Ftrain, by Paul Ford

I voted for Rev. Billy, disgusted with Bloomberg for his anti-democracy stance and Thompson for his anti-bike stance. There was no great choice.

As I am currently at the top of laziness what I would prefer right now--prefer to actually making choices and needing to work even harder at my job and myself, as I so obviously do if I am to kick the next dollar--is one of those life-events that robs me of choice. Such that two or three years later I will go out to sit at a bar with someone and say: "And you know what? In retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened to me."

Getting fired, in particular, so that I could be forced, forced to do something else, is a recurring wish. I would finish the novel then! This is a sign of the passive-aggressive beastlet I have become.

Or. Finding out I have (another) life-threatening but ultimately manageable health condition, like spasmodic dysphonia (a problem with the voice) or haptic dystopia (a world where everyone has iPhones). Or frittered colon or veggie sausage fingers--basically, some syndrome where, if I eat enough vitamin-rich foods and get massages, I can still live a fine life, albeit there are certain humiliations at sporting event bathrooms and in the grocery line, but, as my article for Men's Health will adequately explain, this has made me a better husband and father. That is why God gives us suppurated anal fissures, so that we can be better dads.

Of course there could be a child, or a child I never knew about, or a secret inheritance, or a new book deal, one big enough to scare me into excellence. Or war, or a plague that burns through the world and leaves us pockmarked and keening, but forces me to know my own mettle. If a good decision is, by necessary recursive definition, a decision that leads to other good decisions, then what is it to make not bad decisions but no decision at all?

I have a tendency, like most folk, to determine that my current set of neuroses is in some way the organic optimum; that is, what I am right now is the best and most rational thing that I could possibly be. Clearly this is incorrect, but the thought remains: well, given the situation I've done my best. This releases one from certain responsibilities and obligations. But I carry a million bad decisions everywhere I hump my Brobdingnagian self. I had opportunities not to fail and I failed.

In some other quantum state I am thin as a whisper; in another it takes a crane to lift my coffin. In this universe of imperfect but genuine love I have to keep working on it but it's survivable. Leibniz believed we lived in the best of all possible worlds--"Die Beste aller möglichen Welten." But this moment was not inevitable; it did not have to be here.

I spend--this is obvious to all of my friends and remarked upon--too much energy preserving artificial balances, patting down chaos. I sometimes see adulthood as managing the panic of women. But. I am just as panicked as they; I simply manage my own fears by patronizing and thus feeling strong. Thus is sexism born. I am physically regressing, burning the adipose I put on years ago, when I was but a young lad, and this makes maintaining the artificial balance, suppressing the chaos, less essential to my daily well-being. Panic is something for grown-ups; I'm going in the other direction.

Cells fluffed up fifteen years back are shrinking without replenishment (except in the last week, when I've replenished a number of them), cells fluffed up when I was alone in a room with a box of Cheezy-hyphens and Diet Dr. Mengele. Each such shrinking cell represents some fractional good decision, and the reversal of a bad decision. That makes the whole thing into a variant on Bentham's felicific calculus: Tracking variables and measuring the infinitesimal and calculating rate of change to arrive at a maximum happiness, flushing out lipids and replacing them with hedons. ∑ me. Felicific calculus is Bentham's in particular, but Leibniz also wanted to reduce everything to equations; when there was discord one of the debaters would, he hoped, cry out "Calculemus!" and they would set to mathing it out. I will make a point of saying it to the river today: Calculemus! Thus would Dr. Pangloss have me dimish the pannus, and thus I am dimished. Calories calculemus!

Weight: 306.5 lbs