nutrition information

As another step in No Die '09, I'm changing breakfast from a meat-egg-and-cheese sandwich (Death's Blanket, 500 calories) to cereal.

It's different to make meals with a measuring cup. More linear. A cup of soy and one of Total is 190 calories. What the fuck is riboflavin? I'm glad you asked. Riboflavin increases the portion of funk a person is allocated in a given day, useful in performing complicated handshakes and understanding the accents of people who did not attend prep school.

Pantothenic acid (vitamin B5) helps the body to metabolize and create carbs, proteins, and fats. If consumed in high enough doses, folic acid conjures the semi-clad ghost of William Faulkner, who after a brief mean inscrutable haunting ultimately becomes your trusted dietary coach and as an added benefit constantly explains the phenomena of nature to you in inspired language.

My foray into portion control has admittedly been tentative. It dies with coffee, where my method remains add as much water and coffee as will fit, brew, then mix in Coffeemate Hazelnut until it's potable. Somebody: invent an Egg and Cheese Zero.

two weeks

Last year a good octogenarian friend of mine took a fall. He bore the impact on his shoulder and arm. The arm ended up in a sling and my friend got some new meds.

I was worried and I called a bit more than usual. To my surprise he was more conversational, more lucid, quicker than he'd been in years. The major difference was that he'd stopped drinking for the meds.

Lately I've been down. There are logical reasons, work, the economy, New Jersey, American foreign policy, weight gain. But those alone shouldn't have the gravitas to trump what there is to feel joy and hope about. L. & I have a new son who's healthy, who's bright-eyed and loving, whose life opens wider every hour. We're both employed and we live within our means. The world brims with music, movies, and books. We have friends who love us. We have a furry fat grey cat who's stopped trying to kill us. We have each other.

When I say I've been down I mean I'm losing my shit and for the past few years it's gotten worse. I wake up feeling slow and without control. I become overwhelmed by basic tasks. I wade through it restless and hyper-caffeinated. I can't look people in the eye or even look near their faces. I burrow in lame tasks. I feel suicidal urges that I sublimate into slow ways to achieve the same end. All the sugar I can eat, red meat, fried food, diet soda, cup after cup of coffee. And it never feels time to reach out. Emails from people I love I've been afraid to answer for months.

All ways to be unconscious, secret ways to disappear, and all that before the sun went down. By night I'd drink. For a while I thought the drinking was the natural salve for all the craziness, something to cut the edge from it and bring me a bit closer to calm. But I started to wonder if drinking were the cause of some of it. At the very least, if drinking were amplifying my special place on the DSM-IV.

In a real Lenten move I've given up drinking for 100 days. It's been two weeks, and I feel better every day.

I took a long walk this morning first thing. Gray light by the pond, the way drops of water collect in rhythmic full beads along branchlets. Headphones mixing on the fly with birdsong in loose sync. Walking fast, picking up litter as I went.

the luck of roaring Metuchen

New Jersey is a hell for people exactly as overweight as me. But on the train yesterday the person sitting next to me was for once actually less overweight. It was good, there was room enough for both of us to work on laptops without elbow spear.

People being people the conversation turned to Microsoft Excel and she missed her stop, Newark Airport. The train was an express and stopped next at New Brunswick, the central Jersey equivalent of a million light years away if you're late for a flight at rush hour, separating you from your goal are an obstacle course of little fiefdom moron towns, each with its own dimwitted love for stoplights, poorly designed over-saturated roadways, crazy people intentionally crashing their cars to add spice to their days. The community rallied, each of us too familiar with the eerie impossibility of swift passage through short distances quickly in this area, each eager to help his fellow traveler transcend the shit moorings.

We took on tactical responsibilities, tracked the flight status (sadly: on time), coached her on a return route to Newark (train or taxi?), and reasoned that central Jersey in the pissy cold rain was (depending on your point of view) just as good as spring break Florida, not worse, just different. The flight being delayed was the only reasonable hope.

The way she missed her stop was: she was trying to figure out how to move a worksheet from one workbook to another on a Mac. Anyone worth their salt could do that on a PC, but Mac mice lack a right click, which somehow makes them more complicated, which takes artsy people and makes it impossible for them to do math, which encourages a whole mediocre patch of right-brained art and music uninformed by specificity or science. So first it had to be googled how the fuck you right-click on a Mac (option-click-let go of the click, which I never remember). Then it had to be tried, then eureka, worksheets came unmoored from their shells as the door chimed closed and the train jumped forward with grim determination and the conductor leapt out for after-the-fact non-helpfulness.

When I got to Hamilton the weather was shit, scary to drive in perfect storm style. Fog plus rain plus Newark, there's no way that thing went out on time.