Photo Credit – Carol Madigan    This year the streets of New Orleans on Mardi Gras day looked like scenes from an episode of Life Without People. While, personally, it would have been “the best Mardi Gras ever” to be able to walk the streets completely empty of Fat Tuesday drunks, I have mixed emotions […]

   There was the time I walked into a theater with Carol for a showing of The Book Club. A youngish woman (I’ve attained the age where they’re all more or less youngish) who passed me in the aisle said, “You’re like the third dude in here.” I didn’t know whether to feel special for […]

   It rained today in Southern California. It rarely rains here, but when it does, it usually manages to throw a monkey wrench in outdoor plans, especially for Carol’s family. Just in the short time we’ve been together, rain has disrupted a wedding and a birthday celebration. But covid has done worse, so rain this […]

   So here’s how someone who didn’t feel the Christmas spirit handled these pandemic holidays.    Carol popped up in bed at 7:30 Christmas Eve morning, and began whisking batter and heating grease for snowflake cookies. It didn’t go well. What should have been perfect, light, golden flaked confections actually peeled off the cooking iron […]

   2020 may go down as a year best forgotten. On the other hand, if it’s true we do tend to learn best from our own mistakes, then this year might be the one to take full stock of, as it’s a treasure trove of fubars, bad decisions and poor choices. As in your own […]

   I turned the corner during my morning jog, already lost in a spirited dialog with my chosen, invisible nemesis running partner. Across the street I noticed a cyclist gesturing with one hand and then the other, presumably to a nemesis partner of her own. There we were, the four of us out for our […]

I had an idea for a blog the other day. It arrived with the clarity and completeness that I’ve come to recognize as “serviceable.” That’s the midrange of the ideas that I get. There’s the ones that come with the blaze of divine inspiration and strike with the suddenness of an attack of sciatica. And […]

With this, I will slide into another of my hiatuses. Unlike the last one, which was fake (I merely shoveled in old, recycled material from decades earlier), this one is a real interruption, serving an actual professional purpose.

WhaI did not want a photoshoot. The fact that it was my idea is beside the point. That dang cabbage patch kid diet, or whatever it was called, was also my brilliant idea, but that doesn’t mean I had to like it, and I didn’t.

For those of you keeping tabs, this will be the last blog that refuses to talk about my diet experience. It’s not because it was a dismal failure. It wasn’t. It wasn’t a rousing success either. What it was was that if I’d kept on it for a very long time, it would eventually put me at the weight I desired.