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Enter Yoga Girl.
The Continuing Adventures of Eco Boy vs. Yoga Girl.
“The below is an excerpt of a forthcoming novella. It’s autobiographical fiction (with the emphasis on fiction). Book forthcoming in Spring 2012, the first from elephant journal press.”
“The Goldilocks Phenomenon would seem to apply to dating. First you try some porridge that’s too hot. Second, too cold. Third, just right. That’s a nice fairytale. When it comes to relationships, it’s never just right. So find someone palatable and swallow it. Or—forever alone.”
~ Dr. Willard Evans
…And now we rise up into those silver clouds above, away from the boy, and descend again down now into San Monica and listen to another voice, this the heart and mind of our heroine, the lovely tall very (fake) blond very rich very lazy very selfish very fit Yoga Girl.
Drum roll, please.
She had big eyes and long legs and perfect hair that she didn’t consider perfect, and spent $300 a month bridging that gap in her local perfect hair salon. She spent an hour or two or three a week ranting at her equally lovely yuppie girlfriends over drinks over lunch and she got her weekly massage from Cesar’s strong hands and it was all worth it. If you have the money and you care about your health you really should treat yourself right. The body is an instrument that requires loving attention.
She hadn’t had a real relationship in three years. She was barely 26, and the gap was beginning to concern her.
Oh, she’d met Surfing Son and Patagonia Clad and Tech 14er and Burn Man and various good to look at naked from behind boys over the last few years. She’d had her fun. But she didn’t know if she liked them and didn’t want them interfering in her life and she was busy living and didn’t have time for needy men. She was too beautiful, she knew, for even good looking charming rich men to handle. She was waiting for someone who wasn’t entranced by her looks, who could look her in the eye and into her heart…and the only ones she found who didn’t care about her looks didn’t care about her. She was a walking cliche, she liked to admit with a sweet cashmere shrug—she loved Bad Boys and yes, they were bad to her.
So now she was in that cliche phase of celibacy. She was attractive and attracted and young and near-perfect, and she was celibate. Ridiculous.
So she spent more money on herself—injecting infusions of joy in the form of a yoga retreat in Costa Rica (she played hooky half the time, f*cking around with Surfing Son) and doing a teacher training with Yoga Tycoon and one with Anusara Curly Hair and she spent a year decorating her new Dwell-worthy but-too-small white apartment near the beach in San Monica.
She dogsat for her friends—she loved small dogs—only dogs understood her truly as she dragged them for passive aggressive too-early-morning runs along the beach. She didn’t own a dog, because cleaning up shit and paying for a kennel as she flew about the world was too stressful.
~
One day, on the phone with her dad, whom she was not allowed to call “dad”:
“Father, how are you n’mother?”
She pictured two perfect elegant silver-haired people who hated her.
“What do you care, m’dear?”
She could picture the f*cking little dark waves lapping up toward the cabin up in Maine where he sat on his screened-in porch, waiting to get off the phone so he could grab the gun leaning in the corner and go shoot at some birds.
“Oh, Father, I’m sad,” she went on, not even hearing him. “I’m worried.”
“Darling,” he intoned in that haughty prep-trained old man voice of his, “let me get your Mother. She loves this stuff.” She heard the phone click/tap against the table.
“Darling,” his mother came on too-quickly, she’d been listening in of course. “What’s wrong? Still can’t find a man?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Yoga Girl said, defensively. “I’m going to teacher training in Colorado, next month.”
“Oh, more yoga?,” her mother snidely sniveled. “Great career choice. There’s about as many yoga teachers now as there were goldseekers 100 years ago, and just as few make a living. I know you know that, darling. Stop acting rich.”
Yoga Girl wondered how Darling could be said with so little warmth. It made her doubt all that talk about how Sanskrit was a sacred language…language was empty. It’s what’s behind the words, or not, that carries through, she figured.
“Mother, I’m going to study with Rich Freelander. I’m fine, I’m just f*cking lonely. I’ll call you from Boulton.”
She was sad and she’d called her dad, and dad had passed her over to mother. Father didn’t care, and Yoga Girl didn’t care what Mother thought. She hung up.
And three weeks later a big plane burned fuel, pushing Yoga Girl and her four big well-built properly pricey Burberry bags…to Denton, where she took a car to Boulton, where she had a perfect quaint little downtown cottage (with Electra) she’d found off of AirBnB. And the closest cafe to Perfect Quaint Cottage was Tridential, a watering hole where used books and half-assed half-baked hipsters and Boulton’s old fart conservatives (all 10 of them) gathered each morning for pre-stale pastries and okay coffee and great tea and the best ambiance of any cafe in these United States.
And so it was that on Wednesday the 14th of July Eco Boy biked down his hill and rolled up and hopped off and locked up and strolled into Tridential, and noticed a black-tight-ed Lululemon girl in the corner with fake perfect blond hair and a little tote bag and great posture reading, so cliché it wasn’t funny, a dogeared Eat Pray Cliché book and looking like she’d look incredible, naked.
…click here for the first half of this chapter.
Yours in writing a send-up of ourselves & our “scene”,
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