A Movie Called Blood

The news you didn't know you'd been waiting to hear: in 2012, a movie will be released called "Blood," and I'm the Executive Producer. You can find all kinds of information all over the place: the website is here, and there are also pages and channels for Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, among others.

Obviously I'll be talking about this a lot from now on, after months of strict silence. So let's start with how and why.

The how, of course, is that writer/director Marc Rosenbush may claim it's his project, but really it's all because of me. (Me! Me! Me!) Because I've read comics off and on since I was a kid, in fact I learned to read with comic books. And after giving them up for a while during high school, shortly after college a friend showed me a copy of "Watchmen" and said "Things have changed."

Boy had they ever. Soon there was Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison and a whole crowd of really gifted writers doing things with comics that no one had ever even really thought about before. And in short order, I discovered my own personal favorite graphic novel of all time: "Moonshadow," by J.M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth.

It's basically "Candide" in outer space, but it's also filled with poetry and whimsy and, despite the fact that none of the events in it are remotely like anything in my life, it still felt, while I read it, as if it was my own biography somehow. An emotional biography, perhaps. So I started reading DeMatteis's other work, and he turned out to be an interesting guy: a musician at one time who moves easily between straight-up comics work on Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and so forth (his Spidey storyline "Kraven's Last Hunt" may be his standout), and very adult, very deep, very emotional works like "Moonshadow," "Mercy," "Seekers Into the Mystery" and "Blood: A Tale," done with the fabulous painter Kent Williams.

And at some point, as one does with works one loves, I said to my friend Marc, "You've absolutely got to read "Moonshadow." So he did, and he loved it, and then he started looking for more stuff by that DeMatteis guy. Before too long, he got to "Blood."

And here's where he did what I didn't: he read it and he said "Jesus, this would make a fantastic movie."

So here we are. With a script written, and the deals being put together, and the website and the Twitter feed and all the rest of it, with a team being rapidly assembled and contracts signed and a lot of people getting very excited indeed.

Yep. All because of me. (And maybe a little bit because of the brilliance of J.M. DeMatteis.)

More to come, fer shure.

The Impossible Question

About twenty years ago, Fred Friendly, now made famous by George Clooney in Good Night, and Good Luck, created a wonderful PBS program called The Constitution: That Delicate Balance. What he did was to put together a preeminent group of people: Supreme Court Justices, Senators and Congressmen, the then-president of Planned Parenthood, theologians and philosophers, etc., and to pose to them an escalating series of hypotheticals. The moderator (often it was Harvard’s Arthur Miller, no relation to the playwright) would ask a “What if?” question and ask people to respond to it, from legal, moral and ethical points of view. He would then turn up the heat. He would make the question worse. Make the hypothetical harder to bear. Pretty soon he and the panel would reach that eternally-difficult place where human logic runs smack into human emotion, and logic doesn’t always win; that place where we know what we should think, but the situation posed strikes us in such a central place that the deep, primal, damn-it-this-hurts part of us rises up and will not be denied.

In that spirit, then...

A few weeks ago I posed a hypothetical of my own. If Mark David Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon, were to be paroled from prison and he ended up sitting in front of you asking for a job, would you give him one? I asked it as a lifelong rabid fan of John Lennon, whose influence on my own life has been gigantic. (Put it this way: when I am on my deathbed, my brother has standing instructions to play The Beatles.) A lively discussion ensued on Facebook, and of course what I was going after was the notion of redemption. Do we believe, do we actually believe, in the possibility of rehabilitation. And just to be clear, the question is not whether Chapman, as a specific person, can be made again into a productive, non-murderous non-whacko member of society; the question is whether those of us who love and loved John Lennon can ever find it in ourselves to believe that that man has actually reformed.

But now, let’s do the difficult thing. Let’s turn up the heat.

Mark David Chapman is your cousin. You grew up with him, you played together when you were kids, and damn it all, you loved him. You knew he had withdrawn, you knew he was obsessed with Catcher in the Rye, but you still never imagined for a second that he could actually hurt anyone, let alone kill anyone, let alone John Lennon. But he did, and he’s been in prison all these years, and you’ve had to endure the stigma of being Mark David Chapman’s cousin, and now he’s out and he hopes that you can forgive him. He seems completely fine, he even seems kinda like the cousin you once knew and loved. But can you ever trust your own impressions of him ever again? Can you believe, right down to your core, that he has truly reformed?

The heat. Turning it up.

It’s not Mark David Chapman, but it’s still your cousin, and you grew up together and you loved him. But now the person he hurt wasn’t some public figure who you loved in the way we love certain public figures; now he has hurt your sister. Someone you love has done something awful, truly awful, to someone you love.

Hate the sin but love the sinner. That’s what we’re taught, and it’s right, we know it’s right. We know that it’s right. But someone you love has done something truly awful to someone you love. How can you possibly resolve this in your own soul without your mind cracking open? This question has shattered marriages and torn families apart.

Let me emphasize, right here: I have a sister, and I love her beyond description. Nothing like this has ever happened to her, and I pray that nothing like it ever, ever will, and the mere thought of something happening to her makes my mind skitter away in horror. I do not, for a moment, intend of any of what follows to diminish the hideous pain and anguish of the hypothetical awful thing described.

Because the situation can still get worse. There’s one more layer.

The something awful that was done to someone you loved, it was a sexual offense of some kind. The kind of thing that gets people listed as sexual offenders--for forever. Twenty years have passed since the horrible thing that happened, and your sister was deeply scarred by it and no one has talked to your cousin’s mother for years now. But you have somehow done the heroic, the truly heroic, thing: you’ve found a way to forgive your cousin, in your own heart. You’ve actually achieved that. Your sister doesn’t understand it, but you’ve done it.

And now your cousin has been released from prison. By every indication, prison has done the thing we supposedly create prisons for: your cousin has been chastened, he’s found religion, he is gentle and peaceful and there’s a sense of calm about him that you would have never thought possible.

But he’s on that list. And you’ve found a way to forgive him, but society hasn’t. Society has found a way to continue to punish, even after the punishment is supposed to have ended. It’s easy for them: they don’t know your cousin, they didn’t grow up with him, he’s just another guy on a list and they don’t have to consider whether or not he might be reformed. As a friend of mine put it on Facebook (I’m paraphrasing), why should we use real people as a laboratory to find out whether this guy has actually reformed? Why run the risk to innocents when we can’t ever be truly certain that someone on a list of sexual offenders is actually rehabilitated?

But you know. You know him better than anyone, and you’ve forgiven him, and you can see what he’s become now. You know he’s okay. Still: the list, and his name, and the websites that list sexual offenders in any given neighborhood. Your cousin can’t find an apartment, he can’t get a job.

He comes to you. He begs you. Put in a good word for him, or he’s gonna be out on the street. He will die, out there on the street. You’ve already done the impossible heroic thing, you’ve forgiven the unforgivable, but now he’s begging for that one thing more. Stand up in public, even in front of your sister who cannot understand any of this, and say to the world that you believe this person is okay. That we should stop punishing him. That a person, even a person who has done that truly awful thing, can in fact change. Even though some people don’t change; even though rapists are sometimes released from prison and go back to raping; even though, even though, even though. In this case, this one specific case about this one specific human being, you know reform has actually happened, but the world doesn’t and the world has a million reasons not to believe you.

Will you stand up? Can you?

And here’s where any hypothetical breaks down, because there is no general answer that can ever satisfy the question. It’s personal, and it can only be answered by you, and the answer is almost certainly one thing when it’s a hypothetical but if it actually happened that way you would get swamped by emotion and your real answer in the moment will almost certainly be fuck no.

In one direction, horrible consequences to your cousin. In the other direction, a scar on your sister’s soul is ripped open and she can’t face you anymore. You know what you know, but there are no good consequences in any conceivable direction. So. Will you?

In Which I Am Kindled

It was a most-welcome late birthday present: the new Kindle 3. I’ve written about e-book readers several times, beginning with the very first Kindle and a lamentation over its astonishing ugliness. But Amazon has fixed the ugliness problem, and made a host of other improvements--most notably dropping its price down to a level that people can actually sorta kinda afford. The device arrived on Wednesday so I am now an expert, because fiddling with new gadgets is way more fun than it ought to be.

The whole premise of eInk, and the extra crispness of this new screen, definitely live up to expectations. I’ve had Kindle’s app on my iPhone for months, but I never did much reading on it because of the tiny screen size and the massive, overpowering glare if I tried to read outside. (Which I often do.) In no time at all, I already find myself treating the Kindle almost (almost) exactly like a book. I read indoors, I read outdoors, and if it’s dark I need some light. (No, I did not buy that nifty-looking but expensive cover with the light built in.) The turning of pages is almost automatic, and I find that the length of the screen flash between pages is no worse than the length of time it would take to turn an actual page—often faster, since you never have that problem where several pages get bunched together and you can’t get quite the first one separated, so you spend what feels like twenty minutes trying to flick it loose.

The magnificent difference, of course, is that in a gizmo smaller and thinner than most hardcovers (and weighing about the same, in a cover) I am currently carrying seven books. Which barely scratches the surface of how many books I can actually carry.

Considering that I’m usually in the middle of five or six books at once? This is impossibly cool.

And most of those books were free—material written before 1923 is in the public domain, and there are often multiple sources for copies that can be downloaded at no cost. I’m a little wary of downloading anything that originated in another language, since there’s no telling the quality of the translation, and that leaves out Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Voltaire and hundreds of others; but the whole of English literature pre-1923 is available. Dickens, Forster, Austen, the Brontes, Henry James, the list goes on and on. I even picked up the first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Right now I’m reading Silas Marner, and enjoying it a lot. The only book I’ve purchased so far? A complete Shakespeare for $2.65. It looks so good, I can easily imagine a bunch of actors at a Shakespeare festival, standing around in rehearsal, reading from their Kindles.

I particularly like the ability to highlight a chunk of text that I like, and the Kindle will keep it both marked in the book, and stored in a separate area where I can look only at things I’ve marked in various books. If I had Proust on the Kindle, for instance, there’s a quote I’ve been trying to find in it for years without success--but if I could search for it, and then mark it, that would be fantastic. All without “defacing” the book by scribbling in it.

There are things that I miss. The specific thumping sound that a book makes when you tap on it, a sound that nothing else quite makes. (Books make decent drums, actually.) The feel of the paper that changes subtly from one book to another. The pleasant conundrum of what to do with the bookmark while you’re reading. People talk a lot about the smell of a book and I’m sure that’s true, but my sniffer isn’t very powerful so that one doesn’t really work for me. The feel, though--plastic ain’t paper, and that’s definitely a loss. But compared to the ability to easily lug around an ever-growing library in one slim device? I’ll happily accept the loss.

When Mark David Chapman Gets Paroled…

... would you hire him? If he’s been set free after all these years, and comes to you looking for a job, and is qualified in every way except that he’s Mark David Chapman and he not only killed a man, he killed John Lennon. Would you give Chapman a job?

It might depend on how old you are--if John’s murder is as distant to you as JFK’s is to me, then you might be (slightly) more inclined to hire MDC. Except of course that there’s still that bothersome history of mental illness, and the fact of a murder in his past. Not to mention how your customers might feel--if you’ve got a bunch of Beatles fans and they find out that man is working for you, might they decide to boycott your business? They might. They definitely might.

Or maybe it might depend on how much you love John Lennon. If you don’t at all, you might not even recognize MDC’s name. But even a cursory background check will reveal the truth, and you’ll then have all the peripheral objections I just mentioned.

(One odd and ironic fact: John Lennon wrote “Attica State” in solidarity with the inmates after the ’71 riot. Attica State is where his killer ended up being incarcerated.)

So I suppose you have to ask yourself, Do I believe people can be rehabilitated? Or, do I rather believe that some people are what they are and can never be changed and therefore should never be let out of prison? In which case, you might as well execute them because there’s no place for them in society therefore society is better off without them. With someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, that argument carries some weight.

But is Mark David Chapman in that same camp? Is he another Dahmer or Bundy or Manson? If we believe at all in the possibility of rehabilitation, mustn’t we extend that hope even to someone like Chapman?

But John’s death is not distant to me. I have been a rabid fan for decades, and I can’t stop wondering what John might have had to say about September 11th, and the war in Iraq, and the current wave of Islamophobia, and all the rest of it. I wish I could hear the songs he hadn’t written yet. Mark David Chapman, with his absurd Holden Caulfield fixation, took all of that away from all of us, and is it the sort of thing I can ever forgive?

(Here’s a recent piece in Time where Yoko Ono talks briefly about the difficulty of forgiving the man who murdered her husband.)

But there’s the beauty of a hypothetical (for me at least--for Yoko, it can never be hypothetical). Chapman was denied parole for the sixth time the other day, and it’ll be at least two years before he’s eligible again. I don’t have to answer this question in real life, and honestly, I have no idea how I would answer if it did come up. Would my deep-rooted sorrow over the loss of John Lennon outweigh an impulse I believe John would have supported, to believe that someone like that can be brought round again, to believe in second chances and the possibility that we can become better than we currently are? Or would I find myself fighting waves of nausea at the idea that that man was sitting in front of me?

What about you? If he came to you looking for a job, what do you think you might do? Hit me in the comments.

The Daily Beatle

What are friends for? Some days, they're about showing you stuff you hadn't seen before. Therefore, courtesy of my friend Rachel Coburn's recent Facebook post, I bring you catnip for a Beatles fan, Barry Lenser's encyclopedic, and massively entertaining, The Daily Beatle.

Enjoy.

You, Me and the Mythos

Here’s one advantage of keeping two blogs: linked entries. I’ll talk about the documentary I just watched here, but I’ll discuss one of the ideas it raises over on the Damn Lies blog. Collect the full set!

Over at Internet Marketing for Filmmakers, our current clients include Steven and Whitney Boe, two charming and clever folks who have created a film called Mythic Journeys. And though we’ve worked on some fine films, this one happens to come closest to my own sensibilities, so I want to rave about it a little, not to try and goose its sales (though its sales deserve to be spectacular), but simply because I like it a lot and feel like raving a little.

Okay, I always feel like raving a little. But here it’ll be specific raving.



It’s an odd duck of a film, part talking-heads interviews, and part narrative. With puppets. The backbone of the film is a retelling of a famous Indian story translated as “The Bone Orchard,” in which a king must rescue a corpse dangling from a tree and bring it back to a powerful magician—but the corpse keeps telling stories with complex moral questions, and every time the king’s answer is insufficient, the corpse reappears at the end of its rope, dangling from the same tree. So what you get is a very interesting documentary, punctuated by a really good stop-animation film using puppets by Brian and Wendy Froud, with voice work by Mark Hamill, Tim Curry and Lance Henriksen. (And each of the stories told by the corpse is done in yet another animation style.) It had the potential to be a mess, but it totally works.

It’s also one of the very few films where I ever sat there with a notepad out, scribbling things down. It’s obviously about myth, but the tag line is “Every life is a story, and a story can change the world,” which is exactly in line with my wacky novel. So I’ve thought about this stuff a lot, and am always eager to hear more—which is why the density of the material in this film has such great appeal for me. It gave me ideas, it sparked my imagination, and I will happily watch it more than once, then set it on my DVD shelf next to the Bill Moyers/Joseph Campbell set, with which it clearly belongs.

I won’t say any more. But it’s available through their site, through Amazon, all kinds of places. Check out a copy: it’s got the Bob Toombs Seal of Approval, so you know it’s top-notch.

Just Had to Mention...

...this new Facebook group. Plugging the Gulf Oil Leak With the Works of Ayn Rand. At last, a solution that cures two major problems!

A Thing Seen While Walking

A sign on a gate to someone’s backyard, nicely etched into a small piece of painted wood:

RABID DOG’S
KEEP-OUT

Being who I am, my eye is instantly drawn to spelling and grammatical errors, so this one with its pair of problems really leaped out. But for whatever reason, I started to dwell on this particular sign, and three possibilities suggest themselves:

1. The sign-maker is illiterate, and has no business making signs. The owners of the house aren’t terribly literate themselves, so I guess they got what they deserve. (Given the notion that the simplest solution is usually the best, this one has to get high marks.)

2. The sign is in fact correct. If the yard is being called a “keep-out,” which would be unusual but not impossible, and if there is only one dog who effectively owns the yard, then the grammar would be correct: it would in fact be the rabid dog’s keep-out. (This does not seem likely at all, but is my personal favorite alternative.)

3. The sign-maker is a crook who charges by the character. Of the eighteen characters on that sign, two shouldn’t be there but are. So if he’s charging, say, one dollar per character carved, those two extra bucks represent a significant markup in the real price of the work. And if he does that systematically, he’s conning a lot of people out of a lot of cash they don’t need to spend. (This one? More likely than it ought to be.)

The real curiosity here? The fact that my brain is wired in such a way that I will spend this much time pondering bad grammar without ever bothering to wonder--are there really rabid dogs back there? Do they ever jump the fence to maul passing strangers obsessed with grammar? Maybe that’s why the sign is as it is, to lure the grammatically-obsessed close enough that they can be picked off by rabid dog’s!

So yeah, man. Keep-out, please.

A New Blog

Yes, it makes perfect sense. Because I’ve been doing such a great job keeping this blog updated. A second one, absolutely, nothing odd about that at all.

But here’s the thing.

The purpose of the bobblog is that it’s about whatever I want it to be about, at any given moment. If I want to complain about an astonishingly uncomfortable bench outside a great big building in Century City, I can do that; if I want to share excerpts from something I’m writing, I can do that; if I want to relate a comical misadventure in Ireland, I can do that too. But from time to time I wax political, and very often when I do, it’s because I feel that someone official is lying to us, for reasons that have nothing to do with good governance and everything to do with exploiting us for their own gain. This is the sort of thing that makes me good and angry, every time.

So I’ve decided to create a new blog. I’m going to call it Damn Lies, an obvious play on “lies, damn lies and statistics.” (Attributed to Disraeli but disputed; Mark Twain popularized its use.) This new blog will only ever be about one thing: the various ways we’re being lied to, and why. It will be political, economical and social, but it will almost certainly never relate how I locked myself out of my car or what those crazy siblings are up to.

Here’s a bit of overlap: the following will intro the new blog...

While writing my first novel I discovered my theme. Proust asserts that every writer only really has one theme, and every new work is a renewed attempt to express that theme, or a piece of it, better than the last work did. (If I could find the quote I would provide it, but those books are huge.) And so, while I was writing a novel that turned out to be about the way our lives are like stories that we tell to ourselves, I realized that this is the idea I will probably explore for my entire life. In my newest work, a play based on the infamous cadaver synod, I examine the ways institutions lie to us, but how the power of a good example, a good story, even if it’s just propaganda, can still transcend its manipulative origins.

Segue to this new blog.

As you can guess from the title, it will focus on the lies we’re told, and how those lies are used to exploit us. But from time to time I hope to also tell the other story, about how we’re able to, let’s just say, take a sad song and make it better. I’ll try to keep it light and entertaining, to restrain the impulse toward outrage can make an outrageous subject seem muddy and clouded, thereby weakening its impact. But when anger is called for, angry I will be.

So there you go. There’s more over on the blog, namely a quick examination of gift cards and calling cards and how they’re being used to swindle us. Just a little taste of what’s to come. Hope you’ll take a look.

Lasers!

The last time I got my teeth cleaned, my dentist told me I had a little cavity. Needed to be filled.

Cue two weeks of dread.

Because I am a dental wimp of the first order. Do not like dental pain, no sir no how. It's so bad that when I had my wisdom teeth pulled, I was so paranoid about the pain that even as I drifted into unconsciousness I actually resisted the anaesthetic--because my brain was thinking "Was that pain? Is it hurting now? Find the pain! Focus on it! Pain! Pain! Pain!" And then, fortunately, blissful unconsciousness at last took over.

So when I know I'm going to have to have a cavity dug out, I will spend the days before working myself up into a small frenzy of anticipatory pain. When it's about time to leave, I always have five or ten really great excuses as to why I should postpone. I go anyway because I have at least a little self-control, but by the time I get there I'm a barely-contained mess of dread and fear.

This time, the good Dr. Gordon said he was going to be using a laser instead of a drill. And really, there'd be no need for any anaesthetic at all.

Cue the comical double-take.

I took some novocaine anyway, because I just wasn't prepared to make that leap. So I got the long pinching piercing pain of a needle being stuck into my gums, then a little wait and then, aaaah, the spread of that delicious numbing sensation. Perfect. He began.

The device looks a little like an electric toothbrush, and it makes a clicking sound so you know when it's working. Of course it also leaves a considerable smell of burning tooth when it's working, so there's really no mistaking it. But in about a minute, it was done.

A second double-take. "What, that's it?" (Or rather, "Wha, assit?") "That's it."

No grinding, no drilling, no horrible zzzzzzzzzzzzz sound. No pressure. No pain. Nothing. The only painful part, by far, had been the needle with the novocaine—and now I was stuck with a numb mouth for the next four hours, unable to eat or drink without drooling all over myself.

This may be one of the greatest things I've ever had happen to me. (No, not the drooling.)  Really, I’m not kidding. It was that fantastic.

Every once in a while I think, "I was born at the wrong time. Should've been born during the Enlightenment, one of those periods when society actually cared about language and reason." (It's a fallacy, but that discussion is for another day.) But that thought is always followed by another: indoor plumbing and modern dentistry. And I would not live in any other time than this one right here now.

Lasers!

On the Doing of a Thing

In a recent Facebook status update, I reported that I was one pound away from hitting my college weight again.  Many delightful and encouraging responses followed, and of course there was the inevitable question from more than one quarter: "How did you do it?"

In a word: slowly.  I did it slowly.

And of course, since I'm a gadget junkie, there was some electronic help as well, but I'll get to that in a second.

"College weight" is what I'm calling my target—I'm pretty sure I was hovering around 185 by the time I graduated.  (And at 6'3", that weight is squarely within the Normal range.)  The specific memory I'm clinging to is when I was walking through the Boston Common, past the fountain at the corner nearest Downtown Crossing, and some guy sitting at the fountain said something or other to me—and then called me "Slim."

These are the sorts of things we remember.  I weighed 185 when a complete stranger called me Slim.  Almost a quarter century later, that's why that particular weight is my target weight.  It's completely silly, and it's just as valid as any other reason for picking a target weight.  (In truth, in high school I was five to ten pounds lighter than that, so I could pick a lower number if I wanted, and maybe in time I will.)

There was a span when I was gaining about a pound a year, which seemed fine till I realized what would happen in thirty years.  And indeed, shortly after I moved to Los Angeles, something I should have foreseen happened: because I now lived in a place where I drove rather than walked, I gained weight.  A lot of it.  And fast.  Before I could blink, 200 pounds had become 220.

Enter a gizmo.  The iPhone, and a free app called "Lose It."  I had already, with exercise and a little diligence, gotten 220 back down to a range between 205 and 210.  But what Lose It does turns out to be invaluable: it's a simple calorie tracker, and it presents a clean, graphically unmistakable chart with a red line denoting your maximum caloric intake on any given day.  If your bar graph representing that day's food intake passes the red line, you've eaten too much.

There's a large database of brand-name and restaurant foods with the number of calories, the amount of cholesterol, etc. already programmed in, and that helps with the data entry.  I still end up entering a lot of things freehand, but there are lots of websites out there that will tell you the calorie content of almost anything, so it's not too hard to get accurate information.  No, the hard part is really this: you have to be honest.

If you don't enter that third cookie you had, sure, you'll stay on the correct side of the thin red line, but your body will still know the difference and you will have defeated the whole purpose of using the app.  That kind of truth-telling is hard as hell, but there are rewards to be had.

I lost weight slowly.  Very slowly.  Started using Lose It early last February when my weight was 206, and only now have I reached 186.  There are always thresholds, where you'll hit a weight and won't seem able to dip below it for a long time; then suddenly you'll drop far below it and find a new threshold.  Naturally, my current threshold turns out to be 186, so I haven't been able to get below it yet, haven't been able to grab that one last pound.  But it'll happen, I'm confident about that.

I'm no nutritionist, but I have to think that losing weight slowly is better than losing it fast.  Because if you lose it fast, you're very likely to gain it back, just as fast.  In other words, if you go on a crash diet where you follow some program and crush your daily caloric intake and blah blah blah, you're making a temporary lifestyle change.  You hit your target, you congratulate yourself, then you go right back on the rotuine that got you overweight in the first place.

But here's the beauty of Lose It: I didn't change my diet.  Didn't change the sorts of foods I ate, not at all.  (Okay, there was one change: potato chips had to go.  There was no way they could fit into any day without driving me over the red line.  And man, do I love potato chips.  But one sacrifice isn't so bad.  Now, if I'd had to give up pizza….)  (And yes, a nutritionist would hear all this and shudder for reasons that have nothing to do with weight gain.)  (And by the way, even as I write this I am eating a nice lovely cookie.  So there.)

Around last October, I stopped using Lose It for a while.  "I've got the system down," I said to myself.  "I know the quantities, I know when to stop eating.  No problem.  The app got me started, now I can continue on my own."  The result was no surprise at all: the amount I ate started to slide upward, so slowly I never really noticed—till I got on the scale.  And sure enough, the weight was starting to slide upward again.  I got back onto Lose It, saw how many days were well over the thin red line, and realized that this little app, and its descendants, will probably be with me for a very long time indeed.

So that's the answer to how I did it.  (And am doing it still.)  By losing weight slowly, not by dieting, not by eliminating food I like (with that one notable exception), but by simply paying scrupulous attention, being honest with myself, and sticking with the program on a long-term basis.  It's not necessarily easy, but it sure as hell ain't that hard.  Now go forth and shed ye the pounds.

Adventures in "Aww, @#$%!"

Here’s how I managed to lock myself out of the car this morning. It was comedy, all the way through.

The parking garage of the place where I work quite naturally requires a parking card before you can enter. As I rounded a turn half a block from said garage, said parking card flipped itself out of the place where it rests. Flipped itself rather beautifully, actually: I caught its flight out of the corner of my eye, and a gymnast would have been proud of the precision of its tumbling routine.

It stuck the landing, too: totally out of sight under the passenger seat.

Fortunately, before you actually reach the garage entrance, the building has a little freight/delivery area where I was able to pull off, out of the way. No problem. I got out, went around to the passenger side, the door was still locked. Duh. I went back around to the driver side, opened the door, hit the Lock/Unlock button, closed the driver-side door, and went back around to the passenger door.

Naturally, and it need hardly be said because otherwise there’s no story: I hit the Lock/Unlock button the wrong way. Then closed the door.

Passenger door: still locked. “Ho ho ho,” I said to myself, and trundled around to the driver’s door again. Which was now quite thoroughly locked.

I was no longer saying anything resembling “Ho ho ho.”

Oh, and my business partner was making my cellphone tintinnabulate repeatedly.

Two items of good fortune: it’s a lovely early-spring day here in Los Angeles, and I am a tall person with unusually long arms. Which means that both windows were slightly open, and my long arms and long bassist’s fingers were barely long enough to barely reach the Lock/Unlock button on the passenger-but-not-the-driver side.

Pop goes the door, card retrieved, business partner’s problems dealt with, everything back to normal. Arms red and stinging, scrapes washed and cleaned.

But really. I mean, really. Come on, world, leave me alone, wouldja?

By the way, in the movie version of this (because that’s how my brain works), the story as it happened tells itself pretty well—except that there must not be a convenient freight/delivery area. The poor hapless schmuck locking himself out of the car must be blocking the entrance to the garage, with cars piling up behind and honking, people yelling, the whole thing. Because one of the primary rules of storytelling is always this: whatever the situation is, make it as bad as possible. A cop approaching on horseback, demanding the guy move his damn car. Some burly guy getting out of a truck about to beat the guy up. That sort of thing.

Some days, the world, it just says to you, “Nah. Go home. Trust me on this one.”

Did I mention I have a dentist’s appointment for this afternoon? That should finish things off nicely, don’t you think?