Not in any danger of realizing full enlightenment any time soon...

...such a drag to want something sometimes, one thing leads to another I know, sang Chrissie Hynde...distilling the first two noble truths of the Buddha, along with the law of causation, into one bouncy rock n' roll nugget....suffering caused by self-centered desire spiraling into only more desire and, hence, more suffering....I know all this shit, really...even if it doesn't seem to be doing me much good, at the moment...

...I'm as much a chemical hybrid as any GMO...hate to see my weight on the doctor's scale, and wouldn't want it anywhere near scales of justice...any tribe I'd be a member of is quite certainly lost, and yet my neuroses have their own zip codes and Wikipedia entries...so much water, but no place to piss...

...had a dream I was back in high school, and also back to teaching college...but refusing to leave the breakfast table, seeing no point in trying to learn or teach anything....even more miserable upon actually waking....by early afternoon decided to blow off both yoga class and the meditation sangha, do anything that absolutely had to be done, then get in the car, drive across the Walt Whitman Bridge...Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road...to the Jersey side, not stopping 'til the ocean...Surf City...[cue Beach Boys, Springsteen, Miley Cyrus, whatever the hell you like...]...just to get some sand between the toes...

...there's a lot to be said for some sand between the toes...

Return to Hogwarts

...January hit like a giant hunk of ice in the forehead...days of severe lassitude...not much work but that little bit took all day...endlessly seeking minor forms of stimulation, trying and often failing to avoid the ones that make things worse in the long run...

...this morning, dragged myself out early through a brushing of snow, drove five hours north to Kripalu, for the first time since the yoga teacher training two years ago...where I'm gonna spend the week in a meditation retreat with Jack Kornfield...Meditation for Freedom and Compassion Everywhere...(should definitely work better than meditating to right-wing talk radio to teach myself to be less compassionate...in line with my reverse-Boddhisattva vow not to attain full enlightenment until all sentient beings in the universe are as miserable as I am)...(just kidding)...

...hugged some old friends, mindfully chowed down the healthiest lunch I've had in a long time, took a walk in the woods, went to yoga class, had the healthiest dinner I've had in a long time, went to the first meditation retreat session...where they urged me to turn off the electronic devices and be silent for the week...oops...felt like I had a minor yet satisfying psychedelic experience, took a walk down to the beach in the dark to look at the stars while listening to Miles Davis In a Silent Way on the purple ipod...oops, again...maybe gotta wean myself a bit...

...now, it's almost 11:00 and I got yoga class to go to at 6:15 in the morning...oh yeah...

The Yoga Cynic Has Issues

It would be useless to try now to impose upon my narrative more order than there was in my life.
André Gide

....as may be obvious by now, the author of this blog has issues....

...was doing some personal writing...purely personal...none o’ yer damn business...when, as tends to happen, my inner blogger told me to turn it into a Yoga for Cynics post involving the various people inside my head...

...like the inner critic people talk, write, and do expensive self-help workshops about...even as my own inner critic’s telling me that Yoga for Cynics is delving into that airy-fairy realm of new age pop psychology where, in annoyingly cutesy-putesy ways, everything gets personified, and.......the inner blogger says shut up and write...

BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
William Butler Yeats, The Scholars

...I’ve written about my inner Foul Mouthed Grand Inquisitor...which works better, for me, than inner critic...most likely because, given the time I’ve spent as a professional literary critic, and around them, the image of some musty academic surrounded by dusty piles of books and reminder cards for therapy appointments, unable to say anything without citing a pile of jargon-laden articles from journals nobody reads, fails to embody the kind of fear involved...

...at Kripalu, we did this psychodrama kinda thing...taking the form of one’s own inner critic...not just personifying and speaking the natterings of self-doubt and -loathing running through our heads but taking on a physical posture to go along with them...which, for me, made a kind of asana from hell....seriously, my back hurt for days, afterward....which might say something about what happens to my psyche on a daily basis...

...which might bring us to the inner therapist...caring yet dangerously opinionated, ever groping toward that celebrated inner child...

...they open and close you, and talk like they know you,
they don’t know you, they’re friends and they’re foes, too...
Joni Mitchell, Trouble Child

...I get laughs in yoga class when the teacher asks if anybody has any injuries and I pipe up and say my inner child is wounded...but it’s only partially a joke....which may be be precisely what makes it funny...

...my inner yogi’d like to describe all of this in terms of koshas...annamayakosha, pranamayakosha, manamayakosha, vijnanamayakosha, anandamayakosha...sheaths surrounding the atman...the true, ultimate self-beyond-self.......which, to my inner pomo graduate student, sounds suspiciously phallic...

...(sometimes the inner pomo graduate student bears a suspicious resemblance to the inner adolescent...perpetually smart, creative, horny, reflexively defensive, and often downright nasty...sometimes acting like a flat-out inner bully...but without the sophistication of the inner critic or old-school pseudo-authority of the Grand Inquisitor....this shit gets confusing)...

Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing.
Anne Sexton, Said the Poet to the Analyst

...the inner blogger says now’s the time to bring this post to a satisfying conclusion...perhaps simultaneously funny and inspiring...the kind people really like, so they leave nice comments and share on Facebook and twitter and all that...but never quite enough to satisfy the other members of the inner committee...

...and ya wonder why it’s been a week and a half since the last post?...

Yamas, Niyamas, and the Way It Usually Goes... (Running Into Mirrors, Part Two)

...went to dog-sit for some friends and found they’d left a bottle of Pinot Noir and two-thirds of a fresh-baked chocolate cake on the kitchen counter....some time later, sitting at the beginning of yoga class, it occurred to me that this might be a perfect yogic opportunity for an exercise in the yamas and niyamas*...particularly, santosha**, aparigraha***, and tapas****...

...but, alas, by that point, it was already too late...


* ethical restraints and practices...(you learn about this stuff in yoga teacher training)...
** contentment
*** non-attachment
**** self-discipline...not to be confused with those trendy bars whose attraction seems to be that you get to spend more money for less food...though, now that I think of it, there may be some relation...

Forty Days in the Yoga Wilderness

...wouldn’t say I bit off more than I could chew, but definitely a lot that needs to be carefully masticated, tasted, and savored for a long time...allowed to sink in gradually and somewhat systematically into the bloodstream...

...(right now seems more a time for coalescing than conclusion)...(or maybe I’m just lazy)...

...a true transformational experience might be one that leaves you just the way you were, but just a bit more okay with that...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 300:978

...returning home from Shangri-La...however defined...is, it must be said, inherently difficult....leaving so many essential connections forged in such a short span of time....(including, missed perhaps most of all, those who relentlessly made fun of me when I got intense)....only to come home to farewell drinks...lots of farewell drinks...(particularly for a guy who’d been so good for a month)...with a close friend leaving town for good just as I returned....my ego still intact enough to overdo it and strain my back moving furniture...

Don’t try to transform yourself. Move into yourself. Move into your human unsuccess. Perfection rapes the soul.
Marion Woodman

In any case, directly knowing the way things are remains a very different matter than making sense of them. As in music, where silently analyzing the score of a symphony might be instructive but could never replace the actual sounds ringing in the ears, yogic practice must supersede theory.
Chip Hartranft

...though yoga class, certainly, has taken on new resonance...now in technicolor...3-D....IMAX...

...(which doesn’t necessarily mean much...hell, The Maltese Falcon and The Philadelphia Story were black and white 1940’s Hollywood studio product but near-infinitely better than Gladiator, Titanic or any of that plotless characterless glorified special effects trade show crap these days where ya hafta wear those stupid glasses and pay twice as much as ya do for a regular movie)...(but metaphors are never meant to be 100% precise)...

The time to make up your mind about people is never.
Katherine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story

...as of last Friday, I’ve been to at least one class...and, often, a whole hell of a lot more than that...every day since February 13...when I was busy cross-country skiing in the Rockies and gorging on pho noodles and bubble tea...making forty days in the yoga wilderness...(which, with its ironic Biblical reference seemed a perfect title for a Yoga for Cynics post a week ago, when I didn't get around to writing it)....on Sunday, that turned to forty-two...which I think meant something, or everything, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy...a couple days ago to forty-five...my current age...yesterday to forty-six, and later today it’ll probably be forty-seven...neither of which, as far as I know has any particular spiritual significance...except that it’s the day I finally managed to get this blog post up...which, really, might be all it needs...

...as I tend to think spiritual significance is where ya find it...would take a fresh baked biscuit over the clavicle bone of some supposed 13th century saint any day...

The scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
Walt Whitman

...and, anyway, what really matters isn’t so much what or how much you do as the consciousness with which you do it...and that, as always, is a work in progress...

...certainly, if nothing else, I’ve found an expanded sense of potential...which is a lot, really...though potential, of course, is worth exactly, only and always, what you do with it...

The Slowly Unfolding Orgasm of Existence

We exult in out extraordinarily responsive central nervous system, which we ever seek to amplify through increasing exposure. We live in order to experience life more, and more closely. We soak up experience at every turn. Our bodyminds have evolved to participate fully in the slowly unfolding orgasm of existence. We have created yoga as a toolbox of participation.
matthew remski & scott petrie, yoga 2.0*

...last weekend took my mother to see Black Swan...(both liked it, though I probably would’ve enjoyed certain scenes without knowing mom was watching in the next seat)...(yeah, that one)...(and that one...definitely that one)...I’ve known lotsa dancers, and people who have dance backgrounds and are now yoga teachers...(almost as many as acid heads who are now yoga teachers)...and there are clear parallels between the traditions...as well as glaring differences...in the movie, somebody destroys herself, mind, body, and spirit, in pursuit of an aesthetic ideal...dying for perfection...which might be one of the better reasons to self-destruct, relatively speaking...like Oscar Wilde said...Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honour...

...I dunno, though...could be I’m finally coming to a point in my life where I start to see that all as just a lot of depressed romantic overgrown adolescent bullshit...

...not that there’s anything wrong with that...

...it’s cold out...cold enough stuff hurts when I go outside...or maybe I’m just getting old...or maybe both...growing old hurts, but youth, as I remember, can be painful as hell...

...snow’s falling gently outside the cafe window, sticking, first, to cars and benches...now sidewalk and street...not much more than a dusting, really...but enough to make driving ugly...had planned on going from here to run some errands...by car...and go to yoga class...but might be nice to stay put...have some more green tea and watch it fall...

...anyway, to misquote both James Joyce and Grace Slick, I’d rather have perfection die for me...

* this might be the first of possibly a buncha posts kinda sorta maybe having something to do with this book...which I just started.... thanks to Carol, for turning me on to the book with her review at Elephant...

No Comment

...a bunch of friends crammed into my car to go downtown and see another friend play guitar in a record store...(yes, those still exist)...just down the street from where I go to yoga class...and, as it turned out, yet another friend, who’d biked down, was hoping for a ride home, asked if I could put her bike in my trunk....I said I’d see if it’d fit, but wasn’t too optimistic...having thrown all the crap from the backseat in there to make room for everybody....plus, one of those people had gotten off a train and put her luggage in there...but, the biggest problem with making the bike fit, even if the tires both came off, as she said they would, would be the bike rack I keep in the trunk, which takes up half the space...

....it actually took me a couple minutes to realize the bike rack might, in fact, be something other than an obstacle...

Idyll with Static

...my head, lately, seems jammed...awash in static...

interference...like I’m caught between frequencies....not the low crackling heard on long drives, out in the country...barely more disturbing than white noise, indicative of a relative calm in the realm of electric current...more like deep metropolitan dissonance...the loud cacophony of signals reducing particular subject matter to a thick grey noise...occasional bursts tantalizingly reminiscent of clarity disappearing as rapidly as they emerge...consciousness following, finding itself only more lost in the dense sticky fog...

...makes that mindfulness thing difficult...

kpmo,otcje;;
bwcwevyt BTRGUBFQURGVIRG XGWWAW bs dRDEWW UBRGW

Bnw=======iranMW
ftmksur-ii

...always usedta to spend time in yoga class longing for the day when it’d get easy...all the good parts...the cool mellow feelings...dance-like sensations...trippy intervals...without those sore, sweaty moments when I forget about all that and wonder why the hell I subject myself to this....then, one day, went to this class where just about everybody was either a senior citizen or significantly overweight...or both...and, we lifted knees...put hands in the air...bent over, as best we could....and, all in all, it wasn’t a bad way to spend the hour...in fact, it left me perfectly warmed up...rarin’ to practice some yoga...but it was over...and I realized I don’t actually like easy...

A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
William James

...two weeks after the bike accident, the orthopedist looked at x-rays...said the pieces of my first and second metacarpals were moving further apart, rather than back together...then asked, quite nonchalantly, got any plans for tomorrow?....and I had to admire the dry sense of humor of someone who could let me know in such a clever, off hand way that she needed to perform surgery on me as soon as possible....I asked if, once the surgery was done, and my hand healed, I’d be able to play the violin...she, without missing a beat, responded could you play the violin before you broke it?....which was good...don’t know how much confidence I’d have in a surgeon who’d fall for a line like that...

Morning Haze

been thinking about
thinking about thinking, and
winter’s coming soon

...Massachusetts was a lot colder than Philly’s been so far this fall...saw some white on the mountaintops driving in, as well as remains of a snowman...or snowperson...snowbeing...on Kripalu’s back deck....still, had to get out and take a brisk hike down through that chilly air to the lake as soon as I arrived...causing already irritated early November sinus passages to just about scream...

...was surprised the next day to hear somebody mention his head had been hurting all morning...somehow, it never occurred to me that I might not be the only person in the entire place with a headache...

...y’know...when yer in a totally mellow spiritual holistic type setting like that, ya just tend to assume that everybody else is positively blanketed in wellness and good feeling...at least I do....then, I also tend to think I’m the only person in the yoga class thinking about lunch instead of fully inhabiting whatever asana experience we’re supposed to be having...the only person at the party feeling lonely and out of place...the only person on the sidewalk lost in worry instead of striding purposefully toward success success success...

...of course the irony is that I’m anything but alone in feeling that way...and the same goes for all of our headaches, our awkwardness, our doubts....and, certainly, if there's one thing we're never, ever truly alone in, it's our loneliness...

It's All About Balance

...went to a wedding night before last and woke up yesterday morning more hungover than I’ve been in years...two parts 7-Up, two parts champagne, and a whole lotta Southern Comfort makes a helluva fruit punch...then back to yoga class in the evening...it’s all about balance...

...last wedding I went to was a little over a year ago...two hours and three lengthy dissertations on the proper godly nature of marriage...some people these days think they can redefine marriage, but you can’t redefine marriage, God decreed what marriage is...man on the top, woman—having blown her chance at self-determination in the Garden of Eden—meek and submissive on the bottom...guy behind me let out a deep MMHHH! of spiritual satisfaction every time his inherent mastery over womankind was extolled....and these, I thought, are my relatives...

...this time, just over the bridge from West Mt. Airy, State of Caffeinated Reverie, U.S.A., two young cousins of the bride determined who would read vows first by rock-paper-scissors...and, in a spirited mélange of Quaker meeting and Jewish ritual, journal reading and storytelling, nods to Chagall and classical ballet, and quite a bit of heartfelt creative anarchy, the deed was done....and this, I thought, is where I live now...

...for Sarah and Jason...long life & happiness...

Watery Reflections

...had a moment there in yoga class when this bead of sweat was dripping down the bridge of my nose...gradually making its way down to the tip...and I was doing one of those mudra things so didn’t want to lift a hand to brush it away...so instead just felt it there...imagining its glassy clarity...possibly reflecting the ceiling lights...or the entire room...like one of those beads of sweat William Blake didn’t write about in Auguries of Innocence...but probably would have if he’d ever attended a yoga class on a hot July day in Philadelphia...

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake

....afterwards was going to see this Shakespeare in the park thing...A Midsummer Night’s Dream...stopping for a while under a railroad bridge to wait out a lightning storm...the kind where being under a solid stone bridge doesn’t really keep a person or bike from getting wet...as sheets of misty rain entered horizontally...a couple of other guys were there at first...but gradually made their way away...to somewhere...I stayed, coming out once it stopped to a bright blue above, seeming to have thoroughly forgotten what it had been doing moments before...got back on the bike, dodging fallen trees, branches, and rainwater running down side streets like raging streams, making it just at the time the play was supposed to start...to see actors packing up their truck, promising a rain-date next week...

...clearly, there's more than one kind of midsummer dream...

Is It Time?

...some time ago, when I decided to start doing the yoga thing everyday, was really gung-ho...impatient...so really started pushin’ it...and, in a couple weeks got myself to a point where I pretty much had to avoid anything involving knees or lower back, or twists...which, as it turned out, didn’t leave much...

...the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one...
Albert Einstein

To find our way, we will need to pay more attention to this moment. It is the only time that we have in which to live, grow, feel, and change. We will need to become more aware of and take precautions against the incredible pull of the Scylla and Charybdis of past and future, and the dreamworld they offer us in place of our lives.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

Time is making fools of us again.
J. K. Rowling

...more recently went to this class in West Philly with this teacher named Dhyana...getting a bit frustrated, as I tend to do...after all this time spent workin’ on this yoga shit...almost hurting my neck trying to force a tripod headstand...and the teacher started telling this old story....this guy goes to see a Zen master and asks him how long it’ll take to reach enlightenment...the Zen master says thirty years...the guy says I can’t wait that long...listen, I’ll do anything...just tell me how I can get it now...and the Zen master says okay then, seventy years...

Weather Report Suite

Winter rain, now tell me why summers fade and roses die.
The answer came: the wind and rain.
Eric Andersen/Bob Weir

...sunshine outside...day before the summer solstice...just moments after acknowledging to friends behind the counter: it’s now official—the weather’s made me depressed...paid, picked up the coffee mug, walked to a window table...and there it was...felt it before I saw it...a warmth and brightness coming in through the glass...

...could only hope it’s shining on my friends at the Clearwater Folk Festival, singing along with Pete Seeger...to everything, turn turn turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn...

...woke this morning half an hour after Saturday morning yoga class started...heard the rain beating down on the roof before even opening my eyes...decided to go back to sleep...

...wouldn’t’ve been so bad if it hadn’t been for the teasing un-wet summerlike yesterday...walking in the early evening, I saw fireflies...fireflies...for the first time this year...

...ended up going downtown for a different yoga class in the afternoon...was sitting around feeling miserable thinking jesuschristIdon’tfeellikedoin’anyfuckin’yogatoday...but know from experience that there’s no better time to do yoga than when you’re sitting around feeling miserable thinking jesuschristIdon’tfeellikedoin’anyfuckin’yogatoday...and it’s true...

...started out by bike, then turned around and got the car...don’t mind getting wet on the way home...just keep peddling to keep warm then jump in the shower and into dry clothes...but getting soaked on the way to somewhere else is different...

Tonight's Fortune Cookie

...kitchen so small in the new place it’s not exactly curbing my tendency to get take-out instead of putting in time and effort to make dinner...particularly not with that Chinese place down the road with its five buck heaping portions of General Tso’s and rice...deep frying, high fat content, MSG—check, check, check...does it help at all that I biked the half mile or so and back for it?

...there’s also the ongoing cold and wet that’s making Philly in June more like Seattle in April...I’m a negative creep, I’m a negative creep, I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned...Kurt Cobain...been there, done that, of course, but not now...

...now I’m sitting in my mellow room after midnight, reading poems and typing away on another blog post...was getting heated there for a bit, reading politics on the web...which, of course, is outside the purview of the mellow room...but, then, the number one rule of the mellow room is that if I break the mellow room’s rules, it’s not a big deal...

For now, my life is enough. There’s not much more to expect.
Simon J. Ortiz

...still going to four yoga classes and biking between fifty and a hundred miles most weeks...cut down to not-too-much-more-than a mug of coffee a day months ago and, amazingly enough, have stuck to it...even if I’ve started drinking soda again...don’t drink much alcohol, though...don’t smoke anything...so, all in all, really not doing badly...even if...oh, god, do I love junk food...that fortune cookie merely a final sugary bite to cap off the day’s indulgence...but it's alright...

...and its fortune, as it turns out, was memorable enough to cap off this post...

Don’t ask, don’t say.
Everything lies in silence.

Cluttered Perspectives (Moving, part three)

...earlier today was surprised at how sad I felt...having parked the moving truck, biked away to yoga class for a break from all that....then, hours later, everything moved but the grime exhausted scrubbing couldn’t seem to make disappear...looking at bare white walls of a place where I’ve lived for two years...no, wait a second...it’s later than that, now...keys are in the building manager’s drop box...need to change tense from present perfect to past: I lived there for two years...but don’t anymore....door’s locked and I no longer have any way of getting in...

...just one in a long series of places...none too spectacular...don’t think I could provide a street address for any of them...which is just as well....places are ephemeral...not good to get too attached to them...not even those given that most greatly revered title of home...

....though I lived in the same house for almost all of my childhood, and off and on during early adulthood...even if I didn’t feel very at home, then...and my mom still lives there....in fact, I’m visiting her as I write this, in my old bedroom...same stuff on the walls...some of it, at least, though it’s decaying fast...a greeting card drawing of a dog that looks like Mittens, our Welsh Corgi, when I was a kid...a yellowed newspaper review of the Who concert I saw in 1982...a postcard with a picture of Gumbi with what looks like a napkin wrapped around him and a caption reading: Mahatma Gumbhi Man of Peace...a program from the production of West Side Story in which I played a small part senior year...tonight, tonight won’t be just any night, tonight there will be no morning star...

...then, places are also perspectives...especially when those places are homes...the ceiling fan I saw and sometimes heard first thing in the morning...the trees and parking lot out the window...the particular distance to bathroom and kitchen...all gone...or soon to be someone else’s...

...the house where I grew up is surrounded by trees...and I can’t imagine what it’d be like to grow up somewhere that wasn't...

...when I was in high school, my family flew in to Mexico City, then drove to Puebla and Oaxaca through the mountains...twisty, narrow mountain roads with trucks that moved so slowly, my dad would have to pass them...a cliff on the other side, if he misjudged....most of the trip was truly beautiful, but what’ll always stick with me most was what we saw on the way out of Mexico City...my attention, I think, first drawn away from whatever I was reading or the music on my Sony Walkman by an incredible rancid odor...and I looked out the window to see a mountain of garbage, and people all over it, foraging for whatever they might find...and, around it, a seemingly endless sea of dingy, crumbling grey in which countless human beings lived....I’d thought I knew what the word slum meant before then but I was mistaken...and as we drove on, it continued, for mile after mile....I really can’t imagine what it’d be like to grow up there....

...lately, my perspective has simply tended to be filled with clutter...papers all over every surface and spilling onto the floor, and other crap lying around everywhere...crumpled things I didn’t feel like picking up all around the corner trash cans...dirty laundry in a pile by the bed....was really somewhat shocked to see the quantity of dust in every corner, along every wall, underneath every piece of furniture....

...and clutter, clearly, is a problem in my perspective...as is junk...and ugly residue that sticks and needs to be washed...and all the tiny motes, fragments of sloughed off skin that should’ve been allowed to blow away long ago...

...my new home is nothing but clutter at this point...and I’m really not sure where exactly I’m gonna put stuff...except for the small room in front, where I told Jason, the friend who kindly helped with the move, not to put anything, and where I lay down only my little moon and stars rug, a couple of small art objects, an incense holder, and a few selected books...an attempt at leaving one small part of my new place largely open and uncluttered...it’s a start...

And so it goes...

Why study Buddhist texts on impermanence when I can just sit here and watch Thursday slip away?
Sy Safransky

...the clouds drift by on an unseasonably hot day, and my cold enters its second week...coincidentally...I hope...just when the world’s been freaking out about swine flu...I’ll start worrying about that when the total number of deaths from the pandemic approach those from car crashes or cigarettes on the average day...

...the combination of last week’s rain and this week's high temperature seems to have made the buds explode like firecrackers...new green leaves, flowers, pollen everywhere...and last week’s fever gave way to this week’s stuffy, irritated nose...haven’t been to yoga class in over a week...done almost no writing...no biking...barely any walking...a little reading, but not much...a bit of deep thinking but, really, very little...

...and so it goes...

Bruce Springsteen, The Wrestler, and Fleeting Moments of Grace

Totally bizarre true confession: I once spontaneously bellowed out the first verse of Thunder Road in the middle of doing 108 sun salutations in a yoga class in Mexico...believe it or not, it went over quite well...got a rousing ovation at the end, even...though I was horrified recently to learn there’s video footage out there....it’s a long story...

...didn’t see Springsteen’s halftime show...missed the whole Superbowl, in fact...but I did go see The Wrestler, with Bruce over the closing credits, which was fitting, since it was kinda like one of his slice-of-a-fucked-up-life songs in movie form...

...listen, I’ve never once referred to Springsteen as the boss...and never bought into the Bruce persona...yeah, I hear ya: what?! The boss doesn’t have a persona! He’s a regular guy from Jersey, just like me!...um...yeah...that’s kinda my point....anyway, each of his albums has at least one or two of these tiny-but-remarkably-complete short stories that make Raymond Carver seem long-winded...about people on the bottom and most likely staying there...American dreams crumbling into the dust of disappointment and desperation...I got Mary pregnant and man that was all she wrote...there’s a sadness in her pretty face a sadness all her own from which no man can keep Candy safe...I’m tired of comin’ out on this losin’ end so honey last night I met this guy and I’m gonna do a little favor for him...like Mickey Rourke, washed up, ailing and alone, doing the only thing he knows, even though he knows it’s gonna kill him...but, somehow, all finding fleeting moments of grace...remembered swimming in a transcendent river, driving deep into the night, walking the boardwalk in Atlantic City, flying through the air as the crowd cheers...or, like Eddie and the other guy in Meeting Across the River, a couple of lowlifes who’ve stumbled into a big score that’s likely to leave them either dead or in prison...that’s their last chance...nonetheless, in the brief moments before their seemingly inevitable doom, saying tonight we’ve got style....