Eden M. Kennedy has acted impulsively in ways she now regrets.

Inner Space

Jackson and I were looking for some entertaining bedtime reading so we picked up a copy of Dav Pilkey's The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-fu Cavemen from the Future. It's fun and it's silly, as time-traveling cave boys with missing teeth and afros often are. But you know that phrase, When the student is ready the teacher appears? Apparently, if you give me a kids' book full of Kung-fu Panda-style wisdom* I'm halfway to Buddha consciousness.

I had been trundling along for 76 pages, tra-la tra-la, but when we got to this page I stopped. I probably read it five or six times until Jackson was like, Mom, turn the page, PLEASE, but I couldn't because all the atoms in my body had lifted apart from one another and I found myself floating between them, grounded in groundlessness, space, and light. It was like Fantastic Voyage combined that other thing with Martin Short when he played a grocery clerk who got accidentally injected into and then sneezed out of Dennis Quaid. Clearly, a decade-plus of yoga has made me susceptible to meditative suggestion (I will relax my teeth, breathe into my forehead, and lift my cervix at the drop of a mat) but it was one of those moments when something I read just fit. There is so much space within me! Ahh. I am more than an inflexible spine or a clenched heart; I have a universe inside that's big enough for me and Raquel Welch to tease each other's hair zero-gravity style.

*Did I tell you I once saw David Carradine? I was pulling into the parking lot of the old Vons on Victoria Street, looking for a spot, and these two pedestrians, a man and a woman, were walking reeeeaally slowly in front of me, not over to the side so cars could pass, but right in the middle of the, whatever, car lane. So because I was young and impatient and the world wasn't responding to my needs quickly enough, I did the old passive-aggressive parking lot move, I drove reeeeaally slowly ten feet behind them, not close enough to run them down but close enough to be all HI, YOU'RE WALKING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LANE AND I NEED HOT DOG BUNS. Then the man turned around with his stringy hair and rangy physique and I was all, "Oh, shit, it's David Carradine," and that was my last thought on this planet because then he bored a hole into my skull with the intensity of his stare. And then I stopped my car and he turned away and he and his lady friend went into the store. At that point I may or may not have driven away and gone to another grocery store, I can't be sure of what happened because Kwai Chang Caine erased my mind.

But you know who I really loved in that family was the dad, John Carradine. If you haven't seen it, you should rent The Grapes of Wrath right now, it's so fucking good.

The Tiger Mother Made Me Do It

I took down the tree and then I made a video about it

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