The other day, I was teaching a yoga class and talked about Stevie the Dog, comparing his mischievous antics to the way my mind works.

The second yoga sutra,  “Yoga chitta vritti nirodhah” loosely translates as “Yoga is the eroding of the fluctuations of the mind.”

Since it is one of the few sutras I have memorized and can pronounce correctly, I trot it out a lot.  Also, I find it really helpful to remind myself to erode the fluctuations of the mind. 

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts looking for trouble, cataloguing impending onerous tasks rather than simply BEING — taking in the morning light, inhaling the corn chip smell wafting off the sleeping dogs.

Sometimes, the mind goes on a total rampage, screaming. YOUR CLOTHES ARE HOMELY.  YOU HAVE NO MONEY.  YOUR HAIR IS TERRIBLE.  KILL YOURSELF.

Once I get past this, telling the mind to shut up, switching gears to peaceful thoughts, I go about my day.  Walk the dogs.  Write. Teach yoga. Garden.

Then, when I least expect it, WAMMO, the mind randomly picks something unpleasant to gnaw on. Latches on to some troubling thought it’s been carrying around like a pet rock for several months.  Other times, it picks on a person that it decides is irksome.   It can be a person of any shape, gender, or age, though it thrives on people at the gym.

There are some weird-ass people at the gym. Bizarre grunting men with upper bodies like oil drums.  They invariably congregate near whatever it is I want to use.  Free weights.  Machines.  Stretching mats.  They hang in little packs and alternate between looking at themselves in the mirror, drinking beverages the color of plumbing products, and communicating in grunts. 

I find myself wishing they would topple over and smash their heads on the gym floor.    Then, I take it down a notch and simply wish they would MOVE out of the way.

My mind knows where I live and it knows how to get me. Earlier today, I flipped my car’s sun visor up halfway and noticed it kind of stuck out like an upholstered ax in direct line with my forehead. I imagined having a car accident and that the impact would drive the sun visor into my skull.  I pictured walking into an ER with a sun visor in my skull. Then, I thought of the Denis Johnson story where a guy walks into the ER with a knife stuck in his forehead.

Mischief.

Stevie the Mexican Beach Dog is pure mischief.

He looks for the things he knows we value (shoes, lunch, phones) then snatches these and trots around, just out of reach, with the shoe, lunch or phone in his mouth.

He grins and his eyes twinkle and, the more we chase after him, the more he dances and grins and darts just out of reach.  He doesn’t fall for food bribes and or other Common Dog Trickery.

Before coming up to us on that Mexican beach and asking for help, he ran with a pack of other stray dogs who probably schooled him in the art of pilfering to survive.  Now, he pilfers for fun.

In the garden, he transports potted plants from one place to another just to see if I’ll notice.

Here is Stevie’s gardening video.

He darts around, needles me, sometimes very obviously laughs at me.  Kind of like my mind.

At least I’ve learned to recognize the Mind Mischief and not mistake it for fact and go insane convincing myself my car’s sun visor is going to implant itself in my head or that the Weird Gym Dudes can successfully be turned into thoughtful human beings.

But, maybe if I work on it further, harnessing the mind, training it, eroding its fluctuations, I will be able to MOVE entire packs of gym guys out of the way.   I can dream.

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I was supposed to go get my gums SCALED tomorrow.

But I canceled. The idea of someone digging in my gums with small metal instruments was engendering borderline panic attacks. Particularly since this dental practice, the only local one to accept my shoddy insurance, is horrifying.

The waiting room was packed with unhealthy-looking people and squalling children. TV’s blared from every wall, ripped-up People Magazines were strewn across industrial carpeting, and there were ominous oily smears on the faux-wood paneled walls.

The hygienist I saw had an Eastern European accent, cruel eyes, and laughed at me when I said I was afraid of dentistry. I’m pretty sure she would have sliced my tongue out and eaten it if I’d kept my appointment.

Dentistry always makes me think of the poet Max Blagg. Max has a poem fetishizing a dental hygienist who, I believe, wears a black rubber apron. I can’t find the poem online, nor can I find Max to fact check all this but, in my memory, there are some serious antics involving teeth, rubber aprons, and a hot hygienist.

Yesterday, I read an article about a forthcoming interview with the novelist Martin Amis. Among other topics, Amis discusses regret over demanding a 500K advance, for his book The Information. Apparently, there was a lot of hoopla about the outrageousness of such a large advance. Brit tabloids claimed he wanted that chunk of change in part so he could spend it on cosmetic dentistry.

In fact, Martin Amis’s horrendous teeth were going to kill him and all he did was get them fixed enough to NOT kill him. And anyway, a 500k advance is a drop in the bucket if one considers TV writer Lena Dunham’s irksome 3.7 MILLION DOLLAR advance for an advice book.

I just read an article in the Daily Beast about the ongoing death of book publishing. It made no mention of the bloated Lena Dunham advance, but did cite the “gatekeeper” aspect of publishing whereby a few people from similar privileged backgrounds decide which books will be pushed while the rest of the books lie gasping for breath.

The other day it was revealed that, because JK Rowling can’t bear all the fanfare surrounding her own oeuvre, she assumed another name and published a crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, that got good reviews but sold 449 copies. Now that she has been unmasked as its author, it will sell literal boatloads.

It’s all fairly stupid. I mostly try NOT to think about these kinds of things.

I write  to stay sane and because I LOVE when someone tells me I made them feel something. But it is sometimes difficult to shut out the CHATTER in my head. The Brain Monkeys that say if I am to publish a new book the old school way, (in paper, through a major publisher) it has to have some sort of HOOK, be identifiable as something FAMILIAR, something that already exists.

A few years back, an editor at Little Brown, the publisher of the JK Rowling crime novel, rejected an early draft of one of my current books-in-progress. She said the work was too strange and ANTIC, that it would take an editor braver than herself to publish it. I remember scratching my head thinking: Antic? It just seems NORMAL to me. I write what I know. Apparently, what I know is ANTIC.

I don’t save these rejections. I don’t save anything. I like to just keep MOVING FORWARD, trying to keep the Brain Monkeys quiet.

Perhaps the moral of this story is that I’m holding off on having my gums SCALED not because I’m terrified of the Discount Dental Office, but because I am waiting for my teeth to fall out of my head so I can suffer enough to force myself to understand and generate a non-antic book.

Or maybe I just need to bite the bullet, learn to fetishize dental hygienists, and get my damn gums SCALED.

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My mom just turned 70 and I’m putting a “subscribe” option on the blog here.

These two events aren’t really related other than my mother asking, over dinner last night, how the hell I’m making a living now that publishing advances for mid-to-low list novelists have evaporated.
“Uh..I’m teaching yoga and writing TWO books and endlessly poking at the idea of a movie I want to write?” I ventured, hoping it sounded like enough since I come from a long line of workaholics.
My mom looked concerned.
“I’m not making much money.” I shrugged, “but, you know, I’m going to put a “subscribe” option on my blog. Like a magazine.”
My mother didn’t look all that reassured, but she had other things on her plate. Namely TWO birthday cakes.

When my brother Jon and I figured out, through the help of our cousin, Colleen, that our mother was turning 70, we arranged to both descend on her farm in Maryland. We also decided to make a cake, and that this cake should be something slightly exotic. I sent out feelers to my friends who actually like food (Laura the Hot Farmer and Deb the Vegan Cupcake Maker) and got some recipes. Deb’s coconut/lime cupcake recipe seemed to best fit the bill.

Jon is more experienced at baking than I am, but that’s not saying much. Plus, we weren’t working under ideal conditions. Jon had been up since 5 am feeding horses and mowing fields, and I had taken Mickey on a long hike and gone swimming (yes, I have always been the family layabout)  for the first time in many months, so I was exhausted. Jon and I had a 90-minute window of time to work in the kitchen, with my mom’s fifteen poodles “helping” (Mickey stayed in the barn apartment, napping, as he is terrified of poodles.)

Halfway through our frenzied baking session, as we tried to remember which ingredients we had already put into our late grandmother’s mixer and which ones we’d forgotten, our step father Neil came in brandishing a birthday cake from a bakery.

Of course, THIS cake looked beautiful. And Neil was deflated to find that we were going to steal his thunder with a homemade cake.

“Two cakes are better than one.” I said and Neil seemed slightly cheered.

Jon and I did our best with the coconut lime cake but seem to have forgotten SOMETHING. We baked the cake and it came out of the oven looking like a PANCAKE. We left it to cool and Jon went out to do evening Horse Chores. Mickey and I “helped” by riding with Jon on the “Mule”, the thingamajig that hauls grain and hay and pitchforks out to the fields.

By the time we had eaten dinner and sung a highly unglamorous rendition of Happy Birthday, it was late, and it’s possible our mother might not have noticed how FLAT her coconut lime cake was, but Jon and I pointed it out anyway, lest she think us complete idiots.

It was so late that that my photos of our mother slicing the cake were blurry and not flattering so instead, here is a photo of her with Jon and Molly the Poodle in front of the barn.

I brought home one slice of the Pancake Coconut Lime Cake for my boyfriend and he claims it TASTES great even if it looks like something a deranged and eggless peasant made in Spain in 1370.

And now my mom has successfully turned 70 and my friend John (not to be confused with my brother Jon) has kindly installed this SUBSRIBE option on the blog and I hope you will subscribe.

Here, as a little nudge, is Amanda Palmer’s excellent TED talk, The Art of Asking. I’ve posted it before, and perhaps you’ve already seen it, but it bears re-watching. This is the future for those of us who write and make music and paint. We’re not GETTING you to pay for our work, we’re ASKING.

So, please, share the blog, share the love, and SUBSCRIBE!

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I despise the word “utilize. “ Up until a few years ago, I had no strong feelings about the word, then, I worked in a rehab, teaching teenagers.

Utilize is a really popular word in institutional settings.  There were UTILIZE signs all over that rehab.

“Please do not UTILIZE this office as a break room”

“Please clean up after UTLIZING this bathroom”

Really?  Does anyone UTILIZE a bathroom?  Personally, I USE it.  Utilizing it would make me feel like an extra from I Robot.

And when did UTILIZING become so popular?  I see writers I respect using the word UTILIZE when USE would have been briefer and less bleached-sounding.

Weirdly, the overuse of UTILIZE seems to coincide with the proliferation of SANITIZING.  One can’t leave the house without encountering a SANITIZING STATION.  America seems to have become obsessed with sanitizing itself.  

My friend Xavier wrote a blog post about the installation of a SANITIZING STATION in the building where he works.  See it here.

The other day, I stood in the grocery store, pretending I was selecting cantaloupe, but really I was studying people walking by the sanitizing station, noticing who felt the need to SANITIZE.  Interestingly, it was the unhealthiest-looking people. Either nervous, hunched, brittle people, or extremely heavy people who looked like they subsist on mass quantities of processed foods.

These folks were scrubbing surface germs off their hands at the sanitizing station,  as if that would somehow clean what was inside them.

Americans seem to feel dirty.  The insides of our bodies are full of chemicals so we feel the need to rub chemicals all over our hands.  Soon, we can move into hermetically-sealed, climate-controlled bubbles where everything is sanitized.  And utilized.

I like dirt.  I like the earth.  I like sitting in dirt. Rolling in dirt.

I like humans who smell and look like humans.  I like my humans un-sanitized and definitely un-perfumed.

Perfume was popularized by 16^th Century French people who never bathed.

I’ll concede that MAYBE scents made from flowers were more palatable than bodies ripened over periods of months, but, in modern day America, even the very poor have access to bathing water.  The perfume abuse thing is not actually necessary and, if you’re like me and have a keen sense of smell, it’s really noxious.  If I get hugged by a perfumed person, I smell it on myself and on my clothes until I bathe and wash my clothes.  I suppose I could use a sanitizing station and scour the perfume off, but, my guess is, whatever the sanitizing stations dispense is SCENTED.  Because Americans are afraid they smell.

Europeans are looser about these things.  They are more comfortable being naked and smelling like people.

Photo: Spencer Tunick

Why are Euros happier naked and smelling than we are?   I don’t have a theory on that . But America has become a bizarrely prudish, phobic country operating on fear. We have politicians legislating women’s bodies and sanitizing stations in grocery stores. And the word UTILIZE is at the heart of it all.

Utilize is impersonal and filled with chemicals.  Also, I’m sure it’s a member of that creepy Tea Party.

Let’s put UTILIZE out to pasture NOW. 

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I am boring.

I like routine and quiet and having the capacity to blend in and just BE.

I can only deal with very small parties, and am uncomfortable in crowds.

When I lived in the city, I traveled by bike rather than face swarms of people on  the subway.

I usually only go to shows I am performing in or that friends are performing in. Not because I’m a jerk, but because this assures me a tucked-away place to sit or stand, away form the crowd.

My friend Jonathan Ames likes to say that when he’s not onstage he is extremely boring.  Actually, I think he says he has the personality of a cardboard box.

Self-proclaimed Boring Person Jonathan

When performing, Jonathan is anything but a cardboard box.  Perhaps you’ve seen him or heard him.  He is VERY LIVELY.

I was soothed when Jonathan insisted that he is boring.  Having a friend who has a wild and lovely mind claim to be boring validated my own boringness.

There is honor in being boring.

Sometimes I wear very large glasses to be less boring

People like to tell things to boring people.  Boring people, at least the brand of boring I suffer from, are good listeners.

Also, boring people are never bored.  I am always interested in something because I can take stuff in because I am BORING.

I lead a simple, quiet life.  Even when touring, doing many consecutive days or weeks of performing and traveling, I endeavor to transport my boringness with me.  To settle into the rhythm of any given situation and just LISTEN and OBSERVE.  Even when flying into some strange country with a bunch of strange writers at some strange hour and the only vegetarian food available is POTATOES.

As a Boring Person, I don’t go out and do things just for the sake of doing things.  I’d rather stay home and garden with the dogs or spend two hours in headstand or lurk in my office generating fiction.

I’ve known a number of performer/artists who are not boring.  They are constantly ON.  Sometimes it’s tiring to be around them and I imagine it must be really tiring being them.

But I don’t have that problem.  I am boring.

I didn’t always know I was boring.

When I was doing things on MTV in the 1990’s, people would try to find me and insist on meeting me.  There was one really persistent guy, a TV Writer who wrote for a very good and successful show.  We knew a few people in common so I agreed to meet him for a sort-of-date in LA.

As I remember, it was an okay sort-of-date, but the guy kept looking at me as if expecting me to suddenly launch into my stage persona.

We didn’t have a second date.  A few years later, I was at a (small) party and the TV writer guy’s name came up and I said: Oh yeah, THAT guy, he semi-stalked me for a while and then we went on a sort-of-date.

To which the person I was talking to said: Yeah, I heard about that, he said he expected you to be wild.  But you were just BORING.

I was a little upset that this guy had apparently told anyone who would listen that I am BORING.

Then, I thought about it and realized I AM boring.  And I LIKE being boring.  Being boring means I will (probably) not go completely insane from over-stimulation.

I used to have a therapist, Marilyn, who LOVED to cite Matisse as an example of a really boring person who made great art work and didn’t go insane and self-destruct.

Matisse

I would always counter Marilyn’s Matisse with Caravaggio who was NOT boring at all and made even greater work.

Now that I am no longer in my YOUTH, I am glad to be the Matisse variety.  If I were Caravaggio, I’d already be dead of infection after years of dueling, brawling, and being banned from entire principalities.

I do not wish to die from infection after dueling and brawling.

I am boring and I’m proud.

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In July, I like to watch skinny men in tights ride bicycles up big mountains.

I’m not a sports person. I only enjoy partaking of solitary sports like swimming and cycling.  Watching other people do those things on TV always seemed as appealing as stabbing myself in the eye with a fork.  Then, one day about ten years ago, I watched a mountain stage of the Tour de France.

The mountain was so steep and endless, the men on the bicycles were in such obvious physical agony. It was riveting.

I’ve loved and ridden bicycles since I was a kid and, for most of my life, I commuted by bike, both in New York and abroad.  But the idea of wearing special outfits, the idea of even wearing a helmet or carrying a water bottle, had always seemed vaguely bourgeois — or like something only jocks did, those people who looked at me funny in high school when I was smoking in the bathroom.

If you had told me eleven years ago that I would look like this when I went out for a bike ride, I would have laughed really hard. 

One summer, I was at the artists’ colony Yaddo at the same time as my novelist friend Donald Antrim.

Donald Antrim and Mickey

Donald is a serious cyclist. His cycling get-up (which reveals a great deal of man-flesh) was a frequent topic of dinner conversation at Yaddo.

I think there is a prevailing notion that artists do NOT partake of strenuous physical activity.  A little yoga or a dip in the pool maybe, but riding a bike 50 miles in a shiny tight outfit?  No.

One day that summer, I went into a bike shop in downtown Saratoga. I don’t remember what I was looking for,  but I ended up falling in love with a 1980’s Peugeot 10-speed bike. It was $200.  I felt weird spending even $200 on a bicycle.  But I  did.  And I  loved that bike and rode it daily, not just to get from Yaddo to town,  but for fun, exploring , able to go further because it was a better bike than what I was used to.   My legs got stronger.  I started feeling invincible and remembering the joy of childhood bike riding, when I rode for FUN, not just to get from point A to point B.

I asked Donald Antrim if he wanted to go for a ride one day and he smiled and said:  You won’t be able to keep up with me.

This may have been the instigating incident.

Twelve months later, I had a two-thousand-dollar Cannondale racing bike that I rode every day for 2-3 hours unless there were sheets of ice on the ground.

I started training with a pack of women interested in amateur bike racing.  Most were younger and hadn’t spent half their lives smoking cigarettes.   It was painful.  Plus, I don’t have any particular physical gift for bike riding.  However,  once I decide to do something, even if I SUCK at it, I keep banging my head against the wall until I can do it.  What I lack in talent, I make up for in obstinacy.

Which is perhaps how I came to admire Alexandre Vinokourov, a pro cyclist from Kazakhstan . Vino, as he is known, is the most determined, stubborn, lunatic cyclist I’ve ever seen.  Also, he sort of resembles Mickey.

Mickey

Vino

Vino doesn’t ride methodically, the way almost all the eventual winners of famous bike races ride.  He rides the way Stravinsky wrote music and Bunuel made movies.  Throwing methodology and rules out the window.   He grits his teeth, and RIDES HIS BIKE AS FAST AS HE CAN.

Like most of the big names in cycling, Vino was doping and got caught and served a suspension.  Then he came back after the suspension and shattered his pelvis in the 2011 Tour de France.  He was 37.  Old for a pro cyclist.   He retired.  For about five minutes.  He came back again and, at the age of 38, last summer, against staggering odds, won the gold medal at the Olympic men’s road race.

Vino chews his gold medal

Mickey chews his stick

My own bike racing career didn’t go that well.  The only thing I was good at was accelerating.  I might have been a decent sprinter but, in a race, sprinting entails being buried in the pack of other riders, in REALLY close quarters,  weaving your bike, and running a high risk of crashing.   It is SCARY.

Also, I was constantly exhausted and hungry.  I started having trouble with yoga because my leg muscles were so bulbous and stiff.  I wasn’t getting my work done because my brain was flooded with weird Exercise Abuse Chemicals.

I couldn’t remember how or why the whole cycling thing had gone from being a joy to a compulsion, but it had.  It wasn’t fun, it was painful and it was making me stupid.

I started to slow down.  I had to actually taper off because otherwise I had panic attacks from the chemical changes in my brain — that had grown accustomed to enormous doses of exercise chemicals. It was freaky.

Now, I actually ride my bike WHEN I FEEL LIKE IT.  And there is joy in it again.  And, yes, when I’m out on a long clear stretch of country road and I see another cyclist ahead, something kicks in and I become Alexandre Vinokourov. I put my head down and ACCELERATE until I catch whoever is ahead of me.

Then, I go home, flip the TV on, and watch men in tights ride up big mountains.

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I like reading blogs where NOT MUCH HAPPENS.  The beauty of the mundane. A doorman being nice to a delivery person.  A broody hen.  My friend Isa’s victories wrestling her post-traumatic-brain-injury  brain.

I don’t read Angry People Blogs or Blah Blogs where people post 30 things a day out of COMPULSION rather than out of actual connection with the thing they are blogging.

Yet I cant’ seem to be breezy and quick in my own blog situation here.   I always INTEND to dash off a small, fleeting notion, then, I start having INTERWOVEN IDEAS and they won’t stop.

But this post is devoted to a small thing.  A golden bunny.  Here it is.

Golden Jackalope by Ria Charisse

It’s a Jackalope really, but I like the way “small golden bunny” sounds.

The small golden bunny was made by a woman named Ria Charisse who has a lovely web site. Looking through it calmed me earlier today, when I was beginning to get vexed.

I had been looking at the comic Marc Maron’s Twitter feed.

Marc and I were friends for a while. He is a very funny and talented man. He could NEVER STOP BEING FUNNY though so hanging out with him was exhausting. I would go home and have to nap.   He was also incredibly driven.  Consumed. It made me feel boring and vaguely lazy by comparison.

We fell out of touch.

I started a Twitter account a few months back. I’m not at my best in 140 characters,  but, I have friends who are, so I do look at Twitter most days.

When I first started, I looked for Marc on Twitter  and followed his feed for a while.  He was doing a lot of  REALLY SUCCESSFUL GUY STUFF.   It made me feel boring and vaguely lazy again.  And also a little bitter.

For the most part, I am genuinely pleased for the successes of friends and acquaintances and total strangers. If someone is good at something, be it symphonies, quilts, yoga, horse whispering,  I get filled with a sense of wonder. My brain gets flushed with good chemicals and I like myself and the world a little bit better.

I don’t care for religion and I do not believe in GOD in the traditional sense, but I believe in small-case-plural-gods.

Marcel Dzama drawings are gods.  

Bach is gods.

Trees and creeks are gods.

The stories people tell are gods (sometimes.)

Other people’s successes usually make me want to be better at my own work, to make small gods that might ignite small gods in others.

But, for some reason, following Marc on Twitter, I started to feel diminished and bitter. He has made a living out of making fun of himself for feeling bitter.  And now I’m bitter about that.

I don’t know why that is or why I’m admitting this.

This was meant to be a fleeting post about the golden bunny I bought today.

When I got home and held the golden bunny in my hand, I literally felt my heart expanding like a watermelon of joy in my chest.

Here is a link to Kosa, where I bought the golden bunny, though I’m not linking to it because I think the owner will give me free stuff.

There is very little free stuff in this world until you’re famous enough to not actually NEED free stuff.

Marc Maron is probably getting free stuff as we speak.

I had heard this story, from my non-biological cousin, Shahram, that the poet Gregory Corso used to get free Agnes b suits.

In fact, Shahram told me that when Gregory Corso died, he was buried in a brown velvet Agnes b suit.

I have NO idea how Shahram knew this, but Shahram knows EVERYTHING.  His brain is extraordinary, possibly owing to the fact that my best friend, Jenny, his biological cousin, used to babysit him when he was 7 and she was 14 and she would grab him by the ankles and SPIN HIM around as fast as she could.

Jenny and Shahram a few years before she took to SPINNING him

Jenny could have dropped Shahram on his head and killed him.  But we like to joke that it was this SPINNING that gave Shahram an unusual brain that indexes EVERYTHING.

Shahram inspecting me

I think Shahram only met Gregory Corso a few times, and he did not attend Gregory’s funeral, but he knew that the man was buried in an Agnes b suit.

Knowing that Agnes b had given Gregory Corso a free suit for being a poet, I thought maybe she’d give me one too. I have long loved her clothes.  Perhaps she would love me.

At the time, I was about to do a taping for an HBO thing. So I called up Agnes b headquarters and explained the situation, how presumably several million people would see my outfit and could I please have some clothes. I was offered a 10% discount.

I wore old clothes.   I still have them.

And now, I have a golden bunny that filled me with small gods when I was bounding toward bitterness over an old friend who is successful because he can laugh at his bitterness.

So, it all works out.

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