Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Had I been a slender, happy youth (instead of one for whom erotic experience was transacted mostly by scented note), I doubt I would have become a writer. I would have become something much more sensible. A social worker, or an entrepreneur, or a project manager. Yes, that--project manager for a firm that creates ticketing and reservation systems. Fundamental, NP-hard problems to solve. Team of six. $130K salary, home in a medium-sized city near a technology college. Rochester, say. A Honda Civic. Enjoying life after divorce, attending bi-annual conferences, re-reading Ayn Rand on the plane, subscribing to Latina porn sites. Just a good American life instead of this shameful commie broke-ass New York technohumanities bullshit I've got going on. Nonsense you can't even get a grant for.

Forget it. You go into parallel universes to see how I turned out with the dials turned to the left or right, I'm the same moron. Thinner, fatter. Like L-- I used to have a fantasy that a return to form would be spiritual, that there were angels in the cage of my gut ready to flutter out once I turned some mystic thinning key. Instead the angels, whole flocks of them--are dying with the fat cells. And death to feathered superstition; I am the angel reaver.

When I look through the feed of Twitter/Facebook posts from my friends I often see people training for things--most often triathlons, which seem to have come into popularity among my age group in the last few years, along with slab serif typefaces and scarves. I would like to train for something but I am in competition with no one. That is not some fatty rejection of sports; that is me saying that the idea of being trapped in a throng of running strangers mortifies (I keep expecting police with riot shields up front). I am decreasing in weight in order to increase the distance, even if it's only a few inches around the waist, between myself and passing strangers.

That said I am now, as a practice, taking invitations to any reading or panel at which people would like to see me appear, whereas before I put people off, mostly due to the weird cognitive disconnect that people obviously felt between reading my writing and seeing my fleshly incarnation. Awwwwk-ward. Still, it is important to see and interact with people, especially from a stage. A stageworths is the comfortable distance between myself and most other people. Far better than sweating it out in the throng. Also, standing in front of people to give a reading is good practice for when you are placed in a camp and must entertain the Commandant or be sent to death. Look your best.

One of the reasons this website is important to me is that it is teaching me how I can write without the compulsive behaviors to guide my hand and manage my thoughts. Writing being a solitarish pursuit requiring one to reside inside ones head, where one might decide to hell with it let's get a pizza and a six and get things rolling. Therefore you could say that all of the biking and writing and calorie-counting is to a certain fixed goal. I need to write longer-form but insist on doing it in a healthful manner. Going all-American. So when people ask what I'm doing I can say: I am training for the novel.

Weight: 329.75 lbs