Bon and I had what I like to call a "Ray and Deborah moment" this morning.

I had been up since 6:15 snow-throwing and snow-shoveling. It was now 7:45 and my wife was kindly making me some pancakes. I, still wiping sweat from my eyes (for no amount of cold stays my glands), decided I would have a glass of the delicious juice of the orange with the break in my fast.

We had three half gallons of OJ in the fridge -- I bought them on sale -- and I took the first out, shook it, and empted it into my glass. It was only a thimble full of liquid. So I grabbed the next full container. I took the top off, but thought to myself "Before I remove the little plastic tab/stopper, I shall first shake this carton to ensure it is properly mixed within." For no fan of the water at the top/sediment in the bottom of beverage containers am I. And thus did I shook.

Orange juice flew everywhere.

"Hey, look out, Jesus, I just pulled the the tab on that one, dumb-ass!" my wife said to me.

"What the hell!" I yelled back, taking my sticky/sweet arm and hand to the sink to rinse off. "Why the hell would you do that?"

"I needed to put some in the batter," she said very matter-of-factly. OJ is just one of the many secret ingredients in her pancakes, but that wasn't the matter-of-fact she meant to convey, moreso the "you're a dumb-ass for not looking for the tab first" fact.

"For Christ sake," I said (we're quite the blasphemers here because, well, we don't believe in shit), "there's a God-damn [see, there it is again] open container in the fridge!"

And on it went (as she directed me in how to properly clean the floor of the drippins). Finally, she said, "Why did you even do that?" She meant the shaking. So I pantomimed it for her, starting with the open container, moving to the new, and my horrified reaction to having juice run down my arm, until she laughed, and I laughed, and we ate our panckaes with syrup.

I'm thinking of turning this into a stage act. Pantomime of spills has got to pay something.

I'm developing an unhealthy fascination with Scarlett Johansson, the star of Lost in Translation (who was robbed at the Golden Globes). I must stop goggling her right now. Thankfully, there's about 50 new ones at IMDB.com. Yowza.

Three weeks into WW, and down 5.44310844 kilograms.

So I'm two weeks into Weight Watchers and I'm already down 10 pounds. No lie. This is, of course, very nice and I receive many kudos (especially at the cult meetings), but I don't think it means much. I was helped by having an enormous amount to lose anyway, like a rich man in Vegas. And the liquid diet last weekend probably helped. This week I'm hoping that donating a pint of blood will knock off a pound or too.

The meetings are the bread and butter of this diet to me. I find them annoying, cloying, and -- occasionally -- fascinating. They are the punishment that keeps it real.

This silly-ass constant denial that Weight Watchers isn't a diet (it’s a "food program") feels like programming from the corporate higher ups, who I hope are a damned skinny lot. But I can overlook that, since rationalization is just one of many ways to cope with trying to lose weight (my favorite way to cope is to ignore it and eat frosting right out of the can.)

(Aside: The last time I ate pre-made cake frosting right out of the can -- something I was known for as a child that probably hasn't helped me out one iota in my later life -- was in February 1999, freshly laid off from my job at FamilyPC and working from home at the time for a dotcom that I despised. I sat in my basement office reading and eating fudge chocolate icing with a spoon, watching over Caper who was then about 10 weeks old. Every time he yawned and stretched I'd panic that he was peeing on the floor and I'd scoop him up to go outside and do that in the snow. He'd look at me with droopy eyes that we thought back then he'd never grow into like I was quite mad.)

The meeting leader is a woman -- there are only three men out of about 50 women there each week -- who is not afraid to embarrass herself, I'll give her that. Last week she did a rap. This week she sang a song she wrote for Oprah back in the 80's on the occasion of her massive weight loss. Her favorite platitude, one I've seen in three meetings in a row, is "Turn over a new leaf," which turns into a group activity as she expects all of us to hold our hands together in front of us as if praying but flattened horizontally, and then flip our hands over. I guess that mimics a turning leaf, but it makes me think of flipping a flapjack. And then coating said pancake in pure Vermont Maple Syrup...

The meetings are meant to be stress free, so its not as if anyone is called upon or forced to speak when she pitches out her questions such as "What did you find this week that really helped you?" or "What did you do to find a positive this week?" The only time I thought about volunteering was when she asked "What is the best thing about losing weight?" and I got a foolish grin on my face when I thought about raising my hand and saying, "I can see my penis again!"

You don't have to say anything -- unless you get an 'award.' Awards are handed out for individual's milestones. In two weeks I've had two such landmarks -- the 5 pound barrier (I got a bookmark!) and then the 10 pound mark (I got a ribbon! I'm moving up in the world. At 15 pounds I expect to get a letter opener, with which I can gouge out my eyes.) When she hands out an award, she asks point blank, "What did you do to get to this point? What helped you achieve your goals?" Both times I've not really been able to think of a good answer, so instead I first told the tale of how I went to Wegmans to get vegetables one day, and they were giving out free cake. In the vegetable aisle. (No lie.) The second time I just told them about the spreadsheet I use to track the all important points (or as they write them, POINTS), as I'm too lazy to pickup an actual pencil to track my caloric intake.

With three meetings down, I've got eight paid yet to go, which will get me through the end of March. At which time I expect to weight 145 pounds dripping wet with my clothes on and I can again start eating things like corn nuts and butter -- dare I say it -- frosting from the can.

If only that were true...

The whole ColonBlow experiment was a dismal failure. I basically went on a liquid diet for 24 hours, drank sawdust that smelled faintly of grapes, felt bloated and worried that I would need to rush to facilities so badly at some unexpected moment so I never left the house all weekend... and got nothing out of it. Literally. Apparently, my large intestine is clean as a whistle. Which is disappointing, really. As a person who has swallowed his gum all his life (I just swallowed a wad of Big Red this morning!), I was hoping to get that giant impacted ball of Cherry Bubbalicious Bubble Gum out that everyone always told me I was going to be stricken with.

Two months after buying our new mini-van -- which we named Matilda, because I always wanted a car with a name, like Herbie -- we've finally sold the vehicle it is meant to replace, our Ford Explorer. I have to say, this Explorer has been perhaps the greatest vehicle I have ever owned. I was resistant to getting something new, that's for sure. My wife's cries of the safety factor and how driving something with 120,000 miles on it would lead to disaster, and yada yada yada fell on deaf ears. Or at least ears with headphones on, with the volume turned way up. Eventually I caved, as I usually do.

Anyway, the Explorer: we advertised it for a month in December and got not a single call. Slight panic ensued. We got one call when I parked the vehicle at the bottom of our drive way with a FOR SALE sign in it, but scared the caller off with our asking price. Then, last week I placed $100 worth of classifieds in local papers and one day into our ad campaign, we get a call. The guy wants to pay cash for the full asking price and will take the vehicle sight-unseen. This could be a disaster, but I think by tonight we'll be richer and back down to being a two-car family... and I'll be missing the one piece of machinery with an internal combustion engine that never gave me a moment's grief.

The wife requested last night as we lay in bed trying to fall asleep as the wind howled outside that I not write about our venture into the world of colon cleansing, so to be a nice (albeit censored!) guy, I deleted the post, and sadly, along with it, a comment from Laura requesting photographic evidence… I don't want to look like I'm revising history, so I'll just say, sorry, despite how much I think this research would give to the world of science and comedy, I'm going to honor her wishes and keep my posts to writing about losing weight and playing Xbox. The only feces I'll be writing about will be that of my dogs. (and hey, it's the time of year for Poop-cicles!).

There's a lot of folks I admire in the world, some of which I follow obsessively, others not so much. The latter can sometimes be because they're not very prolific or high profile, so seeking them out can be a challenge. Spalding Gray falls into the latter category.

Gray is a "monologist," meaning he performs monologues -- one man shows that consist of him sitting a wooden desk with a glass of water reading his handwritten notes from a spiral notebook. And he's a genius at it. Many of his monologues have been turned into movies (Swimming to Cambodia is the most famous). He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel and did a monologue (Monster in a Box) about it.

I have no problem saying he's a genius.

(Though his book was awful -- except for one sequence about farting in a crowded car with the windows rolled up and hoping no one noticed.)

He lived through medical issues (Grays Anatomy)., relationship issues, his mom's own suicide, growing up a Christian Scientist, and oh yeah, lots of depression to make some truly magical words come to life when read aloud.

The Wife and I saw Gray live in Northampton in 1998, performing Morning, Noon and Night, a monologue about every day life with is family. It seemed to me then he was a quite content man at the time and I remember remarking as such.

I didn't know that in 2001 he almost died in a car accident and that the scars of it went deep beyond the cracked skull and broken hip, making him depressed (again). I didn't know he'd attempted suicide in 2002 and again in October last year -- he jumped of a bridge. In front of a cop and a civilian who saved his life.

Supposedly he was making a comeback last year doing a monologue about the accident (Life Interrupted, or Interrupting Life, depending on the source), workshopping it in NYC.

And now, Spaulding Gray is missing . He hasn't been seen since Saturday. The cops are looking.

Great art can't come without great suffering seems to be the theme of a life like his. Because he made some truly great art (and I'm not one for silly-ass performance art). I truly hope he's okay.

When I was young and starting out in the industry that chose me (I didn't choose it until a few years later), I used to always sign my name to emails with some kind of pithy little quote or joke in my name. Something like:

Best,
Eric "Where are my pants?" Griffith
Or

Your's truly,
Eric "And thus, I'll never try to pet a bear again" Griffith

That kind of thing.

I'm not sure when it stopped... probably about the time my ego was crushed out of me by an overbearing boss and a soul-sucking job.

I miss that annoying punk 24-year-old. He was a relatively stupid bastard, but overall he was a good kid. He knew some stuff. He was going somewhere.

Signed,
Eric "Seriously, where the hell are my pants?" Griffith

Off to a good start today with the points counting -- had only a smoothie today for breakfast.

I wish it had had a pancake in it.

Hi! I just wanted to tell you all what GREAT time I'm having loosing weight, and how much fun my first meeting was now that I've rejoined Weight Watchers!

I never felt so much support in my life! People in the room were there to help and nuture me, and I wanted to nurture them back!

At one point, a lady got a special bookmark for hitting the point of loosing 80 pounds, can you believe it? She talked about how she'd started the program a couple of years ago but they both dropped out, but she'd stuck with it and look at her now! You go!

Our group leader told us how important it is to find an anchor to get past the food, and she suggested a teddy bear! Just like we used to have as kids as an anchor before we learned to substitute food in whenever we felt hurt or down or bored-- genius! She cracked though thirty years of my societal conditioning in mere moments! I went right out to Target and bought myself a big snuggly bear right after the meeting. I named him Growly! I hug him whenever I feel hungry, and it makes the pounds glide off!

And man, do I feel cool and respected when I count the point values for all the foods! Math IS fun!

Time to go eat some celery sticks! C-ya l8t! (Get it?)

I tried to love it. I really did. But a mere 47 hours later, and I'm as fucking miserable as I remember being the entire first half of 1998. God, how I hate dieting.

Of course, Weight Watchers would tell you "It's not a diet! We don't limit you to any one type of food!" In fact, someone did say that in the meeting on Tuesday. I should have printed out this from Dictionary.com to wave in her retarded zombie face:

di-et: N. A regulated selection of foods, as for medical reasons or cosmetic weight loss.

It's a cult. And I actually paid for entry.

There was indeed a woman at the meeting (see above) who talked about how she'd lost 80 lbs, which is admittedly an astounding accomplishment. (Supposedly, were I to ever meet my body height's optimal weight, I have to lose the same. Which is about as likely as my winning a Tony award for dramatic snow shoveling.)

My attitude was poor at the meeting. As the aforementioned woman described her weight loss (and she still had a ways to go, to be honest) and how she'd started with a couple of friends who were no longer there, I almost blurted out "Is it because you ATE THEM?"

The platitudes for the evening were written on the board before we sat down, so our perky leader (though not perky in a Katie Couric sense... more like in a washed-up Liza Minelli sense) wouldn't forget to try and drill them in. From the comments of other diligent members there, she's big at drilling in sayings. My favorite was the night was, "If I get hungry, I'll stick a screwdriver into my eyeball."

Sorry, that wasn't her. That was me in my head.

The group leader did actually suggest the teddy bear though. I thought about trying the one she brought in, let my dogs have their way with the pink stuffed monster, and then return it the next week, soiled and torn and trod upon, like my once glorious caloric intake.

Since the meeting has ended, it's been one disappointment after another. I kept to my point allotment yesterday (WW For Dummies: All foods carry certain number of points. You get only a certain amount of points you can eat per day. Going over means you're a fat-ass.). Yet after the wife went to bed, I slunk into the kitchen and downed a handful of corn nuts -- one corn nut is easly 72 points. Yet I only am allowed to eat 28 a day.

Life without corn nuts is not worth living, but yet I go on.

I also found out that despite paying over $130 for 11 weeks worth of meetings, the online tools for keeping track of these points are not available to me unless I want to pay another $12 a month! For Christ sake. I found a spreadsheet I can use to tracking things, but it's not going to do me much good on the road. Online tools were part of why I thought it wouldn't be too painful -- I could assuage my growling tummy with my Internet addition. WW can go screw themselves before they get another dime of my money. Shysters. Mountebanks!

Today was actually easier though. Not as many pangs, and I'm not thinking about food every second. I think it pays to stay busy... yesterday I didn’t have much to do so everything was taking on the shape of lollipops and meat products just like in old Warner Bros. cartoons. I put a rubber band around my wrist to snap myself when hungry, like the smoker's do, but I haven't used it yet. I keep forgetting it's there.

Here's hoping I don't eat it. I wonder how many points in a rubber band?

The New Year is upon us and as always in this time of some sort of temporal new-ness, thoughts turn to the topic of… self-improvement.

This usually takes the form of "New Year resolutions," AKA lies we tell others and ourselves about how we'd like to become better as human beings. I could list a number of such items here, and what the hell, for my own cognizance (but not necessarily for my edification) I shall list a few, so I don't forget where I'm lacking:

1. Lose weight.
2. Write more.
3. Meet people locally.
4. Be more charitable.
5. Take the dogs for a damn walk occasionally.
6. Fucking swear less.

But all of these items are probably not going to happen. Except, I hope, number one. Things are getting out of hand.

This week, taking days off between the holidays to do some projects around the house, I really let myself go. In getting ready for this resolution, telling myself it's all one last hoo-rah! before I put myself on the weight-loss wagon, I bought my favorite kettle chips, got a bag of corn nuts, made salsa, ate chili and tacos and pizza, snacked on chocolates filled with liquors, and, oh yes, ate one last meal from McD's complete with an extra order of fries. It was glorious.

And it was not radically different from a normal weeks caloric intake.

I even bought a 2-liter bottle of Sierra Mist. Not the Diet Sierra Mist I usually get -- I got the leaded type!

I'm outta control.

Back in good ol' 1998 (back when I was still only in the second job of my adult career, still in my first house, and still wearing glasses that could be used be industrious arsonists to start fires when the sun was out) I managed to shed 25 or so pounds with a combination of starvation and physical abuse. That is, I joined Weight Watchers and went to the gym.

The gym was actually the fun part -- it was an easy walk from work and my friend Laura and I would go down there a few times a week and push ourselves through the routine to get a sweat worked up and mock the freaks we saw there. Would that she were here now.

Weight Watchers was the true torture. Me, then a 28-year-old in my so-called prime, I sent myself to the weekly weigh-in for 12 weeks straight and a few times afterwards, hoping to catch the bug that brought the multiples of middle-aged women -- oh, and yes, such meetings are almost exclusively 40+ women wearing a 14+ in size -- out to discuss their eating habits, their successes and triumphs in not eating, and their tragic defeats at the hands of Zingers and Swiss Cake Rolls.

Aside: Zingers used to be one of the grand snack cakes of their day -- you couldn't watch a Peanuts special on CBS in the 1970's without craving one as Dolly Madison spread its money around as sponsor. I recently encountered Zingers on a store shelf and they are shrunken, dry, wizened versions of their old selves.

Would that were true of us all. But unlike Zingers, I've expanded, and not my horizons.

So, I'm making the commitment again. It's time for me to lose some weight, and spending some money on a bargain gym membership up at the ol' alma mater last year wasn't enough. I obviously need to throw in some public humiliation of talking about my fat-ass with a bunch of strangers.

The money factor also is big on my psyche. Especially if I pay ahead. Wasting money on $92 worth of posters this week (we're decorating a newly panted room in the house) seems like no big deal to me, but that same amount spent on a few weeks of stupid one-hour meetings will probably drive me to the meetings with zeal to not waste a stupid cent.

I truly dread the whole thing. But will I try to stay committed.

Even as my attitude will inevitably suffer, as my pangs grow, as my thoughts turn toward the lack of things in my (future) life with any taste to them… I will try to stay committed.

Either that, or I'll accept that I'm at the size my genetics meant for me and just keeping wolfing down these corn nuts.