A bit more than a month back, I posted here trying to justify not having television. Tie into the cable network, I protested, and I’d be “dragged by the gateway drugs of The West Wing and Law & Order onto the icy top of a long, slippery slope that runs down, down, down, through Desperate Housewives, Survivor 8 and re-runs of Full House.”

Turns out, however, that even without cable, protected by my standard practice of Netflix-ing past seasons of TV shows one disc at a time, a catchy enough show can still be my undoing.

Friday evening, I threw in the first disc of the first season of 24. By Sunday afternoon, I had downloaded and watched my way through all twenty-four episodes of the first season.

I have, as a result, pre-emptively removed the subsequent seasons from my Netlfix queue. Clearly, I should stop now before this gets any worse.

I eat a lot of food. I mean, a lot of food. I always joke that, while I don’t think I could win an eating contest, if there were a ’24 hour total’ competition, where the winner was the person who consumed the most calories in a single 24 hour stretch, I could easily crush all comers. There’s no meal so large that, two hours later, I couldn’t sit down and eat the same thing again.

This is particularly odd given that, by any account, I’m not very large: 5’6″, 140 pounds. At that size, even using equations that incorporate my high activity level, I should need to consume somewhere around 2100 calories daily.

Usually, that’s what I consume by lunch.

Honestly, I don’t know where the food goes. Maybe I have a tape worm.

Over the years of running companies, my eating has been the butt of ongoing jokes: “Do we need to stop in at Subway and feed Newman before the meeting?” “I don’t know, it could last as long as an hour; can he go that long without food?”

And, of course, it jacks up my grocery bill unbelievably; I can easily eat my way through $150 of supplies within a seven day span, without even counting the numerous business breakfasts, lunches, and dinners intermixed therein.

But, mainly, all that eating garners from friends and family of all ages dire warnings about the inevitable, impending slowdown of my metabolism, and of a consequent slow ballooning into late-twenties obesity.

People tell me about their friend, or child, or husband, or self, who used to be thin as a rail, until he hit 27, when all of a sudden, his metabolism slowed and he porked up.

And they tell me this as though I’m eating every half-hour because I don’t have anything better to do. But, really, trust me, if my calorie needs dropped, if I could somehow eat a normal number of meals a day instead of having to constantly stuff my face, I’d be thrilled – thrilled! – at the time and money saved.

Until then, however, the eating continues. Literally, as I’m off to cook up a second breakfast.

Bon appetit.

Speaking of alone and bored, it occurred to me recently that I haven’t been on a real date since I broke up with Abigail this summer. Which, as long-standing readers will doubtless note, flies in the face of both prior practice and (admittedly somewhat deserved) reputation.

It’s just that, with so much going on, with so much time spent out of town, with not more than single-week stretches at home since mid-summer, I simply haven’t had the chance to disastrously sleep my way through New York City.

Tragic, I know, and doubtless deleterious to the content of this site. So, spurred on by necessity, I headed back to Nerve, the only dating site I’ve ever used. (And even then, just once – the first email I sent locked a date that kicked off an [uncharacteristically long] seven-month relationship.)

Then, as Nerve has apparently started sucking, I also headed off to JDate (are you happy Mom?) and Consumating (where I has apparently registered a year back when the site was brand new, and had since been tagged ‘beautiful’ and ‘misanthrope’, the second half of which, at least, is probably right).

I’ll therefore, again, shortly be heading out into the fray of New York single life. Wish me luck, and remind me to wear my bean-proof shirt.

[Also: Hi, potential dates who have Google-stalked me back to this site! Don’t worry, I’d never write about you! Okay, that’s not true. But I at least promise I won’t use your name!]

When we were growing up, my brother and I used to joke that, if my father were to die, we would have him made into a fireplace-front rug.

Which is to say, he’s fairly hairy. Apparently, however, that fact eluded him for some time. Famously, shortly after he and my mother were married in their early twenties, when he was already verging on gorilla, the two of them went to Jones Beach with my mother’s sister. As a middle-aged man walked by, my father commented, ‘you know what I think is really gross? Back hair.’ Which led the two ladies to share concerned glances, implying the question, “which one of us has to tell him?”

This seminal story stuck with me for at least two reasons: first, it explicated the dangers of unnoticed back hair, and second, it indicated that, genetically, if I was at risk of looking like Teen Wolf myself, it would likely already have kicked in.

By now, having made it all the way to 26, I think I may finally be in the clear. But, heeding the other lesson of that family story, about once a week, I adjust the mirrored doors of my bathroom cabinets so that one faces the other, allowing me to double-check.

And, if I ever were to find a villous matting, I know my younger brother would come through. Still in his perilous early twenties, he keeps an electrolysist on speed-dial. Just in case.

In the wake of Katrina, I’ve read countless interviews of New Orleans musicians who’ve been called upon nearly nonstop to perform at jazz funerals.†

For those not familiar with the ritual, a jazz funeral begins with musicians accompanying mourners†to graveside, underscoring with slow marches and somber dirges.† The body is ‘cut loose’ from earthly ties, laid peacefully to rest.†

Then, the musicians and mourners raise horns and voices to the heavens, singing the spirit upwards with the raucous music of the French Quarter, of the pubs and dives and dance halls of Storyville.† The musicians and mourners dance in the street and sing and eat and party until they collapse.

As one well-known jazz historian explained, “we celebrate and laugh at life.† So we must celebrate and laugh at death.”

Which, I think, is exactly right.† Or, at least, exactly what I want. When I kick the bucket, don’t give me somber memorials.† Skip the eulogies and quiet tears.† Once I’m in the ground, play and sing and drink and eat.† Party until it hurts.

Sport psychologists often say that a key trait of the best athletes is constant visualization – playing through, in their minds’ eyes, upcoming competitions, again and again, until, when they come to a big event itself, it seems like nothing new.

I, instead, and likely far less helpfully, tend to visualize post-facto. After a conversation, I run it repeatedly in my head, tweaking what I said or what they said, working out more clever responses than I could possibly have generated in that first, in-the-moment pass.

The problem is, recently, somewhere in all of those conversational re-runs, I forget that I’m supposed to be doing them only internally. Mid-conversation, I’ll suddenly say my next line out loud: “Sure, in Kansas,” or “Anybody can option the script.”

It isn’t until the full sentence is out of my mouth, however, that I realize I’ve somehow moved from inner world to outer. Then, guiltily, like someone who trips on a curb and tries to dance it off, I act the next few moments as if it were entirely intentional to have suddenly voiced a non-sequitur, out of nowhere, and to nobody in particular.

And, frankly, it never really works. But, at least, I can replay that recovery, again and again in my head, until I’ve come up with something that would.