present tension

Here I am, working again at Chelsea Piers, the only place where you can keep up with top 40 hits while eating sushi, wearing workout gear, monitoring your e-mail and generally producing the words and drawings that your career depends upon. It will be very hard for me when I have to work in an office again.

You forget about the real world here. Half the people are extraordinarily fit and good-looking, and the others are just, well, old. Or black. You forget about the epidemic of hormone- and corn-syrup-induced obesity that rages on in the outside world, beyond the piers and past the moat that surrounds Manhattan. But just yesterday I was sitting here and saw a FAT BOY. A little fat boy, about 11 or 12, the kind you see in shopping malls and friends’ houses (schoolmates, one hopes). He wore a voluminous t-shirt, shorts that came below the the knee, and a head that was nearly shaved. In other words, standard fat-kid wear. I used to think this look originated with fat black kids–gangsta rap and that–but now I realize that it didn’t; the first boys I ever saw like this were normal anglo-saxon types; no doubt little black kids took to the style because they are constitutionally more inclined to be obese. And when you’re an obese kid, an obese boy particularly, there aren’t very many kinds of clothes you can wear, let alone fit into.

I try to imagine this little porker dressed in the sartorial analog from, say, 1970, and what I get is a mental picture of very tight bluejeans worn with a leather belt and a yoked cowboy shirt. Or maybe some superhero t-shirt. If you saw someone dressed like that today, you assume it was a mental patient. Of course in 1970 if you saw a 200-pound 11-year-old with a shaved head…

The shaved head is the most mystifying part of the concoction. Is it a way of reinforcing gender identity or something? Years ago I had a coworker who was an eccentric computer programmer and mild transvestite, who in middle age decided to see if he could become a woman. By jiminy he did it–sort of–though the journey required a continual tripping over the obvious, such as finding out that his wife didn’t care for the idea, thought he’d gone crazy, and decided to sue him for every cent she could, as well as keeping him from having access to their two preteen sons. A bunch of us from the office made a journey out to this person’s condo one day to deliver a potted plant or something. The new woman was at home, recuperating from extensive facial surgery that enabled her to look a bit like Margaret Hamilton rather than, say, Murray Hamilton. She had her long curly hair arranged in two long cocker-spaniel ears that hid most of her face. She plied us with drinks and asked us to stay a while and meet her two sons, who were making a rare visit that evening. Nice looking boys, to judge from their pictures in the hall, neither fat nor thin. What turned up at six pm were two roly-poly youngsters with shaven heads.

“They look like they’re recovering from brain cancer,” one of us said. This was some years ago, as I say.

“Oh they just did that recently,” said the programmer. “It’s the new style.”

The rest of us looked at each other and mentally wondered if the New Style could possibly be related to Daddy’s New Life, but none of us were drunk enough to ask the kids directly.

I’m on an IND platform, West 50s, 6:40 am on July 4th. It being a long holiday weekend, most people have left the city, apart from assorted bohemians and the colored underclass. And everything is moving just a little…slow. I have to get to Penn Station by 7 and am beginning to panic that I won’t make it.

I play little mental games: if the train doesn’t come in two minutes, I’ll run upstairs, get some cash, hail a cab. Then another two minutes, and another two.

An old gypsy female gets off a train going in the opposite directions. She has an entourage of about 15 parcels and shopping bags, each one about big enough to hold a pair of shoes or an old towel. She slowly drags them out to the platform and stands there, wandering around a little, shoving them to and fro with her thong-clad feet. She walks around to the stairwell, reaches under her sack dress, adjusts her underclothing, stands with her feet apart, and pees right there. Then she moves down the platform a little bit, away from the puddle now dribbling down into the tracks, and squats a little, still fiddling with her underwear. Then she gingerly takes off her black diaper, or panties, or whatever. Is she going to throw them into the track trench? The rubbish bin? No, she rolls them up a little and deposits them in one of her little plastic bags.

Meanwhile, farther down the platform, a very large negro, or some other nonwhite, is taking his shirt off, and washing his face and hands with water gushing out of some spigot. Or maybe he’s pouring water on himself from a bottle. I can’t tell; he’s an eighth of a mile away from me. At some point he sees me standing there, watching for the train. He pulls down his pants and waves his lunchmeat at me. I can’t see anything clearly; he’s far away and in shadow. Obviously, though, Big Nig is hoping for a reaction. He keeps this up for a good five minutes.

A few more people enter the subway station. At long last the train arrives.

Something seen in the cafe at the Chelsea Piers gym: A guy with scraggly blond hair has his MacBook open, is looking at the IMDB site, where we see a picture of a scraggly-haired personage named Martin Ewen. I can’t resist the temptation to creep around and see if this the same guy. Hmm–could be!

Martin looks very troubled. Some information is misstated or missing in the IMDB listing. He’s now looking at his e-mail. A half-dozen messages from IMDB support. They haven’t updated his listing yet.

Isn’t it bad luck to keep looking yourself up on IMDB? I know it is for Google.

….here at PT, not because everyone else does but because the idiom we think in—I think in, ain’t no we here—is just too rare and idiosyncratic to sustain a conversation. Like 18th-century Cornish.

But politics is like baseball (write that down! remember I said it!). You can only talk so long before inevitably referring to it (or as non-native English speakers say nowadays, “referencing it").

So here I am, and I must say I am flabbergasted by the suicidal delusions of the pro-Obama Democrats and their media chatterboxes. Obama, the freshman Senator, seems to have hooked the Democrat nomination, but in a string of most odd circumstances. He trounced the opposition in states where there were very few white Democrats (or as in the case of Wyoming, very few Democrats, period). Where a state had a substantial white Democrat population, he lost by a wide margin.

The chatterboxes tried to explain this away by saying he had a problem with “the white working class,” neatly skipping over the bold fact that most Americans are white, and most are working-class. Obama’s “win” is the flimsiest nomination in modern history. It’s based almost entirely on race: blacks turned out to vote someone who looked like one of their own. This works well in the South Carolina primary, but it’s a fatal liability in a national election. Because if 20 million votes go to him simply on account of race, it’s a fair bet that at least as many will go against him on the same score. In November, it doesn’t matter if Obama captures every black vote in South Carolina: the state still goes to the Republicans. And therein lies the basis of John McCain’s nice-guy, politically-correct, sweet-talk strategy. He doesn’t have to do a damn thing except stand up and show that he has a pulse. He will smile and wave and wish the Democrats well as they gaily proceed to hang themselves.

Do you care?

I got laid off a few months ago, and in the fullness of time came around to looking for a job. There are several stages of looking for a job:

1) I will have to start looking very seriously, next week, or when I get back from vacation.
2) I am finding all sorts of things on craigslist and those awful online job banks…it is going to be hard to pick and choose.
3) I am starting to get a little scared.
4) I’ll take anything.

I have now arrived at 3), and am starting to feign interest in exciting opportunities I wouldn’t have touched with a barge pole. A headhunter at an agency found my resume online and persuaded me to apply for a job with a hedge fund. As a preliminary I had to go down and meet him at his office yesterday. Not an interview, exactly, but a pre-interview, so he could at least tell his clients he’d met me in person.

I got dressed up for the first time in weeks, trying to strike an exact midpoint between corporate-tailored and business-casual. What a lot of effort. I carefully packed up three copies of my resume, and timed my arrival to be exactly two minutes early. I memorized the address and brought a printout of the e-mail just in case.

The office building was few blocks south of Grand Central. “Oh gawd,” I thought when I saw the address, “Grand Central Hell! Where all those nasty temp agencies are, or used to be.” I was thinking of grimy warrens I’d stumbled into years ago, boiler rooms where hard-bitten girls from Queens sat in plywood cubicles and flogged $8/hr nigger receptionists to banks and ad agencies.

But this was going to be different. An executive headhunting firm, a boutiquey place with fresh flowers on the credenza and real milk with the coffee. And the coffee would be good, too…

Surprise! Grand Central Hell still lives. This place was bigger, grimier, noisier than anything I remembered. I was the only white person in the room. The girl at the reception area, a member of one of the Spanish-speaking mulatto tribes, directed me to a small room, labeled “Testing Room #1″. Tiny old desks with four foul, antiquated yellowish PCs. This is where I was to make my electronic application for employment. Gingerly I tapped my name and vitals into the well-worn keyboard. I got to a field marked “desired salary” and found it would not accept more than two digits. (Is that eighty dollars a week or eighty dollars a year?)

When this was over I went back to reception where another colored girl handed me a thick sheaf of application forms. My CIA application was bigger, but just barely. Every employer you ever had, every school you ever went to, authorization to phone everyone up and check on your credentials. I wrote down my name, flipped through the flyspecked xerographic pages, and took the thing back to reception. A joke’s a joke, but this was too much.

All around, obese negroes and mulattoes lolled around, lounged on sofas, and watched the wide-screen television on the wall.

“You know,” I said, testily but with a good-natured smile, “I think I may have come to the wrong place. This does not look like an executive search firm.”

“No, it’s an employment agency,” came the reply.

At long last my contact arrived, a normal-looking young fellow in rolled-up shirtsleeves, harried and sweaty, apologizing for being late. (Did I mention it was a warm day and the air-conditioning wasn’t on?)

We had a good meeting. As we went into the conference room, I couldn’t resist making a little gibe: “So…this agency places a lot of hedge-fund managers, does it?”

Well I do. Have most of my life. Of course I haven’t read it much since childhood (my father was always fervently contemplating the purchase of something he never ended up purchasing, but he did keep sending his subscription checks to CR). But I see bits of it sporadically, in Xeroxed PR packs and online links, and from what I can tell it hasn’t changed much. Its main purpose is still to inform you that whatever you bought is wrong, and the better product is something that is ugly and inaccessible.

I was reminded of this technique today when I stumbled across a recent NYTimes article in which CR rated commercial gyms and health clubs, and informed its subscribers that “local” gyms generally satisfied their customers better than national chains.

This is a mystifying claim for a number of interrelated reasons. First, there really aren’t that many national chains. Offhand I could think of only two that had any presence in New York City (Gold’s Gym and Bally’s), and both of them are rather marginal in terms of local membership. Talk about major health-club facilities in New York, and you think of New York Sports Club (regional; branches in DC and Boston), Equinox (mostly New York City and California), Crunch (mainly New York), the New York Health and Racquet Club (Manhattan), and and a handful of high-end stand-alone places such as Asphalt Green and Chelsea Piers. Commercial gyms by their nature are space- and labor-intensive. High-quality national chains would work only if they competed on quality and charged top-dollar, which would necessarily limit the number of installations (since there aren’t that many devoted gym rats in the first place). Gym users tend to be specialists and gourmets, not susceptible to a McDonalds model of high-volume, limited services, and low price. But that’s the only way a national chain can compete.

So, to sum up the long story: there are few national chains. And the ones that are there generally charge minimal fees, give minimal service, and their customers aren’t terrifically happy. A logical outcome, but you won’t see any of this spelled out in the Consumer Reports survey.

One national chain that got good ratings from CR was a place called Life Time Fitness. Have you ever heard of Life Time Fitness? I certainly hadn’t. I now check out their website and find that they are basically a Midwest and Texas operation, with no outlets at all in the Northeast or the West Coast. (Goodness, how relevant to the readership of the New York Times!)

This is classic Consumer Reports, and puts me in mind of all those irritating CR articles I read in my childhood. The most nutritious chicken pot pies are those sold by a small grocery-store chain in Pipsewah, Ohio. The Kodak Instamatic camera system is inefficient and overpackaged (even though you can buy the film anywhere); your money would be better spent on the Rapid instant-load camera (even though you’ll never find its funny film cartridges at your local Rexall). That highly advertised dandruff shampoo from Proctor & Gamble is a waste of money: shampoo is mostly just detergent, you know–so you’d do much better just to buy the twenty-nine-cent Brand X gunk on sale at this supermarket we visited in Des Moines.

That’s the important thing. That’s what all primitive people really want to know about you.

They get to the point where they’ve figured out that you’re either male or female (even though they they can’t see either a penis gourd or pendulous dugs), and they know your approximate age (somewhere between adolescence and total decrepitude). Now they’re happily puffing away on your Philip Morris Commanders (king-size, unfiltered, good for jungle bugs) and they’re ready to move into the small-talk stage of your acquaintanceship.

And here it is. “Hey you! You got chillun? How many chillun?”

Go ahead and tell them. Anything you like. One kid, six kids, sixteen kids. It’s not like the little savages are going to write down your children’s birthdays so they can send them something nice (just imagine!). No, they’re just being innocently nosy. It’s something they ask of all strangers, and no one’s ever smacked them down for this rudeness so they keep on asking.

Sometimes the questions get detailed—"You have a boy? How old? Is he warrior? You have girl—how much you sell her for?” It is always best to be prepared for this. Along with the Philip Morris Commanders in the left side pocket of your photo-vest, bring a fact sheet about your kids. Maybe even some fuzzy snapshots.

My own prepared script goes basically like this. “Oh yes I have four children. Two girls, two boys. Between five and fifteen. Evenly spaced. Their names are Mary, Joan, John, and Robert. They live with their other parent, as I am usually away on business. The boys play baseball [a game formerly very popular in America] and the girls do ballet [this is a kind of theater-dance some people do in my country]. Who is oldest? Oh, that would be John. Then Mary. Then…”

Even a savage has limited attention for this sort of thing, and by this point my new friend is probably waving and nodding and inviting me into his hut to look at the shrunken heads.

Monday night I was flying to JFK from Heathrow and exhausted my reading material before we passed Newfoundland. I found Caddyshack listed on the in-flight movie menu, but everytime I looked for it on the assigned channel I got a mid-80s Molly Ringwald turkey instead. And I’d already seen the Narnia movie and the documentary about the German submarine. So I idly scrolled through the channels and came to rest at I Love Lucy.
It was an old episode. No, I mean really old, one of the early ones from the first (1951-52) season…Lucy and Ricky (and Fred and Ethel) as the broadest of broad comic characters, before they got backstory and nuance and visited Hollywood and Europe.
In fact, it was THE classic episode, the first one that pops into your mind, the one where the men and women “switch jobs.” They don’t literally switch jobs (Ricky was the only character who had real employment anyway), rather they switch breadwinner-homemaker roles. Ricky and Fred cook in the kitchen while Lucy and Ethel get assembly-line jobs in a candy factory. I’d seen this a million times–well, a dozen–but this time was utterly fascinated by all the details and subtexts and social propaganda.
1. The appliances in the Ricardos’ kitchen are bright and obtrusive. They aren’t just mute background furniture (like the succession of Macintosh computers you see in Jerry Seinfeld’s place). There’s a matched washer-dryer pair, and neither looks ever to have been used. There’s the distinct air of a TV commercial for Maytag or RCA Whirlpool. Message: “If your kitchen doesn’t look like this, well for heaven’s sake make it so. You can buy them now, you know. War production’s been over for six or seven years.”
2. Elsewhere there’s a real postwar look to the whole thing. Everybody’s fifteen or twenty pounds overweight, and they’re all over-upholstered. Wide lapels, big shoulders and skirts. Showing off one’s bounty, you know. Now that the war’s over we can do that.
3. The effects of war on social roles are much in evidence. A man wears a suit and brings home the bacon, a woman wears frilly clothes and hangs out at home. Anything else is eccentric and laughable.
4. Women getting jobs means putting on waitress uniforms (like Mildred Pierce) and working on an assembly line (like Rosie the Riveter). Roz Russell career girls? Never heard of ‘em. If Ethel and Lucy got decent jobs, that would undercut the premise of the humor, which is that women in the workplace are pitiable fish out of water.

Rumbling-bumbling in the back of my brain, some tags of poesy and foggy images leap up and nag at me every so often.

I was about seven years old when I came across a short poem about a girl who was worried about having a dirty frock. The accompanying illustration, vaguely Tenniel-ish, showed a rather mature young lady (about 14, I might have thought) in Alice band and frilly 19th-century dress. She was looking down at the folds of her frock with a mildly perturbed expression.
I scarcely read the poem, but the last line jumped up and grabbed me: “Nor on my Pinafore.”

Pinafore! How I hated this aspect of children’s anthologies: the preciousness of so many of their selections, their cultish obsession with mid-Victoriana! I had the vague but distinct sense that such pieces reflected the taste of perverse old people who didn’t really like children at all: old maids with cats and tea cosies, strange men who dreamt about petticoats.

This, I fumed inwardly, is what is wrong with putting adults in charge of children’s literature!

I should note I was very down on Victoriana and pinafores anyway, having recently seen bits of H.M.S. Pinafore on the tube and finding it disgusting.

Anyway, here we are, thirty-odd or maybe forty years later, and the memory of the irritating poem and illustration comes back to me. I go to Google and find that the offending lines were an Edward Lear nonsense verse, called “Spots of Greece":

Papa once went to Greece,
And there I understand
He saw no end of lovely spots
About that lovely land.
He talks about these spots of Greece
To both Mama and me
Yet spots of Greece upon my dress
They can’t abear to see!
I cannot make it out at all–
If ever on my Frock
They see the smallest Spot of Greece
It gives them quite a shock!
Henceforth, therefore–to please them both
These spots of Greece no more
Shall be upon my frock at all–
Nor on my Pinafore.

Haw-haw! A real knee-slapper, eh? I probably noticed that it was Edward Lear, but this wouldn’t have impressed me awfully. So far as I was concerned he was a drooling quaintsy, self-satisfied, with a low-wattage sense of humor.

Lear’s stuff was all over those treasuries and anthologies of “children’s literature,” and constituted fully one-fourth of the contents of my edition of Ditties for the Nursery (so delightfully contrived that they may be either sung or said, by nurse or baby).

Today the Associated Press posted this photograph, without explanatory comment, on its website. If it truly is a photo of President Bush as he looked (say) thirty years ago, then his years of drink and drugs took much more of a toll than anyone has hitherto suspected.

I really did not intend this blog to be a public accounting of my road races and negative splits, it’s just that most of my idle thoughts—you might say chewing-gum ruminations or CGRs—are about running. Not long ago most of my CGRs were about all my personal failures and deficiencies, except in the early morning, when I raged and muttered about other people’s. Since I can’t do anything about my own failures and deficiencies, let alone other people’s, I am experiencing far less frustration these days as I go about my woolgathering.
Moreover, the running thing is as good a peephole as any other when you seek to make cultural criticism. The stuff you notice! The stuff you discover!
Take a good look at the accompanying image for the “Crazylegs Marathon” in 1972, which I just found on the NYRR website. In sheer repellent ugliness, this poster or flyer surpasses anything I’ve seen from that era. Note the “Deco"-style Letraset presstype used for the arching logotype—heavy influence from theatrical posters for “Dames at Sea,” “No, No, Nanette!” and “Follies.”
But that’s relatively minor, compared to the rich sociological ore to be dug up here. Look at those photos! Now this is 1972, remember, the high-tide mark of feminism. Ms. magazine had just been launched ("Jane O’Reilly on the Housewife’s Moment of Truth"). But there was no visual vocabulary for portraying a women-only road race. No toned bodies here, no high-fashion workout gear. My impression from the photos is that this event is some kind of a fun-run for flabby gals in Gussie Moran panties.
We are going back here to a forgotten mindset: an era before people commonly spoke of “jogging” (c. 1977) or “jogbras” (c. 1979), and when any run longer than a dash around the block might be called a marathon. Or maybe it’s not really a forgotten mindset at all, just a rather weirdly unexamined one. I know so many people, age 40 on up, who still look upon distance running, especially distance running by women, as a marginal and eccentric activity. The world’s moved on but the calendar in their heads is still dated 1972.
And what was the “Crazylegs Marathon"? Well it wasn’t a marathon, it was a 6-mile run, sponsored by Johnson’s Wax, which was launching a new leg-shave cream for women called Crazylegs. Originally they wanted to sponsor a marathon, then discovered there were no female marathoners—well, almost none. Crazylegs the shave cream vanished without a trace, thanks to a trademark-infringement suit. But the race itself survived, evolving into an annual 10k that reappeared every June, often with a new name and sponsor.
When I first became aware of it in the early 80s, it was called the “L’Eggs Mini Marathon” and all its branding was in hot pink. Not that big a leap, really, from leg-shave-gel to pantyhose. This in an era when the stereotypical workout wear for gym-bound gals was a stretchy striped leotard and leg-warmers.
Now it’s called the “Circle of Friends NY Mini 10K,” which if you ask me is even more confusing than “Crazylegs Marathon.” It’s not a mini-10k at all, and all Circle of Friends means to me is a bad Minnie Driver movie.
However, its ads and promotional materials are beautiful.
For more on this fascinating artefact, see this link:
http://www.mini10k.org/history.php#

Last Labor Day weekend I was up at five in the morning and noticed that some oddballs—advertising boffins, I supposed—were blocking off the street outside and setting up a series of double beds in the middle of Sixth Avenue and photographing them from a high rolling platform. Just now I follow a link to The Daily Telegraph’s site and find an animated GIF ad for British Airways that shows the image I’ve long been awaiting. I notice they’ve taken their six or so beds and Photoshopped them into a longer parade.

(Correction, please. It was not merely Photoshop. They painstakingly moved all six of the beds down the avenue and reshot them in position. Why the hell would you do that, when the cityscape light was changing every few minutes anyway, so that none of the shadows would exactly match and you’d have to retouch each tier of beds anyway? The photo retoucher has his reasons. See here for his description.)

A vile and mean-streaky harridan whom we used to call the Sausage Lady has published a “memoir” (quotations here suggesting a high degree of self-aggrandizing fictionalization) that tells how she was abused and victimized when she was a fat ugly little whelp. She keeps popping up in my occasional political cartoons, including this throwaway from 2003. Oh, yes—she’s the one with the bag of mail.

Postscript, May 2008. Not long after writing the above, I learned that the Sausage Lady was dead. Yes, even as her Fat Girl made her a bestselling author in her 60s, she was wasting away with many different forms of cancer (including pineapple cancer, which Harold liked best). Well lots of us get cancer from time to time, so there’s no gloating here. However, there was a time when I called upon the mischevious sprites of the world to fill her with tumors, and this was the first thing I thought of when I heard she was dead. This was about 15 years ago. Sausage Lady and some friends of hers were waging a campaign of horrific pranks at my expense. Everything from harassing phone calls to anonymous smears to physical threats. I hadn’t done anything against them, other than occasionally complain or fight back (feebly), though at long last I did engage an attorney to send threatening folderol to Sausage Lady’s employer. More decisive action was called for, I felt. So I built a Devil Doll of the Sausage Lady, shaped it out of Sculpey and froze it upside down in the fridge. Then I tied a miniature noose about its neck and hung it from the arched entrance to my kitchen. Finally I took it out into the alley and smashed it on the cobblestones. I put pieces into an envelope and addressed it to Sausage Lady, along with an anonymous note saying how sorry we all were to hear she was dying of colonic cancer.

So farewell then, George Kennan. Seems to me I’ve been hearing your obituary in my dreams for about ten days. How delightful to read in the Times that you were a gloomy, complicated and morose person, who despaired of conveying fine nuance in a world of political hackery. Whenever I thought of a foreign-service career for myself, you were always there in my mind as one of the Big Names. Somebody who’d hung around for decades—from the first delegation to the Soviet Hell in the early thirties, to an active career as an elder sage that ended only with his death at 101. I suppose now I shall have to think seriously about that graduate education in global whatsit and foreign relations. The baton passes.

The NYRR Snowflake 4-mile run, split up into men’s and women’s races, was this morning. I treated it casually. It didn’t bother me when everybody was passing me for the last mile and a half. This included a tall girl in an ungainly straw sombrero decorated with small toothpick models of The Gates. ‘Great hat!’ I heard when she was a few paces behind, and ‘great hat!’ again when she was twenty paces ahead. This sort of attention would turn my stomach. Maybe if you ask for attention you can deal with it. All I know is it distresses me mightily when goofballs stand by the side of the road, give the thumbs-up sign, and bellow, ‘All right! Looking good!’
After all that, my pace was 8:01 or a net of 32:07.
In other words, if I’d just goosed it a bit for the last quarter-mile, I could have broken the 8-minute barrier again, with room to spare.

To lunch with KP and Sylvia at Seppi’s. Seppi’s now offers their famous Alsatian tarte flambée rolled up with meat or fish, served with fries and soup and salad and bacon. I did not see the bacon, but I was very full. Sylvia had a regular tarte flambée, followed by a hot chocolate torte. I snapped a picture of her with my miniature Air France digital. We talked a bit of blogs. ‘Oh Sylvia,’ said I,’you ought to have a blog.’ She may be interested. A schoolmate was wearing a cap that said Blogger, and didn’t know what it was.

Then to The Container Store with Moki. Moki is in a refurbishing mood, and dreams of redoing the apartment with wire shelves and brackets. ‘No standards!’ I tell him. I’ve had lots more experience with wiry things and molly bolts than he has. Cleverly organized closets look really swell in the store, but they don’t work unless they’re made of solid materials. Moki plans to buy me a tall wiry mesh-drawer unit to keep my clothes in. That is a Margot classic. I’ve kept my clothes in things like that most of my life. Someday someone will give me a Biedermeier chest.

Back home I do a quick Google for Paris Marathon attendees and find Meg Hourihan. She’s not only doing the Paris, she’ll be running with me in the Brooklyn Half-Marathon on March 19th. I dropped her a note. I’d come across her site before. She is, coicidentally enough, the creator of Blogger, and quite famous in that little world. The New Yorker did a story on her a few years ago. If she writes back I’ll have a new friend in Paris for a few days, though I can’t imagine what we’d talk about.