Even More Unctuous

I’m on a diet, hope to lose 10 pounds.

Isn’t everyone?

In my case, there’s a slight difference from most, I suspect, in that I don’t need to lose the weight. My BMI is 22, putting me comfortably in the middle of the normal range, well below most of my peers (60% of whom are classified as either “overweight” or “obese”).

I don’t particularly want to lose the weight either. I’m currently at the lower-end of my personal weight range. My clothes all fit. I don’t care how I look. And, happily married and surgically removed from the breeding pool, I have no need to impress the ladies (and if did, I’d have to gain weight, my slight physique the sort that begs for the sand-kicking and subsequent girl-stealing so popular amongst those with high BMIs).

And apart from two small love handles, I’m not sure where my body will find the expendable pounds if my diet succeeds. Will it be forced to jettison minor organs?

So why am I doing this?

My purpose is not, as many of you surely suspect, to annoy the hell out of those who actually need to lose weight. In fact, only my wife and you are privy to my plan. As the pounds melt away, I’m perfectly content to let everyone else think I’m dying from some wasting disease.

And my purpose is not in any way anorexic, unless, that is, a middle-aged man with no history of eating disorders or concern for his body image or desire for more control over his life could nevertheless be hit out of the blue with strong but well-disguised anorexic urges. I suppose anything’s possible, but if so, these urges are so deeply submerged I’ve never perceived them.

My purpose, as far as I can tell, has three levels.

At the first and most superficial level, my purpose is to prove a point. Intrigued by the science behind Seth Roberts’ Shangri-La Diet, I tried to convince my wife to try it. My wife, in my opinion, needs to lose no weight, but this is not, apparently, her opinion, for she, like so many of her female peers, is steadfastly devoted to periodically depriving herself of food in order to reach the impossible dream of the Perfect Weight, which is always defined as 10 pounds less than whatever she happens to weigh that day. It’s the modern equivalent of sackcloth, ashes and self-flagellation in order to attain that eternally elusive goal of Perfect Grace.

The Shangri-La Diet claims to offer a much easier way, like free indulgences that actually work. It’s based on the premise that your body actively regulates your appetite, ramping it up in times of plenty, damping it down in times of scarcity. Flavor is the signal; the more intense and familiar the flavor, the more your body assumes you’re in a time of plenty. This little-known process is little-known in the developed world because we live in a land of perpetual plenty, our highly-processed food stuffed full of artificial flavor enhancers, ensuring our appetites are permanently set on “Gorge.”

When your appetite is set to “Gorge,” it’s really hard to stop eating. Which is why conventional diets are so hard to follow for long. Your body won’t stop screaming “EAT!” Is it any wonder 60% of my peers are overweight or obese?

The Shangri-La Diet seeks to subvert this system by depriving it of flavor, not of food. Every day on this diet, you consume 300 or so calories in the form of flavorless oil. By ingesting these flavorless calories, you manage the neat trick of avoiding hunger pangs while fooling your body into thinking you’re hungry. As your body reacts by going into scarcity mode, lowering your appetite, you need less and less real food to feel full, causing those excess pounds to effortlessly melt away.

It seems too good to be true, it’s counterintuitive, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom so, of course, I had to try it. My hope is that, if it works, I can convince my wife to exchange her deprivation treadmill for daily doses of flavorless oil.

At a deeper level, though, this isn’t really about the Shangri-La Diet. It’s simply the latest episode in my long history of self-experimentation with food.

One year, I went vegetarian, not out of a love for animals, or a hatred of vegetables, but simply out of curiosity. How difficult would it be? Would I develop cravings for the taste of freshly-slaughtered animal flesh? Or, with distance, would I lose the desire to sink my teeth into dead things? Is it possible to completely avoid the omnipresence of meat and meat byproducts in our food system (what, no Jello!) while still living a normal life? Would I feel better, or worse? Would the sudden disappearance from my diet of bovine growth hormones soften my features, raise the pitch of my voice and reduce the density of my body hair? Does a meatless diet attract (or repel) the opposite sex? Is it something in the vegetables that causes hard-eyed cynicism to melt into wide-eyed idealism, ultimately driving one to vote for a Kennedy?

One summer I lived on fried rice for lunch and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner. That wasn’t experiment, though, as I couldn’t afford anything else.

Other times I’ve given up specific food items or ingredients just to see what effect, if any, that would have on me. Giving up dairy revealed a lactose intolerance I never realized I had (hey, I feel so much better!). Radically reducing the sodium in my daily diet made restaurant food taste like it had been soaked overnight in brine (I still avoid it, and it still does). Similarly, a ban on sugar made many foods taste like candy (do you realize how much sugar is in ketchup?). Giving up caffeine revealed (a) that I didn’t need it (I actually felt awake when I awoke), but (b) that I nevertheless wanted it so much I made it my recreational drug of choice, which it is to this day.

I once tried to gain weight, wondering where it would show. I guzzled two liter bottles of regular Coke, I ate almost exclusively at fast food joints, at night I downed a pint or two of ice cream and, to top it off, I’d have a few beers. Within just a few weeks, love handles appeared on the side, and then, in a matter of only a few months, I had several inches of belly skin drooping my significantly expanded waistband. Looking back, that experiment was a mistake; although it took only a few months of monastic living to shed the beer belly, nothing I’ve done has succeeded in eliminating the handles.

Once I gave up solid food for a blended concoction of various powders, fruits, supplements and yogurts. I didn’t do this out of a desire to improve my health, or to lose weight, or to see if I could live without teeth, but to see how much time I could save if I eliminated most trips to the grocery store, almost all food preparation time, and all that time we spend sitting around a table chewing the cud. If we had food pellets like in the Jetsons, I would have gladly eaten those instead.

I was eventually coaxed into returning to the table, but as recently as last year I was experimenting with the total elimination of lunch from my life, subsisting solely on breakfast and dinner and a few cashews or peanuts in between. This has made my shift to the Shangri-La Diet much easier, for all I had to do was substitute 3 tablespoons of oil for the nuts.

By this point you may be wondering why anyone would do this to himself. Food is one of life’s great pleasures. Why mess with it if you don’t have to? The answer, I think, is in the third, and probably ultimate, reason why I’ve undertaken to lose weight I don’t have.

It goes back to the whole Cartesian mind/body duality thing. Philosophically, I reject this mind/body dualism. It isn’t mind over matter, it’s mind is matter.

I qualify this with “philosophically,” though, not because I’m trying to score more pretentiousness points (as if that were possible) but because I have to admit that when it comes to dualism, what I believe is very different from what I do.

Every day, my mind holds fast to the belief that it’s just matter, no different from the rest of me, in fact it is me, while at the same time my mind carries on a constant campaign to detach itself from my body.

So when my body sends hunger signals up my spine and into my amygdala, some higher part of my brain asks “Why?” That higher part asks whether this is true hunger, or just time-based conditioning (it’s noon, must eat) or social conditioning (everyone’s eating, so must I). That higher part likes to experiment, wondering what would happen if we denied the request or answered it with something different (you want lunch? here’s a handful of peanuts). That higher part basically needs to insert itself between me and all my basic urges, monitoring, analyzing, filtering and ultimately controlling what I do. Nothing is allowed to be mindless.

We all do this to some degree – that is, those of us who aren’t savages – but I suspect I do it to a greater degree than most. And I can appreciate that at some point, all this thinking just gets in the way. It isn’t living. It isn’t healthy. I’ve tried to turn off my mind – studied Taoism, meditated – but so far without success. I can’t resist self-analysis.

So I’ll continue to drink oil to see what happens, just as I’ll continue to experiment with sleep (how much do I really need? can I get it all on the weekend?, can I get to REM sleep while sitting up?), music (must it be repetitive? how long should it take to grow on you? when have you listened too much? does it sound one way when you play it, another when you listen to a tape of yourself playing? are all pop melodies derived from the same simple formula?), sex (if I wear nose plugs, will it affect my desire or just my desirability? is it better with eyes closed or open? does sex improve in the dark? does laughter help or get in the way?), and everything else that makes life, for everyone else, worth living.

Yes, I Had to Write a Check

In the criminal world, a protection racket works like this:

Goons approach shopkeeper, ball-peen hammers in hand. Goons say it’s a dangerous neighborhood out there, you heard about that shopkeeper whose knee-caps were broken?, and suggest, almost as an aside, that a contribution to their protection fund would be most welcome and appreciated and would, incidentally, greatly assist in the protection of the shopkeeper and his knee-caps.

Shopkeeper understands. He contributes.

In the political world, a protection racket works like this:

A Business Man is facing the prospect of some tough legislation in Congress. A certain Congressman is running for re-election next year. That Congressman has indicated that he might sponsor legislation more favorable to the Business Man’s business. A few weeks later, a friend of the Congressman’s with no official ties to the campaign suggests, almost as an aside, but not quite, to the Business Man that the Congressman is facing another tough re-election fight (he barely squeaked by with a 60-40 margin in the last election) and needs your support, a $100,000 contribution to the campaign fund would be most welcome and appreciated and would, incidentally, greatly assist in the protection of the political ideals we all hold so dear.

The Business Man, not wanting to shell out $100,000, an amount which would, conveniently, greatly exceed the individual contribution limits set by Federal election law, has one of his flunkies call his company’s 20 or so largest vendors. Each is told that the support of the Congressman is important to the company, and therefore should be important to the vendor. We all feel strongly that our long-term business partners should step up to plate and demonstrate their support for our business relationship by contributing $5,000 to the Congressman. Are you one of our long-term business partners?

Vendor understands. He walks the halls, rounding up $1,000 contributions from his underlings, those team players willing to take one thousand for the team. Their five checks are sent to the Business Man who bundles them together with maybe 60 checks from other vendors and sends them all to the Congressman’s campaign, with a note to the friend thanking him for reaching out.

How are these protection rackets different?

One's perpetrated by law breakers, the other by law makers.

Favorite Living Writer

"Focus on the Words - Not on the Writer." (link via Mental Multivitamin) Any essay with that title is sure to get my head nodding, as are words like the following:

What matters is the book, and the book has to stand on its own merit. What the author accomplishes, or doesn't, outside of the book is fine for the gossip pages, but it doesn't merit mentioning in a book review.

So it shouldn't matter whether a writer is a nice guy or a jerk, looks like a cheerleader or a troll, lives like a hermit or a media whore, is a normal mild-mannered person or suffers from a raging narcissistic personality disorder (which might, actually, be the norm for writers), or is living or dead. What matters are the words.

I was therefore surprised to read, in the same essay, that a particular writer was the essayist's "favorite living writer."

Does the essayist also have a favorite dead writer? A favorite ugly writer? A favorite red-haired writer?

Do words on a page read differently while the writer maintains a pulse? If a writer dies while you're reading his book, would his words suddenly lose their appeal? Or, as in some other branches of the arts, would they suddenly improve?

I was also surprised to see the essayist's photo at the top of the essay. If the essay's point is words are all that matters, why is his face the first thing we see? Was he thinking "words are all that matter" as he sat for his head shot?

And at the end of the essay, the last words we read aren't the essayist's well-written and persuasive conclusion, they're instead a short biographical note informing us that the essayist is the author of a novel and erotica collection. Is this to assure us that we have just read are not the wannabee-writerly words of a disgruntled no-name never-published blogger shamefacedly hiding behind a picture of P.G. Wodehouse but, instead, the extra-writerly words of a published novelist and erotica-collection-producer not afraid to display his face for all to see? Or is it just a product plug?

If all that matters is the words, nothing else should matter.

But of course it all matters. Whether we like it or not. We're all human, even the essayist, and being human we have an insatiable curiousity about other humans, particularly those closest to us. That closeness can be actual or virtual. Those who are actually close to us include family, friends, neighbors, co-workers. Those who are virtually close to us include the actors, athletes, musicians and, for the few who still read, writers whose work speaks to us, moves us, so much so that we admit them into our lives.

Gossip is a good indicator closeness; the drinking problem of a friend, or a cousin, or a musician or actor you admire is far more interesting to you than the drinking problem of some guy on the other side of town you've never met and never will, or a musician or actor whose work has never reached you. Some of us resist gossip's allure better than others, but none of us is completely free from its grasp. Except maybe the psychopaths.

Publishers, like other media magnates, recognize this, so while pushing their product they do everything they can to push our human buttons.

We are attracted to attractive people, so if a writer is attractive, you can be sure we'll see a huge professional head shot on the dust cover. We care more about people we know, so if a writer is a celebrity virtually "known" by millions, you can be sure his words will be published and purchased and maybe even read without regard to the merit of the words themselves. We tend to like things other people like, so if a writer has ever touched a bestseller list, even if only for a few minutes, even if only in his local bookstore after he surreptitiously purchases all its copies, all his books for the rest of his life will describe him as a "bestselling" writer. None of these features of the word trade have anything to do with the words themselves, but they strongly influence our reading choices and therefore have become ubiquitous.

I've thought a lot about the importance of words versus the importance of the writer since I started writing this blog.

One of my first decisions was to write anonymously. At the time, I had my reasons, principally a desire to preserve some level of plausible deniability should my initial stabs at writing stink up the room. If anyone ever looked my way, brows arched and nose plugged, I could always point at the dog and say "bad boy!"

But after a while I began to appreciate another reason for writing anonymously: It liberated my words. Without my name, or my picture, or any idea of my background, expertise or experience, all you, the reader, have is my words. If you like them, it's not me or my face or my background or my expertise you're liking, it's just my words. If you hate them, it's not me you're hating, it's yourself, for only an incredibly self-loathing person would stoop as low as to hate inanimate objects like words. Or maybe, just maybe, it was my words you hated. But in any event you weren't hating me.

This anonymity has also liberated me. When I first started writing, I thought anonymity would give me the freedom to shade the truth when convenient but I've since discovered that anonymity actually gives me the freedom to tell the truth, even when it's not convenient. I've got nothing riding on these words, other than the hope that you keeping reading them. So all I have to do is keep them true. I have no reputation to uphold or resurrect. I have no money-making plans for my writing (which is good because no one has any money-paying plans for my writing). I haven't even scored with any high-class literary groupies. All I get out of this is the satisfaction of churning out words others are willing to read.

I've thought of making this process even purer. I could disable comments, removing any temptation that I’d ever twist my words to garner gushing comments. I could also disable my email account, cutting off any possibility that I'd be tempted by gushing comments by email, or hateful comments, or comments offering v1agra or peni5 enlargement pills. I could ignore, or better yet remove, my stat counters, further obscuring the extent of my obscurity. And I could continue alienating you with self-congratulatory screeds like this.

I probably won't do all that, for I've allowed enough of my ego to get entwined with Outer Life that I get a rush when someone says something nice, or links to something I've written. So it's not all about the words. Or, said another way, it is all about the words, but despite my best efforts the words here still retain a little piece of me.

A Familiar, Consistent and Predictable Story

Lately I've been on a book buying binge.

They're coming in much faster than I can read them, and I have this thing against shelving unread books, worried that once they're up there I'll forget to read them, which is, in fact, what tends to happen, so I stack them on a table next to my desk, a crude but effective self-regulating temporary storage system that keeps them in my line of sight and therefore in my mind so that when I'm looking for something new to read I'm more likely select one from the stack, thereby maintaining it at a manageable size, except, that is, when I start binge-buying books like a drunken professor, disrupting the fragile equilibrium of the pile's ecosystem with an uncontrolled influx of new volumes until, one day, the stack hits the tipping point, both in the sense that at that point it's gotten so big my wife figures out I'm on a book buying binge, something I'd rather she not know because she'll make me stop, and in the more literal sense that at that point, the stack, grown to a teetering tower, topples onto my desk and the floor, making it all but impossible for me to get any work done, let alone get within two feet of my desk, which is exactly what happened last weekend.

So I've got to shelve them. Problem is, I don't have the shelf space. I have enough space for shelves, but not enough shelves in that space. That's because my plans to convert our living and dining rooms into a library annex have, thus far, been stymied by my wife's steadfast resistance, forcing me to squeeze my infinitely expanding book collection into my all-too finite shelf space.

Something's got to give so, with a stout but heavy heart, I resolved to cull my books to clear enough shelf space for all the new editions.

This won't be easy because I've been culling my collection for years, giving away most books after I finish with them, shelving only those books I need to consult (in the case of reference books) or liked enough to read again (in the case of all other books). So there shouldn't be much low-hanging fruit left to be picked.

Or so I thought, as I started the grim task of reaping my way through my books. Instead, I noticed that while I have, indeed, continued to consult the reference books I thought I would consult, and therefore can't possibly get rid of any of them, I've actually re-read very few of the other books I once thought I'd re-read.

A lot of this is due to the sudden realization that hit me a few years ago as I entered my middle ages: I will die. I understand a lot of us formerly feckless get the same sudden realization around middle age. What this means for me is that there's a finite number of books left for me to read, so for every book I re-read, there's an unread book I'll never read. Those great books I shelved in my twenties, back when I had all the time in the work, now look a lot less attractive next to the great books I'll never get to read.

So, mindful of my mortality, and needing to clear a lot of space to shelve the bounty of my most recent book buying binge, I vow to be ruthless.

Genre books are the easiest target.

Some of this is due to changes in my reading tastes -- as a pimply-faced socially-inept teenager subsisting on a steady diet of science fiction, I never imagined there'd come a day when I'd lose my fascination with escapist futuristic fiction, but that improbable day did come. Right around the time I lost my pimples. And, come to think of it, my virginity. Anyways, three decades later, I've still got a shelf stuffed two deep with sci-fi paperbacks exploring futures already passed, yellowing reminders of a past that's also passed. It's time to say goodbye.

And some of this is due to sheer volume. Normally when I read a good book I don't feel the need to read every other book written by the author. I appreciate the book as an individual book, and move on with my reading life. But when I read a good genre book, I rejoice to learn there are 25 others by the same author with the same characters in the same situations, and I eagerly anticipate reading every one of them, in chronological order, knowing all along that, apart from the names and some minor details, I'll effectively be reading the same book 26 times.

And keeping 26 copies on my shelves. After I go to the trouble of tracking down all the books in a series, I'm loathe to get rid of any single volume, no matter how bad. After all, if I ever read the series again, I'd have to track down that missing volume. And in the meantime, any gap in the carefully-assembled series on my shelf would constantly nag at me, like a tongue that can't stop probing the empty socket left behind by a missing tooth.

So, when culling my book collection, if I decide to ditch, say, J.A. Baker, I'd lose one book taking up less than half an inch of shelf space. And a great book at that, so even though I'll probably never read it again, there is some cost and very little benefit to getting rid of it. The cost-benefit isn't compelling, so it stays.

But if I ditch Gregory Mcdonald, I'll lose thirteen Fletch books taking up about a foot of shelf space. I like the Fletch books, but I've already read them and being now all-too aware of my mortality I now know I'll probably never re-read them again and, best of all, getting rid of them will free up space for at thirteen new books. Some cost but great benefit, so away they go.

This calculus turns out to be common, so after an afternoon whacking my way through the shelves, I free up big chunks of free space and end up with two boxes of discards comprised, disproportionately, of series books.

It wasn't easy, and I didn't toss all my series, being unable to part with a few too near and dear to my heart. The exercise reaffirmed my affection for all these series books, both the gut wrenching agony as I tossed some, and the relief I felt in saving others, and it got me wondering why I'm so attached to these books in the first place.

Within each genre, the books pretty much follow the same formula. They start the same, they end the same, they adhere to the same story rules, their main characters share the same fundamental traits. The books differ chiefly in color, style and setting, and some manage to take minor detours off the well-trod plot path, but they're all much more alike than different. Which is what makes them genre books, of course.

As if this general genre uniformity wasn't uniform enough, the most successful genre books are part of a series offering the same character, the same setting, the same color, the same style, even the same detours off the plot path.

It's easy to denigrate genre books. They are, after all, formulaic by definition, and "formulaic" is a pejorative word indicating lack of originality, reminding us that it is, of course, originality that we value.

What's a lot harder to explain is why a people who profess to value originality so often devour books defined by their lack of originality. I've often wondered that about myself. Over the years, I've entertained a number of explanations, none wholly satisfying.

Perhaps because I read genre books, I don't believe those who read genre fiction are necessarily inferior readers, rubes lacking the education and enlightenment needed to venture beyond formulaic entertainment. I've known too many educated and enlightened people with a fondness for genre fiction, sometimes a secret fondness for a guilty pleasure, but a real appreciation nonetheless. It may be pap, but it's pap they keep consuming long after they've cut their teeth on the hard stuff.

Genre books are like comfort food. Variety may be the spice of life, but it's only a spice, not the main course, which for most of us remains your basic meat and potatoes. Or, in another strained food analogy, genre books are like Saltine crackers, cleansing the mental palate between forays into originality.

My current thinking is that our brains have evolved to prefer genre fiction. (Note: Not being a scientist, or even particularly knowledgeable when it comes to scientific matters, you'll find my scientific pronouncements refreshingly free of pesky limitations imposed by facts, knowledge, understanding or accountability, more informed by a mixture of "just so" stories from preliterate days and sci-fi I consumed while a pimply-faced teenage virgin than the latest peer-reviewed papers and objective studies. So please do not quote these theories at cocktail parties unless you either (1) seek to cultivate about yourself an aura of ignorance or (2) can imbue them in the telling with sufficient sarcasm and detached irony that others will merely see it as a feeble attempt at meta-humor.)

The brain prefers the familiar; genre fiction is nothing if not familiar. Long ago in our primordial past, as our ancestors migrated around the world they encountered new potential food sources. Some of these were food, and nourished them, while others weren't food at all, and killed them. Those who evolved a preference for eating the same old same old over and over were more likely to survive long enough to reproduce, while those who couldn't resist sampling the root or berry du jour were more likely to die young. We are descended from the survivors, so embedded deep within our brains is a built-in preference for the familiar. While we work our way from A is for Alibi to Z is for Zee Final Book, our brains signal "survival," but the minute we pick up a slim volume of modern experimental fiction, our brains signal "death."

Similarly, the brain seeks recognizable patterns; genre fiction provides stories with recognizable patterns. Bombarded with billions of sensory signals, how does a brain manage to get through the day? By seeking recognizable patterns and discarding the rest. If in the sea of signals it detects A and B in the context of C, it knows to send the D signal. So, if A is the flash of anger on your wife's face, and B is a verbal threat from your wife, and the context of C is her standing in the middle of your toppled pile of books, evidence of your ill-advised and heretofore hidden binge buying spree, and she's holding one of them like a frisbee, that's all your brain needs to send a frantic D for "DUCK!" signal immediately before the book hurtles towards your head. Genre books send similarly recognizable patterns to the brain, soothingly massaging it with the assurance that it can make sense of the world. Reading a genre book, you know that A and B in the context of C will always mean D. If instead, in the example above, the book in your wife's hand turned into a giant rat chanting Bushisms in Spanish with a Castilian accent while dancing the can-can around your now-befuddled wife, you'd have an original and challenging work of modern magical realism but a very unsatisfying pattern for your brain to process. Is it any wonder the brain seeks the formulaic and so often rejects the original?

In short, the brain works 24/7 to construct meaning, so it latches onto the familiar, the consistent, the predictable. But much of the world is unfamiliar, inconsistent, unpredictable, making it very difficult, maybe impossible, for our brains to explain what it all means. Genre books offer a safe haven to a mind frazzled by reality, a mini-world consisting only of the familiar, the consistent, the predictable, allowing us to find, if only for a moment, the meaning that eludes us outside the pages, where we're just one of billions, in a world that's one of billions, in a galaxy that's one of billions in a universe so inconceivably vast that it might just include, somewhere, a giant dancing rat who speaks with a slight lisp and has it in for Bush.

Old Mutton Chops

My first thought on meeting my new boss was the first thought I imagine everyone had on meeting him: “You don’t see mutton chops much these days.”

That was in the early Nineties, a time when men shaved their faces, not their heads. The mustache and the beard defined the outer boundaries of facial hair in an otherwise clean cut world.

But even today, well into the Age of the Goatee and the growing popularity of all sort of exotic facial hair, such as soul patches, billy goats and Elvis burns, not to mention the three day perma-shadow, the very essence of careless carefree modern cool, the mutton chop still stands apart, defining an outer boundary none dare cross.

He was a throwback in other ways, too.

He didn’t use a computer. Instead, he composed his memos and reports in long hand on yellow legal pads, his slanted loopy scrawl the sort I imagine would work well within the limitations of a quill pen, though in a rare concession to modernity he used a ballpoint. If he replied to your email, his secretary would bring you a print-out of your email with his handwritten reply squeezed into the margins. Forget about PowerPoint, he delivered presentations off the cuff, sometimes consulting a 3x5 note card or two, never providing charts or other graphics, so you actually had to listen to him. And ran his numbers the old fashioned way, on the back of the envelope, sometimes deigning to use a calculator but never opening Excel.

For him, office technology was forever defined by the Wang word processor, a tool designed for secretaries, not executives. By the time office technology spilled over into the executive suite, permeating everything everyone did, he was high enough in the organization that he could resist its onslaught, reasoning that the millions we spent on technology was, like the millions we spent on plant equipment, merely an investment in worker productivity, not something that would ever affect what an executive did. I remember his surprise one evening when, his secretary gone for the day, I sat at her station and typed a few revisions to the report we were working on. He often chided me for that, asking me if I could sit in for his secretary while she was at lunch, or, after reviewing something I wrote, saying I had a great future in word processing, his last two words dripping with disdain.

He was a real meat-and-potatoes guy, both figuratively and literally, for he never seemed to eat anything other than meat and potatoes. If the lunchroom didn’t have some form of meat and potatoes on the menu, he’d have his secretary pick up a Bacon Western Cheeseburger and French fries at the Carls, Jr. down the street.

He smoked like a chimney. When I started, no one wanted to sit near his office, the reek of smoke permeating everything, and everyone, within 50 feet. It was like sitting next to a coal-fired power plant. By mid-morning there’d be a mountain of unfiltered cigarette butts in his ashtray, ash scattered over his desk and clothes, some even sticking to his mutton chops, as he chain-smoked his way through the day.

When the city banned smoking in office buildings, he took it personally. Initially, he threatened to move to Virginia or North Carolina, tobacco states that surely encouraged smoking in the workplace. Then he calmed down enough to scour the city’s new regulations, finding not one, but two loopholes. The regulations were primarily designed to protect workers in modern office buildings, those glass boxes with windows that don’t open, so he planned to define himself out of the rules by cutting a ventilation hole in his 40th floor office window. Building management put a stop to his scheme, alerted no doubt by one of the underlings in his hallway forced to inhale his smoke, second-hand.

When that didn’t work, he played his other card, applying for a liquor license for his office. The rules contained an exception for licensed bars located in office buildings, so he planned to turn his office into a bar, joking that he already kept enough alcohol in there (he did, but that’s a different story). He only needed a liquor license and permission from building management for what was certainly a non-conforming use of the premises. Neither the city nor building management took him seriously.

He wasn’t surprised he lost. His ideas were clever, but even he knew they were strained. But he was surprised that no one in the office backed him up. Some had endured years of his smoke, but none had ever asked him to stop. He was just too senior. And too clueless to see why we were silent. It was easier for us to request a transfer.

Perhaps out of hurt, but more likely out of raging nicotine withdrawal, he retreated just outside the lobby, where he spent half the day puffing away twice as fast with a foreign object, some newfangled wireless doohickey the kids were calling a “cellular telephone communication device,” plastered to his ear. Our building got lousy cell reception, especially down on the ground, something he was incapable of appreciating, so a conversation with him would be filled with him saying “huh?” as you dropped in and out and you saying “what?” as he prattled on and on, oblivious to the fact that you were only hearing every third word he said, and then his line would drop and you’d be talking to yourself until his secretary poked her head in your office and asked you to reconnect him to the call.

This was better than the old days, though, when we’d have to do those conference calls in the smokehouse. He liked his speakerphone, calling it “the box,” and he liked his desk chair, a winged leather high-back that reclined almost to the floor, allowing him to lie back, his feet planted on his desk right in front of your face, so close you could count the gum spots and evaluate their freshness when you weren’t staring at the extremely elongated ash precariously protruding from the end of the cigarette bouncing up and down in his lips as he quietly conducted the call. And I mean quietly, his voice a raspy whisper, his windpipe so encrusted with years of accumulated tar that only the smallest bit of air was permitted to escape his open mouth. Sitting across his desk, we could barely hear him. And we were sitting next to “the box,” so chances were the rest of the people on the call couldn’t hear him at all. Lots of “huhs” and “whats” from them, forcing us to repeat his words like simultaneous UN translators. And when they were speaking, and he had something to say, he’d try to interrupt but the speakerphone’s sound detection circuits wouldn’t register the itty-bitty sound waves faintly croaking from his smoke-filled lungs, so they would talk on while he kept trying to get a word in, his frustration growing, until one of us shouted the speaker down and cleared the way for him to speak again.

I remember once he was trying to talk to someone on air phone, his rasp no match for the incessant background drone of the jet engines, so he couldn’t get a word in at all. Rather than pick up his handset, which would allow him to break through more easily, something that never occurred to him, he just shouted and shouted, his voice growing louder than I’d ever heard it, but even that loud wasn’t loud enough, until he pulled his phone out of the wall and threw it against his office window. The phone shattered, but the window didn’t even crack, thereby frustrating one prong of his future anti-anti-smoking campaign.

For all that, I liked him.

He was different, a rare quality in an office environment back in the days before they invented blue shirts, casual Fridays and non-secretarial females. I remember my first week in the office, sitting in a conference room, looking up and down the long table and being blinded by rows of white shirts and clean-shaven white faces until my eyes hit his pink striped shirt and scraggly mutton chops. For some reason, although I too wore a white shirt and have always had a clean-shaven white face, and have never once even considered mutton chops, it comforted me that someone there had.

He was unaffected. Although I never learned why he wears mutton chops, I am certain he was not trying to be different or retro or to get attention. He was just, like his shirts, cut from a different cloth, doing things his own way, seemingly oblivious to what others were doing or what they thought of him or his mutton chops.

He rarely chatted, but sometimes, after a long call, he’d light one up, lean way back, and illustrate a point he’d made on the call with a story, often from the really old days when he first started out. More than the points he made, I remember the details he conveyed, the huge chunks of his early life spent on business trips by train, the more relaxed rhythm of work days before faxes, FedEx and email, the languid feel of an office in the summer without air conditioning, the challenges of working after a three-martini lunch. He straddled two eras, giving me a valuable perspective, the sort some people pick up from their grandparents but I, having none, never did.

He was the only person I ever knew who complained about being paid too much. He feared for the future of a society with values so misplaced that people like him earned so much for doing what they did, while others earned so much less for doing so much more. I’m sure he took the money, but he lived so modestly it isn’t clear what he did with it.

He spoke his mind, something few here do, now that the greatest generation is retired and dying off. I think there’s something about growing up in the crushing poverty of a Depression and then dodging bullets in the Pacific and seeing your buddies blown apart next to you that leaves you no time for BS, compels you to get right to the point, even when no one wants to hear it. He was very smart and highly educated, yet he spoke very plainly, more like a guy in the trenches than an executive in a 40th floor office suite.

But for all his success, he was kind of sad. He lived alone, never marrying. He didn’t seem to have any friends. His only hobby was golfing, and he was a terrible golfer, slashing violently down at the ball, digging a deep trench in the fairway and sending the ball on a low, boring trajectory that either landed 100 yards short of the green or 100 yards over it. He played fast, and always itched to play faster. His impatience with slow weekend golfers forced him to join a country club, albeit the cheapest one in town, a club whose narrow fairways wrapped around a mountain, sending all but the straightest shots into ball eating bushes on the high side or, more often, over the cliff and into oblivion on the other side.

Early in a typical round he’d hit a bad shot and start cursing, retreating inward, ignoring you, his face getting redder and redder as he wheezed his way from hole to hole, all the while silently screaming at himself, the agony of his day only increasing with each bad shot, making you feel guilty for your good shots and leaving you no solace for your bad shots. You’d reach the 18th green only to find that he’d stormed off the course, leaving you to putt out alone. His car would be gone by the time you reached the parking lot.

And then, the next Monday, you’d see him in the office and he’d ask if you were free to play again that weekend. Most of our colleagues made excuses after one or two rounds with him, but for some reason I didn’t, playing maybe 20 rounds over the few years we worked together, each time watching him tortured himself around the course, marveling at his tolerance for self-inflicted pain. I didn’t take pleasure in that pain, but I was oddly drawn to it, perhaps the sane part of me hoping the golf-addled part of me would learn something from this Ghost of Golf Future.

I transferred away from his group after a few years, never working (or golfing) with him again. Soon after, he hit 70 and was forced to retire, and I lost track of him. Today I tried googling him but, not surprisingly, nothing came up on this man who never owned a computer, let alone touched a keyboard. He may be dead, probably should be, what with all the smoke and saturated fat he inhaled over the years, but something tells me Old Mutton Chops is still hacking and cursing his way around a tight course somewhere. I hope he’s happy.

Lifelong Learning Endowment

In order to maintain my Parenting License, Middle Class, in good standing, each month I shovel a not insignificant portion of my earnings into 429 plans for the future college education of my kids.

By “not insignificant,” I mean the amount it would take for me to save $552,000, the projected amount I will need to send my two kids to the college I attended.

That’s a lot of money, especially for someone like me, who completely wasted his college years. Unable to shake the ever-present delusion of self-justification, I can’t escape the feeling that my kids will waste their college years too, which makes the prospect of blowing $552,000 even harder to take.

Having wasted my college years, and most of the years before college too, and therefore having gotten through life pretty much on what I’ve figured out on my own, I place little value on formal education, disdaining its rigid one-size-fits-all pedagogical model, its fetishistic reliance on objective but meaningless facts and figures, its sports-addled pep rally-style of conditioned social conformity and its artificial and other-directed Pavlovian system of grade-based rewards. That’s another reason I can’t imagine dropping $552,000 into our halls of higher learning.

(Interestingly, I’ve found that those auto-didacts who did not attend college tend to worship the idea of college, idealizing it to an unhealthy degree.)

But I place a very high value on an informal, but self-directed and lifelong, education. So high, in fact, that over my life I’ve spent thousands upon thousands of hours and dollars on my own educational pursuits, most of them through books. The other day, as I tore open yet another box filled with books ordered online, each another lesson on my lifelong syllabus, it occurred to me that maybe there was a better use for that $552,000 I am so assiduously saving.

What if I split it in half, $276,000 for each of my kids, and with that set up an endowment to fund their own lifelong learning endeavors? Call it a “Lifelong Learning Endowment.” If conservatively invested and spent, the Lifelong Learning Endowments would allow each of my kids to spend about $200 each and every week over their entire lives on self-directed educational endeavors. They could blow it all on books, like me, or they could save it for lectures, pottery lessons, world travel or whatever. And that $200 would be in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, so it should grow with inflation, ensuring that throughout their lives they will always have enough money to meet their educational needs.

And they would never spend the principal, so when they died there’d be at least $276,000 available to seed Lifelong Learning Endowments for their kids, grandkids or other deserving youth, thereby passing the spark of lifelong learning along to future generations.

Which do you think is the better buy – $276,000 given to a college in exchange for four years of fun, frivolity and, possibly, a little bit of learning, or $276,000 to a Lifelong Learning Endowment for a lifetime’s worth of self-directed learning?

I’m so excited about the possibilities of the Lifelong Learning Endowment, I don’t even care if it causes them to downgrade me to the dreaded Parenting License, Lower Class.

Sunny Days

It was my first job interview in Los Angeles, way back in the Roaring ‘80’s. As I shuffled into the interview room, before I even sat down, the recruiter fixed me with a determined stare, cleared this throat and asked, “Where are you from?”

My mind stumbled, having expected something more along the lines of a “hello” or handshake or offer of a business card before he started on the third degree. Thankfully I have a fall-back in mind-stumbling situations like this: I repeated his question back to him.

“Where am I from?”

“Your résumé says you live in New York and went to school in the East, but it doesn’t say where you grew up.”

“Oh, here, in Los Angeles.”

He smiled, leaned back and said, “You’d be amazed. I interview all these college grads from the East and Midwest, highly-accomplished young people making major life decisions, with tons of variables to consider and weigh, and what do they want to talk about? The weather. It always comes down to the weather with them. They’re not here for a job, they’re only here for sunny days. Amazing!”

He shook his head while he spoke, underscoring his disappointment and disdain, feelings I tried to mirror with indications of empathetic agreement, eager as I was to get the job.

The truth is, I wasn’t amazed at all. I had, after all, been raised by those sun seekers.

* * *
As soon as they left college, my parents fled the cold climes of their youth to bask in the Southern California sun. Families and friends were left behind to freeze. My parents weren’t alone. So many flooded into the state after World War II, like moths drawn to the sunlight, that it seemed every adult I met while growing up had traded snow for sun.

My parents and their fellow émigrés did not pine for the old country. Quite the opposite: they were rabid Southern California boosters, relentlessly giddy with delight in their new promised land, never missing a chance to compare and contrast their new Golden State with the Eastern hometowns they left behind:

“You think it’s hot outside, let me tell you, you don’t know hot until you’ve spent a summer back East. Don’t even get me started on the bugs....”

“You think it’s cold outside, let me tell you, you don’t know cold until you’ve spent an autumn back East. Don’t even get me started on the winters....”

“That’s the beauty of an earthquake, it might be bad, but only for a minute. Back East the cold grey days of winter never seem to end, and there’s the mud season to look forward to. Now that’s a natural disaster….”

They lived for our 85 degree Christmas days and those ridiculously sunny Rose Parades on New Year’s. The TV news would be showing blizzards back East, stranded travelers at airports, cities buried in snow, and they’d be on the phone, trying to get through to their frozen relatives, desperate to let them know the sun was still shining here, it’s such a shame to be inside, maybe this afternoon we’ll have barbecue out back. And a swim, it’s a little hot today. Oh, and by the way, how is the weather back there?

* * *
My parents never returned East, not even to visit relatives. They didn’t have to – the frozen relations they left behind were more than happy to visit us. And our sun.

And we never took up any winter sports, my parents convinced that only the feeble-minded and the insane would spend good money to freeze to death. The sun is free, they’d say. I didn’t touch snow until I was 14 and a friend’s family took me along on a ski trip. And I was in college before snow first fell on me.

So without any firsthand experience of cold, I had little choice but to believe my parents. They must be right: The East must be hell. Not hell in a hot way, of course, but hell in a cold way. Sort of the opposite of traditional depictions of hell but still real hellish, if you get where I’m going with this because I no longer do.

Anyways, I internalized the “Cold Bad” part of the message. Made sense to me. Everyone I knew hated the cold. And how else do you explain Phoenix? Over time the North would slowly drain South until one day we’d look up and realize there was no one left up there, other than those too old, infirm or feeble-minded to join the migration.

But the awkward part is I never internalized the “Heat Good” part of their message. I am melanin-challenged, my northern European pallor barely able to withstand a weak sun peeking through thick clouds maybe once or twice a week. Anything more and I burn. In the days before sunscreen, growing up in the land of constant sun and cloudless days, with wanton sun worshippers for parents, I burned all the time. Today my dermatologist calls me “The Annuity.”

My parents believed in heat so much they never bought an air conditioned car. We drove around for years soaked with sweat and sticking to the vinyl seats while the open car windows blasted hot air into our faces. And our house wasn’t much better, my parents springing only for a swamp cooler, a strange device that blew air through a wet sponge-like pad, managing to keep the house a degree or two cooler than the outside while infusing our interior air with the moisture-laden malarial miasma of a swamp. Hence the name, I guess. Some say it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. With our swamp cooler, it was the heat and the humidity.

Not that it was easy to stay inside in the days before cable TV, computers, video games or the internet. It was universally understood in those pre-milk carton days that during the day adults stayed inside while kids vanished somewhere outside. When the sun was up, we were out. Whether we liked it or not. “It’s not healthy for a 10 year old to be sitting around the house all day,” my mom would say, pushing me out the door and into the smog-filled radiation-drenched frying pan we called the front yard, ordering me not to return until the street lights went on.

We rode our bikes everywhere. Had to, the role of “parent chauffeur” not yet written. I remember riding to a friend’s house on one of those triple-digit days, the sun burning my sunscreen-less skin and blinding my sunglass-less eyes, huffing and puffing as I struggled up his hill, my prematurely-browned lungs struggling to separate the oxygen from the smog, till I blacked out and came to in the gutter with a pounding headache and scrapes up and down my left side. Just a mild case of sunstroke, not to worry, they said. Memories of that ride, and the other Bataan death rides of my youth, are still seared in my mind.

My favorite destination was the public library, the only air-conditioned building within biking distance that encouraged loitering and didn’t require me to buy anything. Sometimes I think my love of reading is just a byproduct of my childhood need to beat the heat.

* * *
College offered my first chance of escape. By then I was ready to test the Cold Bad idea in person. As applications from schools in the Northeast started filling our mailbox, my parents were puzzled. How could he even think of leaving the sun, they wondered. Maybe he isn’t as smart as we thought.

I applied to a few California schools, but in the end I chose a college in the frozen East, as I knew all along I would. I didn’t choose it for the cold, of course. I chose it for a reason far more relevant to my higher education prospects: how to put the most distance between me and my parents.

My parents and their émigré friends assured me I wouldn’t be able to handle the cold. Everyone knew someone whose idiot kid left California for the East only to high-tail it back after the first frost, tail between his legs, vowing never again to forsake the warmth of the sun. Intelligent, highly-educated people would tell me, as a biological fact, that my blood was simply too thin to withstand a real winter. They assured me I’d be back.

And once I arrived at college, I began to think they might be right. Where were all the Californians? My school proudly proclaimed in its glossy admissions brochure that it drew students from every state – that explained the dork from Wyoming – so I naturally assumed that the most populous state in the nation would be better represented at my school than, say, Rhode Island, but it wasn’t. Maybe, I thought, I was the only Californian stupid enough to leave.

I wasn’t the only one, but we Californians were such a novelty that each of us was known as “The Californian,” as in “Were you at The Pit last night? Did you see that guy break the pitcher while trying to break-dance on the bar? The one who’d lost his pants? Well, later we saw him on the sidewalk passed out in a pool of his own vomit. Who was he? I don’t remember his name, but you know, he’s The Californian.”

In psychology there’s a useful concept called “social proof,” the primal sense of comfort we get when mindlessly moving along with the herd. One week at college and I realized I’d left my herd behind for a primal sense of discomfort. And I hadn’t even experienced the cold yet. I kept thinking of those idiot California kids who didn’t make it through the first frost. Maybe my parents were right.

It didn’t help that my classmates were amazed that anyone would voluntarily leave California for this place. They sounded disturbingly like the children my parents should have had, what with their longing to flee the cold and dreary East to bask in the blinding glare of Southern California’s fabled perma-sun. Surely these were the kids who, just a few years later, could speak only of sunny days at Los Angeles job interviews.

My classmates had these naive notions about Californians, based mostly on Beach Boys songs and those “I Love Lucy” episodes when she visited a Hollywood so stuffed with celebrities she couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one. So everyone assumed I surfed with celebrities. I didn’t, on both counts, but years of bike rides in the searing desert heat had browned my skin enough so that, while a Californian would see my library-bleached skin and assume I was either terminally ill or a vampire, next to these pasty white Easterners I could pass for a Laird Hamilton. Or even a George Hamilton.

The point was, there is this thing called the California Dream. There is not this thing called the Rhode Island Dream, or the Pennsylvania Dream, or the New Jersey Dream. The New Jersey Nightmare, maybe, but never the New Jersey Dream. And for some perverse and unfathomable reason I was born into the Dream, but turned my back and fled from it. What was wrong with me?

* * *
After all this the cold, when it finally hit, was anti-climactic. I’d prepared by ordering enough gear from L.L. Bean to outfit an arctic expedition, so if anything it was never cold enough for me. It’d be a breezy 20 degrees and I’d be sweating in my thermal underwear and flannel-lined trousers and down parka rated to 30 below. I quickly learned to shed these layers, eventually getting by on all but the coldest days with regular jeans and a thin cotton field coat. Maybe my blood thickened. Maybe it was an early flash of global warming. Or maybe my parents’ cold was much colder than the real cold.

When the first snow hit, I walked about entranced, marveling at the quiet beauty of the white blanket. It was love at first sight. My father said my love affair would end the day I had to shovel my own driveway, but that didn’t faze me at all, and not just because I was a feckless student without a heating bill to pay, or because the snow was forbidden fruit denied to me for so many years, or because loving the snow was a tangible manifestation of my late adolescent need to repudiate my parents, nor even because I somehow anticipated the day when homeowners of even modest means could afford their own gas-powered self-propelled snow blowers. No, I simply loved the snow, and still do, for basic reasons I have a hard time explaining, except to note that my ancestors must have felt it too. Why else would they have walked out of sunny Africa 30,000 years ago, not stopping until they reached the frozen north?

I loved the seasons. Not any particular season, just the fact that there are seasons. Where I grew up, they had this outdoor thermostat they’d set at 78 half the year, 72 the other half. Yawn. Back East there was always something happening outside, nature was always asserting itself somehow. It added a degree of interest to my days.

It wasn’t all perfect, of course. I had a hard time adjusting to the rain. I owned the proper rain gear, but a lifetime living in a land where it’s bone dry nearly all the time left me incapable of comprehending that a sunny morning could turn into a soaking afternoon. How many times did I leave the rain gear in my room only to return that afternoon soaked to the skin? Enough that over the years I got wetter than my rain gear.

And I never made my peace with forced-air heating systems, those arid blasts of hot air reminiscent of the arid desert land I’d fled. At night I’d either turn off the heat or open a window, sometimes waking to snow drifts on my bed and always finding it that much harder to leave the warmth under the covers, the last thing a late riser with morning classes needed, and a direct cause, I maintain, of some of my lowest grades.

* * *
And with those grades I nearly flunked out of college. I managed to graduate, but without a job. I moved to New York, figuring in a city of eight million jobs, one or two would fall between the cracks for me to find, and sure enough, after a some desperate months of searching, I managed to find the only job as pathetic as me, a job every other recent college graduate must have already turned down, the sort of job they gladly shipped to Bangalore as soon as it opened for business a few years later.

The job was, alas, more pathetic than me. In between hundreds of telemarketing calls to fast food restaurant managers – my job requiring me to shill food service industry trade publications to the functionally illiterate – I desperately searched for a way out. After ruling out homelessness, a life of crime and suicide, I realized I had to find another job. Any job. Doing anything. Anywhere.

Which led me back to Los Angeles, where my parents knew someone who knew someone who knew of a ground floor opportunity available to anyone who could get through an interview without mentioning sunny days, something I managed to do without even trying, being perhaps the only person to ever move to Los Angeles despite, not because of, the weather.

Twenty years later, I’m still here. Amazing.