Weird sickness, and Less Every Day

Yesterday in the early am’s (i.e., the early 5 am’s when I wake up potentially to go south for the yoga), I felt weird in the belly and head. The car then told me, in big red letters “STOP, TURN MOTOR OFF” as it was out of oil. An oil check a few hours later revealed NOT A DROP in there. No moisture whatsoever. So I didn’t get the yoga done on Monday and it was probably a good thing. Then later I got properly sick, feverish, sleeping for 7 hours in the morning/afternoon, the real thing. Nothing gross, just uneasy sensations and chills and all that good business.

Each day that I make it to the studio, I do less. First day, well into Intermediate, with dropbacks and all. Second day, mightily sore, barely into Intermediate, no dropbacks. Today still with sore belly but without queasiness, only to Janu B and then the handstand festival, and then I backbent (no straight arms, no dropbacks) and closed. Not even jumpbacks or anything; it feels like if I clench my abs to pull my knees up, I’ll toss my cookies, even though I’ve barely eaten anything in 24 hours.

Maybe in the future I will just go to different teachers’ rooms and do whatever, with no expectations at all. In Indy I think of my practice as having a variable Intermediate stopping point: Kapo sometimes, Dwi Pada other times, Karanda other times, the whole thing other times. Here I’ve been OK’d for Ardha Matsyendrasana, but I can’t seem to get to it.

Vacation with a kid means, basically, that you don’t bring your work with you. It doesn’t mean vacation. And having so much exposure to J and the kid means that I am getting a deep soak in how dead/on hold our relationship is, but I’ve also been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (for the first time ever, despite a thousand recommendations when I was in college), so many of my days here are spent thinking about the kind of crazy shit that well-meaning people can come up with and then have to live with. I wrote a whole draft of a post about my counter-vision of Western civilization, which as I said in the still quite-valuable “fascist tendencies” post, is all full of the same illusions as Western civ itself.

J sees the world through the lens of parenting: when she considers working out, it’s never for her, it’s so she “won’t die young and leave the kid by himself.” That sort of thing; a hundred examples. What she does, what she considers, even how she argues with me; it’s ALL parenting, all the time.

I retained a split view; I remained “many” whereas J has, to the best of her ability, become “one” (parent). I still see myself as yoga guy over there, parent over there, interpersonal relating guy over there, and so on. But because J is locked strictly into parent mode, she can call my yoga “leisure activity” when in actuality it is a central element in my mellowing-out mechanism, which has on more than one occasion kept me from throwing her out a window, and she can call interpersonal relating “not the real thing” because being a parent is “the real thing.” So basically we have no relationship, other than that we parent together. When we talk about intimacy, she says “well maybe you can find a certain intimacy in doing this hard thing together.” When we argue about the relationship, she says that “we are responsible for this child, we have to make all of his choices.” In short, J and I CANNOT talk about our relationship, because all she can see in any aspect of life, is parenting. In one argument, I said, “You treat me like I don’t exist” and she said, “We both have to be on, all the time, to keep him safe.”

How do those relate, you say? I was talking generally about how even when she leaves me “in charge” of the child, she is still the guardian. She doesn’t trust me, at least not as much as she trusts herself. And also there was a clear note of interpersonal relating in there, because where that’s concerned, there’s neither me nor relationship. J was talking about child care, and whoever can be more cautious and more aware, basically “wins.” She, of course, is always more cautious and more aware than I am because she has hormonal super powers where that’s concerned and I do not. So I was trying to say that our relationship is wildly unbalanced and that I find that painful, and she was trying to say that the point of our lives is to be attentive parents. There’s virtually no common ground there.

So it’s all death. Grey skies, reduced yoga, belly sickness, parenting and relating being wildly unbalanced. It’s all death and I don’t even have any work with me so that I can escape it for a second to a world that’s got less death in it. Well, there’s Zen… of course, but that’s just a story like mine, a guy with an obsessive and insane idea that he chases to the very, very end. I can’t put it down, but it’s hardly a comforting read.