SUMMER IS READY (WHEN YOU ARE)




I dreamt last night that I took back the 12-inch record collection I gave away in January. How I miss it. Getting rid of stuff is good, yes, but it still hurts like the hell to lose all of that music.

The above song ("Saints," by the Breeders), however, is on compact disc, and I still have it. It brings back all of the sweet memories of Lollapalooza '94, when I drove to Detroit with Ira Glass and later rode into a couple of shows on Nick Cave's tour bus, and wasted time backstage with the likes of L7, the Bad Seeds, the Breeders and P-Funk (for some reason the Beastie Boys were nowhere to be found). They liked Nick Cave's green room because he had the best liquor rider on the tour, and my friend Jim was (is) a wonderful bartender. L7 was the life of the party. Ah, the days before yoga ruined my life....


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Yesterday Jammu, Baby Sachi and I had an Mysore-ish day hanging out on Devon Avenue, where we dined on North Indian thali (at Udupi Palace) and chai and sweets (at Sukhadia's), had our eyebrows threaded ($6 at Dilshad's), and shopped for books (India Book House), nose-pins (many places), bananas and Chandrika soap (Patel Bros), and groused about how much we miss Guruji (all of the above). During our trek we saw that my favorite restaurant, Mysore Woodlands, was poised to re-open that very night. To my great disappointment it has been closed "for remodeling" since the cold January day I signed the lease on the new apartment.





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Today it was 90 degrees in the city and the whole word was outside, smiling and soaking it in. What a wonderful day for a day off from teaching.... After a very soft practice (Dharma's Level I, plus my back-care sequence and the usual sitting) I put on a Punjabi dress, anklets, bindi, and bangles and had two coconuts on Devon Avenue. Then I went home for a moon day nap before returning to the Avenue - where the streets were filled with women in billowy saris and dresses doing their shopping, and Muslim men in kurtas making their way to the mosque. I weaved my way through them and headed straight to Mysore Woodlands, where I had the most wonderful South Indian thali outside of Karnataka - and for just $7.95. Plus they remembered me. How nice it is to be recognized....

Later I put on western dress and rode the blue Schwinn to meet SportMarty at the Davis for a screening of The Soloist, which to me was about yoga and being receptive to the grace of God. Plus I'm all for any movie that depicts the desperate lives of lonely journalists whose stories are about to fall through. Ah, the days before corporate greed + the internet ruined the newspaper business...

On the way home I saw people pointing at the sky. I looked up, and saw a massive rainbow spanning the eastern horizon. Not a bad ending to the first (real) day of spring.



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*This is my 1,000th post, or the 999th since I wrote this just before leaving on my second trip to India.