Thriftshopping is my religion.  One of them, at least — my philosophy is, why not collect 'em all? But what I like about thriftshopping in particular is, karma is built right into the system.  Not only are the goods for sale recycled, but you're helping people out by buying them.  All the big thrift shops — Goodwill, Salvation Army, St. Vincent de Paul — are committed to helping the less fortunate with the proceeds from sales (regardless of what you think about their methods or success in doing so, that's ultimately what they're there for). 

And if that's not enough of a reason to love thriftshopping, you've got the archaeological thrill of sifting through the bottomless bin of cultural flotsam you find there.  Thrift shops, particularly in affluent areas like our own, are fascinating moving pictures of what we value and then discard as a culture.  Items from daily life, trinkets and tchotchkes, gifts that could not be safely regifted, fashion nightmares resurrected from the back of some forgotten closet, books lovingly inscribed with birthday greetings to the long-dead.  It's all there.  As if some great Vesuvius of consumer goods had exploded, burying the world in its rich spume. Instant archaeology. 

Along with all of that is the daily mystery and magic of the way things surface again after disappearing deep into our lives for a spell — the way things change hands, the way lives intermingle in these objects that pass between strangers.  There is this intricate flow of things in and out of our lives, through and among us.  Their usefulness may be exhausted for us, but they are taken up enthusiastically by new hands, with new plans for them.  (I owe some of these reflections to Mark Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, which before dissolving into utter banality — a distinct danger of dealing with the banal — did have some insights on the strange allure of the superficial.  It got me thinking about how animated some of the inanimate objects around me actually are.)

Beyond the novelty of old things, there are deeper mysteries still.  For me, whatever the question, thriftshopping's provided an answer, if only I have been willing to sift through the detritus of consumer discharge, and had a couple bucks for the oracle.  In return, whenever I'm down on my luck, The Goodwill Gods provide.  They came through during my little skid-row incident last fall, when I paid my rent more than once reselling the booty I gathered from my local thrift shop.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg, really.

When I was fretting over the loss of my old much-beloved lawn chair, these no-nonsense gods delivered not one, but two aluminum tube web chairs in mint condition, straight from my Speedway, Indiana childhood. 

The day I decided to start planning a trip to visit my friend Pasquale in Milan, I found this waiting for me in the book bin at Goodwill...


A brand spanking new Italian textbook to help me brush up (I studied it for two years in college three hundred years ago).  When, a week later, I started thinking about my itinerary and wondered if I should go back to Venice while I'm there, I found my answer beckoning from a shelf in the back of the thrift shop...


Well, so what? you say.  Somebody threw out all their old Italian books.  You happened upon them.  And?  Well, timing is everything, innit?  So I guess I'm going to Venice, too, in the Spring. 

Lately I've been thinking about yoga.  Mostly on account of throwing my back out shoveling snow when we had our last storm.  Now, that's one topic that, for some reason, there's no shortage of discarded books on (lots of vegan cookbooks, too, go figure).  To be honest, there's a lot about the whole kind of culture around it that skeezes me out a little.  Of course I also know that skeezibility and ignorance have been linked in clinical studies.

But seriously.  I mean, first of all there's the whole Sting thing.  He's into all that shit.  Now, I liked him with the Police.  I rocked out in junior high to Outlandos d'Amour and Zenyatta Mondatta and got all intellectual with them in high school with Ghost in the Machine and Synchronicity. But now Sting's about three hundred and fifty years old, scarily well-preserved, if strikingly lizard-like, with zero body fat, and can twist himself all up into a pretzel, I'm sure, whenever the mood strikes him.  He and his pickled wife, Tooty, or whatever her name is, probably know all those tantric sex tricks, too.  They both creep me out.

Some of you will no doubt remember the old-school reality show That's Incredible!  That was actually my earliest introduction to yoga.  I thought it was something that allowed you to fold yourself up so you'd fit inside a tiny Plexiglas box like the yogi they used to have on that show.  It was never explained exactly why he wanted to do this.  To FedEx himself back to Kokomo?  For easy storage at the top of the closet?  To fit under the Christmas tree?  All throughout the show they would keep coming back to him, to see if he'd gotten all of himself stuffed into that box.  "Oops! He's still got an elbow sticking out!"  He would giggle and wave his elbow.  You could see his breath pulsing on the inside of the glass.  Awful.
 
And I hate stretching.  I do the minimum at the gym.  I admire people who spend a lot of time with it, though.  They always look placid and professional.  Mind you, I don't rush around like a maniac, myself, grunting and groaning and scratching myself.  I'm very focused, and have taken time to learn proper form when lifting.  Very important.  But I've reached a point where I'm not quite as flexible as I once was.  And the minute you realize it, that's when you you have to start integrating new measures to deal with it into your regimen, otherwise ten years down the road you won't be able to tie your own shoes.  And it's looking like there's not going to be anyone else around to tie them for me, unless I get a trained monkey to help out around the house. 

That's the thing about exercise.  I have had a very comfortable, mildly challenging regimen since college, which I have amped up and toned down according to necessity or inclination, and I'm doing well simply by maintaining. Simplicity and a dash of discipline will do the trick.  If you don't let things get out of hand, it actually gets easier with time (gravity eventually crushes even the sveltest and most self-assured of us, of course, but the less there is to crush the less crushed you'll be when it does, trust me). People get snared, though.  They acquire a taste for sugar and high-fructose corn syrup and sitting around with their feet up. Truth is, sweets aren't what's really sweet in life.  Everything's sweeter when you have all your teeth and can can touch your toes. 

I have a friend who is a few years younger than me and doesn't exercise a lick, which is something you can get away with up to a certain age.  Like, I don't know, a year and a half.  Problem is, like global warming: by the time you see it's time to start, it's already too late.  Way too late, in most cases.  And just like the coming climate catastrophe, change can be as rapid as it is irremediable.  And when you're at that stage in your personal health and wellness arc (the all-the-polar-bears-are-drowning stage) physical exertion is for the birds.  And who needs it, anyway, right?  I mean, when you can order a pizza, and all you have to do is wait half an hour, and then walk three feet to the door to get it.  That's evolution at its best.  Heck, that's exactly why we have evolution to begin with!

I gave my young (but not anywhere near as young as he thinks he is) friend a couple of guest passes to my new gym.  He didn't take the hint.  It's just as well.  It's already too late.  All his polar bears have drowned by now.

Whether it's too late for me to get into yoga or not, I don't really know.  But I don't want to get all flaky and weird about it if I do.  That's my fear.  I mean, next thing you know I'll take up veganism and announce I'm a lesbian.  It's not that there's anything wrong with any of that, if it's your bag.  It's just that anyone I've ever known like that has been a big buzzkill.  I like a pint down the pub every once in a while.  I like my philly cheesesteak when that carnivorous mood strikes.  I like a rare New York strip with a bottle of Bull's Blood, and a little mano-a-mano to follow.  I like my somewhat rambly, shambolic, hold-on-tightly-let-go-lightly existence.  I do.  I don't want to think about breathing.  I'll hyperventilate.

But I could definitely do without the back pain.  And I know stretching is important.  So I started turning the whole  yoga thing over in my head, and pretty soon the oracle burped this up:


How could I resist? Obviously, this book was meant for me.  Full Catastrophe Living.  I mean, if I was going to call my lifestyle something... And this is not by some fly-by-night yogi, either.  This is Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, bestselling author of Wherever You Go, There You Are.  Full Catastrophe Living is the Program of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.  Need I even mention that there's a shitload of yoga in there?

Still, I needed more.  To make sure Full Catastrophe wasn't just a fluke, or a joke left over from my lolcats phase.  I needed another message from the oracle meant just for me.  I didn't know what it would look like, but I knew I'd know when I saw it. And the next day, there it was...


I could tell this was no ordinary, run-of-the-mill yoga book. This is yogametrics.  This is the stuff they don't tell you in yoga class, because it'd piss off Sting and the vegans and the militant lesbians.  Like "yoga secrets for personal popularity".  Nobody talks about those in yoga class.  It's "stress this" and "flexibility that".  Balance and wholeness and connectedness and integration.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  But what about "popularity magic"?  And you know you can trust Frank Young.  I mean, he's frank.  He's young.  That's what you want in a yoga instructor.  His photo on the back cover seals the deal:


(And "frank r young" is lolcatspeak for "Frank is young," by the way — coincidence? I think not.)  Young is the author of other great books, too, like Cyclomancy: The Secret of Psychic Power Control, The Laws of Mental Domination, and Psychastra: The Key to secret ESP+ Control, The Secrets of Personal Psychic Power.  Unfortunately, without those old-school muscle mags his ads used to appear in...


...there's no way of ordering them anymore.  So this was a real find.  It makes the secret knowledge inside (I bet you don't know how to do the "parallel look" or the "facial gravity-angle surrender") even secreter.

Young knows why real guys really do yoga.  Just skim the pages of Yoga For Men Only, and you'll find all sorts of useful tips like  "how to banish fear instantly with the Myo-Pector":

1. Sit relaxed before your mirror, with your torso naked, in order to see exactly what you are doing.
2. Rest your hands, palms down, on your thighs, with the tips of your middle finger about two inches from your knees.
3. Now, lower your shoulders forcibly towards the ground.  That places your chest muscles into their best angles of pull.
4. Next, move your shoulders inwards fast, towards each other, as far as they will go, and tense your chest hard at the same time.
5. Hold the contraction for two seconds.  Then relax.  You swiftly acquire the unconquerable feeling of a solid musculature breastplate.

"This is," Young assures us, "how to banish fear instantly any time it assails or overtakes you, and thereby protect yourself against being selfishly dominated by others."

And that's still the kind of thing a guy needs to know yoga for in today's dog-eat-dog world, innit?

So, once I'd devoured Frank Young's book of yoga secrets FOR MEN ONLY! I phoned a local yogi of my acquaintance and set up an appointment. 

Because, you know, it's obviously fate.