Big Mike: Brainy Brian Learns A Lesson

A couple of guys I know are trying to start their own web site. One of them - let's call him Barney Kay - is an admitted dope when it comes to technology, the Internet, electronics, machinery and, for that matter, chewing his food. He wears his ignorance as a badge of honor. He leans on friends and acquaintances to help him through crises like computer crashes and those rare occasions when he gets a bit of celery stuck between his teeth. He has lent one ear each to his friend the track coach and his college-student daughter, who guide him through modern life's puzzles. Barney sings their praises as if they are the second coming of the Steves, Wozniak and Jobs.

The other fellow - call him Brainy Brian - tells his pal Barney that he knows this computer business like the back of his hand, that the two of them have no need for such self-proclaimed experts as track coaches and college-student daughters. He holds Barney Kay's hand through countless phone conversations wherein the two try to navigate the treacherous waters of the cyberworld.

Barney Kay and Brainy Brian made the decision to go online with their rants and flights of literary fancy early last fall. First, they honed their voices on a free blog site. Once they became good at it, they told each other, they'd create their own free-standing site. By Christmas, they knew they were ready to strike out on their own. They'd never missed a day of posting and kept each other entertained throughout.

As any schoolchild knows, it takes the click of a Buy This Package Now! button to start a web site. But Brainy Brian has convinced Barney Kay that they should study web hosts, web builders and the like with all the zeal of Marie and Pierre Curie trying to decipher the mysteries of radium.

"We must do this the right way," Brainy Brian proclaims.

"Yeah sure, but how do we know what's the right way?" responds Barney Kay.

"Don't worry," Brainy Brian says, giggling at his dear friend's timidity. "Leave it to me. I'll get you all the information you need so we can make a rational, considered decision."

At which point, Barney Kay shrugs and says, "Well, you know me. I'm a dope when it comes to technology, the Internet, et cetera. In fact, I'm proud of my ignorance!"

"Hah," says Brainy Brian. "You're lucky you have me as a partner. My knowledge of the topic is second only to that Gates guy, and he only knows about a few more details that I consider extraneous."

The preceding conversation has taken place, in one form or another, at least a dozen times since early last fall. Since then, Brainy Brian has immersed himself in the world of web sites. He's even written up a glossary for Barney Kay so the two can chatter in geek language.

Here's an example of one such conversation:

Brainy Brian: "Let's look for a company that offers 10 or 15 gigabytes of disk space and guarantees 99.9 percent uptime."

Barney Kay: "What's disk space?"

"Jesus Christ! I sent you the glossary. Didn't you read it?"

"Yeah, I read it, but I don't remember disk space."

Brainy Brian again explains disk space.

"Okay, got it," says Barney Kay. "Now, what's uptime?"

"Aaaaarrrggghhh!"

So, Brainy Brian returns to his lonely task of finding the perfect web host for the pair's new web site. He reads countless web host reviews. He thumbs through Wired and PCWorld at the Barnes & Noble magazine rack. He visits every conceivable web host's site, comparing prices, features and options.

Brainy Brian has contemplated MySQL, POP3/IMAP/STMP, Box Trappers, Coppermines, PHP-Nukes, Mambo and Joomia, Zen Carts, Apache Watchdogs, Pythons, PERL 5, CGI-BIN, AWStats, SSI, SSH, and ASP.NET AJAX.

Brainy Brian has also mulled the attributes of Red Hat ES Linux 4 OS, RAIF functionality, the EXTJS control panel and Putty. When he encountered this last feature, Brainy Brian sat back in his chair and let out a mighty sigh. He shook the cobwebs out of his head and yelled:

"WHAT IN GOD'S HOLY FUCKING NAME ARE THESE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT!"

As the cats ran for cover, Brainy Brian banged his head against the dining room wall. Then he went into the den and banged his head against three of the walls in that room. Finally, he collapsed into his bed and cried himself to sleep.

If any of you can guess who these two fellows are, please don't tell Barney Kay what Brainy Brian has been going through. See, Brainy Brian has sent Barney Kay a monograph explaining precisely why they should choose a certain company to be their web host. It's chock full of all the aforementioned arcana. When Barney Kay reads it, he'll think that Brainy Brian has made a momentous choice based on all the available information at hand. It is the model of a rational, considered decision. Now, Barney Kay and Brainy Brian's web site can be up within days.

Try as he might, though, Brainy Brian has no more familiarity with MySQL than he does with the inner workings of the Illuminati. He made his web host choice based on Barney Kay's offhand mention that that is the company his track coach friend uses for his successful web site. Brainy Brian secretly hopes Barney Kay's college-student daughter approves.

Big Mike: It's Rocket Science To Me

Ah, love and marriage.

The Loved One looked up from her laptop, removed her glasses, and asked me, accusingly, "So, you bought a book today? How much did it cost?"

I was ready with the snappy comeback: "Huh?"

"You wrote in your post today that you bought a book."

"Oh." Clearly I was at the top of my repartee game.

It took a few beats for me to get her drift. In Tuesday's post, I wrote about what an intellectual titan I am. I stood on my head to separate myself from the common clay, illustrating this by pointing out that the radio and television banality I'm being bombarded with during my stay at the Holiday Inn is so, well, weird - at least to me. My concluding line was that I was going to jump up and rush to Barnes & Noble to buy Isaac Newton's "Principia."

I was, of course, being a smartass. I bet I'll never actually purchase a copy of one of the two or three most important scientific works ever written in any language. In it, Newton lays out his Law of Universal Gravitation and explains his Laws of Motion. I mean, for gosh sakes, who hasn't heard the line, For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction? That isn't exactly how Newton wrote it, but it'll do for us here. Suffice it to say that the physics of everyday life are laid out tidily in this three-volume set.

A quick search on Amazon reveals that used sets of the Principia start at $337, and therein lies today's tale.

A good marriage, I am discovering after having experienced a bad version or two, mixes two people whose strengths and weaknesses dovetail nicely. It would be impossible for me to illustrate this better than to admit that The Loved One handles the checkbook and I do not.

In earlier posts, I've revealed that my mother was a fiscal tyrant. She was the type of person who looked out the front door in search of the mailman because the electric bill was due. Long before things like online banking, Ma kept a stack of envelopes - marked electric, gas, car insurance, and so on - into which she'd parcel cash from each of her and Dad's paychecks throughout the month. She kept such a close eye on these envelopes that when I, at the age of ten, began feeling aggrieved that my baseball card addiction wasn't accounted for in them and decided to help myself to some of their contents, she knew immediately what was going on. The next time I went in for the dip, I found a note written by her saying, essentially, Gotcha!

Ma became a paragon of bill-paying in reaction to her mother, who was not. I, in turn, rebelled against Ma's ways. And so it goes. Had I chosen to spawn, my daughter or son would probably have become a CPA. Thankfully, I've spared at least one poor soul that cruel fate.

Anyway, I've lived most of my life like a drunken sailor. I've suffered more third-degree burns on my right thigh than I'd care to admit. Poor old Pat Arden, my former editor at the Chicago Reader - the microsecond after any of my stories ran in his paper, I'd be banging on his door to find out when he could cut me a check. And god forbid I should spend that check on anything as silly as bills - not when there were motorcycles to buy, rounds to pick up, women to impress and, yes, books to accumulate.

Whereas Ma couldn't mail the check to the electric company fast enough, I looked upon utility bills as mere suggestions. The real bill, in my warped view, was the disconnect notice. This system worked well except for those times I forgot to open the disconnect notice. Trying to read in the dark is such an ordeal.

The Loved One was aghast at my pecuniary discipline, or lack thereof. Fortunately, she was drawn in by one or two other facets of my character and so we became a going concern. Only she made it clear from the start that she would be the Chief Financial Officer and if she caught me thumbing through the checkbook, she'd cut said digits off clean.

Now that's a system that really works. Rather like Newton's everyday universe.

Big Mike: Rachael Ray, What Am I To Do?

Sometimes I forget how tight a cocoon I've woven for myself. I like to think of myself as being much smarter than the average bear. Toward that end, I've sworn off broadcast TV, commercial radio and other artifacts of the illiterati such as USAToday.

Oh, I'm as smart as an extraterrestrial visiting Earth. With rare exceptions, I don't even argue with people about politics or social issues, preferring instead to roll my eyes and bury myself in my New York Times when guys insist on buffeting me with their uninformed opinions. Yeah, I'm smart.

I play chess rather than poker (although I shouldn't be too hard on that game - a university professor I know paid for his doctorate studies as a professional poker player.) I don't just root for the Cubs; hell, I pore over the most minute baseball statistics and analyze trends with all the zeal of an epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health.

For laughs, I read P.G. Wodehouse rather than watch Jimmy Fallon. My car is a Prius. I cook with olive oil rather than butter. I do the laundry in cold water to conserve energy. I'm typing this on a MacBook, not - puh-lease! - a PC. I even wear horn-rimmed glasses.

I'm so smart smoke ought to be pouring out of my ears.

My constant efforts to cultivate this streak of elitism in me - and let's be frank, that's really all it is - have cut me off from, well, American life.

A great way to submerge one's brilliant self in the normal world is to stay at a Holiday Inn. The Loved One and I are spending a week in Bloomington, Indiana so we can look at homes. In our cramped room, the TV dominates. Even the lobby, with its plush leather sofas and cushiony armchairs, is dominated  by an enormous flat screen tuned to whatever peppy talk show is on at the moment.

And since The Loved One forgot to bring her alarm clock, she's had to use the radio alarm that comes with the room and seems permanently tuned to the local oldies station.

Here's what I've gleaned thus far in my descent into reality. The radio, first. I was in that delicious few minutes of half-sleep this morning when suddenly the radio alarm began to blare the Beatles' "Back In The USSR." Only it sounded as though the Fab Four had swallowed a jugful of amphetamines before they recorded it. I realized that a lot of commercial radio stations still use that speed-up technique to quicken the pace of records so they can sound more "energetic" than the competition. I was transformed from sleepily serene to jaw-clenchingly tense before Paul McCartney could sing "Man, I had a dreadful flight."

Unfortunately for me, The Loved One had gotten up before the alarm and was already in the shower. I would have had to roll all the way over to the other side of the bed and stretch out to hit the snooze button. Horrors! So the speeded-up blaring continued.

Next up, the news. I guessed, correctly, that the lead story - the only story - would be the impending termination of the human race by swine flu. It was the kicker at the end of the newscast that informed me radio news readers still employ that stale old format of ending on a wry (read: stupid, dull, and guaranteed to make the brain dead titter) story. This one was about a Chicago guy who wants to open up a hot dog stand called Felony Franks. He wants to staff the joint with ex-cons. Now, that might be a sort-of interesting tidbit but the news reader found the names of the entrees to be the meat of the story. "He wants to serve Pardon Burgers and Misdemeanor Weiners," came the voice over the radio, "this is ABC News."

I suppose the news reader intended me to respond he-he or ho-ho. Instead, I moaned "Shut the fuck up!" which elicited the query from the shower, "What's wrong?"

I decide to go down in the lobby for a cup of coffee and write this post. I'm immediately overwhelemed by The Early Show on CBS. Well, whaddya know - the big story is the coming collapse of civilization due to swine flu. A jittery couple at home wearing surgical masks answer the host's questions. Their teenaged son has developed flu-like symptoms and was tested yesterday for the virus. While awaiting the results, they're doing what comes naturally to Americans - panicking. The kid is off-screen somewhere, coughing occasionally, as if on cue. The host asks them, "Is this the worst day of your life?"

Man, this human-race terminating, civilization-collapsing swine flu couldn't have come a moment too soon, for my money.

After a commercial for a lawyer ("If someone you love has died after using a pain patch containing fentanyl, call...,) The Rachael Ray Show comes on. The maniacally grinning face of Rachael Ray has infested more grocery store aisles than all the ants and mice that have ever lived. Now, apparently, she's a life coach, too. Today's show features a segment on The Recession (that will, of course, collapse civilization.) A woman calls in to say she'd recently lost her job and asks what she should do next.

Again, she called Rachael Ray for this vital advice!

I can't take it anymore. I dash over to Barnes & Noble to buy Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica." I have to hurry up and read it before civilization collapses.

Big Mike: Our Strange Heroes

Benny Jay and I had that conversation the day before yesterday. You know, the one wherein two old chums discuss the untimely passing of a third.

I was walking home from  the Barnes and Noble in the late afternoon. Every few minutes, a drop or two of rain hit my shiny scalp. As I struggled up and down the Ten Broeck hills, Benny rang me up and broke the news that Norm Van Lier had been found dead in his apartment. Our reactions ran the gamut from shock to silence and, finally, to uproarious laughter over shared Stormin' Norman anecdotes.

There was, as a single example, the time seven years ago that Norm decked a fireman. Based on news reports and what I think I know of Norm's ways, it wasn't hard to imagine what had happened. Norm was at home in his lakefront highrise, probably sitting in his beloved beanbag chair - or, at least, its modern-day equivalent- and listening to that first, brilliant Chicago Transit Authority album (my own favorite cut from it is "Questions 67 & 68.") Perhaps he'd employed some additional aid to achieve a certain tranquil frame of mind; no one can say. Whatever. The sound of sirens stopping in front of his building caused him to high-tail it down to the lobby.

Rattled that his mood had been broken, Norm had a head full of steam as he exited the elevator. In the lobby, he encountered a stranger wearing a white T-shirt. Apparently, a few cross words were exchanged.

The dialogue might have gone something like this:

Norm: "Who the fuck are you?"

T-shirted stranger: "Who the fuck are you?"

The next thing anybody knew, the man in the white T-shirt, actually one of the responding firefighters, was laying on the marble floor rubbing his jaw.

True? Who knows. But like all good stories, it ought to have been. Stormin' Norman was the toughest, meanest, most competitive son of a bitch you can imagine.

I knew that Benny would write about him yesterday. Norm Van Lier was to Benny what Ron Santo is to me. That is, a teenager's fixation. Even as we've become thicker, grayer, and more flatulent with the years, Benny and I have hung on to our boyhood idols, Norm and Santo. In fact, we've each written long, in-depth Chicago Reader cover stories of our respective paladins. The hardest part of the extended times we'd spent with Norm and Santo was trying not to look like the awe-struck, acne-faced geeks we'd reverted to.

After I hung up with Benny, I planned to follow up on his post by writing today that his affinity for Norm was baffling because no two more diverse personalities exist on this planet. Benny is the most accommodating, understanding, serene man on six continents. Norm was, of course, Stormin' Norman.

Yet, mirabile dictu, Benny expounded on that very dichotomy. Norm was everything Benny wasn't and, often, wanted to be.

It wasn't so with Santo and me. He was impulsive, confrontational, uncontrollable, thin-skinned, opinionated, and a general pain in the ass. Subtract 16 years and the exceptional baseball skills, and that would be the precise description of me.

Benny idolized what he wasn't; I idolized what I was. That's ironic because throughout his adult life, Benny has appeared to be very comfortable within his own skin. I, on the other hand, have spent most of my life trying to jump out of mine.

Benny and I will have that conversation again, perhaps very soon. Santo turned 69 on Wednesday. He's a diabetic and has a troublesome heart. We'll express our shock, turn silent, and then laugh ourselves to tears recounting the time he set his toupee on fire in the Shea Stadium broadcast booth.

What is it with us and jocks? Benny Jay and I have constructed our lives to be the antitheses of single-minded, physically-oriented, acquisitive, pugnacious professional athletes. Today we revere Philip Roth and Amnesty International. We discuss lofty concepts like altruism, egalitarianism, and the inner workings of the political process.

Yet we're still held in thrall by a couple of old warhorses. I doubt Stormin' Norman ever ranked altruism among his most cherished human traits. And I Santo knows why Portnoy was inexorably drawn to a girlfriend nicknamed "The Monkey," he hasn't let on yet.

We're odd birds, Benny and I.

Big Mike: Wise, Wise Man?

Here's what a geek I am. Because I've been hearing so many loudmouths bitch and moan about how the economic stimulus package is "full of pork" and "loaded with earmarks" and so on, I decided to read the actual bill.

Dubbed the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009," it's 407 pages of the most brain-numbingly boring legal- and political-speak you've ever laid your eyes upon. No, let me amend that - it's the most boring thing I've ever laid my eyes upon. You are too smart to waste precious hours of your life studying the document.

That's right, I read the god-damned thing! Where did it get me? Well, now I know that none of those loudmouths know what in the hell they're talking about. Of course, I already knew that so I guess I'm back where I started. I suppose I can now argue with confidence against them. I have the facts. They don't. Then again, the facts never seem to make a bit of difference to them.

Why do I do things like this? Here's another example. When the steroid scandal hit baseball, I boned up on everything I could about performance enhancing drugs. I learned how prevalent their use is, what the health benefits and risks are, and how they might or might not actually improve a hitter's or pitcher's game. I then wrote a 5000-word treatise on the subject. All the while I was saying to myself, Just wait till I dazzle them all with my brilliance!

Naturally, when it came time to pit my research against the uninformed ramblings of the loudmouthed set, I may as well have been speaking Amharic.

We like to view ourselves as a rational, intelligent species. We call ourselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens - wise, wise man. It's as if we're insecure about our wisdom: Hey, we're smart! You hear me? We're smart!

We must be smart. We've created an Internet which provides us access to the most diverse, minutely-studied array of pornography imaginable. We've invented television and CDs and DVDs, which bring us the artistry of Howie Mandell, Madonna, and "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" directly into our homes. Perhaps our most spectacular and life-changing invention has been the automobile, whose evolution has resulted in that most sublime and aesthetically pleasing artifact known as The Hummer.

So yeah, we're smart. And I'm a smart ass but I like to think of myself as plain old smart as well. Sadly, though, we seem to have a need to be willfully not-smart too. I remember watching the first debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry during the 2004 election. No matter what you think about the respective candidates' positions, you have to agree that the incumbent Bush appeared embarrassingly uninformed and unable to articulate complex ideas. I felt a sense of shame and humiliation that the rest of the world saw the leader of the United States as, well, a dope. I wondered who could possibly vote for a man so lacking in intellectual assets. Oops - who's the real dope here? It turned out that a majority of Americans actually liked Bush's folksy befuddlement and were turned off by Kerry's intellectualism.

How about this? Years ago, I watched the mondo film "The Faces of Death" with my old pal Submarine Tony. Part of a series that was wildly popular in the 80s, it was purportedly a compilation of gruesome, real-life scenes of people being given one-way tickets out of this mortal coil. From the very start, I could tell that the producers' plan was to show a single, blurry, rough-cut clip of a real death and surround it with dozens of staged incidents.

So I launched into a scathing critique of the movie. I pointed out all the camera tricks and verbal suggestions, the breathless dramatic buildups and the shallow payoffs. I figured Submarine Tony would be thankful I'd opened his eyes. Instead, after listening to me for 20 minutes he said, "Would you shut the hell up? You're ruining the whole thing."

Another example. When Carl Sagan's book, "The Demon-Haunted World," came out in the mid-90s, I ran around excitedly telling everyone I knew what a great and valuable message it contained. Sagan wrote the book as a response to the exploding trends of pseudoscience. He deftly carved up fortune-tellers, UFO buffs, conspiracy theorists, New Agers, homeopaths, channelers, faith healers, and the like.

I was working at Barnes and Noble in Evanston at the time. One of my co-workers was Don the Egyptian, a tall fellow whom I'd figured to be fairly savvy. After I gushed about the book to him, he shrugged and said he wasn't interested in it. "I want my world to be demon-haunted," he said. "It's more interesting."

I wrote a note to myself: People want to be fooled.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only guy in the world who thinks the way I do. I also wonder where it gets me. Now and again I think, Wouldn't I be better off watching "Deal Or No Deal"? Instead, I read H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Then I think, Who would I rather hang out with? Howie Mandell or Carl Sagan? Sagan's been dead a dozen years now. I'd still prefer his company.

Big Mike: Hey, I Wanna Be An Evangelist Too!

Young Joe, the kid next door, rang my back bell yesterday afternoon. As usual, I'd been pounding away at the keyboard in my underwear ala Hemingway (pretty much the only thing we have in common.) Without thinking, I dashed upstairs and answered wearing nothing more than a T-shirt and a pair of wind-whipped man-bloomers - white with red hearts, natch.

The kid had been waiting in the rare bright sunshine (this has been a lousy winter even in the great Commonwealth of Kentucky), shifting nervously from foot to foot in his gargantuan sneakers in the melting snow. When he saw me, I thought his eyes might pop out of his head.

"Sorry buddy," I said. "I always write like this." The explanation only seemed to confuse him further so I let it drop. "What's up?"

He handed me two copies of a book. "These are for you and your wife," he said, smiling shyly.

I put my cheaters back on and studied the top copy's cover. It was entitled "One Heartbeat Away: Your Journey Into Eternity." It was, of course, a tome on god and how I ought to get cracking on believing in him/her/it before the old ticker shorts out.

"Um, thanks," I said. "Why are you giving these to me?"

"I'm witnessing for my church," Young Joe said.

At this point I was already debating in my mind whether I should tell him not to waste the books on The Loved One and me or if I should soften the blow and say One will do, thanks. I mean, I didn't want to appear unneighborly but, you know, save a tree and all that. Before I could speak, he said, beaming proudly, "I printed your names in them for you."

"Oh. Fine. Yes. Fine. Very nice. That's awfully nice of you," I replied, now holding the books as if they were rare artifacts. With that, Young Joe bid adieu and dashed back home.

The god and Jesus thing has been a quandary for me since I arrived in Louisville nearly two years ago. Back home in Chicago, belief in god usually manifests itself in one of two ways. The vast majority of people in the city proper profess to be far too sophisticated for traditional worship. I'm not a member of any regular religion, they might say, I believe in my own way. Those who aren't apologetic for their religiosity often can be found shouting into bullhorns on State Street.

In Kentucky, though, Christianity seems to be the club everybody wants to belong to. My first weekend here, I was cornered at Barnes and Noble by some old bird who bent my ear about how I had to accept Jesus. Cab drivers, Chick-fil-a drive-thru clerks, convenience store owners, and the like think nothing of going on and on about how fabulous and wonderful god and Jesus are. Or, I guess, is. Sometimes it seems as though every citizen of the Commonwealth has a story about how he or she was saved from some crushing reversal of fortune or even sudden death and has The Big Man to thank for it.

I try to keep my non-believer status close to the vest in these parts now. When we first moved onto Murray Hill Pike, I met Young Joe as he dashed through my yard chasing a ball. We introduced ourselves and exchanged information. Puffing out his chest, he told me he attends a school affiliated with one of the biggest mega-churches in the region. I told him that was, well, nice. "You should come to service on Sunday," he gushed. "You'll love it!"

"Well, I'll think about it," I replied. Then, to fill in an uncomfortable silence that followed, I asked, "What denomination is it?"

Young Joe looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"Y'know, is it Methodist or Lutheran or something?"

"Oh," Joe said, "it's just Christian." Which is, as I understand it, a denomination all its own under The Big C umbrella - search me; as I said, I'm a non-believer

"So what are you?" Joe asked.

Uh oh. My mind shifted into fifth gear. What do I tell this 10-year-old about my atheism? I don't want it to sound as if I'm proselytizing. And I don't want his parents to think I'm polluting his mind. But he asked. "I'm, uh, nothing," I said.

Young Joe was aghast. "You don't have any religion?" he whispered, as if merely uttering the words would taint his soul.

"No," I answered, sotto voce, the way I used to speak in the confessional.

"Then you have to come to services Sunday," Joe concluded. In the ensuing weeks, his mother, Jan, repeatedly told me how terrific their church was and how we were invited to come anytime as her special guests. I thanked her repeatedly. She still doesn't know the exact nature of my beliefs although the language that came spewing out of me last summer when I hit my head on the Prius's hatchback latch gave her an indication I'm not a Baptist minister. Jan and her mother had been sitting in the swing behind her house when the torrent commenced. Even though It was a perfect evening, the two hustled inside as if my verbiage were a plague of locusts.

I'm rather touched that Young Joe hopes to save my soul. I appreciate Jan's invitations to church. And, honest, I listen politely when cabdrivers go on and on about how god's hand has guided their lives. I only wish I could figure out a way to tell them about my god-free world without thinking I'm gonna burn in hell.

Big Mike: Snap Out Of It!

The Louisville area got four or five inches of snow last night, the equivalent of 25 inches in Chicago. Schools and businesses were closed today, most streets were treacherous, and hardly anyone was on the road.

I got up at the crack of dawn to shovel the driveway. It's about fifty yards from the garage to the street so it took me a good two hours. It was only after I'd finished and was peeling off my sweaty layers that I thought, Hey, I've got freakin' congestive heart failure!

As usual, I overdid it. I drove over to Barnes & Noble for morning coffee and the New York Times but the place was closed. Most of the shops in The Summit - one of only three malls in this city - were closed. Jeez! The Starbucks was open - phew! - so I sat down and began to read. Then it hit me. A wave of exhaustion. I could hardly concentrate. My legs and arms felt like lead. I thought I might pass out.

That's what happens when a CHF sufferer goes overboard, as I did. It didn't alarm me; I knew it would pass after a few hours. I sat back and breathed deeply. Then, suddenly, I started thinking about the last year and a half.

I've gotta confess - I went through yet another of my patented, fall-off-the-face-of-the-Earth depressions last year. The realization that I'd experienced another lost six months was as jarring as if I'd recalled that I'd lost a loved one.

This kind of thing has happened to me before. Somehow, whenever I've found myself extraordinarily worn out by physical exertion, the sun,or some emotional strain, the reality of my depression floods into my consciousness. The first time it happened was way back in the fall of 1979. My little nephew Doug, 11 at the time, wanted to go downtown to see the Pope at the Petrillo Bandshell. I considered counseling him to shun the gaudily-attired leader of the world's most pompous mythology but then decided, hell, it'll be an event and I can disillusion the kid another day. So we went.

The day was unseasonably warm. Doug and I stood out in the sun for eight hours. When we got back home, we collapsed on my mother's sofa, spent and dehydrated. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by the memories of my first real cyclical depressive episode, one that I'd just been emerging from. I'd been feeling fairly decent the last few weeks but sprawled on that sofa, the feelings of alienation, loneliness, dread, uselessness, and all the other classic symptoms washed over me. I began to sob uncontrollably. I told my mother that day that I wanted to kill myself, the first time I'd ever revealed the secret I'd been holding in throughout the just-passed episode.

I got over it, of course, only to go through the same process all over again more times than I care to recount here.

Today's realization was an epiphany. Here's what I learned: the amount of energy I expend fighting depression, running from it, arguing with it, pretending it isn't there, trying to fix it - all the strategies I employ against it - is enormous. Sure, I see shrinks, I take anti-depressants, I repeat affirmations, I seek joys and answers - I do, in short , what every depressive does to survive. But the most important thing I do each day, every day - every minute - is pretend it isn't there.

Were I to remain in constant cognizance that I carry this gray-matter burden, this six-ton anchor on my heart, this emotional Rubik's Cube, I'd never have a moment to wash my face, write a story, or, well, shovel the snow. It takes gigawatts of energy to shove the melancholia into an unused corner of my brain so I may pursue everyday life. Then, when I'm exhausted, when my energy reserves are depleted, that melancholia breaks out of its closet.

I'll be participating in a gallery show at the Lakeside Legacy Arts Park in Crystal Lake, Illinois in May. The opening reception will be on the first. The show is entitled "Snap Out Of It!" and will feature highly personal works about the artists' battle with depression. I'm doing a video piece. Keep an eye on these precincts for more info.