Do you have a need to stop the ever-present anxiety and obsessive self-spiraling narratives that you’re always playing out in your head, to the point where the timeline of your thought process follows a predictable oscillation between hypothetical conversations that you might have in the future with people you might or might not see, soon or ever, or with snippets of actual conversations you had, in which you or the other person could have or should have said something else to take the conversation down a different path or to be more cutting, more loving, more accurate, more spiteful, more something? Don’t do Yoga if you have this need. Do something that includes the possibility of you getting struck full on in the face, with sufficient force to cause blood to shed. Check into the Duchamp Outpatient Clinic, and see if you get enough of a blood infusion to get whole new blood. But not all at once.

It’s a thin porous line between waking up on a sticky vinyl seat of a bus trudging through an urbanscape, stopping at damn nearly every red-light, through the guts of the city, powered by the perialstalsis that takes anyone whose nobody from point A to point B, mass transit style, and waking up on a beach in the Dominican, at night, unable to remember the last part of the afternoon and wondering in which direction you might walk to find what approximates the idea of home, on this here vacation?

I once read a profile of a University of Miami football coach named Randy Shannon, and for awhile afterward I wanted to be aloof and detached and a mystery. The title is: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT MIAMI'S EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH FOR A FOOTBALL COACH ENDED WITH A MAN WHO'D BEEN THERE ALL ALONG: ASSISTANT RANDY SHANNON, A LONER WITH A MYSTERIOUS, TRAGIC PAST and I would say I go back and read it at least once every year, usually when I need a dose of inspiration and whatever other ersatz sentiment comes up in encountering those figures whose character was formed in a crucible of deprivation and who come out with quiet voices, stern unblinkered looks, and a desire to keep achieving. (Isn’t it almost necessary to call that desire “fierce,” in this context and to do the bidding of narrative convention?”

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Doing the bidding of narrative convention is the lubricant that oils the machination machine. it’s like how I watch Bourne movies and want to start carrying a gun, or watch movies or shows that are fairly realistic foreign policy/spy thrillers and then want to start being concerned about operational security and whether I should start encrypting my emails. Which is all to say maybe there is a certain kind of mood (r a certain of self) that embraces malleability and conforms to the suggestible pules of narratives as a temporary proxy for nearly insurmountable emotions that other people have on repeat and all the time organically, somehow, and survive, somehow.