Going negative

It's winter. Get used to it.

On this planet, temperatures go up and down. Especially here in the middle latitudes, including central Swingstate where I live, the seasons come and go with remarkable variation, bringing wide fluctuations of warm and cold weather. So pardon my interruption of your January rant about how horrible it is to endure the harsh subfreezing gale outside, but hey, it's winter.

Or you could move in with Ken Lay down in the Cayman Islands, where it's nice and warm with all that oily money. Here in the relatively temperate Lower 48, it's not as tropical as Hawaii and not as arctic as Alaska, and there will be warmer months and colder months. Like yin times and yang times in the cycle of the year, they're not going away very soon.

Excuse me if I repeat myself, but in case you didn't get the memo, change happens. Sometimes change is wet and cold. Learn to live with it. The wet and cold stuff of January is good for the apple trees and other flora that grace this part of the country. Put on your mittens, fergoshsakes.

As much as you might object, it might get hotter than 72 F. in the summer, then you can complain that it's too hot. And as much as you hate the cold, the temperature might drop below 32 in the winter. Horrors! In our command-and-control culture, you can push all the buttons you want, and it doesn't change the fact of the ups and downs.

I say life is a garden, so dig it.

It's the same with human interaction. I respectfully disagree with the unwritten rule that when someone asks "How are you?" the appropriate response is the upbeat "Great!" or even "Fine, thank you." If they take the trouble to ask, I think you owe them an honest answer, even if it's "I feel like hell but I think I'll live."

I realize these are mixed messages. On the one hand, everyone should enjoy winter - as I do - and get all gung-ho about wearing wool, shoveling snow, and turning corners in a controlled slide. On the other hand, everyone should act as grumpy as they feel - like I do - and stop feigning a constant but perfunctory state of happiness.

In other words, enjoy the down side. We're not in any old recession, we're in a Great Recession. I'm not just in a bad mood, I'm mired in an acute state of existential malaise. But at least be present for the event.

Excuse me while I leave my cubicle to take a walk in an outdoor oval to breathe unrecirculated air.

Ink-Stained Wretch

Why do all my shirts have dark blue or black blotter-like stains on the cuffs below the elbow? Why do two of my favorite pairs of pants have small but impossible-to-ignore and hard-to-remove Rorschach tests on the seat? Should I start wearing plastic sleeve coverings like the bookkeeper or telegraph clerk in the old movies? Its an occupational hazard.

I've been scribbling since I can remember. Some of my early work was drawing on scrap paper my dad would bring home from the office; the writing of actual words and sentences probably came later, but the medium is the message, and the visual line, not the play, is the thing. Paper, pencil, pen, eye, hand, analog marks on a two-dimensional surface.

Early on, uniforms of sports teams and military units - real or imaginary - were a favorite subject. The typography of team names, logos, and players' numbers was fun too. Serif or sans serif, block or rounded, printed or cursive. Later came lists and maps of realigned baseball or football leagues with divisions reflecting geographical balance, maps of dreamed-up cities with street grids and government buildings, floor plans of unlikely houses. I spent a lot of time in my room and went through a lot of paper in the 1950s before anyone thought about saving trees.

The technology of the game changed in junior high school when I developed a personal relationship with the typewriter. I still wrote longhand of course; make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold. Mr. Fiocchi had a roomful of manual Royals in typing class, and I had access to a little blue Olivetti portable at home. Neural pathways connecting with the keyboard, smudges on the fingers from changing the ribbon, followed by crisp impressions on the paper. The round eraser with a little brush attached.

In high school we had a couple of IBM Selectrics in the journalism room, with the detachable golf-ball you could change to get a different typeface (we didn't call it a 'font') and a half-backspace key to justify lines. That was when I started to compose at the keyboard instead of doing a draft with a pen and then transcribing. But then, as now, it's all about revising, deleting, inserting, and transposing in a quest for the perfect lead, active verbs, and an editable inverted pyramid.

It's not always easy finding gainful employment when words on a page are your bricks and mortar, so I have found it expedient at times to do something else for a living. Then I would come home with dirt or dough under my fingernails instead of ink on my fingers. At times I had a hard time staying with a job in publishing, like the summer internship that convinced me I really didn't want to work at a newspaper, but that's another story.

Then there was the time I wanted to set type in the composing room instead of writing articles as a beat reporter, only to quit the night shift for a nine-to-five gig at the phone company doing business letters on an early A.B. Dick word-processing machine, circa 1978. Once you typed it in, the plastic magnetic cards stored the data electronically and printed out on command, very cutting edge.

When I decided to go back to college and get a degree in education, NOT journalism, the employment agency put me behind an IBM Selectric where I knocked out engineering syllabi, vitae, tests, and grant applications. When I changed schools and applied for financial aid, the administrators took one look at my record and put me to work on the faculty-staff newspaper. I thought I was in heaven, with my own office in the old stone theology building next to Asia House and facing Tappan Square, but as usual I didn't take full advantage of the opportunity. Was it the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time? I don't know, but I chose to go elsewhere and do other things.

Doing other things, of course, led me back behind a typewriter. I couldn't get away. After brief forays teaching kids, planting trees, selling trees, and landscaping trees - my karma after all that paper - I entered the digital age at a keyboard attached to a Mac, then a PC, then a Mac again.

It's only right to ponder, every once in a while, the possibility of another line of work, especially now that print is on its way out as the dominant publishing form. Yet half the people I know are connected in some way to printed pages and their digital offspring. In the meantime, anybody know a good stain remover? Out damn spot!

Champagne and Caveat

Happy New Year? Take a rain check.

Is it a new decade yet? I can never remember whether a decade officially begins or ends on the zero-numbered year? If it starts with a 1, then I guess we're a year away, but I have my own reasons to redraw the line. It's been exactly ten years since I began working at the Hill. As anniversaries go, it might not be much, but it's a record of professional longevity for me.

I interviewed with Michael and Marty for a staff job that went to someone else, but they called me back and offered me a project editor position. I told them I would think about it. After another interview with a small company that offered less money with less job security in worse working conditions, I consulted with my career counselor, Zelda Golly, who strongly recommended that I take the job at the Hill.

I called Marty to accept the offer, and she asked what salary I was looking for, so I pull an hourly figure out of the air that was slightly higher than what I made freelancing. She said they would pay me a little more than that, I said okay, and that was that. I reported for work the first Monday of 2000. Ruth showed me to my very own cubicle with my very own computer, phone, Web 10, and Herman Miller chair. Janet handed me my very own copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and I thought, hey, this might work. But would it last?

Flash forward ten years to the waning days of 2009, and my new supervisor in my new department in a newly constituted division of the Reorganized Corporation of the Latter-Day Hill calls a meeting to celebrate my ten-year anniversary. She even brought pie - apple, cherry, and blueberry! Since the date in question happened to fall during the week following Christmas, there were all of four people in the office to eat the delicious pies and help me celebrate. It was fun anyway.

With very little prompting, I described my brilliant career in publishing, starting with the high school newspaper, a summer at the Detroit News, through three undergraduate and one graduate institution, off-the-beaten-path sojourns in the UP, north Georgia, the composing room of a newspaper on the North Shore of Chicago, stints as a busdriver, landscaper, butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. Jaymee, Kim, Aaron, Sandra, and Valerie made me feel special, and that's what's important.

My dark secret was that my date of hire was in the last days of the last century, just before the dreaded apocalypse Y2K, but my first actual day at work was in the first days of 2000, after the would-be threat had passed. It was also in the early days of the opening of the new building at Polaris, so my new co-workers were just getting used to the space after moving up north from Eastwind Drive.

My tenth year ended with me and my new co-workers getting used to a new space at the Easton office, with new and transitioning people arriving every day. I'm going to pretend that today's impromptu lunch at Anemame was an unofficial celebration of that unofficial anniversary. The sushi, the atmosphere, and the company were excellent. Alas, no sake, since we were going back to work.

Almost in passing, the other anniversary last week, my thirty-first as a married man, was also just a half-bubble off center. Since Gven Golly and I had gone to Chicago last year to celebrate our thirtieth in style, we thought we would keep it simple this year, just go out to dinner, and maybe do something wild like paint the new baseboards. However, family events intervened, and we found ourselves driving south the morning of December 30 to attend a funeral.

We stopped off in central Tennessee to have dinner and stay overnight with my parents at their retirement place in Vol Halla. By happy accident, my brother and his wife and daughter were also there for dinner, so we got to spend some bonus time with Pete, Cindy, and Liz, swapping stories of home renovations, college applications, and musician offspring. In-depth discussions of plumbing, wiring, framing, and drywall are just as effective as anything else in bringing people together.

Early Thursday morning, Gven and I were on the dark, winding, rainy, foggy road across the ridge and down the mountain toward Atlanta, where we arrived in ample time for my niece's funeral. Such occasions are often a happy-sad opportunity to reconnect with distant family members, and this was no exception. I hadn't seen some members of the Bradley clan for many years, and now their kids, like my kids, are grown up, some with kids of their own, and I'm one of the old folks. Under the circumstances, I can enjoy that distinction. Cry, laugh, talk about old times, catch up on what's new, laugh, cry.

Since Sandra was a veteran of the first Gulf War, burial with military honors was at the National Cemetery outside Canton, Georgia, in an otherwise beautiful spot on top of a pine-covered and increasingly gravestone-covered mountain. After initially missing the turn-off from highway 20, we got there in time to witness the playing of "Taps" and the folding and presentation of the flag to my brother-in-law. Burt understandably looked a little the worse for wear, having buried two of his daughters in the last few months. Family members went back to my sister Jo Jo's house to eat, relax a bit, and begin the next phase of grieving, healing, adjusting. Clearly it is easier to do that among others who are doing the same.

Eventually Gven and I went to our motel, which was way out in Norcross but was very cheap and very adequate. Gven was tired, so she went to sleep early. I was wound up, so I stayed up. The superstition says the way you start the new year shows what kind of year it will be. Apparently 2010 will consist of multiple "The Thin Man" movies watched back to back over a local pale ale and a tangerine; doing a taiji form and sitting for half an hour with the last movie on mute; sleeping soundly with active dreams that I don't remember; eating the complimentary bagel and coffee while watching CNN in the lobby with visitors from India and Tennessee; and meeting Jo Jo for breakfast.

The days have totally run together, but I'm pretty sure it was New Year's Day in most time zones. We drove straight down Peachtree Road past our former neighborhood near the Brookhaven MARTA station, so we happened to pass a few familiar places, like Nuts & Berries, the natural food store we used to frequent when the kids were little. The IHOP in the heart of Buckhead was packed at noon, but we were seated within minutes. The country omelet was excellent, the service was even better, and the additional time with loved ones priceless.

When it was time to go, we head up Roswell Road for the nickel tour of Sandy Springs on our way out of town. Atlanta turns into Marietta, Calhoun, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Lake City, and London, Kentucky, where we stop at Frisch's Big Boy for a Brawny Lad (Sven) and an open-face roast beef sandwich (Gven). We phoned Zelda from Frisch's to check in with her, and she follows up with text messages updating us with the score of the Rose Bowl. Go Bucks. Lexington, Cincinnati, Grove City, and home in record time. I'm pretty sure there's a pretty good bottle of L. Mawby Consort sparkling wine in the fridge just waiting for a special occasion.

Binary Politics

There are four kinds of people in American politics today, and they can't be easily pigeonholed as either 'conservative' or 'liberal' or 'radical' or 'nut-case'. That by itself could automatically make the following distinctions far too complex for most people who claim an interest in matters of public policy, for whom heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys, Us and Them make it so much easier to assign credit and blame.

I haven't figured out what to call the four types yet, but surely some pundit is on the case. Sadly, because it frames a multitude of issues as a trade-off between foreign and domestic spending, this argument reinforces the notion that Barack Obama is a latter-day Lyndon Johnson figure. With LBJ the prevailing issues were 'Guns and Butter' - large federal expenditures on the war in Vietnam and/or the Great Society social programs. With BHO it could come down to 'Insurgents and Insurance' - whether to spend megabucks to bring a semblance of humane order to Afghanistan and/or to the health care industry.

To be more specific, the four types of people are really segments of the small percentage of folks who have actually given some thought to what they want to pay for with their taxes, not just what they want someone else to do something about. So we might be talking about five percent of registered voters. Which would make an interesting statistical sample in itself: How many poll respondents consider the cost/benefit of a program or policy when asked to support or oppose it, rather than scoring political points for the Good Guys (us) against the Bad Guys (them)?

Expanding the war in Afghanistan is one expensive policy that Americans can either support or oppose. It's binary; you're either fer it or agin' it, and it's gonna cost ya either way. National health insurance - whether you call it a "public option" or "nonprofit coops" or "Medicare buy-in" or some other euphemism - is another. It's big, it's expensive, you either support it or oppose it. Many boatloads of money will likely be spent on one or both of these large-scale projects, and the money has to come from somewhere. The rumor is that you and I will foot the bill.

Citizens, if you want the government to provide more services, you have to pay more taxes. The binary nature of yea or nay questions means the four groups in question would: a) spend the money needed to win the war in Central Asia but NOT to provide national health insurance; b) spend the money needed to provide national health insurance but NOT to win the war in Central Asia; c) spend the money BOTH to win the war AND provide insurance; d) do neither, save the money, and see what other consequences ensue.

There are some obvious problems. Options (a) and (c) beg the question of whether two years or ten years and many lost lives CAN win a war in Central Asia. Options (b) and (c) offer no guarantee that Congress can "fix" health insurance. Are you kidding? While this admittedly leaves out many complexities of policy making and its limitations, it also has the advantage of cutting through much of the nonsense spouted by those who want to have it both ways, waging endless wars, saving investment bankers from themselves, underwriting entire industries, deregulating other, all while cutting taxes.

End of rant. I have a friend who is fond of saying there are two kinds of people - those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don't. That pretty much discredits everything I've said above. Or not.

Silvio e Sylvia

Sometimes the news is all the literature, theater, and plain old down-and-dirty comedy that one could ever want. When the news events in question occur in Italy, and in this case in Milan, the feeling of high drama is only intensified, as if the seat of government were transplanted onto the stage of La Scala and the curtain was raised on another scene in the grand opera of politics.

When the larger-than-life figure at the center of all the attention is the megalomaniacal head of state Silvio Berlusconi, owner of a media empire as well as the unchallenged plutocrat at the controls of Italy's government, and the reporter's voice on the radio belongs to NPR's inimitable Sylvia Poggioli, well, what can I say, it's journalistic heaven.

Take this terse summary (from an overcautious Slate):

At a rally in Milan yesterday, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was met by demonstrators who shouted insults while he gave a speech. Later, when he was signing autographs, a 42-year-old with a history of mental illness hit Berlusconi on the face with a model of the Duomo cathedral. The attack left Berlusconi bloodied with two broken teeth, a fractured nose, and cuts on his nose and cheeks. Berlusconi spent the night in the hospital with a severe headache, but doctors say he's doing well.

Spare us the timid account, Slate. Burlusconi runs the most influential news outlets in his country and arguably determines what information makes it onto front pages and TV screens from Torino to Palermo. One part Rupert Murdoch and one part Benito Mussolini, I'm guessing his people make sure the national news in Rome isn't too critical of the ruling party. And I mean party. Old Silvio has earned a reputation for romancing young women that American pro golfers might envy, except he unapologetically gets away with it.

Part of the NPR story that Slate omitted was the alleged Mafia connections that helped Signor Ministerio Primo get his start in real estate, from which entrepreneurial foundations he went on to dominate the tone and substance of the right wing in Italian politics. In the tradition of Mussolini, an arrogant kind of masculinity and swagger are expected in a leader. Il Duce liked women, weapons, and fast cars too, and he wasn't a fan of dissent.

His spiritual descendant Berlusconi has recently been accused of having ties to the Mafia, which he dismisses as a figment of the American movie-going imagination. What I loved in the news account was his denial of any connections with organized crime accompanied by a promise that if he got his hands on his accusers, he would personally strangle them. Then his nose is broken by a half-crazy man in a crowd throwing a stone model of a cathedral. You can't make this stuff up.

My people are from another European peninsular nation, also bold seafaring stock who ventured far from their ports, as did the Renaissance Italians, but this kind of thing doesn't happen in Oslo. On the other hand, I haven't heard a Norsk news correspondent with a smoking hot voice like Poggioli, who can write a factual straight-news piece for the radio and deliver it on the air like poetry, like a torch singer, like the muse of the news.

In the details

The time was Friday night, and she left her knitting at work and had to go back to the studio, it should only take ten minutes, do you want anything, okay a bottle of tonic, during which time the fire in the stove gradually grew, probably due to the green sticks I'm reduced to using for kindling, finally combusting a handful of wood chips, which consumed a miniature log cabin of thin split logs, which engulfed three or four full-sized pear branches that fill the house with a fruity aroma.

It all adds up, and then it all reduces down to almost nothing, you can see in a clean well-lighted room that it's not absolutely nada, as he nudges the air intake closed a half-inch to slow down the conflagration, a small adjustment that over the course of the next four hours affects the whole house.

The guacamole has been tightly sealed so it's still good after a few days in a ceramic bowl in the fridge, and smeared on half a slice of bagel, eaten between bites of brown rice and adzuki beans, heavy on the salsa which is heavy on the onions, and you've got a sweet, sour, salty, savory sense of the moment. The Chardonnay, the fine conundrum, make tonight a wonderful day.

It's about time

I took my time getting up, taking a shower, eating scrambled eggs and toast, and reading the paper on Saturday morning. By the time I had drunk a second cup of coffee and swept the floor, it was time for my appointment to go give blood. Oh, I also sewed on a couple of buttons in the meantime. A stitch in time, you know.

The Red Cross trailer was parked in front of Lowe's on Silver Drive just like it usually is. The little booth in back felt even more claustrophobic than usual, but the attendant was very professional and polished in the procedure. She had perfect skin. I don't think she smiled or frowned once during the entire 45 minutes. My blood pressure was 120/80. The otherwise too-loud radio played "Baba O'Reilly" too softly while they hooked me up and I squeezed and released the little rubber ball every five seconds.

I ate the entire bag of Cheez-Its while sitting in the parking lot before going to my next errand, saving the trail mix for later. Must maintain energy. The rec. center was not as close as I'd imagined when I made the appointment, thinking that Lowe's would be on the way, when in fact it was a few miles out of the way at the opposite end of Clintonville, an easy mistake to make if coming from Methodistville. The drive up High Street was not unpleasant if you like that kind of thing.

In the rec. center parking lot the midafternoon sun was slanting across the field as it does in winter, and it drew me to the three pine trees beside the softball diamond. I've always liked those three pine trees. Even facing into the wind it was a good time to do a little qigong, having just given blood, and when is it not a good time for some internal healing practice? I just hope the recipient of my pint appreciates the high-quality rum remaining in my system from a bit of Friday night celebrating.

A few drummers were already banging away when I entered the room, and a collective shout went up welcoming me back, because I hadn't been there in a few months, kind of like Norm walking into Cheers. It was great to see some familiar faces and another great source of healing to join in the rhythm-building, shape-shifting, bass and treble-making crescendo and diminuendo of the drum circle. After one particularly awesome jam, Mark remarked, "Was that specifically fun?" You had to be there.

I got home just before dark, so I put the new lights on my bike and went for a very short, very cold ride. I think my mistake was removing my gloves to fiddle around with the straps that attach the lights to the handlebars, thus starting out with cold hands, so my fleece gloves had no chance. After quickly turning back, I ran warm water over my frozen fingers, started a fire, and poured a glass of red wine to watch the Crimson Tide dominate the Gators.

The next day, right on schedule, I began to descend into my annual preholiday funk. Call it stress, call it seasonal affective disorder, call it uncertainty and change at work, or feel free to make up an interesting new name for it, whatever you call it, I am not making the transition into winter smoothly. Consequently, 'tis the season to humbug. At least that I know how to do. Some time around noon on December 24, I fully intend to become a nice person again, at least long enough to enjoy some lutefisk and lefse.

Like everyone else in this krazy krismas kulture, I have many preparations to make, and compared to most my preparations are minimal. Some of them involve ripping out a doorway, cutting through lath and plaster, and pulling nails, which can be satisfying in a cathartic sort of way. Then the hard part comes - putting the slightly enlarged doorway back together with a semblance of stability. Like any task worth doing right, it will take more time than it seems at first.

The good news is the weather was slightly warmer on Sunday, and while bread dough was rising I took the time to get out on le Trek Vert for a nice long ride down Alum Creek Trail. It was a successful test of helmet, tires, gloves, and matching le windbreaker vert, all of which handled the weather just fine. Best of all, I was not as exhausted and unfit as I feared, having neglected any aerobic training for far too long. At least one positive sign heading into the season of darkness, I won't need a pacemaker quite yet.

How many Gollys does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Seven.

One to arrive by Greyhound from New York Freaking City and regale us with tales from the cranberry bog in Buzzard's Bay; go to Lowe's and pick out the right kind of junction boxes, plugs, wire caps, and outdoor cable to reconnect the power between the house and the garage, suspend the far end from a pine branch with a ceramic insulator and a bicycle tube, and connect the near end to a new outdoor receptacle mounted on a corner post of the pergola; cut holes in the plaster wall and ceiling upstairs to remove, repair, and re-install the stairway light fixture, snake new wires between the rafters to connect the hanging lamp with two new three-way switches, and run wires down through the wall to the new switches at the top and bottom of stairs; go out with his sister and her friends to their favorite watering hole du jour; bring the grandparents up to date on his latest adventures in trade school and prospects for gainful employment. 

One to hand him tools, flip circuit breakers while he tests all the outlets and fixtures in the house, and label what outlet is on which circuit; climb the white pine to hang the cable, fetch a stepladder, caulk the boxes; tear out an upstairs closet wall to get to the switch box; start a cozy fire in the den; pour the libations appropriate to the season (rum, coffee, pale ale, white wine); bring the patriarch up to date on his latest adventures in the reorganized church of latter-day educational publishing and prospects for continued gainful employment. 

One to consult on the proper placement of screws, staples, and wire; compliment the hostess, inquire about the garlands of cayenne peppers hanging over all seven windows in the den, drying for future use in bean soup as well as adorning the holiday festivities, and settle into a comfortable chair to work on the crossword puzzle, and finish his biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes; carve the turkey, say grace, compliment the cook; tell stories about life on the farm in Minnesota, his five brothers and sisters, his parents and grandparents, and being stationed out west during World War II; take everyone out for breakfast the morning of their return home. 

One to bring a blueberry pie and consult on the roasting of the turkey, stuffing, etc.; inquire about the yoga studio, the bookstore, the cranberry farm, and the textbook business; knit a few rows, read a few pages of her biography of Mark Twain, express her condolences on the loss of our cat and dog, inquire whether we going to get another pet any time soon; compliment her grandchildren on their most recent accomplishments, insist on helping clean up after every meal, and utter not a single complaint about her own faltering hearing, eyesight, or mobility. 

One to drive from Atlanta, GA, to Cumberland County, TN, to central Swingstate (and back again) and accompany her parents to the home of her brother and sister-in-law (and in spirit); generously augment the supply of seasonal libations with top-shelf stuff; find time for one-to-one conversation with each person in attendance, bring her brother up to date on administrative downsizing at her university, a death and a birth in her own immediate family; enliven dinner-table conversation with an account of her recent work-related trip to Spain; wash dishes after every meal, and be all-around good company.

One to pop in after a long, exhausting day at work to have a piece of pie with her extended family, after working all morning making not one but two outrageously delicious apple-cranberry pies before work; reprise her acclaimed role in the last ten Thanksgiving feasts by making awesome garlic mashed potatoes; spend quality time with her aunt, grandmother, grandfather, doting mother, adoring father, and spirit her brother away to hang with people their own age when it gets late and the old folks are tired. 

One to clean the house and cook for her own family plus her husband's parents and sister: turkey, sausage stuffing, gravy, sweet potatoes au gratin, brussels sprouts with caramelized onions, fresh organic cranberries shipped directly from Mann's family farm in Massachusetts, rolls, spinach salad, white wine, and arguably the best pumpkin pie on the planet - with your choice or real or nondairy whipped topping - working around unplanned interruptions due to thrown circuit breakers for the benefit of Jessi Electric and his intrepid team of electricians. 

We're not high-culture, just high-calorie, high-voltage, and high-maintenance. 

Dear friends/colleagues/countrymen

unentitled autumnal screed

Watch out for the Mad Men.

They say Milarepa, the Tibetan poet, was a wild and crazy guy in his day (eleventh and twelfth centuries). They say he killed some people, then went through a deep remorse for his actions and worked even harder than others to get outside his self-inflicted predicament to find peace of mind. They say he had an ear for music and he made up songs to help him remember the things he was taught. He was one of the Mad Men of his day.

So, short of poisoning 30 people at a party and redeeming yourself by meditating for the rest of your life, what is 'madness' anyway?

This week I had the pleasure of becoming better acquainted with the songs of Bertholt Brecht, who was perhaps a little bit mad himself, but in the modern sense sometimes romanticized as the archetypal politically Angry Young Man. Germany between the wars was not a pretty sight, I'm told, and people with their eyes open, like Brecht, had a bone to pick with the emerging political economy, so they wrote songs with titles like "There's Nothing Quite Like Money," "German Miserere," and "Ballad of Why Human Effort Is Always Futile." Happy stuff.

Maybe madness is nothing but excess. Excessive anger or giddiness, talkativeness or silence, eating and drinking or abstinence, work or rest, acceptance or criticism, lethargy or activity, deliberation or decisiveness, mobility or stillness, discipline or laziness, patience or impulsiveness, questioning or answering, complication or simplicity, attraction or repulsion, contact or separation. Excessive use of commas. Excessive cheese consumption. Excessive list making.

Like an imbalance of the humors, it's being a little off-center to the point where other people think you have a problem.

Madness itself is a rather old-fashioned term. The psychological profession has come a long way, and the vocabulary for labeling the continuum from 'sanity' (mental cleanliness) to 'insanity' has grown with it. Thanks for Dr. Freud and others, we have an abundant and varied menu of conditions such as neurosis, psychosis, paranoia, schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and many more to choose from. May you live in interesting times.

What do you call the sudden awareness of your own condition, when it hits you that you have no escape hatch, no way out of a predicament of your own making, and all of your best-laid plans for turning things around have no chance of realization? When you see once and for all that your adversaries are correct, and you are, after all, completely inadequate for the task you are attempting. There must be a word for finally facing the fact that one is guilty of all the shortcomings others have found in you. In short, you are doomed.

I call it optimism. In spite of being unfit for everything now on the horizon, the closing of one path could be the perfect opportunity to re-invent oneself in a different environment, under a new regime, with a brand-new title, an altered persona, and a different attitude. At least outwardly. A chance to make connections with a new set of people, to hear what is on their minds, and to reconnect with other people whose situations have also changed.

Sometimes people do re-invent themselves, like Don Draper did when he came back from Korea wearing another (dead) man's dog tags and made a decisive break with his unenviable past. Others just lower their standards when they find out that they've been trying to land a fish rated 10 when they only have the bait and tackle to catch a 7 fish. Maybe 'lower their standards' is too harsh; maybe 'refocus' is more accurate.

If I always wanted to be editor of the New York Times AND teach journalism at Columbia, while raising goats on the roof of my coop in Central Park West, maybe it's appropriate to use my current midlife crisis (my third) to adjust my game plan and aim a little, uh, differently. When I grow up, I wanna be a production coordinator and teach a class at the rec center, and grow cayenne peppers in the backyard in Methodistville!

Dicycling

I'm thinking of getting some accessories for my bike. A light for visibility, a helmet for safety, and maybe some fuzzy dice for that statement to the world that establishes a unique identity, a distinctive persona, a brand if you will. Then all the world will see what a ramblin' gamblin' man I am.

Yeah, no. I do need a light on occasion, and I'm pushing my luck if I go much longer without wearing a helmet, even though most of my riding is done on bike trails and less-traveled roads. But there are always factors that one doesn't control - along with a few that one does control - that bring an element of risk and unpredictability to the otherwise safe, serene, and self-reliant activity of cycling. Riding is a game of chance.

It's a roll of the dice, for example, whether the wind out in the country turns out like it seemed when I started out in town. I always check wind speed and direction before I decide whether to go north, south, east, or west. In spite of MacKenzie's First Law (go out with a headwind, come back with a tailwind), there have been times when I rode for an hour, turned around, and inexplicably found myself coming home riding, like the venerable Motor City rocker Bob Seger, against the wind.

At other times my level of conditioning betrayed me, and the ride back from halfway across Licking County was a long, slow grind. In those cases, I have no excuse. You have to train if you want to go farther. Where there are hills involved, the oxygen debt of biting off more than my cardiovascular system can chew makes mountains out of central Swingstate molehills, and the muscles won't do what the mind tells them to do. Then I struggle up even the mildest hills in first gear and use the next downhill to recover. That's pushing your luck.

In moderation, of course, pushing one's limits can have beneficial effects. If I did that three or four times a week, I would get stronger and chug up those same hills in sixth gear. But I don't train consistently, so when I hit the wall it can get dicey coming back. And that's the slippery slope a casual cyclist rides on, letting days go by between rides, losing the aerobic edge, and making every extended ride a gamble.

Gatsby in Ohio

There is a beautiful spot in the middle of a cluster of office buildings across the road called Easton Oval. My building is on Easton Commons. I was looking for a place to take a walk and decompress and discovered a little park in the center of the elliptical street that connects the buildings bearing the logos of Huntington Bank, State Auto, Elmer's Glue, and other regionally based companies that have bought or rented space in the complex within a complex just inside the interstate perimeter highway around our fair city.

The captains of industry who made the decision to locate at Easton Oval were wise to move their money-making operations to such a verdant place. It's a humane way to arrange multi-story office building full of workers sitting in cubicles looking at monitors, because they can go outside on their lunch hour and take a walk along the gravel paths meandering through the oak, beech, and hickory trees. This time of year leaves cover the ground, and you can barely make out the path, and lots of sunlight filters through the branches. I'm looking forward to seeing how it changes in the next few months.

As nice as the weather is this week, I'm surprised there aren't more people out enjoying it. In the half hour I was there, I saw half a dozen pairs of walkers and one maintenance guy checking the sprinkler system. One end of the oval is designed more geometrically, like a downtown park, with benches arranged around a circular walkway. The rest is just a patch of woods that has been there for a while, preserved by smart architects. The breeze would be chilly if you stopped moving and sat in the shade, but the sun is out and it's perfect weather for walking.

I'm just glad to have a place to go in the middle of the workday and breathe. All those mature hardwoods are more than willing to absorb the carbon dioxide coming in from cars on I-270 and connecting streets. I'm happy to join them for twenty minutes hanging out between earth and sky. The egg-like name and shape of this oasis in the midst of commercial sprawl just adds to my appreciation. I'll have to re-read Scott Fitzgerald to get a better sense of what it was about East Egg and West Egg that drove Jay Gatsby crazy. Then I'll try not to do that.