February 19th - June 30th, 2003.

June 30th, 2003 - Emmett gets up early, between 4am and 6am, every morning for a month. He stumbles downstairs in the dark, careful to preserve his night vision, and makes coffee guided by the sound of the water filling the reservoir and the crunch of his spoon in the dark, moist granules. With steaming cup in hand he makes his way to a chair by the fireplace, strikes a match and lights a fire. Then he just riffs for a few pages, examining the little rituals of everyday life in excruciating detail.

The book is A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker. I read it last week. It was ok. I enjoyed it, though I couldn't escape that feeling in the back of my brain, the one that says, "Shit, I could have written this." And depending on how you look at it (Baker did win a National Book Award two years ago), that's either a good thing or a bad thing.

Writer's envy aside though, what was most interesting about A Box of Matches was the subtext about beginnings, specifically the beginnings of days, but also the beginnings of marriages, of childhoods, even the beginnings of works of prose.

I'm not sure I'm up to discussing those more monumental beginnings in today's blog (I just don't know where to start ;-)), but I've been thinking a lot about the way I begin my days lately. Obviously I'm not getting up before dawn cracks to light a fire. I enjoy sleeping too much, and I don't have a fireplace.

But Baker talks specifically about good ways and bad ways to start days. He suggests that getting up after everyone else (as I do) and shuffling across the hall in your underwear (as I do) to check your e-mail and read the news (as I do), is an approach that dooms you to long days of discombobulation and stress. It's something about the immediate input of information and calls to action, and I can buy that. I often find myself stuck in front of the machine in the middle of the afternoon, unable to concentrate on work and unable to tear myself away to do something else.

Beginnings are difficult. If you don't start off on the right foot, you're wrong-footed all day. Baker's prescription is to remain blank as long as possible, allowing your body and brain to ease into consciousness gradually, to let your brain stumble and trip along its own path, until it's fully engaged and ready to take on bigger challenges. In theory this sounds pretty good, though I'm not sure it's always practical.

So I've resolved to experiment a little with my own mornings. Over the weekend I got up both days, grabbed my book (America's Best Short Stories - 2002) and went outside to read, sitting on a bench in the yard. That was pretty nice, but I found I was reluctant to stop reading, just as I might have been in front of the computer. Also, I have this problem where I feel more productive sitting in front of the monitor here, even if I'm just reading the day's headlines for a second time, than I do reading a work of literature, which is more like a leisure time activity, though in the end it's probably better for me as an aspiring writer. Anyway, reading in the yard is good, but maybe not the best in the long run, especially since the long run includes the onset of fall and then winter. I can't see myself pulling on boots and wool hat to read Frost in the frost, can you?

This morning I got up and did some yoga. I started with sun salutations, flowing series of poses that are supposed to get all of your muscles involved and get you stretched in nearly every direction. Then I did some twisting (the move that isn't included in the sun salutation) and some standing poses. After that I kipped out in relaxation pose to finish things off. In theory, relaxation pose is what you do to calm your body and mind. You lay there very still (it's also called corpse pose) and concentrate on your breathing, letting everything else fade away into and even out of the background.

Here's the problem. I have trouble relaxing. The reason I've gotten out of bed in the first place is that the little starter's pistol in my brain has gone off with a crack, and I've bolted out of the gate like a greyhound chasing a mechanized rabbit. I lay there on my yoga mat making to-do lists and composing the day's blog with a mental pen that is running out of ink and needs to be shaken after every fourth word just to get the pigment flowing again.

I'm not done with yoga yet, though. Relaxation takes time and practice. I'm going to try to go straight from mattress to mat rest every day this week, and see where I am then. I think regardless of what I do when I get up, the key is to be patient, to let the day come to me instead of attacking it like the dog barking after a squirrel.

I have a sneaking suspicion (a desperate hope actually) that being patient with the morning translates to being patient with other things too, like marriages, childhoods and works of prose. I'll let you know what I figure out.

June 27th, 2003 - Summer is hot. Cognitively I know this, and yet every year it catches me a little by surprise. I am sitting here at my desk, a dew settling on my upper lip, moisture forming at my temples. Am I sweating? What is this sweat? I'm not running right now. Why am I sweating? Has my typing become so vigorous that it now constitutes legitimate cardio-vascular exercise? Perhaps I'm on the verge of creating a new sport, extreme blogging. I am confused. I don't understand the weather here on your planet.

When I moved to New England I thought I was escaping the heat and humidity of my Alabama youth. I was thrilled about swapping sweat for snow. I am far more comfortable in the brisk and chilly, the kind of weather that encourages you to move, the kind of weather that reminds you you're alive and want to stay that way. The heat, on the other hand, makes me want learn that yoga trick where you slow your heart down to some reptilian pace and then I want to climb under a rock until the fall comes.

Well, ha ha. The joke's on me. Here in Boston, it's miserably cold in the winter and miserably hot in the summer. All the houses are old and bereft of central air (or proper heat for that matter). New Englanders, it seems, are meant to suffer year round. Perhaps it's a holdover from Puritan times when the general populace adhered to a mildly ascetic lifestyle in order to get just that little bit closer to their god.

In Alabama, at least the wacky Baptists and evangelical types have the good sense to chill every indoor space to goosebump raising temperatures and then spend their summers dashing from building to building in cars so hyper-charged on freon and cheap middle eastern gasoline that their christian god can only smile down from heaven knowing his chosen ones are beating down the heathen hordes through gross consumption of fossil fuels and a strong drive to conquer mother nature's seeming need to simmer them all to soft, meat-falling-off-the-bone tenderness. Can I get an Hallelujah?

I'm overreacting of course. These are only just the first few hot days of summer 2003. And they haven't even been that warm.

I remember a summer during college that was much, much hotter. I was living in a fifth floor walk-up with a window fan and a soaking wet sheet. Every night I'd lay naked and spread across my bed hoping and praying for sleep to come along and relieve me of a few minutes' suffering. During the daytime, when I wasn't at work, I'd go over to my friend Lauren's apartment and we'd sit in her living room letting ice cubes melt on our foreheads. In the evening we'd climb to the roof of her building and eat popsicles in the luke warm breeze.

Now at least Brittney and I have invested in a pair of environment-destroying, energy-devouring, single-room, air-conditioning units. We sleep in seventy degree comfort, and if I wasn't too lazy to go down to the basement and schlep the other one upstairs I could be typing in a gentler clime right now as well. My friend Thatcher, who lives in New York, assuages his guilt over running a unit in his bedroom by "purchasing" his electricity from a company that puts wind-generated juice into the New York power grid. Me, I just stew in the guilt (and the sultry summer heat), as any good Puritan would.

June 26th, 2003 - I've just been outside killin' weeds. I mixed up a toxic batch of Round Up, some over the counter poison for laying waste to swathes of dandelion and clover. I took it out front and worked my way down the sidewalk coating all the creepy, crawly, viney, sprouty, spreading weedlife with a thick mist of 'thanks for playing.'

Normally I'm pretty averse to spraying pesticides on the ground anywhere near human and animal life, but it's hot today and I was irritated by that, so I figured I'd save myself the hour of hard work and scraped nuckles that always comes from trying to clean up the front walk, and kill some stuff in the process. I only use the Round Up outside our fence because I don't want to come downstairs in the morning and find the dog frothing at the mouth. I like the dog, despite all the complaining I do about him.

In a way I feel bad for putting the kaibosh on the little weed fest going on out there. I mean, these are hearty plants, growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. They're survivors. In some ways they're the best nature has to offer. Who am I to end their little weed lives just because I don't like the straggly way they make the house look? Who am I to wield the spray bottle of death with such impunity?

Goddamnit! I'm the homeowner! I'm the King of the American Hill. I'm the sheriff on this here plot of land, and I'll point my gun at whomever and whatever I like!

I know I don't live in Southern California, but I can aspire to having the kind of over-manicured, over-watered parcel of dirt the denizens of that area cultivate, can't I? I can get up at 5:30 in the morning and fire up the weed whacker. I can deploy a whole squad of minimum wagers with blowers and mowers and trimmers and edgers. With a little gasoline, a little electricity and a whole lot of obsessive/compulsive disorder I can turn my 5,000 square feet of urban bliss into a miniature golf course with wind mills and giant clown heads. I can buy a soft serve ice cream machine and brew up some lemonade. I can charge admission, build my business, expand to the next town over and eventually charge Japanese tourists exhorbitant sums to drive tiny go-karts around tiny tracks ringed with old tires and crying children with ice cream dripping down their arms.

What I'm saying is: FROM DEATH SPRINGS LIFE. Today those weeds are photosynthesizing their last bits of chlorophyll. Tomorrow I will birth a nation-state of quaint, American theme parks featuring all the great contributions of this grand culture of ours. We'll have candle pin bowling and hot dogs, horseshoe pits and funnel cakes. I'll sell Americana right back to the people I bought it from at twice the price. With Martha Stewart out of my way I can't be stopped!

June 25th, 2003 - Another trip to see Joe the barber. This time I noticed that he had a series of fairly amateurish paintings of sports scenes displayed on one wall of the shop. There was a baseball player sliding into home plate and being tagged out. There was a boxer, "some kid outta Connecticut," standing over his knocked-out opponent. There was another of Ted Williams and one of Rocky Marciano.

I asked about them, and Joe told me that an "old timer" did them, a guy that lived just around the corner. Apparently the guy had always painted, but then after he retired he started turning these things out regularly, up until he went blind of course. "He just died," Joe said, "what was it? I guess about a year and half ago."

It puzzled me, how a year-and-a-half ago could constitute "just." I had expected him to say last month or something, which would have dove-tailed nicely with the detail about the guy going blind. Joe delivers tragedy pretty easily. Since he's been cutting many of the same heads of hair for thirty years he knows a lot of people who are near the front of the line for death. This is not the first time he's told me about a guy that "used to come in."

But then I guess that's why the painter's demise seemed so recent to him. Spending thirty years in one spot, cutting, trimming and combing over must drag time to a near stop. Joe must be close to converting to geological time. He's been waiting for Godot in that shop. He's been so much the same for so long, and so many kids have become men in his chair, and so many man have passed on from his chair, that time might be flowing forwards or backwards in his mind. By this reckoning Vincent van Red Sox Fan is either newly passed or due to walk through the door with a fresh canvas under his arm.

And it reminded me of something my yoga teacher said to me once (yes, I realize how that sounds). He said something like, finding meaning in life is about freeing yourself of the temporal constraints of your existence and making connections to the eternal. Honestly I figured this was just wacky, new age, feel-good bullshit at the time. I mean, I could see his point theoretically, but it sounded like a line out of 'Enlightenment for Dummies.'

But listening to Joe talk about this guy and seeing the smile on his face made me think there might be something to it, that maybe there amid the wood panelling and Clubman Talc there was some small bit of enlightenment waiting to be had.

And then, just as I was rattling out of the station on some rusty old train of thought headed for a slack jaw and a ten thousand yard stare, Joe broke the silence and said, "So, what'll it be today?"

June 24th, 2003 - There is a book on the back of the toilet, 'Craving for Swan' by Andrei Codrescu. For those of you unfamiliar with Codrescu, he's a Romanian poet who emigrated to this country twenty or thirty years ago and set about teaching at various universities in New Orleans and San Francisco and Minneapolis and Baltimore. He also runs the journal, 'Exquisite Corpse,' though if you know him, it's likely from the commentaries he does on NPR's 'All Things Considered.' That's where I first heard him spinning yarns about his adopted homeland and waxing poetic, quite literally, on our notions of space, time and death, all with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

'Craving for Swan,' which now lists slightly to the left in its spine after months of standing off balance on the back of the toilet tank, is a collection of Codrescu's commentaries, neat one and two page rants that he once read on-air and I now read on-porcelain.

For obvious reasons of length and self-containment these little nuggets of prose make perfect reading faire for the morning movement. I usually read two or three of them a day, depending on things I won't go into detail about here.

And it strikes me that a book like that is very much like a blog, except it's not on-line and the commentaries aren't bound by any sort of chronology. OK. So I guess it's not much like a blog, but I read them the same way I read my friends' blogs, and what I like about Codrescu's commentaries is exactly what I think makes good blogs good.

They're personal without being a real diary, which would, of course, be creepy. They try to connect the smaller dots in his life with the larger dots of shared experience. They're funny, but sometimes very sad. They're well written. And above all, they're short and to the point.

And this is the part where I apologize, because really what I'm striving for in my blog is to approximate the experience of reading Codrescu, to be clever and engaging and personal and funny all at once. And as it turns out there's a reason they put him on 'All Things Considered' and put me on a URL long enough to ensure only friends, family and the tragically lost happen by.

Right. The apology. I'm sorry friend. I'm sorry dad. I'm sorry random stranger who got here by clicking a link on the site of someone who knows me and linked to me out of loyalty or pity or the need to look like they too had friends on-line. I've tried to be clever and I've tried to be funny and once or twice I think I might have approximated these, but by and large I've missed the mark. And so I'm sorry.

But don't think this is some sort of sad, I'm-not-good-at-it-so-I'm-quitting kind of thing. Oh no. There's so much more where this came from. What is it the folk singer says in that Monty Python skit? "All my life I've suffered for my art. Now it's your turn." Well, yeah. That's what's going on here. You better get another cup of coffee because I'm not nearly finished yet.

In the movie I saw the other night, Stone Reader (which, by the way, my mother would absolutely love...did you get that Mom?), this guy Bruce Dobler, a semi-famous writer who teaches at Pitt, is talking about his time at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, specifically the first year when he studied with William Cotter Murray. I guess Dobler moved out to Iowa with his wife and kids to do the grad school thing and, like an aspiring, young writer, poured all his sweat and anguish into the work he submitted to Murray only to receive the kind of brusque, stinging criticism that crushes spirits and sweeps them, without ceremony, under the closest rug.

At the end of the year Dobler gets what qualifies as high praise from Murray who assesses his latest bit of scribbling and says something like, 'this is passable. It's almost professional writing.' Dobler, disconsolate and thinking about giving up sits there for a minute and then Murray says, "Look Bruce, why don't you just once try to write something that means a god damn thing to you, something you care about."

I'm not sure that has anything to do with anything I might be going through at the moment, or if it's just a funny scene in a movie I saw. I guess I'd like to believe I'm getting somewhere, that writing about what I read on the toilet constitutes legitimate work and that this blog is somehow a yellow brick road to writerly success.

I do know that if you were reading this on the toilet right now, one of your feet would be asleep. I've learned that much from Codrescu. I can tell you that.

June 23rd, 2003 - Last night in Kendall Square I locked my keys in my truck, walked blithely into the movie theater, watched a two-and-a-half-hour documentary about a book that no one's ever read, sat through the credits, stumbled, bleary-eyed up the ramp to the exit, patted myself down in search of the still-dangling-from-the-ignition keys, bolted back into the theater to search the sticky floor, then slowly and resignedly shuffled back out to the parking garage where the awful truth was confirmed.

A quick call to my lovely wife established both that it was an inconvenient time for a brain fart and also that it was going to be forty-five minutes before she could swing by to drop off her spare key. Luckily, I had a book with me.

I sat down to read.

I like to read. In fact, the documentary I had just seen and really enjoyed, Stone Reader, is about the love of books and the power of the creative process. Also, I was alone and it's always good to have a book when you're alone at the movies so you don't spend too much time thinking all the kissing couples and giggling groups in the seats around you are stealing glances at the pathetic, lonely guy...even though I almost never feel lonely...really.

Anyway I read, or did my best to read, because honestly I was a little bit worked up over the fact that I had locked my keys in my truck. I mean, this is a stupid thing do, isn't it? And it wasn't the first time I've done it.

Without getting into a much longer story, let me say that I owe over a decade of bliss with my wife to an unfortunate lapse with a set of keys in a long-term parking lot in St. Mary's, Georgia, and since then I've locked the keys in the truck two other times. So that's four times total in an eleven year span. That's too much, right?

So I'm sitting there on the bench by the pay phone in the theater, half reading this short story by E.L. Doctorow and half coming to terms with the fact that I might just be a little absent minded. I mean, here's the thing. On the way down to Kendall Square one of my windshield wipers was coming apart, and since it was raining pretty heavily I told myself I had better fix it right when I got out of the truck to avoid absolutely certainly forgetting to do so when I got back in to drive home in the relentless downpour.

And joy of joys I remembered to fix the wiper when I got out. But in this remembering there was a small forgetting. See, I know that I sometimes lock myself out of my truck, so I've gotten in the habit of patting myself down before I push the little plastic lock tab down prior to slamming the door. It's a ritual. This time however I was expending so much mental effort on remembering to slide the rubber blade of the wiper back down onto the metal cartridge on the passenger side, that I failed to perform the dance of the dangling keys and set into motion the series of events recounted above.

CRAP.

And so I sat and read and thought, and the conclusion I reached, other than the end of the story (the guy gets the girl by the way), was that sometimes there just isn't space in my brain for all the thoughts that want to live there. It's like the housing market in Manhatten. So many thoughts want to live in my brain that almost never sleeps, and almost all of them manage to cram themselves into impossibly-small, even-more-impossibly-expensive spaces, but sometimes there are a few thoughts who just give up and move to New Jersey and then my keys are dangling in my ignition and I'm sitting on some ridiculous, stainless steel bench reading and thinking and I guess I can admit to you now, eavesdropping on the goateed boy and his heavily accented date on the next bench over.

I was also trying to recall a quote, displayed at some point during the film I'd just watched, from Milan Kundera. It was something about memory destroying the past as in, memory never actually getting the past correctly, but rather always revising and creating a new past or even present through some false mental mechanism. I had the idea that my memory of locking the keys in the truck, the need to fix the wiper, the fear of sitting alone in a theater and the heavy weight of trying to make some sense of the psycho babble of a strange Czech man twice my age, might have contributed to this predicament. In fact, I had a cold fear grab me for half-a-sec, a fear that I wasn't entirely in control of what I was doing, that my thoughts were all jumbled and incoherent and that I was fooling myself by trusting that there was rhyme or reason to the world in the first place. I mean how else can you explain the fact that I just left the keys in the ignition and walked away?

Then the chic on the next bench said something and giggled and I came back to earth and E.L. Doctorow and a subtle but persistent need to pee.

When Brittney drove up and gave me her sympathetic smile I knew everything was ok. I drove home with the window open. I'm more alert that way.

June 18th, 2003 - As you might be aware, much of the work I do involves interviewing athletes and cobbling together news items of interest from the bits and pieces of semi-articulate babble they produce. These men and women have a language all their own which consists of a littany of trite little expressions such as 'we've got to get back to basics' and 'we've just got to get back to practice, work harder and come out ready for next week' and 'the ball wasn't bouncing our way, but sometimes you've got to create your own luck.' I call this semaphore of grunts and clucks 'athlete speak.'

For those of you not familiar with the jargon of pro sports I refer you to 'sales speak,' that lexicon of smarm employed by telemarketers, door-to-door and car salespeople. This perplexing patois consists of mis-used expressions such as 'win-win situation,' 'no-brainer,' 'quality, pre-owned' and 'upfront savings.' Are you with me?

One of the colloquialisms of athlete speak that I most detest is 'take it to the next level,' as in "This was a good win here tonight. Everyone is really stepping up and taking it to the next level." Now obviously there are no levels. The team wasn't playing at a five and then magically, through heart-rending effort and shear force of will achieve the six that put them over the proverbial top. 'Taking it to the next level' is just an overblown way of saying 'doing better,' as in "We were behind, but then we started [doing better] and won the game."

I'm over-reacting of course. I'm expecting too much of people who are paid to chase balls for a living. I'm being one of those snotty writer-types who takes issue with people who aren't as obsessed with grammar and usage and vocabulary as I am. I confess. You got me. Where do I pay my fine?

I can see that a half-naked athlete, dog tired after a couple hours of exertion and let's be honest, not in possession of the kind of intellectual drive that might make them, just as an example, a gastroenterologist in the first place, shouldn't be expected to spin webs of metaphor and simile just to say that the team sucked today and they sure as hell better do something quickly because they're scheduled for another prime time beating next weekend. We should let our brawn be brawny, and not expect a lot of brains.

To be fair, more than a few of the athletes I've worked with are quite intelligent and articulate and thoughtful. I am generalizing to make a point. Writers do this. It's because more often than not we've got an agenda we're pushing under the guise of objective analysis. But I digress.

I wouldn't be all flamin' pissed off about some sweaty half-wit making messy with the English language if I hadn't just seen the dire consequences of allowing athlete speak to continue unabated. I was transcribing an interview I did recently with an esteemed gastroenterologist (no kidding), when I came across a section where, speaking about the technical advances in the equipment used to measure the esophageal pH levels in patients with gastro esophageal reflux disease (GERD) she says, "We felt it was time to take it to the next level here at the hospital, and really get ahead of the curve in terms of gastroenterology."

The answer was not, as it turns out, to purchase a quality, pre-owned nasal pH catheter with matching receiver. In light of recent advances in transducers outfitted for transmission of pH data that wouldn't have been a win-win situation for the hospital. Getting the latest and greatest instead was a real no-brainer.

June 17th, 2003 - The other day Brittney was watching this movie about a woman living in Nova Scotia in the '40s. She was falling in love with some big, bearded Scottish guy and her mother was on her case non-stop about ruining her life. The Scottish guy played the bagpipes, which I think is very cool, and the main character was played by Helena Bonham Carter, who is as cute as a tiny, English button.

Anyway, I only caught about ten minutes of this film, but there was this one scene where the Scottish guy comes and serenades her with some lovely, lilting little ditty about love lost and found again, and I wasn't really listening to the words, but the guy sang it so nicely. Just the sound of it was charming and sweet. For a moment it made me wish (a wish I've had for a long, long time) that I could sing like that.

The truth is I would trade any two of my fairly modest talents for the ability to sing well. I would gladly offer up good-at-pruning-bushes AND ability-to-charm-the-elderly in exchange for sings-passably. Instead I've got a voice as sweet as sawdust. Luckily, my ear is sharp enough to know that most of the time I only flirt with being in key, otherwise I might victimize innocent standersby with kicked dog renditions of pop favorites like Happy Birthday and Jingle Bells.

The truth is, I tried. I sang in a couple of bands in college. They were three-chord punk bands with songs that lasted only slightly longer than sneezes. I yelled a lot. I warbled intentionally. I was bad.

And I'm half Welsh for chrissakes! I'm genetically predisposed to euphony, to choir participation and impromptu crooning. My father often bursts into song as he putters around the house on a Sunday morning. He can carry a tune. What happened to me? Perhaps the answer is in my mother's steadfast silence. Maybe it's that part of me that was born in New Jersey. Like the Garden State's most famous pop icons Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, I CAN'T SING.

And all this flashed through my mind as this saskwatch looking Scot serenaded his sweet little Helena Bonham Carter. Jealousy wracked my bones. A deep yearning to be someone else, a man of voice, settled in my stomach.

And then it was gone.

If I could sing well, I realized, I'd be doing it all the bloody time. I'd be schlepping around the countryside trying to make it as a singer and songwriter, a minstrel, a jester. This is not a life I wish for, but had I the vocal prowess to pull it off, it's one I would most certainly pursue.

So there it is. I've been saved a hard life on the road by the simple fact that I haven't the talent to sing. I could have ended up like Willie Nelson, ugly, bearded and owing a hell of a lot of back taxes, but my inability to spit out even the simplest harmony has saved me.

My tunelessness is actually an adaptation to my environment. I am reminded of those bugs whose sole defense against a world of predators is the ability to generate an unholy stink, a smell that says, 'guess what's not for breakfast.' I'm kind of like that I guess, but with a slightly better smell. Only slightly though.

June 16th, 2003 - Is it a good idea to try to suppress bad moods? I guess I've always tried, when finding myself a bit crabby, to somehow shake it off. Of course, a 'bit crabby' doesn't always adequately express the depth of the feeling, does it? Sometimes I'm so inexplicably sour I feel I just brushed my teeth and rinsed with OJ. Sometimes I absolutely seethe with non-specific anger, my knee bouncing under the desk, tapping out the Morse Code for S-T-A-Y-T-H-E-H-E-L-L-A-W-A-Y.

Lately, when confronted with one of these moods, I find it best to seek solitude, not least of all because I'm likely to say something needlessly brusque to someone who is, after all, really only trying to cheer me up. The other important reason for being alone at such times is that other humans, caught in the shadow of my dark mood, often become the focus of my anger rather than the salve, which isn't really fair now is it?

Tonight I scrupulously avoided my wife. I mowed the lawn, trimmed the hedges, plied the dog with flea and tick treatment, cut his nails, gave him a heart worm pill, finished a magazine piece I was working on and came here to blog. All this after returning from the gym.

Brittney has been on the couch most of the evening, reclined, with remote control at the ready. The dog has wisely chosen to take up his post on the other couch.

And I'm not quite back to my normal self yet either. I see a long, hot shower and my nose in a book before the night's over. Little Orphan Annie said tomorrow was only a day away. The little bitch better be right.

June 15th, 2003 - On Friday we went to Brittney's grandfather's funeral out in Western Mass. Before the cemetary there was a mass, for which we arrived about half an hour early. We stood out on the front steps of the church watching the rain pour down and bracing ourselves for a day of emotional strain.

Eventually the hearse pulled up and the men from the funeral home got out. It was interesting to watch the way they pulled the collapsible cart out and loaded the coffin onto it for transport into the church. They even had a rain fly for the big lacquered box that came off once it was inside. Even death, as it turns out, has a method. I just kept thinking that Brittney's grandfather, Pep as the family called him, was in that box, as if he had been packed for shipping. We filed in behind the casket and took our seats in the front pew with the rest of the family.

Now it had been some years since I attended a Catholic mass. I had forgotten how like some strange Dungeons and Dragons ritual it is, with incantations and incense and the quaffing of wine and wafers. Afterwards Brittney was pretty irritated. "It was all about preaching. It was all about their weird Catholic agenda. It wasn't about Pep at all. What's up with that?," she said.

The cemetary was sad and the rain kept falling. People were crying too, so it was very wet, as you can imagine. A guy with a moustache presented an American flag to Brittney's grandmother on behalf of the US military for whom her grandfather had served. We put flowers on the casket and retreated to our car.

Afterwards we all went to Roma's Restaurant for pasta and beer. The recently widowed Mem did a good job of laughing and joking and putting people at ease. She drank a beer and pronounced it just about the best beer she ever tasted. Brittney's uncle Phil thought it was an occasion for taking family pictures, which seemed weird, but no one objected so we stood and smiled. Then we left.

For my part, I couldn't help feeling that this was just one of those days that life serves up. Someone you know stops living and you pause to recognize it. If you're lucky the person isn't someone you know very well. Eventually it will be though. That's just how life is. So I do my best to take it all in no matter who it is that's passed on.

I'm not sure whether that's me preparing for the day when someone a bit closer dies or just gathering material to include in some very 'perceptive' bit of writing later on. I guess I think it's a bit of both. I don't like the idea of dodging feelings, mine or other people's, so on one hand I want to look the grieving widow in the eye and share some of her pain, and on the other hand I want to capture, if only in my brain, one of life's (or death's) more poignant moments.

In a mostly unrelated development, I went mountain biking with the dog this morning, and had my first real fall of the season. Physical pain, like its emotional counterpart, brings us closer to life's surface, don't you think.

Here's what happened. I crossed a little foot bridge which ended in a pile of rocks that resembled a sculpture made of bowling balls and steak knives. There was also a large, flat-faced stone which I didn't see but plowed my front wheel into just the same. The wheel went one direction, the rest of the bike the other and I split the difference, tackling the sharp and lumpy statue and sprawling across the trail in a heap.

It hurt.

After taking a few moments (ok, five minutes) to catch my breath and convince myself nothing was broken it occured to me that I must, in fact, have fractured one of the laws of physics. See when you fall, off a cliff for example, you reach a terminal velocity of 32 feet per second per second. But when you fall off your bike you don't have nearly enough time to build that much speed. The arc described by the front fork rotating over the front tire limits your acceleration and, I suppose, your terminal velocity. Newton didn't do much work with bicycles, and I never took physics in school so I'm pulling all of this from one of the few places on my body that wasn't hurting at the time.

And I couldn't remember who said it as I sat there bleeding (Google says it was Archimedes), but someone said, "Give me a lever and a firm place to stand and I shall move the earth." The Greeks said all sorts of hyperbolic bullshit just to make a point, didn't they?

So I'm watching this bruise blossom on my shin and figuring that I must somehow have created a levering action between myself and my bicycle, such that I didn't actually fall onto the pile of pointy rocks but rather catapulted myself groundward in such a way that I reached terminal velocity much more quickly than would otherwise be possible. There may even have been a sonic boom (though the sound I heard was likely my expensive, space-age helmet paying for itself in the nano-second it took my head to reach the mossy, forest floor).

There is simply no other way to describe either my injuries (which are far less impressive having been washed and dried) or the instant ache travelling up one arm and down the leg on the same side before settling over my entire frame. Adding insult to the mix, the dog only glanced at me cursorily before hopping off the footbridge into the babbling brook below for a swim and drink, the little bastard.

June 12th, 2003 - One week, gentle reader. I have been away for one week. And during that time I have had many adventures, mostly of the familiar and familial variety. How, you ask, have my escapades been simultaneously adventurous AND completely familiar? Let me tell you that time spent with family is always this way.

Because the thing is, you always end up playing some role, one you haven't played for some time, but that remains completely, and blindingly familiar. The adventure comes from trying to reconcile the ordinary, everyday adult part you play in life's current drama with the ensemble role you once reprised in your parents' home.

And so Brittney and I were off on family duty, visiting my brother, or more specifically the nephew his wife produced in November, a child with the same name I've got, and Brittney's mother, or rather her youngest brother, whose high school graduation requested the somewhat dubious honor of our presence.

First stop: Jacksonville. My brother George and I, after many years of separation and too little communication, are fairly close now. Though he is eight years older than I am and about four inches taller, we somehow see eye-to-eye. His wife is a charming and beautiful woman from Honduras who spent the entire weekend plying us with the rich and delicious food of her homeland. The pupusas were perhaps the high point of the entire trip, though I am easily swayed by pork products nestled in home made corn tortillas.

George's older kid is eight-year-old George, named after his father and his father's father. Go figure. Young George exemplifies all that is good and all that is bad about eight-year-old boys. He is simultaneously cute, curious and precocious AND whiney, selfish and hyper. One minute he is telling you about some sub-species of lizard that eats its own tail in times of hardship, the next he is beseeching you to take him to Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater. That children, and especially males, of this age are all about hunger is beyond discussion.

As we walked through the door of their new three bedroom home upon arrival from the airport, George Jr. jumped from behind the door and blurted, in his best approximation of an Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter drawl, "Hello Clarise!" Later in the visit he whispered in my ear, "Uncle John, I would take all of your guts out and fill you up with ice cream and then eat it." He was just finishing a large bowl of pistachio at the time.

My brand new nephew, the six-month-old John, is the perfect baby, or so Brittney thinks. He had her in his little Osh Kosh pocket the moment she first laid eyes on him. A generally happy kid who is on the verge of crawling, he spent much of the weekend on my wife's hip, gurgling his little gurgles and smiling like he just won the lottery.

On to Ft. Lauderdale to see Brittney's mother, step-father and younger brothers. It was my first time to their south Florida abode, one of those fairly horrible boxy numbers with a ton of bedrooms and a lot of tile. The redeeming feature of this house is, of course, the pool, which we availed ourselves of in the spare moments when the sky wasn't unleashing its fury in torrents of luke warm rain.

The graduation itself was quite an event. Five hundred kids and their various friends and family members crammed into a church auditorium and commenced to commencing. This rite of passage included forty-five minutes of diploma-handing-out and a further hour and a half of speeches. I have never before received so much advice about how to move forward with my life from a cadre of over-achieving eighteen-year-olds. I should certainly have taken notes.

I was, fortunately, able to beat down the rising flames of cynicism long enough to recognize what a monumental event this was for the hundreds of kids in caps and gowns, and to remember the world-is-my-oyster hope of a similar event in my own life. I left amused, humbled and just a tiny bit jealous.

For his part, Erick, Brittney's graduating brother, was non-plussed. He took great pains to play down the significance of the milestone and to distance himself from the unwashed masses cavorting around the auditorium lobby afterwards. In this subtle holier-than-them stance I also recognized a bit of myself circa 1989, and it made me sad though only for a minute. That's when Erick cranked up the I'm-off-to-college-siren, speaking animatedly about all the cool stuff he was looking forward to next fall at the University of Florida.

Family mission accomplished, Brittney and I boarded a plane for home but only got as far as Philadelphia before her cell-phone tinkled and her father, back up in Massachusetts informed us that her grandfather had passed away. We're off to the funeral tomorrow. This is how it is to be part of a family.

June 5th, 2003 Update - In a flurry of ringing phones, chatting sources, rolling tapes and flying fingers I have, at roughly quarter to eleven, finished the June issue of Soccer New England. As Managing Editor of this fine magazine, I am officially taking myself off performance plan and removing the 'KICK ME' sign from my back.

June 5th, 2003 - I've spent the last few days trying to put the finishing touches on the June issue of Soccer New England (click here), the magazine whose masthead lists yours truly as its Managing Editor. In light of recent travails, though, I am inclined to change that title to something like Chief Flailer or even Bungler-in-Chief. Pathetic Idiot is an option, as is No Talent Ass Clown. E-mail me if you have any better ideas.

I am reminded of a guy who used to work for my friend Charlie. I forget his real name now, but Charlie called him "Ho Ho the Clown" or "Ho Ho the Yum Yum Boy." This was not a term of endearment. You see, Ho Ho wasn't very good at his job. Actually, Ho Ho wasn't just not good at his job. Ho Ho was not good at his job AND not good at conceiling it.

In fact Ho Ho was belligerently bad at his job, so that when Charlie sat him down to explain just how bad he was and how he might improve, Ho Ho became very angry and filed a grievance with HR. He went to Charlie's boss to complain too. The big boss later came down to Charlie's office to laugh about it.

Things didn't look good for Ho Ho. Charlie put him on a "performance plan," which is corporate speak for "starting a paper trail that leads to a final check and an awkward few minutes in which the person holding the final check contemplates going home for a hand gun before crumpling emotionally, filling a small box with personal effects and slinking out the door for the last time." If you are reading these words and saying to yourself, "but I'm on a performance plan here at my job," just remember, gun violence doesn't solve problems, it just makes messes.

Back here at the Soccer New England news desk I am going through a tough journalistic spell. I can't seem to get anyone to call me back, so that I have all these half-finished stories and I have to have all the content to the layout person tonight. I'm going out of town tomorrow, too. Nice, huh?

The thing is I have this idea that good journalists are clever about ways of getting in touch with people. They persevere. They are relentless.

So far I am relentlessly waiting by the phone for no one to call me back. Clever, no?

Hopefully when I get back from my trip the jinx will be done, and people will start calling me back again. I don't want to be Ho Ho the Yum Yum Boy.

June 3rd, 2003 - I'm not really a letter writer, but I wrote one tonight. It was brief and to the point. I sent it to my friends at Boston.com, one of my favorite sites (until recently) on this dang ole Web.

Here's what it said:

I have complained in the past about the excessive number of pop-up ads served during visits to your site. Though I was advised that a Boston.com cookie would limit pop-ups to one per visit, I regularly get three or even four. Now you've added sound to some of these irritating ads, making them even more irritating.

I'm done. I've complained to no avail, and now I'm taking my eyeballs elsewhere.

Certainly a news organization is entitled to support itself through advertising sales, and I appreciate that the depreciation in value of Internet advertising has forced Boston.com to get more aggressive in delivering results for sponsors.

But these ads are too much. I spend half my visit to your site fending off pop-ups like a swarm of mosquitoes.

I am one person. Your usage statistics will tell you whether I am unique or not.

They're ruining the Web. We've got to stop them, don't we? I mean I subscribe to the print version of their stupid newspaper too. I'm not just a freeloader.

P.S. I'm over my cold.

June 2nd, 2003 - It's not a summer cold when it follows days of cold rain and wind, is it? But then, it's not any less irritating for taking root in the wet and foul rather than the balmy, blissful and sun-drenched, I just have one more reason to complain, because honestly, why is it 48 degrees and pouring down rain at the end of May? As if the cruel and unusual winter we thought we were through with wasn't bad enough, we're now having an Indian winter of sorts. And I'm sick of it. Literally.

I am not a good sick person either. I get whiny (ok, whinier). I play for sympathy. I sulk.

The fact that mucus and plegm have built up in my chest, sinuses and throat boggles my mind. What major malfunction of my immune system allowed this to happen? Someone has hell to pay for letting the cold virus in. If the guys in mock turtlenecks manning the velvet ropes down there don't recognize the undesirable element, then I'll have to replace them with a crackhouse-style slot and a pair of beady eyes.

I know. I know. Don't waste time on finger-pointing, on assigning blame. Concentrate on fixing the problem instead. Get plenty of rest. Drink lots of water.

Well, whoever hatched the plot to take me down one sneeze at a time has obviously enlisted the help of the dog, because cute, little Eddie has sprung up from his bed between 6am and 7am two days running, ready to play and/or at least fidget so I can't get back to sleep on the couch downstairs.

Just so you know, the little bastard is snoozing the afternoon away as I type this. He's plum tuckered out from sniffing my face as I struggled in vain to slip off to the land of nod. I'm thinking of trying to catch a nap now while he's off guard duty, but I suspect I'm just letting myself in for another round of let-me-out/let-me-in, one of his all-time favorite games.

I am not a good sick person.

May 29th, 2003 - I was on a streak. I was writing here everyday. And then nothing. Five days, and nothing. Silence.

Now I'm routine oriented like my father. We both appreciate the subtle comfort and charm of knowing what to expect, of getting things done in an orderly and efficient manner, of choosing boredom over crisis.

My father used to park in the exact same spot in the lot at work every single day. It wasn't a particularly good spot, but it was almost always open, and so he made it his own. It was there for him, you know, when he needed it. That was one crisis averted.

He would also set out the plates, bowls and silverware for breakfast before he went to bed at night, so they'd be ready for us when we got up. For a while he was even pouring the juice the night before, but it would separate while we slept and I successfully talked him out of the practice. Routines are good. Separated juice is not.

And I would like to tell you that I am free of these kinds of neuroses (what else can we call them?), but I'm not. I do the same sorts of things, and I thrive in situations where I know what to do. I eschew chaos, mystery and adventure. I'm not proud of that, but I can admit it's true.

The problem is that life abhors a routine. The weather is variable, and despite a million smiling meteorologists attempts to predict it, it resists. Likewise, the demands of making a living pull and push on my fragile routines, giving me things to do during inconvenient times and taking me to out of the way places which requires running the gauntlet of unexpected traffic jams.

It's not just me either. We, as humans, struggle to identify the patterns in nature's grand design. We gauge our scientific and technological progress by our ability to master these patterns and turn them to our advantage. The vast majority of us are adventurous only within the confines of our own skulls. Only the audacious few scale Himalayan peaks or blast themselves off into space. The rest of us settle down, make families and park in the same spots over and over and over again.

So I was driving home from a business meeting (yes, struggling writers go to business meetings) today, and I began to worry that I had been neglecting my blog here. A writer that doesn't write regularly isn't really a writer, is he?

But then I realized that my juice was just separating, and it was ok not to pour it out in advance. Sometimes it's better just to wait until you're thirsty.

May 24th, 2003 - Today it is pouring with rain, and I have made the mistake of being too much in the house this week, so that a drizzly Saturday seems like a kick in the guts. I have escape fantasies. I see myself soaked, walking through the woods, or better, riding through the woods on my mountain bike, caked in mud, absent of thought.

That's what I really need, to be absent of thought. Specifically, to be absent of the thoughts of this house, this office, this desk. To escape my list of things to do. To escape even the pet projects (not to mention the actual pet) that lurk around every corner, the half-stripped wallpaper, the half-sanded chair, the wedding video that could so easily be edited, if only I would edit it.

My mind is seeking other misery, the cold, wet, dirty misery of riding in the rain and then stopping, because really, it's only when you stop that you feel it. And logic says you just shouldn't stop, just keep on riding, but muscles aren't logical and brains have far more stamina.

But somehow (very obviously) I just don't have it in me to push off into the rain today. It's one thing to write about a lust for physical discomfort. It's another thing entirely to take it on.

These are the things you learn, staring out the window, on a rainy day.

May 23rd, 2003 - The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote: "Years have gone by and I've finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good soccer. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: 'A pretty move, for the love of God.' And when it happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don't give a damn which team or country performs it."

I guess I've come to see the sport I love much the same way. There is a subtext, no maybe that's not right. There is a supertext, of winning and losing, of goals scored and saves made. But all of that seems like so much noise, obscuring the real art.

If you don't know what I mean then you haven't seen the mazey, helter skelter, almost-out-of-control dribbling run that Diego Armando Maradona made through the English defense at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico City. You never saw Hugo Sanchez, a national hero/obsession in Mexico, tuck a flying half-volley into the upper corner of the net from twenty yards out. You never witnessed Peter Schmeichel reaching back across his body to palm a ball around the post when the striker was already celebrating the goal and making some asinine gesture to the crowd. Because if you had seen any of these things you would know what I'm talking about.

Soccer can be dull. It can be twenty two people running around in a field chasing after a speckled ball for ninety minutes. Inspiration is not an over-the-counter drug. Soccer players are paid to win games, but sometimes that translates to wanting so badly not to lose that they forget to try to win at all, and winning often takes art.

And you don't have to be Maradona or Sanchez or Schmeichel to be an artist. As a player I am nothing, and yet even I have had the experience of waiting for the ball to come, and in the half a moment it takes to reach my foot, of gaining a sudden inspiration and conjuring some small bit of magic, turning my defender inside out and leaving him, mouth agape, to kick at the air where I once was.

People argue about the rules of the game constantly. What they don't realize is that the rules are only a context for the real art, the real creation. A free kick is only one more kick in an endless series of kicks if it doesn't curl over the wall, brush the keeper's finger tips and ripple the back of the net.

When I tell friends and family and those I haven't seen for some time that I'm spending most of my time writing about soccer, they can't understand it. A quizzical look comes and goes, and I feel compelled to explain. But there is no explanation, if you don't see the art.

It's like this. Have you ever tried to knock a ball, out of the air, into the top corner of a soccer goal from fifteen yards? No? Well let me tell you. It's impossible. It can't be done. You could stand there all day and all night for forty nights and never make that shot, but Zinedine Zidane did it in last year's Champions' League semifinal to win the game for Real Madrid. I don't even like Real. Outside Spain's capital, no one does. But Zidane is loved and revered nonetheless.

So I continue to write about soccer, to slink from stadium to stadium, to stand on rain-soaked practice fields with my hand outstretched, begging for a pretty move, for a paltry paycheck, for half a chance to fall in love with life again as some brash kid spins on the ball, scoops it past his marker and sweeps it past the keeper in one blinding movement.

Thankfully, my wife pays the mortgage.

May 22nd, 2003 - I had this idea for a weekly column called "Letters from Planet Earth." The premise is that there are aliens out there who are eagerly awaiting news of the trivial comings and goings of this tiny blue marble of a planet, and that I am their correspondent. Each week I would do my darndedest to explain to the aliens, who by the way have no background in our history or culture, what we're doing and why.

I might write about the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula this way:

Dear Aliens,

This week on earth everyone is worried that a crazy Korean man is going to blow up the planet. This man has stolen much of his persona and image from an American music star named Elvis, who in turn stole much of his persona and image from old black men who sang songs about how poor they were and how they couldn't get laid. It is unclear at this time how much of the crazy Korean man's anger is a result of growing up poor or not being able to get laid.

This crazy Korean man also thought it would be a good idea to kidnap famous film stars and directors from his neighboring countries, so that he would have good stuff to see at the movies. He likes to drive fast cars, have sex with beautiful women and feel like he's the most powerful man in the world. This is a fantasy shared by many of the men here on earth.

The president of the planet's actual-most-powerful country refuses to speak to the crazy Korean man, though he will say that this man is evil and must be dealt with. Strangely, the crazy Korean man has pursued the weaponry necessary to blow up the planet in an effort to counterbalance the power of the president who refuses to speak to him. How much of their inability to reconcile matters is born of sharing the need to be the planet's most powerful man is a matter of debate.

Bi Bim Bap is a common dish served in Korea where the crazy man comes from. It is essentially vegetables and rice together in one bowl, served with a spicy sauce. It is very delicious. If the planet doesn't get blown up, I highly recommend you try it next time you're here.

Also, American Idol is down to the final two contestants. All of planet earth verges on psycho-emotional breakdown waiting to find out if Clay or Ruben will win. This has nothing to do with the planet getting blown up as far as I know, but a connection can't be ruled out.

I understand if you find all this hard to follow, but don't worry. There is a very good chance that, assuming we're still here next week, this pattern of events will repeat itself, so you'll have another shot at wrapping your alien, and let's be honest very strange looking heads, around matters of earthly import.

Yours truly,

Emlyn Lewis

May 21st, 2003 - Ice cream. Two magical words that arouse hope in even the most dour of hearts. Children sprint down streets, dropping change and screaming like a thousand car alarms when the ice cream man drives past, playing that music that means frozen happiness or, in modern cinema, that some really bizarre and twisted murder is about to happen.

Anyway, I remember when my Welsh grandparents came to visit us in Alabama when I was a kid, they ate ice cream just about every day, and sometimes twice. My father, their son, is also an ice cream addict. He is very quiet, almost reverential, while he eats it, and then, when he looks up from his bowl or cone, you see that he has somehow managed to smear some of it on his glasses. When there is ice cream involved, my retired father becomes his five-year-old self, except that afterwards he doesn't go on a sugar-induced bender around the house, breaking lamps and knocking over potted plants, which is nice.

Brittney and I went out for ice cream last night. The best ice cream shop on planet Earth is two blocks from our house. The owner is this mis-shapen little man whose teeth have nearly all rotted out of his head. He bops around to club music and watches Harry Potter movies over and over again, while doling out dollops of sweet perfection.

His specialty is the Blendah. A Blendah (his spelling not mine) is a mix of soft-serve ice cream with just about any combination of ingredients you can imagine. He piles it all into a cup and then sticks it in this big, old, rattley machine that he operates with a foot pedal. You can get a Pumpkin Pie Blendah or a Pop Rocks Explosion Blendah, or you can get Pralines and Creme (Dad's favorite), or you can opt for Wholly Cannoli (vanilla ice cream with cannoli filling and bits of ice cream cone mixed in) which is my favorite.

Last night though, we just got soft-serve. I got vanilla with root beer dip (yes, root beer dip). Brittney went with chocolate, covered in chocolate sprinkles. It was very delicious, as you can imagine.

As we were walking home, working hard on our cones to keep the ice cream from melting down our arms, Brittney said, "Look, the little cone wrapper thingy has the American flag on it. When I first saw it, I thought, 'gimme a break,' but then I realized that this really is what America is all about. We don't even have to cross the street to get ice cream. That's freedom. It's beautiful, isn't it?"

And I said, "Yes. Yes, it is."

Ice cream.

May 20th, 2003 - This morning I spilled milk on the dog. Twice. Actually it was soy milk. Vanilla. And it wasn't my fault. I mean, yes, I did overfill my cereal bowl, but that's because I'm in love with a new cereal called Strawberry Fields that has little pieces of dehydrated strawberry in it. It's all organic and they seem to have sprayed some sort of sweetener on the flakes too, so you don't notice that it's good for you, which I like. I also really like the name. Strawberry Fields Forever is off my favorite Beatles album, Magical Mystery Tour. I am the walrus. Goo goo ga joob. Know what I mean?

You can understand why, given a fresh box of your new favorite cereal, you might pour yourself a larger-than-normal mound of the stuff and then add the appropriate amount of milk in order to ensure the optimal moisture to crunch ratio. You can also understand why you'd be pretty irritated after spilling said cereal, which I was, swearing out loud and with some considerable gusto both times.

Which is why I blame the dog, at the very least, for getting spilled on the second time. I mean I yelled CRAP or GODDAMNIT pretty loud the first time which, coupled with an unexpected soy milk bath, sent him scurrying. So for him to come back and continue his constant patrol of the area surrounding my ankles was pretty dumb.

I wonder what went through his mind the second time he heard me yell CRAP, just before the follow up wave of milk splattered his haunches. Did he think, "Was it something I did? Why is he coating me with milk? Does he intend to eat me, too?" I bet he did.

He really does get underfoot. He pretty much almost takes me down at least three times a day. I think he wants to be with me so badly that he tries to stay as close as he can, often anticipating my next move but not quite clearing the path enough for me to step forward.

So it's clearly his fault that I spilled vanilla soy milk on him twice this morning. I brushed it out afterwards, except it's hard to brush liquids off a dog. Honestly. Now he's got these weird dry patches on him, like I sprayed him with hair spray or something, which makes me wonder what soy milk does when it's in my stomach.

Ah, well. I'm sure some other dog will lick it off him at the dog park.

May 19th, 2003 - There are days when you stumble from minor catastrophe to outright annoyance without any clue as to what high-interest karmic debt you're paying. For me, today was just such a day. Nothing too tragic went down, but I felt a half step behind the world all day, and honestly I'll be happy when I'm safe in bed and my eyelids begin to droop.

It started on the way to the park with the dog. There are two ways to get to the park, each of which presents its own trafficular pitfalls. The obvious and most direct route is often backed up in the morning, as it is also the most obvious and direct route to the major highway that carries the bulk of the local population to their downtown offices. The windier, less-logical, only-people-who-live-here-know-it route is gated by a traffic light that can be cruel or it can be kind, seldom in the right measure.

And when I leave the house on my way to the park I do some crude calculus as to which way is the best way. I base my decision on time of day, knowledge of special events (such as a graduation or football game at the college) and that gut feeling that so often leads me into gridlock and construction delay.

This morning I chose the indirect route and was immediately rewarded with the time to ponder the nature of all existence as I sat through the aforementioned light three times. Ah yes, no big deal, because after that I was on my way, the rest of the day sprawling in front of me like a ten dollar buffet.

Until, of course, I got back in the car to come home. I decided to take, don't you just love it, the scenic way home, the one that avoids the highway and instead snakes down into Medford Square and over to Rt. 16 West by way of Forest St. Well Forest sometimes backs up at the Square and today it was as clogged as the shower at the YMCA. I must have sat through the light four times before I finally sped through while it was that pinkish/yellowish hue that some associate with moving violations, but I prefer to think of as the color of freedom.

To get to this point I have already honked my horn twice and upon entering the Square I notice immediately that I am not the only one running lights. There are cars streaming across my lane from the left and a police officer, on foot, perched on the island in the middle of proceedings. I look up at him, shrug my shoulders and give the "what the hell?" gesture that I'm sure he just loves to see while he's directing traffic for a FUNERAL.

Yeah. I honked at a funeral procession and then gave the cop grief for not letting me break ranks to defile the casket. Sweet, huh? I'm going to hell. Soon.

Once home the real fun started. I spent most of the afternoon transcribing the tape of an interview that someone else conducted with a group of doctors who specialize in treating occupational and environmental diseases. I then fashioned the most interesting and engaging piece of non-fiction you're likely to read this century from the resulting quotes.

Oh, wait. No I didn't. I flailed away for hours, only to come up with 1500 words of pathetic drivel the editor is sure to reject as the amateurish spew of a guy who spends the better part of his life sitting through traffic lights.

On to Home Depot!!!

That's where I went about 3:30, to buy top soil to fill in the holes the dog has dug in the yard. Things started pretty well there. I immediately located one of those giant, flatbed carts you need for hauling bags of top soil around on, and this one wasn't even tippy and screwed up like most of them are. I marched in and slapped four 40-pound bags of dirt on the cart, threw on some grass seed and a bit of potting soil for Brittney and then parked it to make the cross-store journey to the door hardware aisle (I needed a new knob for the side door).

Well, they didn't have the knob I wanted, though they had every other knob in creation, and the helpful Home Depot man I spoke with told me, "We get this stuff in pretty regularly, but who knows? We probably won't get that knob for a while. I'd try someplace else. Seriously."

Awesome! Thanks!

So I trek back to my cart and after navigating the narrow aisles of potted plants I manage to get on line to leave, and I am standing there in line for a good five minutes before I look down at my cart and notice that some asshole has taken two of my bags of top soil. Crap!!!!!!

With people behind me in line, I can't move the cart, so I settle for schlepping a single replacement bag over from the pallet on the other side of the garden section and then thanking the woman behind me for watching my stuff, though she's probably the asshole that took my dirt in the first place.

After that I laid low for the rest of the day, whiling away a few hours reading my friends' blogs and brushing the dog's teeth. It's not that any one thing that happened to me today was so awful that I needed to go into hiding, but when you can afford yourself the luxury of wasting an hour reading about your buddy's dislocated shoulder and then coating your latex finger brush with poultry flavored dentifrice for the dog to lick off, you do it.

This is how you restore the karmic balance and move on with your life.

May 16th, 2003 - The growth of both hair and fingernails is relentless, even after you die. Nails, for the most part are easy, though I am continually forgetting to trim them until they're long enough to bend backwards as I do some everyday task, leaving me swearing and stomping my feet. As for the hair, I have tried cutting it myself, but the results almost always demanded follow up attention from a professional.

And though it's inconvenient (not to mention expensive) to toddle off to the barber every month or so, I have always enjoyed the experience of the barbershop. It's like this: old men (and most of my barbers have been old men) tell good stories. They've typically seen and heard it all, and they seldom censor themselves in the retelling.

Today I was in the chair over at Joe's, and he regaled me with more stories about the geriatric playboy who is his favorite customer. He also told me a dirty joke, which wasn't that funny, and informed me that Dunkin Donuts doesn't, in fact, make the best donuts. He recommended I try Donuts with a Difference down in Medford Square, near the bus stop.

"You can take one of their donuts and squeeze it in your hand," he said, stepping away from the chair to demonstrate how you might squeeze a donut, "and it leaves not a drop of oil in your palm. The guy told me they're kosher too. He doesn't use any animal fats."

Keeping kosher is somehow important to my red-sauce-in-his-veins, Italian barber.

I like going to Joe, even though no matter how short I ask him to cut my thatch he always leaves it too long. I assume he likes to shorten the turnaround time before I'm back in the chair again. Maybe that's why there's always a line there, and why he drives a great big Lincoln Towncar.

Today, as his clippers hummed in my ears, I resolved to write a personal Barberology, an account of all the barbers I've had the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of visiting. I'll let you know when you can pick it up, down at your local bookseller. I'll even sign it for you. I'm good like that.

Anyway, as I sat there thinking of all those haircuts, all the little bits of hair itching at my collar and collecting in my ears, I saw the unmistakable march of time, from the pretzel rods and tears of my first barber visit to today when I looked in Joe's mirror and saw crow's feet perched on either side of my smiling eyes and little bits of gray fluttering floorward.

I came home and started scribbling notes about Roy and Patti and Rocco and Nick and the guy with the double comb over at Dente's in Davis Square.

May 15th, 2003 - I am worthless without a 'to do' list. Some would argue that even with such a list, my value is not very high. To these people I say: My ability to grill a hamburger without creating a hockey puck makes me easily the most valuable person you know, especially on a sunny Sunday afternoon when the lawn's already mowed and the neighborhood kids are all inside rotting their brains with video games and summer reruns.

But I digress.

My desk is littered with lists, most of them containing twenty or thirty 'to dos' with most of them already crossed out. More often than not it's the big ticket items that remain.

For example, selecting a list at random produces this: Fifty two total items plus an address and two phone numbers. The uncrossed items include: Collector Story, Space Story (both pieces of short fiction I will probably never complete), knob (i.e. I need to buy a new door knob for the door to the basement), strip wallpaper (in hallway in preparation for painting), Ben (that is to say, I need to finish editing the video from Ben's wedding) and yoga (which I seldom do at home because I tend to review my to do list mentally the whole time I'm trying to get serene, which is, as you can imagine, somewhat counterproductive).

Another list reminds me to put in those ear drops that claim to help you remove excess earwax (I have copious amounts of earwax, and it makes it hard for me to hear...but that's more than you probably needed to know) and to order an add on cable package that will bring even more soccer into my home, ensuring that I will get to less and less of the items on my 'to do' list.

When I claimed to be worthless without a list, I wasn't kidding. Days spent without the black and white direction of a sticky note or index card are usually wasted reading every last article on Salon.com or shopping online for things I will never buy and frankly have no use for, things like coasters and...well...soccer videos.

I even put 'BLOG' on my list sometimes, like when it's been a few days and I suspect my audience (i.e. Brittney) might need some entertainment.

I also sometimes pad my list by writing down things that I've already done and then immediately crossing them off. This exercise gives me a feeling of accomplishment that motivates me to tackle more things on the list, so once I've crossed off 'get out of bed' and 'shower' I can focus more energy on 'read War and Peace' or even 'become a better person.'

If you are not getting enough out of your every day I suggest you start making yourself a 'to do' list. I also suggest you put 'learn to grill a hamburger without creating a hockey puck' at the top of that list. It is, after all, a very valuable skill to have.

May 13th, 2003 - A couple days ago I wrote about the connection, for me, between yoga and Alcoholics Anonymous. And I was thinking about what I had written while I was at yoga class tonight, contorting myself in new and strange ways and struggling for breath. It occurred to me that I missed the real point of connection between AA and yoga in my previous blathering, and that I should probably revisit the topic, just for the sake of clarity.

The thing about both AA and yoga is not the mindless/mindful repetition of platitudes and cliches. It's that they both ask the same thing of their participants, faith. Faith that an odd and often painful process will pay dividends in the quality of your life.

AA promises to keep you sober if you follow their simple rules. Yoga promises you health and peace of mind if only you practice with openness and patience.

And the thing that I find so compelling about these programs, these systems, these lets-be-honest, quasi-cults of self-help-in-group-therapy-clothing, is that I, of all people, have faith in them.

Because I don't believe in things. I am an ardent atheist, not only irreligious but often areligious. I was president of my high school Cynics Club (no, not really). I am a card carrying skeptic who mistrusts almost every form of group think going, from the Salvation Army to the Seventh Day Adventists.

But then, sometimes things people say resonate with you. You empathize. You share a common experience or feeling, and strange things happen. Suddenly you're not alone in your carefully constructed little world. The doorbell rings and the unwashed masses walk through the door bearing yoga mats and crappy instant coffee. It's humbling.

In the end, it seems like this might be what personal growth is all about. Not deciding what you don't believe in, but rather figuring out what you DO believe in.

There. That's better. I won't bring it up again.

May 9th, 2003 - My friend Brian is buying a house. He suspects this act will signal a final capitulation to the demands of adulthood, that his freedom, a freedom he seldom enjoys anyway because darn it he works too much, will disolve in an acid bath of mortgage payments and home improvements. He recalls the happy-go-lucky times when he kipped out every night in a bed full of sand, covered not by a quilt or a comforter but by the unzipped sleeping bag his dad bought him for that teenaged camping trip.

This is what I told Brian:

1) A house is a committment, a stake in the ground, a huge responsibility from which there is no hiding. Furthermore, a house is often a liability. No house is so sturdy that the wind can't blow the roof off or the rain can't flood it.

2) Houses slow you down. There's no picking up and leaving when you've got a house (unless it's a trailer home of course). There's no 'let's move to Costa Rica,' when you own a home.

3) Houses collect shit. You might think that you're the one out there buying shit you don't need and packing it into your already paltry square-footage, but you're not. You are only an agent of your house. Houses draw objects in through their doors and up their stairways, often leaving marks on the wall that will need patching. Go buy some spackle right now.

4) None of this is bad, because at the end of the day, the decision to buy a house is a financial decision, one that makes profound sense and actually ends up giving you security and freedom you will never have as a renter.

5) Here's how it works. Your house appreciates in value. The boheme in you eschews the trappings of material gain, but your house doesn't care. It makes money while you're sitting on the can reading Leaves of Grass (assuming you've got Leaves of Grass sitting on the back of the can like any self-respecting writer would).

6) Once your house is worth more than you paid for it, you have options. Don't like what you do? Sell it and use the money to go to Costa Rica. Want to buy a place down on the beach? Take a home equity loan based on your appreciation and buy another one. Lost your job and don't know how you're going to pay the mortgage? Sell the place and use the equity to buy a frickin' spread in Wyoming...or Costa Rica.

7) Bottomline: Houses can be homes, but they can also be the most valuable currency you have for changing your life.

May 8th, 2003 - Everything I needed to know to practice yoga I learned first in AA. That's Alcoholics Anonymous for those of you wondering what a broken down car has to do with downward facing dog pose. Try to keep up, ok?

Just to get the particulars out of the way first, I haven't had a drink in over a decade, which is a long time for a guy as young as I am, and when I stopped drinking I didn't do it by going to AA and working through their twelve steps. Basically I woke up one morning scared to death that my life was out of control and that I was heading, in no uncertain terms, for death. I realize that sounds dramatic, but that's how I felt, and I've passed up a decade of beers with the boys based on that feeling, so it is what it is.

My experience with AA came some years later, when a friend of mine started attending meetings in order to get herself off the devil liquor. She asked me to come along, and I went. I had heard a lot, and truthfully when I was getting sober the friend who helped me through the hardest parts was well versed in the doctrine and dogma of the organization, so I was curious what meetings would be like.

Now there are a million different AA meetings in a million different church basements, and each of them is subtley different in attendance and philosophy and practice, so what I'm going to describe shouldn't be construed as 'what AA is like,' but rather 'what AA was like for me.'

For me, AA was a broad mix of people sitting around exchanging tear-fraught and belly-laugh-inducing stories of their miserable pasts and sometimes presents. The personal stories are the best part, and they make the psycho-emotional discomfort of mainlining other people's pain really quite bearable.

Then there are the platitudes. 'With dope there's no hope.' 'Work your program.' 'Keep coming.' 'One day at a time.' And there are more, hundreds of them. Thousands of them. At an AA meeting personal stories often end with a reminder in the form of one of these platitudes. Their repetition will drive you crazy if you don't spend the time to understand them, to learn the lesson of the cliche if you will. My sense is that those who succeed at staying sober are the ones who get comfortable living by this seemingly infinite set of catch phrases.

I enjoyed the meetings I attended. A 'sharing session' at an AA meeting will put you right back in touch with what is important in your life, much the way I imagine electro-shock therapy will. While I've never had my temples smeared with conductive jelly or my ankles shaved to make room for the electrodes, I have heard that, though painful during, the patient almost always feels better afterward, more connected to the basics of surviving this crazy (poor choice of words) life.

Now the yoga connection. Again, let me come clean about my yogic experience. I have sun saluted along with San Francisco yoga celebrity Rodney Yee a thousand times right here in the comfort of my living room, the gentle hum of the VCR setting a soothing, white-noise backdrop to my practice. I have also begun taking classes. Brittney did the research. There's a studio down the street from us, and we've been going once-a-week for about four months.

The thing I noticed right away was that there seemed to be a lot of repetition to the instruction. And most of the time I didn't really understand what was being asked of me. Our teacher would say things like, "Good, now breathe down into your legs," or "Stretch as far as you can, and then find a little bit more room in your core and stretch further." Um...ok.

I enjoy yoga. I feel better after a class, and I feel my body changing in small and profitable ways. I am looser. I breathe more and better now than I did before. Also the people are friendly, and not too touchy-feely, hippy-dippy as I expected them to be.

And slowly I am coming to understand what our teacher is telling us to do. I keep coming, and working the program. I take it one day at a time. It's just like getting sober, except the guy on the next yoga mat's not chain smoking and chugging crappy instant coffee.

Oh, and now, occasionally, I can even breathe down into my legs...whatever that means.

May 7th, 2003 - Don't tell my wife I went to Dunkin Donuts today, but if you do tell her, don't mention that I got a boston creme AND a chocolate frosted. But if you let it slip that I got the donuts, then you should definitely mention that the Dunkin Donuts, or Double D Ranch as she calls it, up by the post office on High St., doesn't, according to the impatient and incredulous-that-I-didn't-want-coffe-with-my-donuts counter help, carry the French cruller, aka the most perfect donut of them all.

Also, don't tell her that I almost got a box of twenty five munchkins, but ruled that out because, really, twenty five is just too much and I would have felt like an ass ordering just half a dozen. Of course I ended up eating three hot dogs at the baseball game last weekend because I didn't think it was right to ask the hot dog man, make that the HOT DOG MAN because that's the only way to get that bastard's attention, for just one dog. Having eaten three, my bravado and a slightly irritating exhibitionist streak prompted me to announce, "this is the kind of day where I'd bet I could eat every damn hot dog in the HOT DOG MAN's little steel hot dog bin," much to the amusement or disgust (who can tell?) of the woman sitting in front of us.

In actual fact I nearly talked myself out of the sugar overdose altogether by reasoning that a hot and greasy breakfast sandwich might provide me with the caloric infusion I was looking for without rotting the teeth out of my head or leaving me with the blunt-object-to-the-head sort of sugar crash I'm dealing with even as I type.

So don't mention any of that to her, because she'll be upset that I'm out eating crap while she's busily gnawing on some bit of root or tuber at her desk, counting the seconds until Friday night when we go out and eat something with cheese on it.

The thing you'll want to tell her about is the old guy sitting in the window of the aforementioned Dunkin Donuts (though how will the story make sense without letting her know that I was IN the Dunkin Donuts?). This guys had on work boots and jeans (or were they dungarees?) and a gray t-shirt with red suspenders, and sitting on his head as he crammed all manner of sugar coated goodness into a mouth that was already fairly overflowing with doughy delight, his lips glistening with hot coffee and the remnants of a regular glazed, was a hat that said, "I LOVE MY SENIOR DISCOUNT!"

Go on tell her. She'll like that.

May 2nd, 2003 - My neighbor Pauline told me that her doctor gave her four to eight months to live...four months ago. When she said it she looked skyward with a defiant and irritated shake of her head. It wasn't until she told me about having to stop working that tears welled up in her eyes, though she choked them right back down again.

Pauline has breast cancer. She had it once before, and had a breast removed then. That was eight years ago. She thought at the time it might be best for them to take both breasts, but they argued that there was nothing wrong with the other one, so she kept it. And she recovered.

But then about six months ago they told her it was back, the cancer, and it was out of control. It had moved from the breast, into the chest wall and from there into the lungs. Now her pancreas is shot, and the disease continues to spread. Apparently the tumors in her chest wall give her a lot of pain, and she is on Percocet 24/7.

She's also on some new, experimental chemotherapy that's kicking her ass sideways and upside down, and a cocktail of hormones that she says leaves her a little bit emotional. Again, tears well up, and I suspect it's not the hormones at work but the awful feelings of fear and loneliness she must be having.

Pauline's story is sad. Her son, Paul, is about to graduate from high school. He is her only child, the top student in his class and a real nice kid. He is, according to her, in denial about what's happening to his mother. As is her husband Frank, a cantankerous old guy who works as an electrician up at the college in our neighborhood. He goes on with his daily routine, but you can see he's nervous. He doesn't know what to do. Paul doesn't either.

And I don't know what to do or what to say. Here I am talking to a woman, leaning over the fence while our dogs wrestle in her yard, who is waiting to die. She's on that plane and the engines have died and she knows it's going down and part of her is resigned to it, too tired to fight, and part of her is angry and looking for the stupid son-of-a-bitch that killed the engines. She spends several minutes telling me how useless doctors are, and how she knew she should have had the second breast removed eight years ago, how she knew this would happen. Did I mention she was nurse...in an oncology ward?

I am looking across at her. She is shorter now and much thinner. In a strange way she looks healthier than she did when we first moved in. She was a big woman then, in a house dress. She lumbered along, always out of breath, always sweating. And now she's going to die.

Her hope is that she'll be able to see Paul go to the prom, graduate from high school, maybe even pack him off to college. She's playing for time now, not survival.

And I knew from my experiences with friends who've had cancer that there's really nothing to say. You can't make them feel better about what's happening to them. You can't understand what they're going through. They don't want you to. They don't want you to say anything.

So I just looked at her, and she just looked back at me. And that was it. The dogs were done wrestling, and I took Eddie and put him back in our yard. Pauline shuffled back in her house, and I went back to cleaning the kitchen.

May 1st, 2003 - On Wednesday nights I play soccer with friends. We go from roughly 6pm to whenever it gets too dark to see, sort of like you did when you were a kid but with a lot more standing doubled over trying to stop the searing pain in your lungs.

I look forward to soccer all week, and when it's good, it leaves me in buoyant mood for several days. When it's bad (i.e. I play poorly or we just don't get a good game going), I am very disappointed. Despite the aforementioned lung searing pain and an admission that I no longer have what exercise physiologists call 'fast-twitch muscle fibers,' the two hours I spend kicking the ball around with friends are the only time I feel like a kid again (though I realize that's a horrible cliche).

Thursday morning is a different story. If I feel half my age on Wednesday night, a metamorphosis occurs during the wee hours and I wake feeling twice my age on Thursday (or actually four times my age of the previous evening if you want to be particular about it).

This morning I am limping around with a sore right calf. I believe I kicked myself there during an attempt to 'put a move on' an erstwhile defender last night. Also, my left knee feels loose, as if I'd shaken it violently trying to get some last bit of change out. Add that to the bruised sensation in my left heel, a situation that developed about two months ago and hasn't sorted itself out yet, and I'm a walking complaint. I am Ben-Gay stinky and heating pad hot. And this is one of my better Thursdays.

You've heard jokes about old folks and their preferred conversational topics...

"How are you Grandma?"

"I'm ok. My goiter hurts and I'm constipated, but at least the pain in my hip is only excruciatingly painful, rather than 'doctor, hurry up and cut it off' kind of painful. And of course I never know when this old heart of mine will pop, but at least I'm alive today, eh kiddo?"

At my current pace, I will have arrived at this stage of conversational complaint and candor by the time I'm 35, and that's not so very far off at all.

April 29th, 2003 - So I'm walking my dog, Eddie, at the park near my house this morning, and I'm ambling down the trail when I come upon this older fella with some kind of cocker spaniel looking dog. This guy is beaming this big, white-toothed smile, and I say, "Morning" in that just passing by kind of way.

I guess he was probably in his late 60s, dressed in jeans, bright white sneakers and this pastel plaid short sleeved shirt. His hair was a shock of straight white pushed over to the side with meticulous care.

And apparently my greeting flipped a switch somewhere deep inside him because he started just about screaming at me, though in an over-the-top friendly sort of way.

Maybe he was hard of hearing. He said (yelled actually), "Well I guess I've got me a hunting dog here. He chases a squirrel right up a tree and then looks around like he can't figure out where it went." Then he laughed like he'd just won the lottery.

Eddie sidled over to his dog and gave it a cursory sniff, but the dog started growling and bearing its teeth.

Mr. Friendly burst out again, "I think he picked that up from my wife!!!" More uproarious laughter.

Now at this point I should have recognized that I was in the presence of greatness. I should have provoked more conversation, teased out some more details. I mean, how often do you find yourself face to face with a person this entertaining?

Instead I felt repulsed by the sheer force of the guy's personality, and I don't mean grossed out. I mean actually pushed backwards. His words had mass. His smile thudded against my chest.

I'm thinking he was probably retired military. There was just something about the way he was dressed. His clothes were casual but very, very neat. And his hair was perfectly straight in that colonel kind of way. Maybe that's where he developed the habit of screaming at people.

Anyway, I sort of mumbled, "Well, have a good day," and he laughed some more and turned and walked off in the other direction with his dog.

April 28th, 2003 - After some years of chasing after larger and larger pay checks in the software business, I finally got off the materialist merry-go-round and started this writing thing. I made good money managing development and installation projects for the digerati of the metro-Boston area, but the work was so frustrating. The rush to release products or to please demanding customers led to a pervasive culture of bad decision making at each of the places I worked. The result was...well...the economy went in the crapper and I burned out. Completely.

In truth, my decision to drop out was predicated on a realization that it's not what you have that makes you happy, but what you do. In other words, I figured I'd be happier sitting in the sun in my urban backyard than working a million hours a week to pay for a beach house I would never have time to visit. Nice things have no value if you haven't got the energy or inspiration to use them. Also, I'm the type of person who has to find some fulfillment in the work he does. I know. It's lame. But it's how I am.

Now I thought this was a pretty big step toward happiness. I felt I had discovered some fundamental truth about myself and about life that would lead me to happiness and contentment.

What's that? What?

Well, yes. I am naive. And not a little simple minded. But I'm working with what I've got, so get off my back.

Anyway. I enjoy writing and the idea of doing something creative as a full-time thing was very appealing. I already had a bunch of clips from serving as a part-time correspondent for a soccer website for a few years and from serving as managing editor of Soccer New England magazine, another 'spare' time activity that I somehow crammed into an already packed schedule. So I left my software job and began building my writing portfolio, sending query letters to potential publishers and generally making contacts wherever I could. And I made progress. Slowly.

But you know, I'm not a patient person. I really wanted my career to take off. I wanted happiness immediately and every day. I figured I spent far too much time thinking about these things to get bogged down in the details of actually building the life I wanted minute-by-minute. I was making myself miserable again, despite the fact I was writing all the time, and I was confused by that. Here I was doing the thing I thought I wanted to do, but someone had forgotten to flip the happy switch.

And then I had another mini-epiphany. See, I was only partially right before. It's not what you have, and it's not what you do that makes you happy. It's how you do what you do that is key. In other words, miserable people can get jobs as ice cream tasters and find things to complain about. Those of us who are impatient, pessimistic perfectionists will always find something wrong with what we're doing.

And so, before I start to sound like one of those self-help books chock full of chirpy, good advice and overworked cliches (too late), I'll say this. Happiness is a choice you make. If you can't see the good in any situation, you're basically screwed, doomed to a life of self-imposed misery. Give up now. No, seriously.

If only making these realizations was all you had to do to pay your fare on the happy bus, there would be people standing in the aisles and the line for the bathroom would be way, way too long. The truth is, people like me need to learn to look at every little thing in a completely different way. It's too bad we can't reformat our mental and emotional hard drives and just start over. Instead we literally have to second guess everything we do.

'Wow, it's a crappy day out!'

Wrong. Try again.

'Hmmm, this rain will be good for the lawn.'

Bingo.

It seems stupid, but it's not. Trust me.

So today, I'm very fortunate to be able to sit here in front of my trusty computer with a little Op Ivy spinning on the turntable, the sun streaming in through the open window and a nice spring breeze on my back. I've got laundry going downstairs and a deposit to make at the bank. The dog is asleep on the couch.

Do things get better than this? Probably not.

A note to those of you who count yourselves members of the cult of misery: I'm sorry to have bored you with all this today, but let's be honest. I write this stuff for me, not for you.

April 24th, 2003 - The other day I was putting some shelves in the walk-in closet in the guest room. Actually 'walk-in closet' doesn't really adequately communicate the size of this space. It's more like the 'cedar-lined, in-house storage facility' than any mere closet. But anyway, I was in there, moving things around, grunting and sweating.

At the very back of this mausoleum of seldom used crap there's a clothes rack on which we hang winter coats and jackets that have gone out of style but might, Joan Rivers willing, come back in. And as I pulled Christmas ornaments and wrapping paper out from under the curtain of Gore-Tex and fleece back there, my eyes fixed on two old suit coats that belonged to my grandfather. They are virtually identical in texture and cut, scratchy wool numbers in a boxy, short 38 stout. One is brown. The other is dark gray.

When I was in high school they fit me really well, and I wore them regularly just to convince myself I wasn't a fascist, preppy geek like the kids I went to school with. Yeah...I know.

Of course they don't fit me anymore. I was (am?) a late bloomer and grew several inches and gained many pounds between high school graduation and my first apartment two years later. But I've kept them, and this is why I bring them to your attention now.

My grandfather lived with us in the last years of his life. Polio had wasted his legs when he was young, and he didn't get around very well. He always walked with a cane and had this strange flopping way of moving around. He'd anchor all his weight on one wobbly leg, then fling the other one out and shift over onto it briefly before anchoring himself again. His upper body was full and strong. He had hands like a pair of vices.

He spent most of his years working as a book keeper and doing odd jobs. Never very ambitious, he mostly got along until one day in his late sixties when I guess he figured he'd just about had enough. He had managed to save up a bunch of money towards retirement but got taken in one of those over-the-phone investment scams. That's when he moved down to Alabama where we were living at the time. I was vaguely aware of some legal proceeding aimed at getting his money back, but I was young and careless, and he was old and alien and we hadn't spent appreciable time together since I was much younger.

At first he lived on his own in a sparsely furnished apartment about a mile from our house. There he fried himself pork chops and choked them down with apple sauce and orange juice.

I don't remember now if he had a heart attack and then moved in with us or the other way around. But he moved in, and that's when I started getting to know him. And let me tell you, he was a funny old bastard. He had all these stories about the various characters he had come across in a life spent drifting along.

You know, honestly, there's a lot to say here. I could tell you about his long, weird relationship with my grandmother (they separated in the '50s but never divorced) and about the way he painted his sputtering old Subaru with a brush, but suffice it to say he was an interesting guy, equal parts comedy and tragedy. I remember once I found him sitting quietly in front of the TV, though it wasn't on, and I asked what was wrong, and he said, "All my friends are dead now, and I feel like I'm just waiting to die too."

As you can imagine that was sort of a heavy one for a twelve or thirteen-year-old kid, and I'm sorry now that I couldn't come up with anything to soothe his depression. Between old age and being ripped off of his life's savings, old Herbie deserved a bit better, you know?

So I'm looking at his old suit coats, the pants long banished to the Salvation Army or the Disabled Vets, and I'm wondering why I keep them. They don't fit me anymore, and suit coats don't make very good keepsakes, especially nestled in the back of cedar-lined, in-house storage facilities.

And I guess it's not complicated. I keep them because to throw them out would feel like throwing him out, and though I know he wouldn't mind (after he died we had him cremated and disposed of per his wishes), it just wouldn't feel right.

I keep them because I can, because I have room for them. And I guess I'm starting to think that a well-ordered house is one that has space for the stuff you use and the stuff you don't use but still need. And I need Herbie, if only to remind me of all those good old stories and the stuff I learned from his demise and eventual death, good stuff and bad stuff, both.

If I could say one more thing to him, I'd just tell him not to worry, that I've hung his coats up high in the back of the 'cedar-lined, in-house storage facility' where the dog can't pee on them. He'd like that. He'd laugh.

April 20th, 2003 - How do you sleep? Well, I hope. I hope you clock your requisite eight hours and awake refreshed each morning. I hope you dream of lottery success or successful sexual conquest. I hope you don't have to get up to pee. Sleep is wonderful, isn't it? Sleep cures all. All.

I used to enjoy perfect sleep. I have never had trouble getting to sleep, and during my high school and college years I could prolong blissful slumber at will, sometimes pushing a night's sleep into the next day's afternoon. Even after I left school and began my work life I used the weekends to recharge, sleeping in on a Saturday morning, then going for big, greasy, make-your-clothes-stink brunches with friends.

Perhaps it was pure hubris that ruined my peaceful rest. My wife has lived a sleepless life, plagued by insomnia and the early ring of the alarm clock. Maybe all those years of drifting off on her created a karmic debt to be paid in dormus interuptus.

Now I am a tosser. A turner. I have to pee. The dog (the goddamn dog, if you really want to know) needs to be let out. And once I'm awake there is little chance of getting back to the land of nod. Oh, no. Awake is awake.

Thankfully, my ability to get to sleep remains intact. In fact, it has become a malady of its own kind. I fall asleep everywhere now, sitting up in chairs, riding in cars, if it's late, in restaurants. Few nights pass without my falling heavily asleep on the couch. Brittney has grown tired of cajoling me to climb the stairs before REM sets in. Now she issues orders. "John! You're sleeping! Go to bed!"

Who can blame her? It's the only way to get me to move. I think of it as tough love.

April 15th, 2003 - I wasn't really conscious of trying to project an image through this site until yesterday when I started posting fiction in my writing portfolio section. Now, I know that my short stories are boring and amateurish. They remind me of the sorts of things a self-involved high school kid would write, and I wonder if, by posting them, I am making myself appear even more like a hack than I appeared before.

Of course that line of reasoning presupposes that the other work in my portfolio paints the picture of professionalism, that the few articles in the soccer writing and other journalism sections aren't in fact amateurish, which they may well be. It might be the case that I have enough perspective to judge my fiction accurately, but not my other work.

Since no one really reads this site, save a few friends and the odd potential employer who actually takes the time to click the link in the e-mail I've sent, I really have no way of knowing. My friends all seem to nod their heads and say, 'nice work.' And well, the potential employers, for the most part, remain potential rather than actual. So perhaps that's a good measure of the quality of my work, the paucity of further work that it begets.

Some hyper-intellectual English guy came up with this idea of the 'looking glass self.' His theory was that we are not who we think we are. We are not who others think we are. We are who we think others think we are. Does that make sense? If not, sorry. That's the best I can do.

So I guess what I'm saying is: I think you must think I'm an amateurish, self-involved hack with too much time on his hands and far too little talent to make a real go of this writing thing. And that's where I have you fooled, because in reality I'm just affecting the image of an amateurish, self-involved hack with too much time on his hands. That image of Emlyn Lewis couldn't be further from the truth. I'm really quite masterful in a number of disciplines, including charades, microwave cookery and thumb wrestling. By playing the part of the unskilled writer I am only throwing the Pulitzer committee a curve ball I suspect they won't have the courage to hit. The ruse will make my eventual elevation to the status of literary god so much sweeter.

For my next trick I will demonstrate perfect mediocrity as a film director or as an actor. I haven't decided which yet.

April 14th, 2003 - Sometimes I want to take a leafblower to this office. I'd blow all the papers and crap into one corner and then pitchfork it all right out the window. Then I'd compost it for a month or two and use it to fertilize the garden boxes next to the driveway. Nothing every grows in them anyway.

Next I'd pull most of the furniture out of here and maybe burn it as yard waste. Then I'd push the desk into the middle of the room so that I could stack things on all sides, papers, office supplies, bills and books. I'd make a little office igloo, so that eventually I'd be able to put sticky notes on the domed ceiling right over my head. It would be like a little work-sphere, a self-contained productivity chamber.

Or maybe I'll just clear the whole room out, get rid of the desk and computer altogether, trash my collection of dictionaries and style guides, send all of the bills and important papers in the filing cabinet back to the people who sent them to me in the first place, then back out of the room, lock it up and brick it over like the Cask of Amontillado.

See, sometimes I blame the office for the long list of crap I have to deal with. For example, if I didn't have a filing cabinet I wouldn't feel compelled to file things. If this keyboard wasn't here, I wouldn't spend my whole day tippity-tapping my way to oblivion. If there was a brick wall where currently there is an office door, I wouldn't slink across the hall in my underwear every morning to check e-mail and remind the world I'm alive.

Who knows? Maybe, without this office, I'd be an astronaut or a religious prophet. Sure, the chances are slim, but I hate to think I'm missing out, you know?

April 10th, 2003 - Today I went to the barbershop on the corner to get my haircut. And while I sat there waiting my turn, I thought, 'This guy hears the same shit all day long. Stuff like, Can you believe this weather? or What do you think of the Sox bullpen this year?' All day long he soaks this stuff in. He cuts hair and has the same conversations over and over again.

So when I got in the chair I said to him, "Joe, you hear anything interesting today?"

And he said, "What, I assume you're talking about Iraq?"

And I said, "Not necessarily, just anything interesting at all?"

And he paused for a moment, and then this big smile cracked his face, and he said, "I'll tell you what I heard today."

And this is what he told me:

"I've got this guy who comes in here, he's 75-years-old, and last night he finally got this lady to (makes pumping motion with fist) with him. He'd been working on her forever I guess, and he was happy as a clam. That made my day."

I laughed (cause it was funny), and said, "Well, I hope I'm still up for it when I'm his age."

And he said, "No kidding. This guy, it's all he thinks about. His wife passed away 10 or 12 years ago, and since then he's been on the prowl. He keeps 3 women on the hook at a time. He wines 'em. He dines 'em. He takes 'em dancing. I guess he belongs to this senior club they've got in town, and he meets 'em all that way. For a while he was seeing this one woman, she musta been 80, skinny as a rail, couldn't have weighed more than 95 pounds. He told me he could hardly keep up with her. She wanted it all the time. I said she must be perfect for you, and he said he liked it, but he got tired. Tired! Christ almighty, that's good. He buried her a year ago and kept right on going."

"Sounds like quite an operator." - Me.

Him - "He is. He is. He's a retired firefighter, and this guy has more energy at 75 than I ever had. You talk to him and he's out of breath from jumping around so much. Loves to dance. Loves to travel. He treats these ladies real well, picks up the checks, never asks for a Dutch treat or nothing."

Then I said, "Well, he's asking them for one kind of Dutch treat, isn't he?"

And he just laughed and said, "Yeah, he is. Yeah, he is."

April 9th, 2003 - When I was a kid, sitting in Mrs. Reed's third grade classroom not learning my multiplication tables I would watch the clock. It was one of those standard-issue school clocks, big and round with a white face and black numbers. A thin black cord dangled from its base, connected to a two-pronged plug directly below.

I'd sit and watch that clock, trying to see the minute hand move. The thin red stick that spun out the seconds was a little bit distracting, but if I concentrated very hard and Mrs. Reed didn't need me to tell her that 3 x 7 equalled 25, then I could just make out the subtlest of movements, the advance of time. I always felt very satisified when I'd succeeded at this little game. I felt like I was proving that time really did move forward, despite Mrs. Reed's clear attempt to drag it to a complete halt with the instruction to copy the 7 times table over 7 times in my notebook.

And that's the way it went from third grade up through twelfth. Time crept forward almost imperceptibly. Childhood seemed like a long, long lay over at a midwestern bus station. I remember amusing myself one summer by just walking around the backyard whacking the trees with a baseball bat. Another time, probably around age twelve, I passed an afternoon driving a whole box of nails into a 2x4.

Then adulthood happened and the pace picked up.

Now it seems like all the clocks are digital, and they run like stopwatches. 10:35 becomes 11:02 in the blink of an eye. Time flies whether there's fun involved or not. We think in hours, days and weeks now, the big moving pieces, the significant chunks of time, because that's how you plan adult things. Adult things are complicated and can't be accomplished in a matter of minutes.

In this manner, my twenties seemed to pass in approximately the time it took me to learn to tie my shoes when I was five. Yes, five. I'm a slow learner.

Now there's no time for anything. I catch life as I can and write down as much as possible to review later. Maybe if I'd skipped those multiplication tables and just gone straight on to division I'd have been ok. When you divide you break things down into smaller parts, like minutes or even seconds. It's odd the mistakes you make when you're seven-years-old and staring at a clock.

April 8th, 2003 - The thing about an April snowstorm in New England that makes it so frustrating is not that you don't expect it. Quite the contrary. You do, in your darkest, most cynical moments, expect exactly this sort of torture. The falling flakes only confirm your most pessimistic inclinations. They reinforce the feeling that you might have been put here on planet earth to suffer.

And the weatherman doesn't help.

I have to believe we'd all be just that little bit less pissed-off if the local meteorologist would just seem a touch contrite when giving us the bad news that the spring has not yet sprung. Instead, he (or she) smiles. I think they enjoy the freakishness of below average temps and inordinate precipitation totals. They are more interested in weather than they are bothered by it, so when something interesting happens, they can't help grinning like the little brother or sister that has just succeeded in getting you grounded.

Strangely, I didn't find shovelling the driveway particularly INTERESTING this morning. Nor do I appreciate being grounded by Mother Nature when I should be outside soaking in the first rays of spring's warmth.

Of course, the weather people will all argue that they're only the messengers, that they don't make the weather. They just report on it.

Sorry. That doesn't cut it with me.

We (I'm speaking for New Englanders here) need our weather folk to take some responsibility for the crappy hand we are continually dealt. I will feel far less animosity towards them when they allow themselves to be burnt in effigy for nature's inadequacies.

Better yet, weather needs a customer service department. Give me a phone number to call or an e-mail address to write to. Let me spill my frustration in long, rambling complaint letters or in profanity-laced harangues left on the voice mails of non-existent weather representatives. Tape the call for quality assurance purposes.

Otherwise, I'm forced to do what I did this morning, shake my fist at the sky and piss directly into the wind.

April 7th, 2003 - It's so quiet in the middle of the day, even with the white noise of traffic on the road outside. The house breathes and creaks and groans with the ignition of the furnace and the geologically slow shifting of the foundation. The dog sits in the window downstairs, serving as sentinel in case of an unexpected attack by the mailman or a neighbor on the way to the corner convenience. He sleeps intermittently. I might too, if I wasn't sitting at my desk.

Instead I work on a little bit of everything. I've just confirmed that the paper shredder is, in fact, completely broken. No more rolling the blades forward and back to unjam it. I took it apart to see if I could pull enough bits out of the tines to get it going again, but after covering my hands with some nasty brown grease I realized that the gears aren't even moving anymore. The motor spins, but the gears, they no spin.

That's ok. I'll just stick my secrets in the recycle bin instead. Maybe they'll do someone else some good.

Every so often I lean over and carefully place the needle on a fresh record, something to reflect my mood, or even improve it. Just now I've chosen an old Uncle Tupelo record, the one with all those old traditional tunes on it. It reminds me of the mountain childhood I never had, and the deep soulfulness of other people.

If I turn it up loud enough (and I often do) I even feel a little bit soulful myself. I've got to nudge the volume up to that point where the bass bounces in my rib cage and the words crowd out all the thoughts in my head. Then, if I cock my head to the right ever so slightly, I feel soulful. It's so funny that my hearing is slowly going. I wonder if you notice how quiet it is when you're deaf.

April 2nd, 2003 - Every morning I read the news, and every morning, while I read, faces stare back at me from the screen's periphery. They are the faces of a thousand hopeful singles, grinning out from digital mug shots on popular websites. Beneath each photo is some witty and clever quote like, “Chocolate is sexy; hot chocolate is sexier” or “Three things I couldn’t live without: Starbucks’ Coffee, James Taylor’s Greatest Hits and my dog Boojiboy.”

I can’t help but wonder how these people affect the broad smiles and devil-may-care attitude that springs off my computer monitor saying, ‘Date me. I am cool.’ I wonder how they get their teeth so white, their collars so starched. I dream up conversations between us.

They are interested in me. They want to hear what I have to say. We’re friends. Of course we’re friends, they’re funny and interesting and I am…I am…a good listener…an alright person once you get to know me.

As a married person, I am at once superior for not needing to run a personal ad, and inferior for not having the audacity to advertise myself. Superior for having better musical taste. Inferior for being so judgmental, so closed.

I also hate that I find many of them attractive. I envy them the courage it takes to stick their faces up on what amounts to an enormous pixilated billboard stuck right next to the high-speed lane on the information superhighway. I want to believe they are desperate, lonely people, but I know they’re not. They are ballsy. They are brash. They want companionship, and they aren’t afraid to say so.

I can’t even tell anybody that I think James Taylor’s Greatest Hits aren’t really all that bad.

April 1st, 2003 - When I opened the invitation for my friend Ben's wedding, I was aghast to see the words 'black tie preferred' printed in the upper right hand corner of the card. A quick phone call confirmed my worst suspicions. This was yet another case of over-zealous and over-bearing parents hijacking a wedding.

So it was with some contempt that I arranged a tux for myself and booked a hotel in Baltimore near the country club where this fancy dress ball was slated to take place.

Well, let me tell you. I'm an ass. Many of you already knew that though.

The wedding was this weekend, and I can confirm that many of my assumptions about the nature of the affair were correct. The rehearsal dinner was held at a fancy-schmancy club in downtown Baltimore that required us to show ID just to enter the building. Both the dinner and the wedding were attended by an overwhelming majority of older folks, friends and associates of the happy couple's parents. And in the end, very little of the personalities of my friend or his bride were allowed to shine through.

Having said all that, it was a blast.

What's better than getting dressed up in a monkey suit to go raise heck with your old college friends? Ben and Michelle (the aforementioned bride) certainly seemed to be having a good time. We ate great food. Drank free booze. And danced our heads off alongside Baltimore's top lawyers and doctors and general hangers-on.

And at the risk of sounding like an uncultured and insensitive boob (too late), those Jews know how to party. I've never seen so much good food or so much bad (but genuinely spirited) dancing in all my life. I had also never worn a yarmulke before, and let me say, they're surprisingly comfortable and sort of nice.

Also, the Hora kicks ass. That's when everyone joins hands and dances circles around the bride and groom. Some lucky bastards (me included) get to lift them up on chairs and bounce 'em like they just don't care. During this portion of the evening, with the Motown cover band belting out the Hava Nagila up on the stage, I actually had a brief moment of zen happiness. We had Ben rockin' like Dokken, and his mother came up to us and started to yell for us to put him down. Except the music was too loud, and she was too small, so we just kept carrying him around. Then the guys next to us tried to hoist the bride, only to catapult her face first onto the floor. Too funny.

All in all I give Ben's wedding the big thumbs up. I know it wasn't what he really wanted it to be, but he seemed to enjoy himself nonetheless. Oh, and now I own a slick, all-black, Johnny Cash-style tux.

How cool is that?

March 26th, 2003 - The war has done strange things to my sense of space and distance.

On the one hand it feels weird that my country is fighting a brutal war, and yet I don't feel particularly threatened by our opposition. I see Iraquis clamoring for food and medical aid on the television in the air-conditioned gym while I crank out the miles on the treadmill. I hear about sandstorms and flooding while I ponder the state of my lawn and open the windows to air the house. This is nothing like WWII when nightly the Germans would fly across the Channel to bomb English cities, and the Brits would return the favor. I am as removed from actual suffering and conflict as I can be.

On the other hand, 'embedded' journalists bring me heart-racing accounts of clashes between heavily armored infantries. Freelance correspondents in khakis crouch behind sand dunes clutching helmets to their heads and shouting into microphones. TV cameras pan across scenes of carnage complete with craters and corpses. If something terrible happens, you can be sure someone is there to capture it on video. This, to me, is the ultimate in post-modern warfare. A fighting force has been sent to a far off land to wage war on my behalf. I'll pay for their efforts in my taxes and at the gas pump. Just in case I don't feel I'm getting value for my money, I can climb through the television screen to confirm that a reasonable amount of chaos and suffering are being caused.

I feel simultaneously too removed from the conflict and also too close. If this country has anything to gain from Operation Iraqui Freedom (and I'm really not convinced we do), the vagaries of modern warfare have precluded me from actually having to sacrifice, to suffer, for the war. And if we are routing the enemy so completely, why do we need to take every opportunity to document their suffering in vivid detail.

In the end, I am lucky and grateful to be out of harms way, but I wonder what greater proximity to this conflict might do to all American's feelings about the worthiness of the war. If we were starving and dying in the streets of our cities, would the need for Saddam's ouster seem so pressing? Or is it only our distance, the space between ourselves and real human suffering, that feeds our self-righteousness?

March 25th, 2003 - How do you blog during a war and not mention the war? You don't. The idea that some future archaelogist might spin his computer's disk down slow enough to decipher the digital cave drawings contained on my machine compells me to mention Operation Iraqui Freedom. I'd hate to think that future generations might determine that 21st century Americans were unfazed by armed conflict.

First of all, I am against the war. I will not even pretend that I understand all of the complex problems that have pushed us into this conflict. I won't even take the easy road, criticizing the current US administration for their heavy-handed execution of what was already a pretty ham-fisted foreign policy. I won't bemoan the receding tide of our civil liberties or lambaste the uber-patriots who would deport those of us who oppose war.

I will, however, say this. War is bad. People die. Those who don't die are traumatized, both the victorious armies and the survivors on the other side. People in other countries who will never smell the fires or starve under the sanctions will still suffer for this conflict. Even in the days leading up to armed conflict, thousands of people were documenting their heightened anxiety in a sort of pre-traumatic stress disorder.

Wars tear apart countries, alliances, families and individual's lives. War is bad, and it should be avoided at all costs. ALL COSTS.

March 19th, 2003 - I am not good at selling myself. This makes living as a freelance writer somewhat difficult. Flowery prose is not beyond my abilities, though I find it inordinately taxing to come up with clever ways to spout my own praise. Make no mistake. This is not modesty at work. Rather, it's the deeply held belief that my quality should be abundantly clear for all to see without the need of calling attention to myself.

Even now, you are mesmerized by the words you are reading. You feel a strong urge to drift off to sleep. I am soothing you with iambs and anapests, the meter of the hypnotically charming. Notice the way I eschew the use of trochaic and dactylic verse. Marvel at the way I not only lie to you about my poetic prowess, but do so in exactly the meters I claim to disclaim. I am audacious in my deceit, clever in my misdirection. Only my mother, master of all things arcane and trivial, will have detected my bluff. You, gentle reader, were none the wiser.

And these are only words, the instruments of my fiendish charm. If you were to step in the room with me, my appearance would only add weight to the force of my verse. My breath alone would push you straight back out the door from whence you had come. The unruly tangle of my hair would send a shudder down your spine and plant the cold seed of dread in your heart of hearts.

And yet somehow these empty boasts do little to impress the sports editors of this nation's big city dailies. They don't see how my halitosis and bad hair add up to in depth reporting on the state of US Soccer. They can't seem to make the connection between my inane blatherings about meter and three sparkling column inches of game day reporting for an upcoming match.

Am I missing something? Clearly.

In my mind A=B and B=C, but here on planet earth there's no way to make the leap from A to C without knowing someone who is tight with the editor at C, and might, if I make them dinner or wash their car, introduce me and/or put in a good word. Here on planet earth it's not what you know. It's not even who you know. It's how well you know them, and what they owe you that counts.

Looking to the future I will drop all this crap about bad breath and rhyming spondees, and focus on doing favors for people who know people I'd like to know. I'm no good at selling myself, but I'm not in the mood to sell myself short just yet either.

March 13, 2003 - The morning is hard. I find it not so difficult to tear myself out of the bed, though this is more true in summer than in winter. But once I'm up I have trouble getting things started.

As a matter of course, I stumble downstairs (note: I am stumbling more because I am stiff and sore all the time, rather than because I'm bleary eyed and tired). I turn the electric teapot on. I make some fruit-packed smoothie kind of thing. I finish cleaning up after the previous evening's dinner. I sit.

But you see, sitting was not the point of getting up. Standing was. Or walking around. Doing things.

The night before I've planned to roll out of the sack, don running shoes and shorts and head straight out the door for a lung-searing, calorie-burning good time. Or maybe I've planned to get up, walk the dog straight away and then plow into some as yet unfinished bit of writing.

This seldom happens.

Instead I stare out the window for a few minutes, contemplating air temperature and likelihood of precipitation. I shuffle back upstairs to check e-mail, read the morning news, awaken the wife. By now I'm fully ensconced in the office. The computer's hum is hypnotizing. I must find out how my paltry stock portfolio did yesterday (though I already know the answer is horribly). I must research the GoreTex trail running shoes that will facilitate early morning romps with the dog in the woods. I am busy. Other things can wait.

All of this makes me wonder if maybe I should just stay in the bed. I have, on occasion, passed entire mornings laying there on my back, awake and staring at the ceiling. Public radio is breaking down the latest bombing or protest. Strangely, it is soothing. It is the white noise of morning.

And maybe this is exactly the problem. The morning is full of violence. First there is the horrible shock of reentry known as waking up, complete with the restoration of the forces of gravity on a, let's face it, not getting any younger body. Then there are the first foods, the first fluids. The air is hot or cold. The traffic is bad or worse. And the radios and televisions and computers all just spew the violence of the rest of the world, the stuff that's been going on while you've been sleeping.

Now I ask you...is this any way to start the day?

March 4, 2003 - In the afternoon I open the blinds and let the sunshine come streaming in to light up my office/crypt. Even when it's 20 degrees outside, as it is now, there are window shaped blocks of orangey warmth on the office floor. That's when the dog rouses himself from the couch, makes the arduous journ