Monthly Archives: September 2009

Try it. First and easiest: there are the justifications to be made for the old selves: “she did the best she could with what she had at the time.” Sometimes the easy story is true. I use it when it’s impossible to give myself a break by any other method. It works like this: looking at […]

Ok yes, books make lousy fetishes. I dislike them because they are hard to live with, distrust them when they gather in showy groups, and idealize a relationship to writing that keeps alive what’s relevant and doesn’t cling to thoughts from the past. Living words, interesting; personal libraries, much baggage. But… it is good to […]

Two overcast Sundays. On the Palisades in late morning, the ocean’s the color of the sky and the ultrafine grass is so perfect that it might be fake. Welcome to Santa Monica. I’m up at fourish, then take four hypnotic hours in Mysore space—the first two in the dark with the doors thrown open, the […]

The next street over is called Hiscock. Nobody blinks. They call our neighborhood the Upper West Side: the upper west side. Amused by the contrast, I’ll mention to the natives that other neighborhood of the same name. They shrug. The central feature of the next town over, Ypsilanti, is a Shivalinga water tower, sitting on […]

Last week I did light practice and spent the rest of most days moving heavy objects. This week, there’s a deep ache in the piriformis, the glutes, and the quadriceps. As somebody said, hurts so good. The leftover tension is from power work in external rotation, rather than the internally-rotated lifting I’m used to in […]

Monday I drove Pico Blvd from Santa Monica toward downtown, straight toward the wildfire smoke roiling in the east—smoke so dense that for days it generated its own precipitation, perfect white cumulonimbus billowing over the greys and ashen browns of the destruction. For once I sympathized with the forward-thinkers, the Editor among them, who say […]