With Spring in the air, and a spring in my step and a whole fucking slew of other cliches, I’m feeling a bit more on top of shit if not the world.

In a moment of team-playing, pretending I don’t hate the fucking world, I signed up for a 10,000-step challenge at work. They handed out pedometers, and everyone’s seeing how much they can move a bit off their asses.

The central irony of this work-thrill activity is that the place where I work is so fucking Silicon Valley, Bay Area, California, life/work balance, Blue State, lefty, outdoorsy, green-loving that no one there needs the boost in activity. A huge chunk are hiking, biking, camping, jogging, gardening, farming, plane-flying, marathon-running freaks. Piled on top of Type A, overachieving, saving the world do-gooding.

I signed on to get my own fat ass off the couch. For this I am happy. Sloth that I am, though, I like a good walk. But judging by the numbers already racked in three days, I woulda had to walk here from Cambridge to make the grade.

Actually, apart from my sense of competitive loserness, wearing a pedometer clicks one part of the brain that I think ain’t a bad thing. You know that whole Thoreau, woods, living life deliberately thing? Counting steps puts you into a certain here and now choosing more thoughtfully where you are going.

Or all sorts of other kind of pseudo-zen crap. It’s good enough for me. I mean I’m too shallow to dig the real zen crap.

I also enjoy that a pedometer resonates with my latent OCD tendencies. Saves me from counting to 9,996 just to make down the street.

I started walking to work a few days. It puts me right back into circa 1979.

Somewhere in the walk of a couple or miles or so, it starts feeling like mornings in Braintree-ville when I missed the bus. I’m chugging along, stealing fresh looks at the watch conscious of time creeping, making me hustle a bit faster. Trying to get to work feels like the long-forgotten goal of hitting homeroom before the second bell.

The key to enjoying the walk 20 years ago was missing the bus when Tommy White missed the bus. Nothing provides a morning eye-opener quite like a teenage introvert with a joint to share, walking, stream of consciousness flowing, ranting on the Who and his own rock opera. Weed and Pete Townshend dreaming.

‘Course that was the way olden days back before the Sony Walkman was even invented, let alone iPods. I mean what the fuck, I used that have to walk to school in silence.

Catching a bit of the old fire, the high school pipedreams, minus the pipe and the pot, my plan is to use the walks to think through my writing.

Apart from writing, my fitness goal is to be able to walk up the two flights of stairs at work or to our apartment without heaving like a moist, asthmatic man three times my weight, age and circumference, as I do now.

Happy St. Patty’s to all that care. Happy March 17th to the rest.

We had corned beef and cabbage at a local pub (well, meaning they have beer, some dark paneling and drunks) and might go back tonight for the stew. To be fair to the place, despite having a wine list and a not-particularly pasty-faced clientele, the first time we went there a guy was pounding beers at the bar and opining about the Sox. All things are possible under Dice K.

We walked to the mall that’s about the same distance from our place here as the mall of my childhood was from my childhood home. A healthy walk.

Everywhere at the mall, I saw flashes of green in T-shirts and on children. Almost to a person, these green-bearers had almond eyes and straight, black hair. Asia, the new Ireland?

A bad week at the office is like a bad day fishing, if by bad you mean you’re the fish and the hook ended up in your bunghole.

That was my week. Week and weak enough to make me figure a few moments looking at the resume and some classified this weekend could be time well spent.

I don’t know for sure if I’ll leave this gig. The benefits are pretty huge, it’s now close to home and overall people seem to dig me. Moreover, a former dean of a major university gave me excellent feedback on my paltry scribblings so far. Awesome feedback actually, while treating me to lunch at the faculty club.

Picture the scene. I write crap about my pathetic existence to amuse myself, and I’m sitting in the West Coast version of ivy-covered ivory towers chatting about it over a club sandwich. A successful academic and psychiatrist no less.

Bizarre.

It would be a lunch I never enjoyed and editing I wouldn’t have gotten without this job.

But, fucking A. If it doesn’t stop feeling like “The Devil Wears Prada,” the ignomies will outstrip the perqs.

Answering a few want ads can’t hurt.

Karl Rove was going the Iago thang once again. This time with the omigod-is-he-really-
the-head-law-official Alberto Gonzales.

Let me get this straight, we live in a representational democracy designed with a series of quote checks and balances unquote, right? No one ever fucking voted for Karl Rove into any position. And, he’s calling all sorts of important shots.

Shots including those that seem a bit like tearing down the checks and balances. He’s still employed, people. Karl Rove walks the political earth and still and all, no one ain’t been impeached.

Of course, Bush was nowhere near the stank of Rove. He was too busy locking himself in a room with the Brazilian presidents G-spot and hoping for his meat-filled dreams to come true.

Today was a shit day at the office. One of those days where you kind of feel brittle — Like one more dumbass fucking comment, criticism, question and you’ll snap. Snapping might mean walking out the door, spewing obscenities or simply weeping.

I did none of the above, because I was just too fucking lazy and apathetic to commit to emotion.

In the end, you gotta wonder if my lizard brain was just processing the annual event that generally affects me more than my own birthday or New Year’s Day. I mean what makes you think about passing time and wasting your life and futility (and their collective relationship to crappy office work) than the death of someone who gave up.

I’ll be fucking goddamned if my final legacy is the ability to label and organize folders.

Maybe my salvation will be swell phone manners.

Tomorrow is the as yet labeled holiday celebrating the birth of one heckuva a cranky broad. She was our cranky broad. The people’s crab.

Much more than trying to remember and figure out the anniversary of her death, I remember Pat on her birthday.

I set myself up a deadline of getting something new written about her by tomorrow, so I wrote a fair amount this past weekend. It’s rough, I want crystalline prose dripping from my fingertips. But, in the lumps and bumps of drafting, who the fuck knows, if not diamonds maybe a bit of zirconia.

The Pat story I decided to commemorate in my writing, which may turn into some kind of intro went something like this…

One story sums up the adult relationship I had with my mother, Pat. I had gone to her house to take her shopping, run errands or just annoy her, as she was wont to comment on some of my visits. As she flipped TV channels in the living room, I wandered in some other room. Excitedly, Pat called to me to come and see what was on television.

I entered the living room to see a nano-second of a Brady Bunch special, as Pat gleefully switched off the TV entirely. Incredibly pleased with herself, she cackled that she had been waiting 20 years to do just that.

Vintage Pat.

Two things kind of sink a bit of a counterpuntal thang in my head about the loss of Pat and her anniversary day.

First, I’m behind in my writing or my creative writing. Behind in the goals inevitably you have to set up in your head to trick you into thinking you got something to say. I mean, come fucking on, the world cares not for the shit dripping from my gray ooze. If and what I write is on the importance scale about a -273, actually more like negative n+1.

So I give myself guidelines to fake tangibility, substance, merit. I got nothing, of course.

Anyhow, my creative writing got trumped a bit by the prosaic matter of life. I poured my skillz into documentating my Nick hate.

I wrote two whole pages on why in god’s fucking name we would be terribly unlikely to give him our cash, and in fact he be owing. I threw in California state code and clauses, I documented, I ‘splained. Most of all I demanded our dough back.

For extra drama, I attached this list:

Item: ➡ Replacement cost
Casual Home Birch Sailcloth Tab Top Panel Pair – 84″x108″ ➡ $34.99
Classic Home Ball Drapery Rod – Mahogony Wood (7′) ➡ $24.99
Sterilite 44 qt. Trash Can (for trash) ➡ $12.99
Sterilite 44 qt. Trash Can (for recycling) ➡ $12.99
IKEA Wastepaper basket (main bathroom) ➡ $1.99
IKEA Wastepaper basket (master bathroom) ➡ $1.99
Round Patio Table ➡ $29.99
Master Plunger for kitchen sink ➡ $8.99
Master Plunger for kitchen sink ➡ $8.99
25 Ft Snake (Drain Unclogger) ➡ $18.48
Grand Total ➡ $156.39

Asking Nick not just for the money he took but a tasty bit more. I think Pat would approve. I’m not sure she would have gotten it up to write the major opus herself, but she’d certainly applaud her baby girl not getting taken or kept down or cheated.

On the flipside, tomorrow’s big event at work will be signing up for a walking/fitness challenge. They’ll be doling out some free pedometers so you can log your steps, get all fit and shit and win some prizes or some other kind of teambuilding fun and friendlty competition.

Now that, competing, fitness, exercise, walking, physicality, in and of itself, is of no fucking relationship to Pat whatsoever. But, her sisters are about nine thousand times more active then Pat chose to be, and they’re still here. Arguably, teaching, her life’s work apart from messing with her own kids, took a huge toll. I doubt folks realize how teaching is probably right up next to mailman and waitress for on your feet all day kind of hell.

I whiningly and whingingly hit the gym, walk, move about a bit, because I am my mother’s daughter. I refuse to take this life lying down, though, and I’ll be fucking damned to give it all up too soon.

Some days, when I’m strolling through Cali in sunshine among folks who love the active life, I mean this is the state no doubt that invented those baby jogger strollers, I muse on the might have been only not really not actually. If through the luck of geography or wanderlust, if Pat landed here, what would have happened. Would she have been one of the feisty dames in polar fleece lining these not so mean streets walking their artisanal cheeses and breads and local wines home from the upscale grocer?

Or, would she still have preferred a couch and a crossword?

Here’s my new writing space…

Up until yesterday, I would have assumed that deer let them selves go like a cow or horse, upright and incidental.

But in this photo essay I call “Copping a Squat,” I learned something I ain’t never seen on the Discovery Channel.

Saturdays are often marred by a certain sense of togetherness. Perhaps “marred” isn’t quite the right word, but being a bitch and all and having a vocabulary, there it is.

Today, M. is often on his own to get his b’day present installed in his car. (Not the Thai hooker, she I returned.)

The idea is that I am out of excuses for procrastinating the book idea. Wish me luck as I delve into the pain and self loathing that is part and parcel of my writing persona. I mean seriously, don’t I suck?

By the way, and apropos nothing, I used a vibrating razor this morning.

What the fuck is the need for something that vibrates that does not go in the vicinity of my hooha?

Finally walked to work. Work is about 2.5 miles or less, maybe a 35-40 minute walk. The street I live on is off a main boulevard, the street where work lies is a main drag.

Eazy peezy, right?

Not without your keeper it seems. I kind of got lost. An hour into the walk and at least a mile over the shortest distance, I was late for a meeting.

Basically, I wandered a circle wider through a residential neighborhood, because I spaced out on one turn. What the fuck is wrong with me?