Seeing Red

...red has always been my least favorite color...seems the antithesis of blue...though purple has always been my favorite, strangely enough, since it’s where red and blue meet...

....red, I think, was my older brother’s favorite color when we were kids...or at least I vaguely remember hearing him say that at least once...and his being red and my being blue always seemed significant, still does, though more in thinking about then than now....red is fire, supposedly, though I’ve always thought it looks more orange, and closer to a yellow orange, at that...but fire engines, nonetheless, which excited me as a kid...one of my earliest memories standing in a crowd watching a fire in center city, Philadelphia...though all I remember seeing were the fire trucks, and smoke...color of anger, certainly...color of spite, color of revenge...my friend who studied Buddhism in Colorado spent weeks meditating in different-colored rooms...wasn’t, as I remember, the most pleasant person to be around during the red week...color of cherries, Valentines, and bricks...color of sunsets, but what isn’t?

...color of lava, certainly...at least I think so, never having actually seen any except in solidified form, at which point it was grey or black...The Red and the Black, a book by Stendhal I failed to appreciate, though there was a great epigraph to one chapter: To think is to be full of sorrow, so should really try reading it again some time...once meant communist, now means Republican...the red rock canyons in Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, also more orange than red...which may be why I’ve always liked orange, even long before I’d ever seen high desert...those craggy canyons, arid orange space-scapes existing already in my mind...or maybe they were my mind...

...Mars...Satan...Hell...but also the words of Jesus in some Bibles...lipstick, while lips, generally speaking, are far more pink...which is another matter entirely...could I write something up about pink without getting pornographic?...probably, but it wouldn’t be much fun...color, along with white, of ambulances...can you believe they charged me over $650 for a two mile ride and didn’t even give me anything for pain since they said by the time they had it ready we’d already be there?...along with blue and white, color of the American flag, and the French flag, and with orange the Russian communist flag...have they changed that?...I remember seeing it up above the train station, having just made it into Yugoslavia, which was all one country then...had to ask a friend recently what country Dubrovnik’s in, which is strange since I’ve been there and she hasn’t...and how strange that was in the Reagan era, missiles pointing and primed in a game of chicken we apparently won...color of the insides of my eyelids when I’m lying in the grass facing upward on a sunny day...

...my favorite sweater, for some reason, is red, though at this point it’s pretty raggedy, so I don’t wear it much...but that’s what happens to favorite sweaters, isn’t it?...read, the heteronym for red is the past tense of read, the heteronym for reed, a kind of plant that sways in the wind by a pond, and is therefore gently active, while read/red is something else...read, dead, spilled on the sidewalk...blood, which is of course the course of life...which confuses things...

...red can make me upset...seems to represent rupture and division...but also roses with their thorns...and blood when they prick fingers...though sometimes I seem to be relatively okay with that...

The Return of the Not-So-Thin White Duke

Yoga for Cynics is back!

What’s that? You hadn’t noticed it was gone? Okay, judging by the date up there, it’s only been a couple days...but it seems like longer...maybe because the holidays happened...not all that eventful but, as always, so deep down expected-to-be-eventful that, on a deep down emotional level...they were eventful...kinda...and, in the midst of all that, the laptop that birthed this blog crashed on Christmas Eve...big time...Titanic into iceberg...kamikaze pilot into aircraft carrier...George of the Jungle into tree....not that I wasn't prepared...emotionally, if not financially...but who could have expected it to happen just before one of the only days of the year when you can't go out and spend money you don't have to buy another one?...drawing into sharp relief the extent to which I’ve become dependent on whatever computer I happen to own, as if it were a major bodily organ...

Thus...it’s somewhat fitting that the title of this post comes from Bowie’s Station to Station, which, like all good pretentious rock n’ roll songs from its era, is about coming down from a heavy-duty drug addiction...and yet, I had to alter it since, particularly after so much holiday indulgence, there’s no way I’m gonna pass for the thin white duke....One thing that's cool about the yoga crowd, they tend to be into healthy lifestyles but not at all into that anorexic ideal that tends to pass for being-in-shape in Western society...and yet, here I am feeling too fat to fit into a goddamn David Bowie song....

So, for now, I’m heading down to the beach for a one man yoga retreat ’til the New Year....began my boycott of New Years Eve events about a decade ago, after six lousy ones in a row...though there were a couple good times before that...sitting quietly on the red rocks overlooking Boulder until the hoots and hollers erupted far below to let us know it was midnight....tramping across frozen farmers’ fields in the Amish country at four A.M. to stumble upon cosmic vortexes...or at least they seemed like cosmic vortexes at the time....

...and, anyway, the shore’s a good place to be in the winter...walking in the sand from lunch ’til dusk...perhaps working off some waffle cookies and red wine...reading and writing late into the night...no internet access unless I wanna carry the computer around town looking for a signal....never mind if I end up doing less actual yoga on these retreats than if I stayed home and went to class like usual...in the season of giving, it’s always the thought that counts.....