Saturday XXXX: Family Jewels • 9 February 2008

Battered re-re-recycled box arriving in the department on Thursday: a stash of antique family jewelry, nestled inside the delicate old wool blanket I requested from the homestead (without disclosing I will use it for meditation practice, having wrapped up to read inside it as a girl).

Sweet mom. She loves her shit, but she lets it go so easy. She’d almost thank us for breaking priceless thises and thats when we were ruddy little nakeds running around the house in winter.

And what will I do with these (unfortunately unbreakable) preciouses I’ll never wear? Thank god I’m not responsible for the giant diamonds or the furniture or the china. Oppressive preciouses.

She comes from middling Denver beer barons but halfway abandoned that family history, and for good reason. The once thriving clan up and sank mid-century like a big tragic cruise ship in a drunken sea of skitzophrenia and suicides, its fragments parceled into lifeboats that drifted in all directions. I’ve re-forged some of the lost connections in adulthood, even as its physical detritus drifts in to my life here and there.

The waves of objects from some lost fantasy family are psychically heavy, but do make me feel slightly less alien in a working-class rural conservative clan that regards me with suspicion. I have the scrappy little physique of my dad’s Irish mongrels, but the increasingly angular aspect of the Bavarian brewmistresses in their old daguerrotypes. The best of both worlds, in some ways, now that it’s more or less clear my personality isn't going to split like the skitzophrenics' do in the early 20s.

Oh, wait.


It’s been three weeks since I posted on a Saturday, and links are stacked up. You know, Pema Chodron went on Ophrah; the TM yogi died; the aliens in Stephenesville just got more and more exciting. Also, an insightful teacher finally made the connection between fundamentalist yoga and the larger political moment (!), and CP kept the conversation going. And a lot of other stuff. But in lieu of links today I’m going to empty the cache and give you headlines from my life.

â— Actually, despite the confusion, the “true” new moon was Thursday. How do I know? Because that’s the day the migraine hit. This is what I get for messing with my hormones. Lame.

â— Wednesday I finally went in for the cheaper, more absorbable spirulina. The powder, rathen than the compacted little tablets. OH MY GOD! Why didn’t someone warn me? The color and consistency are sludge, and the taste…. God, if anything can inure me to pure unadulterated spirulina, it’ll be the next two months it takes me to get through the one pound jar of it. Curses! 

â— No. I am not on Facebook. No!

â— And yes, working for the ivory tower is still a tragedy. Two friends did get jobs, but on balance the market is busy crushing souls. Why do we humans do this—create these viscious markets?

â— Yes there will be some kind of ashtangi gathering next week as things come to a close. Do send me your email if you’d like to be invited.

â— Sunday I am finally making the first of many meetings with Anna from New York! The first agenda items is scratching the muffins. If you don’t know what that means, lucky you.

â— With all these weekday outdoor breakfasts in the yoga idyll that is my life, my hair has turned a horrific strawberry blond. This might call for an intervention.

â— People out there are actually running the google search: “Yoga three years suck your own dick.” Lots of people. I wouldn’t put that in print but they’re coming here anyway. Sorry, guys.

â— Boys with sledgehammers are wailing on the pink concrete walls of my apartment building. Having a great dusty old time of it, day after day. Either the owner is replacing the plumbing or someone is pretty mad at him.

â—The restlessness index climbed back into the double digits this week. Forecast cloudy.