Enlightening Nonsense

“Ten Minutes to Relax” by Paul Overman, Ph.D., Music by James Kurtz

 

TOTALLY GAY. If I were limited to only one word: GAY. If I was not allowed to use a single word but only allowed to emote in some way: I would giggle like a little schoolgirl.

I had bought this CD a year ago at The New Life Expo held each six months at The New Yorker Hotel in New York City, a New-Age Expo where you can hear talks about everything from nutrition to UFOs and buy things from pyramids to wear on your head and other items that are just plain ridiculous.

I had the intention of giving this CD to my brother-in-law, who is a nice guy but a tense fuck, thinking he could use this to relax “IN ONLY 10-MINUTES!” Recently my sister, giving up on the medical model’s “Take this drug” approach to lowering her blood pressure—not because she was philosophically against a procedure that is about dealing with symptoms and not the cause of dis-ease, nor the myriad of possible side-effects any of their poisons may have, like “depression,” “suicide” and “thinking you’re a purple cow” in the case of Prozac’s over 150 possible side-effects—because it wasn’t working. I thought to myself, “What a perfect opportunity to find that ‘Ten Minutes to Relax’ CD!”

I thought I’d give it a listen before I just sent her into the nether regions of inner space without a map and while I didn’t find myself in a deep state of relaxation “IN ONLY 10-MINUTES!” I did find myself laughing often and immersed in deep visualizations that often had nothing to do with what the narrator was guiding.

The first “10-Minute” trip starts with our beloved guide, Paul Overman,, Ph.D., telling me to “Imagine you… are hollow…like a tube…or straw.” I started thinking of the good old straws you used to get with something like a McSlaugherhouse shake, you know, the thick ones with the red and yellow stripe. Nowadays the only plastic straws you get tend to be those cheap see-through ones that god forbid you bend it when missing your mouth on one absentminded trip to your mouth and the thing then has a permanent bright white “dent line” and seems to just not suck the way it used to. We used to use those kick-ass old-timer straws for shooting spitballs and even those yellow plastic Zebra Gun pellets at drivers in cars with open windows. In hindsight, probably not the safest thing to do—we might have inhaled in preparation and choked on one of those plastic balls!

I was guided to breathe through my straw-like feet and almost got distracted thinking about whether I was sucking into my body the thick, “made with bug eggs” McSlaughterhouse shake or the brain-freeze inducing 7-11 Big Gulp. But because of years of meditative work, I was able to avoid this easy beginner’s trap.

He had me breathe through my tubular body into any areas of tension. At that point it was my cheeks, which were quite aching from cracking up at his slow and stilted pattern of talking up to that point. He reminded me of some of the bad phone sex I used to have with people who just didn’t seem to get the concept. Spoken in a monotone, “Yes stick your penis in my ear oh baby yes,” is only useful to getting off the most perverted ear-fucking android fetisher; so it worked for me but for most people it probably wouldn’t.

He juxtaposed a few images that didn’t seem to go together too well for my limited mind. “Imagine your breathing…is so quiet that it…sounds like a spring morning…you hear…snow melting…You hear wa-tour running.” Snow melting? In Spring? What the hell does that sound like anyway? My brain hurt just thinking about it.

I had to rewind a couple of times him saying, “wa-tour” (meaning water), wondering if he was from one of those parts of England where people talk so cockneyed that you can’t tell if they are asking you for a beer or a blowjob and only know truly know after you buy them a beer and they just sit and stare at it. This probably extended the “10-Minute Relaxation” for 30-seconds but I thought it was good use of my time.

He then had me imagine everything turning black and I would have panicked—as if my brain had suddenly blown a fuse and I was no longer able to imagine anything—but he quickly added, “Like a…summer’s…night” and I felt not only safe but somehow loved. It was like William Shatner in the Captain’s chair as we were going through an asteroid belt telling me everything would be okay; I wouldn’t even need to look up from fucking Ohura, knowing that everything would be okay under his leadership. Suddenly we were under a waterfall and he said, “Imagine the…waterfall is now…green. What pleasant thoughts…do you associate with…the color…green?” So long Captain Kirk, here comes Dr. Friggin’ Freud.

I remembered the monster series of cereals, you know, Franken Berry, Count Chocula and Boo Berry. Boo Berry was the retarded step-child of the bunch that everyone tried to forget and, if you paid as much attention to detail as I did growing up, you would have seen that, like the earlier “Tastes great!” “Less filling!” “Gets me fucked up!” Miller Lite commercials, the formula for any debate designed to sell you the same product marketed in a different way—you know, like our Presidential elections—can’t give more than two choices for the simple masses. So “Gets me fucked up!” was dropped from the Miller Lite ads and, similarly, Boo Berry found himself relegated to the Foreign Legion.

The problem was Boo Berry was the tooth-rotting, genetically modified, hyperactivity-inducing, artificially colored cereal that I liked best. It was rarely offered at my local supermarkets, so when I went shopping with my mother and she was like, “Honey, do you want to buy some Count Chocula?” I was like, “Fuck those monster cereals—it’s Tony The Tiger for me!” We were no longer buying the cereal but the cartoon salesperson or animal. There were many cereals I even bought just for the free toy they included. It was a hard sell to convince my mother, “Honestly ma, I’ve eaten Squirrel Poo Nuggets before and really like it!” Periodically when we went traveling to New Jersey or some other dump of a State, their supermarkets had Boo Berry (which, coincidentally, was a major reason for the Watts Riots of 1965) and I would pick up a box.

Now back then, the boxes were big and it wasn’t just because my hands were small. The companies later figured out how to live the Corporate American Dream of squeezing the most money out of people by selling them crap they don’t need: We just shrink the box to ¾ the size and charge the parents of these sugar-addict children the same price.  And it was in those days of kick-ass straws and big cereal boxes that I ate half-a-box of Boo Berry cereal in one sitting, which was a lot even for someone with bigger hands.

My next dump in the toilet was a bright neon-lime green. Not “greenish” or even “natural looking” like a lime—but like a bright green Highlighter! It took me a few moments to figure out if what was sitting in the toilet actually came from my ass or was some kind of alien creature that had eaten up my own dump from the time I squeezed it out to the time I looked in the bowl. I guess we don’t have to go on about the “neon green dump” anymore. It’s just when Dr. Paul asked what the green reminded me of, that psychedelic turd came to mind.

When he had me change the waterfall to violet and think about something violet, I thought about a violet towel and choking his stilted, slow-talking, mellow self out with my newly-imagined violet towel. In Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy a towel is deemed the most important travel item because of its multitude of uses—to dry off from a swim in the Great Lakes of Taraboon Seven, to shield you from the four suns of Xepetux, to wipe your ass after fast-food blasts through you at McZenophod Ronald’s on Planet Quasar. I soon found out it was miraculously equally of great use for inner galaxial travel as well.

I actually liked the waterfall imagery and if I wasn’t such a jackass, perhaps it could have been even relaxing. The music was kind of nice, harpy if you would—not “Harpo,” which would be silences broken up by blasts on a squeezy horn. He left me with just the music and my juvenile imagination for another 10-minutes and while my autistic child-mind climbed the walls and pissed in the waterfall, it was still a nice respite from Dr. Paul’s annoying stilted Shatner voice and stupid psycho-babble guidance.

 

The second “guided relaxation exercise to renew your spirit” had me floating on the ocean at dusk. I had to think for a second, “Wait, is dusk the morning before the sun comes out or at night right after the sun has set?” After 10-minutes of personal debate and constant rewinding of the CD, I settled on the night scene.

Soon Dr. Paul was like, “You see…the sun start…to rise over…the horizon.” I was like, “How? Do I turn my head to the side and risk losing my float—because you know how hard it is to stay afloat when you lift your head. Is it towards the top of my head and I have to strain my eyes to try and look behind me and risk tilting too far and getting water in my nose and fucking up the whole ‘relaxation’ thing?” Finally he had the sun in the sky overhead and warming my body. I suddenly realized, “Yeah, I was freezing my ass off here, floating on the water in the night. What kind of fuckin’ relaxation are you giving here exactly?” It reminded me of a nature tape I had where someone clearly had just left a recorder overnight in the woods and the constant sound of mosquito buzzing totally killed the relaxation buzz.

The music on this track was still harpy but was a bit more jarring at times. There were moments after Dr. Paul had (praise the Lord) shut up, where Mr. Kurtz got a little excited on the harp and, like a child running around banging pots and pans, it might be cute to someone who is related to the little brat and deaf to boot, but for any onlooker—or ocean floater, in my case—it was downright disturbing.

I was thinking of still giving this CD to my sister and as a joke telling her, “This is really an AMAZING journey into relaxation!” but even I’m not that sick a bastard. I think I’ll just use it as a coaster, as anyone who knows me knows that despite all the dog hair and dirt and papers and books and batteries strewn around my house, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a water stain on my pressed wood desk from an irresponsibly-placed mug.

There was a girl who was going to sign-up for my last workshop but after going to my blog and seeing the words “pussy” and “prostitute,” she guessed my teaching style might be a bit clashing for the feminist costume that she donned so proudly. I explained to her in an email that when I use the word “pussy” I mean wimp, as in the word pussycat, that I have too much class to ever use that word to refer to the female vagina, as in the popular phrase from the porno, Obama Is Packing A 14-Inch Change, “YES YOU CAN fuck my pussy!” Of course, all bets are off when it comes to referring to the “male” vagina. Regarding the word “prostitute,” I told her she was a stupid cunt for thinking that word offensive and could go fuck herself.

And so as not to offend any gay people who couldn’t get past my initial two-word review of the CD, “TOTALLY GAY,” let me explain my word usage. In my review, I use the word gay to mean “fruity and ridiculous,” something that in no way refers to anything homosexual. If one feels the need to value the government’s position on whether you and your gay lover are considered “married” or not and as a result are eligible for government hand-outs and for your adopted children to be products of the State and subject to be taken into their care if you so much as say, “Jimmy, stop that silly downer talk—you’re super!” that’s your bad trip. I personally agree with comedian/social commentator Bill Hicks on the issue of gay marriage. “Gay marriage? I’m against it. Straight marriage? I’m against it.”

But I think if you gave this CD a listen, you would agree that if Dr. Paul’s frozen and robotic narration were a gay man and James Kurtz’s periodic  “pots and pans” harp playing were another gay man—regardless of how in love they were—even the gayest gay man wearing a pink tutu on the “House of  Latex” float in  the Gay Parade in San Francisco would say that this gay marriage would go against the sanctity of gay marriages everywhere.