Writerly Cures for Feeling Like a PoS, Picking Gravity's Pocket, Sexy Yoga

I haven't been good about blogging—or writing—lately. When I don't write I feel like A Piece of Shit. That gets capital letters because I know everyone feels that sometimes. It's a mixture of sadness, guilt, shame, desire, and laziness. Feeling like A Piece of Shit can go two ways. You can feel like a PoS and decide, Enough, I'm done, I'm going to do something about this. Then, feeling like a PoS is good because it at least gets rid of the laziness—because you're doing something—and it also gets rid of the guilt—because at least you're trying. But feeling like a PoS can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes things worse. You feel like a PoS so you start hitting yourself about it. Hitting yourself about it brings more sadness, guilt, and shame. You feel Overburdened. You're driven deeper and deeper. Now you're so deep you can't do anything, and you feel even lazier, and yadda yadda yadda, on and on, until, damn, do you ever feel like A Piece of Shit.

So—enough of all that.

I have a backlog of ideas for the blog to which I need to give words.

I remember the moment I first swung a bucket of sand around in a windmill and discovered centrifugal force. It was a whisper, a rumor around the playground—swing it around and nothing will come out. Surely, a trick. Surely, a pile of sand on my head and a big, bullying laugh from everyone around. So I used my hands to gather the loose, dry sand in the sand pit and quickly and quietly filled my blue plastic bucket. Careful—not too much. Careful—no wet stuff, because first it could be pee, and second it'd be easier to get dry sand out of my hair. I slipped through the playground, behind the slide, on the outer edges of the trees surrounding the gravel, and found a nice quiet corner where the fences met.

I could barely be seen through the trees and the kicked up dust from two dozen of my fellow classmates causing playground trouble. And no one was watching and I was alone. And my sandy right hand gripped the bucket handle. And I held on tight. And I swung the bucket back and forth like a pendulum, gathering speed, gathering momentum for the eventual loop-the-loop, seriously contemplating my doom. And then—with a heave!—I flexed and tightened and swung as hard as I could and I almost fell with the force but the bucket flew over my head and around again and when I looked down and when I looked at my shirt and felt around I realized—no sand. No sand.

I had picked gravity's pocket. I had slid one by. I had found an anomaly. The bucket was upside down and nothing came out. Nothing fell. Upside down, and nothing. And that day I knew I cheated something, I knew we had all cheated something, us playground desperadoes, because we had figured out something the grown-ups didn't know about, because surely if they knew they would go around all day swinging buckets of sand. And how lucky we were. And how carefully we guarded this secret. And how precious we held this magic.

What

   about

      firemen

        reciting poetry

    on their way

  to a burning

building?

Here are two quotes I like from "Miss Sophia's Diary" by Ding Ling, who was a female writer during the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China:

"I drank as though the liquor might ease me toward death tonight."

"I imagine the pleasure of sex to be like bones dissolving."

I was in yoga the other day, wrapping my hands around my calves, and thought, Doing yoga is like having sex with yourself. I'm not sure how to feel about that, but really—when you do yoga you get sexy with yourself. How else can you describe it? You pay your body acute and unwavering attention, you move slowly and sensually for your own benefit, you relish in your own breathing, in the stretch of your own muscles. It's body worship. Like sex is. Except it's your own body. It's like having sex with yourself. Honestly, it feels strange to be so intimate with myself. I do it, and I like it, it's just new.

And there's nothing like seeing a woman get down with herself. I've decided and it's now a Lucas Law—yoga women are the most attractive and desirable of all women. Why? Well, sure, they're always with the skin-tight yoga pants and the nicely fitting shirts, and downward dog, despite all my attempts to divert my gaze does always yield a nice view, but women these days wear those yoga pants everywhere (though I assure you I do not complain), and the downward dog scenic overlook isn't anything I haven't seen before. It's more than that. Seeing a woman in touch with her own body, seeing the way she rolls her torso and bends toward her calves, hearing her exhale in that special, centered way, seeing her discover her own supple muscles, the grabbing, the smoothing, the reaching, the breathing—that is It. It's enough to make me dumb, and it does, and I very often have little to say after yoga class.

And that's all for now~~