in which david gahan bursts unbidden into a yoga studio

Yesterday Sarah took me with her to yoga. I have never done any sort of yoga before, although people far and wide have advised me that due to my infirmity and perchant for workaholicness, yoga is something I should pursue.
"It's gentle yoga," Sarah told me, which I envisioned optimistically to be a time where we would lie, zenlike, on floor mats, taking deep breaths -- something not very unlike sleeping. I agreed.

Alert: This is not what yoga is. Yoga is placing yourself in difficult, unfriendly positions, and then staying there, shaking and looking around to see whether anyone else has quit yet. It is also standing upright on your mat looking confused while other people burst out of strange poses into other poses, all named after animals you frequently see on New York City sidewalks. On a scale of 0 to 10 of yoga prowess, where 0 is dousing the yoga studio in gasoline and then lighting the thing aflame, and 10 is being elevated to Grand Yogini or whatever happens to you when you become great at yoga, I would say I performed at about a 0.5, or, if we're giving points for producing some sweat, maybe a kindly 1. For one thing, I am not flexible. For another, I am not outrageously strong. Nor am I "of blank mind." The part that was supposed to be easy, the lying-on-the-floor part that came at the end, was accompanied by some prompts by the instructor to "let certain parts of our bodies go," as well as to "enjoy the silence." (Who knew yoga had so much in common with Depeche Mode?) We were not supposed to think about what we had to do. We were not supposed to think about problems in our lives. That's sort of like showing someone a delicious cookie and then being like, no, you and that cookie shall never be one. That's right: For me, worrying is like a delicious cookie. Now you know.

charm city

Returned from the borough of Queens, I picked up and left again for another borough: the borough of Baltimore. (All right, I'm done.) As you know, Baltimore is home to such denizens as Jimmy McNulty, The Bunk, Omar, Clay Davis, Doctor-Doctor Caitlin, Phil, and veritable legions of brisk, two-steppin' crabs. One can barely take a step in the city of Baltimore without running into one of these persons or crabs, and therefore it was more than just good luck that I got to spend the evening with Doctor-Doctor Caitlin and Phil, the crabs and others being occupied and frankly not nearly as good company.

Sadly, I spent a sizeable chunk of that time barking down the phone to San Francisco Best Buy and my landlord, who were "responsible" (and I use that word with great dubiousness) for the delivery of my new refrigerator today. Neither party seemed to know when the refrigerator might arrive. My landlord's story all along has been that my original refrigerator, which broke "because of the economy" (who knew refrigerators were so angry?) could also not be replaced because of the economy, and then could not be delivered because of the economy, and so on. So I assumed that it was probably the economy that, once again, rudely, was obscuring this important information from me. The Bay, however, did not assume this. The Bay spat vitriol down the line, threatening to shove the refrigerator and several other appliances where the sun did not shine on my landlord, to leave refrigerators dangerously in his path of mobility, to basically shower his waking dreams with refrigerators in retribution. The Bay, you see, had to start waiting at The Fort today at 8:30 am for the new refrigerator to come, and was none too happy about it. However, word is that it has arrived, and I have offered The Bay "anything [he] wants" to commemorate this favor. I'm hoping he says a packet of Certs, because I bought a 12-pack of those at a truck stop and am basically swimming in them.

But back to Baltimore. No fewer than four (4) separate people, upon hearing that I was going there, asked me to give my regards to Omar. I did look for him. I looked for him as soon as I came out of the tunnel under the harbor. I looked for him at the weird sandwich shop where D-D Caitlin, Phil, and I ate dinner, surrounded by tiny figurines of dead babies. I looked for him on the walk back. I looked for him this morning on the street on the way back to DC. No Omar. I'm sorry, everyone. I tried.

borough borough borough borough borough

Greetings from the borough of Queens. Have you ever heard Michael Bloomberg say the word borough? Well, have you? It is simply delightful. "Beeeh-ro," he bleats, like a sheep with gas. Whenever I have the opportunity to say borough, I do. The borough of Oakland. The borough of Marin. Since those aren't really boroughs, it's far more fun to say it when I'm really here in the center of the world, where all hearts beat: New York City. I mean, ahem -- the borough of Queens.

After riding the Hasidic bus line up here from Maryland with entirely too many materials (thanks mostly to my panic over whether or not I should bring my computer to New York; decision: sadly for my biceps, yes) I walked in the pouring rain through Midtown to the subway, which I am happy to report smells the same. There was plenty of pushing, shoving, and cursing to make me feel right at home. Glowing with the happiness that can only come from narrowly avoiding being defecated upon, I switched to the W at Times Square with my many bags, dripping wet, and then proceeded to the neighborhood of Abby, where I continued for fifteen minutes, non-heroically, in the rain, with the bags, until I finally arrived at la Casa dei Pellicani (that's House of Pelicans, friend), aka the home of Abby. Somewhat later thereupon, we consumed substances that prompted me to order Abby to prepare popped corn and then that lent her the brain wave of a viewing of Point Break, a miracle of modern fails in acting. How can Keanu Reeves not know how vacant his voice sounds when he invites Bodhi to "vaya con Dios"? I'd love to hear him say "borough"; I really would. Can someone make this happen? Can someone make Keanu Reeves say "borough"? Substances make this problem even more pressing.

We are about to embark to the opening day of the Morgan's medieval manuscripts exhibit, and I am literally about to pee my pants. Some habits, especially medieval ones, die hard.

and all I got were crabs

Today we went to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. It's not really clear why we did this. There we learned that you can receive a college education during which your room is inspected with a white glove for dust, sit only in hardbacked chairs, learn to fly planes like Tom Cruise did in Top Gun, and run copious miles each morning with the weight of the world on your back. In addition, you play thousands of sports, salute at people, and have a pleasant mien. The tour was maybe 75 minutes long, at the end of which I was so exhausted I could barely put one foot in front of the other. I guess that answers the question of whether I could pass medical clearance to be in the Naval Academy. Nevermind the whole pleasant mien thing.

I was tempted by the T-shirts that said I went to Maryland and all I got were crabs, but given my recent lack of luck with immune responses, I didn't want to jinx my so-far crabs-free existence. Instead, I ate a crab at a Crab Shack. That's right: Our ancestral trajectory led us from the foot of Mount Sinai directly to a crab shack in Grasonville, Maryland. L'chaim, all.

MYO Crohn's Disease

That's make your own. Or in this case, diagnose your own. In your high school science class.

Money quote: "'This has been the highlight of my highschool career, for sure. It's been amazing.'"

Read about it here and kick yourself for not having, uh, looked at slides of your own intestinal tissue so closely when you were a lad.

your big-MD correspondent

This is your psuedo-West Coast correspondent, reporting live from the Big MD.

1) Ativan? Or Xanax, or what have you? Shit does not work. When I boarded the plane to come here, I was seized by an anxiety additional to the one about sailing through the sky in a tin tube -- should I take the Xanax, or work on freelance for five hours? God in heaven, what. should. I. do. If I took the pill I imagined I'd be basically deceased, my head lolling listlessly about on what remained of my neck. If I didn't take it, I'd be terrified but I'd get my work done. There's no shortage of things to be anxious about if you really try, as you can see. Ultimately, I took the pill, which proceeded to do approximately nothing, and for five terrifying hours I copyedited a young adult book at 32,000 feet. Win-win. Thanks, modern medicine.

2) My old bedroom at my parents' house is now a guest room. Not like just a room where guests happen to stay, but like everything has been cleansed, Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! total clearance makeover. The bed -- a different bed, mind you -- is in a different place. There are paintings of tulips on the walls. The theme: pastel. However, in the closet I did espy my old edition of Remembrance of Things Past, which I famously failed to crack during all of Modernism in college and then was forced to write the in-class final essay about. This is the kind of situation in which you have to begin your essay, Uh, greetings! In a true testament to Creative Writing, I am impressed to report that I got an A on that final. I was just as surprised as you are now! Me just dumb writer. Me no good at think big thoughts.

3) My dog is too old and feeble to get up on the new guest-room, nee my room, bed, which is high. My dog and I have frequently been known to act alike -- including barfing out of anger, running willfully away down city streets after squirrels, and begging at the table -- and now is no exception. My report at the doctor's this week was surprisingly bad. All the things that are supposed to be down are up, and all the things that are supposed to be up are down. I get tired standing up for too long, like an old dog. This morning my dog waited patiently at the foot of my bed, where I was working on the computer, to come up.
"Come up!" I encouraged. She just looked at me like Please, fool.
I sang her a little AC/DC for morale. No.
Finally I lifted her up onto the bed, where she settled down pleasantly.
Juan walked in.
"No! Bis'l, off!" she said. (Theme: pastel. Dog: dirty.)
Bis'l looked from me to Juan, conflicted. I asked why she had to get off and was informed that she, the dog, was dirty, which she absolutely is. Docilely, I lifted her off the bed. Once Juan was out of sight, however, I lifted her back up again with a collarly jangle and placed her on some sweatshirt about Israel of my sister's. She fell immediately into dog sleep.
I tried to exchange a complicit look of strategery with Bis'l, but it turns out she was too old and feeble for that too.

It's not working, so this may be my last weeks of the Humira injections. I don't know what's going to come next, but rest assured I'll break from man-dog tradition and still exhange the complicit look of strategery with you.

will work for sprite, akon

Is it wrong that I seem to be unable to produce any writing without the uninterrupted aid of Pandora's Akon Radio station? It's really sort of like a game of "Red Light, Green Light." Stop Akon radio, hands immobile on keyboard. Start Akon radio, scenes fly forth. People sometimes complain that they can't listen to music with words while they're working, but since these words are about bottles, clubs, and hos -- concepts I've deeply internalized, in other words, being a pimp -- I don't have to listen very carefully.

Now that I have nowhere to show up except for the houses where I babysit and the post office, to send my freelance back, I'm resorting more and more to gimmicks to make myself do things. The radio. Sprite. I've been bribing myself with Sprite. Okay, if you write 2500 words today, you can have a Sprite, take a walk, and listen to some more Akon. What am I, a thirteen-year-old boy?

The Sprite has to come from points outward since I'm heading into Week 2 of not having a refrigerator. Turns out this is going to be Week 2 of 5 thereof, according to my sort of inappropriately blase landlord, who blames, among other entities, Home Depot, Best Buy, China, and The Economy for taking five weeks to replace my appliance. People are urging me to get the tenants union involved and try to get my rights "acknowledged," (tee hee! me having rights! hilarious) but I hate conflict. In the meantime, I'm eating a lot of bananas from the corner store, eating and then frequently being forced to vomit back up some ill-advised meals out (man, that Flagyl is some in-tense nauseatrix), and doing things like sticking halves of egg sandwiches from bodegas in my tote bag, where they make my computer smell strange. And, importantly, gearing up to blow this joint, and by this joint I mean San Francisco.

yeah, man.

I've waited for that a loooong time.

stories you might be told if you keep your hanukkiah out in june

The refrigerator repairman came today (diagnosis: need new refrigerator; let's see how the landlord handles this one) and we spent about half an hour in my kitchen talking while he did some time-based test on the corpse of my freezer. After swiftly concluding, without asking, that I was Jewish (although the last name, the out-of-season hanukkiah on the table, and the puhnam might have given it away) he told me he was Jewish too. So, did I want to hear an amazing Holocaust story while we waited?
...Truly, only I would call to get my refrigerator fixed and end up with the only dude in San Francisco who wants to tell Holocaust stories while we waited for the test to be done.
Here's what he told me:

One day, when our man was about nine years old in France, a priest came to the door. He called out to his mother that someone was there to see her. She emerged, stared for a minute or so at the priest, embraced him, and led him away to another room to talk. Our man wasn't interested at all, being nine, and ran off to play.

About ten years later a letter arrived for the mother. It was from the priest. She asked our man if he remembered the priest who had come to the door when he was a child, and he said yes. What about him? The mother explained that that priest was her cousin. Our man was confused -- his mother was Jewish. She explained the priest's story:

At the end of WWII, the Nazis caught wind of a large group of Jews hiding in a mountainside in a French border town. In the center of this town was a large wood-burning stove with a compartment underneath for storing logs for the fire. One of the Jewish women, anticipating the Nazis' arrival, hid her baby in the back of the log compartment, behind all the wood. The Nazis came to the village and killed everyone. At the top of the hill from this village, however, was a convent, and the next day the nuns came down to collect and bury the dead. That's when they heard someone crying from inside the log compartment of the wood-burning stove. They discovered the baby and took him back to their convent, where they raised him and he eventually grew to be a priest. But they did one other thing during their mission in the town: They erected a memorial with the names of those who had died. When the nuns told the priest the story of his childhood, he went down the mountain to study the memorial. He was determined to find some trace of his family. Through research, he found the mother of our man, and that day when our man was nine, he showed up at their door for the first time.

After that, he renounced the priesthood and embraced Judaism. He's married now, and a schoolteacher somewhere in Europe. And today, in San Francisco, his cousin tried to fix my refrigerator. Sometimes it's creepy how the world's stories make it small.

Girth + Crohn's: Your Burning Questions Answered

People with Crohn's Disease are supposed to be small. They are supposed to be skeletal, miniature, wasting away. This makes sense: We have an intestinal disease. If we don't shit out everything we eat, we vomit it up, and our ability to absorb nutrients isn't as good as other people's. It's no surprise, then, that for eighteen years I've been fielding the question, "How do you do it?"
What this question really means to ask is, "How can you have Crohn's Disease and still be so big?"

The answer is simple:

1) Genetics. I come from hearty stock, yo ho, yo ho. I challenge you to board the mighty L. family vessel on the high seas and find one matey in my immediate family who is wasting away, Crohn's or no Crohn's. (As it turns out, I'm the only one with Crohn's, so it's mostly "no Crohn's" you're going to be surveying here, except for my amazing dog (who sort of has Crohn's and was, in her heyday, one of the finest eaters in Maryland, dog division).)

2) I like cooking, and I like food. A lot. I guess a lot of people with Crohn's start to associate food with the disease, since they feel sick whenever they eat it. Not me. I love food. Sorry.

3) I'm terrified of wasting away. I know this seems ridiculous, since I just told you that I come from hearty yo-ho stock and that it would be difficult for me to do anything even remotely resembling wasting away. After not eating for three weeks this spring, I gained -- that's right, gained -- ten pounds. Even the doctors declared me a wonder of the modern world in this respect. More than that, I looked enormous. People were commenting on my robustness daily! How did I do it? Reserves, people. Reserves. If I'd been thin to begin with, we'd have had trouble here in River City. As luck would have it, since I'm terrified of seeing my bones through my skin (or even catching the faintest wind of the idea that I might have any bones under my layers of fat at all), there wasn't any trouble in the slightest -- except when the bed I was lying on threatened to crash neatly through all the levels of the hospital and straight through, like an anvil, to the hot magma core of the Earth.

An example: Tonight, after a few hours rolling around moronically on my bed sans painkillers and then vomiting up who-knew-what (I hadn't eaten in hours, so it seemed kind of random), I knew I still needed dinner. Why? Because it was time for dinner. Because I hadn't eaten in eight hours. Other Crohns would just go to bed, but not me. I found the dregs of some old noodles, maybe half a cup, and ate them plain over the sink. It was not enjoyable, but it seemed necessary. How am I supposed to function if I don't get any calories? I know it sounds ridiculous coming from one of the earth's largest inhabitants -- currently on track to oust the Blue Whale from its National Geographic primetime slot -- but I figure if you can't control any other thing about your health, you can control your nutrition, however dubious.

I hope this answers the question of how I maintain my girth and an almost eighteen-year undefeated Crohn's streak. I'll be happy to answer any more you may have.