Enlightening Nonsense

Craigslist sells everything from services, to items, to butt plugs (although I must warn you that the condition of the butt plugs may not be exactly as described—or so I have heard may be the case.) I have accumulated enough physical trinkets and crap in my life that, besides the occasional butt plug, I don’t have the need to pick up anything more to add to my pigpen apartment. But I figured “love” wouldn’t add too much clutter to my living space, and if she could cook—well, that wouldn’t serve a raw-foodist like me but it would serve sexism and as a founding member of the anti-feminist organization Men Against Dykes Limiting Using Vaginas (MADLUV), I fully support that.

So I was cruising Craigslist hoping to find the love of my life in an ad whose title was “FAT CHICK WANTING TO RIDE YOU LIKE A HIPPO.” After about ten minutes of pondering how exactly a hippo “rides”—is it heavy and in a lumbering way, or maybe rough with a horn in your ass–I moved on. I checked the male ads to see what my brothers in search were posting and came across one that had me in stitches. The title was something like: “LOOKING FOR A HOT ASIAN CHICK WITH A NICE ASS.” I imagined an Asian girl coming across this add and thinking, “I have spent years searching and finally I’ve found it—a man who can appreciate me not for who I am but for the slant of my eyes and the curvature of my ass!” That thought quickly faded and I started obsessing with hippos again to the point where I had to click off of Craigslist and onto the National Geographic website and “rub one off,” as they say.

After “emptying my loaded gun,” to use Something About Mary lingo, I returned to Craigslist and came across an add looking for guys taller than six feet. Like the excited hot Asian girl with the nice ass, I found myself jumping up and down, heels a-clickin’, singing to the tune of Boy George’s “Karma Chameleon,” THAT’S ME! THAT’S ME!” I found out that the ad was posted by a girl involved with a group called Onspeeddating, one of those twenty 3-minute dates in a night groups, and that they were having a “Tall People” event and were desperate for tall guys. She told me that normally the event cost $25 but for me it would be free. More than expecting to meet my tall fat Asian chick with a nice ass, I thought I’d go and play and have a good time.  And even if it was a “Tall Guys For Ugly Girls Night,” the Jew in me couldn’t resist the free ham.

I had to set up an account on their website and was not in the mood to fill out personal information. As much as I discuss openly masturbating to hippos on the National Geographic channel, I am generally a very private person and respond to “Have you joined Facebook yet?” with about the same vehemence that I respond to “If Sarah Palin says shooting defenseless wolves from an airplane is good policy then it’s good enough for me.” So for my name I wrote “Sergeant Pepper,” whose name will become relevant in a bit.

The event was being held at on the second floor of a bar and before it officially started most were getting drinks, boosting up their courage with alcoholic bravado. I was going to ponder how pathetic this was, that most of us are too nervous to talk to someone of the opposite sex without s stiff one—and by that I am not referring to a cock, although I do find a stiff penis before a blind date usually relaxing, if not to my nerves than to my sphincter—but the flat screen T.V. was showing classic Golden Gloves boxing and as I used to be in the fight game, I decided to be a guy and not think of anything too deep for a bit and enjoy the “Sweet Science.” I had to even politely refuse a few blowjob offers with, “Maybe after the next round, honey. Please, don’t cry, my dick is still going to be here when the round ends.” The majority of the offers came from the men, which made me check my print-out that I hadn’t come on “Gay Night” by mistake, which I would have been cool with but would have definitely worn my pink ascot had I known.

Like on any first date, most plan their attire very carefully. You want to look good, but not like you spent hours selecting and deselecting your outfit and doing your hair and putting just the right-sized sock in your pants. I didn’t have that problem as my outfit was selected the moment I filled out the registration form. I wore an aqua blue jacket and pants combo with gold tassels on the shoulders and white bars across the chest, that looks like it was peeled off the cover of The Beatles “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” album, which I bought for $5 from the street and my only regret was that I didn’t buy the matching orange and pink ones as well.

LET’S GET READY TO RUUUUUUUUUUUUMBLE!

You had 3-minutes with each person. It’s a win-win situation for me. Usually within 30 seconds I can tell if someone’s a complete dolt or if I am interested in spending another two-and-a-half minutes with her. And I can put up with anyone for 3-minutes, except for maybe my sister when she is on the rag; the combination of being even more of a bitch than she usually is and the smell of iron filings and tuna is a combination that would snap any enlightened master out of Samadhi and into a full-blown fit of retching. But seriously, while I could probably count on one hand the number of people I like to spend any serious amount of time with, and that would be without the use of my thumb, pinky, ring finger and pointer finger, I do find it interesting to share, if just for a moment, and hear what makes others tick, even if after the ticking I hope they “blow up”—in an explosive manner and not like my Porsche Lynn blow-up doll.

Most of the guys were wearing slacks, a button-up shirt with or without a tie and blazer. If it weren’t my big mess of hair or my distant, “Don’t bother me—I’m watching boxing” attitude, my costume had me standing apart and actually went over well with most of my “dates.” That is, except for one girl who seemed to be emotionally scarred by the outfit, as if she had been fondled by her uncle while the “Sergeant Pepper’s” album was playing in the background.

“So what’s with the outfit?” she said in a tone that made me want to stand up and say, “Your honor, I’d like to treat the witness as hostile.”

“Nothing really.”

“There has to be some relevance to it.”

“No, not really. I just thought it would be fun to wear. Do you really want to burn up our 3-minutes discussing my outfit?”

“What do you wear in the real world?” Apparently so.

“To me this is the real world.” And this is what I have taken two pages of nonsense to get to.

In yoga people are always talking about “practicing” yoga. They talk about one’s “yoga practice” and a yoga teacher’s deepest teachings seem to be about how to make your “yoga practice” a stronger “yoga practice.”

I remember when I first met Jhon T, who owns Atmananda Yoga Studio and a known womanizer. I felt he was sizing me up, perhaps thinking if I entered his yoga palace that I might leave with all of his concubines, when he asked me, “How long have you been practicing yoga?” I was perhaps a little less mature than my current state of immaturity and probably didn’t give the best patent answer for someone seeking employment, as I calmly responded, “I don’t practice yoga. I do yoga,” essentially saying, “You wanna throw down, bitch, here I am!” (For the record, at a future date I would find myself kissing the attractive girl with whom he was sitting on the couch that day and the only reason I didn’t take a photograph of me kissing her and send it to him was because after the photos went around the Internet of me in a Little Bo Peep outfit, I have been a little sensitive to the potential risk of sending anything.)

When you’re on a soccer team, you “practice” daily for the eventual game. If you never had a game scheduled, most would soon start to think, “What’s the friggin’ point of doing all these shooting and dribbling drills anyway?” Now suppose no games were ever planned. What would you do—WHAT would you do? It would be up to you to turn your practice into your game, either that or accept that your soccer life is a futile waste of time and that soccer as a hobby sucks ass.

While you may “practice” certain skills, such as in preparation for a big speech or about what you may talk about if you find yourself face-to-face with the fat, Asian hippo of your dreams, you cannot “practice” LIFE. You are always in life—even when supposedly “practicing.” This even mindfucks all those “Be in the NOW” robots who came out of the production line once Oprah featured Eckarte Tolle on her show. If I am even thinking about something in the future, the thinking itself is in the NOW. You can never really get out of the NOW, no matter how desperately you try. Your choice is to either live it fully or try to distract yourself by pretending the future—or the past—is more “real” and “present” than current moment.

The left-brained “practicing” individual will argue with me, in his need to retain that all his “practicing” has not been for naught, that this is just a matter of semantics. It is absolutely not. If your attitude and understanding and words express that yoga is something you are doing in preparation for something else, or that “I’m a bad yogi now but someday I hope to enter yoga Heaven,”  while you may get a nice stretch and even feel a bit more relaxed from all the accumulated tension in your back from carrying around the Tolle’s “The Power of Now,” 224 pages to tell you to stop practicing and just be, you don’t have a clue what yoga is.

You are not “practicing” life; you are living it. All your “mistakes” are not are not appetizers—they are the main meal. All your trials and tribulations are not the preface to your own personal 224-page book of nonsense—they are the heart of the book. And the reason most of your books are not worth reading is because you are writing it as if it is a 224-page Preface waiting to find the first raunchy sex scene of your tiresome novel after you retire…or after you die…and not a 224-page adventure story where the book opens with, “So I’m standing on an apple crate behind a hippo and fucking her hard and heavy, as I had to finish quickly before the zoo keeper returned from his break.” Stop “practicing” and start living.

When you stop “practicing” yoga and start “being” yoga, then it doesn’t end when you leave the classroom. Then you don’t avoid difficult situations and people because you think yoga is just “bliss”—you realize that yoga is just as much dealing with the jerk on the sidewalk as it is touching your toes. More so, in my “book.”

I once saw a father walking with his little boy who was wearing a Batman costume.  Some man approached and said, “It’s not Halloween.” This little boy wasn’t “practicing” having fun, he was just having fun. And he was lucky enough to have a father who wasn’t “practicing” being a father, he was being a father. They both knew that when you just ARE, you don’t need a special occasion or a made-up holiday to wear a fun costume, that your “real” life doesn’t start and stop based on some 224-page “Preface” written by someone who had a genuine experience and whose book you’re using to extend more pages onto your own personal novel’s Preface. As the old Arabic phrase goes: Life doesn’t begin until you fuck a camel.” I would suggest you start camel fucking now because otherwise you’re probably going to die with nothing but regrets and a Preface.

 

REFLECTION

If I gave you ten million dollars (it used to be that a million dollars was worth something), what would you do differently than you do today? If your life novel would change dramatically, it means you’re still writing your Preface. What is the “goal” of anything you are currently doing? If you are writing a book you might think, “The goal is to finish the book.” I would suggest that if your goal is to “finish your life”—which is the main lesson taught by all life-denying religions—then you might be missing something. You don’t read a book solely to finish the book. You don’t go to a movie solely to finish the movie. And you don’t live your life only to end your life, despite what the religious fools have been telling you for millenia. If you are not enjoying writing your novel then figure out how to—NOW. Change the style, change the structure, throw in the word “pussy” every other line and see how that feels. Don’t wait for God The Editor to review your novel. His only comment will be, “When are you going to start writing?”

MEDITATION

Imagine yourself free from perceived limitations. What would you be doing? Go beyond “what” you would be doing…How would you be feeling? Feel that sense of joy, that sense of freedom, that sense of purposeless purpose. It is deeper than your skin. It is deeper than even your bones. Feel it in your whole Be-ing. That is how you came here to feel. That is how you came here to Be.