Shuffling Through the Chaos

I used to be lost in the shuffle. Now I just shuffle along with the lost.
Anonymous (but quoted by somebody in my high school yearbook)

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.
Bob Dylan

Carolyn, the legendary laughing yogini, was kind enough to give this humble blog an award, referring to it as a "reality” yoga blog, and praising it for being honest and funny....to plagiarize my own comment on her blog, which I hope she’ll forgive me for (nobody said anything about being original)...I think reality, honesty, and humor go hand in hand...humorlessness pretty much requires you to impose a strict and all encompassing order on reality, denying absurdity...while humor is about looking at absurdity and saying if ya can't beat it, join it....

...of course one thing about absurdity is it’s hard to identify...I mean, just because something doesn’t make sense to me, that doesn’t necessarily make it absurd...though it might make me a bit absurd if it’s something everybody else seems to understand...which seems to be the case an awful lot of the time...

...I’m not really into the transmigration of souls thing...generally far more interested in finding out if there’s really life before death...nonetheless, I’ve read the Tibetan Book of the Dead...and suspect that if there really is a bardo...a place in between lives...there’s gotta be some kinda Bardo State College where they offer courses like How to Be a Functioning Human Being 101...and, if so, I must’ve been sitting in the back of the classroom drawing pictures in the margins of my notebook when I should've been paying attention, particularly during lectures like How to Make Sense of Other Human Beings...then, looking around, it appears at least I wasn’t alone back there...

...the things I do understand that a lot of people don’t tend to be unanswerable questions...or questions with so many conflicting answers that you certainly can’t come to anything like a definite conclusion ...except to say that there isn’t one...and that’s where I tend to be good...I get that both a and b are kind of true and kind of false and kind of neither...confusion is kinda like the air that I breathe...which might actually be a good thing...and a bad thing...and neither...

Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Rene Magritte, The Human Condition

Is it possible to plagiarize yourself? If so, we’re probably doing it constantly. I know I am...imitating myself, as well as being highly critical of what are often shoddy, dissolute, unconvincing performances. I am not, I’m afraid, anything like my own Tina Fey. Then, isn’t much of life little more than bad acting? And isn’t that understandable, with such nonsensical scripts? Like Liam Neeson playing a Jedi knight with a mullet more appropriate for a monster truck rally than inter-galactic combat, aren’t we simply working with what we’re given? People talk a lot about the importance of being yourself—from Polonius’ to thine own self be true to Mr. Rogers’ you’re special! to Monty Python’s “You’re all individuals!” “Yes! We’re all individuals!” to those lame-ass red and white Be You t-shirts for sale at the Boston University bookstore when I went there....so, whoever the hell you are, it’s obviously pretty damn important. I will not speak lightly of it. Trust me.

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most.
Bob Dylan

A sudden death in the family is upsetting for lots of reasons, of course—a lot more than I’m about to go into here, and, anyway, to communicate any fraction of them effectively would be to tell the complete life stories of all involved, and even then there’d be countless unfillable holes in the plot...the conclusion in particular not making one lick of discernible sense...like if Moby Dick had ended while they were right in the midst of chasing the whale, or the closing credits started running on Gilligan’s Island while it still seemed like they might get off the island this week....All in all, it’s difficult to shake the idea that life isn’t a novel or sitcom, or anything else that might have any chance of obeying the narrative rules we try so hard to lay down....There are a lot of ends, but few satisfying conclusions, and more perfect comebacks are spoken in a single Oscar Wilde play than you’re likely to manage in your entire life....