Did You Guys See That Year Go By?

A year ago I left the world's oldest international auction house for the last time and embarked on a new job. Not sure if I'm calculating this correctly, but I think I've saved 25 days' worth of commuting time. Which would explain why my kids look so much older; I've jumped ahead a month!


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Freeing up hard drive space

This weekend, five years after first buying a house, I went to Long Island to remove stuff from my old bedroom. In addition to the boxes of D&D materials, comic books, and letters with which I could not part, there were many items whose only value lay in their status as visual reminders of themselves. If that makes sense. So I took pictures of some of them, then set them free.

Then I posted the pictures on Flickr, natch.




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If anyone's looking for me, I'll be doing yoga in my gravity boots

(Important backstory: The author has been six feet and a half inch tall since he was eighteen years old.)

I've peaked.

Alarmed that I hadn't gone to the doctor in three years or so, I made an appointment with a new one. I got on the scale and she slapped the metal ruler onto my head.

"Five-eleven and a quarter," she told me.

"Wha?" I said. "Surely you mean six feet and a half an inch."

"Stand up as tall and as straight as you can," she said. I did. "Ah, yes, right, you're not five-eleven and a quarter. You're five-eleven and a half."

The doctor tells me that as we AGE, our discs "lose their moisture." Oh, please. That's right out of a Gilbert Gottfried bit he used to do about drying out a pet turtle.

She didn't understand. I had gone from Lumberjack to Regular, from CEO-height to grunt, from Heroic Warrior to Hobbit. Five-foot-wha!? ME? There had to be some other explanation besides the loss of a little disc-water. Finally, I made her give it to me straight. Like most parents, I'm shrinking Because Of The Children.


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The Great Reveal

It seems very long ago—a long, long time ago—that I wrote of the Big Concealment, and now we've come again to the Great Reveal. When the bones of the land are laid bare, and the first snowfalls limn (come ON, you've got to love "limn") earth's contours. You can see your neighbor's house and the smoke from his chimney, but it doesn't make you want to move, à la Daniel Boone...no, it makes you want to split wood and twist newspaper and make a fire your own self, settle in with a book.

The fog lifts from the highlands in the morning and as it does you can see through the trees at the edge of the road, across the river, to the rocks on the hills on the far bank etched in snow.

In the afternoon, of course, it's all hid, because the time's all screwy. And also the windows at the coffee shop down the street steam up. On Fridays there's live music there and open mic nights and poetry and steamed milk, and all that humanity clumping up turns the thing into a single soft white lightbulb, electric and steamy as you drive past, home.


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Jiggety Jig

My earliest semi-adult trips away from home without my folks were two-night overnight camping trips in scouts. I have very specific memories of riding back into town in some other kid's dad's car and seeing the movie theater and the Amoco station and wondering how they could possibly still look the same, after I'd been away.

Driving back into that same town after a couple of months away this past weekend, it's flipped: I feel exactly the same, and the Amoco station is a KFC and the theater is a row of doctors' and accountants' offices. And I stick around for a couple of days, then leave town, and see that the bookstore is a dance studio and the Gap is a toy store. How does a farm become a Gap and then become a toy store all within my own memory?

I'd like to report that driving back into THIS town after the weekend away I couldn't believe everything had remained the same, except that while we were gone someone opened a sushi place and they hung a help wanted sign on the new burger joint and all the rest of the leaves fell and the whole place is covered in yellow maple and rainwater, and sometimes the new town, more than a year old, still doesn't quite feel like home.


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"Time passes through our eyes this morning."

It's the first first day of school since Mike Levine passed away; around here, his column on that subject came out as regularly as the buses, button-down shirts, and hastily spit-cleaned faces. It's as perfect a piece of work as was ever written.

Our son starts kindergarten tomorrow; while you can allow in nostalgia and attach significance to every event—or to none at all—a day like this reminds you that nothing is yours to keep.


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The Meeting I Made

Truly friends, have things changed. Among the many ills brought about by commuting is the fragmentation of communities that disproportionately depend on long commutes for their economy. Where I live, where the average commute runs someplace in the 90-minute range (which usually means New York City), there's really no way that anyone wants to come home after such a slog and figure out how to attend the library board meeting, the school night, the church concert, etc. As County Planning Commissioner David Church put it:

"People just can't make the commitment," says Church, who notes that many towns — and his department — schedule meetings later and later, hoping for better attendance. All that time commuting is a big reason why volunteer fire departments and ambulance corps from Blooming Grove to Bloomingburg are hurting for members. "Communities lack the connectedness. It's less of a democracy."

That was my lot for the last four years. Last month, I changed jobs, and changed commutes....

And this evening, at a very civilized 7:30, my wife and I sat down in the Hamptonburgh Town Hall to hear the Orange County Water Authority's presentation on the regional impacts of climate change. The keynote speaker was Dr. Patrick Kinney of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, who summarized a recent report on climate change projections for the northeast. The host was Simon Gruber, head of the Water Authority and on every local green's rolodex. And I had the pleasure of saying hello to Mr. Church, who continually advocates for smart development in the county.

It was precisely the meeting I wanted to attend, to feel like part of the space up here, to listen to people who knew something about the air I breathe and the water I drink and who understand how to keep those things working properly. But it was time that allowed it.


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Agricultural Education

It seems so much longer ago than May that I lamented not being able to get a skilled person in to turn our strangely unadorned staircase into a gentle bumpitty slide made of safety and pillows. And yet. Here we are a mere three monthsish later, and spindles now stand proudly alongside the formerly open staircase. The little one, a cruiser now, will soon find herself blocked by a gate, actually anchored to actual wood and wood by-products, which will open and shut smoothly to the mute request of an adult hand.

It's about pace, I think. Our lawn has been mowed these last few weeks, by a professional. Months ago it seemed as though it simply wouldn't ever happen again — that I might have to go out and buy a lawn mower (again) and do it (again) myself. Shudder. An engineer came a couple of weeks ago and recommended some simple fixes the town could undertake that might help our drainage problems. The dining room seems to have painted itself, against all odds. These things just...happened.

Humans plant seeds, and then we wait. But part of our brains — scientists call it the renuflexum diaptor — doesn't understand the concept of pacing. In this part of the brain, the seed is already corn on the cob and goddammit the renuflexum diaptor wants its corn NOWYOUHEARMENOW. But really, three months? Nothing. It's the interval between the T and the H in nothing.

Sometimes we don't even know we've planted the seed. We just have a vague want, a whiny wish, a momentary whim. And unconsciously, our will bends that way. We enact some tiny change here, make a single phone call there, do a Google search about that thing we wondered about that one time. We write a little list in our special Notebook of Ideas. "Someday/Maybe," David Allen calls this list. We often don't know anything is even growing, until one day our cabinets are painted, or we're in a farmhouse in France, or getting published in the LA Times, or having a kid, or scheduling a book signing, or reporting to a new job.

Check your soil. What are you watering?






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The Hours

"We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems."

Apparently Lee Iacocca said that. I vaguely remember Lee Iacocca as some kind of 1980s presence, an avuncular but untrustworthy corporate magnate, often confused in my pre-adolescent mind with John DeLorean. In any case, Lee had long been off my mind until he was brought back via Weight Watchers, when my leader recited the quote above. Each meeting has an "inspirational close," you see, and this one came early in my weight loss. Not very long afterwards, we moved upstate and I began commuting to my job in Manhattan.

Throughout the four years that I commuted via bus and train, two hours at a shot, toting a laptop, I tried to apply Lee's wisdom to that particular problem. Not just Lee's. Anyone's wisdom who would listen. My Twitter bio explains it: "I talk about commuting almost as much as I talk about not commuting." My cell phone was always handy to call a friend and complain. When the bus was too crowded to call, I'd whip open the laptop and write about it. And write letters to friends. And write personal essays. Do a little work. Look through old pictures. Listen to music. Outline novels. Begin humor books. Read. Nod off. Always in search of that elusive "opportunity" presented by an hour and a half trapped in a metal canister moving painfully slowly along New York's motorways or rails. What, oh what, was the hidden treasure inside this soul-sucking disguise?

With my new, shorter commute, I have noticed something: it's hard to write when you have so much more time. Time to sleep, at home, in your bed. Time to play with the kids. Time to help with the chores. Time to go to sleep, at a reasonable time, at home, in your bed.

This time, at least, I'm in no doubt as to my opportunities. They're not very well disguised.


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A Different Take

The new commute takes me (by car) over the river on the Bear Mountain Bridge, then into the wild roads of northern Westchester. It's interesting; there are ways to go that don't involve big highways and multilane clogs. This morning, with a little extra time, I pulled into a scenic overlook not far from the bridge and wondered if my former train was passing below. There were signs of eagles.



See? Signs, of eagles.

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The Transitioneer, Issue Four: Payoffs

Lest you think The Transitioneer is a litany of complaints and a record of Fears of Change, try this on:

• Two hours less commuting per day.
• Higher pay.
• Goodbye, subways. Goodbye. Goodbye.

I can just sit around for two extra hours a day spending money.* Who hasn’t dreamed of having that kind of time?

Also on the plus side? I won’t have to ride with the guy assembling his paintball gun in the seat across the aisle.**




*The author is joking.
**The author is, alas, not joking.


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EX-urbitude

I’ll never forget the day I parachuted into the walled island of Manhattan on assignment – very much against my will – to rescue the President, whose plane had crashed but whose crash-proof pod had landed intact. The authorities were getting strong signal from his personal transponder, but to stage a recovery op they needed someone who could navigate the city’s complex criminal hierarchy and treacherous back alleys. That’s where I came in.

It’s twelve years later. While I never did find that darned president, I did get a series of comfortable temp jobs and had some extremely limited, tiny success writing pieces for the “Internet,” which at the time was a source of limitless money that ran on a crank and pulley system from someplace on the west coast. I had friends who worked there. Later, after getting in good with the thugs who ran the island (from their heatproof dome in the volcano located under Grand Central Terminal), I was given a temp job at a well-known company in the recycling industry, where I quickly became a permanent employee and rose to some prominence as the one least likely to quit. Failed again, I suppose.

Having some years ago moved to the outlying farming districts (principle crops: onions, McMansions, tree stumps), but bound by honor and paycheck to make a daily pilgrimage to the city (especially daunting because it meant being fitted for a new customized high-velocity parachute harness and dropped from 6,000 feet every morning, then digging through the base of the wall with a spoon and swimming through the nematode-enthickened waters of the Harlem River every afternoon around 5:30 to make the mainland to get home in time for dinner), I sought in vain some way out of my predicament. Rescue came this year, in the form of a squad of revolutionaries from Westchester who rappelled in armed with an excellent benefits package and a job description. I accepted their gracious offer, but, of course, was apprehended digging through the wall.

Which is why you find me live-blogging from a small platform set over a pool of lava in the catacombs below 42nd and Lex, tied to a rather comely woman who attempted to help me escape (to my wife: I’ve never met her before, I have no idea who she is and besides, I think she’s going to betray me), with only my trusty laptop, oh, and Blackberry and cell phone — uh, and my PDA, thumb drive, VPN token and headphones — to help me get out alive.

The barbarian overlords of this granite and steel enclave shouldn’t have brought me here, of course, so close to the heart of their base, because naturally once I’ve used Google’s new UnderStreetView™ to research the best way out of here, I’ll be passing by the vault containing the bagel and pizza recipes that are the source of their stranglehold on power (it’s not “the water,” people). Easily overpowering the overly-complacent guards, I’ll take those with me, thank you very much, and be on my way, synchronizing my departure perfectly with the eruption of said volcano and the destruction of the entire complex. Which will work out nicely, because it’s June and everyone will want to be in the Hamptons anyway and they’ll get everything cleaned up by Labor Day.

In other words, it’s my last day here. Thanks for the adventure, New York. See you soon.



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The Transitioneer, Issue Three: Scenic Splendour

Perhaps I’ve mentioned once or twice that I currently commute by train along the Hudson River and how very nice that looks. In the winter, eagles and ice. In the summer, trees and…uhh, water. Big skies. Wide views. Great leaping splashes of mighty fish (truly). Storm King Mountain in all its majesty. Old, haunted castles. The sudden turn at Spuyten Duyvil and entry into the brick, concrete and steel of the Bronx, with bridges.

And next week? Okay, winding country roads and a beautiful bridge in the highlands over the river, fair enough, but after that it’s the flat black ribbon and a sea of cars, I fear. In the winter, ice — but dangerous fighting ice. And if I glance at an eagle, off the road I will careen. I’m not made for careening.

Maybe I’ll just tape some pictures of Yellowstone to the windshield to soothe me as I drive.


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The Transitioneer, Issue Two: The Automotive Industry

This is really simple. The automotive portion of my commute is changing from a five-minute jaunt to the whole one-hour monkey. So: 1) $1k to replace the a/c on my $2500 eBay car? Or 2) a) Mini Cooper or b) Toyota Prius or c) Honda Civic? Oh, also, what is this – how you say – radio I hear about? And the book that is on the tape?


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The Transitioneer, Issue One: The Service Economy

Introducing The Transitioneer, an occasional series on Exurbitude celebrating the changes accruing to the author’s forthcoming new job and commute, elements of which have been explained previously.

There’s not that much support infrastructure in place for changing your commute. Presently, my dentist, doctor, emergency tailor, barber, massage therapists, podiatrist, and Weight Watchers meeting — not to mention prime breakfast and lunch spots – are all identified and located relatively close to work. I’ll have to get a new one of each of them (although I seem to have been cured by my former podiatrist, so I might be okay on that front, and massages were covered by the company, so they’re probably a thing of the past).

Isn’t there a service that can do that for me? When you move to a new town, you often get a ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ packet with a lot of ads and info. I want that. Plus I want someone to circle the best ones. And should I even be getting these services near my new job, or near my home?

Someone send me the URL.


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