by Jesudas Baba
I am not a very physical person. It is not that I am uncoordinated or weak; in fact I am quite healthy and physically capable. I just don’t like to exert myself. Because of this it was a long time before I decided to try yoga. When I did, I started out real slow by doing the simplest postures, not wanting to over do, you know. Took plenty of time to learn them, too. My first posture was (sinister back-ground music) The Corpse. Easy posture, basically you just lay there.

Took about a month to master that one.

After I did I decided I was ready for a more advanced posture. So I went down to the library and got a book on advanced yoga. Looked through it and picked the very obscure and extremely advanced Thirteen Cobras Entangled in a Knot While Conversing Politics with a Thuggee posture. That was the one for me.

I sat down right there on the sidewalk and started getting into this new and profound posture. Things were going fine until I had to turn the page. While I was doing this I somehow accidentally reversed the correct positioning of my left and right pinkies. Next thing I know I am lying in a tangled heap with my left toe in my ear and my right foot waving vaguely in the direction of New Jersey. It was comfortable enough, but I couldn’t move. Fortunately there were a number of witnesses and someone called 911 immediately.

It eventually took four firemen, three paramedics, a lumberjack, 15 confused onlookers, and a wino with a bottle opener to get me out of this tangle. Nobody was having any luck until the wino came along. He babbled something like “this’ll do the trick,” stuck that bottle opener in a spot I’d rather not reveal and gave it a twist.

All of a sudden my limbs sprang free like rubber bands from a toy gun and I bounced around for a few seconds, knocking down the wino, the lumberjack, and three of the onlookers. A passing martial artist said it was the most amazing thing he had ever seen and went off to try to create a martial art style based on it.

Put me off yoga for good. Now my time is spent doing postures that make sense to me, like the Having Lunch with a Beautiful Woman posture and the ever popular Hanging Out in my Favorite Coffee Shop and Harassing the Baristas posture. And contemplating that ancient truth…

Some people just shouldn’t do yoga.