Still getting situated here in the new digs. It's funny how switching to a new site feels like moving in real life. A little bit, at least. Not as much heavy lifting, but still a lot of headaches. And, since I haven't been able to post to T-Rage! for over a week, due to the server problems at BWP, it's like I'm incognito. No one even knows I'm here. Hopefully, T-Rage! will be up and running again soon, so I can get the word out. I wouldn't want to miss out on all those site-warming presents.

This has been an unsettled past few weeks, personally, in the real world, too. Nothing life-threatening, or wildly traumatic, just little jabs, an occasional shove, and at least one poke in the eye from Providence. There may or may not have been an std involved.

You know, back in the nineteenth century, everyone had one. An std, that is. Syphilis was the it-std in those days. If you weren't being variously ravaged and crippled by the slow-moving poison of syphilis, you were not really alive. There's no shame in slutting around. It's how things get done. That's always been the case, and it's the case today.

I went out to dinner last night with Itchy, to Tremont 467—I had to look it up on the web to make sure I got the number right—pet peeve: naming restaurants with their street address. This place is all about the sauce. My gut, usually made of steel, has been sort of weak and gurgly since I started on the antibiotics. And like I said in my recent our-bodies-ourselves rant, a strong stomach is everything.

So Itchy's been seeing a shrink—I applaud him for that—and he's also got a real MD he sees when he needs some Ritalin. Last night we were eating what were supposed to have been crabcakes, but which tasted distressingly like Stovetop stuffing (and no, I am not kidding)—and there were just two of them about the size of silver dollars for what the dishwasher earns in a day. So we're nibbling away, trying to make our appetizer last until the entree comes—and he's like, "I mentioned you to my pusher."

I'm like, oh yeah?

He says, "I told her I thought you were depressed."

I said, oh yeah? I said, maybe it's just with you.

He's like, "Well, she said she'd be happy to see you, and prescribe you something. At a discount, of course."

All this struck me as funny. How long have I known Itchy? I mean, intimately. Biblically. We took a trip to the Cape a couple weeks ago, and I guess I wasn't very chatty. So he goes to his doctor and tells her I'm depressed. Well, that's depressing. I mean, that he'd think it was something a magic pill could cure. When it obviously calls for a syringe.

No, I am not depressed. I have plenty of reason to be, as do we all. But the truth is, if I were a clinical case, if I were really depressive and not just prone to frequent funks, I would have self-destructed ages ago. Physically, Itchy has an extraordinary pain threshold, but what he doesn't understand is that psychically, I have a just-this-side of superhuman despair threshold. What would cast most men into a deep spiritual coma is kid's play for me. That's why I got on so well with Hungarians, and spent so many of my years of waning youth in Budapest. That, and the fact that they don't call them hung-arians for nothing.

The truth is, I have never been tempted to medicate for something so fundamental to who I am as the daily despair I experience at the slightest provocation. What I have found, in fact, is that the more you allow yourself to feel, the more you can endure. And the more you can endure, the more you can allow yourself to feel. The more you feel, the more you live. The more you live, the more you feel. It's an elegant downward spiral.

Eventually you break through the dread of despair, and come to enjoy it. It's like sushi. I mean, we all know people who are afraid to try it. But when they do, watch out. Shit's addictive.

Of course, I didn't get into any of this with Itchy. We're just not on the same page with this, at all.

I'm all for the Ritalin, though, in case you were wondering. I mean, for Itchy. He's the posterboy for Adult ADHD. He's making some big changes in his life right now that need some focus to carry them through. He might be getting a little over-ambitious, though. Over our crabcakes he started talking about how he was planning to finish The Kite Runner, a book he has been reading every since we met. I'm like, "Pop a Ritalin, come back down to earth, babe." But he told me he was determined. I said, "But, honey, you don't have to do that. I won't love you any different if you finish The Kite Runner." I just got the feeling he was making some kind of big thing out of it—like, I can change! I can be a better man! I can...finish The Kite Runner! I'm like, I know you can. But you don't have to.

I said, anyway, The Kite Runner is way past its purchase-by date. It's one of those books the point of which is to read it when everybody else is reading it. So when you're at a party, or whatever, and somebody, like, alludes to it, you can show you're in the know. If you're going to make it a life goal, read something with no expiration date.

"What? Like Moby Dick?" he snarked. I said, let's start with Hemingway. Hemingway has a lot of advantages. His turse, muscular prose is about as close to Tarzan as you can get and still be literature. The characters are very easy to remember—the men all have one-syllable names. And the themes—impotence, brutality—are timeless.

People with no experience of literature except through high school English class have funny ideas about it. For instance, they don't know that just like in real life, literature's all about sex, money, disease, and death. Because they don't tell you that in high school. The truth of great books is too subversive to be taught openly in school. Because the truth of life is too subversive to be taught.

Still, the idea of literature as something old, fusty and intellectual, instead of what it really is—in Kafka's phrase: "an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us"—robs our public culture of a powerful resource, I think. And it does diminish us, somehow, as a people.

Having said this, the essence of Itchy—his Itchiness—could not survive, say, Proust. And it's not necessary for him to endure Proust, either. There's no reason for the lives of Itchy and Proust to ever intersect. I think Itchy could endure Hemingway, though. And he might actually enjoy the encounter.

I'm a big proponent of mental hygiene. Here's my thing. If Itchy is going to read just one book in his adult life, shouldn't it be one he can use? I'm not sure The Kite Runner is it. The Kite Runner is for people who have read other books, and just need another one to occupy their time on the flight home from Florida. I mean, if he's going to put all this effort into it...

That's what the Bible used to be. It was The Book. The only book a lot of people ever read. And it's all about sex, money, disease and death, too. But if you can get it in The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, or For Whom the Bell Tolls—or best of all, The Old Man and the Sea, which is, like, thirty pages long—then why waste your time with who laid with whom, begat whom, smote whom, and all that Old Testament rigmarole?

One last thing I want to share before I log off today. And it goes along with the theme of funky energy fields, too. Because, really that's what's going down here.

Yesterday I was racking my bike on Boylston, out in front of the Berkeley. They have these obnoxious little horseshoe bike racks I've talked about before (you can see a picture here), where if you rack your bike a certain way you can get four of 'em on it, but if you do it another way, you can only get two, or three. And it's a high-traffic area, and during office hours the racks are always full. So why not do it so you can maximize the usage?

I get to where I'm going and I don't want to have to rack my bike a block away when there's a perfectly good rack right across the street. But someone's parked theirs the selfish, inconsiderate way. But on the other side of the rack someone else has parked theirs the kind and considerate way. So I can get in there, but I have to manhandle the bikes a bit to do it. No problem—they can take it.

So as I'm making way for my bike, this middle-age woman in a rent-a-cop uniform comes out of the Berkeley, popping her gum, rolling her eyes, and snapping her neck at me. She points to the offending bicycle, and says, "that's my bike. Do you MIND?"

Well, I'm already worked into a lather from manhandling those bikes, and I'm like, "in fact, madam, I DO."

I was polite about, but as soon as I started explaining to her that if she would rack her ratty old bike right it wouldn't get manhandled, she rolled her eyes back into her head, snapped her head back into position, did that talk-to-the-hand thing, turned on her heel and started walking away.

I was like, "hey! Wait a second! Come back here!"

Then I started pleading with her: "Just listen! Hey, just listen to me!"

But she strutted on inside without once looking back.

Now, many things went through my head at this moment. There was a little voice that said, "destroy her bike and then go inside and destroy her."

I said, "no, Little Voice, that's not they way we do things in a civil society."

Little Voice said, "But that wasn't very civil of her—to diss you like that, right on your head."

I said, "That's true, Little Voice, but still."

Little was like, "OK, don't destroy her or her bike. Just lock her bike to the rack with your lock, and leave a note saying, 'let me know when you are ready to listen, and I will release your bike'."

I liked Little Voice's idea in theory, but it would probably get me arrested, just like the first idea, which I also have to admit had a certain appeal at first.

Little Voice could see I wasn't sold. So he disguised himself, trying to fool me by pretending to be what I think was supposed to be a female Russian flight attendant, and said, "hey, I've got an idea! Do this: lock your bike up, and just go inside and find her and smile and quietly say, 'um, excuse me, I just wanted to tell you a better way to rack your bike up.' And be real nice about it, and she'll listen, and rack her bike up right, and you'll have made the kind of 'small change' in someone's life that makes the world a little sunnier for us all!'"

Oh, that Little Voice. He is so tricky. He knows you're not supposed to disobey a flight attendant, or the air marshals will tackle you, throw you in the back of the plane, and tie you up with those plastic Glad bag twisty-tie things. Not that it's ever happened to me, personally.  I've just, um, heard that that's how it goes down.

So after I'd locked my bike up—this exchange between me and Little Voice all took place in the space of about half a minute—I actually walked into the lobby of the Berkeley looking for the rent-a-cop.

Then—really at the last possible moment—that other voice piped up. It said: "What the fuck are you DOING, BITCH?"

I was like, "I'm about to make the world a better place, one person at a time."

Other Voice said, "You're about to get your lily ass ARRESTED. She sees you coming up to her, she's gonna get on her little walkie-talkie and have security on your ass before you can say 'rack 'em up right!' Do you WANT to be on the evening news?"

Well, everyone wants to be on the evening news, but I knew that Other Voice was right. So I turned around and walked across the street, and went about my business.

But, you know, I gotta tell ya, that rent-a-cop really got my goat. I couldn't stop thinking about various scenarios that could have played out had I reacted differently.

Then finally I stopped myself and asked: what am I doing (aside from molesting other people's bicycles) to be getting this particular reaction from the universe at this point in time? And how can I return to a fruitful intercourse with the world around me?

And that's the unsettling question I'm left with today.