Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Thirty-five years old today. 7/8ths of 40.

Not the best or worst year, 34. A transition year, an inward-facing year. A year that was about [Wife] and I finding a rhythm, which we found, and about starting projects without worrying about how they might end. I wrote and read in public a short story, checked all of my work into version control, finished the screenplay (well--it is in a sort of purgatory, but my burden is basically lifted); learned a pile of new web technologies that will be extraordinarily useful to me in the coming decade, launched some new products at work, changed my job description to involve less daily panic. And of course this, the website you hold in your hands.

Now comes the new year, the year of the oatmeal-and-mango breakfast, the year of the new bicycle bottom bracket, the year of more math and computer science. Year of the science-fiction novel and the diet blog and the loose pants. Year in which I start teaching a class at SVA, appear on a few panels, and write regularly--here, elsewhere, anywhere, really. Who cares where as long as I'm writing? And Ftrain will be reborn, and soon. I'm sure of it, for therein lies my happiness. It's fun to talk to strangers using the new forms.

In 2005, having achieved some things I was sure I wanted (NPR fame-ishness, novel published, front page of "Arts" section, prestige job in my small world), I drifted away, or squandered my success, or whatever you want to make of it. I could have used my current position as a platform for greater glory, written for the magazine, started a signed blog, but I never mustered the will. I just worked for the organization rather than myself, and I preferred big, quiet projects that took months or years, which I could complete from inside my bear-den office. I improved my programming skills, thought about technology, started riding my bike. My old life is mostly gone. NPR don't call no more, with its 12 million listeners, nor do any of the other outlets that wanted me to write for them (Slate, The Guardian, The New York Times) ask any longer. The PaulFordRocks.com website is long, long shut down (the site was obsessive fans of a friend of mine who then latched on to me, in any case, second-hand celebrity) and the strange letters with photos enclosed that I used to receive no longer arrive. I do keep up with my music reviews and my love letters, though.

From a decade ago:

The tall white muscular bankers join in the quest, too. Go look at them, coming off the train at the World Trade Center in the morning, their eyes as white as bone. Like the rest of us, they want to be seen as bottles filled with passion. So does the woman with eleven teeth, asking you for spare change at the same subway stop. When the manager at your office goes home, taking all his power and authority with him, he wants his lover to look into his eyes and say, "You are beautiful, you have chosen your life well, and I am wise to have chosen you." If she won't, he asks someone else. Prisoners, priests, republicans, liberals all need that hand on the chest and the sweet, simple kiss, or its equivalent in lust or violence. And when we see the faces on the screens of theaters, twelve feet high, phosphorescent, we see ourselves as that beautiful, too, adored and wanted.

But it turns out I didn't want any of that. Not at all. Not online or off. All I wanted--all I wanted--was not to eat the whole bag of pretzels, not to drink the whole bottle of wine, not to smoke the cigarette.

Four years goes by. [Wife] is now there, a whole other life, twice as many heartbeats in the room.

"What if I can't get it together?" I asked her once before we were married. "What if I can't manage the weight, if it just keeps spiraling? I don't know how to manage this, how to deal with it. I could be 500 pounds in a year."

"Then we'll put you in a muumuu and hose you down in the corner," she said, shrugging.

Oh yes she's the one for me. Forever and ever. Forever and ever and ever.

Sends me to the doctor.

Puts me on the scale.

Here I am, mango-and-oatmeal breakfast, and I know that I can stay back from the pretzels, that they won't leap out from the shelves into my hands as they used to. This knowledge is new--weeks old--and thus it's fragile. I begin to spin wires around it, spin around it...

There's no article to be written about me in my current incarnation, no reason for PR. Nothing worth a press release or a friendly email to the bloggers. Just the outline of the old palace remains--one or two notes a year, a few people following my various feeds, which are never updated. Modest by any standard, especially when my niece has 500 Facebook friends.

Expectations have dwindled. Which is important because expectations imply form, and I don't want to work in the old forms. Those territories are staked out. I thought, in my four years off, about what F. Scott Fitzgerald said in "The Crack Up," that he had been a poor caretaker for his own talent. I am also talented, although obviously not like he was. Still, regardless of the merit of my talent even my enemies would grant that I have some and there it is, a lump in my stomach. Like ambergris, waiting to be vomited onto the beach. I was a terrible caretaker. For the thread running through all of it, the humming always there in the back of my head, was if only you were thin you could be properly famous. And there was some truth in that.

But. My successes, small though they may be in this world, were a side-effect of my talent, just as weight-loss is a side-effect of this project. Never the goal; the goal is to learn the new forms, to have control over the craft and understanding of the medium, and ultimately, to fill the HTML textareas with joy. The goal is to wake up beside my wife's ankles (we sleep head-toe), cook a breakfast, pet the cat, write my fill, bike to work. What I did for many years was mistake the side-effect for the cure. A dangerous mistake that I would advise against. Also, I am down another pound.

Weight: 337.25 lbs