Ftrain, by Paul Ford

So many New York City apartments lack inner walls. Kitchen, bedroom, library, and office are one space. Photographers are also musicians are also poets are also editors are also programmers are also writers at once. All aspects of life smearing into one another. Every room crammed. The pile of laundry atop the books. A laptop above the T-shirts. No way to keep the hobbies separate. A palimpsest of stuff.

Form is a mitigator of chaos. Where I work, forms are what allow us to ship the magazine every month. You start with an area of paper, and you know what you need to fill the space, what the standards are for every page. It's easy to know if you're slipping. There are sections, rubrics, column inches. There are mechanisms for filling empty areas (such as pull quotes) and making more areas (such as kerning).

On the web there is an excessively large amount of space available to anyone, which makes the need for form less obvious. The web needs no kerning. Nor does it need hyphenation. You can get away with anything. And thus you can end up, if you are I, replicating your messy apartment in your personal website.

Forms are utterly necessary on the web. Without them one can spin off in a thousand directions at any moment. You can start a blog post about your cats and if you're not careful end up with three hundred pencil sketches, a half-hour video, and an unfinished novel, all filed in your sock drawer between your spats and your regrets.

I would say this form--diet blog with a small database of foods/calories--is effective. Not for the audience--you're on your own, you skinny bastards--but for me. I've lost close to 50 pounds by working within this particular self-invented structure. I have 100 to go. What you are reading is how I'll lose them.

The rigidity of narrative structure and regularity of weight loss are, I would argue, closely connected. My last form, open-ended XML trees, lended itself to late nights and goldfish crackers, gallons of Diet Coke washing down pounds of starch. Nothing was ever done. This form--relational, chronological, obligatory--divides the days into organized units and sums each day into rational numbers: Weight in quarter-pounds, portions in fractions, with the calories represented as members of ℤ, the set of all integers. My last castle was washed into the sea by Cheez-Its and black-and-white cookies. This one is better-fortified, with essential vitamins. This form has health built in.

As is my wont I spent a goodly amount of time--and with help--making this website look a certain way, and I have yet before today to poison the top space, the head image, with the dread stain of bright color. Ohlih.com is intended to hearken to a certain moment in publishing history, when things were done by hand and worried over. Hence the rather precious hyphenation and tabular structure, the dot leaders, and the resolute grayness.

And yet the carrots make me happy. One day at lunchtime I was on my way with R-- to get a Vietnamese sandwich, and there they were. "Look at that," I said. Both of us nodded to this bold pile of root vegetables stacked on Mott St. My camera was in my pocket.

The reliance on gray is a wall that divides the room. It limits my options. Thank God. I do not take the change lightly. I've had that picture on my camera for weeks and I've wrestled with using it. But in black-and-white the picture would lose all meaning. By hewing to form and desaturating the jpeg I would bury something of importance, namely the quality of bright orange on a sunny day in Chinatown. I signed a contract with myself but there are reasons to break form, such as street carrots, or joy.

Weight: 317.5 lbs