in spite of what religion tells him is right....

2. You have to choose any person, living or dead, to write your biography. Who and why?

Probably a dog. They tend to see only the best in me.

3. Someone once said that destiny is a fickle bitch. Has this been true in your life and how?

I don’t believe in destiny. Then, that could be because I'm destined not to believe in it....

4. When was a time you realized that you were in over your head?

I’ve often felt that way about life in general...though, when put to the test, it generally turns out not to be the case...that I’m actually held down by a lousy self-image....

5. Were you one of the millions who hated adolescence (high school in particular) or did you enjoy it?

In all seriousness, and knowing exactly how politically incorrect and irresponsible such a statement is, I think getting into marijuana as a teenager probably saved my life...since getting high was at least one thing other than masturbation that gave me hope that happiness might still be possible when life seemed like one giant shit-hole of alienation and misery....yes, I know, responsible readers are thinking you should have gotten some professional help...to which I reply: no, thank you, that was part of the problem....there’s no better way to tell your kids that they’re fucked up than to stick them in therapy...and if you wanna tell them they’re hopelessly fucked up, put them in therapy multiple times a week, in addition to group therapy with kids who are really severely fucked up, so that every one of them will be like a mirror saying this is you...abandon all hope....
Disclaimer to any young & impressionable folk who might have read the above: anywhere drugs can take you, you can get to on your own, without the negative side effects....remember: your crappy school is not the world, and neither is your dysfunctional family....if they don’t like you for who you are, think you should be more like them, or won't let you be one of them, treat you like you’ll never live up to their standards...take it as a compliment, and consider yourself lucky that their limitations will never be yours, that you’ll never need their approval....namasmotherfuckingte....

Bonus: Can you name all five of the Great Lakes from east to west without looking at a map or any other resource?

Ontario, Erie, Michigan, Superior, Huron...[checking a map]...DOH!


Post-script: in response to a comment from Melinda, I've substituted "marijuana" for "drugs" in the first sentence of #5 above. While the remark may still be highly objectionable to many, I want to be clear that I'm not talking about the harder drugs. I am also not advocating use of marijuana, or any drug, as I hope is made clear. The only addictive behavior that is advocated by me or this blog is yoga...and maybe coffee....

Things To Do While Drinking Coffee #3

*kudos again to the High Point Cafe, West Mt. Airy, State of Mildly Befuddled Sarcasm, USA*
If I told you what it takes to reach the highest high,
you’d laugh and say nothing’s that simple.
But you’ve been told many times before, messiahs pointed to the door, no one had the guts to leave the temple.
Pete Townshend
During the summer between 9th and 10th grade, I listened to Tommy by the Who almost constantly...but I don’t think I really understood why....never mind that I was listening to the story of a kid who went deaf dumb and blind to block out the world following a traumatic experience...written by the dorkiest looking guitar player to ever lead a rock band...and sure, the music rocked... and Roger Daltry looked so fucking cool in the Woodstock movie waving the long fringe of his hippie jacket like wings singing see me feel me touch me heal me listening to you I hear the music gazing at you I get the heat...and I myself an painfully lonely alienated kid locked in my room blasting music loud enough I hoped it might block out the rest of the world...possibly even make it disappear...of course Pete Townshend...even as his own left-over-from-mortally-wounded-adolescence pent up frustration and rage windmilled and destroyed an endless series of guitars...had something loftier in mind...like any ‘60’s rock star whose acid experiences led him to India, he created Tommy as a metaphor...deaf, dumb, and blind but staring at the mirror...unable to perceive anything but his own ego...so smash the mirror and he’s free to become...another rock star.....I, alas, never got to be a rock star...and, at 42, with guitars I rarely play and never played well, am thinking it may be time to throw in the towel on that particular dream...don't cry, don't raise your eye, it's only teenage wasteland...

Things To Do While Drinking Coffee #1

(post made possible by the good graces of the High Point Cafe, West Mt. Airy, State of Deep Perplexity, U.S.A.)
...was reminiscing with somebody about high school a day or two ago...not actually reminiscing, more like referring...with none of that wistful emotional content reminiscing might imply...but then it turned into reminiscing when I remembered seeing Bowie...in 1983...on the Serious Moonlight Tour...which kicked ass...so, today, that in mind, I was listening to the Ziggy Stardust album...in mp3 form...on an ipod...in the car...thinking that shit holds up...though it may be as much or more simply a lingering residue of some kind of sardonic adolescent reverie...the way Bowie could make ya feel cool precisely because you were so hopelessly alienated and desperately miserable and despised by it seemed like every single one of your peers along with...everybody else...basically...i look at my watch it says nine twenty-five and I think oh god i’m still alive...keep your ‘lectric eye on me babe, put your rayguns to my head...to be insulted by these fascists is so degrading...along with perhaps the hope that maybe it was all really just a big mistake...a routine cosmic error by which you inadvertently got born on the wrong planet, and...who knows?...maybe that could be corrected somehow...though probably not...which only makes the teenage romantic despair that much more pungent...one of my all time favorite songs is “Strawberry Fields Forever”...which isn’t so much about drugs...as countless wasted teenagers...or one-time wasted teenagers...will tell you...or about some specific place in Liverpool that had some specific importance in John Lennon’s specific life as countless music trivia nerds will tell you...what it’s about, I think, is having a place in the mind where you can go where everything’s cool...there’s a bunch of Lennon songs about that, actually...except this one takes it a step further...that is you can’t you know tune in but it’s alright, that is I think it’s not too bad...to acknowledge the one big problem with that place...which is not, actually, that it isn’t real...that’s part of the appeal, in fact, and precisely the reason there’s nothing to get hung about...but that you can only ever go there alone...and no matter how many times you say “let me take you down” to how many people, you can only ever be alone there...any real connection requires setting out from that safe comfortable space back out into everything you went there to escape, facing the slings and arrows of outrageous bullshit and................................is there something wrong, do you think, with somebody at 42 thinking so much about old rock lyrics...too much like that kid in junior high with the strikingly early facial hair and funky smelling jean jacket and the complete words to the Dark Side of the Moon album inscribed on his math book cover...and even taking the time and bandwidth to share this shit? Probably, but it’s far from the worst thing wrong with me...when I think of how my light is spent...and anyway, here’s a quote from Hokusai (who, as far as I know, never rhymed “fire” with “desire” or “all night” with “all right”):

I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy-three I have at last caught every aspect of nature—birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further, and I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime, and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life.

So what the hell does that have to with anything? And wasn’t Van Gogh, anyway, the first rock star, in that glorified self-destructive kind of way? No, Keats doesn’t count—I mean, it’s not like he chose to die of t.b...and, despite what Shelley wrote about him, read famously by Mick Jagger at the free concert in Hyde Park in tribute to Brian Jones found floating in his swimming pool two days earlier while Hell’s Angels auditioned for the stabbing death of sixties idealism among the assembled London throng, even his good looking corpse likely meant a big fat missing-out on inspiration rather than any kind of romantic fulfillment of it...and, all in all, much as it’d be nice to have my teens and twenties back, truth be told it’d only be worth it if I could hold on to the mind I’ve got now....