"The Road.''

I am really scared right now because I am reading Cormac McCarthy's outstanding novel, "The Road.'' It's a vision of the future, uncompromising and bleak. Basically, civilization has been blotted out, and there are roving groups of thugs with sack cloths and swords. The two heroes of the book are a young man and his father. They are on the run. Dead trees line the road. Trash and shrunken heads are everywhere. There are no institutions that have survived the unnamed cataclysm in this book, with the lone exception of Starbucks, which somehow thrives. So anyways, these roving bands of thugs, all hopped up on coffee and pastries, are going around laying waste to cities and forests. Great book, except for the many product placements (Pennzoil, Chuck E. Cheese, Amoco, Twizzlers, etc.) which I found discouraging. I'm also reading a great book called "On Chesil Beach'' by Ian McKewan. Basically it's about this neurotic British couple who are trapped, for 48 hours, in a washroom in the back of a Peet's Coffee in Oakland while on their honeymoon. McKewan writes with tremendous subtlety about class distinction, sexuality and deferred dreams, plus he describes the Peet's bathroom extremely well. (you really feel like you're stuck in there with them.)

Published authors' drinking and eating habits

My friend Sam Autman, out in NYC, sent me a very interesting article from the New York Observer talking about the dark side of being published. Basically the article said that a lot of the authors become very large (physically) and isolated and end up eating way too many Entenmann's pastries because they don't have time to manage their health. They interviewed a nice assortment of authors for that piece. After reading that article, I've decided to eat more holistically and start marathon training again.

The dark and secret world of marmots

I've dug up tons of research that I can't fit in my book; I just can't find a place for it. I'm thinking that I'll post some of this excess useless research on my blog because I have no other purpose for it. The first blurb of research involves marmots. They look like guinea pigs but they're the size of a small dog, have russet or gray fur, and can stand up on their hind legs like human beings. These mammals are quite common in the California high country, in elevations 9,000 feet or up. They look cute but can be quite savage. One of my friends, a former park ranger, said marmots wage war against parked cars. They slither up through the chassis, nibble through the plastic tubing, and suck out all the radiator coolant or brake fluid -- and for some reason the chemicals do not harm them. Rangers try to subdue marmots by injecting them with hypodermic needles filled with a serum made from a PCP derivative. But the marmots are incredibly resistant to such chemicals. In one case, a ranger used enough of that sleep serum to put a full-grown black bear to sleep for a while -- and the marmot would not go under. In fact it was wide awake! just thought I'd share this with you all.

Harry Potter, Matt Damon's "dorky'' boots.

A lot of people are going around blabbing about the Harry Potter ending. I still haven't heard what happens. Please don't tell me. I'm still mad at the chubby kid in my bar mitzvah preparation class who told me that Darth was actually Luke's father. Also, I read the GQ interview with Matt Damon the other day. He's apparently still furious about GQ's previous interview with him -- just because they made a dismissive remark about his boots!! Apparently the previous interviewer called Damon's boots "dorky.'' Damon said that the interviewer did not have the "stones'' to call the boots dorky to his face.

By the way, we're back in the Bay Area now. Where are we living? It depends on which day you're asking. We're basically living all over the place.

Cactus craziness

My book will be called "The Cactus Eaters.'' It will be coming out next year, and the book has required me to do a lot of research about cacti. The book is not about cacti per se, but a cactus figures prominently in one very painful backcountry scene that takes place about a quarter of the way through, in the middle of the desert. For this reason, I've been looking for all kinds of ephemera and weird facts about cacti. My wife dug up a great piece of information: she found a document that suggested that a prickly pear cactus caused a shocking international incident in California about a half-century ago )I won't go into any more details -- you'll have to read the book to see exactly what happened.) I also found out that Aztec priests used cactus spines to scourge themselves as part of a painful-sounding purification ritual. Anyone with other strange cactus facts: please post them here.

Life Without Rats

It's weird to live in a place where there are no rats, or where the rats, if they are here at all, are keeping a low profile. In New York, my life was rat-o-centric. I saw rats all the time. Rats fighting. Rats jumping through the laundry area. The last week I spent in New York, I even saw a rat hanging out in a poisoned rat trap! I asked it what it was doing, living in a poison-filled chamber in the middle of an alleyway. "Location, location,'' he replied.

Falsely accused beagle is now suing me over missing eyeglasses

I am looking after a beagle right now near the beach. Anyhow, the other day my glasses went missing, and I was sure -- absolutely sure --- that the beagle had eaten or hidden them. I asked the beagle to give me some clue about the glasses and where they might be but she refused. In desperation I searched every bush and section of the yard, trying to find the beagle's stash, and ended up more than an hour late for my sister's birthday party at the Star of Siam restaurant in Soquel. So I searched the grass and my suitcases and drawers to no avail, which increased my suspicion that the dog had indeed gobbled the glasses. Anyhow, it turns out that I threw the eyeglasses in a garbage can by mistake. The dog had nothing to do with it.

The Innocence Project has intervened on behalf of the dog, who is also filing a "wrongful accusation'' claim against me. The dog is being represented on a pro bono basis by a well-known attorney. I will probably lose my shirt over this one.

I made up that last part.

Weird week, lost glasses

This week we drove all the way across the country. During this time, we saw some strange things, including a strange man in Wisconsin, riding a jet ski through a drainage ditch off the side of Highway 94; intense snow falling all over us in Idaho -- on June 5!! --- and the nearly deserted downtown of Minneapolis, occupied solely by vagrants. In California, I was walking on the beach just the other day when I saw a guy listening to a garbage can, sticking his face in it, collecting its inner vibrations. It turns out he had one of those itty-bitty black and white TV sets connected to a generator and an extension chord and shoved into the bottom of the garbage can. The TV set had a radio attachment, which he had set on full blast. "Wild Thing'' was playing on the TV set. Only in Santa Cruz! Also, I am now dog sitting in Aptos, California. The dog is very nice and much calmer than last year. I falsely accused the dog of devouring or burying my prescription glasses, but it turns out that I was the one to blame (somehow I threw my glasses in the trash accidentally.)

Coffee jerk

Tried to get an iced coffee from Cafe Fresh, the attractive but not-very-well-managed coffee place across from campus, on Amsterdam Ave. I went in and the guy barked, "We're not open right now." I asked him, "Well, when are you going to open.'' He said, "I'm not getting into the details of why we are not open.'' So I repeated, "No, no,I didn't ask WHY you aren't open, I wanted to know WHEN you are going to open so i can have an iced coffee.'' He replied, "I don't feel like having a conversation right now about WHY we are not open.''

And so I went to Starbucks. Nuff said. Their coffee was delicious and they were nice.

Mountain extravaganza

I've just returned from a grand tour of the mountains for a freelance writing assignment. I threw down a 12-mile trail run into the backcountry, explored a creek and a briny lake, hiked through a field full of swallows and dragonflies, traversed a national park, learned a lot about mining and earthquakes, ate a duck, toured an Ayurdevedic spa, interviewed 20 people, spent the night in an historic lodge and watched the sun set over the humpbacked mountains. It was a terrific experience though I'm sleepy now and trying to get some rest but my cat is mauling me. Tomorrow I'm back in NYC (but only for a couple of days)

Return of the human boomerang

I just had a strange realization about my life in relation to geography. I was born on the West Coast, and then my father moved us all to the East Coast when I was two. At age three, my family moved back to the West Coast, where I stayed for 15 years. Then I moved to the East Coast for six years, at which point I returned to the West Coast for six years, at which point I moved to the East Coast for three years. Now, I'm about to move to --- guess where - the West Coast AGAIN!! I am a human boomerang but didn't realize it until this moment.

The tease continues

So check this out. I went into our friendly local grocery store the other day, the one that sells tomatoes that look like someone hurled them against the wall -- and for once, they were unblemished, tasty and beautiful. I decided to try my luck in the 'student rush' ticket line for the Broadway show, "Talk Radio,'' expecting to get shut out and yelled at by nasty people. But guess what, there was no line, the tickets were cheaper than dirt, we got second row, dead center, and Liev Shrieber just tore the roof off the place. In fact, the guy at the ticket counter sold me the tickets 15 minutes before the box office was supposed to open! How weird is that?

New York is a tease

This city has been showing its very best side to us, now that it knows we are leaving.

We have been going to the Shake Shack and getting their vanilla ice cream cones, then watching the Empire State Building flash a strange new color each night. We've been going on long hikes and runs, snarfing the famous banana pudding at Buttercup Bakery and strolling through the cherry blossom esplanade in Brooklyn's surreal botanical gardens. I know that if we changed our minds and decided to stay out here, the nice weather would vaporize in an instant, and cockroaches (as big as spaniels) would crawl into our apartment and throttle us in our sleep. But this is a perfect, gorgeous time in NYC, a time when there is no better place on the planet. Everyone is having fun, throwing Frisbees all over the place, and even the rickshaw drivers near Columbus Circle are almost smiling. In three or four weeks, the weather will be hot and disgusting, and desperate people will pay good money to see Sandra Bullock movies just for the air conditioning. But in this two-week grace period, the city is accessible, overflowing with options, good humor, art, music and dogs of all shapes and outlooks. I'm scrambling to take advantage of it.

Dreading the bagels but full of anticipation

I am moving, for the time being, to the Bay Area --- lovely place, brilliant people, great weather, although the bagels are dinner rolls with bellybuttons. Though I am excited to be out there again, I am not looking forward to the bagel withdrawal. As a result, I've been mainlining H and H and Absolute bagels like you would not believe --- just opening my mouth and shoveling in fistfuls of bagels to make up for the fact that I will soon be eating Noah's bagels, which are so insipid. One time at Noah's Bagels in Santa Cruz, I asked for a toasted bagel with cream cheese on it. Instead, the guy ignored me and microwaved the hell out of a bare bagel. When I complained, and clarified what I wanted, the guy took the microwaved bagel, stuck cream cheese on it and then put it in the toaster!!! It was like eating a shingle with mouth-searing, melted cream cheese on the top of it.

However, I am very much looking forward to seeing loved ones, being able to afford sushi (the kind of sushi that I can afford in NYC looks suspiciously like the stuff that they drag behind fishing boats in shark-chumming contests) and enjoying a wonderful fellowship (the Steinbeck, through the auspices of San Jose State University) which will allow me to finish my book, develop a second book, and get going on some intensive research. I will miss the Chelsea pier, cheap student tickets at the Metropolitan Opera and the staggeringly good vanilla cones at the Shake Shack. I won't miss our stomping, thumping sociopath neighbors and the rats in the laundry room, but I will miss my colleagues at Columbia's School of the Arts (though I've been told that a huge contingent of them lives in the Bay Area.)

The sweet misery of free ice cream

Yesterday, I waited in line with thousands of other people to get free ice cream at Ben and Jerry's in the Upper West Side. I'm not sure if the delicious frozen treats were worth the volley of verbal abuse. You should have seen the ice cream servers screaming at everyone! "WHO WANTS CHOCOLATE? I KNOW SOMEONE SAID STRAWBERRY!!! MOVE THE LINE ALONG!! GET MOVING!! WHICH ONE OF YOU SAID CHERRY GARCIA!! MOVE YOUR BUTTS RIGHT NOW!!'' When I finally got to the front of the line, I was sure that the server was going to start pounding on me for no reason or at least lob a big lump of ice cream on top of me. "WHAT DO YOU WANT??"" she roared. "Cherry Garcia,'' I replied, sheepishly. She reached into the vat and scooped me up a big wedge of ice cream and practically stuffed the cone up my nose. I grabbed up my treat and got out of there as fast as I could. In the ice cream servers' defense, they had to wait on an endless crowd of mopy, rain-drenched people and they probably got carpal tunnel syndrome from all the scooping. The other weird thing was the line itself: A kid, no older than 11, took it upon himself to herd the line into single file. He would not let my wife and I pass by until he was sure that we were walking in an orderly fashion. This sort of behavior scares me. Pre-teens are supposed to resist authority and not behave in such a crypto-fascist way.

Graduating, sort of

When I was checking out grad schools, I crashed on the floor of a fiction writer who took me to a protest the next day while dressed up as a cow. (He was protesting the cost of tuition. The cow suit was relevant to the protest. It's a long story.) It's hard to believe that three years have passed since the angry-cow incident. These are my final days in the Columbia MFA program. I will definitely miss homework (reading two books every week) and having a dozen or so smart and dedicated people close-edit my work. I'll also miss the study alcoves at Columbia, the lectures about crazy short stories, the constant visits from writers and the occasional beery hangouts at Toast and the Amsterdam Lounge. This has been great (and the three years have gone by in a flash.) I'm grateful that the program has given me a chance to teach Ivy League freshmen, work as a research assistant to an NY Times editor and shape a full-length manuscript. Now I'm marking the end of my time here with a little get-together this weekend in the Upper-Upper Westside. I guess this means that I am graduating -- though that isn't true technically (I'm still fiddling with the thesis and probably won't do the graduation "walk'' in June.)

Vodka in matzo balls: Don't knock it til you try it

I'm in the middle of a Jewish soul-food blitz right now. This week I made a big batch of matzo balls fortified with a full two tablespoons of Popov vodka in the batter. They have a nice "kick'' that your run-of-the-mill ordinary matzo balls don't have -- a bit of a sting at the top of your mouth when you bite them --- but I'm concerned they aren't Kosher for Passover. (I know there are strict restrictions on certain grains and legumes during Passover, though it's also true that vodka is made out of all kinds of different things. Perhaps there is a matzo-flour-based vodka that's out there somewhere on the market.) Anyhow, I'm wondering if anyone else has tried this concoction. I got it straight out of the New York Times Passover Cookbook. In case you're curious, it also involves a cup and a hald of matzo meal, four to five farm-fresh eggs, a tablespoon or so of cooking oil, a tablespoon and a half of chicken broth, salt to taste and the aforementioned tablespoon and a half of vodka. Boil in broth for 45 minutes. I strongly recommend cooking them in canned chicken soup for that time and then transferring them into a big vat of Zabar's Homemade Chicken Soup.

Here's the Today Show Link

Click here to watch my interview about the male biological clock.

Nationally televised smooch and soundbite on the Today Show

I was, briefly, on national television this morning, (the Today Show) kissing my wife, and talking briefly about male menopause. I was on for about seven seconds.

They had me remove my glasses for the interview and the smooch because the Klieg lights were reflecting off the lenses. It was fun to take part in this. I hope I am on television again.

Cactuseaters on the Today Show

I am on the Today Show, Tuesday morning (Seriously!) at some point between 730 and 8 a.m., talking, with two other dudes, about male menopause and other issues, including male fertility, etcetera. They taped the segment today. Among other things, they had me talking about aging, talking about my Dad, and at one point I smooched my wife in front of a zillion potential TV-land viewers.

On Tuesday morning I will watch myself and find out how I look on TV. They didn't give me any make-up (unlike a cable access program in Santa Cruz, where they put so much pancake make-up on me that I looked like Gray Davis.) It was pretty casual and fun, and I got to check out the Big Room where Al Roker and Matt Lauer hang out. Also, they had me use the same throat-microphone that George Clooney used last week.