This is totally off the subject, I realize …

But I wish some other sensible person had gotten off their subject long enough to warn me about "hot yoga."

Last Friday I endured a session of hot yoga, as a gesture of moral support for my wife, who is doing 30 of these sessions in a row this summer.

It has taken me almost a week to be able to write about the experience.

Hot yoga is 90 consecutive minutes of alternately splashing around in and lying on a towel drenched by your own sweat and unfathomable other epidermal detritus.

It is holding your heartbreakingly ugly feet as close to your face as possible.

It is smelling a way that you have never smelled before and never want to smell again.

It is being gently singled out by the yoga instructor because you are too dyslexic to hoist the proper slippery leg over the proper slippery shoulder.

It is being surrounded by men carved by Michelangelo and women airbrushed by Vogue, and also hairy, bulgy, silly men and women in short shorts. It is being socially forbidden to stare at the former and psychologically unable to stop gaping at the latter.

Hot yoga is for people whose lives are so utterly unhappy that the only way to feel better about them is to go to an even more ghastly place.

Hot yoga is for people with 90 extra minutes on their hands, and then more time after that to exercise.

Hot yoga is for people who need a serene authority figure to tell them they are perfectly okay just the way they are.

Hot yoga is for sinners who think they can go to hell a little bit every day and maybe get a pass for eternity.

And hot yoga is for people like my wife, who want to prove to themselves they can do something incredibly terrible every single day for a month.

Girl, you could have survived the Battle of the Motherfucking Bulge.