Lost Weight, Hard-Won

I'm down 10.5 pounds from 2/19, one month ago, the day I started my horrifying Zone diet. It's been really hard, as I've discovered the difference between "being hungry" and "wanting food." Food is good, god-dammit. It's hard to think of it as only fuel.

I have to disassociate "going to the gym" with "deserving pizza." And I have to disassociate being thin with being unhappy, and being fat with being happy. This is the way it is with certain cultural and religious iconography, after all... (I'm thinking of the numerous statues of the Buddha, whose attained Nirvana apparently comes with it a certain gastronomic recklessness. But maybe these things no longer matter once you find the Lotus Way.)

I have to change this way of thinking, and learn to love Crystal Light. Despite my recent tendencies toward more natural foods and greener choices, this fact remains, that I will require large quantities of aspartame in the short term. If it means that overall I get healthier, then so be it. Here's my koan: what is the sound of one dry-roasted almond falling into a tiny Tupperware container? There is no answer. I catch it before it falls.

Sine of the Times

Despite a bad cough I've developed over the last week, I made the pilgrimage on Thursday night in below-zero wind-chill weather to see one of my folk heroes, Utah Phillips, perform at Passim. Utah is an activist and labor organizer, former hobo and rail rider. He has made his living since the '60s as a folk singer based in Nevada City, California. A bum ticker has kept him closer to home in recent years, and he's 72 years old, so I didn't want to miss this tour.

He sang the familiar railroad ballads as well as some ditties he'd written for his three kids when they were little, one of whom, grown now and a labor organizer herself, was in attendance at the gig, along with Utah's wife, Joanna. Audience participation at a Utah gig is mandatory, in keeping with the folk traditions he's worked so hard to keep going. The very least we can do is sing along, actually. So I did, between coughs, keep time with the Cambridge folkies beside me, their breath reeking of goat cheese and organic pitas. The songs were often comprised of melancholy lyrics set to a jaunty banjo rhythm, which Utah picked out nimbly from the club's tiny stage.

Utah's four decades of folk singing and rabble-rousing have seen lots of change, and most of it not for the better. I find comfort packed into this little Cambridge basement club with the folding chairs: while our country is going through its darkest days in some time, we've been here before, haven't we? Dylan plugged in; the Apollo missions nearly failed; Kennedy got shot; Lennon died in Central Park; oil prices skyrocketed; the towers fell. The sine wave is just at its nadir, and I have hope that the pendulum will swing the other way again. For now, like Utah in HIS darkest days, I'm staying close to the ground and keeping my head up. Is anybody here with me?

21 Hours in Brooklyn

Okay Thursday played the Magnetic Field in Brooklyn this past weekend. Since I'm learning Flickr, here are some highlights:


We stayed in someone's apartment that qualifies as a B&B in Park Slope. I'm not a good B&B person, but this was a cool place, with an odd layout and really high punched-tin ceilings.


This was the Cosby Show neighborhood that we stayed in. It was super nice with tons of dogs and babies in strollers everywhere.


The band rocked. Hipsters were duly impressed.


The band took photos in a little photo booth inside the club. I was elsewhere nursing some Basil Hayden's.


On Saturday morning, we had an amazing breakfast at the 2nd St. Cafe (2nd and 7th Avenue in Park Slope) and headed up the hill to Prospect Park. There was a small farmers' market goin' on. A coughing Rebecca took this photo while we squinted into the noonday sun.

We returned to Boston in the twilight under a lunar eclipse and settled in for a long night of Sonic on the Wii, followed by the Wallace and Gromit movie "Curse of the Were-Rabbit." That's hard to beat.