Meditation, Intervention

What yoginis we are.

Last night after yoga, Kelly and I went to the gym to do a somewhat perfunctory workout. (Hey, we tried.) Reviewing the yoga class as we lifted weights, Kelly asked me about the short meditation exercise, "Were you actually meditating?" Uh...no. I actually spent that time thinking about the season premier of that awful A&E show Intervention. "What were you thinking about?" I asked Kelly. Turns out she was trying to think of the names of all the streets that run parallel to the largest, western-most street in the city. After that, she tried to think of all the streets that ran perpendicular to the same street.

Ah, meditation.

Later, during shavasana (corpse pose), she fell asleep. While she snored away on my left side, Dave snored away on my right side. It was hard to keep from laughing when both my gurus were napping during yoga.

To be perfectly fair (to me anyway), it was a pretty engrossing episode of Intervention. The addict of the week was a young man named Chad, once an Olympic-hopeful cyclist, now homeless and addicted to crack cocaine. (His last name wasn't given on the show, but Googling "Chad cyclist Intervention" reveals that his full name is Chad Gerlach.) I don't usually slow down much for Intervention when flipping channels as I have a really, really low tolerance for addicts. I sometimes stop and watch a minute or two--just enough to convince me that my sense of superiority is still intact. But something about this particular addict made me stop and watch the whole episode. (You can see it on A&E's website and on youtube, if you're interested.)

I actually watched part of the episode on television, then went back and watched it twice more online after reading about this young man. (I say he's a young man, but he's actually a year younger than I am, so I don't know what I'm on about.) One of the things that impressed me about this guy was that he had worked it around so that he was hurting as few people as possible even though he had all the classic addict behaviors down pat. I mean he wasn't your typical drug-addicted, "poor me" parasite. He was a whole different kind of drug-addicted, "poor me" parasite. He was like a non-functional, functional drug addict. Like many functional addicts, he was as charming and outgoing as he needed to be to panhandle a lot of money from strangers or to entrap various sugar mamas who were willing to buy him drugs and coddle him. But oddly, he kept from explaining too much or from making excuses for himself or rehashing and changing his story to make himself a victim in every interaction. He had obvious anger issues and too much pride to ask for help. In the end, thankfully, he did accept help and ended up in detox followed by rehab. The updated show explains that he relapsed briefly with alcohol but righted himself. Honestly, it's rare that I have any good will at all for any addict or former addict, but for this guy, I did.