Yoga Bro versus the dragons

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. But, then again, the valley didn’t always have you as their Yoga Bro.

You set up shop in the valley yesterday, marketing your wares as “Hardcore Yoga”. You had just completed intensive teacher training with Swami Hardcore. You knew him as the Swami who ditched his masters in order to divine the mysteries of why his hernia flared up only at times when there was trash to be picked up off his floor. You had been coerced into learning the skills required to appraise and acknowledge the holy hernia, or at least to realize it was holier than your abdominal muscles would ever be, even with all the trash you had picked up off Swami Hardcore’s floor.

Whenever there was a question that came up, or if there was something on the floor needing to be picked up, in the course of your training, the solution of Swami Hardcore was to threaten the initiates with incessant moaning until one of the initiates finally bent over and picked up the offensive trash. Swami Hardcore fervently believed that his hernia would chart a new path for humanity, but only after the ritual downing of copious amounts of deep dish pizza and beer, after the holiest hernia was sore from hefting all the pizza boxes that came with being the undisputed master of Hardcore Yoga. Swami Hardcore went through many pizza boxes in the course of your training.

Your training was most arduous. Once Swami Hardcore determined the location of a tree in his neighbor’s front yard was disparaging to his hernia. To appease its will, he had you dig up the neighbor’s tree in the dead of night and replant it in front of his neighbor’s front door, breaking up the pavement in the process. He instructed you to pour new concrete around the tree to lock it in place directly in front of the neighbor’s front door. In this way, the neighbor would be constantly reminded of his offense to the holy hernia, and would now have to exit his house the long way.

Another time, pegasi were eating all the leaves off the bodhi tree in Swami Hardcore’s front lawn. He instructed you to challenge them to a levitation contest. In the contest, you managed to levitate so hard you made the pegasi’s wings realize their redundancy to the degree that they wisped out of existence, and the pegasi became standard horses, but with considerably more sass. The bodhi tree was spared, until the hernia disparaged about its current location, which occurred about once every other week.

This was the way of the holy hernia, and you learned not to question its ways and its connection to all that will be right in this world. Until, as it happened, you did.

It was, after all was said and done, a day of downtrodden despair.

The dragons had, until recently, kept to themselves and did what you thought was routine dragon business. Virgin olive oil sacrifices were at historic lows, due to the dragon’s market hoarding of extra virgin olive oil, which helped keep their scales…extra greasy-looking. While a few of the older dragons droned on an on about how extra virgin olive oil was really just a slick marketing scheme meant to trick shoppers into thinking it wasn’t processed by boy bands, the scheme was a selling point with most of the dragons.

It wasn’t until the dragons started making pizza that life became less than bucolic in the valley. With their breath approaching thousands of degrees and the abundance of crops such as wheat, tomatoes, basil, and lots of cows, the dragons quickly gleaned the skills required to make delicious Napolese-style pizza with a crust so light and flaky it practically floated, hence its trademark name of featherweight crust. The subjugation of the masses, and their cows, manifested itself shortly thereafter, and the dragon’s pizza became the only pie in town.

The dragons, being of reptilian descent, were quite greedy, and had cornered this year’s entire haul of extra virgin olive oil exclusively for themselves and their pizza monopoly within the valley. To counter what was viewed as blasphemous by dragons, the base idea of deep dish pizza, sold only on the black market by those on whom the very idea of neighborhood watch was constructed, the dragons ignited their fury, in addition to their flames, burning all of the blasphemous businesses to ash.

Swami Hardcore had sent you out to get him what you would learn was the last deep dish pizza in the valley. On your way back, the dragons stopped you in your tracks with a 10 pizzas for one deal.

“But my master, the holy hernia of Swami Hardcore, requires a deep dish pizza for its holy hernia dioramas,” you pleaded with them, wary of their fuming fury.

“Oh, we know all about the holy hernia, although we didn’t know it made dioramas,” the dragons responded, clearly caught off guard by the hernia’s creative capriciousness. “But we’ll give you 10 of our vastly superior pizzas, with our patented featherweight crust, in exchange for your deep dish diabolic disparity.”

As you pondered the question of the exchange, the dragons added that their pizzas were guaranteed to be delivered “scalding-scales” hot. That was enough to sell you on the deal, since the last time you had delivered a deep dish to Swami Hardcore it ended up being cold since you had to hoof it all the way from the next county, beyond the valley. Swami Hardcore hadn’t been the least bit pleased, chastising you with a wet noodle.

It was on this day, after that event, that Swami Hardcore unleashed his wrath on you, flailing you repeatedly with overcooked spaghetti and flinging the 10 pizzas you had received in exchange down the neighborhood garbage chasm.

Despite your despair, you knew you had blown it against the hernia. You dared to question it, and you were cast out, never to return to the hernias’ omniscient odor.

There was only one path to right this error, and that was to vanquish the dragons from the Valley.

You had set up shop in the valley for this purpose. You had a plan, and had been assured by your closest comrades that it was so condescendingly kooky that it just…might…work.

You changed the sign on your storefront to “Open”, and waited for the first customer.