I have to write this before I go into my customary weeknight food coma.

I have been really enjoying my evening meals lately. I've totally gone native. I just throw a bunch of stuff out on the table—hunk of cheese, hunk of meat, hunk of bread, tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, grapes, cantaloupe, mayo, mustard, whatever happens by—and start stabbing at 'em, chopping 'em up, smooshing and smearing 'em together. My only utensils: my canines and a knife.

It's like discovering food all over again.

And since when the weather's nice and cool like it has been my evening ride home can take me anywhere from forty minutes to two hours depending on where my fancy leads me, I'm ravenous by the time I get home.

So if I drop off all the sudden, it's nothing personal. Food coma is all.


This evening I sat for a while on the esplanade. The sun had come out after the day's rain, and was dancing on the choppy water. And it was such a pleasure to feel it and the cool wind on my skin. I sat there a long time and watched a multitude of joggers, many seemingly in terrific misery, limp, lurch and lumber by.

Why? Why do they do it?

I have tried to tackle this question before, of course, but I have never come up with a completely satisfactory answer.

There were some—a solid ten percent, I'd say—who looked healthy, fit, and buoyant. They were—as all true athletes are—a marvel and a joy to watch. But the other ninety percent had me going over the basics of that CPR certification course I took back in '93 in my head.

Some people just weren't meant to jog.  In fact, so few really were that I'm convinced that in the not-too-distant future jogging will be an
unknown and unfathomable recreation, like, say self-flagellation or hanging from meat hooks by your nipples.

What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that that old adage, "no pain, no gain" does not necessarily work the other way around. While gains generally entail pain, not all pain leads to gains.

The extent of the distress some folks "jogging" on the esplanade seem to have been in—and on such a perfectly lovely afternoon—seemed to correlate with the extent to which they perceived they had let themselves go in the first place. But I would venture that jogging for many of them is less about physical fitness than it is about guilt and punishment.

I saw something similar on the Minuteman Trail last weekend. There were all kinds of people, of course, traversing the trail for all sorts of reasons. But there was one species of traveler who seemed to feel a joyless obligation to perform some physical activity, and you could tell it was not a pleasure to be out and about, but a self-imposed punishment.

Not that I am anti-self-imposed punishment. But maybe there should be a separate trail for that.  Because, frankly, it's bringing the rest of us down.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the spandex-clad gearheads and weekend bicycle warriors, spewing all the bile they've built up over a week at work on everyone around them. They're just this side of road-raging. They're not penitent and self-punishing in the least. They're utterly righteous agents of judgment whose self-imposed mission is to punish the rest of us by example.

What I have learned cycling in the city is that you're supposed to yield to whoever has the most gear. They are the "real" cyclists. You are merely an obstacle. Make way or be crushed. I have learned that if you have enough brightly-colored spandex and the right wrap-around shades you have special license to blow through red-lights and pass other cyclists on the right, as well as ride the wrong way down one way streets.

Americans love gear, that's for sure. It is part of a culture that fetishizes by design. Accessories and accoutrements confer expertise and authenticity. Look at rugby versus American football. Not that I'm complaining about either. My awe of footballers' bottoms is active and well-documented, and rugby shorts are still short enough to be considered shorts—so I'm still a fan.

But there is something of the Clark Kent/Superman thing in the fetishization of sport and recreation. I have seen people on the road who were obviously serious cyclists in training, but the morning commuters with their bellies, stuffed into spandex and geared-up to the hilt are just living out some comic book fantasy.

I don't begrudge them that. It's just that I do it with my clothes off.

Anyway, the joylessness of these recreational pursuits is sometimes striking.

As is the joylessness with which many people eat. There's definitely a connection between weight gain and loneliness that hasn't been adequately explored. Where people are lonely, they'll also have trouble controlling their weight. Because people love to talk at least as much as they love to eat, and when people eat together, they do a lot of talking, too. The more you talk, the less you eat.

Meals as social communion may be one part of an antidote to obesity.

Good sex is another.

V. is visiting from Russia for three weeks to brush up on his English. We were talking yesterday about the best way to learn a language, and it's just like everybody always says: "sleep with your dictionary."

V. said he would gladly do so, but he's having trouble finding one here. He goes to the gym and no one talks to anyone else. People on the street are plugged into their 'pods. There's no adult nightlife to speak of, especially for singles.

All of which was disappointing to hear. Especially from V., who made a killing in the early years after the collapse of the Soviet Union by privatizing a collective farm he worked on in the old days. He now has 2,300 employees and an operation roughly the size of Vermont.

I said, "come on, V., where there's money there's love," and I drew him a little picture on a napkin to illustrate my point:


And I'm not talking about hookers here. You and I both know that you'll never lack amorous admirers or adventures (should you want them) when you're buying the beers. It's just a fact of life. It may not be true love, but it's good enough for a three-week fling.  Whenever I go abroad, I always budget for a fling.

It could all be so easy, couldn't it?

Where is the joie de vivre, people? Where's the magic? The snap-crackle-pop? Is it really all so serious all the time?

Free Paris Hilton!