December 04, 2005

I'm flying! I'm flying!

A few people have emailed asking me if I'm the dude on the nightmare cover of Poof! in my previous post. The answer is no, and screw you for asking. That's Doug Henning, a disco hippie magician from the 70s who is no longer with us. Besides prancing around on stage and the small screen doing tricks and wishing everyone "a joyful age of enlightenment", he also ran in the 1993 Canadian federal election. A major part of his party's platfrom was proposing that more people do yogic flying to solve the nation's problems.

What's yogic flying? It's this:

There's actually a chapter in Foop! where a guy (and two small robots) float around the room while they do yoga. But I had no idea that yogic flying was a real thing that people do (or try to do) until recently. There's even an annual Yogic Flying Competition (the above pic is from the 2003 one) where they award medals to those who can fly the highest and furthest.

Let's be real, yogic flying people...you're just hopping. Yes, I'll admit that it's impressive as hell that you can hop that high with your legs crossed, but you're not flying. Even the Wright brothers waited until they traveled a decent distance before they claimed the first flight. Because if what you're doing is flying, then I fly every time I leap over a puddle and shout "weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

We need to have certain standards when it comes to the claiming of special powers. When I print out a page of my novel in progress, read it, and then crush the piece of paper in my hand, I don't then pick up the phone and call my agent and say "I have super strength." And when I get a paper cut from the one of the thousands of post-it notes around my computer, I don't wait for it to heal and then send out a press release with the header "NOVELIST CHRIS GENOA HAS HEALING POWERS SIMILAR TO WOLVERINE."

We can't fly. We don't have super strength. We can't heal like Wolverine. But holy crap can we ever hop. And the sooner we all learn to be proud of and take joy in the things we already have, the better we'll all be for it. Need proof? Just look at this happy hopping son-of-a-bitch:

I can't believe I just put a picture of that bouncing idiot tiger on my blog. What's come over me? Has the spirit of my Winnie the Pooh loving high school girlfriend highjacked my soul? I'm a badass dammit! I drink Jack out of the bottle, lift huge weights, watch football, eat fistfulls of meat, and write books. I certainly don't idolize cartoon characters (at least not ones that aren't either a milkshake, a wad of meat, or french fries).

I need something to purge myself of Pooh Corner and bring me back to my core values. I need something like...

that.

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