Some Advice for that One Girl at Our Studio Planning to Go to Mysore
There are only two simple steps.

One, buy the plane ticket.

Two, go.

The rest is incidental---parental freak-outs, vaccinations and immunizations, the yoga, transportation, accommodation, etc, etc. There’s tons of advice on those subjects on EZ Board, various other Web sites, and in all the travel books that you can take notes on at the large corporate bookstores in our area.

Probably the best tip on getting to Mysore I can offer that's different from any of those sources--and which, upon hearing, you’ll realize is completely obvious, and what’s more, is applicable to all facets of life---is this: transcend lottery mentality.

Don’t make the fulfillment of your dreams contingent on the acquisition of some “thing”---usually money. Don’t wait to win the lottery. As they say, “Wish in one hand, shit in the other---see which fills up first.”

You eat a pizza one slice at a time---I guess for you yoga people, you eat that bowl of brown rice one grain at a time. Figure out how much money you need, and then break that amount down into small, manageable chunks.

Figure out how much money you can save per month---even if it’s only $10---and start saving it. As Patanjali says, “Atha yoga anusanam.” “Now begins the study of yoga.” Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but now, today, at this very moment.

You have developed the inner resources to get out of bed to make it to morning Mysore class every day. Now it's time to flex those the hard-earned muscles, sometimes also called “character” and “fortitude” and “tenacity.”

There’s never going to be the “perfect” time and you’re never going to have the “right” amount of money. Your parents are always going to freak out, the car will always need new brakes, you’ll always be too young (until you’re too old), and there are always going to be 40-minute commutes to cubicle jobs in well-manicured office parks.

Once you make it to Mysore, stay tuned for part two, “Some Advice for Your First Mysore Meltdown.”

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1. I would like the overall tone of my blog to be:
(Choose at least 3 but not more than 5.)
Serious
Whimsical
Catty
Devout
Fun
Churlish
Filled with doubt and self-loathing
Reverent
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Sample Blog Template
We’ve included a sample blog template below to help get you started! Simply choose the most descriptive words and publish!

1. Oh my god, I had so much _____ getting out of bed today!
1. difficulty
2. energy

2. It was so _____ in the house!
1. nipple-hardeningly cold
2. heat-rash inducingly hot

3. It was so _____ at the yoga studio this morning!
1. nipple-hardeningly cold
2. heat-rash inducingly hot

4. My body felt so _____.
1. stiff
2. open
3. sore
4. achey
5. strong
6. weak

5. The _____ practicing next to me was so _____.

Noun
1. guy
2. girl

Adjective
1. stiff
2. flexible
3. bendy
4. floaty

6. Their _____ looked very _____.

Asana name
1. jump-backs
2. janu sirsasana C
3. marichyasana D
4. supta kurmasana

Adjective
1. floaty
2. bendy
3. stiff

7. I did _____ and it was so _____.

Asana name
1. jump-backs
2. janu sirsasana C
3. marichyasana D
4. supta kurmasana

Adjective
1. floaty
2. bendy
3. stiff

8. My _____ felt _____, and my _____ are so _____.

Body part
1. hips
2. hamstrings
3. knees

Adjective
1. tight
2. sore
3. open

Body part
1. hips
2. hamstrings
3. knees

Adjective
1. tight
2. sore
3. open

9. (_____ is when you _____.)

Asana name
1. Jump-backs
2. Janu sirsasana C
3. Marichyasana D
4. Supta kurmasana

Asana description
1. pick up off the floor and jump your legs back to a push-up position---without touching down
2. twist one foot and put the arch against the inside of the thigh on the other leg
3. put one foot in half-lotus, flex the other leg, twist, and wrap the arms.

10. My teacher came by to help me, and said _____.
1. “Better luck next year.”
2. “Having a fat day?”
3. “Body flexible, mind stiff.”

11. My teacher is so _____.
1. wise
2. mean
3. inscrutable
4. not interested in my personal story.

12. I am so _____ to be able to _____.

Adjective
1. excited
2. happy
3. self-involved

Asana description
1. press up into handstand
2. put my leg behind my head
3. grab my calves in backbend

13. After practice, I was talking to some _____ and I realized how _____ ashtanga must sound to people who don’t do it!

Noun
1. co-workers
2. friends
3. family

Adjective
1. crazy
2. stupid
3. cult-like
4. narcissistic

Sports Therapy
The idea of a spiritual experience as a peak performance in a sport is hardly a new one, as you can read in accounts about mountain climbing, skiing, snowboarding, even the more mundane sports such as football (both Euro and US varieties), baseball, basketball, golf, et cetera, et cetera.

(The novel The Legend of Bagger Vance, for example, is a mind-numbing, ham-fisted Bhagavad Gita on the golf links. Stephen Pressfield, there will be an accounting.)

I’m culturally marooned in a surf town, so at this point, articles, books, movies, and videos that center on the spirituality of surfing (“I’m, like, at one with the wave!”) now trigger projectile vomiting.

But the unexpected encounter of a fresh take on a physical experience that transcends the physical to become something other, something spiritual, something, dare we say, yogic, is still an exceptional moment.

“I can’t determine precisely the instant in which my thought escapes its object to become a thought of pure effort,” writes avid cyclist and author Paul Fournel in Need for the Bike.

“The moment the rhythm speeds up, the moment the slope becomes steep, the moment fatigue gets the upper hand, thought doesn’t fade away before the ‘animal spirits;’ on the contrary, it’s reinforced and diffused throughout my entire body, becoming thigh-thought, back-intelligence, calf-wit. This unconscious transformation is beyond me, and I only become aware of it much later, when the lion’s share of the effort is over and thought flows back, returning to what is ordinarily considered its place.”

Perhaps “superconscious transformation” would be more fitting.

So the class’ homework assignment, typed two-page minimum due Monday, is to answer the following question: How does a form of stretching that features synchronized breathing and proscribed gazing points differ from gymnastics, calisthenics or aerobics? Or, for that matter, golf, football (both Euro and US versions), and cycling?

Ye Olde Musick Downloade
Geinoh Yamashiro, Akira OST
Jacques Lu Cont, Fabriclive 09
Eagles of Death Metal, Death by Sexy
The Flaming Lips, At War with the Mystics
Mozzer, Ringleader of the Tormentors
Editors, The Back Room
Neil Young, Prairie Wind

"After long enough, you abandon your masterpiece to sink into the real masterpiece."
---Leonard Cohen

Tokyo Sento Versus the Encinitas YMCA
The Japanese are generally very reserved, and so in the sento (or sauna) I visited in Tokyo, I sat and sweated in silence with my fellow sauna-goers, not least because I couldn’t speak Japanese, and if anyone spoke English, they hid it well.

I visited the Encinitas YMCA last week to recreate the sento experience and sweat out the jet lag. The dingy and under-lit wood-walled sauna at the Y is a closet-sized room just off the showers in the men’s locker-room. And o, sweet heavens, there was no piped-in Muzak! I sat in blissful silence for about 10 minutes---before being blindsided by Leonard Baxter.

Leonard entered, climbed to the top bench, and introduced himself. He appeared to be in his late 60s or early 70s. “I was watching the Masters on TV,” he told me. “I’m a golf pro.”

With what seemed to me to be a blatant lie, he immediately grabbed the conversational rudder and proceeded to steer the ship into the deep, uncharted waters of madness.

We talked about golf. Actually, Leonard talked while I listened and nodded. I don’t know shit about golf.

“I was the California Golden Gloves champ!” Leonard then declared, changing tack with a subtle non sequitur. “But I had to retire---you ever seen an old boxer? They’re practically retarded!”

“But I still got it, though. Once a boxer, always a boxer!” Leonard climbed to face me and assumed a boxer’s stance.

The sauna floor at the Encinitas Y is about two-feet square, so as a result, I had a rather intimate view, from about 6 inches away and at eye-level, of the helmeted nub of Leonard’s penis, which sprouted mushroom-like from a tuft of white pubic hair.

Any concerns I had over my sudden and unexpected proximity to Leonard’s antediluvian reproductive organs vanished, however, when he began to fire off a series of one-two punches that stopped just short of my face.

I did a fair-to-middling Spiderman impression and clambered backwards and upwards, as one does when confronted by a nude septuagenarian demonstrating his boxing prowess.

I put my hands up. “Yeah, yeah. Pretty good, man, pretty good.”

At that point, Leonard took in my tattoos and assumed I was a Self-Realization Fellowship devotee. Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship has been a fixture in Encinitas since at least the 1930s. Accordingly, Leonard pulled the pin on another non-sequitur hand-grenade and rolled it into the conversation.

“I did all that meditation shit back in the 60s!” he said, glancing up and down my arms. “I had a girlfriend at the time, this wild broad, she was into all that TM stuff. I can do samadhi if I take five long, deep breaths!” He pronounced it “sa-ma-dee.”

“Wow,” I said, “that’s incredible!”

“Yeah,” said Leonard, “it’s pretty easy.”

I stretched out on the top bench and feigned death.

Leonard was still standing, and began telling me how he felt about religion in general and the Old Testament specifically (he didn’t like either).

“Jonah!” he said.

“What a crock!” he said.

“You get eaten by a whale, you know what happens?” he said. “You die!”

He hopped from foot to foot and gesticulated wildly. Rivers of sweat streamed down his face and body. I couldn’t tell if the fluid spraying from his lips was frothy saliva---he was pretty worked up about the Old Testament---or if it was sweat that had run down his face.

The beauty of sauna polemics is that the heat will wilt even the staunchest zealot. But still, Leonard held on with the tenacity of the cockroach.

I thanked my lucky stars I’d spent time in Tokyo building up tolerance to the heat. Plus I figure that the sauna’s heat-level had been set to a temperature determined by the YMCA’s lawyers to be “safe,” and therefore I found that the room wasn’t close to the thermonuclear heat of a Japanese sento.

So my heart leapt when Leonard placed one hand on the sauna door handle: Here was a sure sign he was about to pull the ripcord! I wasn’t quite on the verge of blacking out, although I’d been pinned in the sauna for more than 45 minutes.

Leonard wasn’t quite done. “Some guy wrestling with an angel!” he said.

“You think anyone ever wrestled an angel? What a load of B.S.!”

And on that note, he opened the door and ducked off to the showers.

For the next 15 minutes, Leonard would walk over from his shower, all soaped up, open the sauna door, stick his head in, and let me know how he felt about various other stories in the Old Testament.

I waited another long 10 minutes before emerging.

When I did, Leonard Baxter was in the locker room, shaving and arguing with another man about Governor Arnold Shwarzenegger.

My total cost: the $10 day-use pass, 5 pounds of water weight, and a strange homesick longing for the tattooed and silent yakuza of my local Tokyo sento.

As those who read my weekly column “Yoga Hustla” know, I have the thumb, index, middle, ring and pinkie fingers of my left hand grasped firmly around the carotid artery of the yoga world. There is not the slightest tremor on Indra’s many-jeweled net that is not picked up and published by yours truly, and even as you read this, I’m working the right arm around the head for a crushing sleeper hold.

So doubtless all will be as excited as I am with this week’s veritable treasure find---the contract rider of one of the world’s biggest celebrity yoga teachers!

A contract rider accompanies a performing artist’s or celebrity’s contract to appear in public, and includes specifications on stage design, sound systems, lighting rigs, as well as the artist's wish list---from transportation and billing to dressing room accommodations and meals.

What does this big-time yoga celebrity, who I shall call “YOGA TEACHER” for fear of both legal and physical retribution, require to show up at your shala to teach the kids downward dog? And who could it possibly be? I'll never tell, so read on, o yogi …

ARTIST RIDER AGREEMENT

This rider to the contract date _____ by and between YOGA TEACHER (hereinafter referred to as "THE ARTIST") and _____ (hereinafter referred to as "THE YOGA SHALA") for the engagement is made part of the setting-forth of additional terms and conditions to attached contract.

1. One LARGE BASKET of WHITE FLOWER PETALS (any genus) to be strewn at ARTIST’S feet during the “Grand Entrance.” Shala owners responsible for flower petal clean up.

2. One NEW LARGE MANDUKA BLACK MAT, to be laid at front of shala, surrounded by AMBER-SCENTED CANDLES and wiped down with scented SANDALWOOD OIL.

3. Photographs and videos will be allowed in special "MEDIA AREA" to be set up facing ARTIST'S LEFT SIDE. All photos or video must be approved by ARTIST’S PUBLICITY AGENT.

4. Pyrotechnic requirements during ARTIST’S bandha demonstration to be paid for by shala owners and to include:
One smudge pot
Three M-80 firecrackers
Smoke machine with dry ice

5. Workshop accommodation requirements include a dressing room separated from main yoga shala by a door with lock (henceforth to be referred to as “VIP ROOM.”)

6. TOUR MANAGER to be supplied with five “VIP PASSES” to permit entry to “VIP ROOM.”

7. At ARTIST’S discretion, select workshop attendees may be invited to “VIP ROOM” for specific and individual bandha adjustments and to participate in various Tantric practices.

8. VIP ROOM craft services table to include:
One bowl of M&Ms---all red M&Ms to be removed!!! [Sic]
One vat Tiger Balm, large
12 bottles de-ionized, charcoal-filtered, glacier-drip water served at room temperature
6 unbleached organic hypo-allergenic cotton towels with thread count of 500 or greater
One large bowl (two cups) brown rice
One bowl steamed veggies, to include broccoli, chard, burdock root, carrots, beets, kale
One extra-large bag of chocolate chocolate chip cookies
One extra-thick bar of Toblerone dark chocolate

8. Workshop organizers will arrange an autograph signing to take place immediately after workshop and not to exceed 15 minutes.

9. Workshop organizers will provide 100 prints of ARTIST’S headshot, to be purchased at $5 per photo prior to workshop, and 100 copies of ARTIST’S 2006 calendar, to be purchased at $10 per copy.

10. The following items are the ONLY that ARTIST will sign:
Yoga mats
ARTIST’S head shot
The current month’s LULULEMON ad featuring ARTIST (Note: But NOT any previous months'!)
ARTIST’S 2006 calendar
ARTIST’S DVD
ARTIST’S book.

11. Questions NOT TO BE ASKED of ARTIST at any time during workshop:
“Are you Certified?”
“Are you still teaching Madonna?”
“Can you do kapotasana?”

Sakura
The cherry blossom trees uncurled their gnarled winter fingers during the last week of March, offering Tokyo the delicate pink and white flowers of the sakura, or cherry blossoms.

Japanese friends had talked about the apparition of the cherry blossoms with a zeal bordering on the religious. Now I see why.

Snow-banks of the gauze-thin white blossoms draped across the green banks of the moat at the Imperial Palace. On some streets, the trees lining the sidewalks were bent and bowed under the weight of the hanging cherry blossoms, or shidarezakura, so that entire city blocks were enclosed in thick pink tunnels. One day, I rounded the corner to my flat to find the neighborhood playground dwarfed by a cherry blossom tree that had sprouted a towering corona of white flowers.

The appearance of the cherry blossoms is an event in Japan that nearly everyone eagerly tracks, as news programs feature daily bloom forecasts like weather reports. The flowers’ appearance in Tokyo marks the start of spring, at which point the Japanese go on hana-mi outings. “Hana-mi” means “flower watching,” although a more adequate definition would be “drunk picnic.”

Last Saturday, a few of us gaijin ("white devils") walked through Yoyogi Park, a massive public park in Tokyo that sprawls through Shibuya and neighborhoods beyond. Certain areas are thick with sakura trees, and when the flowers bloom, hana-mi-goers picnic under a dense snow-white canopy.

That Saturday, thousands of Tokyo dwellers unrolled plastic tarps under the trees, unloaded cases of sake and beer, and removed their shoes to sit down and get to business. The air was electric with an intoxicated anarchic madness, the beautiful sense that anything could happen. People talked, laughed, sang songs, and stumbled into each other, and on one blue picnic tarp, a group of friends took turns donning and then capering about in a strange blue bear outfit, complete with giant blue bear head.

It was the cathartic heaving off of the heavy mantle of winter, and I swear I saw Bacchus, wearing a red Adidas warm-up jacket, winking at me from behind a tree. Although it may just have been a drunk Irishman.

Part of the beauty of the cherry blossoms arises from their sudden appearance after months and months of soul-freezing winter weather, and part of their beauty arises from their fleeting life-span: the flowers only last a few days, until the rain and heavy winds scour clean the branches. Their end is as stunning as their appearance, though---the wind drives the flowers off the trees, and for a time it snows pink and white.

Such a wind blew through Shibuya's Hachiko Square on Monday, and the cherry blossom tree by the Hachiko statue shed its blossoms, which spiraled and immelmanned onto the commuters rushing about below its branches.

That wind carried me out of Tokyo. April 3 was my last day in Japan.

Katsu
The farewells were much more difficult than I anticipated; three months is a long time to visit a place. I also bid a fond farewell to Katsu. His passion and intensity are humbling and beautiful, and remind me of, well, me, when I first began ashtanga.

“You never know what is enough,” said William Blake, “unless you know what is more than enough.” I hope Katsu can build the practice into his life in a more wholesome manner. When I left, he said, in broken English, “I will see you in Mysore!”

I hope so, Katsu. I hope so.

My Nemesis!
Tokyo Yoga is on the fourth floor of a building in the neighborhood of Shibuya, which is just like the city in Blade Runner, only cleaner and more organized. The front entrance is locked until 8, so students use the rear entrance.

On Tuesday morning I cruised around the back to see a Maserati, an all-white Brabus G-Wagon, and a Ferrari Testarosa parked on the curb. Across the street, a crowd of wasted Japanese kids screeched and hollered in the blue neon light and heavy bass that spilled from the doorway of the newly opened Club Camelot.

Motherfuckers were still partying at 4:30 in the morning on a Monday night!

Hardcore.

Katsu was already practicing when I got up to the studio. He finished by 5 and laid down for savasana. It was a deep, deep savasana, as he began snoring. Katsu slept for a whole hour.

(I was in the middle of practice at 5:30 when Club Camelot closed, a fact I deduced from the sounds of 100 wasted people milling around on the street below.)

Part of the reason Katsu got a key to the joint was because Chama hired him to work the front desk, a good deal for Katsu because he gets a key to the studio and gets to practice for free.

After I finished, he asked if he could talk to me.

"I practice twice yesterday," he said, "and today I am tired and sore! What can I do?" He's finding that banging out the double practices takes quite a physical toll. He asked me how often I practiced. "Once a day is enough!" I said.

I told him to keep practicing, and either the soreness and exhaustion would go away or he'd have a complete mental meltdown.

I don't know how much he understood.

I got home later to find my flatmates huddled around their laptops. "You told Katsu you practice once a day?" they asked.

"How do you guys know that?" I said, and peaked at their screens---only to find that Katsu has a blog! He's blogging about me in Japanese!

Ye gods, what is this strange mirror universe into which I've fallen?

Katsu is my doppleganger, a Japanese Bizarro-Jason.

He must be destroyed.

My Least Favorite Authors, Musicians, Artists and Iconic Marxist Guerrillas
In no particular order.

Aleister Crowley
William Burroughs
Jack Kerouac
Charles Bukowski
Salvador Dali
M.C. Escher
Bob Marley
The Greatful Dead
Che Guevara

A Baby Angel Dies
Did you know that a baby angel dies every time Paul McCartney releases a record or the Rolling Stones take the stage and launch into "Start Me Up"?

It's true.

Mantra of the Day
Today's mantra comes courtesy of Brooklyn-based rapper Fabolous:

"I'm on the parkway, see me at the Knick game
Probably seen this tatted on your chick frame:
F-A-B-O-L-O-U-S."

Fabolous is saying here that he is a player of such incomprehensible magnitude that your girlfriend, and in fact all men's girlfriends everywhere, have tattooed his name somewhere on their bodies.

Your directions: repeat mantra throughout practice, and for the rest of day. For is this not god inscribing god's name on the flesh of god, all for the delight of god?

Perhaps it's just a hook from a catchy song.

Next week's mantra will come courtesy of Queensbridge rapper Jadakiss.

Extreme Decisions of a Biblical Magnitude
The new Final Fantasy video game was released to shitloads of fanfare on the sixteenth here in Tokyo, the culmination of weeks of promotional hype. There have been mega-story billboards on buildings througout the city, posters wheatpasted on every building, and the giant jumbotron building monitors have been running commercials non-stop. On weekends, the exits of the major subways were patrolled by scantily clad girls dressed as characters from the game.

The only way to top the last bit would be if the heavens opened and comic books fell from the sky. But anyway, at 6:30 in the morning of the release day, I trucked past the Shibuya Tsutaya to see 50 people lined up and waiting to purchase the game. My nerd heart swelled with emotion.

I love this country's overwelming love and support of all things nerd-related, and when a role-playing videogame is accorded the pomp and circumstance of a major cultural event, it brings tears to a grown nerd's eyes. There are now Final Fantasy point-of-purchase displays at the front counter of every 7-11. The staples: Milk, bread, rice-balls ... and Final Fantasy.

Which brings me to my current and related dilemma, on par with Abraham's from the Old Testament: I have to choose between attending a Chuck and Maty workshop this coming weekend ... or the Tokyo International Anime Fair.

Cell Phones
They’re everywhere in Tokyo, no shit. Yoga students tuck ‘em under their mats and check for text messages during practice.

That Crazy Bastard Katsu
My buddy Katsu, he of double-practice hamburger-flipping fame, is trying to out-zealot me! The crazy bastard! He connived a key to the studio and I arrived at 4:30 this morning to find he’d already started his practice! (Presumably his first.) I’ll show him who’s crazier …

Tokyo Defamiliarization
I walk or bike everywhere in Tokyo and live at the top of a fourth-floor walk-up. What’s a lazy man to do? I keep cashing out my calorie bank account, and consequently I’m so hungry at all times of the day that, if pressed, I could devour my own foot. (I've thought a lot about it: the left one goes first.) I cannot stop eating.

I walked by a Subway sandwich store the other day and ducked inside to hork down some carbohydrates. Ah, the generic familiarity of the global chain stores! One is always automatically oriented to the colors, the menu, and the layout.

Tokyo Subways are the same as the ones in the U.S.---the wallpaper features nineteenth-century newspaper headlines and subway blueprints, the palette is the reassuring yellow and green, and the employees stand behind the same glassed-off sandwich assembly line.

Fabolous’ “You Can’t Deny It,” featuring Nate Dogg, bumps from the overhead speakers, volume at eight. The Japanese woman behind the counter, resplendent in her Subway uniform and visor, inquires about the bread I desire for my 8cm carb-laden treat.

I am about to answer when Fabolous interrupts to say, “And if you duck cheese I'ma fuck her---duck these, motherfucker! Ghetto fabulous nigga, I ride 'til I die!”

I am stunned into immobility. Apparently big corpo chains don’t require radio edits! I recover my composure enough to ask for wheat. The Subway woman and I slide down the counter, and she asks me in open-faced earnestness which vegetables I want. Nate Dogg pipes in from the speakers: “Y’all can’t deny it, I’m a fuckin’ rider---you don’t wanna fuck with me!”

My mission is now to pay for my sandwich with a straight face.

It is difficult.

Fabolous hijacks the familiar in Tokyo! What’s the word? “Ostranenie:” to make the familiar strange. The Russian Formalists, the Situationists, Fabolous, and maybe even Brecht would be doing cartwheels.

I wolfed my Veggie Delite, head bobbing. Fabolous says, “Still don't know me, still jump in a Lex---the chain so icy I got chill bumps on my neck!”

Speaking of Bumping
The girl behind the counter at the corporate yoga studio bumped Enya at volume 10 this morning, doubtless because Enya is on the corporate “Approved Music for Yoga Studios” list. I force her to swab my vomit from the hardwood floor. “There’s a good lass,” I tell her. “You couldn’t have known.” There's nothing worse than Enya, except maybe Enya and power crystals and pewter dragons.

... And Just to Keep it Chemical!
On the heels of the popular phencyclidine posts comes another must-read!

Unfortunately I cannot lay claim to genuine experiential participation in the following event, given my hatred of cigarettes, which seems to be genetically encoded. In addition to dipping their coffin nails in liquid phencyclidine, John and a few homies used to dip 'em in Wite-Out. You know, Liquid Paper?

There was another cross-town crew who reputedly dipped theirs in embalming fluid, but that might've been rumor. Where the fuck does one get embalming fluid? Then again, where does one lay hands on liquid PCP?

I wasn't on-hand the day Eddie flopped over and had a seizure as a result of smoking the Wite-Out-coated cigarette, but I did see him after he'd recovered. One side of his face was paralyzed and looked like lumpy clay: the left side of his mouth drooped and leaked drool and his left eyelid sagged closed. Eddie had to worry about the eyeball drying out because he couldn't blink.

Ah, Phencyclidine
My buddy John had an unspecified number of older brothers, unspecified because they were on steady rotation in and out of jail. They were all in some East Coast biker gang. John's refrigerator at home had one entire shelf stacked with Elmer's glue jars, the kind with the glue-brush stuck on the inside of the top. The glue jars were filled with liquid phencyclidine. We used to take parsley, dip it in the jars, wrap it in tin-foil to soak, then smoke it, releasing a very singular chemical-laced parsley smell.

Once, one of John's brothers was due to be released, so John and his other brothers packed a car and picked him up from jail for a celebratory fishing trip. How many jars of Elmer's were in the car? Who knows, but I'd guess a lot, because as they sped down the freeway, the brother fresh from lock-up opened the car door and stepped out for some fresh air.

He went to the hospital and then straight back to the clink, released Friday and back on Monday. John laughed when he told me the story, like, "Hey, what the fuck? He's a dumbfuck. Shit happens." John was pretty fucked up.

Profanity-laced Phrases That Have No Japanese Equivalent When Shouted In Moving Traffic From A Speeding Bicycle
1. "Loogout homie."
2. "Watch it there, tubby."
3. "Stay in your lane, fuckface."
4. "Gah!
5. "Your left, your left, your left! Your left! Shit."
6. "Hey there chief."
7. "Oops."
8. "Whoops."
9. "Fucktard!"
10. "I am sure your BMW is not scratched."

Katsu
In broken English, Katsu tells me he quit his job as a graphic designer in order to practice ashtanga. He wanted a job that freed up his mornings so he could practice ashtanga. He now "makes hamburgers" from 10 to 10 everyday. That is to say, he works a 10-hour shift at a fast-food restaurant.

He also practices twice a day. I asked him if he was trying to get "there" twice as fast, but he didn't understand me.

We've become friends as Katsu is the first human I see every morning. He arrives at the studio to begin his first practice just when I'm finishing at around 6 a.m. He hasn't abandoned graphic design, however---he has just designed some banging shirts for my friend Chama's studio, tokyo-yoga.com.

Books
"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius"
"Freakonomics"
"Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman
"60 Stories" by Donald Barthelme
"Kundalini: Aghori II" by Bobby Svoboda
"The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe
The number-one Tokyo banger, however, has been "Who Cares?!" by Ramesh Balsekar

Cartoons, Or, Why I Loved Bittorrent Until Our ISP Choked Our Service
Dragon Ball Z
Yu Yu Hakusho
Hellsing
Gundam: War in the Pocket
Gundam: Starlight Express

Post-it Note Stuck to Cerebellum
Pee first, then the Tiger Balm.

Extra-wide Sharpie Tattoo on Back of Hand
(For Walking Around Tokyo)
Buy Nothing

The Best Part of Cappucino
The sludge cloud at the bottom of the cup, cut with espresso and sugar.

The Ol’ Truck Door in the Face Trick
A classic! I bike with the flow of traffic. Sometimes passengers get out of trucks stopped at traffic lights. I caught the door right in the face! Actually, I took most of it on the shoulder. Surprised hell out of the guy climbing out, too.

Chilling with Yakuza in the Sento
There’re just three of us, and we sit and sweat in the wood-walled steam room. A speaker on the ceiling pipes in the Muzak version of Van Morrison’s “Moondance” and comes very close to killing my soul.

The old yakuza guy on my left has the full-body tattoo hook-up. Arms, shoulders, back, thighs---his body is fully covered in tattoos but for a vertical stretch on his chest. All his skin is covered but for the parts that would be revealed when he wears a kimono. He smiles a genial grandfather smile and nods at me, then cracks open a manga comic about yakuza.

The younger kid now sitting on my right is the older man’s underling. He held the door open for the guy and waited a full respectful minute before entering the steam room. He’s since sprinted out twice with comic over-enthusiasm for the older man’s ringing cell phone. Comic because we’re all buck-ass naked, and there’s nothing funnier than a buck-ass naked man attempting to sprint on a wet tile floor with his dick flapping.

He’s got the beginnings of what will be the full-body tattoo hook-up, and he’s shooting sideways glances at the ink on my arm. It’s enough that I baldly stare back at him---man, I fucking hate being stared at like I’m not there, especially when I’m sitting six inches away from someone and we’re both naked.

I smile and point at his tattoos and say, “Nice.” He smiles and points at mine and says, “Very good!” We give each other the thumbs-up---two buck-ass naked guys giving each the thumbs-up and grinning like idiots. It’s not as comic as watching Junior hop around the corner at high speed on a wet floor. But it’s close.

Rice Ball Roulette
I’m not just subsisting on muesli and bananas---I’m also eating a shit-ton of hockey puck-shaped rice balls from the local Sunkus, AM/PMs, and 7-11s. Generally, I’m fairly sure what I’m getting---I prefer the sesame seed and red-bean rice ball---but when that’s not available ... spin the wheel, try your luck.

Lessons in Tokyo iPod Detournement
Directions: wander until lost. Set iPod on stun. Create dream-state meaning. Strip personal biography from the city; hijack Tokyo’s geography and history. Become an alien, make the city a strange and wondrous lunar landscape.

Round One: Leonard Cohen Versus Tokyo
“Famous Blue Raincoat” on the Metro; body pushed and pulled by the tidal wash of the crowds and the ebb and flow of the train; an ocean of humanity; “Did you ever go clear?”

Round Two: Krishna Das Versus Shibuya
4 a.m. bike ride to studio; Krishna Das’ bass-chord voice, perfectly struck, thrumming “Puja”; masked, helmeted, vinyl-suited astronaut construction worker waves me to practice with his twin orange flashlights; cold, cold, empty studio, don’t think, just do.

Round Three: Metallica Versus Akihabara
“Back to the Front”; jaw-clenching phencyclidine disconnection; “You will die/ When I say/ You will die”; technology in all its shapes and sizes; flickering, strobing, pulsing; raw wash of too much, too much.

Ask Cereal Boy
Once again, Cereal Boy is here to answer your cereal- and yoga-related questions.

Dear Cereal Boy,
Is muesli considered cereal, and do you eat it?
Joseph Pasquale
Ramona, CA

Joseph,
Since muesli consists of uncooked rolled oats and fruit, it is frightfully less sugary than cereal, and therefore not as good for you as regular cereal. I blame the sawdust palates of the Swiss, who invented the stuff in 1900. Muesli is, however, part of the cereal food group. It meets all the vital criteria: it is packaged in bags or boxes, is prepared with milk in a bowl, and as Jerry Seinfeld famously noted, it can be eaten with one hand, while one is doing something else. Therefore I eat the shit out of it.

Dear Cereal Boy,
Does your well-known hatred of hippies extend to granola?
Franklin Rochester
Dubuque, IA

Franklin,
My hatred of hippies extends to many of their accoutrements---Birkenstocks, hackie sacks, patchouli, alpaca wool, folk singers---but stops short of granola. Granola, which consists of a baked concoction of fruit, rolled oats, nuts and honey, became part of the cereal food group in the mid-1800s---well before the hippie co-opted it so famously at Woodstock. I do, however, consider it one of last century's great tragedies that such a glorious breakfast treat has become a slang term for those unshaven sandal-shod cretins.

Dear Cereal Boy,
Is it true you subsist solely on cereal?
Anne-Marie Plodnitz
Redford, MA

No. I pour milk on the cereal. I also consume coffee, dark chocolate, and bananas by the branch-load.

Dear Cereal Boy,
Will cereal help my yoga practice?
Sean Fillmore
Vestal, VA

Fuck yes.

Dear Cereal Boy,
In your column in last month's Light Connection, you quoted a passage from the Shiva Samhita, a 17th century yogic text, as listing the many-fold benefits of cereal consumption. I've re-read the text, and I can't find any reference to cereal. I also couldn't find any reference to espresso as "the blood of the gods." What gives?
Lisa Woodrow, DDS
Blaine, VA

You are obviously reading an outdated and culturally myopic translation. I suggest you find a better one.

Tokyo, city of narcoleptics: Trains shuttle to and fro, every third or fifth person slack-jawed and unconscious, either slumped over on their seat or suspended on their feet by fellow passengers and force of habit. Chin-chested hunchbacks have taken over the corner seats in coffee shops. The coffee remains untouched until waking.

Yesterday on the train, the woman next to me slumped over onto my shoulder. Four women sat across from our unlikely coupling. Three of them nodded out during the ride, heads all bowed in the same direction and gently rocking in time with the train’s rhythms.

Mind you, this is mid-day, not early morning or late night.

Tokyo is a raw rush of the most intense stimulus on the planet---visual, auditory, sensory. Its inhabitants work ungodly hours, say 10 or 11 in the morning to 10 at night. Their long work days are often book-ended by hour-and-a-half commutes.

When they don’t work, they play. The karaoke houses are 10-story neon citadels. My daily 4:30 a.m. bike ride to yoga takes me past a karaoke center, and every morning, without fail, I pass drunk clusters of people emerging and heading home … doubtless to catch an hour or two of sleep before heading back to work.

The city seems in the grips of a sleeping sickness epidemic, a story from Calvino: People fall asleep in greater and greater numbers, on the trains and in the coffee shops, to be sure, but also in cars and in supermarkets, at their desks and on street corners, in plazas and skyscraper elevators, in parks and building foyers, until one is stepping over gently snoring bodies as one walks down the sidewalk. The three-story video displays, flashing neon signs and lambent window displays go unseen and unheard, their messages blinking and echoing down silent streets. One navigates once-busy train stations on tiptoes, careful not to wake those slumbering. The city’s ever-present background noise, its dull din, becomes the drone of millions of people, gently snoring.

Tokyo Yoga
Tokyo is the same as anywhere else. People struggle to fit a practice into their daily lives, juggling jobs, families, commutes, traffic, and winter weather. The yoga explosion in Japan, specifically the ashtanga explosion, mirrored its counterpart in the west, and there are many yoga students. They are passionate, driven, and hungry for information; in typical Japanese fashion, they adopted and adapted at hyper-speed.

There is a glut of yoga teachers, too, many foreigners here as well as budding Japanese teachers who have come to the yoga in the last two or three years. Smelling the money, corporations stepped in and sewed their dollars like dragon-teeth, from which have sprouted across Japan fully formed and ultra-modern yoga studio franchises.

Rents are hideous in Tokyo, so studio maximize all hours of the day. Yoga teachers are on the grind as they are in every big city, many traveling to different yoga studios throughout the day in order to teach two or three people. My flatmate Chama owns and runs his own studio. For a while, he was teaching 25 classes a week. He’s since cut back to 15. His studio opens its doors at 6:30 a.m. and has classes throughout the entire day, sometimes until 10:30 at night. I usually only see Chama in the mid-afternoon when he stops by the flat to eat a bowl of noodles. He then passes out until it’s time to teach the evening’s class.

It would be more unsettling---"the yoga trend," like all trends or fads, will end---if ashtanga weren't so difficult to undertake and so powerful in its results. It will never be too popular because it's simply too fucking hard. It doesn't rely on star teachers to encourage the opening of one's heart chakra. Its effects are immediate and bone-deep; you just have to do it.

The Future is Now
One
Our washing machine washes, rinses, spins and dries clothes---all in one. You put the clothes in, push a button, and return two hours later to a load of clean, dry clothes.

Two
Our microwave is also a toaster---you pull off the revolving plate and a grill is underneath. There's a toast button on the front.

Three
Kranti bought the most futuristic cell phone in the world for ¥1. It's a Star Trek tricorder that takes photos and videos, recieves and sends e-mails, browses the Web, and makes excellent wet cappucinos. You can also swipe the phone on the electric sensors at subway turnstiles to ride the train. You can swipe it on many vending machines, which, in Tokyo, contain soda, juices, water, coffee, sandwiches, beer, mixed drinks, cigarettes, cigars, school-girl underpants, et cetera et cetera. There are a growing number of restaurants where you can swipe your phone to pay the bill.

Other
Every day, yoga studios in Tokyo provide fresh wet-wipes to students, with which they wipe down their mats.

Public Bath Blues
I am denied entry to a public bath due to my tattoos; a sign in front of the building features an "x" over an icon of a man covered in dragon tattoos. I try to explain to the employees that I am not yakuza, but to no avail.

Recipe for Coma
Ingredients
1. Wake at 3 a.m. to practice yoga at 4.
2. Stay awake all day.
3. That evening, swallow 1,000mgs of Robaxin (generic name: Methocarbamol).
4. Follow that with two hours in a Japanese bath. "Bath" includes sauna, hot tub, ice dip, and steam room. (Note: "hot" tub more accurately called "core of the fucking sun" tub.)
5. After bath, drink half of one shot-glass-sized hot sake.

Directions:
Slide off the restaurant booth into a puddle on the floor, unable to move your limbs. Blink "SOS" in Morse code to alert friends that you are in fact a sentient puddle of water, and that you need to be levered into a taxi with your home address pinned to your lapel.

Drukqs
Psilocybin mushrooms were legal in Japan until three years ago; head shops used to sell baggies of them. In contrast, marijuana is very illegal. People are brought up on criminal charges for failing urine tests.

DMT is still legal and available; I have not inquired about ketamine.

The GG Allin Challenge
Consumer culture has reached its apogee in Tokyo. Fashion has been deconstructed down to the molecular level and codified accordingly; fashion is followed with a rigor and zeal that, as William Gibson says in Pattern Recognition, has become an act of worship.

All of which has pushed me to the other and no less extreme end of the spectrum, the GG Allin Challenge, or the Scum Fuck Possession Fast, which involves giving up material possessions and only living with whatever fits in a brown paper bag.

GG Allin, as I'm sure everyone is aware, was a punk-rock car accident, a perpetual man on fire who wrote classic songs like "Drink, Fight and Fuck," and who hurled obscenities, fists, excrement, and other bodily effluvia on audience members. He swore he was going to kill himself on stage, but overdosed and died before he could make good.

GG had a simple philosophy on life. He had the jacket on his back and could fit everything else he owned in a brown paper bag, in case he needed to blow town, which he often did. The brown paper bag also presumably contained a six-pack and a carton of cigs.

Proposal: 10-day fast with only access to the clothing and toiletries that one is wearing and and one can fit in one regulation-sized brown paper shopping bag. No layering of clothes like girls who cheat at spin the bottle, and no department store bags! (Those are considered sacks.)

Things that are not considered "clothing" and "toiletries," and are as such outside of the fast: books, music, comic books.

You can't use your credit card, either. It's all cash-on-hand. So withdraw some money and live on a budget. You think fucking GG Allin, who wrote an album called Live Fast, Die Fast, had a fucking credit card, college boy? Fuck no.

Ten days? Make it a month.

You could do this no problem in India ... Tokyo, however, as with most places in the West: much harder---not least because it's freezing in Japan right now and you'd fill up the bag with just one sweater.

Okay, so we make it a seasonal fast---spring and summer only.

Which lets me off the hook ... for now.

Subtle and Insidious
The allure to "teach," to be a "teacher." To tell it like it "is." To see the hunger for knowledge in a slight tilt of head and to seize upon it. To enjoy the role of authoriity figure. To enjoy being listened to and taken seriously. To shrug on the coat of gravitas, worldliness, experience. To hesitate at the thought of practicing with students.To hesitate to be seen as anything less than perfect.

Recipe for Antidote
Practice, practice, practice. Practice. Listen more, talk less. Pause before speaking. Inhale, exhale. Always question, yet move spontaneously. Is this about me? Or them? The worst vice is advice. Your truth is not their truth. Your truth is not even your truth. Remember Siddartha Gautama on his deathbed, to his monks: "Be a lamp unto yourselves."

Respect Due
Tim Miller would no doubt laugh, but one of the things I most respect about him is that he practices with his students three times a week. He unrolls his mat just as they (we) do and then puts in the work, gifts and impediments bare for all to see, sattvic and tamasic days alike.

What the hell? Where have I been? Why haven't I posted in ages? And why am I in Tokyo?

The Rain Bit
It rained non-stop for seven of our ten-day stay in Auroville last October. It was Indra's fury at the Bay of Bengal manifest as an unending apocalyptic torrent of water, which poured forthl from the sky to blot out the universe. All roads were muddy brown lakes that we forded on motorcylce, ankle-deep. The very walls of our guesthouse exhaled water that soaked through our bed.

Everywhere, everything was mold, mud and grit. And always the fucking rain. After three straight days it had penetrated our skins and skulls and souls.

The murder marked the low point. A young man, a member of one of two local village gangs, was stabbed to death by rival gang-members. For the remainder of our stay, the air was filled with tension and grief and the dull roar of the grey rain.

The Cockroach Bit
Fuck a two-hour car ride from Auroville to Chennai, follwed by a nine-hour train ride home to Mysore. We strapped into seats on Air Deccan for a one-hour flight.

Just before take-off, a fat brown roach skittered over the headrest of the seat in front of me. It waved its antennae and then disappeared, continuing its cabin circumambulations.

Jet Lag
For my money, the best drug on the market. Your circadian rhythms are like, totally fucked, man. As William Gibson says, jet lag is like sending your body someplace, and then waiting a few days for it to reel in your soul.

Two or Three Things About in Tokyo
1. People don't lock up bikes. They just park 'em on the sidewalk, hit the kick-stand, and leave 'em.

2, Don't cross against the light at crowded intersections. Lemming-like, everyone will follow you across the street; even into the face of oncoming traffic.

3. The mouth of Takeshita Street slopes gradually downhill. Hundreds of shoppers clog the street and sidewalk, wall to wall. All twirl, maneuver and otherwise pilot umbrellas to fend off the snow pouring forth from the heavens. It is a delicate dance. I am a full head taller than most everyone, and tower over a sea of bobbing plastic Technicolor domes, red, green, white, black, blue, clear, camouflage; plain or monogrammed. It is a Busby Berkeley set waiting for someone to cry "Action!" to cue synchronized song and dance.

The Power Nap Bit
Mid-day: the kid next to me at the coffee-shop is studying, highlighting a page in a book and taking notes, doubtless preparing himself for the critical entrance exam into eleventh grade. Twenty minutes pass. The kid leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and slides down in the booth, dead asleep.

A friend told me that many Japanese students get very little sleep due to school, after-school tutoring school (called "cram" school), and then more studying.

Waitresses passed too and fro and batted nary an eye. After an hour the kid gave a little snort, woke up, and resumed studying.

Straight from the Tap
The milk boy delivers fresh milk---still warm from the udder---every day at 4:30 p.m. for the sum of 7 rupees. We’ve bought a milk pail expressly for the purpose. He pours out a half-liter, then dips back into the bucket with his cup and tops it off with a well-practiced flourish, a graceful mobius swirl of the wrist. The boy does, however, walk into our living room sans knocking, which is quite unnerving. He doesn’t stand in the hallway, doorway or even inside the general front door area: the door will suddenly swing wide and he’ll troop right into the living room. Andrew boils the milk for 2 to 3 minutes; it usually ends up foamed for cappuccino although I’ve been known to pour a bowl for cereal.

We Regret the Passing …
Let me take a moment of silence, head down and on bended knee, for the passing of my position at Cosmodemonic Shoe Co, Inc. My job ended not with the usual ritual pomp and circumstance---the farewell lunch endured, smiles and handshakes apportioned to every cubicle, and the yoga-India monologue recited---but by a gradual and somewhat confused un-entanglement. I worked remotely from India for the last two weeks, responding to certain e-mails, disregarding others, and detaching a little more every day.

Mysore’s Subtle Tyranny
Be free from the idea that you must only read books about yoga! Liberate yourself from the creeping anxiety that your free time must consist of chanting, Sanskrit and Sutra classes! Read John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum! Rent and watch films you would never dream of watching! “American Pie 3!” “40-Year-Old Virgin!” “Orgazmo!”

Casual Piracy
Video Tech is on Kalidasa Road, across from the petrol station. I have to duck my head to enter its open garage-door storefront. Hundreds of VCDs line the racks on the four walls, the DVDs are tucked in a three-foot-tall recessed alcove behind the front counter.

I’m sure I pay Westerner prices---30Rs per DVD!---so they let me sort through the good shit behind the counter. I squat and sit on a stool in confessional and the kid turns on an overhead bulb: “Wedding Crashers,” “Fantastic Four,” “War of the Worlds,” “Red Eye;” incongruously, Renoir’s “The Grand Illusion.”

There’s a 1-in-10 chance my laptop simply won’t read the DVD as existing, and many copies are filmed directly off the screen. We’ve been fortunate, though, as none of the copies we’ve rented have included filmgoers’ heads. “Wedding Crashers” did have an extra audience laugh-track.

I sorted through a basket of music CDs on the counter yesterday. I left with three, for the sum of 15Rs each per day. One CD contained 15 Pink Floyd albums, one contained 11 Metallica albums, and the last contained 13 of the latest pop albums (Backstreet Boys, Jennifer Lopez, Black Eyed Peas, The Scorpions, Richard Marx, and … Nelly?) Tara wanted the two Black Eyed Peas albums, although I swooped the Backstreet Boys album (“Never Gone”) for myself.

Courtesy of Video Tech, last Tuesday I downloaded onto my computer 21 episodes from the third season of “Seinfeld,” and on Sunday the entire first season of “Sex and the City.” Decadent? Maybe. Downright sybaritic? One could make the case ...

Lakshmipuram Organic Market
From Gokulam, we scooter through the Mysore University grounds on our way to Lakshmipuram. Tara wears the baby in a frontal sling. Rowan is a tiny pushpin in a fluorescent Styrofoam helmet that engulfs her baby head. The helmet slips down over her eyes, so she uses her delicate baby hands to hold it up so she can survey the scenery. Andrew pilots the other scooter, Allison on back, blonde hair trailing in the wind. We’re an eye-catching bunch.

The intensity ratchets upwards during the drive. Lakshmipuram is more compact, tighter, louder, more intense than Gokulam. It’s more concentrated India.

Andrew has found the new location of the organic market he frequented on his first trip in 2001. It’s now in a rundown, mould-covered house, in which the “market” takes up one walk-in closet-sized room. Weevils sit in sacks of dal and spiders leap from underneath bunches of bananas. Andrew buys organic mung dal, liquid jaggery, organic coffee, some honey. Allison stocks up on greens.

Tara and I take baby out front. Her blonde hair and translucent skin are an instant hit with the Indian men sitting around the entrance. One man is an endless fount of folk medicine: One drop of honey on the baby’s tongue per morning, he says, will make her learn to talk better, faster. For teething pain, rub sugar on her gums.

We show baby Rowan to the cow grazing across the street. “Woof, woof,” says Rowan; it’s what she now says when she sees any animal. A two-foot piece of rope ties the cow’s neck collar to its front foreleg. It can’t raise its head more than two feet from the ground.

The folk-medicine man tells us the cow is so dumb that it will walk into and through cars, people, and glass windows. Therefore its gaze is roped down. Somehow it seems cruel. I’d never seen a live farm animal until India, though, so I’m very much out of my depth.

Andrew and Allison finish shopping, and we scooter back to Gokulam. Later, Andrew uses his new coffee in my stovetop espresso maker. When it begins hissing, Andrew lifts the lid. “Look,” he says, “it’s boiling out like cream!” And it’s true: the organic coffee is foaming through the slit like cream.

Getting Internet
Andrew bought two Apple iSight cameras prior to coming to India, one for my Mac, one for his wife’s Mac; he would be able to see and talk to her and his 2-year-old son.

We fished two Internet contact names from the Internet place around the corner and called them. “No connection is possible in your neighborhood,” the first place told us.

We met with a representative from the second place. They wanted a 10,000 Rupee deposit. They had hooked up broadband for a Western yoga student before and the student had made 30,000 Rupees-worth of long-distance calls before vanishing back to the West.

Our landlady’s son intervened. They are putting the connection in their name---no deposit, no installation fee.

We returned from yoga practice one day last week to find an amorphous swarm of workers, numbering not less than eight and not more than 11, chopping up the street to lay the cable for our Internet connection.

On our way to breakfast, in front of the house, and in front of the line of workers, I loaned Andrew 100 Rupees, separating the bill from the others in my wallet, realizing too late I had flippantly flashed a week’s wages to the dark, sun-creased, squat men pick-axing the dirt.

The small army worked for four or five hours, then vanished as they’d appeared.

The cable is laid, but the Internet is still not functioning as we’re now circumnavigating the language barrier and Byzantine Indian business practices to have the wires connected.

The Yoga?
The shala numbers dwindle; perhaps 20 people waited out front last Thursday? Tara and I have been leaving Rowan with Nirmala, our landlady, who has agreed to watch Rowan six days a week, two hours a day, for 1,000 Rupees a month. Guruji has told us to arrive at 5:30, and the last week-and-a-half we’ve entered the studio to an ever-increasing number of floor vacancies.

The density in my back and shoulders, which accreted during six weeks of crisscrossing the U.S. via planes, trains and automobiles, has started to melt. My body unkinked from the flight sometime last week. I had been having strong, light practices, and then one day I felt grounded, strong and light.

Guruji is 90 and fiery. He pads about the room, squat and powerful, shouting, eyes twinkling. Last week he suffered from a deep, wet cough, but it seems to have cleared.

Tara, Andrew and I (and Rowan) registered together, and Guruji demanded to know when our teacher Tim would be arriving, to which I lamely replied, “December?” It seemed a fair guess.

Guruji shuffled our stacks of money into his latest accessory, an electronic money counter, which immediately conjured images of the last few places I’d seen the device, namely at the homes of my drug-dealer acquaintances and in the movie “Scarface.” The machine whirred and beeped when it had processed our 54 500-Rupee notes. Gangster!

What else? Show up early, breathe, move. There are moments of an emptiness so full, a silence so loud I only notice them when they’ve passed.

I did not bow my head to Guruji’s feet on my last trip. Not once. This time it is different. There is a swelling, expansive, sternum-cracking gratitude that puts tears in my eyes---how fortunate I am to inhabit this body! To have found this practice!---and Guruji laughs and says, “Tankew, tankew,” as though I’m doing him a favor.

Fever and Slapstick
The baby today shed the last vestiges of a two-day fever; in June she was much, much more sick---wan and listless, shrouded on our bed, chest fluttering like a baby-bird---but it was still nerve-wracking.

I slipped on a throw rug in our living room and sprained my wrist pursuing a mosquito. Ha! I’ve been performing vinyasa on fists and fingertips.

Kuala Lumpur Jump-off
A tenuous thread binds consciousness to its vehicle, this body.

That thread is fraying, unraveling around the edges. What time is it? What day is it? Somewhere in the last 19 hours of flying I lost a day, or gained one.

My brain is a balloon floating over my body, and there is a fractional second of time delay between thought and motor response, command and movement.

Andrew, Tara and Baby Rowan are upstairs, sleeping in our courtesy rooms at the Pan-Pacific Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. I write this in the Business Center, staring at the monitor as though down a long, dark tunnel.

Jetlag is fucked, but I kind of like it when things get loopy.

Baby Rowan is one mellow toddler, her disposition in stark contrast to the India couple with whom we shared a row---every time their 2-year-old opened her eyes, she began screaming.

I've heard sunlight is great for the 'lag, so I'm now hustling to the hotel pool---waterfall! hot tub!---to soak the sun and unknot from the plane.

Pre-Mysore Numbers
Height: 6-feet-1-and-a-half inches
Weight: 143 pounds
Disposition: Sunny, tired, yet hyper-caffeinated