Yoga, as per say a flowing asana practice, did not happen yesterday. In fact it got thwarted, as I received a call about a family tragedy (more on that later) while on my way. However, if you count the practice of meditation, deep breathing, and a focus on the space in between struggle and relinquishment as yoga (which many do), than I practiced it for several hours. Today I plan on doing at least some yoga when I get home, whether it is 20 minutes or an hour and 20 I will not know until I start the practice.
Detox
Yesterday went very well, up until I was at Mom’s, and about to leave for home to go have my salad. Mom had been very very tired, and we decided we had two options: go to bed, or go out to eat. We chose the latter and I sat and ate much pizza and two beers, as did she. This was not, however due to a desire to, or an need or a hunger or an urge, etc. but because it was the only thing appropriate for our family to do when faced with what we had to talk about. It was the most appropriate way to begin a mourning. So today I am water fasting again, except allowing herbal tea which I did not do before, and if I can’t stand it, which perhaps I won’t be able to, I will go out and splurge on a naked juice or something. I am not extending this detox, just counting the pizza and beer as a cheat, that can be repaired, so when all y’all ladies come to visit I will still be able to eat real food and drink real booze (thank god).
Now on to the rest of it:
Some of you may or may not know that our friend Danny has been fighting cancer for about a year. It started as melanoma, and made its way to his lymph nodes in his groin. He had those removed, and the wound became severely infected to the point of necrosis, and an ensuing surgery took out a baseball sized hole in his leg. A few months ago he was given three to six months to live, as it had reached his brain. Then, several weeks later, we found out that in fact in fact someone had put the wrong dye in his brain when he went for the CATScan and he actually had a lot longer than that to live. In the recent weeks he has been given a very strong cancer drug that was supposed to be the best fighter out there, but that also left him groggy and weak, but alive.
Well, last night my mother received a call from the firemen of Charles County, where Danny lived, saying that they had gotten her number from Danny’s boss, who they contacted because they found something relating to the local union in the ashes of a burned down house. There was a man inside who they could not identify, and whose body is being interned in Baltimore while the investigation proceeds, but they assume it was the man who owned the house, who it was known lived alone, and who was none other than Daniel West. That is all we know. But we have our theories.
So, who is Danny? Danny is about as much of father as my Dad ever was. Danny was the one constant element of our holidays, the man who knew my mother before she married my father, the man who I was always trying to impress. This man was a baseball player, a writer, an intellectual, a choreographer, a baker, a carpenter, and a friend. He took us on vacations to Smith Island, he sailed with us, he moved me in to college with a basket of books in French to translate, one of which was Les Fleurs du Mal. He was selfish and vain and dramatic, but the hardest worker I know and the most creative and culturally important as well, influencing the origins of Rolling Stone Magazine and modern dance as we know it with his dance troupe the Daniel West Dancers. He refused to give us the recipe to his famous cheesecake, which still has yet to be topped by any other cheesecake to this day. He had stories that gave you greater understanding of people as weirdos and heros, as family members and as profligate vagabonds living according to the words they heard in a Dylan song.
As I write this I have to keep changing the tense to past. My sleep last night consisted solely of several short extremely terrifying and deeply disturbing dreams involving suicide and every childhood fear (such as a bad grade) I had ever grown out of. All lines have been curved since midnight, all spaces between them warped, as if there was nothing definitive about Euclid’s Postulates in any manner. There is never a single point. There is no such thing as space. Life is a compressed liquid and thought only energy bursts, our existence no less real or inert than the objects around me, our importance moot.
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