Northbound

One mile yesterday, one mile today.

What I like about my walk is that it is up-and-down, a little. I am walking in the Mill Hill neighborhood of Trenton, where the first and second Battles of Trenton were fought. I start at the top of the hill, walk down, take three laps around Assumpink Creek, and then head back up the hill. I think this is maybe a little better than walking on flat ground, but what do I know.

I went walking yesterday, and noticed that one of the buildings down the block has a false front. It’s a state building, a satellite office of the Department of the Treasury. The first two floors are there but the third floor is phony – it’s just a stone façade with some weird peaks on it, and a weathervane. I don’t know what this all means other than you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

I hate exercise.

I did another mile today. I think that I was on Whine Factor Five yesterday; today was more like Whine Factor Two. It took me a minute longer (31.9 minutes) than yesterday, but it was windier yesterday, which means I don’t know what.

I woke up this morning with this statement rolling around in my head:

“If you choose an outcome, you must choose all the steps that lead up to that outcome.”

So I went for a walk this afternoon – one mile, which is three circuits around the park that straddles Assunpink Creek in beautiful downtown Trenton. It took me thirty-one minutes.

I emphatically do not want to start walking again, but you can’t have the outcome just by itself, for nothing. You have to choose the steps that lead to the outcome.

Over the next 13 weeks (August 2 – November 1) I have decided to:

1. Stop writing this blog. (Big shock, I know.) Basically, all non-commercial writing (except for two book reviews I have committed to do) is off limits.
2. Get off (and stay off) of Facebook. (This one may be a little difficult – Facebook is that addictive – but I am going to try.)
3. Stop lying to myself about my weight. By this I primarily mean no “cheating” with regard to the scale I use, but it’s more than that, it’s about taking the health consequences of my actions seriously.
4. Commit myself to recording my food intake on Weight Watchers – even if I cheat, which I probably will, just because that’s how I roll and you can’t beat yourself up over that.
5. Having said that, no pastries, no matter how delicious, or other obvious big-dessert thingies.
6. No fast-food unless completely unavoidable, in which case, good choices are mandated (out with the Baconators, in with the sugar-free ices from Rita’s).
7. The above includes Five Guys. (I will not get emotional about not being able to go to Five Guys. I won’t. You won’t see me cry. Ever. I… *sniff*…. let’s just change the subject.)
8. This means, of course, bringing my lunch to work every day (including diet green tea).
9. And making the meals that I cook as healthy as I can manage.
10. And taking my fish-oil supplement every day, even when I’d rather not.
11. Write on the new novel every day, unless unavoidable due to whatever. Ideally this is 250 words a day, say, with a rough goal of one chapter a week. That’s a little over 22k words, which is more than what I have now, so that’s good.
12. Use downtime (commuting, mostly) to thinking about plotting and characters on the novel. This means that I can’t use that time for frivolous purposes, like rehearsing what I will say to Terry Gross when she interviews me about the book. (Don’t tell me you don’t do this.) I don’t have the luxury of unlimited time to sit at a keyboard and plan out plot points; I need to reprogram my brain to think about what I need to write about when I finally get ten minutes to write.
13. I have a book I need to read – something about how to change when change is hard, and that seems to be appropriate reading for this sort of thing.

And these changes are hard. Re-looking at them, they’re all about denying myself without anything much in the way of reward. I would rather not take the fish oil. I would rather read a Michael Chabon book I’ve read sixteen times before I go to bed rather than write something new for myself. I would rather read people’s Facebook stuff, even when it’s drivel, than do something productive and useful (or write drivel of my own, here, for the Eight People Who Read This Blog).

I am hopeful that I will emerge from this process thinner, wiser, more self-aware, and generally feeling better about myself. Either that, or I will try to drown myself in queso. I don’t know. I can’t say. But these are good decisions, positive decisions, and even if I do just a little bit of this agenda I will feel better than if I did nothing.

Except for the Five Guys.

Man, is this going to be tough.

If this is the only place I see you, I will see you in November.

One of the things I despise is the lazy journalistic shorthand that ascribes the foolish and self-destructive things that people do to unnamed, unidentified “demons.”  Case in point:

20. Michael Jackson Dies: Mysteries surrounding Jackson’s pedophilia charges disappear as the issue of doctors overprescribing demanding, drug-addicted celebs takes the spotlight. That’s a bad thing and ultimately a very good thing. But the worst part about Jackson’s death is that he was the world’s greatest living musical genius who gave in to his demons.

Michael Jackson didn’t have “demons.”  Nobody has demons.  Demons don’t exist.  (Cf. Mark 5.)  There’s no such thing as demons. Attributing negative personal behavior to demons is about as helpful as attributing it to the balance of our bodliy fluids, the malign influence of the planets, or George W. Bush. Demons didn’t make Michael Jackson give wine to underage children (for the probable purpose of seduction). Demons didn’t drive Michael Jackson to get plastic surgery to the point where his nose fell off. Demons didn’t make Michael Jackson a drug addict. Demons didn’t make his last few albums suck. Saying that Michael Jackson has “demons” is just a lazy way to say that he was unable to control his impulses – but it’s worse than that, because it negates the concept of responsibility. Anyone who says that his demons made him do something is saying that he doesn’t want to admit responsibility for his vile ways.

Just a quick Google search today:

• Milton Bradley opens up about his inner demons.  BS.  Milton Bradley has demons like I have a million-dollar contract to play baseball.  Demons didn’t make Milton Bradley not be able to hit anymore.
• Donny Osmond:  Marie dealing with her own demons after son’s death.  Marie Osmond’s son committed suicide.  That’s sad, and we should have sympathy for her.  But the suicide of a loved one isn’t a demon, or anything close to a demon.
• Downey beat personal demons.  Yeah.  Robert Downey Jr. took all that blow in the Eighties… and Nineties… and Two-Thousands because of demons.  Please.
• With Wall, Wizards can start fresh, avoid draft demons.  The Washington Wizards made horrible draft picks.  Demons weren’t responsible for those.   Michael Jordan was (well, for Kwame Brown).
• Tragedy revives decades-old demons.  Okay, this is a sad story, but the dead people who died in the plane crash are dead; they’re not haunting anyone.
• Those Internal Demons, Hard To Shake.  Actually, I have no idea about what this is supposed to be about, but demons don’t make anyone do interpretive modern dance, or write about it.  Or I hope not.
• Hand washing dispels the decision demons.  No it doesn’t. 
• Will Jonathan ever be able to beat his demons?  No.  But he might try not drinking for awhile, see how that works out.
• Ecuador’s oil demons.  Be careful when you pump that next gallon of gas; it might be… haunted!
• “Edge of Darkness” illuminates Mel Gibson’s inner demons.  So that’s why it didn’t do so well at the box office – it illuminated the demons.  You shouldn’t do that.
• Twins need to beat demons of the East.  Or, you know, the Yankees.

Bottom line:  “Demons” is a cliche, and a bad one.  Stop using it.

1.  Osama bin Laden.  That OBL still breathes oxygen and eats hummus is a stain upon our banners.  Not killing bin Laden was the single greatest disappointment of the Bush Administration, in an Administration that had lots of big disappointments (for conservatives, yes).  And for all Obama’s big talk during the campaign – “John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of hell — but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives” – he’s done bupkis, too.  Carthaga delenda est, the old Romans used to say, and I feel that way about OBL.

2.  Khalid Sheik Mohammed.  He’s in custody, but again, every day he lives is a stain upon our banners.  There has to be some way to navigate through the dense and impenetrable legal thicket that keeps KSM and his cohorts with their date with the hangman, and hopefully that will happen sometime before his “compassionate release” due to health care reasons.  Pfui.

3.  Ground Zero.  If you’da told me, on the first anniversary of 9/11, that the Freedom Tower (or whatever they are calling it) would not be completed unti 2013 (if that!), I would have called you a liar and plotted ways to smuggle a skunk into your car.  But that’s what’s going to happen.  This is what the site looked like as of yesterday (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Freedo_twer_update.jpg).  Pathetic.  This is what the memorial site looks like as of July (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wtc_construction_update.jpg).  Double pathetic.  We can do better.  Can’t we?

4.  Airport Security.  I hate airport securiy as much as the next guy.  I’ve been detained three times for absolutely no good reason (once because I was late for a plane (through no fault of my own), and twice because I took one-way flights into and out of Reagan National).  It sucks.  The shoe thing sucks.  The petty superiority of everybody who I have ever come in contact with at TSA sucks.  But they are 0-for-the-last-eight-years, and you got to give a little somethin’ to a record like that.  (And you Mexican airport security people, wake up over there.)

5.  Obama.  No terrorist attacks under his watch so far, at least one big-time terrorist squashed by an airstrike in Pakistan, Gitmo is still open, and he’s making all the right noises about increasing our footprint in Afghanistan.  A lot better record than I expected.

6.  Technology.  One of the things people forget about 9/11 is that’s the day when CNN instituted the non-stop news ticker at the bottom of the screen.  (I remember this because I was watching the news coverage with my boss, who is blind – we kept talking about stories on the ticker that didn’t have any relevance to what the talking heads were saying, and it ticked her off.)  Imagine if 9/11 happened today, what with all the social networking stuff out there – people Twittering the attacks, people having to tell all their Facebook friends that they were OK.  In a country where people go slighly off their bearings if Gmail is down for an hour, imagine if all the big news sites were down today as much as they were during 9/11?  Makes you think.

7.  God.  I went to a memorial service in a park in Austin right after 9/11 sponsored by some church or other – after not really setting foot in a church for over a year – and the idjit leading the service called 9/11 a judgment on America for all our sins.  I left and haven’t been back except for maybe the holidays, and not all of them.  Not that I don’t believe in God, not that I don’t love Jesus – I do, sometimes in spite of myself – but I’m just not going to participate in communal worship if it means I get blamed for horrible terrorist acts because I’m not nice enough to some people or because I don’t give enough money to the poor or whatever other sins I happen to commit. 

 8.  Sa-lute.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ground_Zero_Spirit.jpg)

(And just completely in the spirit of shameless self-promotion, here’s what I wrote eight years ago today.  It ain’t enough, but it’s something.)

I think back, occasionally, of when I was single and living alone in Atlanta, and could do anything I want on the weekends, so long as I had clean underwear to wear to work on Monday.  I am not necessarily indulging in nostalgia when I do this – I can’t, and shouldn’t, because I was lonely and unhappy and broke for a good part of this time.  But on any given fall weekend, you could find me doing any of a variety of pleasant things:

• Sleeping late
• Checking e-mail
• Working on novel
• Long, hot bath
• Schlepping to Publix to pick up breakfast-type substance (chocolate milk, donuts, maybe Crunchberries, stuff like that).
• Walking in Piedmont Park
• Playing video games
• Getting Mexican food at Nuevo Laredo Cantina, with the UGa game on in the background
• Doing a little shopping at the junky little design stores over north of Georgia Tech
• Catching a movie at the little theater in Midtown
• Writing a movie review of whatever movie it was that I saw
• Grabbing an F.O. at the Varsity or maybe a Krispy Kreme over on Ponce or a butterscotch shake at Zesto’s

There’s a lot you can say about living your life this way – wasteful, high-calorie, lazier than Adam’s off ox – but what it was, you see, was self-directed.  I decided what to do.  Nobody else told me what to do, ever, period.  I got to choose what to do – and maybe just as importantly, I got to choose what order I could do them in.  If I wanted to get up early and grab donuts and then haze out in front of the TV to the Falcons game all the rest of the day, I could do it – with whatever snack and donut breaks that I wanted.  If I wanted to sleep late and write and not stir out of my apartment until three in the afternoon, I could do that, too.  I decided what to do and when to do it.

I mention this because it occurs to me that a lot of the trouble that I have in relating to my daughters is that they have absolutely zero freedom at all to do anything.  Being a four-month-old baby is like watching a giant TV but having someone else change the channels for you randomly – somebody with a good idea of what you like, but no clue of what you want to see right now.  Storytime with Daddy?  That’s a good show, very popular, but not everybody wants to see it when it’s on.  Let’s Ride in the Minivan?  Usually a hit, but sometimes it’s too short, and sometimes it drags on.  What about Does The Baby Have A Fever?  Oh, not so popular. 

The only mechanism that the baby has to change the channel (so to speak) is crying; even the threat of crying is enough to cause the program directors (that’s Mommy and Daddy) to produce a new show.  Is Tummy Time not testing well?  Okay then.  Time to switch to Monkey!  Monkey!  Monkey!  That’s usually a big hit… no?  How about the interactive version, where the baby gets to hold the monkey (it’s a rattle, shaped like a monkey)?  No?  Okay, how about Riding on Daddy’s Shoulder.  That’s a great show – that’s like The Sopranos when you’re four months old.  If that doesn’t work – sometimes it doesn’t at first… then what?

Here’s the thing.  I want to do good here.  I want to be a good program manager.  But I have no – zero – idea what to do at any given moment.  I can try the monkey-rattle.  I can try the swing.  I can try the diaper change.  I can try the bottle.  But I don’t know what’s going to be popular at any one given moment in time.  And that problem doubles when you’re trying to figure out two babies at once – one may want to spend some quiet time watching Let’s Look at the Ceiling Fan while the other one is interested in Pick Me Up Or Else.  It’s difficult.  Throw in short attention spans – you can’t really count on Monkey!  Monkey!  Monkey!  to distract them for very long anymore – and it’s impossible.  (Not to mention that they are starting to create new shows of their own – last night saw the premiere of I’m Keeping This Pacifier In My Mouth For Three Seconds and That’s It.)

And that means they’re going to cry.  A lot.  And it’s going to be really, really loud.

• Newborns are selfish, but not in the way most people are selfish.  Newborns don’t know from money or property or even greed.  “Selfish” means that they think about themselves exclusively and could care less that you need to cut the grass or pay bills or pee if there’s some better way they think you could spend your time.  “Inconsiderate” is a better word, if you multiply it by ten thousand.
• Newborns do not get the concepts of “please” or “thank you.”  Ingratitude is their modus operandi.  You could spend the entire morning holding and feeding a newborn, and ten minutes later, they can holler as loudly as though you’d been neglecting them shamefully.
• Newborns do not know from “just wait one minute, please.”  Whoever wrote that Obama line about the fierce urgency of now has spent time with a newborn.
• Newborns are honest.  They will tell you what’s on their minds, and won’t waste time with “constructive criticism” or white lies or any other social lubricant.
• Newborns are famous for their inability to tell time or adhere to the normal circadian rhythms of light and dark.  But if you put a newborn in its crib for the night, said newborn will wait until one second after your head hits the pillow before crying, without fail.
• The dad in Marley and Me has a long speech at the end where he says “A dog doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull.”  A newborn doesn’t care about any of this, either.  The difference is that your dog will suck up to you show you affection.  A newborn won’t, but at least a newborn won’t track dirt through the house or shed all over the couch.
• Newborns don’t care about politics, sports, or literature.  They have no cultural awareness other than deep-seated fashion prejudices (zippers are better than snaps, socks are not worth the time).  Your best, most timely Simpsons quote won’t work on a newborn, period.
• Newborns can get along with anybody; they don’t care who is holding them or who is feeding them as long as the job gets done.
• Newborns will pee on you without thinking too much about it.  Other people, like your boss, take years to develop this skill.

Welcome Kathryn Bernice Edmonds, 8 pounds even, born 12:57 pm on 3/12/2009, and Stephanie Lynn Edmonds, 7 pounds 6 ounces, born 12:58 pm on 3/12/2009.  Mother and babies are fine.

kathryn tipping the scales

stephanie getting weighed

the proud papa

kathryn and stephanie, all bundled up