Ftrain, by Paul Ford

WASPGEL says I'm down 3 lb. from yesterday. Wouldn't that be fine were it so simple.

Much of this effort is about death, namely avoiding it, but even though I am trending lifewards I am full of death-fears still. Old & alone & impoverished, or suddenly, tomorrow, in a crash, or from a falling piano (or production studio, pianos going out of favor). So for the next few I will open my mornings by planning/plotting my own death. So as to release myself from the anxieties. Most of which have to do with not having my work completed; and leaving [Wife] to her own devices. If I should die in the next few days well, this was not my intent, and the reader is counseled not to assign spiritual intent to ironic self-exploration. But doesn't that reveal something about my fears, though? That I am somewhat afraid to write about it for fear that its grey specter will envelop me. I don't want the gods to notice me. Which is why I am losing weight in the first place.

Steve Jobs, in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford:

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Death 1: Heart attack at 38

I have decided for some unaccountable reason to take up sponge-diving and, shoehorned into a diving-suit three sizes too small, thus with a terrible case of stingray-toe about the crotch (so the final pictures later show), I fall backwards over the side of the boat in search of the deadly sponge. I am immediately beset by a school of tiny pirate submarines, piloted by elves. The sight of elf-eyes staring at me through the porthole is so awful, so primordially terrifying, that I immediately freeze up, enter cardiac arrest, and expire; sinking to the floor of the ocean I rest in the silt there, half-a-mile deeper than anyone else would dive. The body, all are told, is unrecoverable. They bury a hat instead. My last memory is a vague one, of great pressures and little eyes staring out through tiny windows, tiny hands pulling brass rods and setting steam-dials.

Weight: 314.5 lbs