One of These Kids Is Not Like the Others....

...maybe it's the Nerf ball....

That Yoga Thing

to live is to fly, low and high,
so shake the dust off of your wings, and the sleep out of your eyes...
Townes Van Zandt

...had stuff to do in a whole lotta different places in the city today...without a lotta time to do any of it...running around like a chicken with its head cut off...but on a bike...and a bit on foot...healthier, cheaper, and avoids the waking nightmare of trying to get around center city Philadelphia in the middle of the day by car...hectic, crazy, frenetic movement...which, strangely enough, left me feeling better than I have in weeks...

...by the time I got to this evening’s yoga class, was exhausted, sore all over the place...and, as I know already, yoga class can be downright painful after biking crazily around town all day...and it was...but I was cool with that...not ignoring, transcending, or escaping sore and tired, but deep inside both...pumping on all cylinders...feeling whatever I felt...and good with it...

if the spirit moves ya, let me groove ya...
Marvin Gaye

...it’s never been exactly unusual for me to feel alienated from any thing or body around...especially my own...which is one reason that yoga thing’s been particularly potent...working that mind & body thing...even if I’m a bit more ambivalent about the spirit thing...tending to be kind of a trippy mystical dude when hanging out with atheists, and a grumpy non-theist when hanging out with believers...overall, probably happiest swimming in the boundless unknown...when I can manage it...

just to dig it all and not to wonder, that’s just fine...
Van Morrison

...then, I think I’ve come to some kind of understanding of that namaste thing...which doesn’t mean you’re cool because you believe what I do....it means whoever you are and whatever you believe or don’t believe, what's in you is as holy and sacred as anything...

...thanks to Brooks and Lea for sending some blog love my way...even while I’ve been barely reading anybody else’s blogs lately...so it goes...namaste to all...

Skeletons (in the closet and elsewhere)

...it’s hard to do that living in the present thing...people meditate and do yoga for years, sometimes their entire lives, just to get to the present day...the skeletal grip of the past often feeling unbreakable as it digs into present-day flesh...

...ever get into a fight with a skeleton?...me neither...not literally...but I don’t think it’d be anything like that Jason and the Argonauts movie...though might be kinda cool if it was...


History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
James Joyce

...there’s this great John Sayles movie called Lone Star...a skeleton with a sheriff’s badge is found in the desert...leaving the present day sheriff to figure out how it got there...and, as it turns out, all kinds of events are intertwined...as they tend to be...and half the people in town seem to know more than they’re letting on....one guy tells the sheriff a story about rooting through old things and uncovering a rattlesnake...says it goes to show, once you start rooting around, you never know what you’re gonna find...and the past, as is often the case, turns out to be fucked up...with unexpected consequences for the present....nonetheless, in the end, the sheriff goes on with his life...skeletons are dead...they don’t kill you...


...thanks to Skyewriter for making this humble blog one of the first batch of honorees for the Funny Bone Award....it suits my sense of irony perfectly to accept it in a post that’s not particularly funny...though it does involve bones...

Biking With Einstein

I thought of that while riding my bike.
Albert Einstein, on the theory of relativity

...was gonna go get coffee then bike downtown...stepped outside to check the weather...no rain drops falling but a sound of thunder in the distance...decided to have my coffee at home...

...between the endless cold/flu/whatever and the endless rain, I haven’t gotten to bike nearly as much as I’d like lately...and, when I have, have tended to overdo it a bit...what I like most is to take a fifteen to twenty mile ride along the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill River, stopping for a yoga class and at one of those Indian buffet places for lunch somewhere in the middle...that covers a lot of bases...

...overall, yoga is highly complementary to biking...though the opposite really isn’t true at all...at least not in a physical sense...

...there’s something about having the body occupied with the bike that seems to allow the mind to wander more freely than usual...maybe it’s because of that one part of the brain that’s closely monitoring...hopefully...where the bike is going...keeping it from going into walls or over concrete abutments...and, most of all, watching the devious, potentially deadly movements of cars...with all that on its plate it can’t possibly watch where the mind goes, too...

Rain, Conflict, and Green Tea

rainy day, dream away, let the sun take a holiday...
Jimi Hendrix

...or else just sit around feeling miserable...there are days when it seems like conflicts spring up out of the dirt like weeds...watered by incessant rain...make ya wanna run home and hide....then, the worst conflicts are generally those experienced alone...and most disagreements are actually about something entirely different than those caught up in them think...maybe most agreements are, too....often we tend to drift from one argument to the next, never really plumbing the depths...never finding out what's really behind any of them...

...is it closed minded or judgemental to tell a friend his dislike of dogs is a personality flaw?...I say it with a smile, at least....my friends at the coffee shop were running down their latest rude-customer stories while I finished up a mug of green tea I’d let get cold...making me realize how quickly I’d be fired if I had their job...and that I should tip more....I used to try to get elite college students to write papers on an issue that matters to you....how bad the food on campus was tended to be the most pressing...and I couldn’t disagree it was lousy....but they’d also talk about how rude the servers were...though, whenever I forgot to bring my lunch, I’d end up standing in a line with ten or so undergraduates, not one of whom would say please or thank you...sometimes barking orders like particularly irascible drill sergeants...acting like their privacy was being violated if the guy behind the counter interrupted their conversations to say excuse me, sir, do you want fries with that?...

...Henry David Thoreau, after starting a forest fire by accident, saw it from a distance, finding it a glorious spectacle if one can part the burning from the burned...or so I read in the New York Times Book Review...I can remember somebody saying something similar about footage of the first space shuttle explosion, back in the 80’s...some people like to use a flower as a symbol or metonym of life...others use war in much the same way...William Blake said everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth...and he was probably right...

Getting Personal...

...contrary to the impression some may have gotten from that last post, this blog’s not gonna prostitute itself for hits, gratuitously throwing around keywords like big boobs...kinky sex...or hot throbbing orgasms...so don’t worry...

Oh I just don’t know where to begin...
Elvis Costello

...actually been doing some intense personal writing...off and on...since the trip to Mexico...where somebody told me I should write about the stuff I don’t wanna write about...things I tend to hint at before making a joke about big boobs, kinky sex, or hot throbbing orgasms...

...finding I can only dig into that stuff in pieces...going in, then backing off, then going in and backing off again...sometimes it helps to drink three quarters of a bottle of red wine first...saving the last quarter for afterwards...but, in the long run, that’s probably not the best idea...

Humanity’s hope lies in its capacity not to accept the way its past has played out.
Joel Kramer

...I didn’t really need to be told that...I mean, hell, it’s what I’m trying to get other people to do...dig into their deep trauma and put it into words...capture it in narrative...encapsulate it...put it outside where they can look at it...re-envision...reevaluate...reinvent...

...then, other people’s problems are always easier to confront...and it’s not exactly unusual for the cobbler to wear no shoes...ask anybody who’s spent any time with shrinks outside of their professional capacities....I’m the son of a psychiatrist and a social worker, have had a couple messed up shrinks as friends, even went out with one for a mercifully brief time...I’m not gonna tell ya what she was into...

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
J. Krishnamurti

...as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better, if you’re gonna try and help somebody else, than an awareness of just how fucked up you are yourself...to know you’re not one inch above or below the person you’re trying to help....sometimes I get the impression that the addicts I work with see me as more like one of them than one of the staff...and I take that as a compliment...

The Annie Hall of Blogs?

Hello? I forgot my mantra...
L.A. party guest on the phone with his guru, Annie Hall

One thing I think I’ve said here before...though I have no problem with being redundant...or with being redundant...is that there’s nothing like not doing yoga for a little while to make you realize how badly you need to do yoga...like jeezus, did I really used to feel this crappy all the time?

...with my Illness That Probably Wasn’t Swine Flu But Sure As Hell Lasted Forfuckingever finally, apparently past, I went to a yoga class and every movement was like whoah...kind of a shock...a bit of pain...causing a tiny but quickly dissipating twinge of fear...followed by a strange pleasurable sensation that might be considered a bodily corollary to gee, it’s sure nice to be home again...

...of course I’ve also barely been blogging...but Mandy at Yoga Addiction was filled with enough of that ineffably yogic loving kindness to nonetheless give me one lovely blog award...I think it was actually called that....yeah, I’m ignoring the rules again...just like Woody Allen playing his weekly Dixieland gig instead of showing up to accept his best picture Oscar for Annie Hall...okay, maybe not quite that...but, still, Yoga for Cynics can aspire to be the Annie Hall of blogs...neurotic, insecure, often incoherent, but, in the end, beautiful and kind....sure, Diane Keaton showed up for her Oscar, but Annie herself probably would’ve smoked too much pot and ended up missing it for an emergency session with her therapist...

...meanwhile, Svasti, in her latest post, said she got 6,000 hits for using the words big boobs...I resisted the impulse to make that the title of this one, but that’s as far as my self control’s gonna go...