I did yoga tonight for the first time in about two-months, maybe longer. The last time I did yoga, it was still warm outside, and I did it in my backyard. I did it regularly throughout the entire summer, despite the heat and mosquitoes. It was nice to spend time outside, although I did finally have to resort to using some kind of spray like Off! that contains DEET and shit in it by the time August rolled around. Terrible, but it did relieve me of a lot of insect bites while I did my half-hour yoga routine. It made me feel good doing it - the yoga that is, not the DEET - both then and tonight.
Tonight was the first time I did yoga indoors since probably early spring. Wearing my typical lounging pants - long Adidas sport pants with three stripes going down the side - made one of my poses nearly impossible, despite the presumed athleticism that the sport stripes on my pants should imply. I don’t even know what the pose is called, but it’s when you bend one leg and push the sole of your foot into your opposing thigh, and the bent knee protrudes outward to the side, kind of like a figure-four. I was wearing hiking socks, and my foot would just slide effortlessly down my straight left leg. “Damn!” I’d exclaim to myself in a mild whisper, as I would try and try again with the same result. I finally took off my socks, which helped, but it was still tremendously difficult. I realized that cursing while trying to do yoga defeats part of its purpose of maintaining calmness, and decided to control my frustrations by cursing inside my head instead.
I completed my typical yoga routine of approximately 30-minutes, consisting of ten or so poses per side and realized that my body is quite unbalanced! No surprise, really, since my body has always been unbalanced, despite the regularity of yoga throughout this summer. Mind you, I’m in pretty good shape overall, but my back is curved with mild scoliosis, my core is flabby, and holding my balance in some of those poses took some serious effort!
Thus today, my thoughts center on the lack of balance that people endure on a daily basis, myself included. I think about the mindless normalcy for most of us with regards to how we hold ourselves up, our bodies, that is. We don’t often think about our posture, and our backs are rounded and hunched, much like mine was just now until writing this very sentence forced an adjustment. The lack of consciousness regarding my back, head, neck… everything! It’s absolutely appalling when I think about it. I catch myself leaning forward at work in an awful posture, staring into the computer screen, my back all bent up in an S-curve that it shouldn’t be capable of contorting into. Awful.
On a positive note, I am in good health and am in decent physical shape, so I’m not hell-bent on hating myself or anything. It’s just that I wish my overall physical presentation and posture were more clean and upright. Perhaps it is more accurate to desire a more confident presentation. It is my belief that one’s physical presentation is a direct manifestation of one’s internal happenings. Meaning, one’s emotions, thoughts, and spirit, directly affect the physical self. This includes things like general health and well-being, weight, as well as more momentary physical circumstances, such as posture.
In this day and age, it is no longer necessary to take on physical demands in order to survive day to day. Unless there is a total social meltdown, one can conceivably live each day with minimal physical effort. Case in point, look at the average American who takes less than 3,000 steps per day. I think that’s what the guy said in the documentary “Super-Size Me”. That’s just unbelievable. 20-years ago, I used to joke how we would eventually devolve into a slobby organism that sits in front of a large computer screen with a built-in toilet, and have an automatic food dispenser punch out pellets, not unlike a hamster. Except the hamster has its wheel to run in.
Sadly, this is now a practical reality for many in the United States and probably the UK, too. And this sickness is spreading worldwide. It’s the McDonaldization of the world. I’ve actually witnessed this nightmarish scene several years ago when I flew into Vegas in order to go backpacking in Utah. I hated Vegas. It was so crazy. You couldn’t tell if it was night or day once inside these mind and life-sucking casino hellholes. It truly didn’t matter what time it was. It could have been 10am or 10pm. And there she was, a 50-something or 60-something woman, cigarette dangling from her mouth in lieu of slobber, with a drink at her side, mindlessly staring into a colorful TV screen, drowning in a plethora of obnoxiously stimulating “music”, if you could call it that. It was more like jingles of tones that persisted throughout the entire building, each successive machine somehow harmonizing with its neighbor, for the express purpose of melting away any semblance of the human mind that no longer occupied the mostly dead shell that was at one time, her body.
Even more amazing was that she no longer needed to lift her arm to pull on the lever of the machine. I don’t even know what to call it. It was one of those “Jackpot” machines, where you used to pull a lever at the side, and if you got three successive whatevers, it was good. Well, these machines don’t even have levers anymore! Maybe some still do as functioning ornaments, but most people just sit there and push a button now. It was disturbing to say the least. She very well may have been in her 40s but appeared to be much older than she really is. This, my friends, was a real life Zombie Land. The walking dead do exist. If you want to be scared, go to a casino and people watch. Just don’t become one of them. They will kill you…
Ah, I almost forgot. What about sitting on toilets? This apparently has not yet happened in casinos, at least not that I know of. However, maybe that’s not a bad idea. Apparently it's commonplace for casinos to throw people out every night for pissing or shitting themselves while they exert themselves pushing that button because they don’t want to get up to go to the bathroom, fearing that they will miss out on their “run” of good luck. Maybe they need to run in a different way. Save yourself. Save your money. It’s not recreational anymore when you’re willing to forego your basic bodily functions! Now that’s scary.
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