The poet as content provider

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The egg business was shrinking by the 1960s. Like nearly everyone we knew, my father began to make other plans, and in 1965 we moved away from Vineland. More on that in another post.

My Own Private Ramadan

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

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

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.

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

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

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

"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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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.