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DAY NINE: Should be Feeling Fine

Wind which rallies the skin yet makes one feel more porous
Poor us
Opened Richard Perry's bottle of wine
Finally
He gave it to me a couple of years ago
Dated 1971
It was German, a dessert wine
Poured auburn
Tasted tarnished yet sweet
I miss him and those times
Recorded an old Paul McCartney song tonight
with Doogie
We drank whisky and crowed over how sweet
it sounded
Whisky wine
old people old songs
chocolate melting in my mouth
as I write you
mind bust open like a broken zipper
almost bedtime
but I break myself to stay up
and open

DAY EIGHT: No More Sparkle in the Horse

Sparklehorse shot himself in the heart on Saturday.
Now why would he go and do that at the age of 47?
Mark, didn't you realise you had people loving you
wanting you
needing your songs?
We looked forward to more
Aye, we are still out there.
And, as we hear the news, our own wee handkerchief hearts
are fluttering.
Just when you think it's all about winning
Wham bam
Another gun, another gone.
Just gone no whinny
I gotta get more yoga juice
That road is so dusty long no horse can keep his polish on

DAY SEVEN: OSCAR HAS HIS DAY

They are all beautiful. In the bouquet for a day. Even in high-def, Sandra B. looks so pretty.
Our friend B, who came over to watch Oscars, now has a goatee sort of thing going on. It seems a lot of men do right now. I confess I like him better without it, but I like him regardless.
He seems like a teddy bear who has lost some stuffing. But I am happy that he has a big cat, and also a bunny. The three of them sleep together. They have a simple life. B. needs a job. Let's hope his sadness doesn't shadow his good mind.
He is like me, a cinefile.
Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin are so funny. They feel like bumpkins from a vaudeville time, with timing so perfect you feel like they've been partners for years.
We need a tradition like the Oscars to talk about and complain about. Americans and the world have been doing that for 82 years.
We need all the glitzy pretty, the gowns, the stars, Ben Stiller dressing up as a Neti. We need to see groups of people getting up to accept awards. Just to remind us that groups of people can get along, and do.
We need to see people win.
There is so much loss and losing in our world.
I am so glad "The Cove" won.
I am happy for all of the winners.
All of us need to win something sometimes.
Or at least to dream of that.
Yeah. Aye. Uh huh.

DAY SIX: Bright Eyes and Bloody Waters

Docu-Day Part Two started at the Writer's Guild of America at 9am. F. drives me over the hill. weather spectacular, feel like I live in a national park. Clouds big, blustery, moody, supposed to rain today. Weird goin into a crowd, especially docu-hounds who tend to keep to themselves, or to huddle in smart-hipster packs. They who prefer the succinct and the smart. They who buy dollar coffees and Cheetos and half sandwiches and sit in darkness for 15 hours.
Who would do that, you ask? Especially when the news out there is not so good. Dolphins and whales are being slaughtered and enslaved. Chickens and cows and pigs live and die, crowded together, standing in their own feces. There are only five meat processing/packing plants in the whole United States, and only five major food corporations. There's too much corn in all of our food. 1 in 2 children born after 2000 risks developing childhood diabetes. Obesity is a prevalent disease. Unions are being undermined. Industrial America is closing shop and shutting down for good, leaving blue collar workers at age 45 and beyond unable to find jobs that pay enough for them to support a family, afford health care, have a nice vacation every year.
Children as young as 9 years old from Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico are leaving home to ride Mexican freight trains to cross deserts into the U.S. Those who do not make it die from dehydration, alone, bodies sent back to their parents, unrecognizable, buried without visual identification, DNA evidence sufficing.
Children in schools in the Szechuan province of China died in large numbers due to the shoddy construction of the schools where they sat, learning, when the earthquake came. Parents seek justice, but are censored by their government, compensated $8000 a child lost, to keep their mouths shut.
Dissidents in Burma are beaten, jailed, imprisoned, when they stand up to the repressive regime that rules their country. They must smuggle their videos out of the country. Monks who stand with the people are beaten, yet they return, in support of those who suffer with no freedom.
It's a brutal sad hard world. In the cosy confines of the dignified WGA, I sit, with strangers who cry as I do, ask good questions, while I sit in silence.
These are the good times. My heroes are those documentary makers. I will keep showing up, watching, learning, glad they are out there taking the risks.
This blog is simply to honour them.
And to say I want to simplify my life.
This must relate to yoga somehow.
But that discussion belongs to another episode.
On to the Oscars.

DAY FIVE: Skin Like Shiny Parchment

"There are only activists and unactivists."
Mimz and I went to the Independent Documentary Association's (IDA) "DOCU NIGHT." The traffic was light, and I was glad as I have never driven that far, in the dark, in Los Angeles, before.
By the time we'd gotten parked, the first film, "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" had already started. The Writer's Guild of America theater is old and feels like a dignified place. You try to think of how many Oscar-winning bums have sat in those seats.
We sat in the way-back, and Shane joined us. The DOC took me a wee while to get. It was strange to hear Richard Nixon's voice, sweaty, swearing, paranoid, trying to contain Daniel Ellsberg. It was exhilarating, knowing that 17 major newspapers were willing to publish segments of The Pentagon Papers, Robert McNamara's true confessions on what was really perceived to be going on in Vietnam.
Mostly, I felt sad, and nostalgic for a time that seems so unlike these times. When Ellsberg got busted for stealing and revealing government secrets, the Court overturned his prison sentence.
You wonder if stuff like this could happen now, in a time when newspapers are dying, infotainment is blooming, and people spend more time on computers than with soft dog-eared pages.
It freaked me out when Daniel Ellsberg and his wife magically appeared with the film-makers afterward for a "Q&A." Ellsberg has a voice like light rain. His complexion is white, like a refined old parchment. His wife is soft too, like a dove. They had a holy magnetism to them, like ghosts of another time come back to haunt a room.
I wonder if it will take some mysterious Republican inside the whole political boondoggle, to become the whistle blower. Like Joe Don Baker was, in the original "Edge of Darkness.' Bless 'em.
Then saw "THE COVE." I recommend this one highly, chaps. Everything you have heard about the painfulness of the slaughter of dolphins IS there. But there is so much more. And Mimz and I agreed that if ever there were a sense of activism that we could understand, it was to be found in this movie, where people pool their skills and actually DO something to shake up those who are doing the slaughter.
Sometimes a person gets weary with the news that animals are dying, the planet is dying, people are apathetic, blah blah blah.
Makes me want to eat chocolate, take a nap, and retreat into my own little musical den to escape the voices. THE COVE's director, however, was funny, upbeat, positive, encouraging.
If people are gonna do anything to change the miserable situations around the world, heck, we need to be around the funny, hyper buzzed-up happy go-for-it types, not the sad miserable end-time Joes.
I am heading off to DOCU 2 tomorrow. Will try to relay highlights.
Rain is coming. Off to Beverly Hills. Your freeway phobic fool friend Feef

DAY FOUR: The Sky is Falling, The Sky is Falling?

People are saying, "What are you going to do when you lose your job?" and I know they are talking about the budget cuts. Everyone feels the balloons are bursting. The "Up" house will never lift. And it used to be floating.
The distress is palpable. Reminds me of how we were glued to tellies after September 11th. We were nested in our reptilian brains, repeating what the news reports told us, using words like lozenges to comfort ourselves.
How far is any soul from a mother's breast, after all?
In my mind, I am a skinny little kid who has run away from home. Elated and dizzy, always hungry, not thinking, I run toward the next light, not wanting to wait for the green.
I am so tired of clinging and weeping, mourning, worrying, feeling that anxious sense of impending loss.
We can't live on tears. We can't live on hugs either. There has to be a place within where the balloon floats, where the string to hold it, is within reach. There has to be a way of letting go that celebrates flight, even knowing that, going against gravity, reaching for the sky, there will be breakage.
There has to be something to look forward to. Even with all of the scary stuff out there.
I say, "One job lost just means another to be found. I got stuff to do. So, please don't worry about me. I am gonna be ok."
You will be, too.
I really think so.

OK SO DAY THREE CONTINUES

Ok, so the lonely little yogi yours truly dropped by to see pal Leslie, and three glasses of wine later, stayed for dinner and never showed up at Yoga Blend for the all -girls yoga get together she had committed to attending, and with zest and relish...
What is wrong with me?
Talk about Blend.
I am a Cain-Abel girl mix, that is for certain. For it seems that the more ardent my desire to become the ultimate meditative yummy body, the more flagrant my fatty failure.
I enjoy rebellion, that is for certain.
Still, why do I so often sabotage my greatest physical endeavors?
And especially since I was so looking forward to the BASICS class, and to seeing my new chums, who, as the song goes, are "the best thing... that ever happened to me...?"
Where are you, James Dean?
I understand that you were quite possibly a wee man, and wee men do not even half-corner-eye-see girls over 5'8"
Still tonight, I have bonded with your R with no cause.
I just hope my cause comes back.
Now to put the idiot child to bed.

DAY THREE: Scared Little Music Yogi Wakens Early

DAY THREE: May write more later. On the way to old people's land.
5:30am. Charlie wakens me with a request for food. Do not get back to sleep.
Muscles are speaking to me. Fear turns my head back to pillow. Cannot really fall back to slumber. Could this mean something? Is something shifting in me?
How do bodies, minds, hearts, souls... actually make a change?
I pretend I am all loosey goosy. Really, I'm a slow slug, possible a hard wee pebble.

No Followers: DAY TWO

IN the Old People World, I taught my __ off today. Hard day.
At Memory Class, two new people walked in. One was a woman, born in 1971. She couldn't spell the word "green." The man who accompanied her told us that she has had two brain tumors, and surgeries. Her name she can spell: Nancy. She is petite and pretty. One would never guess how much she has suffered.
Humbled me right away.
"Death is the greatest teacher of all life," writes Michael Singer, in "The Untethered Soul ." Can you imagine having to relearn your childhood's skills? Then, even to show up to a round table of unknowns, and to sit, graciously, as others speak and stuff their papers into plastic folders, organizing their little lives, while you, colossal sufferer of all those gathered, spectate in silence?
My petty woes, my flabby mind, body, soul, have not come close to experiencing such trauma and loss.
I can see how far I have to go. Well, not really. Who ever knows how long the road on which one must travel? It will end, of course.
I have moved today the way a gila monster moves. I am in camouflage. I am my own reptilian statue.
1/4 a centimeter, but at least I have lived today to tell my tale.
God bless all Nancies.

Inner Roomie:DAY ONE

I dared myself to write every day in March, as my inner roomie and I climb into "the journey beyond oneself." (Read "The Untethered Soul" by Michael A. Singer.)
Listen to yourself: glibly written, wouldn't you say? Now, quite seriously, do you think you stand any chance of becoming "enlightened?"
Building a yogic practice? Feeling better about yourself?
Not being the moody, rather sad, lumpy brooding big Muppet you've seemed to become over the past eight or so years since you became a teacher of older adults and not a kid out there bashing your rage out on an electric guitar, singing like a voice was the key to the freedom door?
Going inside. Relaxing and Releasing. Shifting.... consciousness?
I am on a quest to understand "consciousness" which I think is about "being present."
"Be Here Now."
I am a caffeine freak who is a bit of a fattie. Yes, I confess, right here to my couch potato avoidism.
WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN OVER THE NEXT MONTH?
I have always associated taking care of myself as a sort of narcissism. But now I am on track.
My plan. Yoga or gym every day. Fat Blast diet. Read yoga books. Hold down my financial fort. Can these thigns be done? Can change occur?
Stay tuned.
I will be back tomorrow.