January 15, 2010

The Apple Of My Ear

Sort of sleeping at 7 AM. From the kitchen, I heard:

"ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!"

Lunacy can erupt in our house at any moment.

Elijah came into the bedroom, stuck his steaming face in mine, and yelled,

"WHY DID YOU EAT MY SPECIAL APPLE?"

"Your what?"

"MY SPECIAL APPLE THAT I PICKED OUT AT THE STORE AND MOMMY BOUGHT FOR ME! AND YOU ATE IT! WHY? WHY? WHY?"

"I didn't know it was a special apple. I just ate an apple."

"YOU DID TOO KNOW!"

"No, Elijah, I was out of town. Mommy didn't tell me you had a special apple."

He stormed out of the room. I got out of bed, moaning. Elijah stood at the kitchen table, continuing to scream about his apple.

"Of all the apples you could eat," Regina said.

"How the hell was I supposed to know?"

"HOW THE HELL WERE YOU SUPPOSED TO EAT MY SPECIAL APPLE?" Elijah said.

"Don't say hell," I replied.

"THAT'S IT! I'M NOT EATING BREAKFAST, LUNCH, OR DINNER TODAY!"

"That's your problem."

"NO! IT'S YOUR PROBLEM, MISTER!"

"You know, Elijah, that apple was kind of mushy."

Elijah snuffled.

"It was?"

"Yeah. It had a big brown spot."

"Oh," he said. "Then can I have a different apple?"

"As soon as you apologize."

"I'm sorry I yelled at you."

"Don't let it happen again."

"OK."

And he didn't yell at me again until 2:30, when I picked him up at school.

"Daddy," he said. "When I get home, can I go online to www.killthebackyardigans.com?"

"I don't think there is such a site."

"WHY NOT? HOW DO YOU KNOW? YOU'RE LYING!"

I've got to teach this kid how to meditate.

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January 5, 2010

Strange Doings In The Dark

4 AM and the world was snoring, or at least our two Boston Terriers were. A voice pierced the calm of night.

"MAMA! I HAD A BAD DREAM!"

Though she normally gets out of bed at the speed of sludge, Regina was up and running before the boy finished his sentence, as though she'd been launched by tightly-coiled springs. My own response in these situations tends to be slower and fuzzier. I gradually gained some waking consciousness, and staggered toward Elijah's room.

Regina was busy talking him down.

"What happened?" I said.

"I dreamed that Shaq ate us!" Elijah said.

He wasn't referring to the itinerant sheriff-pimp NBA All-Timer. Our dog Shaq is old, blind, deaf, hobbled, and flatulent. We have to add hot water to his food so he can gum it down. Eating us isn't on his agenda.

"Hardly likely," I said.

"And then he ate himself!"

"Even less likely."

"I'm scared!"

"It'll be OK."

"Can I sleep with you?"

"You know the answer to that."

Many people let their children into bed with them after a bad dream. We aren't those people. Once you open the sheets to visitors, the odds of having a 12-year-old co-sleeper are reasonably high. Horror stories of the family bed abound, and we want our damn privacy at bedtime. We help our kid through the rough dreams, but then he stays in his own room. The night belongs to us.

Regina plugged in a string of accent lights that hang around the boy's dresser, and we went back to bed, unaware that the night's terrors had just begun.

Continue reading "Strange Doings In The Dark"

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December 29, 2009

Innocence, Not Yet Lost

Last night, Elijah and I were enjoying the Suns' rare beatdown of the Lakers. After all, what seven-year-old doesn't want to see the bad guys lose? At some point in the fourth quarter, during a fruitless Lakers timeout, the inevitable commercial for Carl's Jr. appeared. In it, a hot young thing who appeared to have studied at the Megan Fox school of crazy-charm writhed around on a bed while eating a hideous-looking salad that appeared to contain some combination of fruit, chicken, and nuts. Sometimes, she said, she just gets so hungry. The commercial ended with our heroine dipping her smooth, tanned form into a soaking tub, gazing coyly over her shoulder, leaving the core customer base of Carl's Jr. with a vaguely dissatisfied feeling in its collective loin.

This seemed like a teachable moment, as President Obama would say. I'd use the opportunity to give my son a simple lesson in media criticism.

"Now, Elijah, what do you think that commercial is trying to tell us?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think it's trying to say that if you eat at Carl's Jr., a sexy lady is going to come over to your house and lay on your bed?"

"I don't know."

"Well, do you think that would happen?"

"No. The commercial is trying to tell you that if you eat at Carl's Jr., you're going to be clean."

This was an interesting angle.

"Why?" I said.

"Because the lady takes a bath at the end."

"Oh."

"That's lying, daddy, because if you eat at Carl's Jr., you're probably going to be dirty."

Sex doesn't sell to seven-year-olds, thank Jeebus. But they end up getting the point anyway.

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December 7, 2009

Coming Soon, I Swear

This space has been such an egregious Internet dead zone, for so long, that I almost feel ridiculous posting here. When I started with this particular iteration of this web site, now nearing its 10-year anniversary of continual operations, it was with such great hopes for fun and community and good times for all. Then I went and started Offsprung, and then I sold my soul to Parents.com for nickels on the dollar, and when I woke up after that 30-month fever dream, this place looked old and tired and everyone had left. Plus, Facebook and Twitter, barely a gleam in the net's eye when I started, had taken over, and my energies went there.

But now a rebirth is coming. I'll debut a new design sometime early in 2010, and hopefully will start writing every day, or at least several times a week, and the amusements will start again. I hope, like the swallows to San Juan Capistrano, or some post-burrito reflux, my readers will return.

Meanwhile, I'm guest-blogging over on Details.com for a few weeks. Here's a link to my first post.

And here's my latest yoga column for The Faster Times. Please to enjoy, and see you back here soon.

Namaste,
NP

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November 9, 2009

Hipster Kids Say The Darndest Things: Rock Edition

"Daddy, Leon says there's a kind of music called steel."

Pause.

"You mean metal?"

"Yeah, metal. What is metal anyway?"

"Well, it's like rock and roll, but really loud and extreme and grinding."

"That sounds good."

"It is good. Sometimes."

"I like loud music."

"OK."

"But I don't like crowds."

"OK."

"That's why I want to listen to rock at home, but I don't want to go to concerts."

"Your choice, kid."

"Daddy?"

"Yes, son?"

"Guess what two things I'll never do?"

"What?"

"Kill myself, or watch The Backyardigans."

"OK, but if you had to pick one?"

"Watching The Backyardigans. But it would be close."

The boy is clearly not yet ready for Nirvana.

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November 8, 2009

A Short Description Of My New Book

STRETCH: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude
Coming August 2010 from Harper Perennial

Years after achieving literary stardom as the author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, Neal Pollack has fallen into a rut. He’s overweight, the hair on his head is thinning, and the hair on his face is pretentious—all of which a New York Times critic points out while panning his second book, Never Mind the Pollacks. That review, combined with the complete failure of his attempt to become the frontman for a rock band, leaves Pollack lying facedown in a puddle of his own tears, pounding the mattress and sobbing into his pillow. His wife intervenes by saying: “You should do yoga with me.” “Yoga,” he writes, “didn’t occur to me, ever. Why would it have? EA Sports had never put out a yoga video game.”

Yet Pollack is desperate enough to try anything—even if it means trying to stand on his head in the exercise room of the Lance Armstrong 24-Hour Fitness in Austin, Texas. As he struggles to master the “alligator pose” and keep from kicking other people in the face, Pollack begins to feel better. Soon, he’s working his way through the chakra system and coming closer and closer, he mistakenly believes, to dharma megha samadhi, “a state of enlightened bliss where the ego separates from the self and the practitioner realizes that he's powerless to control the vagaries of an endlessly shifting universe.”

Pollack moves his family to Los Angeles and soon finds himself immersed in its “weird and circuslike” yoga scene. He takes part in a 24-Hour Yogathon, volunteers at his neighborhood yoga studio, attends a “yoga Olympics” in an airport hotel ballroom, becomes a reporter for Yoga Journal magazine, gets invited to yoga conferences and yoga rock shows, travels to Thailand for a two-week yoga retreat, and starts teaching yoga himself. Though Pollack mercilessly lampoons America’s seemingly omnipresent yoga culture, he also undergoes a profound personal transformation. His dedicated yoga practice, he writes, “has done more for my physical and mental well-being than anything else I've tried.”

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October 15, 2009

Yoga: The True Path To Awesome Poops

Yoga does many wonderful things. It clarifies the mind and provides a solid ethical foundation for a productive, happy life. For physical fitness and a way to make loving friendships that last, it can hardly be topped. It can be a path to spiritual ecstasy. But for me, one of yoga’s most profound benefits is also one of its most simple:

If you practice regularly, you take awesome poops.

The masters think so, too. BKS Iyengar’s first instruction in Light On Yoga is that you should “evacuate” your bowels before practice. In general, I try to follow that maxim, but the after-yoga sit is so much sweeter. When I’m grinding myself through another brutal Ashtanga primary series, or holding artachandrasana for a seeming eternity, the thought of my coming yoga poo often gets me through. Sure enough, about an hour after I get home, a five-dollar foot-long, a quarter pounder, emerges from my body like some sort of fecal alien. I gaze at it in wonder, and yoga redeems itself yet again. The pain of practice is worth the resulting endorphine release. After a particularly good session, sometimes the day brings two poops, or even three. You could build a log cabin with the magnificent yoga-caused arrays that I produce. My insides are scraped clean and my steps get bouncier. It makes me want to practice again.

Lest you think I’m being vulgar (or at least needlessly vulgar), yogic literature backs up my shit. Yoga philosophy says that we have an agni, or fire, in the body, located near the navel. Breathing directs the fire. The in-breath creates a wind that moves the flame downward toward the belly, burning up waste matter, and the exhale moves that waste down toward its eventual home in the toilet. If your exhales are twice as long as your inhales, Desikachar writes in The Heart Of Yoga, it provides “more time for freeing the body of its blockages.” In other words, long exhales lead to making poopy. This is particularly true if you’re doing your long exhales while upside down. For this reason, among, I’m sure, many others, inverted postures such as headstand and shoulder stand come toward the end of the practice. Yoga studios might smell very different if they didn’t.

The Yoga Sutra talks about poop as well, in its usual inscrutable way. Desikachar shares this interpretation, straight from the mother-text: “If a farmer wants to water his terraced fields, he does not have to carry the water in buckets to the various parts of his fields; he has only to open the retaining wall at the top. If he has laid out his terraces well and nothing blocks the flow of the water, it will be able to reach the last field and the furthest blade of grass without help from the farmer.”

Translated: You are the farmer, and your body is full of what Desikachar calls “rubbish.” If you practice yoga properly, regulating the breath in a well-designed series of postures, then your internal fire will literally burn away all the crap in your body. As a result, you’ll find yourself reading a magazine in the bathroom with a beatific smile on your face.

Yoga tells us not to become attached to pleasurable things, merely to experience and enjoy them when they come. It’s unhealthy to desire what cannot happen again. Therefore, though I sometimes find myself thinking about excellent poops hours afterward, they can’t be re-created. You don’t automatically turn your agni up to high and expect the deluge. Instead, you need to remain dedicated to your practice, to the integrity of your postures and the quality of your breath. With diligent focus, magical nuggets of reward will emerge when you least expect them. As the late K. Patthabi Jois said, “practice, practice, practice, and all is coming.” Including transcendent quantities of poo.

Originally printed in The Faster Times.

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October 6, 2009

Tense

"Daddy?"

"Yes, son?"

"You know what I like in movies?"

"What?"

"When scenes are tense."

"What do you mean, tense?"

"When they make you feel tense, when they have tension. When you don't know what's going to happen next. Those are good movies."

"That's not a bad observation."

"And it's not just suspenseful movies that can be tense. Funny movies are tense, too, only nothing bad really happens."

"True enough."

"I'm not talking about movies that make me nervous. Those aren't good."

"OK."

"But tense is different than nervous."

"I'm glad you can make that distinction."

"When I get older, I want to make tense movies about Julius Caesar fighting dinosaurs."

When you raise a kid in Hollywood, this, apparently, is the end result.

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September 26, 2009

A Very Pleasant Good Evening To You, Wherever You May Be

All week, the Dodgers have slogging through a dull late-year road trip to Washington and Pittsburgh, the two worst teams in baseball, barely playing up to the level of their competition, or, for that matter, of their broadcasters. When the Dodgers head east of Colorado, the quality of their game-calling goes from "best in history" to "sonorous at best, borderline retarded at worst." On the radio, Charley Steiner and Rick Monday are all cliché and pomposity, describing plays inaccurately and five seconds too late, talking about guys who "play the game the right way", and complaining about jet lag, though Steiner does do an exciting home-run call. The TV is much worse, with Vin Scully, the greatest broadcaster of all time, replaced by Eric Collins, a guy who, when we go up 8-2 on the Nationals, says things like, "Looks like the Dodgers are threatening to break this thing wide open."

Such disparities aren't lost on my son. As I drove him home from school the other day, with the late-afternoon game on the radio, he said,

"These guys aren't as good as Vin Scully."

"That's for sure," I said.

"They talk too much," he said.

"Vin Scully talks a lot, too."

"Not as much as these guys. Vin Scully lets you actually watch the game and he only talks when he has to."

I grew up listening to Vin Scully, spending half my boyhood Sundays on a raft in a pool, letting him narrate huge chunks of my childhood. It's such a treat, and a privilege, that my son has the same narrator, at least for a couple more years. We just need to mute the TV during those East Coast road trips. No one, especially not a six-year-old, wants to know what Eric Collins had for dinner in Pittsburgh.

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Old Guy Blathering On About Yoga

Originally published in The Faster Times.

When we were talking about what the hell a yoga column would contain, my editor proposed that we feature photos of me, demonstrating the yoga pose of the week. I said that would be a great idea, if he wanted to immediately lose 95 percent of his hard-gained page views. While I practice some poses more skillfully than others, my yoga asana technique can, in general, best be described as “mad cattle stampede through the sagebrush.” People go online for any number of reasons, but no one, no matter how mentally ill or fetishistic, is ever looking for photos of an early-middle-aged, slightly overweight, hairline-drastically-receding, back-furred Jew doing half-assed yoga poses. Of this, I can be fairly certain.

Nevertheless, I think I can explain some things about yoga, in the most basic sort of way. So: If you’re practicing asana (Sanskrit for poses), you want to be as focused and diligent as possible, for many reasons. Proper alignment means your skeleton and muscles and joints and digestive system will be healthy. Frequent (but not too-frequent) practice means you won’t hurt yourself as easily. As for what that proper alignment might entail, I suggest you turn elsewhere for adjustments. BKS Iyengar’s Light On Yoga is probably the best contemporary source for showing good asana form. You’ll get excellent alignment instruction if you attend an Iyengar class, though the odds are also high that you’ll end up getting bent over the back of a folding chair by a stern schoolmarm wearing a red velour sweat suit. That happened to me recently in a studio at the back of a West L.A. strip mall, and it wasn’t real sexy.

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