Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It

"Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It", by Geoff Dyer, initially seemed like the type of travel book for which I have the least patience- the kind in which the locations are incidental and the real focus is on the author's drug-induced mishaps, relationships with women named Dazed and Circle, and existential crises. But while I wouldn't exactly leap at the chance to join Dyer on his next trip to Bali, passages like this (in which, under the influence of mushrooms in Amsterdam, he tries to change his pants) kept me with him at least through 257 pages:

"In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they had more legs than a spider; either that or they didn't have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over. From the outside it may have looked like a simple toilet, but once you were locked in here the most rules of basic arithmetic no longer held true. Two into two simply would not go. It was insane, it took a terrible toll on my head. I concentrated hard, applied myself with a vengeance to the task in hand. I got one leg in and I got the other in. Hooray! A man who has finally put behind him the spectre of thirty years of unwanted celibacy-I'm in!-cannot have felt a greater surge of triumph and self-vindication than I I did at that point.

Such exultation was short-lived, however, for these trousers were wet too. Somehow, I had put back on the wet pair I had just taken off."