All over the place today:

• I sent an email to my friend Prairie with the words, “Barney Fife is dead. Thank God for reruns.” She wrote back, “That’s the difference between you and [my husband]. He told me Mr. Furley died.” The Andy Griffith Show marathon was on TV Land last night in honor of Don Knotts’ passing. Mom and I watched the pickle episode together, she went to bed and I toughed it out for one more. The rest we taped for swarthy nights of double features to come.
• Yesterday was Fat Tuesday and appropriately so; I armed myself for that second episode with about a 1/3 of a carton of ice cream. Cinnamon Caramel Pecan. Equally amazing was my dishing it out in just two scoops.
• If yesterday was Fat Tuesday, then today must be Ash Wednesday. I few Ash Wednesdays ago I was walking I was walking up Broadway towards Wall Street with my friend Johnny. It was our lunch break and we were both still hungover. One of the magic things about New York City is that once every spring you can actually see otherwise well-heeled and stiffly pressed people walking around all day with a black smudge on their foreheads and make the connection that Johnny and I did that day. I suggested we give up alcohol for Lent and he, feeling as he did, readily agreed. Really? He swore he would do it. I don’t remember for sure but I don’t think he made it one night. I went the whole forty plus a week or so. I enjoyed it. I went on walking tours all over the city and got all goofy on a petite and sweet Japanese girl who treated me well. My downfall was going to a party her German coworkers threw a building over from John Lennon’s. She was a corporate lawyer. I think you understand.
• This year I’m giving up ice cream for Lent. Yup, I scream, you scream. I won’t mind if after six weeks of dry nights in front of Barney, I go back on that sauce in moderation. The drinking, though, I think, needs to stay a thing of the past.
• This morning I spent too much time prepping a photo of myself and another of Buddy to add to my new profile on datemypet.com. Big step. One giant leap for my kind. Now I know internet dating has done beautiful things for beautiful people, but its really just not so much my style. I resist it to the bitter end, which seems, obviously, to have come. I’m just dipping my toe in the water for now. The pet angle makes it less intense and this particular site has about five women within a 25 mile radius. So no hopes or expectations. I’m not even sure I should have or if I even want a relationship. I need and want to work on my P&P. That’s my Program (recovery) and Project (the bigger writing thing, which also serves as a personal sussing out of sorts that will have as a side benefit the orienting and facilitating of a love life.) Besides, bedding down every night under your mother’s pink comforter would dampen things even if they weren’t getting hot. But man alive I’m severely missing some girlyness in my life and can rationalize well the stablizing, balancing, motivating, centered effect that could have, not to mention a fun social outlet that’ll keep me looking for fun in all the wrong places. Whatever.
• Looking at it another way, it’s probably the last big piece in the puzzle that is my life I’m putting back together. Wait, that maybe sounded overwrought. In a very quotidian way, one by one I’m putting back the things that (one by one?) dropped out of my living.
• With all that, working out, a new dog park, and reparating a corrupted anti-virus database, I was dead beat by the time it was time to go on my movie date with Mom (see above). Yawning every three seconds tired, but I plowed through. I only mention this as it pertains to the previous post (see above).
• We saw Walk The Line. “Sunday Morning Coming Down” was my soundtrack on crackedover Sunday mornings when I lived in Fort Greene. As cliche as it is to say, boy, that song really spoke to me then. And then there was my uncanny discovery of his “Cocaine Carolina” with David Allan Coe when I was coked out in South Carolina. So, yeah, it’s relevant. As is the fact that the depiction of his drug abuse invoked a complicated squirminess in me that didn’t ultimately result in my wanting to go from theater to the nearest opium den of iniquity as many other also negative cinematic drug sagas have in the past. My other oft-noted exception to my ironic response to would-be sobering dramatic tragedy was to Requiem For a Dream. I did not want to do drugs after that. But that film was all about drugs and much harsher. The difference this time, was it how it was portrayed or the result of a shift in my deep feelings about intoxication?
• On a less profound level, there was also the received hope in the example of Johnny’s redemption and finally finding love. But when you’re in my position you take whatever you can get.
• That includes the shrinking gut that should accompany the exercise of self-discipline as I excise ice cream from my happy hours, and that shrinking gut just might help me get some quality time with Dawn Marie on datemypet.com. She seems lovely.

P.S. One more thing, just because it’s funny: by far the biggest cut I ever got shaving I got today. The swath must arc about five inches. I told Mom that (I have no one else to talk to, okay?) and she searched my face. “Where is it?” she said. “Um, on my butt.” “You shave your butt?” she said. “No. See, I shave in the shower and I had my back to the water and when I brought the razor down around behind me to rinse it off, I accidentally scraped it across my right cheek.” It bled profusely but I was down to the last two minutes before we had to walk out the door to make the movie in time, so the only thing to do was get dressed. I wanted to put on boxers—something loose that wouldn’t irritate the stinging cut and would let some air up there so it could scab over. But the boxers were tan and when you only have five pairs of panties, you can’t afford to stain one. Especially not with a streak of blood, which turns brown when it dries. So, I chose a black, silky pair, which Mom pointed out had the advantage of not sticking to the scab and ripping it off when removed. I was in a hurry, but in retrospect I must consider the possibility that my spacial body awareness had not yet caught up to my of-late ballooning butt.