Rhythm, no blues

Filed by Steve on Friday, July 3, 2009

Terrific rhythm to my life in the last 24 hours:

• I did most of the work on my weekly Kindle Nation email newsletter yesterday morning, writing a lost post that I feel pretty good about under the title "Wake Up, Amazon!"
• Then I hung with Danny who was home sick from tweener summer day camp from 2 to 6 and he cleaned my clock twice at Clue, Simpsons version. We also went outside with Brownie for a while so he could take a hammer to a matchbox el-caminoed Cadillac which he had purchased for two bucks at Newbury Comics for the express purpose of seeing how hard it would be to demolish it with a hammer. That's my boy.
• I got to the pool at 6 and did my 40 laps, which got me to a little over 3 miles for the week. Hot damn!
• Arrived back at my house about 7:30 knowing I needed to do about two hours of work to send out Kindle Nation. Took a 45-minute nap with the replay of the previous day's Sox game as ambient TV noise, then got up, made myself a sardine sandwich and a cup of coffee, and hit "send" on Kindle Nation at 10:35 pm.
• Included, in Kindle Nation, a note saying that there would be no issue this coming week. Just like the New York does in the summer sometimes, except they plan their breaks a little further ahead.
• I was asleep by 11, like a rock on the pillow. Okay, a big rock.
• Wandered through the house looking for coffee some time this morning, sat down and read an email sent by my pal suggesting I give her a call at 11:17 pm, looked at the clock on the computer and it said 5:52 am.
• Had a bowl of flax cereal and two cups of coffee and spent the next two hours extremely productively while lying down: reading the chapter about my friend Jim Koch's friend John Wing in the The Smartest Guys in the Room, then making notes toward an amazing business plan for a new media company.
• I also made a long list of things I could do today, and have done some of them.
• Had a lovely conversation with my pal, although it was not about anything.
  

Five minutes

I took five minutes yesterday.

Jack G's wife died Thursday morning, and last night I drove down to Milford for the wake. My pal came with me and we had good talks on the way and the way back, so all it really took for me to pay my respects to Jack, to give him hugs of greeting and of parting, to tell him to call me any hour of the day or night, was five minutes. We got there about 7:30 and we were back in the car before 7:45. It meant something to Jack G, and it meant something to me.

How many wakes or funerals have I passed up, begrudging the five minutes? Dozens, maybe more. Probably there will be more to come, and maybe I'll have learned something when they do come.

The fact that I made it a priority to reach out to Jack imposed some order on my day yesterday, along with my time with Danny and his Karate class, so I did not post here about my weekly weigh-in, or anything else.

But I did the weigh-in, and even though the clock says 8:09 and my current regimen says that I must be working on the book and not blogging between 8 am and 1 pm, I am taking this five minutes now. As important as it is to be accountable to my writing regimen, it is equally important to be accountable to my BMGS regimen.

Sometimes life as a grown-up is about balancing multiple and mildly conflicting forms of accountability. Duh.

So I will just post the chart here, and say that it is all good, very good, especially when the weigh-in at 251.4 came after a weekend that featured a Father's Day brunch with Danny at Country Buffet (yes, as in "all you can eat") and a delicious barbecue at my pal's.

I am going to keep this up and I am going to be down into the 240s at or near the first of July! Is that big?

Well, a little less big, but yes.

Sound and fury, signifying.... - Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 Oct 20, 2007

Through most of my 20s and my 30s I was a community organizer, working with poor folks who were in many ways a lot like my own people, all over the country. I worked with great groups like ACORN and the People’s Alliance in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine and I trained organizers and community activists all over the country. I regularly worked 70 hours a week kicking ass, taking names and helping people make a positive difference in their lives.

I bring that up now not only for the obvious reason why a 50-something guys brings up all the things he did in his 20s, but I was thinking about how important it was to me, back then, to do significant work. I had put my writing on hold to organize for social change, and when a friend like Stewart Acuff or Larry Ginsburg would ask me what my bottom line was I would say that I just wanted to be responsible for as much good organizing to change as many people’s lives as I could, in any way I could. Whatever my success with that goal over the course of many years, I have to acknowledge that it changed over time, as my children got older and I began to think about looming tuition payments and eventually struggled through some serious difficulties that I created in my own life and the lives of people I loved.

Now, here I am, 57, and working at various writing gigs while I create a more or less daily blog that on several levels is all about contemplating my navel. It has come to this.

But I do not despair. My purpose here is not, primarily or initially, to achieve something of great significance. (Duh, that’s a good thing, hmm?). I’d like to keep getting into better and better shape so I can enjoy life more and have more of it. I’d like to stay true to my path, learn as much as I can, share some of it, and enjoy some music with friends and passersby.

It is all going pretty well. My weight has been on a plateau for about a week, but a good pal emailed me: “Don't feel sluggish about your blog. If you are at a plateau, then tell your readers. Just be honest, like you have been since day one and they'll love you for it.”

I like love, whether or not I expect it here.

Sometimes I do think about whether this is all just an exercise in self-absorption. A close friend of my ex-wife, a woman who in the past has been very good to me and mine, sent me a zinger of an email in which she asked not too cryptically: “Still on the pretentious Bus are we?”

Anyone would be a fool not to understand that the best friend of an ex-spouse tends to be placed in the role of crucible (if that can be a role, which I am sure it can’t but I am hurrying a little here) for some of the anger that the ex does not always get to express in a generally amicable parting. I don’t hold that against anyone, and I appreciate the honesty. Here’s most of what I wrote back, hoping not to be too defensive either of myself or of my blog.

“It's possible, but I didn't see that route listed when I got on, if this is a bus. As in pretense? Or pretend? I don't know. I parse the words not to play a semantic game, but to wonder honestly about your meaning. I will grant that both the premise and presentation of the blog are self-absorbed by definition, but I hoped that by mixing in liberal amounts of honesty, self-deprecation and attempted humor and entertainment (and by the mere and I think obvious fact that when one starts anything by admitting to weighing 273 pounds there is some shame, if not humility, in the enterprise), I might pull it all off while also accomplishing the face-value goal explicit in the title of the blog. I'm sure some people read it and consider it ridiculous, including those who know me and those who don't. I guess I can take your question or implicit statement that I am ‘still on [any kind of] bus’ to mean that you see it as part of a past pattern that I have revealed before. I am open to that idea, and surely it is all of a piece because it is all me. But while I have [screwed up] in the past, I have tried to own it and be responsible for it in different ways. This seems different, and positive in my intentions. But if I come across as full of myself in a simplified way, and in doing so give anyone who is pissed off at me (or whatever) another confirmation that being pissed off at me (or whatever) is the right response to me, I'm not bothered by that and I do not blame anyone for having that response….

“Maybe the whole thing is a waste of the 40-45 minutes a day I have been putting into it, but it began with some real desperation about the 273.5 that was flashing back at me from the scale's digital readout, and a hunch that I could accomplish a few things in the process. I guess I will just have to see.”

Which is true. I will. Have to see.

But meanwhile, another email I got overnight came from, Mark, an old friend who is a damned good writer in his own right. He wrote to thank me, implying that somehow my blog had got him writing poetry again.

Go figure. Do I really believe it? Not so much. Do I believe that it worked for Mark? Absolutely. Does it make me feel that there can somehow be some significance in what I am doing here for a little while each day?

Just enough.

Thanks, Mark. Keep writing.

Saturday's soundtrack

My son's mom and I saw Tracy Chapman perform one night on the waterfront here. She was so good I can't even remember who she was opening for. She's with us this morning, opening for all of us with today's soundtrack.

Ordinarily I don't pay a lot of attention to the visual montage part of some of these Youtube video's, which is unfair of me since their creators are far more talented at what they are doing than, say, I am at creating this blog. But this one of "The Promise" is kind of stunning, almost enough to make up for something like the last few seconds being clipped off at the end of the song*.



*If you want to hear the whole song, this time with some of that ubiquitous footage of the colossally but perhaps unbearably cute Harry and Hermione, here it is.

Old Coot Shocks the World! (Or, at least, pleases himself....)

If I'm going to go to the gym to swim on a day when it is (1) deadline day for my weekly Kindle Nation email newsletter and (2) the day my Kindle DX arrived and half the sentient world is waiting with baited breath for me to post my incredibly interesting impressions of it, then, well, I better make something of the trip.

Did I?

Yes I did.

I started off feeling good and committed myself, right from the get-go, to lengthening out the segments between my 45-second rest-and-recoveries. Yesterday I lengthened out the segments from 50 yards to 100 yards (4 laps). Today I added another 50 yards to each segments and only rested after each bundle of 6 laps.

Then, during my second rest period, I happened to look up and see a sign on the wall that I somehow had not noticed before. Maybe it was new, or maybe I just have a way of filtering out what does not apply to me. Until it does apply.

The sign said:

1 lap = 25 yards 72 laps = 1 mile

Okay, I had noticed the top line. Not the bottom line.

Once I noticed it, my fate for today was sealed.

I was determined to complete a half-mile swim. 36 laps.

So that's what I did. It felt great, all the way. It's probably pathetic that I get such motivation out of such games. But I do. I knew I had done 30 laps last Friday, so getting to 36 isn't shock-the-world stuff. But for most of my daily swims I have just been adding 10% a week -- or that's what I am saying I am doing -- so the long-day jump from 30 to 36 feels good. Here's the log for the past 3 1/2 weeks:

5/19 - 12 laps
5/20 - 14 laps
5/21 - 16 laps
5/26 - 18 laps
5/27 - 20 laps
5/28 - 20 laps
6/1 - 22 laps
6/2 - 22 laps
6/3 - 22 laps
6/5 - 30 laps
6/8 - 24 laps
6/9 - 30-minute jog
6/10 - 24 laps
6/11 - 36 laps (1/2 mile!)

I'm just starting to get into a book that I picked up on fitness swimming, so I am probably a couple of weeks away from the craziness of timing my laps, swimming intervals, etc. But gaming the workouts a bit just helps to make it fun, and writing it down the way I do plays a big part in allowing me to see -- and celebrate -- the progress I am making. But as it is, I'll have to tell my friend Martha -- who sat next to me in Western Civ freshman year but swims so much that she still looks 37. Don't you think? She did 2 miles in 60 minutes this year, so half a mile is nothing. But it's a start.

I've never considered myself enough of an athlete to get seriously competitive with other people. Or at least not in a long time. But I do find it very easy to take inspiration from them. And I also find it very easy to feel self-congratulatory when I accomplish anything. Which is part of the brain chemistry that keeps me coming back.

A friend of mine got up before 5 this morning and went right out for a walk and jog, and then she said it was no big deal because she had already been up so early. I'm just the opposite. Give yourself credit! That's the way I look at it. And it is partly because I know that feeling good about what I did today will help me to go out and do what I need to do tomorrow.

It's a gray, slightly drizzly Thursday in East Arlington, but I barely know it. I am in the zone.

So simple

I was talking with my pal this morning, after my swim.

I hadn't been sure about my swim. I was physically tired yesterday. I needed to skip a day at the pool and that's what I did. Felt right. Even thought that maybe -- what with the pool being open for adult swim Monday through Friday -- I should start scheduling a regular mid-week day off from the pool. Then I had a bit of a comfort-food dinner last night and, well, when I rolled out of bed at 7 this morning I wasn't feeling like a paragon of physical discipline. (Which is good, because I am not).

Got myself to the pool though. But once I was in the water, I didn't think I would be able to complete 10 laps. I just felt like I was working harder to swim than I had been working lately. plus, and this is important, there was the thing about not feeling like a paragon of physical discipline. My feeling like I hadn't been with the program yesterday sapped my motivation to get back on it today. Not the blues exactly, but it is definitely an ingredient of the blues, that thing where your brain starts working against you, negotiating with itself against your better angels, making deals to let you off easy.

But I persevered. I had a feeling that brain was at work, and I also had a feeling that the best thing to do was to work through it.

So I got to 10 laps and I kept going. I've been doing 22 laps a day the last 3 or 4 times I have been to the pool. Once I got to 10 I was pretty sure I could get to 22.

And then I kept going. Yes I did. Past 22 laps, two at a time, until I had completed 30 laps, feeling strong, and 750 yards.

Sitting here typing, I feel my arms, my legs, and my confidence that I am back on track. I came back and had a high-protein bachelor breakfast. You don't want to know. Okay, what the hell. I had a can of sardines. I like sardines. My sister Deborah, a very knowledgeable foodie, says they are really good for me. Maybe not if I have a date soon afterward, but otherwise.

Anyway, that brings me back to talking with my pal. She was at her office, a little after 9, telling me she had been feeling foggy all week, not getting much done.

Whoa, said I. I kind of recalled her finishing some big projects on Monday and Tuesday, and I also recalled that what she had done on Tuesday, which is a work-at-home day for her, was exactly what she had planned to do. I pointed this out. "Oh, yeah," she said, and I could tell that she was sincerely surprised.

"So, in fact, you have been feeling foggy and not getting much done for a day," I said. "A little different."

I'm just saying. Isn't it interesting how are brains are constantly negotiating with reality, revising our sense what we have or have not done and how we feel about it. And it isn't always a good thing.

Far be it from me to tell my pal how to think about her work, but with me -- especially on this BMGS 2.0 campaign of mine -- it really matters that I write things down just about every day, and make sure I give myself credit for what I do. Otherwise I might have managed to get in the pool this morning thinking I hadn't accomplished anything, or eaten in a healthy way, for days. I might have allowed myself to give in to my brain with the notion that it didn't really matter what I did today, because I had been drifting so aimlessly.

Instead, I had a great day in the pool, a good healthy smelly breakfast, and I have going to have some cantaloupe and toast before I clean the house a bit before Danny comes over in a couple of hours.

And I'm on track for another happy weigh-in on Sunday.

Life is so simple. Much more simple than this troublesome brain of mine.

Freaky Pizza, and a Great Line

As I wrote on my Facebook page today (June 3, 2009), I am "amazed and grateful for your wonderful outpouring of birthday wishes. I began my 60th year with an absolutely wonderful dinner with multiple generations of family and loved ones last night at Za in East Arlington. I know I am a sap, but so far, it is a great, great year."

Also worth mentioning that both yesterday on my birthday and today in its aftermath I got to the pool and did my 22 laps, and despite a very nice dinner that included what Danny calls "freaky pizza" (others might call it "gourmet"), a pint and a half of Smutty Nose dark beer (I split the second pint with Kippy), and some extremely sinful "bourbon pecan pie with whipped cream," I got on the scale today and can report that I right on track as I head toward my next weigh-in on Sunday.

Said she'd never been in trouble, or even in town

Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 10/8/2007

A little over a week ago Donna made a very thoughtful comment that I’ve been kind of waiting for the right moment to engage:

22 Pounds! That's very good for one month! How does all this make you feel? I would imagine you are having feelings of accomplishment and power, and loving yourself more and more. Those are the real benefits of having a goal, focusing on it and doing it!
Donna

I think those very positive feelings are there, definitely, and as she says they are direct benefits of focusing on a goal and achieving it.

Yet I have to admit that it is so easy to lose touch with the positive feelings, even while I am doing it. It is my proven nature that, far too often, even when things are going exceptionally well, I have a tendency to get all wrapped up in the other things I want to accomplish, the other goals that are not being met, the various and manifold ways in which I am flawed. If that were simple humility it might be a good thing, but I think it is as many parts pride as humility.

I am not bringing this up just now to try to figure it out or conquer it, because I would not be optimistic regarding my chances in that battle. I only want to say that it is part of the condition of things for me, something I must live with and try to keep in its place.

And what I must say beyond that, the almost naming of this probably pointless angst, is that this is a large part of why it is good for me to write things down as I am doing, to record my progress toward this very serious goal – the goal of getting into good shape, a goal that I haven’t yet made specific in terms of an ultimate number. By writing things down here, of course, there is the obvious gravity of accountability that helps me stay on track. But there is also the fact that I am allowed to look at this blog each morning, a few times a day even, and say, “Yeah, keep it up, you are doing it, you hot shit,” or words to that effect.

And every bit as nice is that I get comments like Donna’s and emails and other nice feedback from people who know me and people who don’t, along the way. It helps, and I absolutely believe that I will live longer as a result.

I am getting younger every day. The problem with that is that I could keep going, way too far, and end up a dorky kid again, back in 1965, knowing nothing ... sort of like these guys ... give it up for The Critters. Really, they called themselves that.

American pop music had it moments in the 60s, it really did. These guys made two mildly interesting songs, and just go ahead and try to tell me that this line isn't deep:

Said she'd never been in trouble, or even in town

It's a great line, is all.



Here's a somewhat more interesting cover of the same song, by an English-language band out of Hong Kong, Teddy Robin and the Playboys:

The Leonard Chronicles: Something Higher to Get You Through

As I mentioned we would, we had dinner last night with my sister Deborah. She had been to see Leonard Cohen at the Wang Saturday night while we were doing our Gilbert and Sullivan thing at the Huntington, and the indoor Cohen concert, by her account, was magical.

Cohen's namesake, my friend, Kindle colleague and long-ago classmate Len Edgerly, mentioned in a very lovely comment yesterday that on [my] "birthday [he'll] be listening to our mutual friend Leonard Cohen at the incomparable Red Rocks outdoor theater in the foothills of Denver." I am a wee bit jealous. If Cohen is magical indoors these days, I am sure that outdoors he will be, well, mystical.

And indeed, it was outdoors that I was first introduced -- a few months after I stayed up all night as a 16-year-old reading Beautiful Losers -- to Cohen the musician (I know, it sounds like a Singer story, and may be). I first saw him in two outdoor Judy Collins concerts in the round at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in the mid-60s, as he began to come out of the shadows from being just -- as if he ever was just -- her pianist and frequent composer.

I can't think of a man who inspires me -- yes, this me, the BMGS at 58.997 -- more than Leonard Cohen. The beauty and power of his golden voice is no less wondrous whether he is singing or writing, music or poetry or fiction, whether he is teaching or observing or being silly, whether he is 75 as he is today or 33 as he was when I first heard him sing, whether he is giving a self-deprecating interview on NPR or the CBC or (as I imagine him) chanting with the other monks or thanking Janis for making an exception at the Chelsea Hotel. And yes, did I mention he is freaking 75? He has lived through experience beautiful and terrible, and among his many lessons the best come as simple observations, and the best of these may be those that tell us that we should hope to be so lucky as to live and love another day.

"He has you at any stage in your life.
He has your youthful idealism.
He has you when your relationship is splitting up.
He has you when you can't face the world and you look for something higher to get you through.
He has you at all stages."

--Bono, describing the songwriter Leonard Cohen, from the documentary film I'm Your Man, about which I wrote here 13 months ago:

Last night I watched a terrific film. I'm not usually much for documentary/tribute films about musicians, but I absolutely loved I'm Your Man, which is about, for, and with Leonard Cohen and a pretty amazing cadre of other musicians including Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Bono, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Beth Orton, Nick Cave and others. Cohen's a remarkable man, has been from his days as a novelist and poet in Montreal to a songwriting and singing career that reaches into and illuminates and gives texture to the most needful moments of so many lives to his own rekindling as a Zen monk at the still point of the turning earth, again and again. The film is a tour de force spiritually, musically, and as a filmed inquiry into the heart of human creativity. So I guess I have to give it a thumbs up.

I spend plenty of time here focusing on how I am undertaking this campaign to reclaim my health and live a longer life, and about the nuts and bolts of what works for me. File this post under why it is so important.

And, oh, by the way, 22 laps at the pool this morning and I feel great!

Sticky situations - Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 10.1.2009

5.28.2009: Maybe it was the big dinner, the good company, or the Dos Equis, but I slept like the most interesting man in the world last night and didn't open my eyes until after 7, well more than an hour later than usual. So instead of getting to the pool around 7:15 as I usually do I took advantage of the fact that there are 10 more days of mid-day swimming hours for adults, and I did my 20 laps at noon. All is well with my exercise, my calorie counts, and the scale, and I'll be back tomorrow. Until then:

Sticky Situations
Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 10.1.2007

Did you ever notice how we get ourselves into these situations? I mean, sticky situations? Did you? Or is it just me?

Quite often they begin with the best of intentions. Mine always do.

Sometimes, in my past, they became very, very sticky. I’m not going to write about that now. It is neither the time nor the place.

But this weekend, while the stakes were not nearly so high in the short run, was one of those sticky situations.

One of my several jobs – they all have to do with writing and/or publishing in way or another – involves copywriting, writing web content that is neatly balanced between helpful information and marketing copy, for a variety of business websites. It isn’t bad work, and I like the 5-second commute. It keeps the wolf from the door.

I get to choose my assignments on my employer’s intranet site. Sometimes they are fun. Sometimes they involve decades of research. Sometimes they are short. Sometimes they are way too long.

This weekend I got caught up in an assignment that was way too long, 50 pages all about a little college in San Diego that provides various types of computer training. 50 pages! By yesterday afternoon I never wanted to hear another word about Bioinformatics or an inverted “career first” curriculum. But I had to finish. I did, a little bit late but still in plenty of time for the assignment to be included in third-quarter revenue.

What does any of this have to do with the enduring themes of Big Man Getting Smaller? Plenty.

It’s great not to have a 9 to 5 job, except when I get myself into situations where I have to work 15-hour days. Those were fine when I was in my 20s, but now they stress my body a lot more and create imbalances as far as sleep and exercise are concerned.

I made up my mind that I would not allow this weekend’s work to create an imbalance for me eating-wise, and I stuck to it. My calorie intake was in the 1800-1900 range each day. Having this blog with its built in accountability made a big difference. When I finished last night I was hungry and exhausted and I felt some ill effects from not getting any real exercise the last couple of days. But I knew I would be fine today if I just kept to the basics of my plan. So I had a celebratory dinner of a huge salad and a 400-calorie sub, caught up on a few emails, and went to bed.

I got back to the gym for a nice workout this morning, my weight is right where it should be, and I feel terrific.

There’s plenty more to say, but it can wait until tomorrow.