Waiting for Hungry

I voted for a Republican. Once.

2012-01-13T14:27:00.003-05:00

Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.)

Newt Gingrich's latest campaign ad ends with a scathing epithet: "MITT ROMNEY, MASSACHUSETTS MODERATE," spoken in a tone of voice you would ordinarily reserve for saying "TRAITOROUS SCUMBAG."

The delicious ironies here are too abundant to mention, so I won't, but it did remind me of the first, last and only time I voted for a Republican candidate, another Massachusetts moderate, Edward Brooke. Brooke was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1966, the first African-American to serve there since the 19th century.

The term "moderate" is always relative to the extremes. On racial matters Brooke proclaimed himself to stand between Stokely Carmichael at one end of the spectrum and George Wallace at the other. I voted for him the only chance I got, in 1978 when he ran for a third term, losing to Paul Tsongas.

The only other time a moderate Republican earned my approval, it was 1966. We lived in Maryland but I was too young to vote. A politician then called Ted Agnew ran for governor and had the good luck to be running against George Mahoney, a segregationist who did not bother to conceal his racist views. Mahoney's slogan was "A man's home is his castle -- Protect it!" This did not sit well with the black population of Baltimore or the liberal whites in Montgomery County, so Agnew won. His later career showed that he was no moderate. In 1972, I hitched a ride from college in Connecticut back to Maryland for the express purpose of voting against the Nixon-Agnew ticket, and in 1973 had the pleasure of hearing he had resigned after bribery charges.

Weinstock Predicts: The Republican hatred of moderation will reelect Obama in 2012.

Weinstock Wonders: Ed Brooke is still alive. I wonder who he'll vote for.

A modest proposal for 2012

2012-01-01T19:52:00.002-05:00

My tribal ancestors launched several enduring ideas, such as monotheism and bagels, but maybe the best of all is Heshvan. Heshvan is a month on the Jewish calendar. It occurs late in the fall, and it is famous. What is it famous for? One thing: Heshvan contains no holidays.

Imagine it, one entire month with not a single holiday. No feast days to cook for, no fasts to pre-load for. No presents to wrap, no gifts to send, no parades to watch, no seasonal décor to hang. No mandatory family gatherings, no TV specials, no silly hats on waitresses and no themed sales on car lots. In Heshvan, everything you dislike about holidays is completely absent for one entire lunar month.

Couldn’t you use a little Heshvan right now? Wouldn’t you kill for one solid month of predictable five-day work weeks, punctuated by perfectly long-enough two-day weekends? Don’t you hunger for a get-it-done month, when the post office and the bank are open every single Monday, and the kids are in school every single Friday? (And what do teachers do on “in-service” days anyway?)

I’m past ready. Every year, the holidays come at us faster and closer together. Not half an hour separates one holiday from the next. Immediately after store Christmas displays are taken down, valentine cards and candy appear for a six-week run. By February 15, valentines are so yesterday and six weeks of Easter shopping begins.

It isn’t only store decorators who can’t keep their holidays apart. At least they clear away the Christmas course before setting out the valentines. But the rest of us don’t. Half the buildings in town (including my own, fully bicultural, home) sport their front-door Christmas wreaths well into late March.

Don’t get me wrong. I am neither Grinch nor Scrooge. Holidays can be done right. My idea of the perfect holiday would be a single day, strictly limited to 24 hours, consecrated to doing nothing and going nowhere. It would be like an Iraqi election day; nobody could drive their car on pain of being shot. It would be a misdemeanor to exchange anything more tangible than verbal greetings and a felony to decorate so much as a cake, much less the front lawn. And when would the perfect holiday be? Pick any day you want, as long as it’s not in Heshvan.

***

In slightly different form, this piece originally appeared

in the Addison Independent.

APOSTROPHE POLICE PLEASE NOTE:

In Massachusetts, it is officially Patriots' Day.

In Maine, it is Patriot's Day.

The Way We Read, or, Tuba Time

2011-11-13T08:31:00.001-05:00

(I wrote this in 1999 after my second Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. It appeared in Riding the Meridian as part of a longer piece, "Bread Loaf Diaries." )

The entire enterprise of public poetry readings is a painful one
for me. When I first began performing my own work, a friend, an
elderly Maine poet named Wilbert Snow, saw how much I was enjoying it
and warned me, wagging his finger. "Creative contact with an audience
can destroy a poet. Look what happened to Vachel Lindsay!" That was 25
years ago, and I have still never looked up what happened to Vachel
Lindsay, lest it stop me from giving readings.

I love reading my own poetry in public, and I get compliments when I
do. I take no credit for this; I attribute it to the fact that my
poems are frequently comical, and therefore out of the mainstream.
Audiences know what to do about funny poetry: they laugh. Everyone
knows their part, and it is comfortable. But most American poetry and
poetry readings are deadly serious, painfully intimate, like a
prostate exam, dreadful but necessary, 90% embarrassment and 10%
unexpected thrill.

In case you have never attended a poetry reading let me describe one.
Imagine you have taken your sweetheart out for an evening of chamber
music at the local arts center. You join forty or fifty
highly-educated adults seated on folding chairs and wait politely. The
hour arrives. But instead of a tuxedoed string quartet, in comes an
11-year-old boy, dressed like Jimmy Olson on a bad bowtie day, wearing
a tuba, carrying a baseball bat, and with an overstuffed dimestore
photo album tucked under his arm.

The audience applauds. For his first piece, the boy--we'll call him
"the poet"--plays a brief series of scales on the tuba. The audience
takes a deep breath and holds it. The poet misunderstands this as a
signal to proceed, so he favors us with a second creation: he opens
his tuba's spit valve to eject a bubbly stream of sputum and
condensation, which splatters on the floor.

The audience, in rhythmic unison, sits perfectly still. Pleased that
he has been so entertaining, the poet drops his tuba and shoulders his
bat. He takes a few tentative practice strokes, swings for the fences
and smashes the bat into his own forehead. The audience averts its
gaze as he bleeds for several stanzas. The audience stares at the
ceiling, then at the floor. Thus encouraged, the poet, for a grand
finale, opens the photo album, which turns out to contain not
snapshots, but X-ray films, all revealing metastatic cancer in the
bodies of the poet's loved ones: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles,
wives, children, self, and historical figures. The audience stares and
gasps. Some weep, some snore. The poet closes the album, steps back
from the podium, bows. The reading is over. There is applause.

There are a dozen more readings to go this week. I can't wait.

A periodic table of the experiences

2011-11-06T16:42:00.004-05:00

All 92 elements, attractively
displayed, available at
www.element-collection.com.
Worried about the radium,
uranium and thorium? They also
sell a radiation monitor.

All this collecting talk reminds me of a brilliant freelance physicist I once knew who was assembling a collection of all the natural elements in the periodic table. I sent an email to ask about his motives and methods. He answered within minutes with a firm "No comment."

Nobody's required to answer random importunate questions from near-strangers, but I was disappointed. Otherwise, I would never mention the time that he accidentally inhaled a snootful of tellurium powder and had to be rushed to the hospital for chelation therapy. Tellurium, if it does not kill you, gives a distinctive garlic odor to the breath that has been known to last for months. I'm sure it's gone by now.

But objects aren't the only thing you can collect. You can collect experiences, you can make a bucket list and go fill your bucket with your heart's desire. Wikipedia, a staggeringly vast collection in its own right, says “An alternative to collecting physical objects is collecting experiences of some kind, through observation or photography. Examples include bird-watching; transportation, e.g. train spotting, aircraft spotting, metrophiles, bus spotting, see also I-Spy; and visiting continents, countries, states, counties, and national parks....”

OF SOME KIND

All the trains spotted, every state stepped in,

all the birds you have seen, did they see you?

And now think of all the girls you have kissed,

through observation or photography,

or boys, and exactly how they tasted,

and how few wanted even one more kiss.

Experience collects us, brings us back

to be stored dry, neat in a wide flat drawer,

but when the drawers are full, piles us up

in closets, in stacks of old wine cartons,

in a clutter in his heart, in a horde

of life to be relived.

I don’t talk this way.

This is something new for me, this sounding

like epitaphs, like sermons on gray stone.

Sunday they pointed out where I’ll be buried

in Waitsfield, just up from the Mad River,

with all the rest of the family, all.

It didn’t seem to bother them a bit.

While you're waiting for me, a poem by Marcus Bales

2011-10-30T10:59:00.000-04:00

Thank you, Marcus. Guilty as charged. Stay tuned.

Villanelle: Waiting for Hungry

by Marcus Bales

"I will write here every day, and there will be only one excuse for not blogging, and that will be writing poetry" – David Weinstock, http://waitingforhungry.blogspot.com/2011/09/sliver-time.html

David promised he would speak

A little every single day

But we've been waiting for a week.

He'll probably say I've got some cheek

To chide him like a child this way:

David promised he would speak.

His backlog's big -- a little tweak

Of something old would be okay

Since we've been waiting for a week.

I know he isn't really meek:

He's slashed me like a limp fillet,

When David promised he would speak.

I hope he's on a writing streak,

And too intent for mere display --

But we've been waiting for a week!

Perhaps there'll be a little leak

On Facebook -- we can only pray,

Since David promised he would speak.

Our present prospects still seem bleak:

After all, he gets no pay;

But David promised he would speak --

And we've been waiting for a week.

CAUTION: OBTUSE SIGNAGE

2011-10-21T22:38:00.003-04:00

You can't blame the Zanesville authorities for the complete non-communicativeness of this sign. They had a real live emergency on their hands, and hardly had time to call in a team of copywriters and poets for a proper brainstorm. But now that it's over, in preparation for the next time, let's create a better message.

Don't think it's going to be easy, either. This sign is a strict form. Three lines, seven characters max per line. That's tighter than haiku. It would take six or seven of them to add up to one 140-character Twitter tweet.

So here's your assignment,which could go two ways.
1) Compose a highway sign that will actually prevent collisions and save lives with a useful warning.
or 2) Write the coolest sign imaginable.

Got it? I'll go first:

ZBRA XNG

NEXT 3 MI

GO SLOW

DANGER

LOOSE

ANIMALS

LIONS

TIGERS

BEAR O MY

Now your turn. If my comments box gives you any trouble, email sign copy to me at david.weinstock@gmaill.om

The Button List

2011-10-21T00:32:00.005-04:00

Fifty-six men, including John Hancock, put their John Hancocks on the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Collectively they are known as The Signers. In 1833, William Buell Sprague, who was not born until nearly 20 years after the Declaration, invented a new hobby: collecting the signatures of all 56 signers. There are two things that need to be said about this.

One is that inventing a hobby for yourself is an admirable achievement. But inventing a hobby for other people to follow...I don't know. It seems like an odd and slightly sketchy act, nearly anti-social. I say this on a hunch and practically no evidence, so I could be wrong; I welcome your counterexamples.

The second is that by defining the set to be collected so precisely, Sprague set in motion a long-term rise in the price in the autographs of all the signers. Some signatures were relatively easy to find, some were less common. But the scarcest of all is that of Georgia delegate Button Gwinnett.

Why? Because Gwinnett, during his 41 years of life before the Signing, for whatever reason, happens not to have put his signature on many pieces of parchment or paper that survived. Nor could he do so afterward, as he was fatally wounded in a duel in 1777. Unlike signer Ben Franklin, who lived twice as long and seems to have spent nearly every waking minute writing letters, Signer Gwinnett didn't sign much of anything else.

That made Button Gwinnett's signature the Babe Ruth rookie card of the Signer list, the rarest and hardest to find, even if you are willing to spend a fortune. The latest Button sig changed hands for over $750,000.

Every collection of any kind that is based on a list will include one Button, one piece more rare than the others. And if very many people are clutching the same scavenger hunt list, it's just the law of supply and demand. The rare piece soars in price, because everybody's got to have it.

In book collecting, the Button is the first edition of the first book of a very famous author before he got famous, so published in a small press run. In comic books, it's Spiderman #1, because Marvel was a fringey company and because Spidey was such a jerk. And if it is your heart's desire to own one license plate from every state, your Button is Hawaii. Nobody drives here from Hawaii.

Cover Story

2011-10-19T15:59:00.003-04:00

Chatting with poet friends about the relative merits of different approaches to writing cover letters for manuscript submissions, I came up with the ultimate cover letter. I don't think I will be actually sending it.

Dear Editor,

Thank the man who delivers this,
he has risked his life for art.
I am being held by the Taliban,
or possibly the CIA, hard to tell,

in a tiny bamboo cage somewhere
I am not sure where but it is hot
and dusty, and I am hot and dusty
and the only thing that keeps me alive
is writing poetry and hoping
it will appear in a journal like yours.
My guards let me out of my cage

five times a day for prayer

and if I were a Muslim I would pray
but instead I use the time
writing poems in the dust with a stick
where my friend finds them
and writes them on cigarette papers
that are easily concealed
and after they have served their purpose
can be filled with tobacco and smoked.
You living in America can have no idea
of how much people smoke around here,
wherever that is. They roll their own
but prefer American cigarettes
when they can get them. I don't doubt
that I could buy my freedom for as little
as two cartons of Marlboros
but did not think to bring any with me
as I was being kidnapped. I am not,
I must assure you, an MFA candidate,
nor a professor of creative writing,
not a careerist full of ambition, no.
My only ambition is to survive
and someday, inshallah, see a copy
of your journal containing even one
of the poems before you now,
and I cannot rule out the possibility
that if my poems appear in your journal,
it will focus attention on my captivity
that might save my life. I hope
you like the poems.

Best,
David Weinstock
Somewhere hot and dusty

To get from Aardvark to Army, you must go through Alabama and Alaric

2011-10-19T00:14:00.004-04:00

I promised to write more about collecting, and the urge to "Collect the Whole Set!" which is an idea that animates and energizes a surprisingly large segment of the economy, as I learned during the two years I accidentally spent in the world of investment-grade rare coins. But actually, I already knew it from an earlier experience.

Remember how supermarkets would sell encyclopedias, with a new volume available every week? The first volume was priced very low to get shopper and child hooked. My mother bought me Volume 1 (Aardvark-Army) of the Golden Book Encyclopedia for 49 cents, and proceeded faithfully to buy the rest of the set until I had all 16, and I pretty much read them all, skipping only the long articles about each state, always accompanied by a map dotted with little symbols of whatever that state grew or dug or manufactured. I did not care, I still do not care, what they grow or dig or build in Alabama. (I am however very interested in how Alabama is going to grow, dig or make anything when it starts to enforce its lunatic new immigration laws.)

And then there was Alaric, king of the Visigoths. Every supermarket encyclopedia since Gutenberg includes an article on Alaric, a fact which was not lost on a man named Alaric whom I met in Cambridge in the late 1970s.. When I told him I knew his name from my encyclopedia, he revealed that he had purchased dozens of Volume Ones from many different sets, at great introductory prices, just to have the Alaric articles. From him I learned that not everybody needs or wants to "Collect the Whole Set." This discovery has influenced my own collecting life, on which I will say more soon.

GO BAG

2011-10-14T17:28:00.002-04:00

GO BAG

You should have a bag already packed

with what you’ll need if the worst should happen.

Keep it in your car. Never leave without it.

It is your only chance to make it through.

Clothing for all conditions: think layers.

Think hot, cold, camouflage, and funerals.

First aid, medications, comforting books,

weapons, a flashlight, and means of escape,

and food, food enough, for how many days?

I cannot answer that. The rest of your life.

Imagine that much food fitting in one bag.

You could not carry that bag very far.

When the bag is empty, fold it up.

Discard it safely where no one can find.

Undress. Disarm. Stay where you are right now.

The worst has already happened

Science should be popularized

2011-10-12T15:22:00.005-04:00

RELATIVITY FOR THE MILLION,
by Martin Gardner (1962)

Writers who "popularize" science for the rest of us--Lucretius, George Gamow, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Oliver Sacks, Gina Kolata, Rebecca Skloot--are sometimes looked down upon, but I look up to them all. Science is way too important to be left to the scientists. If more writers were explaining climate change and global warming right now, there might be fewer politicians talking nonsense about it.

In 1962, when it was still being said that only a dozen people in the world understood Einstein's theory of relativity, Martin Gardner (1914-2010) brought out a book, Relativity for the Million, that a 10-year-old could read, so I did. My favorite part was about how the Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the existence of the ether wind.

I also devoured Gardner's books of mathematical games and puzzles, drawn from his Scientific American columns, and The Annotated Alice edition of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which contains hundreds of what may be the most enjoyable footnotes ever written.*

I've been thinking about other books I read as a child. I had absolute permission from my parents to read any book I found, as if they could have stopped me. I seem to have opened up every book in the house, although if it was boring or too far over my head I would put it back down after a few pages. In adult life since I have often started a book and instantly realized that I'd already read the first couple of pages decades before.**

But here's the thing I really wanted to say. Martin Gardner was one of my favorite writers, and he was quite prolific, with dozens of books to his credit. Why have I read only a few? Why haven't I collected them all?

Some readers and many book collectors just "Gotta catch 'em all." Gardner's list would be both achievable and affordable, especially if I opted for "reading copies" instead of first editions in mint condition. I know of a collector who did that for Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, finding every possible edition and translations in every language from 1776 onward.

But that's not how I read or buy. I find a book I like and read it again and again. I have read the entire oeuvre of very few writers I care about, and only if their corpus is relatively small and important. James Joyce? I've read all five books. JK Rowling? All seven. Isaac Asimov? If anybody in the entire world has read every one of his more than 500 books, I'd like to meet him.*** Or her.****

Next time, more about those who, as the cereal boxes used to say, "Collect the whole set!" and what's the difference between fastidious collecting and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* I have decided that all footnotes ought to be extremely entertaining. Sorry about this one..

** There is some dispute about whether there is any such thing as a photographic memory. I read that somewhere.

*** If you are that person, I will buy you lunch and hear your explanation for this bizarre act of fandom.

**** You also get lunch, but will have even more to explain.

Why I Don't Own an iPad 4, or, Libidinal Confessions of a Late Adopter

2011-10-08T16:01:00.007-04:00

A CARBURETOR. Cars don't have
carbs anymore, but lawnmowers do.
Not until carburetors have become
completely obsolete will I love them.

Whoa! Did seeing "iPad 4" in the title make you leap up and grab the car keys? Simmer down. There is no iPad 4, not yet. And you, Sir or Madam (but most probably Sir because it's a guy thing), are officially an Early Adopter.

Me, I'm a Late Adopter. You won't find me camped outside the Apple store the night before a release date. On the spectrum between early adopters, who are always the first to snap up new technology, and Luddites who would rather smash it than buy it, I am somewhere in between. You can have tomorrow's technology, I want yesterday's. Or better yet, yesteryear's.

I got my 1945 Leica IIIc camera in 1965, my 1946 Hallicrafters SX-25 shortwave receiver in 1966, and my 1956 Buick Super in 1970. All three were gifts from my father, but I continued in the same vein, with Ann's kind encouragement, culminating with a 1913 Chandler & Price 10 x 15 printing press, acquired in 1984. We also harbor an Ivers & Pond upright piano built in the late 19th century and fully restored for the 21st.*

One reason to be a late adopter is that it's cheaper, anywhere from 25% during the clearance sale down to half price on eBay. Or even better, a prematurely jaded early adopter gives you a superseded model for free because it is so last week and he wouldn't be caught dead.

True, a few categories of old things become more expensive rather than cheaper with age, and in a future post I will tell all I know about the charms of rare books, the darker side of rare coins, and other variations of tulip bulb madness. But old technology usually holds little allure for collectors. Bulky, heavy, inconvenient objects like printing presses and parlor pianos typically change hands on the basis of "Get this damn thing out of my garage and it's yours."

Another reason to prefer older tech to new is that, at least until recently, older equipment can be repaired. Its parts are discrete and visible. Before the extreme miniaturization into silicon chips of even the most complex gadgets. it was possible to take things apart, discover what had failed, and replace it. Parts may be hard to find, but the satisfaction is great when it works.

The repairability of old machines, however, is not guaranteed, and there can be a great deal of self-delusion about it, verging on compulsive hoarding disorder, which has recently become the subject of not one but two popular and horrifying reality shows. Ham radio hobbyists notoriously keep "junk boxes" because you never know when some tube or capacitor might be just what you need to fix something else. But junk boxes all too easily can became junk basements, junk garages and junk barns, and well, a junked-up life.

Why do we do it? "It is the libidinization of stuff," Cambridge psychologist Lucia Stone told me, adding that it is far more common in men, and she ought to have known. Her husband, Fred Stone, was a magnificent acquisitor of nearly everything, including wood and lead printing type, vintage glass bottles, old buttons, and World War II airplane parts. Fred was the kind of guy who gave materialism a good name. The type that overflowed the basement was stored in a makeshift shed Fred lovingly built in his backyard from military surplus magnesium aircraft frames.

I wish I had been there, standing slightly upwind from the plume of fragrant and poisonous fumes, the day that shed caught on fire.

But I digress, yes I do, digression upon digression, and I intend to continue. Stay tuned.

************************************************************************
*The piano was restored by Emily and Ed Hilbert of New Haven, Vermont. We schlepped it to California, where a piano tuner tried to buy it from us, and then hauled it back to Middlebury where it may be viewed by appointment.

**Fred Stone's collection of 19th and early 20th century wood type ("Take it all! Just take it!") went from his basement in Cambridge to mine in Somerville, then to our next basement in Waterville, Maine, and finally to the Art Department at Smith College, where we hope to visit it someday soon.

Relics

2011-10-05T19:59:00.005-04:00

My friend Charlie, a martyr but no saint, collected relics, principally by stealing them. To his credit, he always chose objects far too small to be missed. Once, in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, pre-renovation, he reached up and pinched off a tiny scrappet of rubber gasketing from the fuselage of the Hiroshima bomber Enola Gay.

Another time, he found a little deposit of paper bits in Emily Dickinson's writing desk at Harvard's Houghton Library. They were broken-off corners and edges of her writing paper, maybe her poems. It was sacred confetti. Charlie swept it into a plastic bag and kept it for years.

Soon after I married Ann, Charlie presented her with an orange smidge of broken brick, the size and color of an unripe cranberry. He told us it came from the rubble of Cambridge's ancient jail, where Ann's ancestor, the witch Martha Carrier, was held before her execution by hanging in 1692.

Charlie had so little and wanted so much that I naturally wished to contribute to his collection of micro-relics. One day, on a walk, I picked him up a pair of sea pebbles from one of his holy places, Nauset Beach, by Marconi Station in the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Charlie was from Cape Cod. He was estranged from his family, and wasn't keen on human beings generally. But he honored this particular place for being uninhabited, bleak, and windy. He would have lived there if he could, tenting in the lee of a dune, free at last from the tyranny of landlord and roommate.

Marconi chose Nauset for his radio experiments for similar reasons. It was barren table land overlooking the sea, with an unobstructed path to England, and it was vast.

Marconi's signals, his radio waves, were big and floppy. By wingspan, if you think of today's compact little frequencies as sandpipers, Marconi's emissions were wandering albatrosses. Coming in for a landing, Marconi's trans-Atlantic flocks of di-di-dit could not be expected to perch comfortably on much less than a quarter mile length of aerial wire. His frequencies were so low, in fact, and their wavelengths so long, that for decades afterward, any useful frequency shorter than a football field would be known as "short-wave."

In Charlie's pantheon of higher beings, Marconi was in fact what Charlie himself wished to be, a truly important self-educated tinkerer. No higher calling could exist, unless it were friend or parent. Charlie would rather have invented a new ice-ax than find a cure for cancer, or war, especially not war, which intrigued him as the human activity calling tinkerers to their most heroic feats of ingenuity.

In his mind if not in fact, Charlie could field-strip and reassemble a Panzer tank. If you left him alone in your basement, he would find a tool you had thought was lost, and take it apart for cleaning and polishing. He would never tell you he was about to do this, or that he had done it, but he did usually attach a note. Years later I am still finding posthumous notes from Charlie, tied with sturdy tent-repair thread to the handle of a wire stripper, or tucked inside the leather case of a voltmeter.

One day, exploring the Houghton Library treasure

room, he found a pair of dueling pistols that had belonged to George Washington. They were not, in his opinion, being properly cared for. He did not steal them--they did not fit his collecting strategy.

But he did immediately appoint himself as their rightful curator and conservationist. (This would have shocked the trusting library director who had hired him as a part-time security guard and issued him the key.) Charlie unpacked the pistols, cleaned them as thoroughly as if he were seconding a duel at daybreak, and left them shimmering with preserving oil.

Back from the Cape, I ran into Charlie on the street, and pulled the two stones out of my backpack. They were flat, round, surf-polished cookies of dove-gray basalt. He took one in each hand, and squeezed them for a long time, with his eyes closed.

"Uploading," he said. "Uploading."

**************************************************

In memory of Charles A. Reynolds, 1945-1997

My first and last language

2011-10-04T16:37:00.006-04:00

One April, for National Poetry Month, I invited a respected poet to visit my poetry workshop as a guest speaker. She is a distinguished teacher/scholar and and no shrinking violet, but she suddenly expressed a lack of confidence in her public speaking skills. "David," she explained, "English is my fifth language!"

She did eventually accept, and on the day of her talk she held forth in flawless though Chinese-accented English for an hour. At one point she actually used the word "instantiation," which I had to look up, and English is my first language. Unfortunately, I fear, it will also be my last.

That's not for lack of trying. I have formally studied four languages, Hebrew, German, Spanish and Russian, and cannot speak any of them. I am tongue-tied in four tongues all at once, if you can picture that.

Hebrew school, of course, was never actually intended to make me chatter like an Israeli. The aim instead was teaching me to pray in a language God could understand. After four years, six hours a week, I know dozens of blessings and prayers and psalms and songs, although not necessarily what they mean or how they mean it. Some of what I memorized, I discovered much later, wasn't Hebrew at all but Aramaic, which come to think of it is another language God understands, see Matthew 27:46. Shows how little Hebrew I grasped, if I couldn't detect when we switched into Aramaic.

Three years of high school Spanish really ought to have given me some ability to converse, with all those dialogs and drills and language labs. But although I could play back a dialog--"Where is the library?"-- I couldn't carry on an actual conversation. It only took five minutes in Barcelona to make it clear that I was a natural-born monoglot. I could barely order almuerzo.*

Next I took a reading course in German because I wanted to understand Rilke, and that worked out as well as you'd expect--who understands Rilke? I absolutely love German but definitely can't speak it. When occasionally I attempt a word of German out loud to a native speaker, I get only verständnislose Blicke.**

Mind you, my disability in Spanish and German is about speaking; in both languages I can usefully read ordinary text, if not mystical poetry. But Russian was different. After two semesters plus a summer at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow and Leningrad. I couldn't really read or talk. I understood barely half of what was said to me, and the Russians caught even less of what I said, which invariably caused them to switch to English, which is what they had wanted to do in the first place. Everyone in the Soviet Union was mad for English and Western culture and consumer goods. "Peenk Floyd?" they would ask, fishing for forbidden music, and "Troozya?"

Troozya? Troozya, I eventually deduced, meant trousers, which at that delicate moment in US-Soviet relations meant that they would pay many rubles for my blue jeans. Would I sell them my blue jeans? "Da!"***

It doesn't add up. In English, I am handy with words and have lived by my pen. I possess a good ear, an easy style, and a vocabulary twice as large as anyone needs, even to play Scrabble. I can give a speech to a large audience without looking at my notes. Why can't I talk foreign?

I blame a lifelong aversion to going through that painful but necessary phase of language learning when one makes mistakes and more mistakes, commits howlers in public, and gets frustrated and flustered and laughed at for sounding like an idiot. Even as a toddler, I'm told, I hated to babble. "You never talked baby talk," says my mother, a longtime elementary school teacher. "You weren't going to talk until you were good and ready. Then one day, full sentences!"

At age two, I could have it both ways: dignified and fluent. Ever since, apparently not. But I keep thinking how interesting it would be to learn Arabic. Inshallah!****

*Lunch
** Uncomprehending stares
*** Yes.
****God willing.

They are your houses

2011-10-02T19:25:00.006-04:00

All week long I've been getting into arguments with friends and strangers about the Occupy Wall Street protests. I'm not sure why I'm so bothered about it but I can't seem to shut up.

Partly it is the incessant whining about "media blackouts" that seemed not to notice the literally thousands of news stories about the events.

Partly it is the group's evident lack of ideological or programmatic focus. Not that they're not trying. Even as the protests were in full swing, the Coup Media website was polling supporters (and anyone else who happened onto the site) to find out what their demands should be.

The list of candidate positions weirdly includes not only perfectly understandable wishes like free college education for all and nationalized health care but also the repeal of the 16th Amendment (which allowed the federal income tax) and re-opening the investigation of the 9/11 attacks. (Here is the full list: http://coupmedia.org/the-sovereign-peoples-movement.html )

But mostly I suppose I'm comparing Occupy Wall Street to another ongoing protest, the one against the Tar Sands Pipeline. I love their well-rehearsed discipline, their laser focus on a specific issue, and their orderly and methodical way of getting themselves arrested, one after another, by the hundreds, outside the White House. It made me proud of leaders like Bill McKibben and Chris Shaw for knowing what they are talking about and getting the world to listen.

And finally, I am remembering a poem by Richard Wilbur, who would later be my teacher, written in spring of 1970 for the Wesleyan Strike News. There's a sentence I can't forget, as I think of the houses bought with the mortgages that spawned the current Wall Street crisis. "They are your houses."

FOR THE STUDENT STRIKERS

by

RICHARD WILBUR

Go talk with those who are rumored to be unlike you

and whom, it is said, you are so unlike.

Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why

You are out on strike.

It is not time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt

Slogan that fuddles the mind toward force.

Let the new sound of our streets be the patient sound

Of our discourse. 

Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.

Yet here and there, it may be, there will start,

Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening,

Changes of heart.

They are your houses; the people are not unlike you;

Talk with them then and let it be done

Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff

And the guardsman's son.

The poet as content provider

2011-09-30T20:40:00.006-04:00

Poetry and the Web go together remarkably well. It's a good fit, for several reasons. The average length of a modern American poem is just about one screenload of text. Then, there's the money. A Hollywood producer who sinks $100 million into a film can't afford to give it away on the Web. But since it costs next to nothing to write a poem, publishing it to be viewed for free on the Web is not such a big change from previous methods of disseminating poems. Poets have pretty much always given it away.

But the thing that impresses me most, and this is going to sound perverse, is the relative permanence of Web publishing over print publishing. How can I say that, when everyone else is bemoaning the evanescent nature of pixels compared to good old corporeal paper and ink?

I've published some poems in printed "little" magazines, all of them now out of print. Occasionally a copy will turn up in the catalog of a rare book dealer. But so few copies of literary journals are printed to begin with, and so few kept, that you might as well seal a poem into a bottle and cast it into the ocean.

On the other hand, nearly every poem I have ever published on the Web is still instantly available, anywhere in the world. The very first was in an early ezine called Blue Moon Review, and here it still is www.thebluemoon.com/4/weinstock.html

A large group of poems came out in 1997 in Riding the Meridian, from web publishing pioneer Jennifer Ley. http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/weinstock.html. And it's all still there to be read, and has been read far more times than it ever could have been if immured in the pages of low-circulation little mags.

The real reason poetry and the Web are a perfect marriage--there aren't many people who care about it, and before the Web it was labor-intensive for them to find each other. In this they resemble enthusiasts of nearly every other small-niche interest. What the Web has done is create truly vibrant and growing communities of people who share the same rare allergies, collecting hobbies, obsessions, and kinks.

I don't think poetry is just a kink. It's a mother art, a wellspring of all of our literature, lively arts and culture. But now, with the Web, poetry never had it so good.

The Army Termite Midget Dream

2011-09-29T00:03:00.001-04:00

Halfway through my 10th year, for the first time ever, I noticed myself. All at once, I knew that I was me, a person, different from and separate from all the other people. Just as quickly, I knew that I had to grab this sudden feeling and secure it so it could not get away, and to do that I had to put it into words. Fiercely, I said to myself, "I am me and I know I am me. I must remember this moment."

Not long after that, I had a dream, a regular sort of night dream, with jump-cuts and shape-shifting and all the nonsensical stuff that happens in dreams. What made this dream different was that I gave it a title, and started trying to sell it on the playground. "I'm selling dreams," I said. "I just had The Army Termite Midget Dream and I'll sell it to you for a dime."

My friends, my two best school friends, made it clear that this was silly and not the least bit entertaining and that nobody was going to pay me to tell them my dreams. Even when I revealed tantalizing details of the dream, like our classmate Bonnie Peterson wearing a suit of armor, nobody was buying it.

What the hell was I doing? I've never understood that incident or known what to call it, until now. Four inches up the screen from where I am typing this sentence, on Blogger's dashboard, is a clickable tab that says MONETIZE. I haven't clicked it yet, but someday, someday I will. And then I'm finally going to sell somebody that dream.

Poem: The Names We Took

2011-09-28T06:33:00.004-04:00

Slow Turtle, Sitting Bull, I envy you no more.
These are the names that we took:

Garden of Trees, Almond Leaf, Shooting Star,

Grapeleaf, Grapevine, Grapeblossom,

He-Who-Prunes-Vines and He-Who-Sells Wine,

a River of Wine, Wine Glass, Goblet, White Cloth,

Grain-Grinder, Bread, the Guest-to-Whom-Wine-Is-Served,

Gift of Wine, A Field of Corn, Shining Corn,

White Bread, Son of the Earth, Petals of Stone,

Little Flower, Big Mountain, Silver Nail,

Silver Ingot, and Gold, Always Gold,

A Flood of Gold, A Brook of Gold,

He-Who-Fishes-for-Gold, A Grove of Gold,

A Roomful of it, its Shine, its Joy, its Clang,

its Grumble.

Hoozajew? How I defeated an online Nazi

2011-09-27T23:57:00.004-04:00

Today is Google’s birthday. With as much as I use Google and how totally the search engine and all of its subsidiaries have changed my life, today ought to be my birthday too. And why shouldn’t it? This is America. You can have any birthday you want. That’s what my grandfather, Leon Weinstock, believed when he immigrated. He didn’t change his name, but he wanted an all-American birthday, and chose, what else? The Fourth of July.

My name is Weinstock. Let me spell that for you, I say. Spelling out my surname, which I must do constantly, is a minor annoyance. People named, e.g., Ann Jones, have no idea what we go through, unless they impulsively commit hyphenation somewhere along the way.

We are foreigners on this earth, no matter where we go, no matter how long we stay. Forget for an instant and your name will remind you. Once, when my father bought a lake house in South Jersey, a neighbor remarked that his name might be too long to fit on the mailbox. Nine letters? Give me a break. He would never have said that to a nine-letter WASP, not even to a ten-letter one. The implication was clear: we simply didn’t belong.

My interest in Jewish names quickly brought me into contact with a brilliant anti-Semite. It started when we traveled to New York for a bar mitzvah. In our hotel room I picked up the Manhattan phone book and started to browse. Immediately what caught my eye was the astonishing variety of Jewish names. There were all the usual ones, Gold this and Silver that, Wein this and Rose that, but also others, unfamiliar but in the same onomastic vein, full of references to shiny metal and jewels, pretty flowers, delicious food and drink. I wrote down all my favorites. After the trip I pulled down my German dictionary, looked up the names, translated them into English, and wrote my poem “The Names We Took.”

The subject intrigued me, so with Google as my tireless research assistant, I swarmed the net to learn just how we got such names. To make a long story short, we took them, en masse, in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, at the behest of European civil authorities who were finding it damned inconvenient to keep track of (and tax and draft and control) people who had no surnames at all, instead using patronymics of the “David Ben Schmuel” variety – “David son of Samuel.”

But as my search expanded, I also found a website called Hoozajew.org. On the site was offered, free for downloading, a piece of software called “Hoozajew 2.0” whose stated purpose was “counting Jews.” Just feed in a list of names and back comes the list with all the Jewish names flagged. The site owner had already performed this data analysis on dozens of lists, and had discovered, with alarm, that Jews were taking over the government, the law, the banks, the media, the arts and sciences, and more.

From my research, I knew that the anonymous site owner probably had not developed the software, but had adopted a program devised for a much different and more benign purpose than uncovering the workings of the worldwide conspiracy. No, it was developed by Jews for fundraising purposes, a quick and efficient way to sort a prospect mailing list for Jewish charities who wanted to target the tribe with appeal letters, rather than wasting postage and printing on unconnected strangers.

The site, perhaps a dozen pages in all, was very matter-of-fact, quite understated as anti-Semitic ranting goes, but still hateful enough for me to want to know exactly who was sponsoring it. I searched for days, checking domain name registries and every search engine I knew about, looking for clues.

Lucky for me, the Hoozajew founder had other hobbies than Jew-bashing. He carelessly included a traceable email address on the hate site. The address included the name “dimona.” Dimona is the location of Israel’s secret nuclear facility, the place they developed and build their still-unacknowledged atomic bombs.

But the Dimona address also appeared on a site about the physics of the trebuchet, a medieval war engine, a sort of catapult popular among technically minded Ren Faire geeks. On the trebuchet site, he freely gave out his real name and location. He was a scientist, living in central New Jersey. I found his address, his phone number, the names of his wife and children and brother. I found out that he had once run for the Senate as a Libertarian candidate, and that he occasionally posted consumer book reviews on Amazon. In other words, he wasn’t a solitary kook; he was a man with a job and some standing in his community, and who would have strong reasons to keep his hatred hidden.

So now I knew, but what was I going to do about it? I didn’t really object to his having his site. I didn’t write to his domain host and demand that the site be taken down. What bothered me most was his anonymity. I wanted to expose him, or something.

At that point, my quest slowed down. I just didn’t know what to do next. I dithered. I called New Jersey’s Anti-Defamation League; they listened but offered no action. I called a newspaper in the man’s town, but they did not seem interested in the story either.

Eventually, I realized that I would have to do something myself. I began to email the man, as if I were a sympathizer who wanted to chat, using an email address that did not give away my own identity. We exchanged several rounds of email over a few days; he was cautious, but once he was convinced that I was on his side, his comments grew more virulent.

And then I overplayed my hand. I told him I knew exactly who he was, using his name and everything else I had found, and challenging him to come out in the open. At that point, he panicked. He did not write back, but immediately, within a few hours that same day, scrubbed both his sites of any identifying information, and soon after anonymized his domain registration. Hoozajew.org continued for a few months after that, and then eventually disappeared.

Did my emails force him to skedaddle and contribute to shutting down the site? I hope so, and I’m glad I did what I did. I do notice, though, that the site name Hoozajew.org is in use again, this time as a sort of links page on the topic of free speech.

The poem "The Names We Took" can be read in my Sept. 28 post.

Sliver Time

2011-09-26T20:30:00.001-04:00

You say you have no time to practice your art, and I bubble over with advice. I say “Choose a different form, one that is better suited to the precious slivers of time you still have. Write haiku or flash fiction. Paint watercolors. Compose etudes instead of symphonies, snapshots instead of studio shots. Make raku pots. If you can’t roast, stir-fry. Maybe art can’t be central, but it can be interstitial.” That’s the kind of thing I say.

I am sorry for all that advice, you may ignore it. Actually, you already ignore it. But worse than that, I ignore it. In all these years, I have never been able to settle on an artistic endeavor for myself that fit permanently and productively into my life. And yet, when asked who I really really am, I say “poet.” I say “writer.” I say “artist.”

And then there is this blog, which I announced four years ago, and about which I blithely used the word “diary.” If this were actually a diary, there would have been nearly 1500 posts by now instead of 40. It hasn’t been daily, it hasn’t even been monthly. My track record on that kind of dailiness, on any kind of dailiness, is poor. I never do the same thing two days in a row, never have done.

Still I suspect that it is now time to make art every day, because all I have is every day. So here’s a new idea. I will write here every day, and there will be only one excuse for not blogging, and that will be writing poetry. If I’m here, I hope I will bring you entertaining prose. If I’m missing, there will be a poem in the works. Feel free to ask for the poem, and if I don’t have it, give me a hard time about it.

Last week I started asking friends, colleagues and students to give me poetry assignments, and I’ve already received dozens. I’ve got my work cut out for me. Gotta go work. I'll see you tomorrow. Or better yet, I won't.

Top 40

2009-10-13T11:05:00.036-04:00

My first real job was at a top-40 AM radio station in Rockville, Maryland, WINX. WINX ("winks") had been my favorite music station since I moved to Maryland at 13. I was a card-carrying member of their fan club, the WINX Winkers, so I was thrilled to join their staff. Working for a radio station gave me considerable cachet among my high school peers. It was ever so much more glamorous than the Math Team. Adding to my status was the fact that I had grown a beard. This photo is not me, but radio pioneer Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894). In his day, all men had beards; but in mine a beard was a daring fashion statement (my first and last) which made me a pioneer too. It was the summer of '68, and WINX needed a vacation replacement for their transmitter engineer. I was only 16, and didn't even have a driver's license yet, but I did have a First Class Radiotelephone Operator's license from the FCC. My duties were few but federally mandated. Broadcasting was heavily regulated almost since its beginnings, chiefly to keep stations from interfering with each other's signals. Radio waves travel especially far at night, skipping off the dark ionosphere for hundred or thousands of miles. To prevent this, local stations on shared channels like WINX were required to either sign off after dark or transmit with low power in a restricted local pattern. I would arrive at sundown, unlock the transmitter shack, turn on the lights, and throttle back the station's 1,000-watt transmitter to half power. Then I pushed a big black Bakelite button, activating a heavy relay. Kerchunk! The relay re-routed the station's signal from a single omnidirectional daytime tower to a three-tower directional array. Then I would take the logbook clipboard and walk into the summer twilight to visit all three towers where I jotted down the current reading from an ammeter at the base of each tower. After touring the antenna field, I went back to the shack and read a book or phoned my friends. It was essentially an easy babysitting job but paid better. My only chore for the rest of the night was to check every half-hour that the transmitter hadn't strayed from its assigned power level or frequency. Frequency was allowed to vary only 10 cycles per second in either direction from 1600 kilocycles. They aren't called cycles and kilocycles anymore. Hertz and kilohertz had been the official units since the 1930s, but nobody used them much, and I still don't like them, because cycles per second are easier to imagine than hertzes. Isn't it hard enough to understand invisible things? Words that make the invisible visible are to be valued. That is why there is poetry. My shift ended at midnight when the combo man arrived. Combo meant a disk jockey who also had a First Phone ticket and was a qualified transmitter-sitter. Jay drove up in a red Mustang convertible and talked endlessly about drag racing even after my complete disinterest became clear. He ran his six-hour show from the tiny, shabby spare studio in the transmitter shack rather than the big studio in downtown Rockville. I always stayed up all night to watch Jay do his show, because I couldn't drive myself home. A station profile in Billboard says "Jay salutes all who must work at night, such as police, fire departments, hospital staff, and military personnel." I don't remember him saluting anybody. What he did was cue up records, station jingles and commercials, and introduce songs to within an inch of their lives. Top-40 stations today advertise "Less Talk!" but back then, deejays never shut up. They honored a strict taboo against the briefest interval of silence. Even three seconds of silence was considered "dead air," and dead air was unforgivable. It meant you were asleep on the job, or had lingered too long in the bathroom, or worst of all, had nothing to say. Jay ran a tight show. He would even talk during a song's instrumental introduction, up until the very split-second when the singing began. Back then, even the lowliest local deejay was a celebrity. Starstruck girls called Jay all night long to flirt. They generally claimed to be 16, although most eventually confessed to being barely 13. Jay, who was 21 and engaged to be married, had been in the business long enough to lose any interest in Winker jailbait, so he would pass the phone over to me. I don't know how I stayed up all night, but I was young and stupid. At 6:00 am, Jay would switch back to full daytime power, lock up, and give me a ride in the Mustang to downtown Rockville where I could catch a bus for home. *** (My thanks to Alan Hochberg for suggesting this topic by asking whether our generation had any such thing as a musical canon. The answer is yes, and its name is Top 40.)

Say the word fat

2008-10-02T21:12:00.006-04:00

I'm in a weight-loss program again, six months long. They gave me a charming little pedometer with their logo, plus a copy of this valuable reference work by "the Calorie King." I had made up my mind to use my hour-long bus ride to Burlington every morning to do my food journaling for the program, recording everything I eat and looking up each item's calories and fat gram content. But the first time I fished the book out of my bag to start, I put it right back in. The dominant graphic element of the cover is the word FAT in 144-point letters, yellow on a field of blue. It's bad enough that my co-commuters already look at me and think "FAT!" No point encouraging them. Our assignment for next week, beside learning to keep our journals, is to find the highest calorie food item in the entire book. As far as I've read, the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cheesecake is winning, at over 2,000 calories per slice. Tonight I searched my bookshelves to find a suitable cover-up for the offending book cover. After reviewing many volumes which were willing to sacrifice their covers to the cause, I chose Dante's Purgatorio, in the John Ciardi translation. For the sin of gluttony, six months in purgatory should be just about long enough, don't you think?

Passing Peak Lemon

2008-10-01T09:09:00.003-04:00

These things sneak up on you, like global warming and the credit crunch. On Saturday, the shelf-stocker at Greg's Meat Market told me he hadn't been able to order bottled lemon juice for a month, and that the other stores in town didn't have any either. This sounded fishy to me, so I investigated. There's definitely something going on. Shaw's did not have either Realemon or their house brand in the big green bottles, only a tiny plastic jug. I bought two. Hannaford's did have regular-size bottles, but a brand I hadn't seen before--"Lemon Time." I bought two of those too. And why am I hoarding lemon juice? Why am I acting like a Baghdad taxi driver who can't find an open gasoline station? It's because recently lemonade has become a big item at our house, both the cold and hot varieties: bottled juice, water, and Splenda. I'm sort of an improvisatory cook, using whatever's around, so my shopping isn't systematic either. The problem with lemon juice is that there's no substitute for it--hence the panic. Googling around revealed that there is indeed a worldwide shortage of the sour stuff, caused by weather and crop failures. I won't trouble you with the details. I'm just here to remind you that food comes from farms, not grocery stores. If you see a a farmer today, give him a nice cold lemonade.

Food is messy

2008-04-16T16:51:00.001-04:00

Even if you are a neat, precise cook (and I am not), even if you wipe up spills when they happen and clean as you go (and I don't), cooking generates prodigious amounts of messiness, and eating is not far behind.

Food is inherently, intrinsically, essentially messy. Why do you think they call it a mess hall? The kitchen is a factory that would not pass an OSHA inspection. Bread flour flies through the air. Non-stick spray (hi, Pam!) drifts like a toxic chemical cloud. Thick tomato lava spatters the stove with fiery globs. Peanut butter clings to the knife so tenaciously that even boiling dishwasher water cannot loosen its grip.

My Kitchen of Shame is notorious, but I am putting up a good fight lately to conquer food mess and my inherent distractability. The trick, I have finally learned, is to treat the cleaning task as finite and strictly ordered, from left to right. Left to right is an arbitrary approach. I rebel against all that is arbitrary, but most order is arbitrary, and without order there is only disorder, and disorder is mess. QED. Now I clean the counters from left to right and in an hour I can get the place looking respectable.

I know that this entry is not profound. Sometimes I have to stop being profound and just clean the kitchen. It is humbling. I need some of that.

The perils of brand extension

2008-04-16T16:40:00.000-04:00

You can see the corner the One-Pie company has painted itself into. Their canned pumpkin puree was such a hit, the public demanded more. But how could the One-Pie company sell a two-pie can? Imagine the angst in the creative department. Finally, somebody came up with that yellow circle with a message. In the biz we call it a splash.

The splash says "NEW! 2 PIE SIZE."

I had to show you. I saved the can to use for a pencil holder and I carry it around with me everywhere I go.

I am the eggman

2008-04-16T16:01:00.000-04:00

I grew up surrounded by egg farms and thought this was perfectly normal. You may be surprised, but I thought it unremarkable that all the egg farmers I knew were Jewish. Why shouldn't they be? Nearly everyone we knew in our South Jersey town was a Jewish egg farmer, or had been before they got into something else. My grandfather had a poultry farm, my father and his three partners ran a chicken feed mill, our next-door neighbors the Gingolds had a poultry farm, and so did the Auerbachs, the Eisens, the Fleischers, the Kaufmans, the Mullers and Maiers and Ritters and Wolfs.

For a few decades, from the 1920s through the mid-60s, this odd enclave of Jewish poultry farmers flourished in and around Vineland. At its peak in the 1940s, there were thousands of Jews on the sandy flats, far from the slums of the Lower East Side or the suburbs of Westchester County. The earliest settlements were encouraged by a German-Jewish philanthropist, the Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who thought that the solution to "the Jewish question" was for them (i.e. us) to go back to the land. He planted Jewish agricultural colonies in Turkey, Argentina and New Jersey. One of the first was in Alliance, NJ, still the site of the Jewish cemetery where my father and his parents lie buried.

All the other Jewish kids I met in college and later life grew up in suburbs, or in cities. Nobody knew from farming.

And what odd farming it was! This was not the 4-H life, no storybook menagerie with a quack-quack here and a moo-moo there. It was monoculture: white chickens laying white eggs. There were no tractors, no fields, no growing of animal feed from the soil. Feed was purchased from local mills like my father's, which ground into powder the carloads of grain that came by rail from the Midwest. There were no cows or horses, and certainly no pigs. We did not witness the constant cycle of livestock breeding, birthing and slaughtering which was supposed to teach regular farm children the facts of life. At our farms, day-old fuzzy yellow chicks arrived in cardboard boxes from the hatchery, already peeping, roughly spherical, and ready, within a few months, to start laying eggs. At the time, a hardworking grain-fed chicken was expected to produce about 200 eggs per year.

The hatchery chicks were guaranteed to be nearly 100% female. Rooster chicks, who obviously were never going to lay eggs, were culled at the hatchery by sharp-eyed sexers and thrown into barrels to die. Chicken sexers in that era were always Japanese, a prime example of America's ethnic division of labor, which is always shifting and reshuffling but never entirely disappears. Yesterday we had Jewish lawyers and comedians, Italian singers and organ-grinders, Negro boxers and railroad porters. Today we have Pakistani emergency room doctors, Vietnamese pedicurists, Oaxacan roofers and African-American secretaries of state. But I digress.

It is often said that Americans nowadays, spoiled by supermarkets and plastic packaging, don't even know where food comes from. All sentences containing the word "nowadays" are propaganda on their face and can be safely ignored. And I do know where eggs come from. A few times I accompanied my father, who was his mill's outside man, on his rounds of the poultry farms. The farmers were always glad to see him, because he was funny, and respectful, and spoke a little Yiddish, and knew all about agriculture. They would bring out the limp carcasses of dead birds for him to autopsy. He cut them open with a hunting knife, looking for signs of disease in the flock that could be remedied by adjustments in the feed, or by antibiotics. During one of these field post-mortems he cried out in triumph and lifted something up to show me. It was the dead hen's oviduct, with an already-formed egg visible inside it, patiently waiting to be laid, still unaware of the catastrophe that had overtaken it.

In another post I will say more about my agricultural childhood. But now I would like two scrambled eggs with a tablespoon of homemade strawberry preserves.

My Own Private Ramadan

2007-10-23T17:16:00.000-04:00

This fall, as happens every 32 years when our two different lunar calendars intersect, the Jewish High Holy Days coincided with the Islamic month of Ramadan.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is an absolute 24-hour fast. Before sundown the night before Yom Kippur, one eats the Meal of Cessation, called Seudat Mafkeset. From then on, it's NPO, nothing by mouth. You don't even brush your teeth, lest a drop of water be swallowed.

Finally, after sundown the next day, the fast is broken with a traditional meal that varies by culture. The Sephardic custom is egg-lemon soup, avgolemono. We Ashkenazim go for a dairy meal--bagels, cream cheese, smoked fish, cheese blintzes. (A traditional Yom Kippur greeting is "May you have an easy fast!" My own family of origin took that to its limits, enjoying the fast-breaking feast without ever enduring the fast itself.)

Ramadan is very different, an entire month alternating diurnally between fasting and feasting. Fasting during the daylight hours is still a considerable feat and sacrifice, especially when Ramadan, which migrates through the solar year, falls in the longest days of summer. The faithful stoke up with Suhur, the morning meal, before dawn, and cannot refuel again until Iftar, the festive evening meal. (Harira, above left, is an Iftar tradition in Morocco, lamb stew with lentils and chickpeas.)

What does all this have to do with me? I have never kept the Yom Kippur fast, and wouldn't even notice when Ramadan came around if we weren't at war in two Muslim countries. By next week, maybe three.

But lately, on many days each week, I seem to be simply putting off eating until late in the day. In short, I am finally doing what my blog title says, Waiting For Hungry. No breakfast except coffee, no lunch, no snacks. Finally, in mid-afternoon, I allow myself a meal.

It's my own private Ramadan.

The Man in the Blue Tarp

2007-10-23T14:33:00.001-04:00

I keep seeing this story. It's always a different person, but the story is the same. In this case from Lansing, Michigan, a 900-pound man, who had not been able to leave his home for four years, was brought to the hospital by extraordinary means. Firefighters and paramedics cut a hole in a wall to remove him from the second floor of his duplex, using a telescoping forklift. To shield him from the gawking crowds, they covered him completely in a blue tarp. The press, in its unfailingly humanitarian fashion, has made photos available.

For those not willing to avert their gaze, the Web also offers tarp-free images of the similarly immobilized Manuel Uribe Garcia of Monterrey, Mexico. He is now down to 800 pounds, but at 1200 pounds he was acclaimed the heaviest man in the world. Modestly he plays down his achievement. Just a regular Jose, he told ABC News. "I used to eat normal, just like all Mexicans do. Beans, rice, flour tortilla, corn tortilla, French fries, hamburgers, subs and pizzas, whatever regular people eat. I worked as a technician, repairing typewriters, electronic calculators and computers. So I worked on a chair. It was a sedentary life."

Manuel's picture isn't easy to look at, but one must look. What are we to make of this freakshow display? Perhaps it is a cautionary tale. You cannot ever turn into a two-headed calf or a snake-faced woman, but if you don't watch out, if you get always get fries with that, if you are a desk worker instead of a bicycle courier, if you let yourself go, this could be you: a man in a blue plastic suit whose other car is a forklift. You have been warned. Tarpe diem.

Star Light

2007-10-23T13:06:00.001-04:00

In September, I joined Weight Watchers, not for the first time, but this time it's working. Why?

The last time, I used their Core Foods plan. That turned out to be too loosely structured for my already too-loose, screw-loose psyche. The Points plan, along with online tracking of everything I eat, suits much better.

Nutritionists and other Helpful People have always told me to get a notebook and log my food, but I simply couldn't. Clicking online is much easier, and much more satisfying. Because the E-Tools immediately calculate not only how many points you've already eaten, but how many are still ahead in the day, it seems to have a soothing effect on the anxiety of hunger. (A point is roughly 50 calories, with some reduction in calorie value given for high fiber content.) My initial plan allowed 42 points, or 2100 calories. As I've lost weight, the points allowance is adjusted downward, now standing at 39.

We meet in a church basement. I don't talk much, but when I announced I had dropped 25 lb, the leader shrieked and ran out the back door, apparently to her car for a prop. When she came back in, she was carrying a medium-sized black suitcase, and gave it to me to hold. "This suitcase weighs 25 pounds!" she said. I held it up over my head like it was the Stanley Cup. Then she gave me a star-shaped refrigerator magnet.

Weight Watchers. Whodathunk it? Keep Watching.

You are getting skinny. Very very skinny.

2007-08-13T13:33:00.000-04:00

We arrived back in Vermont two weeks ago. I nearly got down on my hands and knees to kiss the tarmac, but I didn't want to be mistaken for the Pope. It is bad enough being mistaken for Luciano Pavarotti.

While we waited for the moving van to catch up with us, we couch-surfed at various friends' homes, and I pursued my hobbies, like listening to music on hold and negotiating with utility companies. I also made an appointment with my hypnotist. The last time she put me under, I lost 60 pounds in a few months. Nothing else has ever had that kind of impact, so I went back.

I don't know how hypnosis works; nobody does. I've never even heard a coherent theory. All I know is it worked for me. Others in town swear by this therapist, who has helped people quit smoking, deal with grief, and other problems known to respond to hypnosis. She also does past lives regression. Ordinarily, this would put me off entirely, but I've decided it's harmless.

In the therapist's office, I chose the big black recliner armchair over the couch; if I lay down on a couch right now I'll fall asleep. We strategized for a few minutes, trying to identify the elements of the previous therapy I wanted to recapture. I also asked if she were willing to do "aversion therapy"--planting hypnotic suggestions that would make certain foods positively unpleasant, even nauseating. She demurred; she doesn't like the idea. I tried again and she refused again, and we left it at that.

Then I closed my eyes, settled back in the recliner, and got totally paralyzed. There are people who can't be hypnotized, but I'm not one of them. And then it started. I can tell you exactly what she said -- I've got a tape of the entire session -- but I don't really think the words would tell you anything. For the first 10 or 15 minutes, she said relaxing things and I relaxed. For the next 20 minutes, she spoke about food and eating and satisfaction and health and said many sensible things that I've heard before, but there's apparently something different about hearing them in a trance, whatever a trance is.

After she brought me out of the trance, she brought me a glass of water. She gave me the tape and reminded me not to listen to it while driving. I've listened a few times since; once I listened all the way through, the other time I fell asleep.

Result of all this: A calm indifference to food. Greatly increased ability, when the mind begs for food, to change the subject to something else. Restored hope.

Into the Bariatric

2007-07-08T21:36:00.000-04:00

Baros is Greek for heavy. Iatros is Greek for physician. Bariatric medicine specializes in the treatment of obesity. Doctors have always had obese patients, but recently the field has organized and formalized itself. And medical suppliers have responded to the need for bariatric stuff.

These two white-shoe medical professionals are wrapped in a Bariatric Towel. The towel is 45 x 102 inches. The maker describes the towel this way: "Oversized design accommodates any body size or style."

I've been a catalog writer a long time, so I know that bland sentence wasn't the writer's first thought. No, that's a classic second serve, safe but not jazzy. Before he settled on that, he would have first tried something more picturesque. Something like these:

"Our Big'n'Tall towels cover acres of cellulite!"

"No more dripping wet fat guys!"

"Our whale-sized towel fits your plus-sized patients!"

"She may not fit in the shower, but she'll fit into our towel!"

"Gigantic towel doubles as a shroud!"

Our Ever-Expanding Global Reach

2007-07-08T20:52:00.000-04:00

This blog is getting some far-flung eyeballs. It isn't just David's poetry friends anymore, no. We've gone totally global. We have reached the farthest shore. It doesn't get much better than this. Today the blog drew a complimentary comment from Rodrigo, the Brazilian T-shirt printer. He was so excited, in fact, that he posted the same comment three times, and I don't have to tell you what that means. Rodrigo, welcome to the audience. We are honored. We are overwhelmed. And we have reinstated comment moderation.

Here's what Rodrigo said: Oi, achei teu blog pelo google tá bem interessante gostei desse post. Quando der dá uma passada pelo meu blog, é sobre camisetas personalizadas, mostra passo a passo como criar uma camiseta personalizada bem maneira. Se você quiser linkar meu blog no seu eu ficaria agradecido, até mais e sucesso. (If you speak English can see the version in English of the Camiseta Personalizada. If he will be possible add my blog in your blogroll I thankful, bye friend).

What Gets Measured

2007-07-04T20:57:00.000-04:00

"What gets measured, gets done." But for measurement to matter, we must measure the right thing in the right way. Otherwise you get Iraqi civilian body counts, No Child Left Behind, U.S. News & World Report's college rankings, the Guinness Book of World Records, and other towering monuments to the folly of mismeasurement.

In a weight-loss diet the obvious way to measure progress is to step on the scale. The problem, as every dieter knows, is that one failing report card from the bathroom scale can be so discouraging that the whole diet is abandoned.

My friend Laurence avoids the scale. Instead he tracks his progress with a trusty old leather belt. (Disclaimer: The photo above does not depict his belt, or his waist.)

We own no less than three scales.

One, a doctor's scale with sliding weights, is in the attic back in Vermont. Another, a digital bathroom scale, works very well, but will not register anything over 308 lb., and I have zoomed into that dreaded territory several times this year. Finally, after much searching, an analog scale was found that goes up to 330.

The digital scale has some extra features, some quite unnecessary. It purports to gauge percentage of body fat by measuring the electrical resistance between your feet. I forgive it for this lofty pretension.

What I like best is how I can turn it on by poking a button with my big toe, and the cheery, non-judgmental beep it emits as it displays my weight. Except when it displays OL. I don't know what that means. Over Load? Or maybe it's short for LOL.

So much for scales. I wanted a measuring tape, one of my own, not one borrowed from Ann's ancestral sewing box. I went into the fabric store in Watsonville.

When men walk into fabric stores, fabric store ladies see us coming, nervously striding into unfamiliar territory. They know we are good for a laugh. (Usually, one fabric store lady confided in me, all men want is Velcro for something in the shop.)

I got a nice little yellow retractable tailor's tape for under $2. The lady asked me if the color was okay. She had the same thing in purple and red. I said it wasn't going to be a fashion accessory.

The first thing I measured, and the only measurement I am going to tell you now, was my neck: 19 inches. That's awful. A 19-inch neck all by itself is highly diagnostic for sleep apnea. Everybody worries about their waistlines; nobody should ever be fat enough to worry about their neck circumference.

Ok. There's a benchmark. I'll keep you posted.

Bread: What We Used To Eat

2007-05-31T19:05:00.002-04:00

Back in the mid-1970s, a Wesleyan professor was doing ethnomusicology field work in Indonesia, and like a good investigator he asked lots of questions. But his host and informant asked a question of his own. "What do you eat in America?"

The professor didn't answer right away. What to say? Our diet is so varied, how to sum it up? Nor did he wish to embarrass his host by describing America's extraordinary plenty, or by extension his own comparative personal wealth. "I don't know," he said. "Lots of things. Um...chicken?"

The Indonesian laughed. "No, no," he said, "what do you eat?"

Finally it dawned on the American that his host was curious about America's staple starch. Was it rice? Taro? Potatoes? That's what you eat. A chicken is a luxury item, party food, not a national diet. "Bread," said the professor finally. "We eat bread."

It wasn't exactly a lie. Although bread no longer holds the same place in Western cuisine as rice still does in Asia or potatoes did in pre-blight Ireland, it did once. "Give us this day our daily bread" was no mere synecdoche. Once, bread was food, and food was bread.

I've never forgotten Balzac's description, in "Lost Illusions," of a venerable Paris restaurant, Flicoteaux's, where impoverished students could eat for a few sous. The fare was not fancy, but the menu carried this irresistible item: "Bread at your discretion." All the bread you can eat! Unimaginable plenty. And to back up the offer, the tables were heaped with six-pound loaves, cut into quarters.

By bizarre contrast, I have more than once heard Americans complain about the basket of bread served in restaurants. "They want you to fill up on bread before the food arrives!" This is a sentence that could never, ever, have been uttered by a Frenchman in any century.

There's a stock character in classic Greek and Roman comedy named Artotrogus, or Bread-Eater. Artotrogus, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

Chocolate Irony

2007-05-16T02:20:00.000-04:00

You want irony? I'll give you irony. Remember in "Out of Milk" when I promised an essay about chocolate and how I would never eat it again as long as I lived? (It has been 10 days already, and 10 days without chocolate is a long, long time. ) (Photo: Detail from "Chocolate Kama Sutra," artist unknown.)

Here comes the irony. Just now my wife Ann has forwarded me notice of an intriguing job opening at a company in Vermont that needs a marketing person just like me. The company? Lake Champlain Chocolates, purveyors of super-premium gift chocolates, "made in small batches," for prices that approach $30 per pound.

So I have written a very memorable letter to the chocolate makers about how I would bend my creative talents to their noble purpose, and I mean every word of it. I could do that. I love chocolate. I love all food that comes with a story.

I remember my grandmother feeding me, zooming a spoon around in front of my face. I was well past the age when I needed to be fed by an adult, but she was my grandmother and it was a luxury. She would say, "Here comes the airplane, now open the hanger!" or "Here comes the spaceship!" What was the food? I don't remember. I remember the story.

I remember my mother burning the toast, and saying "Aunt Susie would have loved it. She always asked for the burnt toast."

I heard that my Aunt Lois, during the hungry times of the Great Depression, was asked what she wanted for her birthday. She replied, "A whole chicken, all to myself." I never heard whether she got it.

There are foods that nobody would eat at all if it were not for the power of the accompanying story. Matzoh is one example, and its near cousin, communion wafer, is an infinitely better example.

Haggis is in the same league of foods that can only be consumed with a heavy sauce of narrative. I remember a Bobby Burns Night concert in Cambridge, when folksinger Jean Redpath brought out a haggis on a platter, and even in the tenth row I could sense that eating it would require an act not of hunger but of faith.

You can tell stories about chocolate, but chocolate requires no story. Chocolate doesn't need to talk its way into your mouth. Your mouth is made for chocolate, the way your lungs are made for air. There is no resistance, no hesitation, no intermediation, no required ritual, no byplay of salt-licking and lime-biting.

That's the problem with chocolate. It doesn't say no. It doesn't even say "Wait a minute." It says "Eat me now. Eat all of me. It's what I live for."

I read once that a properly-planned dinner must include a "piece de resistance" and that although that French phrase has lately come to mean merely "a very special dish," its name comes from the idea that this should be the most substantial part of the meal, the part that takes some time, that slows you down, that offers resistance. It's not a two-bite appetizer, not an amuse-bouche. It's food that takes some work and study to eat. When that course appears, the conversation dies down and the serious eating begins.

For me, chocolate is just too easy. It lets me eat too much too fast with too little effort. It's not like walnuts in the shell, which must be attacked with various steel surgical tools. It's not like pomegranates, or steamed crabs, or artichokes. Those foods are all resistance.

There's a bag of chocolate morsels in the pantry, waiting to be made into cookies. I know where it is. I leave it alone. This doesn't sound like much, but it's a breakthrough.

Peanut butter, milk, chocolate. Now what? What next? I will entertain nominations from the floor.

Punching Down Day

2007-05-11T21:58:00.000-04:00

"When the dough has doubled in bulk, punch it down." A human baby doubles its birth weight by six months. It's a milestone, an occasion, a passage, like a birthday. Call it First Doubling. May it have its own page in all the world's baby books from this day forth. Call it Punching Down Day.

Most adults stop gaining weight after their fourth doubling. Starting at 8 pounds, they go to 16, 32, 64, 128, and a bit more. Most stop a bit after four; I, after a long pause, kept going until a bit after five. It's exponential.

And me? You thought I was an exhibitionist, discussing my embonpoint so boldly here on the embonet? No. Not an exhibitionist. I'm an exponentialist.

Out of Milk

2007-05-05T17:38:00.000-04:00

In Barbara Kingsolver's novel "Pigs in Heaven," a single mom, Taylor Greer, brings her adopted Cherokee daughter, Turtle, to a doctor. Turtle has been having painful abdominal cramps. The doctor asks about Turtle's diet. Taylor is panicky and guilty--she doesn't have much money, but she's been trying to do right by the kid.

"I make sure she gets protein," she tells the doctor. "We eat a lot of peanut butter. And tuna fish. And she always gets milk. Every single day, no matter what."

"Well, actually, that might be the problem." The doctor then instructs Taylor, without explaining why, to stop giving Turtle milk.

"Excuse me, but I don't get this," Taylor says. "I thought milk was the perfect food. Vitamins and calcium, and everything."

"Cow's milk is fine for white folks," the doctor answers, "but somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the rest of us are lactose intolerant. That means we don't have the enzymes in our system to digest some of the sugar in cow's milk. So it ferments in the intestine and causes all kinds of problems."

In the current American estimate, I'm white folks, but that's a fairly recent development--see Karen Brodkin's fascinating book "How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America." I'm nouveau blanc. But I'm also one of the earth's lactose-intolerant billions. I grew up loving milk and I still do, but enough is enough. Last week I finally put milk on my banned list, as part of a subtractive process of figuring out what's wrong with me and my diet.

I'm not allergic to milk, that's a rare problem I don't have. I'm not ethically opposed to dairying industry practices, BST, antibiotics and all; and if I don't object to eating cows I can hardly object to milking them. Nor do I have any alternative or mystical ideas about milk or the holy sacred function of the bowels.

I just want to give the food I eat a chance, for once, to be digested in peace, floating lazily down the steady-flowing peristaltic river of life, not rushed along in repeated spring spates and flash floods. (I could have said this more plainly but be glad I didn't.) My hope is that I can establish a more normal relationship with the food I eat if it spends a more normal amount of time in my gut.

What took me so long? The problem has been evident since I was 11 or 12, and I've known its name for at least 20 years. But the ill effects of lactose strike so late in the process. It doesn't make my lips and tongue and palate itch, the way raw apples do. It doesn't make my stomach burn, like walnuts, or make me throw up, like mussels. No, I love drinking milk. By the time the trouble starts, the eating is done. Mission Accomplished! And when it comes to eating, I guess that the mouth is "the decider" and devil take the hindmost...which it does.

Weight loss is simple, some people tell me, and I agree that it ought to be. But I seem to have complicated my life in many ways such that nothing ever seems simple. My new strategy involves radical simplification, round after round of it, more rounds than I thought would be necessary, but here we are.

No peanuts, no milk. So much to blog about. Next time, chocolate gets it between the eyes. You don't want to miss that.

Poem Titles I Am Saving For Later

2007-05-02T21:00:00.000-04:00

I do not "find" poems. "Found poems" are a minor curiosity, like optical illusions, or interesting ways you can fold a dollar bill to make George Washington look like a mushroom. Once you've seen a few, that's enough. The existence of found poems does not prove anything about the essential nature of poetry in general, or free verse in particular.

But I do "find" poem titles. Here are three I am saving up.

1. OTHER NOTABLE RAMPAGES (headline of a sidebar in New York Times coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings)

2. LIGHTFIGHTER DRIVE (name of a freeway exit I pass every morning)

3. WHALES ALL YEAR! (sign at a tour-boat company in Moss Landing)

And no, this has nothing to do with my blog. It's strictly Off Topic.

Peanut Extinction

2007-05-01T14:05:00.000-04:00

Is there any sadder idea than extinction? Dinosaurs have been gone for 75 million years and I never get sentimental about them, but I think constantly of the mammoths. The last mammoth on earth died on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean around 1700 BC. That's an eyeblink ago, well within the span of written human history. I know poems that old.

I keep a round slice of mammoth tusk in my dining room. It isn't even old enough to be fossilized, it's a piece of natural ivory. It is creamy white, polished, with light brown streaks. Sometimes I pick it up and hold it, and all I can think to say is, "You almost made it. You almost made it."

Behaviorists also use the term "extinction." Behaviors can be erased. They can, for a variety of reasons, become less persistent. This can happen quickly or slowly. A behavior can be nibbled away, or it can vanish overnight. It is extinct. It has been extinguished.

I have several behaviors that deserve to be extinguished, maybe a dozen or more. I can't seem to do it globally, wholesale, all at once. There does not seem to be an internal commandment that I can issue to myself that is strong enough. So I'm breaking down the problem into its component parts.

This is embarrassing, as usual, but that's the whole point of doing it in public like this, isn't it?

Yesterday I marked three behaviors for extinction. Number one is eating peanuts and peanut butter.

And at the exact moment I write these words, an email comes through. In honour of Kevin’s birthday, there are peanut butter cookies with M&Ms by the printers. Cake will be later. There you go. Invent a new sin and a new Satan appears.

More about peanuts, stay tuned.

Photo: A brachylophosaurus nicknamed "Peanut" at the Judith River Dinosaur Institute dig in Montana.

Wrong Way, Right Way

2007-04-30T13:53:00.000-04:00

Consider the story of Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan, who in 1938 accidentally, or maybe not so accidentally, flew east from New York to Ireland, when he was supposed to be flying west to California. Corrigan had been trying for years to get permission for a transatlantic flight. When the federal aviation authorities repeatedly refused, it seems, he just decided to go anyway. Wrong Way Corrigan never admitted that he made the flight deliberately. His 1938 autobiography was titled "That's My Story."

Corrigan was in the air for 28 hours. What did he bring to eat? Two chocolate bars, two boxes of fig bars, and a quart of water.

There was another famous "Wrong Way" character. Even before Corrigan's flight, Ron Riegels, a University of California football player, in the 1929 Rose Bowl against Georgia Tech, got spun around on the field and ran the ball 74 yards in the wrong direction, contributing to an 8-7 loss.

I don't know what Wrong Way Riegels ate that day, besides crow and humble pie, but for years after, people would send him gag gifts, reportedly including upside-down cakes.

All this is to say with puzzlement and regret that having established my blog to chart my weight loss progress, my weight has gone not down but up. I need to think about this, don't I? I don't want to be David "Wrong Way" Weinstock.

I'm thinking, I'm thinking.

Leaving the Party of Food

2007-04-02T22:05:00.000-04:00

Hezbollah calls itself "The Party of God." The Republicans are a little sore about that, but Hezbollah got there first, fair and square. The advantage of calling yourself The Party of God is the succinct way it makes all the other parties seem anti-God, godless, even Satanic.

But what about me? Do I have a party? What party am I? Investigation reveals that I'm a registered member of "The Party of Food." I'm pro-food. I'm food-positive. I think food is A Good Thing. I have a benign view of food. You know those sports fans who will watch any sporting event on TV, even sports they've never played or followed or even heard of? Like curling? They are from The Party of Sports. I'm from the Party of Food, as sure as I'm a Democrat, but I'm wondering if it isn't time for me to quit.

A scary thought: How completely must I turn my coat? Does resigning as a food booster demand that I become a food basher? Do I have to be one of those insufferable people who know the fatal flaw in every dish? I hate that. I even hated it even when I was thin, even when I had no weight issues on my mind. It's such bad table manners to offer color commentary on the health dangers of everything on the menu.

So now you see how my mind works, or fails to work. Although I am never vain in matters of dress or physique, I am a flaming foppish snob in other, even more foolish ways. For the truth is, I have much to gain by turning against food: health, energy, respect. Those things are infinitely more precious than the pathetic style points to be gained, in my private tally, for being able to sound like a restaurant critic.

Party's over.

Waiting

2007-02-11T13:59:00.000-05:00

Childhood demands an excruciating quantity of waiting around. Waiting for adults to finish talking,waiting for Christmas, waiting to grow up. The ultimate form of of waiting is being forced to stand in line. We lined up for the morning school bus. We queued for the water fountain, recess, lunch, dismissal, and the afternoon bus home. I despised everything about lines. Didn't everybody?

Of course not. There were kids for whom standing in line was making the scene, being where the action was. Missing a line was like missing a party. I remember them streaking across the playground, singing out a joyous call, like the call to prayer: "Line up, line up, L-I-N-E-! U-P-!" It was the high point of the day. Only there could they play out the urgent social dramas of their lives. Who stands next to whom. Who let who cut. Who is whose best friend today. They must have felt about line-standing the way I felt about spelling bees--a golden chance to show the world what you're made of.

For me, waiting has no redeeming features. I dislike suspense or anticipation. I don't think getting there is half the fun. That's one reason dieting is so damned hard. It's all about waiting, waiting for normal body processes to do their inevitable but very, very slow work of burning off stored fat. Yes, the process can be sped up by exercise. But still it's like trying to empty the swimming pool, not by opening a drain, but by letting the water evaporate.

My dear reader, you have been listening so patiently. Now you have some advice to give me, don't you? I'd love to hear it. Get in line!

Abundance

2007-02-04T21:44:00.000-05:00

On Saturday I drove to Costco to buy a folding card table. A young man in his own jeans and a store-issued green plaid shirt checked the inventory on the computer and said there were no card tables in stock, but I should check back around Father's Day. Father's Day? Yes, that's when they have card tables. This caught me off guard. Was I supposed to have given my father a card table? It would never have occurred to me in a million years.

So there I was, in a gigantic warehouse store with nothing to do and no shopping list, so I wandered. Back in the '70s I would hear stories about Soviet emigres, after consumer-deprived lifetimes of standing in long lines in empty shops, getting their first dazzling glimpse of American supermarkets. I've been in American supermarkets all my life, but Costco has that same effect on me. Abundance! Hyper-abundance! Mega-giga-tera-abundance!

Everything is multiple. Nobody would go there to buy one of anything, when here is the world packaged in super-economy size. There are 24-packs of Snickers, and 5-pound bags of dried cranberries, and shrink-wrapped pallets of bottled juice, and 4-packs of lace thongs, and 12-packs of crew socks and 250-packs of kitchen garbage bags.

My father, the father whom I never gave a card table, grew up in the Depression, and may have had an abundance issue. Once, when he owned a house on a tiny lake in South Jersey, he bought me a very big aluminum canoe. Too big really, too big for the lake and too big for me. "Why so big?" I asked. " He said, "It didn't cost much more than the smaller ones."

My father was overweight most of his adult life. He was a gourmet cook and a gourmet eater. He died young, at 59, in the Houston airport. May I give you some advice? Never read the autopsy report of anyone you love. Along with a number of other facts, both routine and pathological, the Harris County medical examiner noted his weight: 210 pounds.

My dream weight

2007-01-31T00:00:00.000-05:00

I had an odd dream Saturday night. In the dream I was living on the moon. My dream moon was a basically pleasant and ordinary place, like Vermont. I spent most of my time there in a Chinese restaurant with red and gold dragon wallpaper. But at one point, I suddenly remembered that I was on the moon, and only weighed one-sixth of my Earth weight, so I did a triumphant, slow-motion back flip.

This made me wonder what I would weigh on other planets, and promptly found a website that provided the answer. I would weigh 342 pounds on Neptune, and I am never, ever going to Neptune. On Mars I would weigh 114 pounds, and I don't think I'll be going there either.

Let's shoot for Venus, 276 pounds. How far is it to Venus? Millions of miles, millions. But it's on my way, so I'm going.

The Prisoner of Splenda

2007-01-27T14:45:00.000-05:00

"Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. " Since the dawn of time, diet plans have included a list of "free foods" which may be consumed without penalty. The list varies widely from diet to diet. Which brings us to the topic of Splenda.

Splenda is the latest and best in a series of non-nutritive sweeteners. There was saccharin, which I remember in the form of tiny, vile white tablets fizzing around on top of my mother's coffee. Saccharin is still available, mixed with dextrose, in Sweet & Low's pink packets. There were cyclamates, popular but soon banned for being possibly carcinogenic. There was Nutrasweet, aspartame, in the blue packets.

Finally came Splenda. Splenda, sucralose, tastes almost like sugar. The advertising says it tastes like sugar because it's "made from sugar." I can't vouch for the chemistry of that claim, but it's true that the stuff fools me better than all of its predecessors. Next to the coffeemaker at home I keep an 400-packet industrial-size box of Splenda. A litter of shredded yellow packets follows me everywhere.

Why do I need Splenda? Because I don't like the taste of coffee. Why do I need coffee? Because I need to stay awake. Why do I need to stay awake? Because I don't get enough sleep. Why don't I get enough sleep? Because I stay awake. Of all the many vicious circles in which I dance, this is the very viciousest.

I could give up coffee and just take caffeine tablets, but they taste worse than saccharin pills. I could drink Diet Coke, which is fairly palatable, but expensive, and then there's all the aluminum cans on top of the refrigerator.

I'm giving up so many high-calorie foods right now that it hurts to think I should also give up anything from the free list. But I don't think coffee is doing me any good.

A new theory of everything

2007-01-24T19:46:00.000-05:00

Here's an idea. I like this one. This explains a lot.

Suppose it happened like this. Suppose he came to think that all that extra food was somehow doing him not harm but good. Active good. Positive, even healing, good.

Or to put it another way, suppose that he was a rare, specialized and secretive sort of hypochondriac. Not the kind who comes down with imaginary cases of every foolish disease he reads about and complains loudly about it; no, he was not so promiscuous, and he never complained. It was something more like this: whatever went wrong with his body or his mind, he instinctively identified the disease as hunger or one of its manifestations, and he treated it with food.

If you could listen in to his internal dialogue, it would sound like this: I'm tired; I should eat. I'm cranky; I should eat. I don't want to be argumentative, I'd better load up. I've eaten something heavy and greasy; I should take something light and sweet to cut the grease. I have to keep up my energy, I'll eat. I don't want to crash later, I'll eat now. I'm chilled; probably not eating enough. How does that rule go, feed a fever and starve a cold, or is it the other way around? I forget; I'll feed them both to be safe.

Taken all at once, of course it sounds like absurd rationalization. But nobody says to himself, "From this day forward, I will be utterly and self-destructively absurd." No, no, no. It steals up on you gradually, one lunatic rule at a time.

This insight has the ring of truth. Do I dare to trust it? I want to, for it has what the scientists call "explanatory power," and I'm dying for an explanation. Somebody said, "An explanation is where the mind comes to rest." My mind wants a place to rest.

Yes, it explains a lot. It explains why, when Helpful People offer to explain my problem, I rarely recognize myself in their stories. And this is not a basic stubbornness of mine, a blanket refusal to be known. It seems to be limited to food. In most other arenas, I can't resist a good story about myself. When I took the Meyer-Briggs personality test, I was insanely delighted that such a simple instrument could reveal so much about me; I was pleased to be found out, to have my unlisted number scrawled on such a public wall. When close friends have told me secrets about myself, I have always acknowledged when they have hit the mark, and treasured both the insights and the friends for their vision.

So now I have this new story, this exciting new explanation. No matter what it looks like on the outside, inside I am a misguided self-medicator. I am an elaborately self-deluded food pharmacist, a snake-oil salesman with only one customer, dosing himself up a dozen times a day, saying sincerely each and every time "This will make you feel better!"

Two things can happen when you're caught in the act. You can stop. Or you can find a new act. I wonder which I'll do?

Operating beyond design limits, part 2

2007-01-24T01:43:00.000-05:00

Chuang Chuang the giant panda has gotten too fat to have sex, I see by the news. Chuang Chuang and his mate Lin Hui live in the zoo in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He weighs 331 pounds, and that's too much for Lin Hui, a relatively svelte 253 pounds. The zookeepers want the pair, who are on a 10-year lease from China, to reproduce, so they are trying various measures.

For one thing, Chuang Chuang's diet has been restricted to bamboo leaves; he may not have any more high-calorie bamboo shoots. Good luck on that. I haven't eaten a bamboo shoot in years, and look at me.

Also, the zookeepers are going to show Chuang Chuang some panda pornography. You may wonder where to get panda pornography. You get panda pornography the same place you get your pandas, from China, where it is an important part of the panda breeding program. If you are in a hurry and don't want to go to China, try YouTube first.

Once, years ago, I read a guidebook to Chiang Mai, a square little book with an orange cover, I remember vividly, full of the cultural and geographic wonders of the place. But only one thing caught and held my interest: a brief listing for a restaurant that served meat from exotic animals: elephant, giraffe, mongoose. Eating mongoose. Somehow that struck a chord deep within me, an insatiably omnivorous longing.

During our zoo-visiting phase, we read about a German zookeeper who had a policy of tasting all his animals when they died. He just had to know what every species tasted like. Once, while he was on vacation traveling away from the zoo, a Siberian tiger died and was buried. Upon his return, he insisted that the tiger be exhumed so he could have his meal of it.

We never got to Thailand; I'm basically a stay-at-home type. But eating is a way of encountering the world, and I've done much too much of it.

I never bade you go
to Moscow or to Rome
Renounce that drudgery.
Call the muses home.

Working things out at the black bird

2007-01-18T22:05:00.000-05:00

Writing about my weight problem, which to my surprise I have been enjoying, is a completely different experience than talking about it. Why is that?

Maybe it's that writing is just like talking, only without being interrupted, except by yourself. I am writing at length and at leisure and keep seeing myself say things that surprise me, things that I would have never have gotten around to say in the usual give-and-take of conversation.

I use writing to figure stuff out. I was never the kind of writer who takes dictation from the muse, the way Mozart got his tunes, direct from God and the angels. I'm more like a mathematician, a speculative geometer, working things out at the blackboard.

Not that I don't occasionally receive a gift from the ether, a verbal donnee, a word or sentence or a little bit of beat that shows up in my ear, unbidden and undeserved. This past week I've been getting more than my usual portion of those; it has been a minor meteor shower of unearned blazes of grace. I would give you an example if I could, but I can't just yet. These things are mysterious visitors; they are articulate but cryptic; they perch on the bust of Pallas squawking, repeating themselves, commanding attention, and waiting patiently to be understood.

All this is to say that I'm not just talking now; I am writing. For those who want me to change, know that that is a change, and that all the changes I've ever made have started that way.

Too much of a good thing

2007-01-16T23:31:00.000-05:00

In Sacramento last weekend, a woman died after drinking about two gallons of water in a radio station's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest.

Nobody at the radio station was thinking about the fatal effects of hyponatremia. What was on their minds was much smaller potatoes -- fourth-grade bathroom humor. It's one more senseless tragedy that could have been avoided by hiring better writers. Think of how much funnier KDND's marathon of wee-wee jokes could have been if the contestants had been drinking yellow Gatorade instead of bottled spring water, and nobody would have died of fatal dilution.

Food, like water, is a good thing. You could argue that it's the good thing, the mother of all good things, the big universal need. You can't live without food and neither can any creature we know about. You can live perfectly well without alcohol, without tobacco, without cannabis and opium; I do it every day. But you can't live long without food. Food is a good thing.

Nearly everyone agrees on this, although you'll meet the occasional dissenter. Back in college, we knew a boy who claimed to care nothing for food. My guess is that he resented the time that eating subtracted from his studying. He was a pre-med whose father was a doctor, so he had no viable Plan B if he didn't get into medical school. He said that if he could swallow a daily pill that would take care of his total nutritional needs, he wouldn't miss food one bit.

Where is the food-hater now? He's a senior vascular surgeon in North Carolina. What does he do all day? Triple, quadruple and quintuple bypasses on people like me.

Doctor, did you ever find that pill? I'd like a bottle now.

Silver Leaf & Green Meadow

2007-01-16T16:01:00.000-05:00

The best exercise is walking somewhere you can't get back from without even more walking. The corner of Silver Leaf Drive and Green Meadow Drive is six-tenths of a mile from my office; up and back makes 1.2 miles, a 20- or 25-minute stroll. It's uphill yet not steep on the way and pleasantly downhill back. It's far enough for me to lose my desk-job stiffness by the middle and be striding expansively by the end.

Hypothesis #1, lightly held and hopefully offered: Any day I eat 3 moderate meals and don't do any late night eating to cancel out all that lovely moderation, I will lose a pound or so.

Hypothesis #2, "yif that I can": Any day I eat 3 moderate meals and also walk to Silver Leaf and Green Meadow, I will do even better.

Stay tuned.

Operating beyond design limits, part 1

2007-01-15T13:22:00.000-05:00

"Our text books like to illustrate evolution with examples of optimal design—nearly perfect mimicry of a dead leaf by a butterfly or of a poisonous species by a palatable relative: But ideal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution--paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce."
— Stephen Jay Gould

Even if no one (and nobody) can be said to have designed the human body, it definitely must be said that I am operating my body "beyond design limits."

I have obstructive sleep apnea, caused by overweight. At some point, probably around 220 pounds, fat deposits built up in my soft palate and around my throat, causing an already small airway to close down whenever I wasn't consciously keeping it open. When I fell asleep, I couldn't breathe. After a few seconds, I would pop awake; I'd grab a breath and go back to sleep. A sleep study revealed that this happened about 90 times per hour, all night long.

In other words, I wasn't able to sleep for more than about half a minute at a time. Until my wife figured out what was happening and got me treated, I was a zombie, always on the edge of falling asleep, always half-dreaming.

Talk about "odd arrangements and funny solutions"! I sleep with a mask strapped to my face, covering my nose; the mask is connected by six feet of flexible ribbed tubing to an electric air pump. The apparatus is called CPAP, pronounced "see-pap," for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. We refer to it as my breathing machine.

I can't go anywhere without it, and I can't even risk putting it into checked baggage on airplanes lest the airline lose it. Loads of people must be boarding with CPAP machines, because most TSA screeners seem to know what it is when they inspect my carry-on bag—although last time we flew, the San Jose inspectors rushed it over to the bomb sniffer. This was annoying, yet not half as embarrassing as another time I got frisked, presumably because of my jutting belly's resemblance to a jihadi's explosives belt.

CPAP is a pain in the neck, but I'm fortunate that I can use it. Many apnea sufferers never learn how. They can't master the trick of closing the back of the throat and sleeping with their mouths shut. Or they can't stand the noise. The secret of my success is a squirt of Afrin in each nostril, and a pair of foam earplugs.

I never don my mask except in the dark. The straps get tangled and I've learned to straighten them out without looking. I've even repaired a broken mask with duct tape without opening my eyes. I never look in the mirror while wearing the mask;I couldn't bear it. I know it would look too much like something I wish I'd never seen, the sight of my stepsister in a hospital bed in New York City, comatose after a cerebral hemorrhage, breathing through a face mask.

Are you dieting to look good in tight jeans or fit into last year's bikini? Good for you. I'm dieting so I can take a nap on the couch without asphyxiating myself. How did this happen to me?

The goal thing

2007-01-12T18:29:00.000-05:00

As I said in my opening post, I've tried most everything. One was NutriSystem. In NutriSystem, they sell you a bag or two of food every week and that's all you're supposed to eat, except for fresh skim milk and maybe salad greens you add as needed. Some people do fine on NutriSystem.

My first two weeks went well, but on the third visit I had a bad weigh-in. "Now what?" I asked the counselor. This was in Maine, and she was one of the Helpful People. In the course of trying to lose weight, I have met many Helpful People. God bless them, they mean well. "Have you tried setting goals for yourself?" she asked. Helpfully.

"Honey," I thought to myself but did not say aloud, "by the time a 38-year-old fat man asks a 24-year-old skinny girl 'Now what?,' he has set thousands of goals for himself. He has a clear and bitter memory of every one of them, and he now questions the value of goal-setting itself."

I wish I had said it aloud, because maybe, against all the odds, she might have known an answer that might have gotten through. She might have said something like this: "Let's set a mini-goal, something so small and so close that you can't possibly miss it. It's a confidence-building measure, as they say in Middle East peace negotiations, a baby step that obviously doesn't come within a million miles of settling the core problem, but which begins to begin to create a positive mood despite years of very discouraging history. So, suppose you lose one pound, just one little pound, by next week." I would have listened to that.

What the Helpful People often don't understand is that the problem has been on my mind for years. I've thought about it, however unsuccessfully, from every obvious and several obscure angles. Attention, Helpful People! I know I eat too much. I may be fat, but I'm not clueless. (Nor am I "in denial," but that belongs in another post.)

So watch me now as I get in touch with my own Inner Helpful Person. I will set one of those teensy-weensy, can't-miss goals described above, something that even Hamas and Hezbollah could agree on, and I try to build my confidence with it. No, I won't tell you what it is, not until I've done it.

The best sauce

2007-01-10T00:38:00.000-05:00

I'm a high-taste eater. I can't bear food with weak flavor. When cooking, I automatically double the amount of spices called for in recipes, and triple the garlic. I've got to amp up the flavor.

But the most delicious things I've ever eaten, the meals I will remember all my life, are foods I ate when I was very, very hungry.

In 1971, I ordered a plate of radis avec beurre, radishes with butter, at a sidewalk cafe in Paris. If you've seen "French breakfast radishes" in a seed catalog and thought it just one more proof that the French are meshuggenah, think again. The long, red-and-white radishes were exquisite; the butter was as superior to American butter as Camembert is to Cheez-Whiz. When I had finished, leaving only the radish tops, the waiter dumped the greens into the street. A few minutes later, the gutters welled up with water and were flushed clean. The meal continued with an omelet filled with potato slices -- omelette a la russe is what I'd swear they called it, although the more usual name for that is omelette Parmentier.

Anybody's first day in Paris is bound to be memorable, but what fixed the scene in my mind is that I was extremely hungry. I have since tried to duplicate both dishes, but could never duplicate the experience. I wasn't hungry enough.

Hunger is the best sauce, said the Greeks. What if that's more than a proverb? What if it's actual cooking advice? Even weight-loss advice? What if I could improve the flavor of everything I eat from now on and for the rest of my life, simply by arriving at the table hungry?

Giving normality a second chance

2007-01-09T01:38:00.000-05:00

An old friend asks, quite reasonably, what's the plan? How are you going to carry out this project?

The answer, basically, is that I'm going to stop doing all the things that got me this far. I'm going to eat like a normal person, and after a while, I'll turn back into a normal person. What could be simpler?

I don't like being normal. I never have. I zig when everybody else zags. It's a reflex, and I'm starting to think it's not my healthiest tropism.

What seemed so wrong about normal? Normal looked boring. Normal seemed like something anybody could have; it wasn't special enough. Normal seemed unambitious, even mediocre. In a hundred ways, I have fled from normalness. In some limited areas of my life -- some very few areas, mostly involving my writing and creative work -- this instinctual aversion to the ordinary is an asset. But in nearly every other way, it's a craziness on my part, a thought-error verging on a thoughtcrime. I've distorted my body and my life by running away from normalness, and that was a mistake.

Here's the only plan I've got: Get normal. You can't afford any more specialness than you've already got. Develop a keen eye for the ordinary way. For once be the rule, not the exception. Because the normal people may have lots of problems, but they don't weigh 300 pounds apiece. They know something you don't. Study them.

150 pounds of prevention

2007-01-07T15:52:00.000-05:00

I don't like feeling hungry. For me, hunger is not just a sensation, it's an emotion, and I prefer to avoid it. Actually, "avoid" is not the word. I prefer to prevent hunger. I want to get way out in front of it and head it off at the pass. I take pre-emptive steps to make sure it doesn't happen.

On the surface, this makes a certain amount of sense. Why get caught short? You keep the gas tank filled so you don't run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere. You keep money in the checking account so you don't get hit with overdraft fees. Same thing, right?

Wrong. The problem is that filling your belly is not one tiny bit like filling a gas tank. My Subaru's gas tank tops off at 14 gallons and won't take another ounce. The Valero gas pump knows this and obligingly shuts itself off. But the body is a greedy miser, and in a billion years of no-second-chance evolution it has learned to be even more frightened of starvation than I am. Give it too much food, and it instantly, automatically, instinctively scurries around to find a place to put it. Give it even more, and it literally builds on an addition just to make room, with as little hesitation or regret as a classic car collector putting up a new 12-car garage for the latest batch of cherry '68 Camaros he found on eBay.

Exactly how much starvation prevention have I got socked away? Rough calculation: if my surplus 150 pounds are all composed of body fat, and if a pound of body fat is the equivalent of 3,500 calories, I've got 525,000 calories in the bank. A man of my height and age at his ideal weight burns about 2,050 calories a day, according to one of the Web's innumerable online calculators. Half a million calories, on a 2,000 daily allowance, would last 256 days ... or eight and a half months.*

It's January 7th. I shouldn't need to eat again until the last week in August.

__________

*For quantitative geeks only. There are no less than three errors in this calculation, I know. Number one, my 150 extra pounds are surely not all body fat; some is muscle, because schlepping around my weight requires extra muscle. Some is skin, created to cover the extra bulk, and blood, to keep it all irrigated and oxygenated. Second error, it's not right to divide 525,000 by the calorie need of my ideal weight, because I'm not at my ideal weight. If I stopped eating now, I'd start by burning stored fat at a rate based on my current weight, about 4,000 calories a day just to maintain body temperature and basic processes. The smaller I got, the less energy that would take. I think that would take an equation with a logarithm in it, and I'd need to brush up. Besides, and this is another reason not to write the equation, there's a third error: the body is so averse to starvation that it doesn't willingly spend its reserves, no matter how excessive they are. Early in a fast, the metabolic rates slows down in a way not governed by an obvious formula.

Waiting for hungry, part 1

2007-01-06T12:22:00.000-05:00

I called this blog "Waiting for Hungry" because of a hunch I have about the nature of my problem. I think there is something screwy about my understanding of "hunger" and "hungry."

I suspect that it has been a long time since I've actually felt hunger in the normal sense. This will come as a shock to anyone who has watched me eat. Many helpful people who have watched me say that I eat like a starving man: too fast, too much, too messy, too loud. (Thank you, Helpful People. In a future post I will thank all of you in excruciating detail for that helpfulness. It's not your fault that your helpfulness hasn't, until now, helped one bit. It's my fault. Really. Thanks again.)

One rule, universally recommended by Helpful People and Zen masters alike, is "Eat when hungry." I follow that rule, after my peculiar fashion: hungry all the time, I eat all the time. That can't possibly be what the HP and ZM intended, can it?

Perhaps the problem is that there are multiple meanings to "hungry." Maybe two entirely different words both look like "hungry." They are identical twin words who dress alike and love playing tricks. They are Mary Kate and Ashley, or Fred and George. No, better say they are Thing One and Thing Two. I need to grab them both in mid-somersault, wrestle them to the ground, and tattoo an indelible blue star on one of their noses so I can permanently tell them apart. I lunge. I grab. Got em!

Yes. Upon further inspection, there are two. There is Hungry Type One, meaning "I want to eat," and Hungry Type Two, meaning "I need to eat." And I, despite an IQ well into three digits, have stupidly and tragically gotten the two "hungries" mixed up.

Never again. Hungry Type Two gets the blue star, and I will follow that star. I'm going to see if I can recover my longlost sense of "need to eat" hunger and put it to some use.

Scale check: Yesterday, 304.2. Today, 302.4.

I can eat, or I can blog

2007-01-05T15:02:00.000-05:00

The other day I read the book that Julie Powell wrote based on her year of blogging her way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." The book is funny and profane and generally inspiring. I'm sure it will launch a thousand blogs.

But a year of French cooking not only made Julie Powell famous, it also made her gain weight. And I don't need to gain weight. I need to lose weight. In fact, I need to lose just about half of my body weight.

I am a writer by inclination and profession. I use my writing to figure stuff out. Ordinarily I only write about things that interest me, or things I am being paid to write about. Weight loss isn't either of those, but I think I've got to spend some time writing about it or I'm never going to make sense of my life.

So today, January 5, 2007, I am setting up this online diary for myself. I will use it, I think, in many ways. One of them will be to keep my family and friends informed about my progress. Another will be to give me something absorbing to do at moments when I might otherwise just go entertain myself by eating.

I've got to say that this is embarrassing to the max. I hate talking about my weight; I hate listening to anybody else talk about their weight. It is my least favorite subject in the world. Even when I was slim -- more than half my life -- I hated weight talk and dieting talk. More on that -- much more -- and on every other topic -- to come.

So here we go. Watch if you want, comment if you want. I'm going from 304 lbs. to 154 lbs. in front of your very eyes. I don't know how long it's going to take, but this isn't optional anymore and I have to begin immediately and continue in a way that I can't give up on. I've tried most everything else.