GREENWICH, Conn. It’s Sunday night, and Dan Lavesque would like to be relaxing with his kids and maybe drinking a bottle of Whole Foods Lemon Italian Sparkling Mineral Water, but his wife Cindy has a different program in mind.
Suck it up.
“C’mon,” she says as she hands him a very dry martini before dinner, which consists of a sirloin steak, french fries and less vegetation than you’d find in a bonsai version of the Gobi Desert. “You’ve got to be ready for work tomorrow.”
Dan groans, but knows his wife is right; Friday evening he “wound-down” from his work week with a Hatha yoga session with Cindy, and now needs to wind back up to be the consumate jerk who makes an annual income in the high six figures before bonus that supports their upscale lifestyle.
“Really, sweetie–don’t you think you’ve had enough non-alcoholic beverages?”
“All right,” he says with resignation as he sips at the martini, which he knows will give him a hangover that will put him in a bad mood for the first workday at the week. “Do we have any salty, high-fat snack foods to go with it?” he asks, hewing closely to the regimen his firm’s doctor prescribed for him at his annual executive checkup. “I need to get my blood pressure up.”
“Must . . . screw . . . somebody . . . hard.”
“Negative yoga” in an unauthorized offshoot of traditional yoga, whose disciples in the United States are overwhelmingly female. Negative yoga gurus tend to have M.B.A.’s or law degrees, and attract devotees who are more concerned about creating a dynamic imbalance between yin and yang that will allow them to spot and exploit market inefficiencies in bond and stock markets, reaping big profits for their firms and themselves.
“Sorry–I can’t reach my wallet right now.”
“It is not enough that I achieve inner peace,” says Dan, a self-described “Type Double-A” for his commitment to work and making money. “It is also important that I continue to rake in the dough since we’ve got mucho college tuition coming up.”
After dinner, Dan will roll out his mat in the family’s basement and begin the stretching and breathing exercises he says help him focus on both long-term results and short-term gains tomorrow morning. He begins by reciting his mantra,which was given to him by his guru at the negative yoga classes he took at the New York Athletic Club on his lunch breaks last winter. “fuggingassholefuggingassholefuggingasshole,” he chants, gradually slipping into a fugue state that allows him to visualize success when the market opens. He rolls his pupils back into his eyelids, and continues in a monotone that seems stolen from a dream: “mustfuggingfugsomebodymakemoneyMonday.”
Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “I Hear America Whining.”