Mid-Thanksgiving Weekend Update (not with Dennis Miller)

SO FAR, I'M HALFWAY THROUGH the four days of 0ur American binge-weekend of commerce and calories — and occasional thankfulness — and I've only indulged in half of that equation. The vast bulk of Thursday was spent over at my parents' house: helping Mom with food prep, burrowing with my Dad through dips and a cheese ball while watching two subpar football games, and tapping out an abortive blog post that ended up in the scraps pile with the other pieces of half-baked TextEdit compost. Also, I did laundry. The most effective multitasking I've done all week. The weather was cool, but not painfully so, and the skies clear and favorable to both travelers and Macy's parade-goers alike. Weather's not usually a hitch for a Thanksgiving journey to my parents'; they live one town away, a distance I could walk if pressed. And ought to have, considering the amount of full-fat dairy products alone that my Dad and I packed away.

I drifted home happy to have shared another Turkey Day with my parents, and crashed early under the sedative influence of a lovingly prepared meal. I didn't even get the chance to read. Just out like a light. I'd like to say that not having to go into work the next day accelerated my drop into the lotus-perfumed arms of Morpheus, but that's a whole other post or series of same.

I made a weak try at rising early to hit the gym on Friday morning. Wasn't gonna happen. I was still paying a sleep debt from a very late Wednesday night at the poker game, and I knew if I didn't pay it off then, I'd drag my sleep–wake cycle far off kilter over the rest of the weekend, and firmly screw myself Monday morning. Why fight nature? I set the clock a couple of hours forward, wound up awakening about 15 minutes before it anyway, and got my ass in gear.

After a couple of hours' cleaning in preparation for the Christmas party I'll host a week from today, I mixed up a protein-berry smoothie and rolled over to the gym shortly before noon. I'd come to the conclusion that hitting the gym first thing in the morning, without any sort of meal beforehand, was the reason why I'd been losing steam short of a session's end. I'd also noticed that the smoothie, when consumed after a workout, tended to make me sleepy. I blame this on the blizzard of simple carbs in the smoothie: nearly a cup of frozen berries, a banana, and a quarter-cup of 100% cranberry juice, to say nothing of what might be in the two scoops of protein powder (actually, I have this number: 6 g carbs).

This was particularly the case after a gym visit in which I'd just been on a treadmill or elliptical trainer for a half-hour, with no major muscle-tissue teardown. I'd be getting dressed for work after downing this and feel like getting back into bed. And I'd read a study recently that declared immediate post-workout nutrition to be counterproductive for all except competitive athletes, powerlifters, and other such folks who routinely burn 2,000 calories per gym trip. Not me by a longshot.

So I decided to compromise and bring the smoothie with me to drink during a workout. This has been working much better, and I don't get to work thinking I need a Costanza drawer in my desk for a nap. This is what I did yesterday, and I teetered into the gym, bag and keys (with membership tag) in one hand, big plastic cup brimming with purple sludge in the other, hoping the path to the squat rack was clear.

Usually I lift weights first thing in the morning, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, as close to the opening of the facility as I can get.

Now, this is more or less the type of squat rack we have at the gym:
Rather than use this for movements like squats, overhead shoulder presses, deadlifts, and other compound exercises during which you might want a nice, sturdy piece of steel onto which to drop the weight on a final, exhausting set, some speciments will use the heavy-duty bar (the Olympic bar that you find on these things alone weighs 45 lb.) to do curls. Without any other weight. While folks itching to squat grit their teeth and wait for this jerkass to be done. Simplest solution, as with many sources of stress in life, is avoidance. Getting into the gym at the open accomplishes this.

Not so yesterday. I feared that, at noontime on a weekday with most folks home from work, I'd run upstairs to the weight floor to find the joint jammed with bleary-eyed Thanksgiving binge victims expiating their guilt one curl at a time (of course, in the squat rack). I'd brought my iPod just in case I had to call an audible and burn 30 minutes on a piece of aerobic equipment while the scrum upstairs emptied out, though my schedule had Friday as a weight-training day, and I prefer to hold to the schedule if at all possible.

But I was lucky; the many cars in the parking lot belonged to the folks populating the treadmills and trainers, not the Cybex or Hammer Strength machines upstairs . . . and what few folks were busying themselves with their muscles were nowhere near the squat rack. Perfect.

November was a spotty month for me. I hit a low in job satisfaction, and also caught a cold, both of which screwed up my gym attendance, nutrition, and weight loss. But I found my footing again this last weekend, and thus far I'd been putting up good numbers. Even when your ass is dragging, I've found, if you can just keep going back to the gym for a couple of down days, it'll be a lot easier to get fully back into a program when your health returns or a dark mood passes. (And exercise is itself a fine antidepressant.) The squat is the foundation of the routine I do (the Stronglifts.com 5x5 beginner's routine), and after stalling out at 45 lb. of plates on the bar (for a total of 90 lb.), I'd been feeling strong enough to continue the advancement.

This week was fantastic. I broke through the 45-lb. weight to do five sets of five with 50 lb. on Monday. I ate more carefully and got more and better sleep. Wednesday morning, I entered the century club by adding 55 lb. to the 45-lb. bar, with which I was again able to hit the specified five sets of five reps. The kicker was yesterday, when, despite the Thursday binge, I racked up 60 lb., and still managed to complete final set with good form, albeit quite slowly. Even though I hit a temporary wall on the bench press later that day, I was still happy to have inched forward with the foundation exercise of the Stronglifts routine. Not sure if I can exceed that on Monday, but I'll have had two rest days to heal and prepare. So cross your fingers.

I returned to my parents' house for dinner that night, but I didn't go anywhere near a mall. I used to go out on Black Fridays. Not anymore. I don't need anything like that level of stress. People go feral that day and are best handled at the length of a cattle prod. Nothing I might need isn't already available elsewhere, either within walking distance of my apartment, or via the Web. Aside from the short trips to the gym and my parents' place, I put few miles on the car, or on my mental odometer.

Today, I've got a list of items I can find at local strip malls or grocery stores, rather than the mega-palaces of commerce straining at their rivets in Paramus. These are mostly things I need for the party next weekend: a nice scented soap, a few extra Pottery Barn mugs f0r my caffeine-craving guests, a couple of the giftcards I'll need for the grab bag I always have at the affair, and the envelopes in which I'll place 'em. I can even dodge the parking problem, because one of these places is within walking distance of my workplace, so I can stash the car and tromp down to the stores without jockeying with folks over spots. Insane.

That's how things stand as we cruise toward noon on Saturday, as a clear blue sky filters through the evergreens outside my window, and retailers gnaw the nails from their fingers hoping for sales salvation this weekend. I may venture over to the gym for a bit of treadmill and college football, before ticking off some more to-do's from the party prep list. A haircut would also be a good idea, which would take me no further than crossing the street outside that selfsame window. Other than that, and a bundle of leftovers awaiting me in the fridge, I plan to take the second half of this weekend at a delightfully slow pace.

Season of the Itch

THE HALFWAY POINT OF THE YEAR finds me contemplative most times around. Not only do I have the second six months on the calendar to ponder, or the last six to scrutinize, but my birthday precedes this dividing line by four days.

This birthday saw me enter the final year of my thirties. Jack Benny time. It was more of a diffuse zone than a day this time around, because I saw so many people over the course of the days surrounding it. I was convinced that my friends Jen and Steve would be thoroughly sick of me by the end of the weekend, as I saw them for three dinner dates in four days, including one they kindly hosted. Also saw a few folks I don't get the chance to hang with as often on my actual birthday, including one guy now (but possibly not for long) in North Carolina. The mighty Felix and his wife, Julia, were present for the third day of my unprecedented social activity, on a weekend that saw their own six-month anniversary as a married couple.

One common thread among my friends was discontent with the current job. At least four people I saw over the weekend, and a fifth living outside the area, are either contemplating an employment shift or have just completed one. I could make that five and a half, in that I plan to update my resume in case my shop gets the yen for another round of job relocations or layoffs. With the business downturn entering a new month and the stock market officially in bear territory, one never knows how an employer will defend itself against losses. This made it all the more interesting that some of my friends seek a change. As a defense against a market that punishes narrow skill sets, two other friends of mine have completed higher degrees or additional certification in their field.

Most of my friends are in the latter half of their 30s. Could they all be in the same contemplative mode as I am? Looking forward a couple of years, pondering a property purchase, a wedding, children, and figuring, at least get a job change settled first for greater satisfaction, security, or interest in the work?

As for me, with the passage of this birthday milestone, I have a very specific plan for one aspect of my life over the next 12 months. Not employment. See next post.

Schizohedron's Delivery Service

THIS PAST SATURDAY, I WAS heading out to the gym, just ahead of a threatening mass of thunderheads bearing down on the area. I'd parked my car close to the front door of the apartment complex in anticipation of the coming deluge, but it hadn't struck just yet.

As I walked out of the complex, I was flagged by an elderly tenant, who asked me, "Where are you going?" In response, I pointed to my car, not 20 feet away. I continued walking to the vehicle, not knowing that this fleet-footed woman was following me. When I popped open the door, she asked — from right behind me, which nearly made me jump over the car from surprise — if I could drive her to church.

The church to which she referred lies within sight from my front door, about a five-minute walk. (Maybe a little longer for her, an octogenarian, but one with few mobility issues, it seems, if she could sneak up on me like that.) I guess she was nervous about getting caught in the imminent rain. To which I initially thought, Your cure is an umbrella. But what sort of Nazi would I be if I just left her there?

I clarified that we were talking about the same church — this becomes important — then began clearing out my front passenger seat. She began working the back door latch. I shooed her away to clear the considerably more cluttered back seat. Amid a storm of "Thank you"s and "God bless you"s, I drove out of my parking lot and began negotiating my way over to the church, where a decision would have to be made over where to drop her off.

My plan had been to deposit her on the curb from my passenger side and let her make it into the church from there, but seeing as she'd beelined for my back seat (why do only old ladies want to get into my back seat? Who am I, Max Bialystock?). From that point, I'd be dropping her into oncoming traffic. So instead of just letting her out onto the streetside curb, where she stood a good chance of becoming one of those stuffed animals you find on the front of garbage trucks, I asked which set of steps she preferred to climb.

Now by this time, I'd already picked up on the fact that she wasn't quite all there. I'd had this exchange with her:

Me: It's a shame we're losing the resident manager to National Guard duty. He's the only one we've had in nine years who got anything done.

Her: Are you the manager?

So I wanted to get her clear intent before I made the last bit of her journey needlessly complicated by dropping her at the wrong point.

I asked her if she wanted to be let out in the courtyard or around the side. The courtyard had three fewer steps leading in than the side entrance, but would let her get right onto church property without walking through part of the driveway. The side entrance had more steps, but also sported a ramp . . . but in turn would also force her to share part of her approach with traffic under the porte cochere.

I briefed her on the differences, and she asked to be let out into the courtyard, again showering me with quite unnecessary proxy thanks on the part of her deity. From there, she walked back into the driveway . . . toward the longer steps of the side entrance.

I have no idea how my golden years will arrive, whether as a gentle slowing of function, a dissolution of mental capacity so slow I don't even notice its disappearance, or as an abrupt break with soundness of mind or body that revokes any connection with my past. With few if any remaining chances to produce children, much less to presage grandchildren, I suppose I, too, will have to rely on my wits and others' altruism to negotiate the days' challenges when I arrive at the same stage of life as this ride-wranglin' churchgoer has. Let's keep our fingers crossed for both.

Las Vegas 2008: Flash-Forward to Present

I STILL NEED TO CHRONICLE my Vegas adventures, which the march of time has once again outstripped, but I figured I would drop a note here to all readers to let them know I've returned safe and sound, and that I had a fun trip, despite donating some money to the local poker economy.

Before departing for Sin City, I called a number of folks to bid them goodbye, though I haven't done the same to herald my return. I think I know why, and I have the recent and stunning death of legendary reporter, newscaster, and debate moderator Tim Russert to credit for the understanding. I believe I wanted to at least leave folks with a gentle parting and a kind word before heading off into the unknown, just in case this was the last opportunity.

I have firm belief in the safety of air travel (though landings irrationally scare me a little), but there are many hazards in any travel, and definitely in Las Vegas. Though I feel safe transporting cash at midnight on the well-populated and policed Strip or walking the floor of just about any casino, there are dangers aplenty: hiking in the desert, driving along an alternate route away from the casinos' cameras, walking to my car in a vast parking garage, taking an elevator with two strangers. There are simple expedients to evade all these dangers, but it never hurts to keep one's guard up, as Vegas hosts many opportunists who don't fear a return to jail if a quick crime can fund their next hit or stave off a pimp-beating. Much as I love the town, it, like all major cities, requires discretion on the part of the solo traveler to avoid harm.

And harm might not be from a hostile source; it could be an accident, or a health problem, that makes a given goodbye one's last. I've read that Russert was under observation for a heart condition, but the sudden infarction still surprised most folks. Death can hit at any time, not just those with cardiac enlargement and coronary artery disease. It's best to part with friends and family in kindness and at peace. It's cliché by this point to hear folks say they wish they could've taken back an argument, or broken a festering silence, before losing someone.

I suspect that, and not the offer to throw a couple of bucks on a table as a proxy bettor in Vegas, was why I called around to bid my near and dear adieu. But I'm back now, and — again with Russert in mind — I've resumed my usual practice at the gym. I have a few Vegas calories to burn off, but also some stories to relate. Watch this space.

The Mouth on Me!

I'M APPARENTLY BECOMING A CARD in my old age. The key to humor? Know your audience. Witness this exchange last night at the local supermarket.

I was using the self-checkout station, which in this store abuts the customer service desk. The 20-something female desk clerk watched me scan and bag my two items, the second of which evoked an error message when I bagged it — the weight and the item's UPC didn't match.

I rebagged it, only to get the same message. The clerk said, "Sometimes it needs to adjust itself."

After 20 seconds of waiting, I smirked and said in a Paulie Walnuts tone, "I gotta adjust myself sometimes, too, but I don't take this long!" To which she laughed loudly.

I won't be opening for Carlin anytime soon, but it's nice to get a 100% positive audience response now and again.

Overdue Returns

FOR THE PAST TWO MONTHS or so, I've been culling my library. It's now obvious that books are missing from the shelves. If you were wise enough to have taken a picture of my living room during one of my Xmas parties here, holding that photo up with my current shelves in the background would display notable gaps.

This has not been easy. I was raised with a reverence for bound words. I've long had full shelves, plus a couple of boxes of additional books — roleplaying tomes, mostly — in the closet. Parting with them seemed heretical.

I've since understood the emotional attachment that old possessions can conceal, the ties to a safer past they can represent for some. Taken to an extreme of which I would accuse nobody I know, it results in hoarding. In my case, it belies a sad nostalgia. And I have come to hate that prison of a word.

Merciless winnowing was in order.

The first couple of loads went easily. I've brought three grocery bags to the library so far. I actually believe some of the books came to me from their monthly fundraising sales. I think I bought them — I'm thinking of four or so S. J. Perelman collections — out of a sense that I was rescuing the wit inside from final disappearance. I now know it is not my duty to rescue them at the cost of convenience, storage space, or sentimental ties to a New York society now long gone. I'm done with them; let someone else enjoy them. Their past is not my past. I've got enough trouble with that past already.

Poker books from earlier in my studies were also added to the mix. If I've internalized the wisdom, I don't need the shells from whence it sprung. Not that I've become some sort of hold'em demigod, but if I am playing better in any way as a result of having read them, they're sort of alive through my improved play. Which sounds like the justification those soccer-team plane-crash cannibals made for wolfing their dead chums in Alive. At no-limit hold'em, there's little distinction. Eat or be eaten.

But I digress. I made a rule earlier this year that if I were to buy new books, old books would have to go on a one-for-one exchange. I recently took the opportunity to upgrade my Las Vegas Fodor's Guide. My copy of James Ellroy's towering and ugly masterpiece American Tabloid seems to be out on permanent loan, and I fetishize that book; thus I also ordered that. Those were straight replacements (my 2006 Vegas Fodor's is now in the care of a recent convert to the Neon Havens). Were anything else to come in the door, however, something else would need to exit.

Inspired by a post on Get Rich Slowly about the acid-drip that renting a storage space can represent to one's savings, I felt energized to resume my book winnowing. This morning, my local library will become the lucky recipients of the following volumes:

Red Storm Rising and The Hunt for Red October, Tom Clancy: Millions of these two titles are in print, and shall be for years. No need to duplicate the work of the public library system by retaining two of them here. I do have fond memories of Red Storm though. During my boring college summer job, I used to sneak the paving-stone-sized Red Storm paperback into the john for 20-minute reading breaks. Not as brazen as my mother's habit of taking naps in the ladies' room on days following benders with officemates, but damn close.

The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction: This one, a college textbook, has survived several purges. It was the sole text used in an American fiction class I took as part of the English major program. A second course I took that same semester — for which I had to read and comprehend a Great Novel like The Sound and the Fury or A Farewell to Arms each week — had the same professor. And he was terrifying. Think about one click less scary than Elaine Benes's dad as portrayed by Lawrence Tierney in Seinfeld. He wasn't hostile or lacking in academic rigor, just terse and uncompromising, and he detested lack of class participation. (As someone who is terrified of public speaking, but even more upset by having nobody else in a class or meeting answering an instructor's question, I thus had four phobia-laden classes per week.) People eventually forced themselves to answer his questions, but almost always with an unconscious inquisitive lilt at the end, as though asking the prof if they had finally satisfied his burning quest for an answer that demonstrated that the class was actually thinking deeply about the literature. In retrospect, it was effective. In person, it was enervating.

For the class in which we used the Norton, we had the choice for a final project of analyzing one of the short stories we hadn't covered in class, or writing a new one. I chose the latter, and submitted what I, with my current set of eyes, now recognize as a terrible pastiche of cyberpunk clichés. I also now realize they were only really clichés to someone who, as I had been in 1990, hadn't been steeping themselves in William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Walter Jon Williams, and Richard Kadrey at every chance. I anticipated a withering last-page summation of its crappiness from this strict arbiter of great American literature. I was instead stunned to receive an A–. Two years later, I entered the story into a contest run by the college literary magazine. It took third, won me a C-note, and was published in the magazine. Not bad for a story whose best line was, "His scream abruptly cut off as my fingers met in his forebrain."

Writer's Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing: I took the opportunity a month ago to read through this, to determine whether it held anything of continuing worth. It does not; in fact, it's shockingly dated, and was so in the late 80s, when I received it as a gift. You wouldn't think writing tips could go out of date, but the book is tied closely to the markets contemporary to the publication of its individual articles. (Likewise with a guide to writing science fiction short stories that went in an earlier purge.) There is no advice in here that I cannot also find from working writers' blogs, more current writers' guides or marketplace reports, or — frankly — by taking the advice of an oaf I know who told me, about 12 years ago, that I ought to spend 3 hours a day writing. It was his one non-oafish piece of wisdom, and shames me in my failure to follow it.

(Yes, I owned this book before I wrote that horrible cyberpunk story in college. No, I didn't call upon its advice. Writer's Digest is blameless for that horrid line you read a couple of grafs up.)

White Jazz, James Ellroy: This will surprise some folks I know. But it's simply not as good as its predecessor, L.A. Confidential (which is an order of magnitude more complex than the also-excellent movie it inspired), or Ellroy's next novel, the aforementioned American Tabloid. (Jazz does introduce a prototype of Pete Bondurant, one of Tabloid's three stars, which gives me one of those shared-universe kicks, like seeing the skull of an Alien warrior-bug among the Predator's trophies in Predator 2.) For me, the tighter, more telegraphic prose style he adopted after L.A. doesn't function as well in the first-person narrative he uses in Jazz. Third-person limited seems to work best with that style, as does his use of three rotating protagonists, each of whom illuminates traits of the other two through his observations and interactions. With only one narrator, White Jazz feels more like a transcript; with three, Ellroy's books become brutal, seductively shadowed sculptures.

Shock Value, John Waters: The year was 1999. I'd just quit my first real job, and I was attending a horror convention with one of my now-former coworkers, on whom I had a wicked, unspoken crush. We shared a love for the science fiction show Babylon 5, and several of its stars were set to appear at the con. Also on the guest list, along with the usual assortment of nostalgia-pimps and fraying fright-flick and geek-TV retreads, was sleazemeister John Waters. I spent most of the con waffling over how to tell my coworker — who was, if it can be believed, even more naïve about romance than I was — that I dug her as more than just a friend. As I'd driven her to the con, however, I didn't want to spook her and make her even more skittish. So instead I followed her through the exhibition halls, spending way too much money on signed photos of various B5 stars. We bought copies of Waters's book and queued up for his signature. I told the surprisingly normal-looking but stylish Waters my name, shook his hand after he signed the book, and told him I loved his work in The Simpsons, for which he graciously thanked me. If I could've mustered the balls to have been as honest and direct with my coworker about how I liked her as Waters was about his life, aesthetics, and films in this book, I could've spared myself a summer's worth of nervous frustration and second-guessing . . . and the eventual humiliation of being flatly told, when I finally spilled my guts to her, that (and I quote) "you know, I don't date," only to watch her begin dating a longtime friend of mine, her eventual husband, that fall.

A Nielsen Nightmare

IT OCCURRED TO ME TODAY, while vacuuming the living room, that it's been at least 2 weeks since I last watched television in my home. Though I've watched early-morning financial news and crap on the Food Network while at the gym, and TiVo'd America's Test Kitchen eps at my parents' on Sundays, the postwork viewing habits I'd long maintained had evaporated.

For a long time, my evening ritual was to make dinner with the first Simpsons episode on Fox running in the background, then watch the second one, and then Seinfeld, while eating. After eight, I'd switch over to the computer or book and listen to WFMU until bedtime. Sometime before FOX eliminated the double dose of Springfield, I decided I had nothing more to learn from the show, and stopped watching, tuning into Jeopardy! instead as my pre-Jerry viewing. Then one of the crap VHF channels began airing reruns of Family Guy, a show I only began watching during its unlikely but successful return to air after cancellation. For a while, I would tune in at 7:30 to see some of the older episodes, ignoring the distractions of different voice-acting styles, cheaper animation, and heavy censorship to fill in my gaps.

Now, however, that network seems to have fallen into a rut of Family Guys already rerun a million times on Sunday nights between blocks of fresh eps. (I'd written off new eps of The Simpsons as a viewing priority even before the mediocre movie came out.) I don't have cable, and the only other air-signal channel I watch at all is 13, our local PBS station. And most of the good stuff they air is released on DVD . . . not unlike nearly all of pay-TV's nonsports content.

As I wound up the cord on the vacuum, I thought about whether I'd even take this TV with me in the next move. (Not for another year at least; the lease renewal is sitting on my desk here, and I'd like to remain within 15 minutes of my current job, and within walking distance of a transit nexus should I need to change jobs in the next 12 months.) The set itself — what I suppose in 10 years we'll call an old-style tube model — is a bit fucked. A purple tinge has been creeping from the bottom left corner for the past 2 years or so. I've had this thing since my move here in 1999, and it was a gift from my parents, so it owes me squat.

With the pointless ballyhoo of digital broadcasting edging every closer, I assume that past some point next year, my choices will be to piss away some money on a digital tuner, or to get cable. In my review of the offerings on my parents' cable lineup during my Sunday visits, I gotta say, there's not many reasons to pay Cablevision any more than I already am for the broadband account. Getting a Netflix account, tapping the DVD burner in my parents' TiVo, or using iTunes can fill in any gaps. Between that realization, and the lack of any broadcast shows in which I'm interested, why even have the TV set at all?

I'd say about half of the movies I've rented in the past few months, and all of the TiVo DVDs I've bummed off my parents, I've watched on my 17" PowerBook with studio-quality headphones for the audio. (My DVD player, about the same vintage as the TV, can't read most TiVo-burned discs.) I've already mentally committed to jumping to the big MacBook when this slab on which I'm typing eventually merges with the infinite. According to Apple.com, the maximum 17" offers 1080-resolution HD video. Not a bad reason to begin hoarding my pennies, though I am hoping this current Mac makes it to its 5-year anniversary in November at minimum before it, too, begins the death spiral my TV is cutting.

The only upcoming reasons to retain the TV are football and the political spectacle approaching in the fall. Football I can watch at the gym or over at my parents', and I usually can't stay up late enough on Mondays to watch the air signal for that anyway. (The cable-only NFL Network can go fuck itself.) As regards Decision '08, it's not as much Election Night I worry about missing — I've already deemed a combination of radio and Net coverage to be superior to a repeat of watching Dan Rather run through three lifetimes worth of folksy sayings. Any relevant bits of "wisdom," spectactles, dramatic suicides, etc., will be retained by the news sites and thus be streamable. But I did briefly think the tube might be worth retaining for the debates between Sens. McCain and Obama. (Heh.) Then I remember how much seeing McCain makes me want to throw my crockery across the room, and I figure, if he's not gonna pay my Pottery Barn bill, why should I rack one up?

As for the spot occupied by the TV? I'm thinking another couch. Make my living room into a talk show set. I get more out of talking with the people I know, and occasionally playing the odd board or card game with them, than the shit the entertainment industry shovels onto the airwaves and co-ax, and I always feel bad making my Christmas party guests sit on folding chairs. I'd probably have to get rid of one of my bookshelves and its books (I suspect some of you just shuddered at that thought). There are quite a number of tomes there that I haven't touched in years, though, and if a library, or the patron of one of its book sales, can benefit from it, why leave the knowledge frozen on the shelf? I painlessly handed off five books to the local library this morning, and in the unlikely situation that I buy a new book in the next several months (can't beat interlibrary loan and note-taking for most of the books I've impulse-wanted in the recent past), I will remove an existing book to make space.

However it goes, I don't intend to become that Onion area man who constantly mentions that he has no televison.

January 2008 in Review

IT'S WORTH LOOKING BACK AT the month just passed to see how my efforts to improve have worked out in practice. Here's what I've done right, and where I still need to work harder.

Good Starts

Setting a budget for the year: At the outset of 2008, I plotted out in Excel my estimate of how my take-home pay would be spent. I found keeping up with this easier than I would have imagined. I tried to make things predictable in my spending habits, such as buying gas in $20/week portions (itself a coup, because I actually budgeted for $30/week, and also made a run to Atlantic City amid this tighter rationing). Having one's expenses laid out in such fashion is an education.

Organizing a chore calendar: I assigned a minor household task to each day of the week on a 14-day schedule. This was a great success. The place looks like it did before my holiday party. I try to do the chore either immediately before or after dinner, so I don't get involved in some absorbing book or drift aimlessly on the Internet and let it slip out of mind. The only chore I've skipped (and which I may therefore replace) has been cleaning the exterior of my car. I'm not sure why I even put that on there. Maybe I anticipated having to scour road salt off of the car more often than I have. I'm not gonna run the beast through the car wash every fortnight, I know that much. I'm sure I can find something to plug in there. Looking at the desktop of my Mac, perhaps a cleanup/backup session might be a good replacement.

Gym visits: I began the year at 231.5, having gained a little weight back after being sick and navigating through the siege of holiday treats. Despite catching a minor cold late in the January and skipping 2 days, I kept my daily gym habit and got down to 227 as of last Sunday. The program I've set up proved flexible enough to allow me to restart after I got better from the cold with minimal fuss. But I still have a lot of work to do, both at the gym and in my kitchen (and I don't mean installing new cabinets). Losing football on Sundays will be rough, as that was my entertainment for an hourlong cardiovascular tour. I may have to dig up some interesting podcasts. I am open to suggestions.

Keeping normal work hours: At the beginning of the year, I resolved to leave each day at 5:00, unless I was doing something fun like writing or updating the website and needed an empty office to enhance the experience. This has worked out, even after my boss left, when I determined not to let her absence make me as crazy as she was when she departed. It's important, even with a job whose basic functions I enjoy, to set boundaries, because all employers will take as much as they can, for as small a price as they can pay, unless you resolve to take that time back.

Areas for Improvement

My dinners are made of fail: The number one barrier to weight loss has been the radical nutritional difference between my breakfasts, lunches, and work snacks, and the dinners I end up with. Much of the chili I made for the month came to work with me as lunch, especially because Trader Joe's seems to have discontinued the brand of lunch meat I'd been getting since I started my new job. (I am an extreme creature of habit.) I did teach myself a great new stir fry recipe with TJ's pork and a few other ingredients, which actually provides a great second and even third portion of food to fill in lunch gaps. But I need either to develop more dinners like this, or to eat a largish late-afternoon meal (vs. a snack like nuts or dried fruit), and then just have a small, simple meal before hitting the hay. Homemade nachos or frozen pizza from Trader Joe's is too much starch, too late in the day, to keep the fat-loss train rolling.

Better sleep schedule: The only way to keep a 7-day gym habit working at the hour I visit it (5:00–5:30 a.m., the earlier the better, to avoid the 6:00 spin class and its awful music), is to hit the hay no later than 9:00. If I actually train myself to go to sleep earlier, with the goal of writing before the gym or eating a small pre-workout meal, that might actually creep up to 8:00. Because it's tougher for me to get to sleep in the summer, and it takes a while for this joint to cool down (though I will get home earlier, if I am still at the same place), I need to develop a better sleep routine now.

Resume revision: I had hoped to get a new version of my resume written at this point, both to include my new experiences and skills, and to shoot over to, well, just about my whole gang of former coworkers at their new location. Haven't done so yet. No reason not to. Maybe I should place it on my chore calendar instead of cleaning my car's exterior. A fortnightly career checkup? Might work. But it has to start with a resume review.

All right, this is a slightly shorter month, even with the leap day, so maybe it'll work in my favor. I'll just schedule the days I veer off plan for February 30 and 31.

Seat Open, Table One

MIGHT AS WELL TAKE A moment, while my wash is sudsing itself to cleanliness, and I'm taking my weekly dose of political discourse via Face the Nation, to update the masses on how things progress in life.

I had the pleasure this week of returning to the weekly poker game. I'd been absent since late November, due to time pressure from planning the holiday party and staying late at work to get the magazine out — if not on time, then less late. At the turn of the year, I made the decision not to stay after regular working hours unless it directly served me. For example, I enjoy updating the website and writing, both of which are best accomplished without interruption; I've done both either before or after regular hours. But, I take that time back by snipping it from another day or tacking it onto a lunch hour.

My former supervisor was redlining herself for months by working 1 or 2 hours after hours, affecting her health in the process. That's not for me. As passionate as I may be about something in my life, be it labor or leisure, nothing is ever going to be worth my physical or mental health. I've seen both sacrificed for jobs. That won't be me.

Having made this resolution, I took advantage of not being directly supervised to say yes to the weekly card game for the first time in almost 2 months. I simply couldn't have fit it in before the end of the year, and had trouble justifying the time after making the committment not to stay late. And there was a question of balance. I didn't want to stagger in Friday mornings looking less than ready to contribute. It wasn't necessary for me to distort the all-important weekend by staying all night at the game Thursday. It's part of trying to achieve balance across all areas of my life so I don't have to do catch-up work to address someplace I've been less attentive. With exercise, nutrition, cleaning my apartment, writing, and leisure, everything should have its place.

To that end, I've been thinking about my trips to Atlantic City. Not my group gambling binges of late, but rather my solo poker trips. With other folks in the car, you can at least keep up a conversation and keep the driver from drowsing off. Pulling driving duty alone twice in 24 hours is rough; that last hour during the drive home can get dangerous. Now, Harrah's has been sending me room-rate offers since November, some of which are quite attractive, especially when contrasted to the cost of an accident while falling asleep at the wheel.

It's not necessary to stay until the bitter end at poker night and arrive home at 3:30 a.m. on a weekday. It's something different to jam all night at the felt on a Friday or Saturday, when I can sleep in the next day, and my gym trip isn't scheduled until the afternoon. If I'm up late on Thursday, however, it takes me through Sunday to make up that sleep deficit. When I was out of work, it was easier to plan that sort of thing out and get my job-hunting done during the first four days of the week, then grab a nice 8-hour chunk of poker for myself and cruise home under tweeting birds. With the current workout schedule, it's better to make an earlier night of things so I can still make it to the gym on Friday.

Still, new habits take a while to establish themselves, and this one is no different. I thought I might ease back into things last Thursday with a 2- or 3-hour spin 'round the tables. Betting was more aggressive than I remembered it during the early hours of the game, so I strapped in tight and waited for a good hand.

Well, the hands did come, but not until 1:00 a.m. Unlike most of the players, I hadn't had to rebuy through that point. I was feeling quite comfortable and having a load of fun. More surprising, I felt more awake later into the evening than I usually do at the game. Could be due to better sleeping habits and regular exercise. All the more noteworthy from my having avoided caffeine that night.

Between taking down two all-in bets with the nuts and catching a miracle river card on a third contest, I finished comfortably into the black, even if my sleep meter was finally verging into the red at the 3:00 hour. Perhaps not the wisest move, seeing as I was backing out of a mild cold I'd picked up on Wednesday. And I faced a full slate of work the next day, which began in less than 4 hours from my return home. But I tell ya, I was feeling strong through Friday, and I even tacked 30 minutes of work onto the end of the day to compensate for a late arrival Wednesday due to said cold.

So next time I will play through about 10:30 or 11:00 or so, and with any luck still make a full day of it, from gym to commute home, that following Friday. I did miss my few hours at the game each week, and I think a break actually made my play better.

Of course, balance is relative. One of the players, having had a monster week after big wins that night and on Monday, made good on his seeming jest that he would book a flight to Los Angeles to play in the Saturday no-limit hold'em tournament at the Commerce card room. Just up and zapped out to the Coast. As much as I am clawing at the walls to get back out to Las Vegas, even I'm not quite that crazy.

I mean, I'd at least water my plants first.

Sidestepping the Ravages of Dementia

OH, AND JUST IN CASE you think I don't have myself figured out: With the knowledge that a utility bill will arrive within the week, I have written "1/ /08" on the next check in my book. I'm not writing a second one for the rent, though. My eyes aren't too old to perceive the monomolecular dividing line between life-hacking and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

. . . And We're Back With Another Year!

BOTH OF THESE TOPICS DESERVE more than just a note, but . . . I have no way to finish that sentence. Anyway, it's been a sweet post-Christmas week for me. Once I finally disentangled myself from the expanding blob of disorganization spreading from my boss's desk last Thursday, I found myself at the beginning of a peaceful 5-day weekend. Within three of those days, though, I had the pleasure of being a guest at Felix and Julia's wedding, and at Ratatosk and Amy's place for New Year's Eve. Though I only have a 3-day week coming up tomorrow, it'll be impossible to top the festivity and hospitality of the past several days. There's no way this weekend can compare. It'll just have to settle for being 2 days off.

Schizohedron and the Beanstalk

THIS IS ONE OF THOSE posts for which having a digital camera would be useful, but I'll do the best I can to describe the result of an accidental bean sprout toughing it out in the most unlikely place.

A few weeks ago, I brewed up a batch of chili. I use dry beans whenever possible instead of canned. Dry beans hold up better during the long simmer, ensuring that my frozen batches — stored in my fridge like so many cryonic heads — will not turn to mush when I microwave them back to molten, superspicy goodness. I pick through the beans before cooking to weed out any tiny stones or funky wrinkled beans (isn't that a comic strip?), then rinse the remaining ones in a colander.

While doing this and pouring them into my pot, a lone pinto bean got loose into the sink. I tried to pick the wet little bugger up, but couldn't get a grip on it. So I used the plunger end of my sink plug to push it down through the trap and out of mind.

Or so I thought. Somehow, this tenacious bean wedged itself into the sink plug. I found it weeks later, when I removed the trap to clean it out. There, snuggled between the metal bars that act to anchor the trap in the sink, rested the bean, its spotted shell pale and discarded and hanging on the edge of a whitish, inch-long sprout. From the other side of the bean emerged a root.

I had, in effect, created a bean sprout.

This isn't the first inadvertent germination that's occurred in my kitchen. Months ago I'd kept a rhizome of ginger past its stale date, which then put forth roots. Had I any spare soil in the joint, I'd have planted it just to see what might happen.

I still don't have any bags of topsoil, but I do have a number of existing plants, including one that's rather too small for its pot. I carefully extracted the sprout from its metal lodging, dug a hole in the huge pot just mentioned, and dropped the seed in. I then covered it up and watered the surrounding area.

For a few days, nothing happened. I figured, the worst thing to occur would be the main plant gets a small, rotting seed on which to feed, Nothing like a little spare nitrogen.

This is where the camera would come in handy. If you ever grew vegetables from seedlings, or experimented with seeds in grammar school, you know what a bean seed looks like when it finally pierces the earth and extends its head to the sun. (This picture will help fill in the blanks.) The sprout appeared quite suddenly over the course of yesterday, greeting me when I finally staggered home from work, and is now a good 3½" tall.

My next course of action will be to buy some soil, extract this bugger from its current bed before the roots get too complex, then plant it in a spare 2-lb. yogurt tub I've got lying around. In an ideal world, I'd then transplant it, along with scores of other seedlings, into a garden. Not an option as an apartment dweller, sadly. I'll let it grow as much as I can get it to inside; I believe beans are annuals, so this might have a built-in stale date. Still, as a surprise science experiment, it just shows how relentless life can be.

Running Free of the Chicken Coop

I TOOK TODAY AND MONDAY off. I only got 5 days due to my signing on in the latter half of the year, and it took me a few months before I used the first one, partly because I was busy, but also because I didn't particularly notice being busy. Not a bad way to be. Not like the last days of the salt mine, where the only reason I didn't take my vacation days was to get cashola for them. Otherwise I would have saved them all up until mid-March and then taken them all, and the severance, with a hearty, Doppler-shifted "Fuck yoooooooooouuuu!"

At the current place, however, I've enjoyed being there. So I've been a comparative laggard in taking my time off. Now, of course, there's a mad sprint to expend it all on the part of the staff. Especially for my immediate boss and the art director; the former couldn't take any of her many days during the 4 months when they were down a person (the very gap I filled), and the latter spent the summer embroiled in the redesign of the magazine. He in particular will have worked only about a month by the time November and December both flutter into the cosmic recycle bin, due to his playing catch-up.

I have taken my Friday and Monday off with purpose. Please raise your hand if you've seen Goodfellas. Recall the music that began the "Sunday, May 11th, 1980" section? Yes, "Jump Into the Fire" by Harry Nilsson. "I was gonna be busy all day," as Henry Hill said. I had a legal pad full of tasks to accomplish for my holiday party tomorrow. No taping bags of dope to a drug mule's leg or selling guns to Robert De Niro or (sadly) making a shitload of Italian food. Though the Italian food will arrive tomorrow, courtesy of the catering crew of a local restaurant. No, in this case I had a number of places to hit across Bergen County, and the best way to accomplish this was to have the entire day to myself.

I had a sinking feeling, on Thursday, that I might lose the chance. I felt a bit run down over the course of the day, which was made worse by the long day I put in (I had to update the magazine's website before departing, which took until 7:00). Worse, one of my eyes seemed very red. I wondered if I was going to be the victim of a one-two punch of a cold and pinkeye. I beat a hasty retreat to bed once I finally got home.

My eye looked better the next day, and I went with glasses rather than contacts to give it a rest. I felt less fatigued, but on the off chance it was due to overtraining and getting a little less sleep than is optimal Wednesday night, I deferred the first-thing-in-the-morning exercise for the afternoon, my favored workout time back during my layoff. I would either do my Saturday 30-minute elliptical workout or go ahead and perform the leg and shoulder muscle exercises ordinarily slated for Friday.

Fortunately, once I got oatmeal and tea into my system, I felt much more chipper. I moved all loose paper and other junk to my bed. This cleaned up all surfaces in the rest of the apartment so I could get a rag or duster onto them. It would also force me to address all of this shit — bag it, file it, or shred it — before sleeping tonight. Nothing like an ultimatum.

Next, I composed a list of destinations, mostly in Paramus, to snag gift cards for my grab bag. I have a tradition, for those guests who want to exchange gifts but who neither have expressed a preference nor have an Amazon wish list, of putting together a clutch of gift certificates/cards and letting folks pick'em blind. Everyone loves a clean gamble.

Snow began falling as I traversed the area. I grabbed Chik-Fil-A at Paramus Park a few stops along the way. I didn't see any of the dozen or so police cars and the helicopter the radio had warned would be present at either Paramus Park or the Garden State Plaza, in a supposedly longstanding security plan that had nothing to do at all with the recent shootings at that Omaha, NE mall. So at least I was spared some tooth enamel at gritting my choppers at such an example of money-burning security theater.

I got home around 3:30 feeling well. My eye was still clearing up, and the worn-out feeling had long subsided, so I donned gym clothes and hit the club. The weight area was nearly dead, so I grabbed the opportunity of a well-paced workout and did my usual Friday work. This completed four weeks of the new program, with progressively (read as: slowly) better eating habits to go along with it, and this morning the payoff was a weight of 225. That's 15 pounds lighter than the beginning of the year. If I improve my diet further and stick to the gym plan, I might lose two or three more before New Year's. Of course, this is not something I can afford to stop: It's a lifelong need.

After finishing a strong workout (moved up my reps in all areas by a little), I returned to my lair and continued to clean. Also snagged a few decorations for the place as well. All that remains is vacuuming, waxing the kitchen floor, picking up the hot food, and waiting for this little place to fill up with friends.

Catching up With the Week

A MIXED WEEK THIS was, the last before the final plunge into the holiday season. The week ahead, though truncated, might be even crazier, at least until I go home on Wednesday night . . . which might not be at 5:00. But first, this week.

On Monday and Tuesday, the managing editor (who works in another office) was in our department. She greeted me Monday morning by asking me to write another whole column for the December issue, which is supposed to go to press on 11/20. The issue was already running late, partially due to her; she made some requests on a nearly completed article, queries of a frankly passive and paranoid nature, and requested that the PR department of the institution mentioned in the article review it. This set off a mini-mutiny in the department, but it typifies the very tentative approach our boss takes in making decisions or trying to change things at the 11th hour. It's one of the few negatives of the job, but insofar as she's otherwise a pleasant person who can be swayed by reason, it's mitigated somewhat. Still, there are limits. But adding a new column that late wasn't one of them; I'd come to expect it.

For the next two days, I was fiercely busy at work, mostly writing, which I enjoyed. Autumn weather also returned, with chill nights and gemlike skies of pure blue. The trees in my workplace's parking lot blazed in the sun like raging gas fires. We had a company Thanksgiving lunch Tuesday, an actual catered turkey dinner but at midday. The company also ran a side-dish and dessert competition, so we had a wide variety of both to choose from. The rest of that day was a bit of a blur, though my progress list did have other stuff I'd written on it in a tryptophan-and-sugar-induced coma. That evening, I went with Steve and Jen to a local pizza/Italian joint for dinner. This wasn't one of those weeks that showed a net drop in weight, as you might imagine.

On Wednesday, despite my immediate boss splitting time between the December issue and a year-end special publication that she'd gotten at the last minute from our managing editor, we seemed to be making headway. Then one of the group who works on the magazine announced she'd be quitting at the end of the month. This detonated like a bomb that leaves buildings intact but destroys motivation. The employee in question is a former professional in the field the magazine covers, so her input into content-heavy articles is critical. She is also able to explain complex concepts in that field to the rest of us in accessible English. She writes our editorials, and her experience helped us connect directly with our readers in ways the rest of us might not. Worse, she is an absolute blast to work with. But she'd been butting heads with the managing editor, including a couple of times recently when said supervisor took issue with pathetically ridiculous minutiae. With several of our former colleagues working at local publishers in our field, our coworker cast her eye around, found a better option to the one she faced under this regime, and gave notice.

So this cast a pall over the rest of the week. The department had been under full strength before this year, after my predecessor left in the early spring, and I'm told those three months before my arrival were hellish. (Not that I'm Superman, but even a thoroughly new trainee doing some of the basic labor would've been preferable to folks doubling up on duties as they were during that stretch.) Getting email from my managing editor, the immediate cause of the problem, was difficult, as was replying civilly . . . especially, as is typical, when the requests had nothing at all to do with completing the December issue.

But Wednesday and Thursday were otherwise writing days — again, among my favorites. I felt a cold command of the various projects, as I did when I regularly typeset a complex, table-heavy accounting newsletter in 48 hours back at the salt mine. Priorities were clear. Tools were readily available. Distractions melted away. On Thursday night, I put in a half-evening at the regular poker game. I should note that I had hit the gym every day this week since the previous Saturday, and I am convinced that this physical devotion kept my mood and energy up to the level the week's chaos would demand. Only playing until 11:00 was part of this fitness drive, because I wanted to hit the gym Friday morning. Although I lost two buy-ins (ran high pocket pairs into AA twice, goodnight!), I rode home with a high spirit; I'd dodged a couple of dangerous traps, too, something I wasn't capable of this time last year.

I did indeed go to the gym on Friday morning, and I erased one more item from my to-do list at work. Then I grappled with the column my boss had told me on Monday to slip into this issue . . . and I screeched to a brake-locking halt. This column is best written over the course of the month leading up to deadline, not the week; it comprises small items harvested from various Web sources, which were not yielding their usual bushels of fruit when shaken. I spent much of the day trying not to grow more frustrated than the task warranted by wrapping the stress of my coworker's reasons for departure up with this current challenge, but by lunchtime, it was too much. Even at the best job, one needs to get the hell out now and again. So I bailed for a local Chinese joint and sank into some Empress Chicken and a book on investing for an hour, bookended by leisurely drives beneath wind-buffeted trees and swirling storms of gorgeous leaves. In sum, quite therapeutic.

My boss and I already have accepted that this book will be late, primarily due to our boss's tampering. So when I returned to the office, I set the troublesome task aside and concentrated on another item I had to write (which by its nature goes in last minute anyway, so now was the time). Just to keep my hand moving in the Natalie Goldberg sense. It worked, and in fact I was able to pull in a lot of material for the January issue. I feel if we can get back to setting these issues up a lot earlier than we currently are, we'll be able to negotiate around the tendency of the managing editor to tinker with things and greatly offset the schedules. That might have to wait until we have a full crew again. Busy winter, this may turn out to be. At least it's an employed one. And as the soon-to-depart employee confided in me, "You're gonna have no problem. We know a lot of people in this industry. You're in." Hopefully not something I need immediately, but I did give her my personal email address so we can stay in touch.

Still, this last day of the week wasn't without further twists. The managing editor has been paranoid about licensing, and she sent a letter requesting rights to run a chart to one of our story sources for the December issue. The source freaked out and denied us permission to run the chart. For this article, it subtracts the same sort of structure as removing the actual road from the George Washington Bridge might. The group's artist had already scanned, retouched, and placed this piece, amid laying out the year-end publication ensnaring my boss — in essence, he was doing two issues this month. He was blissfully unaware of this, having taken Friday off. I dread his reaction upon arrival tomorrow.

By Friday night, I was looking forward to an idle weekend. Or at least a weekend that followed my own schedule, which I had in spades. I needed to begin prepping for a Christmas party next month. I also had to grab a gift and card for my mother's birthday today. The day went well. I hit the gym shortly after the opening and had a fine 30-minute stroll on the elliptical trainer and hit my abs (or at least the region of my abs, which are in there somewhere, I suspect). Chores went well and were limited to my town, which at least afforded me the privilege of walking through the chill fall air to get them done. I headed down to the Edgewater Whole Foods to secure a box of Seventh Generation dishwashing powder with one of several coupons kindly provided by their customer relations point person.

New York City lies just across the river from that Whole Foods location, and I sat for a while regarding the apartments of the Upper West Side, Columbia University, and, more distant, the rise of Midtown's skyscrapers. I do miss working there, even if I understand how much the commute took out of my daily life. Fortunately, tourism has become considerably easier: New Jersey Transit now runs more trains to Secaucus and Hoboken on our local line, not only on weekends, but inbound late on weekdays. Now catching a weekend show or attending an evening event doesn't require negotiating rush-hour traffic to get to Hoboken, and then the accompanying parking nightmare . . . just catch the late train on a weekday, or any of them on the weekend, and you're all set. I'm still getting used to hearing trains pass my window on Saturdays and Sundays, but I'm sure they'll prove valuable as long as I'm living in this area. Getting my weekend dose of the city is now as easy as buying a couple of tickets. Very exciting.

As evening fell, I hit the Blockbuster for a movie. I'm all but committed to securing a Netflix account. Blockbuster is sorely lacking. I did manage to find the film I wanted, Untergang (a 2004 German film about the last days in the Führerbunker, as seen through the eyes of Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge), which turned out to be very good (aside from three minor-to-moderate historical inaccuracies that someone who hadn't recently reread The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and who wasn't an anal former Jeopardy! winner, might not have picked up). But for them not to have any Family Guy discs aside from the last season — not even the first season, monstrous sales of which were the trigger for getting the show back on the air — or the first season of Venture Bros. marked this place as no longer suitable for my erratic video needs. If I can justify the monthly outlay against the films I actually want to see (and there are a lot; I've shaded my theatergoing way back in the past 18 months, because it's seemingly still illegal to shoot movie-house cellphone users in the back of the head), I'll sign up.

So that gets us to today. The three days of next week's work week will be, er, interesting. I am taking it one task at a time; I just need to complete the work that had me frustrated on Friday, and then I'll just assist my boss in anything I can do . . . assuming, of course, she can extricate herself from the year-end thing she's been tangling with reluctantly, instead of the December issue. I don't have any significant holiday travel to worry about next weekend, just cleaning and party planning. Assuming the art director doesn't go after the managing editor — who is scheduled to be up here tomorrow and Tuesday — because of the art swap. Then you might hear about my office on the news.

Rambling(s) About the Home Base

UNLIKE MANY OF MY fellow Tri-Staters, I tend to spend Memorial and Labor Days close to home. Furthest I usually go is to a friend's house for a cookout, or perhaps the local malls if a household need coincides with a sale. This stems from my loathing of stand-still traffic.

I am a veteran of yearly childhood trips with my parents to the Jersey Shore and countless weekend transits across the George Washington Bridge to visit my grandparents. I've therefore done my time sitting in bumper-to-bumper shore and Yankees traffic. I could paint from memory a portait of the white knuckles of my father, wrapped around a steering wheel. All that might vary would be the backdrop: the ominous rise of the Driscoll Bridge, abandoned tenements as viewed from the Cross Bronx Expressway, or one of the many tollbooth bottlenecks along the Garden State Parkway. Perhaps a whiff of exhaust to lend a realistic air.

I broke my rule once. I took Friday before Labor Day off to go to Foxwoods. Even hitting the road at 2:00 p.m. wasn't early enough to prevent me from becoming embedded in a matrix of slow-moving vehicles. Running narratives on the overhanging LED road signs told of delays through all urban chokepoints of the Connecticut Turnpike. A dedicated degenerate can make the Foxwoods Run at dawn in just 2 hours with no Imperial entanglements. Not so that Friday. It was damn near six when I rolled onto the Happy Punting Grounds. For the record, I lost. To quote the immortal Rodney Dangerfield, "I shoulda stayed at home and played with myself!"

Now, no more. Out to Rockaway along 80 for a BBQ, sure. Down to Hoboken to harass the mighty Billhouse in his riverside fastness, absolutely, especially now that Bergen County will run weekend trains. Other than that, these long weekends tend to be self-directed. Good targets for raising a mighty mass of pasta sauce or chili with the aid of the kitchen spirits (or failing that, the spirits in the liquor cabinet).

Yesterday came to a rolling start . . . a slow one. The usual poker game went off on Wednesday instead of Thursday, because the host had plans to participate in his office fantasy football draft on Thursday. With a short table looming, I joined in to get the minimum number of players for a decent game. (Playing hold'em with six or fewer people is a discipline in and of itself and not to everyone's liking.) The evening ran long, something I hadn't done routinely since being unemployed. I stumbled through Thursday in a daze, with Friday being little better. So Saturday I paid the piper.

I crept out of bed much later than planned. Although I got over to the gym and put in 40 good minutes on the aerobic machines, I hadn't been there since Wednesday morning, and I could feel the sluggish muscles protesting even then my planned return in the afternoon to lift. After a couple of hours at home reading in the sweet Saturday sun, I was inclined to agree. My engine was clicking on empty, possibly because of the lack of exercise in the previous two days, and the poor nutrition I pursued on Thursday in my semiconscious state.

By late afternoon, I felt ready for a nap. Uncharacteristic. Typically when I feel like this, I ought to just go to sleep and just call the rest of the day a wash. In past cases like this, I have slept for 14 hours straight. I spend most attempts at napping for the usual hour or half-hour trying to fall asleep. When I "wake up" from these naps, I usually feel worse: fatigued, frustrated, and washed out, like an overbleached T-shirt. I felt I was paying the piper on the late Wednesday and crummy nutrition since then, so I tried it out.

This experience was no different. I roused myself an hour later from fitful fading in and out, and shuffled out of the bedroom, moving like a hypoglycemic septuagenarian, feeling stupid for having backed myself into this corner on such a gorgeous day. Yeah, I had been outside for a good stretch, but I felt like I hadn't done anything. This from someone who fences off what vacation and personal time he gets from the encroachment of work with miserly fervor. Now I felt even more tired than before the nap . . . with a gnawing hunger and a touch of a caffeine headache to boot.

Fuck this, I thought, it's time to get out of this furniture-filled mausoleum. So I showered again, dressed, and boomed over to the Blue Moon Mexican joint a couple of towns north. I briefly considered Friendly's, but thought the impact of grease and sugar on my depleted carcass would just take me from one worn-out feeling to another when the fat and glucose highs crapped out. The Mex grub at Blue Moon is fairly healthful as that cuisine goes. Well, except for their Buffalo wings, but I had no intention of demolishing a plate of those that afternoon. Maybe well into the football season, as I did during one Jets game, stripping wing after wing from the end of the deserted bar one December as the big screen depicted Herman Edwards suffering one of his last defeats in green and white. But not now.

One chicken quesadilla and two Diet Cokes later, I felt like Popeye after clearcutting a spinach field. Simple enough solution to the problem, eh? I felt peppy enough to cut over to 9W and head south to the Edgewater Whole Foods.

So that's how Saturday went. The lessons concern both food and evening divertiments. For one, I feel the Thursday poker nights can no longer go much past midnight for me anymore. On the weekends, sure; in fact, plans are afoot for an evening of hold'em tonight. But I have all of Monday to recover. Not so Thursday, or Wednesday as was the case last week. Maybe I'm taking on a feline cast to my sleep habits. Tacking an extra hour or so on might be the thing. As for poker night, I can try cutting it off "early." After about 1:00, unless I'm up big and juiced on adrenaline, I'm basically treading water, and there's no way my judgment is as sharp. This affects driving as well as poker, surely with more dire consequences for an error; and the need to stop for Dunkin Donuts on the way home does me no physical favors. If the need for an extended binge presents itself, as winter approaches the weekend rates on AC motels and even some of the casino hotels will drop; I can shack up, sleep off the late night, and motor home with a clear head and an empty road.

And of course that brings me to food. My dining habits were too heavy with simple carbs and deli food on Thursday and Friday to allow a decent recovery either from the workout or the late night. I've had great success with all meals but dinner in the past several weeks. I bring lunch and snacks like fruit, healthful nuts, or homemade protein "bars" to work, so my dose is fairly evenly titrated. Once I get home, unless I've got chili or something like that cued up, my discipline wanders . . . in many cases to some of the instant and less beneficial choices at the Trader Joe's next door. That place is a trove of inexpensive nutrition, but there's still a fair amount of crap, and I can't rely on that unless I want the work I do at the gym during the morning to be undone at night. Preparing some easily reheated protein-based food ahead of time, plus fresh veggies, or even a second complex-carb-based breakfast or an omelet if I haven't gone the egg route that day yet, is a better way to go.

So those are the two course corrections I have set for the fall as it washes across the area in a pageant of color and crisp nights. For the rest of today, I believe another stretch of peaceful reading and WFMU listening on my complex lawn is in order, then a run over to the gym for a session of twisting and lifting and such. When football season returns for true, my Sunday afternoon watch-and-cycle routine will as well, so time to get some two-a-days of my own in. From there, dinner with the family, possibly followed by a round of hold'em after sundown, when the gambling vampires ride free. As for Monday, I shall celebrate that Labor Day with enlightened self-interest . . . but close to home.

Hurricane Schizohedron Destroys Tons of Apartment Clutter

INSPIRED BY A SPATE of recent posts on personal finance/simple living blogs about the horrors of clutter, I have begun sweeping the decks with greater industry than I've shown in months. Although I successfully dump junk mail into the shredder within minutes of its arrival (unless it's not personalized, in which case it just goes in the trash outside the front door), there were a few feet of dead files and defunct paper in closets and file cabinets that no longer needed to exist.

Previous attempts to purge this crap were sidetracked by the twin scourges of sentiment and nostalgia. Both are fatal to a clutter-free domicile or workstation. There's only one type of love you should have for academic papers from 15 years ago, yellowed newspaper clippings long since made available on the Internet, letters from estranged friends, or clothing that you wouldn't wear even if you could fit into it: tough love.

I wanted to walk a straight line across my bedroom without what my pal Felix once referred to as "crap reefs" impeding my progress. When I'm beelining to the john in the dark at five in the morning, the last thing I need to find underfoot is a pile of hangers or a mound of unpaired socks. I wanted to face facts about the houseplants from the salt mine that were slowly dying, and free up room for thriving organisms of the human species to congregate. I wanted to weed my book collection of anything I hadn't touched in a decade and had no plans ever to pick up again. I wanted, in the style of TLC clutter-buster and author of It's All Too Much, to free up the mindshare and time that maintaining, moving, and negotiating all of this clutter was costing me.

I set a gradual process. I chose small goals. The filing cabinet was first. One folder per night. I selected my "A" folder one night before bed, instead of some reading material, and began making two piles of paper. The shredder would claim one of them. With only one folder to clean out, there was far less risk of my getting absorbed in some reading material and lose my momentum. I dug in my heels at sentiment, trusting my memory to recall the good things such-and-such a cartoon, article, or note had brought me. The shredding pile outweighed the remainder. A good start.

After getting a running start on the alphabet, I used some of my copious free time in the early evening to attack the kitchen. I had scored a huge success months ago by dumping what must have been 30 of those plastic 32-oz. yogurt tubs. I suppose I imagined using these as planters; indeed, I have some rubber plant clippings and syngonium sprouts growing out of them. But the number I was storing was sufficient to start a pot farm. Not looking forward to a stay in Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, I've not availed myself of that moneymaking horticultural career path.

Now, while examining the cabinets above my fridge (and a side note here; with half of my complex occupied by elderly women who can barely stand straight, how the hell are they ever gonna reach these fucking things if I can barely get to them from a chair?), I discovered that I had never chucked the lids from all of these yogurt containers. I had a teetering tower of lids in the back of the cabinet. Absurd. Out they went. Out, too, went a clutch of expired spice jars, a tube of instant rice I recall purchasing with a coupon a few months after I moved in, a half-bag of buckwheat flour, and a few more items I no longer wanted. I found a few more sealed, edible foodstuffs that will go out to the next food drive I spot.

Next on the block was a pile of plasticware: trays, those covered Versatainer things, and big bowls, all rescued from the saltmine. My previous office had frequent catering service, sometimes for visiting professionals who might be wooed with food to stock our books in their school libraries, other times by managers running out their quarterly budgets by buying themselves and their fellow suits sandwiches and snacks. The food came in the Versatainers and on heavy plastic trays or in bowls that uniformly got thrown away. This waste disgusted me, so I took the opportunity to stock my own pantry with enough plasticware to accommodate chips for the poker crowd or desserts for the holiday-party gang.

Well, I got a little overzealous. I must've rescued about a dozen each of the small and large covered containers, about 10 trays and bowls, and a stack of aluminum trays from previous Sterno setups. Unless I was planning on feeding the entire complex, and sending half of them home with a week's worth of leftovers, I didn't need all of this shit. So I took half of the Versatainers over to my parents' place and offered them as many as they wanted, and recycled those that they didn't. The trays and tinfoil shit just went into the trash. I can now see the wall behind the rack on which they sat, and my cabinets are shockingly free and ready to hold only what needs to be held — which, considering I was able to survive without using every container in the house, may simply be nothing at all.

Back to the bedroom. The shelf over my clothing rack was groaning with surplus matter. I snatched up a huge sheaf of papers and began sorting. It turned out to be a pile of my college papers. Digging through called to mind the many nights and weekend I had labored, spreading open three or four books at a time as I typed notes into my Mac SE/30, then holding my ears as the print head of my ImageWriter II screeched out undergraduate wisdom at a pokey pace. Doing these papers taught me how to organize, write and think. The skills thus acquired, the papers themselves could go the way of all things. For the most part I avoided reading the professors' comments on the work as I dropped the vast majority of them into my shredder. I was stunned, though, to see again how much some of them had written. It's tough to imagine any overworked academic, himself or herself pounding out prose to fulfill their own tenure, having the time to scribe a few pointers or compliments above and beyond the letter grade across the back of a paper. Like the act of writing the work, I had benefitted long ago from their compliments, critiques, and written wisdom. I had space for them in my mind; I no longer needed them in my apartment.

The job's not done yet. In slicing the labor into small bouts of productivity, it'll take many weeks to get this place as far down to the walls and rugs as I can make it. With more time during the day to do it, now that I work closer to the joint, and with being free of the need to maintain or ever move this shit to another apartment, the work is its own reward. Keeping the crap from building up again will be an ongoing process, but seeing this place in a state of minimal, easily maintained grace will support me in that quest.

And if I can apply that logic to my fat ass, well, that's like winning two wars with the same secret weapon.

Exhaustion Physical and Mental

I AM TIRED. No, not the lassitude of a recumbent emperor who has lost interest in the scrambles of his courtiers. I'm talking a molecular weariness in mind and body. A reckoning surely is at hand, most likely with my bed.

It's been a series of late nights. Saturday, the excellent Ratatosk hosted a boardgame night. Another member of the game gang and Amy joined us for dinner, and then the evening turned to saving the world in a harrowing round of Arkham Horror. Despite our best efforts, too many gates opened amid the misty hills and shadowed gambrels of this mythical Lovecraftian town, and Azathoth, the blind idiot god seething at the center of the universe, impinged upon our dimension and cast Earth into a doom of shrieking madness.

Midnight coffee and cookies took the edge off.

I arose late on Sunday. I had gotten Hellboy from the video store, and about halfway through, my friend M. called. She has been sending me pages of her graduate thesis to proofread, and she is under severe time and work pressure with final projects for two other classes competing for her attention. She explained how she was running into problems with some of the older art she had color corrected some time ago. I'm less skilled than she is at Photoshop (don't tell my future employers that), but more important than my technical help was my just listening. I told her how cohesive her work thus far had been, how I was able to understand her hypothesis, and that the prototype she had commissioned would put her far ahead of her competition in the class. I encouraged M. to take a moment to write down her remaining tasks. She reported having trouble focusing from lack of sleep and the stress, but I know she works well from a hard list, so I advocated drawing one up. She apologized several times for interrupting the film, but I wanted to make sure she knew she was doing solid work. She was an excellent supervisor and coworker when we were one cube apart, so letting her know how much she rocks is the least I could do.

I was surprised to see the time when I hung up. I left the DVD for Monday night and hit the hay. I had plans for the morning. M. was going to slide me some more proof PDFs to review. I had a date at WFMU to help get the Marathon mailing out. I actually reviewed one PDF before sleeping, then finished a couple more as the morning sun streamed through my window.

I took the train to Hoboken for the first time since March 30. I had forgotten how much individual train tickets cost. On past FMU visits, I merely used my monthly train pass on NJ Transit and the light rail system in Hudson County. I hung onto the receipts in case my taxes this year actually get itemized. (Normally I don't have enough individual charges to warrant it.)

I always enjoy pitching in at WFMU. I donate to the fundraising Marathon each year, but work often prevents me from donating my labors. Considering I'm much more free for the short term, I answered Volunteer Director Scott Williams's call for help in getting the massive mound of Marathon swag out the door. I appreciated the chance to help, and the opportunity to get the hell out of this apartment for a day.

I couldn't have picked a more beautiful one. It felt like late spring out, in stark contrast to the Monday prior, when the nor'easter was still ravaging the area. With my date at FMU not until 10:30, I got to Jersey City early and took a stroll through the lower leg of the new financial district. I sat on a riverside bench next to the massive Goldman Sachs tower and read the Wall Street Journal as Manhattan ground to full life in the distance. It was tough to concentrate on the paper with such a peerless view.

Work at WFMU was actually more physical than I had anticipated. The mailing comprised bumper stickers, T-shirts, and prizes (mostly CDs) given as mid-show prizes to lucky pledgers. It was the T-shirts that did me in. I learned how to fold a shirt properly, which required me to reach in ways I don't ordinarily reach. By the end of the evening, my lower back was surprisingly sore. The walk back to the train was more of a shuffle. Embarrassing.

I watched the second half of Hellboy after I ate dinner, and then chatted a little more with M. From the previous two days, my bedtime was artificially late, so I wasn't tired by the time I hung up. I read for a while, then finally dropped off.

I forced myself to get up at a normal time, because I had two teleconferences with the career counseling folks. One of them, on interviewing, was actually one of the best ones I've listened in on so far. The other, on starting one's own business, was like listening to a timeshare huckster. Good or less-than-good, both took time, and by 4:00 I was feeling drained.

But the fun wasn't over! Tuesday and Wednesday are gym days, so I got my arse in gear and trekked over. My back wasn't sore any more from yesterday — a good thing, because back muscles get hit today. Hit them I did. I pushed on all fronts, especially my back and biceps, and left the gym feeling like I'd emerged from a spin-dryer. Awesome.

I think I've got just enough oomph to get the DVD back to the store and do some laundry while watching Sunday's Sopranos. After that, I will drop like a dynamited chimney.

Punched Out Early

WITH A SLEET STORM raging across the area, immobilizing airports and glazing roads into skating rinks, I decided to head home on the first train out. My supervisor had taken the day off, I had completed all of the few tasks I had to perform in her absence, and I wasn't feeling that lucky coming up sevens on the train. Normally it blasts through everything, but tonight, I suspected I would be joined by half of New Jersey's commuting corps trying to flee home early. It being a Friday, few folks would need a lot of nudging to head home for the additional reason of getting ahead of a storm.

I've been fortunate enough not to have to leave work for illness midday all that often in my nearly 8 years with this firm. It's not as easy as my last job, which was a 25-minute automotive dash between work in Mahwah to home in Hackensack, with gas stations, bookstores, and other bathroom-equipped establishments all along Route 17 to backstop me mid-puke. In the city, you're at the mercy of bus and train schedules, and in the case of the bus, midday it's a milk run that makes Every. Goddamn. Stop. along the Palisades and down through the tainted fens of the northern Meadowlands even before it creeps with painful sloth through the lower armpit region of Bergen County. This is a joyous thrill-ride on a bouncing bus while succumbing to stomach flu.

I returned home today without delay or incident, and immediately felt like I had come home on a sick day. Ridiculous. Old instincts die hard. To counteract this feeling, I went out and cleaned off the car. Insane as this sounds, I have a trip to the gym planned for tomorrow morning. This might be done in whiteout conditions, if the wind kicks up. Right now it looks damn Christmas-y out. Tomorrow it's supposed to stay cold. It might be safer to trek to the gym on foot.

Burning Down the Apartment

THIS DAY WENT TO HELL early, but this evening I came close to bringing the flames right to my kitchen. Nothing like a visit from the town emergency crews to wake a body up, to say nothing of the rest of the building's residents.

I bailed early on work, having no work to do and not needing to stick around either to monitor the outsourcing gang or to search for a job. I was looking forward to dinner — not just the eatin', but the makin'. As part of my plan to eat more wisely, I had purchased some beautiful Empire chicken breasts at my local Trader Joe's. My plan was to grill these on my cast-iron stovetop grill, making at least four meals' worth of protein for my accelerated gym schedule.

For those who have never visited my apartment, its major flaw is a lack of ventilation. My apartment building is a hotel-style structure, in that I have one wall of windows, the other being contiguous with the central hallway. I have a floor fan and an air conditioner, but they only blow air around and into the apartment. The fan over my stove only filters fumes, and has no port to the outside. On those few occasions when I cook anything smoky, I have to be quick about it, lest I set off my apartment's smoke alarm.

Being aware of this, I halved the breasts lengthwise to make them thinner. I then brushed them with olive oil and sprinkled them with McCormick Lemon Pepper & Herb Grill Mates rub. I brushed the grill with oil as well, let it heat up, and dropped on the chicken. At their thickness, I figured 6 minutes on one side, 5 on the other, and they'd be done.

I got through the first 6 minutes with minimal fumes. The smoke began collecting during the second stretch, mostly from particles of the Grill Mates shake that were carbonizing rapidly. Although I had my floor fan aimed at the stove to carry any smoke away from my main hallway, I still got a complaint from my smoke alarm. I turned the chicken, then aimed the fan directly at the screaming disc on the ceiling. It quieted down. I turned back to the kitchen to find it billowing with smoke . . . which promptly sparked the smoke alarm again.

I dragged my stepladder under the box and pulled it down from the ceiling, hoping to disconnect it. No dice; even as I did so, I remembered it was wired into building current. I had a black wire going one way and a white wire going another and it was still BEEP BEEP BEEPing in my hand with my other hand clutching my ear which didn't do squat. . . . and by this time I could barely think straight from the alarm, which I would like to say explains the inscrutable burst of logic that motivated me to open my apartment door, after turning off the stove, to let the smoke vent into the hall. . . .

. . . where the building fire system began shrieking.

The building fire system, which is wired straight to the town fire department.

I ran back to the stove, double-checked the OFF status of the burners, tonged the chicken (which looked quite nice, actually) onto a plate, and dumped the still-smoldering grill into my oven. Then I called the list of local resident managers (ours just got canned, so we have a trio of backups from other, nearby buildings) to let someone know the company wasn't in imminent danger of losing an apartment building. By this point, the town fire alarm, sounding like an air-raid siren, was echoing across the landscape. I knew I'd have guests soon. I decided to go downstairs to let them know there was no danger — and then a knock came at my door.

It was one of our local policemen. I quickly assured him there was no fire and no damage, that it was just a cooking mishap. (I also thanked my lucky stars I hadn't hosted poker the previous night, and have a table full of professional plastic cards and high-denomination chips in great lovely incriminating stacks to explain.) He seemed relieved. I told him I was going to meet the firemen downstairs to let them know there was no emergency.

Outside, the chaos I had inadvertently wrought was in full swing. The average age of the residents here is about 66. My dear elderly neighbors, bent over canes, trunding along with walkers, were slowly making their way out of their respective lairs, shuffling in pairs as though they had chosen fire buddies upon moving in, making their pained way down the stairs . . . I felt so awful. I tried to say to them it was under control, that there was no danger, that it was just an idiot bachelor overreaching the limits of his cooking abilities, but they just dutifully kept descending the stairs.

Around 15 of my co-residents had already gathered in the lobby, and were milling about trying to decide whether it was a real fire or a false alarm. I told some of the more attentive ones the facts, relying on them to spread the news. At that moment, two firemen came in, casually dressed rather than fully garbed for an inferno, and I quickly told them the basics. I led them up to my pad, now slightly less smoky but at least getting no worse, while the strobes and sirens screamed in the halls and still more stunned residents poked their heads out to see what the ruckus was. I felt like crawling under the rug.

Two more firemen, these guys actually in the traditional suits, arrived on my floor from the opposite direction, and their cohorts confirmed there was no need to escalate matters to ladder-and-hose work. They checked out the area, made sure my windows were open and the air conditioner was on, and deemed the place under control. One guy went down to check if the stairwells were vented, which — if they were — would enable them to shut down the alarm. Fortunately, they were, and in a couple of minutes, as one guy advised the team on the truck to stand down, the mind-shattering shriek from the halls fell silent.

I should add that each time I encountered another fireman, I apologized profusely for being such an idiot and dragging them out for nothing. In turn, they all told me not to worry about it, that it was no problem, and that it happened all the time. (Not to me!) I assume they were just relieved to find no full-fledged fire in progress and no lives in jeopardy.

The cop who had arrived first took my name and number, just for reporting purposes; I hadn't committed a crime, though I joked I was guilty of aggravated crappy cooking. I also went downstairs to thank the rest of the firemen for arriving so swiftly and, one last time, apologize. As before, they shrugged it off. Considering we just lost nine children from the same family in the city to a horrific fire this weekend, a simple stove mishap on the part of a solitary retard must have been a joy to find. I wandered back up to my place, telling any neighbors I ran into that I was sorry. If only to spare my enduring embarrassment for the rest of my stay here, I hope some of them lose the details of today's events to senility.

Alone at last, I steamed some broccoli, dropped two pieces of chicken onto a plate with it, and ate.

And for all of the tsuris its creation evoked, that chicken was pretty damn good.

Crawling Into Henry Rollins's Head

I THINK MY OVERALL mood is dipping somewhat. Friday night and last night, my nightstand companion was the prose and poetry of Henry Rollins. I had consulted Do I Come Here Often? for his inspirational essay on weightlifting, "The Iron." From there, I read the rest of that book, and then found myself hip deep in See a Grown Man Cry/Now Watch Him Die and Black Coffee Blues. This indicates to me I'm brushing along the emotional walls somewhat.

I first became aware of Rollins when I saw some of his early, slender books of poetry during college at Newbury Comics. Not being into free verse, and not realizing his background, I did little more than skim the books and groove on the clever titles. It wasn't until 1994 that I dug a little deeper, aided by a then-new acquaintance at work who owned most of his works. When I got her a Rollins disc for Christmas, I made a friend. I subsequently borrowed from her, then bought for myself, all of his books, including the Black Flag tour diary Get in the Van. This from a guy who knew barely anything about punk rock and even less about Black Flag other than their contribution to the Repo Man soundtrack, "TV Party." This being the age before Wikipedia, indeed the dawn of wide public access to the Internet, I learned about Henry Rollins through his words before I understood his biography. A contemporary New York Times article filled in the blanks.

Since then, I've stayed current on this "aging alternative icon," as he described himself at Irving Plaza the first time I saw his spoken word show. I've enjoyed spotting him in unlikely cameos in films like The Getaway (as a cop!) and Heat (where he had the honor of being thrown through glass by Al Pacino). Knowing how lowly his origins were, anytime I saw Rollins sneaking into the Hollywood machine and making off with a bit of its lucre was a fist-pump moment. I have to admit, though, it's sometimes difficult to sqaure the kinetic, witty, self-effacing, no-bullshit raconteur of his spoken word gigs with the tortured, self-doubting, lonely warrior that huddles in subzero tour vans and dodges enemy fire while threading through the post-Apocalypse killing floor of LA.

It's the works that arise from the latter Henry, the one who truly lives only when he's performing, lifting, or diving into the grooves of some 40-year-old record, that I read when I get moody myself. I have little to bitch about, really. In no sense can I compare myself with a man who watched his best friend get his brains blown out. I find it easy sometimes to disappear into his nihilism, even as I know the words are products of his unique moods and mindset. And truth be told, his later works do contain celebratory moments of discovery and wonder, so it's not all darkness and black stretches between tour dates.

The question is, why am I seeking his work out? From what am I hiding? Why am I crawling into his words, as he might do the same with a Miles Davis or Thelonius Monk LP? I've embarked on a new job hunt, I've created a so-far successful workout schedule. The last thing I need to do is walk along Rollins's lonely footsteps when I need to be more extroverted than usual and get the hell out there in many different ways. Perhaps that's just it. I'm digging into the familiar. At least it's legal.

For a while, as I was returning the Rollins books to my shelves, I regarded the rest of the tomes forcing a deep bow in the top shelf, and decided, I can probably live without a lot of these. I can live a leaner life in ways other than just diet. I would give them to my friends, but they're in the same boat as I am, with a few walls of books each and possibly even more in storage. I don't want to have to screw around with shipping each time I sell these on eBay, so what I will do is hold some sort of cull-fest and drop the winnowed texts off at the library for sale or their own shelves.

That might also be part of it — shrugging off excess resources that don't serve my goals or further my relationships with my near and dear. Rollins followed a clean road through temptation across his touring career. Maybe I am attracted to this asceticism. Such considerations risk sounding hollow coming from a well-fed First Worlder. It doesn't mean I can't live more honestly, more simply, or more in touch with my deeper needs.

I'm fairly certain I won't find them in the documentation for someone else's life, though.