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.