John's Auto Spa

is like yoga.

At the end of my aerial yoga classes, the instructor always turns the lights down and gives you a push, like a child on a swing set. As the practice winds down, you feel the air rushing past your face as you swing back and forth. The end of any yoga class tends to be a relief of some kind as you stop exerting effort, your breathing goes back to normal, and you return to your regular life with more awareness. But the end of an aerial yoga class is often euphoria.

My roommate once described aerial yoga as something a “lady from southern California thought up in the late 90s after she went to a yoga class and saw a Cirque de Soleil performance.” I started doing it about a year ago, one of the many weapons I’d amassed against seasonal depression and the garden variety. To me, yoga meant a willingness to let certain things go, an acknowledgement of weakness—I’m often at least mediocre at things when I try them, but lacking flexibility, proprioception, and athleticism mean that after a year I have still not risen to the mediocre level here. It was a good corrective—a reminder that some things cannot be controlled, do not respond to a well-written cover letter or carefully-crafted argument. Some things don’t care how much you’ve thought about them, and only care somewhat how much you’ve tried.

I don’t do this exactly. But it gives you the idea.

My favorite car wash is called John’s Auto Spa. Initially I had intended to write this analogy about Drive and Shine, only because if I told all of you that John’s Auto Spa is like yoga, you might have assumed that it was the spa element that brought the two together—this is not at all the case. John’s Auto Spa is nothing like a spa, and yoga is not really much like a spa either, but I couldn’t stand not being surprising, so now I’m being surprising by having engaged in false advertising.

John’s Auto Spa is a frequently-broken car wash on the corner of McKinley and Grape Roads in Mishawaka. There is also one in Nappanee. John’s Auto Spa itself is heavily themed in ways that are reminiscent of Nappanee’s theming, but under a different guise—composed entirely of two car washes in small-town Indiana, John’s Auto Spa has an island theme, with a palm tree in its logo and car washes named after various levels of destruction: “Hurricane,” “Tsunami,” and “Monsoon.”