Have your snark and eat it too

After spending several days as a snotty, coughy, achy, feverish petri dish, I’m upright once again and ready to continue my grand tradition of blogcrastination. Blogcrastination is a beautiful, versatile, made-up little term. It refers both to blogging when I should be doing something else and to doing something else when I should be blogging. As you might have noticed, I’ve trended a bit more toward the latter lately, the snot factory notwithstanding.

Here’s my trouble: Being given to protracted bouts of curmudgeonly snark, I generally pull up the keyboard only when I’m irked about something. I can be piercing or catty or wittily critical all day long–and we’ll skip the psychoanalysis portion of today’s post, if you don’t mind. Suffice it to say that I hold that humor and martinis are both best served dry, dry, dry, and some folks don’t appreciate the flavor.

I’ve been reading a lot about yoga and meditation lately, and trying my hand at some of it. As I’ve mentioned, I’m boldly going where most rationally inclined, left-brain types never do, trying to pick up a little skill at energy work, and using it to get more deeply acquainted with myself. It’s heady stuff, and feels more true than anything I’ve ever encountered. My guts, my bones, my atoms know that I’m onto something, and I want to learn more.

So I have a conflict: how does an inveterate sarcastic become adept at a practice that’s ultimately rooted in the purest form of love and compassion? How does a judgmental snark become a yogi who really does see and honor that spark of the divine that’s in all of us? I want to have my cake and eat it too… and we all know how that turns out.

I wrote an appropriate, if ever-so-slightly tangential take on this dilemma some time ago over here. It bears repeating.

I haven’t the energy or the inclination to confirm tonight that this quotation is attributed appropriately, but Google tells me that Ezra Pound said, “I have never met a poet worth a damn that was not irascible.” It might amuse you to note that I discovered that gem while idly googling “irascible buddha.” Really, the words just aren’t coming so easily tonight, and I was looking for an easy way out. If the I.B. is a legitimate aspiration, I can throw in the towel right now. Alas, I don’t think it exists. But you have to admit it would make a damn fine band name. I could just take up the guitar with my cake…

Regardless, I’m not saying anything original here. This sort of conflict has been around about as long as abstract thought itself. It’s really just another way of saying that I want to be good and worthy but still get my kicks, too. I want to make the world a better place by having been here, and I want to give it a spanking and put it in time-out for having needed the improvement in the first place. I want to see god in the people around me, but most days I can’t stand to look at them. It’s ultimately hubris, I suppose–I think I can be wholly responsible for The State We’re In, both passively criticizing and actively changing everything around me.

Whatever the reason, it makes for a little blogging problem. I’m here simply to write, a directive that gives quite a bit of leeway. But I’m also conscious of the fact that I have readers, and they may not welcome a steady diet of acrimony and spite, no matter how amusingly worded. Then we get into the sticky territory of policing my own words, which leads right back into that old judge not debate, which gets me after my own tail until I just collapse on the floor. Circular thinking is the drug of choice for intellectual procrastinators–you do a lot of work, but get absolutely nowhere at all. It allows one to maintain the illusion of productivity. And, boy howdy, is productivity one of my golden calves.

Both hard science and woowoo tend to agree that all organisms strive for homeostasis, for balance. Balance implies two or more opposing forces reaching some sort of harmony, not the annihilation of one by the other–which suggests that I can have my dry martini commentary and my unicorns and rainbows. My irascible and my buddha. It’s a hopeful thought.